The Opening of Misty Beethoven / L’iniziazione di Misty Beethoven, Uncut (1976)

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Description: Pornography meets Pygmalion. Misty, the hooker, meets the sexologist who thinks he can transform her from “the nadir of passion” into someone who inspires passion. While Misty is trained for her big test, the relationship between the doctor and Misty remains unsettled
The Opening of Misty Beethoven is an American pornographic comedy film released in 1976. It was produced with a relatively high budget and filmed on elaborate locations in Paris, New York City and Rome with a musical score, and owes much to its director Radley Metzger.
Misty became the standard for such films, a high artistic bar worth striving for, but, alas, few adult films came close. (Three that come to mind are Barbara Broadcast (also from Radley Metzger, though it was nearly plotless), Sexcapades, and Wanda Whips Wall Street.) Perhaps it was difficult to find people willing to do the explicit scenes and still have enough acting talent to read lines convincingly. There are some: Georgina Spelvin comes to mind, and Marilyn Chambers, Kay Parker, Jamie Gillis, and Ron Jeremy, to note but a few, but not enough of them, and not enough really entertaining scripts to pair them with, and they all had to contend with the small-minded forces of moral rectitude always dragging filmmakers and stars into court, making them persecuted First Amendment pioneers, barred from “legitimate” films due to the moral stigma attached to adult films.
Someday, there should be statues of them in public parks. A few of the women, at least, have been immortalized in song. A ribald 1974 Off-Broadway musical titled Let My People Come, has a song titled, “Linda, Georgina, Marilyn and Me.” (The actresses referred to being Lovelace, Spelvin, and Chambers.) Unfortunately, the score, though recorded, has never made it to CD. Eventually, and all too soon, this trend toward classy adult films with plots and characters fell to the wayside in favor of cheaper amateur (and plotless) videos, as depicted in the mainstream Burt Reynolds, Julianne Moore film, Boogie Nights, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. (The very successful book and film, 50 Shades of Grey was, to my mind, just an R-rated rip-off of an earlier and more explicit Jamie Gillis film titled The Story of Joanna.) That was the Golden Age of adult films, 1976, and The Opening of Misty Beethoven ranks as the best and classiest of them. (Radley Metzger, aka Henry Paris, died in 2017 at the age of 88. Perhaps someday he’ll be enshrined in the Directors Guild as a true pioneer filmmaker.)

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