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A funky dirty joke, the one about the gal on Swallow Street. The tone is offhand carnal vaudeville, Linda Lovelace—freckled, frizzy-haloed, affectingly half-lost—wanders into her bungalow and nonchalantly greets her cigarette-dangling roommate (Dolly Sharp), who's spread on the kitchen counter with a lout's head between her thighs. Orgasms have long eluded the heroine, an orgy leaves a roomful of exhausted studs but none of the bursting dams and exploding bombs she yearns for. The Ovidian revelation arrives in a medical examination charmingly patterned after A Day at the Races, the clitoris deep in the larynx like the bell at the bottom of the well. The doctor (Harry Reems) volunteers to help her overcome her gag complex ("just a matter of discipline"), the oral spectacle that follows earns its shuddering montage of fireworks and rockets. On the soundtrack, a Mickey & Sylvia spoof attempts to make sense of it all: "Loooove is strange, a lot of people like it in the mouth..." As befits a tale of displaced anatomy and pleasure, Gerard Damiano's triple-X smash is a male fantasy of female desire, a Doris Day-Rock Hudson romp with the polished veneer scraped off and the coy innuendo replaced with slapdash, raunchy surrealism. (The heroine in nursing lingerie readies herself for an old kinkster's soda pop and straw while the doctor clutches his bandaged crotch under the sheets, "wounded in the line of duty." Nixon led the prudes after it only to have its title haunt his great scandal, Cronenberg took the yonic drollery and ran with it. With Carol Connors, Bill Harrison, Bob Phillips, Jack Birch, and William Love.
--- Fernando F. Croce |