''Poor Pretty Eddie'' is a 1975 American film starring
Leslie Uggams
Leslie Marian Uggams (born May 25, 1943) is an American actress and singer. Beginning her career as a child in the early 1950s, Uggams is recognized for portraying Kizzy Reynolds in the television miniseries ''Roots'' (1977), earning Golden Globe ...
,
Shelley Winters
Shelley Winters (born Shirley Schrift; August 18, 1920 – January 14, 2006) was an American actress whose career spanned seven decades. She appeared in numerous films. She won Academy Awards for ''The Diary of Anne Frank'' (1959) and ''A Patch o ...
and
Michael Christian
Michael Christian (born 21 August 1964) is a former Australian rules footballer and media personality from Busselton, Western Australia who played for East Perth Football Club, East Perth in the West Australian Football League (WAFL) and Coll ...
. Made on a relatively small budget, it is known for having an atypical narrative and directorial style, which combines elements of
horror,
exploitation film making and
Southern gothic
Southern Gothic is an artistic subgenre of fiction, country music, film and television that are heavily influenced by Gothic elements and the American South. Common themes of Southern Gothic include storytelling of deeply flawed, disturbing or ...
. It has subsequently become popular in cult and
B movie circles.
Plot
Liz Wetherly is a popular black singer in need of a break from her hectic schedule. When her car breaks down, she ends up stuck in a remote southern town that‘s been left for dead “ever since they put in the interstate.”
She is forced to spend the night at “Bertha’s Oasis”, a rundown lodge that serves as the bizarre fiefdom of an overweight ex-burlesque star who lords over her much younger boyfriend, Eddie, and a cast of equally-strange townsfolk. Eddie fancies himself a singer on par with
Elvis
Elvis Aaron Presley (January 8, 1935 – August 16, 1977), or simply Elvis, was an American singer and actor. Dubbed the " King of Rock and Roll", he is regarded as one of the most significant cultural figures of the 20th century. His ener ...
, and expects Wetherly to make him famous. But things turn ugly for Wetherly, who endures rape and abuse at the hands of her captors, before culminating in her bloody revenge on the “rednecks” that terrorized her.
Cast
*
Leslie Uggams
Leslie Marian Uggams (born May 25, 1943) is an American actress and singer. Beginning her career as a child in the early 1950s, Uggams is recognized for portraying Kizzy Reynolds in the television miniseries ''Roots'' (1977), earning Golden Globe ...
as Liz Wetherly
*
Shelley Winters
Shelley Winters (born Shirley Schrift; August 18, 1920 – January 14, 2006) was an American actress whose career spanned seven decades. She appeared in numerous films. She won Academy Awards for ''The Diary of Anne Frank'' (1959) and ''A Patch o ...
as Bertha
*
Michael Christian
Michael Christian (born 21 August 1964) is a former Australian rules footballer and media personality from Busselton, Western Australia who played for East Perth Football Club, East Perth in the West Australian Football League (WAFL) and Coll ...
as Eddie Collins
*
Slim Pickens
Louis Burton Lindley Jr. (June 29, 1919 – December 8, 1983), better known by his stage name Slim Pickens, was an American actor and rodeo performer. Starting off in the rodeo, Pickens transitioned to acting and appeared in dozens of movies and ...
as Sheriff Orville
*
Dub Taylor
Walter Clarence "Dub" Taylor Jr. (February 26, 1907 – October 3, 1994),Dub Taylor, 87, Actor in Westerns, The New York Times, October 5, 1994, Section B, Page 12 was an American character actor who from the 1940s into the 1990s worked extens ...
as Justice of the Peace Floyd
*
Ted Cassidy
Theodore Crawford Cassidy (July 31, 1932 – January 16, 1979) was an American actor noted for his tall stature at and deep voice. He tended to play unusual characters in offbeat or science-fiction series such as ''Star Trek'' and ''I Dream of ...
as Keno
Background
Most of the individuals involved in the production of ''Poor Pretty Eddie'' were, at the time, nominally employed in the world of
adult films
An adult is a human or other animal that has reached full growth. In human context, the term ''adult'' has meanings associated with social and legal concepts. In contrast to a " minor", a legal adult is a person who has attained the age of ma ...
, with the picture representing an opportunity to "go straight." According to the DVD's extensive liner notes, they secured backing from
Michael Thevis
Michael George Thevis (February 25, 1932 – November 20, 2013) was a Greek Americans, Greek American millionaire Pornography, pornographer and convicted murderer based in Atlanta, Georgia, but with close links to the Five Families of New York C ...
, a notorious
Atlanta
Atlanta ( ) is the capital and most populous city of the U.S. state of Georgia. It is the seat of Fulton County, the most populous county in Georgia, but its territory falls in both Fulton and DeKalb counties. With a population of 498,715 ...
-based businessman commonly known as “The King of Pornography”
whose other interests included a chain of
sex shop
A sex shop is a retailer that sells products related to adult sexual or erotic entertainment, such as sex toys, lingerie, pornography, and other related products.
An early precursor of the modern sex shop was a chain of stores set up in t ...
s, a
record company
A record label, or record company, is a brand or trademark of music recordings and music videos, or the company that owns it. Sometimes, a record label is also a publishing company that manages such brands and trademarks, coordinates the produ ...
, and the manufacture of
peep show
A peep show or peepshow is a presentation of a live sex show or pornographic film which is viewed through a viewing slot.
Several historical media provided voyeuristic entertainment through hidden erotic imagery. Before the development of the c ...
booths.
Further motivating Thevis was a desire to
launder money
Money laundering is the process of concealing the origin of money, obtained from illicit activities such as drug trafficking, corruption, embezzlement or gambling, by converting it into a legitimate source. It is a crime in many jurisdictions ...
he had made through dealings with various
Mafia
"Mafia" is an informal term that is used to describe criminal organizations that bear a strong similarity to the original “Mafia”, the Sicilian Mafia and Italian Mafia. The central activity of such an organization would be the arbitration of d ...
figures, which had attracted the attention of the FBI.
