The Embracers (1963) User Reviews

Early effort from prolific Gary Graver...not his strongest work.

[EyeAskance · 24 January 2019]

THE EMBRACERS marks the directorial debut of Gary Graver(also the film's male lead), who went on to become a big cheese in the adult film industry, and was also at the helm of a few sub-B drive-in horror pictures. Rather surprisingly, he also collaborated with the iconic Orson Welles on a number of unrealized projects.

The print of this film which I viewed was heavily edited, clocking in at a full seventeen minutes shorter than the complete film's running time. I think it's safe to say the missing scenes featured mature-audience content, because this IS supposed to be an erotic/sexploitation film of sorts. What's left after the naughty bits have been shorn is a freeform and utterly pointless scribble which vaguely illustrates a budding romance between two undependable losers in the craggier environs of Hollywood...he, a down-on-his-luck thespian, and she, a spirited but pretty flaky case of human wreckage. Their ill-starred affair seems to mark the center of this beggarly amateur effort, speciously presented in a "slice of life" naturalist style replete with coffee-house beat jazz. This loose-narrative structure struggles to imitate superior "arthouse" films of the period...just a random cluster of non-ocurrences strung together willy-nilly with credits at either end. Our woebegone protagonist, for instance, is forced by hunger to take a housecleaning job overseen by a coarse and heavily imbibed dwarf. It's weird, and corresponds to nothing in the film beyond the fact that every other scene is equally extraneous. There is a method to this messiness, mind you...similarly crafted films have, at times, been met with high praise. You can't shoot a guy for trying, I suppose...be it bad or good, art is art.

I bet those missing scenes were awesomely hot.

3/10.

Highly personal

[lor_ · 23 August 2023]

Before Gary Graver's debut film begins, I was immediately engaged as the credits rolled with the oh-so distinctive sounds of the Les McCann Trio, a group I greatly enjoyed in the early '60s playing at Leo's Casino in downtown Cleveland. This music sets the tone and literally carries along a highly personal movie and ill-fated love story, shot mainly MOS, with Gary's voice-over and an engagingly simple style in black & white familiar from other indie pictures of the era. I could easily identify with his character's lonely plight.

No, it's not a sexploitation film, any more than Scorsese's debut starring Harvey Keitel, "Who's That Knocking at My Door?" in the same time period was, though both were sold as sexy movies by the same distributor, Joseph Brenner Associates.

And it did play at Film Festivals. It's important to note, given the movie's subject matter of how difficult, nay nearly impossible, it is for budding filmmakers like Gary to make it in Hollywood, that the mainstream cinema, and independents, and even pornographersz.. exist and work in a continuum. Tony Anthony, so famous for having inaugurated the new 3-D era with his indie "Comin' At Ya!" in 1983, was just like Gary, a true independent in the early '60s with the excellent, also highly personal movie "Force of Impulse" and he even had a Clint Eastwood phase mid-career imitating Clint with his "Stranger in Town" Westerns made in Europe for MGM. Later he hooked up, still unsung, with Ringo Starr and George Harrison to produce "Blindman" and "The Concert for Bangladesh".

Graver was later revered and also ridiculed for his many porn films (as "Robert McCallum") and best-remembered as Orson Welles' right-hand man late in the great one's career. It's all part of a continuum, that critics and especially audiences insist upon compartmentalizing.