SEX KITTENS GO TO COLLEGE (1960)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *psychological*

Analyzing the movies of deceased filmmakers is sometimes not unlike an archeaological excavation. Some movies are so well made that they stand firm after the passage of many years, and the analyst has no doubt about what the filmmaker was trying to accomplish or what materials he used. Other films are like buildings that have collapsed from either the maker's bad construction processes, his use of disparate materials that don't go well together, or both. SEX KITTENS GO TO COLLEGE is one such "building," and even the title it used as a come-on is something of a mess. An earlier, more accurate working title was SEXPOT GOES TO COLLEGE, which was accurate since the movie focuses on the character of hot-bod scientist Mathilda West (Mamie Van Doren), who "goes to college" in the sense of accepting a teaching position at one Collins University. Of the six films Zugsmith produced with Van Doren, four place the actress in supporting roles. Only in the 1959 GIRLS TOWN and in KITTENS, the last Zugsmith-Van Doren collaboration, is Van Doren the character who overshadows everyone else (in more ways than one). The official title makes it sound as if it's going to unveil racy stories about "kittenish" female students, but there are two who have actual characters-- Jody (Tuesday Weld) and Suzanne (Mijanou Bardot, a.k.a. "sister of Brigitte")-- and though the second of the two is a horny type of girl, the film certainly isn't about either of them.

Nor is KITTENS about the only being who makes this a metaphenomenal movie: Thinko, the sentient robot/computer who advises the college to hire Mathida. An alternare TV-title for KITTENS was BEAUTY AND THE ROBOT, and Thinko does become a mechanical horndog whose true motives for inviting Mathilda are strictly dishonorable. But Thinko too is just a support character despite his borrowing from "Beauty and the Beast." All of the other support-types look like Zugsmith-- credited with writing the movie in collaboration with one Robert Hill-- borrowed all these disparate materials from wildly conflicting sources. Mathilda's nominal romantic interest George (Martin Milner) has an unappealing quasi-girlfriend that the audience wants to see out of the picture, which is similar to the situation of Cary Grant's character in Hawks' BRINGING UP BABY. Thinko's creator Zorch (Louis Nye) is a half-baked Doctor Frankenstein, and Mathilda's only conquest in the student body is "Woo Woo" (Norman Grabowski), who's the epitome of every slow-witted football player from every college-football movie ever made. A couple of dimbulb thugs wander out of a Damon Runyon story and onto Collins campus, in theory to provide either comedy or tension (and succeeding at neither). Finally, Mathilda herself, a buxom intellectual who funded her doctoral studies by dancing in burlesque shows, may have been borrowed from the Virginia Mayo character in the 1952 musical SHE'S WORKING HER WAY THROUGH COLLEGE-- discussed here-- though admittedly Mayo's character in that movie is not a super-genius, as Mathilda is.

So what does writer-director Zugsmith do with all these cobbled-together stock characters? Not much. 

The Runyonesque thugs have come to the college to rub out someone named "Sam Thinko," who's been betting so successfully on the ponies that the thugs' employer wants Thinko disposed of. The thugs don't do much, though Suzanne, the movie's only actual "sex kitten," crushes on one of the two older men, much to his confusion.

The dimwit Woo Woo, on meeting Mathilda for the first time, faints dead away, implicitly from sexual overstimulation, though he has zero enthusiasm for the blandishments of the comely Jody. Mathilda makes a sincere attempt to straighten out the young putz, since her many degrees include psychiatry, though Zugsmith and Hill drop this plot-thread almost as soon as they establish it. Mathilda's helpful efforts are met with acrimony from Jody, who claims that all the women on the campus feel inferior to Mathida's charms. (It should go without saying that many other sex-comedies have done a better job of conveying a "sexpot's" irresistible appeal.)

Finally, though the audience barely gets a sense of George having some established relationship with dowdy instructress Myrtle, the film barely does anything to portray Mathilda moving in on their relationship. Halfway through the film, when Mathilda gets the sense that George might be trying to downplay her presence at Collins because he as a college employee (of some sort) is embarrassed by her pneumatic image, she decides to tweak him for it, though they barely know each other. This involves a long nightclub scene in which Mathilda dresses up in a tight party-dress and performs a musical number reminiscent of her burlesque acts. For good measure, she also uses hypnosis to make some randy old faculty members (including John Carradine) dance around the nightclub with her. Yet by the end George and Mathilda are passionately in love, because the script says so, and Myrtle the killjoy even considerately gets out of the way.

Oh, did I mention there's a chimp wandering around through all this, apparently with no one in charge of him? Well, there is.

Only two haphazard scenes in this farrago prove halfway interesting, and I wonder if these were the creation of Robert Hill, since Zugsmith doesn't seem to have cared about any sort of quality control.

One takes place toward the end, which is a lame attempt at Keystone Kops slapstick. It's confusingly revealed that Thinko didn't place the horse-race bets; that Woo Woo, in the midst of a bout of sleepwalking, programmed the computer to do so. How did a dullard like him know how to program a computer to do anything? There's no knowing, but since Thinko and Woo Woo are both ensorcelled by Mathilda's charms, the two of them seem like goony reflections of one another. There's a second or two when sleepwalking Woo Woo advances on Jody like he was a second-rate Frankenstein's Monster. But Zugsmith wastes this visual trope and when we next see the two collegians, they're suddenly fully in love, just like George and Mathilda.

The second scene of interest takes place toward the beginning. Mathilda appears in an auditorium to greet both the faculty and the student body, and she decides she's going to make some abstruse comment on physics by firing a couple of live-ammo pistols over the heads of the students. To be sure, a lot of slapstick comedy is meant to have supposedly rational characters do stupid things, but Zugsmith doesn't even try to make this seem believable. HOWEVER, there's almost certainly a visual pun here, showing Mamie of the Mammaries firing not just one gun (which would have made her physics point) but two, and then tucking the guns in her skirt-band as if that could serve as a cowboy's holster. 

I should add that the European version of KITTENS, which I finally saw, includes a extra-diegetic scene in which Thinko stands around in a room while a bevy of strippers dance and doff their clothes, presumably trying to stimulate him like Mathilda did. This addition actually fits with the remainder of Zugsmith's career, for as he went independent he ceased doing fairly comprehensible B-movies, like the aforementioned GIRLS TOWN. Except for a high budget, KITTENS is almost indistinguishable from most of the sexploitation movies that dominated grindhouses in the sixties, which also tended to throw together a lot of random story-elements with not much concern for building anything like a story. A lot of filmmakers gravitated to the sex-movies because they had obsessions that wouldn't fit the mainstream. I'm not sure that was true of Albert Zugsmith, though I may see if I think so after screening some of his later offerings.