Year: 1965
Director: Jospeh P. Mawra
Country: US
Language: English
Nicholas Winding Refn (Drive) is a strange man with an offbeat taste for eccentric pictures that have long been forgotten. With his website (https://www.bynwr.com) he presents "an unadulterated expressway of the arts", cinematic revivals of lost pictures that, thanks to him and his restoration partners, can be seen with astonishing quality. I've enjoyed House on Bare Mountain, Wild Guitar and now Chained Girls.
This exploitation classic purports to expose the secrets of the 1960s lesbian underworld.
"Only through understanding the facts, can we keep Lesbianism from becoming a serious social problem." Mocking public service movies like Reefer Madness (1936), Chained Girls can be seen as a mockumentary that keeps us laughing with ridiculous "facts" like 33% of single female college graduates are lesbians! and Marriages are not uncommon among lesbians. How were they "not uncommon" decades before lesbian marriage was even legal?
One of the ways pre-hippy 60's authors and filmmakers avoided obscenity charges when dealing with homosexual subject matter was to smear their exploration of sexual deviance in "scientific" terms. Chained Girls writer-director Joseph Mawra uses this tactic, and thus gets away with making a picture that serves as part pornography. The film-maker was able to get away with gratuitous shots of topless women rolling around on top of each other, because the censors were truely fooled into thinking this really was "educational".
Chained Girls is a trashy film that tells us a lot about society at the time. Some Americans were really this paranoid about gay culture and thought, regardless of nudity, the "truth" had to be told. Some of America were perverts desperate to see half-naked women onscreen & some Americans wanted a laugh at the theatre. This film appeals to everyone!
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