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In the days when drive-ins and art houses thrived, before the advent of the mall multiplex and the MPAA ratings system, a certain style of film boasted the caveat "for mature audiences only." Sexually frank, European-flavored, and aimed at adventurous adults, films like "The Lickerish Quartet," "Camille 2000," "Carmen, Baby," and the lesbian classic "Therese and Isabelle" played to urban art house audiences and the drive-in date crowd (often with wildly divergent advertising campaigns). They were reviewed by critics as established as Vincent Canby and promoted in venues as mainstream as "The Merv Griffin Show." The auteur of this soft-core erotic genre is Radley Metzger. His films are available on home video from First Run Features. Metzger's films, which contain less sex than today's average R-rated teen comedies and are as picturesque, lush, and literate as many high-gloss foreign films, are a hybrid of the "blue" movies he imported from Europe in the 1960s -- most notably "I, A Woman" distributed by Metzger's Audubon Films in 1966 -- and the more racy soft-core films that took advantage in the mid-'60s of broadening sexual parameters. The Bronx-born Metzger's "continental" stamp (his films were shot abroad and used an international cast and crew; most were filmed in English and later dubbed into other languages) grew, perhaps, from the dual influences of Hollywood and European cinema. He "lived" in movie theaters as a boy, he says, because he suffered from hay fever, and air conditioning in those days was most easily found at the movies. After starting his Master's Degree at Columbia University, Metzger did a stint with the Air Force during the Korean conflict and worked with a film unit. Back in New York, he went to work for Janus Films, the U.S. distributor of European auteurs such as Godard, Fellini, Bergman, and Truffaut. He distributed his first film, "The Nude Set" (renamed "The Fast Set" when "nude" was forbidden on movie marquees) with modest success; he teamed with Ava Leighton from Janus Films to form Audubon Films. Metzger's films are distinguished by their high production values, visual sophistication, attractive stars, and exotic settings: the monastic French boarding school in "Therese and Isabelle," an austere, medieval castle in Italy for "The Lickerish Quartet," Fellini-esque Rome for "Camille 2000"๗and a libertine atmosphere that melds swinging sophistication and saucy decadence. More importantly, Metzger's films celebrate the full spectrum of adult sexuality rather than myriad sexual acts spliced into a plot. Women, in particular, are allowed full erotic expression in Metzger films. In "The Lickerish Quartet," shot on location in Italy's Abruzzi mountains and at the famed Cinecitta studio in Rome, a female circus performer who figures in a hard-core stag film seduces each member of an aristocratic family of voyeurs -- husband, wife, and wife's adult son -- for psychological as well as physical pleasure. Metzger calls "The Lickerish Quartet" his most personal film because, with its themes of reality and illusion, it examines the impermanence and subjectivity of film. In "Score," a playful celebration of bisexuality, a swinging couple on vacation seduces the young couple next door; the husband sleeps with the man (a real taboo-smasher for the genre) while in another room the wife seduces the woman. Lesbian scenes in erotic films quickly became de rigueur by the mid-'60s, but in Metzger's movies they are not necessarily just foreplay to heterosexual sex; often they occur solely for the satisfaction of the female characters. "It's all very positive, and that went through all the stuff I did," says Metzger on the telephone from his New York office. "What I wound up with was sex that was guilt-free." His films, he says, were marketed to audiences of both men and women. "Without appealing to women you couldn't survive. Erotic films will draw the men, anyway. With our budgets, we needed to draw both." This awareness is most evident in what many consider Metzger's erotic masterpiece, "Therese and Isabelle" (1968). Based on the semi-autobiographical novel by French writer Violette Leduc, it is sensitive and tasteful in its rendering of the highly charged sexual atmosphere of Leduc's story about the relationship between two adolescent girls at a French boarding school. Shot in black-and-white (for financial reasons, says Metzger, by his longtime cinematographer Hans Jura), the film's flourishing eroticism is aided by its austere setting, long takes, tracking camera, and Georges Auric's melancholy score. "Therese and Isabelle" is neither exploitative nor puerile in its treatment of female and lesbian sexuality. "I had a very good partner in Violette Leduc who told me when I met her, 'Don't make a dirty movie.' I felt an obligation to that, and I leaned on her prose," says