My local movie theater Bow Tie in Chelsea features a wall exhibition of WeeGee's photography, but were they foolish enough to show THE IMP-PROBABLE MR. WEEGEE (perhaps as a midnight show?) that old "Absolutely No Refunds!" sign would have to be prominently displayed. This '60s example of wimpy soft porn is truly awful.
Taking the blame, literally, is filmmaker Sherman Price, whose entire small output of dumb comedies have been unearthed by Something Weird Video. Not weird enough for me, however.
WEEGEE is two films in one: opening is a terrible extended sketch set in a police squad room, where various women take off most of their clothes (not professional enough to call it a striptease) as prospective character witnesses for the prosecutor against Mr. WeeGee, who's in the hoosegow for stealing a store mannequin.
When they discover he has escaped, the film switches to an hour-plus MOS exercise in boredom, with the real WeeGee traveling from NYC to London and then Paris in search of his dream girl (a mannequin he was smitten with when he saw her fall from a shipping box at the docks).
There's attempted slapstick and plenty of local color as our goofy but famous hero chomps on a trademark (Groucho actually has the trademark) cigar, pursuing feminine pulchritude but with a taste for the inanimate kind. This touristy format lets Price throw in a semi-nude woman from time to time, the sum total of skin footage all revealed in the film's trailer. One busty girl shaving her legs in the bathroom is about the only five seconds of the overlong film I enjoyed.
What makes this film so hard to watch is actually the non-stop voice-over narration where Price keeps up a torrent of bad jokes. Example: when WeeGee in Paris encounters a mannequin looking like Shirley Eaton in GOLDFINGER, we are told it is suffering from a "gilt complex". The only interesting moments occur when various authentic WeeGee pictures are shown, in his police blotter style as well as fanciful distorted ones, featuring a host of celebrities including Picasso, James Dean, Leslie Caron, Marlene Dietrich, Jack Paar, Jackie O (she was still Kennedy at the time), De Gaulle and Khrushchev.
The so-called nudie cuties of this period supposedly have a nostalgic following 50 years on, but they're pretty much a waste of celluloid.
