Adventures in 'Sploitation: 'The Immoral Mr. Teas'

In 1959, former third-grade technician of the 166^th Signal Photo Company, a company that filmed and documented the battles of WWII, and part-time photographer for Playboy Magazine, Russ Meyer, made history. With a budget of twenty-four thousand dollars, he made his first feature, The Immoral Mr. Teas, a film that would go on to gross a little over a million dollars and usher in a new era of nudity in the movies in the bargain. 

Sometimes, it’s wild to think there was a period where nudity in films was, if not outright illegal, at the very least verboten. To the point that porn was an underground business, like in the old days of VHS pirating, porn was passed around and shown in private residences, but it was never for mainstream or public consumption. 

In America, especially, sex in art has always been tantamount to “I saw Lizzy Proctor talking to the Devil!” To say nothing about how the very existence of a woman with breasts over a certain cup size would throw puritanical censors into a frenzy. (They throw me into a frenzy as well, but in a good non-fascist way.)  Mae West, the woman with the hourglass physique and a bust as ripe as her wit, had a talent for penning and delivering lines so laden with sexual innuendo that she often found herself in court under obscenity charges. 

West hadn’t said or done anything explicitly obscene. She had merely hinted, implied, and intoned. But that was enough to get some people hot under the collar because she made them hot under the zipper. 

The history of sex, nudity, and even breast size on screen is a long and winding one. Whether it’s Jane Russell’s massive knockers throwing censorship boards and the MPA into a tizzy or the 1950s trend known as Sweater Girls, boobs, nudity, and sex have long been the bane of existence for dull, goody-goody, wrong-thinking Americans of any political stripe. 

The Sweater Girls were a group of actresses hired because their breasts were big enough to be visible under thick woolly sweaters. Think of it as the origin story of the r/2busty2hide. It was an attempt to do an end run around the restrictive Hays Code, which forbade, among other things: Any licentious or suggestive nudity—in fact or in silhouette; and any lecherous or licentious notice thereof by other characters in the picture.  

Talk about taking all the fun out of movies.  

The Immoral Mr. Teas, or as it was known overseas by its far more salacious title, Mr. Teas and His Playthings, was the first movie since the pre-code era to have nudity. The first legitimate movie, to be clear. There has been and will always be porn, but until Meyer’s cinematic voyeuristic romp, the porn was all underground. If you wanted to see nudity on the big screen, you likely had to settle for documentaries about the joys of nudists' camps-the cinematic versions of National Geographic. 

But one of the most astonishing things about The Immoral Mr. Teas is how tame the film is, not just by modern standards, but by Meyer’s own standards that he would go on to set in his later films. We don’t even see any actual full-frontal knockers until about twenty-eight minutes in. 

But what makes Meyer’s The Immoral Mr. Teas so groundbreaking and what must have felt like an H-bomb to the culture was the naked lust for hooters displayed throughout the film. Few filmmakers have made their hunger for ripe, overflowing, mouthwatering melons their entire personality quite like Meyer. But what made him such an iconoclast was how he infused that lust into every frame of his work. 

Meyer once said, “I have to have the erection,” when asked what moves him to make his films. While crass, Meyer is essentially saying what every great director has said. In other words, he must have the desire or else the whole project is sunk before it’s begun to set sail. 

The Immoral Mr. Teas, while tame and containing no outright sex scenes, does contain Mr. Teas (Bill Teas) openly leering at women and their breasts, which all but spill out of their tops. My favorite being a buxom brunette nurse at a local dentist office played by the fulsome Marilyn Wesley. Something about that smile of hers and her walk has always made me go “Hello Nurse!” 

Yet, these women are nothing compared to the women Meyer would later make famous in his films. Don't get me wrong, every one of these women is a sight to behold, but there's not a Tura Santana, Haji, Erica Gavin, or Kitten Natividad among them. Remarkably, it's the humor of The Immoral Mr. Teas that's almost more impressive than the bustline of the stable of beauties walking across the screen.

While Meyer won't miss a chance to make boob jokes, he also has a wry Termite Alley sense of humor with a tiny dash of Chaplin to keep it interesting. Teas fiddling with his camera and missing the topless woman behind him hits just the same now as it does then, if not more so in our current state of social media-obsessed delirium. But then there's the feud with the little girl down the lane in which the little girl chucks a rock at Teas for making her lose her hula-hoop rhythm. A glimpse at the anarchic comic spirit Meyer would later infuse into his films.