Metzger. "I take pleasure in amalgams: it was a French story, [and] I had a German cameraman and a Swedish star [Essy Persson of "I, A Woman"]. Mongrels are stronger than pure breeds." But it was still 1968; in addition to art houses, "Therese and Isabelle" was booked heavily on the drive-in circuit. "We had two distinct ad campaigns; the one aimed at the drive-ins wasn't as subtle," recalls Metzger. "Briefly, we had an alternate ending for the drive-in version, where [the adult Therese], instead of getting into her car, walks off on the arm of a man. I was against doing this version but a 100-percent gay story was a very frightening concept [then]. Eventually, I was able to get rid of most of those prints. They are buried in an unmarked grave." Metzger acknowledges the trailblazers in the late '50s and early '60s, from the European auteurs to the American Russ Meyer, who preceded his Audubon groundbreakers. "In 1960, if there was nudity in a film, it had to be justified. It had to take place in a nudist camp, or it had to be about non-Caucasians, almost a National Geographic type of film. ... 'The Immoral Mr. Teas' was a one-hour, unpretentious Russ Meyer film in 1960 that showed a bare breast without justification. That changed the face of distribution for Audubon and for lots of others." So-called "nudie cuties," like Meyer's early films, came along during a general drop in attendance at theaters. "Theaters had to pay the rent, so they took a chance," says Metzger. But by the early 1970s, the marketplace and mores had shifted again. "The drive-ins went at the same time independent films declined in general," he says. Metzger took a bold step with the more sexually-graphic "Score," based on an off-Broadway play that had starred a young actor named Sylvester Stallone. It took nine weeks to shoot the film on location in Yugoslavia, where Metzger made use of equipment and technicians who'd just shot "Fiddler on the Roof" there. But by the time Metzger released "Score," audience appetites had already changed and a new ratings system would brand the film as hard-core. "The novelty of X-rated films took away our audience," Metzger says. "The X-rated crowd would have thrown rocks at 'Score.' The ratings system was the nail in the coffin, so to speak." Prior to the MPAA and its dreaded "X" rating, soft-core films adopted the informal "for mature audiences only" warning and theaters were "fastidious about restricting erotic films to adults," Metzger says. Arty sex films were advertised and reviewed just like any other film, but that would all change with the stigma of an "X" rating, which quickly became associated with hard-core films. "We were at the crest of the sexual revolution, then X-rated came in and undermined it all," Metzger says. Metzger at first resisted the financial pressures to make hard-core films. Finally, under the name Henry Paris, he shot "The Private Afternoons of Pamela Mann" (1975) in six and a half days. "It went though the roof," he says. "So we did four more. Henry Paris was more successful than I ever was." His hard-core films, which Metzger says were just like his earlier work but with more explicit sex, are also considered hallmarks of the genre. "The Opening of Misty Beethoven" (1976), Metzger's X-rated "Pygmalion," played for years in many first-run adult theaters. "I only know how to do one thing; it's what I know how to do. But I'm not sure I could have done just sexually explicit porn films," Metzger says. "One of my worst nightmares is that I would have to make a porn 'loop.' If I had to make a living on strictly porn, I would have starved to death. I'm not being snobbish; it's been my failing, in a way." Eager to try a different genre, Metzger abandoned Henry Paris after five films. ("There was nothing left for me to say," he notes.) He bought the rights to "The Cat and the Canary" and remade the horror classic in 1978 with Wendy Hiller and Edward Fox. In 1984 he directed "The Princess and the Call Girl" for the Playboy cable channel. His films reflected and helped shape an era in cinema. "I wonder what would have happened to our pictures if people could have gone home at night and watched 'Sex and the City,'" he says. "I think one of the most erotic movies ever made is 'Gilda,' yet [the leads] never even kiss. The eroticism is entwined in the fabric; it could never be cut. It's just there. I was always impressed by that. There's a line at the start of Cocteau's 'Beauty and the Beast': Every limitation is a freedom. Anytime you can't do something, you find another way. We had artistic restrictions, and we found ways to go a few notches above the speed limit." PQ MOVIE NEWS: PQ Video Hot List | Interviews | Advance Guide to Queer Film | Movie News Archive | PQ Video Hot Lists Galore MORE NEWS ON PLANETOUT: PlanetOut News & Politics | PlanetOutRadio | Entertainment
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