Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!

Dean DeFino

• Publisher: WallFlower Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780231850544
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

Russ Meyer's Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965) is an enigma. A box-office failure when initially released on the grindhouse circuit, it has since been embraced by art-house audiences, and referenced in countless films, television series, and songs. A riot of styles and story clichés lifted from biker, juvenile delinquency, and beach party movies, it has the coherence of a dream, and the improvisatory daring of a jazz solo. John Waters has called it the greatest movie ever made, and Quentin Tarantino has long promised to remake it. But what draws them, and so many other cult fans to Pussycat? To help answer that question, this book looks at the production and critical reception of the film, its place within the cultural history of the 1960s, its representations of gender and sexuality, and the specific ways it meets the criteria of a cult film.

1

THE PUSSYCATS GEAR UP

The budgetary formula applied in my earlier films was simple. I would hit upon an idea, and then impose strict limitations upon myself before even considering budget … With just a thin outline in mind, we would try to find a location. Then and there, I would know how to build my story.

– Russ Meyer, ‘The Low-Budget Producer’ (1979:180)

And here’s where our screenplay starts to unfold, right now.

– Varla

Much like our discovery of them, cult films seem simply to emerge as the unforeseen result of rarefied conditions and happy accidents. Idiosyncratic, transgressive and more often than not made under singular circumstances, they should probably not find an audience at all, but each charts its own serpentine path to cult success. In the age of the DVD commentary track, even the casual viewer may be exposed to key facts about a film’s origins, but for the cult fan the act of retracing that serpentine path is a pilgrim’s progress, a ritual sanctification. At first glance, Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! looks a lot like any other Russ Meyer film. Produced by one of the most successful independent filmmakers in the history of the medium, it is a work of remarkable craft and formal rigour that, like all Meyer films, came in under budget and on time. Exploiting the lust-and-rage formula that had served him well over his last three films – a formula Meyer described as a combination of Al Capp, Erskine Caldwell and the Bible, which exploited the recent vogue in sex-and-violence exploitation films known as ‘roughies’ – it was marketed to a loyal Meyer audience that had been growing steadily over the half-dozen films since he broke out with his first ‘nudie-cutie’, The Immoral Mr. Teas, in 1959. To its maker, Pussycat was just another Russ Meyer film, conceived not to realise some grand vision but to turn a profit.

Just another Russ Meyer movie?

The only trouble was, it bombed.

PRODUCTION

1964 and 1965 were prolific years for Russ Meyer, with three films made under his own banner, Eve Productions, and a fourth as director-for-hire on Albert Zugsmith’s hamfisted adaptation of John Cleland’s Fanny Hill (1964). Meyer’s first roughie, Lorna, about a young wanton stuck in a sexless rural marriage, was a massive financial success ($2 million against a $37,000 budget), so Meyer followed up with Mudhoney (1965), a Depression-era ‘shitkicker’ about the perverse underbelly of rural America that plays like God’s Little Acre as imagined by … well, Russ Meyer. But where the waifish Lorna Maitland of Lorna charmed the Meyer nudie-cutie faithful with her soft voice, overheated libido and enormous breasts swollen from pregnancy, the bizarre rural freaks of Mudhoney – including a post-pregnancy Maitland – confounded them. Meyer’s next film, Motor Psycho! (1965), which tells the story of three psychotic hoodlums who roll into town on mopeds and proceed to murder and rape the terrified locals, was more successful, largely because it exploited recent public hysteria about motorcycle gangs (it also predicted the vogue of biker films to follow in the late 1960s). From there sprung the idea of three female hoodlums. It would be the last of the Meyer roughies.

With little more than that basic idea and a $45,000 budget, Meyer turned to friend and former child actor, Jack Moran, who had worked with him on the script for Wild Gals of the Naked West (1962). Moran would script two other Meyer films – Common-Law Cabin and Good Morning… and Goodbye! (both 1967) – and define the Meyer style perhaps more than any other member of his coterie, with the possible exception of Roger Ebert, who co-wrote several of Meyer’s 1970s sex parodies, most notably Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970). But if Ebert teased out the self-reflective camp qualities in Meyer’s work and lent him much-sought critical legitimacy, Moran’s work has a primal, straightforward quality that seems timeless next to the 1970s put-ons. Meyer’s working relationship with Moran is almost as legendary as the film they made together. Moran demanded only three things: payment by the page, brown-bag cuisine and plenty of alcohol at the end of each working day. After five days and nights locked up in a hotel room, Moran produced the first draft, tentatively titled The Leather Girls, then The Mankillers. The film had already begun shooting when sound editor, Richard S. Brummer, came up with its final title.

