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Released by: AGFA/Something Weird Video
Released on: November 25th, 2022.
Director: Doris Wishman
Cast: Lester Brown, William Mayer, Blaze Starr, Frank Young, Greg Conrad, Earl Bauer, Delores Carlos, Joan Bamford
Year: 1962/1962/1960
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The Films Of Doris Wishman: The Daylight Years – Movie Review:
Anyone even remotely familiar with the history of exploitation films knows the name Doris Wishman. Looked upon as sort of a female equivalent of the H. G. Lewis/David Friedman team, she made all manner of violent horror films, sexploitation pictures, and nudist films throughout her long and illustrious career. AGFA and Something Weird Video have teamed up to release the third of three sets collecting her work in properly restored presentations with all new extra features.
Here’s a look…
Disc One – Nude On The Moon/Blaze Starr Goes Nudist:
The first film in the set (directed by Wishman under the pseudonym of Anthony Brooks), Nude On The Moon, follows two scientists, the hunky young Jeff Huntley (Lester Brown) and an older man known only as The Professor (William Mayer). These two scientists are big into trying to develop a rocket ship that will take them to the moon so that they can bring back samples and what not, but they don't want to wait for their government funding to come through – they're chomping at the bit and ready to go now! While Jeff toils with how to get the money for his project faster, his secretary, Kathy (Marietta), pines away for him – Jeff's too busy thinking about science to notice that she's obviously madly in love with him.
Soon, good fortune smiles on our scientist friends and Jeff's uncle dies, leaving him exactly three million dollars (after taxes). He apparently was a big player in the fur business and left his estate to his nephew. Score! The two guys develop their space ship in record time and before you know it they're driving around Miami listening to music and not saying anything to each other in preparation for their launch. They hit the launch pad and climb into their space ship (which is obviously a plane's cockpit) and use radio headsets to talk to each other while sitting about a foot apart. Shortly after a successful lift off they land on the moon and start wandering around in their space suits, surprised to find that the surface of the moon looks a whole lot like Florida.
The two men start wandering around and picking up rocks that have been spray painted gold, figuring if they bring a few of those babies back with them they'll have all the funding they need, but are soon puzzled to find a colony of topless moon people wandering around not far from their ship. You can tell they're moon people because they are wearing antennas and hot pants. Before long, Jeff has fallen for the foxy Moon Goddess who leads this strange people. After wandering around and watching the naked moon people do things like swim and dance The Professor decides it's time to go home – they only had thirteen hours’ worth of oxygen with them. Jeff, however, has fallen for the Moon Goddess (who bears a striking resemblance to Kathy) and doesn't want to leave...
As to the second movie, Blaze Starr Goes Nudist (or, Blaze Starr Goes Wild, which is what the title card on this edition reads? It's tough being Blaze Starr, life beats you up all the time and puts you through the Hollywood machine without so much as a thought as to how you feel about it. With so much stress in her life, can you blame ol' Blaze when she decides to escape her life of dancing and from her dirtball agent/boyfriend? Not in the least! Any of us would do the same thing in her shoes.
When Blaze stumbles into a screening of a nudist camp movie, she decides that this is the life for her and off she goes to run around a Florida resort without her top on. Soon enough she falls for the guy who runs the place, Ralph, but there might be more to Ralph than meets the eye...
Both of these films are completely awful, but that being said, it's hard not to appreciate them. Wishman's penchant for shooting completely inappropriate things during important scenes is here in full swing and the looped dialogue is also present. There's plenty of obvious padding and bad camera work and neither movie operates under any form of logic whatsoever. It's precisely this carefree attitude (you could call it sloppy filmmaking, and yeah, that's not a stretch...) that makes these two films so much fun. Wishman would soon move on to rougher territory before shooting horror films and XXX films but here she's making quaint little low budget films for a niche market and likely having a good time doing it. There's a sense of wonder here, a sense that maybe she was doing something different (had anyone combined the sci-fi film with the nudist camp film before?) and it comes across in both films. Don't come for the acting or the cinematography, don't come for the sets or the effects – instead, enjoy these little oddities for what they are, relics of a more innocent era of exploitation filmmaking.
