Cute, pallie. Sony’s Choice Collection vault of hard-to-find library and cult titles has released How to Save a Marriage — And Ruin Your Life, the 1968 sex comedy starring Dean Martin, Stella Stevens, Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson that isn’t all that “hard-to-find”…because Sony already released it back in ’06 as part of The Dean Martin Double Feature disc (along with Who Was That Lady). Anyone owning that disc won’t need to double-dip here; it looks to be the same transfer, and there are no extras, new or otherwise. A silly, dated, but well-tempoed battle of the sexes farce, How to Save a Marriage — And Ruin Your Life still generates laughs with its often amusing script and its superlative cast. Looks terrific in this anamorphically-enhanced widescreen release.

New York City salesgirl Carol Corman (Stella Stevens) would like to get ahead at swank Hunter Department Store…but not if it means accepting a promotion in exchange for a drinks at lecherous boss Everett Bauer’s (Alan Oppenheimer) apartment. Carol’s friend, Marcia (Shelley Morrison) points out that owner Harry Hunter (Eli Wallach) is the kind of gentleman who would never treat a woman the way Bauer does, but when Carol has to deliver a package after hours, who should answer the door of Miss Muriel Laszlo’s (Anne Jackson) apartment than the very married Harry Hunter. The next day, Hunter offers to buy off Carol with a promotion, but Carol has too much integrity for that…until she hears slimy Bauer recommending another girl to Hunter for the position–which Carol takes to stick it to Bauer. Unfortunately, that makes everyone think Carol is Hunter’s mistress, including Hunter’s investment banker friend, David Sloane (Dean Martin). When Sloane confirms with Hunter that he indeed is having an affair, Sloane proposes seducing the mistress to save Hunter’s marriage to harpy Mary Hunter (Katharine Bard). Of course, Sloane is already on the wrong track with the wrong girl, and soon he’s involved with marriage-hungry good girl Carol, who agrees to be kept by him…provided there’s a wedding ring in the bargain.

 I hadn’t seen How to Save a Marriage — And Ruin Your Life for years and years, having forgotten most of it (who could forget Stella), and quite frankly, I wasn’t expecting much this time around, considering how many of these 60s Dino sex comedies seem to just melt together in my memory–they even sound the same: Who Was That Lady, All in a Night’s Work, Who’s Got the Action, Who’s Been Sleeping in My Bed, and of course the Matt Helm spy movies. However, I had a good time watching How to Save a Marriage — And Ruin Your Life. It’s a little classier, a little wittier than many of those relatively innocent-but-still-leering sex comedies from that time period, due no doubt to the better-than-average cast and crew.

 Similar to the earlier Doris Day-type “clean” naughty little confections, How to Save a Marriage — And Ruin Your Life‘s January, 1968 release might tempt one to quickly dismiss it as a title released just past its sell-by date. After all, the year before two romantic comedy dramas, The Graduate and Two for the Road, pretty much pushed the genre way past the then-accepted Hollywood conventions of the genre (it’s with no little bit of irony that Day was offered the part of The Graduate‘s Mrs. Robinson, only to turn it down for fear of offending her loyal fans). So seen within in that historical timeline, How to Save a Marriage — And Ruin Your Life pseudo-contemporary concerns amid all the “marriage is torture” jokes, pale in comparison.

 Closer inspection of How to Save a Marriage — And Ruin Your Life, though, reveals it’s nothing more than a thin reworking of basic Restoration comedy elements, and those never go out of style. Mistaken identities, frustrated, weak husbands, dissatisfied wives, angry lovers pushed to plot and scheme, horn-dog bachelors (who will surely get hitched and de-balled), various blocked assignations amid much frenzied back-and-forth door slamming, until wedding bells sound and all is happily, synthetically made right. Everyone is a type, who then acts against type, as the farcical machinery ratchets up the comedic, sexual tension: Dino the womanizer gets the guilts when he could plow away at Stella, then bursts into a homicidal rage every time he believes she–the girl he thinks he doesn’t want–has cheated on him. Powerful store owner Wallach is afraid of his wife and infatuated with his screwy mistress, and Stella is the career girl with too much integrity to take a promotion to keep quiet, but not enough integrity to immediately decline Dino’s offer of co-habitation, regardless of the promise of marriage at the end of it. To criticize How to Save a Marriage — And Ruin Your Life based on today’s sociological and gender understandings is first, kind of silly, and second, beside the point: that’s missing the forest for the trendy trees. All How to Save a Marriage — And Ruin Your Life has to do is honor its Restoration comedy/farce traditions and make us laugh…which it does quite nicely, thanks to Fielder Cook’s (Patterns, A Big Hand for the Little Lady, TV’s The Homecoming – A Christmas Story) sprightly direction and producer Stanley Shapiro’s and Nate Monaster’s frequently funny script (Shaprio practically invented the 60s sex comedy with scripts for Pillow Talk, Lover Come Back, That Touch of Mink, along with Monaster, and Come September, among many others) .

