VOLUME 09 - NUMBER 01 JANUARY-FEBRUARY 1973

WR - MYSTERIES OF THE ORGANISM Z TRASH THE GARDEN OF THE FINZI-CONTINIS WEDNESDAV'S CHILD A SENSE OF LOSS i~~m~ f~?~~?5~6~~~5!~~n ~~~New~!~~~~~ ~Now available 421-5555

STAFF VOLUME 9 NUMBER 1 editor JANUARY-FEBRUARY 1973 RICHARD CORLISS CONTENTS book editor / assistant editor MELINDA WARD CINEMA SEX : from THE KISS to DEEP THROAT graphic design by Richard Corliss MARTHA LEHTOLA page 4 BLUE NOTES managing editor by Brendan Gill AUSTIN LAMONT page 6 SEX AND SEXISM advertising manager IN THE ERODUCTION NAOMI WEISS by Donald Richie page 12 correspondents RADLEY METZGER: London RICHARD ROUD aristocrat of the erotic Los Angeles STEPHEN FARBER interviewed by Richard Corliss Paris JONATHAN ROSENBAUM page 18 CENSORSHIP IN LONDON assistants by Verina Glaessner research MARY CORLISS page 30 CENSORSHIP IN CALIFORNIA design LINDA MANCINI by Stephen Farber design GRETCHEN ACKERMAN page 32 RUSS MEYER: production SAYRE MAXFIELD the king of the nudies subscriptions MARY WESTROPP by Roger Ebert page 34 authors liason RUSS MEYER: PETER BRODERICK , STUART BYRON sex, violence and drugs- STEPHEN FARBER , MOSES SHAPIRO all in good fun interviewed by Stan Berkowitz editorial board page 46 JOSEPH L. ANDERSON , Director AN EVENING WITH MEYER AND MASOCH Film Program , Ohio University aspects of VIXEN and VENUS IN FURS JAMES A. BEVERIDGE, Director by Raymond Durgnat Progra mme in Film , York University page 52 HOWARD SUBER , Chairman, Critical Studies BOOKS Motion Picture / Television Division , UCLA reviewed by Jonathan Rosenbaum , Noel Carroll, Paul S, Arthur, WILLARD VAN DYKE, Director Lewis Jacobs, Phoebe Cohen Department of Film , Museum of Modern Art page 64 LETTERS Th e opinions expressed in FILM COMMENT page 70 are those of the individual authors and do not BACK PAGE page 72 necessari ly represent the opinions of the editor, staff or publisher. on the cover: Russ Meyer FILM COMM ENT , January-February 1973. at work, Volume 9 number 1, published bimonthly photo: Fling Magazine by Film Comment Publishing Corporation, 42 Dustin Street , Boston MA 02135 USA. Second class postage paid at Boston, Massachusetts. Copyrigh t<'l 1973 by Film Comment Publishing Corporation . All rights reserved . This publication is fully protected by domestic and international copyright. tt is forbidden to duplicate any part of th is publication in any way without prior written permission from the publishers. Subscription rates in the United States: $9 for six numbers , $17 for twelve numbers. Elsewhere: $10.50 for six numbers , $20.00 for twelve numbers, paya ble in US funds only . New subscribers please include your occupation and zip code. Subscription and back issue correspondence: FILM COMM ENT box 686 Village Station , Brookl ine MA 02147 USA. Editorial correspondence: FILM COMM ENT 214 East 11th Street , New York NY 10003 USA. Microfilm editions available from University Microfilms, Ann Arbor MI 48106. Printed in USA by Printing Division, AVCO Corporation . Distributed in the USA by Eastern News Company, 155 West 15th Street , New York NY 10011 . International distribution by Wo rld wide Media Service, 386 Park Avenue South, New York NY 10016 USA. Distributed in Great Britain by Moore-Harness Company, London . FILM COMMENT participates in the FIAF period ical indexing plan . Library of Congress card number 76-498.

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From \"The Kiss\" to \"Deep Throat\" by Richard Corliss For almost forty years, the History of Sex in the De Mille's parting of the Red Sea in THE TEN COM- American Talkie Cinema followed a curve of permis- MANDMENTS . siveness so imperceptible that it could easily have been mistaken for a comma in the puritanical Pro- Clearly, the explosion of hard-core pornography duction Code. In leisurely succession , audiences (distinguished from \" soft-core \" by an almost clinical were allowed to be shocked by Rhett Butler 's treatment of explicit sex) demands study as a socio- \" damn, \" Jane Russell's cleavage, Gilda's discarded logical phenomenon . It may also deserve sympa- glove, Stanley Kowalski's torn T-shirt, Maggie thetic appraisal as a budding art form. Ten years McNamara's \"professional virginity, \" Baby Doll 's ago, if Russ Meyer and Radley Metzger were recog- thumb, Jack Lemmon's communal apartment, and nized at all , it was as entrepreneurs and not as Zorba's backside-culminating in that nadir of auteurs. Today we can look at their work and discern screen pornography, Elizabeth Taylor's humping craftsmanship, vigor, and two very personal direc- hostess. torial styles. They have gone legit. Is it too early to predict such preeminence for David Reberg Now. things are a little different. HOLLYWOOI) BLUE (SCHOOL GIRL), Bill Osco (MONA) , or Jerry Gerard treated us to that oddest of odd couples, the Lady (DEEP THROAT)? Film criticism has taken stranger and the Big Dog (or the Warped and the Woof). twists. The heroine of DEEP THROAT possesses an oral cavity so extraordinary that she makes advances in root- The range of articles and interviews in this special canal work beyond the American Dental Associa- FILM COMMENT issue may not be inclusive (we tion 's wildest dreams. But the cul-de-sac of narrative would like to have published the viewpoints of fem- porn may well be the sadomasochistic fist-in-the- inists and Gay Activists), but it should suggest socket scene in L.A. PLAYS ITSELF-which one critic some contours of the past decade's sex films-from described as the most spectacular sequence since soft-core to hard-core; from Metzger's Audubon Films in the Si xties to its current , grimier equivalent, THE KISS . 1896 . wit h May Irwin and John C. Rice. Th is 40-second Louis Sher's Sherpix; from Meyer's cartoon violence to the Japanese eroduction 's sculptural sadism; fi lm was denounced by the c le rg y as \" a ly ri c o f th e stockyards .\" from repression in London to openness on Times Th is is where it all start ed . Photo : Museum of Modern Art/ Film Square to the possibility of a new repression in Stills Archive. California. The most casual moviegoer will have noticed the outspoken , baroquely detailed approach to sex and violence in such films as THE DEVILS, CLOCKWORK ORANGE, STRAW DOGS and-most recently and re- markably-the Brando-Bertolucci LAST TANGO IN PARIS. Curiously enough , these films (all major-stu- dio productions , though none were made in this country) seem to state a common theme: that sex is violence , and perhaps even that violence can offer a crucial sexual release. Compared with these mainstream films by respectable directors , the new porn looks tepid indeed in its handling of sex-as- pain. Nevertheless, one's first exposure to hard-core tends to be off-putting , if only because-unlike the simulated carnage and copulation in , say, LAST TANGO IN PARis-we know that what we see is really happening . Our interest in the fantasy life of a film character gets derailed into speculations upon the private life of a porn actress. Nor can the hard-core theaters (or their extortionist prices) be exactly described as inviting . So most moviegoers, who are curious but also yellow, just don't go. As a public 4 JANUARY 1973

service, then , for those readers whose experience hero 's sex ual fatigue (with a bandage bow-tied of cinema pornography is limited to an occasional stroll past mangy midtown marquees, the following around his over-used member). generalizations are offered . So where do we go from here? Two factors seem 1. In running time (about an hour) , production values (mediocre) , film gauge (16mm) , and comedic operative: the Law of Supply and Demand , and the tone (raunchy) , porn is similar to the Russ Meyer \" nudies\" that opened up the sexploitation market Law of the Land . The immediate, voracious appetite in the late Fifties. for hard-core has probably been sated: a few blocks 2. In their graphic depiction of sex-making , they are similar to stag films of the past seventy years. away from DEEP THROAT'S boffo run in New York , 3. Soft-core was all foreplay ; hard-core is no fore- half-a-dozen theaters have discontinued porn. In- play . Gone is the building up of erotic tension via the striptease , the horny gaze, the humid caress. evitably ,the market will imitate Hollywood 's response Hard-core starts in medias res and goes on from there. to the challenge of television , and make fewer. pic- 4. Nudity isn't emphasized-except from the waist tures of somewhat higher quality. The more talented down-the way it was in soft-core. Some hard-core heroines never take their blouses off. Breast fet- and ambitious filmmakers may follow the lead of ishism has been replaced by groin fi xation . Meyer and Metzger, and move slightly to the right 5. As Radley Metzger has observed , there is vir- tually no kissing . The Liberated Generation may as Hollywood itself inches toward hard-core. If they have made sex as familiar as shaking hands, but they don 't as yet seem to have invented a metaphor were to meet, such a felicitous conjunction might for osculation. even produce a superior species of porn : one that 6. Plot elements are surprisingly strong in the higher-quality films , and often inventive. HOT' CIR- was erotic without being emetic, generously affec- CUIT, for example , is a hard-core LA RONDE. Debra Allen , the charming lead in SCHOOL GIRL, does her tionate without being solemnly mechanical , sexy balling in the name of term-paper research , and meets her co-stars through the Berkeley Barb Per- without being dirty. sonals column . The orgy of oral sex in DEEP THROAT evolves from an ingenious plot-twist: Linda Love- Of course, hard-core may never get that chance. lace, the heroine, has a clitoris in her throat! Speculations in this area are hazardous, especially 7. The most successful films-MONA , SCHOOL GIRL, DEEP THROAT-focus on one adventurous girl against since I write just prior to an election that could well a picaresque backdrop. Group-grope porn is more common but less popular. determine (among other things) which way the judi- 8. The men are often better-looking , one way or cial pendulum will swing . But the Justice Depart- another, than the women . ment is reportedly anx ious to bring a porn case 9. Fellatio takes place almost as often as fucking , but cunnilingus is rare . Is th is because the films before the Ni xonian Supreme Court, believing that appeal to the bourgeois male who wants to see on the screen what he can 't get at home? Or is it simply the result will be a precedent-making conviction for because (as Brendan Gill argues elsewhere in this issue) fellatio has a visible , visual kick that cunnilin- obscenity in films . If so , the Loathsome Pornog- gus lacks? rapher may join the open-mouthed masseuse and 10. For all the directorial touches in some of the newer films , porn is essentially cinema- verite and , the close-mouthed journalist in the new demonology as such , a performer 's medium . Its success crucially depends on the attractiveness-and involvement-of of Enem ies of the People. Will that passive , amor- the leading players. phous mass-the People-speak up for freedom of Already there are hints of sophistication and self- mockery in the genre , although progress here the spoken word (however blasphemous) and the moves at about the glacial pace of permissiveness in Hollywood 's Golden Age . Two of Debra Allen 's screen image ( however scrofulous)? Or will they sexmates are frustrated metteurs-en-scEme who \" direct \" her \" acting \" from fade-in to climax; one simply close their eyes and say, \" Frankly, Sherpi x, of them does it over the phone! And DEEP THROAT not only breaks the hard-and-fast rule that you don't I don't give a d---\" ? 11111111 crack jokes during the sex scenes (Linda's first orgasm is greeted by chiming bells and Hitch- DEE P THROAT. 1972. wit h Linda Love lace. Th is 55-mi nute fil m cockian fireworks) , but dares to poke fun at the was acc lai med by Screw magazi ne as ..the very best porn fil m eve r made,\" Whe re wi ll it all end? Photo : Damiano Film Produc- tions , FILM COMMENT 5



Bue a patience that they no doubt consider irritating , I point out that they have misconstrued the argu- ment, a sure sign of unease: up to that moment, I had not claimed that blue movies were interesting in themselves but only that they could not be ignored as a phenomenon . Lest I be thought to be masking a Puritan prurience behind sociological cant (one thinks of Bishop Potter leapfrogging among the whores in order to improve his education), I then quickly add that a large portion of the blue movies I go to strike me as being at once boring and fascinating , and that what proves fascinating in them nearly always encourages me to sit through what proves boring . In that respect, if perhaps in no other , blue movies are not unlike the works of George Eliot. Notes II go to as many blue movies as I can find time by Brendan Gill for, and it amounts to a blessing that two of the most important theatres housing hard-core porn in Brendan Gill writes on the Broadway theatre for New York City-the Hudson / Avon, for heterosexual The New Yorker and is the author of books on Cole blue movies, and the Park / Miller, for homosexual Porter and Tallulah Bankhead. ones-are within a couple of hundred yards of my office. At the moment of writing, another fifteen or For a good many years, I was a movie reviewer twenty porn houses are but five minutes away. How for the New Yorker, and I continue to go to movies lucky I am that this unexpected period of permissi- with an undiminished and evidently incorrigible zeal, veness in pornography should have coincided with which is to say that I am upset if I fail to see most my life, and how unready I am to have the period of the important movies of a given season and that brought to a close by some new ruling of the courts! I feel from time to time a nagging desire not merely The President's Commission on Obscenity and to have seen certain movies but also to be known Pornography, appointed by Johnson, submitted a to have seen them-to put in my two cents' worth report to Nixon so little disapproving of pornography of criticism along with that of my former colleagues. and therefore so little to his liking that Nixon imme- I try to resist this temptation, but there are areas diately rejected it . Open pornography openly arrived of moviemaking that myoid friends curiously ne- at has been in increasing jeopardy during the Nixon glect, and with pleasure I now volunteer to walk the administration . A permissive society makes people bounds of one such area, calling attention to a few like Nixon nervous , because they feel sure of them- of the more notable features of a landscape ap- selves only under conditions of repression. These parently as foreign to most newspaper and maga- conditions need not be the ones they favor; if they zine reviewers as Cockaigne . What I have in mind exist, they can be manipulated and made to serve. are those commercial blue movies that have become The threat to freedom of the press and the threat a commonplace of our contemporary culture and to a continued easy access to pornography are about which , up to now, there has been an almost scarcely to be spoken of in the same breath , but total lack of critical discussion. Whenever I raise they occupy the same ground and will often be the question of the radical changes that have taken found to have the same defenders. place in their manufacture and distribution in recent years, it will usually turn out that my friends among III the reviewers have no first-hand knowledge of these History may see the early nineteen-seventies as changes and that what little they possess in the way the high-water mark of permissiveness in the arts of opinions is based on hearsay. All this for the in this country . At present, there is nothing I can reason that they simply do not go to blue movies. think of that a novel or poem is not free to describe, Indeed, they are, or affect to be, aggressively indif- that a play or dance cannot embody, that a movie ferent to them. Sometimes they protest that the cannot depict. We are no longer at the mercy of reason for their indifference is that blue movies are the Irish Catholic policeman who stops a movie, so boring. How can they be sure of this, I ask them , arrests the projectionist, and testifies in court that if they refuse to see any? Unhappy at being caught the movie must have been obscene because it gave out in a child 's dodge, they offer a child's riposte: him an erection . (What does that make his wife, who everyone knows that blue movies are boring, and presumably is capable of securing the same the only mystery is what a person of my supposedly response? Or his sacred old mother, who , if she had lacked this ability, would have failed to conceive refined perceptions finds of interest in them . With him?) Still , we remain a Jansenist country, in which , as Henry Adams noted long ago , sex remains a species of crime. The police and the courts are eager to resume control over our appetites; prose- FILM COMMENT 7

Fred cutors who should know better continue to equate Ha lste ad morality with law. The grating insistence on the part of clergymen and big real-estate operators that the in L. A. city clean up Times Square may be a hint of hard PL AYS times to come. The Times Square that these IT S ELF . groaners pretend to look back upon with affection photos : never existed ; it was a squalid and ramshackle Museum of honky-tonk fifty years ago, as it is today , and the Modern Art/ groaners were already in full-and , thank goodness, Film Stills ineffectual-voice . The metaphor for the Square is Arch ive the statue of Father Duffy there: pigeons shitting on the bronze head of a priest. The question is not L. A. \" What are they doing there? \" but \" What is he dOing PLAYS there?\" I grant that the Square is more dangerous IT S ELF . now than it was in the twenties , but then so is Fifth Avenue , so is Main Street everywhere . The groaners Peter Fi sk do not really want the Square to be cleaned up; and Casey they want it to be wiped out. Their cure for what they consider all the uglier manifestations of the Do novan life-force is extermination . in BOYS IN THE SA ND . IV Yeats says that love pitches its mansion in the photo.' place of excrement , and this is precisely what all Poo/emar blue movies, even the worst of them , say again and Productions again ; ideally, it is all they have to say. And I say that we are a timid and fastidious people and are BIJ OU. far from having heard the message as often as we photos: need to . But in saying even that much I risk striking Poo/emar the note of the Puritan bully: the mutilating didact, Productions sure that he knows what is good for everyone else , and who , if he likes eating dung , would turn us into B ill a nation of dung-eaters. Har riso n in BIJOU . V Many otherwise sophisticated men are embar- rassed to be seen entering or leaving a blue movie house. Hard as it is to believe , this sense of shame is surely one of the reasons that so few of my former colleagues have kept up with the revolution in the genre. By and large, movie reviewers are a bour- geois lot, and while they would not be averse to catching a blue movie or two at the home of that quintessence of bourgeois chic, George Plimpton, they are unwilling to stand at the turnstiles of the not very fashionable little boutique pornie hous- es-former hardware stores, shoe shops, and deli- catessens-that bespeckle the West Forties. They would feel that the eyes of the world were upon them , glittering with disapprobation . (\"Nanny spank! \" ) Myself, what I usually feel at the turnstiles is a rueful sense of outrage at the price of admission : three or four dollars at most midtown heterosexual blue movie houses and five dollars at most midtown homosexual houses. In the light of how little the movies have cost to make compared with , say, RYAN'S DAUGHTER , I cannot fail to feel that I am being flim-flammed . Nevertheless, I pay, for nevertheless it is worth it. On leaving the theatre , many people dart sidelong into the crowd , seeking to efface themselves and their immediate past as quickly as possible. My own tendency is to saunter. Since I have the reputation of being an exceptionally fast walker, my slow pace under the marquee must be

a way of affirming that attendance at blue movies W HAT is not to my mind a clandestine activity. Grubby, ABOUT yes , it may be that, but I have long since made my JANE ? peace with grubbiness. There are a number of things photo : in my life that I cherish and that lack elegance. Sherpix VI HOT Some titles: THE ODD MOTHER , LITTLE WOMEN , THE CIRC UIT photos' COMING THING , GLAND HOTEL, CHEE K TO CHEEK, ALL Sherpix BALLED UP . And in just tribute to that early capital HOT of movie porn , on every blazing marquee: SAN CI RCUIT FRANCISCO FEMMES. MO NA. photos : VII Sherpix Nowhere in these notes have I tried to define the MO NA. word \" pornography.\" And this is wise and not merely craven , for if two people were to discuss the matter face to face it is possible that they could arrive at last at a rough meaning , hedged round with all manner of provisos concerning its applicability to such and such a state of affairs in such and such a time and place. Three people, though they met face to face , would be unlikely to agree on a defini- tion . Pornography is whatever one thinks it is, and what I think it is will have to be guessed from the way I write about it. In his biog raphy of Mark Twain , Justin Kaplan speaks of the pornography of the dollar. I think I know what the phrase means, but I doubt if J. Paul Getty would know what it means. Or, rather, to be fair to Mr. Getty (for the evidence is clear that he is far more acute about money than I am) , if he were to be right about what the phrase means, then I would be sure to be wrong. In the same fashon , Pope Pau l and I do not mean the same thing when we speak of the sacredness of the body. To me that means its continuous , joyous use, in all its passionate carnality ; to the Pope it means chastity, the highest expression of which is virginity, both in men and in women . In short , non-use: a gathering of cob-webs , to be broken only by the furtive, unruly finger. VIII If I am being fair to J. Paul Getty , I may as well try to be fair to the Papacy as well. Paul's predeces- sor, the jolly and sensual John, would have granted me my definition of the sacredness of the body, only adding that eating and drinking and working and playing and making love must be to the greater glory of God . \" No harm in that?\" he would have asked me, and \" No harm in that ,\" I would have been obliged to reply . John once granted an audience to a large body of journalists meeting in Rome. His message to them : \" Now, you gentlemen are journal- ists, and there is one commandment- 'Thou shalt not bear false witness '-that is to be followed with a particular fidelity by you . As for the other nine, pay as little attention as possible to them. \" IX A good deal of nonsense has been written about the audiences at blue movies. As a veteran champi- on of Women 's Lib , I am sorry to say that the most inaccurate articles I have read on the subject have

