WISH LIST THE DEVIL’S CLEAVAGE
rakhage and Frampton have gotten the Criterion treatment—so why not George Kuchar? If Bergman’s glimpses into the seems like low-hanging fruit. One of Kuchar’s rare feature-length scripted films, it follows nurse Ginger Menninger (Ainslie Pryor) as she flees the fast life in San Francisco for Blessed Prairie, Oklahoma, only to find horny randos wherever she turns. A breathlessly funny parody of Hollywood melodrama (“I stink, Frank—I stink so bad it scares me!” “Then let me take you in my arms and fumigate that beautiful body”), the film’s low-budget aesthetic owes more to Edgar Ulmer than to Roger Corman’s contemporary cheapies. From the dreamy expressionism of the opening, through the convoluted, absurd, and hilarious rest of the movie, Kuchar purely embodies an oft-abused term: the amateur, someone who creates solely for the love of it.
