The Naked Fog (Joseph W. Sarno, 1966)

Reportedly last screened in 1966, Joseph W. Sarno's The Naked Fog, shown over the weekend in Anthology Film Archives' Beyond Cassavetes: Lost Legends Of The New York Film World (1945-70) series, epitomizes that point in sexploitation's history when, as outlined by Elena Gorfinkel in her essential book Lewd Looks: American Sexploitation Cinema in the 1960s, directors took advantage of looser censorship laws and became as concerned with showing boobs than telling a story. Fortunately for someone like me who doesn't treat narrative as an automatic virtue, such spectacularization makes for a fascinating watch.

Early in the film, Marge (Sarno regular Tammy Latour), a typical Sarnoian prude, goes to a party with her boyfriend and it turns out to be an orgy. For about ten minutes (or so it seems), she stands in the doorway appalled at all the couplings and nudity. She finishes her drink and can no longer even nurse it in an attempt to avoid sexual contact. It all becomes too much for her and she eventually runs out. The story, such that is, gets under way here. But it will halt on a regular basis for acres of boobage. 

What strikes me about The Naked Fog (and much of Sarno' filmography in general) is that nudity is far from the only thing that stalls the narrative. Immediately after the orgy, Marge's voice over reveals that she took what little money she had and stayed with family in Long Island. But instead of finding a job (or even interacting with said family), she is shown aimlessly strolling on the beach and alongside waterways. Sarno displays her doing this a lot. These moments come across to me as one instantiation of what Betty Friedan called in The Feminine Mystique (1963) "The Problem That Has No Name," that ineffable sense of longing on the part of middle-class housewives for something more useful and meaningful in their lives. And while Marge is not a housewife and the one mother in the film (a madame Marge is observing for an exposé on prostitution) is rendered evil by trying to get Marge to deflower her infantilized adult son, she embodies the signs of that unspecified problem Friedan detected in the women she interviewed: "Their voices were dull and flat, or nervous and jittery; they were listless and bored, or frantically 'busy' around the house or community."

Sarno shows even minor characters ever lounging. At the bar/cathouse where Marge has taken up residency, the prostitutes play cards, smoke cigarettes, and sit around in bra and panties before the bar is open. No one really does anything in this naked fog of spray-stiffed hair and eyeliner Cleopatraed out to the walls. For the characters, this is a life of itches they cannot scratch. But for the discerning viewers at Anthology (and perhaps the masturbating ones uptown on 42nd St. 50 years ago), The Naked Fog is a sybaritic delight.

Actress and Sarno's wife Peggy Steffans was in attendance.