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Aristocrat of the Erotic (part one)

Article from Film Comment, January 1973.

It may be said that Metzger-the-distributor is as much an auteur as Metzger-the-director, since he would often spend months re-editing (and occasionally re-shooting) a foreign film for the American market; one film, The Libertine, was tightened up with over 300 cuts, some of them subliminal. But, if the films Metzger imported are personal, his own films are virtually confessional in their exploration of themes and feelings, moods and mise-en-scène. Surely the soft-core regulars of the late Sixties could have been only bewildered by Therese and Isabelle, which spends its first forty minutes building character and prowling elegantly around an old monastery, to the exclusion of any sex scenes. Most of his characters inhabit an erotic twilight world halfway between haute monde and demi-monde, and few "straight" directors excel Metzger at creating an almost tactile milieu of quasi-aristocratic decadence - credit for which Metzger gladly shares with his long-time cinematographer, the gifted Hans Jura, and his art director on Camille 2000 and The Lickerish Quartet, Enrico Sabbatini.

The visual and visceral sophistication of Metzger's films demands that they be taken as seriously - and criticized as severely - as any of the more highly touted major studio product. in this spirit, the most sympathetic reviewer is forced to note the frequent banality and obviousness of his scripts (most of them written by men who spent years writing English language adaptations of the sex films Metzger used to distribute). One suspects that Metzger - a charming and persuasive spokesman for his films, as this interview should demonstrate - would make even better movies if he took one further step towards complete auteur status, and wrote the films himself. He might also consider starring in them, for he is certainly as handsome and urbane as any of his leading men. In fact, at first glance, his face looks very familiar.

RICHARD CORLISS: Did I spot you in a cameo role as a surgeon in Little Mother?

RADLEY METZGER: Yes. I was also in my first film, The Dirty Girls. I jumped in the swimming pool, and that was my acting debut, and my retirement, all at once. I studied to be an actor, actually. I took my B.A. at City College. I started my Master's at Columbia, and then it was suggested that I help save the world from the Korean menace, so at the suggestion of the Government I went in the Air Force. And I got in the movie unit. So I never finished the Master's. When I came back I got into the foreign end of film distribution. I did a lot of TV commercials. I was lucky - I'd gotten into the union before I went into the service. I somehow gravitated toward the importers of foreign films; I worked on the dubbing of And God Created Woman, and pictures like that. I worked at Janus Films; I did all their Ingmar Bergman trailers, Jules and Jim, L'Avventura. And simultaneously with that I did my first picture in New York.

CORLISS: That was Dark Odyssey.

METZGER: Had we more money, it could have been called a shoestring production. We didn't have enough for a shoestring.

CORLISS: The New York Times was very sympathetic to it.

METZGER: As a matter of fact, I re-read it about a year or two ago, and I didn't realize what a good review it was. But the film was absolutely catastrophic in terms of its reception. It had the same fate as Morris Engel's The Little Fugitive - but without the happy ending. Because while nobody would sit through his picture, it went on to be a festival winner and very successful. But our picture, nobody wanted. At that time, the "art" field was more or less reserved for the foreign film explosion of the late Fifties. Dark Odyssey was one of those pictures we shot until we ran out of money, and then everybody went to work, and then we shot some more. So it took about seven months to shoot. And then when it was ready to market, there was just no market. And I have a feeling that it was so much from the heart that it didn't take the audience too much into consideration.

CORLISS: You had co-director credit on that?

METZGER: Yes, and co-producer.

CORLISS: How did it really break down?

METZGER: Well, we really did everything together. That might have been one of the problems. I was in my early, mid-twenties, and I'm not sure that I had the proper background to take on an enterprise so ambitious. I had done a short; I had of course worked on a lot of pictures. But you really have to tiptoe into it a little bit. to see what your relationship is with your audience. Having been an editor, I wanted it to look dazzling; I wanted it to be a first-rate production, so no one would say "it's sort of amateurish". This was before Truffaut, before Lelouch - that kind of free style of filmmaking hadn't come in, and we. wanted it to look very formal.