Though the script is full of iconic moments (Varla breaking a teenager’s back with her bare hands; a joust between a muscle man and a Porsche) and dialogue to shame Raymond Chandler (‘Drive! And don’t miss!’), the key to the film’s cult appeal is its casting, which in typical Meyer fashion began at a strip club. Haji (nee Barbarella Catton), a Canadian-born actor and exotic dancer whose chosen moniker means ‘pilgrim’ in Arabic and who claimed to be an extraterrestrial sent to Earth to teach respect for nature, was the first to be cast. A feline presence with soulful eyes, a wasp waist and the requisite Meyer bust, Haji would appear in more Meyer films than any other female performer (her only significant non-Meyer film role was as a stripper in John Cassavetes’ The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, 1976). Whether playing the Cajun spitfire in Motor Psycho!, the sorceress who restores male potency in Good Morning… and Goodbye! or the lovelorn lesbian Rosie in Pussycat, whose growl sounds like a combination of Nico and Chico (Marx, that is), Haji embodied the mystical power of female sexuality at the very core of Meyer’s films: fecund, aggressive, a force of nature. Though Meyer made greater use of Erica Gavin, Ushi Digart, Shari Eubanks and Kitten Natividad, Haji was his great Muse.

She also introduced him to his greatest star, her friend and fellow dancer at The Losers Club: Tura Satana. The Pussycats’ monstrous ringleader, Varla, may have been scripted by Meyer and Moran, but the black-clad supervillain who remains the indelible cult image of the Meyer Superwoman was Tura’s creation. A Japanese-born American of mixed Asian and Native American background, Tura led a remarkable life before ever locking horns with Russ Meyer. At age five, she and her family were forced into a Japanese internment camp. When World War Two ended, they moved to Chicago where, at the age of ten, the precociously-developed Tura was raped by five men. They got off by bribing the judge, but she was sent to reform school. After her release a few months later, she began studying karate and aikido and formed a girl gang to protect others from sexual predators. They carried switchblades in their boots and razors in their hair. At age 13, her family arranged for her to marry a 17-year-old boy in Mississippi. The marriage did not last and, with a fake I.D., she made her way to Hollywood, taking work as a swimsuit model, then as a nude subject for screen legend and amateur photographer, Harold Lloyd, whom she credited with giving her the confidence to pursue a career in film. That same year, she moved back with her family in Chicago and began a long and highly successful career as an exotic dancer. By 15, she was doing strip-tease, soon earning a reputation for her back bends and tassle work (she could spin one at a time). By 20, she was earning $1,500 a week and had her own cult following. By 25, around the time she first met Meyer, Tura was teaching Shirley MacLaine burlesque moves for Billy Wilder’s Irma La Douce (1963), and could already claim Elvis as a lover. She turned down his marriage proposal, but purportedly kept the ring.² Tura’s was a big life, the autobiographical book and film versions of which were still incomplete at the time of her death in 2011, but you see the outlines of it in her larger-than-life screen image.

An iconic moment: Varla breaks Tommy’s back in the desert

Lori Williams got the part of blonde nymphomaniac, Billie, by answering a casting call. She had some acting experience, including an unexceptional beach party movie called A Swingin’ Summer (1965) that happened to be Raquel Welch’s film debut, along with un-credited appearances as a dancer in several Elvis movies. Though it is hard to imagine anyone else playing the role of Billie, and though the blonde beach bum was a popular cinematic type in the mid-1960s, Lori is the one casting anomaly in Meyer’s pantheon of ‘buxotic’ leading ladies, as her bust line simply did not measure up to the director´s standard. When asked about the decision to hire her, Meyer would merely shrug and admit that he had Lori stuff her top: heresy in any but this Russ Meyer film, because it is the only one not to feature frontal nudity. Perhaps to compensate for the perceived handicap, Lori plays Billie as the most hedonistic and sexually aggressive of the three, setting herself up in sharp contrast to the other female character of ‘average’ proportions, the naïve ingénue and kidnap victim, Linda, played by the 16-year-old Susan Bernard.

The male cast features two Meyer regulars: Stuart Lancaster in the role of the psychotic, wheelchair-bound Old Man and Mickey Foxx as the toothless, ogling Gas Station Attendant. The Old Man’s muscle-bound son, known simply as The Vegetable, who serves as the instrument of his father’s sexual aggression, is played by Dennis Busch in his only film role; his straight-laced, moralising, spineless brother Kirk is played by veteran television actor, Paul Trinka (Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea); and the pasty, feckless jock who out-races Varla on the salt flats, only to have her break his back like a wishbone, is played by Ray Barlow. Each embodies familiar Meyer male archetypes: the raging impotent, the slack-jawed voyeur, the mindless stud, the morally conflicted hand-wringer and the earnest All-American boy. Meyer’s films refract male libido through a prism, breaking it down into a series of basic elements, then subjecting each to the same irresistible force: the Meyer Superwoman.