 The cast is equally talented. Familiar and most welcome faces pop up for punchy little supporting turns, including shiny-pated Alan Oppenheimer as a handsy boss, Betty Field as a pissed-off, wronged woman, the marvelous George Furth as a slide-rule Romeo courting Stella (“We’ll have 2.7 kids!”), and one of my all-time favorites, terrified Woodrow Parfrey, convinced his hated mother-in-law has returned from the grave (the movie’s best sight gag). I’m not sure what Jack Albertson and Shelley Morrison are doing here, but I’ll bet most of their stuff was left on the cutting room floor. As for our four leads, they’re effortlessly funny. Eli Wallach gets a chance to be crazy funny (his manic frustration is beautifully controlled, physically and verbally), and his energy is infectious (a completely different approach to getting laughs in comparison with his upcoming comedic gem in Leone’s The Good, the Bad, & The Ugly). His real-life wife, the equally talented Anne Jackson, doesn’t have much to do with her odd character (she loves old dead movie stars, it’s pointed out…before that’s dropped with a thud), but she’s still funny doing it (that two shot of her and Fields, talking to Dino, is memorably bizarre). As for Dino, well…he’s Dino. He seems a little bit more on his game here, a little more engaged (he’s such a pro at being laid back and charming, who can tell), but some of those close-ups are brutal (hard to believe he’s only 50 here). And Stella, well…what can I write about Stella Stevens that other infatuated movie fans haven’t already written Smolderingly sexy with a body built exclusively for Playboy® and capable of being hilariously funny, Stevens was, along with Tuesday Weld, one of the most criminally underutilized actresses in ’60s Hollywood. As charming and erotic as she is here in How to Save a Marriage — And Ruin Your Life…it’s just too bad she kept appearing in movies like How to Save a Marriage — And Ruin Your Life.

 0The DVD:

The Video:
Legendary cinematographer Lee Garmes (Morocco, Shanghai Express, Jungle Book, Scarface, Duel in the Sun, Land of the Pharaohs), in his penultimate assignment, gives How to Save a Marriage — And Ruin Your Life a molded, sculptured look that’s really unlike most of the flatly-lit, crudely-colored sex comedies from the studios at this time. And that visual schematic looks terrific here in a mostly-perfect anamorphicall-enhanced, 2.35:1 widescreen transfer, with zero blemishes and no compression issues (a few times, the print went a little dark, a little grainy―but not for long). Fantastic.

The Audio:
The Dolby Digital English mono audio track doesn’t exactly do justice to that insanely catchy title tune, The Winds of Change, from Michel Legrand, Mack David and The Ray Conniff Singers, but it’s serviceable, with little hiss and fluctuation. No subtitles or closed-captions available.

The Extras:
No extras for How to Save a Marriage — And Ruin Your Life.

Final Thoughts:
A bit choppy at times, but most of the classical farce elements are in place. The script is pretty witty for this kind of nonsense, the direction is on-tack, and the cast is first-rate. Funny. I’m recommending How to Save a Marriage — And Ruin Your Life.

Paul Mavis is an internationally published movie and television historian, a member of the Online Film Critics Society, and the author of The Espionage Filmography.

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THE MOVIE:

Priest of Evil plays like a feature-length version of an episode of Law & Order: SVU, only grittier, gorier and in Finnish. Depending on your perspective this is either a great thing (a foreign genre movie…Yaay!) or an exercise in tedium (yet another serial killer flick…Yawn). My opinion lies somewhere in between. While I’m a sucker for procedurals and rather enjoy the serial killer genre, director Olli Saarela’s film doesn’t do a great job of integrating the two into a cohesive experience.

