Chesty Morgan, Doris Wishman and impossibly large naturals

Doris Wishman

Doris Wishman and her 1960-64 nudist films

Born in New York City, Doris Wishman's first works all revolved around the central theme of nudism (of the sort today known as naturism). In the moral climate of the day, nudism was the only way nudity could be depicted in a film without it being considered pornographic. Not that these films were considered family entertainment by any standards, but it filled the gap between mainsteam Hollywood fare and crude short sex loops shown primarily for masturbatory purposes--in the early 1960s, softcore porn movies in the modern sense effectively didn't exist yet.

Among the eight nudist films Wishman made in these four years are the 1960 Blaze Starr Goes Wild, also known as Blaze Starr Goes Nudist featuring legendary Baltimore stripper Blaze Starr. It was also notable as one of the few films in which Wishman herself made a cameo appearance.

By far the most unusual of Wishman's nudist pictures was 1962's Nude on the Moon, an attempt to combine traditional nudist material with a science fiction story. The plot involves a nudist civilization on the moon and two Earth astronauts who discover it.

Other Wishman films of the era included Hideout in the Sun (1960), Diary of a Nudist (1961), Gentlemen Prefer Nature Girls (1962), Playgirls International (1963), Behind the Nudist Curtain (1963), and The Prince and the Nature Girl (1964).

1965-1978 Sexploitation

For the next decade, Wishman directed primarily roughies, the work for which she was to become best known. Several films of this period were directed under the pseudonym "Louis Silverman", which was actually her husband's name.

The 1965 effort Bad Girls Go to Hell is regarded as Wishman's best-known film, and includes many elements common to sexploitation movies of the era. The main character is a young woman who accidentally kills a man in the course of an attempted rape, and flees to New York to escape capture. There, she succumbs to various sleazy situations while starting over under an assumed identity. Though archetypal in its use of genre situations, Wishman's empathy for her female protagonist in Bad Girls Go to Hell has been lauded by some observers as proto-feminist. Bad Girls Go to Hell was also one of the earliest collaborations between Wishman and cinematographer C. Davis Smith, who worked closely with Wishman on much of her output for over 38 years.

Other Wishman films of the era included The Sex Perils of Paulette (1965), Another Day, Another Man (1966), My Brother's Wife (1966), A Taste of Her Flesh (1967), Indecent Desires (1967), Too Much Too Often! (1968), Love Toy (1968), The Amazing Transplant (1970), Keyholes Are for Peeping (1972), Satan Was a Lady (1975), a foray into pornography called Come with Me, My Love (1976), and Let Me Die a Woman (1978), an exploitative documentary about transexuals done in the alarmist style of the roadshow "problem" pictures of the 1930s and 1940s.

The first two movies of the Chesty Trilogy - Deadly Weapons (1973) and Double Agent 73 (1974) - are among Wishman's best-known and most outrageous work. The trilogy was intended to star stripper Chesty Morgan, known for her 73-inch bust size, but Morgan and Wishman had creative differences during filming, so Morgan did not appear in the final film, The Immortal Three(1975). Instead, her character Agent 73 from the previous film is played by a different actress, who dies shortly after the opening credits. The two films Wishman directed with Chesty Morgan have become minor cult movies, due to their highly unconventional plots, which were written by Wishman's niece, Judy J. Kushner. In Double Agent 73, for example, Morgan plays a secret agent who has both a camera and a bomb installed in her breasts. Such a thing might not seem wholly out of place in a comedy, but these films are played straight - the tone is more serious than a James Bond movie.

Wishman's films are filled with contradictions, particularly about sex. Rather than erotic, many of her movies could actually be described as anti-sexual.

Doris Wishman's final films

A five-year dormant period followed Let Me Die a Woman. At the time, sexploitation movies were experiencing a retreat in the face of competition from hardcore pornography and the budding home video industry. Noticing the trend toward slasher movies such as Friday the 13th, Wishman filmed the gory horror picture A Night to Dismember in 1983. The completed film was destroyed by a disgruntled employee, and Wishman, who was uninsured, attempted to cobble together a full-length film out of the remaining footage, plus out-takes and unfinished sequences. The resulting film was not successful, and Wishman left the movie business for more than a decade to live in Florida.

In the mid-1990s, because of the video-driven cult status of her earlier work, she set to filming another feature, a sex comedy called Dildo Heaven, which would see a release after seven years of production in 2002. Around the same time (2001) she released a film noir called Satan Was a Lady - not to be confused with her 1975 film of the same title. Wishman's last film, Each Time I Kill, was another attempt at horror. She completed almost all of the film herself, and left detailed instructions on how to finish the remainder.

Doris Wishman died at her home in Miami, Florida in 2002 of lymphoma. She can best be described as an outsider artist in that she remained independent of studios and retained creative control of her films to pursue her unique vision.

Copyright: This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article on Doris Wishman.