Brainscan’s comments:

Some screen captures of Carole Lombard and Jean Harlow from movies I do not recognize. Jean’s scene has particularly impressive side-boobage.

Scoop’s notes:

Well, here is where my store of infinitely useless knowledge becomes almost useful.

• The top picture is Lombard in Bolero (1934)
• The next picture down is also Lombard in Bolero, this time with George Raft.
• The next one down is Lombard in We’re Not Dressing (1930)
• The last one is Harlow in Hell’s Angels, from 1930, when she was still sporting her natural eyebrows.

In previous editions of Other Crap, you will find Brainscan’s long series on the history of pre-code Hollywood

• Part 1: 1932. Peak Pre-Code Talkies.
• Part 2: 1929-1934. The Other Pre-Code Talkies.
• Part 3: 1927. The Swan Song of the Silents.
• Part 4: 1900-1926. The Silent Era.
• Part 5: 1935-1951. The Dry Years.
• Part 6: 1952-1959. Europe to the Rescue.

This will take you back a few years. Most of us probably lusted after her when she was on Maude.

Once again Brainscan takes a deep dive into a forgotten chapter in the history of film nudity: the grindhouse era. Brainscan alone created all the commentary and collages, as well as the myriad of film clips that accompany this article in the members’ version of the Fun House.

1963 had two other nudie cutie movies. Bare Hunt was shot in black and white, and She Should Have Stayed in Bed was shot in color.

I had my doubts about the format of the She Should Have Stayed in Bed, so washed out was the color, until I got hold of the trailer.  This was one of Gigi Darlene’s first movies, which makes the miserable condition of the DVD border on the tragic. I used the DVD for the first two collages,

but then in the third collage you see The Goddess of All Things Grindhouse in
vivid color.  She was to die for as a blonde but as a redhead Gigi was off-scale.

She Should Have purports to show the viewpoint of a cameraman as he follows women around from one apartment to another, with a running gag about a wedding cake and a repeating performance of Audrey Campbell brushing her hair.

Through it all is the voice of he who is supposed to be the director, speaking lines written by the wife of the real-life director; they are amusing in the same sense that Tiger King’s comments at his husband’s funeral were.

A few other women revealed in their natural habitats are:

Bare Hunt also uses voice over for most of its length, as a detective follows a trail of dead women who had been naked only moments before they met their maker. Not so much a whodunnit as a who gives a shit about it, the movie manages to reveal:

Someone manages to slip a noose around Ms. Moore’s neck without her noticing anything amiss until the noose tightens, such is the magic of hemp.

The detective hangs out a pool with Marge London in a verrrryyy long photo shoot.

It all ends when he confronts Marilyn Savage, his secretary and serial murderess.

The scene with Ms. Savage is the only one shot with dialogue, and by the sound of it, the director set up a microphone in the kitchen but shot the scene in the living room.  Ms. Savage is a hoot to watch as she goes from enticing – y’all wouldn’t shoot little ol’ me because I am too sexy for my shirt – to seriously pissed off in less than a second.  She then runs out the door.  Roll credits.

This is what grind houses had to offer their customers in 1963, desperately awful movies for desperately horny men.  And the producers could get away with it because in the early 1960’s they had no competition.  All of that would change in the space of 5 years and when it did, grindhouse would become much more  interesting.

Part 1 of this series, The Immoral Mr. Teas, can be found here

Part 2, Nudie Cuties and More, 1963-1965, can be found here.

To be continued …

 

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If you enjoy Brainscan’s work, here are the other series that can be found on Other Crap:

The Films of Harry Novak

Part 1, The Sixties, can be found here.

Part 2, Hicksploitation, is here.

Part 3, The Seventies, is here.

Part 4, The Models in Print (and in his films), is here

 

The Early Years of Film Nudity

Part 1: 1932. Peak Pre-Code Talkies.

Part 2: 1929-1934. The Other Pre-Code Talkies.

Part 3: 1927. The Swan Song of the Silents.

Part 4: 1900-1926. The Silent Era.

Part 5: 1935-1951. The Dry Years.

Part 6: 1952-1959. Europe to the Rescue

The same articles, with the added bonus of all of Brainscan’s film clips, can be found in the members’s version of the Fun House, along with the many thousands of other collages, clips and commentaries that Brainscan has created in the past two decades. (And his contributions represent only a tiny fraction of the content in the back issues, since the Fun House has been updated every day, seven days a week, for the past 24 years, except for one month in 2023.)

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This time in La Famiglia (2017)

She’s the star of the week, isn’t she?

Earlier in the week, she appeared fully nude in the premiere of the new HBO mini-series The Undoing.

