Cinema: Flinch by Flinch

The movie camera can do anything the human eye can do except flinch; that faculty is left to the audience. In What Do You Say to a Naked Lady?, Director Allen Funt's candid camera remains as fixed and beady as any voyeur's. It is the viewers who must proceed, flinch by flinch, to the fadeout.

As the title promises, a parade of the naked—male and female—are exposed to the unsuspecting, with entirely predictable results. An undraped lady waits for an elevator; men emerge, confront her and gape. One even offers his jacket. For a sex lecture, the lady instructor arrives in the buff, prompting a genial response from a student audience, and furious blushing and giggles from four parents.

In all of Funt's TV work there was an underlying hum of smugness. Here it becomes a dominant theme. The most vulnerable targets of Funt's sexual satire are social victims: fat ladies in print dresses, cavernous old men prattling about the new amorality, young men anxious for employment, unaware that the hidden waiting-room camera is counting every tic. Periodically, Funt breaks in to remind the audience that it is hidebound by the strictures of Victorian morality, that his X-rated candid camerawork is helping to free society from hypocrisy and cant. But if society were truly free, there would be no Naked Lady, which lives, like any thigh-slapping practical joker, on the embarrassment of the innocent.

In the film's most telling episode, a subject is asked to group unfamiliar words under two headings, clean and dirty. Fugue, she decides is a clean, but titillate and thespian are both dirties. Thus, the film implies, words cannot be untainted if the mind is unwashed. It is the unintended moral of the movie. Sexually, What Do You Say to a Naked Lady? is a clean. Ethically, it is a dirty.