The Lost Burlesque Auteur: The Films of Lillian Hunt

By Alexandra Heller-Nicholas.

What remains so striking about Hunt’s films is how openly both they and their supporting promotional material clearly sought to appeal to a female audience, well beyond the cliché of the porn-consuming scopophilic male.”

While American burlesque cinema flourished in popularity during in the 1940s and 1950s, today it is broadly remembered through figures such as Irving Klaw and his films Varietease (1954) and Teaserama (1955). It was through movies like these that major burlesque stars like Tempest Storm, Lili St. Cyr and of course the iconic Bettie Page found their way to the screen, these films rendered surely as much a text book case of that old chestnut “the male gaze” in action if there was ever one. Made by men for men, the burlesque film of this period for many might be the last place to look for filmmaking traditions that configure women as anything but the pure object of sexual spectacle.

As it so often does, however, actual history shows no interest in supporting such a clear-cut, easily digestible view. Klaw’s background is the stuff of legend: before turning to filmmaking, he published nudie magazines that he soon figured could be given a profitable boost by adding a cute S&M twist, tying his models up, binding their hands and feet, and even popping a gag in their mouths now and then for good measure. While Klaw himself is well known, just as central to this business enterprise was his hardworking sister Paula Kramer, who doubled not only as photographer but would often set the shoots up herself, tying the laborious knots when needed and – at times – donning a mask and appearing in front of the camera, too. As noted in an interview with Gloria Leonard in 1980, Paula’s involvement was purely practical: “I had a few offers for me to tie people up. Some men were masochistic and would give anything to have me tie them up. I never did that. I was strictly a businesswoman”. Like the legendary pin-up model turned photographer Bunny Yeager (who of course worked with Page in a number of famous collaborations), Kramer is but one of many women who throws a spanner in the works when it comes to assumptions about gender and labor in the burlesque industry of this period.

Amongst this important group of women is the lesser known but equally significant Lillian Hunt. She was initially a burlesque theater manager who saw clear financial benefits to filming her stage shows in order to bring in some extra cash, a decision which according to Eric Schaeffer and his foundational 1999 book Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!: A History of Exploitation Films, 1919-1959 saw her make “at least” ten movies in the 1940s and 1950s (309). Notably, if the dates on IMDb.com are correct, it appears that Hunt’s final film – Kiss Me Baby (1957) with Taffy O’Neil and Lili St. Cyr – was released a whole three years before the debut of another woman who today is widely considered the grandmother of American sexploitation film, the great Doris Wishman. Make no mistake, Wishman’s 1960 movie Hideout in the Sun was unambiguously groundbreaking, launching a career that has rightly earned a significant place not merely in the history of exploitation cinema, but in the story of women’s filmmaking more broadly. But there is surely also room to add the significant donation of Lillian Hunt, a filmmaker whose historical and ideological value have largely remained comparatively invisible.

At stake here is much more than canon building. Today, Lillian Hunt’s work is striking not simply because of the novelty that she is a broadly forgotten woman filmmaker who sets the clock of women’s involvement in sexploitation as directors back a decade at least. In fact, what remains so striking about her films is how openly both they and their supporting promotional material clearly sought to appeal to a female audience, well beyond the cliché of the porn-consuming scopophilic male. Building on the crucial work of both Schaeffer and Something Weird Video and Kino Lorber (the latter who joined forces to bring Hunt’s 1952 film “B” Girl Rhapsody and Peek-A-Boo to Blu-ray in 2021), I hope here to add further to these efforts to bring her name to the fore.

Burlesque films of this period – certainly Hunt’s, at least – are largely presented as a no-frills attempt to replicate the theatrical experience of watching a live burlesque show. As “B” Girl Rhapsody demonstrates quite clearly, after an initial external shot of the famous New Follies Theater at 548 South Main Street in New York City that Hunt managed to set the scene, as it were, the camera – placed in the centre seat in the front row – bar one brief diversion to a singing performance, is largely unmoving. From this perspective, the camera ‘watches’ the series of burlesque dancers and comics who populate the film from a fixed position, one after another, with a voiceover introducing each one and acting as a practical segue between each performance.

