The Happy Hooker (1975)

The name will seduce you, but here's a film with no marketable audience.

by Kevin Flanagan

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Cannon Films, that legendary outfit helmed by Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus, developed a reputation in the 1980s for productivity. They virtually flooded theaters and video rental stores with product. Their business model was simple. Hire fast-working crews and directors to make exploitable “genre” films with easy-to-ballyhoo hooks (ninjas, Chuck Norris, naked aliens, etc etc). Rush the films to the market. Rinse. Repeat. The organization was very successful. In fact, as Alexander Walker reports in Icons in the Fire: The Decline and Fall of Almost Everybody in the British Film Industry (2004), the company had strategically positioned itself in Britain (though it also operated in Israel and the U.S., at large) in a production/distribution/exhibition capacity. Their seemingly endless production slate, combined with theater ownership and a nearly cornered market, meant that they very nearly took over the whole of the British film industry during one of its famously struggling phases. Almost. Cannon eventually collapsed upon itself. Bad debt, suspect business practices, and, above all, bad movies meant that its star faded.

Given Cannon's place in the annals of bad movie lore, I held out specific hope for The Happy Hooker. Distributed by Cannon before the halcyon days of Golan/Globus superflops and Chuck Norris marquees, it struck me as the sort of film that they must have built the company's reputation upon. Sadly, this is not the case.

Xaviera Hollander (Lynn Redgrave) is a naïve but euro-worldly Dutch girl (you see, her last name is Hollander, so you can imagine that she comes from Holland) who comes to America to live with a man she met on a passionate holiday. Though the two hit it off in the la-la land of a vacation, she quickly learns that the man lured her across the pond over false pretenses: dominated by a nagging mother, he seems unwilling to defend his bride-to-be. Xaviera leaves this spineless man and gets a translating job at the Dutch consulate. However, she soon falls in with the wife-swapping, swinging set of international high finance and stumbles into a tryst as a prostitute. Somewhat incensed that she was taken for a whore, she nonetheless becomes a “high class” call-girl, serving rich clientele. In fact, her Protestant work ethic is so strong that she eventually takes over her own den of iniquity from a seasoned mistress set on retiring. She is, however, set up by jealous undercover cops soon after this take-over, but her touching defense of her working girls ends the film on a high note.

The film is, in fact, told as a confessional wrap-around: it begins with them all being busted, thrown in jail, and compared to the common crack-whores that give prostitution a bad name. The strange path from nice Dutch girl to seasoned hooker is told in voice over, with the key events shown on screen. The film therefore amounts to a kind-hearted polemic in defense of benevolent prostitution, presented with mild exploitation elements. This peculiar mix, however, seems to prevent the film from touching either built-in audience to such fare. Far too contentious to the feel-good, moral crowd—after all, the film is about prostitutes, dares to surmise that sex can be enjoyable, and contains some bare flesh—yet a bit sappy for skin-flick-fiends, it ends up looking like an awkward date movie. Armchair feminists might detect some ill-conceived talk of female liberation and sexual self-determination, but the overall message is ultimately very much to the contrary. Xaviera and her girls are the bourgeois-mainstream “happy hookers,” subsuming the sex industry to a mom-and-pop small business, at once window-dressed as ideal but at the same time placing women and the female body on a pedestal as the ultimate consumer good for mid-1970s businessmen. Time, sex, feeling, love, and companionship are money. Would Marx be pleased?

So, unlike something like The Ranch in which solidarity is stressed, Xaviera allows camaraderie up to a point, but ends up perpetuating an alienated sexuality with a benign, human face. The “happy hooker” mentality was later sentimentalized to greater heights in Pretty Woman (1990), and later given a critical run-through in Ken Russell's vastly different films Crimes of Passion (1984) and Whore (1991, a more direct answer to the Pretty Woman mentality). In sum, The Happy Hooker is one of those weird 1970s relics that neither fulfills its niche (genre, in the canon of Cannon products, as exploitation) nor ventures into the contentious aspects of gender politics, rather playing today as a seemingly palatable, yet ultimately indigestible exercise in perfunctory sexual celebration. Happy indeed.

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