NM cult classic ‘The Devil’s Mistress’ screens in Santa Fe

“The Devil’s Mistress” (1965) by Orville “Buddy” Wanzer was the first indie film shot in New Mexico, as well as the first-ever film in the “acid Western” genre, according to filmmaker and scholar Julia Smith.

On Friday, May 2, Smith will screen “The Devil’s Mistress” at the Jean Cocteau Cinema in Santa Fe. She will introduce the film and show a trailer for her in-progress documentary, “Birth of the Acid Western,” which explores Wanzer’s legacy. Actor Robert “Teddy” Gregory, the last surviving cowboy in the film, will also be on hand to answer questions.

“This screening is a rare opportunity to experience a forgotten piece of New Mexico film history,” Smith said. “Orville Wanzer’s ‘The Devil’s Mistress’ is not just a lost cult film — it represents the birth of an independent regional filmmaking movement that challenged Hollywood’s dominance.”

Smith first stumbled across “The Devil’s Mistress” in a forgotten archive, along with a trove of other materials by Wanzer and his students, while teaching film studies courses at New Mexico State University in 2019. Wanzer himself had taught at NMSU beginning in 1959 and inspired generations of film students.

When Smith learned that Wanzer was still alive but receiving end-of-life hospice care, she visited him at his home and recorded a series of candid conversations, which set her on the path toward making a documentary about him.

“My documentary, ‘Birth of the Acid Western,’ builds on his legacy by tracing the genre’s evolution and cultural impact, and its cultural significance in being made in New Mexico,” Smith said.

Despite the name, “acid Westerns” do not always depict drug experiences. Smith said it may be more useful to think of “acid,” in this case, not as LSD but as something sharp and biting, like “acid criticism,” since acid Westerns tend to take a dim view of humanity while skewering genre tropes.

“When I saw ‘The Devil’s Mistress’ for the first time, I was struck by how much it was not like a conventional Western,” Smith said. “The cowboys do not fit the conventional type of cowboy, and the film does not follow genre conventions.”

Smith believed that the film’s dark, existential themes and surrealist imagery placed it squarely in the acid Western category, although most film historians cite Monte Hellman’s “The Shooting” (1966) as the first acid Western, and Alejandro Jodorowsky’s mind-bending “El Topo” (1970) as the culmination of the form.

Smith, who lives and works in Las Cruces, was excited by the prospect that the first acid Western may have, in fact, been a homegrown phenomenon, birthed in Southern New Mexico.

As she dug more deeply into Wanzer’s life story, Smith learned that he had consciously worked to create a regional cinematic ecosystem where people could make films that were more personal — and much weirder — than anything coming out of Hollywood.

“He saw his film production company as a revolution against the Hollywood machine,” Smith said.

At the same time, because Wanzer did want his work to be seen by as many people as possible, he ended up signing with a Hollywood distributor, who changed the title of the film from “Bruja (Witch)” to “The Devil’s Mistress” and marketed it with a lurid movie poster similar to those used for other exploitation films of the era.

“In true exploitation form, the title and the poster don’t really match what the movie is like,” Smith said.

The film is less action-driven than the poster indicates, and rather more brooding. Early reviews were mixed.

Sally Sparlin’s 1965 review for The Alamogordo Daily News called it “a disturbing tale of witchcraft, evil and revenge,” praising the “haunting” score by Billy Allen and Doug Warren, while faulting the production’s “technical limitations.”

Sparlin also compared Wanzer’s narrative style to Ingmar Bergman’s, although she didn’t quite intend that as a compliment, noting that the film is “probably too rich in allegory and symbolism for the average movie-goer’s fare.”

Like Bergman’s “The Seventh Seal” (1957), “The Devil’s Mistress” begins with a portentous Biblical quote, and Wanzer’s stoic, black-robed devil recalls the death character from Bergman’s film. Sparlin writes of Arthur Resley, who plays Wanzer’s devil, “His performance exudes the aura of inevitability and calm of The Evil One as compared to the humanistic whimperings and frettings of his evil-but-human killers.”

Smith said she was pleasantly surprised to learn that Alamogordo, whose present population is less than 32,000, had a film critic in the 1960s who was even familiar enough with European art cinema to compare Wanzer to Bergman — whether or not the comparison was flattering. “It’s kind of amazing,” she said.

Wanzer’s dream of making Las Cruces a global indie filmmaking capital that could compete toe-to-toe with Hollywood never quite panned out. In fact, he never even made his second feature-length film — another acid Western called “Dust” — although Smith said she did find the script for it and would love to see it get made someday.

In the meantime, Smith just wants more people to know who Wanzer is, and she hopes emerging and would-be filmmakers in New Mexico today will feel inspired to take up his gauntlet.

NM cult classic ‘The Devil’s Mistress’ screens in Santa Fe

Logan Royce Beitmen is an arts writer for the Albuquerque Journal. He covers music, visual arts, books and more. You can reach him at lbeitmen@abqjournal.com.