Leader of a Revolution

The sexual revolution is dead. Long live the sexual revolution.

Among the filmmakers who rode the wave of changing sexual mores in the ‘60s and early ‘70s was Radley Metzger, whose stylish erotic romps (usually set in Europe) stand beside Russ Meyer’s satiric escapades in pushing independent (and some mainstream) filmmakers toward breaking new boundaries in the on-screen depiction of sex and nudity.

Almost 30 years later, Metzger’s titillating films are being rediscovered via retrospectives--the Nuart begins a weeklong run Friday--and the long overdue video release of such films as “The Licorice Quartet,” “Camille 2000,” “Carmen, Baby,” “Therese and Isabelle” and “Score.”

Like blaxploitation movies and the early American independent films of John Cassavetes and Shirley Clarke, Metzger’s films are cultural benchmarks for a new generation of film buffs and filmmakers. (“Boogie Nights” is a virtual homage to Metzger, Meyer and their ilk.)

At 68, Metzger is not your central casting erotic filmmaker. Strikingly tall and white-haired, he’s gentlemanly and articulate, with an astute sense of the business of making and selling films. He emerged during the golden age of the art-house film in the ‘50s and ‘60s when the major studios no longer controlled movie theaters and before they mass-booked films into multiplexes. It was a period during which--strange as it may sound now--the major studios shunned summer, providing an opportunity for independent filmmakers and distributors to break through the Hollywood logjam.

“Suddenly, we could compete,” recalls Metzger, who lives in New York.

After studying film at City College in New York, Metzger directed his first feature, a low-budget drama called “The Dark Odyssey” (1961). Since no one else would distribute it, he did it himself. The film’s dismal box-office performance taught him that he still had a lot to learn. His education continued at Janus Films, where he cut movie trailers for the specialized New York distributor that released the films of Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni, among others.

In the mid-’60s, Metzger and fellow worker Ava Leighton broke away from Janus and formed Audobon Films. They acquired a French drama, “I Spit on Your Grave,” about a black man who avenges racial injustice by seducing the white women in his town. Audobon sold it as an art film and audiences responded. A similar strategy was used on a Scandinavian import, “I, a Woman,” which despite its title was a relatively tame movie with only a fleeting shot of bare breasts.

It was controversial nonetheless because “it presented a female as the sexual aggressor, and that was thought very daring at the time,” Metzger says. And that was enough of a draw for the film to bring in $4 million, virtually unheard of at the time for an art-house film.

Metzger admits to turning down what was probably the definitive erotic art-house film of the ‘60s, “I Am Curious Yellow”--”and I never heard the end of it,” he says with a laugh--which featured full nudity. The otherwise unremarkable Scandinavian film received the best free publicity money could buy when former First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy was photographed coming out of the theater after having viewed the film.

Audobon’s unconventional releases drew the wrath of self-appointed moral guardians, and the company fought many a censorship battle, one of which, over an Italian acquisition titled “The Libertine,” reached the Supreme Court. “We never lost a lawsuit,” Metzger says with a grin.

But distribution was only a means to an end for Metzger, who was eager to direct again. The sexual revolution was still young when Metzger made “The Dirty Girls” (1965) and “Carmen, Baby” (1967), and interest in sexual exploration was high.

“It was the first time the country had moved away from the turn-of-the-century Booth Tarkington mentality,” Metzger recalls, “and my films fell on a fertile field.”

But more than just sexuality, elaborate, stylish games of seduction are what Metzger’s films are all about. “I remember that Dashiell Hammett said that if a mystery is well-written, you can take out the final chapter and it doesn’t matter.”

The other component of Metzger’s films is exoticism. Most are shot in chic European locales, lending them more of an art-house feel. “Score,” his witty 1972 ode to bisexuality, might have seemed less palatable if it were set in an apartment in Queens, N.Y., like the play on which it was based. “Besides, who wants to see people having sex in Queens?” he scoffs. Moving it to a deluxe Adriatic resort town gave the film a high-gloss patina. “My films are always one step removed from reality,” Metzger says. “It’s like what Sergio Leone did with the western; he brought a profound sense of exaggeration to it.”

There was also a pragmatic side to using foreign locales and emphasizing lavish production values; it differentiated Metzger’s films from grainy low-budget “nudie” films of the era. Plus the relatively lower costs of shooting abroad allowed him to devote more time to making his films (“Score” shot for nine weeks, comparable to an average studio film at the time).

In Europe, Metzger could afford to hire the best technicians, whose U.S. counterparts would either have been too expensive or unwilling to work for him because of the subject matter. His pop-futuristic “Camille 2000” was shot by the same cameraman who photographed Vittorio de Sica’s “The Garden of the Finzi Contini” (“It’s no wonder that the film played better dubbed in Italian,” he jokes). Humor also differentiated Metzger’s romps from grind-house sex films, and that too was deliberate.

“I was trying to show audiences that they don’t have to feel guilty about enjoying themselves,” he says.

The era of Metzger’s feel-good erotic films proved to be relatively brief--less than a decade. By the mid-’70s, the sexual revolution had exploded and was in the process of turning back on itself. Major-city art houses were booking slam-bam hard-core sex films like “Deep Throat,” which made Metzger’s films seem relatively tame and quaint.

“It was like when sound first came in,” Metzger laments. “The movies suddenly got crude all over again.” And, unfortunately, the art of on-screen erotica never had time to evolve and mature. By the end of the ‘70s, sexual liberation was quickly disappearing, eroded by more stringent legal definitions of pornography (remember “redeeming social value”?) and an emerging conservative political climate. Then the video revolution moved screen sex behind closed doors, perhaps for good.

For a few years, Metzger got on the hard-core bandwagon. Under the pseudonym Henry Paris (“for which I’m still better known than my real name,” he smiles ruefully), he brought the same attention for detail to such X-rated fare as “The Private Afternoons of Pamela Mann,” “Naked Came the Stranger” and probably his most popular film ever, “The Opening of Misty Beethoven,” which is said to have delighted many a politician during its record-breaking seven-year run in Washington, D.C.

Metzger doesn’t see much hope for sex on the screen in the near future. “We’re living in too much of a theocracy right now,” he says.

Even without the threat of religious censorship, the economics of the business and the strictures of the MPAA film ratings are such that filmmakers stay away from the subject of sex altogether or render it in the same cliched way, since any deviation will slip the movie from an R-rating to an NC-17. The multiplexing of America has rendered it virtually impossible to play an “adult” film next door to a mainstream movie. As for pay cable and hotel room soft-core fare, Metzger bemoans their lack of imagination.

“What I’ve seen is extremely crude and inexpensively done, almost a reversion to the kind of [underground] movies being made back in the ‘30s and ‘40s,” he says.

Not that budget always dictates quality. He singles out Spike Lee’s low-budget first film, “She’s Gotta Have It,” as one of the best examples of a filmmaker bringing wit and honesty to the depiction of the world’s oldest sport.

But perhaps all hope is not lost. The prestigious and not especially audacious Book of the Month Club’s video division currently sells Metzger’s films, which he says represents some kind of step forward.

“Even if they were selling videos in 1968, I don’t think they would have even answered my letters.”

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* ‘ELEGANT EROTICA’: At the Nuart, a week-long offering of Metzger’s films begins Friday. Kevin Thomas looks at the offerings. Page 17