MikeMagi At Oceanfront High School, all of the female students are lithe, lovely,luscious and lusty, the substitute English teacher is delighted to introduce the assistant manager of the football team to the wonders of sex (if only to help shrink his perpetual erection) and someone is killing off co-eds.The identity of the murderer isn't hard to figure out. The short list of suspects is a very short list. More puzzling is how MGM got away with schoolmarm Angie Dickinson's seduction of the underage lad played by John David Carson. Or why even the homeliest co-ed at Oceanfront turns out to be a knockout when she takes off her glasses and lets her hair hang loose. Rock Hudson in an uncharacteristic role is the phys ed teacher who spends most of his time bedding students. Telly Savalas is a curious cop and Keenan Wynn gets what he deserves for being the movie's dumbest security guard.

beauzee Comments are based upon TV viewing.Always a fan of Angie Dickenson and interested in Gene Roddenbery projects.In 1970, singer Little Richard mentioned that he was to be in a movie with Rock Hudson, as "The Insane Minister". Did he mean MGM? Historians, please help! :)This presumptive unrealized Richard project sure is different....a true cult movie with a lot of interest for fans of Hudson, as well. Gene Roddenberry did the script, which can't be considered at the level of his famous sci-fi TV icon, but there is zero impetus to raid the frig' during the viewing. Has much of the feel and atmosphere of the period. Hudson's acting is especially nuanced; Dickenson's sensuousness actually moves the plot line.

inspectors71 I am mildly fond of Pretty Maids All In a Row not because it is chock full of T and A, a veritable smörgåsbord of ditsy, horny girls wearing those wonderful mini-skirts from the early seventies, but because it's a visually pleasing movie for non-prurient reasons. The review on the main page is more than adequate to give you a cinematic and historical overview of the movie (kudos to krorie!). I like the movie because it somehow captures what's best about the California southland. The movie's images, its cinematography show the sort of comfortable warmth that I enjoyed when I lived there almost twenty years ago.Sure, it's a sex movie, and whether or not it's a really stupid one is up to the viewer, but the story of Rock Hudson's counselor coach humping the female student body of a California high school is deeply offensive, unless you concentrate on whatever hackneyed social commentary Gene Roddenberry was trying to put forth. Wow! Now there's a choice.Stripped down to its knickers, PMAIAR is the sort of stupid, dirty, and watchable movie that inhabited the drive-in screens of this country three and a half decades ago.There's enough shock value in this movie to give you a shuddering case of the guffaws; Roddenberry and director Roger Vadim must have figured that adults screwing children (albeit children who look like they're in their mid-twenties) was the height of cinematic daring. I remember seeing this flick with a friend who kept saying, "This has got to be a junior college, not a high school!" Nope. Sorry. Rock Hudson and Angie Dickinson spend much of the movie doing what would get normal mortals branded "pedophile." Then again, if you just put the obvious sniggering, Penthouse Forum claptrap out of your mind and concentrate on the visual aspects, I guess you might be able to make it through to the ending credits. Rock looks great in mod hair and mustache, Angie is all legs and that little thing she does pushing wisps of hair out of her face (or is that Helen Hunt?), the girls look as if they left the set to immediately run over to the Playboy Mansion for a photo shoot, and the strong secondary cast of Telly Savalas, James Doohan, and Roddy McDowall, although looking somewhat pained for signing their contracts, make Pretty Maids All In a Row just serious enough for you not to do what I did when I rented a mainstream movie and found a Allysa Milano B movie in it by accident.Run it through to the good parts, then return it for a refund.

tarmcgator Another blast from my past! I was a horny college student when this film was released in 1971, and I recall a big photo spread in "Playboy" promoting the film with revealing images of various "Pretty Maids." (Joy Bang? Nothing suggestive there!) I went to see the film based on that promise of titillation, but rather than being turned on, my tender sensibilities were turned off by the amoral characters and plot line.I recently watched the film again on TCM (give them credit for not censoring the mild nudity!), and I can't say that my view has changed much in 35 years. Those who try to excuse this fecal matter as "black comedy" or as an unsung "cult classic" are putting a lot of lipstick on a warthog.Many privileged Baby Boomers (of which I was one) developed in the 1960s a peculiarly self-centered notion that youth is morally superior to maturity, that idealism always trumps experience. The media -- especially a movie industry with a new ratings system that released filmmakers from the restrictions of the old Production Code -- pandered to the Baby Boomers' self-congratulatory moral smugness. This film is rife with such pandering. Rock Hudson's lecherous/murderous teacher is represented as the only cool adult in the film, as much for his "youthful" sense of style as for his unorthodox ideas about educating horny teenagers. The only other remotely hip adult is Telly Savalas' detective, who himself develops a grudging admiration for the murderer. The Angie Dickinson character is an overly earnest teacher who has to be "enlightened" by Hudson into seducing Hudson's sexually frustrated protégé (John David Carson). The other adult characters are essentially movie idiots (Keenan Wynn and Roddy McDowall are particularly offensive -- I hope they were paid well), while the hip, turned-on teens in the film protest the Vietnam war and lecture their elders on sexual freedom and openness.I have nothing against good old-fashioned lust, but even in 1971 I saw the impropriety of Hudson's character having sex with his female students (which he excuses as a way to enhance their psychological well-being). That sort of sexual power-mongering is bad enough, but then the controlling bastard must kill certain sexual partners (and others) who might expose his escapades. Rather hypocritical, isn't it? Advocating sexual license but afraid of having his own licentiousness exposed? (His wife, played by the lovely Barbara Leigh, is strangely passive in all this mess. It's never clear if she's totally clueless or remarkably tolerant of her husband's extramarital liaisons, though the film's ending points toward the latter.) After the Hudson character's demise(?), the newly unfrustrated protégé (who earlier is dismayed by revelations of his mentor's murderous behavior) adopts the same style of sexual duplicity for himself. (He attains symbolic hipness by abandoning his wimpy Vespa for a studlier motorcycle.) Perhaps the filmmakers were trying to argue that the new sexual mores of the '60s were a sham -- just the old, inescapable sexual hypocrisy coated with hip psychobabble – but that point itself is objectionable, and the film's own hypocrisy emphasizes just how disgusting the old sexual double standard really was (and is).One would think that this film was a rather blatant fantasy by that unapologetic libertine, Roger Vadim. But the film was written and produced by that celebrated intergalactic moralist, Gene Roddenberry, for God'sake! This guy gives dirty old men a bad name, and the film makes me yearn for the mindless but honest lasciviousness of hardcore porn. Comedy, even black comedy, still needs a moral center, something we can laugh with rather than just laugh at. This film glories in its amorality and mocks what the many progressive Boomers of the 60s, for all our ignorance and pretense, were trying to accomplish (and to some extent, have achieved) in making society's attitudes about sex more humane.