Disc Two – Hideout In The Sun/Gentlemen Prefer Nature Girls:
Hideout In The Sun was Doris Wishman's debut feature film! While Wishman would certainly go on to make stranger and more interesting films than this nudist camp/crime thriller hybrid, the fact remains that this is a historically important exploitation film and it's fun to see the early signs of the trademark 'Wishmanisms' show up in the picture.
Shot on location in Wishman's base of operations, Miami, the film follows Duke (Greg Conrad) and Steve (Earl Bauer), a pair of hoods who decide to hold up a bank. The job gets botched when an attempt to change cars results in a dead battery. With no other choice, the pair spot a dame walking out of the grocery store and, at gun point, they take her hostage and jack her car. As luck would have it, this girl, named Dorothy (Delores Carlos), works at the Hibiscus Country Club which turns out to be a fancy nudist camp. Duke and Steve decide that this sounds like the ideal place to hang out and lay low until they can find their way to Cuba, so off they go.
As the pair becomes accustomed to life at the club, Dorothy starts to fall for Steve, while he's growing accustomed to wandering around in the buff. To make sure that none of the other nudists start to suspect anything he decides to pretend he's Dorothy's husband and before you know it, he's having a ball doing all those things that nudists do - sports, swimming, enjoying a cocktail or two - it's all good! Unfortunately, Duke is hiding out in Dorothy's house refusing to go nudist and basically freaking out. He can't get used to the lifestyle change and rather than blow his cover he decides to make a break for it. What is poor Steve to do? Stand by his woman and his new lifestyle choice or go back on the lam with Duke? Dilemmas, dilemmas! Also, a naked woman plays with an ostrich!
Compared to the more exploitative fare that Wishman would churn out in later years, Hideout In The Sun is quite playful. There are no moments of real violence nor is there much in the way of sex - even the nudity is pretty harmless, with most of the full frontal bits conveniently covered up by objects in the foreground of the frame. It's interesting though to see some of the traits that Wishman would become known for show up even in this first film of hers. Strange, random camera work that doesn't seem to go anywhere coupled with inane dialogue and truly wooden acting are staples of her filmography and this debut feature exemplifies her 'talents' for those areas. It's obvious that Wishman is just winging it here, there's very little evidence of any technical ability on display and the film's pacing is awkward to say the least, but that's a big part of the film's charm.
Don't expect much out of the plot besides the basic synopsis above, as there aren't really any shocking revelations nor is there much of a twist ending (though without spoiling it, the snakes are a nice touch!). The bank robbery elements really only exist to get us to the nudist camp in the first place at which point the film becomes a meandering naked travelogue of sorts. The opening scene could have been cut in half and been more effective but it's moments like this, that stand out as curiously out of place, that endear the director's work to so many of us. Plenty of post-production dubbing is obvious, but when much of the footage shows the actors from behind (another curiously bad technique) it's likely that this was done to salvage the film rather than out of artistic intent.
In the end the film is interesting more than it is entertaining. It's far from provocative in this day and age and instead functions more as a time capsule of sorts. Wishman fans will certainly devour it as her stamp is all over the film but to call the picture good in the traditional sense of the word would be lying. It's a horrible film, but it does have its charm and its place in history.
Directed by Wishman in 1963, Gentlemen Prefer Nature Girls tells the story of Thomas Brooks (Lou Alexion) and his blushing bride Anne (Joan Bamford). Tom has a nice career going as a real estage agent, until his stuck up boss finds out that, in his spare time, Tom is a nudist. Anne works at the office as well, as the boss' secretary, but the boss doesn't realize they're married? it's complicated. Anne is also a nudist but the boss doesn't know this. Anyway, this discovery results in Tom's immediate dismissal from the film, leaving him unemployed just as Tom was about to close a big time deal with a man named Al Jenkins (William Mayer).
Needing some rest and relaxation, Tom decides to head to his regular nudist retreat to enjoy some sun and tack stock of the situation. Who should Tom run into while doing his thing at the camp? Why none other than Al himself, of course! Once Al is made aware of what happened, the two of them scheme to not only get Anne out to the camp to check it all out, but Tom's former boss as well, all in the hopes of broadening everyone's respective horizons and finishing up that big real estate deal they were working on.
