Street of a Thousand Pleasures

Date: December 17^th, 2013

This is a bit of a departure from the usual Sword and Sorcery movies that I review. There are no swords, and no sorcery, but the film does feature the largest number of naked women that I have ever seen in any movie, and I suppose that makes it worth writing about. The first thing I should make clear is that this is a soft core porn flick, not a B-grade adventure movie like I usually review. There is minimal plot, atrocious acting, ridiculous dialog, insanely bad editing and continuity errors, etc. But arguably, all that is offset by the sheer number and variety of breasts on display.

What little storyline there is can be summarized as follows. A henpecked field geologist goes to Iraq (pre-Saddam Hussein) to meet with a sheik regarding some oil fields. The geologist saves the sheik from a would-be assassin, and as a reward he asks to be taken to a slave market that he has heard about. Although the market is off limits to foreigners, the sheik complies. Almost the entirety of the next 68 minutes of this 76 minute film is devoted to the geologist exploring the market and viewing naked slave women. There are tall ones, short ones, dark-skinned ones, light-skinned ones, Asian, Mediterranean, Nordic, Celtic, and Slavic. They dance, get groped, giggle, jiggle, have (non-explicit) sex, get chained up – in short they do everything except have meaningful dialog or advance what little plot this cheap skinflick has. There is a brief action sequence at the end when violence erupts at the market, but otherwise, it is all about the tits and ass.

According to some online sources, there are 71 naked women in this movie. I didn't count, but it sounds about right. Many are uncredited, but a few became well known in the 1970's, notably Uschi Digard, who was a go-to girl for skin flicks focusing on big breasts. The uncredited appearance of an actress named Deborah Downey was what led me to this film in the first place. She had a minor role in an episode of Star Trek in 1969 entitled The Way to Eden, wherein the crew of the Enterprise encounters a band of goofy space hippies. Downey played a lovely hippie chick with a great singing voice. I re-watched the episode recently and was curious about the actress and what else she may have appeared in. One thing led to another and I found my way to Street of a Thousand Pleasures where she has a non-speaking role, dancing naked and getting groped in the opening sequence. A pretty big step down from a prime time TV series, but I guess Hollywood can be a pretty tough place even if you've got talent, as seemed to be the case with Downey. (Search for "way to eden" on YouTube and you might find the scene of her singing).

There's not much else to say about this low budget piece of fun filth. If you like breasts (and who doesn't?), and especially if you like pubic hair (the film is from 1972, before shaving was invented), you'll be in paradise. I should mention that throughout the geologist's trip through the market, he is constantly muttering about how beautiful the women are, and how many of them there are, etc. This quickly gets pretty tiresome, so you may want to turn off the volume and just enjoy the visuals. And even then, you may get a bit overloaded by all the nudity. About halfway through the film I had to put it on pause and take a break for a while, as the non-stop tit parade was just getting to be a bit tedious. I never thought it would be possible for me to get tired of seeing naked women; I guess I am getting old.

IMDB link. Self-Rated X.