been by women reporters , who in most cases de- movies. \" They make me feel sexy,\" she says. \" I was scribe what they expected to find and not what, ac- very strictly brought up , so the feeling may come cording to my greater experience in this field , actu- as much from my sense of doing a forbidden thing ally exists. What Dwight Macdonald has called the as from watching sex . I go to skinflicks with a man parajournalism of Tom Wolfe has infected a younger from the office-married; no big deal-to kill a generation of writers ; in Wolfe's terms, serendipity couple of hours at lunchtime. We bring hot dogs is not the happy faculty of stumbling by chance upon and cokes and relax. I like everything about skin- something one wants but the inventing of something flicks except the way the man always has to ejaculate one wants that is then stumbled upon by calculation. outside the woman . I suppose that's to prove he Writers in the Village Voice and elsewhere would isn't cheating the audience. Naturally, I think of him have you believe that audiences at blue movies as cheating the woman .\" consist largely of lonely, middle-aged men bringing themselves off under rustling raincoats. Let me XI testify that the pleasure of masturbation appears to A good many Puerto Ricans and blacks come be no more commonly indulged in at blue movies in couples to blue movies, nearly always seating than at straight ones. It could be argued , indeed , themselves at the rear of the theatre and appearing that the rate of indulgence would be likely to be more interested in nuzzling each other than in higher at straight movies, on the grounds that one's watching the screen. At homosexual blue movies fantasy in respect to a desirable but wholly unat- one sees, understandably, no women at all. As far tainable sex object would be far more intense than as I know , there is not a single blue movie theatre one 's fantasy in respect to women who combine in New York that caters to Lesbians ; they must make do with the occasional movie of women having an appearance of immediate availability with com- intercourse that one encounters in programs com- paratively little allure. (In a similar way, the under- bining si x or eight so-called \" featurettes \" or \" stag- wear advertisements in the Sunday Times magazine ette lOOps .\" Even in these movies , the two or more section may be more stimulating to many men and women making love will sooner or later be joined women than the photographs of genitalia in the by two or more men, and a heterosexual frolic will magazines sold in the shabby storefronts on Forty- then ensue . (In such cases, the men never make second Street.) Nor does the average audience con- love to other men ; it is a tradition in blue movies sist of middle-aged men-the range in age will ex- that women are permitted to be indiscriminate in tend from , say , very young, non-English-speaking regard to the sex of their partners but that men are Argentinian sailors, who are spending a few days not.) Women play no part in homosexual blue mcJV- in port and can think of nothing better to do at the ies ; one might expect them to be introduced into moment, to very old men , who also have nothing a plot as possible rivals or as sexual objects to be better to do and who tend to fall asleep almost as repudiated , but no-the only authentic feminine note soon as they sit down, hypnotized not by what they struck is by drag-queens. A large portion of the see on the screen but by its harsh light. As for the audience at both heterosexual and homosexual blue loneliness of the men in the audience, that is surely movies is Oriental. Unlike white males, Oriental in the mind of the beholder; if it is not, then I am males come into the theatre by two 's and three 's at a loss to understand the method by which , in and talk and laugh freely throughout the course of a darkened auditorium , a reporter succeeds in de- the program. At heterosexual blue movies, white tecting such a characteristic . Loneliness is some- males ordinarily enter and leave alone, speak to no thing I am unable to make out with any degree of one , and manifest as little emotion as possible. If confidence in the faces of strangers passing me on some especially gauche sexual gesture is enacted a sunlit Madison Avenue , to say nothing of the faces on screen , there may be scattered laughter, almost of old friends passing me in the corridor outside instantly suppressed ; and sometimes , as when an my office. My guess is that the audiences at blue ardent act of fellatio fails to have the desired result movies would be scarcely different in appearance , and the fellator increases her efforts with evident aptitudes, and appetites from the male portion of impatience and a speed of thrusting that seems to any crowd in a subway car or a political rally or threaten actual injury, a universal groan will go up. a meeting of the P.-T.A. I suspect , but cannot be Otherwise, the conventional posture of the audience sure, that many of the audience are salesmen idling is that of the herd: calculatedly impassive, taking between appointments; others-those who, glanc- everything in with fi xed eyes and giving nothing ing at their watches around five in the afternoon , back. hastily jump to their feet and race up the aisle-may be commuters , on their way ho~e to voluptuous XII wives in Scarsdale. The behavior of audiences at homosexual blue movies is radically unlike that of audiences at het- X erosexual ones. Each kind of audience has its fa- What all reporters can agree on is that the great vorite rituals and taboos, and although it is a topic majority of the audiences at blue movies is male. risky to speculate on , it would seem to be the case White middle-class women of any age are conspicu- that the homosexual audience, enjoying a much ously absent . Only one white woman of my ac- greater freedom of action than the heterosexual quaintance-a brilliant Englishwoman of twenty- audience , is likely to be having a much better time . seven-has seen as many as three or four blue 10 JAN UARY 1973

p For the homosexual , it is the accepted thing that present license to depict anything one pleases on the theatre is there to be cruised in ; this is one of the screen has led to a falling off in the ingenuity the advantages he has purchased with his expensive of the plots of blue movies-never a strong point ticket of admission. The atmosphere is perhaps not in the best of circumstances-therefore to a lessen- quite that of a tea-dance on a terrace in the Hamp- ing of sympathetic interest on the part of the specta- tons, but neither is it that of the Meditation Room tor. In the old Mrs . Grundy days, one had to find at Frank Campbell 's. Far from sitting slumped mo- some means, however clumsy, to get the performers tionless in one 's chair, one moves about at will, down to their skins , in order that they could set about sizing up possibilities. Often there will be found making love or at least-and how sad this always standing at the back of the theatre two or three seemed!-to simulate making love, with the man 's young men , any of whom, for a fee , will accompany shadowy genitalia just out of camera range and the one to seats well down front and there practice upon girl 's tongue licking her lips in transports of paSSion one the same arts that are being practiced upon that she was all too evidently far from feeling. We others on screen . One is thus enabled to enjoy two had time to become familiar with the amateur actors, very different sorts of sexual pleasure simulta- squeaking away uneasily in their poor little paper- neously-a boon that Edison , though himself of thin roles, and even to identify with their often gro- strongly homosexual tendencies (one remembers tesque problems. We wanted them to be happy, those camping trips with Henry Ford), was too which is to say that we wanted them to score , and inhibited to have made his goal when he set about we knew that sooner or later they would be able inventing a practicable motion-picture camera. to do so. Nowadays, the protagonists are often to be seen scoring as the movie opens, and scoring XIII in gigantic close-ups of great technical resource- It is a sign of the increasing acceptance of blue fulness , well-lighted and (to the extent that scoring movies in our culture that Variety now lists the most is subject to instruction) well-directed , and at the successful of them in its weekly chart of big movie same time hard to recognize as human . For the grossers. Throughout the autumn , DEEP THROAT was camerawork may well be so superb that at first we averaging something like $35,000 a week at the will simply not know where we are-can we be bo x-office, giving it a place of importance not far approaching the nave of some great Gothic cathe- below WHATS UP DOC and THE STRAW DOGS. Legman 's dral, hung with pink moss, or is this only a vagina? now widely accepted theory that Americans , in their That immense veined wet redwood, straining to arts as in their lives, prefer violence to sex, is borne resist the force of some incalculable gale-is it only, out by the fact that there has yet to be a really at second glance, a penis? A few years ago , we substantial bo x-office hit among blue movies. The would not have thought \" only\" a vagina, \" only\" a figures speak for themselves: in the time that it took penis. The bolder the movie and the better made DEEP THROAT to gross $500 ,000, THE GODFATHER it is, the more it risks , in 1972, boring us . The threat grossed $42 ,000 ,000 . DEEP THROAT is a silly little of anti-climax hovers over the latest and most skilled fable celebrating life; THE GODFATHER is a celebration handiwork of young blue movie makers, prompting of blood and death . us to observe that in the field of pornography , as in so many other fields , prosperity is often the enemy XIV of promise. Another sign of a general acceptance of blue XIV movies is the number of Upper East Side people who are venturing into Times Square to catch blue Simply as theatre , cunnilingus isn 't a patch on movies often at what they believe to be the risk fellatio , and it is difficult to see what even the most of their lives. A ticket-seller in the box-office at the ardent Women's Lib maker of blue movies can do Cameo was quoted recently as saying , \" We 're get- about it. ting an altogether different class of people in here these days-the kind of people who call up and ask XVII what time the feature starts.\" People like me , who champion pornography on XV the grounds that it is life-enhancing are constantly being told that it isn 't truly life-enhancing , because As blue movies gain in popularity, they become it is only a travesty of the real thing . The difficulty more and more profitable to manufacture and dis- with that argument is knowing what the real thing tribute . Already they are claiming attention as a is. Whevever I ask for a definition , my interlocutor growth industry, like mobile homes and male cos- begins to sputter ; precisely as \" everyone \" knows metics. In a fashion often praised by big business that blue movies are boring , \" everyone\" knows what but rarely practiced by it, the money to be made the real thing is. But I don 't. Or I do and I don 't. in blue movies has led to increased competition in I live bathed in a continuous erotic glow, and I the marketplace, which has led in turn to a notable recognize pornography as among the thousand improvement in the quality of the product . Of course blessed things that heighten this glow. Like sunlight, I do not mean an improvement in its artistic quality. like water, like the smell and taste of skin , it helps On the contrary , I would be tempted to argue that, make me happy. I foresee that with every paSSing following the prinCiple that it is the difficulty of the year it will become increasingly precious to me: a sonnet that makes for excellence in that form , the vade mecum when the adventure of old age begins . 11111111 FILM COMMENT 11

Sexand Sexism in the Eroductionby Donald Richie Donald Richie, author of Ozu, The Films of Akira actresses, the larger question remains: how to stim- Kurosawa, and other books on the Japanese cinema ulate when the means are missing. is Curator of Film at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. The rigidity of Japanese law in this regard is to be observed in film showing as a whole. Japanese Both economically and psychologically, the ero- production must remain within certain limits, and duction (a Japanese portmanteau-term coined from when it does not-as was the case with certain \" erotic production \" ) is an interesting cinematic Nikkatsu pictures this year-the company is sued phenomenon . In these days of fallen box-office by the Metropolitan Police and a full scale court receipts it makes back its costs within the first case follows. Imported films also are no exception several weeks of release ; in these times of half- to the general rule . Pasolini 's THE DECAMERON is empty movie theaters, it plays to full houses; now chaotic because so many scenes are missing ; A that the ordinary Japanese motion-picture no longer CLOCKWORK ORANGE is hard to follow because the captures belief nor stirs imagination , the eroduction film goes out of focus (an alternative to snipping) continues to command the attention of a loyal audi- during all nude scenes; I AM CURIOUS (YELLOW) has ence . forty-one scenes blacked out with the title \" Cen- sored .\" One of the reasons for this is that Japan , unlike other civilized countries, has no porno houses. The A further curiosity was the Japanese presentation eroductions are the limpest of soft-core, and though of WOODSTOCK. In several of the scenes nude cou- there is much breast and buttock display, though ples wander in the distance. Though perhaps unno- there are simulations of intercourse, none of the ticed in many countries, the sharp eyes of the working parts are ever shown . Indeed , one pubic Japanese censor instantly detected this irregularity. hair breaks an unwritten but closely-observed code. A number of employees were equipped with small Though this last problem is solved by shaving the scraping needles and painstakingly scraped the emulsion from the offending parts. When the film All illustrations are from the Wakamatsu Koji Production was consequently projected, the distant strolling Company and are printed with the permission of the Scorpio couples seemed girded with fireworks. Though this Theater, A.T .G. Corporation , Tokyo. called instant attention to what the censors were 12 JANUARY 1973

> Typical sadism in a Japanese eroduction . Filmtitle unknown . presumably attempting to hide, the letter of the law as $30. The cost for such a film can be as low as had been observed-a result that satisfies all cen- $2 ,000 , though many cost more , particularly those sors everywhere. in part-color. In Japan , consequently , the eroduction is need- The released film is triple-billed and leased to a ed , no outlet for prurient interest or simple curiosity distributing chain which owns its own theaters . being found elsewhere. Though any number of There are in Tokyo over twenty such chains (Kanto privately-made blue movies are around, they are Films, Okuro Productions, Tokyo Kyoe, Roppo , etc.) expensive, difficult to obtain, and dangerous to and the profits from the film are divided in such show. For the average, interested movie-goer, the a way that the 70 cents per picture average admis- eroduction is all there is. sion price ($2 for the triple bill ) is divided : 12 cents to the original producing company, 8 to the distribu- Thus, unlike other countries where a free access tion company , and 50 to the theater. to pornography has resulted in a satisfied curiosity, a stilled prurience, and emptier and emptier porno This division would seem unfair to the production houses, Japan retains a compulsive and relatively company owning no theaters , but there are actually obsessed audience. There are perhaps deeper psy- very few such . Usually, the production company , chological reasons for this-as may be apparent the distribution chain , and the theater management later in these notes-but in any event attendance all belong to the same corporation. The profits are is good enough that the eroduction bus iness re- therefore both total and considerable . There are mains a highly successful one. over thirty eroduction theaters in Tokyo (and proba- bly over two hundred and fifty in all of Japan) with Over twenty small companies make some two an average capacity of eight hundred per house; hundred such pictures each year. The shooting-time they are open daily from ten in the morning to ten for each is short-two or three weeks at the most. at night, and they are usually well-filled. Given the Studios are seldom used; actual apartments, small original budget , the low cost of overhead , the houses, etc ., are seen instead . Wages are low: profits are great-much greater proportionally than actresses receive about $60 a day, actors as low those enjoyed by the producing companies of ordi- nary films . FILM COMMENT 13

VIOLATED The situation is somewhat analagous to that of statement of intent to titillate, the presumed intention ANGEL S, the porno houses of America, where the product of all eroductions, costs very little , upkeep is negligible, and admission next to ur prices are high . Differences would include the Likewise , the length of each film is predeter- ph otos. amounts of money authorities must sometimes be mined. Since each is intended to be shown with Th e paid to allow public showings, and a capricious two others , the ideal length decided upon is 6,500 public which is not to be depended upon. feet, or 70 minutes , Further codifications are then wo m an is introduced into the structure of the film itself. In In Japan the eroduction is the only type of picture theory , directors are instructed to aim at some kind sed uced that retains an assured audience , The mass audi- of sex scene every five minutes; in practice, how- ence has fallen off disastrously in the last decade. ever, it has proved almost impossible to construct a Two of the majors (Shintoho and Daiei) are no story-l ine which allows this, with the results that sex longer in existence, Nikkatsu has gotten into trouble scenes are sometimes fewer but longer. trying to turn out high-class porno, and the finances of Toho , Toei , and Shochiku cannot be described Also predetermined , though perhaps not so con- as good . There exist, however, smaller , isolated sciously , is the interior shape of the film , One comes audiences-and among these none are more faithful to recognize the component parts , just as in Arab than that for the eroduction. cinema one comes to expect the cabaret-sequence; in the jidai-geki, the final sword fight ; in the western, An assured audience means a standard product. the last shoot out ; etc. In the eroduction these It is only in times of economic disaster that different necessary parts would be: establishing sequence, formulas are tried and experimentation is indulged. plot sequence, defiling sequence, consequence se- If commercial cinema in Japan is now changing its quence, and concluding sequence, The connecting content along with its form , it is only because the tissue may vary with the story, but some or all of assured audience has largely disappeared . The ero- the predetermined sequences are invariable, duction , however, has its own loyal audience and this has resulted in its becoming a codified form Since the ostensible intent of the eroduction is of entertainment. Like the Indian spectacle, the Betty to arouse, the establishing sequence usually shows Grable musical , the sword-fight chambara, the Joan the beginning if not the conclusion of a sexual act. Crawford woman 's-film-all cinematic forms which Common among these are: tipsy bar hostess being enjoyed a stable audience-the eroduction is escorted home by inflamed customers; hiking girls formula-film , being offered and accepting rides from plainly un- trustworthy gentlemen in automobiles; unmotivated Thus , as a genre, the eroduction is predeter- sexual acts during which conversation establishes mined. Since the audience knows what it is to get, that this is her first time. From these beginnings grow it need not be informed. Consequently, the films ' scenes which establish that sex ual union is taking titles are decorative rather than descriptive , INTER- place. COURSE BEFORE MARRIAGE (KENZEN KOSHI) , I CAN 'T WAIT FOR NIGHT (YORU MADE MATENAI) , WRIGGLING The plot sequence follows at once , This estab- (NOTAUCHI)-all these tell nothing about their re- lishes that: the drunken hostess has really fallen into spective contents. They merely make the ritual the hands of a white-Cor yellow-)slaver; the girls are not to be shown the good time they perhaps expect- ed but , rather , are to be painfully raped by numbers of men ; the despoiler of the now-repentant ex-virgin was not actually interested in these now-wasted charms-rather he was really captured by those of a virginal younger sister, etc. With such tragic complications occurring so soon , one rightly suspects that the eroductions are about something other than the joys of sexual union. The next sequence confirms this-it is about the denigration of women , Bar hostess, good-time girls, ex-virgin-all are given a very bad time. Common are: scenes where , in order to escape, women must run nude through the fields or the streets; scenes where nude or near-nude women are overtaken in muddy rice-paddies, knocked down , mauled, and dirtied by their attackers; scenes where women are blackmailed into , or are in other ways compelled to give themselves to , various perversions, the over- whelmingly most common being : tied up, hung by wrists , being savagely beaten , being otherwise mis- treated with sticks, lighted candles, and-oddly, but an eroduction favorite-long -handled shoe-horns. The consequences of such excess are depicted in the following sequence. These are various and include women-never men-coming to see the error of their ways through the humiliations of ve- 14 JANUARY 1973

, nereal disease and unwanted pregnancy. Among the found among eroductions. What the Japanese ... compelled more spectacular, however-and occurring often genre has done, however, is to reflect or create a to surrender enough to deserve some comment is that , though kind of mythology. to var io us the attackers are shown simulating every symptom per vers i ons of unbridled lust except the ultimate, it is eventually they who most suffer. Having finally achieved his The producers of the eroduction bel ieve that they way , the hero is suddenly unable to perform. This have discovered a money-making recipe ; the pa- is not, as one might expect, seen as a consequence trons of the eroduction think they have found a of his own rashness ; rather, it is always, somehow , harmless and inexpensive way of killing a few hours. the woman 's fault. (Naturally, this failure is never Both , however, would seem to share further as- once seen as human and amusing ; indeed , as en- sumptions , and these one must deduce. In the main tertainment , the eroduction is unique in being both they share a belief, a myth-and the denominator risible and humorless.) The failure is a tragedy for of this common agreement is invariable: to be com- which woman is to blame. pletely enjoyed a woman must be completely deni- grated. This leads directly to the concluding sequence where repentance and remorse are the emotions How different are the various myths suggested most often simulated. If the girl has been bad, she by the pornography of other countries! Even if an will now be good ; if merely unfortunate, she will now amount of sadism is involved it is always plainly be prudent ; if hurt, she must simply live with the labeled , never suggested as the norm , something knowledge of an abortion or a ruined younger sister; which invariably occurs in Japanese eroductions. if dead (as she is in a surprising number of in- Though the women in Western pornography may stances) , short shrift is made of her personal exis- be a bit more forward than is common in Western tence-rather, she becomes a symbol for the general life, her only motivation is to have and to give a dangerousness of sex , and heads are shaken , wise good time. That she is bold , even brazen, suits her words spoken. audience. Indeed, if a man did not require that kind of woman he probably would not be sitting in a porno If she is dead she has often become so as a result house. of the ·'impotence \" sequence. Unable to express baffled emotions, the man resorts to strangling , The Japanese eroduction is very different. shooting , knifing , etc . (A typical scene occurred in Woman must be denigrated and she must deserve BLACK SNOW [KUROI YUKI] , a film for which Nikkatsu to be. The ways in which this is shown are various , Films was taken to court: the young man unable to but the conclusions are identical. Often , for exam- express himself in any other way blew out the brains ple, the woman has had some prior experience. Since of his girl friend just as she was climaxing in she.is no longer a virgin , she is ritually unclean and , response to his dextral stimulation .) Since, some- it would therefore seem , deserves all that she gets. how, it was all the woman 's fault anyway , the ero- Again , however, if the woman is still a virgin , her duction audience (entirely male, watching a film culpability is evidenced in other ways . A simple made entirely by males) finds that this murder is crush , or mere attraction for some young , clean-cut to be regarded sympathetically. It was perhaps un- type, suffices. He shortly vanishes from the film (his kind , but, after all , the hero was experiencing the sole function having been to uncover her low, animal worst humiliation a man can know, so what else nature) and she proceeds to be warmly punished. was he to do? More often , however, man and woman agree to part. After such extended sexual encounters, such pain , such pleasure , the feeling is that it was some- how not worth it-flesh is grass , waste the result. They go their separate ways, sadder, wiser, and the screen darkens. This conclusion is, when you con- sider it, surprising in a film the announced aim of which was mere titillation . But then, like most formula film , the eroduction is of two minds about its subject. Unable to dwell upon a detailed examination of the sex act-as is, say, American pornography-the eroduction must sublimate and take that path which occasionally, in other kinds of film , reaches the summits of art . All the way along , however, it hankers after what it legally cannot have . Its compromises further dis- tort its already myopic view of reality . American pornography is kept forever on its elemental level because , showing ali , it need show nothing else ; Japanese eroductions have to do something else since they cannot show all. This stultified impulse has created some extraordinary works of art , a few films among them. None of these, however, are FILM COMMENT 15

