Directed by Herschell Gordon Lewis
Written by David F. Friedman, Herschell Gordon Lewis and Jim McGinn
Produced by David F. Friedman
Starring:
- William Kerwin as Jack Norwall
- Harvey Korman as Ken Carter
- Danica D’Hondt as Peggy Brandon
- Jeanette Leahy as Margo Lawrence
- J. Aberwood as Max Stein
- Linné Ahlstrand as Diane
Release Date: February 1961
Rating: 
Step right up! Witness the American Dream! Watch the rise! Marvel at the glory! Then stick around for the inevitable crash! Hollywood has been milking that rise-and-fall formula for generations. But then along came Herschell Gordon Lewis and David F. Friedman, two guys who weren’t exactly known for keeping their hands clean. Living Venus therefore has about as much business being mentioned alongside Hollywood’s respectable classics as a nudie-cutie does at the Oscars. This is the rise-and-fall story after it’s been stripped, roughed up, and sent crashing into the low-rent world of sexploitation.
Before he was chopping people up on screen, Herschell Gordon Lewis was already chopping away at the boundaries of respectable entertainment. Along with sexploitation veteran David F. Friedman, he turns Living Venus into a lurid tragic tale of a man who discovers there’s money to be made in the forbidden stuff. Jack Norwall (William Kerwin), a magazine editor tired of the decorous game, starts his own skin publication and builds it around the three great pillars of exploitation: flesh, sensation, and scandal.
Enter Miss Canada Danica d’Hondt, spotted by Jack in a bar and immediately promoted to queen of his new skin-mag kingdom. As the face and body of Pagan, she becomes the centerpiece of his little publishing empire, which bears more than a passing resemblance to Playboy. Hugh Hefner’s shadow hangs over the whole affair, with Living Venus straddling the line between a sly send-up of Playboy and a genuine tip of the hat to the magazine that changed the game. Is it satire? Is it a salute? A little of both, perhaps. Whatever the case, the movie itself stays on the gentler side of the exploitation spectrum, unfolding as a loose “nudie cutie” with a taste for racy melodrama.
For the skin crowd, there are boobs and high heels aplenty. For the drama crowd, William Kerwin is ready with the tortured looks and emotional fireworks, backed by Danica d’Hondt and Harvey Korman as the other two points of a dangerous romantic triangle. It’s an unlikely cocktail of bare-bones exploitation and full-blooded romance, revealing a surprisingly polished side of Lewis before he traded sexed-up emotional turmoil for buckets of blood.
There’s something almost anomalous about Living Venus. For a pair as notorious as Lewis and Friedman, the filmmaking is remarkably understated, even if “polished” would be pushing it. It’s never quite good in the conventional sense, but it’s effective enough to carry the picture across its brisk running time. In less than 80 minutes, the film serves up the nudity and cheap thrills demanded of a 1961 sexploitation picture while also taking the unusual step of developing its characters and giving their downfall a logical progression. Beneath the tackiness and occasional clumsiness lies a familiar story of ambition: power arrives quickly, intoxication follows, and the hangover is brutal. What makes it even more curious is the distance between the story and the people telling it. Living Venus is about the exploitation business, made by two men working inside that very business. Whether intentional or not, that gives the picture an oddly self-reflexive quality—something Lewis would return to a few years later with his roughie Scum of the Earth, also produced by Friedman, where the dirty little machinery of exploitation once again becomes part of the story.
