Wider Screenings HomePage

W I D E R SCREENINGS TM presents...
WORLD EROTICA INDEX
JOHN HOLMES COLLECTION (1976)
After Hours DVD (region 1)
DEAR PAM (1976) d. Roberta Findlay; scr. Findlay; cast. John Holmes, Eric Edwards, Jennifer Jordan, CJ Laing, Crystal Sync, Ginger Snaps (89 mins)

________________________________________________________________________________________________________

42nd Street was the centre of the New York sex and sleaze cinema grindhouses of the late 1960s and 1970s.

The cinemas there catered to a diverse crowd of sexual deviants, whores, drug users, porn junkies and gorehounds, programming a succession of lurid, exploitative and pornographic features. By the early 1980s, the grindhouses were gone. Religious moralizers intent on cleaning up Times Square saw to it that the thriving sex and drugs world of 42nd Street was prettified for the tourists. But in its heyday, it was the place for the best porn, the finest exploitation sleaze and the most risk-taking horror that could be found anywhere in America. The place may be different now, but to men like 42nd Street Pete, it remains hallowed ground.

42nd Street Pete is the presenter of the Signature Series John Holmes Collection, a two-disc DVD featuring the mid 1970s porn movie Dear Pam and a collection of ten stag film loops featuring Holmes at various stages in his illustrious career.

Pete comes off as a man who knows his stuff, a dedicated porn hound and sleazebag who unzips his fly and smokes from a bong before he sits down to introduce the films on this collection and turn on the 16mm film projector, presumably to jerk off stoned to some sleaze. The DVD presentation here is a nostalgic tribute to the bygone days of peep show booths, adult cinemas and junkie hangouts that comprised the grindhouse era. If you are not familiar with this scene or the type of movies it embraced, this DVD is a useful introduction, complete with an informative booklet of liner notes. For those who are familiar with the grindhouse scene, those porn junkies and gorehounds hooked on dope and looking for sleaze, this DVD collection is a sizzler!

How Johnny Wadd Came to Work with the Premier Female Director in Grindhouse Porn

John Holmes may be the showcase of this set, and his member is featured in the manner his fans need, but he’s not the real find here for the pornhound: the real treat here is the chance to see the work of director Roberta Findlay in Dear Pam.

Holmes may be a legendary figure in porn notoriety, but it’s Findlay who deserves the credit here. 42nd Street Pete has deliberately selected a film which, although it does feature Holmes, is not devoted to the actor and his grotesquely large penis. In selecting Dear Pam, Pete has made an interesting, and valuable choice.

While Holmes went from shooting stag loops to features, finding infamy and success in a series of luridly pulp detective films for director Bob Chinn in which Holmes played a sleazy private eye named Johnny Wadd –

in detective film, closer to the spirit of Mickey Spillane’s misogynistic trash fiction hero Mike Hammer than Raymond Chandler’s sly cynical hard-bitten moralist Phillip Marlowe – Findlay created a true controversy as the director of the infamous Snuff. Snuff was a horror movie with a tacked-on ending (stage-managed by a grubby distributor named Allan Shackleton, who delighted in repelling militant feminists at every opportunity to the point where they picketed him) which showed a girl eviscerated for the sexual enjoyment of the male viewer. Women everywhere protested this film, and it became synonymous with everything that was repugnant and dangerous about pornography. Whilst Findlay segued from horror to pornography and back again, the feminist backlash against the genre that she helped create would result in the chant “pornography is the theory, rape is the practice.”

Actually, if one porn film can be singled out as a representative example of the feminist rationale, it’s Dear Pam, directed by Findlay under the grin-worthy porn alias Harold Hindgrind.