The film opens with Inspector Timo Harjunpää (Peter Franzén) of the Helsinki Violent Crimes Unit on one of the worst days of his life. When he gets stuck at work later than expected, he is delayed in picking up his daughter who has just attended a concert. This ends badly for everyone involved as she tries to walk home on her own but is attacked and killed by a lecherous thug. Harjunpää’s wife, Elisa (Irina Björklund), partially blames him for their daughter’s death. Feelings of guilt and anger eat away at their marriage while their other daughter, Paulina (Rosa Salomaa), is cast aside in neglect.

When we see Harjunpää two years later, his life is imploding around him while he struggles to do his job. These days that means tracking a killer (Sampo Sarkola) who has been pushing people in front of trains in the underground rail system. Working with his partner, Onerva Nykänen (Jenni Banerjee), he comes close on occasion but the murderer always stays tantalizingly out of reach. It doesn’t help that Harjunpää is as distracted as can be. They caught his daughter’s killer and put him behind bars but he managed to secure an unusually short sentence. With his release imminent, Harjunpää can’t decide what he’s going to do when he encounters the creep as a free man.

If it feels like I’ve given the subway killer plotline short shrift, I assure you the film doesn’t do much better. Although there are a few murders along the way and we get to see cops chasing down leads to discover the killer’s identity, the investigation is routinely set aside so we can focus on Harjunpää’s anguish. The tension is palpable and Franzén’s performance is certainly powerful but there’s no denying the fact that the film’s subplots keep stepping on each other instead of being complementary. The unintended result is that instead of playing out in parallel, one storyline is completely resolved before attending to the other.

Harjunpää’s revenge against his daughter’s killer has all the impact that you would expect from the emotionally charged material. Unfortunately, after that is tied up with a nice, neat bow there is the still the business of the subway killer to attend to. This is where the film falls down. As we come to understand the subway killer’s motives, he starts to transform from an outright evildoer into an anti-hero (fine line there). His actions are still heinous but in a weird way morally justifiable; that is until the film’s climax when his established characterization is cast aside in the name of exaggerated villainy. A completely gratuitous sexual assault is tossed in just to ramp up the grittiness (“Hmm, doesn’t seem bleak enough. Let’s just sprinkle some rape on that.”) before the whole thing is resolved with standard-issue action movie heroics.

From what I understand, the film is based on a book by Finnish crime writer Matti Yrjänä Joensuu who wrote an entire series about Harjunpää and his crime fighting ways. Although I haven’t read the book, everything I’ve read about it suggests that the story has undergone some major changes on its way to the screen. This may displease fans greatly but from the perspective of someone who came into the film with zero expectations, the final result is still a bit of a letdown. The setup promises an uncompromising crime drama. What we get is a character study with some half-hearted elements of a procedural tacked on. Harjunpää may be a riveting character on the page, but on screen he comes across as just another tortured cop with a heavy cross to bear (despite Franzén’s best efforts). If that’s the case, I’d rather just watch a few reruns with Benson and Stabler.

THE DVD:

Video:
The image is presented in a 2.35:1 aspect ratio with anamorphic enhancement. The film possesses a cool oppressive look supported by dull grays and a bleached and desaturated image. Sickly yellows in the color palette enhance the sense of decay. Grain in some of the darker shots adds to the film’s gritty feel but black levels are decent throughout. Other than a bit of banding, there are no obvious defects to speak of.

Audio:
The audio is presented in a Finnish 5.1 Dolby Digital mix with optional English subtitles. While clearly favoring the front of the soundstage, the audio mix provides adequate support to the action on screen. Small character moments are presented with just as much clarity as the more bombastic action beats. The mix is perfectly suitable for the material at hand.

Extras:
The sole extra is a Trailer (1:53).

FINAL THOUGHTS:
If you’re in the mood for a Finnish procedural, Priest of Evil may just scratch that itch. It features competent performances, a stylish visual treatment and a thick foreboding atmosphere. What it’s missing is a compelling blend that transforms interesting elements into a cohesive whole. The climax also goes out of its way to undo some of the good will that the film has earned up till then. I don’t plan on going out of my way to catch any more movies in this series (if they ever get made) but it was certainly a passable watch. Rent It.

