Double Agent 73
Chicago Filmmakers
Featured in John Water?s Serial Mom, Wishman?s classic Double Agent 73, (35mm, 1974, 72 min) simultaneously uses and transcends the exploitation genre when she came up with the bizarre idea of implanting a spy camera in burlesque star Chesty Morgan?s 73? manmaries.
Featured in John Water?s Serial Mom, Wishman?s?s classic Double Agent 73, (35mm, 1974, 72 min) simultaneously uses and transcends the exploitation genre when she came up with the bizarre idea of implanting a spy camera in burlesque star Chesty Morgan?s 73? manmaries. Chsty start as secret agent Jane Genet (yes it?s a play on Jean Genet?s name/persona). A camera is implanted by the ?chief? in Jane?s breast with which she is to photograph the villains she kills! This of course means that she must take off her clothes every time she wants to take a picture!!
Jim Morton, Incredibly Strange Films
?Extremely tacky, Double Agent 73 makes Pink Flamingos look almost genteel. And the film does not merely strain credulity ? it tears it asunder.?
Bill Stamets, Chicago Reader September 22, 1995
?Women auteurs are rare among the directors of ultra cheap sleaze flicks. But starting after her husband died in 1960, self-taught filmmaker Doris Wishman wrote, directed, edited, and produced over two dozen charmingly crude films with names such as Bad Girls Go to Hell and Keyholes Are for Peeping. Unlike camp icon Russ Meyer, whose big-breasted features have long been championed by Roger Ebert, Wishman has only recently been treated to retrospectives.
Beneath her outlandish plots lurk a crypto-feminist critique of the male gaze. In Double Agent 73, made in 1974, Chesty Morgan plays secret agent Jane Genet, whose left breast is equipped with a surgically implanted camera for documenting her hits. Men are the victims here; they die with eyefuls of blurry flesh. Let Me Die a Woman, a 1978 documentary on transsexuals, includes a lurid castration scene. A doctor is interviewed while holding a pointer to his patient’s penis and saying, “His one and only all-consuming thought and desire is to get rid of his hated penis and testicles.” Nude on the Moon, filmed in 1962, is about two young rocket scientists–one smokes a pipe with Hugh Hefner urbanity–who travel to the moon, where they obsessively photograph a matriarchy of nude moon maidens. But they’re deprived of their photographic trophies when they leave their camera behind.?