‘70’s soft-core brought safe sex to cinemas - Boston Globe
Interesting article by Ty Burr of the Boston Globe. From 1984-1989 he was a “film evaluator” at Cinemax vetting the ”Drive-In Saturday Night” and ”Friday After Dark” blocks. Which basically means he was the person choosing the exact films that I, as an adolescent, watched behind my parents’ backs with such glee. This article is also significant in that it provides a name for this movement - “Skinemax” and traces the origin of the movement to one film in particular ”Emmanuelle” (1975).
‘70’s soft-core brought safe sex to cinemas
In ”The X List: The National Society of Film Critics’ Guide to the Movies That Turn Us On,” recently published by Da Capo Press, 41 members of that professional organization contribute original essays on films that have pushed society’s buttons and their own. The films addressed range from the classic (”The Long Hot Summer”) to the modern (”Irreversible”), from the discreet (”Gilda”) to the explicit (”Deep Throat”). Sensing an area that had gone unaddressed, Globe movie critic Ty Burr chose for his essay the 1977 soft-core movie ”Young Lady Chatterley.” From ”The X List”:
The buxom yet elegant woman uncoils ecstatically in front of a roaring fire, drinking in the sight of her unclad lower-class lover. Outside, the rain pours down; inside, it is as if time has stopped. In a daze of fulfilled lust, she bluntly asks him to do something that, until recently, was illegal in many states.
”Young Lady Chatterley” is not a great film. It’s not even a good film. But it may be the quintessential relic of 1970s soft-core, a genre that flourished in the decade between ”Deep Throat” and the rise of home video and that marks porn’s most sustained lunge for middle-class respectability.
Consider what was happening in the previously predictable little world of smut. Decades of underground stag reels and exploitation ”birth of a baby” quickies had given way in the 1960s to a wave of increasingly frank T&A movies. As the ’60s mass freak-out widened and the old studio production code crumbled, filmmakers started to get arty, Radley Metzger (”Therese and Isabelle,” 1968) and Joe Sarno (”Daddy, Darling,” 1968) chief among them. Then came ”Deep Throat” in 1972, and all bets were off. Why watch movies that pretended to be about ”it” when you could get the real thing?
Except that not everyone was comfortable watching the real thing, especially in a public movie theater. An unarticulated need arose for comparatively discreet ”date-movie” sex films that brushed an artful patina over the old dance. Thus ”Emmanuelle” (1975), the first true ’70s soft-core flick and by some accounts the most financially successful French film of all time.
Gauzy and pretentious as hell, ”Emmanuelle” proved the existence of an under-explored market niche. That niche found its most effective delivery medium with the late-’70s rise of pay-cable TV channels like HBO and sister service Cinemax. The reasons were obvious: With its bountiful nudity and simulated sex, soft-core was able to attract cable viewers without being so explicit as to cause complaints or cancellation. Legions of teenagers knew full well what played on ”Skinemax” after midnight, and their parents could rest assured their kids wouldn’t be exposed to clinical anatomy lessons. In fact, mom and dad could watch ”Melody in Love” or ”Hard Ticket to Hawaii” and get hot but not bothered. Soft-core preserved the social compact of dirty cinema: arousal under the sanitary wrapping of the Aristotelian unities (time, place, and action, in case you weren’t paying attention).
In other words, you could pretend these were real movies if you wanted to.
That said, not many soft-core films managed the delicate balancing act of class-vs.-smut required of the genre. This writer is in a position to know: From 1984 to 1989, as one of my first jobs upon graduating from a prestigious Ivy League college, I was a Cinemax sex-movie content appraiser.
The job title was actually ”film evaluator,” which meant I was an in-house movie critic vetting new releases and film libraries for the cable channel’s acquisitions, scheduling, and promotion departments. There were six of us, each an expert in one area or another. Jim and Monty handled the big Hollywood movies, Roger the classics libraries, Mary the documentaries, David the art films. Because I was young and male and straight and new, I was handed the low-budget action films and the soft-core — what the programming department aired in blocks titled ”Drive-In Saturday Night” and ”Friday After Dark.”
In the latter category, it was clear what got ratings: Breasts. Particularly all-American cheerleader-type breasts, as in the distaff ”Porky’s” knock-off ”H.O.T.S.” or woozily-shot Euro-breasts, as in the ”Emmanuelle” series featuring the blank-faced, rail-thin Sylvia Kristel and Laura Gemser.
