The Taming

I saw this film in Cleveland back when it was released theatrically, probably at the Standard Theater, and it was quite impressive at the time -a black & white extremely morbid soft porn tale of loneliness, alienation and overall depression, set on a New York City subway train. I have always been a huge fan of film noir, and this film, within the soft-core/s&m genre of the 1960s, captures a similar mood of self-division, rejection and quite simply dark atmosphere. I suspect like so many thousands of other early porn efforts it is a lost film now. For porn fans, I would categorize it in the realm of Gerard Damiano's classic, and also forgotten, Memories Within Miss Aggie, and it is not too much of a stretch to note the overwhelming influence of Ingmar Bergman here, most notably his early film Torst (Three Strange Loves) which has a similar structure to The Taming.