CORLISS: It was a little like a slice from Kazan's projected America America trilogy.

METZGER: The basic story tells very well. Unfortunately, we got so absorbed in the philosophy that we didn't pay too much attention to the dramaturgy. It was about a boy from Greece, and it was set in the Greek American community, which we thought was very exotic, because it had never been treated - it hasn't since been treated. We were trying to show the conflict of cultures. We took a situation where a boy lives in a mountain village in Greece, and his sister is dishonored by somebody, and he must do what is socially acceptable - and that is kill the guy. It happens every day. Nobody arrests you, nobody fines you; you go away and live on another mountain for about six months, and you come back, and it's all forgotten. But the guy is in New York. So the boy comes to New York, trying to be socially acceptable within his own social framework, and his own mores. But now, applied to our mores, he's just a killer. And eventually he kills him. We tried to show the irony of it, that the boy's a criminal whether he does it or not. I still think that basic idea could be done, but with a little more consideration for the audience. I haven't seen the film in many, many years. I'm sure it has positive qualities. But making a film is like a lot of other activities. It's like driving a car, or making love. There's an enormous amount of inspiration involved, but you sort of have to know what you're doing.

CORLISS: You called Dark Odyssey "heartfelt". But I assume you don't think of your later films as any less heartfelt - or do you?

METZGER: Well, I would stand by "heartfelt", but I should qualify it and say "exclusively heartfelt." Sure, you have to have that belief. I didn't believe in Dark Odyssey any more or less than any picture I've done. I get very involved in whatever I'm doing. I don't mean "involved" in an artsy-craftsy way. But to do a film you really need that kind of involvement or you're going to lose interest.

Metzger as Distributor

METZGER: So we had all this effort and sweat and blood tied up . . .

CORLISS: But not much money.

METZGER: Well, that's being gracious about it. We actually had a lot of debts. I was working for Janus, and they said there was a movie around that nobody wanted because it was the outer limits of obscenity. Nobody would want their name associated with it. What it turned out to be, of course' was a film in which you had some nudity. But there was no suggestion of sex. It was like the Dennis O'Keefe comedies that were made in the Forties - a very well-produced comedy with a very good cast. So I bought the picture‹without seeing it - with money that was lent to me by the laboratory that did Dark Odyssey I owed them so much money' I said, "Well, look' I can't possibly pay you, but if you'll help me buy this picture, and if it makes any money I can pay you everything". And through some insanity they lent me the money.

The picture was originally called Mademoiselle Striptease. But because there was a Brigitte Bardot picture with that title in America, we called it The Fast Set. It had a little girl in it who I personally thought had everything. She was the Bardot type, but I think she was better looking. She had more charisma, more sex appeal. Her name was Agnes Laurent. The picture went out, and it did a nice little business. There was no overhead. By that time, Ava Leighton from Janus Films had joined me. We had an IBM typewriter that nobody could repair, it was so old - and that was the company, Audubon Films. July 15, 1960, we released The Fast Set in Los Angeles, so we date the company from then.

Based on the success of The Fast Set, I bought two more films produced by René Thevenet. One of them was called Les Collegiennes/The School Girls. We called it The Twilight Girls. I shot some inserts for it, to kind of expand on the idea they were trying to present. We did a little lesbian scene, but the extent of it was that you saw two girls who looked like they were kissing, and you saw some bare breasts, and that was that.

CORLISS: By this time, there was a network of sexploitation houses?

METZGER: No. We had to go in with a hammer and chisel and forge them out. There was a network of theaters, but it had nothing to do with what we were doing. There were always theaters that showed burlesque movies - the porno track of its day - the Mom and Dad kind of films that played on your insecurities and your guilt and whatever virility anxiety you might have. When I was stationed in Ohio, I used to see a lot of the trailers for that sort of thing. It's the old sale: first they get you terrified, and then they show you the film that's going to cure it all, and then you realize that the film doesn't cure it all because they want to sell you some books while you're in there. Our product wasn't sensational enough for that market. Of course there were theaters that showed the "nudie-cuties" - all take-offs from The Immoral Mr. Teas - but we went for the drive-ins, because that's where a great deal of revenue was generated.

