Claustrophobic and uneventful, Joe Sarno's FLESH AND LACE is one of his lesser efforts. Though made before his assembly-line techniques of the late '60s, it resembles those half-hearted productions.
With overlapping cast, film is a companion piece to the similarly deficient MY BODY HUNGERS. One-shot Heather Hall contributes a dreadful leading performance as Bev, a blonde working as a B-girl at a low-class strip joint where catatonic June Roberts and buxom Marlene Starr dance around in lingerie and go topless.
Owner Dop (Norman Lind, who I could imagine impersonating Henry Kissinger in summer stock) is on Bev's case due to her inability to lead the customers on to push drinks. Sarno's never-credible scenario flunks out early, because she is simultaneously shy and prudish with the customers but in reality an extreme nymphomaniac. Georgina Spelvin or even Meryl Streep couldn't pull off this nonsensical role, let alone the untalented Hall.
Plot sickens with the arrival of Rook (untalented John Aristides, slightly more animated than he was in MY BODY HUNGERS), a gambler who mooches off girl friend Joan (Judy Young, memorable co-starring opposite Audrey Campbell in OLGA'S HOUSE OF SHAME). Bev is rooming with Joan, and it's three's company with Rook moving back in.
Of course Rook rapes Bev late one night as latter sleeps in the anteroom, but she digs it, establishing her nympho status, which is a plot peg Sarno will milk far beyond its worth.
Rook has markers from his craps game totaling $1,500 held by Dop, with a 24-hour time limit to pay up. Coincidentally (via asinine scripting), Bev has confided to Joan that a kindly toy shop owner (Joe Santos, paying his early career dues in porn assignments for Sarno) keeps all his money not in a safe but tucked away in his shop behind an encyclopedia.
So Rook grabs Joan's handgun and goes to burglarize the shop, setting up a very badly directed shootout climax.
Most preposterous subplot involves the oddball Santos/Hall romance. Santos is introduced initially unsympathetically, as a shylock overcharging a guy for borrowing some money, his toy shop seeming to be a front. But later on he's Mr. Nice Guy, letting Bev sleep in his basement after Joan throws her out. He can't satisfy her (nympho, remember) sexually, so he has his young store assistant shtup Bev and immediately calls up another guy to come service her. Outside of porn circles, I would say that's carrying niceness too far.
Along the way Sarno's most famous fetishes are all on display: two scenes featuring wind-up toys, both throwaways (compared to his chilling use of same in INGA and YOUNG PLAYTHINGS); cheap-jack transition exteriors of heroines walking along the sidewalk or by the El trains, recycled endlessly in his late '80s porn videos; sexy panties, stockings and high heels, also the dominant contrast for his '80s output.
We see Hall nude from the rear, but given her non-acting, the fans deserved more skin from their leading lady than that, even back in 1965. This was a loser, though Sarno sycophants evidently salute.
Oddest touch is casting of the film's sound man Lee Dichter in a key role, one of the customers who hassles Bev, and gets her fired. Dichter has been a top NYC sound re-recorder, at Sound One, in NYC for over 40 years, though I doubt if he remembers this peculiar moment in the (low-budget) sun.
