MANHATTAN, New York – Radley Metzger, a Golden Age of Porn filmmaker known for creating “artful” pornography with lavish sets, witty dialogue and unusual camera angles, died March 31 in Manhattan. He was 88.
Born in 1929 in The Bronx, Metzger broke into filmmaking in the 1950s by editing mainstream movies for directors including Ingmar Bergman. In the 1960s, he received critical acclaim for his own “artful erotic cinema” that combined mainstream production values with decidedly adult themes (though non-explicit). By the mid-1970s, after realizing hardcore pornography could be much more profitable, he segued into the adult industry, directing many of his porn classics under the name “Henry Paris.”
His legacy includes the softcore classics I, a Woman (1966; reportedly inspired Andy Warhol’s I, a Man), Camille 2000 (1969) and The Lickerish Quartet (1970; his final non-explicit film and perhaps his most critically acclaimed), in addition to the explicit The Image (1975) and The Opening of Misty Beethoven (1976).
Metzger said he never intended to produce explicit films until his 1974 film Score “flopped.” Shot in Yugoslavia with what was, for the day, a respectable production budget, the movie’s quick demise prompted Metzger to reevaluate his priorities. While he gave up the notion of mainstream respectability, he never discarded his artistic sensibilities.
He also never apologized for his decision to switch filmmaking gears. In Metzger’s mind, porn held a mirror to mainstream morality.
“When I was coming of age, eroticism was always in films, but eroticism was punished,” he told an interviewer in 2014. “The promiscuous girl never got the leading man, the woman who sold her charms, always had a bad fate. The ‘good girl’ always achieved ends the bad girl never did. As a reaction to that, I tried to do the opposite. You could have a free attitude and behave in a free way and not be punished.
“A parallel to that is that it could also be light. It didn’t have to be tragedy. You could look at [sex] in a fun way. That was a personal thing, to work against the clichés in cinema when I was growing up.”
According to the Film Society of Lincoln Center, Metzger was “a fascinating transitional figure whose unique brand of sophisticated erotic art cinema created an almost utopian space between the cheap grindhouse sexploitation of the ’60s and the full-on hard-core porn of the ’70s.” The society honored him with a retrospective of his non-explicit work in 2014.
