DORIS DECEMBER: DIARY OF A NUDIST (1961) **

(Originally posted July 17th, 2007)

A newspaper editor is out hunting one day when he stumbles upon a nudist colony.  Outraged, he sends his cutest reporter to infiltrate the colony to do a smear campaign against them.  When the reporter ends up enjoying being a nudist, he fires her.  Then, he joins the colony himself and falls in love with her (and nudism).  Director Doris Wishman filmed parts of this movie in the same nudist colony she filmed Blaze Starr Goes Nudist.  She crams the screen with buns and boobs and badly dubbed dialogue.  It’s pretty harmless stuff, but endless scenes of naked shuffleboard, volleyball and swimming gets repetitive after a while.  

DIARY OF A NUDIST  (1961)  **

(New review)

If the above review looks really short, it’s because it was originally written for my Video Vacuum fanzine (remember those?) before I ported it over to the old LiveJournal website.  That capsule review gets the job done, but now that I am knee-deep in Doris Wishman movies, I decided to write a new review for Diary of a Nudist instead of just a series of quick bullet points.  If anything, it will help contextualize the picture within her filmography.

The first thing we notice about Diary of a Nudist is that it gets right to the nudism, making it vastly different than the other Doris films so far.  The head of a nudist camp gathers members around and reads “The Nudist Creed”.  Then, the opening titles kick in, accompanied by a song called “Sun Lovers’ Blues”, and like the other title songs in the Doris Wishman repertoire, it is a banger.  Seriously, after the absence of a title song in Gentlemen Prefer Nature Girls, I was a little worried, but this catchy ditty lifted my spirits immensely.  When you have mainlined five Doris Wishman movies back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back in an eight-hour span, you look for any beacon of hope.  

Like Gentlemen Prefer Nature Girls, Diary of a Nudist is pro-nudism propaganda.  (If that opening scene with “The Nudist Creed” wasn’t an obvious tip-off.)  The film hinges on our heroine, a reporter named Stacy (Davee Decker) trying to convince her editor (Norman Casserly) that nudism makes for a healthy and happy lifestyle.  The nudism scenes aren’t bad either.  We get nude flower basket making, nude suntan lotion application, nude swimming, nude sunbathing, nude coffee table discussions, nude shuffleboard, nude volleyball, and nude spraying each other with a garden hose. 

While Wishman stages the set-up in expedient fashion, things quickly get bogged down once Decker arrives at the camp.  The scenes of guests pulling up to the entrance of the camp, getting out of their cars, and futzing with the lock on the gate go on seemingly forever.  The worst form of padding comes late in the game when Casserly sits at his typewriter and writes his big story while wearing tiny shorts.  At seventy-one minutes, the movie is already overlong to begin with.  Had Wishman cut all the needless padding and brought the film to a lean hour running time, it might’ve skated by with ** ½.

Although there are some surprisingly long dialogue scenes (where the dubbing is only slightly off), there are still scenes where we hear people’s thoughts/narration on the soundtrack and telephone conversations where the user strategically places the receiver over their mouth so dialogue can be dubbed in later.  Then again, if we didn’t have these scenes, it wouldn’t be a Doris Wishman movie.  Overall, Diary of a Nudist isn’t Wishman’s best film, but it might be her most competent.  

AKA:  Diary of a Naturist.  AKA:  Diary of a Girl Reporter.  AKA:  Girl Reporter Diary.  AKA:  Nature Camp Confidential.  AKA:  Nature Camp Diary.