I rather doubt that many people have gone bankrupt betting on whether men like looking at naked dames. Hugh Hefner got so rich doing it, that he only ever had to wear pajamas the rest of his life. Hefner's success was the envy of many a young hustler in the 60's and I have no doubt that Jack H. Harris was among them. He made his stab at filling that niche with 1962's Paradisio, the first of his "Nudie Cuties".
Nudie Cuties were films featuring looks at naked flesh minus the offbeat and strained rationale of the practice of Nudism or Nudist Colonies. Russ Meyer's The Immortal Mr. Teas from 1959 is considered the first installment of this kind of movie. Ed Wood's Orgy of the Dead is also a later addition. Jack Harris entered the arena in 1962 with Paradisio, a movie about a professor chap who gets hold of some x-ray glasses and then gets swept up in a spy plot. When he's looking through his glasses it generates a 3-D quality to the nudity, and we are to use our own glasses for full effect. For more details check out this TCM link. To watch the movie, follow this link. At two hours it's pretty slow.
With the movie Without a Stitch Harris movie into full-blown soft pornography. There was clearly money to be made in those days with this kind of faire. This one features a young girl who seeks sexual gratification and ends up in hands of a sadist. Now Harris had no creative hand in this one, he just arranged its distribution.
Harris found product from overseas. France was a supplier for a few of the movies he distributed. The two titles I've found at the forefront of that are Les Biches and Erotique.
Harris scored a real coup when he got his mitts on a softer core movie title The Oldest Profession. One of the stars of this bit of cinema was Raquel Welch herself, which came the after her breakout performances in Fantastic Voyage and One Million B.C. It's a weird movie with six directors each telling a separate tale of prostitution through the ages. Welch shows up in the section about the Gay Nineties. She was the sole American actress in the film.
Raquel was a stunning beauty, that's for certain. Now for a couple of movies of a different kind.
In his book Harris indicated he was involved with the American distribution of My Son the Vampire, an English movie featuring Bela Lugosi originally titled Mother Riley Meets The Vampire. Allen Sherman created a daffy song to help promote this offbeat horror-comedy in the weird tradition of Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.
These are the kinds of films which Harris used to make his living through the 60's but things were about to change when even weirder monsters come to call. Next time we visit the Equinox.
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