Moonlighting Wives

Joseph W. Sarno – 1966 – USA

A respectable, married middle-class woman deciding to dabble in prostitution on the side is a famous trope in erotic fiction. In 1967, Luis Buñuel’s Belle de Jour depicted the idle, wealthy, glamorous Catherine Deneuve deciding to work in a brothel for the sordid thrill of it. But a year earlier, in Joe Sarno’s Moonlighting Wives, a suburban housewife makes a similar decision out of necessity. Her husband’s meager income is barely keeping them afloat. So, she recruits some of her acquaintances around town and goes into business. Aside from this focus on a working-class woman and her friends, who hit the glass ceiling at taking dictation for sleazy small-businessmen, Moonlighting Wives is also fairly remarkable in its depiction of a female protagonist’s determination, cunning and legitimate business sense. In its compact 86 minutes, her Scarface-like rise and fall unfolds on a small scale, as a simple idea to earn the girls some extra “pin money” quickly escalates into aggressive MLM-style recruiting, intimidation and blackmail. A pair of detectives are shown trying to crack down on a mysterious new madam in town, but are unable to accomplish anything until a few of the boss’s disgruntled associates complain about her. I haven’t seen all of Sarno’s 60s films, but this is the only one I’ve seen that was shot in color. You can tell that – like his rural skin flick contemporary Russ Meyer – Sarno was aiming for the next level in this period, trying to move beyond the black-and-white “roughies” of the early-mid-60s with improved production values and more ambitious stories. The acting is a smidge better than what you usually see in these movies. Even compositions are occasionally striking and memorable, as in a scene where the heroine goes into her child’s darkened bedroom to say goodnight, flanked by her distraught, jealous husband, out in the hall, on one side of the screen, and a Walter Keene painting on the other.