Blue Money (1972)

Blue Money, a low-budget 1972 release, is a movie about blue movies. Alain Patrick stars. He also directed the film and co-wrote the screenplay. It’s about a French-Canadian guy who makes hardcore porn films although of course he’d really prefer to be making serious movies. He has plenty of problems to deal with. The Vice Squad is on his trail and he keeps getting ripped off by sleazy distributors.

There have been quite a few movies about the adult film industry but I must confess that this is the first one I’ve actually seen. It takes itself pretty seriously.

Jim (Alain Patrick) makes blue movies for a living. His wife Lisa is OK with that because they’re going to use the money to fix up their boat and then they’re going to set sail for the South Seas. With their baby. They’re going to trade copra and stuff. And get high. High on nature and high on weed. They’re going to be free, man.

In other words they’re brain-dead hippies. So ten minutes into the movie I already find myself hoping that really really bad things happen to them. Which is a problem because the viewer is supposed to relate to them and their puerile 1970s ideas about freedom.

It’s interesting that this movie was released in 1972 which was the year that the hardcore floodgates opened (both Deep Throat and Behind the Green Door were released that year). So by the time Blue Money hit the theatres the movies that the protagonist is shooting were starting to become more or less legal.

This becomes an important story point. The movie takes place at a time when the laws were being tested and whether you got busted or not was largely a matter of luck. So whether Jim and his partner Mike are going to have major problems with the cops or just get harassed a bit is something they can’t predict.

Jim has marriage problems as well. Lisa is getting weird about what he does for a living, even though she was all in favour of it at first and she likes the money he makes. She just thinks that since he’s been making sex movies there’s a kind of dead space (she’s a real hippie chick and she says stuff like that). Things are getting kind of tense between them.

And then there’s the Ingrid situation. Ingrid really needs some bread and she wants to appear in one of Jim’s movies. Jim isn’t happy about this. He doesn’t like the idea of a nice girl like Ingrid making his kinds of movies. On the other hand he really likes the idea of sleeping with a nice girl like Ingrid. Which he does. Jim is sure that Lisa won’t find out but maybe he’s a bit too confident about that. And he’s not a very good liar.

It seems like the police, aware that it’s becoming increasingly difficult to procure convictions for obscenity, are making one last-ditch effort to harass film-makers like Jim out of business. And they seem to be getting closer and closer to closing in on him.

Now if you go into this movie expecting an erotic thriller you’re going to be disappointed. There are no actual thriller elements at all. In fact there’s not much in the way of actual story. The script is threadbare to say the least. The whole thing has a bit of an amateur hour quality to it. It’s a bit like a movie with exploitation elements but with the aimlessness  of a ’60s underground movie. People talk a lot, Jim makes his movies, he and his wife quarrel, he has an affair, but nothing leads anywhere. Every time some dramatic tension builds up it just dissipates. Then people talk some more, Jim makes another movie, he and Lisa quarrel again. The only climaxes in this movie are the ones in Jim’s movies. If you’ll forgive the bad pun, it’s a story that never actually gets consummated.

This is a movie that isn’t quite sure what it wants to be. The sex scenes, especially on the set of Jim’s movies, are mostly shot in such a way that we see don’t see very much (except in one scene towards the end). There’s probably not quite enough skin in this movie for audiences hoping for lots of sex and nudity but maybe just a bit too much skin for it to be accepted as a serious piece of social commentary.

And social commentary seems to be what Blue Money is trying for. It wants to say something serious about the effects of pornography on the people who major it. But it’s also the kind of movie that was probably destined for the drive-in market so it has to be titillating as well.

It’s worth pointing out that the version I’m reviewing is the cut version. There’s a much raunchier X-rated version which I’ve not seen. I would imagine that the cut version in some ways would make the film’s problems worse since it would have made it even more difficult to sell the idea that it’s a serious film.

Alain Patrick is a pretty terrible actor. We know from his odd behaviour with Ingrid that Jim is not entirely comfortable with the way he earns his living but Patrick doesn’t manage to give us any real insight into how Jim actually feels about it, and we don’t really know exactly how Jim feels about his marriage. For an audience to take this movie as seriously as it wants to be taken it really needed a fairy decent actor in the rôle.

Barbara Mills as Lisa is marginally better even if I did dislike the character intensely. The supporting cast includes quite a few adult film stars of the era.

This film is included in Mill Creek's Drive-In Cult Classics 32 Movie Collection. The transfer is anamorphic and it’s pretty good. I believe there has now been a Blu-Ray release of Blue Money, which surprises me. The Blu-Ray is the uncut version. I’m not really convinced that I need to see the Blu-Ray. If you decide that you want to do so be careful since there are other unrelated movies with the same title also available on Blu-Ray.

Blue Money is a brave attempt to make a thought-provoking exploitation movie but it doesn’t quite come off. It’s intriguing as a look at the adult film business at a particular point in time but as a movie it doesn’t gel. If you’re going to buy the Mill Creek boxed set anyway (and you should) then maybe it’s worth giving this one a spin but be sure to set your expectations very low.