· . ti ed up Or a man may not even be involved . Instead , she and in general abandons herself, he remains by her is sometimes observed in amorous dalliance with thoughtful , calm , a dedicated craftsman . w rists another girl-a spectacle some men find exciting- wh ich establishes her worthlessness at once. Her focus of interest is upon the loins, both his and her own . His, however, is upon the breasts, and One recognizes here an inverted idealism , partic- much footage is ex panded on scenes of their being ularly as regards the state of virginity . Pornography caressed and aroused. This reinforces the idea of is typically puritanical about the virgin state . Women the man as being above it all (in both senses of are presumed (for very suspicious reasons) to be the word). And since he is therefore not directly better than human , and the hymen is proof of involved in the essentials of the act , he appears this-they emerge from the creator's hands clean , disinterested, civilized, somehow a nobler person pure , factory-sealed as it were . Being human , than she . He is immune to the vagaries of undisci- women naturally do not long remain in this state, plined emotion (all women are latent lesbians, to the chagrin of romantically-minded males. Since homosexuality among men is unknown) , to the tyr- they are no longer pure they must then be made anny of a jaded palate (scenes of simulated fellatio completely impure. It is thus that women who natu- are very common , scenes of cunnilingus extremely rally, humanly, warmly acknowledge their emotional rare) . In every way the man shows that he is, ob- needs are regarded as vicious. viously, a much better person. Men who so acknowledge their needs are , of He also displays-and this is something which the course , not. It is here, in this rigid belief in a eroduction-makers do not intend-an extremely double-standard which it either observes or creates , immature relationship with women . Precisely, he that the hypocrisy of the eroduction is greatest. It reenacts the mother-child relationship. Mother is would follow , then , that man in the throes of passion cast as bad-woman ; bad-woman is cast as mother. is always somehow noble; that the woman , in the Even in those scenes where the suspended and same situation , is always ignoble. unfortunate girl is about to be tortured , there are ritual breast fondlings which would seem to indicate Th is curiously inverted , perhaps even oddly chi- an extremely ambivalent male attitude. valric but certainly unrealistic attitude, is visible even in the ways in which love scenes are photographed . One might simplify and say that, if the man with The woman is often completely nude and is ob- served as a hysterical animal. The man , on the other the whip shows the average eroduction customer hand , is always at least partially clothed and , thus himself as he would like to be, the same man appearing in the raiments of civilization , does not kneeling in near-adoration before the breasts shows suffer common nudity. While she screams, kicks, him as he truly is . To insist upon this , however, would not explain why Japanese eroductions are really, if unconsciously, concerned with depicting a love- hate relationship of major proportions. The hatred takes the form of undisguised sadism. The hero has turned his neurosis into a perversion and , while this may be more healthy for him, it offers no help to the audience. At the same time, anyone engaging in active sadism is , among other things , proclaiming a profoundly-felt inadequacy. The impotence syndrome observed in some of these pictures supports and explains, at least on a plot level , this inadequacy. At the same time there is ample reason everywhere to see this sadism as merely inverted masochism. Just as idealism is plainly inverted in these pictures to create the un i- versal bad woman , so natural masochism is also inverted to create these endless torture scenes which presumably so engage the audience . It is presumed that the audiences are engaged , or else they would not be in the theater. Yet , one might also ask if they are not merely enduring rather than enjoying such savage spectacles in an effort to extract a mite of titillation . In other words , are we not seeing the fantasy of the jaded eroduction executive , rather than viewing an anthropologically interesting attitude on the part of the average ero- duction-goer? That the eroductions fill a social need, no matter how poorly, is beyond doubt. Throughout the decade during which they have been made in any number, the audience has continued to grow. And , though they may sometimes resemble the soft-core quickies shown on Times Square or the naughty nudies 16 JANUARY 1973

shown in Soho, the differences are at once appar- sively related back to woman 's voracious sex ual . . soon ent. Those foreign pictures are often little comedies , she little melodramas. Innocent of overtone, happy to appetite . In an eroduction even a remark about the display the allowed quotient of female flesh , they will be babble their way to the final reel , mindless and weather carries innuendo . One is caught in a cata- utte r ly ephemeral. The Japanese eroduction , on the other defiled . hand , can be seen as tortured , dark , involved- tonic, changeless state where every action springs plainly of psychological import. but from one cause , where everyone is caught , fi xed The eroduction-makers would claim that I delve too deeply, that their hour-long fantasies were never forever, by his own ambivalent sexuality. It is a world intended to bear the weight of investigation . And , as for the ex cessive scenes of torture , well , you have where generosity, freedom , love are unknown. This to have some kind of story, and you cannot have plot without good , strong conflict. We make an is the world of the solitary, the domain of the voyeur. honest living , they would tell me , because we give our public what it wants. That the public always Naturally, the eroduction is, like all pornographic wants a cheap, safe thrill is their contention ; and this , they claim , is all that the eroduction provides . production , masturbatory cinema. The audience is I would maintain that it provides considerably not thinking about women ; it is thinking about itself. more-that it, in fact , provides an outlet for the often stultified animosity which all men everywhere must The most elemental of fantasies being acted before feel toward women from time to time . It expresses this in second-hand terms which , precisely because them , they are caught, trapped in their own elemen- they do not arouse the intelligence, are potent indeed in arousing and exhausting the emotions. tal and hence infantile nature. This is because they are dealing with archetypal situations, the essence of the eroduction myth . Like In Japan the eroduction seems to be a habit, like most formula film , the eroduction is also mythic cinema. Here one may go and see a common fantasy smoking , drinking , biting the nails. Its gratifications endlessly repeated . are instant, meaningless, and necessary. Quite ac- This repetition must reassure at least some members of the audience, because the fantasy is cidentally and (even now) unknowingly, the makers an infantile one . That woman is an enemy is a sensation that all men have experienced , but it is of eroductions have tapped an audience of great not one that we usually or necessarily believe. We may cast woman in this role but we do not long financial potential. For this reason the films can keep her there . Yet this is precisely what the ero- duction does. With a truly compulsive insistence, afford to be shoddy , badly done , unerotic to an it monomaniacally maintains that the nursery vision is the only one , that woman is evil , that man is her extreme, and often ludicrously inept. The economic prey , and that sex is her instrument. phenomenon is firmly based upon the psycholog ical A too-cursory glance at the films might seem otherwise- it is the women after all who are being phenomenon . The eroduction theater in this sense beaten and shoe-horned . Actually , however, pro- longed viewing indicates that the tortures almost shares much with the bar and the ra c e-track. invariably result from fear felt by the men . They are doing the women in , before the women have a And , like these male retreats , it is essentially chance to do them in. That this is an extremely primitive view of the male-female relationship is harmless. Working out a fantasy never caused any- obvious, but it is as basic as it is barbaric. It lurks in the mind of every man , and only his knowledge one any trouble. But, at the same time, the patrons and love and good-will can bridge this gap to make happy relations between the sexes possible at all. of the eroductions must receive some rather strange This is matched by a fear within the woman , and it is her trust and self-knowledge which completes ideas of the world they live in-because the point the bridge connecting herself and a man . The ero- duction , however, is not concerned with happy about fantasy is that the real world is, after all , relations . Indeed , it does not believe in them . It encourages in the spectator a rigid dichotomy of different. 11111111 thought, and offers ample provocation to every latent love-hate neurosis in the theater . Which is perhaps why the eroduction cannot afford to be human , altruistic, fair-minded. Every speech , every action must be instantly and compul- FILM COMMENT 17

- Elke Sommer in SW EET ECSTACY. al/ photos : Audubon Films Silvana Ve nturelli in CAM ILLE 2000 . 18 JANUARY 1973

RadleyMetzger Aristocrat of the Erotic an interview by Richard Corliss As a genre, the \" sexploitation \" films of the early his long-time cinematographer, the gifted Hans and middle Sixties more than lived up to their name; Jura, and his art director on CAMILLE 2000 and THE they exploited not only sex but also their actors and LICKERISH QUARTET, Enrico Sabbatini. their audiences. The one great exception to this standard was Radley Metzger's Audubon Films. The visual and visceral sophistication of Metzger's Metzger-first as a distributor and then , concur- films demands that they be taken as seriously-and rently, as a director-did for sex films in the Sixties criticized as severely-as any of the more highly what Playboy had done for sex magazines in the touted major-studio product. In this spirit , the most Fifties. His movies were classier, more literate, bet- sympathetiC reviewer is forced to note the frequent ter-made , and blessed with women who looked as banality and obviousness of his scripts (most of if they could communicate desire without carrying them written by men who spent years writing En- disease. Although there was less explicit sex per glish-language adaptations of the sex films Metzger frame in his films than in those of his competitors, used to distribute). One suspects that Metzger-a they usually had an erotic atmosphere that made charming and persuasive spokesman for his films , a single raised eyebrow more highly charged than as this interview should demonstrate-would make an entire William Mishkin gang bang . His success even better movies if he took one further step with these European melodramas undoubtedly towards complete auteur status, and wrote the films helped convince Russ Meyer to abandon \" nudies\" himself. He might also consider starring in them , for his later, more delirious excursions into big- for he is certainly as handsome and urbane as any bosomed kink. of his leading men. In fact , at first glance, his face looks very familiar . . It may be said that Metzger-the-distributor is as much an auteur as Metzger-the-director, since he RICHARD CORLISS: Did I spot you in a cameo would often spend months re-editing (and occa- role as a surgeon in LITTLE MOTHER? sionally re-shooting) a foreign film for the American market; one film , THE LIBERTINE , was \" tightened up\" RADLEY METZGER : Yes. I was also in my first with over 300 cuts, some of them subliminal. But, film , THE DIRTY GIRLS . I jumped in the swimming pool , if the films Metzger imported are personal , his own and that was my acting debut, and my retirement, films are virtually confessional in their exploration all at once. I studied to be an actor, actually. I took of themes and feelings, moods and mise-en-scene. my B.A. at City College. I started my Master's at Surely the soft-core regulars of the late Sixties could Columbia, and then it was suggested that I help save have been only bewildered by THERESE AND ISABELLE, the world from the Korean menace, so at the sug- which spends its first forty minutes building charac- gestion of the Government I went in the Air Force. ter and prowling elegantly around an old monastery, And I got in the movie unit. So I never finished the to the exclusion of any sex scenes. Most of his Master's. When I came back I got into the foreign characters inhabit an erotic twilight world halfway end of film distribution . I did a lot of TV commercials. between haute monde and demi-monde, and few I was lucky-I'd gotten into the union before I went \" straight\" directors excel Metzger at creating an into the service. I somehow gravitated toward the almost tactile milieu of quasi-aristocratic deca- importers of foreign films; I worked on the dubbing dence-credit for which Metzger gladly shares with of AND GOD CREATED WOMAN , and pictures like that. I worked at Janus Films; I did all their Ingmar FILM COMMENT 19

Bergman trailers , JULES AND JIM , L'AVVENTURA. And whether he does it or not. I still think that basic simultaneously with that I did my first picture in New idea could be done, but with a little more consider- York. ation for the audience. I haven 't seen the film in many, many years. I'm sure it has positive qualities. CORLISS: That was DARK ODYSSEY. But making a film is like a lot of other activities. METZGER: Had we more money, it could have It's like driving a car, or making love. There 's an been called a shoestring production. We didn't have enormous amount of inspiration involved , but you enough for a shoestring . sort of have to know what you ' re doing . CORLISS: The New York Times was very sympa- thetic to it. CORLISS : You called DARK ODYSSEY \" heartfelt.\" METZGER : As a matter of fact, I re-read it about But I assume you don 't think of your later films as a year or two ago, and I didn't realize what a good any less heartfelt-or do you? review it was. But the film was absolutely catastrophic in terms of its reception. It had the METZGER : Well, I would stand by \" heartfelt, \" same fate as Morris Engel 's THE LITTLE FUGITIVE-but but I should qualify it and say \"exclusively heartfelt. \" without the happy ending. Because while nobody Sure, you have to have that belief. I didn 't believe would sit through his picture, it went on to be a in DARK ODYSSEY any more or less than any picture festival winner and very successful. But our picture, I've done. I get very involved in whatever I' m doing . nobody wanted. At that time, the \" art\" field was I don 't mean \"involved\" in an artsy-craftsy way. But more or less reserved for the foreign film explosion to do a film you really need that kind of involvement of the late Fifties. DARK ODYSSEY was one of those or you 're going to lose interest. pictures we shot until we ran out of money, and then everybody went to work, and then we shot Metzger as Distributor some more. So it took about seven months to shoot. And then when it was ready to market, there was METZGER: So we had all this effort and sweat just no market. And I have a feeling that it was so and blood tied up ... much from the heart that it didn't take the audience too much into consideration. CORLISS : But not much money. CORLISS : You had co-director credit on that? METZGER : Well , that's being gracious about it. METZGER : Yes, and co-producer. We actually had a lot of debts. I was working for CORLISS: How did it really break down? Janus, and they said there was a movie around that METZGER: Well , we really did everything to- nobody wanted because it was the outer limits of gether. That might have been one of the problems. obscenity. Nobody would want their name associated I was in my early , mid-twenties, and I' m not sure with it. What it turned out to be , of course , was a that I had the proper background to take on an film in which you had some nudity. But there was enterprise so ambitious. I had done a short; I had no suggestion of sex. It was like the Dennis O 'Keefe of course worked on a lot of pictures. But you really comedies that were made in the Forties-a very have to tiptoe into it a little bit , to see what your well-produced comedy with a very good cast. So relationship is with your audience. Having been an I bought the picture-without seeing it-with money editor, I wanted it to look dazzling ; I wanted it to that was lent to me by the laboratory that did DARK be a first-rate production , so no one would say \"it's ODYSSEY. lowed them so much money, I said , \"Well , sort of amateurish. \" This was before Truffaut, before look , I can 't possibly pay you , but if you ' ll help me Lelouch-that kind of free style of filmmaking hadn 't buy this picture, and if it makes any money I can come in , and we wanted it to look very formal. pay you everything. \" And through some insanity CORLISS : It was a little like a slice from Kazan 's they lent me the money. projected AMERICA AMERICA trilogy. The picture was originally called MADEMOISELLE METZGER : The basic story tells very well. Unfor- STRIPTEASE. But because there was a Brigitte Bardot tunately , we got so absorbed in the philosophy that picture with that title in America , we called it THE we didn 't pay too much attention to the dramaturgy. FAST SET. It had a little girl in it who I personally It was about a boy from Greece , and it was set in thought had everything . She was the Bardot type, the Greek-American community, which we thought but I think she was better looking. She had more was very exotic, because it had never been treated charisma, more sex appeal. Her name was Agnes -it hasn 't since been treated. We were trying to Laurent. The picture went out, and it did a nice little show the conflict of cultures. We took a situation business . There was no overhead. By that time , Ava where a boy lives in a mountain village in Greece, Leighton from Janus Films had joined me. We had and his sister is dishonored by somebody , and he an IBM typewriter that nobody could repair , it was must do what is socially acceptable-and that is kill so old-and that was the company, Audubon Films . the guy . It happens every day. Nobody arrests you , July 15, 1960, we released THE FAST SET in Los nobody fines you; you go away and live on another Angeles , so we date the company from then . mountain for about six months, and you come back, Based on the success of THE FAST SET, I bought and it's all forgotten . But the guy is in New York. two more films produced by Rene Thevenet. One So the boy comes to New York, trying to be socially of them was called LES COLLEGIENNES-THE SCHOOL acceptable within his own social framework, and his GIRLS. We called it THE TWILIGHT GIRLS. I shot some own mores. But now, applied to our mores, he's inserts for it, to kind of expand on the idea they just a killer. And eventually he kills him . We tried were trying to present. We did a little lesbian scene, to show the irony of it, that the boy 's a criminal but the extent of it was that you saw two girls who looked like they were kissing , and you saw some bare breasts, and that was that . 20 JANUARY 1973

CORLISS: By this time, there was a network of sexploitation houses? METZGER: No. We had to go in with a hammer and chisel and forge them out. There was a network of theaters , but it had nothing to do with what we were doing . There were always theaters that showed burlesque movies-the porno track of its day-the MOM AND DAD kind of films that played on your insecurities and your guilt and whatever virility anxi- ety you might have. When I was stationed in Ohio, I used to see a lot of the trailers for that sort of thing . It's the old sale: first they get you terrified , and then they show you the film that's going to cure it all , and then you realize that the film doesn 't cure it all because they want to sell you some books while you 're in there . Our product wasn 't sensational enough for that market. Of course there were thea- ters that showed the \" nudie-cuties \" -all take-offs Marlene Sherler and Reine Rohan in THE DIRTYGIRLS. from MR . TEAS-but we went for the drive-ins, be- cause that 's where a great deal of revenue was generated . Then , based on the success of THE TWILIGHT GIRLS and FAST SET, I made my first buying trip to Europe. I must have seen two hundred films , and I bought four of them . One was another picture with Agnes Laurent-she' d been in the two previous pictures, and she was actually building up a following . She later went to Hollywood-for AlP , I think-but it didn 't work out because she pushed a bottle into Arthur ,, Loew Jr.'s face-somebody like that-and she was sort of unwelcome. Then I bought two films with Elke Sommer. One was a small co-production, a murder mystery, and the other was DOUCE VIOLENCE , which was 20th Century-Fox 's picture. It was like taking a weekend on the French Riviera . It was a lot more money than I was used to paying , but I bought that. And then I bought a picture for just about $1.98 in change , which nobody wanted . The film was I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE . Everyone claimed at the time that we did the miraculous, but we really didn 't. It was just a combi- nation of the right film in the right hands. Very few distributors, if any, were editors. When they looked at a film , they were unable to see the potential in Annie Josse. Alain Tissier and Virginie de Solenn in SEXUS. the material ; they only dealt in finished product. But I could say , \" Well , this is ridiculous and that 's ridiculous , so we 'll eliminate it. \" The novel , J 'irai Cracher sur Vos Tombes , was a first-person experi- ence of what it was like to be a black man in the United States. It was very strong , very sexy, and very violent . The book was banned , and was pub- lished like Tropic of Cancer. Well , it turned out that it wasn 't an American black man who wrote it: it was Boris Vian-who was sort of the first hippie, a drug addict , a musician , a poet and an actor-and he had never been to the United States! They made a movie of the book a few years later, which was-unfortunately, for the director, Michel Gast-well ahead of its time. It has one of the best atmospheres I've ever seen in a movie-if you want a perverse, erotic, degenerate, violent atmos- phere-with absolutely nothing happening . It took place in the American North , but they shot it as if it was the South , because they really didn 't know the difference. So in the dubbing we gave everybody FILM COMMENT 21

