The Contortionist

The great team of director Ron Sullivan/Henri Pachard and writer Raven Touchstone produced this powerful classic, somehow lost in the mists of porn history. Lack of superstar femmes in the cast perhaps accounts for its obscurity.

But that's a plus, as this was made at a time when the contract system (copying Hollywood's Golden Age of 60 or 70 years earlier) was in full force at the major labels like Vivid, Wicked, Adam & Eve and the source of this video, VCA Pictures.

But Sullivan opted for lesser-known actresses, not suffering from overexposure. Case in point is lead player (in the title role) Cameron Caine, cast in a Candide style part, moving from man to man aimlessly in a story of self-discovery.

Film (shot on video) opens with her voice-over filling in the blanks, as we see her character Pinky on a rooftop about to jump, following the similar suicide of her boyfriend, but she's saved at the last moment by cop Herschel Savage.

He takes her under his wing and they soon fall in love, but in a kinky sidebar she gets a job working at a shooting range, and we're treated to a tantalizingly brief softcore interlude of them embracing while Pinky holds a rifle at her groin phallically.

Savage (whose character name is Dick Husky) throws her out when she starts acting a bit too much like him: he craves variety. Pinky has copied Herschel's humanitarian impulses and started bringing home bums from the street. One of these, Prince (played by a really obscure actor Gino Greco who I'd seen previously in Bud Lee's "Angels of Mercy"), becomes her new boyfriend.

Prince is a professional gambler, and Pinky enjoys the new, flamboyant life style, but he soon drops her for a new good luck charm in the person of Honey, very sexy in her scene with him.

Dru Berrymore (who Caine co-starred with later in a Raven Touchstone movie for Vivid "Heart of Darkness" directed by Paul Thomas, unlike this one a multi-awardwinning pretentious stinker) enlists Pinky into the streetwalker profession, and she gets way too chummy with a pair of customers, BDSM swingers Anna Mills and Steve Hatcher.

Pachard stages a fine domination/submission threesome as Mills & Steve share our heroine, but again, she's thrown out of their menage when she starts copying them and wants to be a femdom, replete with whip.

Amidst sex scenes spotlighting the supporting cast including Dru, Pinky lands on her feet as a gangster moll for bank robber Nick Manning, sort of a low-rent Bonnie and Clyde team. After his famous "droppin' loads!" exclamation at climax, that arrangement also falls apart, leading to a fabulous ending in which Raven's script explains the movie's title and paints a satisfying moral to the tale.

Raven and director Ron utilize an unusual device that gives the sex show depth, as Pinky's travails and sexual adventures are not only explained via her narration but also by a stage show mime duo, acted by British beauty Layla Jade and Tony Tedeschi. Their act includes puppeteer strings, and for the movie's finale they're joined by Pinky wearing a mask and all doubled up (legs behind her head in porn actress contortionist pose) as the narration accompanies her freedom. It's a stylish and thematically rich conclusion to a true sleeper of an Adult movie.

While thousands of mainstream films have inspired Adult movies, lately in the form of those dreadful "porn parodies", "The Contortionist" with its Raven Touchstone screenplay could easily be remade as an R-rated mainstream picture without explicit sex depicted.

I had trouble (since it is narration and not a character speaking) adding the final lines, but they are wonderful in summing up the movie:

"She couldn't go on like this forever, an emotional contortionist twisting herself in a mirror image of every man she loved. She needed to stop and unwind. She needed a safe place where she could go and figure out who she was and what she wanted to do with her life. She could do that now. She was with friends and ultimately she learned it wasn't all about sex."