---

The title of Russ Meyer’s Vixen! (1968) is not exclusively descriptive. It’s also the Christian name of its protagonist, a woman who parades around her small world so declaratively that the bookending exclamation point feels like a nod to her effect on a room. Vixen is played by Erica Gavin, a 21-year-old with a fetching smile; she’s the wife of a bush pilot and tourist-lodge owner, Tom (Garth Pillsbury), who does his business on a stretch of Canadian wilderness so exceedingly rural that even hiking trails are largely too big an ask for the land’s stewards to pave. There is naturally little for Vixen to do there besides live up to her name, taunting and then seducing horny local men when not fucking her husband seemingly round the clock.

As it is with most of Meyer’s sex comedies, Vixen! either eschews completely or challenges the dynamics one might expect in a movie with its sort of premise. The Vixen character, like most of his heroines, is a sex object. But she’s a sex object distinguished for her hyperawareness of her interest to men and her proficiency at weaponizing it. She never passively caters to a man or woman’s desire; she always has the upper hand, whether in bed or out of it, and only does what she wants. She’s chronically aggressive, even hostile. 

A Meyer heroine feels seven feet tall even when she isn’t — an effect of her being written as indomitable but also of Meyer’s tendency to place the camera at their feet and gaze up, visually admiring her power arguably more than her sexual viability. (Though it would be incorrect to see those things as exclusive from each other from his vantage.) In Meyer’s movies, sex is usually fun, framed often as silly, but he never underestimates the way it can be appropriated as a means for dominance in a patriarchal world.

Harrison Page and Erica Gavin in Vixen!.

Vixen!’s cameras are enamored of its eponymous character. But Meyer subversively complicates the admiration, the title character’s hypersexuality not averse from the unnegotiable wrongs of incest or bigotry. Meyer makes overt the racism regularly lurking in soft and hardcore porn when the woman lead is white and her male partner in a scene, whether prospective or actual, is Black. The norm is racism by fetishization. In Vixen!, that racism is more straightforward, its title character willing to sleep with anybody, even her brother, but not the tiny town’s sole Black man (Harrison Page), who’s living in Canada because he refused to serve in a war supporting a country that willfully does not support him back. 

The film’s screenplay, written by Meyer and Anthony James Ryan, may not probe this narrative thread enough to make it feel fully explored. Still, it’s an interesting, daring move, obliquely critiquing racist white conceptions of Black sexuality while taking that a step further into the attitudes undergirding that point of view.

Meyer’s movies are always a little strange, unaverse to going on tangents like that one that make things feel unbalanced — that ensure that, beyond his distinctive framing of his collection of sex symbols, one is not enjoying his movies the way one would expect to enjoy a movie with his narratives, with the types of heroine he offers. Meyer would come to unhandily lean more into his fetishes the more movies he made. Ideological sharpness only softened. Vixen!, a commercial breakthrough for him, is an ideal nexus point.