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Five by Gary Graver



Gary Graver's 3 A.M.: A Time for Sexuality opens with a domestic situation almost toxically intimate and insular and proceeds to see it stifle any sense of emotional catharsis in light of a tragedy. Narration by Georgina Spelvin explains the situation:

"My name is Kate, and I live in this house. This is my sister Elaine and her husband Mark, and this is their home. I have lived with them a long time, long enough to help raise their son, Ronny. Long enough to help raise their daughter, Stacy. This is me, Kate, and I have lived here long enough for Mark and I to be having a love affair for fifteen years. I knew loneliness. I didn't want to hurt Elaine, but I desperately needed Mark's love to help me fill this void. But this night was to unalterably change the lives of the three of us, and the end began at 3 A.M."
The "end", is that the husband, who decided to leave his wife and her sister, is accidentally killed after trying to depart from a tryst with the sister. The rest of the movie has the different family members process the grief from his death, and the fact that they never really reconcile his loss does feel genuine to the material. Given that it's in the hardcore porn genre, one might be surprised by how raw it feels, but much of the credit goes to the actors, particularly Georgina Spelvin, who plays her role with a real vulnerability that sells these emotions. She's tremendous.

Graver drives home the insular quality of the piece with a visual strategy that relies on mirrors, deep shadows and yellowish hues somewhere between sepia and honey. He also cuts more aggressively than is usual in the genre between the different characters and plot threads, thereby emphasizing their pain and fracturing psyches. (This also means that it's probably more approachable for those unused to the narrative rhythms of most vintage hardcore movies.) There are some perfunctory elements (a tryst between the son and a neighbour, incest), but however clumsy these are in execution they can be defended as tying to the emotionally messy headspace of the characters.

I first heard of this after learning that Orson Welles edited a sex scene (apparently to free up Graver and his editing equipment). This is not exactly a "fun" scene, as Spelvin spends it half crying, half grimacing while the haunting call of a woman's voice plays on the soundtrack, but the emotional rawness and sense of urgency pushes it into genuinely erotic territory (which probably doesn't say anything good about me). You can tell the same team that worked on this sex scene worked on the one in The Other Side of the Wind, and you can see some of the same visual talents here of the man who shot the Antonioni parody sequence in that other movie. Graver and Welles had a pretty complex relationship (chronicled in the extremely worthwhile documentary They'll Love Me When I'm Dead), but in moments like this you can see what brought them together and what they brought out of each other.

V: The Hot One is another case demonstrating that the most reliable plot for a porno is the one from Belle de Jour, which was also used effectively in William Lustig's The Violation of Claudia and the Japanese film Debauchery. In all of these, not only is there a valid narrative reason for the sexual content, but the narrative is grounded in the heroine's perspective, helping to wring some actual eroticism out of the proceedings. The title aptly refers to Annette Haven, who after growing up sexually repressed finds herself intrigued by the idea of becoming a prostitute. After a dry run of picking up a few guys in a porno theatre (where the escalation of her encounter matches the one playing on the screen), she decides to follow through, unbeknownst to her husband and circle of friends, eventually becoming the top performer in her madam's escort agency. The madam is played by Kay Parker in an early non-sex role. It's a minor role and you don't really see the full scale of her talents (I'm not speaking entirely euphemistically here, she's a very good actress), but she is effectively business-like.

Haven, who exudes a certain old Hollywood glamour (and certainly looks like she could have starred in something of that era), really carries this movie with her magnetic, high class screen presence. This also happens to be a very stylishly made movie, with Graver finding interesting camera moves and compositions throughout, like the De Palma style imitation split diopter shot he brings in during a throwaway moment. I understand he was a little embarrassed by his career in pornography, and tried at one point to have his credits in that genre removed from IMDb, but this movie finds him fully engaged in his craft. Fans of the genre's soundtracks will also be pleased by a pretty awesome bit of electronic/prog scoring that plays during some of the later scenes. Where the movie suffers is the strangely mean-spirited denouement, which feels at odds with the film's overall arc. I guess downer endings are an indicator of seriousness, but the one here doesn't feel unearned.

