Smoke and Flesh (USA, 1968) 70 min B&W DIR-SCR-DOP: Joseph Mangine. CAST: Richard Howell, Ed Sansone, Lee Parker.
Perhaps the Scorpio Rising of 60s softcore, Smoke and Flesh may sound like a Tennessee Williams play, but is instead a near-plotless account of a “sex and drugs” party gone awry. Beneath the campy surface is a scathing portrayal of sexual liberation gone straight to hell. Cheerfully bereft of such pesky things as character development, this is an exploitation picture at the base level. If all you want is people getting high and rolling in the hay, well, that’s all you’re gonna get! Even so, this study of mankind’s primal activities shows just how much less civilized we are than the beasts. The elaborate opening scene shows this leather-clad dude riding his motorcycle through alleys, parking his hog, going up a fire escape, hopping over into another building, and finally, into someone’s apartment to buy some dope for tonight’s big party with his hippie friends!
That’s the crux of this whole picture: the extremities that people will go for some pleasure. And what ensues in this party is a non-stop laugh riot up until its bizarre third act. Most memorable are the scenes where a guy makes love to a beautiful black woman, with generous amounts of whipped cream for good measure (I’m mentioning her ethnicity because only sexploitation films ever dared show interracial couplings at the time), and get a load of the fifty-something professor who encourages these hippie studs to make love to his wife for his research project! Wilhelm Reich, eat your heart out! The movie turns sour when bikers crash the party and begin to have their way with the booze and the women. The stoned-out hippies retaliate by putting acid in their beer! So much for “peace and love”, man! This initially campy romp ends on an ugly note, but necessarily so. What is this picture but a depiction of society taking its newfound liberation to outrageous degrees?
Smoke and Flesh seems like a picture from another world now, but it’s distinguished from dozens of other 60s raincoat movies for its curious misanthropy, and its surprisingly creative B&W photography. (Check out when the bikers freak out on LSD- everything is shot in negative.) This is a rare directorial effort for cinematographer Joseph Mangine, whose resume includes such drive-in favourites as Squirm and Alligator. He hired himself as cameraman for this project, which is likely why it is visually a step above other sexploitation films of the time. This is precisely the kind of reward given for being an incurable film archaeologist. Something Weird released this to VHS (how I reviewed it), and on DVD is paired with Alice In Acidland in one of the pressings that Something Weird released through Image Entertainment.