As Roger Ebert wrote at the time of the film’s release, DeBell “projects such a freshness and naiveté that she charms us even in scenes where some rather alarming things are going on. Alice in Wonderland: An X-Rated Musical Comedy emerges from this perverted innocence.Īt the heart of this pornographic trip through Wonderland was model-actress Kristine DeBell.
Pornography, in a new kind of nascent stage, seemed caught in a tonal ground of early adolescent sexual naivety. The best pornos of this era were keenly self-aware and infused with a disconcerting enthusiasm. There is a keen sense of the absurd in a film like Deep Throat, about a woman who does not enjoy sex, only to have a doctor inform her that her clitoris is actually located in the back of her throat. Some of the films, though, rose above the rabble, vibrating with ambition and inspiration. They were transgressive through the virtue of their existence rather than their content. Very few of these films challenged sexual mores or desires: they were, on a whole, silly.
As Norman Mailer explained in the documentary Inside Deep Throat (Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato, 2005), the appeal of pornography during this era was that “it lived in some mid-world between crime and art.” The riskiness of pornography during this era was largely confined to its previous (and in some states and cities, continued) illegality. While the popularity of cinematic porn was very much a zeitgeist moment that coincided with the free-sex countercultural movement, sex on screen was still a novelty to be embraced at a safe distance. Unsurprisingly, the most popular pornos of the day were comedies – films like Gerard Damiano’s Deep Throat (1972) and The Devil in Miss Jones (1973), where titillation could be offset by laughs.
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