Score is another of those porn crossover movies from the “Golden Age of Pornography”, when the marginal moved into the mainstream and, for a while, it looked like attitudes to sex loosened by the cultural changes of the 1960s were about to be consolidated.
Of course they did change – there’s more sex on the screen today, and more various sex, than there ever was before – and yet in mainstream movies (look at last year’s Barbie and Oppenheimer, or the big movies from any year) it’s like the Golden Age never really happened. Which makes the likes of Score doubly fascinating.
Watching it now it’s obvious throughout that there’s a tension in director Radley Metzger objectives. Does he want to make a porn movie or a movie movie? Drilling down further, Metzger isn’t even sure about the porn bit. He’s far more interested in the erotic. They have different approaches and outcomes – the porn crowd want graphic, sharp, almost forensic imagery, the erotic crowd want a head of steam. The erotic is less about visuals and more about mood.
Unlike Metzger’s much more overtly graphic The Opening of Misty Beethoven, Score leans more obviously towards the erotic and when (“Finally! Finally!” you can hear the porn hounds shouting) Metzger’s quartet of actors get down to business, Metzger is still less about watching body parts slotting together and more about making something cinematic.
It’s not as porny as you might think, in other words. Maybe the title stands for S(oft)core? Maybe?
It’s essentially a reworking of the plot of Les Liaisons Dangereuses (or Dangerous Liaisons, as the 1988 Glenn Close/John Malkovich/Michelle Pfeiffer movie had it), with Claire Wilbur and Gerald Grant in the Close/Malkovich roles as a pair of tired old roués who make a private bet that they can defile a virginal young woman, the Pfeiffer role played here by Lynn Lowry.
Jack (Grant) and Elvira (Wilbur) are swingers sick of the run of backpackers they’ve been working their through in their splendid European holiday home – in Yugoslavia, now Croatia – and are eager for the new experience of bedding an entirely unavailable young woman, Betsy (Lowry). As a side bet, Jack is also angling for a pop at Betsy’s beau, Eddie (Casey Donovan, here working under his nom de porn Calvin Culver).
Jack and Elvira invite the two for dinner, ply Betsy and Eddie with drink and drugs and then, using guile and stealth, manoeuvre the young innocents towards the bedroom.
There’s a faintly creepy and vampiric aspect to the whole thing but also, in conversations about very 1970s subjects like astrology, a touch of the faintly ludicrous, as if the guests at Mike Leigh’s Abigail’s Party had been pornified a touch and switched out of suburban England to Southern Europe.
There is a fifth member of the cast. Mike the telephone repair man acts as a warm-up act for Elvira and is played by Carl Parker. Sylvester Stallone played Mike in the original stage play of Score, but was apparently “too ethnic” to play Mike on screen. While watching, digest the fact that the “too ethnic” Stallone is of Italian descent, and here we are in the next-door country. No, Mike’s bits are never seen, so you’d never have got to see Rambo’s assault pump-action weapon even if Stallone had been cast.
Not that Metzger ever says where we are, beyond, in fairytale-style voiceover, insisting that everything is taking place in the “Land of Plenty” in the “City of Leisure”, with Decadence on the northern border and Euphoria to the south, on the western shore of the Idle Sea – the 1970s in capsule form, laid back and whacked out.
No one in this movie really seems to have any visible means of support, apart from Jack, who’s a photographer. Metzger works in a little photographer’s joke early on in a conversation between Elvira and Betsy about the importance of the aperture F22 to erotic photography. F22 renders everything sharp, as Metzger knows, and it’s much more likely to be used in porn than erotica, as Metzger also knows.
The performances are good, with Lowry and her 1960s skislope nose job making her a plausible and cute lamb to the slaughter. Donovan occasionally undermines his attempts to play the heterosexual with a swish or a catwalk pose. More convincingly straight – until he swings into action – is Grant, while Wilbur’s Elvira doesn’t just have the name, she’s like something that’s escaped from a Hammer vampire movie.
Metzger is a good film-maker and it’s obvious he has aspirations to break free from porn. This is a well shot, nicely lit and precisely and artfully edited movie. And if the camera seems always to be too close to the actors – the curse of porn – Score is imbued with an overriding sense of ennui, as if all these liaisons would be a lot more meaningful and a lot more fun if they weren’t so easy. A dangerous liaison is a tasty one.
Score – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2023
