A half-baked script and several inferior performances sink MARCY, a once-missing 1969 Joe Sarno film recently given a shoddy DVD release. This was at #1 on my Want to See list among's Sarno's pictures and I was very disappointed when I finally got to see it.
I watched the film back-to-back with LOVE ME...PLEASE!, a movie shot right after MARCY in 1968 by Victor Petrashevic featuring the identical leading actresses, and the comparison is quite striking -I'll return to that later.
Uta Erickson, one of my favorite softcore stars, fumbles the title role as a repressed lady who inherited the family farm. Most of the cast affects vaguely Southern accents for this strictly rural piece, but it was shot in Suffolk, NY.
Uta nearly whispers her dialog, at first giving off a sexy "unattainable" allure reminiscent of Anne Heywood, British star of the breakthrough Hollywood lesbian drama of the day, THE FOX. But Sarno fails to do proper direct sound recording or post-synching (other than a brief male voice-over at one point), so much of Uta's work is unintelligible. Her underplaying simply doesn't come off.
SPOILERS ALERT:
Script was badly in need of a few rewrites, as the opening reels keep hammering unsubtly at the premise: everyone is gossiping in escalating fashion about an assumed lesbian relationship between Marcy and her long-time worker June (Sheila Britt, delivering the movie's best thesping). Sarno teases the fans (this being an Adult film to play at Adult cinemas plus drive-ins) unmercifully with the gals' innocent horseplay and June's almost nightly attempts to seduce Marcy, before delivering the de rigeur lesbian scenes (including a three-way) late in the picture.
Central conflict occurs because Marcy and neighboring farm inheritor Dalton Christie (Nick Linkov) had an affair when she was 15, with prospects of merging the two family farms. Instead, they broke off and he's married to brunette Sharon, played by Barbara Lance. Lance's career consists of only four pictures, all by Sarno, and as usual gives a stilted, amateurish performance. Like the Marcy/June lesbian consummation, Marcy & Dalton are back together in the sack 20 years after their teenage fling, and facing an open-ended future together by film's end.
But with this basic drama set in place, Sarno's film goes nowhere. In trademark two or three-character foreground groupings, the cast hashes and rehashes these issues over and over, with no action or movement of the plot. It's all an excuse for LA RONDE-type couplings, none of which are sexy or explicit enough to satisfy a soft porn audience of the 1969 era. Overall effect resembles those cookie-cutter Cinemax movies that exist in a truncated R-rated version (equivalent to MARCY's content) and an "unrated" edition the fans prefer.
The simulated sex scenes here last seconds, not minutes, and we get a modicum of topless shots by the attractive female cast but minus the frontal nudity and "grinding" sex scenes of most soft X product circa 1969. The AFI catalog 1961-1970 states an 80-minute running time, cut from 95 minutes originally, while the splicey DVD print only lasts 77 minutes.
Final femme cast member, Linda Boyce, is effective as the sexy wife of a ranch hand working for Dalton & Sharon. However, the contradiction between her harping intolerantly about assumed lesbianism and instant conversion later on to the Sapphic persuasion betrays the film's porn roots, and displays why (unless you are a latter-day Sarno sycophant) it is impossible to take the work seriously alongside mainstream cinema of its day.
The trio of male performers give poor performances: Alex Mann as another ranch hand affects Method mannerisms that imitate a Brando (or James Dean) of a decade or two earlier; untalented Aaron Green walks around without a clue as Boyce's husband; and Linkov makes for a dull hero throughout.
Best thing about the film is a very interesting musical score by Michael Colicchio (billed as "Sandy McVane"), mainly consisting of occasionally haunting harmonica solos, accompanied by guitar and bass, or some jazzy harpsichord/clavinet runs that reminded me of the keyboard work of Sun Ra at the time.
They create the mood that's missing from the lackluster acting and the dreamy but soporific landscape photography of Steven Silverman. Moodily lit interiors are interesting to see in color for a change (instead of Sarno's usual '60s b&w), but the too close-up framing is not conducive to the fans' need for sex.
The contrast with LOVE ME...PLEASE! is instructive. Both films (per the AFI) were released in mid-1969, contrary to the IMDb listings, after being shot nearly back-to-back late in 1968. While Sarno gives us a theatrical play to watch, almost as eavesdroppers (voyeurs), Petrashevic takes the same actresses to Manhattan and delivers almost a one-woman, highly erotic show spotlighting Boyce.
Victor's sex scenes are far more explicit and last as long as 10 minutes apiece in a largely MOS-shot pure-porn opus. Boyce (cast in the Anne Heywood mold also, and outdoing latter's classic THE FOX masturbation scene) connects directly by voice-over and often first-person camera to the viewer, and is completely uninhibited (full-frontal nudity included).
Petrashevic concocted a feature-length porn loop, craftily designed merely to evoke an ejaculation from male patrons in the cheap seats. Sarno's portentous and pretentious approach fails to deliver the goods as soft porn and sadly is merely static and boring as a would-be real film.
