The Swinging Cheerleaders (1974) Jack Hill’s sleazy entrée into the high school comedy (Review)

1974’s The Swinging Cheerleaders, reissued on Blu-Ray by Arrow Home Video, has a script credited to Jane Witherspoon and Betty Conklin. In the same year, Conklin was also responsible for the screenplay for Act of Vengeance, a female revenge picture also released under the impeccably well-it-was-the-70s title Rape Squad. Witherspoon simply disappeared. They are the most obscure figures in the pantheon of 1970s drive-in cinema, writers who even the likes of Sleazoid Express or Film Threat have yet to run an interview with. Which isn’t surprising, considering they don’t exist.

In the nineteenth century, authors such as George Eliot and Charlotte Brontë wrote under pseudonyms to forestall the moral denunciations Victorian critics saved up for women’s novels. It might be stretching it to say director Jack Hill and his co-writer David Kidd were driven by similar motivations when they took on the names of Witherspoon and Conklin. Still, The Swinging Cheerleaders is one of a run of 1970s exploitation movies that seemed to recognise that there was an audience for sex-and-violence movies that were also – in the parlance of our times – woke. The films’ heroine is Kate, played by Jo Johnson, a feminist journalist who decides to go undercover as part of her university cheerleading team. The cheerleaders are the most exploited women on campus, she explains, perfect for a consciousness-raising exposé. Then she takes her top off and has sex with her boyfriend.

Hill has earned a little indulgence here. The Swinging Cheerleaders was made late on in his run of groundbreaking B-movies, just in between Foxy Brown and Switchblade Sisters. Those films, like many of his others, are unquestionably pulpy and tasteless and un-PC, and yet they clearly have their hearts in the right place. You could probably put together a fair case against his blaxploitation films for fetishising and othering their characters’ race, and it would never erase the sheer galvanic charge of seeing Pam Grier or Marlene Clark taking charge of the scene and kicking some ass.

The Swinging Cheerleaders doesn’t have a performance that magnetic, and its gender and racial politics are half-hearted when put next to a comparable work like Stephanie Rothman’s The Student Nurses. The central four girls are all fairly dull, with only a brief cameo from a knife-wielding Mae Mercer to remind you that Hill’s female protagonists usually have a bit more fire to them. The probable reason for this is that Hill was trying for comedy with this movie, but that doesn’t really come through. The plot – all bed-hopping and love triangles and an accidentally uncovered corruption scandal – certainly has the shape of a farce, but the jokes and mishaps that should fill that mould never arrive.

Which isn’t to say the film didn’t make me laugh. Hill claims to have finished filming The Swinging Cheerleaders about four months after he and Kidd started the script, and there are some howlers in the dialogue which do attest to a very sharp turnaround. Some of them are simple cliches, like the police officers who do actually say “Well, well, well, what have we here?” Others are more peculiar. In one early scene, Buck, a jock with a heart of gold played by Ron Hajak, is chided by a cheerleader he’s trying it on with, who tells him “You can’t treat women the same way you treat football players on the field!” Given that he was running his hand up and down her thighs just before she said that, you have to wonder how Buck plays football.

Hajak is kind of endearing despite his character’s piggishness, which is the exact opposite of Ross, the film’s other major male character. Played by Ian Sander, he’s a truly vile creation, hiding his manipulative, misogynistic qualities beneath a paper-thin veneer of radical chic. Hill claims that a scene where Ross is beaten up turned out to be the biggest crowd-pleaser in the film, ascribing this to the Nixon-era backlash against hippies. I think Hill and Kidd might have put their finger on something less transient here. Ross is the ultimate “brocialist”, selling his tedious radical paper with a resistible sales pitch of “Read about the corruption in high places!”, yet proving equally corruptible and self-interested when left alone with an attractive woman.

No question, Ross is the film’s most fascinating character. Unfortunately, the film is about the cheerleaders, who remain under-characterised and forgettably played. After an hour in their company the storyline starts to coalesce around an upcoming football match, which is an unwise choice for this film’s finale – one where the central characters are, literally, on the sidelines. If The Swinging Cheerleaders is far from Hill’s best you wouldn’t know it from Arrow’s disc, which includes interviews with Hill and his cinematographer Alfred Taylor, a commentary by Hill, TV spots, and a restoration guaranteed to thrill any fan of 1970s-vintage grainy film stock. The film achieved a strange form of immortality when Randall Dale Adams and Dave Harris went to see it at a drive-in; uncomfortable with the film’s sex scenes, Adams asked Harris if he’d mind leaving early. The rest of what happened that night – complete with an excerpt from The Swinging Cheerleaders – is documented in Errol Morris’s classic “non-fiction noir” The Thin Blue Line.

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