Friday, December 3, 2010

The Happy Hooker (1975) & The Happy Hooker Goes to Washington (1977)



          Dutch-born madam Xaviera Hollander became a minor celebrity in 1971, when she published a raunchy memoir titled The Happy Hooker at the apex of the sexual revolution, so a film adaptation was inevitable. And perhaps just as inevitably, the movie version of The Happy Hooker is a slapdash affair stitching together several silly episodes from Hollander’s adventures without any artistry or purpose. Indifferently directed by TV journeyman Nicholas Sgarro, the picture suffers from cheap production values, atrocious music, and a complete absence of sexiness—for a movie with the word happy in the title (not to mention the other word), it’s actually pretty miserable to watch.
          Screenwriter William Richert, who later wrote and directed the wonderfully weird Winter Kills (1979), contributes a few palatable dialogue exchanges, but his efforts can’t elevate the tacky source material or surmount the producers’ low intentions. Lynn Redgrave, a long way from her Oscar-nominated role as an overweight naif in Georgy Girl (1966), tries valiantly to invest her leading performance as Hollander with liberated-woman dignity, but even she can’t do get a rise out of the flaccid script.
          About the only novelty value of this dreary film is the presence of familiar character actors in small roles: Risky Business dad Nicholas Pryor plays Hollander’s first American boyfriend; ghoulish B-movie villain Richard Lynch plays a creepy cop; Smuckers pitchman Mason Adams and future Ghost costar Vincent Schiavelli play johns; and Newhart regular Tom Poston appears in the movie’s only amusing-ish scene, as a corporate exec who gets off watching a half-dressed Hollander deliver a ribald version of the daily stock report.
          Redgrave wisely steered clear of the movie’s two diminishing-returns sequels, the first of which, The Happy Hooker Goes to Washington, features actress/singer Joey Heatherton in the lead role. The story, such as it is, depicts Xaviera getting summoned before a Congressional committee as part of a morals inquiry and then getting recruited to serve as a Mata Hari for the CIA. Heatherton is a knockout, but her idea of sexiness is cooing and pouting, resulting in a flaccid Marilyn Monroe routine, and she’s surrounded by a truly random assortment of supporting players: Billy Barty, George Hamilton, Larry Storch, Ray Walston, and even Harold Sakata, the hulking Hawaiian who played “Odd Job” in Goldfinger.
          The movie is car-crash awful from start to finish, though it’s weirdly arresting to watch flamboyant comic Rip Taylor playing a fashion photographer who complains when he starts to see, horror of all horrors, a female model’s nether regions: “I don’t want to see any privates!” Well, not hers, anyway. Less amusing are embarrassing scenes like the vignette of Walston acting out a sex fantasy by dressing as Superman for a tryst with a bimbo prostitute. FYI, a final picture, The Happy Hooker Goes to Hollywood, with B-movie veteran Martine Beswick as Hollander, was released in 1980 and is therefore (thankfully) outside the purview of this survey.

The Happy Hooker: LAME
The Happy Hooker Goes to Washington: SQUARE

1 comment:

Heli0tr0pe said...

You had me at "Smuckers pitchman Mason Adams and future 'Ghost' costar Vincent Schiavelli play johns."