NUDE ON THE MOON
Color, 1962, 70 min. 14 secs.
Directed by Doris Wishman
Starring
Marietta, William Mayer, Lester Brown, Pat Reilly, Ira Magee, Lacey Kelly
AGFA / Something Weird (Blu-ray) (US R0 HD), Image Entertainment (DVD) (US R1 NTSC)
BLAZE STARR GOES NUDIST
Color, 1962, 74 mins. 43 secs.
Directed by Doris Wishman
Starring Blaze Starr, Ralph Young, Gene Berk, William Mayer, Sandra Sinclair
AGFA / Something Weird (Blu-ray) (US R0 HD), Image Entertainment (DVD) (US R1 NTSC)
HIDEOUT IN THE SUN
Color, 69 mins. 28 secs.
Directed by Doris Wishman
Starring Greg Conrad, Dolores Carlos, Earl Bauer, Carol Little, Ann Ricahrds, Mary Jane Line
AGFA / Something Weird (Blu-ray) (US R0 HD), After Hours Cinema (DVD) (US R0 NTSC)
GENTLEMEN PREFER NATURE GIRLS
Color, 1963, 69 mins. 27 secs.
Directed by Doris Wishman
Starring Lou Alexion, Joan Bamford, Jim Antonio, Sandra Sinclair, Lee Abel, Mary Jo Wellls
AGFA / Something Weird (Blu-ray) (US R0 HD), Something Weird (DVD-R) (US R0 NTSC)
DIARY OF A NUDIST
Color,1961, 71 mins. 47 secs.
Directed by Doris Wishman
Starring Davee Decker, Norman Casserly, Dolores Carlos, Una Diehl, Joan Bamford
AGFA / Something Weird (Blu-ray) (US R0 HD), Image Entertainment (DVD) (US R1 NTSC)
THE PRINCE AND THE NATURE GIRL
Color, 1965, 57 mins. 32 secs.
Directed by Doris Wishman
Starring Jeffrey Niles, Sandra Sinclair, Lee Abell, Warrene Gray
AGFA / Something Weird (Blu-ray) (US R0 HD), Forgotten Film (Blu-ray) (Germany R0 HD), Pop Cinema (DVD) (US R0 NTSC)
Before she confounded viewers with her New York City-shot roughies and bizarre crime films about murderous mammaries, pioneering 
exploitation auteur Doris Wishman got her start in the early '60s churning out a string of cheerful, eccentric nudist camp films all lensed in Florida. A key 
component in the history of vintage sexploitation, nudist camp films, a subset of the popular nudie-cutie films, were essentially a way to deliver lots of skin to viewers without worrying about censorship since there was no sexuality involved. Instead these were odes to the benefits of sun worship and a healthy outdoor lifestyle, which may or may not have borne much resemblance to the folks you'd actually see at a real naturist resort. Strangely, these are also among the most accomplished and "normal" of Wishman's work in filmmaking terms since she hadn't yet discovered the wonders of random cutaways to feet, hairdos, and sofas. Now her entire surviving nudist output has been collected by AGFA and Something Weird as a three-disc Blu-ray set, The Film of Doris Wishman: The Daylight Years (though it could have easily been called The Sunlight Years), the third and last in their quest to collect as much of her work as possible in glorious high definition.
First up on disc one is the strangest and most endearing film in the set, Nude on the Moon, which marked Doris' second outing as a director (sharing credit with cinematographer Raymond Phelan). You know you're in for something special in the opening seconds thanks to the theme song, "Moon Doll," one of the many weirdly infectious easy listening ditties Doris worked into these films. The aesthetic here is sort of a cross between a Les Baxter album cover, an issue of Playboy, and a surrealist painting as we follow the adventures of rocket scientist Jeff Huntley (one-off actor Brown) and his mentor, Dr. 
