The essence of the true sexploitation movies of the 1960s (as opposed to the softcore movies that followed) was to make movies about sex whilst showing very little indeed. There’s nothing even approaching explicit sex, and often very little nudity. What the best of these movies do have, though, is sexual tension. Joe Sarno’s genius was his ability to exploit that very quality to make serious and surprisingly dark movies about human sexuality.The Swap and How They Make It is fairly typical early Sarno. As the title implies, it’s about wife-swapping. It’s included in a double-bill from Something Weird Video, paired with another Sarno movie, Sin in the Suburbs. And it’s an ideal pairing. Both movies deal with the boredom and emptiness of suburbia and small-town life, and with people who try to fill that emptiness with sex, especially sex of a slightly kinky kind.
The Swap and How They Make It, made in 1966, deals with two couples who are introduced into a wife-swapping circle (known as The Exchange) in a particularly dreary small town in some unspecified part of the US. Given that the alternatives are playing golf or playing bridge, it’s not difficult to understand why The Exhange is so popular!
At first it all seems like fun. Everybody appears to understand the rules, that it’s just fun and that nobody how many partners you have within the circle your first loyalty is always to your wife or husband. But of course not everyone is able to remain quite so detached, and pretty soon emotional complications arise and jealousies develop. To make things worse, a young unmarried student couple manipulate their way into The Exchange, and they are most definitely not able to deal with the situation. Sarno’s interest in not in sex as such, but in the psychological dimensions to sex, and these are explored with a subtlety that you don’t generally expect in a low-budget exploitation movie.
Sarno’s black-and-white movies have a wonderfully austere quality to them that enhances the atmosphere of boredom. The acting is somewhat amateurish but the rather flat delivery of the dialogue also adds a touch of starkness to the movie.
Both image and sound quality on the DVD are superb. Sarno was a true auteur of the sexploitation genre, and his movies are both fascinating and disturbing, and shed an intriguing light on the sexual morality of an outwardly strait-laced society. Highly recommended.
I love your blog, dfordoom, but I disagree wholeheartedly with your initial premise here:
ReplyDelete"The essence of the true sexploitation movies of the 1960s (as opposed to the softcore movies that followed) was to make movies about sex whilst showing very little indeed. There’s nothing even approaching explicit sex, and often very little nudity."
Joe Sarno's films are distinguished by his background in psychology, to the detriment (IMHO) of their functionality as sexploitation. Unlike Russ Meyer, Doris Wishman, A.C. Stephens, Peter Perry, and Lee Frost - who all created films that unselfconsciously fulfilled the tenets of the genre, while remaining fascinating for the id-driven thematics found organically within - Sarno forces the audience to confront his issues overtly, smugly denying them the sort of content explicitly promised in the title and advertising hook. Indeed, even as casual comparison to other sexploitation films of the period - Mudhoney, Bad Girls Go to Hell, Kiss Me Quick, Orgy of the Dead, and The Defilers - reveals Sarno to be the outlier with regards to providing the nudity requisite of the genre.
For some, I suppose this exchange of content (skin for intellectualism) might be considered a fair trade. If so, more power to you - goodness knows that at 101 minutes (a half-hour longer than the average mid-'60s roughie) you're definitely getting your money's worth out of this one! I do like some of his early films, particularly Sin in the Suburbs and The Love Merchant, but overall I consider Sarno pretty over-rated within the genre.
I love your blog, dfordoom, but I disagree wholeheartedly with your initial premise here:
ReplyDelete"The essence of the true sexploitation movies of the 1960s (as opposed to the softcore movies that followed) was to make movies about sex whilst showing very little indeed. There’s nothing even approaching explicit sex, and often very little nudity."
Joe Sarno's films are distinguished by his background in psychology, to the detriment (IMHO) of their functionality as sexploitation. Unlike Russ Meyer, Doris Wishman, A.C. Stephens, Peter Perry, and Lee Frost - who all created films that unselfconsciously fulfilled the tenets of the genre, while remaining fascinating for the id-driven thematics found organically within - Sarno forces the audience to confront his issues overtly, smugly denying them the sort of content explicitly promised in the title and advertising hook. Indeed, even as casual comparison to other sexploitation films of the period - Mudhoney, Bad Girls Go to Hell, Kiss Me Quick, Orgy of the Dead, and The Defilers - reveals Sarno to be the outlier with regards to providing the nudity requisite of the genre.
For some, I suppose this exchange of content (skin for intellectualism) might be considered a fair trade. If so, more power to you - goodness knows that at 101 minutes (a half-hour longer than the average mid-'60s roughie) you're definitely getting your money's worth out of this one! I do like some of his early films, particularly Sin in the Suburbs and The Love Merchant, but overall I consider Sarno pretty over-rated within the genre.