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Deep Throat
Friday, February 6th, 2009 | roger ebert | No Comments
Roger Ebert / March 6, 1973
Deep Throat movie poster art
Deep Throat Movie Reviewe by Roger Ebert March 6th 1973
Deep Throat Movie Review
There are, I have been told, 17 scenes of explicit sex in the movie”DeepThroat.” I did not count them myself, I saw the movie, but I forgot to start counting until too late. Harold, who is a bartender in the Old Town area, counted them on Friday afternoon, and we will have to take his word. Harold is not often mistaken in these matters. He has a keen eye and a good memory.
Harold had just finished counting the 17 scenes on Friday afternoon when seven marked squad cars and four unmarked squad cars pulled up on Armitage in front of the Town Theater, which is showing “Deep Throat.” This concentration of law enforcement vehicles created a gapers’ block in both directions on Armitage, and also slowed traffic on Clark St. and Lincoln Ave.
I am not quite sure why such a massive hit force was necessary; smaller numbers of officers have successfully flushed killers from attics and directed the traffic at Soldier Field after a Bears game. No matter. They blew the whistle, and most of the patrons of the theater left quietly, keeping their hat brims low and their collars turned up, for it was a chilly afternoon.The police, alas, neglected to obtain the necessary papers before making their raid, and so a federal judged ruled on Saturday that the Town could continue to show “Deep Throat.” I exercised my constitutional right to see the movie on Sunday afternoon, and felt only a little twinge of nostalgia as I entered the theater. In its balmier days, the Town showed Orson Welles, “Falstaff,” Luis Bunuel’s “The Exterminating Angel,” and Babette (48-24-36) Bardot’s strip-tease pantomime to “Melancholy Baby” - all three works of art superior, I would say, to “Deep Throat.”
The movie became “pornographic chic” in New York before it was busted. Mike Nichols told Truman Capote he shouldn’t miss it, and then the word just sort of got around: This is the first stag film to see with a date. There were a lot of couples in the audience Sunday afternoon. Most of them, I thought, left the theater looking a little grim.
It is all very well and good for Linda Lovelace, the star of the movie, to advocate sexual freedom; but the energy she brings to her role is less awesome than discouraging. If you have to work this hard at sexual freedom, maybe it isn’t worth the effort.
Anyway, to continue our consumer’s report, the 17 scenes take place in a movie 62 minutes long. Allowing for the six minutes devoted to Linda Lovelace driving around Miami while the credits roll past, and taking out the swimming pool scene, the fireworks and the launching at Cape Kennedy, this leaves an average of 2.9 minutes per act, which is considerably less than Xaviera Hollander is recommending these days in her Penthouse column.
On the other hand, the cost is only 33.6 cents per sex scene, while you have to put six quarters in the machine to see a whole movie in the arcades on South State St. Sounds like a bargain until you realize that if “Gone with the Wind” were exhibited at the same cost-per-minute as “Deep Throat,” It would cost you $36.72 for tickets for yourself and your date.
Devil in Miss Jones
Friday, February 6th, 2009 | Reviews | No Comments
Devil in Miss Jones poster art
Roger Ebert / June 13, 1973
I sometimes find myself the advocate of what might be called a generic theory of film criticism. That’s to say I think movies should be judged, in part, in terms of the expectations we have for them. A handful of movies rise above their genres: “Bonnie and Clyde” is no gangster film, for example, and “Stagecoach” is more than a Western. But most of the time, when we go to the movies, we go seeking more modest rewards: A decent spy picture, for example, or a passable musical.
If you can accept this system of judgment, then “The Devil in Miss Jones” is maybe a three-star dirty movie. It’s the best hard-core porno film I’ve seen, and although I’m not a member of the raincoat brigade, I have seen the highly touted productions like “Deep Throat” and “It Happened in Hollywood.”
“The Devil in Miss Jones” (made by the “Deep Throat” people) is good primarily because of the performance of Georgina Spevlin in the title role. Miss Spevlin, who has become the Linda Lovelace of the literate, is already something of a legend. She’s said to be a housewife from upstate New York, in her 30s, married with kids, who decided one day to go to the big city for a last tango or two. How, and why she found herself in porno movies a few days later is a little unclear; but there burns in her soul the spark of an artist, and she is not only the best, but possibly the only, actress in the hard-core field. By that I mean when she’s on the screen, her body and actions aren’t the only reasons we’re watching her. Alone among porno stars, she never seems exploited. The plot of “The Devil in Miss Jones” is cursory, as these things always are, but somehow an ambiance is established in the first 10 minutes of the movie that carries over and gives even the most explicit scenes a curiously affecting quality. My notion is that the makers of “The Devil in Miss Jones,” having labored in the porno field for some time (it’s about the only employment available for the new graduates of filmmaking schools), made enough money with “Deep Throat” to finally take a few risks on a more ambitious project. The hard-core stuff aside, they maintain a very nice, moody, even poignant atmosphere that’s a relief after all the frantic fun-seeking of Miss Lovelace and colleagues. The story involves a withdrawn and lonely woman (Miss Spevlin) who commits suicide, only to find that she’s gotten herself committed to hell on a technicality. She convinces the gatekeeper to allow her to go back to earth and really earn her admission to the lower depths, and he agrees. She then pursues the deadly sin of lust for the next hour and 10 minutes. This sounds banal, of course, but the opening is so well directed and acted that we can almost suspend our disbelief. This is the first porno movie I’ve seen that actually seems to be about its leading character - instead of merely using her as the object of sexual variations.
None of this will make sense, I suppose, to the majority of moviegoers who have never been to a hard-core film, and never intend to. But for those of us who do attend occasionally (even if only out of professional duty, ahem), the most depressing thing about them is their cheerlessness, their grim preoccupation with the mechanics of a situation, and their total exploitation of actors. If explicit sex is a legitimate subject matter for the movies - and “Cries and Whispers” and “Last Tango in Paris” have recently demonstrated that most memorably - then there is no reason why porno movies have to be wretchedly made, corrupt and inhuman. At the very least, “The Devil in Miss Jones” demonstrates that such failings are not native to the genre.
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