Nichols (Wishman regular Mayer), when the former inherits $3 million from his furrier uncle. Far too impatient to wait for government 
funding, Jeff plows ahead with his plan to take a rocket to the moon with Nichols along for the ride. Aided by office manager Cathy (Marietta), they manage to pull it off after six months and blast off to find that the moon is really a foliage-filled paradise filled with antennae-sporting topless women and beefy dudes. The two men only have a limited supply of oxygen as they observe the activities of this lunar civilization and take some photos, but Jeff is so taken with the exotic and telepathic Moon Queen (Marietta) that he becomes very reluctant to go home.
A key cornerstone title of the Something Weird catalog, Nude on the Moon is a total delight and a real outlier in the nudist camp cycle since it's devoid of the usual activities like volleyball, checkers, and al fresco dining. The sci-fi angle here is a fun twist on the alien planet formula audiences had been seeing throughout the '50s, and it's significant that all of Wishman's nudist films use the setting to work with either a familiar genre or take a look at a social attitude instead of just using it as a chance to ogle at naked bodies. The second half of the film is essentially nonstop toplessness, but the effect here is upbeat and refreshing rather than exploitative -- even turning into a kind of bittersweet love story by the end. Not surprisingly, this was one of the first Something Weird titles out of the gate on DVD in 2000 (after a popular run through them on VHS) as part of their licensing deal with Image Entertainment, paving the way for several Wishman titles to come over the years. The transfer looked excellent for the time and still holds up quite well, while extras include the trailer, a "Moon Strip" short, and a Wishman gallery. The 2022 Blu-ray edition offers a gorgeous new restoration of the film with all the blazing colors and fine detail you'd expect, with the second half in particular offering a riot of textures at the Coral Castle resort in Homestead, Florida. The opening extended animation title sequence looks quite rough by comparison, but after that it's smooth sailing with the body of the feature in pristine condition. As with the remaining titles, the DTS-HD MA 2.0 mono track (with optional English subtitles) sounds very nice with no issues to report. Filmmaker Frank Henenlotter has been a very vocal fan of this film for ages, so the addition here of a new commentary by him is a big plus indeed. Joined by an unbilled Anthony Sneed (star of Bad Biology), a Wishman newbie who asks plenty of amusing questions, it's a great track that will probably have you throwing the film back on again for a repeat viewing.
Sharing space on the same Blu-ray is the second Wishman film to hit 
DVD back in the day, 1962's Blaze Starr Goes Nudist, an adorably ridiculous vehicle for famous burlesque performer Blaze Starr (whose life was later turned into the Hollywood film Blaze with Paul Newman and Lolita Davidovich). Here our gal Blaze is burned out by the endless grind of performing, autograph sessions, and photo shoots engineered by her manager and boyfriend, Tony (Berk), who has her under the studio lights every day by the crack of dawn. Trotting out for an afternoon off under the palm trees, she wanders into a movie theater where she sees a spotlight feature on nearby nature camp Sunny Palms Lodge. More than a little intrigued, she slips on some gold lamé pants and drives out to the resort where she's greeted by manager Andy (played by crooner Ralph Young, who sang most of Doris' '60s theme songs). As it turns out, the lifestyle is just the tonic she needed -- but Tony's not pleased at the bad publicity that might emerge from, uh, a stripper being a member of a nudist colony. Will Blaze ever find a perfect work-life balance, and how much clothing will she have to wear in the process?
Though it's hard to gauge her actual acting ability given the limited demands here, Blaze is definitely a winning and magnetic presence here strutting her stuff and effectively conveying her sense of freedom brought about by her change in environment. To add to the fun, Doris (who tended to have brief cameos in her films) also has one of her biggest roles here. As with most '60s Florida productions, the colors are almost overpowering in their intensity here which gives it all a heightened feeling beyond the rudimentary nature of the story itself. The actual nudist camp footage is par for the course as we see the members of all ages frolicking around, and it's also interesting as a very early look at the mental and physical erosion caused by the grind of celebrity culture. The DVD (which featured a bonus B&W Starr striptease short, a trailer, and the usual Wishman gallery) was already very nice, but the Blu-ray outdoes it with a very crisp and healthy transfer from the original negative (bearing the title Blaze Starr Goes Wild) featuring some of the wildest reds you've ever seen. Wishman biographer Michael J. Bowen provides a thorough commentary about the film explaining how it all came about, covering the essentials of Starr's scandalous life and career, and giving context to the nudist movie craze in general while noting how Wishman managed to set herself apart. Also included on the disc are a 2m41s gallery and standard def trailers for both features.
