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Madames are made in MOONLIGHTING WIVES (1966)

Posted by Daniel Metz

Dir. Joseph W. Sarno
Alamo Drafthouse Ritz, 5/12/10, 11:59pm

As I noted a few weeks ago, famed sexploitation filmmaker Joe Sarno passed away on April 26. The Alamo and Weird Wednesday hosted a memorial screening for the director this week, showcasing one of his best loved films, Moonlighting Wives. Unfortunately, the mechanical and proletarian Iron Man 2 bumped this picture into the small theatre at the Ritz. But, as we have learned from films like The Cheerleaders, Lord Love a Duck, Pretty Maids All in a Row, etc., sometimes the best Weird Wednesdays are those that are relegated to the smaller house. Moonlighting Wives was no exception.

The film itself is tremendous Sarno fare. Sarno, as a filmmaker, shows us that sexploitation films can be much more than mere exploitation. His films are imbued with insight into the human condition and, especially, what it means to be a woman in a sexual world. All the while, his pictures are shot in a proficient-if-low-budget style, often cinematically experimenting with light and dark (and in this film, color) in a way above and beyond typical sleaze.

This film takes as its subject a very real concern about marriage; most people are unfulfilled. So, the film suggests, unhappy lovers place their unsatisfied desires onto others, creating abstract, faux-panacean statues in the process.

In this case, an entrepreneurial woman (Mrs. Joan Rand, played here by Tammy Latour) sets up a prostitution ring by enlisting her bored housewife friends. They do it for two reasons, both of which amount to the same thing: men are inadequate and not meeting the needs of their wives. These streetwalking spouses sell themselves because they need the “pin money” that their husbands aren’t bringing to them. More importantly, though, they do it because they want to get fucked in a way that hubby just ain’t doing anymore.

Discussing the gender politics of this picture gets me to an issue clear in this film as well as most sexploitation pictures of this era, and something that I’ve always been crazy about. The sexuality of 1960s sex films is more steeped in 1950s eroticism than the free-love era in which they belong.

Looking back, we now know that the 1960s was a time of sexual awakening for the United States and most Western countries. Our associations with this time need little rehashing: orgies, love-ins, the pill, promiscuity, etc. Yet the sex films of this era, with some notable exceptions like Antonioni’s Blow-Up, do not really reflect these attitudes and themes. This is not a surprise, considering the filmmakers of this era were all past hip-age; in 1966, Sarno was 45, Russ Meyer was 44, David Friedman was 43, Doris Wishman was 54, Radley Metzger was 37.

So, the past-their-prime filmmakers instead made films focusing on the previous decade’s sexual politics and mores. Moonlighting Wives‘ take on post-war suburbanized discontent is no different; this is not a film for the hippies, but one for their parents.

One thing I loved about this film was the recurrent phrase “pin money.” The women are selling their cunts in order to get some “pin money.” This phrase is one my grandmother uses, and she taught it to me to mean money to walk around and buy stuff with. I like thinking that it originally meant money to buy pins with.

Tammy Latour’s performance here is also worth noting. Her eyes are over-expressive, often reaching an absurd level of communication. While some people’s voices are described using alcohol terms like a fine scotch or a dry martini, Latour’s timbre is best described as a soda pop, somewhere between a cheap root beer and an off-brand diet orange soda. Basically I’m saying she’s a lousy actress, but in a special way.

There was one absolutely remarkable thing about this screening, however. This was apparently the first time the Alamo screened this print of the film, a recent purchase from the North Carolina School of the Arts trade that benefited the Austin Genre Film Archive. The print had a sixth reel that was extra footage. This reel contained all the nude scenes that had been cut out of the original film.

This find is absolutely astounding. All currently accounted-for prints of the film (and a corresponding DVD for one of them) contain no nudity. These nude scenes, and there are quite a few, form a historical mystery: why are they all contained in one place rather than interspersed within the film where they should be, and why do all other known-prints not contain this material?

Different accounts and theories have come up about this. Lars announced to the crowd that it was a censorship thing, and that the distributor would have sent this out to theatres and said, “Here is a clean version of the film, use this to pass the censors and then add these other scenes in where they belong after.” I’m not really buying this, for two reasons. First of all, censor boards regularly inspected screenings to make sure that exhibitors were not doing this exact practice of sneaking in taboo content, and it would be very risky for a theatre to do this.

Further, and more importantly, by 1966 local governmental film censorship was practically over. In 1965, a US Supreme Court Case called the Freedman Case (Freedman v. Maryland, 380 U.S. 51) effectively ended the practice, saying that a censor board did not have the power to ban a film. Accordingly, a film like Moonlighting Wives, even including the sexy but not groundbreaking nude scenes that were in this reel 6, would not be using any trickery to avoid censorship at this time.

I spoke about this with Michael Bowen, who is Sarno’s biographer and who was my mentor at NYU. He came to this conclusion:

I think the national distributor, in fact, made this material available on the separate reel you folks have (it’s not a random, catchall reel of stuff some local sub cut out of the film) and that the general release version of the film was, in fact, the “censored” [i.e. clean] version.  Since the 3 previously known prints are essentially all cut in the same way, I suspect the distributor intended for it to be released that way, but gave local sub-distributors the option of “spicing it up” if they wished.

Stephen suggested this practice actually be dubbed “splicing it up.” I’m going to have to end on that.