LORNA

Lorna (Lorna Maitland) is growing tired of her husband, Jim (James Rucker), after only a year of matrimony. He spends his days toiling in a salt mine and his evenings studying to become a certified public accountant, and their home is a run-down shack in a boring little town. Worse still, he has never satisfied her as a lover, and Lorna is aching to experience more from life. On the day of their first anniversary, Lorna is attacked and raped by an escaped convict (Mark Bradley). Though she resists at first, the act awakens her frustrated sexuality, and she brings this dangerous stranger home for more illicit pleasure while Jim works. Meanwhile, Jim's slovenly bachelor co-workers — Luther (Hal Hopper) and Jonah (Doc Scortt) — taunt him out of jealousy for his beautiful wife, trying to inspire suspicion in his heart. Jim trusts Lorna and defends her honor with his fists. When he returns from work early with a battered face, he discovers Lorna's indiscretion, and the result is tragedy.

Russ Meyer's minimalist morality tale Lorna was a drastic change from the colorful nudie-cuties he had based his reputation on. After the adult film marketplace became flooded with cheap copies of his own groundbreaking The Immoral Mr. Teas, Meyer adjusted his approach and filmed this stark, black-and-white story of frustration and adultery. The director made the most of a small cast and a low budget and ended up with a bristling melodrama that simultaneously exalts and condemns the lusts of the flesh. The raw, unbridled action is commented upon by a fiery-tongued preacher (played by screenwriter James Griffith), an omniscient narrator who appears only to cast aspersions upon the sinners. No one is innocent here, even the cuckolded husband who has turned a blind eye to his wife's obvious needs. The cast is serviceable, though Hal Hopper stands out as the leering, insatiable Luther (a year later he returned to work with Meyer, doing an even more extreme job with a similar character in Mudhoney). The director continued in this dark, sweaty territory for the next few years, eschewing humor and color for violence and noir. He finally perfected this style with the snarling Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! and afterward returned to color films, gradually adding strong doses of broad humor to his cartoonish burlesque shows. FRED BELDIN