Then, based on the success of The Twilight Girls and The Fast Set, I made my first buying trip to Europe. I must have seen two hundred films, and I bought four of them. One was another picture with Agnes Laurent. She'd been in the two previous pictures, and she was actually building up a following. She later went to Hollywood, for AIP, I think, but it didn't work out because she pushed a bottle into Arthur Loew Jr.'s face - somebody like that - and she was sort of unwelcome. Then I bought two films with Elke Sommer. One was a small co-production, a murder mystery, and the other was Douce Violence, which was 20th Century-Fox's picture. It was like taking a weekend on the French Riviera. It was a lot more money than I was used to paying, but I bought that. And then I bought a picture for just about $1.98 in change, which nobody wanted. The film was I Spit on your Grave.

Everyone claimed at the time that we did the miraculous, but we really didn't. It was just a combination of the right film in the right hands. Very few distributors, if any, were editors. When they looked at a film, they were unable to see the potential in the material; they only dealt in finished product. But I could say, "Well, this is ridiculous and that's ridiculous, so we'll eliminate it." The novel, J'irai Cracher sur Vos Tombes, was a first-person experience of what it was like to be a black man in the United States. It was very strong, very sexy, and very violent. The book was banned, and was published like Tropic of Cancer. Well, it turned out that it wasn't an American black man who wrote it: it was Boris Vian - who was sort of the first hippie, a drug addict, a musician, a poet and an actor - and he had never been to the United States!

They made a movie of the book a few years later, which was - unfortunately, for the director, Michel Gast - well ahead of its time. It has one of the best atmospheres I've ever seen in a movie - if you want a perverse, erotic, degenerate, violent atmosphere - with absolutely nothing happening. It took place in the American North, but they shot it as if it was the South, because they really didn't know the difference. So in the dubbing we gave everybody Southern accents and put it back down South, so it made sense. It was the first picture of ours that really went legit. It was an enormous drive-in picture.

CORLISS: Sweet Ecstasy, your title for Douce Violence, had a more restricted market.

METZGER: Well, actually no. We tried to make it a sex picture, but it just didn't work. There was very little sex. A lot of theaters showed it on a double bill with Where the Boys Are and it really had that kind of atmosphere. There was a nude love scene on a boat, but the fact that a man had his hand on Elke Sommer's left nipple wasn't all that daring - and that was the only thing in the movie with an erotic overton wasn't all that daring - and that was the only thing in the movie with an erotic overtone.

CORLISS: Elke Sommer's face sort of had an erotic overtone. Almost feral.

METZGER: An absolutely perfect face. I happened to be in California when she arrived to do her first movie. Ava Leighton and I sat there at her first press conference - it was for The Prize - like the only two people on the bride's side at the wedding when it's held in another country. We were sitting talking with her, and suddenly a man came over and said to us, in his very polite, firm, public-relations manner, "Excuse me, may I take her away from you?" And I said, "Surely". She got up and walked across the room, and I said, "She's really walking into another way of life". And, sure enough, she was.

CORLISS: Max Pecas directed the two Elke Sommer films, and several of your later pictures: Erotic Touch of Hot Skin and Her & She & Him among them.

METZGER: He's got, oddly enough, the best cinematographer in France, Jean Lefebvre. The only person he seems to want to work for is Max. Even with a small budget, Max gets a beautiful picture on the screen. Her and She and Him is exquisite - with just three or four lights. He always has a rich, rich looking picture.

CORLISS: He also specializes in opulent-looking actresses.

METZGER: Agreed. I thought Fabienne Dali, in Erotic Touch, was dynamite. I cast her in THE ALLEY CATS - but she never showed up.

CORLISS: Then there was José Benazeraf's Sexus.

METZGER: The original title was La Plus Longue Nuit. They sold a lot of Henry Miller books on the basis of the movie, but I suspect that a lot of people went to the movie thinking it was the film version of that book. We had another Benazeraf movie, The Fourth Sex, and I've seen all his movies. He really has a feel for making an erotic movie. There's a degenerate streak in his films, which he lives. You literally can smell the film. It's a gift. And he has impeccable taste in choosing his girls. Sexus was a very strong picture at the time. We were a little worried about it because it had a couple of lesbian striptease acts.