That burlesque as a theatrical tradition and cinema would come together in such a way is little surprise, as the two had a long history of intersecting; early silent films, for example, were often shown in vaudeville theaters when cinema first arrived in the United States before the nickelodeons took over at the start of the 20th century. Cinema in this sense was considered just one aspect of the variety-style entertainments vaudeville during this period could offer. Similarly, erotic movies are as old as film itself; 1915’s A Free Ride is popularly considered the first hardcore or ‘stag’ movie made in the United States, while Mark Stein in his 2017 book Vice Capades: Sex, Drugs, and Bowling from the Pilgrims to the Present lists a series of earlier sexually provocative sounding film titles including 1905’s Airy Fairy Lillian Tries on Her New Corsets (123) that again establish a pre-history of sorts of the rise of both the later burlesque films and sexploitation movies.

But whether consciously or not, as Eric Schaeffer notes, in the case of burlesque films from the era in question here, “we can locate the one classical exploitation genre that went beyond the simple presentation of transgressive behaviour to find a group of films that contained the potential for real social transgression” (291). Schaeffer’s reasoning here is worth citing at length:

By removing articles of clothing in a highly ritualized and stylized fashion, the stripper not only became a potential object of erotic desire, but in making a spectacle of herself, she simultaneously made a spectacle of gender identity. As performers, strippers were not merely the bearers of meaning in films, but active makers of meaning, calling attention to the performative aspect of gender.” (314)

He continues:

The aggressively erotic aspects of the dances further called into question the passive “nature” of female sexuality as it was constructed by the dominant culture during the postwar years.” (315)

A significant figure in the study of classical era exploitation cinema, Schaeffer’s crucial work stands uniquely as one of the very few deep-dive critical engagements with burlesque cinema that discusses Hunt as a noteworthy auteur.

While sexploitation cinema is broadly considered to have begun with Russ Meyer’s The Immoral Mr Teas in 1959, despite the central role of Wishman in that category, Schaeffer has noted that sexploitation films were very much largely intended for a male audience (123-4). But this was not the case for earlier exploitation movies, including postwar burlesque movies. While the bulk of these films do seem to be promoted to attract a male audience, they also drew women, Schaeffer noting that the dancers themselves were often audiences of these films, and key figures such as Hildegarde Esper (wife of exploitation king Dwayne Esper, who wrote and produced a number of his films) have verified that in the earlier days of exploitation cinema, “women often made up the largest segment of the audience for films on sex hygiene and birth because those movies promised to impart knowledge that was difficult or embarrassing to obtain” (124). Again, the origins here can be found in American burlesque as a theatrical form, where Coleen Scott notes in her 2019 book The Costumes of Burlesque: 1866-2018 that “burlesque shows were recognized in the mainstream as a couples’ activity for a night out, and acknowledged in Hollywood as a popular art form”.

As the long-time manager of the Follies and the New Follies for many years, Hunt was uniquely positioned to transition burlesque films into her business model. Working with so many burlesque performers on a day-to-day basis meant sourcing talent was never an issue. Hunt was far from green and she knew the business; she at one point also managed Oakland’s El Rey Theater, and she was really one of a handful of women running these kinds of theaters around this period alongside Sally Rand who managed a number of clubs in San Francisco, and the previous owner of the Follies, one-time stripper Ginger Britton.

As demonstrated most vividly in her close professional relationship with burlesque star Lili St. Cyr whose career Hunt very much championed (including casting her in both on stage and in her films) it was Hunt who tried – and, ultimately failed – to push St. Cyr towards a mainstream Hollywood acting career. But even when working through Hunt’s filmography and focusing on the films in which her long-term collaborator St. Cyr did not star, what becomes immediately apparent is how either explicitly or implicitly these films sought to either actively invite women audiences, or to, at the very least, not alienate them. Hunt’s burlesque films were rarely presented as the ‘boys own’ terrain that very much marked later sexploitation films, for example. We see this on the promotional artwork for what appears to be her debut film as director, 1949’s Midnight Frolics which starred “lovely Sunny Knight: The Parisian whirlwind” and “Mickey Ginger Jones: The Wham Bam Girl”. While the latter certainly has a kind of masculine appeal, the charm and exoticness of the former, in contrast, lacks the element of sleaze of the latter. In other materials, the words “French Burlesque” appear in lettering the same size as the film itself, again promising an exotic foreign adventure, where not just the promise of sex is contained, but also a “a riot of mirth and melody”.

While the bulk of early exploitation films do seem to be promoted to attract a male audience, they also drew women, Schaeffer noting that the dancers themselves were often audiences of these films.”

