Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 86: "For Love or Money" (1969)

Ed Wood did it all for love... and money. Mostly money.

An out-of-print Wood anthology.

Didn't I already review something called "For Love or Money"? Close. Back in 2013, I examined Don Davis' For Love & Money (1967), a feature film based on The Sexecutives, Ed Wood's novel of naughty corporate espionage. That film remains a real time capsule item, a garishly colorful snapshot of the swinging 1960s. Though Davis' movie is almost entirely forgotten today, more of Wood's fans should check it out, especially for its mindlessly catchy theme song and its cast of young lovelies like Michi Tani and Michelle Angelo.

But Eddie also wrote a short story called "For Love or Money" (note the change in conjunction) in 1969 for one of Bernie Bloom's many adult magazines, in this case a publication called Wild Couples. This particular erotic tale was one of Eddie's earlier short stories for Bernie. It predates most of what's in Angora Fever and Blood Splatters Quickly, but it's nevertheless highly indicative of Ed Wood's quirky style, even building up to one of the author's trademark twist endings. And I think it even offers some insight into Ed's mind and shows us how he saw the world.

The story: "For Love or Money," originally printed in Wild Couples (1969). Credited to "Charles Chadwick." Anthologized in Short Wood: Short Fiction by Edward D. Wood, Jr. (Ramble House, 2009).

Synopsis: Meg, 26 and gorgeous, has two men in her life—Marty and Artie. Handsome young Marty is an aspiring actor without a penny to his name. Meg has sex with him purely out of love and plans to marry him someday. Fat slob Artie has gotten wealthy through "dirty" means and lives in a luxurious apartment. Meg has sex with him strictly for the money he gives her. In fact, Artie is unwittingly subsidizing both Meg's lifestyle and Marty's acting career. One afternoon, while Marty is out on an audition, Meg has a rendezvous with Artie. The fat man's plan is to urinate on Meg while another man makes love to her. "A friggin' orgy," he calls it. But Meg is very surprised by the identity of Artie's hired stud!

Wood trademarks: Phase "for love or money" (cf. "Superfruit"); prostitution (cf. "Private Girl"); neologism "sex-voice" (compare to phrases like "sex dumb" from "Tears on Her Pillow," and "sex region" from "Pekka at the Circus"); post-coital conversation (cf. "The Hazards of the Game," "Never Look Back"); reference to hippies on the Sunset Strip (cf. Death of a Transvestite); ellipses (Ed's favorite punctuation); reference to classic movie actor (in this case Edward G. Robinson).

Excerpt: "How happy she felt, even as the door was being opened for her by the leering, gaudily-uniformed doorman in front of the obscenely luxurious apartment house above the strip where fat-fart Artie lived. She went up in the elevator, her thoughts of Marty blocking out the muzak and the image of Artie in his black silk dressing-robe. Imagine? A black silk dressing-robe in this day and age. When he smoked a big Havana, hands in robe pockets, talking out of the side of his mouth, he looked like a B-movie Edward G. Robinson."

Edward G. Robinson: An inspiration to Ed Wood.

Reflections: Why did I single out "For Love or Money" for an article in this series? After all, I've already written many times about Ed Wood's fixation on prostitutes and how he uses that profession as a metaphor for his own experiences making movies in Hollywood, constantly having to sell out his own ideals to please the moneymen. And that's true again here. I mean, our heroine literally goes from sleeping with a broke aspiring actor to sleeping with a disgusting, corpulent gangster. The story's very title makes a clear division between doing things for love and doing things for money, but it's a theme Ed Wood has explored in many other stories.

Our heroine is another classic Wood archetype. Meg (aka Maggie) is a woman who is aging in the sex trade and compares herself to younger women. This, too, is a theme Ed Wood revisited again and again as he himself grew older and saw a younger generation entering the business. Take "Private Girl," for example, or "Flowers for Flame LeMarr" or "Hooker by Choice." "For Love or Money" is just a slightly earlier variation on that theme.