“See what hard working girls do after a hard day at the office!”
Shot on location in Florida at Sunny Palms Lodge, picture is remarkably chilled out. There isn’t a whole lot of story here and what there is, well, it’s pretty predictable but the good natured vibe of the whole thing is weirdly relaxing. Granted, it is, like all nudist camp pictures, an excuse to show naked people being naked, but it gives us a glimpse of what life at Sunny Palms might have been like back in the sixties, as we spend time with naked people playing sports, getting some sun, enjoying the sounds of some dude with an accordion and really just enjoying life without the burden of clothing.
It isn’t really any more complicated than that, nor does it need to be.
Disc Three – Diary Of A Nudist/The Prince And The Nature Girl:
Released way back in 1961, Diary Of A Nudist tells the shockingly sordid tale of what happens when a newspaper man named Arthur Sherwood (Norman Casserly) is out on a hunting trip and inadvertently discovers the existence of a nudist camp out there in the woods!
Understandably both shocked and intrigued by what he's discovered, Arthur assigns his best (and probably best looking!) reporter, Stacy Taylor (Davee Decker) to uncover the truth about the origins of this facility and the nudist lifestyle that it purports to promote, hoping to get enough dirt on the place to get it closed down for good. Of course, once Stacy arrives at the camp and starts digging about, she starts to acclimate to her surroundings - how can you resist nudists playing volleyball (if nudist camp movies are to be believed, nudists played volleyball all the time)? Before you know it, Stacy's ditched her clothes and joined in on all the fun. When she writes a rave review of the camp, she's canned, leaving grouchy old Arthur to take on the cause himself. He joins the camp with every intention of writing what is essentially a hit piece, but will he too be won over by naked volleyball and chilled out sunbathing?
Like most of the films in the nudist camp cannon, Diary Of A Nudist is light on plot and high on footage of naked people just sort of hanging out and being naked (thought don’t go into this one or any of the others in this set expecting much in the way of full frontal, America just wasn’t ready for that in the early sixties it would seem). Still, the storyline with Arthur and Stacy is at least enough to hold all of this together and keep things moving when there aren’t naked people on screen to ogle, and that counts for something.
The direction is, of course, very Wishman-like, so things move at their own sort of alien pace. The camera will sometimes focus on things that don’t matter and the dialogue will sometimes be nonsense. All of these are things you want of a Wishman pictures, and this goofy entry in her filmography doesn’t disappoint in that regard.
The Prince And The Nature Girl is a fifty-three minute feature, directed in 1965, was her last nudist feature. This previously thought to be lost film was sourced from a print that turned up in Germany of all places. Watching a Wishman film in German is a strange experience, but one well worth taking on.
The plot - what little there is of it - tells the story of a man named Albert Prince. He's a businessman who hires two twin sisters, Eve and Sue. Aside from their hair color - Eve is blonde and Sue is a brunette - they are identical twins. Eve is the party girl type, she's loose and fun loving and always up for a good time. Sue is her opposite, she's calm, quiet, reserved and very dedicated to her job.
Prince takes a shine to pretty blonde Eve, a shine that becomes even shinier when he runs into her, seemingly completely by chance, at a nudist camp retreat called Sunny Palms Lodge. They hit it off and a casual romance seems to be in bloom, while back in the city poor Sue pines away for the man her sister seems to be courting, sans pants. When Eve splits town to go to a wedding (she's got to head to Ohio to be the maid of honor!), Sue gets a call from Prince in her sister's absence and sees this as a chance to make her move with Mr. Prince… all is fair in love and war, we're told.
"The devil himself knows no cunning like that of a woman in love!"