CORLISS: Were they in the original film?

METZGER: Yes. I didn't do anything with Sexus except cut about forty minutes out of it. It was a style that might go today, but it seemed very slow then. We were trying to give our audience a little more commercial entertainment, so I compressed the thing, took out a lot of the pauses.

CORLISS: Benazeraf was the subject of a rather affectionate article by Jean-Luc Godard in Cahiers du Cinema.

METZGER: I think that was a gag, to show how sheeplike French critics were. They took this guy who makes these really dreadful little movies, and claimed all sorts of profundities for him. It was the Emperor's New Clothes.

CORLISS: You think Benazeraf's movies are dreadful?

METZGER: Well he has this great erotic feel, but his story-telling is so primitive. I've seen the pictures that weren't shown here‹unreleasable. He became the darling of the French Left when one of his pictures - Joe Caligula - was banned for violence.

CORLISS: Do Benazeraf and Pecas represent the outer limits of French sex films?

METZGER: I guess so. I don't think they're into hard-core yet.

CORLISS: How many different versions would you make of a film like Sexus?

METZGER: At that time, the question was survival. We really would do anything to get the film exhibited. But some states, like New York, were very strict. I think we helped knock the State Censorship Board out with The Twilight Girls. I got my old City College arrogance back: when they said, "It's a dirty picture," I said, "No, it isn't dirty." And they said, "Well, it's lousy." And I said, "That's like saying a rich man deserves more justice than a poor man. A bad picture should be shown just the same as a good picture." We were in the courts for two years over The Twilight Girls, but we finally won. And that was one of the last big cases the New York Board fought before it died.

CORLISS: One of the basic ingredients in an Audubon Film was the beautiful, sexy girl who doesn't look like a whore. How would you describe the kind of actress you've cast in your films?

METZGER: My cameraman pointed out to me that they all looked the same. Of course, cameramen look at people differently; they've got a very perceptive eye. I'd try to get a girl who, in my opinion, was very, very pretty, very young, kind of sexy - but who didn't have sex on her mind. That was the key to it. I don't think anyone's interested in seeing a girl who thinks of nothing but sex. Sex had to be an adjunct to something else. Most of the people in our movies do other things. Now, you might say that the hookers in The Dirty Girls were preoccupied with sex. But they never looked, or behaved, like hookers. They might go out with you on Saturday night, but they'd be studying all week long.

CORLISS: Another, perhaps even more important, difference between Audubon product and that of, say, William Mishkin - who, in an interview, called his customers "slobs" - was that you respected your audience.

METZGER: Well, one thing is sure: however the pictures look today, they represented the ultimate of my ability at the time. I was never conscious of saying, "Well, it's a sex picture, so we can just slough it off.'' I was so thrilled that I'd been given the chance to make a real movie, that I always did the best I could. If the picture was terrible, it's because terrible was the best I could do.

As for Mishkin - a very fine gentleman, by the way - we never competed with him. He had his market, and we had ours. He was working more in the burlesque-movie tradition. There are people who only want to see "slob" movies with fat, ugly women. We took a different approach. We tried to present the films to a fairly sophisticated audience. As you move up the educational and economic ladder, you want to see something that's not so traditional. Usually, if we played a picture of mine in a skin-flick theater, we wouldn't do any business. We couldn't compete with the straight skin flick.

CORLISS: In the mid-Sixties, competition started to come from another direction. To an extent, the continued financial growth of Audubon trims depended on the continuing Puritan repression in Hollywood. But then Hollywood films got gamier, spoke in four-letter words, and bared the flesh of high-priced actresses. In a 1966 interview. you complained to Variety that Hollywood might put you out of business.

