Soon after the release of Alex de Renzy’s Pornography in Denmark: A New Approach in 1970, a rash of other filmmakers and producers decided to get in on the act and make their own “documentaries,” then a semantic-but-legal safe haven for producing or projecting non-simulated sexual acts. One of the earliest and most notable examples of these inspired works was The History of Pornography, a production of Ed De Priest’s Canyon Films that was directed and narrated by Bob Chinn. Produced and released with lightening quickness, it proved immensely popular, and like de Renzy’s film, it was pretty decent on face value. Framed as a trip through pornography’s deep roots in every culture since time was recorded, Chinn’s film would unfold far enough that it would find itself highlighting the stag films and loops.
Whether Alex de Renzy’s A History of the Blue Movie, released soon after The History of Pornography, was meant as an earnest track of the stag film from its nascency to the contemporary, or a magnified examination of a lifted chunk of Chinn’s A History of Pornography is unknown. It’s probably a little of both as the history itself is accurate and the examples are well-presented; the film would make for a fun visual companion piece to Al Di Laura and Gerald Rabkin’s 1976 book Dirty Movies. But it also gives a TON of screen time to The Nun’s Story, one of the two stag films that are examined in the Bob Chinn picture where it ALSO burned a good twenty or so minutes as it ran in its (near) entirety.
Whatever the case may be, de Renzy’s film is a fun ride, but it’s a long one and the viewer is definitely going to feel every second of its 115 minute running time. Like Pornography in Denmark (or A History of Pornography, for that matter), A History of the Blue Movie works as a fine documentary and it is undeniably interesting. It begins with A Free Ride (c. 1915) and moves forward through the primitive stag films and directly into the penny arcade movies and striptease pictures. It certainly aims to do a full history of selling sex in motion picture form, but despite the bite-sized samplers, a little quickly becomes a lot as the film unspools a seemingly bottomless cornucopia of antiquated smut that could be considered dizzyingly academic until its dreamier, more contemporary third act.
Though A History of the Blue Movie gives an accounting of the populism of photographic pursuits, a change that went from the bespoke 35mm productions that were usually made by professionals for the idle rich or prostitution houses, to the affordable 16mm, and finally to the downright cheap 8mm, de Renzy certainly didn’t know in 1970 that porn would soon rise and fall again, reaching the heights of 35mm again before it would plummet through the bottom floor and into the basement that was video. The narration offers up an apt comparison between the early stag films and the early two-reelers as their shared aesthetic made it crystal clear that the more that porn looked like regular films, the more acceptable it would be to audiences. This would also prove to be the case a couple of years later with the porno chic phenomenon when an acceptance of porn by a much more conventional audience. But this notion might also give a clue as to why porn eventually found itself in perpetual degradation by the public at large when it stooped so low as to be captured on videotape in the 80’s.
The most notable curiosity in the collection is Smart Alec, a nice piece of homemade amateur porn from 1951 over which de Renzy wisely throws “Stuff” by Miles Davis from the Miles in the Sky album. As was noted in Chinn’s film, one of the more enduring lore’s surrounding stag films was the perpetual rumor of a hardcore skin flick the that featured a name actress on the skids, and Smart Alec which features famous stripper Candy Barr turning a paid trick when she was working as a teenage prostitute, was about as close to reality that urban legend ever got.
In its final 40 minutes, the movie eventually drifts into a more expressionistic document as the times catch up to the mid-sixties which kicks off the slow roll of nudity from tits and ass to beaver to split-beaver, moving with a quickening momentum. The film’s penultimate passage is The Masseuse, a fun piece de Renzy softcore that itself is an idea that he’d further develop in 1974’s Fantasy Girls. Much in the same way Bob Chinn incorporated Canyon Films loops into The History of Pornography, de Renzy stitches in self-produced material into the history of the subject matter.
To add to the self-reflexiveness, the film ends on a young couple who come to The Screening Room to model for one of de Renzy’s films. They meet de Renzy backstage and he whisks them through the looking glass. They appear in a short hardcore loop that runs about six minutes and almost immediately becomes part of the in-film text as the couple encounters the film of their lovemaking playing to an audience as they leave the theater.
Somewhere embedded in A History of the Blue Movie is an articulated breakdown of what makes a good stag film. Enthusiasm of performers is highly valued as is the skilled eye and technical ability of professionals behind the camera, and both of these were things that were foundational for de Renzy’s best work throughout his career. But it’s also fascinating that the movie is commenting on an adult film industry that really didn’t exist at the time. Each and every example found within A History of the Blue Movie is part of an independent movement that occurred without any real connection to anything outside its own means of production and distribution. The narrator speaks of “today’s stag films” because, in 1970, there was not a lot of hardcore pornography to which anything onscreen could be compared. And to that point, it’s easy to watch this collection of dirty movies and see the pressure building just as things were about to burst wide open.
(C) Copyright 2025, Patrick Crain
Apollo Twin 