Blue Movie Read Free Page A

walked silently, while Sid continued to muse: “Wonder where the hell he found them . . . Christ, they sure are shicksa . . . probably Swedes . . . I hate the fucking Swedes. Except for Bergman, natch,” he added, hoping to amuse B.—who acknowledged the effort with scarcely more than a grunt.
    Sid looked at him, undisturbed by his preoccupation. One thing in particular was locked in his mind concerning Boris; it was a conversation they had after the premiere of one of his movies, a movie on which Sid had been executive producer—a simple, poignant, tender, love story . . . a film which received the highest acclaim, and which was distinguished for, among other things a poetic and rather daring (for its day) bedroom two-shot. In this brief scene, the lovers, entwined in bare embrace, are visible only from the waist up. The man is lying on top, gently kissing the girl’s face, her throat, her shoulders . . . as his head moves slowly down between her breasts, the camera remains stationary, and his head gradually slides out of the frame and, presumably, down to her honey-pot, whereupon the camera moves up to her closed-eyed face and holds on her expression of mounting rapture.
    Naturally, the film had been interfered with in various quarters of hinterland—including New York City. Petitions were rife, and vigilante groups active, to get “that monstrous cunnilingus episode” (as the N.Y. Times critic described it) out of the film.
    There were abortive attempts to delete the major portion of the scene . . . with the projectionist, under union instruction, or management bribe, causing the film to jump the sprocket at the crucial point, and then rethreading several frames (two hundred feet actually) afterward.
    Responsible critics, of course, were quick to seize ready cudgel in the film’s defense. The scene was lauded by the editors of Cahiers du Cinéma as a “tour de force érotique” unique in the history of contemporary film. It was described by Sight and Sound as “masterfully aesthetic . . . sheer poetry, and in the best possible taste.”
    The critic’s use of the word “taste” in this instance had caused B. to smile. “How can he talk about taste?” he asked Sid (putting him on a bit), “. . . with the camera on the girl’s face, who knows how it tasted! Right, Sid?”
    Understandably this had elicited the coarsest sort of rejoinder from Sid. “Huh?” not quite getting it at first, but then nodding violently, laughing, coughing, spitting, slapping his leg, urgently scratching his crotch: “Yeah, yeah, I know, you’d even like to show the guy after —pickin’ cunt-hair outta his teeth, huh? Haw, haw, haw!”
    “Not necessarily,” said B., gentle and very earnest, “I would like to have followed his head, though . . . when it went down, out of the frame. I should have done that. It was a cop-out not to.”
    Sid realized he was serious. “What . . . you mean, show him suckin’ her cunt, for Chrissake?!? Whatta you, nuts?”
    Of course this had been several years ago, six in all, and was now a part of cinematic history. In a subsequent film, Enough Rope, during a scene in which the voyeur-antagonist fastens his eye to a crack in the wall, while in the next room the heroine disrobes against the terrible heat of a Mexican summer afternoon, the camera (voyeur’s POV) finds occasion to linger, in a desultory, almost caressing fashion on her pubes. In commercial film prior to this, other than documentaries on nudism, a view of the pubic region—the “beaver shot” it was called—occurred only as a brief glimpse, a seven- or eight-frame cut, never in close-up, and, above all, never integrated as part of a “romantic,” or a deliberately erotic, sequence. Naturally, the studio was quick to snap its wig.
    “Damn it to hell,” Les Harrison had wailed, “you’re sabotaging your whole career! And you’re taking a lot of good guys down the drain with you,” adding this last a bit piously, voice