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Even today, almost fifty years after Score was made, it pushes taboos. It’s one of the first films to explore bisexual relationships, which is something movies still shy away from. And it was one of the porn chic movies of the 1970s Golden Age, a time when adult movies could both be adult and movies.
It was directed by Radley Metzger, someone who one can honestly say was an auteur of adult filmmaking. He told Cinedelphia, “When I was coming of age, eroticism was always in films, but eroticism was punished. The promiscuous girl never got the leading man, the woman who sold her charms, always had a bad fate. The “good girl” always achieved ends the bad girl never did. As a reaction to that, I tried to do the opposite. You could have a free attitude and behave in a free way and not be punished. A parallel to that is that it could also be light. It didn’t have to be tragedy. You could look at sex in a fun way. That was a personal thing, to work against the clichés in cinema when I was growing up.”
It’s based on an off-Broadway stage play that ran in 1970 and even had Sylvester Stallone in a small part. The movie version was written by Jerry Douglas, who also wrote the original play, who would go on to create the magazine Manshots and eventually direct several of his own adult films.
In the mythical European city of Leisure — the play was set in a New York City apartment building — married couple Jack (Gerald Grant) and Elvira (Claire Wilbur, who originated the role and would go on to win an Oscar for producing Robin Lehman’s The End of the Game) have a bet about who can pick up whom. She thinks she can win over Betsy (Lynn Lowry, who is still in so many horror movies and making them better just by being herself), a young bride who has just married Eddie (Casey Donovan, who was a popular gay adult star and the long-time lover of Tom Tryon).
Betsy might be a Catholic schoolgirl who doesn’t know the world yet but she’s fascinated by Elvira, who even seduces a telephone repairman (Carl Parker) right in front of her. That night, she catches her husband masturbating and confesses that she’s not happy.
A costume party allows them all to change it up, as Eddie is dressed as a cowboy and Betsy a nun. They pair up with their same sex — just to talk, hmm? — and confess that they’re unsatisfied. The pot helps. So does the poppers. Before midnight, the young couple is seduced. The shocking part — for some — may be that in the hardcore cut that the man-on-man sex is given just as much time as the female-on-female. By the end, Betsy and Eddie wonder which one of them is the strange one.
By the way, Lowry’s scenes have a body double in them, as she didn’t participate in the unsimulated coupling.
While yes, this is a dirty movie, one of the things you find in all of Metzger’s films of this era are class. The budget is good, the setting — Croatia — is beautiful and there’s more story than sin.
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