The Lonely Sex (1959)

Directed by Richard Hilliard

Featuring Karl Light, Jean Evans, Carl Collyer and Leon Benedict 

‘I was driving past the beach yesterday and I saw you standing there, but you didn’t even notice me… I like seeing you in a bathing suit Annabelle, you have a nice figure.’

Opening with shots of a newspaper reporting a ‘Sex Slaying in Memorial Park’, we quickly cut to a man in a tweed coat and bow tie, looking suspicious as he conspicuously tries to seem inconspicuous. He peeps into a window to watch a dancer as she undresses (providing a topless scene of reasonable length – unusual for a 1950s film). With this burst of exploitation out of the way (got to reel in customers somehow!), the film moves on to weirder yet more thoughtful territory.

Teenaged Annabelle lives with her physician father and their boarder, Mr Wyler. Unfortunately for her, Mr Wyler is an unrepentant creep. He repeatedly ‘accidentally’ walks into her room while she is undressing, and generally goes around harassing her and making her feel uncomfortable by commenting on her body. Getting some time away from him, Annabelle frolics with her boyfriend down by the creek. An intense, silent stranger watches them from a distance, and eventually kidnaps Annabelle. He imprisons her in his wooden shack by the quarry, seeing this as his only way of gaining female companionship and sex.

This film is interesting in the way it compares the two perverts, Mr Wyler and the unnamed man in the shack. Both are sexually frustrated, and take it out on women via voyeurism and stalking. We soon learn that this goes even further with the man from the shack, who murdered a woman after she rejected his advances, humiliating him with her laughter. After a traumatic first sexual experience, which he seems to have never gotten over, he has ruined his own life via repeated arrests as a peeping tom. The film is an exploration of the chilling nature of the weirdness of male over-entitlement: these unpleasant men both mistreat women, with an apparent total lack of insight into how the women experience this violation. The men differ in that one is tortured and miserable, but the other (Mr Wyler) is apparently respectable, but also hypocritical and unashamed (and therefore more insidious). Mr Wyler is never punished for his actions, and in the abrupt, low key ending of the film we see that he never changes, even after the man from the shack gets his comeuppance. Even more remarkably, this examination of the nature of voyeurism was all aimed at a grindhouse audience!

The film is also interesting in terms of its atmosphere, which is strange and disconnected. The film is quite minimalist, with characters having simple interactions in front of plain household backdrops, or even blank black backgrounds. There are flashes of bleak arty-ness in the cinematography, adding to the pervasive sense of alienation.

There are many other bizarre aspects to the film, not the least being the man from the shack’s reactions to the world. He gets worked up listening to breathy lipstick commercials on the radio, scrawls a new face over his reflection in the mirror, and goes to leer at shop mannequins in lingerie (!). This becomes even more ridiculous when you consider that the film’s primary argument is that this man deserves our sympathy, rather than persecution or ridicule. Despite its interesting points the film suffers from being somewhat too sympathetic to the perverts in question, with Annabelle’s father acting as the loud mouthpiece of these views. This questionable perspective on the characters’ behaviour casts a queasy shadow over the film.

The print I saw (from Vinegar Syndrome) was quite crisp and in surprisingly good condition. Overall, this obscurity was a less exploitative and much more nuanced film than I had expected.

Worth watching? Yes. Despite the unconvincing central argument of the film, it is one of a kind. A strange and sometimes dark viewing experience, following unattractive characters through an unforgiving world.

Truth in advertising? My interpretation is that the title is calling men the ‘lonely sex’. Pfft – there is a good reason why these creeps are lonely, and it is not just down to their sex! 0/5.