I was too young to be exposed to the "nudie cuties" of the early '60s, but they're fun to watch in retrospect, revived on video. Though a famous title, TALES OF A SALESMAN is an uninteresting example of the genre.
SPOILER: Chief drawback is the movie's "it's all a dream" format - probably my least favorite gimmick. Our hero is selling door to door for the Tiger Brush Company, with a mean boss who keeps telling him what to do. He's a lousy salesman, but the format, reminiscent of stag films but here the softest of soft porn, is a sure-fire excuse for voyeuristic set-ups.
Repetitive format has him visiting housewives at five neighboring homes, with various slapstick antics occurring. The women end up going topless, though one remains covered up until the padded final reel where all of them get together in an afterlife-styled fantasy.
These women are good-looking, but none of them are familiar from other movies or men's magazines of the time. They likely were exotic dancers (one does an alluring striptease near the end of the movie), but the film would have been more interesting had it preserved some famous beauties of the era for posterity.
Attempts at comedy consistently fall flat. In the title role, David Reed is a refugee from Arch Hall Sr. movies (ouch!), including a similar exercise about a bra salesman titled WHAT'S UP FRONT!. The director Don Russell also was a flunkie working for Hall Sr. and Ray Dennis Steckler. IMDb credits the great Vilmos Zsigmond with this movie's merely adequate cinematography, while the print I watched gave R. (Robert) Caramico the camera credit.
SPOILER: Chief drawback is the movie's "it's all a dream" format - probably my least favorite gimmick. Our hero is selling door to door for the Tiger Brush Company, with a mean boss who keeps telling him what to do. He's a lousy salesman, but the format, reminiscent of stag films but here the softest of soft porn, is a sure-fire excuse for voyeuristic set-ups.
Repetitive format has him visiting housewives at five neighboring homes, with various slapstick antics occurring. The women end up going topless, though one remains covered up until the padded final reel where all of them get together in an afterlife-styled fantasy.
These women are good-looking, but none of them are familiar from other movies or men's magazines of the time. They likely were exotic dancers (one does an alluring striptease near the end of the movie), but the film would have been more interesting had it preserved some famous beauties of the era for posterity.
Attempts at comedy consistently fall flat. In the title role, David Reed is a refugee from Arch Hall Sr. movies (ouch!), including a similar exercise about a bra salesman titled WHAT'S UP FRONT!. The director Don Russell also was a flunkie working for Hall Sr. and Ray Dennis Steckler. IMDb credits the great Vilmos Zsigmond with this movie's merely adequate cinematography, while the print I watched gave R. (Robert) Caramico the camera credit.
