Les filles de rues

..along with other subtle humorous touches, this is a nicely knowing piece of exploitation history.

The Maidens of Fet Street (1966)

* 1/2 (out of 4)

Silly and rather boring sexploitation film tells various stories about some girls from "F" street (the alternate title of this is THE GIRLS ON F STREET). The stories include a couple women and their true feelings for one another, a loser pays an angry prostitute and a husband decides to have some fun after watching a dirty show. I think there might be something going on to connect all of these stories but I freely admit that I lost track of what was going on or at least what director Saul Resnick was trying to do with it. On one hand this is a rather technical sexploitation picture meaning that the director was obviously trying to do something "special" with the picture. There are all sorts of weird edits, strange lighting situations and even some Dragnet-like narration and all of this actually brings an art-house feel to the picture. It also takes away from the grindhouse feel of the film but none of this really matters because the story is just so weak, unerotic and in the end downright boring. The film barely runs a hour and for the most part there's just nothing going on here that really keeps you entertained. Fans of the genre, or at least those who made it through the first two films on the Something Weird disc, might want to give it a shot but don't be shocked if you turn it off early.

There's no denying that this nudie classic looks terrific and I'm not talking about the pouting and extremely well-developed 'maidens' strutting their stuff on screen but of the brilliant black and white cinematography of Saul Resnick that turns them into living, breathing works of art. Of course, it wasn't an art-house audience that "The Girls on F Street" aka "The Maidens of Fetish Street" was aimed at, (the clue's in the title), but those back-street cinemas frequented by what was once euphemistically called 'the dirty mac brigade' and who would have been aware only of the women on screen and not the way Resnick filmed them. In other words, this is just another cheap exploitation picture, full of continuity errors, whose artistic merits would have escaped 99.9% of its audience. Now, of course, in a beautifully restored new print by director Nicolas Winding Refn it should attract an entirely different audience; grindhouse meets art-house, and we can simply wonder what one-man band Resnick, (he basically did everything on the film except sweep the floor), might have become had he ever made another picture - the Orson Welles of filth?

In a sub-genre dominated by hacks, director/cinematographer Saul Resnick stands out -- if for one brief, shining moment -- as a true talent with the eye of an artist. It is a great shame that he disappeared without a trace after directing this one film. His only other screen credits are as camera operator on the sexploitation films "Mondo Bizarro" and "Everybody Love It".

Supposedly adapted from the novel "The Degenerates", this is set, for no practical reason, in 1928 Los Angeles. The appearance of a 1920s car, an antique radio, and a phonograph are the only feeble attempts at period detail. Otherwise, the film, especially the scenes inside an adult bookshop, seem contemporary.

The episodic, near-plot less story concerns Nick (Ken McCormick), a lonely middle-aged creep who divides his time between strip joints, sex shops, and visiting whores. He goes to The House of Fetish and shacks up with the ugly old madam proprietress. But Nick gets caught fooling around with the other hookers and the jealous, hell-on-wheels madam spanks and whips the hell out of them several times. In one particularly strange scene, Nick lusts after a lovely black girl (Toni Lee Oliver) who dreams of tying him up, dumping molasses on his head and letting loose an ant colony on him.

The 62-minute movie is padded with several interesting ten-minute "art film" shorts presented as flashbacks or mood-piece interludes. The best one is a silent (only a couple scenes have live sound), beautifully filmed and edited vignette of a nude model (Kellie Everts) posing for a lesbian artist. Everts went on to become a well-known Christian stripper ("I strip for God") and body-builder who is still around today. The only other interesting cast member is Barbara Nordin, who appears with Nick in the last scene. She was one of the topless dancers from beyond the grave in Ed Wood's nutty "Orgy of the Dead" (1965).

The only connective tissue linking these disparate elements is a narrator who describes each scene in rich purple prose. Resnick delivers the seedy atmosphere, frequent nudity, and kinky perversity one expects from a "roughie" flick, but clearly didn't have (or didn't care about) a plot-driven story with structural logic. Instead, he created a moody, dream-like twilight world with film noire lighting, camera tricks, and bizarre sound effects. Strange as it is, in the end, this is more satisfying as an art film than the typical crude, simplistic sexploitation melodramas from lesser directors.

Made is the mid-1960s, set in the 1920s, with some highly melodramatic acting/narration/score that would seem more at home in an era somewhere in between. All the lurid, interesting or comedic bits could be distilled into a 10 minute clip cut. While there are certainly some tempting 'maidens' the likes of which you'd never see in a contemporary erotic film (hard, soft or premium cable), and some high-quality black & white cinematography that often seems more contemporary than 1966, the lack of any coherent plot or even theme uniting the vignettes makes for one VERY long hour. Overall, MUCH less fun than contemporary Russ Meyer's productions.