J Paul Johnson
Film Masters, the physical media restoration and distribution company founded in 2023, takes a new and generally delightful detour into the southern backroads with their June 2024 release, a “Backwoods Double Feature” packaging two lesser-known tales into a two-disc special edition Blu-ray. The feature films tell sordid tales of old geezers, young babes, and violent betrayals—“Hicksploitation,” they’re called by C. Courtney Joyner in a detailed mini-documentary featurette. Common Law Wife (1963) is the main feature, a Frankenstein-sutured remake of an unreleased film called Swamp Rose, but it’s the second-billed Jennie, Wife/Child (1968) that is the daring darling of the two, a delightfully scripted, shot, and performed gem of Southern-fried seduction.
Exploitation films do not, necessarily, as is the case with Blaxploitation, exploit a people for profit; they may, as with other paracinematic subgenres, simply seek to exploit current trends, cultural niches, or lurid content for financial gain, often at the expense of cinematic artistry. Not all of them get a pithy portmanteau (Blaxploitation, Hicksploitation, Vetsploitation, Sexploitation, etc.), but they all lean toward the taboo: suggestive titillation, explicit sex, fetishized violence, drug use, gore, mayhem, occult, and the like. They’ve been, in dozens of different guises, around nearly since cinema’s inception, and Hicksploitation films—made in the South, featuring southern performers, settings, stories, and scripts depicting similarly southern characters, often engaged in hillbilly conflict, thrived especially in the breakdown of the MPAA or Hays Code in smaller-town cinemas in the late 1950s and ’60s.
Especially popular were the kinds tales depicted in these two features: both Common Law Wife and Jennie, Wife/Child are tales of the boondocks’ “bad girls,” so to speak, blond babes eager to rise above their station, willing to use their wily sexuality to do so, and all too happy to take advantage of the miserly old geezers who control the purse-strings—and their freedom. Both use the familiar “child bride” trope to engender the main conflict, but each film ends up rooting for its bad-girl protagonist to get her way—and maybe a new, younger lover in the bargain.
Common Law Wife (1963)
To put it bluntly, Common Law Wife is, as a film, more interesting to read and think about than it is to watch. Sure, there was an appeal to Southerners both well off and less so to muck about in this seedy tale of sex and seduction. And the very notion of a “common law” marriage must have been of interest at a time when traditional mores were breaking down as the institutions designed to encode and enculturate them struggled to keep pace: a cohabitation or pretense of marriage was sufficient, in some states, to serve as a legal marriage, with all of its binding property contracts intact. Mix in some tawdry incest implied between a corrupt old geezer and his sexy young niece and one has all the trappings of a lurid potboiler to keep audiences’ upright attention.
Here, the old coot—Shugfoot Rainey (George Edgley)—is ready to trade up to a new model, as he’s had enough of his (to his thinking) over-the-hill mistress, Linda (Annabelle Weenick). As fate and a weak script would have it, just in time his niece Jonelle (Lacey Kelly), who goes by the name “Baby Doll” in her (cough, cough, ahem) “professional” career, arrives to “take care” of her uncle and his estate in his dotage. The new plan delights horny old Shugfoot, except for one wrinkle: he’s been cohabitating with Linda for over five years, long enough for the “common law” clause to take effect, and Linda isn’t going to give up her creature comforts without a fight. There is no actual sex to speak of, but Jonelle wields her appeal like a cudgel with the locals, getting her way until an increasingly desperate and disrobed Linda solves her problem in the way of the Old West.
The final theatrical release of Common Law Wife, though, is an ungainly sour mash of unlike components. It began as Texas shlockmeister Larry Buchanan’s Swamp Rose, shot in color 16mm on the border of Texas and Louisiana and with different character names, plot, and details than what one sees in Common Law Wife. Swamp Rose was never released, but a distributor purchased the rights and new director Eric Sayers folded in much of its footage—now duped in blurry black and white—into a new tale focusing on the legality of the common law marriage in question. The resulting film juxtaposes Buchanan’s footage with Sayers’, the two looking tonally completely different, dubs some actors’ voices and not others, and features a Jonelle character who looks so different in scenes it is difficult to believe she is the same actress (according to Lisa Petrucci’s liner notes she is—but shot three years later; according to Buchanan’s commentary track she cannot be).
Common Law Wife is full of devious depravity, local yokels, moonshine, and striptease, but it’s not by any means any good, not even as a cult or exploitation film. It’s just too scattershot to hit its target. At best, it’s the kind of film that serves as a helpful and instructional context for the broader appeal of Hicksploitation movies more generally, the kind that would pit boondocks babes against the patriarchal hegemony that ruled over them. For an example of this saucy Southern subgenre at its fullest expression, Film Masters’ second-billed feature is far better fare than Common Law Wife.
Jennie, Wife/Child (1968)
Surprisingly, given its title, Jennie, Wife/Child is the feature on this twin bill that does not deal with incest. The protagonist is just young enough to be considered a child of sorts (at 20!) by her husband. Titular young “river bottom,” as the townies call her, Jennie (Beverly Lunsford) is wife to old coot Albert Peckingpaw (Jack Lester), a rich geezer who keeps his money and his young wife both under tight lock and key. When she’s not obliged to her “wifely duties” (every time Albert announces it’s time for his “nap”) and seething with contempt for her crusty hubby, Jennie has her eyes on the dimpled but dimwitted farmhand Mario (Jim Reader). To keep things lively there is a town floozie—literally called just that in the film’s silent-style credit cards—named Lulu Belle (Virginia Wood) who is there to stir more sh*t and entice both men with her wiles.
