Scholar says '60s avant-garde Western seeded Las Cruces movie industry

LAS CRUCES — One of the strangest Western movies I’ve ever seen held its premiere not in Hollywood but in downtown Las Cruces, 60 years ago on Nov. 3.

Last week, it returned to the big screen at the Rio Grande Theatre, where I sat with a tub of popcorn and a cold beer amid a crowd of over 75 people — including Teddy Gregory, one of the movie’s two surviving cast members and its cinematographer.

“The Devil’s Mistress,” written and directed on a shoestring budget by New Mexico State University English professor Orville Wanzer, played on 4,000 screens nationwide in 1966, proving that a feature made outside the Hollywood studio system could earn wide release.

Shortly thereafter, the movie disappeared for 50 years until it was discovered in a local archive by filmmaker and scholar Julia Smith near the end of 2018 — shortly before Wanzer’s death, at age 88, the following year. Reportedly, a 16mm print was discovered in a rusty film can beneath the director’s bed.

Smith holds “The Devil’s Mistress” as a pioneering work in the Acid western genre, describing Wanzer’s film as “one part B-movie, one part exploitation film, one part European cinema, wrapped up in a hybrid genre between western and horror — and perhaps the first rape-revenge film to ever feature a woman taking her own revenge.”

Smith is producing a documentary, “Birth of the Acid Western,” highlighting Wanzer’s movie as an early influence on the dark, sometimes hallucinatory westerns of the latter 20th century, as well as the first independent feature film produced in Las Cruces. She is promoting the project, and raising funds for its completion, online at AcidWesternDoc.com.

At last week’s screening, Smith suggested it was “The Devil’s Mistress” that drew the producers of “Hang ‘Em High,” the 1968 drama starring Clint Eastwood, to film in the Mesilla Valley.

The “Acid western” label, attributed to critic Pauline Kael when she used it to describe Alejandro Jodorowski’s controversial “El Topo” (1970) in the New Yorker, applies to western films with one foot in avant-garde cinema, where landscapes, relationships and lonely frontier settlements are portrayed in morally ambiguous, emotionally grim or mystical scenes often pointing toward death.

Smith describes it as a collision between conventional Westerns and counterculture.

Like the Spaghetti westerns that rose to prominence in the 1960s, Acid westerns represent a sensibility that departed from older Westerns’ fantasies of American frontier justice, individual grit and distinct heroes and villains — along with their portrayals of Native Americans as uncivilized and menacing.

Acid westerns are distinct in their willingness to depart from realism altogether and reflect psychic landscapes: They are dreams, often nightmares.

“The Devil’s Mistress” is also a gloomy yet sometimes goofy horror flick involving a mysterious old man who appears to be the Devil (Arthur Resley) and a beautiful, completely mute woman (Joan Stapleton) living with him in a remote stone cabin that will be familiar to area hikers.

The opening credits play over a grim, dusty desert landscape with the Organ Mountains in the background as four bandits on the run make their way through creosote, rocky hillsides and parched trees, running low on food and whiskey.

A campfire conversation reveals that their moral fiber ranges from amoral to depraved, displaying naked racism toward Apaches and disgusting views of women. The worst of these miscreants frequently giggles like a hyena converging on its prey.

Memorable moments include the most excessive eating scene in a movie since the lascivious chicken dinner in “Tom Jones” (1963). The slow-moving rape scene draws heavily on Hitchcockian suggestion, showing little yet sufficiently disturbing that a young man seated next to me gasped, fled the cinema and did not return — in 2025.

The bandits come to unpleasant ends at the hands of the mysterious woman they have kidnapped, who can talk to animals and appears to be a succubus. The climax is surprisingly gory for its time and ends in an occult ritual.

If there is any clear moral to this story, it is to think twice about accepting dinner invitations from strange hermits with baritone voices and fake beards: Possibly Satan, one star, do not recommend.

“As a filmmaker and an educator, I’m drawn to stories, objects and people that don’t fit in, the ones that exist on the edges of art and history,” Smith said during a lecture at the 10x25 Creativity Conference last month at Doña Ana Community College. “I believe it is those edges where hidden futures can begin to be perceived.”

She holds up Wanzer, a Brooklyn transplant to Las Cruces hired onto NMSU’s English department in 1959, as a local film pioneer, writing and producing movies locally with students and friends decades before there was serious talk of Las Cruces as a film industry center.

Today, southern New Mexico provides not only scenic backdrops for feature films, music videos and television productions, but local production crews and performers.

Ross Marks, a professor at NMSU’s Creative Media Institute, regularly involves students in the production of short- and feature-length films that have played on screens all over the world. In 2018, Eastwood returned to Las Cruces – 50 years after filming “Hang ‘Em High” – to film scenes for “The Mule.” California-based 828 Productions is now headquartered in Las Cruces. Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham attended the groundbreaking for a state-funded professional soundstage in September.

And last week, Film Las Cruces – a nonprofit serving as the city’s film office – celebrated its 10th anniversary.

Smith regards Wanzer not only as a founding father of the Acid western, but a trailblazing figure for Las Cruces’ future movie industry.

Intriguingly, Wanzer taught at NMSU at the same time as the late Mark Medoff, the Tony-winning playwright, Oscar-nominated screenwriter and filmmaker who co-founded the university’s Creative Media Institute. Marks, who is also Medoff’s son-in-law, said the two men were never close. Medoff passed away at age 79 in 2019, just two months after Wanzer.

Yet Smith contends it was Wanzer who proved that home-grown feature films showcasing southern New Mexico’s landscape could hold their own with productions forged in Hollywood.

“He saw Las Cruces as a place where we have such beautiful scenery, we have such talented people and artists and we have this university. He really created a film culture and a film movement,” Smith said.