THE MAIDENS OF FETISH STREET *

There's no denying that this nudie classic looks terrific and I'm not talking about the pouting and extremely well-developed 'maidens' strutting their stuff on screen but of the brilliant black and white cinematography of Saul Resnick that turns them into living, breathing works of art. Of course, it wasn't an art-house audience that "The Girls on F Street" aka "The Maidens of Fetish Street" was aimed at, (the clue's in the title), but those back-street cinemas frequented by what was once euphemistically called 'the dirty mac brigade' and who would have been aware only of the women on screen and not the way Resnick filmed them. In other words, this is just another cheap exploitation picture, full of continuity errors, whose artistic merits would have escaped 99.9% of its audience. Now, of course, in a beautifully restored new print by director Nicolas Winding Refn it should attract an entirely different audience; grindhouse meets art-house, and we can simply wonder what one-man band Resnick, (he basically did everything on the film except sweep the floor), might have become had he ever made another picture - the Orson Welles of filth?