Findlay Week (August 18 – 24) Husband and wife Michael and Roberta Findlay made mean-spirited films. They collaborated on films like Take Me Naked, The Ultimate Degenerate, and the notorious Flesh Trilogy, plus they actually looked like criminals – walking mug shots! You expect to see them glowering on the cover of one of those tabloids next to a headline like “KIDNAPPER COUPLE COLLECTED VICTIMS FINGERS.” Instead they were pornographers which did make them like criminals in their day. A lot of the filmmakers of their era would claim they only made this kind of movie because there was money in it, but Michael and Roberta were sincere adherents. Even when audience tastes changed and the couple were divorced they continued to make their own films that mixed in elements of kink and cruelty. 

Michael (Michael Findlay, who co-directed and co-wrote this with his wife Roberta) wakes up in ancient Greece. Why? Who cares. The important thing is that the first woman that he runs into (Maria Lease, fated to one day direct Dolly Dearest), well, he beats into oblivion because he’s Michael Findlay.

Set to the poetry of Pierre Louys, we see Linda Boyce, Maria Lorello, Rosine Martinque, Denise Lemaine and Uta Erickson, the lesbians of this past time, playing in the woods. It tends to go on and on, but this feels like an attempt to be arthouse instead of grindhouse, except that Roberta shoots the women like Jess Franco in a Spanish ballroom in the mid 2000’s, her camera invading right into gynecology instead of the kind of fare that critics would pontificate upon.

Elsa Gidow, who wrote the first book of openly lesbian poetry published in North America, has a poem by the same title:

I shall not harm you at all nor ask you
        for anything,
You need have no fear;
I am only very tired and would like to
        rest awhile
With my head here
And play with the long strands of your
        loosed hair,
Or touch your skin,
Feel your cool breath on my eyes,
        watch it stir
Those rising hills where your breasts begin;
And listen to your voice whispering
        tender words
Until, perhaps, I fall asleep;
Or feel you kiss my forehead to comfort me
        a little
If I should weep.
That is all, just to lie so beside you
Till dawn’s lamp is lit.
You need not fear me. I have given
        too much of love
Ever to ask for it.

As for Mnasidika, she’s one of the characters in Pierre Louÿs’ The Songs of Bilitis, Translated from the Greek. Pretty cultured stuff for a movie made after the Supreme Court permitted genitals in movies and the Findlays went for it. This movie is, at times, just genitals. It was new at the time, I guess, and you didn’t need a baby coming out of it like Mom and Dad so that raincoaters could watch.

That said, the Findlays love ruined orgasms before that became a thing on Pornhub, so this ends with the women hunting down Michael and castrating him. That’s wild, because if you dwell on it, he had his wife filming a scene where his cock got cut off. As always, a maniac.