Felicity (1979)

I was baffled, while watching Lamond’s ABC of L&S, by the thought of who was actually watching films like that back in the day, and I find myself similarly puzzled by Felicity. For one thing, I can’t work out if Glory Annen’s a poor actress or if she’s just been poorly served by the script and/or dubbing (and if this is true of the rest of the cast), but that’s not all; I’m just puzzled by who was watching this back then. I think I’m just confused by the idea of the theatrical sex film, soft or hard, and the thought that people would actually congregate in large groups to watch them… and Lamond was making his films for drive-ins, so people were congregating not only in groups but in the open air in their cars. I don’t get it. I know home video wasn’t really an option here in 1979, but even so. Anyway—Lamond himself had gone up in the world a bit by the time of his first actual fiction feature (Australia After Dark‘s “satanists” notwithstanding), and in the interests of fairness it must be said it looks really good; Lamond apparently decided to make a film in Hong Kong while on holiday there or something, and the film does a nice job with that setting, the whole thing really does look lovely on the digital disc. Beyond that… um… well, I suppose it’s kind of interesting that a girl from a rural Catholic girls school in 1979 would’ve not only heard of The Story of O but actually had access to it (the Corgi film tie-in paperback)… I’m sorry, I know it’s meant to be fantasy to some extent, but that’s stretching it a bit for me. I don’t know, maybe I should’ve watched it with the sound turned off and just looked at it or something.