Big Bosoms and Square Jaws: the biography of Russ Meyer Jimmy McDonough Jonathan Cape, 463pp, £17.99 ISBN 0224072501

In 1944, in a French cathouse, Ernest Hemingway picked up the tab for the loss of 22-year-old Russ Meyer's virginity. The memory of that night stayed with Meyer all his life. As Jimmy McDonough points out, the incident is garnished with some of the purplest prose in Meyer's autobiography - a book that is pretty much aubergine from page one. Recalling the moment, Meyer writes of "a new-found tingling", "the emptying of sacks" and "a logjam burst asunder". But what really stays with you is Meyer's description of the whorehouse itself - all candles and shadows and half-draped hookers: "Fifteen girls, their children, a woman with a bun sitting in the back. It was like something out of de Maupassant."

Huh? The director of Mondo Topless and Pandora Peaks had read Fort comme la mort? The film-maker who worked out that the sound of a leg of lamb being slapped could stand in for that of a bare breast cuffing a face knew his French naturalists? You're darn tootin'. Pornographers tend to be pinheads, but Russ Meyer was a cut above. He might have had bristols on the brain, but there is no denying that he possessed a brain to have them on.

For one thing, Meyer's mind was plainly linked to his wonderful eye. His camera, like Orson Welles's, was always in the right place. Meyer was one of the movies' most instinctive image-makers, and his looming, low-angled compositions are instantly recognisable. Certainly they were instantly recognised. As early as 1937, when Meyer was only 15, he was winning prizes in amateur film-making competitions. When the Second World War came along he was assigned to the 166th Signal Photographic Corps, for which he shot newsreel footage of Patton's Third Army on duty in Germany and France.

Once back home in California he made industrial pictures for Standard Oil and tried to break into Hollywood, though the big studios had no time for his raunchy vision. Nor did his first wife, Betty Valdovinos, a practical-minded woman who, according to Meyer's lifelong pal Jim Ryan, "thought Russ should go to work every day and carry a lunchbox". She almost got her wish. Not long after she and Meyer split - he ran off with a model who described herself as a "freak with a 40-inch bosom" and called herself Tempest Storm - Meyer was working every day, snapping centrefolds for Hugh Hefner's newly launched Playboy. Alas for Betty, he wasn't carrying his lunchbox so much as constraining it. Fearful of shooting off more than just reels of film, Meyer, McDonough solemnly informs us, took to wearing a "sturdy jockstrap" while at work.

But the dream of making movies never left Meyer's head and in 1950 he was fortunate enough to meet Pete DeCenzie, a strip-joint entrepreneur who wanted to get into the picture business, too. Their first (and only) feature film together was The Immoral Mr Teas, "a ribald classic in revealing Eastman Color", as the poster had it, that took more than $1m at the box office. Not bad for five days' work and an upfront investment of $76,000. Meyer used his share of the profits to finance a string of low-budget drive-in flicks with titles such as Mudhoney, Motorpsycho and Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, which became more bizarre, violent and cartoonish as the 1960s wore on.

"All you need to make a movie," Jean-Luc Godard once said, "is a girl and a gun." Meyer would have concurred, so long as the girl in question had gazungas the size of grapefruit. But he was less sure whether such limited iconography was enough to make a reputation, so much so, that he admitted to fearing that his obsession had screwed his chances of being taken for an artist. "I probably could've been a great film-maker," he once lamented, "if I wasn't so into tits."

McDonough tells Meyer's story well enough in this rather too long book. He seems to have interviewed pretty much everyone alive who was involved with Meyer, and coaxed from them a thoroughgoing account of what it was like to work with him. What his life consisted in when away from the set, however, McDonough leaves largely undiscussed. Like Meyer before him, he never really gets beneath the surface of things.

Because Meyer's knockers didn't just knock him for knockers. His obsession with what he called "cantilevered overhang" was a perfect metonym for his overall aesthetic limitations. Appearances - camera angles, compositions, cuts - were all that mattered to him. He had no time for that most essential of director's tasks: getting the best out of his actors. Asked whether he rated any of the performers he had worked with, Meyer said he'd never thought about it, because he would always "rather have a big-chested stiff who can hardly pronounce her name". A notoriously selfish lover - "hug, kiss, touch and put it in" - Meyer lacked the interest in other people so necessary to the narrative artist. Hence the mindless speed with which his pictures zip along. Slower, pussycat, you keep wanting to say to this raciest of film-makers. Chill! Chill!

Christopher Bray's Michael Caine: a class act will be published this October by Faber & Faber

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