Flicker Read Free

in their seats. For the next hour, we were treated to a dimly photographed parade of bored and beefy ladies whose perfunctory bumping and grinding was more often off camera than on. When we finally got to Tempest Storm, she was as blurred an image as all the rest and no less concealed by tassles and bangles. This erotic delight was followed by a bonus: a silent reel of posture shots featuring a dozen or so rigidly positioned “artist’s models” morosely shifting this way and that. Whenever the girls failed in their maladroit efforts to make sure that not more than the permissible half-nipple was revealed, chop! the film got edited with a meat-ax. Even seen from beginning to end a second time, these were meager rations, barely enough to give us the satisfaction of vindicated manhood.
    Afterward, our lust unslaked and the night still young, we cruised the streets fruitlessly looking for more of the same. Finally, when we’d drifted out of the Tenderloin into more respectable parts of town, we were ready to give up and begin the long drive home. But then, in one of the city’s better neighborhoods, we happened upon a demurely lit first-run movie house whose marquee advertised a film called
The Lovers.
This sounded promising, and indeed there were posters of a man and a woman and a bed. We decided to make a few exploratory passes.
    The theater seemed suspiciously tasteful, much too swanky for aporn show. The glass doors were polished, the lobby inside carpeted, the man who took the tickets was dressed in jacket and tie. Moreover, the audience going in wasn’t the scruffy crowd with whom we’d shared Tempest Storm’s charms. The men buying tickets looked well-dressed, intelligent, reputable. They looked like our fathers, for God’s sake! Moreover, they had
women
with them. How could a guy enjoy dirty movies with females present? We knew there had to be a catch. There was. This wasn’t an American movie. It was
French.
That’s why it cost so much. A whole dollar. More than Tempest Storm. Our doubts grew stronger when one of my companions perceptively noted, “It says subtitles.” He made the observation as if he’d discovered a dubious clause in the small print of a contract. “That means they put all the talking in words at the bottom of the screen.”
    A foreign film. A film you had to
read.
Of course I’d heard about such movies. I’d even seen one the year before: Brigitte Bardot, though in a toned-down and domesticated version. With voice dubbed and bare posterior expurgated (how else could she have gained admittance to Modesto?) she’d come off seeming vastly overrated to me, a poor substitute for Mamie Van Doren, suffering from out-of-sync lips. Given our prurient mission that evening, the movie at hand seemed even less likely to be the merchandise we were shopping for. Still, it looked as if we might have no trouble getting into the place. There were young guys getting past the usher at the door, no questions asked. We could probably pass for college age—not that the management showed signs of caring. After a brief consultation, we decided to gamble the buck. It was a night for running risks.
    As a mordant commentary on bourgeois marital habits, Louis Malle’s
The Lovers,
that season’s rage of the art houses, was lost on me. Nor did it matter in the least that to the critics’ way of thinking, the story was feather-light and much too preciously played. But what did I know about critics? What did I know about thinking? For me, the movie was an excuse for the camera to loiter deliciously over the intimate details of an illicit love affair. A man and a woman share a bed, a bath. She yields to his touch with the easy grace of water stirred in a pool. Their lovemaking flows as lyrically as the gorgeous music that accompanies their brief romance. (A Brahms sextet, as I later learned. An unusual bit of film scoring.) I sat in the presence