What's Up Front!

I saw this movie when I was a kid and remember thinking it was so stupid it was hilarious. It came on this old cable channel and it was rerun about every week. I must have seen it 20 times. My father watched it with me once and thought it was the worst movie he'd ever seen, but laughed the whole way through. For the next twenty years, he would bring up "the bra salesman movie" and crack up.

This was a surprisingly clean movie, as everything was "suggested" rather than crude. The acting was terrible, on par with a porno film. Actually, many of the situations in the film were basic porno set-ups, but without the payoffs.

I wish I could see it again, for nostalgia alone.

Homer Pettigrew is a salesman that gets into the Brassiere selling business. One hopes for a light sex comedy going into this, with maybe some skin to redeem it if it is a bad movie. This movie is simply Homer put into various suggestive (in 1963 anyway...) situations which usually results in him leering at women. Homer ends up being a door-to door bra salesman (ha ha ha..) and the movie goes no where. Why was this made? Was it a B-movie to go with nudie movies? My only guess is that it had to have been that, a teaser movie before the real nudie movie started. Seen by itself away from a double-feature setting it has no value and you will wonder why you wasted your time when there are many better movies out there.

This is a fantastically campy movie, and gets a bad rap it doesn't deserve. Movies don't need huge production budgets to be good, and What's Up Front is an excellent example of that.

Even though the subject matter is adult oriented, it has such a corny innocence to it you could easily show it to the kids. The early 60's color processing and perky soundtrack immerse you in a happy-go-lucky world gone past.

Sure, it would make for a truly great MST3K episode, but it's still a fun ride of pure cheese on its own. I can't recommend it highly enough, and wish it was available on DVD!

Sonny Bono lookalike Homer L. Pettigrew, takes us on a brassiere drenched romp thru a Southern California populated by nobodies. I can't figure out the deal with this picture... it's tame; tamer than successful commercial releases of it's time, and not funny. It's like a manque Hugh Hefner's college film project, inexorably thudding along to the end. Watch it and say, "Why does it exist?"

This indie comedy is easy to mock, as it has such a quaint approach to the "nudie-cutie" genre of softcore '60s movies. In fact it would be classified just a "cutie" since a decision was made at some point to avoid any nudity at all.

Arch Hall Sr., known for sponsoring his untalented son Arch Hall Jr. In some of the most reviled movies around (other than "The Sadist", a classic) co-wrote and co-stars, clearly devoid of talent. The slapstick and one-note "comedy" (about bras and voyeurism) content is poorly but insistently done, and the movie runs about two reels too long by any standard.

It's an artifact of interest as an example of how real talent has to start off at the bottom in an industry that is something of an oligopoly, in this case dominated by major studios. Vilmos Zsigmond and Laszlo Kovacs photographed "What's Up Front!", and less than a decade later had graduated to become the best directors of photography in the entire industry. Russ Meyer famously as an independent producer-director successfully emerged with his brand of sex and action cinema, and in drive-in mode Roger Corman became legendary with his sci-fi/fantasy and youth films. "What's Up Front!" is a failure in its merely recycling very, very hold (and stale) comical cliches dating back to vaudeville routines.

The star Tommy Holden is insufferable; any honeymoon with the viewer giving him a chance to be funny is over within the first few minutes, yet he keeps going and going nowhere interminably. The bevy of beauties simply aren't attractive -presumably a cardinal sin for this genre. Compare with Barry Mahon who created a formidable catalogue of similar but far better softcore features and short films in this time period. Same team from "What's Up Front!" earlier made "Magic Spectacles", same concept but hopefully a bit sexier.