Wednesday, December 05, 2018

Movie review - "Cherry Harry and Raquel" (1969) ***

Russ Meyer's nutty desert saga, made flush with the confidence of his success with Vixen. It's got some familiar male faces - Stuart Lancaster, who played old men a few times in Meyer films, and Charles Napier, who would go on to become a familiar face on screens.

There is a story - Napier is seeing two women (brunette Linda Ashton and blonde Larissa Ely) and involved in a crime ring. Ely in particular is a lot of fun - like many a Meyer starlet I wish we'd seen her in more things. Napier is good rugged value - he does full frontal running across the desert which was a shock. Meyer was surprisingly progressive in a lot of ways. Like the ending - it has Meyer and John Milo shooting at each other while Ashton and Ely have sex. It's a wonderfully positive message - men tend to violence and death, the women like to have sex.

Meyer had to rewrite some of the film because a lead actor didn't want to do it (Ashton?) So he threw in shots of Uschi Digard running naked around the desert. And it totally makes sense in the context of the film.

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