I have a little bit of nostalgia for Private Teacher, as it's the first vintage hardcore movie I watched all the way through. Not that it was my intention at the time (I was, ahem, skipping around for the good parts only to realize it actually had a plot, and decided to give it a proper viewing), but I do remember gelling to its sense of humour. The movie concerns a teenage boy played by Tom Byron, whose aunt Honey Wilder is very, very concerned that he spends all his time alone in his room. But you see, he has a very good reason. He happens to live next door to a pair of really hot flight attendants (Joanna Storm and Laurie Smith) who spend all their time enacting elaborate sexual scenarios with an assortment of lame-o dudes. (One scene has them playing "Barnyard" with the guys as chickens. One of the guys asks "Couldn't he be a wood-pecker?" The response: "That was pretty dumb, Jack.") Wilder, who doesn't have much to fill up her days other than fantasizing about the public access TV host (Eric Edwards, looking like he has no eyebrows and wearing, I think, the same white suit I've seen him sport in The Young Like it Hot), decides to enlist the help of a tutor, played by Kay Parker, to help him break out of his shell. Parker struggles at first, but eventually through the power of Shakespeare (also intercourse, this is probably the key ingredient actually), she breaks through, and Byron eventually finds the confidence to visit his neighbours (they play "Flashlight", which means you can barely see anything in this scene). And things wrap up with a new twist on the phrase "family affair", in the words of the great Sly Stone. (Incest. The twist is incest.)

These movies generally traffic in fantasy, and this foregrounds it by filtering the events mostly through Byron's perspective, which gives the proceedings enough shape to work as a narrative. It also helps that the movie has a pretty decent sense of humour. (We're clued in early on when the narrator tells us that San Fernando Valley is "where the normal people live" and the movie cuts to Paul Thomas in a rabbit costume, closer to the "space cases and all assorted weirdos" the movie alleges populate Los Angeles.) This doesn't seem to be as technically exacting as the previous films I've seen from Graver, but I unfortunately watched this in a less than pristine transfer, which was not conducive to such appreciation, but his sense of narrative sturdiness does hold the movie together nicely. As for whether the movie "worked" for me in that respect, I must note that I was not immune to the charms of certain performers here. We could all benefit from Kay Parker reading us some Shakespeare.

What's been standing out to me with Graver's work is how much they move like mainstream narrative movies. Most pornographic films I've seen have at roughly half the runtime, if not more, taken up by the sex scenes, and the better ones find ways to structure the movie around them for maximum narrative or thematic impact. Graver's play more like narrative films first in whatever genre he's dabbling in, but with the sex scenes held a little longer than they would be in a more respectable movie. That's certainly the case in Amanda By Night, a pretty gripping thriller about the cover-up of a prostitute's murder that shares some of the same DNA as the noirish sleaze and post-Watergate disillusionment popular in mainstream cinema during that time. The movie has better production values than most porno movies, but Graver's secret weapon is the casting, particularly the terrific central performances by Veronica Hart and Robert Kerman, who bring a world-weariness and gravity that give the movie a credible moral centre. Kerman will be known to most cult cinema fans for his role in Italian cannibal movies but is quite a bit better here, and Hart...well, don't just take my word for it. Paul Thomas Anderson once called her the "Meryl Streep of porn", a title which seems fully earned here.

That Hart, Kerman and Graver had careers that straddled both porn and the mainstream gives some resonance to the heroine's desire to go straight, and provides an interesting parallel to the leads' righteousness compared to the corruption around them. There are also good supporting performances from Jamie Gillis as Hart's former pimp, whose seedy charm nicely keep us on edge as to his motivations, and Samantha Fox, who as in Her Name Was Lisa brings a real poignancy to her role as a drug addicted prostitute, which has some resonance in light of her real life troubles with substance abuse. Even Ron Jeremy, who I normally find an off putting presence, is well used as a dirty vice cop, his normal unctuousness playing nicely with the character's corrupt, sleazy nature. The performances go a long way in selling this material, even if this doesn't seem quite as stylish as 3 A.M. or V: The Hot One. (Full disclosure: I watched this in an unimpressive but watchable transfer, but the shot choices didn't feel as inspired as those films.) Perhaps Graver trusted the story and the actors enough to make the story work. Judging by the finished product, he probably made the right choice, but I can't help wonder if it might have sang even more with a bolder style.

