MovieChat Forums > Slave Girls (1967) Discussion > Laughable anti-feminist subtext?

Laughable anti-feminist subtext?

posted 13 years ago by londomollari
4 replies | jump to latest

Watching this for the first (and last!) time to tick off my list of Hammer films to see, I began to get the idea that Michael Carreras (who wrote as well as produced and directed this nonsense under the name Henry Younger as a play on John Elder) was trying to say something about sexual politics. Considering this was made in 1966 this would make sense, with many men being a bit unsettled by those feisty, liberated 60s women disturbing the status quo.
When Edina Ronay's character suggests trusting in the men to help overthrow those Dark-haired dominants, I laughed. "Look how dangerous and cruel women will be to men if they get control!" the trailer should have exclaimed. "Conservative women - stand by your men!" it should have shouted at us in bright green letters.
Or maybe Carreras was being pro-feminist? Or maybe he just liked to show Martine, Edina and Carol all running around in fur bikinis, dancing and stroking rhino horns suggestively and this poor excuse for a script was the best way to do that? Yeah, probably that last one!

[–] Professicchio 11 years ago

I have only seen the trailer so far but I definitely got the same vibe, it looks like serious fun of the cheesy kind though!

[–] antiparticleboard 10 years ago

I think you have this all wrong. While at first this movie would seem to be schlock or maybe light exploitation, it is much more of a avant-garde jewel. I got lost in all the twists and turns of the complicated gender and racial reversals and re-reversals. I had this movie for years and had watched it a couple of time. A few days ago I really watched it. As an example there's a part where the Queen offers to let the hunter rule with her as an equal and I believed that she meant it. The hunter has noticed her cruelty and says yes but you have to stop being cruel. She takes this as his first and likely not last demand so there goes equal rule. She has a point and yet she is cruel.

[–] drystyx 9 years ago

Your OP is retarded. This is the most "feminist" movie I ever saw. It's a "laughable feminist subtext", with the man siding with the pale feminist plain Jane tribe against the tribe of beautiful chicks. Had to be a woman who made this. I know it's a man listed as writer and director, but he's obviously gay, or maybe he's a brainwashed Nazi.

Look at it from the times. It wasn't until the seventies that Hollywood succeeded in making the feminist blonde woman the ideal. Young men were not allowed to be glued to TV sets, so they had the natural lust for dark hair. It wasn't until kids were brainwashed from age 2 that the new role model of blond feminism succeeded, somewhere in the late seventies. Granted, it took an endless tirade of neo Nazi preaching from Hollywood movies to force this on America, and now the world.

Now go away or I shall taunt you a second time!

[–] ilon 8 years ago

Didn't you get that there are too slave women in this movie?
Didn't you get that slave men say that their own cruelty turned that particular woman in what she is?
I mean, it's a bit sexist to think that these women need a man to be free, but... the movie makes a clear point that they need a particular kind of men and women for all to be free: people who treat each other like friends.
A bit old fashioned in the men-women archetipic roles, but I think the movie for the time it was made in, is more fair than what I would expect.
Anti-feminist? I don't know what feminism means to you, but the villain in this movie is just evil, if you think feminism suits her, well... there you go.