What was the first exploitation film?
Cinema history is littered with movies designed to titillate and thrill by the crudest means, including those made long before the Motion Picture Production Code began to police Hollywood in 1934. But there was a point at which film studios began to explicitly use sex, nudity, violence, drugs and other supposedly taboo elements of society to sell their pictures.
These movies have become known as exploitation films because they deliberately attempt to exploit their audience’s thirst for things generally prohibited outside of the cinema. Director Quentin Tarantino has expressed his love of the exploitation genre, if we can even call it that. Tarantino has cited the 1973 blaxploitation classic Coffy as one of his favourite movies and references it repeatedly in his film Jackie Brown.
But before exploitation movies and their blaxploitation subgenre aimed at African-Americans became an accepted part of cinematic subculture in the early 1970s, some studios and directors were blazing a trail. Notably, director Russ Meyer made two films in 1965, which became definitive examples of cinematic exploitation. Motorpsycho and Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! each combine different forms of violence with overtly hyper-sexualised female characters.
Meyer is best known for his 1970 film Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, which is one of the most thought-provoking exploitation movies ever made. It turns the lightweight 1967 flick Valley of the Dolls, which starred rising star Sharon Tate, into a dystopian, nightmarish vision of the collapsing hippie movement while evoking Tate’s real-life murder at the hands of the Manson Family. Superficially, the film also affected typically exploitative approaches to sex and violence.
But which movie came first?
Meyer’s entire career in cinema was defined by the exploitation genre, and it wouldn’t be overstepping the mark to claim that he invented it himself. His first movie as director, 1959’s The Immoral Mr. Teas, is widely seen as the first example of pure exploitation cinema.
The film is a surreal 63-minute series of vignettes concerning the perverse thoughts of the title character, who imagines every woman he sees to be naked. It was the first movie since the pre-code era before 1934 containing nudity to be shown outside of pornographic cinemas.
It set the tone for Meyer’s next few pictures, which were mainly nude comedies. He then moved into exploring scenes of graphic violence, too. He had a reputation for using his movies to satisfy his own perversions and once jokingly referred to himself as a “serial bigamist”.
However, we should recognise the satirical bent of many of his films. They are undoubtedly exploitative in the crudest forms, but they also aim to subvert audience expectations. Outside of the films themselves, though, Meyer apparently never subjected any of his actresses to the infamous “casting couch”. Perhaps he didn’t need to, given what he subjected them to on camera instead.
