Filthy logo

Vintage Movie Review: 'The First Nudie Musical' (1976) Gets Blu-Ray and On-Demand Re-Release

A cult musical that attempted to combine pornography and Broadway, The First Nudie Musical is a bonanza of 1970's weirdness.

By Sean PatrickPublished 2 years ago 5 min read
Like

Specialty film imprint Quiver have once again dug into the annals of 70's cinema for another unique and mostly forgotten movie, 1976’s bizarre sex comedy, The First Nudie Musical. This remarkably 1970's movie stars a pre-Laverne & Shirley Cindy Williams as Rose and Steven Nathan as her boss, adult movie producer Harry Schechter. Harry, having lost money on his most recent picture, is desperately searching for a way to freshen up the porn genre.

With investors breathing down his neck and threatening to take his studio away, Harry suddenly has a big idea, a porno musical called Come, Come With Me. He even has the opening tune ready to go titled, The First Nudie Musical which he performs off the cuff for his money guys alongside a kickline of beautiful naked women. This is quickly explained away as a dream sequence but one that Harry was vividly illustrating to the investors as he went on.

The money men agree to finance Harry’s new movie but he must cast, shoot and release the movie in just two weeks. And if that were not enough of an obstacle, Harry must also use one of the money guys’ nephews as his director. Enter Bruce Kimmel as John Smithee, a childlike innocent who has read a few books on directing and picked up a few terms but is mostly a naive schnook who has perhaps never seen a naked woman before.

Bruce Kimmel steals every inch of The First Nudie Musical. Despite the nudity and the off the wall premise, it is Kimmel’s creepy little geek of a director who consistently made me laugh in this otherwise tepid comedy. That Bruce Kimmel also wrote all of the music and directed the movie while delivering its best performance is quite remarkable when you lay it all out.

Kimmel has an energy that only Cindy Williams seems capable of matching among this cast. Williams is an actress of an effortless charisma and had the movie embraced a little more of her energy instead of trying to stuff nudity into every corner of the screen, perhaps The First Nudie Musical would not have been mostly forgotten for the past 46 years. Williams sparks the film in the opening scene with her wit and manner and then leaves far too quickly only to spend most of the film playing second fiddle to star Steven Nathan.

There is a sort of incidental misogynist streak that runs through The First Nudie Musical, one that likely was the norm of the time. We can recognize these elements as misogynistic today but in 1976 it was simply the standard operating procedure of Hollywood. Two examples of this standout. One is the way the movie exploits female nudity while rarely showing male nudity. The other comes in a character played by Alexandra Morgan, Miss Mary LaRue. Mary is played as an egotistical, man-hungry she-beast when she isn’t completely nude for utterly pointless scenes.

I understand that the nudity and the pornographic sex is intended to be charming against the anachronistic Busby Berkley music of The First Nudie Musical but the joke wears thin rather quickly and the porno scenes feel simply like porno scenes amid a movie that has the heart and soul of a mainstream comedy. The First Nudie Musical was trying to pull off a tricky tone of envelope pushing sexuality and mainstream comedy and it comes up short of that goal more often than not.

The First Nudie Musical is not badly made, it has elements that I really enjoyed, especially the performances of Bruce Kimmel and what little there is of Cindy Williams aside from when she’s just witness to the male leads' mostly forgettable performance. Steven Nathan has some charm but he’s no match for either Kimmel or Williams who have more dynamic personalities. It doesn’t help that he’s also playing a sleazy porn producer whom we are supposed to be rooting for so that he can keep making cheap porn.

I will say that Nathan shines in the film's closing number, Let them Eat Cake. This lengthy ode to oral sex is unquestionably the high point of the movie, a witty ditty with a sly edge to it. The Vaudeville naughtiness of Let them Eat Cake is slightly upended by the inclusion of more unnecessary female nudity in the form of bottomless, top hat and coat wearing dancers but my problem is not the female nudity, it's that lack of equality in the nudity. If the movie is going to push the envelope then go all in or don't go at all.

I’m not opposed to pornography, but I prefer to keep my pornography and my mainstream comedy separate from one another. The two appear antithetical to me. That rather simply explains the ultimately fatal flaw of The First Nudie Musical, it’s not funny enough and it is certainly not sexy. It has naked people and jokes and the two are almost entirely at odds aside from a pair of terrific songs, the previously mentioned Let Them Eat Cake and a song I will describe below.

I have to praise the song Lesbian, Butch, Dyke, and the performance by actress Nancy Chadwick. The song is less than a minute long and Chadwick appears to have no other scenes in the movie but her drag tango is vivid, strange and very entertaining. The implications in it regarding predatory gayness and the homophobic slur in the title are unfortunate, but the scene is very entertaining if entirely problematic.

The First Nudie Musical arrives on Video On Demand Services and on Blu-Ray on Friday, February 25th, 2022, from Quiver.

movie review
Like

About the Creator

Sean Patrick

Hello, my name is Sean Patrick He/Him, and I am a film critic and podcast host for the I Hate Critics Movie Review Podcast I am a voting member of the Critics Choice Association, the group behind the annual Critics Choice Awards.

Reader insights

Be the first to share your insights about this piece.

How does it work?

Add your insights

Comments

There are no comments for this story

Be the first to respond and start the conversation.

Sign in to comment

    Find us on social media

    Miscellaneous links

    • Explore
    • Contact
    • Privacy Policy
    • Terms of Use
    • Support

    © 2024 Creatd, Inc. All Rights Reserved.