All the Sins of Sodom

Still from "All the Sins of Sodom"

"All the Sins of Sodom" is a striking feature by Joe Sarno that displays to the full extent his skills in high-key black and white lighting, effective mise en scène, and casting and directing actors. The series of models parading in and out of fashion photographer Henning's life and bedroom (in a not so subtle reference to the film BLOW UP), offers the perfect opportunity for a cinematic and erotic exploration of the ideal male fantasy, which is total artistic and sexual command of a stable of beautiful and willing women. The nymph who enters his life, occupies his spare room, and slowly turns his ideal setup upside down is yet another component to this fantasy, at at least for the viewer, as it allows for girl on girl scenes in which the models are further dominated sexually, and in which there is more sexual variety and kinkiness at play. Sarno's use of the female face captures the erotic more fully than many films which are fully graphic, and the psychological components of sexual desire are both varied and realistic.

Indeed, viewing the film made me understand fully what it would be like to be a male with the desire to sexually dominate a series of women, as it presents such a fantasy outside of moral concerns or even social concerns, but purely as a giddy lifestyle of pleasure from which no escape would ever be desired. Oddly enough, this also gives the women, who are otherwise so individual and so uniquely beautiful, an interchangeability that can be chilling to the heart of a romantic. There is a Sadean dimension to the pleasure that erases the importance of the women, even as they are made full subjects in terms of their equal and complicit engagement in the acts which they crave.

The man always remains intact and individual, insofar as he is the only male on screen in a sea of women, and because he is a complete person and an artist in his own right, liking sex but not needing it to complete and define him. The women, on the other hand, have no identity separate from what sex gives them (their inside dimension) or what their appearance offers to the screen and to his camera (their outside dimension). They are eaten up by both cameras and by the male gaze, in such a voracious way that there is nothing left to hide, and in this feat lies Sarno's skill as a director, that he can lay this vulnerability bare and get these actresses to go to places that you normally don't see women go in movies.

Therefore, the goal of the photographer in this film (to capture something in women that is fully erotic, fully female in the darkest sense), is met successfully by the protagonist's camera, and also by Sarno's camera. Even as the photographer in the film complains that he can't capture on film the expression that his lover has when she is transported by pleasure, Sarno's camera shows us this expression, and tells us at the same time that we are watching something extraordinary.

The big, dirty secret in many 1960s sex films and pulp novels is that many women enjoy sex, and that they have sexual desires and fantasies of their own. Although this is a fact that must have been playing out in bedrooms everywhere for all of human history, it could not, for most of human history, be discussed in society, in literature, or in film. Good writers have always wanted to bring out truth in experience, especially in times when psychological realism is in vogue, as it was post World War II, and this is one part of life that must have seemed to the more serious writers to be frustratingly missing in accounts of natural experience.

One finds a quality in much of this sex literature and film from the 1960s of curtains being ripped off houses and inhibitions ripped off psyches to reveal what's really going on inside of peoples' lives and minds. Sarno was a specialist in this, revealing ordinary people with strong sexual urges and fantasy lives that are frankly expressed, suffering from the restrictions that society places on behavior and expression. What's most striking about this time period is, it's a tiny window of time in which the male and the female unite against society at large in order to rally for sexual freedom. And thus, curiously, it's one of the few times we find the battle of the sexes as expressed in culture actually diminished or put on the back burner.

In contrast to the underground sex movies of the 1960s, mainstream romantic comedies of the time focused, as they do today, on a simple conflict between the male and the female: he wants to get laid, she wants a ring. Even if she agrees to sex, it's never what she's really after - the body of the male, the ecstasy and rapture of being enfolded in his arms, an addiction to his lovemaking. She wants basically to civilize him and tame his desires, and the utopian goal thus achieved is smiled on by the audience, who is relieved to find the demon of sexual desire quelled and replaced by an abstract and flowery romance, and a life in which the disorderly and disruptive facts of sex are politely ignored.

In the film "Pillow Talk" this concept is explained by Rock Hudson, who compares a single man to a tree standing tall and proud in the forest. Once he gets married, that tree's branches are cut off and the tree is chopped up into wood which is used to make a baby crib, a patch for the roof, an extra wing on the house, dinner napkins, etc. The anxiety and even anguish of a male who is subjected to this type of emasculation by his wife was the subject of many postwar comedies and cartoons by humorists such as James Thurber. The wife was seen as the enemy, and the battle was bloody. Men who had fought overseas and had lived dangerous lives, facing death every day and visiting exotic brothels, were not the nice boys they used to be before they left home, and thus the comforting hearth was often seen more as a prison than a haven.

