Smut Fest

I spent part of the weekend watching smut.  I was in the mood for some seventies smut - an era when it far less constrained and far grittier than the sort of stuff we started getting in the eighties.  First up, I finally got around to watching Ginger (1971), the first of Don Schain's trio of action-orientated smut-fests centreing on Cheri Caffero's titular society girl-turned-private-eye.  Not as crudely made as many contemporaneous low-budget action flicks, it does suffer from poor dialogue, a largely wooden cast and some fairly perfunctory action scenes.  But let's face it - nobody was watching it for any of those.  Luckily, its scenario of having Caffaro's rookie PI go undercover in an upmarket resort town to break up a drugs, sex and blackmail ring, affords plenty of opportunities for sex and nudity.  I have to say, that I admire director Schain's restraint in holding off on both for quite some time, building up plenty of audience expectation - which isn't disappointed. This being the early seventies, we get the full gamut of kinkiness, from girl-on-girl action to some pretty serious bondage.  There is also a lot of rape and, equally disconcertingly for modern audiences, a fair amount of racist invective.  

This latter is 'justified' by one of the heroine's various flashbacks, (which explain her motivation for her various violent actions against the villains - including castration and shooting dead at point blank range), in which we learn that, as a teenager, she was gang-raped by three black men.  Employing Liam Neeson's logic that murdering any black man in revenge would be appropriate, she entraps the film's only black character.  Now, to be fair, he , as characterised, a particularly nasty member of the blackmail gang, but unfortunately, his portrayal also plays into typical racist stereotyping of black guys obsessed with raping 'white ass' as some kind of cultural revenge for slavery.  The film follows the strict formula for tough heroines: before the end she has to endure beatings, bondage, rape and drugging at the hands of the main bad guy, but endures it all to emerge with her various psychological hang-ups resolved.  That's some therapy.

While Ginger epitomises the more brutal end of seventies smut, the other main piece of smut I watched approached its subject matter from a very different perspective.  The Schoolgirl Report (1970) is the first in a very long series of movies which focused on the supposed sexual activities of Germany's liberated youth.  Interestingly deriving its title and central concept from a serious book by a respected psychologist, these films are closely related to the 'Mondo' format, in that they present themselves as being serious explorations of anthropological issues, thereby justifying (both for the filmmakers and the audience) all the sex and nudity.  It isn't titillating smut, you see, it's a serious study of modern sexual moralities.  Also, like a true 'Mondo', the Schoolgirl Report series present a series of 'dramatic recreations' of various of the experiences related by its participants.  What is somewhat more than mildly disconcerting for modern audiences is that each of the vignettes presented opens with subtitles telling us not just the names of the female characters, but also their ages, some of which are supposedly only fourteen and fifteen.  OK, in reality they are all played by actresses with what appears to be an average age of twenty five, but nonetheless, the fact that we are meant to be watching under age sex and naked under age girls is, undoubtedly, somewhat uncomfortable.

In common with the rest of the series, the first Schoolgirl Report has an overarching story which links together the various vignettes.  In this case, the film opens with eighteen year old Renata, who is caught on the backseat shagging the coach driver during a school trip to a power station.  Naturally, the prissy teacher who caught her wants to see Renata expelled for her 'immoral' behaviour, before her moral turpitude corrupts the other girls.  At a meeting of the school governors to decide her fate, however, the father of one of her friends - a psychologist who has, conveniently, conducted a study into teenage mating habits - intervenes on her behalf, arguing that her behaviour is perfectly normal for her generation.  In order to make his case, he relates a series of 'case studies' (the vignettes) which illustrate the way in which the German girls of 1970 deal with such things as masturbation, losing their virginity, underage sex and so on and, just as importantly, how they their parents' more conservative attitudes are, more often than not, actually harmful to their development.  This is interspersed with a reporter conducting street interviews with various young women, asking them about various aspects of their sex lives.  The whole thing is shot in the sort of faux 'realistic' fashion typical of the 'Mondo', with mainly amateur performers in real, rather mundane looking, locations. 

 All of which actually makes it curiously likeable - for much of the time, the sheer ordinariness of the girl-next-door types and their usually decidedly average looking male partners take the exploitative edge off of the copious amounts of sex and nudity on display.  Rather like the British sex comedies which were appearing around the same time, the ordinariness of settings and performers doesn't leave the audience feeling inadequate.  That said, the supposed age of some of the 'schoolgirls' involved still makes much of it feel dubious.  Rather like Ginger and its rape and bondage fueled plot, The Schoolgirl Report with its voyeuristic and salacious obsession with the sex lives of kids, it is difficult to imagine a film like this getting made today, let alone being given a widespread cinema release, (the Schoolgirl series were hugely popular in Germany in the seventies, raking in a lot of money for the producers).