I enjoyed SEXUAL LIBERTY NOW more than its famous (and historically important) predecessor SEXUAL FREEDOM IN DENMARK. That's because director John Lamb was able to up the hardcore content in the follow-up exercise.
With some footage overlapping from the earlier film, this picture is unabashedly a propaganda piece, inspired by the publication of the results of the 3-year-long Presidential Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, which came out for liberalizing treatment and regulation of hardcore porn.
The vocal dissenters from the Commission, Father Morton Hill and Charles Keating, are ridiculed with their own reactionary and idiotic statements, taking pro-censorship stances that seemed ludicrous both then and now. When Keating proclaims that freeing up porn for adults in America would turn us into Denmark, which he characterizes as a barbaric, animalistic culture, we don't need the carefully provided man-on-the-street reaction interviews to know he's a stupid blow-hard.
With high-toned narration, director Lamb is careful to dole out on-screen an endless array of XXX scenes, ranging from a series of carefully chosen and entertaining classic stag loops & cartoons to recycled footage including John Holmes' memorable underwater sex from Lamb's ZODIAC RAPIST. (A lot of this footage was reused in 1986 in another Lamb production, CHASTITY AND THE STARLETS). Newly shot scenes give us a romantic porn approach.
My favorite scene is when a panel of ordinary people is shown new (circa 1970) porn loops. They laugh uproariously at the amateurishness of the performers, who frequently stare at the camera in search of direction; even a de rigeur "pull out for the money shot" got a hilarious reception due to its corniness.
Mainly focusing on San Francisco and Copenhagen, this scatter-shot documentary is hardly a masterpiece of construction, but emerges a hell of a lot more entertaining than the usual Michael Moore or Alex Gibney opus.
