Score (1973)

director Radley Metzger
starring Claire Wilbur, Calvin Culver, Lynn Lowry, Gerald Grant

Married bisexual swingers Elvira and Jack scoff at middle class morality, but are bored with the easy swingers who answer their ad in Screw Magazine. Seeking a challenge Elvira invites vanilla newlyweds over for dinner, drugs, and seduction (not necessarily in that order). But the inexperienced couple proves hard to crack due to a smorgasbord of immature sexual hang ups.

Just as their evening threatens to become boring,Jack bets Elvira that he can score with the groom before she does with the bride. Think Lickerish Quartet meets Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf with the script from Beyond the Valley of the Dolls and you start to get the idea. It’s extremely campy, and refreshingly unrepentant.

While het-porn is eager to explore girl-on-girl (as long as she ends up with a dude at the end) god forbid there’s guy-on-guy action for the rest of us to watch. Happily, Metzger is the exception: always presenting strong beautiful women, and adding style and substance along with the erotic bits. In Score he evens the score (pardon the pun) by including vulnerable males, bisexuality, and more. Yay!

If you’re reading this you’re probably already a Radley Metzger fan or fell in love with his glossy erotic dramas like Camille 2000 or Carmen, Baby and are looking for more, but Score marks a turning point in Metzger’s career from romantic tragedies to a full-on nudie comedy. It’s still a Metzger film, set in some unspecified Euro rental, with attractive people and another groovalicious soundtrack, but in Score the budget seems to have plummeted. Little or no time is wasted on rehearsing the actors, or dressing the sets with Metzger’s signature mod furniture. The overall feeling is chintzy compared to his earlier efforts. The actors spend as much time naked as clothed — it’s not as explicit as today’s porn, but it’s clear that Metzger has abandoned his high concept orgies and classic 19th-century novels for frontal nudity and frank sex talk.

But I’m not knocking Score, it is a sparkling example of campy 70’s porn. Compared with the icy Camille 2000 or the pretentious Lickerish Quartet, Score is a tongue-in-cheek party film! I watched it with my favorite gay and we howled with laughter– more often WITH it than AT it. The hokey dialog is deliberate, and the conversations so over the top it almost lampoons adult movies. I’ve fantasized more than once about turning the script into an off-off-Broadway play….

The sex is only simulated, but kinky and fetishistic, and it does not embarrass by being overly graphic or banal. The actors are reflected in sheets of mylar and other psychedelic touches (although Metzger has done better), and the editing inter-cuts between men’s and women’s bodies mirroring at times their positions and movements. There is a lot of nudity but it is never clinical. Metzger gets creative in the men’s sex scenes: an undone belt is grasped as if it were an erection, and other phallus-shaped objects stand in for oral (including an amyl nitrate cartridge — ooh, it’s SO decedent!). Metzger attempts to keep even the straightest guys aroused during the guy- on-guy action with lots of abstract tension and no scary erect penises, meanwhile the women play complex top/bottom roles exchanging rapid fire dialog that draws you into their psychological games.

If you have friends who consider themselves the decedent type who might throw on a porno for laughs, try sneaking this one on them as a campy swingers movie and see who you can turn bi. Or make it into a drinking game (everytime they take a drink or smoke a joint in the movie, you do too! har har.) I’d give it 7 out of 10 stars: although the production is sad compared to earlier Metzger films, the result is a Trojan horse of a too clever script disguised as a trash-fest. “Score” makes you laugh and holds your attention, delving gleefully into taboos, drugs, and nudity that no “legit” movie could touch.