Frank Prince (Jeffrey Niles) isn’t a real “prince”, but he’s rich and has a high-profile job, so that’s close enough to a prince for a half-assed modern fairy tale/nudist movie directed by Doris Wishman. Prince only has eyes for his coworker, the blonde Eve (Joni Roberts), but her twin sister, Sue (also Roberts), a brunette, is secretly in love with him. Her solution? Slap on a blonde wig, pose as Eve, and trick him into going on a date with her.
It’s a miracle that The Prince and the Nature Girl exists. Previously thought lost, a print turned up in Germany, and it looks pretty good, all things considered. Watching a Doris Wishman movie in German with English subtitles adds a layer of weirdness to the proceedings that would’ve been sorely missed had we been watching the original version.
That said, I think it was lost on purpose.
Heavily padded with footage from Wishman’s other nudist movies (most noticeably Blaze Starr Goes Nudist and Gentlemen Prefer Nature Girls), The Prince and the Nature Girl is a poor hatchet-and-patch-it job. I know I’ve been watching all these movies in a single sitting, and there’s a possibility there are starting to run together, but the repeated footage of naked canoeing, volleyball, swimming, seesawing, walks in the rain, checkers, photography, sunbathing, swinging, gardening, popsicle eating, chess, picnicking, basketball, and archery (of course) are definitely not the byproduct of sleep deprivation, déjà vu, or my overactive imagination.
The newly shot scenes of naked orange picking, naked games of horseshoes, naked punching bag practice, and naked wood chopping (which, if you ask me, doesn’t seem like a safe thing to do au natural) aren’t exactly great. Wishman also relies way too much on narration to string everything together (which probably saved a pretty penny when it came to synching the sound). The weird dubbing and the random shots of feet are there to remind you it is indeed, a Wishman joint, and the idea of characters trying to balance work with nudism is thematically in line with other Wishman efforts. However, it just feels like her heart wasn’t in this one.
Even with a skimpy fifty-seven-minute running time, The Prince and the Nature Girl feels much, much longer. The movie really runs out of gas about two-thirds of the way through when we get a random-ass montage of flowers, shrubs, and ducks that is only there to pad things out. I’m all for finding lost movies, but ultimately, this Prince probably deserved to stay in exile.
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