THE ALL-AMERICAN GIRL (1972)

Touched with a unique magic that makes every single second count, The All-American Girl, writer and director Mark Haggard’s 1972 follow-up to the previous year’s The Love Garden, is easily the filmmaker’s high-water mark and very well be the best project executive producer Bob Chinn was involved with (where he wasn’t the director himself, naturally). A carefree drift through a summer vacation in which a nubile young woman tastes from a sampler plate of erotic encounters, The All-American Girl is a clever and effective piece of softcore that is completely Hall of Fame worthy. In fact, it’s so good, an entire wing of that Hall of Fame should be named after it.

Debbie Collins (Peggy Church) finishes out the last day of her junior year but is a bit on the melancholy side as she’s having trouble with her boyfriend, Bobbie (Alan Burton), who is about to spend the entire summer in Guatemala with the Peace Corps. What a bummer. She wants to go all the way with him but won’t go all the way with him. She will, however, take everything to the brink of consummation but in complete indifference to the spirit of chastity. “It’s a strange code, I guess. But it’s my code,” she writes in her diary. Throughout the summer, Debbie will become intertwined with each member of the Goodman family who lives across the hall, much like a miniature Teorema set within the stucco walls of a very El Lay apartment complex. Hired to look in on 14 year-old Johnny (Paul Berry), Debbie also finds a way to entertain Johnny’s mother, Grace (Tracy Rogers), and father, Mark (Andy Mitchell), both of whom are having sexual issues with each other. This playground will provide Debbie with one hell of a summer vacation where no refunds will be asked nor will they be necessary.

With its simple setup, The All-American Girl emerges as one of the best examples of the hoary but reliable tale in which a young woman (or man) slowly strolls through various scenarios that highlight and play out their own sexual blossoming. Haggard liked to keep his smut tasteful and classy and by making the film for the softcore market, Debbie’s initial “everything but” mantra is simpatico with the boundaries of the subgenre. The film finds just the right combination of humor and heat as Debbie’s sexual encounters all come with a preamble about her limits (making the “All-American” piece of the title a smart backhand against a puritanical culture) and each allows her to explore without penetration or being fully unclothed, giving her some clever work-arounds to some pretty dirty material.

All of the performances in The All-American Girl are great, but, let’s be honest, the film is essentially carried on the shoulders of Peggy Church who delivers an absolutely knockout turn. In each scene, she finds the right frequency that is somewhere between awkward sincerity and winking camp. The way she calls everyone “honey” and “sweetie” makes her sound like she’s working the register in a southeastern Oklahoma liquor store and she stone-face delivers lines like “this is my vagina; this is where you put your penis to make it stop hurting” and “just do what Debbie wants and says and we’ll both have fun” with a knowing relish. It’s simply one hell of an intuitive performance that is completely unexpected.

As was the case in The Love Garden, Douglas Knapp’s photography brings a lot to the table as everything is exquisitely lit and framed. With his ability to work in close, dark interiors or allowing for the orange glow of California sunshine to creep through the window during a masturbation scene, Knapp’s work is confident and steady throughout. It’s easy to see why he was retained by John Carpenter to shoot Assault on Precinct 13 in 1976 after lensing Dark Star, the filmmaker’s debt film/college project that saw a theatrical release in 1974. Another delightful touch is the music by Don Dunn, a professional musician/songwriter who wrote “Hitchcock Railway” and Diana Ross’s “Baby, It’s Me”. Dunn’s instrumental passages go well during the extended softcore moments and his title track is definitely an ear worm that’ll get stuck in one’s head for a solid day or so.

In the end, The All-American Girl proved to be such a good film that it got into a minor, secretive bidding war between Nancy Lindsay, whose Continental Film Corporation the film was initially produced for, and Manny Conde, Chinn’s producer-friend whose post-production facilities Chinn frequently used. Out of Conde’s desperation for a guaranteed Pussycat Theater booking, Chinn threw his buddy a bone and Conde won out but only after Chinn promised Lindsay a controversial, incest-leaning barn-burner called Brother and Sister which would prove to be the sole film directed by Roland Miller, Chinn’s producing partner on both The Love Garden and The All-American Girl.

It’s a genuine shame that Mark Haggard didn’t have a longer carer behind the camera. After helming The First Nudie Musical and The All-American Woman in 1976, he more or less hung it up for other endeavors. But with The All-American Girl and The Love Garden, Haggard crafted two solid pieces of erotica that were serious-minded without being somber and light without being bubble-headed; true rarities of which everyone involved should be very, very proud and take a thousand bows.

(C) Copyright 2023, Patrick Crain