We open in a fair ground, a place that is evocative of license, liminality, and the precarious. A place that smells of sawdust, cotton candy, popcorn, and donuts. It is a miasma of sugar and sweat. Here, we meet Stacey Kane (Meg Myles), a woman who almost certainly smells like nicotine and cherry cola, but who wants to smell like paradise. Smart and self-possessed, she flees the fair ground burlesque show and gets on a plane in nothing but a trench coat, sequin one-piece and fishnets. It’s Stacey’s world and we’re just following her around, listening to the clack of her stiletto mules.
This movie has separate credits for the leather wardrobe (Samuel Robert), footwear (Sydney’s of Hollywood), lingerie (Lady Marlene), Furs (Milton Herman) and this tells me this is a fetish picture even before I discover that its producer was a major publisher of fetish magazines in the 1950s. I respect the fact that these essential elements are highlighted here.
Stacey is a woman whose eyeliner never quits and who can pull off sex hair at any time of day. She is an icon and I worship her
We encounter a range of fascinating characters here, including Pepe (Grayson Hall), the queer coded, tweed jacket lesbian nightclub manager, who remarks before even meeting Stacey: “Louie’s girls are always female”—implying that this is a world where ‘female’ is a quality separate from womanhood or even femininity.
When Pepe agrees to hire Stacey and train her for the new season’s show, she also takes her in. We see them drinking brandy together after dinner, and Stacey reclines on the piano stool in a satin house dress, postcoital and seductive as if these two have fucked. Later, Pepe takes Stacey shopping for black patent stiletto mules, the stripper shoe before the advent of Pleaser, along with a number of leather dresses and a pair of leather jodhpurs. “You’ll wear a girdle and smile” Pepe says, an edge in her voice.
In contrast to both Pepe and Stacey, we also have Sabrina (playing herself, with great charm), a glamourous blonde with the kind of hourglass figure that would give Russ Meyer a boner in the beyond.
Sabrina calls Larry (Robert Yuro), the club owner’s son, “Angel boy” an endearment I have not tried out (yet) and this is simultaneously camp, flirtatious, and tender. These qualities encapsulate the utter softness of a bimbo persona—it is the psychological equivalent of wrapping yourself in chiffon. The camera watches Sabrina’s ass sway as she exits, in an example of the kind of objectifying gaze Mulvey and others critique and yet it is also completely obvious that Sabrina is deliberately performing a seductive, hyper-femme, persona. She knows everyone is watching her leave, she is hardly an unknowing subject.
Resistant to Pepe’s constant monitoring, Stacey rebels: “what I need is fresh air and a man” and who amongst us has not had this thought? Stacey goes out and gets just that, showing up to morning coffee with Larry wearing leather trousers, because she is a gal who does not fuck about.
Stacey and Larry take off to his childhood home in the countryside, where she skinny dips in the lake the following morning, washing off the smell of sex and practicing the art of not getting her hair wet (an art also practiced by my mother). Here, Stacey has a taste of a decadent, leisured existence, not driven by the constant hustle. This movie is really pretty hot in places and for 1962 it is frankly volcanic, and has moments reminiscent of Room at the Top (1959). A close-up on Stacey and Larry making out dissolves to footage of a waterfall, and while a trifle obvious this renders it no less affirming as a representation of mature feminine desire.
The last fifteen minutes of this movie are kind of everything, set in Pepe’s nightclub, with Sabrina performing a teasing number, spilling out of a beaded evening dress, snatched within a inch of her life. But the finale belongs to Stacey, in her full domme outfit, singing about being ‘deadlier than the male’. We can imagine that Stacey no longer smells of nicotine and diner cola, but now she is encased in the aromas of leather and petals, perhaps rose or violet, something that would rise out of her ample cleavage, wafting on the air currents created by the riding crop she wields with such authority. What would be truly sublime would be to scent the crop itself, to add to the sensory spectacle of her performance.