Naked Came the Stranger (1975) User Reviews

Many writers!

[BandSAboutMovies · 7/10 · 3 December 2023]

Naked Came the Stranger is based on a hoax.

Mike McGrady was convinced that books had become so dirty - just read Harold Robbins and Jacqueline Susann - that any book could be a best seller if it had sex in it. He recruited nineteen men and five women from Newsday including 1965 Pulitzer Prize winner Gene Goltz, 1970 Pulitzer Prize winner Robert W. Greene and journalist Marilyn Berge. The book, which he edited with Harvey Aronson to ensure that it was not well-written in the least, was written by Penelope Ashe, who would be played by McGrady's sister-in-law Billie Young.

After selling 20,000 copies, McGrady went on The David Frost Show and told America that it was all a lie. It sold 70,000 more copies after that.

According to The Washington Post, "Mr. McGrady and the other writers had nothing to do with the hardcore film with the same title. They did, however, see the movie at a Times Square theater. During one vivid scene, Aronson told The Charlotte Observer, someone shouted "Author, author! Seventeen of us stood up."

Working under his Henry Paris name for directing (his middle name and favorite city) and Jake Barnes (teh narrator of Hemmingway's The Sun Also Rises) for writing, Radley Metzger created this adult adaption of the book. Gilly (Darby Lloyd Rains) and Billy (Levi Richards) host a morning show. He's always been able to sleep around in the marriage - she catches him with their assistant Phyllis (Mary Stuart) - but something has always held her back. This will be the day in which she unleashes herself, even if it keeps ending up in failure.

When she finally gets it together, she has a memorable moment with Marvin (Alan Marlow) in the second floor of a bus in a daring scene shot with no permits, obviously. She also gets Phyllis for herself and even has a classy silent movie black and white love scene with Teddy (Grant Taylor).

If the movie they're watching in the beginning seems familiar, it's British freakout Bizarre AKA Secrets of Sex.

Oh, What a Tangled Web We Weave...

[Nodriesrespect · 10/10 · 28 May 2010]

Back in 1969, the editorial staff of Newsday magazine was amazed and appalled that writers like Harold Robbins and Jacqueline Susann dominated the bestseller lists with their trashy tell-all "romans à clef", so they decided to do them one better with each reporter contributing a chapter of escalating outrageousness to what was to become "Naked Came the Stranger", a saga both saucy and soapy attributed to fictitious "Penelope Ashe". Ironically, it outsold many of the competitors it sought to send up, sales figures barely influenced even once the hoax was exposed.

Almost immediately, rumors of a possible movie adaptation began to circulate but even at the height of "Porno Chic" it remained most unlikely that it would eventually wind up as the second hardcore project for respected erotic auteur Radley Metzger a/k/a "Henry Paris" following his well-received though unflinchingly explicit THE PRIVATE AFTERNOONS OF PAMELA MANN. Perhaps with an eye towards mainstream acceptance of a film form he had largely embraced because it was what the domestic adult movie marketplace at least demanded, an illusion all too cruelly exposed as such once the genre shifted towards home video a mere decade later, Metzger toned down the level of graphic detail on this occasion. As compensation, he lavished more time and attention on the central characterizations of radio talk show hosts William and Gillian ("Billy & Gilly") Blake, sort of a '70s Nick and Nora Charles whose sparkling repartee considerably enlivens their extra-marital erotic encounters.

As with all of his full color penetration films, Metzger wrote the screenplay under his usual "Jake Barnes" porn pen name, truly outdoing himself with a plethora of genuinely witty one liners that echo the sophisticated brilliance of an Ernst Lubitsch or Billy Wilder comedy classic of which this is as close an approximation as the adult genre could ever hope to achieve. Thankful for an opportunity to show off more than their physical prowess, Darby Lloyd Rains and Levi Richards rise to the occasion beautifully. Already something of an industry veteran by 1975, Rains was one of the finest early adult actresses and has never been better. Her mimed shock when she catches her husband sticking it to his secretary Phyllis (a delightfully dizzy Mary Stuart) on a daily basis, which naturally evolves into arousal and a staircase solo both sexy and extremely funny, is absolutely priceless.

Their New York morning show a smash hit, Billy and Gilly appear the perfect couple to all who know them. Once she learns of her husband's frequent infidelity with his "Love Bunny" (a term of endearment which provides the movie with one of its best running gags), Gillian decides that what's good for the gander might also benefit the goose and embarks on a sexual spree within their circle of jet set friends and casual acquaintances. Tied together by a masked ball where all characters mingle, these various episodes of planned seduction supply the movie with most of its, albeit fewer than the industry norm, accomplished sex scenes. Particularly memorable is Rains' orally servicing of Alan Marlow (the vile womanizer who was to forced to return to earth Post Mortem AS Rains in Roberta Findlay's ANGEL NUMBER 9 !) as harried investment banker Marvin Goodman for whom time equals money on a double decker bus actually whizzing through the streets of the Big Apple ! Upper-crust bosom buddy Taylor (well-played by Gerald Grant, who juggled legit stage work with excursions into bisexual erotica, including Metzger's SCORE and Jerry Douglas' BOTH WAYS, thereby presumably scratching a personal itch) provides Gillian with a shoulder to cry on when she decides enough's enough and briefly flees her homestead. In a refined silent movie spoof, he wines, dines and romances her in glorious black and white with silly inter-titles attempting to put a sophisticated spin on Gilly's blunt come-on (read her lips !), switching back to color by the time they reach the bedroom stage.

