Photograph: Magda
Sophisticated Boom Boom
Article from Detour, February/March 1998.
"I think that one of my worst nightmares is that someone's going to say, 'You must shoot an erotic scene or I'll kill you. I would die, I wouldn't know what to do." This is a surprising admission coming from Radley Metzger, whose films in the early '60s end '70s helped bring the sexual revolution to the "heaters and bedrooms of middle-class America. His pre-AIDS oeuvre is populated with strikingly beautiful men and women revering in free love, bisexual exploration, sex parties, and dressing up like sailors, cowboys, and naughty French maids.
But Metzger, who's now in his late sixties, did more than throw bodies together. Along with his longtime collaborator, cameraman Hans Jura, Metzger has an innate feel for high society decadence, arousing abstraction, and the thrill of a lingering look. These same qualities are present even in the later hard-core work he did under the pseudonym Henry Paris. In short, each individual erotic scene draws its power from the film as a whole - there's no fast - forwarding to the good stuff.
Born in the Bronx, Metzger was an insular kid plagued by allergies who spent many an afternoon in air-conditioned theaters. "It was the only place I could breathe freely", he remembers. After Columbia University, he worked as a film editor until his 1957 directorial debut, Dark Odyssey, a collaboration with William Kyriakis, which was a box office bomb. Heavily in debt, Metzger took a job with Janus Films cutting trailers for Bergman, Antonioni and Truffaut, where he met his future business partner Ava Leighton.
Metzger first pushed the limits of what was allowable on American screens in the early '60s as a distributor of European erotica. Under the banner of Audubon Films, he and Leighton, who had a canny understanding of what the market would bear, turned breezy French sex comedies into art-house hits. In 1966, Audubon had its biggest success with the landmark release of the Scandinavian I, A Woman. By that time, however, Metzger had his filmmaking career back on track.
For Metzger, the businessman, eroticism was the hook that allowed him to compete with the big-money Hollywood boys. For Metzger, the artist, it meant freedom. "Once you had the elements that would qualify as an erotic movie, nobody cared about anything else you did. Whatever you wanted to put in, you could." And his films come loaded.
The first line spoken in The Alley Cats (1965) is breathlessly delivered by a voluptuous blonde to a clean-shaven stud who starts mashing her face with kisses as soon as she walks through his door: "I like you because you're always ... ready". The story of a young woman who opens to her sapphic side, The Alley Cats is packed with classic Metzger elements. There's the jet-set socialite who knows how to satisfy the sexual appetites of her aristocratic party guests and how to stir the hunger of the uninitiated.
There's the bachelors who fancy themselves as kings of pleasure, only to find that their fates are in the hands of the women they want to possess. And, of course, there's the director's inimitable approach to climax. When Leslie (Anne Arthur) succumbs to the socialite's seduction (Karen Field), the crescendo of her moans is matched by a swirling pool of overlapping images: The rococo ceiling spins above her bed, male lovers fade in and out, a finger caresses a GrecoRoman sculpture, and Leslie herself floats above her own ecstasy, powerful and radiant in cocktail attire.
Lesbianism is a recurring Metzger motif, and in his first bona fide erotic masterpiece, Therese and Isabelle (1968), it takes center stage. Based on the memoirs of French author Violette Leduc, it's a haunting film in which the rush of self-discovery and the pain of lost love coalesce in every frame. The story of two school girls who find happiness in each others arms unfolds in flashback when Therese (Essy Persson) returns to wander the labyrinthine halls and expansive grounds of the convent where her brief relationship with Isabelle (Anna Gael) blossomed. For much of the film, Metzger explores the film's monastic setting with powerfully composed shots and gliding camera work, drawing out the contrast between its asceticism and the girls' building passion. Jura's photography is exquisite. In contrast to The Alley Cats' randy rhythms, the dialogue here is suitably ripened. As Therese and Isabelle commingle for the last time, their shimmering bodies nestled in the accepting bed of the forest floor, Therese describes their love-making in voice-over: "Our mouths, as they met, opened into an accommodating dream. I made my way inside".
From the early 1960s through the mid '70s, Radley Metzger's films helped usher in the sexual revolution by consistently pushing the bounds of what was allowable on American screens. The secret to his films' success and the essence of their seductiveness is that Metzger finds mise en scène as big a turn on as ménage à trois. He has a seemingly innate ability to frame his erotic scenes in ways that both maximize sensuality and speak volumes about character. That's why his haunting erotic masterpiece Therese and Isabelle (1968), about two French schoolgirls who fall in love, is as much about troubled adolescence and loneliness as it is a depiction of forbidden passion in bloom.
Metzger followed up this almost gothic work in 1969 with the futuristic fantasia of Camille 2000. Alexandre Dumas's story of an aristocrat's wife who sacrifices her own happiness to save her lover provides the film a sturdy backbone, freeing Metzger and art director Enrico Sabbatini to go wild with its visual look. Inside her quaint French chateau, Marguerite (Daniele Gaubert) lives in a Barbarella world of satin, mirrors, and clear plastic inflatable furniture. Camille's many parties are flamboyantly designed and costumed affairs, including an S&M themed bacchanal that features glittering stockades and a jail-cell passion pit. The cool, modern decadence of Camille 2000 is an obvious leadin to the hip automatons and Hollywood orgies of Russ Meyer's Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.
Metzger and Sabbatini teamed up again for what Metzger considers his most personal film, The Lickerish Quartet (1970). In its opening scenes, a dysfunctional family of voyeuristic aristocrats, a mother, her son, and his stepfather recognize a carnival stunt woman as the star of the stag film they've just seen. They invite her back to their mansion for a little fun, but when they screen the film for her, they're shocked to find another actress playing the role. It's a Buñuelian, even Lynchian twist, that lies at the heart of this sensual and surreal film about the tenuous nature of reality and the power of fantasy to heal.
His next project, Score, released in 1972, marks Metzger's turn toward more graphic depictions of sex before his wildly successful entry into the hard-core arena in 1974 under the pseudonym Henry Paris. (The Opening of Misty Beethoven, Metzger's hilarious hard-core Pygmalion, played for seven years in Washington, D.C.'s first-run adult theaters). Based on an off Broadway play, Score is a swinger's fairy tale set in the mythical "Land of Plenty". Elvira (Lynn Lowry) and Mike (Calvin Culver - an actor who had a thriving second life as gay-porn icon "Casey Boys in the Sand Donovan") are a married couple who plot to bring their prim and proper neighbors Betsy and Jack (Claire Wilbur, Gerald Grant) into the free-love fold. The twist being that the partner-swapping falls along bisexual lines, with Elvira trying to seduce Betsy and Mike trying to seduce Jack, both before midnight. A titillating spoof of hard-core narrative inanities, Score is also one of Metzger's most direct commentaries on sexual repression and guilt. Jack's bisexual self loathing and Betsy's Victorian mind-set are smoothed away by Elvira and Jack - with help from a lot of pot and amyl nitrate - until the repressed couple discovers there's nothing to fear in sexual exploration but fear itself. Would that it were still so uncomplicated.
Paul Malcolm
Reproduced with the kind permission of Larry Schubert,
Arts Editor, Detour.