University of Virginia Library

CINEMA

Making
It
With
The
Devil

Well, another porno flick bit the dust last
week. Barely a month since the Supreme Court's
pornography decision, and already the local
officials in Virginia have launched an all-out
assault on smut, whether in printed or celluloid
form.

This time, the casualty was The Devil in Miss.
Jones which ended Friday a nine-day run at the
Biograph (that filthy theater that played Deep
Throat before it, too, was banned) when a
Richmond judge found "probable cause" that

Devil was obscene. I missed Throat; the
courts gunned it down before it could corrupt
my morals. This one, however, I resolved not to
let slip past me without finding out what all the
hoopla was about. So with my hands firmly
clutching the $3.00 admission (the prices of
movies are rapidly approaching the ridiculous,
especially for nothing more than a high-class skin
flick), I made my way to Richmond on the very
last night before the judge lowered the boom.

Apparently I wasn't the only one with the
kindred idea of getting a peek at the forbidden
fruits. The line was half a block down Grace St.
and growing when I arrived in front for the
10:20 show, and by the time the lights dimmed,
not a seat was left in the house. The patrons were
not your average skin flick variety either, nor
even of the Charlottesville porno late show type.
Most amazing of all were the couples, the women
in fashionable dresses and without layers of
makeup.

The movie we were all waiting in line to see,
could just as well have been Live and Let Die,
the latest mindless Xerox-copy James Bond film
which has been packing them in around the
country. Something was decidedly different
about this porno flick, I got the feeling.

Just what brought all these people here, I
wondered. Was porno really chic now? Did the
Richmond Mercury's stamp of approval attract
the seemingly respectable, fashionable patrons
that had herded to this last showing? Or were
they here, as I was, trying to decide for
themselves, regardless of what the courts or
critics said, just what was or was not without
redeeming social value?

We weren't long in seeing just what was
different about The Devil in Miss Jones First
of all, there was a plot. A middle-aged but still
attractive woman kills herself only to find that
her suicide has destined her to damnation.
Feeling cheated, she begs for an opportunity to
earn her keep, returning to life a short while in
order to be "consumed by lust," a choice of
words which, as it turns out, is most apt.

No tricks are left unturned in Miss Jones's
(played by Georgina Spelvin) life of lust. Every
position and perversion is portrayed in a
fast-paced sequence of short sketches as Miss
Jones (Justine, we learn, is her first name)
eagerly adopts wanton ways. And since Devil
was written and directed by Gerard Damiano, the
former hairdresser who made Deep Throat,"
there is an ample spate of oral sex that rivals,
according to Glenn Lovell of the Mercury, Linda
Lovelace's phallic sword swallowing in that blue
movie.

Yet, despite all the variety and the living color
(another sign of Devil's "class," distinguishing
it from the larger body of black-and-white stag
films), midway through the high jinks, I realized
I was bored. That's right, bored.

Perhaps there is some truth to the old adage
that a little left to the imagination keeps sex
exciting. Very little was left to the imagination,
very little suggested, in Miss Spelvin's writhing
contortions. And for me, at least, a little of the
sensuality, the eroticism of what had the
potential to be the most interesting, artistic,
erotic, movie ever produced drained away with
each blushingly frank line that Justine mouths.

Just why this porno film fell, short, I think,
after coming closer than ever before to earning
the label 'art' rather than 'smut,' is because Devil
in all its graphicness, fails to portray the human
passion which, along with lust, makes sex so
exciting.

Oh, make no mistake, Devil is socially
redeeming. It is a moral tale, where the woman
who lives in lust without love finds herself
condemned to Hell, needing another to give her
the sexual satisfaction she cannot get herself
anymore. Her damnation, ironically, is to suffer
eternal sexual frustration.

The Devil in Miss Jones is definitely not the
epoch-making film that makes all the censorship
hoopla worthwhile. It is a flawed depiction of
absolute eroticism which, with a sense of humor,
is rather entertaining. Yet it is flawed. Let's just
hope that the controversy swarming around it
doesn't over inflate its reputation into a film
classic. That would be unfortunate, but it is
indeed tragic that rational adults today in
Virginia will not have the opportunity now to
judge for themselves.

—Tim Wheeler