American Nudes 1, 2 and 3 Review

American Nudes

Studio: Cult Epics

Stars: No credits

Running time: 60 min each disc

Most people look at Deep Throat (1972) as the point when porn made the jump into something resembling the mainstream. Prior to that, porn was seriously underground: featured in seedy theaters in bad parts of town, or advertised discreetly in the back pages of men's interest magazines, or gotten from a friend from sources unknown for bachelor parties.

This 3-DVD set collects and samples a variety of items from the 1940s through the 1960s; each DVD gets a decade, and each is about an hour long. The shorts really are short: the 1940s DVD features 17 titles, the others each have 10.

There are no stars here, unless you're a serious porn historian and actually recognize someone. Most appear to be strippers and nude models from the era.

From an erotic standpoint, it's definitely lacking. Unless vintage porn really appeals to you on some level, there's little here that's more than titillating (though the 1960s does have some hardcore). It's mainly just interesting if you're a porn afficianado, seeing what our fathers and grandfathers had to make due with, and how far we've come. Likely the 40s and 50s DVDs are best played at parties when everyone's a bit boozed up; it would be hilarious.

The 40s DVD is all "special interest" stuff from the period, the sort of thing that largely could have played in art theaters: stripper performances, nudists, and that sort of thing. Some of the shorts would pass as video centerfolds, as the girls mostly just strike different poses for the camera. None of this is hardcore, and very little softcore.

The 50s DVD gets away from "nudist" fluff and tends toward video-centerfolds; most look like Playboy pictorials brought to life, including the fact that you can rarely see pubic hair.

The 60s DVD introduces color (though the quality is still low) and push the boundaries. The first item is a softcore girl-girl, again just a video centerfold with lots of posing. There rest of the disc is hardcore clips, including two girl lesbian, three-girl lesbian, straight sex, and a couple MFF threesomes. It concludes with three old B&W hardcore lupes, one so old that it has subtitles.

As I said, it's less erotic than interesting, though there are times I thought it strokeworthy. Some of the women in here definitely look they belong in those bygone eras, but some (like the lady gardener on the 40s disc) would probably be stars today and look surprisingly modern. Another surprise to me was how much the 60s hardcore videos look like stuff I'd see today, in terms of content and camera work and editing.

Special Features: None, but really—how much more could you expect?

Production values: It's tough to evaluate the video since the masters are not in great shape; these things usually don't get AFI grants for film preservation, and the result is prints which are either very muddy or very contrasty, and scratched beyond belief, and in general just awful looking. But after the initial surprise, the films "improve" and a lot of the defects are ignored. The films look worse as single stills than they do when the film is running, and except where the films are so bad they're nearly unwatchable (like a couple of the B&W loops on the 60s disc), the quality problems diminish enough not to be distracting.

There is no original audio; instead there's soundtrack of somewhat-period music for each. Mostly the music is swing (40s) and jazz (50s and 60s). The audio quality is very bright and clean, but I found it distracting because it doesn't match the film quality. I wondered if an LP rip, complete with dust and pops and scratches, might have been a better fit. And because I grew up in the pre-VCR era, my mind "missed" the soft clatter of the film projector, which is how these videos would have been screened.

The DVDs are spartan but not cheap looking. Each title has a chapter and there's a menu, but they're not identified, so you either have to pick through it to find a particular film or memorize the order. There are no chapter stops in-between.

Final verdict: I bought this out of curiosity and an interest in the subject, rather than as a stroke film. The video quality was worse than I'd thought, the sound was better, but overall I was pleasantly surprised at the content. Some of the performers were beautiful and I wish they were working today, and a few of the films (mostly on the 60s disc) were more erotic than quaint. Still, I think this is best as a party video, when everyone's drunk enough to laugh at naked women weeding a garden, or men swimming with mermaids in a hotel pool, or guys with big moustaches licking out a girl with a very full bush. As a 3-disc collection, there ought to be something here to please.