Touch and Go: “He & She” (1970)

       “He & She”  (1970)

     Matt Cimber’s “He & She” is one of those cannily marketed pseudo-explicit features which skated by the diligently suspicious antennae of community standards by masquerading its exploitative intentions as an educationally enlightening seminar in “marital” lovemaking. (It was an attempt which fooled no one-  despite the rather absurd quotations from Dr. David Reuben and Ovid   -but it was rather quaint for them to give it a good old entrepreneurial try.) An unofficial follow-up to Cimber’s earlier “Man & Wife: An Educational Film For Married Adults”,  the film celebrates an asserted relaxing of taboos while disseminating the forbidden knowledge it so mock defiantly announces as essential to good societal health while simultaneously (and with more than a trace of ironic contradiction) informing the audience that such knowledge is only meant for consenting married couples. Clearly such noble intentions serve to give insufficient warning to those presumed clean living suburban couples who suddenly find themselves in the bowels of the urban grindhouse, to beware the man in the raincoat sitting behind them whose intentions are probably far less domestically altruistic.

    The film begins with an endless explanatory crawl which professes the film’s  intentions with the dedicated piety of a holy mission statement, followed by an indescribably arid lecture delivered by an unidentified man posing as a pompous academic (you know he’s to be taken seriously in the way he waves about his pipe) whose entire spiel is latent with such confused and fraudulent information that, by comparison, makes the typical Ed Wood narration sound like a Nobel Prize acceptance speech. While this dusty codger wearily pontificates as much misinformation about sex as possible (The opening crawl has already defined foreplay as all sexual activity prior to orgasm.), he confidently asserts that “the imperatives of history now demand that the printed marriage manual of the past, helpful though they might have been, yield today to the motion picture marriage manual”, a declaration which just happens to benefit this film in particular with its suggestion of a built-in responsible and necessary societal benefit to the graphic depictions of hanky panky which comprise the greater bulk of the film.

To read the complete review, click the following link to:  https://chandlerswainreviews.wordpress.com/sticky-floors-stained-screens-days-nights-at-the-grindhouse/