Sleaze in the Seventies (1969-1971)
After Hours DVD (region 1)

d. various; scr. anonymous; cast. anonymous (240 mins)

In the days before Deep Throat brought the hardcore sex feature to the mainstream there proliferated the American softcore storefront feature. 

These films were shown in makeshift sex cinemas but were non-explicit, avoiding shots of actual sexual penetration or ejaculation (the trope of hardcore porn known as the “cum shot”).  With minimal plotting but usually a sense of moral irony, these American softcore films were roughly and crudely assembled, far from the image of European glossy softcore erotica of the kind that dominated mainstream cinemas showing erotic features.  Four examples of American storefront softcore are collected on the new After Hours DVD release Sleaze in the Seventies, part of the developing Grindhouse Film Collection. 

After Hours are leaders in the field of erotic DVD archive-quality presentation and continue their unique mix of peep show historian and leering degenerate (personified in the host of the 42nd Street Pete range) with this release. 

Although watching barely-plotting non-explicit simulated sex films has an inevitable air of nostalgic irrelevance considering the contemporary acceptability of explicit hardcore pornography, the films presented cumulatively make for an intriguing time capsule view of morality during the sexual revolution of the late 1960s and the erosion of usually hypocritical traditions.  Of particular interest is the repeat examination of marriage and monogamy in terms of a swinger’s disdain for traditional Patriarchal sexual morality.

Splendor in the Sack is one such example.  Marriage and middle-age are the dreaded duo affecting the couple here, both of whom have resorted to infidelity, the husband with a prostitute in a hotel room and the wife with the maid at home, adding a class analogy to the theme of sexual immorality (as would the pioneering Eduardo Cemano in the one-day wonder Millie’s Homecoming, also released on DVD as part of the After Hours Grindhouse Director Series: Eduardo Cemano).  Social expectation and the comforts of safe, well-to-do middle class conformity stifle Eros in Splendor in the Sack.  Marriage is seen as an inevitably stifling social institution, a trap in which the only possible sexual release is through masturbation or infidelity.  Though sex potentially brings more open communication, it is a double-edged sword when still answerable to Patriarchal morality.

What remains sociologically intriguing in Splendor in the Sack is the incipient but necessary separation of marriage and monogamy. 

The freedom of the sexual revolution and the openness of casual sex effectively render monogamy optional: indeed, the couple here only begin recognize that the other has sexual needs independent of their marriage and give the other the freedom to express themselves openly with others.  Only by indulging sexual desire – in a threesome with a younger girl – can this couple have any communication.  However, the husband’s moral condemnation of his wife’s carnality suggests that hypocritical Patriarchal tradition alone represses women – they both desire and resent female sexual expression, driven to condemn and exploit.    

The initial expressions and examinations of the ethics of swinging carry with them a realization of the ironies of classical Hollywood iconography and the need to show what has previously been concealed by narrative ellipses.  Thus, A Taste of Honey follows two thuggish gangsters who rob a man and then go to a brothel to indulge themselves.  Offered a “genuine virgin” this duo cannot help themselves and have their way with the girl before working their way sequentially through the brothel only to eventually confront a doctor about potential venereal disease – their due punishment for what is virtual rape.  Where Splendor in the Sack examined marital morality, hypocrisy and the reality of beginning to swing, A Taste of Honey is indulgent of forbidden sexual fantasy – prostitution and rape fantasy, just the themes that eventually would alienate radical feminists.

Both films are minimally edited, have threadbare production values and boast long stretches of simulated softcore action. 

However, the violence and rape connotations of A Taste of Honey make it a softcore roughie and its more unpleasant scenes indulge a fantasy of male assertion behind the Hollywood gangster stereotype that is surprisingly confronting.  It features more mannered performances than usual, especially by the lead actor / rapist, and is intriguing for its staging of sexual fantasy within conventional genre archetypes, integrating disreputable characters and crudely rendered forbidden brothel fantasy views of available and disposable femininity. 

Much more elaborate is Sweets for the Suite, a softcore one-day-wonder about out of control desire.  The sex here leans to the more caricatured and there is a deliberate sense of artifice to the production, especially in performance.  After a receptionist masturbates, she gets it on with a magazine publisher only to be sacked by her boss who then tries to replace her, being increasingly moved to molest the applicants.  Once again there is the juxtaposition between sexual desire, seen as anarchic, and moral propriety, seen as the stuffy, hypocritical tradition of easily “corrupted” men.  First applicant Judy Angel instructs this boss in the manner of pleasure and from there, to the tune of classical music, he discovers not just sexual pleasure but Patriarchal power in the manipulation of such. 

More detailed in execution and planning than the previous two films, Sweets for the Suite is ultimately about a sexually conservative man finding liberation only to retreat into a position of authority to manipulate women into performing sexually for him. 

It’s less about the ethics of swinging than the allure of sexual power, always a dialectic in the explicit sex film.  Hooked on sex and increasingly drawn to pornography, he tries coercion and molestation to get his way with the next applicant.  Performed as comedy, the theme of coercion suggests that manipulation is inherent in the male exercise of power – in reaction to and initiated by the sexually free woman but then out of a moral ambivalence to the needs of women.

Sweets for the Suite is surprisingly self-conscious about the increasing prevalence and acceptance of pornography in American society amongst women especially.  Indeed, pornography here is portrayed as the ultimate force in liberation – the fantasy that prompts sexual action.  With the exception of A Taste of Honey, women are the prime motivators of sexual action in these films, expressing their sexuality being a force for inter-personal, social and moral change.  This sense of triumphant female sexual expression – in tandem to mock comical scenarios of coercion – exposes the hypocrisy and sexuality of a Patriarchal power intent on sexual dominance.

Just what sexual freedom means for married couples, a theme running through all the films bar A Taste of Honey, finds its most coherent treatment in the final film in this collection One Hundred Dollar Wife. 

A swingers farce, it is in comparison complexly mounted in script, acting and direction and captures a 1970s naturalism in its enthusiastic performances and rock score.  Though its premise is padded out by long stretches of never hardcore sex – as is the case with all these films – its sense of irony is unusually pronounced at premise level.  Here, two husbands leave their wives on a supposed business trip only to check into a motel for a planned sexual spree with prostitutes.  However, the wives are propositioned by a pimp as to whether they would like to make some easy money and wind up being assigned to service their own husbands.

Once again a dominant theme emerges – the hypocrisy of Patriarchal morality and the sexual independence of women as the means of confronting it.  That was primarily the concern over pornography for the religiously-minded: its unique empowerment of women through their sexual subjectification.  Men are depicted as primarily authoritarian and when not playacting marital monogamy are compelled to seek out prostitutes.  Women are seen as dependent unless they have freed themselves from the same marital monogamy and can express themselves as equal sexual beings – prostitution is empowerment.  This is the theme of One Hundred Dollar Wife which extends it a little by playfully suggesting that relationships between men and women essentially boil down to social-commercial arrangement over sex: husband are johns and wives are hookers.

The cynical nature of marriage in the films on this DVD collection exposes the frequent swinger critique of Patriarchal institution. 

Patriarchal sexual hypocrisy reveals that sexual morality is not an absolute but a relative human dimension open to indulgence, expression and manipulation.  These themes run throughout much early swinger cinema: the theme that innate but non-monogamous sexual desires cannot be suppressed by marriage and that married individuals need new and exciting ways to express themselves sexually if they are not to stagnate into the empty hypocrisy of this Patriarchal tradition.  Far from pornography being the instrument of Patriarchal oppression, these early softcore storefront features demonstrate the sex film’s unique ability to critique, mock and expose Patriarchal power.