Southern accents and put it back down South , so then. We were trying to give our audience a little it made sense. It was the first picture of ours that more commercial entertainment, so I compressed really went legit. It was an enormous drive-in picture. the thing , took out a lot of the pauses. CORLISS : SWEET ECSTACY-your title for DOUCE CORLISS : Benazeraf was the subject of a rather VIOLENCE-had a more restricted market. affectionate article by Jean-Luc Godard in Cahiers du Cinema. METZGER : Well , actually no . We tried to make it a sex picture, but it just didn 't work. There was METZGER : I think that was a gag, to show how very little sex. A lot of theaters showed it on a double sheeplike French critics were. They took this guy bill with WHERE THE BOYS ARE , and it really had that who makes these really dreadful little movies, and kind of atmosphere. There was a nude love scene claimed all sorts of profundities for him . It was the on a boat, but the fact that a man had his hand Emperor's New Clothes. on Elke Sommer's left nipple wasn 't all that daring- and that was the only thing in the movie with an CORLISS : You think Benazeraf's movies are erotic overtone. dreadful? CORLISS: Elke Sommer 's face sort of had an METZGER: Well he has this great erotic feel , but erotic overtone. Almost feral. his story-telling is so primitive . I've seen the pictures that weren 't shown here-unreleasable. He became METZGER: An absolutely perfect face. I hap- the darling of the French Left when one of his pened to be in California when she arrived to do pictureS-JOE CALIGULA-was banned for violence. her first movie. Ava Leighton and I sat there at her first press conference-it was for THE PRIZE-like the CORLISS: Do Benazeraf and Pecas represent the only two people on the bride 's side at the wedding outer limits of French sex films? when it's held in another country . We were sitting talking with her, and suddenly a man came over METZGER : I guess so . I don 't think they're into' and said to us , in his very polite , firm , public-relations hard-core yet. manner, \" Excuse me, may I take her away from you? \" And I said, \" Surely.\" She got up and walked CORLISS: How many different versions would across the room , and I said, \" She's really walking you make of a film like SEXUS? into another way of life.\" And, sure enough , she was. METZGER : At that time, the question was surviv- al. We really would do anything to get the film CORLISS: Max Pecas directed the two Elke Som- exhibited. But some states, like New York, were very mer films, and several of your later pictures: EROTIC strict. I think we helped knock the State Censorship TOUCH OF HOT SKIN and HER & SHE & HIM among Board out with THE TWILIGHT GIRLS. I got myoid City them. College arrogance back: when they said , \" It 's a dirty picture ,\" I said , \" No , it isn 't dirty.\" And they said , METZGER : He's got, oddly enough , the best \" Well , it's lousy.\" And I said , \" That 's like saying cinematographer in France , Jean Lefebvre. The a rich man deserves more justice than a poor man . only person he seems to want to work for is Max. A bad picture should be shown just the same as Even with a small budget, Max gets a beautiful a good picture.\" We were in the courts for two years picture on the screen. HER & SHE & HIM is exquisite- over THE TWILIGHT GIRLS, but we finally won. And with just three or four lights. He always has a rich , that was one of the last big cases the New York rich looking picture. Board fought before it died . CORLISS : He also specializes in opulent-looking CORLISS : One of the basic ingredients in an actresses. Audubon Film was the beautiful, sexy girl who METZGER: Agreed. I tho~ght Fabienne Dali , in doesn 't look like a whore. How would you describe EROTIC TOUCH , was dynamite. I cast her in THE ALLEY CATS-but she never showed up. the kind of actress you 've cast in your films? METZGER: My cameraman pOinted out to me that CORLISS: Then there was Jose Benazeraf's SEXUS. they all looked the same. Of course, cameramen look at people differently ; they 've got a very perceptive METZGER: The original title was LA PLUS LONGUE eye. I'd try to get a girl who , in my opinion , was NUIT. They sold a lot of Henry Miller books on the very, very pretty, very young, kind of sexy-but who basis of the movie, but I suspect that a lot of people didn 't have sex on her mind . That was the key to went to the movie thinking it was the film version it. I don 't think anyone's interested in seeing a girl of that book. We had another Benazeraf movie, THE who thinks of nothing but sex . Sex had to be an FOURTH SEX, and I've seen all his movies . He really adjunct to something else. Most of the people in has a feel for making an erotic movie. There 's a our movies do other things . Now , you might say that degenerate streak in his films-which he lives. You the hookers in THE DIRTY GIRLS were preoccupied literally can smell the film . It's a gift. And he has with sex. But they never looked , or behaved, like impeccable taste in choosing his girls. SEXUS was a hookers. They might go out with you on Saturday very strong picture at the time. We were a little night, but they 'd be studying all week long . worried about it because it had a couple of lesbian CORLISS : Another, perhaps even more impor- striptease acts. tant, difference between Audubon product and that CORLISS : Were they in the original film? of, say, William Mishkin-who , in an interview, called METZGER: Yes . I didn 't do anything with SEXUS his customers \"slobs \" -was that you respected your except cut about forty minutes out of it. It was a audience. style that might go today, but it seemed very slow METZGER : Well , one thing is sure: however the pictures look today, they represented the ultimate of my ability at the time. I was never conscious of 22 JANUARY 1973

saying , \" Well , it 's a sex picture , so we can just prised at the number of people who told me they slough it off.\" I was so thrilled that I'd been given loved the subtitled version and hated it dubbed . the chance to make a real movie , that I always did They never stopped to think that Essy Persson was the best I could . If the picture was terrible , it 's a Swedish actress in a Dan ish mov ie, and that he r because terrible was the best I could do. dialogue had to be dubbed into Danish . As for Mishkin-a very fine gentleman , by the Anyway, the subtitles, plus Mac Ahlberg 's pho- way-we never competed with him . He had his tography , plus Essy Persson 's dynamite perform- market, and we had ours . He was working more in ance-these were the main factors in the success the burlesque-movie tradition . There are people who of the picture. And Trans-Lu x Theatres deserves a only want to see \" slob \" movies with fat , ugly women. lot of credit for playing it. In an era of open porno , We took a different approach . We tried to present it 's easy to sit back and say , \" Well , what did they the films to a fairly sophisticated aud ience. As you have to lose?\" But in 1966 it took a lot of guts to move up the educational and economic ladder, you show I, A WOMAN at the Trans-Lu x 85th Street. You want to see someth ing that 's not so traditional. have to keep in mind that all of these pictures are Usually, if we played a picture of mine in a skin-flick part of a progression . I, A WOMAN may have broken theater , we wouldn 't do any business . We couldn 't the door down , but DEAR JOHN opened the door-and compete with the straight skin flick . AND GOD CREATED WOMAN was a big wedge in the CORLISS : In the mid-Sixties, competition started door. to come from another direction . To an extent, the continued financial growth of Audubon Films depended on the continuing Puritan repression in Metzger as Director Hollywood. But then Hollywood films got gamier, spoke in four-letter words, and bared the flesh of METZGER : I don 't like making comparisons with high-priced actresses. In a 1966 interview, you com- other directors, because it 's a subtle way of saying plained to Variety that Hollywood might put you out you 're in the same category . But you do get influ- of business. enced . And while I don 't feel that I'm in the category METZGER: What you say in interviews is always of ... uh , Mr. Julie Andrews ... a little colored! In those days , I adhered to the John CORLISS: Blake Edwards. Kennedy principle: if he knew he was going to win , METZGER: . .. of Blake Edwards, I think he made he talked as if he was going to lose . At the time, the most influential movie in the area of breaking Hollywood was really floundering , wondering how down old taboos and letting the age of permissive- to break into our market-although they were buying ness come in . And that was BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY ' S. up the big European films. But, about the Puritan- I don 't think anybody realized what a giant step that ism , Hollywood has always made the dirtiest pictures picture represented . Not the fact that anyone would in the world . I've said before that the sexi est picture make this film , but the acceptance of it. People went I've seen is GILDA , and it still is, and that's a Hol- to see it, and they were not at all shaken up by lywood movie. Hollywood didn 't have to discover the content, which was extremely strong. You 'd the sex movie-they invented it. never had a hero that was a male whore, played But they had some conflicting obligations. Sex by a guy as dazzling as George Peppard . It was had to be Production-Code pure ; that meant you this acceptance of the forbidden-done with a fairly could make love until it got serious , and then they light touch-that really made me do DIRTY GIRLS . faded out. So they could live in both worlds . But I didn 't have enough money to do a movie, so I it was getting down to the nitty-gritty: they couldn 't decided to do three-thirds of a movie, one at a time. make a real sex film and still say they were protecting I wanted to do a picture about hookers-they have the John Wayne values of World War II. They were an appeal to everybody-so I'd do a picture about finally able to do it-as they always did it-through a low hooker, a middle hooker, and a high hooker. the integrity of some creative artist. They did an So I went to Paris to do the first part , which was Edward Albee play that everyone went to see be- really the first time I' d ever made a movie all by cause of the dirty talk. myself. It 's probably the single most terrifying thing CORLISS: The interview took place just after I've ever done. I had people around me who 'd made . VIRGINIA WOOLF was released, and just before I, A maybe thirty or forty French films , and they all look WOMAN. at you and say, \" Well , what do we do next?\" And METZGER: My acquisition of I, A WOMAN wasn 't you have to say something that sounds at least mildly part of some grand design ; I didn 't go to Denmark original. So we did that , and I came back to the to buy the most important movie of the year. Like States and edited it. By that time we had enough I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE , it was the right film in the dough to do just one more part, so I combined the right hands . It was a very boring movie, almost second and third into one sequence in Munich. In unplayable. So we brightened it up, shortened it, a sense , that was a light film , li ke TIFFANY ' S. put it more into the American idiom . We took out all the repetitious scenes , and cut out the long CORLISS: Despite the title, the film treats its pauses between lines of dialogue. It was Ava heroines quite sympathetically. And the climactic Leighton 's idea to release the picture subtitled-that moment-when the prettiest girl meets her lover gave it a patina of artistry in first-run situations. I \" Laurence, \" who turns out to be a woman , in the think that's absolute nonsense, but you'd be sur- shower-is charged with genuine suspense, as well as with erotic electricity. FILM COMMENT 23

METZGER: That was a last-minute touch . Those the cutting room , like the \" bottle dance \" in CARMEN , last ten minutes are still my favorite bit of filmmaking . BABY. That was a triumph of editorial eroticism! They say that the first-born has a special relationship Believe me, she didn 't do that much. I wasn 't really to the mother. The first time you conceive some- aware of using the moving camera so much until thing-and I'm not saying you 've conceived some- Vince Canby mentioned my obsession with lateral thing brilliant, or clever-just the fact that you 've camera movements. That's one of the problems with seen it in your mind 's eye , and then you see it up making erotic films: you don't get much criticism . on a screen , and they are somewhat approximate, If they write about you at all , it's usually to say , that's a thrill. And then when you see people \" Aaah , it's just a sexy picture .\" Or \" it's not sexy.\" respond to that , it's really the ultimate satisfaction . CORLISS: Are the tracking shots a conscious CORLISS : Both THE DIRTY GIRLS and THE ALLEY CATS were written by Peter Fernandez. hommage aMax Ophuls? METZGER : He had acted in Hollywood-he was METZGER: An awful lot of people mention Max one of the Amboy Dukes in CITY ACROSS THE RIVER , Ophuls. To me, that's the ultimate compliment, be- Tony Curtis' first picture-and later he was a dub- cause I've seen a lot of his pictures, and I adore bing actor, and later still a dubbing writer. I was him. I don't mean to sound low-brow, but there's a dubbing director. I asked him if he'd be interested another director who brilliantly mastered that tech- in dOing THE DIRTY GIRLS with me, and he came up nique, and that was John Farrow. He did a picture with some cute ideas-mostly on the backs of called CHINA that has the most fabulous shots I've matchbook covers in the studio . You tend to repeat ever seen. And , of course , the opening of TOUCH successes , consciously or not, and so after THE OF EVIL is the ultimate. DIRTY GIRLS he wrote my next picture , THE ALLEY CATS . CORLISS : Even if it 's not a conscious tip of the CORLISS : For your nex t two pictureS-CARMEN , hat, it is a conscious decision on your part to move BABY and THERESE AND ISABELLE-you used Jesse the camera during a sex scene, and not cut it up. Vogel for the screenplay. METZGER: It all depends. In the CARMEN , BABY , METZGER : He had dubbed SEXUS and EROTIC scene where they make love behind the colored TOUCH OF HOT SKIN . Vogel and I also worked on the bottles, the whole point was not to break it up-you adaptation of a Henry Miller book. We put in a lot went from color to color. Or in THE LICKERISH QUAR- of work, did a lot of research , and at the last minute TET, when the boy and girl are on the grass: we they refused to sell it to us . That was a very big were trying to get a pristine, Garden-of-Eden atmo- blow. An even bigger blow was that the book was sphere , and a cut would have been jarring . But in called Quiet Days in Clichy. I don't want to comment the library scene of TH E LICKERISH QUARTET, you have on the picture, but it's not the approach I would a lot of cuts . It was an older man with a young girl , have taken. Vogel also started a script for CAMILLE and the cutting helped suggest the effort and the 2000 , but we disagreed and I got somebody else. spirit in the spine of the scene. I try not to work from a chart; the scene itself will tell you what kind CORLISS : The sex scenes in CARMEN , BABY were of treatment you should give it. suggestive, perhaps even discreet, rather than ex- plicit. lance suggested in print that there was so CORLISS: The use of the long take and the little nudity in your films because your actresses look moving camera can make a sex scene much more so sexy with their clothes on that it 's almost redun- dant for them to disrobe. I suspect, though, that erotic than a lot of cuts. you had other reasons for approaching your sex scenes in this way. METZGER: It allows a freer build on the part of the audience. I mean , you build a scene, but that's METZGER : Well , sometimes it's a question of no guarantee that the audience is going to be with what you want in a scene , and sometimes it 's what you. I think it's easier for them to enter the scene, you can get from an actress. In CARMEN , BABY there and stay with it, with the moving camera. Also , your was a very famous sex star, Barbara Valentine, who decor usually has a reason , and you want to explore had just had a baby , and her breasts were so out it. of proportion to the rest of her that I felt they were better dressed than undressed . And Uta Levka , as CORLISS: The futuristic decor was certainly im- Carmen , also had a figure that was shown to better portant in CAMILLE-sort of Marienbad 1984. advantage with a bra and a dress. METZGER : I was very lucky to have Enrico CORLISS: So you cast actresses with their Sabbatini as my designer on CAMILLE. We tried to clothes on! give Camille a very dead milieu . Nothing around her lived. She was always dressed in either white or METZGER : Yes , generally you do. And if you get black, and the decor of her room was filled with serious about them , then you ask for a further unreal things-plastic, phosphorescent stuff. audition! CORLISS: Your preoccupation with decor of a CORLISS : There 's a preoccupation in CARMEN , different sort in THERESE AND ISABELLE amounted al- BABY with mis-en-scene, the moving camera , which finds its ful/est, most fulsome expression in THERESE most to a flora fetish . AND ISABELLE . METZGER: Well , that old monastery-which we METZGER : Well some of the stuff is created in used as the girls ' Iycee-was such a trip! I was always concerned about capturing the feel of that place, what I felt at the time . It was absolu(ely breathtaking. One of the responsibilities you have is to put what you see into the film can . 24 JANUARY 1973

CORLISS : Essy Persson 's performance in Harold Bae row and Anne Arthur inTHE ALLE YCATS. THERESE was remarkably good. Uta Levka and Wa lter Wiltz in CARMEN , BABY. METZGER : She's an extraordinary talent, and I'm Essy Persson and Anna Gael in THERESE AND ISABELLE. very sorry that she retired right after THERESE . She was really hurt by the reviews. Now, I don 't think that hard work should get you very far-you have to do more than that-but she led the life of a nun during that picture! Every word she spoke to Isabelle is in that film-otherwise she spoke to no one , lived like an absolute recluse . She thought of herself as a girl who got famous showing her tits , and doing a lot of fuck movies. And now she had a real part. We all felt a responsibility to Violette Leduc 's very sensitive, very personal memoir; and we didn 't want to be charged with making money by exploiting deviant behavior. But the only thing the New York daily critics sa id was that Essy Persson was too old-not was she good , was she bad-and that her body wasn 't very good . It wasn 't until the movie had been out for si x months or so that Visconti saw it and loved it, and Dwight Macdonald liked it, and Brooks Atkinson said nice things about it. By that time , you didn 't need it. Still , the picture made a fortune-almost as much as CARMEN , BABY, our big- gest grosser. CORLISS : I think of THE LICKERISH QUARTET as being your most personal film-with its shifting be- tween illusion and reality, between soft-core and hard-core eroticism, between actor as person and actor as role-player. METZGER : It's certainly my most personal film , unquestionably. And as such , I don 't th ink I'm the person to say what the result was. The result has to speak for itself. We had some problems with the supposedly hard-core footage-the stag film-with in- a-film-because Hans Jura photographed it. It looked too beautiful ; it looked like THERESE AND ISABELLE. We had to dupe it about six times before it looked crude and ugly enough for a stag film . And this is a fundamental principle of hard-core: you have to go to a hard-core picture with the feeling that you ' re doing something illegal. When you say hard-core looks lousy , what you really mean is it looks illegal. If the film is too well-produced , you lose that marvelous quality. Although DEEP THROAT -with very meat-and-potatoes color, very straight Shots-may start a trend toward better production values. If \" law and order\" doesn 't turn things around CORLISS: Did the climate of repression, which you suspect may be imminent, have anything to do with your making LITTLE MOTHER? METZGER : Not really. I wanted to make a picture in a non-erotic climate . CORLISS : LITTLE MOTHER does have erotic scenes, but some of them end abruptly. Did you trim these to get an R rating ? METZGER : Uh . .. yes . CORLISS : What kind of mood do you try to create on the set when you 're filming an erotic scene? 00 you throw out all the technicians you don 't need? METZGER : I have a horror of big crews. I don 't like a lot of movement around; that's why I don 't FILM COMMENT 25

fly on 747' s. For THERESE AND ISABELLE , we closed to know your actors. You can 't tell them at the the set. We had the lighting cameraman , the opera- beginning what you yourself don 't know. So you tor-although in a lot of the love scenes I do the need their trust. operating , because the framing is very critical , and there's no way someone can tell you exactly what CORLISS: Have you thought of doing hard-core he sees through the camera-one technician for light scenes in an erotic framework? changes, and someone to push the dolly. We finished shooting the bedroom scenes in THERESE METZGER: Well , the picture I just finished , in three days. But I didn 't tell anybody we were SCORE, culminates in a double seduction-one finished for the next two weeks, and everybody swinging , sort of bi-sexual couple seducing a thought we were shooting love scenes. That was younger, more innocent, latent couple-which we the only way I could justify to the union people that did in a kind of parallel way . And , as it was shot they weren 't needed around the set. in 1972, I was able to take the scenes further than I ever have before , because there 's th is muscle of So you do try to chase everybody out . But then Puritanism which is just relaxing-like the girl 's I did that when Camille had to die in the oxygen muscle in DEEP THROAT!-there seems to be a gener- tent. It just intensifies the concentration . But that al relaxation of muscles in '72! And so the stuff goes only works for the first couple of shots-that an actor into a category-I don 't know what name you 'd give is uncomfortable-because you 've got so many it, but I think it is beyond soft core . How much of shots , so much to worry about, that you don 't have it remains , how much can be seen in the final time to be concerned with anything superficial. If film-well , that remains to be seen , because we 're you work with a long lens, your movement is so in the editing stage now. critical. And as for lighting , you can look very ac- ceptable in one light, and then you can move, CORLISS : Originally, SCORE was an off-Broadway literally, three inches, and look like the Wolf Man play. How did the climax play on the stage? with three noses on your face. So for the actor to concentrate on that , plus whatever movements , it's METZGER : There's a black-out when the couples so critical that they really don 't have time to be decide to do it. That was a kind of \" Hollywood \" concerned with other things. You ' re really look ing resolution to a shocking situation . To sit and see, for other values. five feet away from you , a woman seducing a young girl and a man seducing another man simulta- CORLISS: So the actors don 't really get erotically neously in two different rooms , and going from one to the other within the dialogue, was in and of itself involved in such a scene. very, very shocking . I saw it twice, and you could hear people 's pulses , there was such a tension in METZGER: I can 't th ink of a situation ... perhaps the room . But at the moment it happens, the lights the boy and girl in THE LICKERISH QUARTET were go out and everyone yells \" Bingo! \" We used erotically involved-in the field-but I was so far \" Bingo \" as more of a springboard . You 're able to away, I couldn 't really tell. do more things in film ; you have many more devices. It all finally resolves itself, but in the non-Jane CORLISS : You choreograph all the actors ' Withers idiom . It 's not just: \" Well , we all had that movements? mad weekend , and now let's thank God our lives are straightened so we can all watch Robert Young METZGER : Yes , usually I do. You try to do on TV.\" whatever is comfortable for the actor. Usually the love scenes are done in the middle of shooting , so CORLISS : In the humor and the situation, it you should have a pretty good idea what movement sounds a little like Virginia Woolf, but with the sex is good for the actor , and what is bad . And you up-front instead of off-stage. use sort of a professional blackmail . \" If you ' re not committed to a love scene,\" I tell the actor, \" it's METZGER : No , it's done a little lighter, like the going to look terribly vulgar, terribly funny , laugh- sophisticated comedy of the Thirties . You might say able . If you don 't have a total response , it 's going it 's Private Lives with what they really had in mind . to look bad .\" One thing I admired about Essy Pers- son in THERESE: I thought she did the love scenes CORLISS: Do you think American actors would exqu isitely, but she didn 't do them any better or be more willing to do hard sex scenes than would worse than she did any other scene in the picture. She didn 't say , \"Well , it 's a fuck scene , so we ' ll get Europeans, because it 's more a part of their film through it,\" or \"I gotta make it the best scene in the movie.\" Her concentration was the same vocabulary? throughout the picture. And that 's all I ask of the METZGER : It 's not just their film vocabulary , it 's actors. a part of the atmosphere in which they live. And I CORLISS : Of course , the ac tors know they 're might add , the actors are four of the most exquis- itely beautiful people I've ever worked witt, . It was going to have to do a love scene. very difficult to get a bad shot of any of them . METZGER: I tend to overstate it to them. I ask Metzger on Porn for that visa that Peter Lorre had in CASABLANCA, where you could go anywhere and do anything- CORLISS: Tuli Kupferberg-poet, actor, and Fug papers that can 't be rescinded . I say to the actor, -said that there were two pOints to be made against \" If you trust me , let 's just do it. \" I have some sort pornography: that it exploited the actors, and that of sketches for the erotic scenes in my mind , but it aroused feelings in the audience that could not you can 't get the choreography down until you get be immediately satisfied. 26 JANUARY 1973

