Quite typical of the output of '60s/'70s pornographer Nick Millard (aka Philips), Dr. Christina has more emphasis on the travelogue aspects of his art than usual. The endless footage of Paris is pleasant to watch, and certainly brings back memories of visits I made there during this time frame, but most viewers should be bored and rightly so. In my childhood in Cleveland we had a TV show Adventure Road, hosted by local newscaster Jim Doney, that had guests presenting silent home movies of their travels around the world, with some music added, and they would narrate live on the air. This was in the 1950s and a primitive form of entertainment, as well as a window for the young viewers onto a wide world out there. Millard, however, has merely re-created outdated forms of cinema, making silent films into the 1970s to save a buck, save time (he makes a feature film running an hour long in two days of shooting) and to simplify the process, where greater control is achieved by not doing sync sound recording at all.
I had never seen any of Nick's films theatrically, though I was a film buff in the '60s and '70s, probably because his distribution could not compare with his peers in the soft porn industry. I'm sure he didn't get many play dates in Cleveland. He has outlived many of his contemporaries, notably Russ Meyer, and now almost all of his films are back "in print" on DVD, and bear some interest structurally.
In the case of Dr. Christina, the heroine is a voyeur. The inclusion of clumsily filmed hardcore sex scenes for her to watch, e.g., a lesbian stage act which is clearly filmed on an apartment set and not on stage in some Paris club, makes this a bit different from most of his output, but it is not among his better films.
One of the first film posters on display in Paris that Nick shows on screen is for an Alain Robbe-Grillet film; his work actually has more in common with this novelist/filmmaker than the sources (Godard and Rossellini) that Nick usually cites as his influences. Both are fetishists and structuralists, and a viewing of La Belle Captive by R-G goes well with a dose of Millard/Philips films.
One note to DVD watchers: the self-appointed (and backed by a video company) porno expert and shill named "42nd St. Pete" hilariously embarrasses himself with his intro to Dr. Christina of Sweden. He hasn't watched the film at all, or certainly not carefully, as he refers to her coming to Paris from Copenhagen (the film's narration says Stockholm clearly a couple of times, and obviously the erudite Pete doesn't know one Scandi country from another), and his description of the action is idiotic. (In another film intro to Nick's Les Chic, he runs off on the mouth how natural Rene Bond and the other performers are, body-wise, ignoring the ultra-famous story of Harry Novak financing her breast implants.) His ignorance of the theatrical history of his subject, porn in the '70s, is nearly 100%, but I guess his I'm a slob persona, somewhat less intelligent than previous creations like John Bloom's Joe Bob Briggs or Howard Stern's Howard Stern, helps to make the viewer feel superior.
A request to the distributors at Retro-Seduction/After Hours/Secret Key who are providing the Nick films to an eager public: PLEASE ask the master to provide from memory, or maybe his files of payroll vouchers, a list of credits for the actresses in all his films. It would help IMDb flesh out these otherwise anonymous works.