The plot of The Immoral Mr. Teas is blessedly straightforward and free from any illusions of narrative grandeur. Meyer follows Teas around as he goes about his day, and we begin to see that Teas is a shy melon felon. Yet, it’s the unashamed voyeurism of the whole ordeal that makes The Immoral Mr. Teas the first modern exploitation film. Scenes like Teas seeing a breathtaking blonde on the beach, played to jiggly excitement by Dawn Danielle, have Teas being a peeping Tom. 

Meyer’s camera switches between being from Teas's point of view, to being literally over his shoulder, to Teas's perspiring face. Using editing and camera placement, Meyer wallows in voyeurism, making Tea’s sexual excitement a visceral feeling for the audience. To add another layer of voyeurism is the fact that the cameraman for The Immoral Mr. Teas is Meyer himself.

Daniels frolics on the beach, giggling as she lets the waves wash over her nubile form. Shrewdly, Meyer, a frequent Playboy photographer, vacillates between a young woman enjoying herself and Teas’s own bubbling lust at seeing a woman so free with her body and sexuality. 

Meyer restrains himself, holding off until we see the first set of tits almost a half hour in. When we do, they are framed in the window of a door, the woman’s face obscured by a shade. It's an early bit of grip-framing; Meyer uses the moment to infuse some cartoony melon humor by cutting back to Teas holding two ripe melons. 

Hell, the whole film is dripping with a cleavage aesthetic. Meyer never misses a chance to have a pair of tits, either spilling out, nearly spilling out, or straining a top, to have them perfectly in focus. A true melon felon auteur, Meyer understands breasts are often more visually interesting either in movement, being hidden, or off to the sides. 

Made on a shoestring budget and with a palpable sense of scenes being shot before the cops showed up, Meyer makes a lot of the very apparent little that he has to work with. (Keep an eye out for Meyer himself in the very small audience at the burlesque show. He's the guy with the wolfish grin clapping like Orson Welles in Citizen Kane) There’s no underlying subtext or moralizing. The Immoral Mr. Teas exists purely to ogle, like its titular character; Meyer’s camera leers to the point you can practically hear Meyer smack his lips. 

Compared to his later work, The Immoral Mr. Teas is a laidback affair, filled with wry irony, visual boob puns, and rife with an open but gentle horny-on-main vibe that mainstream society so often lacks. The film itself is a silent film with a narration laid over the images. Narrated by G. Ferrus, his voice a booming wry knockoff of the kind that would normally narrate the very industrial films The Immoral Mr. Teas is lampooning. 

The opening shots of babbling brooks, trees gently swaying in the wind, and shafts of barley waving in the breeze are Meyer jokingly jabbing at the films about nudist camps. He's satirizing their limp pretenses at “educating audiences” when everyone knew the only reason you saw them was to see naked people on the big screen. Meyer simply removed the pretense and replaced it with art and wobbly milk tanks. 

The Immoral Mr. Teas eventually begins to spiral into surrealism. Teas’s leering evolves into full-blown fantasies about these women. Though these fantasies never cross the line into hardcore, they do serve as an excellent excuse to showcase naked stacked beauties with a playful sense of ribald revelry. 

Yet, as tame as The Immoral Mr. Teas was, it still found its way into a Philadelphia court in 1960. Edward Seretsky, owner of the Abbe Art Cinema in West Philadelphia, was arrested for showing Meyer’s debut opus. Incredibly, a jury of Seretsky’s peers, made up of five men and seven women, found him not guilty. Apparently, the deliberation went on for five hours, which is more time than anyone who didn’t work on The Immoral Mr. Teas has ever spent talking about it. 

Judge David C. Ullman is quoted as saying, “Nudity doesn’t make a film obscene, or even interesting.” Oof, harsh but fair. Judge Ullman might have had a future as a film critic with truth bombs like that. He went on to say The Immoral Mr. Teas was, “vulgar, pointless, and in bad taste.” Which is the kind of log line perverts like me live for. 

In fairness to Judge Ullman, you must understand; films like The Immoral Mr. Teas did not exist. Women getting naked for no reason other than to excite, to titillate, were not seen outside private stag parties. The Immoral Mr. Teas is hardly pornographic, but in 1959, it sure felt like it.