A Good Time with a Bad Girl (1967)

A Good Time with a Bad Girl is brought to us on DVD by Something Weird. It opens with the words Barry Mahon Presents superimposed on a jiggling naked female bottom. So you know this is not going to be Citizen Kane. We’re in sexploitation territory.

John Cabot (Vincent Van Lynn) is a very rich middle-aged businessman whose private jet has run into bad weather and has been forced to land in Las Vegas. Cabot will be stuck in Vegas for a while so he checks into a hotel. A very expensive hotel.

He gets a brainwave. He’ll call up his wife and suggest that she come out to Vegas as well. Their kids are grown up so she wouldn’t have any problem getting away. Cabot thinks it could be a fun romantic time. Their marriage is not on the rocks but it’s become a bit stale. They could both use some fun and excitement and romance. But she turns him down. She has to go to a Garden Club meeting.

John Cabot is rather peeved and he’s now a lonely slightly disillusioned middle-aged man stuck in Vegas. There’s plenty of fun to be had, but the idea of trying to have fun alone depresses him.

Then he meets Susan (Susan Evans). She’s young enough to be his daughter, she’s broke, she’s a high school dropout and she’s unemployed. She’s also as cute as a button.

As Cabot tells us in his voiceover narration, fate has laid a snare for him and he’s going to be caught in it. Whether he’ll be able to get out again is another matter.

Cabot of course falls for Susan. He tries to tell himself that it’s not just lust, that maybe he can help the girl. Maybe he can give her the benefit of his experience of life, and perhaps even rub some of the rough edges off her.

He starts to get disillusioned when she drags him to an orgy. He’s just not an orgy kind of guy. He’s more of a pipe and slippers kind of guy. He starts to have second thoughts about the desirability of having an affair with her.

The first thing we notice (after that naked female bottom in the opening credits sequence) is that Vincent Van Lynn actually can act. He’s not a great actor but he’s perfectly competent and he’s better than you expect in a low-budget skin flick.

The rest of the cast are alas not so good. Susan Evans can’t act but she does at least project the required mixture of innocence and cynicism.

While there’s a voiceover narration the movie was (unlike some sexploitation features of this era) shot with synchronised sound. The location shooting was done with live sound - there’s lot of traffic noise and other distracting noise. This actually gives the movie an interesting slightly cinéma vérité vibe.

There’s a lot of location shooting and it’s a treat seeing so much of the real Vegas circa 1967, rather than the glamourised Vegas you see in big studio pictures made at that time.

There’s plenty of skin but no frontal nudity and nothing even approaching explicit sex.

This is a movie that gives the impression it’s going to turn out to belong to the roughie sub-genre but it’s a misleading impression. It’s more of a nudie romantic melodrama with a bitter-sweet tinge. At times it seems that producer-writer-director Barry Mahon is tempted to add some real emotional depth and to explore the consequences of May-December romances, but then he decides to just add more topless dancing scenes.

This particular Something Weird triple-header DVD also includes the rather intriguing and oddly appealing Girl in Trouble (1963) and Bad Girls Do Cry (1954) which I have yet to watch. A Good Time with a Bad Girl gets a reasonable transfer when you consider most of these 1960s sexploitation movies only survive in the form of somewhat battered (sometimes very battered) release prints.

A Good Time with a Bad Girl is entertaining in an odd and even at times touching sort of way, assuming that like me you’re a devotee of the strange but fascinating world of 1960s American sexploitation. Recommended.