Review of Cherry, Harry & Raquel! (1969) by Donald W — 13 Dec 2014

This movie is not one of Russ Meyer's typical sex farces. Even though the title implies a threesome, there is never a threesome in the entire movie. He's trying to make a serious crime story with a lot of naked women.

He's also trying to make some kind of political statement. Before the story starts there is a written script about Russ Meyer's opinion on censorship. Ironically at the time he was talking about right wing religious zealots.

Today when you read it, it sounds like he's talking about left wing radicals. Meyer's loved to use voice over narrators to set up the story and to state the moral of the story at the end. He starts off with a criticism of marijuana and the open boarder between the U.

S.A. and Mexico. After all these years and nothing has changed in the Arizona desert. The Harry character is a deputy sheriff in Arizona who has been smuggling marijuana across the boarder. His corrupt politician boss tells him that his Apache Indian partner has gone into business for himself and wants him killed.

The rest of the movie is Harry and the Apache hunting each other in the desert with random sexual encounters with Cherry and Raquel that have nothing to do with the story. And to stretch the movie he throws in subliminal scenes of naked women that each last about a second or two and again have nothing to do with the story.

At the end of the story the narrator blames the demise of all the dead characters on the evils of greed and marijuana. Then the final scene revels that the whole story is a fiction story written by one of the female characters and Harry and the Apache are based on her boyfriend and brother.

The acting is all overdramatic and the music is cheesy.