Score (1973)
Two bored swingers, two buttoned-up newlyweds and one sabotaged telephone turn a quiet Croatian coast into the cheekiest bisexual game of the 1970s.
In the mythical seaside town of Leisure, Jack and Elvira are a happily married pair who treat seduction like a competitive sport, keeping score as they charm strangers into bed. Casual pickups have become too easy, so Elvira proposes a more interesting challenge: she will seduce Betsy, a shy young newlywed, while Jack takes aim at Betsy’s handsome husband Eddie. Beneath the joke, however, Betsy and Eddie are already coming apart. She remains the blushing Catholic schoolgirl, bewildered by her husband’s distance, while Eddie carries desires he cannot comfortably admit. Elvira starts working on Betsy during an afternoon visit, calmly discussing swinging, drugs and open marriage as if she were explaining a new washing machine. Then a strapping telephone repairman arrives to fix the phone Elvira deliberately disabled. A strategically...
spilled cup of coffee soon gets his trousers off, and Betsy finds herself photographing an impromptu floor show while trying to decide whether she is horrified, fascinated or turned on. That evening the couples gather for dinner, marijuana and a trunk full of costumes. Jack becomes a sailor, Eddie a cowboy, Betsy slips into something revealing, and Elvira appears as a nun with practically no habit underneath. The party gradually divides into two private conversations: upstairs, Elvira encourages Betsy to stop apologising for her curiosity; downstairs, Jack gently probes the cracks in Eddie’s masculine front. Recreational chemistry helps, inhibitions begin dropping faster than the costumes, and the wager turns into two parallel seductions racing towards midnight.
Radley Metzger handles all this with wit rather than grubby urgency. The film retains the clever, talk-heavy structure of its stage-play origins, yet his teasing camera angles, mirrored encounters and elegant intercutting make it feel far more cinematic than a filmed bedroom farce. Its sexual politics are wildly permissive and its hosts are admittedly predatory, but the film is less interested in punishment than liberation. Betsy and Eddie are not corrupted so much as confronted with everything their tidy young marriage has forced them to hide. Beneath the camp humour and naked games is a surprisingly sharp observation: respectable appearances mean very little when two people cannot be honest about what they want.
This is pure early-1970s porno chic, when filmmakers briefly imagined that sex, cinema and sophistication might all share the same cocktail glass. Although the story pretends to unfold in a fantasy European playground, it was filmed around Bakar on the Croatian coast, then part of Yugoslavia, standing in for an expensive Riviera resort. The harbour views, sunny streets, modern interiors, psychedelic beat and bouncy lounge music give the picture an airy holiday mood. It feels like a naughty coastal stage comedy invaded by pot smoke, poppers, Polaroids and bisexual mischief.
Claire Wilbur plays Elvira with cool, mature authority: elegant, amused and completely certain that every locked door will open if she leans against it long enough. She can sit fully dressed beside Betsy and somehow seem more naked than everyone else in the room. Lynn Lowry is the film’s secret weapon, fresh-faced and wide-eyed without playing Betsy as stupid; her shifting expressions make the young wife’s journey from nervous disapproval to hungry curiosity genuinely believable. Their chemistry is playful, intimate and distinctly charged, with Wilbur supplying the experienced feminine confidence and Lowry the delicious uncertainty. The uncut version is not coy: there is abundant nudity, lesbian play, explicit bisexual action, oral sex, full-frontal male exposure and a memorable strap-on sequence. Yet Metzger photographs the bodies with warmth and humour rather than the mechanical close-up routine of ordinary pornography. It is graphic, certainly, but also stylish, funny and remarkably relaxed about pleasure.
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