Jumping back 
on the timeline a bit to Doris' first film, welcome to disc two with Hideout in the Sun which 
started off her bizarre, truly unique career with bare-assed panache. It comes packed with the all the staples you'd expect (volleyball players with one team wearing pants to obstruct frontal nudity, bare-butt archery, gals lounging in swimming pools on inflatable rafts with their legs oh-so-strategically placed, etc.). Lensed in very bright color, it's an utterly ridiculous robbery caper shoehorned into a nudie-cutie template as robbers Steve Martin (Bauer) (Doris must've just been watching the original Godzilla) and Duke (Conrad) wind up hiding at a Miami naturist resort on their way to Cuba, with a buxom hostage, Dorothy Courtney (Carlos), in tow. Duke hides out in their bungalow while Steve and Dorothy go au naturel to blend in with the locals, and soon their escape plans take a not-too-surprising turn. It's all rather sweet and innocent with the heavy amount of bare bosoms and derrieres blending in with the scenery after a few minutes, and Doris' fractured framing is kept to a minimum here. The cast is mostly a bunch of no-names, but nudist movie regular Dolores Carlos also popped up in favorites like Pagan Island, H.G. Lewis' A Taste of Blood, and the immortal The Beast That Killed Women.
Thought extinct after the producer died in prison after stashing away all the elements, Hideout in the Sun resurfaced on DVD from After Hours as a two-disc set; for some reason this Academy ratio (1.33:1) film is presented in both full frame and 16x9 enhanced versions on separate discs. The 
compositions on the latter look workable with all the extraneous headroom lopped away, but it's really a 
toss-up either way depending on own preference. Michael J. Bowen (now the official owner of the film) contributes a full audio commentary in which he talks in detail about Doris' career and the bizarre history of this film, and he also provides liner notes and a text interview with Doris going more into detail about her nudist camp cinematic cycle. The first disc also contains a 6m49s Wishman interview (excerpted from Schlock! The Secret History of American Movies), a 1960 "The Year That Was" newsreel, and a batch of Retro-Seduction trailers, while the second disc adds on a bonus nudie featurette ("Postcards from a Nudist Camp," basically a vintage European travelogue short) and additional vintage trailers for titles like Daddy Darling. The 2022 Blu-ray comes from the same print, obviously, but it hasn't been given any digital tampering here (i.e., original credits left intact) and looks a bit sharper here. The color palette is also more neutral by comparison to more saturated, warmer look of the DVD. A new, different Bowen track is also included with a slew of additional info that wasn't available at the time as well as thoughts about the quirks of this outing shot around Dade County.
The companion feature on this disc is 
1963's Gentlemen Prefer Nature Girls, a cute nudie twist on the office rom-com formula. By day, Tom (Alexion) seems to be far too tough on office secretary Anne (Bamford). His boss, Mr. Bennett (Antonio), urges them to just get along and has very strict viewers about fraternization among co-workers. However, it turns out that Tom and Anne are really secretly married and don't want their secret to come out, lest they lose their jobs. Even crazier, they like to spend their weekends at the nearby nudist camp -- something that turns out to be a big issue when Tom accidentally drops his membership card on the floor at work. An outraged Bennett fires him and vents his frustrations to Anne, unaware that she's into the natural way of living herself. When the camp manager has to go away for a few weeks, he decides to leave Tom in charge for a while to help make ends meet. If you've ever seen one of these films, you can probably figure out how they manage to find a way out of their predicament for good.
