Blu-Ray Review: Immoral Tales

By Jeffery X Martin

The 1970s were a time of sexual revolution. Women’s liberation, bra-burning, birth control pills, swingers, orgies, and who knows what else? It’s not like people didn’t know about sex before, but in the ’70s, sex exploded (which sounds gross). Suburban couples were lining up around the block to see Deep Throat and Behind the Green Door, two pornographic films that found both mainstream success and legal troubles, as both films were placed on trial for obscenity.

Obscenity still has an elastic meaning, and at times the line between artistic license and simple prurient leanings is blurry and hard to see. That’s precisely where 1974’s Immoral Tales lives, in that strange tesseract on the corner of Softcore Porn and Arthouse Loophole.

The film consists of four (or five, depending on which cut of the film you watch) segments. A couple of them are fictional, a couple are based on historical personages. All the stories are linked by beautiful photography and broad concepts of sex and nudity.

Let’s say a 20-year-old man wants to receive oral sex from his female cousin, who is 16 years old. If she agrees to this, is she a libertine? Does that mean her entire moral system is corrupted? Is the viewer taking into account the fact that other cultures do things differently, think about things in a manner that Americans don’t? These are the kinds of questions that pop up while watching Immoral Tales, but it does not care what your answers to the questions are.

In this day and age, we have a pretty good understanding that the historical actions of Erzsébet Báthory were wrong. This is the woman who invited young women into her home to work as servants, and then murdered them all and bathed in their blood. This was her beauty routine. She believed it kept her young. Is it exploitative to show Bathory’s victims, laughing, happy, showering, in a constant state of nudity? Or does it become a grindhouse flick when showing Báthory, slipping about in her blood-filled tub? We know that murder is not moral, but we also that nudity of itself is not immoral. So it isn’t truly immorality the film is concerned with, but exploitation.

There’s a segment that was cut out of Immoral Tales (available on this Blu-Ray) that was expanded into feature length. Called “La Bête,” or in English, “The Beast,” it’s rife with symbolism, as a Victorian woman runs through the forest away from a wolfman creature, who possesses a gigantic, constantly ejaculating penis. The woman loses clothing as she runs (clothing represents repression), finally taking off her corset (the corset represents the teachings of parents and the Church), and her wig (representing her identity and emotional connections with the Victorian class). She breaks down, has sex with The Beast and to paraphrase Alice Cooper, she loves it to death. She ends up burying it in the forest. Is that how the Ruling Class stays the Ruling Class, by grinding the proletariat until they die?

If this had just been a standard porn film, we wouldn’t be asking these questions.

The Arrow Blu-Ray is a gorgeous thing, and the picture is extraordinary. The lighting is soft and muted, small details stick out when they should. The entire film looks like a museum piece. It’s a sumptuous restoration, gauzy and porcelain, and Arrow is well known for fantastic remasters. Just because it’s low-key doesn’t mean it didn’t take a lot of work, and there’s love in each visible pubic hair on screen.

The problem with the film is the usage of the word “immoral.” The film deals less with eroticism and more with exploitation. The real tell for this is that there’s more female nudity in this film than you can shake a stick at. However, with the exception of The Beast, there’s not a penis to be found in this movie. Phallic imagery, yes. An actual cock? Negative.

If there’s anything “immoral” about these tales, it’s that the women are still the ones being paraded about, naked and exposed, while the men still loom over them, in control, the patriarchy in full effect. And while this 40-year-old movie may seem pretty tame by modern standards, it still raises some questions, including the biggest conundrum that a film like this can kick up: can’t we shake free of all the political action and social class symbolism, stop striking blows against –isms and -cracies and just fuck?

Immoral Tales was released on Blu-Ray on September 15 by Arrow Video.