A Cold Wind In August 1961 Movie Review

A Cold Wind in August
US (1961): Drama
80 min, No rating, Black & White
Directed by Alexander Singer
Writing Credits (in alphabetical order)
John Hayes ... (screen treatment)
Burton Wohl ... (novel)
Burton Wohl ... (screenplay)
Cast (in credits order)
Lola Albright as Iris Hartford
Scott Marlowe as Vito Pellegrino
Joe DeSantis as Papa Pellegrino
Clark Gordon as Harry
Janet Brandt as Shirley
Skip Young as Al
Ann Atmar as Carol
Jana Taylor as Alice
Dee Gee Green as Mary
Herschel Bernardi as Juley Franz
When people who work in the movie industry get together they often talk about the small, offbeat pictures made outside the studio system, and this shrewdly conceived and well-acted piece of what might be called tawdry but frank eroticism almost always comes up. It's about a stripper in her late 30s who amuses herself by seducing a 17-year-old boy and discovers greater sexual gratification than she has ever before experienced. The boy finds out she's a stripper, is disgusted and leaves her (to play around at his own age level), and she's left in despair. That's all there is to it-or that's all there might be except for the intensity Lola Albright brings to the stripper's role. Unquestionably the movie was made as a low-budget exploitation film-an American ersatz version of Radiguet's Devil in the Flesh and Colette's The Game of Love-but it doesn't pretend to be set on a high plane, and it's saved by the honesty and clarity of its low intentions. Regrettably, in order to point up the boy's indifference to the meaning the affair has for her, he has been made too simple and callow, and although the actor (Scott Marlowe) manages to convey an emotional nature without overdoing it, Joe De Santis, who plays his good Italian papa, seems far more attractive. At least he does until the writer, Burton Wohl, who adapted his own novel, and the director, Alexander Singer, load him down with a preposterous piece of business. Papa delivers quiet words of wisdom and decency-good counsel-to his son and then sits back to read his well-thumbed leatherbound volume. It was hard to concentrate on the next scene: What could that book be? You never find out. Apart from Albright's arousing performance, the movie's chief strength is the economical script, which is also its weakness. If you set out to be a flesh merchant, you should offer more than a skeleton of material. With Herschel Bernardi; cinematography by Floyd Crosby.