METZGER : Well, I don 't know how you exploit they 'd go to that fight , because there was an atmo- an actor, any more than you exploit a girl by having sphere they could be comfortable in . her as a model in a fashion show . CORLISS : I guess you 'd like to make \" the \" CORLISS : Isn 't there something more direct in movie, to attract both men and women. one actor fucking another? METZGER : Well , of course, when you make a METZGER: I don 't see it exploiting actors, unless film , you want it to reach the widest audience . We 've you 're not honest with them . If he 's talking about always gone for a mi xed audience. We don 't do the beaver films , or loops, perhaps there 's some merit negative kind of se x, the American Legion kind of to the comment. When I talk pornography, I mean sex. That 's another part of the forest-and a part very explicit sex within a narrative framework . As that's probably on the decline. I think the primitive for the second part, when you see pornography, loops are only interesting from an historical point of you can't do anything about it at the time, but you view. certainly can at some not too distant time from your exposure to the film-we hope. CORLISS : In a general-audience sex movie, it seems, you can have man-woman sex scenes, and CORLISS: There are some people who might find woman-woman, but not man-man. our conversation, and perhaps your films, irredeem- ably sexist-using women as luscious objects to be METZGER: People would accept mi xed scenes , fondled or abused by men in the theater or on the and they 'd accept female homosexuality, but they screen. don 't seem ready to accept male homosexuality. METZGER : Well , the men in my films are sex CORLISS: \" People \" meaning \" men.\" objects too. METZGER : No, I mean the broad , film-going public. CORLISS: Yes , and much less attention is paid CORLISS: You don 't think women would be turned on by male sex. them . But for a film to be erotic to a male audience, METZGER : Well , I don 't think they have been . But then I don 't think we've ever had the test. I think it has to concentrate on the woman. SCORE may be the test. That was part of the chal- METZGER : Yes , it's generally done from the male lenge-to create a gay sex scene that can turn on a general audience. point of view. CORLISS : 00 you think that the new hard-core CORLISS: Male superior? audience is the old soft-core audience finally getting METZGER: No, I don 't think that's true at all. In what it always wanted? Or is there a section of the old Audubon audience that feels left out? a successful erotic sequence , the man is terribly METZGER : I think both are probably true. The vulnerable and defenseless-certainly in the scenes hard-core audience certainly wasn 't manufactured. I've done. His complete dependence on the female , They obviously came from somewhere, and we at the mercy of her opinion , her behavior, is a fairly assume they came from the soft-core market. But accurate reflection of the sex act. How can you be audience response to a good erotic movie is still superior in such a state of vulnerability? very , very strong. I'm not sure that hard-core isn 't more in the \" carnival \" area , where you see stunts. CORLISS: Let 's say that women tend to be de- I don 't mean this as a put-down of hard-core , be- graded much less in your films. cause I love it. Part of one 's filmgoing should cer- tainly include hard-core pornography, when it's METZGER : I don 't think they 're degraded at all. done even reasonably well. But I think hard-core Half the scenes, they get on top! is designed less to turn you on and more to shock. I don 't think it works you up. CORLISS : What might be called the obligatory CORLISS: It must work some people up. I don 't shot in a Metzger picture is a closeup of the heroine Simulating orgasm as the man performs cunnilingus. think the hard-core regulars go to be shocked. In hard-core, it 's usually the reverse . METZGER : Well , it's very difficult to assign a METZGER: The only example of that in one of motive to each of the two hundred thousand or so our pictures was THE DIRTY GIRLS, where the prosti- people who go to see a movie. What I'm trying to tute is in a commercial situation . But there the motive say is that the soft-core arousal film , the turn-on wasn 't commercial. The woman was expressing her movie, has always been with us, and will always be gratitude to the man-a little like the Anatole France with us. story, \" The Juggler of Our Lady.\" Where the juggler in front of the icon can only juggle, the only thing CORLISS : But ten years ago, soft-core was the she can do is give him the best lay he 's ever had . Mind you , I'm not saying I'm not a male chauvinist limit of what you could see in a theater. pig . I' m not saying I am , either. METZGER : It's a little like the children in PINOC- CORLISS : The sex-movie audience is predomi- CHIO , when they were given a chance to enter a nantly, most ex clusively, male. 00 you want women world where they could break windows and smoke to see and be turned on by your movies, as well cigars until they got sick. We know that, if they as men? hadn 't turned into donkeys, they 'd have lost interest in a day or two . The population can 't even maintain METZGER : Yes , that 's the intention . Except for interest in the War . In the span of my filmgoing a few of the soft-co res-BUTTERFLY , for example- experience in New York State , you couldn 't have we 've never had an overwhelmingly successful a character who committed suicide; you couldn 't \" briefcase\" picture. Of course, there's the ques- tion of milieu. I go to the fights from time to time, and you get a very specific audience. And then I went to see \"the\" fight-Ali and Frasier-and I saw people you 'd never see at an average fight. But FILM COMMENT 27

The image . shadow and substance of Erika Remberg in THE LICKERISH QUARTET. Gerald Grant . Clare Wilbur . Lynn Lowry and Calvin Culver in SCORE. 28 JANUARY 1973

have sin without punishment. And here we are movie . It's a real turn-on . You want to grab the first in hard-core exhibition. So naturally there 's an in- ass you see when you walk out of the theater. But toxication with this freedom , there 's an excitement that 'll be OK , because the GILDAS will have the at this moment. And I'm not putting it down ; I share diplomas-and the CAR MENS and CAMILLES won 't . 11111111 that excitement. But it's not yet part of the general film vocabulary. In a year or two it may be. If RADLEY METZGER FILMOGRAPHY hard-core is permitted to continue-and we certainly (1930- ) hope it will , it's certainly kicky-you may hear people Except for DARK ODYSSEY , all the following films were saying , \"Do you think we 'll ever again have a picture directed and produced by Radley Metzger. as crude as MONA? \" Then , it will have been absorbed 1961 into the vocabulary . And you ' ll judge hard-core the DARK ODYSSEY. Era KM ; co-director and co-pro- same way as anything else: is it well-made or isn 't ducer William Kyriakys; story and screenplay it? Kyriakys, Metzger, James Vlamos; cast Jeanne Jer- rems, Athan Karras , David Hook, Rosemary Torri . CORLISS: Do you foresee governmental repres- 1964 sion of hard-core? THE DIRTY GIRLS. Audubon ; screenplay Peter Fer- nandez, from a story by Metzger; photography Hans METZGER: Sure, it's an election year. Any politi- Jura; cast Reine Rohan , Marlene Sherter, Denise cian can get his picture in the papers if he takes Roland. a stand on pornography. If you're running for office, 1966 it's a very good way to get exposure , which is really THE ALLEY CATS. Audubon ; screenplay Peter Fer- what your problem is. After an election , the attacks nandez, from a story by Metzger; photography Hans tend to die down very quickly , because politicians Jura; cast Anne Arthur, Karen Field , Sabrina Koch , don 't have to merchandise themselves as much . But Harold Baerow. now we 've seen the government begin to move in 1967 one direction-back to prior censorship. There's a CARMEN, BABY. Audubon ; screenplay Jesse referendum on the November ballot in California. Vogel , from the story by Prosper Merimee; pho- And I think the Supreme Court, in its present frame tography Hans Jura (Ultrascope, Eastman Color); of mind, might slap down hard-core. I think the cast Uta Levka , Claude Ringer, Carl Mohner, Walter government might even be looking for such a case Wiltz, Barbara Valentine. now. 1968 THERESE AND ISABELLE. Audubon ; screenplay There is nothing we 're doing today that hasn't Jesse Vogel , from the memoir by Violette Leduc; been done for three thousand years . It's just that photography Hans Jura; cast Essy Persson , Anna it used to be restricted to a specific segment of Gael, Barbara Laage, Anne Vernon , Remy Longa. society-the ruling class. There was always a lot of 1969 pornography in monasteries. We 're dOing today CAMILLE 2000. Audubon ; screenplay Michael De what they used to do in monasteries-but in the mass Forrest, from the play, La Dame au x Camelias , by population , where it cannot be controlled by the Alexandre Dumas (fils); photography Ennio Guar- ruling class. Time magazine went on for years about nieri (Eastman Color); art direction Enrico Sabbatini ; how terrible erotic movies were: that if your teenage cast Danielle Gaubert, Nino Castelnuovo, Eleanora daughter goes to see THE LICKERISH QUARTET, or Rossi-Drago , Silvana Venturelli . CARMEN , BABY , she ' ll be hooked on heroin and preg- 1970 nant within three weeks . Today, of course , Time THE LICKERISH QUARTET. Audubon ; screenplay magazine prints bare breasts; some day they'll print Michael De Forrest, from the short story, \" Hide and pornography. What they really meant to say is: \" It's Seek ,\" by Metzger and De Forrest; photography terrible to print nude pictures-unless we do it. \" Hans Jura (Eastman Color); art direction Enrico When the Daily News has very detailed rape cases , Sabbatini; cast Silvana Venturelli , Frank Wolff, Erika that's OK-as long as you don 't advertise your Remberg, Paolo Turco. detailed rape case on their entertainment page. 1972 They want to keep it for themselves-in their own , LITTLE MOTHER. Audubon ; story and screenplay powerful hands. Brian Phelan ; photography Hans Jura (Eastman Color); cast Christiane Kruger, Siegfried Rauch , If repression sets in , I think we 'll have something Ivan Desny, Mark Damon , Anton Diffring , Elga like the old rating system. The rating system didn 't Sorbas . really have anything to do with classifying pictures; 1973 it was an effort to contain sensational product within SCORE. Audubon ; screenplay Jerry Douglas, from the major companies. Independent pictures, with the play by Douglas; photography Frano Vodopivec the same content , were rated much more severely. (Eastman Color); cast Lynn Lowry, Calvin Culver, If the current progression continues , I think you ' ll Gerald Grant, Clare Wilbur, Carl Parker. have it back in the hands of the majors. They ' ll dispense the erotic motion picture themselves , by All films distributed in 16mm by Encore Films , 47 the rules. It all comes back to Frank Morgan in THE River Street , Wellesley MA 02181 . WIZARD OF OZ . He said to Ray Bolger,\" You don 't need a brain. You 've always had a brain . What you need is a diploma.\" Well , we ' ll have the brains , but they'll have the diplomas. And you 'll be back to the GILDA situation. That 's a very dirty movie. It's a great FILM COMMENT 29

Verina G/aessner is the film editor of Time Out, as Trevelyan's successor came the first wave of the London weekly. London-shown commercial movies that used the new freedom to treat sex and violence in a relatively With film production at something of an all-time serious , rather than an overtly titillating way: STRAW low, the number of studios in current use for feature films down to three , and no sign of a let-up in the DOGS , CLOCKWORK ORANGE , and THE DEVILS. Some rigid distribution pattern with its parochial regula- film critics engaged in irresponsible attacks on the tions defining what can be shown where and when, films, often to the extent of demanding that they one of the few subjects that can still arouse passion be either re-cut or banned completely. Soona group from all quarters is the old one of sex and violence of local councillors joined in-and the blame fell on in the movies. The latest tabloid controversy has Stephen Murphy. been whipped up by publication of the long-awaited Longford Report on Pornography. After the stream Add to this tumult a wave of sex-education movies of publicity given to the venerable Lord and his from Germany and some sober-sided sex films from Committee-in investigations that ranged from Dan- Sweden , and the backlash was inevitable-although ish sex shows to Soho porn merchants-whatever the foreign-language films are apparently still prov- they finally produced was bound to prove something ing irresistible to the faithful , and still show regularly of a let-down , and this it was . in neighborhood cinemas . It was in one of these that the London public was treated to its first screen The Report-a thick paperback put together by erection and its first vaginal close-up , an experience a handful of such well-known folk as Lords Longford passed only because ofthe extremely clinical context, and Soper, Malcolm Muggeridge, and disc-jockey and not soon to be repeated . Jimmy Saville-is an amateurish , contradictory hodge-podge of ideas and prejudices wrapped up The Report itself gives a clue to the nature of in some quaint language. Although the Report the backlash in its repeated attacks on an \"elite of makes some draconian recommendations about film enthusiasts\" (presumably critics, cinephiles, and exhibition and censorship, there was only one per- other oddball types) who , innocently or not, are not son on the Film and Theatre Subcommittee (Caro- only opening the door of permissiveness to admit line McCullough) who had actually made a film. Peckinpah, Kubrick and Russell, but leaving it open Bernard Delfont, chairman and chief executive of for the professional pornographer and the danger the huge EMI complex, was to have headed it, but to youth he supposedly represents . While it 's withdrew for reasons left unexplained, and was difficult to take the Report seriously (I scoured replaced by James Sharkey, of the talent agency London in vain for one X-rated film which was Fraser and Dunlop. alleged to contain scenes of castration , torture and coprophilia, and which the Committee happened to The present situation here as regards film cen- see in a theater attended by \" a large number of sorship is full of strange anomalies. For example: boys with unbroken voices \" ), the backlash may yet all films shown publicly must be passed by the Board be serious indeed . of Film Censors , which is paid for by the industry. The Board exists by a delicate system of mutual First, several local councils refused to accept the agreements with the local authorities to appraise films Board 's word for films , and insisted on seeing the for them, thus saving the industry the trouble of films themselves-or simply banning them sight un- trekking around the country with cartons of prints, seen . By last spring , things had become so strident and sparing the local authorities the trouble of that an all-Party film group was established to in- spending their time seeing , rating , cutting and ban- vestigate the situation ; and at the end of April they ning movies. concluded that the status quo was quite acceptable. It was then that Lord Longford initiated a debate The fact that the Board has no legal authority in the House of Lords , out of which the Committee became plain early in 1972, following the retirement and its outrageous Report grew. of John Trevelyan , its much-respected Secretary. Coinciding with the appointment of Stephen Murphy What does the Report recommend? It suggests that the Board of Film Censors be replaced by a State-appointed Board consisting of local authori- ties, industry spokesmen, and representatives of \" professions most concerned with young people,\" 30 JANUARY 1973

In London by Verina G\\aess ner and that it should be responsible to the public THE DAISY CHAIN , KISSIN CUZZINS, SOUTHER N COM- (whatever that means). The Report also betrays a niggling legalism vis-a.-vis the film clubs , which it FORTS and (pathetically typical ) the boringly debili- thinks should be regulated closely to forbid adver- tising and control membership. (At the moment, a tating COMPUTER GAMES. This last has a post-dubbed , film does not need a Censors certificate if it is shown free or privately , as in a film club .) masturbatorily breathy commentary tacked onto a The clubs have been vastly useful in providing sketchy story about a dating agency. The agency exposure for films the industry considers uncom- mercial. There have been seasons of Warhol , Anger consists of a single box of file-cards, two rooms, and Snow, a stream of political films from the Third World and the European underground , retrospec- a bar-top for stripping on , and a table upon wh ich tives of established directors, and (perhaps in part as a result of the foregoing) screenings of our own to layout the latest sex ual object. One waits in vain independent filmmakers ' work . The clubs are unprofitable businesses which rely on membership for the glimmers of wit that marked even such a fees to survive. Limiting advertising , or applying more rigid membership rules, would make it virtually sexist exercise as MONA (still unshown in London , impossible for them to continue. (At present there is a membership fee of from 25 cents to $5 , plus of course) , or the genitalia sequences of ADULTER Y ticket cost-plus an hour 's wait.) FOR FUN AND PROFIT. Derek Hill's New Cinema Club-responsible for introducing Makavejev and WARRENDALE to London Sex films that play in the West End 's public audiences, and for establishing a solid Warhol rep- ertoire-is virtually a miniature barometer of the cinemas are about as explicit-or, rather , inexplic- climate of tolerance here . At the moment Hill 's solicitors have demanded a retraction by the Long- it-as those shown in clubs. Nudity, breast-caress- ford Committee for a supposed Hill quote in the Report , which has him saying he offsets losses at ing, homosexual or lesbian sequences cut at the his Club by running sexploitation films . Although Hill probably won 't be awarded damages, or have the crucial moment, and the usual sadomasochistic pleasure of seeing the Report withdrawn from cir- culation , the Committee is apparently composing an set-ups recur with unimaginative, obsessional fre- apology. quency. Oddly, though , no man is allowed to have In point of fact, although hard-core cinema is available if you know where to look, it is not exhibited an on-screen orgasm. And , not suprisingly , the in any advertised theater or club; nor are there any regular, advertised gay movie houses. If I may gen- movies' relative hardness or softness in no way eralize from some infrequent forays into the furtive, masculine depths of my local club (the Cineclub 24) hides their essentially sexist messages. or one of the West End 's half dozen or so regular sex houses, the aim is to promise the viewer every- DANN Y THE RAVAGER , ON THE SIDE , WITHOUT A thing and deliver as little as a judicious wield ing of the scissors will allow. The \" adult\" clubs cut their STITCH and ALL THE LOVING COUPLES (the last shorn films to escape police prosecution , so it's a hit-or- miss affair whether you get your money 's worth or of eight minutes) all received X certificates-but not. so did a perfectly straightforward , gritty spy thriller Whatever you do get, it certainly won 't be a genital close-up-a cinematic area the States first li ke Peter Collinson 's INNOCENT BYSTANDERS , which charted four years ago. There are old favorites like had no sex (and whi c h received a GP rating in America). The leading couple does go to bed , but there's almost no flesh ; and anyway, the hero has had his \" love life \" (as the movie euphem istically calls it) crippled by the KGB . Geraldine Chapl in pro- ceeds to work a miracle cure, but we only know this because of a \" ding \" look in his eyes before the tell-tale cut , and because Ms . Chaplin is extra hungry the next morning . This is perhaps to be expected in a country where TRASH still awaits a ce rtificate , where HEAT must play without its masturbation sequence , where DELIV- ERANCE faced censorship quibbles over its rape scene . In fact , the most puzzling aspect of the entire controversy is how so many people can get excited about so little sex (in this respect , at least, the voyeurs and the vigilantes are on common ground). What is depressingly like ly-if the Longford Report is not, as it now seems , laughed out of court-is that the attempt on so many different fronts to hang out the \" Do Not Disturb \" sign will prove dangerously restrictive in the long run for filmmaker and aud ience alike . 11111111 FILM COMMENT 31

