A tried and true exploitation gambit, for fly-by-night independents and Hollywood studios alike, has long been the girl-gone-wrong scenario - most often realized as the cautionary tale of a pretty young thing who ditches Middle America for a shot at fame and/or fortune in New York City or Los Angeles only to wind up enmeshed in a life of prostitution, pornography, or both. Made in the mid-Fifties, and serving as a linchpin of sorts between the roadhouse childbirth and VD movies of the Thirties and Forties, which purported to teach valuable life lessons while drawing in the rubes with the promise of wildfire carnality, and the later "nudie cuties" and "roughies" that predated outright porn, The Wild and Wicked (1956) takes a page (or two) from Warners' Marked Woman (1937) with the chronicle of a small town girl (Joy Reynolds), who joins her "fashion model" sister (Lisa Rack, assuming the Bette Davis role) in the big city, only to learn that a life of luxury and liberty is paid for one trick at a time.

Writer-director W. Merle Connell was a dab hand at the exploitation game, having already helmed the "sexposé" Test Tube Babies (1948), which worked a striptease into its purportedly clinical discourse on alternative parenting, and the amphetamine ring drama The Devil's Sleep (1949), which goosed its exploitation factor by casting Charlie Chaplin's ex-wife Lita Grey in a prominent role. As did most films in this idiom, The Wild and Wicked - which benefited from a number of retitlings, among them Dial 5683 for Love, Sex Club, and The Flesh Merchant - promised more than it could legally deliver but its barely feature length run time allowed distributors the discretion of adding nude inserts as a come-on for the black raincoat crowd. As a precursor of such acclaimed films on the subject as Louis Buñuel's Belle de Jour (1967) and John Schlesinger's Midnight Cowboy (1969), The Wild and Wicked was unique in offering a tainted protagonist who finds she enjoys selling her body to strangers and the attendant freedom that comes as a perquisite of sin.

Produced by second generation smut merchant Dan Sonney (whose father, Louis Sonney, was paterfamilias to "The First Family of Exploitation"), The Wild and Wicked was not likely to attract rave reviews. At the time of its theatrical release, The Los Angeles Mirror noted that the film's coterie of young actresses "show no evidence of ever having acted anywhere before but a few of the actors look like recent graduates of the Alcatraz Repertory Group." Another wag branded the production "amateurishly made and enacted... sheer paper-back trash aimed at the moron audiences always willing to part with a buck to gander something they think is on the seamy or 'dirty' side." The film's target audience was undeterred, of course, and The Wild and Wicked played grindhouses for years, under various alternate titles, and in countless alternate versions, before becoming a staple of the gray market VHS boom of the Eighties.

By Richard Harland Smith

Sources:

Bold! Daring! Shocking! True! A History of Exploitation Films, 1919-1959 by Eric Schaefer (Duke University Press Books, 1999)

Forbidden Film: The Golden Age of Exploitation Film by Brett Wood (Midnight Marquee Press, 1999)

From the Arthouse to the Grindhouse: High Brow and Low Brow Transgression in Cinema's First Century, edited by John Cline and Robert G. Weiner (Scarecrow Press, 2010)