This film is from the feminist perspective a vile, misogynistic fantasy in which the “ideal” man (Eric Edwards as everyman Harry Phallus) is a womanizing child molester and virgin-coercer who loses a good luck charm, a pearl necklace no less (how perfect is that), when it disappears into the pussy of the 14 year old girl he has been molesting as she sleeps. Musing that he’d forgotten how tight a 14 year old’s pussy could be, Edwards sends a letter to an advice columnist, Pam (Crystal Sync). A Commission for Moral Decency is going to give Sync an award and they want to test her abilities to answer reader letters. They walk in just as she is climaxing on a dildo she has hidden under her desk. Telling the gullible moralizers that it’s a large eraser, she fixes her composure. In front of this stuffy decency brigade (with Holmes in disguise in a dual role) a letter is chosen and read out at random. It details Edwards’ exploits. A disbelieving moralizer goes to investigate, where he is seduced by the 14 year old, the curse of the pearl necklace subsequently being passed on through a succession of sex partners.

From Shooting a Wadd to a Shooting in Wonderland

Actor John Holmes was famous for the size of his penis. The unquestioned superstar of the adult film world in the 1970s and 1980s, the prolific Holmes starred in a series of highly popular detective films featuring a character called Johnny Wadd. But Holmes was a heavy drug user also and on the making of one film seemed to virtually disappear, a crew member finding him hours later curled up in a closet waiting to be called to set. His behaviour grew erratic and many felt they could not trust him. By the early 1980s his career was virtually over and he was living in the back of a milk-truck, homeless but still carrying around a briefcase full of drugs and the paraphernalia needed to use them. It was then that Holmes ran into Eddie Nash, a crooked nightclub owner and drug dealer. Holmes was with some cocaine users on Wonderland Avenue when it was suggested that they make a call on Eddie Nash and steal from him. This was so done but Nash sent reprisals – a team of killers and it was rumoured that Holmes, a snitch, was involved also. The incident formed the basis for the attempted robbery scene in the hit film Boogie Nights (with Mark Wahlberg playing a character based on Holmes) and Wonderland (with Val Kilmer playing Holmes himself).

On the surface of it, this is thoroughly disreputable pornography but on closer examination, a more subversive intent emerges, one bound to hook in the devout illicit-fantasy seeking pornhound and dope-fiend. High and with a hard-on, this film rocks!

Findlay’s made a film for men’s darker side, a dare to the stroker to get off in the grindhouse. Her heroine, Pam, is an independent woman who does not need a man to satisfy her unless she chooses (and its just a matter of time before the smart, savvy woman hooks up with the womanizing sleaze for a little hot one on one as she gives head, frozen as she realizes she is in front of the shocked Moralizers at the awards ceremony). All other women are sexual playthings for men. However, Findlay cleverly depicts not just how women define their own sexuality in relation to lascivious men, but insinuates women’s moral hang-ups are the result of the socialization of such as the Committee, who Findlay depict as hypocritical charlatans, easily corrupted by young pussy. With the exception of Pam, all women here are forced and coerced into sex, so that every scene invites the male viewer to participate in what is essentially a rape fantasy – the fantasy that when a woman says ‘no’, she really means ‘yes’.

Findlay, an intelligent woman, indulges this forbidden male fantasy and takes it for a trippy journey into sexual abandon because for Findlay, rape is not violation.

It is a rite of passage which she says is innate in every man to desire and desirable in every woman from a man: thus as often as Findlay stages sex scenes in which women are hurt by forced sex, these same women are released by it when they work through the pain. In that way, Dear Pam acts as a fantasy of forced sex, rape and coercion, as a sexual turn-on for both men and women. Although that is objectionable to the feminists (and they disowned Findlay’s ilk as traitors to their gender) what they failed to realize was Findlay’s own forbidden sexuality and the release she sought through making pornography.

This taboo belongs in the grindhouse and 42nd Street Pete is the dealer you need. Roberta Findlay is a smart, sexy woman and Dear Pam is a gleefully subversive inverted-morality tale in which Findlay even treats the viewer to herself in action as porn star Anna Riva. A woman’s rape fantasy as a film to turn you on!! With a few bongs and a hard-on, this DVD is well worth a trip back to the forbidden stroke days of dirty movie houses, sluts, drugs and porn that was the glory of the grindhouse.

"42nd Street Pete delivers the goods. Dope fiend pornhound to the likeminded: dose to this one, its well worth the trip."