Satan in High Heels (Vega Productions, Cosmic Films, Inc., 1962)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Friday, May 9) my husband Charles and I watched a weird movie from 1962 that I hadn’t heard of before until I got a copy of a two-CD compilation of five 1950’s LP’s by guitarist Mundell Lowe. Actually only four of the five albums actually featured Lowe on guitar; the fifth was his film score for an exploitation movie called Satan in High Heels, directed by Jerald Intrator (which sounds more like a job title in the government of ancient Rome than a modern-day last name) from a script by Harold Bonnett and John T. Chapman. I was interested enough in the music to seek out the film on YouTube, and last night Charles and I watched it with (blessedly) only one commercial interruption instead of the multiple ones we got during Counterspy Meets Scotland Yard. As you might guess from the title, Satan in High Heels is a story about a femme fatale, Stacey Kane (Meg Myles, true name Billie Jean Jones), who when the movie begins is working as a burlesque performer in a carnival somewhere in the Midwest. She’s legally married to Rudy (Earl Hammond), but he’s become addicted to heroin in the backstory. (Actually it’s the Wikipedia page on the film that mentions heroin; the script itself doesn’t say what drug he’s addicted to, but it’s not hard to guess from the way we see him “jonesing” later in the film after he’s relapsed.) When we meet him he’s just got through rehab and he’s received $900 from a magazine for an article about his experiences. But, acting like the paramours of Bessie Smith in St. Louis Blues (1929) and Billie Holiday in Symphony in Black (1935), Stacey steals her husband’s bankroll and uses it to go to New York City. On the flight to New York she’s openly cruised by a much older man, businessman Arnold Kenyon (Mike Keene), and by the time the plane lands she’s agreed to become his mistress in exchange for a place to live in his apartment and a job at a nightclub called Pepe’s.

Pepe’s is run by its namesake, a hard-edged woman named Pepe (Grayson Hall) who’s described in the Wikipedla page as a Lesbian, though that isn’t at all clear in the actual movie. She does have a really butch character, though, and I suspect that the producers of Satan in High Heels, Leonard Burton (who apparently also published fetish magazines like Exotique, High Heels, Bizarre Life, Unique World, and Corporal) and Ben Himmel, were trying to get their movie out in front of the major-studio (Columbia) release of a similarly sordid story, Walk on the Wild Side (also 1962), which featured Barbara Stanwyck as a Lesbian madam (though once again it was only hinted at, notably in her fierce possessiveness towards her “girls”). Meg Myles isn’t much of an actress (though she had a surprisingly long career, including playing supporting roles in the TV soap operas The Edge of Night, All My Children, Search for Tomorrow, Where My Heart Is, and The Doctors), but the moment she opens her mouth and sings “You Walked Out of My Life” during her audition at Pepe’s, it becomes clear what her real talent was. Sure, she broke into both singing and acting after a successful career as a model (according to her Wikipedia page, her measurements were 42-24-36, though oddly costume designers Milton C. Herman and Samuel Robert have her wear tight-fitting bras under her stunning leather outfits and don’t offer her a chance to show off her décolletage), but she recorded at least three LP’s, including one backed by jazz pianist Jimmy Rowles (who also recorded with Billie Holiday and Carmen McRae) and a live album for Mercury called At the Living Room.

