Music City Mondays: Nashville in the Movies — Girl from Tobacco Row
When: 7 p.m. Monday, Aug. 10
Where: The Belcourt
After successive weeks of salvation (the Johnny Cash religious pageant Gospel Road) and smut (the drive-in halter-ripper Nashville Girl) in The Belcourt’s summer series of vintage Nashville-shot movies, we now land somewhere in between with Music City’s “First Family of Exploitation,” the inimitable Ron, June and Tim Ormond. Former vaudevillians with a lifelong interest in spirituality and spiritualism, Ron and June went on to make some of the most flabbergasting B movies of all time, careening without brakes or shame from sexploitation to hixploitation to the Christian-scare-film genre sometimes known as Xploitation.
This 1966 melodrama lured rural audiences with a siren song of guns, gals, gags, gore and good country music, as escaped convict Earl “Snake” Richards runs afoul of gangsters (including a twitchy Ralph Emery in his acting debut as “Blinky, the Hit-Man”) while preacher Tex Ritter, impressionable Tim Ormond, and perky Rachel Romen (previously seen as a singing nympho in Samuel Fuller’s Shock Corridor) provide glimpses of the straight and narrow.
What, you’re still here? Next week: the Ormonds’ immortal The Exotic Ones, aka The Monster and the Stripper.