In other words, this is all old territory.

So is there anything that makes "For Love or Money" special? Well, for one thing, it has some screwy stylistic quirks all its own, most notably the fact that it shifts without warning from third person perspective to first person at about the halfway point. Meg is always our viewpoint character, but at first she's not actually narrating the story herself. Here's a typical excerpt from that part of the story when Marty tells Meg his next audition will be successful:  "She believed him. She knew about acting from her own brief flirtation with it, knew how rough it was to break in. But Marty would do it. She was sure."

At some point in the writing process, Eddie must have gotten a little lost or disoriented, because he has Meg take over as narrator. Another excerpt from Meg's date with Artie: "I set down my half-finished drink and walked over to where he sat. I reached behind me and slowly zipped down my dress. That’s what he wanted. He wanted me to tantalize him, torture him with expectation. When I had the dress unzipped, I drew it gradually off over my head." Keep in mind, this POV switch occurs after Meg has already had a flashback to her teen years and her first sexual experience. So we already had backstage access to Meg's mind and thoughts.

My guess is that Ed's writing underwent little to no copy editing. Bernie just printed whatever Ed wrote, verbatim. That's why I say these short stories give us the author in his most raw, unrefined, and pure state. Ed's creative process was famously chaotic; he was well known for typing at a furious pace while simultaneously eating, drinking, watching TV, and carrying on a conversation. I was reminded of "Exotic Loves of the Vampire," another of Ed's stories for Wild Couples. That one starts as a diary entry and ends up as a letter, as if Ed forgot what kind of story he'd been writing.

Content-wise, my favorite part of "For Love or Money" comes when Meg snootily evaluates Artie's way of talking and his use of slang.

     "C'mon in, Tootsie-Babes."  

     "Tootsie" from the forties; "Babes" was hippie talk. She walked in nonchalantly, oblivious to the fat little rich man, inured to his crudity from the many times she’d done it with him. 

     "A drink?" he offered predictably.  

     She took it. Inure her still further. He pinched her bare arm as he gave her the drink. What the fuck? That’s what he was shelling out for. He sipped his drink, watching her now from his favorite easy chair. She was sitting demurely on the couch across from him, watching him as he sat with his legs spread apart, the robe covering his hard-on. And she knew that he surely had a hard-on. It was what, besides the money, she would leave him without. 

     "Today I got something special for us."  

     Today I got. Edward G. Robinson talk. He had never been anything more than a front for the real mafiosos. They probably laughed at him behind his back. I got. In this day and age.

What's amusing here is that Ed Wood's own dialogue in his films, stories, and novels is famously stilted, and his grasp of slang was never exactly precise. So this is a real pot and kettle situation.

Regrettably, we must delve into the fact that this story includes some urine-play. (Yes, I know there are other terms for this activity. No, I don't want to use them.) Even after six years of writing these articles and nearly 30 years as a student of Ed Wood's work, I've still only read a small fraction of the man's writing. Maybe five percent, and that's being generous. I don't know if there's a lot of this fetish-y stuff lurking in his stories, novels, and loops. I was genuinely surprised to see it introduced here. And it's done so casually, too. Meg doesn't even bat an eye, to coin a phrase. But I did. Reading "For Love or Money," I felt that Ed Wood and I had crossed yet another threshold.

A controversial horror film.

Considering what Marty and Meg go through in this story, I was vaguely reminded of Srđan Spasojević's A Serbian Film (2010). In that highly controversial, often-censored horror movie, a retired porn actor (Srđan Todorović) agrees to participate in an experimental underground movie. He thinks he's providing financial security for himself and his family, but the project turns out to be an extreme snuff film involving unsimulated rape, murder, pedophilia, incest, and numerous other atrocities. Once the actor realizes what he's gotten himself into, he tries to escape, but it is to no avail. Not only does his initial decision—made purely for monetary reasons—utterly ruin his life, it has truly horrifying consequences for several members of his family. And all of this seems to be made possible by a vast, powerful criminal underground totally immune from the law.