THE MOVIE:

Preston Sturges’ 1948 release, Unfaithfully Yours, is probably his darkest comedy, but it also has a heart of pure romance.

Rex Harrison (My Fair Lady) stars as Sir Alfred, a temperamental orchestra conductor who, upon returning from a trip overseas, is informed by his obnoxious brother-in-law (Rudy Vallee) that he has evidence that Sir Alfred’s wife, Daphne (Linda Darnell, Fallen Angel), might be cheating on him. It seems that, as he was saying good-bye, Alfred made an off-hand comment to the other man to keep an eye on his wife for him. The other man took him literally and hired a private detective (Edgar Kennedy) to follow Daphne around when he couldn’t do it himself.

Upon first hearing the news, Alfred rejects it, insisting it’s impossible and not even bothering to look at the report. Once the knowledge is out there, though, it keeps coming back up, and the harder Alfred fights to not know, the more the information works its way to him. The scandal hinges on an unexplained half hour when Daphne visited Alfred’s assistant, Tony (Kurt Kreuger), dressed in her nightgown. Is it possible that an illicit love affair has been blossoming right under the music man’s nose the whole time

Unfaithfully Yours is, essentially, a comedy about jealousy, with Sturges using the tricks played by one man’s mind to explore the notions of fantasy and revenge and the stupid spirals we can send ourselves into when possessed of an idea we can’t shake. As Alfred conducts that evening’s performance, with his wife and secretary, not to mention the brother-in-law and his smart-mouthed sister-in-law (Barbara Lawrence, whose caustic delivery dominates every scene she’s in), watching from boxed seats, he imagines a trio of scenarios. Sturges and director of photography Victor Milner (It’s a Wonderful Life, The Furies) push into the man’s mind, zooming in on his eyeball, dissolving into his daydreams. First is an elaborate scenario where he frames Tony for Daphne’s murder, and then another where he takes the high road and capitulates, and finally, a third where he challenges his rival to a game of Russian Roulette. Here even Alfred’s fantasy life turns against him, in that he does not succeed. While we entered his musings via the eye, we exit in macabre fashion, peering back into the real world through the bullet wound. It’s a gruesome and ingenious cross-fade.

Rex Harrison is gung-ho, giving a dastardly, high-octane comic performance as the moody, self-involved artiste. He is biting and sharp with Sturges’ verbiage, but also quite agile and adept playing the klutz. When the movie shifts to Alfred trying to make these dreams real, Sturges builds an extended slapstick sequence where Alfred’s every move ends in some kind of bumbling disaster. The implication is bitterly ironic: Alfred is helpless to do anything himself, but the man he wants to frame for murder is the one who usually does everything for him.

It’s a clever commentary on the life of an “artistic genius,” and the culmination of a secondary theme that runs throughout Unfaithfully Yours. Arguably, the reignited passion Alfred feels as a result of his marital doubts goads him into the performance of a lifetime. As the three different daydreams play out, the music that Alfred is conducting keeps going. It rises in emotion and intensity as the imagined scenes do, and by the time we wend our way back to the symphony hall, Alfred has whipped the players–and his audience–into a frenzy of sound and excitement. It’s one of the best examples I can think of where a director uses the soundtrack for both text and subtext. Unlike a standard score, which is usually there to underline and augment, Sturges uses the classical music as a practical device, making it an integral mood enhancement for his protagonist. Life, love, and art are all intertwined.

Unfaithfully Yours, unsurprisingly, ends the way most screwball comedies and romantic misadventures do. Alfred is, after all, a buffoon, not a real killer, and had he been right or successful, this would be an entirely different motion picture. The great thing about Preston Sturges is that he pulls no punches. The writer/director/producer hits the lovey-dovey stuff hard in the end, but he makes it work. He has basically added a second crescendo to the first (Alfred finally confronting Daphne), rather than a romantic coda or denouement. The climax is not the fury and the resolution is not its deflation, but rather, the true peak, and the perfect note to chime out on, is the reaffirmation that, indeed, love has come true for these two, and nothing can tear them apart.

