February 26–March 5, 1998

movies

"I'm working on one called Dildo Heaven," she informs me, adding, "It's not hardcore, but you're supposed to think it is."

Bad Girls Go to Hell

Sexploitation auteur Doris Wishman may be the most prolific female movie director ever.

by Vance Lehmkuhl

"You'll have to excuse me if I sound dead," Doris Wishman says over the phone, "we just this minute got in from Vegas." I've reached her in Los Angeles, the latest stop on a whirlwind tour of movie screenings and personal appearances. For most filmmakers today, that would be unremarkable, except that Doris Wishman hasn't made a movie in 20 years, and her oeuvre is certainly not the most celebrated in American film. In fact, up to a couple years ago, few people had even heard of her.

Wishman is noteworthy for being one of the most prolific women filmmakers ever, certainly of her time. Her heyday was the mid-'60s "roughie" genre, churning out low-budget black-and-white exploitation flicks such as Indecent Desires and Too Much, Too Often! Her acknowledged masterpiece in this medium, Bad Girls Go to Hell (1965), is showing this weekend at International House. Like the rest of these films, Bad Girls relies heavily on a formula of violence and T&A rather than on, say, plot or acting. Its story is a simple one—girl kills rapist, flees to New York to hide, drifts from one temporary hideout to another, suffering abuse of some sort at each step. Oh yes, and there's an incredible "twist" ending which I won't spoil for you.

Wishman herself is upbeat and peppy in discussing Bad Girls, her flight from Vegas notwithstanding. "There's something nostalgic about that movie," she says. "And you know, a magazine at the time compared it to Alfred Hitchcock. That's my claim to fame." I had heard this claim before, and asked if it was a favorable comparison. "Well, they said it was 'as good as Ingmar Bergman, as good as Hitchcock.'" She pauses, reconsidering. "Unless they were thinking of the way Hitchcock looks now."

We laugh as I try to determine whether she means how Hitchcock looked in 1965, as a bald, oafish blimp of a man, or today, as a rotting pile of skeletal remains.

Either way, it's not a pretty picture—and neither is Bad Girls. After its first couple minutes of languorous sexiness (and I use the term loosely) the tone is relentlessly uncomfortable, a combination of dread, anxiety and ambiguity which somehow never becomes actual suspense. Still, unlike the ineptitude of say, Ed Wood, there is here a sense of craft, of purpose. Wishman tells me, "I made all my films out of love," and her shots and edits seem very carefully worked out. The thing is, her rhythm is so awkward and her style so bizarre that it's impossible to tell whether you're looking at mistakes or the manifestations of a weird vision.

Much of the idiosyncrasies are dictated, of course, by the genre, by the need to show as much (carefully exposed) skin and (just brutal enough) violence as possible to get good footage for the trailers. But even within this framework, there are elements that are uniquely Wishmanesque. She has her signature moments, notably the cutaways to shots of furniture or shots of people's feet, but her movies are more (just slightly more) than the sum of their eccentric parts.

In the movie's most riveting scene, or should I say, in the movie's riveting scene, Meg, the "bad girl," is living with Al, a calm, gentle sweet guy who makes no advances but wants to know why she's always so sad. She asks for a drink; he snaps that there's no booze in the house. Missing this cue, she searches for and finds a hidden bottle and pours them each a drink. (Why does she do this? The same reason she sets the initial plot in motion by taking the garbage out in a see-through dress: The formula demands it.)

Al's reaction, of course, is to throw one glass against the wall and to chug the other one, and then to get the bottle and drain the whole thing and then to walk over and beat the crap out of poor Meg. The events follow each other seamlessly, in fatalistic sequence, just as everything in Meg's odyssey unfolds from her initial mistake of getting herself raped.

After Al passes out, Meg packs and leaves, planting a final tender peck on his forehead. It's moments like these that give richness to Wishman's work: it's both absurd for her to do this and logical at the same time. After all, she caused the beating by getting out the booze. These simplistic equations (sexuality=rape, drinking=violence) are vital to the genre, and may make some feminists edgy. But movies like Bad Girls are definitely worth seeing today (even if they weren't then) for so vividly capturing an exaggerated world view that one only finds in underground media.

"I may not even have known what the theme was," when she was making Bad Girls, Wishman admits, but it achieves a perfect reflection of the male id of the '50s (remember that in 1965, "the '60s" hadn't really started yet). At one point I ask her about a key that the detective points at Meg when he figures out who she is. Was this there because he'd found out the "key" to her identity, or because their relationship was "key" to the film's theme, or because Meg needs to "unlock" her sexuality from the constraints forced upon her by society?

Wishman's response: "He has a key in his hand?" Yes, remember, he advances on her, menacing her with this key? "Huh," she says, "maybe it was just something he was holding at the time."

Maybe it was. After all, Wishman was a self-taught filmmaker who virtually fell into the business. Her "outsider" eye may have allowed for elements like this which are evocative even if accidental. Not to get carried away with the deconstructionist angle, but Wishman's name itself is perfect for her oeuvre: First with the "nudist" pictures, where sexuality was socially acceptable, free, colorful, an infantile paradise, and then with the roughies, where it's anti-social, black-and-white, nasty and dangerous for women, she's painting the '50s man's wish of how things should be.

This worked for a while, but as the '60s got rolling, "free love," psychedelia and increasingly risqué Hollywood movies undercut Wishman's market. It didn't dampen her spirit, however, and even today she's looking for funding for more projects.

"I'm working on one called Dildo Heaven," she informs me, adding, "It's not hardcore, but you're supposed to think it is." She also mentions a script for The Summer We Died and for Each Time I Kill, for which she enthuses, "Vance, I have to tell you, it's excellent, it's really very very very very good."

This is encouraging news. Perhaps the new resurgence of interest in Wishman's work will lead to funding for such a movie. I'm not sure whether today's audiences would share her appraisal of it, or even if such a film could be made today, but after all she's done to record and map men's subconscious, I'd say we owe her at least that much.