Pretty Maids All in a Row is unique in many fashions: firstly, Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry wrote the screenplay. Secondly, Rock Hudson is cast as a lecherous high school coach. Roddy McDowall, still in the midst of Planet of the Apes fame, is once again playing a human. And several girls get killed. However, all of this culminates into one of the most interesting premises for a classic film.
The film begins with a typical 17-year-old horny kid, Ponce de Leon Harper (John David Carson) finding a dead girl in the boy’s bathroom, leading the high school Harper attends to become embroiled in a murder case (with none other than Kojack–Telly Savalas–solving the case). At the heart of the mystery is the equally horny football coach/assistant principal, Michael “Tiger” McDrew (Rock Hudson) who has affairs with the high school girls.
The movie is certainly one you probably wouldn’t want to watch with children because there is nudity as well as head-on talk about erections and many sexual innuendos, both physical and mentioned. Basically, it’s rated R for a reason. But, that’s not to say the sex comedy is all about sex; it’s also a social commentary that hinges on the sexual revolution, the disillusionment concerning the goodness of people (what with the fallout after Vietnam and the general upheaval during the ’50s and ’60s), and, to a lesser extent, the plight of being a nerd in high school.
While this movie is highly entertaining, I personally like it because it’s another movie to add to my Roddy McDowall collection. I’ve been a fan of his since seeing him in The Planet of the Apes, and if he happens to pop in a vintage movie, it makes it all the better for me. I would venture to say that McDowall ‘s character, Mr. Proffer, the principal of the school, could be read as a gay man, but then again, that could be said for quite a few characters McDowall played, like his character in Inside Daisy Clover, Walter Baines, who is the secretary/assistant to movie mogul Raymond Swan (Christopher Plummer). In that movie, Baines’s relationship to Swan is one of a devoted on-looker who is slightly jealous of Daisy Clover and Swan’s wife Melora (Katharine Bard), two women who were close to Swan, closer than Baines could ever be. It’s like the one-sided relationship Smithers has with Burns on The Simpsons. Also, it doesn’t help McDowall’s characterizations any that it’s rumored that he was a closeted homosexual. Ironically, while McDowall’s Mr. Proffer’s sexuality could be debated, Rock Hudson, a gay man in real life, was still portraying a virile über-straight man, albeit in a perverse form.
If you’d like to see Pretty Maids All in a Row, also featuring Angie Dickinson as the busty substitute teacher, Miss Betty Smith, go to the Warner Archive to buy it.
