More overheated Southern melodrama from Russ Meyer. You wonder why couldn't he find someone better looking than John Furlong to play the drifter who comes to a small town and gets the hots for his employers wife. I guess the main audience for these films cared about the women more than the men - it just would've made it more believable.
Meyer went ambitious with this one - perhaps too ambitious. He didn't like the film, though Roger Ebert did. There's an awful lot of drama and acting - too much stuff with men to be honest; the lecherous old codger and the nice old codger. There's a lot of sappiness in it - the two leads walking hand in hand as the sun goes down.
The main girl here isn't very buxom. Lorna Maitland who was in Lorna has a part but its support.
There's too much Hal Hopper, who plays the wife beating drunk. Too much Stuart Lancaster, the old guy who creepily wants Furlong to run off with his niece. (How about just talking to the niece instead of getting a man to save her?) Too much Furlong. Too much men.
We never get a sense of who Antoinette Christiani is other than "bored housewife". I know character depth wasn't a great Meyer strong point but his memorable female characters had more drive. There's an over the top finale with a death toll like Lorna but the film simply wasn't fun, at least not to me.
No comments:
Post a Comment