THE DVD

Video:
Unfaithfully Yours is part of the 20th Century Fox Cinema Archives collection, a manufacture-on-demand program. This means it will be produced to order and with a minimum of bells and whistles and without any major restoration effort. Unfaithfully Yours is black-and-white and shown at full frame (4:3). The transfer is extremely problematic. It actually starts out decently, with good resolution and fairly decent contrast. The digital image, however, literally degrades before your eyes. As I was watching the movie, I witnessed the resolution getting worse with each passing scene. Somewhere around minute 50 was when I noticed that the edges were getting so hazy and jagged, it looked like someone had taken a safety pin and scratched over Linda Darnell’s face. This spread across the frame for the second half of the movie, to the point that the lines on all the figures were so jagged, the disc was nearly unwatchable by the time Unfaithfully Yours was over.

Sound:
The two-channel mono mix is slightly better than the video quality, though there are problems here, too. Most noticeable are a couple of volume drops, where the sound dips drastically for about a minute before flooding back. The overall soundscape is rather hot, with top-end distortion that is particularly evident in the dialogue when the actors pronounce their Ss. The syllables hit harsh, like the actors are leaning in too close to the microphone.

Extras:
None.

FINAL THOUGHTS:
Skip It. I love this movie. Unfaithfully Yours is perhaps Preston Sturges’ darkest and most complicated comedy, featuring a witty scenario and a marvelously hilarious performance from Rex Harrison. Unfortunately, this particular DVD edition leaves much to be desired. The Criterion Collection released a version of this movie in 2005 that is much better overall, and also easier to get as you can readily find it from most movie retailers, so I suggest you seek it out instead of this limited Fox release. If I were reviewing that one, or just the movie on its own, there is no doubt I’d rank it as Highly Recommended.

Jamie S. Rich is a novelist and comic book writer. He is best known for his collaborations with Joëlle Jones, including the hardboiled crime comic book You Have Killed Me, the challenging romance 12 Reasons Why I Love Her, and the 2007 prose novel Have You Seen the Horizon Lately, for which Jones did the cover. All three were published by Oni Press. His most recent project is the comedy series Spell Checkers, again with Jones and artist Nicolas Hitori de. Follow Rich’s blog at Confessions123.com.

Generally crappy–but still watchable–B noir heist programmer. 20th Century-Fox’s Cinema Archives vault of hard-to-find library and cult titles has released Raiders from Beneath the Sea, a cheapo 1964 Lippert production released by Fox, directed by Maury Dexter, scripted by Harry Spalding, and starring Ken Scott, Merry Anders, Russ Bender, Booth Colman, and Garth Benton. A few good lines here and there, the impressive sights of Catalina Island and Merry Anders in a bikini, and more than a few unintentionally silly moments make Raiders from Beneath the Sea an acceptable time-killer for fans of cheapjack 60s exploiters. No extras for this so-so full-screen transfer (more about that below).

Scuba diver and former salvager Bill Harper (Ken Scott), bankrupt and mooching dimes off his hot wife, Dottie (Merry Anders), now works rent-free as an apartment house manager…with no salary for the IRS to garnish. His creepy pervert brother, handyman Buddy (Garth Benton), lives there, too, but he’s far too busy chasing tail and lusting after Dottie to do much maintenance around the place. Bill, desperate to change his circumstances, comes up with a plan: on the day after Labor Day, scuba to the dock at Catalina Island, walk uptown–in full gear–to rob the island’s bank’s holiday haul of a cool quarter of a million dollars, walk back to the dock, jump in to the ocean and swim underneath the ferry, attaching the loot to the boat’s hull with magnets, all before Johnnie Law knows what’s what. There’re only a few problems. Troublemaker Purdy (Booth Colman) originally floated this caper to Bill, and now he wants in on the action, while Dottie wants Buddy out after he tries to rape her.

