Nudes Inc. (1964) Poster

(1964)

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Boring Mahon propaganda film
lor_9 January 2015
Barry Mahon made many fun short nudie films in the 1960s, but this feature-length variation is tedious in the extreme. It turns out to be about 10 minutes of movie and nearly an hour of padding.

An unnamed mature blonde model stars as Barbara Jo, fresh to the Big Apple and seeking work. She heads to the title modeling studio and finds it, posing for nude shots.

That's the entire movie in a nutshell, and if it sounds familiar, it is. Mahon made the same movie again a year later as CONFESSIONS OF A BAD GIRL but with significant improvements. In the 1965 version Judy Adler stars, it's a talkie (NUDES INC. was shot MOS with narration added) and is a more honest presentation of the material.

The b.s. level in NUDES INC. is very high, as our helpful narrator tells us at least a dozen times how legitimate this company is (transparently standing in for Mahon's own soft porn empire), how hard it is for women in New York to make a living, and the wonderfulness of earning $50 to $300 a day disrobing for the camera "with no strings attached". So patrons of Adult Theaters of the day were essentially subjected to an hour of self-serving propaganda justifying the pornographer's role in our society. It reminds me of the current "job-creation" statistics being cited anent the ongoing rush to legalize marijuana use not just in Colorado but everywhere.

The upside of this exercise is the chance to see beautiful breasts and nipples in a movie theater in 1964, and Mahon doesn't' stint. Especially delivering the goods is lovely Gigi Darlene, whose orbs shot in low angle are still stimulating 50 years later, She is identified as Gigi by the narrator, and his reciting of her back story as a German refugee to America is surprisingly true. The Bennett twins also pop up, and while not drop-dead beauties the other gals all display attractive racks for our listening pleasure.

The later film used melodrama to hold the audience, as Mahon's heroine Judy Adler suffered through the gropes, propositions and other man-handling by unscrupulous & horny photographers, ad men and huckster movie producers. A hint of that plot line is included in NUDES INC. as we watch in flashback brief case histories of other models getting the runaround.

Some nice location photography of Midtown Manhattan circa 1964 is included to break up the repetition of girls disrobing & posing, over & over again. Cassavetes collaborator Al Ruban did the editing.
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3/10
Story of 8 Girls
BandSAboutMovies25 March 2021
Warning: Spoilers
In case my wife reads this and wonders, "Why have you been covering movies like this all week," it's because of the juxtaposition of Barry Mahon. He's a director who could make movies like this that have one minute of plot and sixty some odd moments of photographing women in various stages of undress. But I have to respect the fact that he continually invents reasons for those moments to happen. This time, it's all about a modeling agency where women are treated fairly, unlike so many of Mahon's films where violence can break out at nearly every moment. Honestly, this is the same movie as Confessions of a Bad Girl but it's much nicer all around and no one really gets hurt. The Bennett Twins are in this, as is Gigi Darlene. Her life story is shared in this and it's all true. Born in Berlin at the end of World War II, she escaped a rough home life by winning beauty pageants and moving to Queens with family friends and finally to Manhattan, where she started posing for nudes, exotic dancing and appearing in the films of Doris Wishman, Joe Sarno, Mahon and other exploitation filmmakers. Working as a feature dancer, she met her husband, a hypnotist named Charles Lamont. She quit dancing and acting at his request and they went on the road and played Vegas together until 1980, when they retired to Florida. Sadly, he died soon after they retired, so she became a real estate agent and started acting again, appearing in movies as an extra, which earned her a SAG card. Gigi's name came from, of course, the movie Gigi and the first name of one of her best friends, the aforementioned Darlene Bennett. Her abrupt vanishing act led to this question in the credits of Michael and Roberta Findlay's Curse Of Her Flesh: "Whatever happened to Gigi Darlene?"
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