To take her into his life Arnold Kenyon has to break up with his previous mistress, Felice (Nolia Chapman, who surprisingly has no other credits on her imdb.com page even though she turns in the best performance in the film despite being in only two scenes; her pathos as she realizes she’s being dumped is unforgettable). Alas, Arnold has competition for Stacey’s rather dubious charms in the person of his own son Lawrence (Robert Yuro), a typical spoiled rich kid who’s smitten with his dad’s new plaything from the get-go and is determined to use his Corvette sports car (a present from Daddy which Daddy tries to get back) to seduce her. (In case you’re wondering where Lawrence’s mother is in all this, Arnold has packed her off for an extended vacation in Europe that could last years so she doesn’t interfere with his extra-relational activity.) While all this romantic byplay is going on, Pepe is supposedly rehearsing a new show at her club which is going to open in two days, and with all Stacey’s gallivanting Pepe is understandably worried about whether she’ll be in shape to perform. So she recruits another singer, the British-born Sabrina (playing herself), to bolster the program and take over from Stacey should she bomb out and be unable to perform. (The credits billed her as “Introducing … SABRINA,” even though she’d been in three previous feature films and two TV shows.) Sabrina was born in 1936 (making her a decade younger than Marilyn Monroe and two years younger than Meg Myles) and, like Myles, she gets to sing two songs in this film. Unfortunately, one has to be heard under the dialogue and the other, “What Have You Done for Me Lately?,” is a blatant knockoff of Monroe’s classic “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. It also doesn’t help that Sabrina has none of Myles’s talent for phrasing (nowhere near the level of Billie Holiday’s or Patsy Cline’s, but enough to give Myles’s vocals some real interest and musicality) and sings in a bland, cooing voice that’s a pale imitation of Monroe’s.

Matters proceed in this rather strained fashion, with Arnold spying on his son and his girlfriend from the big picture window of his apartment, until a diabolus ex machina enters the picture in the form of Stacey’s ex, Rudy (ya remember Rudy?). It’s no surprise at all that the shock of Stacey both leaving him and ripping him off led Rudy to go back to using heroin, and Rudy attacks Stacey with a knife, intending not to kill her but just to cut her up so badly she’ll no longer be attractive and she won’t be able to keep using and sexually exploiting other men. Only Rudy is jonesing so badly he literally can’t hold on to the knife, and Stacey grabs it from him and either accidentally or intentionally kills him. Then she leaves the body behind for Arnold and Lawrence Kenyon to deal with and walks off into the New York night, presumably to pick up another round of gullible male victims and ruin their lives, too. The main problem with Satan In High Heels is that it’s dull; we get one brief nude scene of Stacey while she’s skinny-dipping with Lawrence at his dad’s country estate, but a) the camera is miles away from her and b) we only get to see a glimpse of her naked back: no “naughty bits.” It reminded me of the similar exploitation films from the 1930’s that seemed aimed at warning people away from the demi-monde by making the demi-monde look too boring to be worth bothering with. And that isn’t just my 2025 opinion, either: the New York Times had a similar reaction when Satan in High Heels was new. “Nobody is likely to be corrupted by Satan in High Heels,” the Times reviewer wrote. “Yesterday's new film entry at the Forum demonstrates once again that vice can be dull. From the first glimpse of Meg Myles as a bumptious carnival entertainer wearing tights to bait the breaths of ogling males, it is clear that she is up to no good. ... If this sort of gutter drama were to be made effective, the title role would require, at the very least, a Brigitte Bardot. Miss Myles, alas, is not the type. Singing a couple of songs with sophisticated professionalism, she seems indisputably feminine but insufficiently fatale. Since this deprives the chronicle of its point, the filmmakers’ objective emerges as nothing more than slick sensationalism.”

There are some surprisingly effective noir-style shots from director Intrator and cinematographer Bernard Hirschensohn, along with two excellent performances: from Nolia Chapman as Felice and 1960’s sub-“B” movie stalwart Del Tenney as Paul, Pepe’s piano player and a pretty obviously drawn Gay stereotype which Tenney manages to fill out and make believable. Also, Mundell Lowe’s music (released as a soundtrack album on the Charlie Parker Records label, an enterprise founded by Doris Sydnor, Parker’s third wife and legal heir, with a business partner to release Parker’s and Lester Young’s old tapes and make new recordings, many of which featured people who’d played with Parker and/or performed his music) is quite exciting and dynamic, though the album suffers from Lowe’s choice not to play on it (the guitarist is Barry Galbraith), and it doesn’t include either of Meg Myles’s songs from the film. (Perhaps conflicting record contracts prevented her from being on the album.) But I wouldn’t say Satan in High Heels is a bad movie with a potentially good movie in it trying to get out: it’s just a mediocre piece of cinematic flotsam whose level of sinning probably wasn’t all that shocking in 1962 and certainly isn’t now!