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Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, out of the London fish market and into the boisterous bordello. Pretty Fanny (Letícia Román), new chambermaid for madam (Miriam Hopkins), not quite aware of the nature of the business. "White for virginity, pink for willingness, or satin for stupidity?" Gamy vaudeville turns comprise the wench's education, Teutonic ham (Helmut Weiss), bashful fetishist (Chris Howland), somnambulistic libertine (Walter Giller). Bucolic sojourn, cf. "La Maison Tellier" (Le Plaisir), brush with the sailor (Ulli Lommel) in the haystack, hiding from lightning. Their romance is interrupted before it can properly begin, he's shanghaied to the high seas but comes back to her in strapping drag. "Dear me, they're growing them larger in the country every year. Like beetroot." Russ Meyer's Tom Jones, fast-motion and swinging chandeliers and all, the roving American eye amidst European corsets and perukes. (The link to the private worlds of producer Albert Zugsmith's Confession of an Opium Eater is also salient.) Page-flipping wipes for saucy 18th-century illustrations, an engraving catches fire to register incendiary slapstick at the procurer's mansion. "Invincibly innocent," the heroine, a dense smile floating from boudoir to boudoir. "I'm sure everyone will love her, sooner or later." Alexander D'Arcy is a serviceable Terry-Thomas stand-in, the main Old Hollywood attraction though is Hopkins in full bawdy bloom, singing the praises of Romeo and Juliet while munching on on a bratwurst. All is resolved in a madcap wedding of soused preachers, randy dwarfs and oversized Saint Bernards. "How touchingly apropos." The Seven Minutes marks Meyer's next uneasy flirtation with the mainstream. With Cara Garnett, Marshall Reynor, Syra Marty, and Karin Evans. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |