The Girls on F Street (1966): The Celluloid Dungeon

The Girls on F Street, also known as The Maidens of Fetish Street, is a 1966 exploitation film (IMDB), directed by Saul Resnick. A lot of the film is padded out with the voiceover sermonizing, and shots of 1960s downtown Los Angeles, including landmarks like the Flight of Angels inclined railway.

Girls has even less of a coherent narrative than The Abnormal Female. There are moments when it attempts to present itself as set in the 1920s, mainly through talk overheard on the radio, but all of the fashions and hairstyles are 1960s contemporary.

It’s best understood as the stream of consciousness of and/or about Nick, a lonely middle-aged guy who haunts Los Angeles’ burlesque theatres and porn shops (where you can see glimpses of Eric Stanton and Gene Bilbrew art in their natural habitat). The film shifts to vignettes that may be Nick’s fantasies or memories: a female sculptor and her female model, a Rubenesque burlesque dancer performing on stage, living as male companion of an elderly brothel madam. One scene, actually shot with sound and skilled lighting, is more of a two-hand one-act play between a sex worker and her client.

For kink, the main vignette involves Nick somehow becoming the gigolo of Hilda, an elderly woman who runs some kind of brothel. Hilda uses a flogger (possibly a martinet) to make a brunette woman dance to an antique gramophone, while Nick watches. When Hilda steps out for some reason, she forbids Nick to have any female company. Instead, a black woman named Toni arrives, and the film alternates between Toni fighting off Nick’s sexual advances, Nick washing Toni in a bubble bath, or Toni tying Nick up, pouring molasses all over him, and applying the contents of an ant farm. When Hilda and the brunette woman return, this sparks off a three-way cat fight between Hilda, Toni and the brunette woman. Nick watches for a while, then gets bored and goes elsewhere.

How much of this is “real” in the diegesis and how much is fantasy is not at all clear. In a scene near the end, Nick and a blond woman (presumably a sex worker) lie side by side in bed, not moving at all, just resting. As if he cannot imagine himself being content, Hilda suddenly appears with her whip and beats Nick and the woman (though the whip marks are obviously makedup).

Girls does reflect the contradictions and volatility of male sexual frustration. Nick is poised on the knife edge between masochistic worship of women and sadistic domination, and the seductive woman who says yes with a price and the punishing mother. The final image of the film is Nick locked into the porn shop by the security gate, yelling, “Let me out!”, then crying.

Director Saul Resnick was involved in a few other exploitation films in the 1950s and 1960s. Few of the cast appeared in anything else, with the exception of Kellie Everts, the model in the lesbian sculptor scene, who appeared in a few adult videos in the 1980s and early 1990s.

Addendum: Kellie Everts, also known as Rasa von Werder, had a remarkable life before and after this film. According to her personal web site, she was a dancer, a stripper, specifically a “stripper for god” who did sermons on stage, a photographer, and claims to be “the progenitor of female bodybuilding”. She had pictorials in Esquire in 1975 and Playboy in 1977 (one of nine total appearances). Her other main website, Woman Thou Art God, talks about her philosophy of spiritual matriarchy, her experiences as a pro domme, and how natural breastfeeding is lovemaking (“nutritive coitus”) between a mother and her baby. Her personal Youtube channel was active up until March 2019.