I Watch Films: Strip Tease Murder

 

Strip Tease Murder (1961)

Rita, a stripper at the Flamingo club, is blackmailing the owner Branco, her former lover, about his drug dealing. Tired of this, he hires Perkel, an eccentric and sociopathic electrical engineer who has devised a unique method of killing. He tampers with Rita’s microphone. Rita argues with another dancer, Angelin, and storms out of the club, so they put Diane into her costume and send her out; thinking it’s his target Perkel uses his remote control to kill her.

Bert, Diane’s husband, an alcoholic comic who is supposed to introduce the girls (and entertain the audience only if there’s a delay), is first distraught, and then suspicious. He starts to investigate and realises there’s a lot of strange things going on at the club. His evidence doesn’t convince the police.

Bert recruits help from the dancers in the club, arranges for all the characters to turn up for a special performance and creates what is essentially the classic murder mystery parlour scene. There everything is revealed at last, stripped bare.

Stripped bare? The strippers get down to their pants, sometimes concealing their boobs, sometimes having large tassels on them. There’s a few good bits outside the decidedly mixed dance numbers, Bert giving up drinking after his wife dies, the late night café, the generally downmarket nature of everything, and adding a mad scientist into a film about strippers.

Watch This: Swift crime thriller set in backstreet London sleaze
Don’t Watch This: Tepid stripping awkwardly married to unlikely mystery