Nudie cutie
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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The "nudie cutie" was a genre of American erotic feature films which openly contained female nudity without a pretext of a naturist context, as the nudist film which preceded it.
The Immoral Mr. Teas (1959) directed by Russ Meyer was the first of such films. In that film, the context for the presentation of female nudity was the fantasies of the main character involving nude women. A feature of the film was the use of larger-breasted women, which became a feature of this genre. The film is widely considered the first pornographic feature not confined to under-the-counter distribution, and the film was commercially successful. For the next few years a wave of such films, known as "nudies" or "nudie-cuties", were produced for adult theatres (in the United States sometimes called grindhouse theatres). Films in this genre included Doris Wishman's science fiction spoof Nude on the Moon (1963), the Herschell Gordon Lewis and David F. Friedman film The Adventures of Lucky Pierre (1961), and Ed Wood's horror-nudie Orgy of the Dead (1965), with its bevy of topless dancers from beyond the grave, following his Western screenplay Revenge of the Virgins (1959), which shows a fierce tribe of bare-breasted Indian women hunting a group of treasure seekers. There were very many other similar films and sequels. They all boasted their low budgets and were generally of poor quality. Their producers generally did not claim any artistic merit for their work, but such films were very profitable. The only director in this field to go on to mainstream and critical success is Francis Ford Coppola, who began his career writing and directing a pair of nudie comedies in 1962, Tonight for Sure and The Bellboy and the Playgirls.
The exhibition of female bodies in the nude came into mild, but mainstream competition in the so-called beach party films which started in 1963 and proved surprisingly popular. There were many imitators and series in this genre. Though there was no direct toplessness, the genre featured youthful females spending most of their time in brief bikinis while the young attractive, fit male counterparts spent much of their time barechested. The added attraction was the music, playful atmosphere and dancing and the quality of the production (though plots were typically thin but included some mild romance), as well as the fact that these films could be viewed at "family" theatres and at drive-ins, and in a mixed audience. The females who appeared in these films were invariably youthful, shapely and full-breasted. Interest in these films waned by about 1966.
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