Sleeping Around: “Submission” (1969)

IS THIS ANY WAY TO TREAT A BABY RUTH BAR?: Woman-child Vickie (Lisa Duran, a pre-adult movie Jennifer Welles) is at the mercy of either an extreme sugar fix or the spell of her creepy boyfriend/Svengali figure Barry (Gary Judin); the psychology not being very clear nor consistent in “Submission”, a film that trades on the appeal of its occasionally genuinely erotic sex scenes rather than any semblance of narrative clarity.

                  “Submission”  (1969)

    Audiences seeking erotic satisfaction solely for its own sake could do worse than Allen Savage’s obscure but bizarre softcore effort “Submission”; and this is only considering that the bar for eroticism in the cinema has been set so perilously low that even the most fleeting scrap of genuine sexiness, no matter how seedy the source, is an occasion for attention. That these morsels are wrapped in a film that neither makes sense, has a point, nor seems to have the slightest inclination toward advancing the most primitive form of dramaturgy is, perhaps, proof positive that in the world of sexploitation, the smallest taste of sin is offset by a trip to cinema purgatory.

    Vickie (a pre-porn Jennifer Welles, credited as Lisa Duran) is a young woman whose behavior indicates that she is possessed by some irregular form of infantilism which manifests itself whenever she crosses paths with a pet store bunny or a candy bar. This atypical behavior appears to incapacitate any judgment or will power on her part, allowing her boyfriend Barry (Gary Judin) to exact some strange hold over her, engaging Vickie as a confederate (though what her part in the plan is never defined) in the defrauding of successful women, though what the nature of the scheme is (the film suggests they insinuate themselves into households as live-in help, though Barry’s skill set seems limited to shaking TetraMin flakes into an aquarium tank) never clarified, nor makes a bit of sense even in retrospective consideration. Most of the film is immersed in random  sexual encounters which are either meant as flashbacks or fantasies (this is never made clear) which are (as is much of the film) shot MOS and overlaid with off-putting library music cues that sound like a creepy and ill-suited soundtrack cut from the opening scenes of “Night of the Living Dead”.

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