When our last dive into the to-be-watched pile turned up Bordello - The House of the Rising Sun from 1983, we didn't hold out much hope for it. Our experiences with 80s porn to date have not been that good. The last 80s porn we watched was Panty Raid which was a singularly awful film. However, we gritted our teeth, lowered our expectations and popped it into the player. I have to say, we were pleasantly surprised.
Bordello is set, obviously, in a Bordello. In New Orleans. Since The Animals' 1964 hit "House of The Rising Sun", every bordello in every film set in New Orleans is called The House Of The Rising Sun. The song by the way is much, much older than The Animals version. They got it from an old 1940s Lead Belly recording and before him it was a traditional folk song going way, way back. Everyone assumes it's about a New Orleans brothel but historians have been searching for the historical House of the Rising Sun for years (yes... government grants to go looking for brothels) and have come up pretty much empty handed. There have been plenty of Houses of the Rising Sun since the song became a hit but before that, the closest they can find was a French Madam back in the 1800s called Marianne LeSoleil Levant, which translates from the French as "Marianne The Rising Sun". Current theory says that the song isn't about a brothel at all but about the the old Orleans Parish Women's Prison, the entrance to which was decorated with a rising sun design. There you go... porn and education all at once.
