Fanny Hill (1964): Russ Meyer Films the Notorious Novel With Wit

There is a lovely irony sitting at the centre of the 1964 Fanny Hill, and it takes a moment to see it. Here is a version of the most notorious erotic novel in the English language — a book prosecuted on and off for two centuries — rendered as a chaste, giggling bedroom farce with more slamming doors than skin. And here is Russ Meyer, the American who would spend the rest of the decade making the raunchiest films the drive-ins could bear, directing it as a man in a straitjacket. The gap between subject and treatment is the whole story of the picture, and it makes Fanny Hill far more interesting to think about than it is to watch.

The book that would not stay banned

John Cleland wrote Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure in a debtors’ prison and published it in 1748. It is an epistolary novel — Fanny, now respectable and married, writing two long confessional letters recounting how a penniless country orphan fell into a London brothel and worked her way, through a picaresque series of encounters, back up to love and money. Cleland was hauled before the authorities within a year, and the book was suppressed, pirated, expurgated and prosecuted for the next two hundred years.

The prosecutions built a genuine legal history around the title. An 1821 case in Massachusetts is often cited as the first obscenity trial over a book in the United States, and the novel kept generating them: a full-dress American courtroom fight was still running in the early 1960s, and only the 1966 Supreme Court decision commonly known as Memoirs v. Massachusetts finally established that the book could not be banned as obscene. That is the reputation the title carried into the middle of the decade — a byword, a dare, a thing you had heard of and could not legally buy. To put Fanny Hill on a marquee in 1964 was to trade on two centuries of accumulated scandal.

Which is precisely why producer Albert Zugsmith wanted it. A title like Fanny Hill sells itself. The trick was to deliver something an American distributor could actually release, and that meant sanding every hard edge off Cleland until what remained was innuendo, cleavage and the general idea of naughtiness. The film keeps the eighteenth-century setting, the brothel, the orphan’s progress and the eventual happy ending, and turns Cleland’s frank catalogue of desire into a Carry On-style comedy of near-misses. The dirtiest book in English became one of the tamest films with a dirty title.

Meyer, off his own patch

By 1964 Russ Meyer had already invented a genre. The Immoral Mr. Teas (1959) had launched the “nudie cutie” and made him a small fortune on a shoestring, and his instinct for buxom excess, brisk editing and cartoon energy was entirely his own. Fanny Hill is the odd film out in his career because it is the first he directed without also producing, and it shows. Zugsmith held the reins, the money came from unreliable German backers, and the whole thing was shot in Berlin studio space far from the California deserts where Meyer’s imagination actually lived. Meyer later spoke of the shoot as a miserable experience — difficult producer, shaky financing, near-impossible conditions — and said the one thing that carried him through was working with his star, the veteran actress Miriam Hopkins.

Hopkins is, in fact, the reason to watch. A major Hollywood name of the 1930s — Trouble in Paradise, Design for Living — she plays Mrs. Maude Brown, the brothel-keeper, and she plays her as high comedy: brisk, worldly, delighted with her own wickedness. She understands the register the film wants and lands it every time she opens her mouth. Around her, Letícia Román makes a wide-eyed, giggling Fanny, and a young Ulli Lommel — later a Fassbinder regular and a cult director in his own right — turns up as her sweetheart Charles. The tone is coy throughout: doors close on the interesting moments, the camera discovers a chambermaid mid-shriek, everyone is scandalised and nobody is ever quite naked.

Zugsmith is worth a footnote of his own. He had produced Douglas Sirk’s Written on the Wind and Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil, then slid into exploitation with titles like Sex Kittens Go to College. Pairing him with Meyer sounds, on paper, like a summit of American showmanship. In practice each man wanted a different film, and Fanny Hill is the compromise that satisfied neither: too coy for the exploitation crowd, too silly for anyone drawn by the literary source.

Why the wit only half-lands

The craft question is worth taking seriously, because the film is trying to do a genuinely hard thing: to be a farce. Farce is the most mechanically demanding of comic modes. It needs momentum, geometry, timing you can set a watch by — entrances and exits fitting together like clockwork so that the audience is always a half-second ahead of the characters. When it works, the restraint is the joke; the closed door is funnier than anything it hides. Lubitsch built a career on it, and it is no coincidence that Hopkins, the best thing here, came up through exactly that school.

Fanny Hill gets there in flashes, almost always when Hopkins is driving the scene, and loses it whenever she leaves. Meyer’s own gift was for rhythm — his later films cut like percussion — but the rhythm of slapstick and the rhythm of innuendo are different instruments, and here he is playing an unfamiliar one under a producer’s thumb. The result is a picture that keeps setting up comic machinery and then forgetting to wind it. The eighteenth-century trappings are handsome enough, the Berlin studio standing in gamely for Georgian London, and there is a real film buried in it about the theatre of respectability. But the discipline that makes a farce sing is intermittent, and long stretches simply coast on the title’s promise of naughtiness it has no intention of keeping.

What saves it from being a curio is the irony I opened with, which turns out to be the film’s actual subject whether it means it or not. Cleland’s Fanny survives by performing innocence while trading in experience; the film performs exactly the same trick on its audience, promising scandal and delivering a wink. There is something almost honest in how thoroughly it chickens out.

Where it sits in the collection

The useful way to file Fanny Hill is as the exception that defines the rule of Meyer. To see what his talent actually looked like when it was his own, turn to Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, where the same energy that flails here is aimed and lethal, or to the wider case made in Russ Meyer, the satirist of the drive-in. Fanny Hill is Meyer with the satire confiscated and the buxomness dialled down — a reminder that his films worked because he controlled every frame of them.

The novel itself has been filmed and refilmed, which makes for a useful collector’s shelf. A 1968 Swedish version directed by Mac Ahlberg went considerably further than Meyer’s, playing the material straight as soft-focus period erotica; later versions, including a 1983 British attempt, kept returning to Cleland precisely because the title still promised what the films rarely delivered. Ranked against them, Meyer’s is the strangest — the one made by the decade’s least inhibited director in his single most inhibited mood.

It also marks one pole of the 1960s adult-cinema map. Where Meyer went for cartoon appetite, Radley Metzger was building the opposite case — that frank material could carry the literacy and gloss of European art film — a body of work traced in Radley Metzger, the auteur of elegant eros. A Cleland adaptation was exactly the kind of literary source Metzger might have honoured and Meyer had no idea what to do with. For the full lineage of how these films fought censorship and grew up, the sexploitation canon sets Fanny Hill among the titles that mattered more than it did.

Spoilers below

The plot follows Cleland’s shape with the scandal drained out. Fanny arrives in London an orphan, is taken in by Mrs. Brown believing she has found respectable employment, and only gradually understands the nature of the house. The comedy runs on that gap: Fanny’s persistent innocence colliding with everyone else’s knowingness, a string of suitors and would-be seducers foiled by interruptions, mistaken rooms and her own obliviousness. She is repeatedly on the brink of ruin and repeatedly, farcically, rescued by an ill-timed knock at the door.

The film keeps Cleland’s redemptive ending intact. Fanny is reunited with Charles, her original sweetheart, and the picaresque resolves into respectable love and marriage — the wayward orphan restored to virtue and a good name, exactly as the novel arranges it. The closing note is reassurance: nothing truly bad ever happened, the audience is off the hook, and the notorious title has been safely defanged. It is the tidiest possible landing for a film that spent ninety minutes promising to be dangerous and never once meant it. Cleland’s Fanny earns her happy ending by surviving experience; Meyer’s earns it by being spared any.