The Resurrection of Eve, released in 1973, features the team from the previous year’s Behind the Green Door: Marilyn Chambers plays the title role, Eve, and the film is directed by the Mitchell Brothers. It’s a far more sophisticated and accomplished film than Green Door. It has a substantial narrative, the acting is (with a few exceptions) generally pretty good, and the sex scenes are natural and convincing.
It really is one of the gems of the so-called Golden Age of Porn, maybe the best film of that era. The only real competition would be The Opening of Misty Beethoven. If you want to be educated about porn, then it’s a film you really have to see.
The film begins with a disturbing episode in which a teenage Eve (played by Nancy Welch) is molested by a family friend. This is not presented as erotic, and Eve’s mother eventually walks in on what’s happening and stops it. But this kind of scene is always dangerous in porn, and it probably goes on longer than it needs to. Still, I do wonder whether this kind of scene could be read as challenging the viewer not to have some kind of erotic response.
The point of this scene, I take it, is to provide some kind of background explanation for why Eve is somewhat shy and reserved when it comes to sex. The rest of the film tells the story of Eve’s sexual awakening: a pretty common theme in porn, then and now.
But the movie is really about racism, and in many ways it was way ahead of its time.
Eve (played at this point by Mimi Morgan) meets and then marries Frank (Matthew Armon), a disk jockey who is clearly quite a womanizer and is pretty famous around town. Frank is extremely jealous of Eve’s friendship with a local boxer, Johnny Keyes (played by the actor of the same name), who just happens to be black. (Keyes, like many of the people in this film, also appears in Green Door.) When Eve goes to see one of Johnny’s fights while Frank is working, Frank becomes extremely angry, telling her, “Maybe you need some of that black stuff”. Eve leaves the house upset and is involved in a serious car crash, which lands her in the hospital. Eve’s facial reconstruction surgery changes her appearance dramatically: Henceforth, Eve is played by Marilyn Chambers.
Frank cajoles Eve into exploring swinging. At first, Eve is not particularly interested, but over time she becomes more confident and adventurous. But that only fuels Frank’s jealously. Johnny Keyes turns up at one of the swingers’ parties, where Eve has sex with him. Frank then suggests to Eve that they should stop swinging, but Eve’s response is: It’s over, Frank. The relationship, and the film.
The whole theme of the movie, then, is how Frank’s racially-fueled jealousy destroys his relationship with Eve. In 1973, that was pretty bold. (The film also shows gay male sex, as part of the orgies, which was also pretty bold, at a time when gay sex was illegal in many states.) The now famous film Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, one of the first to include an inter-racial couple, had only been released in 1967. And in 1968, there was a huge ruckus when Petula Clark (a white woman) merely put her hand on the arm of Harry Belafonte (a black singer and actor) on a variety special she hosted (clip here, story here).
What’s perhaps most striking is that nothing is really made of the ‘inter-racial’ aspect of Eve’s friendship with Johnny. Frank, by contrast, comes across as irrational and even evil.
That said, not everything is well here. The black nurse at the hospital (Cozy Edmundson) is very much a ‘mammy’ stereotype. Still, as I said, Eve is far more progressive than much popular media of its day. And it presents Eve as a sexual agent in her own right, without turning her into some kind of sex-fiend (the way Insatiable does).
Links: IAFD, Wikipedia, Marilyn Chambers Archive, GameLink
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