Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 225: More about Mondo Oscenità (1966)

Betty Boatner relaxes in a scene from Mondo Oscenita.

Forgive me for making a second trip to the buffet so soon, but I'm not quite done with Mondo Oscenità (1966) aka World of Obscenity, the forgotten shockumentary with never-before-seen footage from Ed Wood's unfinished juvie epic Hellborn (1956). Reader Brendon Sibley made me aware of this odd little film, which was rereleased by Something Weird Video in 1997. Oscenità was directed by Joseph P. Mawra, an exploitation filmmaker best remembered for the infamous Olga series of grungy, B&W bondage movies originally released in 1964 and 1965. Oscenità contains copious footage from the Olga films, and Brendon informs me that one of those films, Mme. Olga's Massage Parlor (1965), is now considered lost. The fleeting clips we see in this documentary might be all that remains of it.

A typical Olga film.

At the time of its release, Oscenità was an obvious attempt to cash in on the popularity of the Italian film Mondo Cane (1963). Mawra even gave himself a bogus Italian name (Carlo Scappine) for this one. From what I can tell, there are no original scenes in this entire movie; it is all repurposed footage, much of it violent and/or sexual in nature. Mawra simply used whatever material he had available to him to pad the running time, perhaps hoping that the narration by Joel Holt (aka Lou Hopkins) would tie it all together into something coherent.

Beyond the Hellborn footage, which came to Mawra via producer George Weiss, Mondo Oscenità has further scenes of interest to fans of Ed Wood and cult cinema in general. About 45 minutes into the film, for instance, we see a young blonde woman in a flimsy negligee, lounging on a white vinyl couch and smoking a cigarette. After a few seconds, a middle-aged man enters, clutching a half pint of bourbon and two glasses. He sets these items on a nearby coffee table, then snuffs out the girl's cigarette and his own in an ashtray. Now unencumbered, the two lovers make out for a few seconds before the scene fades to black. On the soundtrack through all this, the narrator drones on about how movies have glamourized crime and extramarital sex:

The human desire for realism in motion pictures has created this unfortunate situation. When the code of censorship was in effect, certain responsibilities were set aside for the film producers whereby there would be definite and explicit rules applying to the treatment of sex upon the screen. Promiscuity and adultery or casual disregard for the marriage vows should not be condoned or presented in a way seeming to be desirable. Further rules specified that scenes of passion should not be introduced unless essential to the plot and that these scenes should not include lustful embraces or open-mouthed kissing, nor should there be any suggestive postures or gestures. The spectacle upon the screen of intense passion resulting from love should not corrupt the emotions of the audience. If, however, the passion is presented in such a way as to suggest lust alone, this does tend to stimulate the same emotions in the audience.

What makes this sequence noteworthy is that the blonde on the couch is Betty Boatner, who played the doomed Shirley in Ed Wood's The Sinister Urge (1960), while her male paramour is Western baddie Kenne Duncan, who played the starring role of Lt. Matt Carson in that same film. In addition to being a drinking buddy of Ed Wood, Duncan was a mainstay in Wood's repertory company in the '50s and '60s. Their projects together include Night of the Ghouls (1959) and Trick Shooting with Kenne Duncan (1960). Duncan also worked on such Wood-adjacent films as Pete Perry's Revenge of the Virgins (1959) and Ronny Ashcroft's The Astounding She-Monster (1958). 

While Kenne Duncan has hundreds of credits to his name, Betty Boatner's resume does not extend beyond The Sinister Urge, and the footage of her in Mondo Oscenità is definitely not from that film. According to Rudolph Grey's Nightmare of Ecstasy: The Life and Art of Edward D. Wood, Jr. (1992), Boatner was Duncan's girlfriend at the time. It is Brendon Sibley's contention that Ed Wood himself may have shot the sequence of Duncan and Boatner. As further evidence, he points out that a copy of Ed's favorite magazine, Famous Monsters of Filmland, is visible on the coffee table. I have no reason to dispute any of this. Frankly, I cannot otherwise understand why this footage ever would have been taken in the first place or who would have taken it, since it is not excerpted from a feature film.

Kenne Duncan and Betty Boatner enjoy some quality time.

Meanwhile, reader Paul Apel made an intriguing observation about the Hellborn footage I posted last week. The scene in question features a hoodlum, played by Wood mainstay Conrad Brooks, passionately kissing and then assaulting his date, a curly-haired brunette in an angora sweater, after they wander away from an outdoor picnic area. After the two characters struggle a while, the girl manages to escape from the thug, and he chases her down a dirt road in Griffith Park. 

Paul astutely noticed that a few shots of the aforementioned struggle do not match the rest of the footage. Furthermore, he said, the "girl" in these shots appears to be a man in drag. "Is it possible," Paul asked via Facebook, "this is Wood himself doubling for the actress?" Naturally, this sent me scrambling back to the original clip. Sure enough, there are a couple of shots that are noticeably blurrier and grainier than the rest of the footage, and the female character in these shots looks like a man in a brunette wig. Knowing that Ed Wood donned female clothing to double for actresses in both The Baron of Arizona (1950) and Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957)—not to mention dressing in drag for a gas station holdup scene in Hellborn—I find it entirely possible that this is indeed our Eddie. 

With the "mondo" craze long over, this film has been all but forgotten for decades. Even the Something Weird Video version seems to have flown under the radar of most cult movie maniacs. But what kind of life did Mondo Oscenità have when it was originally released? Did it get any screenings in theaters back in the '60s? As I quickly found out, it certainly did! It may even have been a hit. Under both its original title and World of Obscenity, it scored numerous theatrical bookings from 1966 to 1968. It played in New York, Kentucky, Florida, Texas, California, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Washington DC. Just check out this rather whimsical newspaper ad from the October 14, 1966 edition of the Binghamton, NY Press and Sun-Bulletin. Clearly, the couple in the illustration did not get the memo about the ban on open-mouthed kissing. 

An ad for the film from 1966.

What's especially amusing to me is that, back in the 1960s, adult films like this one were openly advertised in regular daily newspapers, alongside all the other movies in circulation. As I perused the listings for Mondo Oscenità, I kept seeing ads for such decidedly mainstream fare as The Sound of Music (1965), Doctor Zhivago (1965), and even Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) mere inches away on the same page. What a world this used to be, huh?