One of those 60s men’s adventure magazine stories come life (Sex and Death with the Scuba Diving Bank Robbers!), Raiders from Beneath the Sea certainly doesn’t come anywhere near delivering the thrills and action promised in that sweet, sweet one-sheet (“Like Monsters Out of the Deep They Came Ashore…Two Men Out to Seize a Million Dollar Haul!”). There’s nothing remotely “monstrous” about Scott’s and Benton’s characters (we don’t even get a shot of them underwater together), nor are they shooting for a million dollar score (apparently, the actual quarter million dollar prize in the movie wasn’t enough for the Fox promotional department). However, I would imagine this cheaply-budgeted filler did fulfill its purpose: helping to put some coins, however few, into Fox’s coffers during yet another contentious year for the company. Notoriously penurious producer Robert L. Lippert had been with Fox since the mid-50s, when the company’s fortunes took its first serious nose-dive, and he had been providing the major with reliably profitable programmers like Raiders from Beneath the Sea for years. By 1964, Fox president Spyros Skouras was out after the twin calamities of Cleopatra and Something’s Got to Give, and Darryl Zanuck was back as the company’s chairman of the board, with his son Richard acting as president. Production was way down from the company’s heyday (with pick-ups dominating the release roster), and a few major films helped keep the creditors at bay (the all-star What a Way to Go!, Zorba the Greek, Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte)…along with a lot of lower-budgeted moneymakers: Surf Party, The Day of the Living Corpse, The Horror of Party Beach, Shock Treatment, Witchcraft, The Earth Dies Screaming, Apache Rifles, The Pleasure Seekers.

Certainly, Raiders from Beneath the Sea belongs in the latter category, with a terribly cheap production (the sets are amusingly flimsy, and that “all skate” roller rink music is stunningly inappropriate) and boring TV-style direction from Maury Dexter (Maryjane, The Mini-Skirt Mob, Hell’s Belles). Jack-of-all-trades scripter Harry Spalding(Curse of the Fly, Wild on the Beach, One Little Indian, The Watcher in the Woods), though, does create a viable (if completely familiar) noir framework here with the failed diver transitioning into crime with his sexually aggressive brother, organizing a precision heist with a predictable but acceptable fatalistic ending. Spalding even gets in some good lines here and there (when sunbathing Anders asks Scott to hook up her bikini top, he offers, “No way; they’d have me for restraint of trade,”). Thematic and simple mechanical problems, however, abound. The story fails to develop any kind of pervasive triangle between Scott, Anders and Benton (what the hell is “sex antagonism,” anyway), while the goofiness of Dexter’s execution is sometimes hilariously inept (the whole frogmen walking down the deserted streets is a classic). Still…that hot-and-cold mixture of promising elements and hopeless maladroitness, along with the impressive sights of mid-60s Catalina Island and Merry Anders stripping to a sleazy beat, does help put Raiders from Beneath the Sea over as watchable dreck.

The DVD:

The Video:
Why aren’t I telling you to skip this disc outright because it’s been released full-frame After all, I’ve been doing that left and right all week with other releases from Fox’s Cinema Archives. Well…because, although it’s not ideally formatted, it does look perfectly acceptable cropped with your TV to 1.78:1. The key to this allowance is the fact that the movie wasn’t shot in any widescreen format, so matte issues are an extenuating consideration. Is this a deliberate open matte transfer by Fox Doubt it…but there is a lot of dead information at the top and the bottom of the 1.37:1 image, and when cropped by your TV, the framing is dead-on. Sure the grain is bumped up considerably when you do this, and the image softens, but it does look correct. So…benefit of the doubt given. Overall, the image is a tad dark at times, but otherwise, not bad.

The Audio:
The Dolby Digital English mono audio track is re-recorded here at a solid level, with some hiss and little fluctuation. No subtitles or closed-captions available.

The Extras:
No extras.

Final Thoughts:
Goofy little heist noir. Raiders from Beneath the Sea is worth a look for fans of vintage 60s crime mellers, both for its (very) few pluses and its (very) amusing minuses. If you’re a tolerant member of that small group, a rental is best for Raiders from Beneath the Sea.

Paul Mavis is an internationally published movie and television historian, a member of the Online Film Critics Society, and the author of The Espionage Filmography.

 

In 10 Words or Less
Talking porn with porn stars

 

Reviewer’s Bias*
Loves: Documentaries, art photography
Likes: Adult-themed documentaries
Dislikes: Feminist politics
Hates: Cliched porn stars

The Film
Getting to really know a porn star seems like a popular activity, with many movies and TV shows dedicated to the pastime. Apparently, watching a person intimately intertwine their bodies with other humans isn’t personal enough, so we get movies like Thinking XXX, which combine the opportunity to hear people better known for moaning talk about their lives and careers, while still getting plenty of chance to ogle their well-known and oft-exposed bodies. It’s the best of both worlds for the perverted and curious.

