… or ‘if it’s Friday, it must be Tuesday’.
Not that Tuesday, but this Tuesday.
Spend Friday Night At the Flicks with Elizabeth Ellen Carter
There were many platinum blonde starlets who emerged from the Hollywood studio system.
Some went on to immortality such as Marilyn Monroe, others went to B-list semi-obscurity such as Mamie Van Doren and others, like Tuesday Weld managed a vibrant career playing ingenues, to a late career kudos as Mrs Prendergast in Michael Douglas’ confronting and award-winning film Falling Down.
Mostly Tuesday is known for her sex kitten roles through out the 1960s and with her pretty girl-next-door features, it’s no surprise that she became the pin up babe of choice for many teenage boys.
Like many children of Hollywood, Tuesday’s formative years were filled with depression and substance abuse, but fortunately her personal fortitude tended towards more Drew Barrymore, than Lindsay Lohan and from her troubled childhood, Tuesday managed to forge a long lasting career as a result of her professionalism.
In Sex Kittens Go To College, Tuesday gets second billing with ‘Queen of the Bs’ Mamie Van Doren, a sex kitten turned cougar half a century before the term was coined.
Oh, you’re thinking you can’t have a sex kitten movie without a Bardot – well we got ’em, except it’s Brigette’s petite soeur, Mijanou in the exchange student role.
Sex Kittens Go To College is an interesting film for a number of reasons – most of which have nothing to do with the plot (which is hilariously awful).
A college uses a brand new computer called ‘Thinko’ who has a brain the size of a planet to pick the next head of the science department. Easy choice, it has to be Dr Matilda who has 18 degrees, speaks 13 languages and also has a brain the size of a planet… oh, by the way, she used be a stripper – that doesn’t matter right?
It doesn’t matter to the mob who are sniffing around the college on the misapprehension that Thinko is a clandestine bookie and that the token brunette is put out that her erstwhile boyfriend’s head is being turned by a blonde… hey, you don’t mind me giving away the plot like this do you? Thought not ;-)
Where the interest really lies in Sex Kittens Go To College is what is going on outside of the film.
1960s were, as most people know (having at least watched a few seasons of Mad Men), the era of the sexual revolution. The pill, wide spread antibiotics and the exploitation of the new marketing demographic called the teenager brought sexual mores front and centre into popular culture.
With America’s increasing exposure to European cinema, Sex Kittens Goes To College was at the vanguard of a deliberate push by ‘metropolitan’ and ‘sophisticated’ sensibilities against what was deemed ‘petty bourgeois, rural values’ which informed American filmmkaing of previous eras.
That push saw the rise of the sex comedy from the rather tame Pillow Talk with Rock Hudson and Doris Day to the ridiculously campy What’s New Pussy Cat, which shares Sex Kittens Go To College’s comic sensibilities and gave rise to the gritty exploitation and its subset blaxploitation film of the 1960s and 1970s.
For Hollywood it was the dying days of the power of the Hayes Code, which had governed the depiction of crime, sex and religion on film since 1930.
It has been fashionable in post-modern circles to dismiss the Code as interfering puritanical, prudery, but in reality the intervention necessary when when you consider that its introduction was brought about in response to the death, murder, rapes and drug abuse (Hollywood real life, not reel life) that abounded in the Roaring Twenties and which are luridly detailed in the Hollywood Babylon books.
Is it any coincidence that the 30 year period until the end of the 1950s are universally recognised as the Golden Era of Hollywood?
But go on, take a peek at the trailer for Sex Kitten Go To College, you know you want to. ;-)