Leather and Lipsynching

The horrors of Harry Novak put safely aside for the moment (don’t fret, you haven’t seen the last of him), let’s whisk ourselves away to a simpler time, to the humble beginnings of sexploitation, when people could get their rocks off with nary a nipple flashing across the screen, with even the slightest whiff of sexuality buried under layers of girdles and rocket bras and snappy dialogue. Welcome to the dark ages.
Specifically, welcome to 1962. Just before the dam broke.
Satan in High Heels was of course not the first film to capitalize on the prurient desires of American audiences. As far back as the 1920’s, “health” films like the Reefer/Sex/Cocaine Madness trilogy, and Sex Maniac! passed through middle America virtually undetected, peddling titillation in the guise of education. It was in this spirit that director Jerald Intrator, fresh off the naughty but harmless last-gasp-of-burlesque classic Striporama, decided to put his lovely ladies in the confines of an actual storyline.

The strange (and to be honest, kind of disappointing) thing about Satan in High Heels is that it’s actually quite well made, well acted, and well written. Stuck somewhere between the weepy melodramas of the late fifties and the sexy shockers that would follow, it hangs in a kind of limbo, one that’s surprisingly enjoyable to slip into.
The story follows a downright evil carnival stripper named Stacey Kane, and her social climbing exploits in the dying world of burlesque. Tired of the long hours and short pay of the county fair, she swipes $900 from her junkie husband, hops a flight to New York, and immediately jumps into bed with a man she meets on the plane, a talent scout for a local nightclub run by Pepe, a suave, middle aged dyke with some of the best lines in the movie. The exchanges between her and Stacey (played to sinister perfection by Meg Myles) seem culled from the best film noir textbooks.
Soon after being hired by the club and lip synching a few forgettable tunes, Stacey finds herself involved with the club’s owner, Arnold, and his son (of some indeterminate age between 15 and 30) Larry. The usual trouble follows, and the movie culminates after a gut-busting leather clad musical number (“I’ll beat you, mistreat you, till you quiver and quail… The female of the species is more deadly than the male…” Oh, yeah.) with the junkie husband coming back for revenge and subsequently being beaten down by Stacey with a riding crop and sent sheepishly off to murder Arnold for obscure reasons (The husband, incidentally, is played by Del Tenney, who went on the direct the psychedelic gore classic I Eat Your Skin in 1964. The rest of the cast went on to marginally more respectable things, including a CBS After School Special for Meg Myles).
Stacey’s plan, of course, doesn’t work, and she is shamed out of the club and her new high life, doomed to go back to a world of cotton candy and cow shit.


And here we hit the lynchpin of early sexploitation films: It’s okay to get turned on by the man-trampling bitch, as long as she gets her comeuppance at the end. A deeply conflicted message, to say the least, and one that sets the stage for the most disturbing period of grindhouse cinema: the godawful sucking hellhole of the “roughies”


As always, available through Something Weird Video or at Video Oasis in Cambridge.


Next Week: You! You! You! Did you know that Bad Girls Go to Hell?