The Erotic Cinema of Radley Metzger: New Restorations

“The name Radley Metzger has long stood for a particular auteurist promise in adult film of the 1960s and 1970s: European-inflected settings, Ophulsian technique, and a canny sense of the permeable boundaries between art cinema and sex film. But that promise is shadowed by his divided career—split between 1960s softcore and 1970s hardcore, between films released under his own name and those under his nom-de-porn ‘Henry Paris,’ as well as between literary fidelity and cinephile invention. This short series groups together four new restorations that speak across these divides: two ‘Radley Metzger’ softcore (or quasi-softcore) films—Therese and Isabelle (1968) and The Image (1976)—and two ‘Henry Paris’ hardcore entries—Naked Came the Stranger (1975) and Maraschino Cherry (1978). Together, they reveal a filmmaker whose pursuit of auteurist legitimacy in adult film was enlivened by a counter-impulse toward masks and mischief.” —Rob King, series curator, film historian and author of Man of Taste: The Erotic Cinema of Radley Metzger