cinema history class: vixen! (1968)

The session: "Spring! When a Young Man's Thoughts Turn to Russ Meyer"
This month we pay tribute to director Russ Meyer

As always, there may be spoilers here. And the trailer may be NSFW and/or NSFL.

Week 3: Vixen! (1968)
Directed by Russ Meyer

My Impressions Going In:

I may have been vaguely aware of the film's existence. But I'm not sure.

Plot:

Vixen Palmer, the wife of a tourism pilot in rural Canada, likes to seduce anyone and anything.

Reaction and Other Folderol:

I suppose if I wanted to be charitable, I could give Vixen points for being groundbreaking. It was the first film to earn the MPAA's X rating for sexual content.* So Meyer was trying to break ground and innovate.

But there's just no way around the fact that Vixen! is not a good movie. The characters are unlikeable and uninteresting. Well, I suppose there are some interesting aspects to the title character, played by Erica Gavin. But even so, I just couldn't really care about her. That was combined with a weak plot. In fairness, the movie did develop something that could have been an interesting plot if it had been brought in earlier. That being the storyline about the Irish Communist who wants to fly to Cuba. If that had started earlier and had the movie devoted more time to it, things would have been better. But in the event, it was just a rompfest of Vixen screwing anyone she could -- including her brother.

Well, anyone except Niles (Harrison Page). She won't sleep with Niles (despite her brother's efforts to make that happen) because he's black. Instead, she continually heaps racist abuse at him, using almost every anti-black slue in the book (except, oddly, the most obvious one). And it would seem that the only reason for that angle is to turn the movie into some kind of anti-racist statement. Which is fine, though a bit ham-handed. But, combined with the sexual nature of the main plot, the antiracist message gives the movie a distinct split personality. On a related note, the anti-communist and anti-draft-dodger messages are treated clumsily and seem out of place.

Circling back, I'll note that Meyer's experimental idea of showing people seeing things that aren't there was kind of interesting. But like the rest of the film, it was clumsy.

Ratings

Me: 3.5

Christina: 4.8

Dave: 8.5

Ethan: 4

Joe: 8.5

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*A bunch of websites seem to give that credit to Brian De Palma's Greetings (also from 1968). But I suspect that they're overlooking Vixen! because of its low-budget nature.