The Seduction of Lyn Carter

Anthony Spinelli is highly-regarded as one of the masters of the golden age of adult film-making, one of few directors who successfully mixed erotic sex acts, solid acting performances, decent production values and intelligent screenplays to create some of the best films of the porno chic movement. Yet THE SEDUCTION OF LYN CARTER remains extremely hard to find. LYN CARTER is reminiscent of his later film, PORTRAIT OF SEDUCTION, but the performances here are so spot-on and the script so well-written that it easily excels over that film.

Andrea True, future disco diva, stars as Lyn Carter, a happily-married housewife whose husband travels on business and leaves her alone in their spacious suburban home with their young son (who is never seen). Lyn lost her virginity to her husband and has never been with another man, so she is intrigued by the swarthy good looks and cocksure demeanor of Jamie Gillis as Sean, a dark-haired stranger she meets at her dentist's office. A date for a drink leads to going back to his apartment, where she is roughly raped and defiled by Sean's dark side of his split personality. But much to her horror and disgust, she finds herself continually drawn to return to his apartment and forced to endure every imaginable sex act as a sort of depraved "sex education" course. She finally reaches her breaking point, but when she reveals all to her husband in a tearful confession, she finds that her shoulder to cry on may not be the sensitive caring lover she has enjoyed all these years...

Andrea True, who is rarely given any credit as one of the earliest porno stars and even less credit as an accomplished actress and singer, gives the performance of her career! If adult film awards were being given in 1974, there would be no question she would receive due honors. Even by mainstream film standards, she gives a truly gut-wrenching portrayal and it is truly moving to watch her transform from a smiling fresh-faced wife and mother to a degraded and tortured soul. Jamie Gillis would build a career on both his performances as mean bastards and his uninhibited sex scenes. This is just another day in the life for him, but he's such a cruel, heartless heel of a man in LYN CARTER. The film basically relies on the interplay and talent of True and Gillis, because there are only three other minor characters who act as able support. None of the sex is really that erotic, which is the point of the film. It's not an uplifting film, but the fact that it's so well-made and brilliantly acted keeps it fascinating throughout.

A solid 10, a shining jewel of golden age adult film-making and even without the hardcore scenes, this could have easily been made as a serious melodrama.

Arguably the best of the "Wes Brown" movies, a pseudonym employed by the late great Sam Weston - a/k/a "Anthony Spinelli" - during the first half of the '70s, SEDUCTION OF LYN CARTER provides a chamber piece setting with a small group of characters and a limited number of locations he would return to when shooting on video over a decade later. While the reasons therefore were on one hand undeniably economic, its pared down structure simultaneously offered him the opportunity to explore people's nature and motives regarding their sexual needs with an entomologist's eye for psychological detail. His findings weren't always pretty as this movie and its equally scorching companion piece PORTRAIT OF SEDUCTION illustrate.

Married for 15 years and mother of an unseen teenage son, elegant Lyn Carter (Andrea True) is the treasured trophy wife of apparently successful business man husband Darrin, persuasively played by Robert Cole (billed as "Peter Gibbs") who was also in PORTRAIT and Brandon G. Carter's mesmerizing DEVIL'S ECSTASY. Financially secure, there's no need for her to work. Along with the fact that she wed the first (and only) man she has ever known sexually, this has created a social vacuum all too easily pried apart by devious Don Juan Sean (Jamie Gillis) during Darrin's absence while he's on a business trip. Not coincidentally, Sean just happens to be a psychology student ! They meet and chat at the eye doctor's office - she has an in-grown eye lash - and he casually invites her for lunch the next day. After a few drinks too many, he lures her back to his place, all but forces her to smoke pot and takes advantage of her. Shocked and confused, Lyn learns she enjoys the treatment, sending her on a downward spiral as she keeps coming back for more humiliation. Initially threatening to tell her family, Sean soon discovers he doesn't need to resort to coercion in order to keep her in line...

Once the affair between Lyn and Sean takes off, the action becomes practically non stop and it's down to the thespian talent of Gillis and True that the intensity never lets up. No surprise as far as he's concerned, but Andrea True has rarely received praise for anything other than her 1976 cross-over disco hit More, More, More. Still living comfortably off its royalties, she was one of the major female adult performers of the early '70s but seldom recognized as such in retrospect. Presumably, this blatant oversight's due to her lack of industry longevity, unlike Georgina Spelvin for instance, or the absence of skeletons in her closet, like Linda Lovelace. Always the great actor's director, Weston drew a searing performance out of her that should be enshrined in the annals of adult cinema history, never putting a foot wrong as she goes from picture perfect middle class respectability to unbridled out of control sexual addiction. Put like this, it sounds like macho wish fulfillment (you know, any prissy demure woman just being a slut secretly waiting to happen) but, trust me, that's not at all the way Weston allows things to play out on screen. Actions ring uncomfortably true, including the husband's unexpected response when faced with his spouse's self-confessed infidelity.

In keeping with the film's modest scope, informed as much by subject matter as budgetary restraint, the form is stark and to the point with intimate camera work by Kenneth Jackson who also did a fine job on Weston's unsettling NIGHT CALLER. Basically a two character drama with the cuckolded husband added as some sort of bookend figure, its cast is augmented with one shot Italian stallion Tony Russo and the amazing Sharon Thorpe – who would garner considerable praise as well as several industry awards for her indelible work on Weston's subsequent SEX WORLD – as strange couple Doll and Angelo whose "services" Sean has acquired for Lyn's on-going debasement. Film's downer ending may not be what most would expect but it's honest and refreshingly free of moralizing.