Buoyed by a very fine Kelly Nichols performance, "The Mistress" is a minor drama from the Porno Chic era of Adult Cinema that is a fine example of how a porn feature could play like a real film in those days, only with explicit sex integrated into the storytelling.
It's the first movie written and directed by ace photographer Jack Remy and fits into what used to be called (in the 1940s and 1950s) a "Woman's picture" among mainstream movies. Nichols plays a strong central character (featured in at least a dozen sex scenes) in the title role who has put herself in an understandable predicament: as a result of her dad leaving her and her mom high and dry when she was a kid, she avoids romantic commitments, instead dating only married men.
Over the course of the story, aided by flashbacks, we see her good times but more significantly, the heartbreak engendered by this lifestyle. Principally, her love affair with her architect boss, smoothly played by Eric Edwards, and her primary lover, another married man played by Randy West both lead to her being callously treated by both men. West drops her summarily when his wife (a nice little role for Anna Turner) joins Kelly's firm, putting him in jeopardy of being found out as a cheater, and Edwards takes advantage of her by sort of pimping her out -coercing her into sleeping with the firm's major clients supposedly for the firm's sake.
Her friend Lynx Canon and the wife of a client Juliet Anderson both give her needed advice to stop chasing after married men, and in an ending that reflects the wider culture (final shot evokes the spirit of tv breakthough actresses of a decade earlier: Mary Tyler Moore and Marlo Thomas).
More soap opera than feminism, the movie is (thank goodness) way out of step with more recent pornography, and demonstrates that misogyny or pandering to an audience (of males) addicted to sleaze is not a necessary requirement of Adult Cinema. This is content Remy & company can be proud of having created.
It's the first movie written and directed by ace photographer Jack Remy and fits into what used to be called (in the 1940s and 1950s) a "Woman's picture" among mainstream movies. Nichols plays a strong central character (featured in at least a dozen sex scenes) in the title role who has put herself in an understandable predicament: as a result of her dad leaving her and her mom high and dry when she was a kid, she avoids romantic commitments, instead dating only married men.
Over the course of the story, aided by flashbacks, we see her good times but more significantly, the heartbreak engendered by this lifestyle. Principally, her love affair with her architect boss, smoothly played by Eric Edwards, and her primary lover, another married man played by Randy West both lead to her being callously treated by both men. West drops her summarily when his wife (a nice little role for Anna Turner) joins Kelly's firm, putting him in jeopardy of being found out as a cheater, and Edwards takes advantage of her by sort of pimping her out -coercing her into sleeping with the firm's major clients supposedly for the firm's sake.
Her friend Lynx Canon and the wife of a client Juliet Anderson both give her needed advice to stop chasing after married men, and in an ending that reflects the wider culture (final shot evokes the spirit of tv breakthough actresses of a decade earlier: Mary Tyler Moore and Marlo Thomas).
More soap opera than feminism, the movie is (thank goodness) way out of step with more recent pornography, and demonstrates that misogyny or pandering to an audience (of males) addicted to sleaze is not a necessary requirement of Adult Cinema. This is content Remy & company can be proud of having created.