Pretty Maids All in a Row

Another of the movies that I recently got around to watching that is available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive collection is a really odd little thing from the early 1970s: Pretty Maids All in a Row.

The opening credits play out over a song by the Osmonds, while young Ponce (John David Carson) is driving to his high school in suburban Los Angeles and ogling all the girls, Ponce being a typical sex-obsessed teenaged male. The only thing is, he's never actually had sex. It's going to get particularly bad when Ponce finds that he's got a substitute teacher in his English class, Miss Smith (Angie Dickinson). She's hot, and she gets extremely close to Ponce. So close, in fact, that Ponce has to take a bathroom break to cool off

Except that when Ponce goes into the stalls, he notices that it looks as though there's somebody in the next stall, not moving. So he checks up on the guy, only to find that it's a young woman. And a very dead young woman, one of the football team's cheerleaders. Ponce is unsurprisingly shocked, and goes to get help.

Meanwhile, the assistant principal, Tiger McDrew (Rock Hudson) is administering an aptitude test in his office. Well, not really; he's got a "testing" sign and is a psychologist in addition to being the assistant principal, so he could administer psychological evaluation tests to students. It's just that a lot of time, the "testing" is an excuse for Tiger to get it on with one of the female students.

But Tiger has sympathy for sexless Ponce. Ponce is one of the student managers of the football team, and Tiger is the head coach in addition to all his other duties. So Tiger gets Miss Smith to agree to give Ponce some private "lessons", which is really supposed to be teaching Ponce all about sex and helping him finally get laid, or something.

Ponce's sexual quest is half of the movie's story, but of course, there's also been a murder at Ponce's school, and that's the other half of the story. Capt. Surcher (Telly Savalas) comes from the state police together with his colleague Follo (James Doohan) to investigate, after the local police chief, Poldaski (Keenan Wynn) completely screws things up. As Surcher investigates, he gets the distinct feeling that Tiger killed the cheerleader, but isn't able to prove it. To make matters worse, there's another murder, and then a third.

Pretty Maids All in a Row is a really odd little movie, since it spans a bunch of different genres. In some ways, you could imagine this having been written by somebody like Paddy Chayefsky; after all, the movie came out the same year as The Hospital, which also has murder and extremely dark comedy. In fact, however, the screenplay was written by Gene Roddenberry!

The oddness makes Pretty Maids All in a Row interesting and memorable, and in the end also enough to overcome the film's weaknesses. It really shouldn't work, but there's so much nuts going on here that you don't necessarily notice the problems until thinking about it well after the movie has ended.