----------------------,~ This fall the movie industry has been involved \" obscenity\" measure, would also ban such popular in the fight against Proposition 18, the \" anti-smut \" movies as CABARET, THE GODFATHER, and M':' A\" S':' H, initiative on the California ballot. Most observers not to mention Playboy magazine and Michelange- think the measure will fail, though they are quick lo 's David . Actually , almost all the major movies of to add , \" In California , anything can happen .\"':' Close the last few years would be open to prosecution to 400,000 people did sign the initiative petition. under this statute. Even John Wayne has spoken Ronald Reagan has endorsed it, and Pat Boone is out against the amendment, for several of his recent crusading for it, appearing on TV spots-in between movies contain language that could conceivably be his milk commercials-and planning a benefit con- actionable. cert at Disneyland shortly before the election . No matter what the fate of Proposition 18, it may well Right now hard-core porno is exhibited allover serve as a model for other states and municipalities Los Angeles-not just in the seedy center of Hol- contemplating censorship legislation , and it proba- lywood , but in the suburban communities in the bly foreshadows a great many more battles during conservative San Fernando Valley and the even the next several years. It is one of the most sweeping more conservative Orange County. Police have anti-obscenity measures ever proposed . given up trying to badger these theaters, and at present adults in California can see almost anything Proposition 18 would amend the California Su - that they choose to see . The irony is that although preme Court's liberal definition of obscenity, elimi- porno is generally available , the gap between porno nating the \" redeeming social importance\" test alto- movies and major Hollywood movies is widening , gether and allowing each community to set its own not narrowing as the smut-hunters fear. This is obscenity standards. Thus a movie showing in Hol- chiefly a result of pressures exerted by the indefati- lywood could be banned in Santa Monica. The gable Dr. Aaron Stern and his diligent, obedient staff statute would make it a crime to produce, distribute of censors. The MPAA Rating Board never even sees or exhibit a movie showing any sexual conduct or most of the porno movies . But the board is careful nudity, or utilizing \"o bscenities \" in dialogue or song to see that all other movies are shorn of their explicit lyrics. If it can be established that these items are sex. With the board 's standards tightening , any only \" minor or incidental \" parts of the work as a sexual intercourse results in an X rating, while a whole, the films might possibly be cleared , but under film today gets an R for just a couple of audible this proposal the burden of proof would be on the \" fuck \" s (FILLMORE, LADY SINGS THE BLUES) or a flash defendant. Not only could police seize the movie of bare breast (THE NEW CENTURIONS , THE KING OF without a search warrant, but any irate bluenose MARVIN GARDENS). Not a single X-rated film has could make a citizens ' arrest. So the chance to appeared on MPAA rating bulletins over the last few harrass exhibitors would be greater than ever. months; the last major studio film to be rated X was CLOCKWORK ORANGE , at the end of 1971 . (As I write, Supporters of the initiative are hoping that the LAST TANGO IN PARiS-which may be the next crucial word \"o bscenity \" will be enough to hook all the test-case film-has not yet been submitted for rating . people frightened of the expanding freedoms of the Those who have seen it say it will probably receive last few years. Opponents include Jack Valenti and an X, and the word is that United Artists , the film 's the Association of Motion Picture and Television d istributor, would then release it uncut-as an X.) Producers, John Gavin and the Screen Actors Guild, and the National Association of Theater Owners, The recent announcement that Kubrick is altering and they have put a good deal of money into fighting CLOCKWORK ORANGE in return for an R rating only the measure. They are not attempting to make a intensifies the problem. If the revered Kubrick bends case for absolute freedom of the screen . Instead to the whims of Dr. Stern , who will be able to' resist? their billboards read \" No on Obscenity! No on Cen- In a sense Kubrick has acknowledged to the industry sorship!\" They are conducting a straightforward that the economic burden of the X rating is simply informational campaign , working to let people know too great to bear for the sake of moral or artistic that the 6000-word proposition , while billed as an scruples . (In point of fact CLOCKWORK ORANGE was very successful as an X picture , but even the most \" Proposition 18 was defeat ed at the polis . - editor prestigious X movies lose a great many bookings because of their X, and Kubrick 's computers must 32 JANUARY 1973

In Ca\\ifornia by Stephen Farber have predicted a big bonus in earnings if the rating peted as a model of what a black movie should could be changed to R.) The studios are sure to be-clean , wholesome, dign ified , \" positive \" in its get the message, and will probably not take a chance image of black family life. It might be pOinted out on another X movie . Most movies will be toned that many of the \" blax ploitation \" movies (SHAFT, down-with the help of Dr. Stern and staff-before COTTON COMES TO HARLEM and its sequel COME BACK , they go into production , but if something should CHARLESTON BLUE, SWEETBACK, MELINDA , SUPER FLY) slip through , the scissors will be applied later. The were directed by blacks, while the sanctimonious \" ratings clause \" included in virtually all studio con- SOUNDER was directed and produced by whites . tracts-requiring the director to make any cuts nec- SOUNDER projects the \" dignified \" black image that essary to avoid an X rating-effectively strangles the white liberals want to see , while the SWEETBACKS and filmmaker. the SUPER FLYS are probably truer to ghetto realities , It is interesting , however, that the movies sup- and to the angry , antisocial fantasies of the contem- ported by today 's audience are by and large the porary black audience . stronger movies available. As an X movie CLOCKWORK What particularly disturbs me about the current ORANGE was one of the year's top grossers , while protests is that some of the black groups are de- most of the other successful movies have been R- manding the right to read scripts before they go rated-THE GODFATHER , FRENZY, SUPER FLY , DELIVER- into production , to make sure they present the ANCE , THE NEW CENTURIONS , EVERYTHING YOU WANTED \" correct \" image of black life. A new rating system TO KNOW ABOUT SEX. In spite of this , the exhibitors for black movies has also been proposed . Once continue to beg for more G and PG movies, inSisting again a minority is offering to cleanse films in the that sex and violence are keeping the spectators \" best interests \" of the majority. Of course it isn 't away. They seem determined to shove \" clean \" difficult to come up with sophisticated rational- movies down our throats. izations for censorship. According to the protest About the strongest films produced within the groups , the fact that black audiences flock to SHAFT industry are the specialized urban black films . and SUPER FL Y is only a symptom of racial oppres- (\" Blaxploitation \" is the trade moniker.) They are sion . In other words , black audiences don ' t know more explicit than most other current movies in what's really good for them . People will be brow- terms of sex, violence , and language; movies like beaten , intimidated, shamed into going to see SUPER FLY , MELINDA , SLAUGHTER , and SHAFT 'S BIG SOUNDER so the civic groups can \" prove \" their point SCORE have the only moderately graphic and erotic that the black audience prefers more wholesome sex scenes in current big-studio movies. (The soapy films . The facts still belie that conclusion , but the bathtub scene in SUPER FLY is about the best in the determination of moralists-black or white-should genre.) These movies are also under pressure, but never be underestimated . from an unex pected source . A number of influential In the past our movies have been emasculated r black leaders and civic groups-Jesse Jackson, because of the studios' greed. At this moment, CORE , NAACP, and a newly-formed industry Coali- ironically, their greed may be the only protection tion Against Blaxploitation-are protesting the from the well-intentioned crusaders. The industry image of blacks in these melodramas, the emphasis would probably like the stronger movies to fail. The on the sordid side of black life, and the glamorization exhibitors want audiences to support family films. of dope pushers, prostitutes, gangsters, and super- But they will not ignore the message of the cash studs. Many of their objections are valid . Most of the new black movies are dreadful. Like all exploita- register. If audiences continue to buy stronger mov- tion movies, they underestimate their audience; the studio executives have calculated the market, and ies, even with all the intimidation , that fact will reach they don 't want to take chances by deviating from proven formulas . In addition , the civic groups are the front offices. It is always dangerous to follow right to protest the fact that these movies employ so few blacks behind the camera . the box office, but right now economic consider- Still, there are some serious questions to be ations may help to prevent a total surrender to the asked about the protests. SOUNDER is being trum- censors. The next few months, however, will see some crucial test cases on censorShip , and if the voters or the courts turn the clock back to pre-per- missive standards, nothing will be able to block the repressive backlash. 11111111 FILM COMMENT 33



King of the Nudies by Roger Ebert Roger Ebert, the film critic for the Chicago Sun upon the idea of diluting the lesbian encounter by Times, wrote the screenplay for Russ Meyer's intercutting the two nurses with subjective under- BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS . water shots of two girls embracing: \" We 'll get the effect of subliminal pearl-diving ,\" he explained . \" We The first time I saw Russ Meyer at work, he was won 't have to show it.\" filming an underwater scene in his own swimming pool. He has since moved into a much larger house The two actresses in CHERR Y had completed their with a much larger swimming pool , but this would commitments some time ago , and drifted away to have been in early 1969 when he was living a few wherever it is that Meyer stars go (he rarely uses blocks down from Sunset Strip in a four-room house actresses more than once, although he has a male with a pool that literally occupied the entire back- stock company). So Meyer hired two different ac- yard .You walked outontothe back porch and dived in. tresses to portray the symbolic underwater nurses. One of them , Ushi , can also be seen in CHERRY as Meyer was a millionaire at the time , VIXEN having the symbolic figure named \" Soul \" who appears from opened the previous autumn , but he had settled into time to time in Indian headdress, playing a saxo- this bachelor lair with little thought of lu x ury. The phone, or leaping through wheat fields. The other front bedroom was for storage-sound effects, out- actress Meyer hired was black. The original nurses takes, racks of prints of his earlier films. There was had both been white, but this discrepancy did not a bedroom , a kitchen , and the pool. Meyer lived here concern Meyer. \" It's part of the symbolism, \" he for a couple of years with his late cat, Chester, and explained . it was out of these digs that he made GOOD MORN- ING-AND GOODBYE , COMMON LAW CABIN , FINDERS Is he serious when he talks about his symbolism? KEEPERS , LOVERS WEEPERS , VIXEN and CHERRY , HARRY Almost never. One of his chief delights on his AND RAQUEL. independent productions were the spoken narra- tions he used for prologues, epilogues, and the The personal nature of his films has been much underlining of the morals of stories . He usually written about, and everybody who is interested composes these right after breakfast in less than knows that the Meyer in~ependent productions half an hour, and they are designed to sound por- were shot in the wilderness with casts that frequently tentous and universally significant while, in fact , outnumbered (or doubled for) crews. CHERRY , with having little logical meaning at all. I was working a budget of around $90 ,000, was Meyer's most on the screenplay for BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE expensive independent film . You know this, and yet DOLLS while Meyer was in post-production on when you watch Meyer at work the intensely per- CHERRY , and I was awakened at si x one morning sonal nature of his involvement is surprising all the by a telephone call : Meyer wanted to read me the same . If there was an auteur working in American epilogue he had just written , and found it so amusing commercial filmmaking during the Si xties-a man that he could hardly get it out between gasps of totally in control of every aspect of his work-that laughter. Audiences reacted to it in the same way , had to be Meyer. It isn't SO much that he operated and yet (of course) its anti-marijuana message is his own camera as that he also carried it. part of the film 's socially-redeeming content. The underwater scene was intended for CHERRY , But I digress. On the evening of the underwater and appears near the end of the film when the two scene in question , Meyer and an old Army buddy nurses are revolving in the swivel chair . Meyer was named Fred were the entire crew. An underwater concerned at this period about private censorship light had been placed in the shallow end of the pool , pressures (mostly from the Citizens for Decent Liter- the girls were treading water in the middle, and the ature) in some of the Midwestern and Southern camera was at the deep end . Meyer's idea was to states that represent his best markets. He wanted backlight the girls in order to get ex plicit silhouettes the lesbian scene in the swivel chair, but he wanted without excessive nude detail. The shooting strategy to take the edge off it somehow. VIXEN had contained was simplicity itself. Meyer had an Ariflex in an a celebrated lesbian scene, but even there the underwater mount. When the actresses were ready, position of the two girls was face-to-face (a technical he took a deep breath and went under. Fred stood detail much questioned by some critics) because on his shoulders and called out, \" Action , girls.\" The of the censorship situation . For CHERRY , Meyer hit girls went under, Meyer shot until he ran out of FILM COMMENT 35

breath , tapped Fred on the ankle, Fred let him up, As plots go , TEAS was not terrifically subtle . It ,, and Meyer gasped \" Cut! \" with a big grin . \" You don 't is essentially a silent comedy with counterpoint see Preminger doing this,\" he said . narration. But the movie's jolly irony overcame any feeling of embarrassment or self-consciousness on All of the Russ Meyer independent films were shot the part of audiences who were, for the most part, in this direct and informal way, without large crews seeing a nude woman on the screen for the first or costs, and their remarkably high technical quality time . TEAS caused a moderate sensation on its is due mostly to Meyer 's training , experience , and release in late 1959, and would probably have compulsive perfectionism . He was a combat caused a greater one if more theaters had been newsreel photographer in the Second World War available for skin-flick bookings at the time. It played (some of the Signal Corps footage of Patton in the for nearly a year in some college towns . TEAS was movie PATTON is his). After the war , he failed , like the geneSis for the years of increased screen nudity most of the service cinematographers, to find a job that were to follow ; The Wall Street Journal claimed inside the Hollywood union system. He moved to in an article that it inspired 150 imitations within a San Francisco, shot many industrial films, gained a reputation during the Fifties as a leading pin-up year, or more films than the genre had produced photographer, did about half a dozen of Playboy's in the previous five decades. earlier Playmates , and shot an obscure mid-Fifties burlesque film in which Tempest Storm had a plas- Almost all of these films (the most successful ter-of-paris cast of her bust made, for insurance early nudies also included BACHELOR TOM PEEPING , reasons and to offset the publicity generated by GOLDILOCKS AND THE THREE BARES, NOT TONITE , Evelyn (Treasure Chest) West. HENRY , and Meyer 's own EVE AND THE HANDYMAN) have dropped out of release and are not even The first actual Russ Meyer film was, of course, available for film society rental. It is hard to say how THE IMMORAL MR . TEAS , shot in 1959 at a cost of they would look today; Meyer tends to be of the $24,000 and largely improvised during a four-day opinion that his pre-synch-sound films have dated, shooting schedule . TEAS was partly bankrolled by and he doesn't include them in retrospectives such a San Francisco burlesque theater owner, and was as the one held at Yale . My own memory of TEAS the first authentic American nudie. Meyer's assign- is that it worked because of its good-natured humor, ment was to imitate the popular nUdist-camp films not its sex, and that it would survive well. There imported from Europe. Their inevitable strong point is certainly a place for it in the current cultural was a volleyball game made somewhat awkward by renaissance of the Fifties. The other film from this the necessity for the male actors to keep their backs period that deserves attention is Meyer's NAKED GALS to the camera. The nUdist-camp movies were one OF THE GOLDEN WEST, an ambitious attempt at come- of the most pathetic and least significant of the dy and satire . It is one of Meyer 's personal favorites , Fifties sub-genres, and were of interest largely be- but did badly at the box-office because, he now cause of the actors' difficulties in manipulating bath believes, he paid too much attention to the humor towels and standing in shrubbery. Their bookings and not enough to the sex, and was over-cautious were typically limited to burlesque theaters (as audi- in aSSigning pasties to his actresses. ence chasers) and marginal hardtop operations. All of Meyer's independent productions (with the The notion of directing the ultimate nude volley- exceptions of EROTICON , MONDO TOPLESS and EUROPE ball game did not much appeal to Meyer. He felt IN THE RAw-significantly, among his less-successful that the success of Playboy had prepared the Amer- titles) were to follow in the direction of TEAS and ican market for an unabashed , high-quality skin present characters who had a problem and existed flick . The occupation of his lead character and a within a narrative situation. This is one of the rea- great many of his interior locations were suggested sons, I think , why his films found such large audi- when his dentist agreed to let his office be used ences and made so much money; the sex occurred on a weekend (\"The chair was well-lighted ,\" Meyer in context (whether farcical or dramatic) and was explained). And so Mr. Teas, played by a Meyer Army never just trundled on screen . buddy named Bill Teas , came into life as a bicycle delivery-man for false teeth . The rest of the movie This was such a novelty in the genre, and yet was more or less made up as they went along , Meyer so easily perceived , that it's astonishing so few of recalls, and the voice-over narration was added Meyer's competitors seem to have noticed it. One later . of the most distracting enemies of film eroticism is a lack of context. This is particularly true of the new The premise of THE IMMORAL MR. TEAS is simple : generation of erotic movies-the gynecological spe- Teas is a harassed city man , cut off from the solace cials, or Frisco beaver flicks-which often reduce of nature and burdened by the pressures of modern themselves to a survey of disembodied sexual appa- life. He can find no rest , alas , because he has been ratus. While there is apparently a novelty for some cursed by a peculiar ability to undress girls mentally. audiences in taking a voyage up the vaginal track At the most unsettling times (in a soda fountain , with gun and camera, the general falling-off of in a dentist's office) women suddenly appear nude business in the hard-core houses is not surprising . What's worse, Teas cannot even control his strange power ; it seems to have been invested naturally in Meyer has generally avoided full frontal nudity him , and doesn 't require the magic sunglasses or in his films , not because of prudishness , but be- secret eli xi rs employed in such TEAS imitations as cause he feels that complete explicitness is an BACHELOR TOM PEEPING . enemy of erotic fantasy. He has also avoided, for the most part , films in which nudity for its own sake 36 JANUARY 1973

is the only subject matter. All of his most successful of actresses with unusually large breasts , and either films have placed strongly-defined characters in a tried to out-cast him or derided him , depending on particular situation , however elementary. And so his their own taste and preferences. But the big boobs films are structured narratives, and the sexual ac- were symptomatic of an overall psychological orien- tivities in them involve characters with personalities tation in Meyer' s skin-flicks. The girls were over- and motives . True eroticism is therefore more possi- developed not because Meyer was a breast-fetishist ble , Meyer believes , because eroticism is caused (although he says he is) but because he wanted by interplay between the imag ination and a specific them to seem like pornographic fantasies in the fictional situation-and is not inspired by essentially flesh . His female characters were often caricatures , documentary records of genitalia. broadly drawn , and their common denominator was insatiable se xual hunger. , Meyer's independent productions fall into three The typical non-Meyer erotic film of the decade categories which are more-or-Iess chronological , usually featured a male lead as the dominant char- with some overlapping . There were the early acter. (An exception was the stylish Radley Metzger, voyeuristic comedies , always in color and with whose leads were women and , as often as not, voice-over; the middle period of black-and-white, lesbians.) He was a satyr with no capacity for f synch-sound Gothic-sadomasochistic melodramas; exhaustion , and he rutted his way through his co- and the last five color , synch-sound sexual dramas. stars whether they were willing or not. In Meyer 's All three categories were inspired to a large degree films , however, the women were often the dominant by Meyer's reading of the marketplace, and in each characters , initiating the action and (more often than case he moved into the new area of filmmaking not) getting too little of it. This was a fantasy more ahead of his contemporaries. Thus each of his three suited to skin-flick audiences , who perhaps felt largest-grossing independent films was the first of uncomfortable identifying with male characters who its type. TEAS was the first uninhibited American would employ coercion or rape , if necessary. The nudie; LORNA was the first fully-scripted se x-vio- fantasy came to the audience ; it did not require lence-and-nudity movie to attempt to escape the identification with aggression . limited booking situation of the skin-flick genre; and Meyer's male characters fell into a limited number VIXEN was the first American skin-flick intended to of categories . At first (memorably in TEAS) they were appeal to women as well as men , and aimed at voyeurs , primarily because in the very early days bookings in respectable first-run situations. of the American skin-flick it was legally not prudent Because market considerations dictated his to show phYSical contact. In Meyer 's middle period , themes as much as , or probably more than, Meyer's the men tended to be impotent (the husband in personal sex ual interests , it is a little tricky to attempt LORNA) or aggressors (the convict-rapist in the same to psychoanalyze Meyer on the basis of his films . film). In his later color films , the men tended to level This is true despite his own willingness to imply that out somewhat into the delighted partners of such his films are his fantasies . During a panel discussion nymphets as Vi xen . Another character who often at the Meyer retrospective at Yale , he was accused crops up is the middle-aged , hard-as-nails woman- by a feminist of being a breast-fetishist. His response hater. Hal Hopper played such a character in LORNA was to grin and wag his eyebrows . In discussing and MUD HONEY , and Franklin Bolger plays him as the lesbian scene in VIXEN, he has claimed that the the bedridden lecher in CHERRY . The good guys rhythmic camera movement, barely perceptible dur- generally got the girls in the end , and poetic justice ing the photography of the scene, records his own was an obsession during the last five or ten minutes personal response to it. \" I won 't do a sex scene of most of Meyer's melodramas . unless it personally turns me on ,\" he said in a 1969 This mix of a variety of men and a single kind interview about VIXEN . \" I get involved in a scene , of (insatiable) superwoman gave Meyer 's films the and I'm down on the floor looking through the possibility of a variety of sexual situations, and there viewfinder , shouting instructions to my actors , to was apparently at least one that suited most my crew , and don't bother me then . We can discuss members of his audience . It is hard to say . The it tomorrow, but don 't hassle me now. \" patrons of skin-flicks have many and various rea- This is part of his image, and it is no doubt true sons for patronizing them , but they mostly share that some of the sex ual situations in Meyer films one common circumstance : they are without an mirror his own fantasies . But he is not the primitive alternative means of se xual fantasy or release at the or untutored artist he sometimes likes to appear to moment. They join together in the democracy of the be ; his method of work on a picture is all business , darkened theater, the middle-aged husbands, the he is a consummate technical craftsman , he is servicemen , the tourists, the horny high-school kids. obsessed by budgets and schedules , and his actors The audience is almost always all-male , and its do not remember how \" turned on \" a scene was, members are careful to avert their eyes from one but how many times it was re-shot . In a genre another and choose seats as far as possible from overrun by sleazo cheapies, he was the best techni- the nearest neighbor. Some of them come to mas- cian and the only artist. turbate (Meyer cheerfully calls them \" the one-armed He was also , perhaps , one of the canniest psy- viewers \" ), but most do not. They sit in silence as chologists . His films found such large audiences complete as it is depressing . because he understood , instinctively or not, why There is a difference, however, in the way a men go to skin-flicks . His imitators noticed his use skin-flick audience reacts to a Meyer picture. I FILM COMMENT 37