That’s not much of a plot, but it’s perfectly serviceable for plenty of sex, drunkenness, and depravity to follow. What sells Jennie, Wife/Child is a set of quite good performances from all four leads, including Reader, who barely had a film career to speak of. Lunsford, a former child star (in Leave it to Beaver), enjoyed a long career in film and television and is a convincing ingenue as she seduces the farmhand and plots her husband’s richly deserved demise.
Also, if surprisingly, good is the film’s production. Lighting, sets, production design, cinematography, editing—all of it really quite good and with just a touch of European art-house flair. Some of that comes from the contributions of the immeasurably talented Vilmos Zsigmond, later a key figure in the New Hollywood resurgence of the ’70s who shot McCabe and Mrs. Miller, The Deer Hunter, and Blow Out and won an Academy Award for his work on Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). Even on this low-rent Hicksploitation flick his camera moves with the subtlety and grace of a master-in-waiting.
And then there is the soundtrack, a suite of songs composed for the film by Harley Hatcher and released as a commercial LP under the film’s original title, Albert Peckinpaw’s Revenge. Its individual song lyrics reflect the film’s characters and action directly and often delightfully, as is the case when Jennie skinny-dips to a ditty called “Birthday Suit.” That’s exactly the kind of cornpone comedy you get in Jennie, Wife/Child: her seduction of Mario starts with his vigorously plunging her kitchen sink as she watches breathlessly. If you know what I mean.
All told, Jennie, Wife/Child is a delightfully sordid and silly affair, with a comic tone and sprightly pace—punctuated by old Western-style silent-film title cards—that works perfectly well. Tickling the tropes of the “Child Bride” with an effervescence rarely seen in the subgenre (and nowhere to be found in the far-less fetching Common Law Wife), Jennie, Wife/Child is simply a winner, all the way to its giddy conclusion.
Film Masters’ restoration of Jennie, Wife/Child is superb. Both it and Common Law Wife, which looks excellent in its restored sequences and egregious in its duped black and white, are presented with an aspect ratio of 1.85:1. The remasters are made from original 35mm archival elements—with supplemental 1080p footage in Common Law Wife. The discs are region free and include English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing for the main and special features both. Audio is DTS-HD/Dolby AC3s.
Special Features
With their first set of catalog releases, Film Masters’ special features have proved at times invaluable and at others uneven, an inconsistency evident here also in this “Backwoods Double Feature” special edition. There is an excellent mini-documentary to be found on the Hicksploitation subgenre, but three separate full-length commentary tracks add up to only a handful of insights.
That’s Hicksploitation: The Origin of Southern Sinema: Ballyhoo Motion Pictures presents this newly-produced, 50-minute documentary exploring the Hicksploitation subgenre from its 1930s roots to the 1970s. C. Courtney Joyner, who has carried the special-features load for most of the company’s output to date, scripts and hosts the documentary, which is complemented by an excellent array of clips, stills, and promotional images. This feature makes for an engaging watch and worth the price of admission on its own.
Audio Commentary on Common Law Wife: This feature gets two separate audio commentary tracks. First up is an archival recording of Nathaniel Thompson interviewing Swamp Rose director Larry Buchanan. For this recording, Buchanan had not seen the theatrical release Common Law Wife that his own film had been remade into and his comments are largely off-the-cuff: he cannot, for instance, recall the name of his lead actress, and he is completely convinced the role of Jonelle has been recast (liner-note writer Lisa Petrucci claims otherwise). And while Buchanan is deferential to changes made to his work but he is not too confident in his recollection. Thompson, the interviewer, is difficult to hear but full of good and penetrating questions that elicit some pithy, even snarky opinions from the director.
Newly recorded for this edition is a commentary track by film programmer and podcast host (I Saw What you Did) Millie De Chirico and Turner Classic Movies programmer Ben Cheaves, who share a chuckle watching the film but have little of essence to say about it. I can appreciate an ad hoc commentary sprinkled with wit and snark, but this track, like that for Jennie, Wife/Child, is a skip: it’s largely without research or context save for some broad and obvious generalizations (“common-law marriage was a ‘hotsy-totsy’ topic in the 1960s”) and extraneous anecdotes.
Audio Commentary on Jennie, Wife/Child: Chirico is left to her own to comment on Jennie, Wife/Child in this track, which offers some appreciation for the film, especially its cinematography and soundtrack, but little else. At times the commentary will ebb into silence for so long one wonders if it is still playing. Both this and the track for Common Law Wife might have been better condensed into a single short featurette.
The Special Edition also includes trailers for each film—a restored 1963 trailer for Common Law Wife and a new trailer for Jennie, Wife/Child—with a 24-page two-color booklet featuring a comprehensive introductory essay by Lisa Petrucci from Something Weird Video.
The package may be uneven in its quality and presentation but the remaster of Jennie, Wife/Child and the excellent Hicksploitation featurette are by themselves well worth the sojourn into this little neck of the south’s backwoods and boondocks. With it, Film Masters offers a saucy tribute to regional filmmaking at its best—and at close to its worst.
Film Masters’ special Backwoods Double Feature collector’s edition including Common Law Wife (1963) and Jennie, Wife/Child (1968) is available for pre-order with a release date of June 25, 2024.
