If your familiarity with oral sex is not as deep as you'd like it to be, tomorrow night you can get a hardcore crash course in 86 minutes, loaded with visual bonbons to suck on for thought long after finishing. By my count, there are 39 unsimulated oral acts in Radley Metzger's The Opening of Misty Beethoven (1976), including fellatio, cunnilingus, and two coyly implied rim jobs. Shot in the middle of the Golden Age of Porn (1969-1984), when American adult films were successfully inserting explicit sex into mainstream-style cinema, Misty Beethoven borrows its plot from George Bernard Shaw's 1913 play Pygmalion, which later influenced My Fair Lady (1964). In Metzger's version, the sexologist Seymour Love (Jamie Gillis) meets the sexually narrow-minded prostitute Misty Beethoven (Constance Money) and offers to transform her from "the most unexciting thing God ever created" into the finest instrument of pleasure, capable of seducing anyone; he intends to publish the results as a research book. Misty, who wants to do more than charge $5 for hand jobs in a porno theater in Paris, takes Seymour up on his offer. In science, as in sex, you don't know until you try.
When we first meet Misty, she's a bold self-employed woman with her own business and rules of service: "I do a straight fuck. I don't take it in the mouth. I don't take it in the ass. And I don't take it in the bed." She's confident in her bright make-up and curly brunette wig, picking up men in the streets where she knows the territory and the routine. But after agreeing to be part of Seymour's research, she follows him with her natural blonde hair, unmade face, and a shy demeanor. She is hesitant and clumsy during her sexual lessons with the frustrated doubts of any bildungsroman character. By taking Misty out of her comfort zone, Seymour's didactic exposure therapy introduces her to what she had never been willing to do before, but in the safety of a space where she can fail without consequence or judgement. She is also encouraged by Seymour and his co-researcher, Geraldine Rich (Jacqueline Beudant), to try and try again. From fellating dildos, in all shapes and sizes of male genitalia (marked to track how much she can take in), to working simultaneous oral-and-hand coordination on Seymour's deadpan-yet-willing assistants, Misty's education has her practicing skills, techniques, and dilating orifices methodically without any emotional hindrances, embarrassment, or shame. Along the way, her progress is tested with espionage-style seductions in the real world, plotted by Seymour and Geraldine so that she can be named the Golden Rod Girl by the adult magazine publisher Lawrence Layman. For Seymour, this crowning achievement would mark the success of his experiment.
Caught up in stroking his own ego for having conquered Misty's tight view of how to please, Seymour eventually repulses Misty for treating her as a personal victory he boasts and jokes about to anyone who will listen. She had put her trust in him for his consistent attention and support of her, only to be proven as a tool for his own means, another triumph for him to add to his "research" and reputation. As with the countless guys who think their worth as a Man is increased by the number of sexual partners they've had, Seymour's work with Misty reduces her from being a sexual woman to the only thing he needs from their time together: a story.
Ultimately, Misty Beethoven starts and finishes with our protagonist making her own rules and decisions. She was neither tricked nor bribed into following Seymour, but went of her own volition—and she surpassed everyone's expectations, including her own. We don't get an origin story or explanation as to why she makes the choices she does, but her logic isn't our primary concern; it's that she has a choice at all, and that she follows her desire to get what she wants, coming out on top again and again.
The Opening of Misty Beethoven screens tomorrow, March 25, at Light Industry. It will be introduced by Rob King, author of the new book Man of Taste: The Erotic Cinema of Radley Metzger.
