Another blast from my past! I was a horny college student when this film was released in 1971, and I recall a big photo spread in "Playboy" promoting the film with revealing images of various "Pretty Maids." (Joy Bang? Nothing suggestive there!) I went to see the film based on that promise of titillation, but rather than being turned on, my tender sensibilities were turned off by the amoral characters and plot line.
I recently watched the film again on TCM (give them credit for not censoring the mild nudity!), and I can't say that my view has changed much in 35 years. Those who try to excuse this fecal matter as "black comedy" or as an unsung "cult classic" are putting a lot of lipstick on a warthog.
Many privileged Baby Boomers (of which I was one) developed in the 1960s a peculiarly self-centered notion that youth is morally superior to maturity, that idealism always trumps experience. The media -- especially a movie industry with a new ratings system that released filmmakers from the restrictions of the old Production Code -- pandered to the Baby Boomers' self-congratulatory moral smugness. This film is rife with such pandering. Rock Hudson's lecherous/murderous teacher is represented as the only cool adult in the film, as much for his "youthful" sense of style as for his unorthodox ideas about educating horny teenagers. The only other remotely hip adult is Telly Savalas' detective, who himself develops a grudging admiration for the murderer. The Angie Dickinson character is an overly earnest teacher who has to be "enlightened" by Hudson into seducing Hudson's sexually frustrated protégé (John David Carson). The other adult characters are essentially movie idiots (Keenan Wynn and Roddy McDowall are particularly offensive -- I hope they were paid well), while the hip, turned-on teens in the film protest the Vietnam war and lecture their elders on sexual freedom and openness.
I have nothing against good old-fashioned lust, but even in 1971 I saw the impropriety of Hudson's character having sex with his female students (which he excuses as a way to enhance their psychological well-being). That sort of sexual power-mongering is bad enough, but then the controlling bastard must kill certain sexual partners (and others) who might expose his escapades. Rather hypocritical, isn't it? Advocating sexual license but afraid of having his own licentiousness exposed? (His wife, played by the lovely Barbara Leigh, is strangely passive in all this mess. It's never clear if she's totally clueless or remarkably tolerant of her husband's extramarital liaisons, though the film's ending points toward the latter.) After the Hudson character's demise(?), the newly unfrustrated protégé (who earlier is dismayed by revelations of his mentor's murderous behavior) adopts the same style of sexual duplicity for himself. (He attains symbolic hipness by abandoning his wimpy Vespa for a studlier motorcycle.) Perhaps the filmmakers were trying to argue that the new sexual mores of the '60s were a sham -- just the old, inescapable sexual hypocrisy coated with hip psychobabble – but that point itself is objectionable, and the film's own hypocrisy emphasizes just how disgusting the old sexual double standard really was (and is).
One would think that this film was a rather blatant fantasy by that unapologetic libertine, Roger Vadim. But the film was written and produced by that celebrated intergalactic moralist, Gene Roddenberry, for God'sake! This guy gives dirty old men a bad name, and the film makes me yearn for the mindless but honest lasciviousness of hardcore porn. Comedy, even black comedy, still needs a moral center, something we can laugh with rather than just laugh at. This film glories in its amorality and mocks what the many progressive Boomers of the 60s, for all our ignorance and pretense, were trying to accomplish (and to some extent, have achieved) in making society's attitudes about sex more humane.
I recently watched the film again on TCM (give them credit for not censoring the mild nudity!), and I can't say that my view has changed much in 35 years. Those who try to excuse this fecal matter as "black comedy" or as an unsung "cult classic" are putting a lot of lipstick on a warthog.
Many privileged Baby Boomers (of which I was one) developed in the 1960s a peculiarly self-centered notion that youth is morally superior to maturity, that idealism always trumps experience. The media -- especially a movie industry with a new ratings system that released filmmakers from the restrictions of the old Production Code -- pandered to the Baby Boomers' self-congratulatory moral smugness. This film is rife with such pandering. Rock Hudson's lecherous/murderous teacher is represented as the only cool adult in the film, as much for his "youthful" sense of style as for his unorthodox ideas about educating horny teenagers. The only other remotely hip adult is Telly Savalas' detective, who himself develops a grudging admiration for the murderer. The Angie Dickinson character is an overly earnest teacher who has to be "enlightened" by Hudson into seducing Hudson's sexually frustrated protégé (John David Carson). The other adult characters are essentially movie idiots (Keenan Wynn and Roddy McDowall are particularly offensive -- I hope they were paid well), while the hip, turned-on teens in the film protest the Vietnam war and lecture their elders on sexual freedom and openness.
I have nothing against good old-fashioned lust, but even in 1971 I saw the impropriety of Hudson's character having sex with his female students (which he excuses as a way to enhance their psychological well-being). That sort of sexual power-mongering is bad enough, but then the controlling bastard must kill certain sexual partners (and others) who might expose his escapades. Rather hypocritical, isn't it? Advocating sexual license but afraid of having his own licentiousness exposed? (His wife, played by the lovely Barbara Leigh, is strangely passive in all this mess. It's never clear if she's totally clueless or remarkably tolerant of her husband's extramarital liaisons, though the film's ending points toward the latter.) After the Hudson character's demise(?), the newly unfrustrated protégé (who earlier is dismayed by revelations of his mentor's murderous behavior) adopts the same style of sexual duplicity for himself. (He attains symbolic hipness by abandoning his wimpy Vespa for a studlier motorcycle.) Perhaps the filmmakers were trying to argue that the new sexual mores of the '60s were a sham -- just the old, inescapable sexual hypocrisy coated with hip psychobabble – but that point itself is objectionable, and the film's own hypocrisy emphasizes just how disgusting the old sexual double standard really was (and is).
One would think that this film was a rather blatant fantasy by that unapologetic libertine, Roger Vadim. But the film was written and produced by that celebrated intergalactic moralist, Gene Roddenberry, for God'sake! This guy gives dirty old men a bad name, and the film makes me yearn for the mindless but honest lasciviousness of hardcore porn. Comedy, even black comedy, still needs a moral center, something we can laugh with rather than just laugh at. This film glories in its amorality and mocks what the many progressive Boomers of the 60s, for all our ignorance and pretense, were trying to accomplish (and to some extent, have achieved) in making society's attitudes about sex more humane.