Pretty Maids is an all-but-forgotten exploitation film, a black comedy written and produced by Star Trek’s creator, Gene Roddenberry, and directed by Eurotrash legend Roger Vadim, the European John Derek. It featured a theme song by the Osmond Brothers.
So ya know it ain’t gonna be about the Holocaust.
Unless Mel Brooks was involved.
It sort of hinges on the premise that all of our high school fantasies were true. All the chicks had perfect bodies, ran around in mini-skirts, and had sexual habits that made minks look like the Sisters of St. Joseph. Remember that sexy teacher whose dress you looked up every day? Well, she really wanted to sleep with you, but you just never asked. Remember that wise coach who was also your guidance counselor and who taught you so much? You should have told him you needed some poontang. He’d have been there for you, dude. He would have told the hot teacher (who wanted his bod) that you were impotent and needed the cure, and that only she could help. And then she would have cleaned your pipes.
Rock Hudson plays the coach, “Tiger” McDrew, a former professional sporting great who has a wholesome recipe to turn youths into happy adults. For the boys – plenty of sports to keep them away from disruptive influences. For the girls – well, there’s only one way that they can ever learn to be women, if you catch my drift. Ol’ Dr. Hudson has the prescription of love. Yes, that’s right, Rock was sleeping with the females and pimping females for the males. He was really into that whole heterosexual thing. (Cough) Unfortunately, more and more of the high school chickadees start to feel possessive about Rock, and their desire to hook him seems to coincide quite closely to their commitment to an eternal dirt nap. Why does he kill ’em all? Well, Rock is happily married, and he just can’t have his wife find out about his special proclivities, can he?
It is a completely irresponsible movie, filled with amoral characters, other characters who know about the amorality but don’t care, and other characters who simply don’t care about anything. It features plenty of high school teachers seducing students of both sexes, and gratuitous camera angles up the skirts of high school girls, except of course for the ones who are already naked. In fact, this film will absolutely make you squirm when you experience it with today’s eyes and ears. Women found naked and brutalized? The perfect setup for plenty of cavalier remarks (“Cool! We never practice on the day of a murder”) and visual jokes. Roddy McDowell, the principal, offers a fitting funeral oration, that so-and-so was a great girl and a “terrific little cheerleader,” a mantra he had already repeated several times. This film could only be made as a micro-budgeted indie today. In the early 70s, however, this script was sold to MGM, and was able to attract the wholesome Rock Hudson to star, backed up by Telly Savalas, Scotty from Star Trek, Roddy McDowell, Angie Dickinson, and Keenan Wynn.
I guess the film is sort of fun in a shallow, superficial, Roger Vadim kind of way, although Vadim’s slimy European softcore attitude didn’t exactly mesh very well with the wholesome “palm trees and cheerleaders” setting, and the humor really didn’t work for me, neither in 1971 nor now. The film’s smirking condescension toward the dead women was coldly funny, and still is, as a satire of how little people really care for one another, but this is not your basic laugh-out-loud kind of humor.
On the other hand, I’m embarrassed to admit, when I first saw this film with my friends, back when it was in the theaters, some of us (mostly me) were wont to repeat the line about “a terrific little cheerleader” when we discussed people who died tragically.
Yeah, remember Jack Kennedy? Geez, he was a great man … and a terrific little cheerleader.
We repeated this stale joke for years, so I guess the film made some kind of an impression on us.
Of course, we took a lot of drugs in those days.
Angie Dickinson (the first pic is from another source)
Joy Bang
Gretchen Burrell
Aimee Eccles
June Fairchild
Adriana Bentley *
Mighty Isis was also in the film, but stayed clothed
Margaret Markov in a deleted scene
FOOTNOTE
* In the past 55 years, or at least the portion on the internet, nobody has identified Adriana Bentley correctly. That’s not surprising. This is her only IMDb credit, and there are no pictures of her on the open net. Playboy ran a pictorial about this film in April of 1971, with the accompanying article written by Roger Vadim himself, but it mentioned all the nude women except Adriana.
There are, however, many references to her on newspapers.com, including this interview in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, which specifically mentions her topless scene, referring to it quaintly as “barefoot from the waist up.” (They rarely used the word “topless” in mainstream newspapers in those days.) She mentions that she was promised that the scene would be blurred, but we all realize that promise was broken. That said, she looked great. She had a scene alone with Rock Hudson, but did not receive a separate credit, presumably because she never spoke. (She spoke English with a weird mixture of Spanish and Swedish accents, which would have revealed that she was not a California high school student.)
The reason she was left out of the Playboy article was political. All of the other naked women were cast by Vadim himself, but Adriana was forced on Vadim by Roddenberry, for reasons we don’t know, but we probably do. (Ahem. Promises made …) She said in another interview that she was also ostracized during the publicity tour. She did mention in a third interview, that the veteran supporting actors in the cast (Keenan Wynn, Telly Savalas, Angie Dickinson and Roddy McDowell) were very kind to her, so it was just “Team Vadim” that treated her as an outsider.
I assembled all these articles about her just because she has basically disappeared without a trace and the open internet is no help. Here’s one more – a real oddball piece about her walking the MGM lion!
Interesting one woman show
Sounds pretty awful. And too bad there were not better nude scenes for Angie.
Yeah, it was running a ZERO on the Tomato Meter for a long time. As bad as it is, Vadim’s own cut was said to be much worse – almost incomprehensible. Roddenberry took one look at it and decided to re-cut the entire film himself.
Considering that Vadim was a well-known libertine and tended to describe women in terms of their body parts, the nudity is disappointing. Burrell’s nudity is over before you realize what you’re looking at. Bang’s scene is in near-total darkness. Angie’s scene barely showed anything. Markov’s scene was deleted. Eccles’ scene was shot from an angle that made it little more than a tease. Joanna Cameron kept her clothes on, something that Vadim seemed upset about in his Playboy article. There is a good look at Bentley in good light, but it is basically just a still. The only really cool nude scene is June Fairchild’s, but even that is not a world-beater.
My guess is that we would see much more if we could see Vadim’s original cut, but we probably would not see Bentley at all, since she was not one of “his” girls. It’s just my guess, but the Bentley scene involves her character, with no lines and never even identified by name, as well as another student whose story was never developed or even mentioned elsewhere. The entire scene is irrelevant to the murder plot, nor is it necessary to demonstrate the seductions of “Tiger,” which were established in many other scenes. If you were to remove that scene, the film would be tighter. I’m guessing Roddenberry added it back in when he took the film over, since Bentley was his own personal addition to the cast.
But that’s just a guess, and there’s nobody left to ask about it. Both Vadim and Roddenberry have been dead for more than a quarter of a century.
“Gosh, Mr. Rock Hudson, how can you be in scenes with all these beautiful young naked women and not become visibly aroused?”
“Um, you know… uh… acting.”
And I’m a bit surprised that an actress named “Joy Bang” only has two nude roles to her credit.
Joy Bang, best actress name of the 70s – & that kid in bed with Angie has the perfect angle on her Full Heche
Rock – “It’s really not that hard.”
Joy Bang might’ve been in the First Nudie Musical playing a dancing dildo, but I can’t recall for sure. Also, how could a smokin’ hottie like Angie marry a cigar-chomping, gravelly-voiced old troll like Larry King?! That’s even more confounding than Joel – Brinkley. And based on what I’ve heard over the years, there’s little doubt she fucked the entire Rat Pack too, and Rip Torn was icing on the cake. Gross.