In this Depression-era tale, Calef McKinney (John Furlong) is traveling from Michigan to California and stops in Spooner, Missouri, where Lute Wade (Stuart Lancaster) hires him for odd jobs.
McKinney gets involved with Wade's niece, Hannah Brenshaw (Antoinette Cristiani). But she is married to Sidney (Hal Hopper), a wife-beating drunk who hopes to inherit his uncle-in-law's money.
Sidney and an eccentric preacher named Brother Hanson (Frank Bolger) plot against McKinney, who finds it difficult to conceal his mysterious past and his growing affection for Sidney's wife.
Sidney winds up burning his farm and attempting to frame McKinney. He rapes and murders the preacher's wife and is killed by the lynch mob.
The film was based on a novel, Streets Paved with Gold by Friday Locke.[4][failed verification]
Reception
Box Office
The film was a financial failure. Meyer later said, "I made a gamble with Mudhoney and I failed. The only reason I made Mudhoney was I was in love with a girl named Rena. I should have not made the film."[5]
Critical
The Los Angeles Times called it "the perfect dirty picture. Unspoiled by either undue sadism or outright nudity... a flawless piece of unintentional camp."[6]
Roger Ebert called the film "Meyer's neglected masterpiece: his most interesting, most ambitious, most complex and longest independent production. He describes it as a case of over-achievement; it was not necessary, or perhaps even wise, he believes, to expend so much energy on a movie that had so little directly exploitable elements."[7] Ebert said "Meyer's visual invention, always dramatic and energetic, has never been better than in this one. From the Hitchcockian opening (bare feet seen in a closeup on intersecting passages) to such Grand Guignol shots as a body falling into a grave from the grave's P. O. V., this is a melodrama taken to obsessed extremes."[8]
