Reviewed by SexHerald Staff
The packagers of this DVD would have you believe these six vignettes are turn-of-the century treasures - titillating evidence of porn’s timelessness. Instead, they’re silent blue movies from (I would guess) the 1940s, but they’re so scratched, bleached out and blurred by age it’s often difficult to make out what’s happening at all.
The visual integrity if these shorts is so poor, in fact, that judging them as narratives is a challenge. They represent a series of familiarly preposterous premises: in one, a woman has a tryst with a radio repairman (there were no pizza delivery men at the time, I suppose); in another, a woman catches her husband fooling around and heads off to find her own lover. Others, like a four-person group scene, have no story context. Owing, I guess, to limitations of the equipment of the time, there is little variation in camera work. Close-ups are few and far between and most scenes are nothing more than two people having sex before a stationary camera. Edits are uniformly awkward and non-continuous, thanks to either missing segments, poor technical skill or both.
The sex (or at least what little of it can be made out) is straightforward hardcore sex, with nothing more adventurous than blow-jobs. Both and the men and women acting in the shorts reveal the different tastes of the time. The women are much more full-figured, and (needless to say) all have natural breasts and untrimmed pubic hair. Most of the men appeared to be uncircumcised.
Above all, beware the packaging of this DVD. The photos on the box, which are not taken from any of the movies included, do not represent the visual quality of the films or the era in which they were produced. They’re crisp enough, in fact, that they’re not likely taken from any film, but more likely are vintage stills, as the quality of images shot on the nitrate stock used before the 1950s is usually far more degraded. The claims on the box of DVD’s “digital clarity” is a sadly ironic. One can perhaps forgive the effects of age on the image quality, but on my copy even those details added by the production company, such as the title shot at the beginning, look terrible, shot through with lines and digitized almost to the point of illegibility. As for the “enhanced sound,” the movies are silent, with an instrumental soundtrack meant to give the impression of tawdry ragtime romps.
If you’re looking for vintage porn, you’d be better off searching out some classic Victorian erotica (now widely available in mainstream bookstores), or hunting down more of the stills used for the cover of this disappointing edition. TheGoldenAgeofEroticVideo,VolumeTwo
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