D2D #59: The Girl from Pussycat (1969, David Smythe)
(Featured in Dusk to Dawn #9.)
An odd duck, this one. It’s mostly a short, dirty sex feature about some young women who go on a bank-robbing spree in between bouts of sex with each other and various men. Every now and then, though, the filmmakers will do something that makes you think they’ve got something better inside them than this grainy slap ‘n’ tickle - for instance, the actual robbery sequence drops out all sound halfway through save for the insistent thump-thump of a beating heart, and the inconclusive ending strikes me as an attempt at teasing ambiguity. There’s also the surprising savagery of a two-women-on-one-man beating near the film’s end (a toaster figures prominently) and quite a bit more lesbianism than you normally get from these sorts of things. I get the feeling that Smythe and company were trying to find a way to set their flesh feast apart from other, similarly horny bottom bills. Yet the effort never amounts to anything aside from staving off the occasional attack of boredom. It’s not enough merely to make oneself different - there has to be a reason for that difference. Otherwise, you’re just the same old thing with a different hat. The Girl from Pussycat is an easy watch, a quick watch and it has miles of lovely femme flesh. But Smythe is no Joe Sarno, and ultimately this isn’t anything that you can’t get from most any other genre entry of the period.
Fun Fact: The cinematographer took the pseudonym of Søren Kirkegaard!
