Barbara Broadcast

Sexual adventurer Barbara Broadcast meets her reporter friends at an upmarket Manhattan restaurant. Sex is the main thing on the menu – the waiting staff oblige the customers who want to perform fellatio and cunnilingus, or providing a salad dressing of ejaculate, while the maitre'd is fellated by anyone who drops a plate, be they staff or (willing) customer.

With a surreal ambience – the mock-class of Strauss's Blue Danube recalling the quasi-coital docking of the spacecraft in 2001 – and a combination of attractive porno types – Annette Haven, C J Laing – and decidedly average, borderline grotesque/carnivalesque bodies – middle aged and conventionally bourgeois looking, skinny and less than well endowed etc – this opening sequence is the best part of the film.

Full of subversive wit – the opening title announces that "The events in this film are based on an authentic fantasy" – and strategies of detournement – the moment when a white customer asks if she can borrow her neighbour's waiter, as hers has disappeared and "all these caucasians look alike" – the closest analogue one can think of to the scene is the vignette in Buñuel's The Phantom of Liberty where excretion is a public act and eating something that is private and unmentionable, with a similar effect in causing us to question how things might be different.

In some ways it's a shame, then, that from here on in Barbara Broadcast becomes a relatively straightforward sequence of conventional numbers – some pseudo-lesbian activity, some BDSM, and a heterosexual anal scene – which, will always extremely well shot by director Henry Paris/Radley Metzger, well-choreographed to classic 70s porno music – you could actually watch this porno for the music, as they say – and with performances that exude energy and enthusiasm for the most part, cannot but disappoint by comparison and make one all the more aware of what is absent from the piece, most notably male homosexual activity.

Nevertheless, Barbara Broadcast is a well-made piece of classic porn that offers more than just jerk-off material.

Picture quality on this "Collector's Edition" DVD from VCA Interactive is tolerable. Though the image appears slightly cropped if the credits are anything to go by and the levels of dirt, grain and damage are what one would expect, the basic low-budget elegance of Meztger's milieux and mise-en-scene still comes through.

The commentary track with Jamie (Jaimie) Gillis and Gloria Leonard – who does not appear in the film but did work with Metzger on The Opening of Misty Beethoven is surprisingly good, treating the film with an unexpected degree of seriousness and intelligence.

With few lulls and a good to-and-fro they talk about their fellow performers, what it was like to work with Meztger and some of the differences between the industry in the porno-chic era and the present, in terms of both aesthetics and mores. Thus, whereas the film's anal scene was apparently quite daring and unconventional for its day – in sharp contrast to contemporary product – it's worth also noting the cuts made to Gillis's scene with Constance Money's "Protestant American Princess" to avoid depicting a now-taboo combination of coercion and penetration, and the re-editing of the scene where C J Laing urinates in front of Wade Nichols to omit any actual shots of her pissing. (Marc Morris's Mondo Erotico has a useful comparison of the specific differences between this DVD and previous releases: http://www.vidmarc.demon.co.uk/mondo-erotico/m_index.html)

The other extras include a self-advancing "production stills gallery"; a pointless, generic, "hall of fame photo gallery"; links for the main female cast members that just take you to their respective scenes, and a brief introduction to the film and it's place in porn history from some unnamed guy who those more informed about the genre will undoubtedly be able to put a name to…