James Thurber cartoon depicting male anxiety of the home

In this atmosphere, a lot of grim novels and plays came out about the human condition, especially regarding the hardships of life. Neo-realism would change the way movies were looked at forever, and the painful, unglamorous truths of life became increasingly more accepted and interesting to casual viewers. Just like the more "serious" writers, pulp novelists and sex filmmakers attempted to earnestly explain things from the male point of view. So instead of films in which women civilize men, we have films in which men teach women how to be sexually wild. Often, the female is grateful to have her carnal side unleashed; at other times, she is upset and can't accept it. But the gamut of female types of experience was explored, in a society in which female desire has never been a topic of interest for most of the population before or since.

Feminists, when confronted with this material, often reject it as material in which women are objectified, male desire is crudely and sometimes violently expressed, and the woman is diminished by being overly sexualized for the male. While all of this is of course partly true, there are other aspects which can be liberating. For one thing, you have a rare moment in which males are honest about their desire, not confining it to the locker room or bar, but expressing it openly, and trying to communicate to women what they truly feel. This in itself should be welcomed by women, who  often find themselves involved with quiet and irritable men who shut them out and refuse to speak to them about their feelings, afraid of the consequences. Men today have closed up, and their sexual fantasies and cultural outlets are off-limits to girls and women, as they form real or imaginary exclusive men's clubs, and express themselves culturally in darker and more misogynistic ways.

Also, you have a genre in which different types of female desire can be expressed and examined. In films such as "All the Sins of Sodom," sexual desire is equated with something dark, sinister, from the devil, but contemporary viewers will see something different. While the photographer is trying to capture "evil" on the face of his model, when he finally captures it all we see is female desire, female abandonment, female ecstasy. He is showing adults something quite natural that they experience in their own bedrooms, and with his characterization of it pointing out the hypocrisy of the censors. The male imaginary, so repressed in the 1950s, thus finally expresses itself openly, and when we see it we realize that it's not that bad.

In looking at those films today that were once thought of as so smutty, you see levels of humanity and egalitarianism that are absent from the most innocuous mainstream romantic comedies today. In their honesty, those films express truths about men and women that have since been buried under fear of censure. The over-politicization of both male and female roles in movies today makes it impossible for a thing like female desire to come into play, as women must be lawyers and jocks and politicians in order to satisfy some status quo. And yet by taking away women's sexuality, they are taking away large chunks of a woman's identity. Sexploitation movies may have limited women's options by insisting they be sexual creatures; but most contemporary movies limit women's freedom by insisting they have no sexuality at all. Even a film such as "The Notorious Bettie Page" refuses to acknowledge a sexual dimension to Bettie's posing, showing Bettie shocked to discover that men are turned on by her posing, and leaving out any psychology related to her work other than a naive and feather-brained insistence that nudity is natural because God created us that way. Views of female sexuality as taboo are thus entrenched, and an opportunity is missed to go into why a woman chooses that line of work, what she gets out of it, and what it means to her.

Mae West publicity still

Female sexuality has long been an "evil" in the eyes of society and of censors at large. Mae West bragged that she was singlehandedly responsible for the enforcement of the Hays Production Code, due to her frank expressions of predatory sexuality. Gypsy Rose Lee also threatened censors with her witty stripteases, which suggested that a woman can be many things at once: stripper, novelist, playwright, society woman, good girl, bad girl, wit and wag, etc. Censors were much less threatened by passive female sexuality, as exemplified by the tableaux that were accepted in revue shows, in which female nudity was okay as long as the girls remained completely motionless like statues. However, in the films of Hollywood's Golden Age, females were able to be sexualized onscreen through glamour, costume and flirting without being threatening (due to the plots always punishing aggressive females), and so ironically they could be more complete women than actresses in films can be today.

Gypsy Rose Lee publicity still

Sarno, by making female desire and its unveiling the subject of his movie, was doing something transgressive at a time in which such expression was the most taboo thing for audiences. While he was clearly not a feminist, the side-effect of his obsession for the female is that we get to see different parts of her that she often doesn't show to the world. This has been the goal of many of the great male fiction writers and filmmakers from Flaubert to Bergman, and in Sarno's case it deserves another look, rather than being tossed into the trash heap of bad sex movies. Far from being a simple male fantasy about available women, it's a realistic examination into sexual excess, sadism, masochism, ambivalence, desire, and pleasure that is rare in the history of cinema.