June 11th will mark twenty years since the downtown Grand Theatre – formerly the Warner Theatre – ran its last movie. With the shuttering of the Grand, downtown Milwaukee was left without an active movie house for the first time in almost a century. Since June 11th is also the date of 2015’s first MONDO MILWAUKEE boat tour (the city’s only “adults-only” history tour), I thought I’d spend this week’s post taking a look at some of the films that played downtown that don’t exactly bring to mind the glory days of Hollywood. For most people, anyway. But, if you have a bit of trash lust in your heart, read on and learn about some of strangest smut pictures to ever grace Milwaukee ’s silver screens.
Russ Meyer’s Vixen! played Milwaukee’s legendary Riverside Theatre in 1970
Vixen!
Played at the Riverside Theatre, 116 W. Wisconsin Ave , March 1970
While the Riverside never crossed into the adult picture game full-time or even part-time, it did run its share of softcore skin flicks. The most notable was probably Russ Meyer’s 1968 masterwork Vixen! The film touches on all kinds of taboos – incest and vile racism being the two most prevalent – and is a rare example of a film that truly shows no restraints. Vixen! was initially banned in Milwaukee by the old city censor board and Meyer eventually sued the body for illegally restraining his trade, but the Riverside ran the film in defiance of the board before the case made it to court. The film has aged remarkably well and would probably be just as controversial if it were released today. The lead character of Vixen, played brilliantly by Erica Gavin, is one of the more memorable of the sexploitation era.
Midnight Plowboy
Played at the Tower Art Theatre, 757 N 27th St , January 1972
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So, this picture didn’t play in downtown proper, but it arguably has the greatest title of sexploitation’s heyday. The old Tower Theatre – by now calling itself the “Tower Art” – was one of the first Milwaukee theatres to go adults-only full-time. By the mid-1960s, it was running regular programs of sexy imports and, by the early 1970s, had gotten into the raunchy pigpen of independent American smut pictures. Midnight Plowboy is God-awful, but it comes from one of my favorite directors of the period, Bethel Buckalew. Buckalew relied heavily on the fish-out-of-water trope, placing a city slicker in the backwoods or vice versa, with the city folk usually learning a few things about the hard-lovin’ ways of the country. In Plowboy, a dim-witted rube named Junior heads to Los Angeles to find work and eventually ends up working in a brothel. Buckalew pictures seemed to do pretty well in Milwaukee, suggesting that the city folk here in the 1970s longed, at some level, for simple country pleasures, like a mid-day roll in a pigpen or a barnyard game of “look and touch” between cousins.
The Outlaw
Played at the Towne Theatre, 717 N. Third St , February 1947
This is an example of a movie’s history being far more interesting than the film itself. I won’t get into it all here, but The Outlaw was already about seven years old when it opened at the Towne in 1947. Produced by Howard Hughes, the film drew the ire of censors – both local and national – partially due to its depictions of violence and lust, but mostly because of its shameless reliance on star Jane Russell’s cleavage. This film, too, was banned in Milwaukee and its brief engagement at the Towne – it ran only two days – nearly resulted in the police shutting the place down. Hughes dispatched a lawyer to Milwaukee to try to settle the matter, and the back and forth between the censors and Hughes lasted over a year before it was permitted to come back to the city, this time at the Riverside . Audience reaction suggested that the wait was not worth it.
Flesh Gordon
Played at the Esquire Theatre, 310 W. Wisconsin Ave , October 1974
The Esquire was downtown house with a unique history. It opened as the Telenews in 1947, the city’s first full-time newsreel house. It dropped that format in the mid-1960s to become the Esquire, the city’s plushest downtown arthouse. It ran legit art films for a number of years – including Sidney Lumet’s The Pawnbroker, the first film with nudity to be permitted to play in Milwaukee – before running a mixed program of sex and art films in the early 1970s. The film is a play on the old Flash Gordon serials and features a plot that revolves around an alien power from the planet Porno firing “sex rays” at the Earth that causes everyone to… well, you probably get it. Flesh has probably some of the best production value of any sexploitation comedy and its schlock value has held nicely over time.
Long Jeanne Silver
Played at the Towne Theatre, 717 N. Third St , August 1979
The final film that played for the public at the regal old Warner Theatre was The Hunt for Red October, clattering through the house projector for the last time on June 11, 1995. A good project for someone with far more free time than myself would be to track down the FINAL films to run at some of Milwaukee ’s more notable theaters. It’s a tricky thing to figure out, as the exact closing dates for theatres are often unknown. Theatres tended to close suddenly, without public notice and, – especially back in the 60s, 70s, and 80s – without much fanfare. The Towne is one my favorite city theatres to study. It opened in 1917 at the Miller, but was lost in the grandeur of the downtown palaces that opened in the 1920s. It was remade at the Towne in 1947 and became downtown’s premiere independent theatre, taking on the studio powers in a landmark local lawsuit that freed Milwaukee exhibition from the shackles of the old studio system. It went blue in 1970 and alternated between blaxploitation, kung fu, and x-rated pictures for the remainder of the decade. It already closed several times (once reopening as a Christian movie house) before it finally wheezed its last breaths in August 1979. And what played that final night? A film starring “Long Jeanne” Silver, an actress who’d had one of her legs amputated half-way down the shin, leaving her with a “peg leg” that she used to “engage” with female partners.
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So, if you made it this far without clicking away in disgust, the MONDO MILWAUKEE boat tour is for you! You’ll hear all about dirty downtown, the mobbed-up Third Ward, Great Lakes pirates, Lake Michigan disasters, flying saucers manias, and PLENTY more. We depart at 8 pm on June 11th from the Milwaukee Boat Line dock at 101 W. Michigan Street . Tickets are ON SALE NOW!
