Amin Q. Chaudhri's A WOMAN'S URGE is a predictable but well-made softcore porn opus, timid by today's standards but certainly high-quality for 1965. I recently bought a copy from Something Weird but apparently it has since been deleted from their catalog.
Maude Ferguson stars as Laura, a young girl from Upstate New York who heads for the Big Apple (via the Port Authoriy bus terminal, naturally) to make a life for herself. Since she was seriously suicidal, her story is told to us case-history style by her shrink played by film's producer Ed Hall, with Maude chiming in occasionally in voice-over.
Her travails are not unlike those of many a later Doris Wishman heroine: back on the farm she was mistreated by step daddy and almost suffered through incest at his hands, and once in New York she is exploited by mean Heat Wave night club owner Lefty, as she waits tables and later becomes a stripper for him.
Laura's specialty number "Dance of the Virtues" is so good that it's shown twice, including a sexy teaser at the film's outset. One suspects she was cast as a real-life stripper/dancer for the film rather than an actress who performs a striptease as part of the script.
Her Gotham misadventures include drifting into nude modeling at the behest of her best friend from the club Bebe (Laura Ringham) and the fans eventually get to see quality topless footage of both of them. They also have a very romantic lesbian tryst at Bebe's country house.
Most of the film's melodramatic turns are not all that thrilling, including an awkwardly staged orgy that leads to her suicide attempt. My favorite scene is her first visit to Washington Square Park, where a black guy ascends a perch (a la Hyde Park ranters in London) and screams: "I'm the king of the universe!" -eat your heart out James Cameron.
Tech credits, mostly ascribed to filmmaker Amin Q. Chaudhri wearing many hats, are well done, and this qualifies as a decent entry. I got to know Chaudhri fairly well 20 years later when he made a string of ambitious (if unsuccessful at the box office) indie productions starring the likes of Patricia Neal, Shelley Winters and Patrick Swayze. It's a shame he never made it "to the top of the world!".
