04.18.05
Stags, Smokers & Blue Movies: The Origins of American Pornographic Film
When Grove Press, the American publisher of controversial works by authors such as DH Lawrence and Henry Miller, liquidated their film division in the mid 1980’s, they sent their prints to the Harvard film archive. Harvard was expecting to receive art films and documentaries from filmmakers such as Stan Brackhage and Frederick Wiseman. Instead they received multiple prints of films with titles such as Freedom to Love.
Julie Buck, the Harvard archive curator (and George Eastman House’s Selznick School graduate) has assembled a program of the Grove Press material, along with additional shorts representative of the "restricted" titles in Harvard's and other archives, including trailers for 70’s hard- and soft-core films, experimental and student shorts, animation, stag loops from the 20’s, 30’s and 40’s. They’re the tartier cousins of the educational, advertising and industrial films that I collect- fascinating from a purely sociological standpoint in reflecting the tastes and morality of the 20th century. Yeah. Totally sociological. Totally.
And, now that I’ve legitimized the evening with an academic context- on to the porn!
The program was arranged roughly chronologically, backwards from the 80’s to the 20’s. Highlights included:
1. The trailer for the John Holmes/Marilyn Chambers vehicle Insatiable. Yes, once porn played in actual movie theaters, and I suppose the patrons looked forward to seeing the coming attractions. (Heh, you said…) Marilyn Chambers is often touted as the woman who put the "star" in Porn Star, and as the first "beautiful" woman to appear in the genre. Here she looks rather flat-chested and horse-faced, but not nearly as scary as the identical, silicone enhanced sexbots that populate the internet.
2. A hilarious trailer for Russ Meyer’s Vixen, narrated by Meyer himself. ("I’m Russ Meyer and the Management of this theater wants you to know about my upcoming feature- VIXEN!")
3. The trailer for the aforementioned Freedom to Love, directed by German husband-and-wife team Drs. Phyllis and Eberhardt Kronhausen. Uh… I don’t really know what the movie might have been about. It looked very European. Also included was a Kronhausen short subject, which played like Maya Darren’s "Meshes of the Afternoon", only with boobies. At one point, a woman spends several minutes caressing a bell pepper, which I have to admit was kind of hot.
4. "Crocus", an animated student film by a current Harvard professor, rendered in a tedious Monty Python paper cut-out style. Two parents want to have sex, but their screaming baby keeps demanding their attention. Then, a pickle, a giant bird, and a bouquet of roses fly through their window. Goddamn, I hate the 70’s.
5. "Smart Aleck", supposedly the most popular porn film ever made (as documented by the Kinsey Institute). It stars stripper Candy Barr, who was employed by Jack Ruby in his Dallas nightclub and later called on by the FBI to give a statement regarding her knowledge of Ruby’s activities after the Kennedy assassination. Candy gets picked up in a motel swimming pool, and she and the gentleman get a room and have sex. He wants a blowjob, and she refuses, but calls on a friend who accommodates him. She gets envious of the attention being paid to her friend, so she sits on his face. Good for her.
6. "The Aviator", a rather elaborately plotted one-reeler from the early 30’s. Two cute girls with marcelled hair, wearing nothing but strands of pearls, cavort in a shower room but, oops! They forgot it has a glass ceiling, and are being observed by a guy in a helicopter the whole time. One of the girls runs off, and the second beckons to the pilot to land and come have some fun, which he does.
7. "Ever-ready", an animated short. The humor in this one is embarrassingly low-brow, but hilarious. It’s like a Tijuana Bible come to life. It features anamorphic penises, animated venereal diseases, man-on-man anal sex and man-on-cow sex, all done in that crazy 1920’s style. Imagine if the Betty Boop cartoons had been scripted by R. Crumb. After he did a lot of drugs. More than usual. The curator speculated that because of the high quality of the animation, that this might have actually been produced by the Fleischer Brothers studio.
8. "Getting His Goat", the final short on the program, is guaranteed to put to rest any misconceptions about your great-grandparents generation never having heard of sex. Again, this one was very low-brow, but also very funny and fairly well-scripted. Three girls decide to go skinny dipping, and are spied on by a college-boy type who steals their dresses. He demands sex in exchange for giving them back, and then offers them their clothes and $50 in exchange for a good time. They refuse, until one of them gets an idea. They agree on the condition that the intercourse takes place through a hole in a fence. When he agrees, they trick him into copulating with a goat and the girls run off $50 richer. Well, that was the best sex the guy’s ever had, so he starts hanging around the beach, waiting for the girl of his dreams to reappear so he can proposition her again. Eventually the girls see him, and one of them sticks a pillow under her dress so that she looks pregnant and demands money from the flustered young man. He hands over the contents of his wallet, the girls run away, but not before throwing the pillow at his head and laughing at him.
Sadly, Harvard has no plans for the preservation of these films. The curator stated that these "restricted" materials are at the bottom of the list of priorities for most archives, and are usually the first things to get thrown out when they start running out of space. She plans on screening the films until they wear out, but then they’ll be gone forever.