Trucks!
I was fourteen the first time I saw Claudia Jennings. My parents and I were staying with my brother's family in Minnesota. A TV set in the basement had some movie channel. Turning it on one afternoon the channel was showing a film I later knew is called The Great Texas Dynamite Chase. Two women on a crime spree with a lot of action and nudity. The woman who stood out for her screen presence and overall loveliness was Claudia Jennings, a former Playboy Playmate of the Year and, more significantly for cinema, a much-loved B movie actress who died at the age of twenty-nine in a car wreck in 1979.
What's come to impress me about Claudia Jennings is her full embrace of a career in the B movie drive-in theater fare genre. I know nothing about her acting ambitions, but a look at her IMDB page reveals someone working continuously in film and television during the eight years after her Playboy gig until her death. She was in episodes of The Streets of San Francisco, Cannon, The Brady Bunch, Barnaby Jones, Ironside; films like The Unholy Rollers, 'Gator Bait, Sisters of Death, Moonshine County Express, Deathsport.
Every film I've seen her in, since that first time when I was fourteen, is a lesser structure around her greater presence, much like so many films starring Pam Grier. Like with Grier, I don't notice the plot when I'm watching Claudia Jennings. It isn't entirely because of Claudia's beauty and lithe, exquisite figure; it's mostly her ability to command the frame with the stillness of her face, gaze, and body positions when she stands. She had complete control of her physis, or nature, an ability with movement on screen, including still poses (as when aiming and firing a gun), that rivals the sublimity of Japanese actors like Toshiro Mifune and Tatsuya Nakadai. Claudia's piloting of a motorized skiff through a bayou at the beginning of 'Gator Bait combines gracefulness with a look of convincing ability, as if she's done this activity all of her life.
As I watched Truck Stop Women from 1974, I had no idea what the fuck was going on with the narrative. It seemed unnecessarily complicated, all of the characters going about their lives, hurting each other, double dealing, stealing, living the trucking life, all played out in widescreen-photographed New Mexico, the soundtrack saturated with shitty country music.
Claudia's mother in the film runs a truck stop that's also a brothel, with an attached chop shop where stolen trucks are brought to be repainted. Claudia's one of the young women who lure truckers to the roadside, braining them with a wrench while they're checking out her body and her apparent car engine trouble. From her first attack, she's obviously vicious. She also hates her mother, rebels and leaves with a slick New Yorker, gets involved in his scheme (which I didn't understand or care about), but I did like his black Lincoln Continental with suicide doors.
As with all films of this period, whatever their quality, I enjoy the backgrounds, the towns, cars, diner signs, product advertisements. Claudia's mother's desk in her office has a Coors beer can with the lid cut off, pencils sticking out above the top, a nice example of what the writer and humorist Jean Shepherd called "Slob Art."
It's a truck movie. The truck montage in the film's middle goes on for too long, but it's interesting and well photographed, showing a large number of trucks and the desert and mountainous landscapes they're traveling across and through. I saw the film on YouTube, which has other Claudia Jennings films, including her roller derby epic, The Unholy Rollers.
Truck Stop Women was directed by Mark L. Lester, who made Bobbie Jo and the Outlaw, Lynda Carter's film debut, soon before she became Wonder Woman. Lynda Carter has never become the actress Claudia Jennings was, though I'm fond of Lynda Carter because her TV show came along at the exact right time for my adolescent heterosexual enjoyment. Still, I don't feel for Lynda Carter what I do for Claudia Jennings. Claudia was a solid performer and real on the screen, natural before the camera. I've loved her since I first saw her on that TV screen in Minnesota in 1978.
Vic Neptune
I was fourteen the first time I saw Claudia Jennings. My parents and I were staying with my brother's family in Minnesota. A TV set in the basement had some movie channel. Turning it on one afternoon the channel was showing a film I later knew is called The Great Texas Dynamite Chase. Two women on a crime spree with a lot of action and nudity. The woman who stood out for her screen presence and overall loveliness was Claudia Jennings, a former Playboy Playmate of the Year and, more significantly for cinema, a much-loved B movie actress who died at the age of twenty-nine in a car wreck in 1979.
What's come to impress me about Claudia Jennings is her full embrace of a career in the B movie drive-in theater fare genre. I know nothing about her acting ambitions, but a look at her IMDB page reveals someone working continuously in film and television during the eight years after her Playboy gig until her death. She was in episodes of The Streets of San Francisco, Cannon, The Brady Bunch, Barnaby Jones, Ironside; films like The Unholy Rollers, 'Gator Bait, Sisters of Death, Moonshine County Express, Deathsport.
Every film I've seen her in, since that first time when I was fourteen, is a lesser structure around her greater presence, much like so many films starring Pam Grier. Like with Grier, I don't notice the plot when I'm watching Claudia Jennings. It isn't entirely because of Claudia's beauty and lithe, exquisite figure; it's mostly her ability to command the frame with the stillness of her face, gaze, and body positions when she stands. She had complete control of her physis, or nature, an ability with movement on screen, including still poses (as when aiming and firing a gun), that rivals the sublimity of Japanese actors like Toshiro Mifune and Tatsuya Nakadai. Claudia's piloting of a motorized skiff through a bayou at the beginning of 'Gator Bait combines gracefulness with a look of convincing ability, as if she's done this activity all of her life.
As I watched Truck Stop Women from 1974, I had no idea what the fuck was going on with the narrative. It seemed unnecessarily complicated, all of the characters going about their lives, hurting each other, double dealing, stealing, living the trucking life, all played out in widescreen-photographed New Mexico, the soundtrack saturated with shitty country music.
Claudia's mother in the film runs a truck stop that's also a brothel, with an attached chop shop where stolen trucks are brought to be repainted. Claudia's one of the young women who lure truckers to the roadside, braining them with a wrench while they're checking out her body and her apparent car engine trouble. From her first attack, she's obviously vicious. She also hates her mother, rebels and leaves with a slick New Yorker, gets involved in his scheme (which I didn't understand or care about), but I did like his black Lincoln Continental with suicide doors.
As with all films of this period, whatever their quality, I enjoy the backgrounds, the towns, cars, diner signs, product advertisements. Claudia's mother's desk in her office has a Coors beer can with the lid cut off, pencils sticking out above the top, a nice example of what the writer and humorist Jean Shepherd called "Slob Art."
It's a truck movie. The truck montage in the film's middle goes on for too long, but it's interesting and well photographed, showing a large number of trucks and the desert and mountainous landscapes they're traveling across and through. I saw the film on YouTube, which has other Claudia Jennings films, including her roller derby epic, The Unholy Rollers.
Truck Stop Women was directed by Mark L. Lester, who made Bobbie Jo and the Outlaw, Lynda Carter's film debut, soon before she became Wonder Woman. Lynda Carter has never become the actress Claudia Jennings was, though I'm fond of Lynda Carter because her TV show came along at the exact right time for my adolescent heterosexual enjoyment. Still, I don't feel for Lynda Carter what I do for Claudia Jennings. Claudia was a solid performer and real on the screen, natural before the camera. I've loved her since I first saw her on that TV screen in Minnesota in 1978.
Vic Neptune
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