Now, don't get me wrong. "For Love or Money" looks like Sesame Street compared to A Serbian Film. No one is murdered or raped in this story, and no children are harmed. I'm not equating these two works. But there are some similar themes between them. Marty is an actor who can't seem to land a job. He needs money. And so, like the unfortunate porn star from A Serbian Film, he agrees to do business with unsavory gangsters. This choice has longstanding consequences for himself and his future wife, Meg. "For Love or Money" ends on a truly depressing note, as Meg ponders how her future with Marty is now irrevocably stained by this experience.

Yes, we would get married and sit across a dining table from each other many evenings. We would live together and have sex together, and sit across the dining table from each other many times. Marty would go on struggling for success as an actor, and we would get the money we needed whatever way we could. But it wouldn’t be the same. We would do the best we could, and go on together because we were in love, deeply in love with each other, but it would never be the way it could have been.

Wow, Ed. That's not as bleak as the violent, perverse ending of A Serbian Film, but it's quietly sobering in its own way. "For Love or Money" becomes one of Ed Wood's most potent parables about the dangers of selling out.

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 16: "For Love & Money" (1967)

For Love & Money: Of all the movies Ed Wood was ever involved in, this was one of them!

Donald A. Davis as a drunk in Plan 9 from Outer Space.

As bizarre as it often seems, Ed Wood's life story is not exactly unique. Many others followed the same basic career path—writers and directors working on the fringe of the motion picture business, often hopping from genre to genre depending on wherever the money seemed to be that month.

Herschell Gordon Lewis is best known as the "Godfather of Gore" for his blood-soaked horror films, but he dabbled in sexploitation, too, and made children's flicks, hillbilly comedies, juvenile delinquent movies, rock & roll pictures, pseudo-psychedelia, and more. Barry Mahon made cheap but innocent Saturday matinee films for children and equally cheap but sleazy adult movies for their fathers! Anything to make a quick profit. Shoot it, get it out to theaters ASAP, and use the profits, if any, to fund the next one.

The skin flick business was alluring to many independent film makers in the 1960s because it required very little initial investment and the movies were seemingly guaranteed to make money. The operative word here is "seemingly." Showbiz is a harsh industry, especially when you're working at its lowest level. As audiences got more and more jaded, adult films had to get increasingly more explicit in order to hold their attention. Hardcore films—that is, movies with graphic depictions of intercourse—largely made softcore films that emphasized nudity over actual sex obsolete. The adult film business was also beset by any number of outside woes: police harassment, government censorship, protests by religious organizations, dishonest distributors, crooked theater owners, and even mob bosses who wanted to control the whole industry.

Take into consideration that show business tends to attract people who are already a little unstable and needy, and you have a surefire recipe for misery. Time and again in researching these films and the people who made them, I have encountered sad biographies of men and women who died well before their time, often due to alcoholism. One such fellow was Donald A. Davis, usually billed simply as Don Davis.

Born in Florida in 1932, Don Davis got his start in the picture business with Ed Wood in the 1950s, serving as a production assistant on Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959) and making his first-and-last-ever acting appearance as a drunk in that film, a role that would prove tragically prophetic. He also worked as an editorial supervisor on Ed's Night of the Ghouls in 1959. In fact, his name appeared so frequently in the credits of Wood-related films that for years I mistakenly assumed "Don Davis" to be another of Eddie's many pseudonyms. Davis, after all, was Ed's middle name, and Eddie called himself "Don Miller" when he directed Necromania in 1971. But, while he traveled in many of the same social and professional circles as Ed Wood, Don Davis was a separate individual and had his own shadowy, under-the-radar film career in the 1960s and early 1970s.

One of Don Davis's many softcore skin flicks.

