Pretty Maids All in a Row (1971)

At Oceanfront High School, all of the female students are lithe, lovely,luscious and lusty, the substitute English teacher is delighted to introduce the assistant manager of the football team to the wonders of sex (if only to help shrink his perpetual erection) and someone is killing off co-eds.The identity of the murderer isn't hard to figure out. The short list of suspects is a very short list. More puzzling is how MGM got away with schoolmarm Angie Dickinson's seduction of the underage lad played by John David Carson. Or why even the homeliest co-ed at Oceanfront turns out to be a knockout when she takes off her glasses and lets her hair hang loose. Rock Hudson in an uncharacteristic role is the phys ed teacher who spends most of his time bedding students. Telly Savalas is a curious cop and Keenan Wynn gets what he deserves for being the movie's dumbest security guard.

Rock Hudson's extraordinary good looks and charm are cast against type as he plays a school guidance counselor and football coach who picks a few choice plums among the student body on a regular basis. Seeing all those nubile young girls with skirts up to their hynies was temptation enough for anyone. The problem is that these girls want to take a permanent lease out on him and he's already married to Barbara Leigh and has a little daughter. What choice is there before the scandal costs him his job, but kill these Pretty Maids All In A Row.The unusual combination of Gene Roddenberry who wrote script and French director Roger Vadim, best known here on this side of the pond for Barbarella created Pretty Maids All In A Row, a black comedy that garnered a nice cult following. Hudson worked well playing his one and only villain on the big screen. A secondary plot involves substitute teacher Angie Dickinson who Hudson gives a warm up to in preparation for his protégé young John David Carson nailing Dickinson. A little Tea And Sympathy sideline as Carson slowly discovers what his mentor is up to..Roddy McDowall plays the clueless high school principal and Keenan Wynn the equally clueless sheriff. One who is not clueless is Telly Savalas who plays a Kojak like detective who suspicions that Hudson is the murderer but can't quite prove it. At the end of the film Savalas is totally convinced.Hudson as serial killer might be jarring to his fans, but Rock does pull it off. An interesting alternative part for an actor who was far better than he was credited.

TITLE: PRETTY MAIDS ALL IN A ROW opened in theaters on April 28 1971 and it will take you 91 minutes to watch this movie. Pretty Maids All in a Row is an American mystery film starring Rock Hudson and Angie Dickinson that is part dark comedy, part murder mystery. It was released on April 28, 1971, directed by Roger Vadim, and written and produced by Gene Roddenberry based on a novel by Francis Pollini. Pretty Maids was Vadim's first American film. The April 1971 issue of Playboy magazine published an article about the movie written by Vadim. This includes a nine-page pictorial of actresses Angie Dickinson, Gretchen Burrell, Aimee Eccles, Margaret Markov, Playboy bunny Joyce Williams, and others.SUMMARY: The story is set in "Oceanfront High School," a fictitious American high school in the height of the sexual revolution. Young female students are being targeted by an unknown serial killer. Meanwhile, a male student called Ponce is experiencing sexual frustration, surrounded by a seemingly unending stream of beautiful and sexually provocative classmates. Ponce doesn't know how to deal with this So he goes to see Tiger the Head Coach of the Football team. Michael "Tiger" McDrew is the high school's football coach and guidance counselor. There is another aspect of Tiger's character. He is quite fond of sexual encounters with female students. Tiger tries to befriend Ponce and help him deal with his sexual needs by encouraging him to seek the affections of a sexy substitute teacher, Miss Smith. Meanwhile, one young girl after another turns up dead. A police detective captain, Sam Surcher, investigates but never makes an arrest.QUESTIONS: Who was the first victim? Who did Sam Surcher think is the killer? How did Tiger get involved with this? Did Ponce overcome his problem? Who was Miss Smith? Where did she come from? Why did Tiger send Ponco to see Miss Smith? Was the murdered ever caught? MY THOUGHTS: This was one of those movie that had a hard time keeping your attention. It was kind of a comedy and drama movie mix that didn't jell to well. It was hard to stay with this movie because it lacks action. Joann Cameron role was waste in this movie. She's far to pretty to waste a body like that. I bought this movie because Of Angie Dickinson and here talents were also waste in this movie. There was the scene of her lying on the bed with no clothes on and outside of that, this movie was not very interesting. Even with Angie Dickinson in this movie, I can only give this picture 6 weasel stars.

Another blast from my past! I was a horny college student when this film was released in 1971, and I recall a big photo spread in "Playboy" promoting the film with revealing images of various "Pretty Maids." (Joy Bang? Nothing suggestive there!) I went to see the film based on that promise of titillation, but rather than being turned on, my tender sensibilities were turned off by the amoral characters and plot line.I recently watched the film again on TCM (give them credit for not censoring the mild nudity!), and I can't say that my view has changed much in 35 years. Those who try to excuse this fecal matter as "black comedy" or as an unsung "cult classic" are putting a lot of lipstick on a warthog.Many privileged Baby Boomers (of which I was one) developed in the 1960s a peculiarly self-centered notion that youth is morally superior to maturity, that idealism always trumps experience. The media -- especially a movie industry with a new ratings system that released filmmakers from the restrictions of the old Production Code -- pandered to the Baby Boomers' self-congratulatory moral smugness. This film is rife with such pandering. Rock Hudson's lecherous/murderous teacher is represented as the only cool adult in the film, as much for his "youthful" sense of style as for his unorthodox ideas about educating horny teenagers. The only other remotely hip adult is Telly Savalas' detective, who himself develops a grudging admiration for the murderer. The Angie Dickinson character is an overly earnest teacher who has to be "enlightened" by Hudson into seducing Hudson's sexually frustrated protégé (John David Carson). The other adult characters are essentially movie idiots (Keenan Wynn and Roddy McDowall are particularly offensive -- I hope they were paid well), while the hip, turned-on teens in the film protest the Vietnam war and lecture their elders on sexual freedom and openness.I have nothing against good old-fashioned lust, but even in 1971 I saw the impropriety of Hudson's character having sex with his female students (which he excuses as a way to enhance their psychological well-being). That sort of sexual power-mongering is bad enough, but then the controlling bastard must kill certain sexual partners (and others) who might expose his escapades. Rather hypocritical, isn't it? Advocating sexual license but afraid of having his own licentiousness exposed? (His wife, played by the lovely Barbara Leigh, is strangely passive in all this mess. It's never clear if she's totally clueless or remarkably tolerant of her husband's extramarital liaisons, though the film's ending points toward the latter.) After the Hudson character's demise(?), the newly unfrustrated protégé (who earlier is dismayed by revelations of his mentor's murderous behavior) adopts the same style of sexual duplicity for himself. (He attains symbolic hipness by abandoning his wimpy Vespa for a studlier motorcycle.) Perhaps the filmmakers were trying to argue that the new sexual mores of the '60s were a sham -- just the old, inescapable sexual hypocrisy coated with hip psychobabble – but that point itself is objectionable, and the film's own hypocrisy emphasizes just how disgusting the old sexual double standard really was (and is).One would think that this film was a rather blatant fantasy by that unapologetic libertine, Roger Vadim. But the film was written and produced by that celebrated intergalactic moralist, Gene Roddenberry, for God'sake! This guy gives dirty old men a bad name, and the film makes me yearn for the mindless but honest lasciviousness of hardcore porn. Comedy, even black comedy, still needs a moral center, something we can laugh with rather than just laugh at. This film glories in its amorality and mocks what the many progressive Boomers of the 60s, for all our ignorance and pretense, were trying to accomplish (and to some extent, have achieved) in making society's attitudes about sex more humane.