Trinity Brown has Graver returning to porno noir, but the results, while watchable, aren't quite as strong as Amanda By Night. This movie has a pair of detectives, played by Colleen Brennan and John Leslie, investigating the murder of a mobster. The obvious suspect is Joey Silvera, who was sleeping with the mobster's wife the night of the murder, but sensing that his culpability is a little too convenient, they wisely dig further. As in that movie, Graver's best asset is the casting. Brennan and Leslie are both charismatic and have great chemistry, and a lot of the fun comes from how they play off each other. Graver also leans on Robert Kerman and Jamie Gillis as character actors, using them to add to the movie's texture. Kerman carries the bulk of the comic relief as Brennan's and Leslie's superior, who spends much of his time juggling phones and assuring his wife that he isn't smoking, usually with a cigarette dangling from his lips.

Compared to the earlier movie, I think this comes up short a few ways. For one, despite the twists, the story feels a lot more straightforward, with little of the weight of Amanda By Night's narrative. If anything, it feels like the pilot of a cop show, where Brennan and Leslie team up to tackle tough cases each week and sneaking in...extracurricular activities at the same time. (That the movie suggests a compromised history for Leslie's character plays into this. Did Graver envision a franchise?) And those extracurricular activities I think actually hurt the film's narrative integrity. In Amanda By Night, that Kerman didn't have any sex scenes until the case was resolved felt like a deliberate choice, contrasting him with the sleazier Ron Jeremy character who coerces prostitutes and massage parlour attendants into sex and giving him protection money. Here Brennan and Leslie readily have sex with suspects and persons of interest, so that the movie's credibility as a thriller falls apart. Still, there are some nice performances and the overall package is fairly diverting, if below the standard set by some of Graver's other movies.


3 A.M.: A Time for Sexuality

V: The Hot One

Private Teacher

Amanda By Night

Trinity Brown



This is a blind spot for me, but I'm willing to give 3 AM if it has sex scenes like that one form Other Side of the Wind (which didn't have crying though, as I remember).



Maybe not at the same calibre, but definitely the same DNA. And if it gets you in the Georgina Spelvin fanclub, that's okay by me. (Seriously, she's a great actress.)


But yeah, there's probably less...compartmentalizing needed to enjoy 3 A.M. than the average vintage hardcore film. Now if only Vinegar Syndrome would work their magic and give it the release it deserves. Until then, you may have to resort to...other methods.





Streetwalkin' (Freeman, 1985)



Much of the success of this movie is owed to the casting of Dale Midkiff. As far as movie pimps go, he's not as terrifying as Wings Hauser in Vice Squad (nor does he get to sing the movie's theme song), but that makes his performance ring more true. With his charisma and softer demeanour, we can buy that this man could seduce women into hooking for him. When he does resort to histrionics, like trashing his apartment in a long take after the heroine (Melissa Leo) betrays him to a rival pimp for having brutally beaten her friend, it plays credibly as the rage of an abuser. (I'd previously seen Midkiff in Pet Sematary, in which I thought he was terrible. Whatever balance he strikes here is completely lost in that movie. It seems he plays sadistic pimps more convincingly than grieving fathers.) When we first meet him in the opening sequence, he's seen at a distance, stalking Leo like a predator after prey, and moving in during a moment of weakness. Here and elsewhere, the movie benefits from its willingness to hold on a performance, with the pain of the Leo's phone call to her mother simultaneously earning our empathy and making her vulnerability all too apparent. Or when another prostitute (Khandi Alexander), having flirted with Midkiff's character during a night out, contemplates returning to her pimp's (Antonio Fargas) table in a discomfiting mix of shame and embarrassment.

The movie's depiction of the world of street prostitutes is more nuanced than I expected, given that this was an '80s Roger Corman Concorde production. It's particularly astute about the transactional nature of their relationships with their pimps, not just in the money they give them, but in the way their pimps manipulate them with material gifts. Leo falls into Midkiff's orbit after he offers to buy her a meal, Alexander falls under his spell after he places a ring on her finger (one he bought from a shady merchant earlier that night), and Fargas controls his other girl with a carefully meted out supply of drugs. And as my mind invariably drifts to the subject of wardrobe (a side effect of spending an ill advised amount of time reading menswear blogs and then talking myself out of even more ill advised purchases), I couldn't help but notice the contrast between the ostentatious outfits of the pimps with those of the prostitutes, which are undoubtedly catering to male desire yet have a certain honesty in how shamelessly they flaunt the goods. The expensive double-breasted suit worn by Midkiff's rival, the dinner jacket and hat sported by Fargas, and Midkiff's own sportcoat feel like transparent shortcuts to class, perhaps to mask their wearers' seediness. (Midkiff's own outfits are a masterclass in how small details, like an earring too inconspicuous, a ring too large or a shirt unbuttoned too low, can sleaze up an otherwise respectable looking outfit.)