noticed it as an undergraduate attending THE IM- get of around $60,000, or nearly three times his MORAL MR . TEAS , and I have seen it consistently previous high , and there was a crude vitality in the during my latter days as a film critic . Meyer audi- production that made it work . ences enjoy themselves more obviously; they laugh. It is such a good thing to hear laughter during a LORNA 'S plot , summarized , sounds like a morality skin-flick. Meyer's films never imply, or inspire, the play, and so were the plots of the next three Meyer sense of secretiveness or shame present in so many productions : MUD HONE Y, FASTER PUSSYCAT, KILL, KILL ! examples of the genre. They are good-hearted, for and MOTOR PS YCHO . This group of four black-and- the most part, and the action scenes are as liberating white pictures forms a quartet apart from the rest and exhilarating as the work of a Siegel or Leone . of Meyer's work , and exhibits (Fred Chappell wrote What sometimes comes across most strongly in a in Man and the Movies) \" very odd 'serious attempts ' Meyer film is a burly , barracks-room heartiness, a full of big, gloomy archetypes and Gothic puzzle- gusto. What came to be most impressive about Russ ments .\" Chappell even described PUSS YCAT as a Meyer 's work , as the Si xties wore on , was that \" blood brother \" to Kyd 's The Spanish Tragedy, audiences came to see them for other than which is perhaps going a bit far to make a point. specifically sexual reasons. Meyer apparently rea- Meyer himself refers to LORNA and MUD HONEY as lized this at about the time he made LORNA , and his. John Steinbeck period , when he went out into perhaps a survey of his independent productions the woods and filmed stark (but semi-tongue-in- will help to show this development. cheek) melodramas about demented hillbillies, reli- gious fanatics , oversexed baby dolls, violent woods- After TEAS , which Leslie Fiedler praised in a men and obscene grandmothers. celebrated review in Show magazine, there was EVE AND THE HANDYMAN , starring his wife and business LORNA has been widely seen , and is still in release partner, Eve Meyer. (They have since divorced , but as part of a Russ Meyer Film Festiv al package. But maintain a friendly business relationship ; Eve was MUD HONEY is Meyer 's neglected masterpiece: his the associate producer on Meyer's two Twentieth most interesting , most ambitious, most complex and Century-Fox productions, and they are currently longest independent production . He describes it as co-producing BLACKSNAKE! ) The male lead was once a case of over-achievement; it was not necessary, again a shy voyeur, portrayed by another of the large or perhaps even wise , he believes, to expend so supply of Meyer's old Army budd ies , James Ryan . much energy on a movie that had so little directly- One of the most interesting scenes in the movie has ex ploitable elements . Nevertheless , it won an en- Eve dancing in a low-cut dress while playing a thusiastic response at the Yale retrospective , and pinball machine: the rhythm and cutting suggest one critic described it as looking like a recently- se xual intercourse , and the scene has a nice bal- rediscovered Thirties Gothic drama in the visual ance between erotic ism and humor. A frequent style of King Vidor. Meyer turnabout theme-the desirable woman who is rejected by the undesirable man-turns up in EVE MUD HONEY 'S plot is impossible to synopsize in in a hitchhiking scene . Unable to get a lift , Eve takes a limited space (Meyer's plots are either capable off one garment after another, still with no success. of being described in a sentence' or impossible to describe at all ). But it has to do with a fanatic At some point in this early period-the dates are preacher, a terrorized town that turns to mob vio- difficult to determine because his films were not lence, and a backwoods family that is apparently always released in the order they were made-came deficient in all genes not related directly to chest EROTICON , advertised as \" the footage the producers development. The visual style is unlike Meyer's other of MR . TEAS had to leave on the cutting-room floor .\" work: he opens with a protracted shot of feet walking Most of the movie was new, actually, and some of through the village, and closes with a terrifically it is semi-documentary footage showing \" America 's effective point-of-view shot of a body toppling into leading adult filmmaker \" hard at work . NAKED GALS an open grave ; in between , there is more mood , OF THE GOLDEN WEST came soon afterward , but was more languorous camera movement, and less not successful for some of the reasons already quick-cutting than we expect from Meyer. noted . It contains scenes satirizing several famous moments in Western classics (and ten years later There are three films from this general period that Meyer was to return to DUEL IN THE SUN for the final fall outside the categories we 've established . They shoot-out in CHERRY). are FANNY HILL, EUROPE IN THE RAW and MONDO TOPLESS . Albert Zugsmith , the independent produc- NAKED GALS helped convince Meyer that the er of exploitation pictures, hired Meyer to direct trad itional skin-flick had outlived its useful life at the FANNY HILL in Berlin. It was Meyer's first ex perience box office , and that his field was crowded with with a film produced by someone else, and he competitors . With LORNA (1964) he attempted to remembers it unhappily. He found Zugsmith difficult open up a new market. He wanted to make a to work with , the German backers of the film unre- well-acted and scripted melodrama with a strong liable, and the shooting conditions all but impossi- action plot to support the necessary nudity ; theater ble . I haven 't seen FANN Y HILL, but Meyer agrees bookers were supposed to recogn ize it as a \" real \" with the general consensus that it isn 't repre- movie and not a nudie, and enough of them did sentative of his work . that LORNA eventually became Meyer 's fourth most profitable independent production . He used a bud- \" The only thing that got me through at all ,\" he recalls, \" was working with Miriam Hopkins, who was our star. The two of us pulled that picture through somehow. I told her once that it was remarkable FILM COMMENT 39

how much she knew about making a picture, and last five films to match the sustained action direction she reminded me that , after all , she had once been of FASTER PUSSYCAT. There is one montage of images married to Fritz Lang. \" in PUSSYCAT-a woman in a Volvo is attempting to crush the muscular hero against a barn-that is While he was in Europe, Meyer made an classical in its urgency and impact. The heroines independent production; EUROPE IN THE RAW is of of PUSSYCAT and MOTOR PSYCHO were dominant, interest primarily because of the way he filmed it. castrating and sadomasochistic, and both of these He concealed a 16-mm camera in a suitcase and films contain very little nUdity. They were intended got footage in the red-light districts of Paris , Am- for the action-exploitation market, especially in the sterdam and elsewhere. The trailers for this film South . explained the shooting method and displayed the concealed equipment, but I recall thinking at the With COMMON LAW CABIN , GOOD MORNING-AND time that the footage must have been conventional GOODBYE , FINDERS KEEPERS , LOVERS WEEPERS , VIXEN and the \" hidden camera\" was a fake gimmick. and CHERRY , however, Meyer returned to heroines Meyer assures me , however, that he did indeed use that were mostly complaisant; there seems to be a suitcase camera, that it was unhandy and difficult some kind of mellowing process going on in these to use, and that he would not recommend making films. Meyer does occasionally use a scene of sym- a film in that way again. bolic castration (the hero having the hair on his chest shaved off in FINDERS KEEPERS , as a prelude MONDO TOPLESS is in some ways quite an interest- to sexual intercourse), but he dilutes his effects with ing film , especially for the light it sheds on Meyer's humor. (The same scene ends with intercutting attitude to his big-busted actresses. It was a color between the bed and a stock-car demolition derby, nudie made to cash in on the San Francisco topless and then the heroine announces that she wants to boom , and has nothing in common with the black- go to the symphony: \" Erich Leinsdorf is conducting and-white Gothics he was making at the same time. Maxim Gorky's Prelude in 0 Major. \") It opens with a voice-over documentary about the topless industry. The cutting is quick , and we see Neither COMMON LAW CABIN (briefly titled , in some a montage of neon signs, stage performers, topless situations , HOW MUCH LOVING DOES A NORMAL COUPLE waitresses , and so on . But Meyer is of course not NEED?) nor GOOD MORNING-AND GOODBYE represent interested in shooting a movie from the orchestra Meyer's best later work . The plots are too diffuse pit. Almost all of the rest of his footage involves to maintain dramatic tension, the acting is topless dancers in incongruous situations. The indifferent, and there is an uncharacteristic amount stripper Babette Bardot, for example , is seen topless of aimless dialogue . In retrospect, however, these while driving a convertible through the city. Another films can be seen as Meyer 's gradual disengage- performer, the remarkably-endowed model who ment from plot. The Gothic quartet was heavily uses the name Candy Morrison , does a go-go dance plotted , sometimes (as with MUD HONEY) dripping in the desert (and in doing so gains a certain with such a wealth of complication and detail that immortality as undoubtedly the most voluptuous they seemed baroque. CABIN and GOOD MORNING , actress Meyer has ever used in a film) . Meyer also on the other hand, were essentially soap operas has topless girls halfway up oil rigs, on top of whipped up to display voluptuous actresses, and Cadillacs in the desert, and dancing next to a their plots were not only superfluous but distract- railroad track (this last includes a nicely-timed zoom ing . Meyer seems to have realized this, and with reaction shot of a passing diesel engineer). his final three independent productions he makes an almost surrealistic use of plot. Plot is there, but The film 's real interest is in its sound track , which somehow just offstage, or buried , or set aside for consists of tape-recorded interviews with the the moment. He uses the conventions of movie dancers. They talk about the hazards and advan- genre fiction-dialogue cliches, music that points, tages of having large bosoms. There seems to be character stereotypes-to give us the impression something subtly sadistic going on here ; Meyer is that a genre story is unfolding. But then he doesn 't simultaneously photographing the girls because of bother to unfold it. He sort of slips around it, but their dimensions, and recording them as they com- so deftly that we have the uncanny impression it's plain about their problems (\"I have to have my bras all there anyway. custom-made\" ). This sets up a kind of psy- chological Mobius strip, and the encounter between This directorial sleight-of-hand can be most the visuals and the words in MONDO TOPLESS creates clearly seen in CHERRY , HARRY AND RAQUEL. It is not the kind of documentary tension Larry Rivers was generally known , I believe, that Meyer edited this going for in TITS. film under a rather considerable handicap, the De Luxe color lab inadvertently destroyed a fourth of After these three films and the Gothic quartet, his footage . So occupied was De Luxe in rushing Meyer turned to the more direct color melodramas through the print of HELLO, DOLLY! that the error was of his most recent independent period-the films not discovered until after Meyer had returned from that finally won him a general reputation. Some of his desert location and disbanded his cast and crew. his best work can be found in the films of 1967 through 1970, although the dramatic intensity of the The cost of reshooting the missing footage was Gothic movies is often missing . With the exception prohibitive , and so Meyer took what seems to me of the man-versus-machine desert scene and the a brave and inventive course. He hired the actress final shoot-out in CHERRY , there is nothing in Meyer's Ushi to symbolize some of the missing scenes. When footage was missing , Meyer simply cut to Ushi doing 40 JANUARY 1973

• something that substituted for the lost action or wards, she gazes up dreamily at him , and the reverse replaced it. He also shot a great many other brief shot shows him putting on his Royal Canadian takes of Ushi (who nowhere appears in the story Mounted Police uniform . Meyer's ability to keep his proper) in order to give the film a consistent te xture . movies light and farcical took the edge off the sex The result is that audiences don 't even realize any- for people seeing their first skin-flick. By the time thing is missing ; a close analysis might reveal some he made VIXEN , Meyer had developed a directing cavernous gaps in the plot , and it is a little hard style so open , direct and good -humored that it to figure out exactly how (or if) all the characters dominated his material. He was willing to use dia- know each other, but Meyer's subjective scenes are logue so ridiculous (\"We decided to stop doing this so inventive and his editing so confident that he when we were twelve ,\" Vi xen 's brother protests as simply sweeps the audience right along with him . she seduces him in a shower), situations so ob- CHERRY , HARRY AND RAQUEL is possibly the only viously tongue-in-cheek , characters so incredibly narrative film ever made without a narrative. stereotyped and larger than life, that even his most torrid scenes usually managed to get outside them- VIXEN is another film that suggests plot without selves . VIXEN was not only a good skin-flick , but a laboring it. Its story situation is pure simplicity : Vi xen mer.ciless satire on the whole genre. It catalogued and her husband , a wilderness guide, live in the the basic variations in skin-flick plots , and ticked \" bush country\" of the Canadian northwest. Room- them off one by one. ing with them , for the time being , are Vixen 's brother and a black American draft-evader who 's a friend Of all the sex scenes in VIXEN , the only one with of his. An American couple come to spend the genuine erotic impact is the lesbian encounter be- weekend, a red-bearded Scottish Communist hap- tween Vi xen (Erica Gavin) and the wife of the visiting pens down the road , and most of these characters fisherman (Vincene Wallace). And this one works, interact se xually and l or politically with each other I believe, because Meyer wanted it to . He doesn 't for about an hour. cut into it with asides or embellishments. He stays with the characters . His editing rhythm is deliber- At the end of that time, the Communist and the ately sensuous. And his direction of the actresses black (who has been instantly radicalized by Vixen 's (Erica Gavin remembered in an interview several racism and the Scottish Communist's recitation of months later) was \" exhaustive. \" The scene was several pseudo-political ravings no doubt concoct- talked over, run through , rehearsed and finally shot ed by Meyer in a fit of hilarity before breakfast that so many times, she recalled , that the thin edge of morning) attempt to force Vi xen and her husband exhaustion began to look like the thin edge of to fly them to Cuba. The movie ends with a ten-min- passion. ute sequence in the air, during which the characters discuss Communism , Cuban Marxism , Vietnam , That was apparently Meyer's strategy; his ac- draft evasion , civil rights and airplane hijacking . This tresses, who were not experienced movie profes- is the socially-redeeming content , of course , and sionals and who felt some personal awkwardness it is just possible that Meyer stuck it all in at the about a lesbian scene, naturally tended to be inhib- end in order to (a) avoid interrupting his main story ited . The repetition of the scene eventually wore line, and (b) chase the audience. It's certainly true through their reserve until their primary concern was that the word got around during VIXEN 'S year-long simply to get the scene over with , somehow, as soon Chicago run : When everybody gets on the airplane, as possible . And this essentially grim determination Meyer audiences told each other, it's OK to go. was created , photographed and edited by Meyer to result in what looks like a totally authentic erotic The word also got around about VIXEN before the scene. There is no doubting Erica Gavin 's wild movie opening in Chicago , and there was the un- magnetism as an untrained but natural actress, and precedented phenomenon of a dozen or so patrons her personality as Vi xen was central to the movie 's every night who bought tickets simply to see the working , but Meyer's effects are almost always VIXEN trailer. VIXEN'S astonishing success may have brought about through great effort. His willingness been because it was the first skin-flick to really break (in an Argosy interview about VI XEN , for example ) into the quality first-run markets; it was the first to make it all sound like a good time up in the hills booking of its kind in many engagements. It may is primarily for public-relations purposes . also have appealed because it was good-natured , for the most part, and celebrated the typical Meyer Perhaps the most brilliant scene in VIXEN , cine- gusto and lack of inhibition . Meyer himself thinks matically, is the dance Vi xen does before the it may have made it because it was the first skin-flick campfire for the benefit of the visiting husband. The deSigned for couples to attend on dates. scene is comically counterpointed with her own husband's pipe-smoking complacency (his charac- None of these factors by themselves seem to terization is one of the funniest things in the movie ), account for the movie's $6,OOO,OOO-plus gross, but there is no doubting her own erotic intentions. however. My own notion is that VIXEN is the quintes- She fondles , of all things , a freshly-caught fish , fi- sential Russ Meyer film (not the best-MuD HONEY nally dropping it down the front of her dress and then and BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS rank ahead leaning forward so that it slides out and creates one of it). The opening sequence clearly establishes the of the most inexplicably erotic shots in all of Meyer's movie 's ground: Vi xe n, wearing a bikini , is pursued films. Inexplicable, because-with apologies to the through the Canadian Northwest bush country by Marx Brothers-why a fish? an unclad man . He pins her to a tree . She strug- gles . . . to undo her bikini . They make love. After- Meyer's ability to find subjective metaphors for FILM COMMENT 41

his scenes of eroticism and violence is one of the ing the office politics and sexual intrigues of a group most distinctive characteristics of his cinema. The of people in the magazine and fashion photography desert chase scene in CHERR Y, HARRY AND RAQUEL industries. is transformed , for example , when Meyer uses cam- era placement, music and montage to transform his Meyer was brought in on a highly speculative wounded Mexican into a matador, and a Jeep into deal. He was given a suite of offices, a sum of money, a vengeful bull. He also has fun with his cutaways and si x weeks to produce an acceptable treatment (a wild sex ual encounter is likely to be translated for a movie to be called BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE into a stock-car demolition derby); his literal cuts DOLLS . No specific subject matter or characters were among scenes (in CHERR Y, there is three-way cutting specified. It was originally intended , however, that between sexual entry , a gynecologist's vaginal ex- the movie be in some way a sequel , and Fo x had amination , and a tire tool plunging into an auto jack); Barbara Parkins under contract to portray her origi- and his musical puns (Z-Man 's homosexual advance nal VALLE Y OF THE DOLLS character , Anne Welles . on an unwilling partner in BEYOND THE VALLE Y OF THE DOLLS is scored with \" Stranger in Paradise \" ). Even in the original treatment , however, Meyer suggested that another actress be used instead of Meyer doesn 't mind being obvious with these Barbara Parkins, whose salary would have stretched devices and , indeed , his cheerful willingness to go the movie's $900,000 budget. Meyer's plan was to for an outrageous effect is one of the things that pay close to Equity minimum and use the savings makes his movies endearing . His cuts to subjective to buy extra shooting days. As it happened , a lawsuit substitutes for the same action are so literal, so by Jacqueline Susann made it necessary to drop direct, so basic, that they recall a kind of filmmaking all of the names of her original characters from the not seen in the commercial cinema since the Twen- screenplay; \" Anne Welles \" became \" Susan Lake\" ties. Some of his effects are so old-fashioned that and , in the process , BVD added a line to its advertis- in his hands they seem positively experimental, and ing pointing out that it was \" NOT a sequel-there audiences react to them with a delight that has has never been anything like it before.\" nothing to do with the erotic impulse of the movie. At the time we began work on our screenplay, Many critics have wondered in print , however, however, we were under the impression it would wh ether Meyer really knows he's being funny. This be a sequel. This expl<;iins certain residual charac- might seem like an incredible question to be asked ters in BVD who do not seem organic to the story. by anyone who has seen his films: his sense of We were not much concerned with Miss Susann 's humor is so clearly up front. But the question does original novel or film , however. Neither of us ever get asked. One of the New York reviews of BE YOND read the novel , although I attempted to at one time. THE VALLE Y OF THE DOLLS , for example , found it full We did screen Mark Robson 's film vers ion of VALLEY of stereotypes and cliches: The critic apparently was OF THE DOLLS before starting to write , and this gave unwilling to believe that each stereotype and cliche us the notion of making BVD as a parody. We would had been put into the movie lovingly, by hand . My take the basic situation (three young and talented own contacts with Meyer over a period when he gi rls come to Hollywood , find love and success , and was casting , preparing , shooting and editing three then are brought low by booze , drugs and pride), films , left me with the impression that very little gets and attempt to exaggerate it wildly. We would into one of his films by accident. He is a surprisingly include some of the sensational elements of the enthusiastic film buff, has seen almost every Ameri- original story-homosexuality, crippling diseases, can sound feature of importance, was a still pho- characters based on \" real \" people, events out of tographer on location for such directors as George recent headlines-but, again , with flat-out exagger- Stevens, and has-I keep getting back to this-an ation. I originally saw the movie as a total parody ; instinctively satirical sense of the ridiculous that Meyer, with his characteristic unwillingness to stop comes from something of the same Fifties sensibility at the merely total , saw it as a total parody and a that produced Bob and Ray, Lenny Bruce , Stan total sex-and-violence trip . At one point we de- Freberg and Mad magazine. scribed our project to Fox executive David Brown as \" the first exploitation-horror-camp-musical ,\" and This became apparent to me when we began that wasn 't far off. work on the original screenplay for BEYOND THE VALLE Y OF THE DOLLS (which will hereafter be abbre- Working with Meyer, I found , was simplicity itself: viated to BVD , and which I intend to discuss in terms I only had to devote nine hours a day, seven days of my memories and experiences-leaving it to a week , to the actual writing . The evenings could others to evaluate it critically ). At the time Meyer be spent in story conferences and discussions about was approached by 20th Century-Fox about the the style of the film . Meyer had determined to give project, it cons isted mostly of the title, which had Fox, not a treatment , but an actual screenplay at been purchased by Fox for a possible sequel at the the end of the si x weeks . time Jacqueline Susann sold them her VALLEY OF THE DOLLS . Miss Susann had worked- from time to We devised the plot more or less in collaboration , time with several writers on a series of potential BVD by creating characters and then working out situa- scripts , but none of them had succeeded in pleasing tions to cover the range of exploitable content we the Fo x management. The only pre-Meyer BVD script wanted in the film . Meyer wanted the film to appeal , I saw was a melodrama set in New York and involv- in some way , to almost anyone who was under thirty and went to the movies. There had to be music, mod clothes, black characters, violence, romantic love, soap opera situations, behind-the-scenes in- 42 JANUARY 1973



