Arthur “Weegee” Fellig was a famous photographer in the ‘40s and ‘50s who was known for his sensational pictures. He was able to parlay that notoriety into appearing in a handful of movies like Jules Dassin’s The Naked City. By the early ‘60s he was appearing in nudie-cuties. A few years later, he was headlining this one.
Weegee gets busted for trying to marry a mannequin. At the police station, he tells how he came to be enamored with his companion. He leaves the streets of New York for London to investigate a supposedly haunted house. From there, he heads to Paris where he climbs the Eiffel Tower and peeps into women’s windows using his telephoto lens. Next, he appears on a Danish cooking show before finally setting out to become an artist.
This is a weird fucking movie. I’m not sure who the audience is supposed to be as there’s not enough factual information to make for a biopic of Weegee and not quite enough skin to score as a solid nudie-cutie. The comedy bits (like Weegee’s run-in with a barber who doesn’t speak English) are uniformly unfunny, and the wraparound scenes at the police station are only there to pad out the running time. However, if you enjoy antiquated oddball oddities like this, you might dig it. It’s certainly never boring, and it even manages to be fun in spots.
I guess this movie was ahead of its time. Weegee’s love for his mannequin seems like the blueprint for today’s generation of people who are getting into romantic relationships with sex dolls. Thankfully, we never get to see him consummate the “marriage”.
If the nude scenes weren’t so darn brief, this might’ve skated by with ***. The highlight is a great sequence where an enormously breasted woman shaves her legs in the nude. Too bad moments like this offer more tease than please.
Weegee is definitely an oddball character. With his scrunched-up face, he kind of looks like Popeye (a resemblance that only intensifies during the scene where he’s chewing on a long, skinny pipe). Real pictures taken by Weegee are also used, ranging from crime scene photos to shots of New York street life to celebrity snapshots.
If you’re looking for more movies about Weegee, Joe Pesci played a fictionalized version of him in The Public Eye.
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