by Stephen Vagg
It’s always tricky for a film studio to decide how to exploit a cycle – do you try to stagger the follow-ups over a period of time, or do you just go immediate short term cash grab, or a mix? For every series like James Bond, which is still running over sixty years, there’s a bunch which barely last two or three more movies (eg Alvin Purple). Roger Corman had hit a gusher with The Student Nurses and followed it up with Private Duty Nurses and Night Call Nurses. Unsure of how much more oil was in the ground, he decided to cash in while he could – 1973 would see New World not only make a new nurse movie, but “three girls” adventures in other professions as well.
The first was teaching. Corman got the producer and director of Night Call Nurses (Julie Corman and Jonathan Kaplan) and put them on The Student Teachers, which took the nurse formula – three young women having adventures involving sex, nudity, comedy, social issues and romance – and brought it into a high school. The script focused on Rachel (Susan Damante), who teaches a girls’ sex education class, Tracy (Brooke Mills), who teaches art and flirts with a student, and Jody (Brenda Sutton), who mentors a drop out (Johnny Ray McGhee) and goes undercover to bust a heroin operation.
The Student Teachers was a solid hit and is highly regarded by some aficionados of the genre. Kaplan’s flashy direction holds interest, and Dick Miller is on hand yet again, plus there’s the novelty of seeing a small role played by Chuck Norris. However, we have to confess that we’re not huge fans of this movie: the acting is poor, and it has a very unpleasant rape plot (people who think that the sexual assault scene in Kaplan’s The Accused was exploitative will want to avoid this one). At least the three girls are friends, but it’s definitely a weaker New World three girls film. Nonetheless, as mentioned, a lot of people liked it.
Corman was encouraged to invest in a second “three teachers” movie. This was Summer School Teachers, the first since The Student Nurses to be written and directed by a woman, Barbara Peeters, who’d directed some low budget features and worked on various New World movies in different capacities. It was also produced by a woman, Julie Corman.
Summer School Teachers is about three friends from Iowa, who go to California for the summer to teach at a high school. The PE teacher (Candice Rialson) coaches an all-girl football team despite the opposition of the resident coach (Dick Miller), and romances one of the nerdy male teachers; Sally (Pat Anderson) teaches photography and, despite being engaged to a man back home, has affairs with an eccentric rock star with a food fetish, and a male chauvinist teacher, who talks her into posing nude for some photos; chemistry teacher Denise (Rhonda Leigh Hopkins) becomes involved with one of her students, a juvenile delinquent, who is falsely accused of participating in car theft.
Check out the debaucherous trailer here.
Summer School Teachers is terrific: high spirited, breezy, energetic exploitation fun, closer to a screwball comedy than anything else. It benefits from splendid leads, particularly Candice Rialson (perhaps the best ‘70s exploitation star of them all) and Pat Anderson. The movie is a bit wonky in places (make that very wonky – you can see the boom in shot in one scene), with some unfunny comedy (a recurring flaw of the series), but it flies along, with a lot of social comment (corruption, women sport, opportunity for women, etc) and a fun, climactic near-anarchic football game. The nudity is well-integrated: Rialson seduces a teacher by a lake (and falls in); there is a more stylised sex scene involving Fleming, which involves strobe lighting and ice cubes on the nipples (there was often a stylised sex scene in these films – there was an LSD one in The Student Nurses and a trippy one in Candy Stripe Nurses); Anderson is nude a few times being photographed or lying in bed. But the women are in control, they do most of the seducing and stick up for each other. The messages are mostly positive – girls should be able to do whatever boys can do, physical fitness is good, corruption is bad. This is the best character Rialson ever played – she’s spunky, full of energy, fights for girl sports, encourages her overweight neighbour to exercise, seduces the nerdy teacher because she likes him, she loves her boisterous dumb brothers. It’s really good fun.
Summer School Teachers was a hit at the box office and proved that there was still life in the genre. However, Barbara Peeters struggled to direct many more features. She later made the 1978 “three girls” movie Starhops, rewriting a script originally written by Stephanie Rothman (who was originally meant to direct), which annoyed Rothman so much that the latter took her name off it. Starhops isn’t very good, incidentally – it’s hard to tell the three leads apart, it feels padded, lacks sexiness and social conscience; we’re not sure what happened, especially considering Summer School Teachers had been so much fun – maybe it was the absence of Julie Corman, or Peeters having health issues around this time. (Incidentally, Steve Zallian worked on Starhops as an editor). Peeters then had to endure the saga of Humanoids of the Deep which she directed for Roger Corman; he insisted rape scenes be added, which Peeters refused to do, so Corman brought in another person to shoot them (a man), devastating the director. Peeters moved into television and commercials but, like Rothman, never had the film career she should have had, especially after Summer School Teachers.
In addition to teachers and nurses, Roger Corman thought that there might be a market for a film about three stewardesses (a profession which, after all, helped kick off the cycle via 1969’s The Stewardesses). So, he put some money in Fly Me!, made by Filipino director Cirio H Santiago, about three stewardesses travelling from Los Angeles to Hong Kong. Toby (Pat Anderson) tries to dump her mother so that she can shag a doctor (Richard Young), Andrea (Lenore Kasdorf) has a lover (Ken Metcalf), who is secretly leading a white slavery and drug trafficking ring, while Sherry (Lyllah Torena) is one of his smugglers.
