Bill Teas, a dopey, average schlub waltzes around town ogling cleavage and sneaking peaks at nude ladies.That's it.
This is the film that created "sexploitation", delivered real nudity to the screen, caused censor boards around the country to become so enraged their skeletons leaped out of their skin, and launched the career of Russ Meyer, "king of the sex film" who would later direct true classics like Faster Pussycat. ..Kill! Kill! and the Roger Ebert-penned psychotropic candy-colored revelation Beyond The Valley of the Dolls.
It's a bore. Period. Without the historical importance this would have been forgotten among the hoards of imitators. But alas, there were no imitators yet, so we can grapple with the question "because it's the first, does that make it great?" Well, no. But there are worthwhile aspects to this slog whether Meyer knowingly inserted them or they were mere accidents of his shoot-from-the-hip-but-mostly-the-dick 'tude of relentless maleness.
There is a cloud of sadness hanging over this whole production. The hunched, pathetic Teas is humiliated even by a young child throwing her toys at him, while the title screen sees our titular schlemiel amidst a stationary stroll on a treadmill in the street as the rest of society meanders right on by. Obvious? Yes, but an overwhelming admission of late 50's middle class masculine crisis on behalf of an entire country feeling their potential squandered. I've never felt more unease with the antiquated idea of "we work and just deal, this is 'murica!" than while watching Teas, the schlubbiest of voyeurs.Teas' not-quite-M. Hulot jaunt through the streets becomes some kind of desperate male fever dream in which he will gawk, ogle, and drool over the chests of many a buxom beauty, all of whom in this nether-realm are endowed with mountainous mammaries of legend. Russ Meyer's cross cuts between a female's chest and Tea's dumbfounded grin can extend to double digits within a single scene in which nothing happens except grins and cross cuts. It's an exercise in patience and breast-envy, but fascinating in its constitution. But most frightening is that Bill Teas, the screen representation of emasculated working men across America, only has one fantasy: to SEE a woman's voluptuous figure. Not necessarily touch, nothing so lewd you vile, vile reader. He just needs to witness it for himself, up close or at a distance, real or imagined; it's no matter. This can give an inkling to just how sexually repressed the 50's male was that it culminated in THIS being the apex of fantasy (only until later Russ Meyer films, of course). Within this ultimate of voyeur films the profound melancholy envelopes the entire production as well as the modern viewer despite this being the antithesis of Meyer's aims. He just loved tits.
Also we witness the birth of the insane Russ Meyer-montage (Russtage? We coin terms here). Relatively tame in its first incarnation here, but it instills the rapidly increasing fear of technology that his films sometimes imply, all to the tune of a narrator resembling The Real Don Steele on quaaludes. We see the world advancing! Industry! Oil power! Smokestacks! Men putting screwdrivers into things! Turning them! And adjusting them! It's all oddly personal in a way few would want to accept, a defining feature of the Meyer oeuvre. The film revels in low budgetry, yet still looks light years ahead of most nudie-cutie sexploitation garbage out there. Granted, little of that existed yet because Teas began a trend that many would claim eviscerated America's moral center by being what it is, yet playing in real movie theaters and drive-ins, not just glorified janitors closets with 10 ft. screens. The legitimacy made it and Russ himself a pariah, but it didn't stop the endless ticket sales and America's love affair with cinematic depravity.