On Eddie's recommendation, sexploitation kingpin Stephen C. Apostolof hired Don Davis as an editor and post-production supervisor for Orgy of the Dead (1965). Steve took an immediate liking to this good-natured young man, a recent University of California film school graduate eager to make good in pictures, and the two soon found themselves bonding over drinks while discussing their respective divorces.

Actor Harvey Shane, Apostolof's most-frequent leading man, also liked Don as a person but was unimpressed with him as a director. Shane appeared in several of Don Davis' films in the late 1960s and early 1970s, largely as a favor to his friend and frequent employer Steve. Speaking to documentary director Jordan Todorov roughly four decades later, Harvey remembered Davis as a nice, thirtyish guy who would "always drink" and who made movies that were "so bad" that he was "embarrassed to be in" them.

But Orgy had established Don's bona fides in the smut film racket, and two years after its release, he began directing and producing flicks of his own in a run that would last about six years and would produce such lurid-sounding titles as For Single Swingers Only (1968) and Dial-A-Degenerate (1972). In 1969, interestingly, Davis directed a now-apparently-lost film called Gun Runners with a script by Ed Wood. That same year, Don and Steve were instrumental in the founding of the Adult Film Producers Association (AFPA), and Don even served as the organization's first-ever president. But Don Davis's career was derailed in 1972 when he and his business partner, distributor Carl Carter, were busted for obscenity in Tennessee. According to Apostolof, Davis "got into the 16mm pornography really early and used Memphis as a distribution point. They busted him for interstate transport."

Steve was subpoenaed in the trial, as was B-movie bigwig Dave Friedman, possibly best known today as the producer of Herschell Gordon Lewis's early gore flicks (including Blood Feast and Two-Thousand Maniacs) but also a prodigious producer of nudie cuties and other sexploitation films. Steve testified that photographing naked women was "art," not pornography. ("Picasso painted naked women," Apostolof argued.) The jury clearly disagreed. Davis and Carter were found guilty on 27 counts and faced a staggering 135 years in prison. Their conviction was eventually overturned on appeal, but Don Davis's career—and life—never recovered. His filmography came to a halt in 1973, and Don himself was dead by '82, a victim of the chronic alcoholism that had claimed Ed Wood a few years earlier.

Before all this unpleasantness, though, Don Davis made his directorial debut with an adaptation of one of Ed Wood's adult-themed paperback novels. The resulting film, despite its obscurity, is actually quite a remarkable little artifact that more of Wood's fans should see. Why? Well, read on.

FOR LOVE & MONEY (1967)

For Love & Money features the sexiest, most exciting kind of espionage there is... industrial!

Alternate titles: For Love or Money [possible 1969 rerelease title], Harry Novak Presents For Love and Money; The Sexecutives [source novel]

Availability: Mastered in 2001 from a 16mm print found in the vaults of "sexploitation king" Harry Novak, this movie is now readily available as a DVD-R or download from our good pals at Something Weird Video. Either way, the price is ten bucks. The version I saw included a good 40 minutes of sexploitation trailers, including one hawking For Love & Money. Believe me, that one's a keeper! (The hyperbolic announcer intones in a booming voice that this is "a movie you'll want to see more than once!" No kidding, citizens.)

From book to movie and back to book again!

The backstory: Ed Wood's most prolific period as an author of what today we'd call "erotic fiction" was definitely from 1967 to 1968. Desperate for quick cash, Eddie churned out several dozen leering, panting paperbacks during that time, including one called The Sexecutives (Private Edition, 1968; credited to "David L. Westermier"), which enticingly billed itself as "the incredible SEXploits of a gang of sex spies who used grotesque measures to blackmail their victims." Don Davis purchased the rights to this explosive-sounding novel and used it as the basis for his first film, For Love & Money, giving story credit to "Edward Davis."