Saving the best for last, Gillian moves in on her husband's object of affection, circling around the feckless Phyllis as she dances alone in an empty swimming pool, another arresting image in a film fairly rife with them. Their slow Sapphic exploration provides the sexual showstopper and leaves the young girl hopelessly in love with her erstwhile paramour's betrothed. Conveniently quitting the scene rather than remaining the couple's dirty little secret even while switching camps, Phyllis leaves Billy and Gilly to kiss and make up. Now I'm not sure how up front Metzger was about his career change from such lofty erotic epics as THE LICKERISH QUARTET to, well, basically documenting the dirty for real at this stage but he certainly threw in a cute inside joke when his simulated CAMILLE 2000 is seen playing on the couple's bedroom TV set and Billy bemoans how they're showing this "trash" rather the Garbo version !

Production reflects the perfectionism Metzger has shown throughout his distinguished career with mainstream-worthy camera work by the reportedly pseudonymous "Robert Rochester", who adult actress Gloria Leonard insists is actually an Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker. Rita Davis, a minor starlet also in Shaun Costello's LOVE BUS and Carter Stevens' HOT OVEN, appears as Darby's socialite acquaintance dressed as a harem girl during the masked ball sequence, going down on bewhiskered waiter John Buco, C.J. Laing's cop lover from Costello's indelible WATERPOWER. The late Marc Stevens briefly appears as himself in a non-sex capacity and the always enthusiastic Helen Madigan plays the porn star guest on the radio show.

On a practical note, this movie has been released on region O DVD by VCA, missing a substantial amount of mostly non-sexual footage. Far preferable is the Italian region 2 disc from Schendene, as LA STRANIERA NUDA, unfortunately saddled with irremovable subtitles, with soft but watchable image quality, at least sourced from a complete print supplied by the director.

Radley Metzger, a master of filmmaking

[S-Luka · 2 September 2016]

Naked Came the Stranger has a very interesting history, even before it became a film. The back story involving the book and its author(s) is detailed in this package, but I'll give you the Reader's Digest version. In 1969, a columnist at Newsday decided to conduct an experiment and deduce how far our collective literary standards had fallen in the wake of trash novelists like Jacqueline Suzanne taking over the best-seller charts. Mike McGrady assembled a number of his fellow Newsday writers and asked them to each pen separate stories surrounding Gillian Blake and her sexual exploits. The only requirements were that the chapters be vulgar and poorly written, beyond that he gave the authors open hands. The resulting novel was published collectively under the pen name of Penelope Ashe, who didn't exist.

The book, which was so salacious and vulgar that is should have failed, was a huge success. The group nominated one of their own sisters-in- law to play the part of Penelope Ashe and go on TV and radio interviews regarding the book. Eventually McGrady and his team couldn't take it anymore and outed themselves and the entire hoax, hoping that it would put an end to the book's popularity, however, it had the opposite effect and sales got stranger, which eventually led to a "major motion picture" adaptation by Metzger/Paris, and that's where we find ourselves now.

Radley Metzger was a master of erotic filmmaking going back to the mid-60s. His series of steamy films including The Lickerish Quartet, Camille 2000 (briefly referenced in Naked), Score, and many others, were a watershed collection of films which no other filmmaker could touch. The mix of opulence, sophisticated art design, and modern sensibilities made his films huge hits both at home and abroad. However, with the advent of Deep Throat and the resulting era of porno chic, Metzger's brand of cinematic teasing became passe. His two choices were to either jump on board the hardcore train, or stop making films, and so Henry Paris was born with the introduction of The Private Afternoons of Pamela Mann.

Metzger was not one to completely surrender his own style in order to make a living, though, and his hardcore films retain much of the style of his early work. His adaptation of Naked Came the Stranger works perfectly well as a raunchy romantic comedy if you can somehow manage to extract the penetration. That is what makes him such a great filmmaker, the urge with the films of Henry Paris is to fast forward through the grinding to get to the next dialogue sequence. He has a remarkable eye, and an ear for clever dialogue. What could have been a mindless series of sexual encounters is actually an engaging comedy of errors in which we follow the lead, Gilly, as she discovers her own sexuality and eventually realizes that what she was looking for was in her bed all along.

All that being said, this is a porn, there are no two ways about that. There are numerous sex scenes which leave nothing to the imagination and are just as explicit as anything you might see today, only shot with more style and sense of humor. First and foremost, Metzger/Paris was a storyteller, and the story in this film is very entertaining. He cuts no corners and created memorable tableaux for his erotic encounters in places like an abandoned ballroom, the top of a bus on Fifth Ave in New York, or even in the stairwell of a 5th floor walk- up. Metzger does his best to infuse these sequences with a bit of style, but ultimately most porn becomes tedious pretty quickly, and the demands the genre work against him to some degree. However, the film works, and the handful of Henry Paris films that came out of the seventies are among the most accomplished hardcore films ever made.

It is important to recall the era in which these films came about, and what it meant to make them. The breakout success of Deep Throat ushered in an era where everybody was going to see what all the fuss was about. The era of the porn star was born, and among this tight knit community there was an idea, however far fetched, that they were pioneers. These women and men felt like they were the first among a movement that would blur the line between hardcore films and mainstream cinema. In fact, a few of them were able to make a living on both sides of that fence, but not many. Of course, that never happened, and as our country seems to revert to more and more puritanical values, it will probably be a very long time before it does.

Naked Came the Stranger is a historically significant film in several ways. First of all, as an adaptation of a best selling book, it is certainly worth looking at. Second of all, it shows what hardcore adult films are capable of achieving artistically. This is a fun movie, even without the naughty bits, and that is something that probably can't be said for much porn these days. I definitely recommend this title to anyone interested in '70s sleaze, or just looking for a good time. If you're okay with lots of close-ups of people doing the business, I can't imagine anyone not liking this as a film. Definitely recommended.