After wandering in the wilderness of softcore and general release pictures for a couple of years, west coast filmmaker Bob Chinn was given the opportunity to shoot a hardcore feature in San Francisco, which, in then-1974, was a geographic location that had been untouched by Chinn’s own productions but much more lax in enforcement of laws that made shooting hardcore pornography in L.A. a massive risk and a potential legal headache. Curious to see what all the hubbub was about and a desperate need to create some product for the theaters as the softcore market was quickly cratering due to the wild, nationwide success of 1972’s Deep Throat, Chinn took the job (under the incredibly awesome pseudonym of Sparky Shayne) and traversed northward for work on the kind of a one-day wonder as he had churned out a few years prior.
In The Married Woman (retitled My Wife, the Hooker when re-released in 1977), all of the excitement has gone from Stephanie (Justina Lynne) and Al (Turk Lyon) five-year marriage with Stephanie’s libido having gotten more active while Al’s has gradually decreased. Out of frustration and a need to take charge of her life, Stephanie visits a house of prostitution to fulfill a fantasy of turning tricks while Al has his way with Ginger (Spring Finley), a randy neighbor.
Not to discount any of the hardcore films Chinn that came before but The Married Woman is a much bolder and unbridled piece of work that’s similar to watching a hippie chick break free of her fundamentalist parents and run naked through the streets of San Francisco with reckless abandon. The bones of its story are hung with a free jazz approach to sexual performance and there is a high level of control here that was absent in Chinn’s previous run-and-gun productions.
In The Married Woman, there is a real forethought to the compositions of which there are multiple. All of the material is well-covered and well-planned with some setups capturing the action in slow motion, an early stylistic flourish for Chinn that would also find its way into his next four films. Justina Lynne riding Tyler Horn at 48 fps is the stuff dreams are made of and the pop shots prove to be incredibly effective when Chinn is lucky enough to capture those that have some velocity and trajectory behind them as is the case when Lyon shoots a load that goes almost completely into the next condo at the conclusion of his encounter with Toni Scott (though her positioning accentuates it, he literally clears the distance of both her entire torso and head). Whether the choice to employ slow motion was to pad time or for cinematic effect, it definitely pays off.
Though headstrong female characters were a centerpiece to Chinn’s career in film as both director and producer, it’s an incredibly pronounced trait here. If Mark Haggard’s The All American Girl, on which Chinn served as executive producer, was a tongue-in-cheek masterpiece of female sexual awakening, The Married Woman is its spiritual sequel that asks the question “What happens after the thrill of discovery gives way to the nadir of mechanical routine?” The Married Woman decidedly takes Stephanie’s point of view with its use of a female narrator and it also creates a loose femme ensemble piece with boorish, clueless Al, derided by Ginger and then Stephanie for not having a job, as the soft chump centerpiece of the story.
In showing audiences Stephanie taking serious charge of her life, Chinn gets to also get inside the character by jazzing up Stephanie’s trepidatious entrance into the brothel with some cinematic pizazz as her nervous finger reaches out to buzz the door that’s immediately followed by a reverse handheld shot as she enters through the filigreed gate and towards the stairway. It’s a lightly anxious and thrilling piece of micro filmmaking that could as easily fit in a horror film where it would elicit a completely different base response. But ensconced in a porn film, it kindles an illicit excitement that’s front-loaded with the narrator solemnly intoning, “When Stephanie steps into this house, she will enter into a totally different world.”
Though the dialogue retained the same kind of loosey-goosey, improvised style most hardcore sex films always had up to then, it is much better when attached to the more prepared approach in The Married Woman. The performances remain relaxed and naturalistic with Turk Lyon and Tyler Horn, playing a religiously conflicted insurance agent, giving credible and humorous support. And speaking of Lyon, if Chinn was able to get this much out of him in twelve hours, color me impressed. The man simply puts in the work in this picture.
But the real star of the show is Justina Lynne who was a true find and adult cinema lost a promising talent when she dropped out of the business after only making a handful of films. The Married Woman, one of her only starring turns, is helped along considerably by her abilities as a screen presence and sex performer and this film is one hell of a showcase for her. Lynne has a natural awkwardness that is made even more enticing with her down-to-earth and familiar allure, reminding you of somebody you once knew but also being completely unable to place with any certainty. Maybe so-and-so’s cousin? Someone like that.
The musical choices Chinn snagged for The Married Woman are effectively spotted. Stephanie’s entrance into the house of prostitution snips a bit of The Rolling Stones’s “Let’s Sing This All Together” and the film ends on an electrifying use of Ry Cooder and Jack Nitzsche’s “Natural Magic” from the Performance soundtrack, illustrating that Ry Cooder can be fastened to anything, even a slow motion golden shower moment, and elevate it to awesome (even if poor Justina Lynne is left a freezing, chattering mess as the film begins to face out). In between we have a jazzy stack of tunes by Bobby Hutchinson, The Sunsets, the Blues Train, and the Crusaders that give the film a really breezy, sensuous tone.
The Married Woman slow walks through the five gears of straight sex with a nice lesbian garnish on the side for good measure and it is as much a fun pictorial about expanding one’s sexual horizons as it is a narrative feature. While the cross cutting between early scenarios involving Stephanie and Al may have a crudity as if they they were edited after the soundtracks had already been married to the picture, that’s easily forgiven as The Married Woman’s chief assignment is to deliver well-captured sex performed enthusiastically with little fuss and even less muss. And deliver the goods it most definitely does. The film is simply a full-color blowout of the kind of stuff Chinn used to make for $750 a pop, but given a bit more money, a more assured sense of direction, and less heat to worry about, the belt expanding exhalation is palpable and the results are positively delightful and that much more impressive.
(C) Copyright 2023, Patrick Crain
Apollo Twin 