Vixen!

Bluesky

Vixen is a piece of Sixties sexplotation from director Russ Meyer. The film straddles soft core porn, farce and action. It starts with a somewhat innuendos voice over placing the viewer in the Canadian bush. Tom Palmer (Garth Pillsbury) is a bush pilot. In his light plane he connects the isolated communities of the Canadian wilderness. Erica Gavin plays his loving and unfaithful wife, the film's titular - pun intended - protagonist.

While her husband is away, the hypersexual Vixen Palmer plays with almost anyone she can get her hands on. The exception is her brother Judd's (Jon Evans) friend Niles (Harrison Page), a black Vietnam draft dodger to whom she is overtly racist. Just as things are coming to a head between Vixen and Niles, Tom finds a new client, O'Bannion (Michael Donovan O'Donnell). O'Bannion is an IRA terrorist who plans to hijack Tom's plane and take it to Cuba. This is not actually as outlandish as it sounds. In 1968, the year Vixen! was made, there were over 20 such incidents in the US.

Throughout the film, taboos about sex are counterpointed against the evil of acceptable racism. Sex has no adverse consequences, it's racist and Communist[1] ideology that does the damage. Exaggerated acting and an over-the-top script keep the darker elements of the film from being upsetting. It gets its social message across whilst maintaining a light and vigorous tone. Large section are shot outdoors which helps, giving it a bit of a Naturist feel.

In Vixen the camera is mostly kept low, either very low, the upward gaze of the john in a strip club ogling a dancer, or at a shallow incline, a female gaze. Combined with empowered female characters, the second viewpoint might explain why this film was so popular with women. The women in the film are strong and get what they want. With the help of some inventive framing, Vixen exudes power.

By today's standards the sex in Vixen is tame. Between I, Claudius and Smiley's People, the BBC had more explicit content, and that's way before HBO did Oz or Game Of Thrones. In its day it pushed the boundaries, becoming the first film to be X rated in America.

[1] The IRA, as opposed to the Provisional IRA, was a Marxist organisation.