[ What’s it about? ] ^ While pondering whether or not to commit suicide, Wee Gee happens across a mannequin being crated for shipment to Europe. Lovestruck, he follows the mannequin across the Atlantic and stumbles into crazy misadventures; the result is a nutty sex-romp.
[ What did you think? ] ^ It’s taken me a week to sift through my thoughts about this film and I really haven’t come to any conclusions. It falls into that category of movies that always keep you guessing as to what the hell is going on at any given moment and leads to a lot of speculation about the motivations and intentions of the filmmakers.
When I heard about this thing, many questions came to mind:
“Could they be talking about Arthur ‘Wee Gee’ Felling, famous crime photographer of the ’40’s and ’50’s; a guy whose work defined the look of the era?”. ^ Yes. ^ “The real Wee Gee?” ^ Yes. ^ “In a ’60’s sex romp?” ^ Yes. ^ “Really?” ^ Yes. ^ “Is ‘imp-probable’ a typo?” ^ “No.” ^ “Can I rent a copy now and when does it need to be back?”
While watching it, you can almost see the filmmaker’s mind working. From what I can figure out, Sherman Price followed Wee Gee around New York, London, and Paris with a non-synch sound camera for a couple of weeks and told him to just “do crazy stuff”. This was cut together into several five minute scenes. In one, we watch a dog eat his french fries while he sleeps. In another, he decides that he wants to be an artist. Lacking an appropriate beard, he tries to buy an “old, discarded” one from a barber. He and the barber get into a shaving cream fight before he finally calls a truce and offers the barber an exploding cigar. Later, he is chased by a police officer during his attempt to steal a mannequin. He takes a break in the chase long enough to point out a girl bathing across the street. He finally escapes from the cop by putting a rag on his head and pretending that he is an old woman. Next, he climbs to the top of the Eiffel Tower and spies on three girls changing their clothes. In the most baffling sequence, he enters a house which is inhabited by a girl in a nightgown who he can’t see. Tired from walking up the stairs, he lies down on a bed and the girl takes off his hat. A cat makes some noise, disturbing Wee Gee and causing him to run out into the street. The girl then throws the hat out the window and it lands on his head. It keeps going like this. In the end, he is arrested for some reason.
In an attempt to force some logic out of this mishmash, a voice over narration was written for Wee Gee. However, Wee Gee doesn’t appear to have any teeth so I assume that his voice wasn’t that pleasant. To compensate, voice-over artist Rueben Guberman was hired to do his voice. The narration is supposed to be Weegee’s confession to a police psychiatrist. He tries to explain how he saw this mannequin at the New York docks, fell in love and ran all over the world in search of it. Unfortunately, none of this has anything to do with the scenes shot or the stock footage of topless burlesque dancers that was added in to pad out the run time.
In a last ditch effort to salvage the material, two brief scenes were shot to bookend the story. A couple of vaudeville comics and three hookers were cast as police officers and witnesses. They try to build a case against Wee Gee and listen to the aforementioned confession. They apparently couldn’t get the real Wee Gee for these scenes and instead use an actor with his face completely bandaged to play his part.
As an interesting sidenote the director, Sherman Price made a documentary in the ’80s called “The Real Wee Gee”. In that, he intersperses montages of Wee Gee photos with scenes from “The Imp-probable Mr. Wee Gee”. Again, I speculate that Price could never sell “The Imp’probable Mr. Wee Gee” and, since he owned the rights, used it to pad out his meager compliation of documentary footage to a full hour.
[ Is it worth checking out? ] ^ This bizarre curiosity is just that — a curiosity. This review should suffice. I wouldn’t waste the time it takes to watch it.
