While it starts out giving the impression it’s going to be show business sleaze it turns out to be also a sex and sin in small town America tale.
Melissa Carver is one of the countless young women who headed for the bright lights of the big city to break into show business. She acts, she sings, she dances, but so far no producer thinks she does any of these things well enough to hire her. One thing she does know is that she has to stay in show business. Getting a job as a waitress would be an admission of defeat and Melissa has no intention of accepting defeat.
The job offered her by Eddie Desmond is at least a show business job. Well, it’s show business of a sort. She’ll be one of the strippers providing the entertainment at stag-smoker parties (sleazy entertainments for out-of-town businessmen). She assures Eddie that she really is a good dancer but Eddie explains that he doesn’t need to see her dance, he just needs to see her naked. If she looks good nude she’s got the job. Fortunately Melissa looks very good indeed nude.
Eddie has a job lined up at the moment, a smoker party for the Chamber of Commerce (the Sedgemoor Boosters) types in some small town out east. A town called Sedgemoor. They want a couple of girls to put on a girlie show, which will involve the two girls cavorting together naked. It’s not an appealing prospect for Melissa but show business is show business and a girl has to be flexible. The girl she’ll be doing the act with is Roxy Renault and that’s causing her a bit of concern. Melissa doesn’t mind the idea of doing things with another girl on stage for money but Roxy has admitted that she likes doing it with girls for real.
Meanwhile things are happening in the town of Sedgemoor. The town’s richest citizen, George Brewster (who practically owns the town) has cut a deal to have a Hollywood movie shot there. This will bring in lots of money for George and his cronies. George has decided that the town will have to be turned into a showpiece for the movie shoot and that’s just what the movie’s producer and director don’t want. So director Harvey Frank is has been sent to Sedgemoor to check things out before the locals have time to turn it into a model town.
Harvey has other problems to worry about. He wants to cast his young mistress Ivy Howard in the lead role. Ivy can’t act but she has a luscious body and she’s being very accommodating to Harvey in the bedroom but that’s on condition that she gets that lead role.
Under the surface Sedgemoor is a seething cauldron of lust and sexual frustration. George Brewster is not as young as he used to be and he’s not satisfying his wife in the bedroom. She has plans to do something about that. She has her eye on a high school athlete half her age. Alvin Wallace is being cuckolded by his wife Carlotta and she’s taunting him with it. Mousy thirtysomething bookstore proprietress Hester Perkins has been waiting patiently for Mr Right to come along but now she’s starting to think that maybe it’s Miss Right she’s waiting for. She occupies her time with lurid lesbian sexual fantasies.
Both Harvey Frank and Melissa have no desire to get mixed up in the sleazy affairs of this sordid little burg but they get mixed up in them anyway.
With these sleaze novels you’re never quite sure what expect at the end. Will it all end in violence and mayhem, or will true love triumph, will virtue or vice be rewarded. I won’t tell you how this one ends.
It’s also fairly typical of the genre in that it promises all sorts of lurid thrills but when it comes to delivering on those promises it suddenly becomes very tame. It’s like an X-rated movie that turns out to be barely deserving of a PG rating. Mostly these sleaze potboilers relied on an atmosphere of suppressed sexual tension or simply on the fact of having a sleazy story without very much at all in the way of actual sexual content. There’s plenty of sex going on but it’s pretty much all implied.
The small town as a hotbed of sexual frustration and depravity angle is handled well enough. These people have a lot of problems in the bedroom.
In its own way it’s kind of fun and it has a certain breathless melodramatic tone which is rather amusing. Worth a look if you’re a fan of the genre.
No comments:
Post a Comment