Dues paying members of the Jazz Crusade We paid OUR Dues.

Dues paying members of the Jazz Crusade We paid OUR Dues.

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The Lickerish Quartet is the latest film by director Radley Metzger, the man responsible for I, A Woman, Therese and Isabelle, and Camille 2,000. The script for the film is self-consciously earnest and serious, as all pornography must be, but Metzger’s camera movements, his use of color, sound and decor — indeed, his mise-en-scene — is enough to make the mouth of any auteur critic water. With The Lickerish Quartet the ever-improving Metzger has produced some of the richest, ripest kitsch cinema since Douglas Sirk gave us Written on the Wind and Imitation of Life in the late fifties.

Metzger’s specialty is filming love making, a seemingly voyeuristic activity which he has raised to new heights. In The Lickerish Quartet the camera gently pans back and forth while a fornicating couple rolls across the floor of a library which has been decorated with the dictionary definitions of innumerable dirty words. Later, Metzger zooms in and out on a couple making love in the countryside, deftly turning the potentially pastoral into the purely pornographic.

All of this technical virtuosity has been used to support a reality versus illusion story which Pirandello might have written had he been on the staff of Playboy. A bored Italian family (father, mother, son) sits at home in their villa watching stag movies. Venturing out one night, they come upon the girl who performs in their films. The girl returns home with them and proceeds to bed down with each member of the family. At this point reality and illusion begin to interplay; what is happening in the villa begins to appear in the stag movie, and vice versa. Things reach a suitably loony climax when the wife has an orgasm while watching herself simultaneously having one in the stag movie. Metzger then pushes his film-within-a-film metaphor to a fare-thee-well by turning the projector towards his camera, thus reminding us that we are watching a dirty film about people who are watching a dirty film, and, consequently, that the whole world is just one big stag movie. Far fucking out.

Violating time and space as frequently and as joyously as it violates the virtue of its leading characters, The Lickerish Quartet is the Last Year at Marienbad of skin flicks.

John Kane

C. C. & Co. Meet the Stewardesses

“C.C. and Company”. Joe Namath and Ann-Margaret. Motorcycles, sex, and violence. Can you dig it? If you like movies that are so bad they’re good — if you grooved on “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls” more than you did on “Five Easy Pieces” — then make tracks to your local nayburhood theatre.

Lots of groovy things happen in this flick: motorcycle races, beatings with chains, petty theft, threatened gang bangs — you know, neat stuff like that. See, Joe’s a cycle bum, and Ann’s a fashion designer, and they fall in love, but he’s got to escape from these dudes he’s been riding with, and . . . Along the way the plot manages to invoke most of the predominant sex and violence myths of Middle America: all women are sex objects, all men are macho-oriented brutes, violence is cool, might makes right.

Anyway, there’s lots of heavy philosophy in this flick. Joe tells Ann he became a cycle bum because he was looking for something, and she asks him what it was he was looking for, and he replies, “If I’d known what it was, I wouldn’t have had to go looking for it.” friend warns her that she’ll never have a permanent relationship with Joe, she replies, “I’m not looking for something permanent. Nothing lasts forever.” She also gets lots of clever stuff to say, like when the cycle chicks taunt her about being a designer and she says: “Fuck off”. Clever stuff, like that.

Throughout all of the above Joe and Ann remain as super-duper as ever. Sweating, leering, grinding or smiling they are iconographically always the same: a pair of pop-plastic Ken and Barbie dolls slithering through a neon-lit Las Vegas world of chrome, cycles, and groovy fashion. Joe still has only one apparent facet to his personality — brazen self-assurance — but he plays on it ingratiatingly. He’s not much of an actor though, and he looks rather weak next to Ann in most of their scenes. And her acting isn’t going to keep Sophia Loren up nights either.

Well, if you’re into plastic flicks, you can pretty much take it from there. This is a lousy movie, and the only way to accept it is to sit back and revel in its lousiness. In fact, “C.C. and Company’s” only major flaw is its own self conscious awareness of just how bad a film it really is. The people who wrote and directed this film (Roger Smith and Seymour Robbie respectively) knew it was a bummer, and they keep letting us know that they know via several heavy handed bits of dialogue and action. We didn’t need to be told.

Frequently the best trash is also the least pretentious. “C.C. and Company” falters when it winks at its audience in order to let it in on the joke: “The Stewardesses” plays it straight and comes up a winner. This movie has been sold as a skin flick, but it’s been sold short. Actually it’s one of the greatest head flicks since “2001”.

“The Stewardesses” is an earnest account of the on-the-ground activities of several pin-headed, balloon-bosomed airline hostesses. It has terrible acting, terrible direction, terrible writing, and steamy sex. But here’s the beauty part: the entire flick is in 3-D. Remember 3-D? The early fifties, polaroid glasses, two images fusing together to give an illusion of depth, Vincent Price throwing hot wax in your face, the whole bit. It’s all here in “The Stewardesses”, and, if you’re up, it’s a plastic, fantastic trip.

The plot is such a jumble of poorly cross-cut episodes that it defies description. One example: a stewardess returns home and discovers that her parents are on vacation. Turning to the camera and speaking with all the animation of a ventriliquist’s dummy, she announces. “Mom and Dad are away.” Pause “Maybe I’ll take a trip too.” Long pause. “I think I’ll take some acid.” She then trots into the kitchen, unwraps a cube of LSD, and washes it down with a glass of milk. The entire scene has the tenor of a T.V. commercial, but the actress is so wooden and unconvincing that it’s hard to see who’d be persuaded to buy the product. Several scenes later we find the same actress writhing on a bed in the nude. She’s “tripping” now, so it’s no surprise to us when she picks up a lamp and begins to masturbate while making love to the base of the lamp, which has been cast in the mold of an ancient Roman bust. Far out.

Have I left anything out? Oh yeah. Several of the actresses have what erotic novels would call “pear-shaped breasts.” When they lean over the 3-D effect is so overpowering that those pears seem to turn into flesh-colored bananas which threaten to poke your eyes out. Very simply then, “The Stewardesses” is the most absurdly entertaining piece of trash I’ve seen in months. Get stoned, and go.

John Kane