One of the glories of the explosion of video online is that it’s much easier to find all the exploitation films that, one day long ago, inspired young Quentin Tarantino to be a director.
My personal favorites, from a historian’s p.o.v., are the sexploitation films. They exist only to show naked and semi-naked women to the horny male masses. But they wrap that lurid purpose in a blanket of fake, finger-wagging moralism. As such, they prefigure nothing so much as contemporary daytime television.
Here are a few trailers from the 1950s and 1960s, all taken from the excellent Bedazzled. (NSFW — meaning you will spy a fairly steady stream of nipples and the occasional buttock):
- The Twisted Sex (“It explores the sexual deviations of our age and the people whose thirst for love brings them to the edge of madness!”)
- Some Like It Violent (“See how a shy and inhibited boy becomes a vicious sex killer!”)
- It’s a Sick, Sick, Sick World (“The things that women do…not for money, but for the enjoyment and pleasure that is derived from their actions!”)
- The Sex Cycle (“See girls caught in the vortex of vice!”)
- The Girl Smugglers (“The racket was smuggling! And the contraband was young girls, shipped to the states, where their bodies are used to bring cash into the racketeer’s treasury!”)
And finally, a later edition of the smut-wrapped-in-fake-morals genre: from 1967, The Girl, The Body, and The Pill. “Don’t let the size of that little pill fool you — it’s like a hydrogen bomb, exploding in the face of civilization!” That Miss Barrington, she’s pretty cute!