Featuring more coverage of Sunny Palms in its prime, this one never got the retail DVD treatment but has been floating around on VHS, digital download, and DVD-R from 
Something Weird for ages. It's short and sweet with a lot of eye-popping 
Eastmancolor photography showing off the flesh and foliage of the grounds, and the idea of mounting one of these films around a couple's employment and financial woes is a strange one that still feels relevant today. This one doesn't get talked about as much as the rest of the films in this set, but it's about on the same level and unmistakably the work of its director. The Blu-ray looks stunning, restored straight from the negative and likely not even this pretty when it first played theaters; you can easily toss away any old copies you have lying around. Also on this second Blu-ray are the SD trailer for Gentlemen and a Wishman interview (13m46s) conducted by Donald A. Davis in 1974 for his documentary, That's Sexploitation. Presented with subtitles from a transcript since the original audio is lost, it's a real treat and looks gorgeous as she looks back at her nudist cinematic universe.
Finally on disc three, it's time to look inside the Diary of a Nudist, another workplace nudism film here seen through the lens of journalism. While out hunting through the Florida brush one afternoon, rifle-toting newspaper editor Arthur (Casserly) is startling to stumble across a nudist colony filled with happy folks living their best lives au naturel. Deciding this place is so sordid it must be exposed and closed down right away, he sends ace reporter Stacy (Decker) to get the scoop on what all these naked folk are really doing. However, Stacy takes to the scene like a duck to 
water and writes glowing 
reports about her experiences sharing the sunshine with her fellow nudists. What's a prudish publisher to do but strip off and go undercover himself to blow the lid off these sunny shenanigans?
Chronologically this was the third nudist film for Wishman, and it's a treasure trove of coverage of various participants cavorting around on land and underwater that would get recycled into Gentlemen and feature in several sexploitation documentaries. (In turn, eagle-eyed viewers will spot a bit of familiar footage from Blaze Starr as well!) For some reason this one seemed to get reissued and retitled more than any of the others, turning up for years under names like Nature Camp Confidential, Nature Camp Diary, and Diary of a Girl Reporter. In any case, it's a typical lightweight romp with lots of bright scenery and naked folks to make sure you don't have to strain yourself trying to follow much of a plotline. A longtime VHS favorite, the film was presented on DVD by Something Weird in 2002 paired up with Edgar G. Ulmer's The Living Venus, thus offering the only cinematic connection between these two directors. The transfer was okay but definitely more worn than the other Wishman titles around that time, while extras included a batch of nudist trailers, alternate titles and deleted scenes for The Naked Venus, and four short subjects: They Wear No Clothes, Nudist Recruits, Nudists Uncensored, and The Beatlettes Go Nudist. The Blu-ray looks vastly superior, pulled from the camera negative and looking as fresh and healthy as its actors. Also new here is an audio commentary by Elizabeth Purchell, a Florida native who talks about the appeal of home state filmmaking, Wishman's maximizing of production value, and the nostalgic pull of these films.
Finally we get to the last film in our Wishman journey, The Prince and the Nature Girl, whose title implies a take-off of the Marilyn Monroe vehicle The Prince 
and the Showgirl. Actually it's a nudie cutie take on The Prince and the Pauper, sort of, with low-voltage twin confusion running rampant at a naturist resort. The film was made right after two other Wishman nudist camp films still considered 
lost, Playgirls International and Behind the Nudist Curtain, and this one was thought lost as well until a single German-language print popped up. In a fictitious seaside kingdom, a rich prince (Niles) lives in a castle (that looks more like a plantation) but believes he should be employed in case the peasants revolt. To achieve his goal, he slips out five days a week to go get a job in the city at a business office where he... doesn't do much, apparently. On the weekend he takes off to Sunny Palms Lodge, a pretty ragged-looking resort for the "avid sun enthusiast" where everyone swims and plays volleyball and archery all day. Meanwhile two twins starting new jobs at the office, blonde Eve and brunette Sue Pringle (Sinclair), have gotten to crash for a year in the apartment of traveling friend Mary, with Eve catching the prince's eye as his lazy secretary. A chance weekend meeting at Sunny Palms between Eve and "Mr. Prince" (the only attendee who insists on wearing shorts at all times) sends them strolling through lots of outtakes from Doris's previous films and scintillating shots of naked people seesawing and feeding ducks. When Eve gets back home, Sue wonders whether blondes really have more fun -- and since she has a crush on the prince, she decides to do a hair color switcheroo to nab the man she wants.
