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"vintage" porn stars Peter de Rome

nice, but….

what’s wrong with this picture?

5 replies on “nice, but….”

i mean, there’s a clip of her, in the distance, walking down the street – so she’s “in” the film – but making it a selling point seems silly!

Love having Garbo’s picture on the front, and it was very imaginative of him to think to do it. She was always out walking and I saw her about 4 years after this film. Although by that time, she was caught again by the camera in an old coat, which she was wearing when I saw her–I suppose many times, because so many people saw her, but the ‘original’ is filming her in a ‘fiction film’ without her permission. It was among the several peculiarly magical things DeRome did here, and about 20 years before her death, so I always wondered why he didn’t get into some legal trouble for it.

It’s been at least 20 years since I saw it on vhs, first time since the early 70s when it came out at 55th Street Playhouse and seemed so astonishing with that footage of Paris with Ned Roremish music. So I don’t recognize the guys or remember a garden-variety moment like that–only Peter Hardwick and the two guys he makes it with (including Yves), and the Bill Eld (called ‘Bill Young’ in this one) stunning moment, of course, which you can’t quite believe the first time you see it. There was the big scene with black men (mostly) in subway men’s rooms, which I never liked much. In any case, that guy who’s been sucking wasn’t one of Hardwick’s trick/lovers. Also doesn’t mention Jack deVeau, but this surely a good number of years after the film was in theaters, I don’t think there was even in any vhs then.

I don’t think producers (jack Deveau, in this case) usually get mentioned as selling points…. the all black men’s room scene was phenomenal, although I am pretty sure it was supposed to be a Times Square porno theatre bathroom. the theme song from that scene (“Honey Man”), til this day gets me going!

Oh yeah,’Honey Man’, now it comes back. The music for Bill’s Narcissus was very effective–intense, strong organ music, I think may have been Saint-Saens, but it worked well with the film editing (as I recall anyway) to make the scene unique. The ‘Oscar Wilde’ talk seems a bit much in retrospect, though, e.g., “His followers will always be outcast men”. DeRome sometimes tried a little too hard. I think I read a book published by him in the early to mid-80s, in which he seemed a bit at loose ends, and tried to make things not long after the advent of AIDS seem romantic that weren’t–like spitting out cum from a train for safe sex. Still, I always hoped he’d do another biggish film. The Garbo appearance seems gratuitous in the film itself, and he was probably an Extreme Fan of hers.

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