(re)Search my Trash

<body> <div align="left"> <table border="0" cellspacing="0" width="800" cellpadding="0" height="100%"> <tr> <td width="100" rowspan="3" background="../stylepix/square.gif" valign="top">  </td> <td width="4" rowspan="3"></td> <td width="592" height="1%" valign="top">  </td> <td width="4" rowspan="3"></td> <td width="100" rowspan="3" background="../stylepix/squareright.gif" valign="top">  </td> </tr> <tr> <td width="592" valign="top" height="99%">    <p>Ken (Harvey Korman), a photographer-for-hire, accepts an assignment by magazine publisher Jack (William Kerwin) sight unseen, not knowing it's a men's magazine. The real problem though is not only the content of the magazine but the fact that Jack is a rather unstable character, a notorious drunkard and womanizer with a commitment problem - but he has an eye for beauty, as evidenced in his first cover model Peggy (Danica D'Hondt), a pretty waitress he talks into posing scantily clad in front of the camera all too easily. Peggy soon becomes the permanent covergirl for the mag, and is dubbed the <i>Living Venus</i>, and Ken soon takes a definite liking to her, but Jack has long made it a habit to sleep with his models, and he isn't one to make an exception when it comes to his star model - especially after he hears Ken has proposed to her. So Jack is quick to marry her away from right under Ken's nose - and Peggy couldn't be happier ... until Jack finds a new assignment within his magazine for her - as promotion manager, meaning she has to "be nice to the advertising clients." At the same time, he has Ken replaced too, by a photographer (Lee Hauptman) more interested in his models than photographing them.<p>One year later: Ken has moved to fashion photography, while Peggy has become a hopeless alcoholic, as her job as promotion manager has made her more and more the company whore, later also a nude model ... and sales of Jack's magazine have started to slip because he has lost his direction, and his financiers start to ditch him.<p>Everything comes to a head at Jack's mag'sm 2nd anniversary party, where he threatens to divorce newly sobered up Peggy - and she fills herself up with champagne and drowns herself in his pool as a result. This is the last straw for even Jack's most patient backers, who take away his magazine and - in a twist of bitter irony - give it to Ken. At Peggy's funeral, Jack is full of threats for all he thinks have wronged him, but these threats are little more than empty words ...<p> <p>Of course, the main selling point of this film at the time of its release was its occasional topless nudity (still something of a sensation in the early 1960's), carried by a plot that promised insights into the sleaze biz - and yes, the film delivered, and the girls were rather cute, too. But it's actually a pretty decent low budget melodrama as well. Sure, the plot is pretty clichéed, but the whole thing is pretty well-paced, the actors are uniformly up to the job - with William Kerwin giving what might be the best performance of his lifetime -, and the whole thing doesn't take itself too seriously.<p>This all doesn't make <b>Living Venus</b> a masterpiece of any sort, not even one of director Herschell Gordon Lewis' best films, but a very decent effort when nudies were usually made with half a braincell for some quick return at the box office (not that these are necessarily unfunny to watch of course) ... <p>  </td> </tr> <tr> <td width="592" valign="top" height="1%">  <SCRIPT LANGUAGE="JavaScript"> currentyear = "2012"; </SCRIPT> <SCRIPT language="JavaScript" src="../scripts/endcredits.js"></SCRIPT> <SCRIPT LANGUAGE="JavaScript"> dosworsdonn(); </SCRIPT> </td> </tr> </table> </div> </body>