Featuring some newly shot footage using Wishman's apartment for the interiors and a nudist camp in New Jersey for the exteriors as well as a LOT of recycled footage from a few of Wishman's other nudist films, this movie is a mess. Even by Doris Wishman movie standards, it's pretty haggard. The plot is flimsy at best and continuously interrupted by strange and fairly static shots of 'things' in Wishman's apartment. The scenes of frolicking nudists are alright. Most of the girls are pretty enough and we get some decent footage of people doing things like playing volleyball (this seems to happen in EVERY goddamn nudist film ever made!), swimming, picnicking and just sort of hanging out (sometimes swaying back and forth for some reason) and being naked and awesome. There are also a lot of prolonged shots that just sort of make us look at plants in this movie.
In typical Wishman fashion, the cinematography is bland, the pacing is alien and the performances are wooden (though to be fair it's tough to really judge that accurately given the fact that we're watching it by way of a recreated dub). But the movie has its own sort of strange charm. There's lots of footage here of people just 'being naked' - doing routine things like gardening and chopping wood - while nothing else happens to push the plot further. The dialogue is sparse, Wishman knew she was patching together a bunch of leftover stuff and that the plot probably wouldn't make much sense. And it doesn't. And yet, as awful as all of this is - and it is truly awful - it's fascinating in the way that a lot of Doris Wishman's movies are. Unlike some of the stronger sex films she'd go on to make, that she really kind of seemed disinterested in, this one has her personality all over it. If a glimpse into her apartment isn't enough, it has that weird pacing, those strange camera shots, that awful editing that no one in their right mind would otherwise agree to… it's pure Wishman. And as such, you can't help but love it (even if her nudist film masterpiece remains Nude On The Moon).
The Films Of Doris Wishman: The Daylight Years – Blu-ray Review:
Each of the films in this collection has been taken from a new 2k restoration of the original 35mm negative and are spread across three region free 50GB Blu-ray discs and offered up in AVC encoded 1080p high definition, each picture framed at 1.33.1, which would be its original aspect ratio. Nude On The Moon and Blaze Starr Goes Nudist are restored from their respective original 35mm camera negatives and look excellent. There are some scratches in the first movie but they’re faint, while damage is noticeable on Blaze, particularly in the opening five minutes, but it isn’t a big deal. Diary Of A Nudist is also restored from its original 35mm camera negative, while The Prince And The Nature Girl are taken from the only known existing 35mm film elements, a German language print. Understandably, Prince doesn’t looks as sharp as the other movies, and neither does Hideout In The Sun, which is taken from Doris Wishman’s personal 16mm print. Gentlemen Prefer Nature Girls is, once again, taken from the original 35mm camera negative. Overall, these look quite solid, advancing in a pretty big way over previous DVD editions in terms of depth, detail, texture and color reproduction. Any damage that appears in perfectly acceptable given the age and obscurity of the films, everything is more than watchable here and overall, the transfers look really strong and always appropriately film-like.
Each film in the set gets an English language 24-bit DTS-HD 2.0 Mono track, except for The Prince And the Nature Girl which is presented in 24-bit DTS-HD 2.0 Mono In German, with optional subtitles provided in English only. There’s some minor background hiss noticeable here and there throughout the different movies in the set but overall they sound fine. Limitations in the original recordings are obvious at times, things can sound a little flat in spots, but generally speaking the mixes are pretty clean and always properly balanced.
Extras are spread across the three discs in the set as follows:
Disc One – Nude On The Moon/Blaze Starr Goes Nudist:
Nude On The Moon gets a commentary with director Frank Henenlotter and filmmaker Anthony Snead, the latter of whom is seeing the movie for the first time during this recording. Henenlotter does most of the heavy lifting here, detailing the opening theme and its singer Ralph Young (who shows up in Blaze Starr Goes Nudist), how it always looks like there's a thunderstorm going to happen in Florida at any given time, why the state was a Mecca for exploitation movies during this period, details on the cast and crew and where Wishman regulars were involved, how nudity was much tougher to come by during the period when this movie was made as opposed to how easy it is to find now, where there are some genuinely impressive compositions to appreciate in the movie, the influence of the production code and the Catholic Church on movie censorship, the advent of foreign films opening the doors to nudity on screen, some of the obvious logic gaps in the picture, the possible influence of an old sci-fi film called Let's Imagine, the use of models instead of actual nudists in these movies, how the nudist movies were marketed and where alternate titles were used and details on the history of the film's main location and the man who made it.
