![]() ![]() It's not like we see anything go in, and in repose, those thickets of bush that so upset Reed provide their own sort of discretion. From the vantage of our desensitised present, these skin-deep provocations almost seem quaint. Roger Ebert dismissed it as "stupid and slow and uninteresting," while Rex Reed described it as the "vile and disgusting" work of "a very sick Swede with an overwhelming ego and a fondness for photographing pubic hair." What had reactionaries clutching their pearls so hard they turned back into sand grit and bivalve mucus? To us, not much: a frontal canoodle eliding any actual penetration, a vigorous spooning-hump framed around faces, a gentle li'l smooch from our gal Lena on her lover's flaccid penis. In Houston, an arsonist torched his local for playing it. personally seized the reels from a local movie house, their injunction only overturned by four legal filings that went all the way to the Supreme Court. Looking back at it, who can even remember what everyone was so worked up about with Vilgot Sjöman's notorious landmark of eroto-politic cinema? When the Swede's quasi-experimental portrait of a 24-year-old radical leftist raging against the system in Stockholm made it to American theaters in spring 1969, it rang out as a declaration of culture war: the state of Massachusetts banned the film as pornography and Boston P.D.
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