For such a forgotten film in the sprawling resume of Bob Chinn, Blackmail For Daddy is one of his most curious. Piggybacked with the shoot of For Love of Money, Blackmail For Daddy is the one film of Chinn’s that’s truly dependent on another, and not in the same kind of way that would be the case with his later features that functioned as actual serial entries. The particular kind of symbiosis here is wholly unique to Blackmail For Daddy and its relationship to its sister shoot.
Opening with some hand-made credits (which includes Chinn’s short-lived “Ben Koran” pseudonym) and a roaming, close-quarters camera that recalls an early shot of Dario Argento’s Deep Red, the film quickly cuts to a close up of Lilly’s (Jane Clayton) face staring directly at the audience and telling us she “wants it now.” We then cut to Lilly and Henry (David Huber) engaged in sexual congress, but the footage we’re presented is from Huber and Clayton’s sex scene in For Love of Money. It is then revealed that Lilly is watching the footage which is being projected in her living room, and she’s getting hot and bothered in the process. When the footage between Lilly and Henry is over and the lights come on, we are introduced to Mrs. French, another woman who has been in the living room with Lilly the whole time. After they go at it, they discuss igniting the blackmail scheme to take down Mrs. French’s boss, Henry, a low-level executive who works in the Capitol Records building where he keeps a copy of Atlas Shrugged on his bookshelf and has just issued an interoffice edict that decrees that the female employees are not allowed to wear hot pants or revealing clothes unless they are sleeping with him. Lilly calls him “daddy” as she does with all of the men she traps in her web.
As stated before, Blackmail For Daddy is very interesting insofar that it’s impossible to reckon with as its own separate entity. It’s so welded to For Love of Money that it is best engaged with as a spiritual sequel than its own film. More specifically than that, it has as much in common with a Jess Franco film as Chinn’s The Devil’s Garden, though in this particular instance it’s repeating the Franco formula of making a film with a recycled, slightly inverted plot of a previous work with 85% of the same cast. This gives both For Love of Money and Blackmail For Daddy an extra dimension in area where two identical dolly shots that go in opposite directions across an office desk is the axis point of the two films. And, from that vantage point, the yin and yang nature of the two films ends up making for one satisfactory experience, if you’re so inclined to go that route.
Unfortunately, taking both For Love of Money and Blackmail For Daddy as one entity in a single sit for the vague purposes of academic/critical research and possible discussion is probably not the way either one of these films are likely to be seen. This means that Blackmail For Daddy is more or less destined to flail around in the waters and completely drown in the shadow of its more accomplished A-shoot. From that perspective, it gives the air of being a slapdash afterthought that built out of extra and reused footage where screenwriter and editor Jack Tucker’s twin vocations are far less assured than they were on For Love of Money. Even forgiving the natural wear and tear inherent in the print used for the scan that’s available, the presence of some jarring inserts and the jolting shifts from one location to another feels a bit rough around the edges and native to the production.
Aside from the fact that the film feels less than polished, the padded elements in Blackmail For Daddy REALLY feel like padding. While it’s nice to see Pharaoh Sanders showing up in the same darkroom setup as in For Love of Money, and I appreciate Rose Simpson (the white hat girl Friday in the previous film) now playing the shutterbug on the wrong side of the law, their sex scene is absolutely flat and listless. Additionally, Turk Lyon’s third-act sex scene appears out of nowhere and offers no setup as to who he or his partner are which, given the condition of the print used in the transfer, might force a contemporary audience to spend too much time wondering if this scene wasn’t spliced in from another movie (it wasn’t). And though there is a genuine mutual enthusiasm between the two, Chinn shoots it very wild which is comes across as a little retrograde in comparison to control on display in For Love of Money.
Surprisingly, one of the weakest elements of Blackmail For Daddy is Jane Clayton who is far more believable as a horny housewife who unwittingly gets caught up in a honey trap than she is here playing a diabolical schemer running a blackmail hustle. There are some attempts to give her character some interesting quirks but they never really amount to anything and I kind of feel she would have worked better in the Mrs. French role. However, that would be robbing Peter to pay Paul as the one truly great sex scene that exists in the film is between Huber and the Mrs. French character (who is having a GRAND ol’ time).
Though Blackmail For Daddy feels much more run-and-gun than For Love of Money, Chinn still manages to mix it up by using different speeds in some of the setups and, let’s face it, the triple reveal in the opening three minutes is some clever visual storytelling. Though the climax of the film is rushed and a bit confusing, Chinn adds a nice touch by ending it all with Huber flipping on a projector and the camera becoming fixated on it as if the two films are on a constant feedback loop with each other. But there are not enough isolated moments to beach on and enjoy as there were in the A-shoot.
Bob Chinn’s return to hardcore in 1974 produced some of his most sophisticated and interesting films to that point in his career with The Love Slaves being the blueprint for the more fully-formed narrative hardcore features that would follow. The kind of shoots that produced movies like For Love of Money and Blackmail For Daddy were becoming more and more scarce and, after these two, Chinn mostly avoided them until the industry began to wane and video began to creep into the picture. As it stands, Blackmail For Daddy isn’t a representative example of Chinn’s best work but it is a perfect historical document of what a hastily sketched B-side shoot looked like. And, if you look at the both of the films with a certain set of eyes, it’s a sometimes-successful experiment in three-dimensional sculpture through celluloid. I mean, it ain’t always pretty, but it’s interesting.
(C) Copyright 2023, Patrick Crain
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