When watched as the double bill they were marketed as, The Naughty Stewardesses and Blazing Stewardesses, Al Adamson's pair of "stewardess-sexploitation" pictures, greatly show the difference between an Adamson joint where the film maker has an enthusiasm and an actual stake in what he is working with and where he is simply doing something for hire. While neither film is anything particularly memorable (some sequences in both being borderline impossible to watch without eyes glazing over), the differing approaches to these two films working with the same subject (and a few of the same actors) is almost enough evidence to argue that Adamson was not simply churning out product for a paycheck but does have a "vision" of some kind, or, at the very least, a vested interest in a certain type of bending of genres, with the former film showing what happens when nothing in the material is adhering to any of those interests.
In the history of Adamson and producer Sam Sherman's Independent International Pictures, getting The Naughty Stewardesses made was a little bit like pulling teeth for multiple parties. Following the mammoth success of The Stewardesses, a 3-D sex picture that follows a bunch of stewardesses in Los Angeles which made some bank on the Times Square grind house circuit, Sherman was approached to "pick-up" a stewardess film which seemed to be becoming a bit of a hot commodity. He started going about trying to put the pieces together for one, himself admitting to losing interest in the project until he came up with the idea of casting retired actor Robert Livingston (who was more than happy to oblige the pitch of being a dirty old man who runs away with a bunch of mostly naked young girls), using his character Bob Brewster as a sort of centerpiece figure for the girls to meet. Also lacking enthusiasm was Adamson himself, more interested in directing westerns and not particularly wanting to be associated with being a director of "8th avenue pictures", as he put it. But Sherman talked him into it, citing that the film would be made regardless of his involvement or not.
As a self-contained work, The Naughty Stewardesses is an oddly disjointed mixture of exploitation elements, riding on a wave of soft core sex while "hanging out" with this ensemble before becoming a plot heavy crime picture complete with an Adamson trademarked foot chase sequence across a snowy wilderness. Always intriguing is how Adamson and Sherman consider popular fads at the time, and looking at their films in such a condensed period of time allows one to get a nice image of what they thought would sell in a particular moment. The film works within this brief hot selling point of "sexy stewardesses!", but also tries to sustain its shelf life and continued marketability through this back half violent crime narrative that has some nice glimpses at the start of the porn industry. Despite Adamson's self-proclaimed begrudging direction, the film is at least thoughtful in its aim of selling though the final result is often a dry and slogging mess, lingering on these extended sequences of eroticism in search of a narrative and lacking the "do-it-yourself" team charm of his horror or western films.
The film ended up being quite the success on the drive-in scene, making more money for Independent International than any of their previous efforts. The idea of a sequel or at least a companion piece seemed obvious, though when considering the difficulties of shooting the earlier film the pair took the concept in a direction more connected with their general interests: the result, Blazing Stewardesses, has the energy missing from the first film and captures that bizarre quality of Adamson's "better" (or at least more entertaining) works. The title attempts to call to mind two (possibly three) other film: mostly likely the non-damson 3D film, Adamson's Naughty Stewardesses, and Mel Brook's Blazing Saddles.
The top of the film settles into a familiar rhythm, though the whispers that this is "stewardess sex-ploitation" in name only come fairly early (the film itself only has two sex scenes, only one of which is on a plane while the other is, as Sherman puts it, a "gimmick" moment where the couple attempt to have sex upside down: strange and far from sexy). The connective tissue between the pair come from Livingston's Brewster, who calls up Connie Hoffman's Debbie (who seems to have gotten over some of the trauma from the earlier film though is immediately thrown into chaos when she walks in on her boyfriend and roommate post-upside down sex) to spend a couple of weeks on a Dude Ranch to get away for a while (a little bit of a non-violent Female Bunch set-up).
The switch to the ranch signals an entirely different tone, becoming a hub of sorts of a strange patch working of genres and styles: a group of hooded bandits and a Lone Ranger type of hero bringing the picture into a Republic movie-serial territory , Yvonne De Carlo as a sort of tough "mother" figure to the stewardesses (first offered to Rita Hayworth), and the two surviving Ritz Brothers offering some comedy bits (in a comic relief role originally offered to The Three Stooges in what would have been their final hoorah if not for age, illness, and death getting in the way). All of these pieces exist nearly in their own universes, the narrative not even stopping to make way for another element because there is not exactly much of a narrative anyway. Some brief sex, beautiful women, The Ritz Brothers doing a gag involving the two of them eating a massively long sandwich, De Carlo performing some kind of slow ballad right in the middle of the picture, a drunken horny cowboy tricked into having sex with an inflatable doll, and some kind of adventure story with oil: the stewardesses quickly become extraneous. The final product is this wildly broad, occasionally Tex Avery-type of slapstick cartoon, almost avant-garde in its amalgamation of styles, as if Adamson looked for any type of excuse to experiment with the films and traditions he likes. And even if none of it particular works, on its own or together, there is an obvious energy to the picture that is noticeably absent from the first film, and it is a chance for Adamson and company to comment and make something different from the style they are working with instead of simply adhering to the traditions and tropes within it.
The double bill was re-released again as a triple bill in 1978 with Bedroom Stewardesses, its production vintage Adamson. With Sherman coming into possession of the German crime film The Doctor of St. Pauli, Adamson shot about eighteen minutes of insert footage that set up stewardesses characters deciding to travel to Germany (where they presumably get mixed up in whatever the narrative of this other film is) in what seems to be a less complex usage of earlier footage than the weird science fiction Horror of the Blood Monsters.
The Naughty Stewardesses
Dir. Al Adamson
109 Minutes
USA
1973
Starring: Robert Livingston, Connie Hoffman, Richard Smedley, Donna Desmond, Tracy King, Sydney Jordan
*1/2/*****
Blazing Stewardesses
Dir. Al Adamson
98 Minutes
USA 1975
Starring: Yvonne De Carlo, Bob Livingston, Don "Red" Barry, Connie Hoffman, Regina Carrol, T.A. King, The Ritz Brothers--Harry & Jimmy Ritz
*1/2/*****
Films both viewed on August 19th, 2020
Part of the ongoing Al Adamson Project.