A Wishman film to the core, The Prince and the Nature Girl mostly avoids showing characters speaking on camera (all the easier to loop everything afterwards) and basks in long, languorous images of smiling naked people with '60s hairdos passing their afternoons in utopian harmony. None of the actors are really recognizable, nor does the film really require them to do 
more than hit their marks when they're walking around or staring 
close to the camera. As mentioned above, this film only exists as a German print featuring only a dubbed dialogue track. Fortunately a text copy of all the dialogue surviving courtesy of the film's submission to the New York censorship board; that made it possible to create a new English track for the 2017 Pop Cinema DVD, which isn't all that jarring since Wishman usually had canned, disembodied voices in her films anyway. It's all set to a bouncy, pseudo-Herb Alpert score that works well enough, too. The image quality isn't so hot, looking washed out and dull, and it seems to be from an unconverted PAL source clocking in at a mere 52 mins 41 secs. Also included is an audio commentary with Michael Rasso, John Fedele, and Bowen covering the director's background ("a national treasure!"), the scenes shot inside her apartment, the status of female directors at the time, and the shooting locations (with stock Florida shots from the real Sunny Palms turning among among the main New Jersey locales). Other extras include a brief Atomic TV segment with Wishman (4m24s) and Bowen, a "Nature Girl" nudist short (13m43s) from the legendary Dan Sonney, a "Nudism" educational short (10m53s) with lots of peek-a-boo shots and scientific text inserts, a 1941 "Rock Lodge" short (14m37s) from the National Convention of American Sunbathers Association in New Jersey (interestingly the earliest piece but also the only one with outright frontal nudity), and a trailer for Hideout in the Sun.
In 2018, German label Forgotten Film Entertainment gave The Prince and the Nature Girl its jam-packed Blu-ray debut with a drastically improved transfer featuring excellent detail and color. Surprisingly it features not only the vintage German dub but a completely different new English track as well; it's substantially better with more professional voice performances and a more effective female narrator. The film also comes with German subtitles and an isolated score track, plus a German audio commentary (by Heinz Klett, Ingojira, and Jo Steinbeck), a slew of pressbooks and other promotional material, a "Better Than Sex!" (97m5s) chronicle of the making of the 2002 Wishman film Each Time I Kill in Miami, a Wishman visit at the German Buio Omega Filmclub in 2001 (26m52s), a 2000 visit to Wishman in Miami (18m35s), a 5m23s rendition of an archival German review (in front of a swimming pool), a "How I Caught the Summer Wind" (20m4s) look at the film's rediscovery, and two short films, "Weber's Secret" (2m47s) and "Weber's Christmas Gifts" (3m43s). Also included with the main feature is an optional supporting short film, Mädchen in der Sauna (27m46s), a 1967 peek at the benefits of nude sauna time as experienced by a German student abroad in Finland. The U.S. disc features the same excellent transfer as the German Blu-ray, which is good news as it's hard to imagine it looking any better. Instead of ponying up for a third new English dub, this features the extant German track with English subtitles. Something Weird's Lisa Petrucci contributes an excellent essay for the insert booklet, "Sunshine and Spaceships," and provides additional written context for a written interview with Wishman by Davis, all explaining how the censorship standards of the time led to the creation of films like this and how her films manage to stand at the very front of the pack.
NUDE ON THE MOON (Blu-ray)
NUDE ON THE MOON (Blu-ray)
BLAZE STARR GOES NUDIST (Blu-ray)
BLAZE STARR GOES NUDIST (DVD)
HIDEOUT IN THE SUN (Blu-ray)
HIDEOUT IN THE SUN (DVD)
DIARY OF A NUDIST (Blu-ray)
DIARY OF A NUDIST (DVD)
THE PRINCE AND THE NATURE GIRL (AGFA Blu-ray)
THE PRINCE AND THE NATURE GIRL (Forgotten Film Blu-ray)
THE PRINCE AND THE NATURE GIRL (DVD)
Reviewed on November 10, 2022