trigue , fantastic sets , lesbians, org ies , drugs and what had hit it. The movie had to be outrageous ; (eventually) an ending that tied everything together. a total put-on ; and still work as melodrama. Individ- ual scenes were conceived on two levels, usually: In the event, it was hard to keep so many charac- at the dramatic level, and then at the level of what- ters floating all the time , and the first hour of BVD ever inside joke was to be conveyed . Sometimes moves somewhat slowly th rough all the set-ups of this dualism works quite effectively, I think , as when character and story. But we did manage to tie (a ) Harris is discovered on the catwalks of a TV everything together at the end , with a quadruple studio , prepared to commit suicide on live time , and murder and a triple wedding that effectively pun- (b) the camera movement quotes Welles' famous ished all the bad guys and rewarded all the good opera-house shot in CITIZEN KANE. (The shooting ones . We knew we would have the murder-orgy (we script called for the camera to duplicate Welles' were working before the Tate case was solved , and effect exactly, but we couldn 't do this without it was one of the exploitable elements we wanted spending extra money. We did not know at the time to use), but we didn 't know how we would follow that the middle section of Welles ' shot was , in fact, it . Meyer wanted to end the movie with a happy a min iature. We wouldn 't have had the money for ending to end all happy endings . Inspiration came the miniature either, however, and so a zoom was one n ight during dinner: Harris, the parapleg ic used .) Another dual scene involves the surgeon , Dr. rock-group manager, would be jostled during the Scholl, advising the grief-stricken friends that Harris final shoot-out, and his wheelchair overturned . As may not walk again . This scene was written and the violence subsided , we would cut to a close-up scored as soap opera , as was the chess game scene of his toe moving. And then we 'd pull the old \" I between Kelly and Harris. can walk again! \" routine and cut to a parody Easter Seal commercial of Harris and his original girlfriend , The movie's transitional montages, intended to Kelly, walking through a meadow. A triple wedding symbolize Z-Man 's growing influence with the rock wo uld come as an epilogue. This was so totally trio and Harris's personal disintegration , were con- impossible , ridiculous and obvious that we saw it ceived as a kind of throwback to Forties and Fifties as pure gold inspiration and used it. There is a scene musical biographies. We didn't use Variety head- near the end where Kelly assists Harris, on crutches , lines only because we had already used a series to cross a log across a little stream . There was some of roadside signs superimposed on a map to indicate talk of having him fall into the water, but Meyer felt a journey; we wanted our visual fun to be as eclectic this would sabotage the emotional uplift of the scene as possible. The movie originally began with a sym - and its function as visual satire . He also saw the bolic bedside and coffin-side scene between Kelly ep ilogue as a parody of old Justice-of-the-Peace and her mother (who had been disowned by her wedding scenes , and shot and scored it in a frothy family years before for marrying an Irish-American Fo rties style. Catholic, and who only now told Kelly about her rich Aunt Susan and the family inheritance). This The movie itself seemed to ta ke shape qui c kly scene was cut , and about 90 % of the scene in Aunt after we had our basi c premise, which was that Susan 's photography studio (where she first meets nothing could be too outlandish , obvious, stereo- Kelly) was also cut: Meyer felt they moved too slowly, typed , cliched , gaudy or extreme. We needed a although it disappointed him to cut a fashion pho- heavy, of course, and created one in the person tography sequence designed as a parody of BLOWUP . of Ronnie \" Z-Man \" Barzell, the Teen-Age Tycoon of Rock (a character was meant to seem to be based The supporting characters in the movie were on one of the young rock music producers, although intended as a glossary of Hollywood character and neither Meyer nor myself had ever met one-a neat name types . \" Porter Hall,\" the shyster lawyer, was touch , we thought, after all the guessing-games Meyer's contribution , and a bow in the direction of about Susann 's characters). Z-Man began his ca- the late character actor. \" Randy Black,\" heavy- reer as a bo y, and it only occurred to us to ma ke weight champion of the world , probably needs no him a secret transvestite as we were writing the orgy identification . \" Ashley St. Ives,\" the superstar of scene. We had done the lesbian encounter between sex movies, has a splendidly Hollywood name, the two girls, and symmetry seemed to dictate a but I liked her better when she was \" Ashley homosexual encounter between Z-Man and the Famous.\" Unfortu nately , the Fo x front office wasn 't movie 's other heavy, Lance Rocke. Meyer was of sympathetic to our reference to Ted Ashley of the opinion that the American mass audience was Warner Brothers and his former agency. not ready for an erotic homosexual scene played straight, and we had already written the Z-Man / Our actual writing fell into a pattern fairly easily. Lance bedroom scene as it now exists when it We talked out the characters and the plot, making occurred to us, off-hand actually, to reveal Z-Man notes on yellow legal pads, and then I wrote the as a character who had been female the whole time . scenes and Meyer embellished them with technical This kind of triple-twist (gi rl plays male homosexual ) notes and indications of his visual strategy. The final wou ld have audiences coming out of the theater, screenplay was not a polished shooting script, how- Meyer said , \" totally confused .\" He greeted this ever , because Meyer's intention was to work in his possibility (as he had greeted the notion of making usual manner and develop scenes shot-by-shot on Harris walk again ) with an immensely satisfied the sets . This was a particular challenge at Fox , chortle. where he was supporting a large overhead and daily shooting costs and couldn 't afford the perfectionism The basic thrust behind BVD , Meyer said more of his independent productions. than once, was to leave the audience wondering He was able to gain shooting time not only by 44 JANUARY 1973

economizing on actors' salaries, but by using exist- had been harassed for years by various amateur ing Fox sets and props where possible, and bringing in associates from his independent days (including and professional vigilantes , and intended THE SEVEN composer Stu Phillips) to work at less than Fo x' s ordinary expense. Z-Man 's ornate bedroom was MINUTES as his statement against censorship . mostly gotten together from old Fox props for his- torical swashbucklers. The elaborate living room of The result, whatever it was, was not a Russ Meyer the Z-Man manor was actually a set for MYRA BRECK- INRIDGE , but can be seen only briefly in one shot film in the classical vein . There were some nice in MYRA . touches, like making the U.S. Senator from Califor- Meyer 's personal opinion was that BVD was really about Harris, the bedraggled manager who passes nia into a woman played by Yvonne De Carlo. through impotence and paralysis and lives again to walk through the valley of the dolls. I was never There were a few flashes of Meyer humor, like a really sure whether the movie had a focus on one character ; in writing it, it felt more like a juggling self-important character speaking on a car tele- act, and the problem was to keep all the characters alive. It's possible that there were too many charac- phone that turns out to be in a Volkswagen. But ters , but I don 't th ink so. The profusion of cast members gave the movie a nice chaotic feeling , and Meyer 's main thrust seemed to be to bring THE SEVEN there are times when I believe BVD· is the only movie that actually duplicates on the screen the insanely MINUTES to the screen more or less faithfully and crowded feeling of the Jack Davis cartoon ads for comedies like ITS A MAD , MAD , MAD, MAD WORLD. seriously, and I think that was a mistake. The court- It was also slightly easier to keep the characters room scenes and philosophical discussions clashed in mind because each one was drawn as a caricature and then typecast. Meyer was able to heighten this with the melodrama (as they also do in the Irving effect by directing all the actors in an absolutely straight style. This was his intention from the outset: Wallace novel), and the result was a film of a project To write a parody and direct it deadpan . If he succeeded , he said , there should never be a mo- that should probably not have been made at all , and ment in the movie when any actor seems to under- certainly not by Russ Meyer. stand the humor of his dialogue or situation. This was even true in a scene of deliberately extreme exag- By this time , however, Meyer was occasionally geration (later cut from the screenplay for reasons of length) in which Casey , the latent lesbian , is being seen as an auteur whose gifts consisted of pursued around an office by the lecherous \" Marvin Fruchtman ,\" head of \" Bellevue Studios.\" Some of something quite apart from the dynamic , sexy, funny the acting in BVD was criticized as inept and ama- teurish , but in fact the movie must have been terribly personal style his admirers cherish . An earnest critic difficult for the actors, who were given (deliberately) impossible lines and asked to read them as realisti- for the UCLA Daily Bruin perceived that THE SEVEN cally as they could. MINUTES was shot entirely from stationary camera The movie was also linked with MYRA BRECK- INRIDGE attacked for its violence , and seen as the positions (except for one pan which kept a car in harbinger of various alarming trends . It seemed to me that MYRA BRECKINRIDGE was a chicken-hearted mid-screen , and thus had as its purpose a stationary movie, timid about its own vulgarity , while BVD was saved by Meyer 's gusto . In writing BVD , I tried to composition), and described Meyer as the stylistic keep a classic like THE PRODUCERS in mind . It was impossible, I thought , to handle bad taste in good heir of Eisenstein. taste , but possible for a movie (as Mel Brooks once put it) to \" rise below vulgarity.\" I don 't think that says it. He is an original , who BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS was Meyer's developed his own style during a decade of highest-grossing film , taking in an estimated $9 million world-wide (MYRA grossed $3 million on a independent productions he totally controlled . He cost of $4 million ). But Meyer 's next production at Fox , THE SEVEN MINUTES , was his first commercial has a direct, vital , literal approach to his material , failure. This should probably not be surprising ; the project itself was unsuited to Meyer's strongest and the ability to make the same scene fully effective points , which are eroticism , action and parody in about equal doses. THE SEVEN MINUTES was intended in two different ways for two d ifferent audiences. as a serious consideration of pornography and censorship and , alas , that is the way Meyer ap- Unlike many contemporary directors, he doesn 't proached it. He got serious about the theme . He seem to have been directly influenced by anyone- his approach to a scene is a visceral and intellectual expression of his personality. Meyer's next film , BLACKSNAKE! is an independent production (albeit more expensive than formerly), and , judging by the screenplay , he is returning to the ground he knows and covers best. After that , he is conSidering doing a movie titled BEYOND BEYOND-a locale that, if you stop to think about it, his best films have always occupied . IIIIIII RUSS MEYER FILMOGRAPHY 1959 The Immoral Mr. Teas, \" 63 minutes; 1961 Eroticon , 60 minutes; Eve and the Handyman , 65 minutes; 1962 Naked Gals of the Golden West, 65 minutes; 1963 Europe in the Raw , 70 minutes; Heav- enly Bodies , 60 minutes; 1964 Lorna, 79 minutes; 1965 Mud Honey, 92 minutes; Motor Psycho, 74 minutes; 1966 Faster Pussycat, Kill, Kill , 83 minutes; Mondo Topless ,\" 61 minutes ; 1967 Good Morning- and Goodbye, 80 minutes; Common Law Cabin , 70 minutes; 1968 Finders Keepers , Lovers Weepers ,';' 72 minutes; Vi xen ,';' 70 minutes; 1969 Cherry , Harry and Raquel ,'~ 71 minutes; 1970 Beyond the Valley of the Dolls,';'\" 109 minutes; 1971 The Seven Min- utes, 116 minutes; 1972 Blacksnake! ';' Distributed in 16mm by Eve Productions , 7080 Hollywood Boulevard , Los Angeles CA 90028 ';\";' Distributed in 16mm by Films Inc . FILM COMMENT 45



~~~~ ~~CJ)[l~~~~ A~~ (I)~~~~ A[L[L ~~ ~(J)(J)~ ua~~~ Russ Meyer interviewed by Stan Berkowitz Stan Berkowitz is a graduate student in film and it lacking . \" What's the kick? \" he asks. \" Nothing happened to me the time I smoked it. But anyway , has written film criticism for several Los Angeles who needs it? I have my films , and they 're a kind publications. The interview with Russ Meyer took of a turn-on for me.\" Meyer 's latest turn-on is called place in August, 1972. BLACKSNAKE! . Lexington Avenue runs through Hollywood be- tween Sunset and Santa Monica Boulevards. Just STAN BERKOWITZ : What attracted you to the west of where it crosses Highland Avenue , it tra- story of BLACKSNAKE!? verses a distr ~t that is noted for its concentration of companies which furnish supplies and services RUSS MEYER: I read some legend material from to everyone from student filmmakers to major studio the Caribbean , and I also wanted to dabble a little technicians. One of the newer buildings on this bit in a black film . The successful films that I've made street is divided into two stories of offices, few of have always been in the parody genre, so I figured I which are larger than a bachelor apartment. Anyone would try to come up with something that was kind who feels like it can walk up the stairs to the second of irreverent, like All in the Family, maybe. I didn 't floor and , without having to worry about guarded think about All in the Family, the successful TV gates , card keys, or even surly secretaries, he can show, to begin with , but it turned out that it has a go down the hall to room 213. There , as often as strange similarity to it. not, will be Russ Meyer, standing in front of a Moviola near the open door. BERKOWITZ: In films like VIXEN you 've shown a liberal view on civil rights. Are you worried that this Once Meyer basked in the exclusive trappings new irreverent approach might offend some blacks? of a major studio , namely Twentieth Century Fo x. Now, three years and two films later, Meyer doesn't MEYER: No , I think I've made it a kind of JOE . miss any of the prestige. \" An editing room is an I've been to a number of screenings of JOE, and editing room ,\" he shrugs. I like the film very much , and every audience that I've seen it with , including the blacks , enjoyed it Meyer begins his work days with a visit to a enormously. They realized that it was a big broad- Hollywood health club ; his once paunchy frame is ass put-on . now almost gangling . By 8:00 AM he is at his editing room -office working on his new feature. His tiny When we were negotiating with the primarily cubicle shows a few signs of the draining , time-con- black Barbadian government for cooperation in the suming work that goes on there: a shaving kit, some filming of BLACKSNAKE! , it finally got down to a other toiletries , and , tucked away in one corner, a question of what the film was all about. I went whole case of scotch . On one occasion , Meyer through my song and dance, and explained carefully ventured beyond alcohol to marijuana, but he found and quickly the general theme of the film . The commissioner-he was dressed like a British officer, pips, swagger stick, walking shorts, a brown belt To p to bottom : Haji and Ale x Rocco in MOTORP SYC HO ; HaJi and un ide ntified gunman In MOTORPSYC HO . Er ica Gavin and Harriso n Page in VJXEN ' all photos : Eve Productions . FILM COMMENT 47

and the lot-he asked me, \" Who wins? \" I said , \" Well , call a duppy , it's like a zombie, and he runs through the blacks,\" and he said , \" Well , that 's fine .\" So from the forest. It's a gothic thing we have there. He tries then on , we had no trouble about official coopera- to strangle his ex-wife any chance he can , for the tion . terrible deed she did him . This is a very liberal film , extremely so , and What I undertook, and I realized it afterwards, it's told in a manner that is forthright, and with my was a terribly ambitious thing . I was making a period rambunctious style. I think there are a lot of places in the film where the blacks will get up and start afilm , la CAPTAIN BLOOD , Warner Brothers, 1934, and cheering , particularly when they start whipping the white overseer who 's been whipping them for a long we almost didn 't make it. time. Each slave goes up and takes one crack at When I was at Fo x, I worked with a very large him with the blacksnake whip. I think at that point, there's going to be a lot of cheering. But then again , crew, and was able to delegate a lot of authority. the characters are a lot bigger than life. They 're right When I went to Barbados, my associate, Jim Ryan , out of an AI Capp cartoon . There are only two really and I undertook the responsibility of maybe an entire sympathetic people in the picture , but for the most studio, or a portion thereof, and put together a part , they' re all terribly bad people. terribly ambitious film that would have cost at least a million dollars, had it been made by a major studio. BERKOWITZ : Don 't you also try to reflect some We made it for a little over $200,000, and it's a contemporary themes in BLACKSNAKE! ? remarkable picture. MEYER : Yeah , I do that. I've often been accused Prior to making films at FOX-DOLLS and SEVEN of making morality plays. But I kind of like to poke MINUTEs-I had gone out with four or five stalwarts fun at history and, of course, current events. When and we made pictures for a very limited amount of I can borrow from contemporary things, I guess I money, and because they were made at a particular get some kind of turn-on or particular excitement. time, they were highly successful. I daresay if I were Someone might say that there 's a similarity between to go out and make the same kind of film today, this fellow Isaiah and Martin Luther King , or some- it would not be as successful , no matter how much how Joshua reminds me of Eldridge Cleaver, and mox ie I put in . those black troopers in Napoleanic costumes and riding horses-who are they? Perhaps they ' re a BERKOWITZ: Why not? parallel to the Ton Ton Macoutes of Haiti . MEYER: Because I think that the majors on one side have hacked away at the sex ual freedom that BERKOWITZ: This new film seems to mark a shift I was able to express in my early films ; and the porno in your films from sex to violence. bunch , the hard-core people, have chipped away at the audience from the other side. So the idea MEYER: Sure, there 's a change. If you want to of coming up with a film which showed simulated compare it to VIXEN , 60% of that film dealt with sex or eroticism , no matter how attractive or how matters of sex, a very small percentage had any kind well acted , I know it wouldn 't be a success. of violence. But some of the others had a lot of violence : FINDERS KEEPERS ; CHERR Y, HARR Y AND RA- So I have to look toward newer, more ambitious QUEL ; FASTER PUSSYCAT. SO it 's not too great a projects. BLACKSNAKE! was certainly ambitious, departu re o especially in view of the fact that we were making a film in a foreign land , which is not easy. It's not The basis of this film is sexual. An attractive like dealing with a film in the United States, where English whore , low born , has been sold into white there are some things you just assume. Every day slavery-I don 't show this in the film-by a pimp in there was a new staggering problem that was pre- so-called London town . And she meets old Sir Alec, sented to us. We had a schedule of si x weeks , who owns Blackmoor Plantation , on the mythical but then we had a contingency of an additional week island of San Cristobal. He falls in love with her, and we used that week. And then of course we were and he takes her back and marries her and then down there three weeks beforehand , Ryan and she literally screws him to death . Now, again, we myself. Then I spent one extra week with a very don 't see this, but she 's now gone through four limited crew, just the soundman and assistant cam- husbands, and the thread that keeps our story erman, and we went out and shot material for a together is the young Englishman , of the aristoc- montage-which are always very prominent in racy , who calls upon an elderly lord for assistance my films . in getting a letter of recommendation so that he may go to this island to find out what's happened to his BERKOWITZ : Were you also the cinematog- long-lost brother Jonathan. So the story is very rapher? soapy in one way. MEYER : No , a fellow by the name of Arthur Ornitz Jonathan, who was the fourth husband of Lady was . He did THE ANDERSON TAPES , LILIES OF THE FIELD Susan Walker, mysteriously disappeared. There was and some others. He's a very capable camerman . no more correspondence from him. We find out later His brother, Don Ornitz, and I were in the service in the story that brother Jonathan has been together and we 're very close friends . Arthur did emasculated and had his tongue removed , because a very capable job, although it was far more than one hangup that Lady Susan Walker has is that any he had anticipated. He was accustomed to working of her men who have some sort of activity with a with a very large crew, but I made it clear up front black girl , she shuns them very quickly, and in this that he was to be the camera operator as well and instance, she really did this guy in. He is what we he went for it, but it was a very arduous thing , working in the cane fields , the humidity and the heat, the uncomfortableness of it, and I didn 't provide all 48 JANUARY 1973