Russ Meyer Amongst the Vixens

A loose trilogy of newly restored Meyer movies confirm him as an auteur in tune with American horniness and American ugliness.

The Russ Meyer Estate/Severin Films

Anyone who knows Russ Meyer’s name knows the director’s stylistic calling card. A 1968 San Francisco Examiner profile of Meyer opens with the director telling journalist Steven Lovelady, referring to the stars of his films, “You may have noticed that all my girls have a couple of things in common.” The piece’s second paragraph lists four names followed by the same three numbers: 42-24-36. “He is interested basically, in, from the chest up and he likes big breasts. That is his speciality,” Roger Ebert, a friend and sometime collaborator, told Channel 4’s The Incredibly Strange Film Show in 1988.

And, yes, big breasts undeniably were Meyer’s specialty but they weren’t his films’ sole raisons d’etre at the outset. Meyer had a big hit with his first feature, 1959’s The Immoral Mr. Teas, which was built around little more than a string of gags concerning a protagonist with the ability to see through clothes. Its success helped bring smut to the mainstream but, for Meyer, created diminishing returns, artistically and financially. After that, Meyer followed some combination of his muse and commercial trends. “Nudity alone isn’t a drawing card anymore,” Meyer told Lovelady more than a decade after Mr. Teas, years that had seen him turning out film after film made in a variety of styles without losing sight of his specialty. “The public is thirsting for more.”

That “more” would assume increasingly wild forms, some of which proved remarkably successful at the box office. The Examiner profile shortly preceded the release of one such success, Vixen (or, as the film’s poster would have it, Vixen!), one of three Meyer films recently restored and re-released on a feature-packed 4K and Blu-ray by Severin Films alongside its sequels (in theme if not name), Supervixens (1975) and Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens (1979). These are beautiful restorations that confirm Meyer as both a superb visual stylist and a filmmaker of uncommon energy. That Meyer shot film for the Army Signal Corps during World War II then segued into pin-up photography with clients that included Playboy in the 1950s seems almost like too neat an origin story for his style, but that doesn’t make it any less apt. His films combine glamour and eroticism with a scrappy, frontline, middle-of-the-action sensibility. This long-out-of-circulation trilogy also confirms Meyer as a singular, sometimes contradictory, often discomfiting voice.

Still from Vixen / The Russ Meyer Estate/Severin Films

“I like sex. I like getting the gymnastics on film. I make movies to please myself, and fortunately they seem to please lots of other people. I make them strictly to entertain, but I still have points to make,” Meyer told the Los Angeles Times in 1969. “I feel very strongly about racial bigotry and Communism, for example. In Vixen I used sex to make my points.” This isn’t an idle boast. In Vixen, Erica Gavin plays Vixen Palmer, the wife of a British Columbian bush pilot/fishing lodge proprietor named Tom (Garth Pillsbury). The film’s 70-minute running time is primarily devoted to scenes of Vixen (and, to a lesser extent, Tom) having sex with everyone who visits their cabin, often in the uncomfortable-looking outdoor spots that Meyer characters seem to favor. Yet racism, the war in Vietnam, and communism all factor into the story, often in extremely odd ways.