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Profoundly Erotic: Sexy Movies that Changed History

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This is quite simply the most insightful and entertaining book on film since Jonathan Rosenbaum's MOVIE WARS. Underneath the surface of Briggs's "drive-in critic" persona lurks one of our most thoughtful, knowledgeable commentators on the cinema, and PROFOUNDLY EROTIC is his best book to date. Each chapter is a masterful combination of historical context, thematic analysis, and behind-the-scenes anecdotes. The writing is entertaining and accessible enough for the casual fan but thorough enough for the film scholar--I thought I knew everything there was to know about some of these films, but I was wrong. There's an abundance of great material here on both the cinema and our cultural attitudes toward sex. This book is a masterpiece.

It's a little hard to believe that Joe Bob Briggs actually had much to do with the writing of this book, although I guess I believe it. He had an editor, a research assistant, and a copy editor who must have put in any number of sweat-soaked hours keeping this text as cleanly written and as perceptive as it is.

If you're used to Briggs' engaging, laid-back, eighteen-wheeler-jockey sort of light-hearted and thoroughly low-brow approach to crummy movies, you won't find it here. No counts of beheadings, nude dupas, simulated coitus or any of those familiar devices. Furthermore, the movies themselves are hardly Drive-In fodder. They include:

1. The Sheik, a silent movie with Rudolph Valentino.
2. She Done Him wrong, with Mae West.
3. The Miracle of Morgan's Creek, one of the best comedies of its decade.
4. Picnic, a "major motion picture."
5. The Immoral Mister Teas, famous trash.
6. Contempt, another Godard jigsaw puzzle.
7. Kitten With a Whip, infra dig.
8. I Am Curious (Yellow), rambling but with bare boobs.
9. Looking For Mr. Goodbar, a serious moral comment.
10. 9 1/2 Weeks, big but bloodless.

Briggs' prose style is thoughtful, analytical, ironic. How could Briggs -- he of the enumerated decapitations -- write something like this?

"If Godard is our most serious modern filmmaker, as many believe he is, then modern love is dismal indeed.
If Paul Javal is a contemporary Ulysses, as the movie seems to suggest, then Troy remains unconquered and
Penelope is abandoned to her suitors. The European lover has become a wimp." (p. 170)

Now, Joe Bob Briggs is a TV commentator and sometime actor who has claimed his favorite restaurant is some louche barbecue pit in northern Georgia or someplace. And here he's using intensifiers like "indeed"? Now he's alluding to HOMER? What is this guy, a closet egghead?

I enjoyed it as much as I enjoy his rural proletarian comments on movies like "I Spit On Your Grave." It's a different kind of experience, but it's equally likable. It does contain some thematic analysis -- "Looking For Mr. Goodbar" is a warning against women's patronizing singles bars, so says the text -- but it also establishes the careers of the principal performers and crew before and after their involvement in these ten movies. (I would guess it was the research assistant's job to track down some of the details.)

I read it all the way through, including the end-of-chapter epilogues called "For Further Frisson." (How many of Brigg's fans will that word, "frisson", drive to the dictionary?)

It's entertaing and educational. So what more can you expect, even from the unexpected?

This is an excellent book- scholarly and exciting to read at the same time! I was enchanted by each section, after each movie I wanted to continue but had to stop and digest, even in one case playing a DVD of one of the movies before I could go on. It's the kind of book that made me call my friends and say- "Hey! Did you know...?"

Highly recommended, a great companion to Brigg's other books and "The Stewardess is Flying the Plane" by Ron Hogan.

I've been a long time fan of Joe Bob Briggs, so while this book does not have the usual irreverence of a Joe Bob Drive-In Movie book (no descriptions of monkey-fu, no head count, no count of naked...well, you get the picture), Joe Bob (a.k.a. John Bloom) does a masterful job of providing fascinating historical context and insightful commentary of films that fall outside of the normal titles you would expect to see framed within this context. Joe Bob's exploration of performers and movies like Valentino within The Sheik or Diane Keaton's performance within Looking for Mr. Goodbar makes this book a must read for those that truly love cinema. I really enjoyed this book and also recommend Profoundly Disturbing equally as much.