The film's poster suggests an affair like Angel, which sensationalizes the contrast between the heroine's seemingly normal daytime existence and her job as a prostitute, but as we first meet Leo after she's been kicked out of her mother's house, there is no such normalcy in sight here, and we're fully immersed this world. The prostitutes mostly seem friendly with each other, but the ugly realities of their world prevent those friendships from providing them with much comfort. And unlike that earlier movie, where the police are at least well meaning, if of limited help, the police here are shown as entirely unhelpful, disruptive presences, periodically pestering the prostitutes at work but seldom offering any real protection. An early scene pointedly shows a cop breaking up a crowd watching Midkiff beat one of his prostitutes but failing to come to her aid in any meaningful way. This movie is also unusually less harsh on johns than usual, showing them (with one exception) to be fairly harmless.

If the above makes the movie sound like a gritty drama about prostitution, I suppose that's not inaccurate to the movie's effect, but I must report that it eventually turns into a thriller, and a very good one, with the sober first half providing a springboard to launch the film into an accelerated second half. The prostitution theme means that it doesn't need to contrive excuses for titillation, and the fact that it was shot fast, cheap and using well chosen locations adds to its sense of urgency (making Corman's increasing penny-pinching during the decade a non-issue). When it has Julie Newmar in a bright red skimpy outfit waving a gun around, it should seem like a concession to exploitation movie audiences, but credit to the movie, it finds a fairly seamless way to slide into those images. Stylistically, it owes a lot to the urban thrillers of Walter Hill, particularly 48 Hrs. and The Warriors, whose neon aesthetic, nocturnal ambience and compressed timespan are deployed here to electrifying results. Don't sleep on this one, folks.




I don't know if we have the same working definition of "hardcore". I understand that at the time, any film that showed, like, full penetration was considered hard-core, but that seems awfully quaint to me today. I supposed "film" also seems quaint when referring to the kinds of plotless videos (or let's call them "situational porn" - oh, if only they had laugh tracks)) of the 80s-90s, much less what (I hear) passes on pornhub at the moment. So I guess these films are hardcore in the strict parameters of being both a "film" and having some semblence of story and characters, with everything after that falling into another more extreme category of anthropologic musk quarry.



I don't know if we have the same working definition of "hardcore". I understand that at the time, any film that showed, like, full penetration was considered hard-core, but that seems awfully quaint to me today. I supposed "film" also seems quaint when referring to the kinds of plotless videos (or let's call them "situational porn" - oh, if only they had laugh tracks)) of the 80s-90s, much less what (I hear) passes on pornhub at the moment. So I guess these films are hardcore in the strict parameters of being both a "film" and having some semblence of story and characters, with everything after that falling into another more extreme category of anthropologic musk quarry.
I think penetration is the baseline definition, but I would extend it to narrative feature films, but even in that context, I think Graver's work is a bit more plot-centric than most of what I've seen (in that his movies tend to feel like plot with sex scenes, rather than plot around sex scenes, if that distinction helps). My experience is mostly with the "golden age", American narrative features from the early '70s to the mid '80s, when most of these were shot on film, and I think having a sense of their context (there's a podcast called the Rialto Report which does in depth interviews with people from the scene) has helped my appreciation for these movies. (I understand a lot of the same people were making loops at the same time, but I haven't explored on that front.)


I've seen a couple of shot on video affairs from the mid-'80s and early '90s but thanks to their formal qualities, I've mostly found them more difficult to get into even if they mostly had proper plots. Not super eager to dig further on that front. (It also seems like runtimes started getting longer at that point. 90 minutes is a perfectly good amount of time for a porno. These videos from the '90s run like two hours or more, which I suppose is fine if you're just skipping to the "good parts", but likely more of challenge if you're trying to watch it like a real movie.) The one I did like was Party Doll A Go-Go!, from Stephen Sayadian (the director of Cafe Flesh and Dr. Caligari), who seems to understand how stupid the genre is and has fun with it. Not really a proper narrative, but full of all kinds of structural games and wordplay. Not for everyone, but I found it amusing.



