Most silent (shot MOS) porn is bottom-of-the-barrel stuff. But occasionally a tasteful director and quality narration gives good results: CITY WOMEN being a superior example of the format.
After listening to a couple dozen of the asinine, frankly insulting narration tracks for Nick Millard's MOS movies, it was a welcome relief to come to the anonymous CITY WOMEN, with its well-written, romantic track. The voice-over knits together four vignettes of beautiful women daydreaming or recalling romantic trysts. Though XXX in content, this is a surprisingly positive approach, with no violence, debasement of women or the sleaze which unfortunately dominates so much porn in the Golden Age, largely because the audience is assumed to want their entertainment "rough". It's chicken & egg time: did the audience get jaded through boredom or did they demand more outré porn due to being subjected to same by creepy filmmakers?
Three of the best and most beautiful actresses of the period star: Sandy Carey, Rene Bond and Sandy Dempsey, plus a svelte black actress who, alas, is unidentified (black performers of the early porn era were generally treated contemptuously as interchangeable).
The recent After Hours Cinema reissue runs a mere 42 minutes, deleting entirely the segment starring the black actress.
Each segment is related in a wistful, Harlequin fantasy fashion, from Carey's secretary on her lunch hour, Bond entranced with a modern artwork and imagining herself as one of the artist's models, the black girl window shopping at a store advertising water beds (!), and Dempsey frolicking in a park. Jill Sweete shows up as one of the other models in a group-sex scene starring Bond.
Pleasant throughout, with a romantic light jazz score, movie ends appropriately with a card reading "Women's fantasies never end". All in all a classy movie, whose director should have signed his or her work.