Sultans of smut, Mau Mau Sex Sex bares all
Boston Phoenix, BY GERALD PEARY
| Dan Sonney and David F. Friedman, retired sexploitation movie partners, have disparate philosophies concerning the obligations of marriage. In Ted Bonnitt’s affable documentary about these legends, Mau Mau Sex Sex, which opens this Friday (September 21) at the Coolidge Corner, the 84-year-old Sonney claims 62 years of connubial devotion to Margaret Sonney, the mother of his four daughters. And Friedman, who’s been married 47 years? " You’d make a picture to screw the leading lady, " Sonney teases him. The producer of such softcore quasi-classics as Thar She Blows! (1969) and The Erotic Adventures of Zorro (1972), Friedman barely denies entanglements with his bosomy starlets. Do the names Stacey Walker and Connie Strickland ring a bell for their respective lead turns in The Notorious Daughter of Fanny Hill (1966) and Bummer! (1972)? Mrs. Friedman remembers; she says, " I learned very early to close my eyes and ears. " It was Dan Sonney’s ex-cop father, Louis, who gets credit for jumpstarting American sexploitation. The D.W. Griffith of soft-X, he concocted Maniac (1934), in which a Buñuelian madman plucks out a cat’s eyeballs on screen (faked!), and The Wages of Sin (1938), wherein a nice girl becomes prey to the sordid world of hookers in negligees. Audiences weaned on Hollywood craved this sleazy stuff. " Rape, roadhouses, drugs, miscegenation . . . as long as it was in bad taste, " Friedman describes the pioneering works. Sonney and Friedman became absorbed themselves in revenue-making softcore, moving from naive ’50s " nudies " — bare bottoms, bosoms, and volleyballs in nudist camps — to, in the early ’60s, the problematic " roughies, " which featured unclad women being whipped and bloodied. " I was putting up the money, " Dan explains. " Dave was selling it. " They made countless movies, many of them still available from Something Weird Video. Some are sick, some funny, some mildly sexy. All are extremely low-budget. Friedman boasts that he put more time and effort into his ad campaigns and previews than into the scripts. No one will dispute that. Were audiences disappointed when the Friedman/Sonney movies proved less " sexsational " than the come-ons had promised? The unapologetic duo laughed all the way to their money launderers. September 20 2001 |
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