The perfunctory script was written by James Rogers, whose only other screen credit is as a production assistant on Davis's Her Odd Tastes (1969). Weirdly enough, the movie was then turned back into a book -- a heavily-illustrated "Fotoreader" called For Love Or Money (Olympic, 1968) with an abridged version of the plot and various stills from the film. Sadly, both The Sexecutives and For Love Or Money are now expensive, difficult-to-find collectibles and neither was available for review as part of this project. Should anyone find either of these novels in a used bookshop someplace, be sure to drop me a line. Just know in advance that I'm not going to spend a hundred bucks on a paperback book. Probably.

Georgie Cooper listens to people having sex.

The movie's plot hinges on a crime ring of sexy young female blackmailers under the employ of Ms. Irene Kelly (Janice Kelly), who runs what might be considered a combination escort-and-temp agency, renting out the services of secretaries and "convention hostesses" to horny, middle-aged businessmen. What these fellows don't realize is that the young ladies they've hired are not just there to "serve" them. In fact, they're industrial espionage agents, either stealing hush-hush company information or putting powerful men in compromising positions so that they can later be blackmailed. And what the girls themselves don't realize is that the police are wise to them and have been tapping their phone calls and secretly recording their trysts.

Between the girls spying on the businessmen and the cops spying on the girls, a good deal of For Love & Money is devoted to shots of hidden microphones and secreted cameras, and there are many minutes of screen time devoted to people electronically eavesdropping on the conversations -- and love-making sessions -- of others. Possibly out of fear of confusing the audience, rookie director Davis rather oversells this aspect of the story. In Wood's novel, incidentally, Irene's last name is "Longstreet." Perhaps it was changed to Kelly to match the real surname of the actress... or to remind viewers of the so-called "Kelly Girls" who worked for the temporary employment agency Kelly Services.

In both the film and the novel, the framing device for the story is highly reminiscent of Ed Wood's Glen or Glenda? (1953), i.e. two dull white guys in suits sit on either side of a desk in an office, discussing various "cases" that relate to a particular topic. Instead of a doctor grimly lecturing a cop about transvestism and sex changes, however, this film is about a police officer, lethargic old-timer Lt. Gardiner (Lionel Nichols, giving an utterly disengaged performance) grimly lecturing a businessman, sweaty Don Harding (Munro Knight), about how Irene and her army of duplicitous women have been ruining men's careers... and compromising sensitive corporate information to boot. Gardiner believes Harding was one of Irene's victims and wants the increasingly-squirmy man to cooperate in the investigation. But Harding dubiously maintains his innocence, so Garidiner regales him with tale after tale of the girls' dirty work. This turns out to be a lucky break for us, the audience, because this film's raison d'etre is to show Irene Kelly and her talented employees at work.

Without the flimsy frame story -- which, like much of Ed's work, is clearly descended from TV's Dragnet -- For Love & Money is really a series of otherwise-unrelated vignettes about sexy gals and the dumb guys who fall for 'em.

Michelle Angelo's talents speak for themselves.

First up is the story of "Areospace Central" engineer Mr. Wyman (Dean Allen), a Brylcreemed braggart who clams to have 1500 men working for him and says self-aggrandizing things like, "I'm a doer... Doers take all." On a business trip, according to Gardiner, he conveniently picked up a magnificently-endowed redhead (popular 1960s pinup girl Michelle Angelo) at a bar, and they went back to a motel room together. After wowing him with her 44DD breasts, the girl bedded Wyman, waited until he was asleep, then photographed sensitive documents in his briefcase. Meanwhile, a police officer (Georgie Cooper) was listening in through headphones and recording the various grunts and groans emerging from the motel room. Wyman, naturally, was shit-canned for this, but the damage was done.

