GOD, this was BRUTAL. Truly one of the worst movies I've ever seen. Mind-meltingly bad. I don't want to watch it again, so I'm going to write a longer précis than usual.
Xaviera Hollander, who has a platinum kind of shag-fade and is the subject of the exact same close-up innumerable times throughout the movie, flounces and flirts her way through everything, tossing innuendos around like paper in a subway tunnel and wearing more unbuttoned shirts than Barry Gibb. She is summoned to Washington to testify in a "hearing" about sex in America, under the premise that she is the most famous hooker/columnist/madam/general sexpot in the country. The movie claims that a backlash against sexual freedom is taking place, and there's a new conservatism sweeping the nation, at which I hooted, because come on, they ain't seen nothin' in 1977.
It's unclear what Xaviera is meant to testify upon at these hearings, which are laughably organized and blocked. (The whole thing is horribly shot and edited. Bad timing, bad angles, bad bad bad.) The senators ask her a series of questions that lead to her descriptions of various sex parties she organized or participated in, and the result is a bunch of skits threaded vaguely together, all telling the same story and the same joke over and over: ugly 70s dudes surprised by probable sex with hot babes wearing abundant lip gloss. I think if I watched more carefully I'd have seen that the senators are asking about various meaningful American institutions - one skit was at a pretend General Motors - but I didn't care to, because the movie was so awful. The bottomless mugging! The meaningless nudity! The sudden veering-into-nowhere(s)! The racism! Ugh.
Anyway, there's a whisper of a plot around the hearings, the senators' hypocrisy (quelle horror), and Xaviera's chemistry with her lawyer, George Hamilton, who cannot! ad-lib! danger! no!, but the plot gets derailed more often than it gets followed. It's mainly a series of romping skits, many involving food in some way. This long sequence with a sheik...I looked away and shouted and waved my hands at the screen. He shoved pastrami and mustard in the direction of his mouth while Xaviera giggled and preened.
If this had been a regular porno with a whisper of plot, I could've got behind that. If it had been a sex romp with an actual plot, okay. But this aimless softcore nudie with tired, one-note comedy was painful in a way I've infrequently experienced.
So, what does this tell us about the 70s? Well, it fits with my developing thesis that comedy was...in an earlier state of sophistication than Annie Hall indicates. The whole movie is about casual sex in a way that most of the other movies just gesture at. (Of course, no consequences.) Everyone has terrible taste in clothes, interior decoration, and accessories, although Xaviera always looks fantastic. Maybe one of the men in the movie, aside from George Hamilton, is okay-looking (he was under a hat the whole scene), while the rest are old or hairy or some other physical way that keeps the audience from feeling inadequate. Nothin' for the ladies. The credits have a "Nails for Ms. Heatherton By", which I actually think is great, because the manicurist for a movie like this does indeed deserve credit.
I don't know. It was so bad. Maybe I'll figure out some way it fits in with the rest of my work on this year. Maybe its very badness does. Death Bed was a thousand times better.
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