The Radley Metzger Collection
FIRST RUN FEATURES
IT IS REMARKABLE how, with the passage of time, what once appeared outré or scandalous loses its power to shock, and settles into a comfortable middle age. Thus it is with this three-DVD set of films by Radley Metzger, one of the forgotten pioneers of 1960s erotic films. These three works from Metzger's most fruitful period-The Alley Cats (1968), Therese and Isabelle (1968) and Camille 2000 (1969)-are possessed of a vague Eurotrashy glamour meant to add a touch of allure to their softcore spectacles. Emphasis on the soft-these films are so heavy on the dialogue, plot and aura, they would barely qualify for an R rating today.
Metzger was a smut director with pretensions to grandeur. Therese and Isabelle is a misty-eyed song of remembrance that owes a great debt to Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad, and Camille 2000 is an update of the Greta Garbo tearjerker. Where 60s audiences may have seen the film as a series of way-stations between sex scenes, it is clear today how little Metzger's work has in common with contemporary porn. Metzger was not a very good filmmaker, but he desperately wanted to be one, and therein lies the difference.
This trilogy still has its pleasures, though, not the least of which are the sub-Beyond the Valley of the Dolls swingers who seem to populate every frame of its characters' swinging parties. Both The Alley Cats and Camille 2000 seem to be one endless soiree, full of the effortlessly charming and endlessly wealthy, condemned to lives of meaningless pleasure. In The Alley Cats, a young woman feeling abandoned by her heel of a fiancé gallivants with every Tom, Dick and Harriet in town before returning to his (sort of) loving arms. In Camille 2000, a flirtatious courtesan falls desperately in love with an aimless playboy before being forced to give him up.
The Alley Cats is the best of the bunch, with the advantage of attractively lensed sex scenes, and the decided drawback of incoherent characters and plot. Therese and Isabelle is the silliest, a boarding-school lesbian romance tinged with the sorrow of things past, as well as a tin ear for dialogue. These three films are time capsules from some long-lost fantasy of the 60s high life, all champagne wishes and caviar dreams. Time has had the effect of pushing the sex to the background while foregrounding the alienation; these are a depressive's sex flicks.