The Immoral Mr. Teas
Brief Synopsis
Cast & Crew
Russ Meyer
Bill Teas
Ann Peters
Marily Wesley
Mischele Roberts
Dawn Danielle
Film Details
Technical Specs
Synopsis
Mr. Bill Teas, a middle-aged denture deliveryman, has a similar routine each day: As he leaves his house, Teas passes a bratty girl twirling a hula hoop then catches the same bus to his office where he changes into an orange work jumpsuit, grabs his brown leather delivery suitcase and bicycles his route. One day when he takes a break at a bar, the bartender's blouse is unbuttoned enough for Teas to enjoy a glimpse of the woman's bosom. When Teas returns to the main office at the end of his day, he cannot believe his good fortune when the office secretary's blouse is also open wide, revealing her cleavage. However, he is soon disappointed when she leaves the office and embraces her lover. Days later, Teas decides to spend some free time at the beach, where he finds a photographer shooting a young woman in a red bikini. Using his own camera, Teas secretly takes photos of the model, who then poses topless. Later, as Teas sits on an old tree stump to fish, he is suddenly joined by the woman in the red bikini, who decides to sunbathe topless. Unable to believe his vision is real, Teas jumps in the pond and swims away in fear. On another workday, during his ride, Teas is distracted by the shadow cast on a wall of a busty woman. On his first delivery, Teas meets the dental assistant, whose uniform is unbuttoned, revealing her busty chest. When he reports that he has a sore tooth, the dentist gives him an anesthesia injection to pull out his tooth. While Teas is in this dream state, he imagines that a nude assistant helps the doctor. After he regains consciousness, Teas gets a banana at a fruit stand and spots a nude female torso in window nearby. Continuing his route, Teas is summoned by a buxom young woman who appears to be soliciting him for sex, but after following her up a fire escape, Teas discovers that she wants a job ironing his clothes. Disappointed, Teas returns to the bar where he admires the bartender's buttocks and fantasizes that she is serving him wearing only a short apron. While delivering more dentures, Teas follows a performer through the back entrance of a burlesque house, where he watches from backstage as a striptease dancer performs for the audience. After being thrown out by a manager, Teas returns to his office where the secretary again wears a low cut blouse. Teas then fantasizes that the secretary is typing his dictation in the nude. Back in reality, Teas, concerned that he might be losing his mind, seeks the help of female psychiatrist Dr. C. P. Floodback, who sends him out after some friendly reassurance. On another day off, Teas goes fishing and, during a nap, fantasizes that the bartender, secretary and dental assistant are all sunbathing in the nude nearby. He eagerly follows them as they sail on the stream, swing from a tire and lounge in a hammock. When he wakes up, Teas moves to another spot hoping to rid himself of the fantasy, but another woman has undressed to go swimming and Teas's fishing line catches the woman's clothing as he casts his rod. Returning to the psychiatrist, Teas reiterates his problem, but Floodback also appears to him in the nude. Accepting his fate, Teas shrugs and smiles, enjoying the situation.
Director
Russ Meyer
Film Details
Technical Specs
Articles
Russ Meyer, 1922-2004
Born Russell Albion Meyer on March 21, 2004 in Oakland, California, his father was a policeman and mother a nurse. It was the latter that lent young Rusty the money to purchase an 8-millimeter Univex picture-taking machine when he was 12. Quickly he was making films around the neighborhood and won his first prize by the time he was 15. When World War II came around, he was sent to Europe as a newsreel cameraman. After the war, he became a professional photographer, working on studio sets, producing stills on such films as Guys and Dolls and Giant. He eventually found himself doing glamour shots of beautiful models, and would then find fame as one of Hugh Hefner's chief photographers for Playboy magazine.
Sensing that the same audience who was receptive to Playboy would also be receptive to a "nudie" flick, Meyer made his film debut with The Immoral Mr. Teas (1959). Shot as a silent on a miniscule budget of only $24,000, the financial windfall of this soft-core sex film astounded the movie industry, garnering over $1 million. The key to Meyer's success was to walk the fine line between sexual baiting and obscenity. The plot - a man subjected to a powerful anesthetic discovers that he can see through the clothes of every woman who walks by him - was titillating without being too graphic (there is never any physical contact between the players), and Meyer cleverly worked himself around the local film censors while still appealing to his mostly male audience.
