Review: Cherry, Harry, & Raquel!

Macho, somewhat brutish border sheriff Harry (Charles Napier) is also an occasional marijuana smuggler. His girlfriend is English-accented nurse Cherry (Linda Ashton), whilst the Raquel of the title (Larissa Ely) is a blonde hooker acquaintance of Harry’s who is doing unmentionable things with drug baron Mr. Franklin (Frank Bolger) when we first meet him. Mr. Franklin has a new job for Harry, one which will take him away from Cherry for a bit. That’s OK though, ‘coz Cherry is about to get acquainted with Raquel. Real closely acquainted. Uschi Digard appears in flash-cut flashbacks in a Native American headdress that eventually ties into the plot. Sort of. In reality, it was mere padding to make up for the fact that one of Meyer’s lead actresses got fed up being in a ‘dirty movie’ and left (Napier’s re-telling of this in the wonderful documentary “Hollywood Rated R” is hilariously non-PC).

 

Although it’s not one of the better-known or better-loved sex comedies from breast-obsessed Russ Meyer (“Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!”, “Vixen”, “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls”), I think this 1970 mixture of bare breasts and uh…bare rock, is one of his most consistently enjoyable. As with all Meyer films, the editing is rapid fire, it ends up making some of the sex and nudity seem subliminal. He was a clever filmmaker like that, when operating in less liberal times censorship wise. Lovers of T&A and sex need not despair though, you’ll still get your fix here. The requisite sapphic sex scene is actually quite nicely done. Best of all, Meyer handles the sex/comedy/violence mix a lot better here than in some of his other films like “Vixen” and the unnecessarily nasty “Supervixens”.

 

The film gets a definite boost from having a legit actor in veteran character actor Charles Napier, who had smaller turns in Meyer’s “Supervixens” and “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls”. Here he essentially has the lead, and is a typically intimidating, macho presence. There have been few actors more adept at being mean and tough, Meyer was lucky to have Napier on hand. He also gets the film’s funniest line, remarking oafishly: ‘I don’t like women messing around with women. It’s un-American!’. Scripted by Meyer and Tom McGowan, it’s hardly Shakespeare, but a funny line is a funny line. Plot-wise this couldn’t be simpler, but typical of Meyer, the worldview here is a weird, pervy interpretation of the real world. All the women have giant tits and Meyer finds a variety of ways to have them on show. Like I said: Bare breasts, bare rock. In fact, the boobage (a term hereby trademarked by me) is almost non-stop here. You won’t get much bush, Meyer didn’t care what went on below the waist more often than not. If there’s a flaw here it’s that the non-sexual scenes sometimes run too long. For a film that runs about 70 minutes long, it’s still a tad thin and heavily padded as Meyer goes nuts stylistically editing the sexy stuff but lets everything else run on too long. Outside of that though, this is solid, goofy fun from one of cinema’s great exploitation icons.

 

More explicit than “Faster Pussycat” and sexier than “Vixen”, this entertaining Russ Meyer film doesn’t hit the heights of “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls”, but mostly delivers the goods. It deserves to be more well-known and more widely seen…by an appreciative and appropriate audience.

 

Rating: B-