User Reviews

Air itself has more substance than this film. Siv is a photographer who likes Sven, one of her models. She sleeps with him several times. Ann, Siv's assistant, is young and pretty and also has her eye on Sven (who really isn't all that great looking considering he's a model). Eventually, Sven starts to notice Ann but she turns him away every time he tries to mess around with her. I don't know why.

Strangely enough, Siv is able to seduce Ann and they have sex. There is no male nudity in "Love In The 3rd Position" but there are many scenes of a rather tame lesbian orgy sporadically inserted throughout the majority of the film. It pretty much consists of a lot of kissing and playing with each others' breasts. There are also several shots of topless models.

This is just another of a long list of "nudie" films which started cropping up in the mid-'60s and continued well into the '70s. It is a Swedish production but the actors speak choppy English. There is no plot to speak of and the film just kind of ends. 1/10

I'm generally a big fan of American cult director Joe Sarno, and especially of the films made during his "Swedish period" from the late 60's to the mid 70's when he went to Sweden to make films that capitalized on the myth of "Swedish sin". No one has ever accused Sarno of being a very CONSISTENT filmmaker, however, and while some of his Swedish films are top-notch (i.e. "Young Playthings", "Inga", "Inga and Greta"), others are not so good ("Every Afternoon", "To Ingrid, My Love, Lisa"). This one though is REALLY the bottom of the barrel.

Although this is filmed in English, I don't think any of the actors could actually speak English, so the dialogue ranges from stilted and thickly accented to purely phonetic to pretty much incomprehensible. It also doesn't help that this particular film is so cheap there are actually "sound cuts" when the cameras turns around to record dialogue between two characters standing in different parts of a room. For a WWII-trained cinematographer like Sarno, this is strictly amateur hour. Of course, there's not that much dialogue. There are long, mostly lesbian sex scenes (with only disembodied female moaning and the buzzing of an off-screen vibrator) and quite a few scenes of the characters dancing to groovy music (pretty much requisite for low-budget films of that era from ANY country). But there are also some long, clunky exchanges of dialogue to (barely) move the plot along. And that brings me to the "plot". "Anne" is the assistant to a female photographer named "Siv", who mostly does female nudes, but does have one male model, "Sven". "Siv" has free sex with "Sven" and pretty much anything else in and out of pants, but she is still jealous of an innocent romance developing between "Anne" and "Sven", so she herself plots to seduce the innocent young girl first.

I actually have to cast around quite a bit to find ANYTHING good to say about this movie. But one of its few strengths is the actress who plays "Anne", Britt-Marie Engstreom. She is a doe-eyed, innocent looking girl, but with an incredible body--very much in the mould of Sarno's two most famous starlets, Christina Lindberg and Marie Liljedahl. No one has ever accused Lindberg or Liljedahl of being great actresses; they are like Meryl Streep though compared to Engstroem. But Enstroem, in turn, at least TRIES valiantly to act, unlike the rest of the cast of this movie who might as well be reading the English ingredients off a can of Swedish meatballs. And, I have to confess, the only reason I made it to the end of this direly boring movie is because I was waiting for Engstroem to get undressed and join the sex play. I have nothing good to say about any one else here. The girl who plays "Siv" vaguely resembles Brigitte Lahaie or Sarno's frequent American collaborator Rebecca Brooke, but with none of the charisma of either. And they could have replaced "Sven" with the "Swedish Chef" from "The Muppet Show" and it wouldn't have mattered (actually, it probably would have improved the movie). The best thing I can say about the supporting actresses (well, most of them, anyway) is that they were pretty Scandinavian girls who looked good with their clothes off.

Generally though, Joe Sarno should have left this whole movie on the cutting room floor.