Nick Phillips was actually Nick Millard, the son of legendary exploitation movie figure S.S. Millard (known as Steam Ship Millard and one of the notorious Forty Thieves of the exploitation movie business). Nick Phillips carved out his own niche in the business and had a long and prolific career. For some reason he doesn’t get as much attention as people like Russ Meyer, Doris Wishman and Joe Sarno but he does have some claim to being an interesting sexploitation auteur.
The 1960s-70s was the heyday of offbeat non-mainstream movie-making. There were avenues for the distribution of weird and wonderful oddball movies, avenues that no longer exist. If you wanted to make totally off-the-wall movies one of the best ways was to make sexploitation movies. All the distributors cared about was that your movie had enough nudity and simulated sex to make it saleable. Apart from that you could do what you liked.
There were American sexploitation movies that incorporated surrealist and fantasy and sci-fi and arty elements and lots of all-round weirdness, one notable example being Venus in Furs (1967). This was an ideal environment for Nick Phillips.
Nick Phillips gets comparatively little attention because his movies were very overtly erotic indeed and were very very low-budget productions with a bit of a ramshackle feel. As a result he’s a bit too disreputable even for critics who are prepared to celebrate Metzger, Meyer and even perhaps Wishman.
The movies of Nick Phillips are also heavy on the fetishism. Foot fetishism features in a lot of his movies and in this case there’s plenty of leather fetishism as well.
Like most Nick Phillips movie this one was shot without synchronised sound. Phillips makes a virtue of a necessity and decides to at least make the voiceover narration a bit interesting. It’s a woman’s rambling interior monologue.
Suzanne is a housewife who is disturbed by her lesbian sexual fantasies. The entire movie is an extended fantasy sequence. Women do often have quite lurid sexual fantasies and Suzanne is no exception. She fantasises about becoming part of a small circle of lesbians who are rather experimental in their sexual tastes. Leather boots are very prominent.
The voiceover narration explains Suzanne’s unhappy marriage and her conflicted feelings about her desires. She finds her fantasies humiliating and disturbing but very exciting. She analyses her feelings and is not always comfortable with the conclusions she reaches.
It’s probably no accident that when the movie opens she is lying in bed reading Camus. You could call this a sexistentialist movie.
There is no heterosexual sex in the movie. There are no male characters. The nudity is very explicit and the sex scenes are pretty much hardcore. Censors in those days were not quite sure how what to do about lesbian sex scenes and tended to allow film-makers to get away with quite a lot. There is an enormous amount of sex in this movie. But since Suzanne is obsessed by sex it does at least make some sense that the movie is basically little more than a series of her sexual fantasies.
Apart from one or two scenes shot on location this movie is all interiors, which kept the budget down. Again Phillips makes a virtue of a necessity, creating a claustrophobic atmosphere in which Suzanne is stifled by her own out-of-control fantasies and desires.
This is unapologetically a sex movie and if the sex on offer is not your thing the movie might not be your thing either. It does have an appealingly scuzzy sleazy feel to it, if you like that sort of thing. I do like that sort of thing so I enjoyed it. Your mileage may vary.
Media Blasters have released this movie on Blu-Ray in their Guilty Pleasures line, paired with the very early Nick Phillips movie Nudes on Credit (which is more a comedy than a sex film). The extras include a fascinating interview with the director. He has some amusing stories about the glory days of guerrilla film-making and makes no apologies whatsoever for the films he made (and nor should he).
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