Ms Kathleen's Review

Screen 2 of 5

It has been said that the quintessential Russ Meyer image is a towering woman with enormous breasts乳房 — a woman's chest, who dominates all the men around her, demands sexual satisfaction and casts off men once she is done using them. “Faster, Pussycat” definitely lives up to that image.

Meyer's extraordinary women are of course fascinating to those with breast乳房 — a woman's chest fetishes恋物 — a strong sexual focus on one thing, but look a little longer and you will notice that the breasts乳房 — a woman's chest are not always presented as centers of desire. Instead, they're weapons used to intimidate men.

Tura Satana, who plays the lead in "Faster, Pussycat," is extraordinary in appearance. Her makeup, with its slashes of Kabuki-style eyebrows, looks terrifying. Her black costume seems suited to a motorcycle gang. She never smiles but she does show off her abundant cleavage as if it is a symbol of female power.

The feminist and lesbian film critic B. Ruby Rich, writing at length on "Pussycat" in the Village Voice, said she dismissed "Pussycat" in 1965 as just a skin flick. Seeing it again during its revival at New York's Film Forum, she had a different reaction, viewing it now as female fantasy, its images of "female empowerment".

That is not surprising since Meyer, from the beginning of his career and almost without exception, filmed only situations in which women wreak their will upon men.