Marsha: The Erotic Housewife

Marsha as a person is perky, pretty, and very likeable. Personally I don't find women with super-size breasts all that attractive though.

However, there is one absolutely GREAT erotic scene in this film. Marsha walks in on a married couple who are making out in the kitchen. The man's wife takes off all her clothes and sits naked on the kitchen counter. She is very beautiful and the scene is highly erotic.

Sixties porn superstar Marsha Jordan is ill-served by this desultory re-teaming with one of her best directors, Don Davis. What's wrong with the film is obvious -a failed attempt at crossover.

Tipoff is the R rating, anathema for a sex film released in 1970. Major distributors with many hits like THE FOX and upcoming WOMEN IN LOVE from Ken Russell, plus innumerable hot and heavy foreign imports (INGA and I, A WOMAN for example) had raised the bar, and for Davis/Jordan to water down their soft-core formula in vain hope of wide bookings a la Russ Meyer (VIXEN) hits was a terrible miscalculation.

Film has existed in several different cuts -listed officially by the AFI at 73 minutes but with Something Weird and now in an extraneous reissue by Vinegar Syndrome in 60-some minutes running time. Any way you slice it, the film lacks sex scenes -they start up and are not delivered as Don cuts away. It's a situation analogous to pay-cable sex movies which sometimes have sex scenes running seconds and other times 5 minutes long.

Banal story of a straying husband, with flings starting during their honeymoon and later with his secretary, prompting dutiful wife Marsha to go on a sexual spree in Las Vegas, is hoary soap opera leading to an extremely cornball ending.

I have seen praise of the film's production values by revisionist porn fanciers but that completely misses the point. In 1970 if you wanted to leave the theater humming the sets (to rephrase the old cliché) or revel in costumes try 20th Century Fox, Paramount or Universal -even Meyer was working for Fox at that time. A sex film, then as always, needed to supply "something different". Way too tame, MARSHA has a fleeting moment of full-frontal nudity but it's not by Marsha, who is merely a voyeur in that sex scene of neighbors having a nooner in their kitchen.

Cast is merely okay - Ed Blessington the typical John Gavin shirt ad hero he often played in soft-core,

and future XXX director Ann Perry as a dutiful Jordan sidekick she also played in the THE GOLDEN BOX. Davis was cranking 'em out like filler: BOX and MARSHA being bookends of a terrible pair of overproduced movies, while ODD TASTES (currently lost) and HER ODD TASTES also examples of milking a formula.