As I alluded to in the director binge thread, outside of American stuff, I've seen a few Alpha France productions from the '70s and '80s, which had nice enough production values, but I only really gelled to one of them (The Hidden Vices of Eva Blue, which has a private detective angle that gives it some semblance of actual tension). I did unfortunately watch dubs, which probably didn't do them justice. I've also seen one from Hong Kong (paging MKS) from the '90s, co-directed by the guy who did Men Behind the Sun. It's called Trilogy of Lust, and aside from the graphic sex, doesn't look that different from other Category III movies I've seen.



Out of curiosity, are you writing these reviews as you go along with this thread, or did you write some of them in the past and are copy/pasting them here?

If it's the former, Takoma must be getting jealous.
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Some I'm writing as I go along, some I write a bit later (as time allows), some I'm digging up from old blog entries.



American Babylon is a film i would see if i got the chance. I got to read through a few more of your reviews when i have time. To tired tonight. Definitely some cool stuff here. Plus this weekend i am on Jet Li duty.



Out of curiosity, are you writing these reviews as you go along with this thread, or did you write some of them in the past and are copy/pasting them here?

If it's the former, Takoma must be getting jealous.
Yeah, back off man! Everyone knows reviews of vintage pornographic films is my territory!



Sorry if I'm rude but I'm right
Reviewing vintage porn? Boring normie stuff... Review some JAVs instead!

PS: Great thread.
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Look, I'm not judging you - after all, I'm posting here myself, but maybe, just maybe, if you spent less time here and more time watching films, maybe, and I stress, maybe your taste would be of some value. Just a thought, ya know.



Yeah, back off man! Everyone knows reviews of vintage pornographic films is my territory!
Just for the record, my joke was actually in reference to how you write at least one long film review every day here.



Reviewing vintage porn? Boring normie stuff... Review some JAVs instead!

PS: Great thread.
0/10 - they blur out all the good parts.


Not the same thing obviously, but I do intend to dig further into pink film at some point. My experience is extremely limited, but left me intrigued, although the prevalence of sexual assault means that I'll likely take it in small doses. Jeez, there had to be a better way to write that last sentence.


And thanks!



Just for the record, my joke was actually in reference to how you write at least one long film review every day here.
Tak, are you gonna sit there and take this? Or are you gonna watch a ****-ton of pornos and review them all to show Popcorn what's up?



I should add that this thread makes my viewing history seem more porn-heavy than it really is. I gave myself a little project at the beginning of this year to watch and write about vintage porno movies on my blog, so it's more that these are the movies I feel like writing at length about. (Which probably raises some more questions... )



American Babylon is a film i would see if i got the chance. I got to read through a few more of your reviews when i have time. To tired tonight. Definitely some cool stuff here. Plus this weekend i am on Jet Li duty.
I do recommend American Babylon, but for Watkins, I think a better (porno) starting point might be Corruption or Her Name Was Lisa. They're available in nice looking Blu-rays from Vinegar Syndrome, so more conducive to appreciating their visual strengths than the crappy VHS rip I watched of American Babylon. (VS also put out The Pink Ladies, which is fun but probably less essential.) Will I dig up my write-ups on these? Very likely.


And obviously Last House on Dead End Street is worth checking out, but is also remarkably unpleasant. The copy I watched a few years back looked like it had left to rot in a landfill, which adds to its forbidden quality. (I think VS was working on a restoration at one point, but ran into issues with the existing elements.)


As for Jet Li, he's unfortunately a pretty big blind spot for me, as I've associated him (maybe incorrectly) with the rise of exaggerated wirework, which I'm not really a big fan of, so I've stayed away for the most part. (Same reason I'm kind of so so on the universally beloved Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon.) I should correct this at some point.



I should add that this thread makes my viewing history seem more porn-heavy than it really is. I gave myself a little project at the beginning of this year to watch and write about vintage porno movies on my blog, so it's more that these are the movies I feel like writing at length about. (Which probably raises some more questions... )
I don't know if I can believe this. I might have to utilize that cancel culture thing which all the cool people are doing on the internet as punishment.



I don't know if I can believe this. I might have to utilize that cancel culture thing which all the cool people are doing on the internet as punishment.
Cancel me if you must, but you can't erase the dirty movie discourse I've unleashed on this forum. It's like Pandora's Box, but if what sprang out when you opened it was an endless wave of private parts.