Sex Kittens Go to College
Director: Albert Zugsmith
Year: 1960
Rating: 4.0
The International Version. And it doesn't take a genius to figure out what
part is added for that.
I had high hopes for this one. Not that it would be a good film but that
it would have some hijinks humor and a bit of sex appeal. I mean how hard
can that be with Mamie Van Doren and Tuesday Weld. Mamie is at the height
of her looks - given in the film as 40-20-32 - and Tuesday is total jail
bait. Throw on top of that the appearance of Mijanou Bardot as a French exchange
student who basically wants to have sex with American men for a book she
is writing. She is not quite up to the sexuality of her sister Brigitte,
but she tries. But for the most part this film sits there like a soaking
sodden wet paper bag in the rain. Nothing works in this film. The attempts
at comedy are almost tragic to watch they miss their mark by so much. They
have a robot that bets on races, a monkey with sunglasses, a football player
who faints when Mamie gets near him, two lecherous old men who want to seduce
her and two moronic gangster hitmen. How could that not be funny? You could
count the ways.
The new head of the Science Dept. is arriving. A genius with degrees in seven
subjects and can speak eighteen languages. They expect an old crow to get
off the train but it is Dr. Mathilda West (Mamie) who can start nose bleeds
at 20 paces. The professors are shocked and the female professors are affronted.
So she goes out to dinner with a few of them (Louis Nye, Jackie Coogan, John
Carradine, Martin Millner - who is also credited as one of the producers)
and hypnotizes them and leads them on a dance (in which she sings) on top
of the bar - the monkey joins them - with Conway Twitty leading the band.
Meanwhile the two bumbling hitmen are looking for Sam Thinko who is winning
bets too often. Tuesday and Mijanou pop up from time to time for no particular
reason but Tuesday is always welcome. It is interminable. Now for the extra
nine minutes in the International version. Very surreal and Lynchian. Not
all at sexy as intended. The Robot has a dream in which he, a midget and
a monkey are in a bar - the monkey plays the piano with his toes - and a
series of women come out and strip. For nine minutes. So thrilling.
The director Albert Zugsmith strikes me as an oddball. As a producer, he
basically wallowed in cheesy films verging on smutty often trying to appeal
to the young hip audience with films like High School Confidential, The Beat
Generation, Girls Town, College Confidential, Russ Meyer's Fanny Hill - but
he was also involved in A Touch of Evil, Written on the Wind and The Tarnished
Angels - very respectable films.
