Prelude To Happiness
Monday night I finally got around to watching a movie that’s been on my shelf for months and months: Prelude To Happiness. Released in 1974, this film is virtually unknown today. It’s an utterly fascinating piece of low-budget 70’s sexploitation disguised as an over-the-top soap opera.
The plot goes like this - Susan, played by Rose Petra, is an aspiring nurse, about to be wed to her fiancee Joe, is mangled in an auto accident, and loses her leg. Joe dumps her, telling her she doesn’t have a leg to stand on if she wants to stay with him (groan). But luckily, her doctor Steve (Gary Davis) has a crush on her, and arranges for her to get hired as a nurse in the hospital where he works. Susan begins to get her footing in life (double groan), you know, achieve some kind of balance (triple groan) - but there’s bound to be complications. Steve is already engaged to a shrill castrating harpie, played by Carol Sowa in a brilliant, blistering performance. Her only interest in marrying Steve is the status she’ll achieve as a doctor’s wife. So now Steve has to choose between the two women, and Susan has to decide whether she can really find it in her heart to accept that she could be happy in life.
In between decisions, Susan enjoys lounging around in a bikini, and the move takes a sort of perverse pleasure in showing an amputee walking around in a bikini or lingerie. Additionally, there are so many shots in this movie where the boom mike not only peaks at the top or bottom of the frame, but almost goes so far into the actors faces that you expect it to smack right into them. You can see this in the trailer above, in a few places, most notably when Susan is delivering the line “No man is going to want me when I’m only half a woman!” Throw in a crazy folk song sung by Susan at a party, and a even crazier dream sequence that rivals the one in Sam Fuller’s The Naked Kiss (where the amputee kid runs around screaming “I got legs! I got legs!) and you’re all set for cinematic gold.