Shortly after the film's production, Thevis was jailed on an assortment of charges and, following a prison escape in 1978, was placed on the
FBI’s most-wanted list.
The movie's script, loosely based on the
Jean Genet play ''
The Balcony
''The Balcony'' (french: Le Balcon) is a play by the French dramatist Jean Genet. It is set in an unnamed city that is experiencing a revolutionary uprising in the streets; most of the action takes place in an upmarket brothel that functions as a ...
'', was the work of consummate television writer B. W. Sandefur, who also wrote for such shows as ''
Barnaby Jones
''Barnaby Jones'' is an American detective television series starring Buddy Ebsen as a formerly retired investigator and Lee Meriwether as his widowed daughter-in-law, who run a private detective firm in Los Angeles, California. The show was o ...
'', ''
Little House on the Prairie
The ''Little House on the Prairie'' books is a series of American children's novels written by Laura Ingalls Wilder (b. Laura Elizabeth Ingalls). The stories are based on her childhood and adolescence in the American Midwest (Wisconsin, Kansas, ...
'' and ''
Charlie's Angels''.
The film was shot on location in and around
Athens, Georgia
Athens, officially Athens–Clarke County, is a consolidated city-county and college town in the U.S. state of Georgia. Athens lies about northeast of downtown Atlanta, and is a satellite city of the capital. The University of Georgia, the sta ...
in 1973. The film’s biggest star, Shelley Winters, was flown in on a private plane that nearly crashed upon landing.
Contemporary reviews for the film were almost unanimously negative, owing to the film's dark racial undercurrents and repeated depictions of rape. One Georgia-based film writer concluded: “Upon leaving the theater, I quite honestly felt nauseous.”
Alternate titles and versions
Over the course of its 10-year run at
drive-in
A drive-in is a facility (such as a restaurant or movie theater) where one can drive in with an automobile for service. At a drive-in restaurant, for example, customers park their vehicles and are usually served by staff who walk or rollerskat ...
s and
grindhouse
A grindhouse or action house is an American term for a theatre that mainly shows low-budget horror, splatter and exploitation films for adults. According to historian David Church, this theater type was named after the "grind policy", a fil ...
theaters, the film was distributed under several different titles, each intended to market the film as belonging to different genres in an attempt to appeal to a variety of demographics: It was retitled ''Black Vengeance'' for distribution as a
blaxploitation film, ''The Victim'' as a vigilante thriller in the vein of ''
Death Wish'', and ''Redneck County'' and ''Redneck County Rape'' for distribution in the American south as a "hicksploitation" film. Unusually, a wholly alternate version of the film was exhibited under the name ''Heartbreak Motel''. This version—featuring voiceover narration by Eddie—is edited to present the movie as something resembling a filmed play: numerous action scenes are edited out in favor of lengthy dialogue pieces not present in any other versions, while the film's climactic gun battle is replaced by a sequence in which Eddie obtains a recording contract and leaves Georgia for Nashville. Although the ''Heartbreak Motel'' version is noticeably less violent than any other version, and omits most of the film's rape sequences, it also incorporates an
anal sex scene between Eddie and Bertha missing from ''Poor Pretty Eddie'', set to an unknown bluegrass group to a song that seems to be called "You Don't Have To Say You Love Me In The Morning".
Home media
HD Cinema Classics and Film Chest released the movie on Blu-ray and DVD on April 26, 2011. "''Poor Pretty Eddie'' is another public domain feature restored for Blu-ray by HD Cinema Classics/Film Chest. Anyone who doubts any significant restoration beyond overly aggressive DNR was done on this title need only look at the restoration demo included on the disc. The 35mm print utilized for the master is literally littered with virtually nonstop vertical green scratches, most of which have been removed. Color doesn't seem to have been retimed, at least not significantly, and so things have a slightly ruddy cast some of the time. But let's face it. Though filmed in Technicolor (and mid-70s Technicolor was not the Technicolor of yore), this was never a big budget film, and that low budget indie ethos shines (if that's the right word) through virtually every frame of ''Poor Pretty Eddie''. This was never a glossy, pretty film to begin with and it still isn't. The DNR applied means there's an overly smooth texture to this release, but it also means that we have a largely blemish free image. Color is certainly above average, if not mind blowingly robust, given the low budget confines of the original film. Contrast is on the low side, as it obviously has been from day one, and therefore detail tends to get lost in some of the darker interior scenes. The image is also very soft most of the time, but, again, that's how this film looked from day one. But overall, this is the second color film HD Cinema Classics/Film Chest has released in the last week or so (''The Terror'' being the other), and the results, while not perfect, are not as hideously troublesome as those who want grain, and lots of it, seem to think."
Poor Pretty Eddie Review at Blu-ray.com
/ref>
See also
* List of American films of 1975
References
External links
*
Poor Pretty Eddie
at Turner Classic Movies
Turner Classic Movies (TCM) is an American movie-oriented pay-TV network owned by Warner Bros. Discovery. Launched in 1994, Turner Classic Movies is headquartered at Turner's Techwood broadcasting campus in the Midtown business district of At ...
Poor Pretty Eddie Review at Blu-ray.com
Poor Pretty Eddie on Amazon
{{DEFAULTSORT:Poor Pretty Eddie
1970s exploitation films
American independent films
Films set in Georgia (U.S. state)
Films shot in Georgia (U.S. state)
1975 films
1975 horror films
1975 independent films
Southern Gothic films
American horror films
Films directed by David Worth (cinematographer)
1970s English-language films
1970s American films