Secondhand Smut #2: March & April 2014

Welcome back to this bi-monthly (and arguably bi-sexual) column about my second-hand smut findings (both films and literature). I review treasures (or trash, depending on how you look at it) and I provide you with high resolution scans of their covers. The reviews are kept short in order to have as many as possible each time.

I hope you enjoy as much as I do!

D.O.A. (1950)

A man [Edmond O'Brien from 1984 (1956)] is walking at a police station, during the fabulous credit sequence. He finds the captain and says that he has been murdered. The rest of the movie is a series of flashbacks that will let us know how did this happen. The protagonist was poisoned while he was partying, but even though we know he’s about to die (the doctors say he could live up to two weeks at the most) the film [directed by Rudolph Maté, cinematographer of La passion de Jeanne d'Arc (1928)] is still very interesting, because everybody in it seems to know more than he or she would like to admit (it is sort of an interesting whodunit). The story is very clever and I demand a remake.

This PAL DVD was released here through a newspaper and I bought it at a secondhand store for 1 euro, so I wasn’t expecting much, but still the copy’s quality was shit. Is it me or every low budget black & white flick from this era lacks proper restoration?

S&M and the Lesbian (paperback, 1979)

Although the first page informs us that “All characters in this book are fictional…” the whole thing is presented as a collection of short interviews with lesbians who are sadists, masochists or both (depending on their mood). The introduction tells us that the women’s liberation movement is the main reason behind the evolution of such sexual practices. Basically the whole book seems to have been written by a sleazy puritan, and the most hilarious moment comes when a father is forcing his daughter to suck him whilst saying “It is the sprawling capitalistic system which is corrupt. That’s why communism will one day triumph”. You can’t make things like this up!

Submissives: Those Who Serve Mistresses (paperback, 1982)

The introduction informs us that women are submissive beings that exist only to obey. The rest of the book is not much different. It is a collection of (four) stories (fictional of course, the first page let us know) that degrade women in a variety of ways. The sleaziest story is the second one, in which the female lead is raped in New York’s Central Park and seems to enjoy it! She then becomes a figure model for exchange of shelter. Go figure! In the final story a girl is prostituting herself because her father can’t pay the rent. The finale of drug-using in a church is priceless!

As with the book reviewed above this is part of The Crown Report Case Studies, and although this is not Kinsey’s Report by any means, it got me obsessive and I need to find out how many other volumes in the series exist and get my hands on them.

Postscript:

A variety of reasons are forcing me to stop writing this column. On the one hand I’m becoming incredibly busy and on the other hand I can’t find as much interesting Secondhand Smut as the first time around. I will keep on writing for the beloved Cinema Head Cheese in which I will be publishing my Interracial Sex Havoc column, which will become monthly.