If 1980 started out ominously for Bob Chinn with the troubled stateside portion of the Prisoner of Paradise shoot, an experience that more or less ensured that Chinn was all done with John Holmes, things didn’t get much better for him as the year rolled along. For then there was Sadie, a whole other headache of a production for Chinn which, this time, was all about money or, as was actually the case, the lack of it.
While videotape loomed dark on the horizon, the adult film industry was riding pretty high in terms of the kind of budgets they were dealing with and in the scope of the productions themselves. Sadie, a hardcore adaptation of W. Somerset Maugham’s “Rain,” itself a piece of material that had made its way to the big screen no less than four times prior, was to be such a project; a lavish and epic South Seas period piece that had a monster, 200-plus page screenplay, written by Don Greer, as its foundation.
Set in Borneo in 1971 Sadie concerns itself with conservative U.S. Senator Chester A. Daniels (Jospeh Darling) who is on a fact-finding mission regarding the abuse of drugs among American G.I.’s during the Vietnam War. He arrives on a steamer ship with with wife (Debbie Chinn, credited as Deborah Sullivan) and daughter, Honore (Diana Holt), in tow, His mission and uptight character immediately collides with the concurrent arrival of Sadie (Chris Cassidy), a prostitute who has been banished from Saigon and is en route to Jakarta where she is going to take straight work as a dancer. During her time in Borneo, she will share the lodgings with the senator and his family at a dockside trading post run by Doc (Elmo Lavino, credited as John Hires) and his wife, Fatimah (Cantara Christopher).
Sadie is an ambitious and gorgeously-mounted project by Chinn that really reaches for the stars in terms of its balance of serious-minded drama and hardcore adult film. While the big screen “movieness” is deep-rooted in all of his 35mm features, it is most certainly true of Chinn’s films set in tropical locales where he would really allow himself and his crew to go nuts on the set detail to build a convincingly humid, slow roiling atmosphere that was a true feast for the eyes, and one that paired nicely with an umbrella cocktail. Though set during the Vietnam war, Sadie can’t help but feel like a spiritual successor to Chinn’s atmospheric, WWII masterpiece, Tropic of Desire, another film set in likewise steamy climes that was released the previous year.
Josh Koral and Jim Malibu’s sets make up a huge piece of the cinematic puzzle that give modern audiences a sense of what Chinn was aiming for. The wire rack full of paperbacks and magazines are great touches along with the period board games and bric-a-brac that decorate the main room of the trading post. The Half Moon interior, with its lattice-lined cutout windows and blue hues, is spectacularly moody and sumptuous. Curly Eason and Mike Cristopher’s lighting, either while subtly being brought down as a tropical storm is rolling in or projecting the mournful sensuality of the brothel, is superb. Cinematographer Ken Gibb captures everything with great fluidity as Chinn gets some high-angle dollies that are both ambitious and keep the action on the screen moving along and ensuring the piece doesn’t turn into a filmed play shot from the center seat in the third row.
Though it was a little rag-tag and small, the cast Chinn assembled for Sadie is a true winner, too. Cris Cassidy, so great in Chinn’s Candy Stripers, Lipps and McCain, and The China Cat, is mostly excellent in the difficult, multifaceted titular role. She may struggle a bit with some of the third act pathos but there are times where she really cooks, especially when she’s getting steamed at the pious bloviating of veteran stage actor Jospeh Darling. And though their chemistry is a little suspect, Jerome Deeds does a fine job as Jock, Sadie’s daring-do love interest. Doing clutch work, Debbie Chinn jumped into the production and is actually pretty excellent, bringing a believable prim edge to her role as the senator’s wife who, ultimately, ends up being much more three-dimensional and sympathetic than the character might have been in less capable hands. Cantata Christopher gives the film a fun flourish as Fatima, Doc’s forever busy wife who seems to do a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to running the place and whips in and out of her scenes like a cyclone draped in colorful wraps; Gary Eberhart, a really fine second banana performer in adult films, provides the chops for an engaging coming of age subplot with Diana Holt who, while a little shaky, is pretty radiant and conveys the wide-eyed innocence that role demands; and the always fabulous Elmo Lavino is 100% cool business as Doc, the proprietor of the trading post who walks a fine line between taking care of his guests and keeping the local authorities both happy and out of his business. And, as a complete side note, you can also count me as a fan of Gary Eberhart’s title song and his on-screen country pickin’ and singin’.
