I know you’re asking (and if you’re not, you should be) “Why is this guy reviewing an old soft-core porn flick?” Well, one of my guiding principles here is that any movie worth talking about should have something in it to justify the conversation – even if the movie is an example of what not to do.

I also maintain that there is a difference between pornography and erotica: if you remove all the sex from something and what’s left still has some value and interest, then it’s erotica, not porn.

With that in mind, let’s NOT look at the nudity and simulated sex, and see if there’s anything left that’s worth a discussion. This will require winding up the figurative time machine and program in stops in three different eras.

First, let’s go back to the late 1950s to see what was going on in the movie industry.

For the past two decades, Hollywood had been self-censoring according to the Hays Code. Puritans had gotten them to prohibit nudity, swearing, blood and gore, and other “adult” topics. But now, with the end of the monopolistic “studio system”, television stealing their audience, and foreign films coming over from Europe, the industry as a whole was starting to push the boundaries and see what it could get away with.

A few independent moviemakers, like Russ Meyer and Doris Wishman, knocked the boundaries over completely. Fully embracing nudity in their movies, they didn’t even bother with any pretense about documenting the “nudist lifestyle” or being “artistic”. Still concerned a bit with censorship, these “nudie cuties” avoided any explicit sex and tended to be lighthearted farces.

Even though the Supreme Court (in Jacobellis v. Ohio, 1964) ruled that, in essence, nudity in and of itself was not pornography, the Puritans started fighting back. Hollywood, through the Motion Picture Association of America, would introduce a ratings system in 1968. Though nudity and sex (and other adult themes) now had a sort of official permission to be in movies, the end was near for the “nudie cutie”. Their burlesque humor had fallen out of favor, and there wasn’t anything sufficiently transgressive or “naughty” about them to attract viewers anymore. Secret Sex Lives was released right at the end of this era.

The next stop on our journey is in the Elizabethan Era, where we’ll be looking at Shakespeare.

Most people first encounter him in high school, where they are forced to read his plays as if they were Great Art. Well, they generally are, but dealing with them in that manner misses a lot of things.

First, they are plays, not novels. They are meant to be seen, not read. The humor in them frequently gets overlooked in that approach. See them on stage, and you’ll see the cast mugging and gesturing and otherwise showing you the jokes and gags in the text. It’s also worth keeping in mind that Shakespeare wrote his plays for the general public; he was not intentionally trying to create Great Art that would last for centuries. More of a Steven Spielberg than a Martin Scorsese…. All the plays would have some “comic relief” in them amongst all the drama and speeches, if only because the audience demanded it. And the humor could be quite bawdy….

Speaking of bawdiness, another thing that’s missed is that the language has changed in the centuries since he was writing. Not in ways that make it incomprehensible, but slang terms have changed to the point where we need footnotes to tell us what’s really being said. The archetypical example here is when Hamlet tells Ophelia to “Get thee to a nunnery”. We have to be told that he’s not telling her to join a convent; at the time, a “nunnery” was a slang term for a brothel. Hamlet is really calling her a whore. Speaking of Hamlet, it also doesn’t help much that the plays we know the best are the dramas – Macbeth, King Lear, Othello. His comedies – Twelfth Night, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Comedy of Errors, et al. – are relegated to the second tier. So we rarely get to see just how funny – and raunchy – he (and the rest of the Elizabethan stage) could be.

Finally, let’s go even further back for a final stop in “Classical” Greece. I don’t want to say “Ancient” Greece, because I’m certain their drama traditions lasted well past the Late Bronze Age days that we associate with Homer and the legends.

One of the advantages of a solid “liberal arts” education is not just that you are exposed to many different cultural traditions in both time and space, you also get a little ‘training’ in seeing connections between them. So in this movie, when I see a “narrator” giving a little exposition and commentary filling in the gaps between scenes, my mind immediately recognizes it as the equivalent of the “Greek Chorus” – which had the exact same role in Classical Greek drama.

Then I noted that in the dialogue, it’s never just “Verona”; it’s always “Beautiful Downtown Verona”. Aside from understanding the joke reference, I recognize it as an “epithet”. That term also goes back to Greek drama and their oral tradition. It’s a descriptive adjective for a person or character that conveys one of their significant attributes as an aid to memory. It’s always something like “Crafty Odysseus” or “Gray-Eyed Athena” in the epics…..rarely just the name alone.

With those two things in mind, a third bit of trivia about Greek drama bubbled up to the top.

Back in their day, the Greeks would have drama festivals that were the equivalent of our contemporary film festivals. A theater would stage a whole day’s worth of plays and other entertainments. To break up the monotony of a long set of dramas and tragedies, they would stick in a short comedy. Often a spoof of a well-known play or writer, these “satyr plays” would often have a lot of crude humor and ribald jokes. They also gave us the term “satire”.

The penny dropped.

This movie is the “Satyr Play” version of Romeo and Juliet.

So if for some reason you choose to seek this movie out and actually watch it, you can justify it as being educational……

(So I never did get around to actually reviewing the movie. Big deal.)