Radley Metzger | Score / 1974

elivra & betsy & jack & eddie

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jerry Douglas (screenplay), Radley Metzger (director) Score / 1974

 

Having become recognized as one of the best of US erotic filmmakers of the day, Radley Metzger, had already successfully tackled soft heterosexual porn in his Camile 2000 (1969) and The Lickerish Quartet (1970), as well as having distributed several European films that showed causal nudity that deemed them unworthy of being released in the good ole USA, when he decided to dabble with bisexuality, one of the earliest to do so, in Score of 1974, one of the first such US pictures to feature frontal nudity and dramatically present both lesbian and male gay sex. The film received such glowing reviews one might think that Metzger was a kind of cinematic genius.

     Watching this in 2021, however, the fact that it was passed off as a “first”—particularly given the fact that in the very same year Arthur J. Bressan, Jr. presented a far more intelligent and sexually explicit vision of gay sex in Passing Strangers of the same year, and that only a year later Sidney Lumet would tackle a far more complex issue of a transgender, potentially transsexual relationship that leads to a major bank robbery and hostage situation in Dog Day Afternoon, without even mentioning the fact that in Europe and Asia filmmakers such as Luchino Visconti, Lino Brocka, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Chantal Ackerman, and others were delivering up far more professional and daring LGBTQ movies—Score doesn’t particularly impress me given its  laughably bad script, acting, and cinematic tricks, as well as its garish sets and silly presentation of its admittedly “naughty” intentions. In hindsight Score looks like an amateurish production of someone determined to wake up suburban married couples who just loved Paul Muzursky’s Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice and are ready to move up to something slightly kinkier.

    Let me be clear, Metzger’s film has very little do with being gay or lesbian, nor does it have anything at all to do with love. Both Elvira (Clarie Wilbur) and Jack (Gerald Grant), the seducing couple of Metzger’s film, admit that they’d have sex with a porcupine if they found the species attractive.

     That is not to say that if you perceive it as a comedy of seduction in the same way that you can read Mark Robson’s Valley of the Dolls (1967) as a comedy of aging actresses and their drugs that Metzger’s film doesn’t provide a great deal of campy fun. The “true” seductress of the couple, Elvira has been busy grooming the young married convent-trained Betsy (Lynn Lowry) for a lesbian encounter, while her husband Eddie (Calvin Culver) seems, unknown to either of them, ripe and ready to try out a fling in bed with another man. He’s even brought home from a convention, along with his several porno mags of females one magazine of male nudes, so we later discover from the devout Catholic Betsy’s bedtime confessions. Why she’s even discovered him masturbating in the bathroom when he should be focused on his morning shave!

     Everything that matters here, accordingly, is how to go about the seduction. Since Jack has a successful career as a porno and fashion photographer and the couple can afford a nice moderne home in a lovely seaside Croatian village where Metzger filmed the movie, they spend much of their time playing the game of who can succeed at seducing heterosexuals for same-gender sex. Ads for tourist couples in the local paper everyday haven’t panned out, the previous evening having produced a lot of empty wine glasses, a pot of roaches, and tossed off undergarments without, evidently, a “score.” And the clock is running down on their bet. Elvira only has 24 more hours to get Betsy into her bed and to put her tongue into Elvira’s “pussy.” As part of their bet, she’ll pick up Eddie on his way out....that is if Jack doesn’t jack him off first.    

     Meanwhile, there’s the telephone repairman (Carl Parker) to contend with, while Betsy has unexpectedly arrived earlier in the morning on the same evening Elvira and Jack have invited the couple over for the “last supper.” Elvira gets the idea that she might get Betsy in the mood by allowing her to watch while the repairman services her personal line. Betsy’s intrigued but runs home out of modesty and almost refuses to come to dinner.

      The fact that Eddie arrives early as well and is already making fast friends with Jack quickly cures Betsy’s headache as the poor girl comes running, willing to play her role for the rest of the evening as a mix of the ditzy blondes who Goldie Hawn’s been forced to play for most of career and the woman “on the verge of a bathroom upchuck” who Sandy Dennis was asked to perform in the film version of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and, even worse, to play “Chopsticks.”   

     A little bit of wine and a lot of grass, however, is the perfect cure, and before Elvira and Jack can even begin to play “Getting the Guests,” Betsy has stripped and put on a negligee that purposely reveals what most such articles of clothing pretend to hide, while Eddie has eagerly pulled the cowboy regalia out of their host’s deeply stocked costume trunk suddenly convinced that he is Billy the Kid.

       Eddie is almost ready to be seduced, but Metzger refuses to hurry the plot, and nearly bores us to death with the stumbling straight couples’ purposeful misreading of event, and with the terrace conversations of the frustrated seducers. And when, finally, things begin to unravel, Metzger’s camera goes all out of focus as it attempts to show us a truly artsy series of doubled images to signify lesbian sex while becoming suddenly terribly shy about showing the two males going after anything but a few French kisses. The seducers of this film evidently believe amyl nitrate to be an aphrodisiac, and spend more time sniffing than smooching, screw-ing, and scrogging. Yet, obviously, both Jack and Elvira eventually score.       

     The next day Eddie has the “morning after druthers,” while the convent girl has evidently been completely converted to the devil’s ways. Indeed Eddie and Betsy are nearly set to go their own ways, as Betsy jumps into bed with both Elvira and Jack ready for a second act, while Eddie is about to wander home to ponder his new homoself.

      Fortunately, the telephone repairman always rings twice, returning just in time to take along Eddie and Betsy on another call, forcing the slightly disappointed Jack and Elvira to look elsewhere, finding a new object of possible interest in a male waiter they’d never before spotted at a local café. 

 

Los Angeles, December 31, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2021).