The Naked Nympho

Modern porn scholarship of the Linda Williams school generally contends that early X-rated features adopted a story format to lend legitimacy to their sexual content, as there was less risk of the sex seeming prurient when anchored by some form of narrative justification. However, just as porn today is stereotypically derided for its sex-at-the-drop-of-a-hat structure, THE NAKED NYMPHO proves this conceit has been around since the beginning of the industy. It's tedious in the extreme, and justifies its sexual content about as effectively as the LOGJAMMERS parody in THE BIG LEBOWSKI.

Maria Arnold is a virginal 18-year-old staying with her uncle in southern California. We first meet them having sex on a patio (the incest angle isn't even remarked upon in the narrative), where the pair is noticed by early bisexual thesp Charles Lish strolling down a nearby alley. Stopping by the next day and finding Arnold outside, Lish boldly proposes that since he saw her having sex with someone yesterday, she would probably also like to have sex with him today. Arnold takes umbrage for all of three seconds before leading him in.

After that things move to a cabin, where Arnold is supposedly vacationing with Lish. He's nowhere to be seen in the footage, which has her making it with a handsome blonde guy while another woman watches and masturbates. Afterwards, these two disappear and Maria has a dress-up party with a travelling lingerie saleswoman that leads to the required lesbian action. Maria then goes to live with the lingerie lady, but quickly invites Lish over to resume their canoodling (he's still at the cabin, according to her narration). Finally some other guy shows up and has sex with her too.

NYMPHO is about as arbitrary as a film can get, seemingly stitched together out of unused footage (the leap to and back from to the cabin is random and completely pointless) and overdubbed, though a few sequences do feature sync dialogue which mostly consists of improvised babbling. The camerawork is restless, almost entirely handheld and constantly roving around the action in a way that decidedly precludes eroticism. The majority of the film seems to have been shot soft, with extremely tight close-ups of XXX decently well-integrated, though the end does pull back to provide a full view of Lish and Arnold in flagrante. Overall, the entire aura is of a production essentially created at shooting speed, with an absolute minimum of editing, craft or interest. Given the huge name Chinn would become in the industry, it's depressing. I guess we all have to start somewhere, but if you're new to the director and his work, I would recommend anywhere other than here.