This portion of the film seems all-but-certainly inspired by Ed Wood's stint making highly-classified training films for the Autonetics Aviation firm in the early 1960s. Though these short films have never been released to the public, Ed was clearly proud of this phase of his career and wrote about it fondly in Hollywood Rat Race. The next "case" is devoted to a figure model named Tanya (Michi Tani, never to be seen again after this film but prominently featured on its posters) who was hired by a total sleazeball named Loren Grant (Barry Cooper) to model for -- and then seduce -- his aging boss, Floyd Shermac (Curly Etling), the head of the charmingly-named "Stallion Motors" and (in his spare time) a self-styled amateur glamour photographer. Grant snapped some incriminating photos of the old man getting very cozy indeed with Tanya and did temporarily usurp Floyd at Stallion Motors. But it was all for naught, since Don Harding's company bought Stallion and dumped Grant at the first opportunity. That's how the police first suspected that Harding was somehow involved in the crime ring.

Sure enough, the next flashback shows Don's own tryst with one of Kelly's girls. Though he claims to be happily married, Don indulged in some extracurricular nookie with a free spirit named Francie (Norma Mimosa, another one-flick wonder), who introduced him to the pleasures of LSD "capsules" and Laugh-In-style body painting. It is here that the film becomes very preachy and moralistic, with Gardiner scolding Don in the classic Joe Friday style ("Aren't you a little old for the LSD and hippie bit?") and Don immediately repenting ("I've read all about the disastrous results that can happen, and I've even given my kids long lectures on the dangers that can come from its use.")

As per usual, Wood is extremely opposed to the counterculture and the use of psychedelic drugs. Most of the characters in this film drink constantly, but apart from one fleeting remark by Francie ("We all do some pretty wild or silly things when we're drinking.") this vice goes unnoticed. That's textbook Eddie. After hemming and hawing, Don agrees to help the cops, despite the damage it could do to his reputation and his family. (The cops, for their part, agree to squash some of the nasty photos they've got on Don.) Before the triumphant... uh, bust, though, there's time for one more little sexcapade, this time involving Irene herself who poses as a secretary and, naturally, boffs a naughty businessman named Blake Carter (Scott Avery), who has sort of a late-1960s Peter Sellers thing going on, looks-wise.

In the end, a sadder-but wiser Don Harding gets one final chewing out from Lt. Gardiner about the steep toll he's paid for some fleeting pleasure. Screenwriter James Rogers takes this speech largely from Ed's novel, but Eddie phrased it with a bit more style. To wit: "It would seem a high price to pay for a few stolen pleasures on the good ship JOLLY POP!" Rogers left out the "jolly pop" part. See, that's the kind of phraseology that separates Ed Wood from the rest of the hacks in his field.

As always, though, sin has heavy consequences in the Wood-iverse. And yet again, innocent people (Harding's family) suffer along with the guilty.

The Maysles Brothers' Salesman (1968).

The viewing experience: Like opening a time capsule from 1967 and realizing that the year wasn't all "platsticene porters with looking-glass ties," as the Beatles would have it. Like the Maysles Brothers' Salesman (1968) or George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968), For Love & Money largely takes place in what social scientist Toby Miller deemed "the other '60s... a world of starched shirts, dark ties... and morning cigarette coughs -- a world far removed from tie-dyes, beards, long hair, and pot highs." The film's creative apex and main commercial selling point is its laughably inauthentic "LSD trip/body paint" sequence, which acts as the exception that proves the rule.

It's a radical departure from the rest of For Love & Money, a movie that takes place mostly in functional offices and nondescript motel rooms where stationary actors recite their lines at each other while parked in front of uninspiring plain white walls. Apart from the fabulous girls, the characters in this film are mostly dour, middle-aged cops and booze-swilling corporate drones in ugly, off-the-rack suits. But for a few precious minutes somewhere in the middle of this movie, For Love & Money makes an endearingly clueless attempt at being "hip" and in doing so, only reveals itself to be even more square than previously imagined.

