“The very best porn film ever made.”
That was the superlative Al Goldstein of Screw magazine awarded Deep Throat, a film that ushered in the age of mainstream pornography 50 years ago. The “film” — it runs just 61 minutes, so that’s a generous descriptor — was released on June 12, 1972 to … well, not critical acclaim, but lines around the block, obscenity trials, a brief “porno chic” movement and the basis for the nom de plume for a Watergate informant. Jacqueline Onassis even attended a screening.
Some people claimed the film, which cost a low five figures in budget and was reportedly funded by mobsters, eventually grossed $600 million — an impossible figure, given that the film played in few theaters and its release predated the era of VHS/Betamax. Still, the film marked a watershed moment in pop culture: The acceptance of very adult entertainment by the masses.
In spite of Deep Throat’s cultural significance, it’s a surprisingly difficult movie to actually watch in 2022. The film is not on any streaming service (although its sequel is, and you can find the documentary Inside Deep Throat and the biopic Lovelace on several channels). The few DVD listings on Amazon are expensive and/or low in stock.
An arbiter of culture-defining films, Turner Classic Movies reduces the flick to a three-sentence synopsis, which we’ll paste in its entirety below:
A sexually frustrated woman learns from a doctor that she has an anatomical defect that requires her to have oral sex in order to have an orgasm. Grateful for the doctor’s help, she becomes infatuated with him and asks him to marry her. Instead, he gives her a job as a sex therapist, practicing her technique known as “deep throat.”
The reason for its absence might be that the film’s star, Linda Boreman (under the name Linda Lovelace), eventually disowned her participation in the movie. She later joined an anti-pornography movement, testified before the anti-obscenity Meese Commission that “virtually every time someone watches that movie, they’re watching me being raped” and claimed she had been forced to do the film and other porn “loops” at gunpoint; also, her salary for the film was reportedly a paltry $1,250. Boreman died in a car accident in 2005.
Having never seen the movie, I recently watched Deep Throat — possibly the first full-length, scripted pornographic film — from beginning to end. Since it had the pretension of being a “movie,” I wanted to view it as someone who would have seen it in the theater back in 1972.
I ended up finding the film on a free pornographic streaming site (no links; Google it) and settling for viewing on my iPad at my home office desk. This ended up being ideal; Deep Throat is a short but oddly slow film, with a four-minute introduction that simply has Lovelace getting into a car and shuttling around Miami while the credits roll and some “easy-listening porno funk” plays rather aggressively in the background.
Lovelace’s post-film accusations notwithstanding — and they certainly cast a pall over any viewing — there are a few things to appreciate about Deep Throat. The women in the film are fairly strong characters, particularly Lovelace’s friend Helen (Dolly Sharp), who dictates when and how she wants to be sexually pleasured, even coaching her orgasm-deficient friend that “You gotta find what’s right for you.” She has good comedic timing, too; her “Mind if I smoke while you’re eating?” quip is a genuinely funny moment during a kitchen cunnilingus scene.
The sex itself is surprisingly diverse — despite the title, it’s not just blowjobs, and penetration close-ups are just as prevalent as they’d be in any gonzo X-rated clip from this century. The shapes and body hair of both the men and women are also refreshingly honest. And the concept of the female orgasm is so important, it’s the film’s central (albeit ridiculous) plot point.
But that’s about it for the good stuff. The men here, no surprise, all sprout ridiculous mustaches and make feeble attempts at humor. The soundtrack — all original music — veers from bad funk to very bad psych-rock to corny slide whistles (again, “comedy”). There’s a weird, unnecessary sex scene involving shot glasses, Coca-Cola and a giant tube. And Lovelace — spoiler alert — ends up with a man who harbors rape fantasies but also possesses an inadequate penis size (“I’m four inches away from happiness,” he complains, although the movie’s questionable medical professional Dr. Young — played by Harry Reems — soon fixes that).
In 2022, watching Deep Throat is a boring exercise. But the film doesn’t need to be seen today to preserve its legacy. As Joe Briggs wrote in the obituary for Linda Lovelace in 2005: “Deep Throat, strange as it may seem, changed America’s sexual attitudes more than anything since the first Kinsey Report in 1948. It altered the lives of everyone associated with it. It super-charged the feminist movement. It gave the Mafia its most lucrative business since Prohibition. And it changed the nation’s views of obscenity forever.”
Fifty years ago, this was a simple pornographic movie ostensibly about blowing your load that just happened to mark a cultural shift. Which doesn’t mean it was smart, good or better than any other pornographic material of its time. “This is the first stag film to see with a date,” Roger Ebert wrote in 1973 after his first viewing in a theater. “There were a lot of couples in the audience Sunday afternoon. Most of them, I thought, left the theater looking a little grim.”
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