I’ll admit it, I like good porn. Most of the time, this means older porn, the kind where, if you met them today, more than half of the actors would be collecting Social Security, but they were young when the movie was shot. Porn from the days when there were essentially two primary categories: twelve to fourteen-minute 8mm loops used in peep shows in porn shops, and feature length productions, often shot in 35mm, intended to be shown in theatres. The loops were mostly random sex scenes. The features had plots, better production values, and often better acting. When the shorts were still largely on 8mm film, many lacked even a basic soundtrack, since most home projectors didn’t have sound capability. Sound loops existed, but most people couldn’t show them and often didn’t realize there had ever been sound recorded until the old loops were transferred to video.
Generally, I prefer the feature-length oldies, a huge number of which are now available on DVD/BluRay or streaming services. Over the last few days, I watched both parts of the Little Girls Blue series, filmed in 1977 and 1983, and directed by Joanna Williams. Like most of these old features, these were shot with the intention that they would be shown in a theatre, so they included a plot and good production values. Williams obviously had a desire to put out a product that would look good on the big screen and send the viewers home with sex on their minds.
We don’t think of this as often today, but not that many years ago theatrical porn was a shared experience, and, for the viewers, the sex largely came after watching the film, not during. If you got caught masturbating in the theatre it would lead to being thrown at the least, and arrest, a fine, and possible imprisonment if it was a cop and not the usher who caught you. There was even a time when viewing theatrical porn was considered rather chic, and it was common to go to an X-rated theatre on a date. Something we don’t see today, not only because porn theatres have almost entirely vanished from the American scene (if there are any remaining at all), but because a “porn date” today usually means watching it in the living room or bedroom, frequently while naked.
That’s the way I did it recently, anyway. While I was watching that pair of classic movies, my friend Chuck was sitting beside me on the sofa. We’re not the sort of people who feel clothing is necessary if no one else is around, so we were both naked, sitting on towels (something you learn if you spend much time at naturist resorts), and playing with our own or each other’s genitalia as the spirit moved us. Chuck has always said that you can gauge the quality of a porn feature by how many times you cum before it’s over. He managed twice on part 2; I managed six times and ended up having to rewatch the film in order to write the review, having been somewhat distracted for too much of it.
Little Girls Blue is a classic take on the venerable schoolgirl theme, long popular. I’m not sure if it’s supposed to be a Catholic boarding school (at a couple of points I thought a nun might have been briefly in frame), but the uniforms had a distinctly European rather than Catholic look. Solid blue skirts, white blouses, and knee socks, more like what you’d find in a British girls’ school than at Saint Agony’s of Toledo. In any event, it’s clearly a private girls’ boarding school, and the general appearance is of a private high school. If that’s the case, one can only presume that all of the girls are seniors and over eighteen, because there’s a great deal of sexual activity happening.
An obvious advantage of older porn for people like myself, or my friend, Chuck, is that the actors are more esthetically pleasing. Tattoos are rare, which is fine with me. I simply don’t find them attractive. Today they tend to be so extensive on many performers that they literally break up the physical outline of the body, which is hardly something you’d consider advantageous in a profession where physical attractiveness is a major consideration.
Something I noticed in the first installment was that Casey Winters’ character, listed as “Debby” in the credits, seemed to mostly be addressed as “Misty” in the film. At least, that’s what it sounded like to me. I heard “Mariam” for Lori Blue’s character, but the credits called her “Marium,” so I guess cutesy spellings were already a thing in the late 1970s.
Schoolgirl erotica has a long history and reflects a fair amount of historic reality. One of our high school science teachers was fired when he married a former student a year after she graduated. This was based on the presumption that she started dating him while she was still a student. In fact, I knew that she was, but didn’t see any reason to complain about it at the time. I don’t know if they were having sex or not, though it wouldn’t surprise me. I do know that he was actually only about five years older than his future bride and, considering how long they’ve been married, presumably it was a love match sanctioned by whatever gods, or spirits, or compatibility genes bless such unions, regardless of the school board’s opinion. That was at the public high school the real me attended, not the somewhat liberalized version of a Christian high school the semi-fictionalized version of me found in my books attended.
Getting back to feature-length porn, I think there’s a lot to say for long-form sex movies. Aside from the personal benefit I occasionally derived from writing scripts for these things, it’s just nice to see an actual story. While I often got the impression that Williams secretly wanted to be directing some French avant garde work of art, particularly in the fantasy scenes, it was all still remarkably entertaining. You could care about these people.
You don’t find that in many modern porn flicks. Too much recent porn consists of nothing more than some overdeveloped palooka pounding away at the poor actress’ asshole or trying to shove his cock all the way down her throat. There doesn’t seem to be much in the way of caring involved. In many older films the plot unfolds in much the same fashion as a conventional romantic feature, except that in these films the sex is explicit instead of merely suggested or only briefly glimpsed. The final sexual encounter in Little Girls Blue 2 could easily have been lifted from a mainstream feature with only a few cuts. It was artistic as hell, which is another way of saying very moody, intense, and obscurely lit. It also gave the impression that it meant something profound to the participants, while the dénouement of most modern porn seems to signify nothing more than a couple people have had orgasms and will now go on with their individual lives unconcerned with anything except that it felt good for a few minutes.