I watched the film back-to-back with LOVE ME...PLEASE!, a movie shot right after MARCY in 1968 by Victor Petrashevic featuring the identical leading actresses, and the comparison is quite striking -I'll return to that later.
Uta Erickson, one of my favorite softcore stars, fumbles the title role as a repressed lady who inherited the family farm. Most of the cast affects vaguely Southern accents for this strictly rural piece, but it was shot in Suffolk, NY.
Uta nearly whispers her dialog, at first giving off a sexy "unattainable" allure reminiscent of Anne Heywood, British star of the breakthrough Hollywood lesbian drama of the day, THE FOX. But Sarno fails to do proper direct sound recording or post-synching (other than a brief male voice-over at one point), so much of Uta's work is unintelligible. Her underplaying simply doesn't come off.
SPOILERS ALERT:
Script was badly in need of a few rewrites, as the opening reels keep hammering unsubtly at the premise: everyone is gossiping in escalating fashion about an assumed lesbian relationship between Marcy and her long-time worker June (Sheila Britt, delivering the movie's best thesping). Sarno teases the fans (this being an Adult film to play at Adult cinemas plus drive-ins) unmercifully with the gals' innocent horseplay and June's almost nightly attempts to seduce Marcy, before delivering the de rigeur lesbian scenes (including a three-way) late in the picture.
Central conflict occurs because Marcy and neighboring farm inheritor Dalton Christie (Nick Linkov) had an affair when she was 15, with prospects of merging the two family farms. Instead, they broke off and he's married to brunette Sharon, played by Barbara Lance. Lance's career consists of only four pictures, all by Sarno, and as usual gives a stilted, amateurish performance. Like the Marcy/June lesbian consummation, Marcy & Dalton are back together in the sack 20 years after their teenage fling, and facing an open-ended future together by film's end.
But with this basic drama set in place, Sarno's film goes nowhere. In trademark two or three-character foreground groupings, the cast hashes and rehashes these issues over and over, with no action or movement of the plot. It's all an excuse for LA RONDE-type couplings, none of which are sexy or explicit enough to satisfy a soft porn audience of the 1969 era. Overall effect resembles those cookie-cutter Cinemax movies that exist in a truncated R-rated version (equivalent to MARCY's content) and an "unrated" edition the fans prefer.
The simulated sex scenes here last seconds, not minutes, and we get a modicum of topless shots by the attractive female cast but minus the frontal nudity and "grinding" sex scenes of most soft X product circa 1969. The AFI catalog 1961-1970 states an 80-minute running time, cut from 95 minutes originally, while the splicey DVD print only lasts 77 minutes.
Final femme cast member, Linda Boyce, is effective as the sexy wife of a ranch hand working for Dalton & Sharon. However, the contradiction between her harping intolerantly about assumed lesbianism and instant conversion later on to the Sapphic persuasion betrays the film's porn roots, and displays why (unless you are a latter-day Sarno sycophant) it is impossible to take the work seriously alongside mainstream cinema of its day.
The trio of male performers give poor performances: Alex Mann as another ranch hand affects Method mannerisms that imitate a Brando (or James Dean) of a decade or two earlier; untalented Aaron Green walks around without a clue as Boyce's husband; and Linkov makes for a dull hero throughout.
Best thing about the film is a very interesting musical score by Michael Colicchio (billed as "Sandy McVane"), mainly consisting of occasionally haunting harmonica solos, accompanied by guitar and bass, or some jazzy harpsichord/clavinet runs that reminded me of the keyboard work of Sun Ra at the time.
They create the mood that's missing from the lackluster acting and the dreamy but soporific landscape photography of Steven Silverman. Moodily lit interiors are interesting to see in color for a change (instead of Sarno's usual '60s b&w), but the too close-up framing is not conducive to the fans' need for sex.
The contrast with LOVE ME...PLEASE! is instructive. Both films (per the AFI) were released in mid-1969, contrary to the IMDb listings, after being shot nearly back-to-back late in 1968. While Sarno gives us a theatrical play to watch, almost as eavesdroppers (voyeurs), Petrashevic takes the same actresses to Manhattan and delivers almost a one-woman, highly erotic show spotlighting Boyce.
Victor's sex scenes are far more explicit and last as long as 10 minutes apiece in a largely MOS-shot pure-porn opus. Boyce (cast in the Anne Heywood mold also, and outdoing latter's classic THE FOX masturbation scene) connects directly by voice-over and often first-person camera to the viewer, and is completely uninhibited (full-frontal nudity included).
Petrashevic concocted a feature-length porn loop, craftily designed merely to evoke an ejaculation from male patrons in the cheap seats. Sarno's portentous and pretentious approach fails to deliver the goods as soft porn and sadly is merely static and boring as a would-be real film.
