“Paris Trout” and Barbara Hershey’s nudography

Johnny Moronic just did a new HD clip of Barbara Hershey in a 1991 film called Paris Trout. I thought I was a major Hershey fan, but I don’t remember this Showtime film at all. I lived overseas from 1990 to 1994, and I don’t think I was anywhere where Showtime was available.

Set in a small Georgia town in 1949, the film stars furtive and squirrelly Dennis Hopper as the Trout of the title, an irredeemable monster who beats a 12-year-old black girl (14 in the book) with brass knuckles, shoots her several times as the girl’s mother watches in horror, then shoots the mother as well. The homicidal outburst is prompted by an $800 debt Trout imagines he is owed by the man of the house. The girl, already bitten by a baldly symbolic rabid fox in an earlier scene, dies. But Trout has only begun. He nearly drowns his wife by pushing her underwater in the bathtub and then, a few minutes later, rapes her with a soda bottle in the back room of his general store. Before the film is over, he has blown a couple more people’s brains out, matter-of-factly and remorselessly.

It’s a light-hearted, popcorn film for the whole family.

The Manson family.

It’s rated 6.4 at IMDb, which is very respectable, but I don’t think I would watch it if it were rated 10.0. It’s just not my idea of a good way to pass the time.

Anyway, I was inspired to cover her career.

Some quick notes:

1) Last Summer was considered a fairly important film in its day, but it’s now almost impossible to find. It has never been released on an official disc, and broadcasts of the film have censored the graphic rape scene. Everything shown below has been taken from VHS. Warner Classics has posted that they have been trying to release it since 2013, but had been unable to locate the third reel. Last July, they announced that they now have the complete film and were aiming for a release in the summer of 2026. The latest announcement is that the film will be available on Blu-Ray June 30. I don’t know whether it will be censored, but I will cover the topic one way or the other.

2) I don’t know whether there is any actual nudity from Barbara Hershey in The Entity. The full-body shots were done by a body double, and the face/breast close-ups feature fake, pneumatic breasts. It’s possible that there are some frames that show her real breasts, but I don’t know that for a fact.

3) Barbara did not quite make our list of women who have done nudity over a span of at least 35 years, but she came close at 30 years. She could top the list with one more nude scene, but that seems unlikely since her last nude scene was 27 years ago. But one never knows. After all, Glenn Close joined the list last year at age 77.

4) She breast-fed her baby on the Dick Cavett Show, but the cameramen pulled away and Cavett cut to a commercial. The posed shot below demonstrates what the studio audience saw.

5) Those are not prosthetics in Love Comes Quietly. She was pregnant.

6) In the Playboy pictorial for Boxcar Bertha, these was lower frontal exposure. (See the comments section.)

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