Pretty Maids All in a Row (1971)

The Worst Film Ever

Best movie ever!

As somebody who had not heard any of this before, it became a curious phenomenon to sit and watch a film and slowly have the realities begin to click into place.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

Rock Hudson's extraordinary good looks and charm are cast against type as he plays a school guidance counselor and football coach who picks a few choice plums among the student body on a regular basis. Seeing all those nubile young girls with skirts up to their hynies was temptation enough for anyone. The problem is that these girls want to take a permanent lease out on him and he's already married to Barbara Leigh and has a little daughter. What choice is there before the scandal costs him his job, but kill these Pretty Maids All In A Row.The unusual combination of Gene Roddenberry who wrote script and French director Roger Vadim, best known here on this side of the pond for Barbarella created Pretty Maids All In A Row, a black comedy that garnered a nice cult following. Hudson worked well playing his one and only villain on the big screen. A secondary plot involves substitute teacher Angie Dickinson who Hudson gives a warm up to in preparation for his protégé young John David Carson nailing Dickinson. A little Tea And Sympathy sideline as Carson slowly discovers what his mentor is up to..Roddy McDowall plays the clueless high school principal and Keenan Wynn the equally clueless sheriff. One who is not clueless is Telly Savalas who plays a Kojak like detective who suspicions that Hudson is the murderer but can't quite prove it. At the end of the film Savalas is totally convinced.Hudson as serial killer might be jarring to his fans, but Rock does pull it off. An interesting alternative part for an actor who was far better than he was credited.

Really oddball slice of movie-making. Writer Roddenberry apparently wants to say something derogatory about high-school and football, while director Vadim can't seem to train his camera on anything but a girl's groin area. The two threads occasionally cross paths, but not long enough to produce a coherent result. Rock Hudson, of all people, is a high-school coach who dabbles in serial killing, that is, when not testing girls out carnally in his office. Meanwhile, frustrated teenager Carson is having a terminal case of sexual arousal at all the wrong times. At the same time, a half-clad Angie Dickinson is trying to figure out just what her role is supposed to be, while bemused cop Telly Savalas stands by, practicing for his Kojak role. The overall result is a sometimes interesting mess that, nevertheless, remains visually compelling for guys, at least. It's like soft-core porn with a Hollywood cast. I'm impressed, however, by how well Hudson performs as a tough talking womanizer and serial killer, not exactly the actor's stock and trade. Too bad Carson has only one frozen expression for every occasion, as another reviewer points out. Anyhow, if there's a point to the narrative buried somewhere inside the rampant lust, I couldn't find it. The movie is really more like an experience than a story told or a moral revealed.

An oddity from MGM apparently desperate to stay afloat and keep up with the times. Pretty Maids is rather like soft core porn that's been edited for an R rating. Perhaps Roger Vadim's limited understanding of English can account for the vacuous feel and the awkward and uncertain tone, but a stupid script that has no right to exist and Vadim's flat-footed direction are also to blame for this dud. Hudson is interesting because his role provides a contrast from his usual screen persona, but the rest of the cast is adrift. Pretty Maids is ultimately lame and boring; it doesn't work as black comedy or parody and understandably never found an audience. It's shameless exploitation produced and released by a major studio.

Another blast from my past! I was a horny college student when this film was released in 1971, and I recall a big photo spread in "Playboy" promoting the film with revealing images of various "Pretty Maids." (Joy Bang? Nothing suggestive there!) I went to see the film based on that promise of titillation, but rather than being turned on, my tender sensibilities were turned off by the amoral characters and plot line.I recently watched the film again on TCM (give them credit for not censoring the mild nudity!), and I can't say that my view has changed much in 35 years. Those who try to excuse this fecal matter as "black comedy" or as an unsung "cult classic" are putting a lot of lipstick on a warthog.Many privileged Baby Boomers (of which I was one) developed in the 1960s a peculiarly self-centered notion that youth is morally superior to maturity, that idealism always trumps experience. The media -- especially a movie industry with a new ratings system that released filmmakers from the restrictions of the old Production Code -- pandered to the Baby Boomers' self-congratulatory moral smugness. This film is rife with such pandering. Rock Hudson's lecherous/murderous teacher is represented as the only cool adult in the film, as much for his "youthful" sense of style as for his unorthodox ideas about educating horny teenagers. The only other remotely hip adult is Telly Savalas' detective, who himself develops a grudging admiration for the murderer. The Angie Dickinson character is an overly earnest teacher who has to be "enlightened" by Hudson into seducing Hudson's sexually frustrated protégé (John David Carson). The other adult characters are essentially movie idiots (Keenan Wynn and Roddy McDowall are particularly offensive -- I hope they were paid well), while the hip, turned-on teens in the film protest the Vietnam war and lecture their elders on sexual freedom and openness.I have nothing against good old-fashioned lust, but even in 1971 I saw the impropriety of Hudson's character having sex with his female students (which he excuses as a way to enhance their psychological well-being). That sort of sexual power-mongering is bad enough, but then the controlling bastard must kill certain sexual partners (and others) who might expose his escapades. Rather hypocritical, isn't it? Advocating sexual license but afraid of having his own licentiousness exposed? (His wife, played by the lovely Barbara Leigh, is strangely passive in all this mess. It's never clear if she's totally clueless or remarkably tolerant of her husband's extramarital liaisons, though the film's ending points toward the latter.) After the Hudson character's demise(?), the newly unfrustrated protégé (who earlier is dismayed by revelations of his mentor's murderous behavior) adopts the same style of sexual duplicity for himself. (He attains symbolic hipness by abandoning his wimpy Vespa for a studlier motorcycle.) Perhaps the filmmakers were trying to argue that the new sexual mores of the '60s were a sham -- just the old, inescapable sexual hypocrisy coated with hip psychobabble – but that point itself is objectionable, and the film's own hypocrisy emphasizes just how disgusting the old sexual double standard really was (and is).One would think that this film was a rather blatant fantasy by that unapologetic libertine, Roger Vadim. But the film was written and produced by that celebrated intergalactic moralist, Gene Roddenberry, for God'sake! This guy gives dirty old men a bad name, and the film makes me yearn for the mindless but honest lasciviousness of hardcore porn. Comedy, even black comedy, still needs a moral center, something we can laugh with rather than just laugh at. This film glories in its amorality and mocks what the many progressive Boomers of the 60s, for all our ignorance and pretense, were trying to accomplish (and to some extent, have achieved) in making society's attitudes about sex more humane.