Meyer kept the streak coming with such films as Erotica (1961), Wild Gals of the Naked West (1962), and Europe in the Raw (1963), but these were still soft core teasers that concentrated more on voyeurism, than anything more intimate. That changed with the release of the notorious Faster Pussycat, Kill, Kill (1965), where there was a healthy dose of foreplay, leather, blood, carnage, and big-breasted gals for the filmgoers. He kept the fever pitch up with the equally raunchy Motor Psycho (1965), and Mondo Topless (1966). Although his films were relegated to drive-ins, arthouses and adult theaters, many of these viewers came back for more screenings, and Meyer was seeing a healthy profit being turned on his productions.
The film that would eventually break him out of the underground was Vixen (1968). The title character was essentially a nymphomaniac who would sleep with anybody - including her own brother! The film had purists in a lather, which is just what Meyer - ever the self-promotor - wanted. The film was an astounding hit. The entire production cost merely $76,000 dollars, yet earned over $6 million. 20th Century Fox, in deep financial trouble, wanted to cash in on the sudden rash of X-rated films and signed Meyer to direct his first big-studio picture. The film, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970), an in-name only sequel to Valley of the Dolls (1967), was a smash. The screenplay, written by film critic Roger Ebert, dealt with the lives of three young ladies who were determined to make it as a rock band at any cost! It was well-received as a fairly sharp parody of its predecessor and holding more than its share of campy laughs. His next film, the "serious", The Seven Minutes (1971), based on the best-selling novel by Irving Wallace about a pornography trial, was a critical and commercial flop, and it quickly ended his career in big-budget pictures.
By the mid-'70s, Meyer returned to the skin game with such titles as Supervixens (1975), Up! (1976), and his final film Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens (1979). With the advent of hard-core pornography (Meyer's films were teasing but never explicit) and the demise of drive-ins, Meyer found himself out of fashion in the adult film industry. By the '80s, he was something of a recluse, although he continued to make money with the success of his films on VHS, and eventually DVD.
Toward the end of his life, Meyer saw much appreciation for his work on numerous levels: he was offered a cameo role as a video camera salesman in John Landis' (a longtime fan of Meyer) Amazon Women on the Moon (1987); respect from mainstream film critics, various film festivals honoring his work; teachings on his films offered in modern culture courses at such respectable modern institutions as Yale and Harvard; and the open sincerity of noted directors like Landis and John Waters, who claim that Meyer is a great influence on their own work. In 1992, Meyer published his three-volume autobiography, A Clean Breast: The Life and Loves of Russ Meyer. Meyer was single at the time of his death and he left no survivors.
by Michael T. Toole
Russ Meyer, 1922-2004
Quotes
The guitar as we know it today, came about as a result of many types of earlier stringed instruments. There was first the harp, the lute, then the zither, and mandolin. The guitar is a very sensitive instrument, with "G" being the third string, and is played over a system of frets. Sensitive men have been fretting over G-strings for years!- Narrator
Trivia
Meyer named the main character, Bill Teas, after his army buddy in WW2.
Notes
The Immoral Mr. Teas, which has no dialogue, opens with a voice-over narration that precedes the credits and describes the need for the "common man" to experience nature to relieve the stress of modern life. Narration throughout the film describes "Mr. Teas's" initial boredom with his job and follows his encounters with several women, adding humorous asides. For example, in a scene in which a woman plays a guitar, the off-screen narrator adds that men have been "fretting over g-strings" for years. At the close of the film, when Mr. Teas visits a psychiatrist to cure himself of his fantasies of nude women, the psychiatrist appears to him naked. Mr. Teas happily shrugs, while the narrator concludes that "some men just enjoy being sick." Edward J. Lakso's onscreen credit reads: "Narration and Music by Edward J. Lakso" and Russ Meyer's onscreen credit reads: "Direction and Cinematography by Russ Meyer."
As noted in the Variety review, the film was shot in Los Angeles. The Immoral Mr. Teas features footage of several women's bare chests and buttocks; however, as noted in an October 1961 Show article, no passion between the characters is displayed. The November 1960 issue of Playboy noted that the courts had recently ruled that local censorship was unconstitutional and nudity alone could not be considered obscene. A November 2, 1960 Variety article added that cinema owner Edward Sevetsky was arrested for showing the film because of its nudity, but was later found not guilty because the film was deemed not obscene.
A modern biography of Meyer indicates that Meyer and John F. Link served as the film's editors, while Ken Parker and Eric "Mick" Nathanson acted as the assistant directors. The biography also adds the following actors to the cast: June Wilkinson (Torso), Peter A. DeCenzie (Burlesque announcer), G. Ferrus (Narrator) and Nathanson and Don Cochran (Men in burlesque audience). For more information on Meyer, see the entry above for French Peep Show.