Private Duty Nurses was the worst New World nurse movie, but Fly Me! is the worst New World three girls movie of them all. The plots are dumb, the women have no camaraderie, and it is unforgivable that one of them is a baddie (Sherry). Andrea/Kasdorf engages in some hilariously unconvincing martial arts with assassins sent to kill her, the girls have to be rescued by a man (the doctor) instead of getting out of trouble themselves, too much nudity is tied up with sexual assault. The best thing about the movie is Pat Anderson, who at least later got a film worthy of her in Summer School Teachers (Incidentally, the opening scene of her getting changed in a cab driven by Dick Miller was directed by Curtis Hanson of LA Confidential fame; he’d written The Dunwich Horror and directed Sweet Kill for Roger Corman).
Still, enough people liked Fly Me! for Corman to invest in another three girls movie from Santiago about women travelling from Los Angeles to Hong Kong: Cover Girl Models, set in the world of modelling. The three girls were Barbara (Pat Anderson again), who accidentally comes in possession of some microfilm and is chased by secret service agents; Claire (Lindsay Bloom), who tries to get a role in a film; and Mandy (Tara Strohmeier), who tries to make it as a model and falls for their photographer.
Modelling isn’t traditionally a great profession for generating screen stories, as any viewer of Models Inc will be able to tell you, and the plots in Cover Girl Models are particularly dumb, with the leads far too passive. Once again, too much screen time is given to men, such as the sleazy photographer, and once again it’s men saving the day all the time. (You’ll laugh at the scenes with one of the models continually being attacked and saved by a kung fu rescuer.)
There’s none of the fun and camaraderie found in the best of these movies, and few genuinely sexy scenes. Cover Girl Models only goes for 70 minutes but still feels padded out with scenes of the girls trying on clothes and travelogue shots. It’s a shame, because the leads are strong, particularly Pat Anderson and Tara Stromeiher, who has genuine comic talent.
What about nurse movies themselves? Well, around the same time, Julie Corman was working on The Student Teachers, she also did The Young Nurses, which was basically Student Nurses Part 4. This was directed by a man – Clint Kimorough, an actor married at the time to Frances Doel, Roger Corman’s second in command. The plots for The Young Nurses include: a black nurse (Angela Gibbs) investigating a mysterious death, which might have something to do with her dodgy boyfriend; a brunette (Ashley Porter), who romances a surgeon and has ambitions to do doctor’s work, getting involved with a woman’s clinic (the best of the plots); a blonde (Jean Manson) romancing another patient, who insists on sailing despite his injuries (which is about as interesting as it sounds).
The Young Nurses has a few decent moments, such as an actual operating scene in which the girls participate, and some feminist stuff about a pioneering female clinic. There’s also an interesting support cast including Sally Kirkland, Dick Miller and director Sam Fuller (as a doctor)! The Young Nurses is better than Private Duty Nurses but still isn’t much of a movie; it lacks energy, feels undercast, and Kimborough’s direction is flabby (it was the only film he directed).
Still, Corman thought that he might try one last attempt at a nurse picture. Candy Stripe Nurses, the fifth in the official series, was written and directed by a man, Alan Holleb, who had impressed with a short film, and produced by Julie Corman. It’s about three candy stripers (a nickname in America given to hospital volunteers) who seem to be all high school students, which feels a little young considering the antics they get up to, but we guess it was the seventies. Free-loving Sandy (Candice Rialson) sleeps with a young doctor but is more keen on a famous rock star (Kendrew Lascelles), who has sexual problems that Sandy tries to cure; uptight Dianne (Robin Mattson), who wants to be a doctor, has an affair with a star college basketball player (Rod Haase), who is being given speed by one of the hospital’s doctors, and tries to expose the malpractice; juvenile delinquent Marisa (Maria Rojo) falls for Carlos (Roger Cruz), who is falsely accused of taking part in a gas station hold up, and tries to prove his innocence.
Candy Stripe Nurses is a flawed movie, particularly suffering from the fact that the leads play hospital volunteers rather than nurses, and thus have less status. Furthermore, Maria Rojos seems to be off in her own movie, not getting much opportunity to interact with Rialson and Mattson; she doesn’t even have a romance with Carlos, dreaming their sex scenes. However, the film has always been a personal favourite as it has plenty of energy, a bright theme song, Dick Miller playing a heckler, and most of all, some splendid performances from Rialson and Mattson. Rialson is wonderful as always, a perfect screwball comedy heroine (despite her iffy plot which doesn’t make much sense – Rialson was almost always better than her material). Mattson (who later became a big soap star) also provides strong value, and her romance with the jock is one of the best in the series; their seduction scenes in the gym are downright hot, because their characters have great inherent conflict (she’s an uptown nerd, he’s a sporty moron) and both are clearly into each other – apparently, this scene was shot by Barbara Peeters. We place Candy Stripe Nurses as the third best in the nurse series, after The Student Nurses and Night Call Nurses (though we’d rank it below Summer School Teachers) with Rialson and Mattson in our top five New World nurses, along with Karen Carlson, Barbara Leigh and Patti Byrne.
Candy Stripe Nurses was a commercial disappointment, and it seemed that Roger Corman might pull the plug on the series for good. However, Summer School Teachers (which came out later) turned out to be a big hit, so when he was approached by a New World employee with an idea for a different kind of “three girls” movie, Corman was receptive. This would ultimately see the end of the genre, but would also turn out to be the most famous New World three girls film of them all…
