Crew
Director/Producer – Louis Silverman [Doris Wishman], Screenplay – Dawn Whitman [Doris Wishman], Photography (b&w) – C. Davis Smith, Music – Music Sound Recorders, Optical Effects – B&O Film Specialists Inc.. Production Company – Mostest Productions, Inc..
Cast
Sharon Kent (Ann), Michael Lawrence (Zeb), Jackie Richards (Babs), Trom Little (Tom/Mark)
Plot
Zeb retrieves a doll out of a trash can. After passing the secretary Ann on the street, Zeb realises that he can use the doll to make her do anything he likes. He uses this to erotically tease and punish Ann. While trying to deal with her boyfriend Tom, Ann is driven crazy as she periodically loses control of her body.
Doris Wishman (1912-2002) was one of the early directors of nudies. Nudies were the precursor to the more explicit pornographic films and would feature women parading about in a state of undress but never anything more than that. Wishman began making films with Hideout in the Sun (1960) and made another thirty up until her retirement in 1977. These include the infamous Chesty Morgan duo Deadly Weapons (1974) and Double Agent 73 (1974) and the transvestitism documentary Let Me Die a Woman (1977). One or two of these have genre overlap – Nude on the Moon (1961), a nudie set on The Moon, and The Amazing Transplant (1970) about a penis transplant. She also made a couple of ventures into horror with A Night to Dismember (1983) and Each Time I Kill (2007). In a number of these works, as she does in Indecent Desires, she directs behind the pseudonym of her husband Louis Silverman.
There has been a lot of nonsense written about Doris Wishman, given that she was a woman working in the male-dominated genre of the nudie. Claims that her focus on the dull aspects of a scene was her “subverting the male gaze” – something that seems absurd in that Wishman was making films over a decade-and-a-half before Laura Mulvey coined the terms ‘male gaze’ and several more years yet before it came into common usage. The truth is that Wishman was simply making nudies for a primarily male audience and was a working director without any real concerns for politicisation of what she did. Not everybody needs to be seen as secretly defiant of a system – most people are just trying to get on with life and do what they need to survive.
You suspect that with a minimal number of twists of the dial that Indecent Desires could easily have played as a horror film. It could easily have come out as something like Devil Doll (1964) or The Hypnotic Eye (1960). Instead, we get the premise play out as an erotic film where the very creepy looking Michael Lawrence uses the doll to make Sharon Kent undress and caress herself before, in a sadistic mood, he stubs a cigarette out on the doll’s lip, burning her. Although in not taking the horror route, there is no resolution to the story – in a horror film, Lawrence would likely be exposed and defeated/killed – whereas here we get the downbeat one where he snaps the doll’s neck, killing Kent.
The erotic element is quite different to what we get in today’s equivalents, the adult film. Just lots of scenes of Sharon Kent or her workmate Jackie Richards dressing and undressing. They never get any more undressed than boobs and the occasional butt shot. Even the love scenes coyly cut away the moment Sharon Kent starts to lift Trom Little’s shirt up, although a little more is shown of the couple together in Trom’s scenes with Jackie Richards.
Mostly, Indecent Desires is dull. It is slow and not much happens. Part of this is changing standards between erotica of the 1960s and the 2020s – back then a great deal more was forbidden and hence of great fascination to see it uncovered, whereas everything is now freely available on the internet at the click of a button. Beyond that, the film lacks much of a plot and even with a slim 71-minute runtime, seems to be endlessly padded by scenes of the girls at the office and in their apartments and then more long scenes of them dressing/undressing.
Trailer here