Before Gary Graver's debut film begins, I was immediately engaged as the credits rolled with the oh-so distinctive sounds of the Les McCann Trio, a group I greatly enjoyed in the early '60s playing at Leo's Casino in downtown Cleveland. This music sets the tone and literally carries along a highly personal movie and ill-fated love story, shot mainly MOS, with Gary's voice-over and an engagingly simple style in black & white familiar from other indie pictures of the era. I could easily identify with his character's lonely plight.
No, it's not a sexploitation film, any more than Scorsese's debut starring Harvey Keitel, "Who's That Knocking at My Door?" in the same time period was, though both were sold as sexy movies by the same distributor, Joseph Brenner Associates.
And it did play at Film Festivals. It's important to note, given the movie's subject matter of how difficult, nay nearly impossible, it is for budding filmmakers like Gary to make it in Hollywood, that the mainstream cinema, and independents, and even pornographersz.. exist and work in a continuum. Tony Anthony, so famous for having inaugurated the new 3-D era with his indie "Comin' At Ya!" in 1983, was just like Gary, a true independent in the early '60s with the excellent, also highly personal movie "Force of Impulse" and he even had a Clint Eastwood phase mid-career imitating Clint with his "Stranger in Town" Westerns made in Europe for MGM. Later he hooked up, still unsung, with Ringo Starr and George Harrison to produce "Blindman" and "The Concert for Bangladesh".
Graver was later revered and also ridiculed for his many porn films (as "Robert McCallum") and best-remembered as Orson Welles' right-hand man late in the great one's career. It's all part of a continuum, that critics and especially audiences insist upon compartmentalizing.