The Devil’s in the Details: “The Devil in Miss Jones” (1973)

The solemnity of the opening suggests a dramatic shift toward genuine human drama in “adult” cinema, yet the incompatibility of mainstream movies and explicit sex remains an intractable evolutionary path in Gerard Damiano’s “The Devil in Miss Jones”.

    After the release of “Deep Throat” there were a number of graphic, sexual films that met with both unexpected public enthusiam and excited media attention, that would form the basis of the temporarily fashionable trend known as “porno chic”. This designation, by New York Times writer Ralph Blumenthal (predating the sadly optimistic labeling of this period as “The Golden Age of Porn” as if the addition of coordinated decor and fashionable wardrobe- soon shed -were enough to elevate a sow’s ear into a silk purse), was in acknowledgement of the new permissiveness of the American cinema which within a period of less than a decade went from the depiction of married couples in separate beds to the out-of-the-peep-show-booths-and-on-to-the-widescreen gynecological “tunnel shots”, culminating in a number of films of commercial interest to “average” audiences and critical consideration by mainstream media watchdogs.

     With this tremendous leap (not necessarily forward) in the visual insertion of the explicit sexual act in motion picture features, it was presumptively credited that the progression toward a form of commercially “legitimate” sexually explicit film was underway- a filmic strain separated from the traditional stag reels of the “raincoat” crowd -one that evolved up the “sexploitation” ladder through trends in nudies, roughies and Euro-erotica to the mainstream, though there was insufficient indication that mainstream American film, in any way shape or form, had  developed the capacity to accommodate such a proverbial meeting of the minds, nor had the American cinema reached maturity in its newly found sexual freedoms in an artistically contextual sense: using human sexuality as an elevating component in the service of adult stories rather than as anything more than for decorative, snickering nudity.

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