And we also saw a capture of her topless appearance in a 2018 film called Youtopia

Rowan Blanchard in a string bikini – 7/25/20

Ellen Burstyn

Julia Anne Robinson

The very obscure and ethereally beautiful Julia Anne Robinson was the unlikely subject of one of my in-depth essays. Although nobody remembers her but me, she managed to pack a lot of living into a very short life. She was a brilliant student, but chose to forego college in order to experience life. She was an Eileen Ford model who made major magazine covers. She partied with Andy Warhol. She rode the Magic Bus with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters. She co-starred with Jack Nicholson in a major film.

All of that happened before she turned 22.

As fast as she rose, she fell even faster. Within a year after the release of her Nicholson film, she was back in her home town, performing in junior college theater. Within another year or two, she was dead.

Everything I just mentioned happened between 1968 and early 1975. If you define the hippie era as the period between the Summer of Love and Nixon’s resignation, Julia’s adult life was almost perfectly concurrent with that era, and perfectly symbolized it. She was like a real life version of Forrest Gump, having played every iconic chord and met every counter-cultural idol in her brief adulthood. How did she miss being introduced by a rock star on the stage at Woodstock?

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Elsewhere: my comments on the movie.

The all-Canadian girl next door was naked in Species. This placed #5 in our top nude scenes of 1995.

The sequel placed #12 among our top nude scenes of 1998.

In between the two, Natasha appeared topless in Maximum Risk, but could not crack the top nude scenes of 1996, which may have been the year of peak cinema nudity.

Brainscan once again takes a deep dive into the history of film nudity. In this presentation, he focuses on the exploitation master, Harry Novak, who filled the drive-ins and grindhouse theaters of America with some of their most memorable moments. All of the comments and collages below have been created by Brainscan.

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At the time Harry Novak produced hicksploitation fare, he was also had his hand in more traditional exploitation movies.

In 1970 there was Booby Trap, with the exuberant Gina Paluzzi playing a stripper;

in 1971 he made Below the Belt with the legendary Uschi Digard

 

and the less physically gifted Terri Johnson;

 

and in 1974 he cast Jane Tsentas as a love interest in Teenage Bride.

 

As you can see from these frames, Ms. Tsentas had the inhibitions of a mink, which made her career an interesting one to watch. Seems she declined to do anything overtly hardcore but my heavens she got really close a few times, including in this film.

Of all the years he worked, 1973 was Novak’s big year of mainstream exploitation. He employed actresses who crossed over from sexploitation to hard core movies in:

Scream in the Streets, with Sandy Carey;

 

Dirty Mind of Young Sally, with Sandy Dempsey

 

and Colleen Brennan (aka Sharon Kelly)

as well as Angela Carnon

 

and Robyn Whitting;

 

and Please Don’t Eat My Mother, with Alice Friedland.

 

Novak wrapped up a decade’s work in these sorts of movies with Wham, Bam, Thank You Spaceman (1975). Perhaps he could see the handwriting on the wall, after several years of using cross-over actresses, and he might have figured he would either need to move into hardcore movies or get out the business entirely. This last of his big movies intended for grind houses was nearly wall to wall nudity with sometime pornstars

 

Maria Arnold

 

and Sandy Carey (again),

 

and an appearance by the uber-cutie, Gayna Shireen.

 

It was a near-perfect ending to this part of Novak’s career because the movie did not take itself seriously (how in the world could it?), and was shot beautifully with a half-dozen attractive women in a near-constant state of undress. I am a fan of his work, for while many other producers and directors during this same time were making movies that were grim, awful and incomprehensible, Novak made movies that are fun to watch and more fun to work with.

Part 1 of this series, The Sixties, can be found here.

Part 2, Hicksploitation, is here.

Part 4 will wrap things up tomorrow.

Brainscan once again takes a deep dive into the history of film nudity. In this presentation, he focuses on the exploitation master, Harry Novak, who filled the drive-ins and grindhouse theaters of America with some of their most memorable moments. All of the comments and collages below have been created by Brainscan. Some accompanying film clips are found in the members’ section.

In case you can’t see the thumbnails below, switch to this link:

Wrapping it up

In the first several years of his productions, Harry Novak turned to print models to carry the load of on-screen nekkidness. He was not alone, as most who made exploitation movies of the 1960s and early 1970s relied on women who had already shown a disposition to undress in front of a camera. Here is a smattering of what the still camera had to show.

Part 1 of this series, The Sixties, can be found here.

Part 2, Hicksploitation, is here.

Part 3, The Seventies, is here.

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