The sex scenes in Sadie are beautifully handled and really evoke a lustful world in an unbearable swelter. The scene between Billy Dee’s harem guard and diminutive island-girl, Bella (Lisa Loring), with Diana Holt surreptitiously watching while feigning sleep, is pretty joyous. Later, Eberhart shares a sweet pairing with Holt in the same location that comes off like the stolen moment between the two that it is between their characters. While the final orgy sequence with the Rajah and his harem is both confusing and superfluous in the film’s available cut, it’s a well-done piece of costumed fantasy and it gets a pass even though Rick Ardon (credited as Richard Slade) is a poor replacement for the mighty Herschel Savage who had initially been cast as the Rajah but was replaced when the film ran into its production troubles.
Thematically, Sadie couldn’t have come at a better time than it did. In retrospect, Chinn gets a LOT of benefit out of the film’s debate given the encroachment of the moral majority in America at the time of its production. Both Senator Daniels (who looks like TBN’s Paul Crouch by way of Hooverville) and his wife are the embodiment of the worst aspects of the hypocritical Reagan Era, then on the cusp of gaining a vice-grip on American politics that continues to this day. Likewise, the character of Sadie gets used by almost everyone in the film but only the “undesirables” are the ones who truly care for her and create the network for her escape to happiness.
While the aforementioned phone-book of a screenplay was the foundation of the film, at the center of the hurricane that was the film’s production woes was Chinn’s friend and producer Larry Price, who is cast in the picture as Harry McHenry, Sadie’s slippery, fast-talking manager. Looking like a leisure suited lie waiting to happen, his appearance in his own film turned out to be very fortuitous because Price has a likable, motor-mouthed energy that makes it so very easy to imagine the exact verbal cadence and diction he used to relentlessly harangue and wear Chinn down into making the movie in the first place. It’s also not tough to imagine the frustration Chinn and company had as Price’s high promise turned into a scant delivery with production shutting down with only 2/3rd of the picture complete while almost concurrently finding themselves locked out of their hotel due to Price’s bounced check. Months went by before production company Mitam came in and put up the completion funds which allowed Chinn to carry the picture over the finish line. Regardless of whether he was a nice guy besotted by horrible circumstances, a smooth-smoothie quick-buck champion who was just a little delusional (or a little of both) there is no way audiences who see Larry Price in Sadie and learn about its myriad issues would say anything other than “Ah… that makes sense.”
Because what remains of Sadie is a pretty great film, it’s easy to see that had Chinn’s wishes been followed, we could enjoy a probably even greater movie today. Despite his very reasonable doubts about the budget vs. time to complete the film properly, Chinn shot the film as written and ended up with a first cut that ran around three and a half hours. He immediately cut it down to 118 minutes, still a massive running time for an adult film; and, despite his own reservations about it, he signed off on this cut for distribution. But at some point between Chinn turning the film in and its release, another 25 minutes were excised by the producer and it was released to theaters with a running time of 94 minutes. Currently, the only commercially available version of the film is a 74 minute cut that was pieced together from random surviving prints, so the film’s pace and narrative jumps are most definitely due to the fact that not only are there there an entire forty five minutes that are gone but, at the very least, twenty of those minutes were somewhere in the theatrical version. And without a complete version of that theatrical release with which to make a comparison, it’s difficult to know how many of the issues with the story are due to material deterioration over the past few decades or due to the deep cuts made by the producers in 1980.
So Sadie is a film that can really only be judged on what’s there instead of flaming it over what’s missing, an easy enough task given that’s the way modern audiences have had to engage with many great films that were the victims of editing beyond their director’s control. Can we really blame the director for any narrative lapses in the film when we know, in each case, there was crucial bridge material and connective tissue that was deemed inconsequential by people whose only concern was getting it shaved down to a running time so more showings could occur in a day?
At its current 74 minute running time, there is but 62% of what Chinn felt he could live with after the halted production forced him to make further compromises with the material. It’s still a feature, though one fed through a Reader’s Digest condenser machine. But even with the holes in the plot and the shifts in pace that can’t really be helped, what remains of Sadie is a pretty dazzling piece of filmmaking by all involved.
(C) Copyright 2023, Patrick Crain
Apollo Twin 