While the rest of the exploitation filmmakers were busy filming grainy loops of women peeling oranges, Sarno was busy being the Ingmar Bergman of 42nd Street. He didn’t just want to show skin; he wanted to show the quiet, desperate rot behind the picket fence.

Moonlighting Wives follows Mrs. Joan Rand (Tammy Latour), a woman who realizes that the American Dream is expensive and her husband’s paycheck isn’t cutting it. She goes from being sexually harassed at a stenographer job to organizing a stable of neighborhood wives into a call-girl ring. But this isn’t a girl power heist movie. It’s a Sarno film, which means everyone is miserable. Even when they’re making money, they’re staring into the middle distance, wondering where their souls went.

Based on an actual scandal that took place in Nassau County, NY, in February of 1964, this finds Joan using everyone in her way and paying for it, because when this was made, the bad had to go to jail. Today, she’d be getting away with it and moving on to an even bigger scandal.

Tammy Latour was a staple of Joe Sarno’s early black-and-white “adults only” dramas. This film was thought lost for decades until a print was famously discovered in an eBay film lot and restored. Latour also appears in Sarno’s Flesh and Lace.

The cast also includes Joe Santos, playing one of the detectives. He went on to become a legendary character actor, most famous as Sgt. Dennis Becker on The Rockford Files. He was actually Joe Sarno’s cousin, which is how he ended up in these early “roughies” like this one and The Panic in Needle Park.

As for the belly dancer, that’s Fatima, who was a real-life professional dancer. Sarno often included “floor show” segments in his films to pad the runtime and add “production value” without needing to record synchronized dialogue.

Gretchen Rudolph, who plays Nancy, is also in everything from Fantasm and My Body Hungers to Bed of Violence and Run Swinger Run!

What makes Moonlighting Wives a cut above the usual is that it actually has something to say about the 1960s domestic trap. It’s about the commodification of the Happy Housewife archetype. Joan isn’t a villain; she’s an entrepreneur in a world that gave her no other outlets.