#chesty morgan

“Having resurfaced late in life due to a revival of her sex films, an eighty-nine-year-old Doris Wishman, clad in leopard print and wedge sandals, appeared on Late Night with Conan O’Brien in 2002 … Born in 1912, a Jewish New Yorker and child of Ukrainian émigrés, Wishman was hardly ordinary. By the time of the Conan interview, which aired five months before her death, she had titillated and bewildered adult and cult film audiences for many decades with idiosyncratic movies rife with sexual degradation, grotesque and preposterous bodily perfidy, and, as one of her advertisements blared, “Girls without Restraint!” Among the most prolific American women directors of the postwar period, her vastly eccentric body of work, counting thirty features, remains unknown to many film connoisseurs … Entirely self-taught, she came to moviemaking as a widow in middle age, producing her first film, the nudist escapade Hideout in the Sun, with $20,000 borrowed from her sister Pearl. Before long, she was the biggest producer of nudist camp pictures, releasing eight in the early ’60s before shifting into black-and-white sex melodramas, or “roughies,” as the sexploitation mode adjusted to darker, more violent subjects and a grittier aesthetic inflected by noir, art cinema, and variants of realism … The pleasures of watching Wishman’s bawdy, crass, absurd, and kitschy skin flicks heighten across their proliferative form, as the gimmicks, stiletto heels, polyester curtains, ashtrays, vases, and black lace panties pile up from reel to reel.”

/ From “Who’s afraid of Doris Wishman?” by Elena Gorfinkel in Artforum, September 2022 /