Just as black Americans saw their culture exploited in cheesy movies, so did nudists become the subject of many low-budget films aimed at titillating the trench coat crowd. The golden era of such “nudexploitation” was in the early 60s, a time when pornography wasn’t so easily obtained. The “nudist” movie genre was championed by the likes of Doris Wishman and Herschell Gordon Lewis.

Wishman wrote and directed such gems as Hideout in the Sun (1960), Diary of a Nudist (1961), and Blaze Starr Goes Nudist (1962). The story lines ranged from a newspaper editor on a hunting trip accidentally stumbling upon a nudist camp (Diary), to bank robbers hiding-out in a nudist colony (Hideout). Nudist Day hasn’t seen any of her films, but reviews give a hint that her movies were actually respectful of naturism. To wit, one armchair critic whined that her movies made nudity boring, depicting naked people doing mundane day-to-day things. That sounds precisely like any given day at a modern nudist club!

Lewis, on the other hand, was better known for cheap horror movies, but was the hand that crafted Daughter of the Sun (1962), a drama about the foibles of a schoolteacher who’s exposed as a nudist, Nature’s Playmates (1962), a nudist detective story (!), and Bell, Bare and Beautiful (1963), about a burlesque star looking for happiness in a nudist environment.

Nudist exploitation movies didn’t actually start as a genre in the 1960’s. In fact, such entertainment was available as far back as the 1930’s, with such classics (!) as The Unashamed (1938), where a woman convinces her workaholic boss to unwind at a nudist camp.

If you want to find-out more about the nudist movie genre, then pick-up a copy of “Cinema Au Naturel: A History of Nudist Film”, a book by Mark Storey, the editor of Nude and Natural magazine. Both the book and dvd’s of the movies we mentioned earlier can be bought at Amazon.com, if you’re so inclined.