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Russ Meyer's original title (How Much Loving Does a Normal Couple Need?) is glimpsed amid marsh branches, where the narrator booms about a river "taking and leaving like a woman, but with a name like a man: The Colorado!" Stuck in a dilapidated tourist trap, the widower (Jack Moran) endures his lover's (Babette Bardot) Gallic-accented cawing when not stewing over the topless frolicking of his pigtailed daughter (Adele Rein). A salacious boatman (Frank Bolger) brings in "suckers" looking for an excursion, the latest batch includes a hot-to-trot nurse (Alaina Capri) and her feeble-hearted doctor hubby (John Furlong), plus a smirking rogue cop (Ken Swofford) who's "cut like an anteater" and keen on taking over the land. Swofford and Capri lock eyes and splash together in every pond in the island, Bardot materializes atop a cliff whooping with a torch in each hand, Furlong later expires under her thighs. And then, for no other reason than to add another coupling to the crowded fable, a runaway millionaire (Andrew Hagara) drops by the daughter's favorite skinny-dipping spot. "That's the problem... everybody feels." Dialogue like a breakneck magnification of Albee venom ("Must you pant? It's an animal trait." "It's the bitch in me, dear, or don't you remember?"), technique like French postcards leaning toward Wesselmann (one wacky composition has two clods with fishing poles and their backs to the camera while a bikini bunny go-go dances in the foreground). A nudie The Tempest, a sweaty marvel availing itself of flashes of The Lady from Shanghai and Baby Doll before sailing into the sunset, "a nice day to be alive and swimming."
--- Fernando F. Croce |