When Don visits Francie at her home, he notices she has a few pieces of quite benign "psychedelic art" on the wall, the kind of stuff you could find at any poster shop of the era. Unbeknownst to him, one of those pictures has a camera hidden away behind the lens of an unkempt hippie/biker-type's sugnlasses. "I can see where, with those [LSD] capsules, this could be a pretty drop-in, trip-out place," Don tells Francie, before urgently adding, "You do have some more of those capsules, don't you?" Later, he will sadly confess to the police, "I knew when I let her introduce me to LSD that I was letting myself in for trouble." His excuse is typical of the starchy, uptight mindset of those "other '60s" -- he's under "tremendous pressure" at work.

So wholesome is this film that when Don drops acid, it comes swaddled in white bread "to kill the taste." The resultant "trip" scene is one of the mildest to be found in the films of the late 1960s: just a few minutes of swirling colors. Then, totally zonked out on LSD, Don starts to daub paint all over Francie, who has stripped down to her underpants and seems to have checked out emotionally. All the while, he babbles nonsense about color and nature and how the nipple is the center of the universe. Sexy it ain't, brothers and sisters.

Michi Tani, you make my heart sing.

And that brings us to one last major issue: how does For Love & Money function as erotica? Surprisingly well, I'd say, but obviously matters like this are of the utmost subjectivity. If the movie is arousing, it's not due to Ed Wood's writing or Don Davis's directing. For those of you who are curious about such things, the depiction of sex in this film is genteel. Oh, sure, there are many topless shots and a few glimpses of bare bottoms, but not a hint of pubic hair is on display and all fornicating is done either under the covers or off-screen entirely as we "listen in" via the surveillance microphones along with the cops. In one scene, it is obvious that Michi Tani is awkwardly positioning herself to keep from exposing her crotch as she climbs into bed. Why the state of Tennessee thought Don Davis was such a menace is beyond me.

But despite all of this, For Love & Money is occasionally stimulating. The cinematography by "Humphrey Buggit" (likely a pseudonym; this is his only known credit) is not outstanding, but at least the girls look appealing here. That definitely cannot be said for every skin flick of the '60s and '70s, as we will see in upcoming weeks of this project. Janice Kelly and Michelle Angelo are both luscious and sensual -- and not hopeless actresses either -- but it is Michi Tani who stole my heart. She can't act worth a damn, and her English skills are nonexistent. The script unhelpfully gives her American slang terms like "hip" and "groovy," which sound like Martian expressions coming from her lips. But the young lady has... something. Maybe it's that she takes off a leopard-print coat to reveal a leopard-print dress... with leopard-print skivvies underneath that. Maybe it's because she seems so thrilled to be in this shabby little movie, as if this role were the grand prize she'd won on some game show. Or maybe I just think she's cute. Whichever. If you're out there, Michi Tani, get in touch. Soon. Sure, it's been 46 years. I accept that, but I do not care.

By the way, I cannot possibly convey to you the true For Love & Money viewing experience without letting you hear the movie's indelible theme song, written by Jim & Chet Moore and crooned by Jose Siemens. The Moore boys seem to have contributed music to a few forgotten low-budget skin flicks from the 1960s, but Siemens has no other credits to speak of. Here, at any length, is the wonderful, terrible tune in both its incarnations: the relatively boisterous main title and the softer, samba-influenced version that is employed during literally every single one of the film's love scenes. Happy listening.

Next week: In 1966, 20th Century Fox made a cool $8 million (the equivalent of $130 million today) distributing a caveman film produced by England's famed Hammer Studios. This film's success was largely due to the participation of Ms. Raquel Welch, who famously appeared in a very revealing animal-print outfit both in the film and on its iconic poster. (You might remember that one from its pivotal role in The Shawshank Redemption.) 

Does a success like that go unnoticed by the wannabes and schlock merchants? It does not. Three years after the original, Ed Wood (working under the name "Adkov Telmig") penned the script for director Ed De Priest's belated attempt to jump on the prehistoric bandwagon. Make plans to be back here in seven short days for my look at One Million AC/DC (1969).