With Aroused, photographer Deborah Anderson takes advantage of a nude, fine-art shoot with 16 porn stars to conduct interviews getting more in-depth with them. Avoiding any of their work to start, so she approaches the women with no preconceptions outside of their known profession, she chats with them while they are in hair and make-up, shoots them in the buff for her book, and then follows up with a bit of post-shoot discussion. Mixing them all together via topics and themes, you get a decent array of participants, from big names with cross-over appeal, like Jesse Jane, Belladonna and Lisa Ann (of Sarah Palin parody porn infamy), to lesser-known performers, like April O’neil and Brooklyn Lee.

Through the interviews, Anderson paints a picture of the women’s backgrounds, their work in porn, their views on sex and their thoughts on the industry, including negative experiences they’ve had. Though many fall hard into a number of porn industry cliches, like absentee fathers and heavily religious upbringings, many profess to just enjoy sex and money. The most interesting chat though has to be between Anderson and adult-film agent Fran Amidor, who is blunt and insightful about the industry, never sugar-coating the business’ unseemly elements, and the reality that the young girls entering porn today are mainly hungry for attention more than anything else, perhaps making Facebook, Twitter and Instagram gateway drugs for adult films. Her inclusion raises the bar tremendously when it comes to learning anything about this field.

An artist by trade, Anderson makes this film gorgeous to watch, shooting the first half in moody black-and-white, which lends an authenticity to the behind-the-scenes footage and makes the nude modeling a dramatic affair. Once the photos are shot though, the film changes to soft color, as we get up-close and personal with the actresses as they lay around and talk about their work. It has the feel of a round of “pillow talk” following a session of lovemaking, and the switch to color helps define these segments. Though never leering when it comes to showing off the women’s bodies, the camera takes on a definite sense of voyeurism, lingering on a curve here, a nipple there, letting the voice becomes a bit disembodied, as if we’re ignoring what she’s saying to check out her physical beauty. It may not jive with the feminism-focused quotes found throughout the movie, but it certainly makes for a work of art to behold.

The DVD
A one-disc release, this film is packaged in a standard keepcase, and features an aniated anamorphic menu with an option to play the film, select scenes, adjust the set-up and check out the trailer. Audio options include English Dolby Digital 5.1 and 2.0 tracks. There are no subtitles, but closed captioning is available.

The Quality
The anamorphic widescreen transfer on this film looks gorgeous in both black and white and color. The black-and-white footage has a nice deep contrast and a very clean image, while the color segments feature an appropriate saturation that gets the job done. There are no issues with compression artifacts or any other distractions, and the level of fine detail is very high (occasionally to regretful effect for some of the women) at least when the frequently-soft shooting style allows.

The Dolby Digital 5.1 track is surprisingly nuanced for a film that’s mainly about talking, with the center channel holding all the dialogue, and the two side front channels holding some voice echo, as well as a frequent subtle score and some bleed-over sound effects like a hair dryer. The rear speakers get some work when the score steps up, but for the most part the surrounds are just softly present.

The Extras
The only extra included is a trailer for the film.

The Bottom Line
Aroused is an unusual film. If you’re a fan of these actresses or you’ve seen other similar documentaries, much of this is a bit repetitive. But the feminist quotes peppered throughout make it seem like it’s aimed at female newcomers, who may be turned off by the second half’s frequent nudity and brief glimpses of hardcore action. Either way it’s a beautifully-shot film for fans of the female form. The disc offers a high level of quality, but nothing much in terms of extras. It’s certainly worth a look if a bit of nudity doesn’t bother you.

Francis Rizzo III is a native Long Islander, where he works in academia. In his spare time, he enjoys watching hockey, writing and spending time with his wife, daughter and puppy.Check out 1106 – A Moment in Fictional Time or his convention blog called Conning Fellow

*The Reviewer’s Bias section is an attempt to help readers use the review to its best effect. By knowing where the reviewer’s biases lie on the film’s subject matter, one can read the review with the right mindset.