Swedish director Torgny Wickman, who made several significant porn films over the years, went out with a bang via the well-made yet trivial opus PRACTICE MAKES PERFECT. I guess that title sums up his odd career.
He is best known for the Christina Lindberg-starrer ANITA: Swedish NYMPHET, and among collectors for the well-crafted horror-porn FEAR HAS 1000 EYES. For his 1977 finale he imported top-name American talent, a mainstream British leading man and shot it in English. I found the results highly enjoyable, my only disappointment being his failure to develop a strong script which might have spring-boarded a classic.
Film cornily depicts Squire Richard (Chris Chittell, a Brit who worked in everything from TV's "The Avengers" to high-profile movies by James Clavell, Bryan Forbes and Tony Richardson) showing his visiting virginal cousin George (Eric Edwards, comically cast as a boy who can't get it up despite a hundred previous U.S. porn roles) how to make it with women. It's a bit disconcerting watching a legit actor like Chris shtupping Swedish girls & American porn stars scene after scene, but that's show biz!
Unlike the similar-setting, lost-but-now-found Joe Sarno movie MARCY I recently watched, PERFECT spends considerable footage depicting the workings of a Swedish farm -very atmospheric and well-directed. It lulls the viewer into thinking he's watching a real film, though the lengthy XXX sex scenes that frequently grind PERFECT to a halt clearly indicate its strictly porn filler.
Keeping this pot boiling is a teaser subplot of the Squire's housekeeper (severe brunette Jacqueline Laurent -only dark-haired lady in the cast) becoming exasperated at the free-love going around. She starts planting dynamite-laden bombs all over the farm, declaring "I will blow up this whole nest of sin". Defying Hitchcock's famous dictum about bombs that don't go off, Wickman has her relent late in the film when she reluctantly but finally joins the crowd and goes XXX herself with Joe the farmhand (Knud Jörgensen), a more than willing bedmate.
Cute Kim Pope (NYC import) is the farm's cook, willing and able to have sex with anybody nearby, while another guest superstar from the Big Apple, Darby Lloyd Rains, is quite convincing (hiding behind oversize spectacles) as the prudish schoolmarm, who suddenly transforms herself into sexy lingerie and seduces good ole Edwards, curing him of his pre-Viagra affliction.
It's interesting that Rains ended her career (one last lame-duck NY credit to come) with this and another Swedish movie assignment for Mac Ahlberg. Similarly, Pope wrapped up her lengthy soft & hardcore career here too. Chittell, Edwards, Pope and Rains made a more famous Swedish porn film the same year, MOLLY, for Mac Ahlberg, starring the cult fave Marie Forsa/Lynn.
The local femme talent is quite attractive and sexually arousing, as Wickman balances the homegrown unknowns vs. foreign superstars deftly. Why all this firepower is wasted on such a trivial exercise is unknown. 35mm lensing is pro, and if all '70s assembly-line porn films were as well made as this one, maybe subsequent filmmakers (and later videomakers) might have tried harder.
