Heavy Petting

I didn't have high hopes for this documentary but I was looking for something light and entertaining to watch, and the first two comedies were so bad I turned them off in minutes. I stuck with this because of the interesting usage of film and commercials from the 1950s.

But I'm not really sure what was going on here.

There's a couple of elderly men - wondering if they're gay - and one man looks to be in his 70s. IN 1989. He would have been a teenager in the ...1930s?

Then there's a young white woman who doesn't look a day over 35 and a young man who can't be more than 40 who would been little kids in the 1950s.

What are these people even talking about? Oh and the obese, poorly groomed middle aged man who talks about what a failure he was at both masturbating and dating girls in high school. Big surprise there, big guy, I doubt the generation you were born into has anything to do with it.

Some of the stories seemed pretty universal at least to me who was admittedly raised in a small town but in the 1990s. Some of what they're saying just seems like things that happened in the 20th century in conservative, white neighborhoods. I think the principal difference would have been that some of the things they describe as high school would have been middle school or junior high school behavior by my day.

I dunno. It's okay if you like to hound over 20th century vintage film and memorabilia, antiques and clothes, and I'm that sort of person. It's not beautifully filmed or wonderfully edited or anything, though. It's more like a fair-to-middling collage or a montage of 50s clips.

This is a very repetitive documentary. After about a half hour you start wondering if you've seen some of the stuff they shown already earlier in the movie. You've got old sex education clips, you've got clips from old movies, you've got live present day people talking about their experiences which you mostly don't necessarily want to hear. They also have excerpts from shorts on dating. There's just a bunch of editing all over the place. Not to mention, that the whole thing looks really cheap. Everything is grainy. They look like they have public domain trailer clips of the theatrical films. All in all, it becomes a tedious and dull affair.

I guess it is up to us Australians commenting here (both of us) who want to tell you HEAVY PETTING is a very funny documentary. Barely released (no pun there) in 1989 and seen sometimes on a double feature with DIRTY DANCING, this look at sex hygiene and teen social short films of the 50s manages to be laugh out loud funny in between so called celebs offering smirking advice on how they first managed to grope, be groped or get a bra off a prom date. Probably teenagers will get the best from it, shrieking at seeing 50 year olds who look like their parents (or older) tell about their clumsy 1950s finger fests or worse, why they gave up after a few sessions. Much of the footage was already seen in LET THE GOOD TIMES ROLL and is seen again in the dance DVD TWIST from 1992; Whilst reviewers in mainstream media might be deflated, this film plays fairly well to any audience. As a cinema owner of the 80s, it was a lot of fun to watch the teens in the crowd scream at the revelations from the wrinklies on screen. My summary above is a lyric from the 1933 Busby Berkely musical GOLD DIGGERS OF 1933 sequence: the called PETTIN IN THE PARK which is also as risqué as anything seen in HEAVY PETTING

"Heavy Petting" is an entertaining documentary featuring an extraordinary cast of people talking about their recollections of sex back in the '50s. Amidst the testimonials of these writers, musicians, actors/actresses, and... tradespeople and businessmen (?) the movie is constantly interspersed with footage of movies, TV shows and after-school specials that demonstrate some of the old timey attitudes the interviewees are speaking about.

The cast includes David Byrne, Sandra Bernhard, Spalding Gray, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Laurie Anderson, Oates from Hall and Oates, and a few others who aren't famous nor in the entertainment industry, making their inclusion surprising when you realise they're not famous like the others.

With all the quick edits, and at times too-quick contributions from the stars, the movie moves along like rapid fire. It's entertaining, but I didn't learn much from watching it.

In this day and age, no one can resist poking fun at 1950s sexual mores. "Heavy Petting" (a term referring to non-penetrative sex) is a look at those mores, featuring interviews with famous people who discuss how they learned about sex during that era, interspersed with footage from 1950s sex ed films. It's really funny to hear the interviewees (among them Spalding Gray and David Byrne) describe their first sexual experiences. I guess that a sad irony is that even in the 21st century, Americans still have a childish attitude towards sex (which among other things, means that we have unwanted pregnancies than most industrialized countries). But otherwise it's a really good, really funny documentary. It's amazing how, even though sexuality was officially repressed, so much of the culture seemed overtly sexual (just look at Elvis's dancing). I recommend it.

"I think he called it a 'dick'." Indeed!