Blonde Ambition (John & Lem Amero / U.S., 1980):

From Coyote Fang, Wyoming, to the Great White Way under the riotous queer eye of John and Lem Amero. The Broadway Melody is the durable bedrock, the vaudevillian sister-act in this X-rated retelling consists of tap-dancing and tuba-blowing for an unappreciative audience of cowpokes. A curly trouper (Dory Devon, like a moist Ida Lupino) and a squeaky Goldilocks (Suzy Mandel, channeling Jean Hagen’s Singin’ in the Rain dizziness) are the two British birds stranded in the saloon, a pair of lambent, harmonizing comic turns. Discovered by an aristocratic heir (Eric Edwards) with a bachelor pad in the back of his private jet, they head out to New York and find themselves in crinoline gowns for an antebellum hardcore epic. (Orchestrating an orgy before the cardboard mansion, auteur Jamie Gillis wields his megaphone with a limp wrist: "I want a cum shot or none of you faggots gets paid!") Elsewhere, Molly Malone’s redoubtable cattiness under powdered wigs is just one flash of luxuriousness in a roundelay that includes a priceless brooch that ends up, like any good Macguffin, on the tip of a fairy wand at an underground Greenwich Village ball. (The freewheeling gender-blurs land the sisters onstage as rowdy drag queens, with the revelation of the furry surprise beneath their dresses causing at least one muscled leather daddy to pass out.) Devon’s kaleidoscopic shower reverie, Mandel’s strip on ice skates, Kurt Mann’s exasperated drollery, everything's part of a merry stream of Amero bawdiness that even registers (and outdoes) the drop-dead-mother gag from Shoot the Piano Player. The coda brings Anita Loos jubilantly into the pornplex, "show-business immortality, baby!" With David Morris, Wade Nicholas, Robert Kerman, Erica Havens, Ronald Taylor, Victoria Corsaut, and George Payne.

--- Fernando F. Croce

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