Movie Reviews : ‘Heavy Petting’ for the Hand-Holding Crowd

“Heavy Petting” (at the Nuart through Oct. 1) isn’t much of a documentary, but it’s probably a terrific make-out movie.

The subject is teen-age sexuality in the postwar era and the film makers take a jocular attitude that shows they think sex is great and sex education a howl. Producer-co-director Obie Benz juxtaposes educational films, archetypal movie sex icons (Presley, Dean, Monroe, Brando, Tuesday Weld) and the unabashed memoirs of 40 “witnesses”--who collectively recall the days of cruising, petting, making out and trying to go all the way.

All this madly clinical, boobishly straight-faced or dizzily confessional material comes swimming at you in a stew of irony and rock ‘n’ roll. It’s a movie about hypocrisy. It shows what society told adolescents to do, and then has 40 ex-teens describe what they actually did--or in most cases, tried to do but didn’t quite succeed at. “I wasn’t head of the dating team,” Josh Mostel relates with a world-weary look--though he claims that, when he finally mastered more solitary vices, “the rest is history.”

For 74 minutes, the film makers bombard us with racy snippets from a loopy cornucopia of postwar sex-education films: forgotten schoolroom turkeys with titles like “Dating: Do’s and Don’ts,” “How to Say No” and “Physical Aspects of Puberty.” In these mostly monochrome films--shot with delightfully primitive techniques, stilted dialogue and charmingly inept actors--puzzled teens and their all-knowing elders come to terms with burning topics like pornography, condoms and venereal disease.

In “Perversion for Profit,” most riveting of these mini-epics, a beady-eyed announcer, with a curious half-smile, shows us dozens of nudie magazines with strategic black bars covering the models: all, he insists, part of a communist conspiracy to sap and impurify American teen-agers.

Between this deluge, we get interviews with people like Sandra Bernhard, Judith Malina and the late Abbie Hoffman, who laughs and smiles with an air that, in retrospect, suggests a desperate attempt to recapture happiness. Ann Magnuson, looking sweet and pixieish, recalls how no one would dance with her at a school party. Allen Ginsberg laments that no one loves him, while William Burroughs gives him arch glances. Spalding Gray--who looks like someone you couldn’t trust in the dark--describes the techniques of groping, while documentarian Jackie Ochs lists the strategies of fending it off.

It’s difficult to connect the two halves of the film. The sex films are mostly from the ‘50s, while most of the “witnesses” seem to have grown up in the ‘60s or later. But this time warp fits the film. It’s a post-Sexual Revolution look at the “quaint” sexual mores of a vanished past. As such, it’s a scattershot, AIDS-era assault (Times-rated Mature for language and theme) that misses as often as it hits. But that doesn’t mean it won’t have an aphrodisiac effect.