55 Years Ago, Star Trek’s Creator Delivered An Infamously Salacious Farce
Seeking out strange cultural artifacts.
In 1971, Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry produced and wrote a film called Pretty Maids All in a Row. If you’re a Star Trek person and you’ve never heard of it, there’s a very good reason for that: nothing about this film will remind you of the famous 1960s TV series, except for maybe some risque wardrobe choices courtesy of Star Trek’s original costume designer, William Ware Theiss.
But if the original Trek was guilty of any sexploitation in the name of progress, Pretty Maids All in a Row is the opposite, as a bizarre sex farce that’s also a murder mystery wrapped up in a weird high school coming of age story. Based on the 1968 novel by Francis Pollini, the film’s biggest crime is that it can’t decide what it wants to be. Is it a dark comedy mocking a certain type of sexist horror trope? Or is it merely embodying those tropes with the hope of finding some kind of art?
Fifty-five years after its release, Pretty Maids All in a Row represents a different pop culture than those nostaglic for the 1970s often look back on. This is a dirty, careless film that, under different circumstances, could have been something interesting. Instead, it's a curious cultural artifact that, for Roddenberry scholars, represents a strange counterpoint to the humanistic legend we’re all familiar with.
The screenplay for Pretty Maids All in a Row is Roddenberry’s sole writing credit for a motion picture. Adapting the novel wasn’t something he sought out — this was work for hire, and work was something Roddenberry desperately needed. Roddenberry’s official biographer, David Alexander, noted in 1994 that Roddenberry regarded the source material as a “vulgar book” and hoped, in writing an over-the-top satire, “to rewrite so that it has some meaning and some statement about the world around us today.”
The plot, such as it is, concerns a high school football coach named Michael "Tiger" McDrew (Rock Hudson) who’s seducing and murdering female students. Caught up in this is a male student named Ponce de Leon Harper (John David Carson), who, in a plot very reminiscent of The Graduate, finds himself in an affair with a substitute teacher, Miss Smith (Angie Dickinson). While all this is happening, Police Chief Surcher (Telly Savalas) is investigating the murders in full detective mode, two years before he began twirling a lollipop as Kojak. This fact alone might explain why Quentin Tarantino selected the film as one of his 10 favorites back in 2012. There’s a slight grindhouse feeling to the movie, and moments when one senses a provocative classic hiding inside a muddled film.
You wouldn’t think Pretty Maids All in a Row was a murder mystery based on this photo of Rock Hudson.
Directed by Roger Vadim, of Barbarella fame, there’s certainly a reason to suspect that Pretty Maids All in a Row is being ironic about its sexism, or, as Roddenberry’s letters suggest, that the film is attempting to indict corruption in America’s public institutions, namely locker room sexism. And yet, practically every male character is infected by the film’s lecherous tone. In the summer of 1971, Roddenberry wrote to a friend saying, “No, don’t see Pretty Maids. There is nothing worse than writing something you hope is pretty witty and having the director not quite pull it off.”
A year later, the first Star Trek convention would launch a new era of Roddenberry’s life, and at the risk of being reductive, the rest is history. Pretty Maids All in a Row was destined to become a footnote in Roddenberry’s career. But in 1971, he was lucky it wasn’t his epitaph.