Most of the submitted films weren’t remotely fit for cable airing — there were a lot of triple-X movies whittled down to about 20 minutes each — and it got so that the other evaluators and I invented unofficial rules for assaying the programming worth of a soft-core film. First, male nudity was OK, but — how to put this? — happy male nudity wasn’t. Second, the movie had to pass the First Five Minutes Test, meaning if there wasn’t a sex scene by then, the audience was probably gone.
The most absurd yardstick of all was the Breasts-Per-Minute Ratio, or BPM, which a couple of us cooked up on a lark one day. A simple calculation — all you had to do was count the number of breasts in a movie and divide by the running time — it nevertheless had real utility, despite laying itself open to endless Talmudic hairsplitting. Did the same breast in two different shots equal one breast or two? At what point did a clad breast become an unclad, and therefore official, breast?
By all these measures, ”Young Lady Chatterley” scored off the grid, and in fact it was perhaps the single most successful Friday After Dark film of my Cinemax tenure. First five minutes, high BPM, flagrant but not explicit male nudity — it was all there.
So was a curious and now hilariously quaint faux-European gentility that co-existed uneasily with the low comedy and lusty sight gags favored by American drive-in teasers. Directed by a former Broadway gypsy named Bob Brownell under the nom de soft-core ”Alan Roberts,” ”Young Lady Chatterley” is a frank hybrid: a movie that begins in D.H. Lawrence territory but that mostly takes place in ”London, England: Today,” where it concerns the American descendent of Lady Chatterley as played by Harlee McBride, a pleasant, auburn-haired actress known to cognoscenti as the wife of comedian Richard Belzer.
First, the elements of ersatz highbrow need to be set in place. Unfurling to fake classical music over a background of roses and statuary, the opening credits read like a who’s who of bland Anglo-Saxon pseudonyms. Director Roberts, writer Steve Michaels, actors Edgar Daniels and Henry Charles — there’s not a surname in the bunch. The music, by Don Bagley, has been ”adapted from the works of Claude Debussy.”
The first scene takes place in the spurious location of ”Brisbane, England, 1901,” in which Lady Frances Chatterley (Mary Forbes) intones in a potted British/San Fernando Valley accent that life is ”too, too pointless,” and quickly sets about seducing the gardener (Patrick Wright). Discreet shagging follows.
In the modern sequences that ensue, Cynthia Chatterley is an American working in London and engaged to Philip (William Beckley), a ponce who makes it clear on which side of the Atlantic the film’s allegiances lie. Upon inheriting the Chatterley estate and told she must sell it for back taxes, Cynthia goes to see for herself and is promptly insulted by Paul (Peter Ratray), the sulky surfer-dude gardener. The lighting is high-key California sunshine; the mansion looks positively Glendale.
The rest of ”Young Lady Chatterley” plays out as an amusingly silly vision of British class divisions melting away under the democratic carnality of the American intruder. Lady C. discovers her forebear’s randy diary and, under its spell, does the gardener as well as the saucy ”Cockney” chambermaid Sybil (Lindsay Freeman). Cynthia also has her way with a hitchhiker (Michael Hearne) in the back of her Rolls Royce as the shocked Bavarian chauffeur (Lawrence Montaigne) looks on. And in the movie’s dinner party climax, her fiance’s upper-class-twit friends, dressed as 18th-century royals, give in to their repressed urges and roger the assembled help in a full-bore comic orgy.
By then the illusion of ”class” is hanging on by its badly manicured fingernails, through the music, the fraudulent accents, and a banquet sequence that rips off ”Tom Jones” only because the filmmakers know their audience has never seen ”Tom Jones.” That said, ”Young Lady Chatterley” feels more comfortable in its lowbrow moments and even ends, incongruously, with a pie fight. Think of it as D.H. Lawrence by way of Benny Hill.
It’s a movie that tries to be all things to all soft-core devotees and, for the late ’70s at least, it succeeded. Today ”Young Lady Chatterley” says much more about the tastes of its time and about the unstated battle between sleaze and respectability it unintentionally encapsulates. That battle, of course, is long over, thanks to the mainstreaming of hard-core through video and the Internet. How do you keep an audience down on the Chatterley estate after it’s been to a Russian porn site? The answer is, you don’t. In an era of 24/7 come-ons, a high BPM is chasteness itself.
Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com