The crew consisted mainly of Meyer’s old army buddies (Meyer got his start as a filmmaker during World War Two, documenting the movements of Patton’s armies for the Air Signal Corps): a handful of guys out in the desert, doing everything from striking sets to running the second camera. The one technical stand out was the film’s sound editor, Richard S. Brummer, who had worked with Meyer on Motor Psycho! and would continue with him in one or more production roles right up to his final theatrical release, Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens (1979). Brummer came with avant garde credentials, having cut his teeth as editor on Roger Tilton’s Jazz Dance (1954) and bummed around bohemian New York in the 1950s and 1960s with the likes of Maya Deren and Jonas Mekas (McDonaugh 2005:154). Brummer’s high technical standards and his innovative approach to sound design – especially the overlapping, cropped dialogue – amplify and extend the rhythms of Meyer’s Eisensteinian editing style.

By all accounts, Meyer was a ruthless dictator on the set. Charles Napier, who had roles in five of Meyer’s films, put it this way: ‘Working with Russ Meyer was like being in the first wave landing in Normandy during World War II, crossed with a weekend in a whorehouse’ (McDonaugh 2005:54). Meyer would certainly have denied the whorehouse part. He had a strict policy of no fraternisation between cast and crew members. He kept them bivouacked in an isolated motel the length of the shoot, cut off from the outside world and, when not shooting, largely cut off from each other. His logic was simple: he wanted every bit of sexual tension up on the screen. This policy would cause a famous rift between Meyer and Tura. She and Meyer fought furiously over the matter, but eventually came to a secret agreement, by which Tura would arrange secret trysts with one of the crewmembers. It was reputedly the only time Meyer ever bent the rules for one of his actors.

They shot in the desert. Meyer had neither the resources nor the inclination to work in the studio. Under punishing sunlight, made worse by the many reflectors Meyer used to achieve the stark whites and deep lines that are a trademark of his exteriors, dehydration and sunstroke were common. Tura, dressed entirely in black, had a particularly difficult time, not only with the oppressive heat, but with the dust that covered everyone and everything. It was gruelling, and tempers ran high. When Susan Bernard’s mother insisted on hanging around the set – criticising not only the production, but what she saw as the seediness of the other actors – she and Tura almost came to blows.³ But rather than beat on the mother, Tura took it out on the daughter, who to her seemed unforgivably meek and feeble. Through vague threats and physical intimidation, Tura made Susan fear for her life. Meyer did nothing to stop it, because it only helped Susan’s performance. He was not above intimidating actors and fomenting dissent himself, if it helped the picture.

Of course, some of the ugliness was just plain acting. For example, it is frustration rather than anger that motivates Tura during the famous fight sequence where she breaks Ray Barlow’s back. So fearful was he of getting hurt that several shots from the sequence were performed in slow motion, and then sped up in postproduction. And it is disgust that motivates her during the roll-in-the-hay seduction scene with Paul Trinka. A health food junkie, Trinka’s breath was apparently so bad that Tura could hardly stand to face him.⁴

Pussycat was made, like the three roughies that preceded it, using black and white film stock. Though Meyer made conflicting claims about the reason for this (the influence of Italian neorealism vs. keeping costs down as he switched from 16mm to 35mm film stock), it would be difficult to overestimate the effect this choice has upon the viewer. His arch compositions, ruled by the curves of exposed and silhouetted flesh, his love of low ‘Dutch’ angles, close-ups, sudden gestures and staccato cuts, the harsh whites of his exteriors and the crisp greys of his interiors manage to bear equal resemblance to the expressionistic lines of film noir and the more impressionistic chiaroscuro of Italian neorealism. It is neither cartoonish nor naturalistic, yet at times it manages to seem both at once. Almost entirely gone are the Al Capp comedic rural primitives, the Caldwell preachers and moonshine melodramas of the previous roughies. Gone, too, the bucolic scenes of nature and languorous outdoor sex that make the landscape itself an erotic object. In Pussycat, where both sex and nature are manifestations of violence, the shape of all things evokes that abstract value. It is a cartoon in the classical definition of that term: a sketch or study of its primal subject.

PROMOTION

Whether art or commerce or some combination of both led Meyer to the style that defines his roughies of the mid-60s, there can be no doubt these films are in many ways fundamentally different from Meyer films preceding them and Meyer films to follow. They are darker, more threatening, and though rife with hyperbole and humour, dead serious. This shift is apparent even in the films’ advertising. Eric Schaefer writes at length about Meyer’s marketing campaigns, beginning with the nudie-cuties, advertisements for which used cartoon imagery and naughty copy. The posters and newspaper ...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• Dedication
• Introduction: Russ Meyer and Me
• 1. The Pussycats Gear Up
• 2. The Pussycats Find Their Audience
• 3. Seeing America First
• 4. Pussycats and Satyrs
• 5. A Velvet Glove Cast in Iron
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index