Another clasic for you folks this week. Yes, there have been a lot of classics recently. I'm going to let you in on a little secret here - we tend to watch a lot of classics because they have one big advantage over more modern films - they are shorter. We have a couple of kids. When you have kids, time just seems to evaporate. They go to bed late. Then the house needs to be cleaned up after them which takes until really late then they have to dragged out of bed early in the morning and made ready for school. The opportunities for watching three hour long porn features are therefore fairly limited. Classics tend to top out at an hour twenty and are much more doable without being a zombie the next day.
This time it's the 1978 feature - The Erotic Adventures of Candy, directed, unusually for the 70s, by a woman - Gail Palmer. This film, so Ms Palmer tells us in a piece to camera at the start, is apparently based on Candide, the 1759 philosophical satire by Voltaire. That's a pretty highbrow pedigree for a porn and Voltaire's story of a young man's descent from Utopia into a state of philosophical disillusionment is an unlikely premise. On closer inspection though, the film is in fact a screen adaptation of the 1950s erotic novel - Candy, which is, in turn, claimed to be based on Candide. There are two schools of thought on that - one, held mainly by the author, is that it is indeed an erotic retelling of Voltaire's work. The other point of view, mostly held by everyone else, is that Candy has nothing at all to do with Candide and the author is talking out his arse. Still, Candy has been voted one of the 50 sexiest books ever written, which is pedigree enough for a porn.
