Nudist Life

 Today’s viewers may be baffled by the cinematic atrocities that midcentury filmgoers had to endure in order to witness naked bodies on screen. Released in the guise of educational documentaries, nudist films usually combined newly-shot material with cannibalized nudist films, stock footage, and decades-old ethnographic films, backed with needle-drop music, and processed under substandard lab conditions. Eventually, these Frankensteined films became a genre unto themselves, paving the way for the more gruesome Mondo films that would soon follow. Dan Sonney and Maurice Zouary’s Nudist Life (1961) follows a quintet of ringers in a Florida nudist colony. 10 Days in a Nudist Camp (1957) is a reworking and expansion of This Nude World (1932). In Dick Randall’s Shangri-La, former Jerry Lewis impersonator Sammy Petrillo provides loads of cringe-inducing laffs while he lasciviously eyeballs the sun-worshippers.

Special Features:
-Short films: Back to Nature (1955); The Expose of the Nudist Racket (1938); Nature Girls (1952); Nudes, Nudists, and Nudism Around the World; Nudist Memories (1961)