A successful sound mixer in feature films got his start working on GIMME SHELTER and then took a flyer at porn with this extremely phony look at sex workers. It's a chance to see some familiar porn actresses play "let's pretend".
Like the white coaters that were so popular for a brief time 40 years ago, the gimmick is to fool the audience. I doubt if PP USA pulled the wool over many eyes at Adult Cinemas in 1971, but it's fairly ridiculous with hindsight.
Director Susumu Tokunow also appears on camera, as the interviewer holding the mic in front of the face of several beautiful porn girls, as well as conducting the mandatory mindless "man on the street" q&a's.
First segment is a portrait of classy call girl Jo Ann, well played by the incredibly beautiful Barbara Mills. After real-life b&w photos of Barbara growing up, we see her in the bathtub (full-frontal nudity) dispensing words of wisdom about the life of a hooker.
She is such a classy woman and her matter-of-fact patter so patently fake I wondered how the film could persevere. She services (softcore style) two old and ugly customers, supposedly secretly viewed through a 2-way mirror setup.
I've never understood the porn principle that casting yucky looking guys will (1) not intimidate the viewer, and (2) supposedly increase the verisimilitude of the action. History has proved me right; for every doltish pornographer (like Tokunow here) going this route, there have been thousands of more successful mavens who just hire studs with big dicks. The so-called "identification" factor is bogus.
Marilyn is an aging prostitute from Philly, also given the childhood & adolescence photo intro, well-played by future porn director Ann Perry, who started her career acting in nudies including Francis Coppola's very first assignment as director (doing paste-up scenes).
This attractive MILF injects a note of pathos into the proceedings, but we get to watch sleaze as a couple of sailors do a double penetration routine on her, rendered laughable by the softcore format. Her next trick completely wastes the talents of porn stalwart Norman Fields, who whips her and forces her to give head, also cheatingly off-screen.
Donna is a print and nudie film star, very well cast in the person of ultra-built Malta. This is perhaps the best segment in that it comes closest to honesty, because Malta is in fact pretty much what she pretends to be. Tokunow shamelessly shows a long trailer for BANG BANG as an example of recent Adult Movies, and it turns out to be a fiction film, the only other movie he ever directed.
A junkie/hooker named Lauren wraps up the film, played by an unknown actress. This cynical segment brings us to real porn, as she does a three-way lesbian trick featuring a "what-was-that?" transsexual, in which plenty of sucking and masturbation with dildos crosses the line into hardcore territory. I don't think Ken Burns would approve.
In sum, this is just another example of how the industry wasted the talents of Barbara Mills/Barbara Caron, who racked up quite a few credits but never was cast in a good film.
