TOO HOT TO HANDLE is a hoot. An actual burlesque show filmed on 16mm and now released on DVD, it is a recollection of a bygone era of bump and grind, baggy pants comedians (literally) and double entendre sex jokes that are so mild they would be rated PG today. The film was directed by Lillian Hunt, who was one of several female directors in the 1950s and ‘60s who made the earliest sexploitation films. These were more naughty than nude, and indeed, in TOO HOT TO HANDLE all the strippers wear not only pasties but flimsy bras, and even panties over their G-strings. Like her contemporary Doris Wishman, who directed NUDE ON THE MOON (1961) and BAD GIRLS GO TO HELL (1965), Hunt made several nudie films in the supposedly straight-laced 1950s, beginning with MIDNIGHT FROLICS (1949) and continued with TOO HOT TO HANDLE and STRIP STRIP HOORAY. The titles of porn films are worth an academic paper, as the trend to capitalize on popular films of the day or other cultural references flowered in the porn boom of the late 1960s and early 1970s. It’s so interesting that these films were created and controlled at least in some artistic sense by women, even though they were inevitably produced and distributed by men, and seen almost exclusively by male audiences, usually at private parties and the like since the only movie theaters that would show these films were in the worst neighborhoods and red light districts. TOO HOT TO HANDLE was re-released throughout the 1950s and 1960s as FIG LEAF FROLICS, and I swear I remember that title playing in Cleveland in the late 1950s or early 1960s when I grew up there. The formula in this kind of film couldn’t be more simple: turn on the camera and let the show proceed. Comics are interspersed with the strippers, and in the case of Melodee Lane, interacting with them, but the emphasis is on the girls and their boobs. Living in our liberated era, it’s hard to remember the sheer wonder of a woman disrobing on a stage in front of a group of horny men, shouting and catcalling but never ever dreaming of touching. The strippers Jean Carter and Dixie Evans are still famous, and both did bit roles in real movies – Carter appears fleetingly in THE ASPHALT JUNGLE (John Huston, 1950). Here their only job is to take it off, and they do so leisurely, invitingly and in a classic burlesque manner. What made burlesque so inviting was that it was dirty without being gross – the strippers are all squeaky clean looking peroxide blondes with the exception of the uniquely named Novita, who seems actually Hispanic. The routines are all similar and end with the same flourish, but some serious booty shaking goes on that I didn’t quite remember being so overt in 1950. The yuks are the real pleasure in TOO HOT TO HANDLE: two 1940s-style comedians, Mannie King and Harry Savoy whose routines are so old that King actually predates Henny Youngman with, “Take my wife… please!” We hear about performers like Jack Benny and George Burns who played burlesque, but King and Savoy (a low-rent Red Skelton) make vivid what the lifestyle must have been like: always on the road, cheap clubs, cigarette smoke and booze, and the same horn and drum accompaniment to the same strip routines, again and again. Yet King bats lines back and forth with singer Leon DeVoe and a sexy and lanky Lane with a comedic ease for which many of today’s stand-ups would yearn. And the featured women do the stripping in such a good-natured way, with no shame or embarrassment and a kind of pride of earning their own way in show business with the best assets they could muster. That may well be a sexist perspective, but it’s hard to work up much indignation at a moment caught in amber such as TOO HOT TO HANDLE. I enjoyed it on both a nostalgic and an entertainment level, and I wish I could say that about more of the fictional movies I’ve seen lately.

Dir: Lillian Hunt, 1950. 60 mins. B&W. Billiken Prods. Produced by Willis Kent, George Weiss. With Jean Carter, Leon DeVoe, Dixie Evans, Mannie King, Melodee Lane, Novita, Harry Savoy, Patti Waggin. Viewed on DVD.