Hunt’s 1950 film Too Hot to Handle starred the so-called “Marilyn Monroe of Burlesque”, Dixie Evans, named by the Las Vegas-based Burlesque Hall of Fame as “the godmother of the burlesque revival”. Praised by Rob Craig in his book Gutter Auteur: The Films of Andy Milligan (2013), in his words “Too Hot to Handle represents the cream of the crop in burlesque features of the day. It is well-photographed, professionally miked, and contains the better acts of its kind” (75). Along with Strip Strip Hooray – also released in 1950 – these films importantly reveal that appealing to a gender neutral or specifically female audience was not a blanket promotional policy, Too Hot to Handle promising “delectable undraped loveliness” and “girls who will dazzle you! Girls who will excite you! Girls who will make you squirm!”, while the Tempest Storm fronted Strip Strip Hooray’s poster guaranteed “adult fun!” with “those tantalizing girls you meet only in your dreams!”

While the same again was true of Everybody’s Girl (1950) with “the world’s most beautiful girls”, we notice a dramatic shift in who Hunt’s films sought to appeal to – and to directly address – in 1952’s Lili’s Wedding Night, starring the eponymous St. Cyr. One poster screamed “America’s most glamourous girl in her exciting portrayal of every maidens secret dreams”, while another – even more explicitly – said “Ladies! You have Heard about her! You have wondered about her! Now see the fascinating Lili St Cyr in Lili’s Wedding Night! – her most daring creation”! Likewise, in 1953’s The ABC’s of Love, we see, although perhaps more subtly than the marketing material for Lili’s Wedding Night, another appeal to women that, recalling those earlier reproductive rights films Hildegarde Esper had spoken about, an at least superficial gesture towards framing these films as sex education for women; “learn your ABC’s from experts – the follies girls”, the poster reads, implying a desire to appeal less to the sexual bravado of the male audience of these films, but to the curious, sexually inexperienced women who may also be interested.

The promotional framing of The ABC’s of Love and Lili’s Wedding Night especially not only validate Schaeffer’s rejection of having to necessarily assume these films can only be understood through Laura Mulvey’s concept of the male gaze. Instead, for Schaeffer:

Even if gender norms were continually recuperated, burlesque films, with their unique history and mode of production, had the capacity to expose the instability of those norms and deny their hegemony. For the men – and women – who saw them, burlesque films offered alternative models that challenged restrictions on sexual expression and forms of desire that were channelled along rigidly defined lines. Their representations of nonnormative sex and gender roles offered a glimpse of the sexual revolution and second- wave feminism that was to come in the 1960s.” (324)

I would argue that additionally, the significance of Hunt’s work especially does even more than this. As a woman who was primarily working in the theatrical space of burlesque stage shows, filmmaking was never her bread-and-butter, and or was it where her identity was located. In this sense, she exists in a liminal space beyond orthodox film history, and as such does not adhere neatly to the traditional manner in which the way that the history of women’s filmmaking has been traditionally conceived.

In this sense, Lillian Hunt is a difficult fit, but it is precisely this that makes her such a vital figure for further critical inquiry. If the history of not just women’s filmmaking but cinema more generally seeks to exclude certain women because they do not slot easily into preconceived notions of what women’s filmmaking “is”, we do an enormous disservice not only to these women and their work themselves, but to the audiences – and in Hunt’s case, in many key moments, an audience she conceived as emphatically female – that they sought to appeal to.

Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, a contributing editor to Film International, is a film critic from Melbourne, Australia, who frequently contributes to Fangoria and has published widely on cult, horror and exploitation film including The Giallo Canvas: Art, Excess and Horror Cinema (McFarland, 2021), Rape-Revenge Films: A Critical Study (McFarland, 2011) and the 2021 updated second edition of the same name, Found Footage Horror Films: Fear and the Appearance of Reality (McFarland, 2015), the single-film focused monographs Suspiria (Auteur, 2016), Ms. 45 (Columbia University Press, 2017) and The Hitcher (Arrow Books, 2018), and two Bram Stoker Award nominated books, Masks in Horror Cinema: Eyes Without Faces (University of Wales Press, 2019) and 1000 Women in Horror (BearManor Media, 2020). She is also the co-editor, with Dean Brandum, of ReFocus: the Films of Elaine May (Edinburgh University Press, 2019), Wonderland (Thames & Hudson, 2018) on Alice in Wonderland in film, co-edited with Emma McRae, and Strickland: The Analogues of Peter Strickland (2020) and Cattet & Forzani: The Strange Films of Cattet & Forzani (2018), both co-edited with John Edmond and published by the Queensland Film Festival. Alexandra is on the advisory board of the Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies, and a member of the Alliance of Women Film Journalists.