Product Details

• Actors: Suzan Thomas, Betty Whitman, Rene Howard, Barbara Lance, Jean Muniz
• Directors: Joseph W. Sarno
• Writers: Joseph W. Sarno
• Producers: David C. Stone, Donald Havens, J. Arthur Elliot
• Format: Black & White, Closed-captioned, Dolby, DVD, Full Screen, NTSC
• Language: English (Dolby Digital 1.0)
• Region: Region 1 (U.S. and Canada only. Read more about DVD formats.)
  
• Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1
• Number of discs: 1
• Rating: Unrated
• Studio: Image Entertainment
• DVD Release Date: February 21, 2006
• Run Time: 158 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• ASIN: B000BZN1MS
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #123,966 in Movies & TV (See Bestsellers in Movies & TV)
• For more information about "The Love Merchant/The Layout" visit the Internet Movie Database (IMDb)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

I want you to do wild things to me! Unbelievable wild things! Warhol star Louis Waldon (Lonesome Cowboys) is The Love Merchant, a biker named Click Boyd who's the personal procurer of willing women for "millionaire bum" Kendall Harvey III: "With my contacts, I could feed you broads for breakfast, lunch, and dinner!" And while Click has no trouble finding gals eager to trade sex for cash, Kendall has his sights set on Peggy Johns. Trouble is, Peggy is not only "square" but happily married. But when her husband's business suddenly goes bust, Kendall offers to help him out IF she will be his bedmate for 48 hours. This sexploitation version of Indecent Proposal -- though made 27 years earlier! -- is another smart skinflick from the sublime Joe Sarno that also features appearances by nudie-faves June Roberts and Cleo Nova!

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3.0 out of 5 stars Sarno oddities unearthed, but probably the wrong Sarno oddities., July 20, 2007

By	AllOverWith "cannes2000" (L.A.) - See all my reviews

Out of all the Something Weird auteurs, Joe Sarno is the one who most deserves to be airlifted out of obscurity and given what used to be called the Criterion treatment, before that company devoted itself exclusively to the most boring movies on earth. After you see Sin in the Suburbs, you will immediately want more. Well, this disc for me was both more... And less.

The first movie is The Layout, filmed in Florida, far from Sarno's usual haunts. The quality of acting is abysmal, a steep drop from the shaky but insightful performances Sarno usually gets. The dialogue is inaudible, the plot incoherent. The one male in the cast is Chuck Traynor, real-life Svengali behind porn starlets Linda Lovelace AND Marilyn Chambers, but whatever dubious charms he possessed, which I have to suspect are below the belt area, are drastically absent from the mumbling nonentity onscreen ( isn't that always the way? ). But mostly the film concentrates on a quintet of women, none of whom except Pam remains in my memory a couple weeks after I saw this. Pam is what the Frenchies call a "sainte-nitouche" ( Saint Touch-me-Not ) and doesn't want to partake in the reindeer games of her overly lascivious comrades, which makes her randy and debased niece Ellen desperate to bring the goody-two-shoes down.

This threadbare plot culminates in an extended girl-on-girl orgy involving a giant vibrator, at which point any boredom you may have once suffered is forgotten. Now, Sarno is one of the few directors who can graphically depict smut and usually make his moral message come through loud and clear. But do you hear that scraping sound? That's the gates of heaven closing on Sarno for filming this scene and me for watching it, because there's nothing at all redeeming to see here! Yet it is the main reason to buy this DVD.

Sex scenes do nothing for me as a rule, but this almost took me out of my body -- Sarno actually succeeds in translating the ebb, flow and release of the female orgasm into film syntax, kind of like D.H. Lawrence gets it into prose rhythm. The editing is so masterful that it actually made me think of Triumph of the Will, the way its crowds gather, scatter, and reform, culminating in the "orgasm" of Hitler, and if you want to further contemplate the connection between fascism and female sexuality you can. But in the meantime keep this film away from your girlfriend, or she will switch teams. I'm not kidding. I'd almost say that watching this scene, for men, is the closest they'll get to understanding the female orgasm, how much more powerful it is than ours, and why the desperate search for it leads so many astray. There, there's your moral purpose. Happy?

The other film on this disc is called The Love Merchant, about a girl who wants to help her husband out of debt by sleeping with a rich creep. If the story sounds familiar, that's because it was eventually remade as Indecent Proposal. Sarno is back to his craftsmanly ways in this film, but for me it just didn't gel. Others might be different. Sarno often takes unprofessional actors and sees something in them, some buried need for expression, that he's able to draw out. But the hammy Judson Todd, in the Redford role of the rich roue ( try saying that five times fast ) comes off like a local stage star who knows that Peoria has never seen a finer performer. I just didn't buy him as the dissolute rake -- it takes more than cocking your left eyebrow to make a Jack Nicholson.

You'll have to fill most of the dead spaces in the dialogue contemplating the character of Peg. Lorraine Claire plays the role completely poker-faced, so that you never know if she's sacrificing herself for her husband or is secretly kinky and looking for a little action outside the marriage. I'll give Sarno credit here -- he understands the disturbing paradox of his now-famous story, where a woman is in the strange position of being the virgin and the whore all at the same moment. Adrian Lyne in his usual half-hearted fashion completely missed the point when he had Demi Moore fall in desexualized, ethereal love with Redford. Maybe they should do this one a third time?