Lorna

Russ Meyer – 1964 – USA

Lorna was a big step forward for Russ Meyer.  It marks the beginning of his drive-in “rural gothic” phase, (arguably his best period), as well as the beginning of his establishment of himself as a serious filmmaker and much more than a simple purveyor of “nudie cuties,” the genre of which his own The Immoral Mr. Teas (1959) and Eve & the Handyman (1961) are probably the best and least sleazy examples.  Not only his careful attention to character and aggressive camerawork, but his insistence on making Lorna and his next three films in black-and-white, show Meyer as a budding auteur with a strikingly confident ability to operate on the fringes of mainstream filmmaking without compromising the idiosyncrasies that make his films so enjoyable and so identifiable as his own; a bizarre and truly unique mixture of cartoonish melodrama, rigid morality, ribald humor and an almost Eisensteinian preoccupation with allusive editing.  The success of Meyer’s influential fusion of art and trash is borne out by the fact that – despite being banned for obscenity in some cities – Lorna played in metropolitan art houses as well as small-town drive-in’s across the country.  The film opens with a dramatic traveling shot down a country road that stops in front of a mad preacher (played by screenwriter James Griffith), warning us with dire earnestness of the fire and brimstone that await those who engage in wanton sin.  This introduces a backwoods soap opera scenario – taking place in a single day – populated with the most shameless stereotypes.  A buxom and sexually unfulfilled newlywed, Lorna (Lorna Maitland), puts up with her hopelessly clueless lug of a husband, Jim, who is kept up nights studying to be a CPA and works all day in a salt mine, leaving him little energy to give his wife much attention.  One of Jim’s coworkers is a leering lech who was previously shown assaulting a woman, and he spends the day taunting hapless Jim about his hot-to-trot wife left home alone.  Meanwhile, an escaped convict happens upon Lorna bathing nude in a creek and forces himself on her, which has the effect of unbridling her deepest passions.  Despite happily indulging his lascivious gaze in his films, in Meyer’s world the moral order must still always be restored, meaning that Jim is to be punished for neglecting his wife just as Lorna is to be punished for cheating on her husband.  Like all of Meyer’s films, the strength of Lorna isn’t in its plot but in its sheer energy, driven by vivid compositions and camera movements and an emotional pitch sustained at the highest levels.  There isn’t much that’s ethically or intellectually defensible about Lorna, but there is much that’s artistically praiseworthy.  It doesn’t pretend to exist in our world, but creates its own.  Its pre-PC and pre-porn mentality is foreign to us today, but that makes it quaint and strangely pure rather than threatening or offensive.  Lorna solidly established the tone of Meyer’s next few – increasingly over-the-top films, which included Mudhoney (1965), Motor Psycho (1965) and the insane, histrionic cult-classic Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1966).