In Hideout in the Sun, two criminals on the lam after a bank robbery decide to lay low until they can safely slip out of town. This being a Doris Wishman film (her first, from 1960 and feared lost until just recently), they soon find themselves in a nudist colony. You have to admire a film that not only dares to invent a plot like this, but plays it straight to boot.
Wishman got her start making these type of "nudie cuties" before moving on to more explicitly trashy fare. This film is actually more coherent and professional-looking than much of her later work, but what's more surprising is how tame it is. In fact, Hideout is so tame it's, well, shocking. To slip past local censorship regulations, nudist camp films bent over backwards to accentuate the clean-cut, virtuous character of the 'naturist' lifestyle, inevitably resorting to long scenes of depressingly average denizens engaging in healthy, vigorous exercise (swimming and, I'm sorry to say, volleyball are popular choices). The great bulk of this movie consists of such scenes, which work so hard to be innocuous that they scrub every little bit of prurience right out of the frame; this was a terrible pyrrhic victory for yesterday's would-be masturbators. But their loss is our gain, for, if Hideout fails as pornography, it now excels as history, a snapshot of a time that may have been less overtly sleazy than our own, but was every bit as dirty-minded. — Dan Erdman
DVD EXTRAS: Retro-Seduction Cinema's excellent package gives us two versions of the films on two discs (one in matted widescreen, one in the original 4:3 ratio), very interesting and knowledgeable commentary by Wishman scholar Michael J. Bowen, and vintage advertising and trailers for other of the era's most sordid and disreputable cinematic evergreens.