Wishman biographer Michael Bowen provides the commentary track for Blaze Starr Goes Nudist. He starts by talking about the alternate title and why Wishman 'mucked around with a few of her films' when trying to get them released on home video, when nudist films first appeared and how they laid the foundation for the post-war period, the influence of nudist magazines on nudist pictures, biographical information and trivia relating to the cast and crew, how Wishman's nudist films were successful enough to get her financing for her later films, the importance of Walter Bibo's Garden Of Eden from 1954 on the nudist film phenomena, how the film was shot entirely in the Miami area, a few of the locations that are featured in the picture, details on Blaze Starr's life on and off the stage and screen, Bowen's experiences interviewing Ralph Young and what he was like to talk to, Bunny Yeager's work with Wishman and loads more.
Finishing up the first disc are theatrical trailers for both films and a fun “Daylight Years” photo gallery.
Disc Two – Hideout In The Sun/Gentlemen Prefer Nature Girls:
Michael Bowen also provides the commentary track for Hideout In The Sun where he talks about the film's history and how it was quite tough to see for a long time, how the 16mm print used for the transfer came from Wishman's estate, how this film was Wishman's first venture into filmmaking and how she came to get involved in the business and details on the nudist film genre. He gives quite a lot of biographical detail about Wishman in the track, explains the Lazarus L. Wolk directing credit, who really directed the picture and Wishman's credit as producer, how the advent of nudity in magazines opened the door for nudity in films, the locations used for the shoot, the use of a white picket fence optical to cover the frontal nudity in the movie, Wishman's different production deals, the film's scattershot production history, who supplied some of the voice work in the picture, notes on the film's censorship history and details of the movie's theatrical premiere.
The second disc also includes a great unseen Doris Wishman interview from 1974, originally conducted for an unfinished documentary that Donald A. Davis was working on with David F. Friedman and Arthur Knight. This is sourced from the 16mm picture track and a transcript of the interview, the soundtrack has been lost - as such, the piece is presented with subtitles. She speaks here about her work directing nudist camp moves in the early sixties, coming up with the script for Hideout In The Sun, deciding to direct after working in a distribution office, having her niece write the theme song, her own experiences visiting a nudist camp for the first time, some amusing memories from the shoot, the innocent aspect of sexless nudist films, why she doesn't approve of explicit sex in film and more. Fantastic stuff. Doris is in fine form here, do not miss this.
Finishing up disc two is a trailer for Gentlemen Prefer Nature Girls.
Disc Three – Diary Of A Nudist/The Prince And The Nature Girl:
Diary Of A Nudist contains a commentary with queer film historian Elizabeth Purchell that talks about the way that films like this avoided obscenity charges, her own experiences living in Florida, odd little details that pop up in the movie such as the presence of 'The TV And Film Production Guide' sitting on the disc in the newspaper office, details on the different cast members that appear in the movie, how this is the first time that Wishman uses the tried and true tactic of showing the face of the person listening rather than speaking to make dubbing the picture easier, the family element of real life nudist camps, some of the recurring things that appear in Wishman movies and her tendency to reuse sets, the way that the nudists are depicted in the movie, the absence of people of color, how this picture compares to other nudist camp movies and plenty more.
Included inside the case with the three Blu-ray discs is a color insert booklet with an essay from Something Weird’s Lisa Petrucci titled Sunshine And Spaceships: Doris Wishman’s Daylight Years and a vintage Doris Wishman interview titled Made In Wishman Blood by Donald A. Davis which is a text version of the interview included on the second disc with some thoughts from Petrucci closing it off.
The Films Of Doris Wishman: The Daylight Years - The Final Word:
AGFA’s Blu-ray release of The Films Of Doris Wishman: The Daylight Years, their third and final collection of the filmmaker’s work, is yet another excellent collection, this time showcasing her playful and just plain fun nudist films, each restored in high definition from the best available elements. This, combined with the really interesting vintage interview and a nice selection of commentary tracks, makes this set a mandatory purchase for all the Wishman fans out there. Highly recommended!