Marilyn and the Senator (1975) User Reviews

Pretty amusing, but crude and overlong 70's porn comedy romp

[Woodyanders · 6/10 · 27 January 2015]

Busty and beautiful blonde female CIA agent Marilyn Susan Right (flatly played by the fetching, but vapid Nina Fause) chooses a married senator (a solid and engaging performance by William Margold) to impregnate her. Alas, the senator has a hard time holding up his end of the bargain.

Writer/director Carlos Tobalina's blithely sophomoric and scatological sense of humor delivers a reasonable amount of amiably cheap lowbrow laughs, but unfortunately Tobalina's tendency to stretch a thin joke out to often ludicrously protracted extremes ultimately proves to be more taxing than amusing (for example, an early scene with Margold pooping and backfiring on the toilet seems to go on for an agonizing eternity). Worse yet, the two plus hour running time sizes up as another serious debit because the erratic pace tends to drag and the movie in the long run overstays its welcome by at least forty minutes. Luckily, slim and sensuous brunette Sharon Thorpe supplies plenty of much needed (and appreciated) spark as sassy call girl Nancy Johnson while Heather Leigh as the senator's meddlesome wife Mildred and William Kirschner as creepy voyeur Queep both acquit themselves well enough. (Leigh's S&M-themed sex scene with Margold rates as a definite sizzling highlight, too). Popping up in nice lively bits are Liz Renay as a brash madame and Serena as an aggressively amorous blonde at a swingers' party. Tobalina's competent, yet pedestrian cinematography doesn't provide much in the way of either style or polish. Moreover, the surprise bummer ending leaves a foul aftertaste. Okay, but it could (and should) have been much better.

The dick is limp

[lor_ · 1 June 2015]

Terrible sex comedy is neither sexy nor funny; it's merely preachy and annoying. Instead of using one of his anonymous monikers, the filmmaker proudly lists: "Written, directed, filmed, edited and produced by Carlos Tobalina" so posterity will know clearly who to blame.

Picture opens on a soap box with quotes from JFK, Pope Pius XII and the great Tobalina himself as well as references to the Supreme Court and Pres. Nixon, all in support of free speech and the claim that the Constiution protects films like this one for their various "socially redeeming values". Later in the film he has the main character, Sen. John Wolf (played by William Margold) pause to praise the high court and the country's ongoing trend toward liberalism. To quote the cliché, if he wanted to send a message he should have sent a telegram.

Stripping away the film's silly plot about a femme CIA super-spy (Nina Fause as Marilyn Susan Right) hoping to have her perfect baby fathered by the senator, the movie's central theme is the senator's urgent need for Viagra, 30 years before it was invented.

Running over two hours (CT even includes an "Intermission" in the manner of Italian cinema dividing every film into two parts), film fatally features very little actual XXX sex footage, with frequent sex scenes (or beginning of same, as the senator often cannot perform) that last only seconds not minutes. It could play at theaters Tobalina owned on the West Coast, but would have been a horrendous booking at arm's length Adult houses.

Early on Tobalina's competence is in question with problems of lighting (throwing large, extraneous shadows), focus pulling (out-of-focus) and editing (a brief scene is presented out of sequence). A card proudly expresses that the movie was made right under the noses of the F. B. I. And C. I. A., referring to guerrilla type exterior and second unit shots that add a patina of "it's a real movie" to the West Coast-lensed indoor porn.

Nina Fause as the CIA lady delivers her dialog poorly, and casting a very similar looking beautiful blonde (Heather Leigh) as the senator's wife Mildred is a dumb choice. She plays a character that makes no sense on paper or as played, tolerant of her hubby's indiscretions and even seeming to enjoy them, in tandem with Wolf's mini-me assistant Mr. Queep (William Kirschner, a hammy Hollywood extra who appears in several porn films), when they watch together (eating snacks and hot dogs) Margold in action with babes at the Watergate Hotel. Queep and the senator's offices are cheap-looking sets destroying any credibility early in the proceedings.

Sharon Thorpe is cast as the only talented performer in the bunch in a vain effort to save the picture, as a call girl who is conveniently friends with both Wolf and Susan (latter not using her first name Marilyn until the end of the picture). She teaches the supposedly Mata Hari-level spy (who tells us she earns $200,000 a year from the agency -ridiculously big bucks in the early '70s) how to give a blow job.

Tobalina throws in a swingers' party organized by Mildred as sex filler in line with his career's emphasis on orgies in nearly every movie he makes, and a particularly lousy performance is delivered by a guy (character uncredited) playing a male prostitute in Tobalina's oddest scene. Fause pays hims $300 to hump her, but he refuses when she insists on a rubber (she's trying for pregnancy from Margold, not him). The concept of a XXX gigolo who is militant against the use of rubbers is preposterous, whether posited in free-wheeling '70s pre-AIDs time or now, and I almost got the impression that CT was mounting yet another dumb soap box in support of "freedom".

Among the embarrassments is Margold, who provides a video commentary for the 2014 DVD reissue (I militantly refuse to listen to such nonsense) and doesn't seem to realize he's the butt of the film's joke. Despite himself and many other characters talking about his erections (and failures), he never gets hard -having the ability (shared with Tobalina's favorite performer John Holmes) to penetrate and even ejaculate while still perennially soft, what is euphemistically called "semi-erect", and the visual proof is here. One stupid scene has him supposedly humping his wife 3 times in succession, but the first and second money shots are merely the first one repeated from a different camera angle.

About four reels too long, dreary picture features not one but two "surprise" endings, idiotic and poorly staged which I won't spoil here - Tobalina already spoiled them himself.