Mona (1970)
By Richard Corliss

Imagine that there was no feature film before The Birth of a Nation in 1915; no Western before Stagecoach in 1939; no musical, on stage or screen, before 42nd Street in 1933. Imagine that D. W. Griffith, John Ford, and the Lloyd Bacon–Busby Berkeley tandem had to invent, rather than perfect, the conventions that made their movies work. That, to overstate the case just slightly, was the challenge facing the makers of Mona, the first known feature-length film that integrated explicit sex into a fictional plot.

For a few years at the end of the Vietnam era, hard-core sex movies enjoyed a vogue that attracted the rich, the hip, and the curious. In those days of porno chic, seeing a hard-core film or two was de rigeur for trendy urbanites, a rite of passage for college kids. After the 1972 comedy Deep Throat earned many millions for its gangland sponsors, porn directors got ambitious. The form soon appropriated a handful of genres — musicals (Alice in Wonderland, 1976), science fiction (Flesh Gordon, 1974), and Bergmanesque drama (The Devil in Miss Jones, 1973) — before fading out later in the decade.

And before them all was Mona, aka Mona the Virgin Nymph, produced by porn pioneer Bill Osco (scion of the nationwide drugstore chain), written by Bucky Searles (who, according to the Internet Movie Database, was credited with writing an episode of the Diahann Carroll sitcom Julia the same year), and codirected by Michael Benveniste (the dialogue scenes) and Howard Ziehm (the sexy stuff). No names appeared on the film, to protect the perps. Whatever artistic daring Mona required of its makers, the legal bravado was greater; they could all be arrested. But this scuzzy little fable, made in three days for five thousand dollars, had two unique achievements: it played in major U.S. cities without being shut down by the police; and, for the very first of its kind, the movie was pretty good.

Our rambunctious heroine (Fifi Watson) is engaged to Tim (Ric Lutze) but won't have intercourse with him, because she's promised her widowed mom (Judy Angel) that she'd be a virgin on her wedding day. Figuring that her vow leaves plenty of options for recreation, Mona agrees to fellate Tim in a public park. The activity agrees with her, and she's soon pleasuring strangers in back alleys and movie theaters. Meanwhile, Tim drops by the family manse, where Mom lures him into some vigorous sex. When Tim learns of Mona's escapades, he insists she have a simultaneous assignation with all four of her tricks, and her every orifice is plundered en masse. Returning home, Mona tearfully says, "Mother, I have something to tell you." Mom replies, "I have something to tell you, too, dear." They hug. Fade out on this sadder-but-wiser mother-daughter sisterhood.

Mona was a natural blending of two bastard genres: the soft-core sexploitation film, which was basically a low-budget fiction feature with heavy-breathing innuendo, simulated lovemaking, and the occasional exposure of skin; and the stag film, a silent, black-and-white, one- or two-reel depiction of explicit sex. Putting the two forms together — making a feature-length hard-core narrative talkie in color — was almost a historical inevitability, especially as the laws against showing eroticism in movies were gradually relaxed in the late 1960s. But Mona was the first to do it, and show It.

The movie packs plenty of weirdness, and not a few stabs at artistry, into its sixty-nine minutes. When Mona goes to the movie house, the dialogue she hears is pertinent sexual badinage from Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew. The score is an ambitious mix of jug-band tunes, sentimental ballads from the 1920s, baroque stylings on a harpsichord, and, during some of the sex scenes, a kind of aleatory, found-sound symphony in the fashion of John Cage and Walter Carlos. These aural experiments are more distracting than erotic, but they sure beat the disco music that wallpapered every porn soundtrack in later years.

There were also hints the filmmakers had read Freud, or at least Krafft-Ebing. In a black-and-white flashback early in the film, the child Mona is seen being approached sexually by her father, and she is forced into the act she will later perform with such obsessive gusto. Later, when Tim visits Mona's mom, she tells him he reminds her of her late husband and promptly seduces him. The father is a shadow presence, but his depredations haunt, and may have helped form, the sexual compulsions of both Mona and Mom. I wouldn't praise the film's psychology as highly as Kenneth Turan and Stephen Zito did in their 1974 sex-film history Sinema — they describe the relationships as "clear and credible," the motivations "fully developed," and Angel's acting "remarkable" — but it's worlds more sophisticated than an early porn feature had any need or right to be.

And the sex? It's energetic in Watson's scenes, and, when Angel and Lutze go at it, volcanically passionate. The performers weren't the most gorgeous people around, but considering that the available talent pool for a hard-core feature must have been on the shallow side, they do fine. They are the lower-rung kin to actors in off-off-Broadway theater or indie films of the '60s: what they lack in charisma they make up for in authenticity. Besides, what's the point of a porn movie that's pretty? It's got to be dirty, and make its viewers feel that way, too.

I didn't see Mona until 2005, when the release of the documentary Inside Deep Throat prodded me to do some research for a Time.com essay on porno chic. After the piece appeared, I heard from Ziehm, the codirector, who kindly entertained a few film-historical questions. The people in the movie, for example: Were they actors who agreed to be photographed having sex, or swingers who tried to act? The answer was the latter. "Rarely had anyone learned their lines before the day of the shoot," Ziehm wrote. "They were sexual people, not thespians, although some kidded themselves into believing otherwise. It would be like trying to pretend that a defensive end could play cornerback. The idea of writing a complex script for people who were going to come to the set without even looking at the script was absurd."

As for going incognito, Ziehm wrote: "I used a pseudonym for most of my work because I was busted so many times I didn't want to give them a map where to get me next.… In all, I had a court battle over my head for almost 11 years." In 1974 he, Osco, and Benveniste made the soft-core fantasy Flesh Gordon at one hundred times the budget of Mona, employing the effects expertise of Oscar nominee Jim Danforth and future Oscar winners Dennis Muren, Joe Viskocil, and Rick Baker. Ziehm said that in 1980, when porn went to video and everything became cheap again, "I dropped out. The legal and other problems just weren't worth it." A few years ago he published a collection he'd compiled, Golf in the Comic Strips, with an introduction by Bob Hope.

Today, Mona and its progeny seem as distant as Flesh Gordon's Planet Porno. Hard-core is just another corporate assembly line; it lacks not only the lovely old sense of the forbidden but also the artistic boldness, the zizz and the zazz. As for the film that started it all, Mona can be found in the catalog of Something Weird Video, the Criterion Collection of sleaze, under the title Bucky Beaver's Stags, Loops and Peeps Vol. 050. Which is probably where the Birth of a Nation of porn belongs.

Richard Corliss

From the book The B List, edited by David Sterritt and John Anderson. Excerpted by arrangement with Da Capo Press, a member of the Perseus Books Group. Copyright © 2008. Read more about The B List or buy it here.

top