Bowdlerized version -instant frustration
Previous review from Australia adequately sums of the contents of this film, EXCEPT leaving out the crucial info: the extant version on DVD-R (from SWV) presents a "nudie-cutie" without the nude scenes! The 'ho posing as a film critic/historian who wrote the liner notes for the video carefully avoids mentioning this, too, since he was employed to merely hawk the contents. Boy, do I wish that Miles Davis' 1960s dictum of "No damn liner notes" for his LPs had caught on.
As any fan of CINEMA PARADISO knows, it was commonplace to clip the naughty bits out of theatrically exhibited movies, whether by the censors or more often by the pesky projectionists over the years. Latterday distributors of porn for the home viewer, notably Something Weird Video, Alpha Blue Archives and After Hours/Retro Seduction Cinema, present the collector with a catch-as-catch-can product, transferring whatever material they can dig up, preserved for posterity "as is".
THE TOUCHABLES on DVD-R from SWV runs 56 minutes followed by a lengthy trailer for same that gives the game away. The coming attraction shows the lovely ladies in film clips both nude and topless (no full-frontal nudity, this being 1961), and boasts of the innovative underwater photography. The 56-minute version has a less than 10 seconds of a topless shot in a steam room, and that's it. Comparing running times, it would seem that something like 7 minutes of skin (the raison d'etre for this film to exist in the first place) is missing, and the steam room scene could be easily edited to make the movie playable on any local TV station (hard up for entertainment as they are) today.
The fact that the film plays adequately, with no hints of anything being missing, causes me to infer that significantly different versions were prepared in the first place: a normal and a "hot" version. Evidence of this occurs in the massage scene, which is topless in the trailer but carefully framed to "cover up" in the feature version. The proper thing to do would be to release both versions, as was done most notably with a personal favorite of mine, John Lamb's THE MERMAIDS OF TIBURON/THE AQUA SEX, but as we all know, from current distributors' point of view: the fans be damned.
As any fan of CINEMA PARADISO knows, it was commonplace to clip the naughty bits out of theatrically exhibited movies, whether by the censors or more often by the pesky projectionists over the years. Latterday distributors of porn for the home viewer, notably Something Weird Video, Alpha Blue Archives and After Hours/Retro Seduction Cinema, present the collector with a catch-as-catch-can product, transferring whatever material they can dig up, preserved for posterity "as is".
THE TOUCHABLES on DVD-R from SWV runs 56 minutes followed by a lengthy trailer for same that gives the game away. The coming attraction shows the lovely ladies in film clips both nude and topless (no full-frontal nudity, this being 1961), and boasts of the innovative underwater photography. The 56-minute version has a less than 10 seconds of a topless shot in a steam room, and that's it. Comparing running times, it would seem that something like 7 minutes of skin (the raison d'etre for this film to exist in the first place) is missing, and the steam room scene could be easily edited to make the movie playable on any local TV station (hard up for entertainment as they are) today.
The fact that the film plays adequately, with no hints of anything being missing, causes me to infer that significantly different versions were prepared in the first place: a normal and a "hot" version. Evidence of this occurs in the massage scene, which is topless in the trailer but carefully framed to "cover up" in the feature version. The proper thing to do would be to release both versions, as was done most notably with a personal favorite of mine, John Lamb's THE MERMAIDS OF TIBURON/THE AQUA SEX, but as we all know, from current distributors' point of view: the fans be damned.
- lor_
- 13 may 2010