companionship leads to viral rumors that she and June are lovers. (“There’s something about those two gals that just ain’t natural! It just ain’t natural at all!” complains neighbor Car- rie Lou Justin [Linda Boyce] as she porch-sits, shucking cobs of Indian corn.) In fact, June is sleeping with handyman Will Diehl (Alex Mann), who is also bedding Carrie Lou and Dalton’s wife Sharon (Barbara Lance) on the side, but the gossip turns out to be rooted in some correct as- sumptions about June’s sexu- ality that both she and Marcy have been slow to realize, and in the other local women’s fas- cinated ignorance of how lesbian love is made. The simplistic plot attends to how the rumored re- lationship is nudged toward a self-fulfilled prophecy, eventu- ally drawing in Sharon, whose loose lips started the ball roll- ing as a way to explore her own sublimated gay fantasies. Marcy is tempted by June to experi- ment with sapphic love but is repelled by the prospect of a threesome with Carrie Lou— back into the arms of Dalton, her high school sweetheart. Produced by J. Arthur Elliot
(Bava’s FOUR TIMES THAT NIGHT), MARCY is minor Sarno, interesting as always in its psy- chological dimension as it por- trays the cast’s internal effects and external responses to sexual gossip—not unlike an erotic twist on Clouzot’s Le Corbeau, but weak in too many other areas. It offers surprisingly little nudity and fails to achieve the heat or psychological intensity of his most compelling work, and even at this length is too con- spicuously padded with scenic filler. Compositionally, the con- trast of the wide open spaces outside and the cramped interi- ors, with characters arranged in almost cubist close proximity (as
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if to create symbolic contrasts or to hide the shortcomings of non-existent sets) and shadow- bound in over-scrimmy bed scenes, is too contrived to feel organic. Technically, the film is also often at fault, with the sound under frequent attack by location winds thudding against the boom mike. Uta Erickson is not interesting enough as an ac- tress, or as her character, to warrant eponymous focus, but her IMDb page is a fascinat- ing document of pseudony- mous appearances for Michael Findlay (“Artimida Grillet”), Doris Wishman (“Willa Mist”) and others, as well as a previous lead in Sarno’s PASSION IN
HOT HOLLOWS under the name “Britt Hansen”)—though it fails to mention her appear- ance as one of Dyanne Thorne’s henchwomen in ILSA, SHE- WOLF OF THE SS! This last surviving print runs a few min- utes shy of its reported 80m running time and there is nary a single frame of its anamorphic presentation that isn’t banjo- strung with green scratches. The 1.78:1 framing looks overly tight, especially in the closely- framed head shots, suggesting 1.66:1 might be closer to the mark, if not open aperture. The Deweyvision release is without a menu and follows the feature with several minutes of a jeering,
US one-sheet poster.
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