Neither experimental masterpiece nor pioneering stag movie, Gustav Machaty's controversial, even scandalous search for the female orgasm is to lascivious movie buffs like myself the earliest example of celebrity skin -- namely pre-MGM, 19-year-old Hedy Lamarr (née Hedy Kiesler), running through fields with nary a stitch on and mimicking rapture (in writhing close-up) as a brawny lover goes down on her. She plays a young bride laying heatedly on her honeymoon bedspread while her older, finicky hubby (Zvonimir Rogoz) spends the night organizing his toothbrushes. Her desires neglected, Lamarr files for divorce and runs back to her father's house, until one day she bumps (naked, natch) into virile handyman Aribert Mog, whose proletarian vigor finally delivers the head-tossing fuck denied by the circumscribed bourgeois Rogoz. Despite the association of life forces with working-class studs and the culminating montage of peons happily toiling the earth, the movie's politics are resolutely sexual, and its sense of nearly flabbergasted wonder at the sublime heights of female sexuality keeps interest from waning through an ocean of pedestrian symbolism. (Mostly clearance night at Freud's, opening with a key penetrating its hole and proceeding to toss in horses, trains, dew-dripping pods, phallically extended shoes.) Shot as a monosyllabic semi-talkie, the film is crammed with tilted angles, laboriously idiosyncratic camera placement, abstracting editing, and the poetry of flesh -- the kind of avant-garde sensuality panted over by horny Henry Miller during his European sojourn. (In fact, Miller did praise the work as worthy of D.H. Lawrence, though even as early as 1933 Eros had already been more expressively served by the likes of Dreyer, Von Sternberg, Buñuel, Vigo and Pabst.) In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce
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