Swinging in the 70s (1968-1971)
Secret Key DVD (region 1)
d. Godfrey Danials, various; pr. Godfrey Daniels, various; scr. various; cast. Cleo O'Hara, Rene Bond, Jeff Roberts, Keith Erickson, Ric Lutze (180 mins)
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, “swinging” was a popular by-product of the sexual revolution. Couples, usually married, would exchange sex partners with other willing couples via dedicated meeting places or through open dialogue between like-minded individuals. Initially, once criminal prosecutions subsided, swinging became an accepted cultural practice in the USA, with clubs, magazines and films catering to those involved in the rapidly widening lifestyle, seen as an antidote to the frigidity and inconsequence of traditional monogamous, vapidly Christian, marriage.
The films made for this market were cheap, shot in one day and mainly concerned with explicit sex: though this being the era just before hardcore porn there was little if any genital close up action and the couplings were mostly soft-core depictions of the real thing, groping and moaning with most action discreetly hidden or out of shot. Three of these vintage pieces of swingers’ erotica are collected on the Swinging in the 70s Grindhouse Triple Feature 2-disc DVD set with an informative booklet that synopsizes and introduces each film and its participants. The sense of marital monogamy as a stifling, entrapping if traditional morality in desperate need of transgression through sexual expression saturates the films on this set.
Keep Them Happy begins with a voice-over evocation of suburban behavioural reality: a husband too busy to sexually satisfy his wife. The frustrated wife masturbates and then meets with her friends – a trio of women who discuss the financial pressures (pay bills, etc) married women face in a Patriarchal society in which male pride does not allow these women to pursue careers for themselves. Lonely and lusty, these women reluctantly let their dullard husbands be the bread-winners of the relationship while they frolic in lesbian trysts, service visiting salesmen and delivery boys and finally take to prostitution. With earnest, if flatly rendered, talk delineating gender relations in the 1970s, Keep Them Happy is an intriguing curio about the pressures of monogamous marriage driving women to sexual experimentation and finally prostitution in the effort to escape socio-economic determinism.
There is some irony in Keep Them Happy’s ending which suggests the spirit of social satire, irony and provocation that sometimes infiltrated the one-day wonder sex film. Hence, the irony here is that the disinterested businessman husband is echoed in the satisfied client, whose takes advantage of suburban prostitutes and hopes that one day his wife may be like the whore, unaware that his wife is exactly the type to become such. It is this irony and the precipitating discourse concerning women’s opportunities within marriage that reveals the swinger film as very much concerned with sexual socialization, gender roles and behaviour in a context in which traditional monogamous marriages only enslave women. Women’s freedom as much as men’s is the point in the 70s swinger films – equal opportunity means equal pleasure.
Harvey Swings depicts the plight of a henpecked married man whose wife thinks him an “ass” and laments the friends she had to give up on marrying him. With some humour thanks to director Godfrey Daniels (an apparent pseudonym of porn pioneer Stu Segal), marriage again emerges as an outdated, outmoded institution if confined to monogamous sexual encounters. With an involved script, Harvey Swings sets up its sexual encounters with some energy as two couples meet and converse prior to a little harmless “wife-swapping” in which all except Harvey know what is going on. With more comedy than usual for such “one-day wonder” sex films, Harvey Swings is a good look at the behaviourism of the swinging lifestyle, juxtaposing the expert male swinger with the naïve Harvey. Sexual expression is paramount to the veteran swinger, comfortable in his sexuality.
Harvey Swings is a comedy for swingers, making much out of Harvey’s naiveté when confronted by not only a swinging couple but a man-servant dancing in drag, the sight of which prompts Harvey to remark that they don’t have anything like that in Disneyland. Sexual experimentation and sophistication are synonymous here, with Harvey a complete dolt in that he initially has no apparent sexual desire, nor awareness of such in others. Harvey Swings is also much more explicit than Keep Them Happy, emerging as an altogether more interesting piece of vintage erotica, with a solid lounge score accompaniment. The point is the contrast between the stifling idiocy of Harvey (which drives women to desperate acts in light of his sexual non-interest) and the smooth-talking allure of the swinger (played by one day wonder veteran Jeff Roberts): the swinger here is epitome of sophistication.
Your Wife or Mine? concerns the exploits of a professional partner-swapping couple who the film’s narration suggests could be any couple in any suburb. Sharper than both Keep Them Happy and Harvey Swings, Your Wife or Mine? depicts a Presbyterian man’s initiation into adulterous sexual pleasure outside marriage as a cathartic experience. Indeed, religion and Patriarchal tradition are the twin evils hampering sexual fulfilment in all three movies. The liberation from religious morality and the marital monogamy of tradition is the systematic goal of the swinging couple in Your Wife or Mine? as they “convert” others to their cause: the couple here are “swap crusaders”, finding both willingness and reluctance to convert in a film which balances its expected soft-core explicitness with a near documentary look at gender politics and marital discontent resolved by entry into the swinging lifestyle: initiation being the sexual reason behind the set-pieces here.
A scene of two men stroking themselves to erection to impress a disinterested woman (who indeed finds an interest in the prospect of a ménage a trios after all) suggests the group dynamics of heterosexual sex play. The sex is all consensual, as it is in the swinger films (essentially harmless soft-core erotica with some attention to gender politics) and the sheer enthusiasm for sex as a euphoric aspect of the human condition makes this film in design, script and music, an endorsement of the swinging lifestyle by people who believe in its virtues. Women and men here are equally liberated by sexual expression outside marital monogamy which, as it is in sexploitation and pornography as a rule, is a stagnant vice destroying all that is beautiful and free about human nature – indeed, the monogamous marrieds here are asexual and need to be fully educated in the ways of the flesh if they are to enjoy their innate human nature.
There are a variety of sex acts in the three films here, from lesbian frolics in Keep Them Happy to orgiastic group sex in Your Wife or Mine? Unlike such grind-house genres as the “roughie”, there is no context of force or coercion and many of the performers are required to deliver dialogue in quite often protracted talk scenes, which they do to mostly capable ends (especially the unnamed actor playing Harvey in Harvey Swings). Seen in succession, the three films on this DVD set clearly reveal the belief in the swinger lifestyle as the answer to problems of tradition and stagnation: from the put-upon suffering of women in traditional marriage in Keep Them Happy to the disinterest of the asexual traditional husband in Harvey Swings to the behaviourist look at the lifestyle in mock evangelical analogy in Your Wife or Mine? With a good accompaniment of trailers as DVD extras, Swinging in the 70s is a fine collection of entertaining, dependable archive quality vintage erotica.
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