METZGER: What you say in interviews is always a little colored! In those days, I adhered to the John Kennedy principle: if he knew he was going to win, he talked as if he was going to lose. At the time, Hollywood was really floundering, wondering how to break into our market - although they were buying up the big European films. But, about the Puritanism, Hollywood has always made the dirtiest pictures in the world. I've said before that the sexiest picture I've seen is Gilda, and it still is, and that's a Hollywood movie. Hollywood didn't have to discover the sex movie - they invented it.

But they had some conflicting obligations. Sex had to be Production-Code pure; that meant you could make love until it got serious, and then they faded out. So they could live - in both worlds. But it was getting down to the nitty-gritty: they couldn't make a real sex film and still say they were protecting the John Wayne values of World War II. They were finally able to do it - as they always did it - through the integrity of some creative artist. They did an Edward Albee play that everyone went to see because of the dirty talk.

CORLISS: The interview took place just after Virginia Woolf was released, and just before I, a Woman.

METZGER: My acquisition of I, a Woman wasn't part of some grand design; I didn't go to Denmark to buy the most important movie of the year. Like I Spit on your Grave, it was the right film in the right hands. It was a very boring movie, almost unplayable. So we brightened it up, shortened it, put it more into the American idiom. We took out all the repetitious scenes, and cut out the long pauses between lines of dialogue. It was Ava Leighton's idea to release the picture subtitled - that gave it a patina of artistry in first-run situations. I think that's absolute nonsense, but you'd be surprised at the number of people who told me they loved the subtitled version and hated it dubbed. They never stopped to think that Essy Persson was a Swedish actress in a Danish movie, and that her dialogue had to be dubbed into Danish.

Anyway, the subtitles, plus Mac Ahlberg's photography, plus Essy Persson's dynamite performance - these were the main factors in the success of the picture. And Trans-Lux Theatres deserves a lot of credit for playing it. In an era of open porno, it's easy to sit back and say, "Well, what did they have to lose?'' But in 1966 it took a lot of guts to show I, a Woman at the Trans-Lux 85th Street. You have to keep in mind that all of these pictures are part of a progression, I, a Woman may have broken the door down, but Dear John opened the door - and And God Created Woman was a big wedge in the door.

METZGER: I don't like making comparisons with other directors, because it's a subtle way of saying you're in the same category. But you do get influenced. And while I don't feel that I'm in the category of . . . uh, Mr. Julie Andrews . . .

CORLISS: Blake Edwards.

METZGER: . . . of Blake Edwards, I think he made the most influential movie in the area of breaking down old taboos and letting the age of permissiveness come in. And that was Breakfast at Tyffanys. I don't think anybody realized what a giant step that picture represented. Not the fact that anyone would make this film, but the acceptance of it. People went to see it, and they were not at all shaken up by the content, which was extremely strong. You'd never had a hero that was a male whore, played by a guy as dazzling as George Peppard. It was this acceptance of the forbidden - done with a fairly light touch‹that really made me do The Dirty Girls.

I didn't have enough money to do a movie, so I decided to do three-thirds of a movie, one at a time. I wanted to do a picture about hookers - they have an appeal to everybody - so I'd do a picture about a low hooker, a middle hooker, and a high hooker. So I went to Paris to do the first part, which was really the first time I'd ever made a movie all by myself It's probably the single most terrifying thing I've ever done. I had people around me who'd made maybe thirty or forty French films, and they all look at you and say, "Well, what do we do next?" And you have to say something that sounds at least mildly original. So we did that, and I came back to the States and edited it. By that time we had enough dough to do just one more part, so I combined the second and third into one sequence in Munich. In a sense, that was a light film, like Tiffanys.

CORLISS: Despite the title, the film treats its heroines quite sympathetically. And the climactic moment - when the prettiest girl meets her lover "Laurence", who turns out to be a woman, in the shower - is charged with genuine suspense, as well as with erotic electricity.

METZGER: That was a last-minute touch. Those last ten minutes are still my favorite bit of filmmaking. They say that the first-born has a special relationship to the mother. The first time you conceive something - and I'm not saying you've conceived something brilliant, or clever - just the fact that you've seen it in your mind's eye, and then you see it up on a screen, and they are somewhat approximate, that's a thrill. And then when you see people respond to that, it's really the ultimate satisfaction.

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