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There's Eisenstein, Hitchcock, Scorsese, and then there's Russ Meyer. Oh, he's in a completely different category, you say? Well, sure, but that doesn't keep Jimmy McDonough from making the comparisons to those other directors in his book _Big Bosoms and Square Jaws: The Biography of Russ Meyer, King of the Sex Film_ (Crown). This is a thoroughly entertaining look at an influential director who possibly more than any other moviemaker did things his own way. His own way: the title of the book says it all, and note that "square jaws" comes in a distinct second. Meyer liked breasts, he liked big ones, and bigger ones, and when silicone came in, he liked monstrous ones, as McDonough says, "huge, unbelievable, sometimes scary appendages... female superstructures that defied reality." That wasn't all there was to it; McDonough admires much else in Meyer's filmmaking. Sure, he was the one to bring sex into the forefront of movies, but he was keen on photography and editing, and Quentin Tarantino, Tim Burton, and John Waters claim him as an influence. He has had serious retrospectives at, say, the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He was a severely limited personality and lover, and he put those limitations on the screen, an extraordinarily personal self-portrait. And he had a damned good time, even if those working with him couldn't stand it.

Meyer was born in 1922. He didn't get further in movies than becoming a theater usher before joining the Army, where he shot newsreels in the 166th Signal Photographic Company. He documented the advances of Generals Bradley and Patton, and it was the most important experience of his life. His Army buddies became his family, and often appeared or helped in his movies. When he eventually started making movies, he had an aggressive style which one assistant said was "...like being in the first wave landing in Normandy during World War II, crossed with a weekend in a whorehouse." After the war, Meyer took his photographic skills to the men's magazines of the time, taking pictures of women that exaggerated their curves. He made industrial films, learning the basics of cinema.. His first fully entertainment film was _The Immoral Mr. Teas_ in 1959, about a Mittyesque bumbler who had the inner life of imagining the females around him naked. This quaint storyline allowed Meyer to put in all the shots he wanted of busty women naked from the waste up. It seems rather old-fashioned now, but the San Diego police confiscated it 20 minutes into its first screening. Later, Meyer would make films with dialogue and action. McDonough admires the films, and goes into detail on the making of each one. Meyer put his breast obsession into them, of course, but he did not make the sort of X-rated movies like _Deep Throat_. He didn't like regular porn as we have come to know it; he sniffed, "There's a difference. I spend 14 months making a film. Not 30 minutes in a motel room." Part of the reason he didn't like such films is that he didn't like the activities they depicted. He regarded anything other than missionary-position sex as some sort of perversion, and perversion was, he said, "un-American." His many wives and lovers confirm that he was no good at foreplay or other such niceties; in his own words he just wanted to get in there and "wail away at it." He did not have a great need to ensure satisfaction in his partners, but he engaged in no perversions - he saved that for his movies.

However women feel about Meyer's depiction of them, men can't feel any better about their roles, "mere wisps of beings that are about as vague as Meyer's father." Meyer thought that men were "lunch-pail-carrying saps." Woe to the husbands in his movies: "I feel that it's important to really give that husband a bad, bad time," he said, and in one movie after another the husbands are weak, ineffectual, and cuckolded. It is thus especially sad that Meyer spent his lonely last years handled by a female caretaker as he slipped further into dementia, dying only last year. McDonough is surprisingly tender about this descent in a book that is sometimes just as crude and vivacious as Meyer's movies, with a slangy prose that sometimes sounds the way Meyer would talk ("Everything about this shot is perfecto.") The book is big, stuffed with material from Meyer's own thousand-page autobiography and with interviews of those who worked with him, especially his actresses. Meyer may not be everyone's idea of a genius, but he made millions on thirty films, only two of which were within the studio system, and he produced, directed, photographed, and edited every one of them. He took his obsession and made some sort of art out of it, art that millions are still enjoying. McDonough's affectionate and thorough biography is a brilliant portrait of an American original.