Normally, I don't read books about movies, but Joe Bob's name on the cover got me to pick this one up. I've spent many an hour watching Joe Bob hosting cable movies - even if the movies were dreadful. And, after hearing him describe the plot of Ghosts Can'T Do It [VHS] - and then confirming the awful truth - I trust him completely to accurately sum up a movie. Which I have to since I haven't seen a single one of the films he concentrates on.

Those ten movies are "sexy movies", not porn movies. Only one of them can remotely be called that. Each chapter covers one movie, its history, its significance, and the careers of the significant people associated with it. Brief chapters in between cover other contemporary films with sexual themes.

The Sheik (1921), based on the rape fantasy of the very successful eponymous novel, is forever linked to Rudolph Valentino - the man who upped the bar for what American women wanted in their lovers. And haughty, domineering, graceful (and clean) alpha males in the desert became a stock fixture in romance novels.

She Done Him Wrong (Universal Cinema Classics) (1933), a remake of Mae West's stage show Diamond Lil, was something of a last hurrah before the Hays Production Code went into effect. West's persona - little skin, lots of innuendo (shocking then, more amusing now), with an act lifted from drag queens and portraying an unapologetic prostitute and exploiter of men - was very influential even if few outright imitations were tried.

The Miracle of Morgan's Creek (1944) was writer-director Preston Sturges' comedic end run around Hays Office censorship. A highly cynical movie that started with the phenomena of the unintended pregnancies of "V-girls", women who slept with soldiers right before they were shipped overseas, and then went on to mock most of the institutions of WW II America. The Catholic Legion of Decency condemned the movie but also noted "... it was very funny".

Picnic (1955) was a story that obsessed its writer Daniel Taradash. He never bought that its protagonist, Kim Novak, playing a woman in a Kansas small town, would really find happiness by running off with William Holden's drifter. Taradash continued to tinker with the story, but no one wanted what he thought was the more realistic version. They wanted the movie version with its alleged happy ending. Briggs, however, contends that the movie fascinates because audiences sensed the movie was really, whatever they told themselves, about how "sex kills everything it touches".

The Immoral Mr. Teas (1959), the closest thing to a true porn movie here, was the advent of the "content-free sex film". Russ Meyer's film -- about large breasted women as all Russ Meyer's movies are -- enabled national film distributors to book movies with lots of nudity without the packaging of foreign language "art cinema".

Contempt - Criterion Collection (1963) was Jean-Luc Godard's chilly effort, starring Jack Palance, Brigitte Bardot, Fritz Lang, and Michel Piccoli, about unconsummated passion, a love affair unraveling.

Kitten with a Whip (1964) has Ann-Margret showing up with thuggy friends to bedevil John Forsythe, a middle-aged businessman, with her sex-drenched presence and threats of violence. Long considered something of an embarrassment - no legitimate dvd release has been made in America, Joe Bob argues that it was the high point of Ann-Margret's career.

I Am Curious - Yellow (1967) paved the way for Deep Throat's breaking down obscenity laws. A narratively complicated satire, with explicit sex, on left-wing Swedish politics, it also made "Swedish movie" and "porn movie" synonymous in the American mind.

Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977), with its equation of one-night stand=dead woman, affected a generation of single women argues Joe Bob. Little seen today, its title is still shorthand for a moral lesson - even if the moral lesson isn't at all clear in the actual movie.

9 1/2 Weeks (1986) is the most recent movie on the list and still fresh in the public mind. Notorious for allegedly being about B&D or S&M, it seems lacking in all but maybe the D. Joe Bob argues, given the plot and Mickey Rourke's gifts to Kim Bassinger, it's a chick flick for the Bondage Lite set.

Joe Bob's prose does not much resemble his tv persona. That Joe Bob wouldn't talk about Strasberg or Meisner schools of acting. It's much like his John Bloom voice - clear, frankly subjective in places, and informative.

If I have one problem with this book, it's that the title - copying Joe Bob's preceding book, Profoundly Disturbing: The Shocking Movies that Changed History - oversells the significance of some of these movies whatever their artistic merits. Miracle at Morgan's Creek may be a classic screwball comedy, but did it really have any influence on the public or future filmmakers however popular it was? Contempt doesn't even seem to have been that popular, until decades later, with filmmakers much less the public. Picnic may be an interesting look at adult romance and sexual attraction but how did it change things?

Still, I enjoyed the book for what it was, not what it promised, and I'll be checking out some of these movies.