Barbara Broadcast

A classy porn, to be sure, but for a real classic, check out Metzger's The Opening of Misty Beethoven. The opening scene of Barbara is set in a fantastically realized sex restaurant, where the items on the menu are the waiters and waitresses themselves. The plot is much less intricate than Misty Beethoven, but Metzger is still very clever in the ways he fills the screen with the requisite amount of flesh and fornication while maintaining a level of wit and sophistication. C. J. Laing, as the reporter, has an amazing scene with a beefcake-y dishwasher dude in the kitchen of the sex restaurant. You get the impression that these two people were really having sex with each other and enjoying it and the camera was simply recording. In most modern porn the sex seems like a contractual obligation rather than any real expression of sexuality. Hoo-rah for classic porn!

Set in a dystopian New York, Barbara Broadcast takes place entirely in a restaurant with an usual menu, sex, fellatios, cunnilingus, and most kinds of fetishes. Waiters and waitresses stop by tables quite frequently to satisfy their customers or find somebody who can in due time, and quick-witted questions like, "Barbara, is your business still open for pleasure?" and "It's past my head-time" are exchanged amongst waitresses and customers.

Director Radley Metzger, who gave us the decorative and elaborate pornographic film The Opening of Misty Beethoven, gives us Barbara Broadcast in the same sort of light and position as his other films. For one, this film is captured in a surrealist state of mind, in a world where casual sex, most specifically public sex, isn't a taboo or something to bat an eye at. Metzger keenly imagines a world robbed of the societal taboos and double takes people do upon seeing public displays of affection, much less sex. Secondly, he conducts everything in a very beautiful, almost picturesque manner, with soft lighting not over-embellishing the light colors on-screen and very mood-sensitive music to compliment the decadent setting.

Our titular character is played by Annette Haven, and is being interviewed by a local women determined to get to the bottom of Barbara's seasoned history as a server of her valued customers. Right in the middle of her interview, Barbara stops to give a young customer a blowjob and, immediately after asking is he could finish in her mouth, she stops her performance to say that he is not old enough. "How old do I have to be to cum in a woman's mouth," the young customer asks Barbara. "Old enough not to ask," she states before batting her eyes and devoting her undivided attention back to her interview.

Metzger, who serves as the film's writer and director, joyfully plays with the film's tone here and doesn't skimp on the eroticism. While a plethora of sex scenes have that occasionally jarring series of closeups on the actions, but Metzger is always one to make his sex, whatever the position or the situation, classy in a way that a great deal of early pornography could struggle with. Consider the sex scenes of Mona the Virgin Nymph, a film I proclaimed limp and remarkably forgettable had it not been the first pornographic film to obtain a wide, theatrical release in theaters. That film beared so many washed out sex scenes ruined by angles and cloying music.

Barbara Broadcast has a much more elegant presentation, with sex scenes that emphasize eroticism, music that is actually immersive to what's occurring on screen, and a plot that's somewhat interesting based on the simultaneous inanity and the destruction of sexual taboos. With this and The Opening of Misty Beethoven, Metzger has firmly shown his true colors for pornographic filmmaking and they are colors that shine brighter than a great deal of his contemporaries.

Starring: Annette Haven. Directed by: Radley Metzger.

Radley Metzger is a director I will always know best for his fantastic 'The Punishment of Anne', which also happens to be one of my very favourite porn films of all time. He would go on to make Barbara Broadcast two years later and while it's certainly a good and interesting little film; it doesn't have much on Metzger's earlier masterpiece. The film does attempt to be a bit more than merely another porn flick and it seems like the director is trying to make some sort of social commentary, though of course the sex is always the star and for the most of the duration; I couldn't really care much less about what the film is trying to say. In terms of the sex scenes themselves; I have to say that there isn't much here that I haven't seen already in other porn films, but what makes this one stand out really is the music, which features throughout most of the film and gives it a feeling all of it's own. The film is a bit choppy and doesn't really follow a strict narrative - there are times when you are likely to know what is going on, and many when you won't have a clue. I can certainly recommend that hardcore fans check this one out because it is well worth seeing; but I wouldn't put it at the very top of the genre.

This movie is another sub-realist creation of Henry Paris. The stetic aspect is more elaborated than The Opening of Misty Bethofen, but the movie is plot less.

The good: Very good looking actress, perfect photography in some scenes, and that subreal world.

The Bad: Most scenes are just a waste of time, and even not erotic or exiting at all.

If you want to see this movie just FastForward to the Disco sequence. Is like a short movie inside the movie, and maybe the only cool thing to see.

I am sure that anyone interested in the production details about the filming of this striking film from the late 70s will find a lot of information on the Internet, so I will focus on the essentially cinematic aspect, if you can call it that, of a unorthodox film with overtones of Buñuelian surrealism (The discreet charm of the bourgeoisie).

The room of a restaurant (a real one, by the way, not a set) serves to offer on a silver platter any à la carte sexual demand that customers require from their waiters, to the rhythm of a waltz. Each with their own demands, the mistakes of the female servants are paid for with fellatio to the head waiter. All very strange and at the same time so magnetic.

I haven't really found a specific plot thread to intertwine the different scenes, but the majestic setting and the appearance of a spectacular Annette Haven seem like two essential arguments for reviewing this title once again. And then another.

P. S.- The sensational oral study that actress C. J. Laing performs on one of the waiters, and which ends with one of the most morbid facial discharges that I can remember, will be etched in your retina in perpetuity. You are welcome.