The Lickerish Quartet (1970)
A bored aristocratic family brings a beautiful motorcycle daredevil home for a drink, then discovers she may be the blue-movie fantasy already living in their heads.
A wealthy husband, his elegant wife and their grown son are lounging in a vast Italian castle, watching a grubby black-and-white stag reel as casually as another family might watch the evening news. The blonde performer catches their interest, but even pornography bores this jaded trio before long, so they head to a nearby carnival in search of something more immediate. There they see a brunette motorcycle stuntwoman riding the Wall of Death, and all three become convinced she is the girl from the film. The father invites her back to the castle, supposedly to prove their claim by showing her the reel. Yet when the projector starts again, the images no longer match their memories and the woman’s face is mysteriously hidden. From there, she wanders through the castle and into the private desires of each family member,...
becoming seductress, romantic ideal, sexual rival and possibly something less tangible. The father pursues her through a wonderfully absurd library decorated with giant dictionary definitions of erotic words; the son tries to turn lust into youthful romance; and the wife is drawn into an intimate game in which curiosity, jealousy and attraction become impossible to separate. Their encounters do not unfold like ordinary reality. Scenes repeat, reverse or change perspective, while the stag film, wartime memories and present-day seductions begin contaminating one another.
Radley Metzger is not simply supplying naked bodies—though he certainly does not forget them—but playing with the way spectators reshape what they see to fit their own appetites. The mysterious visitor is treated as an available plaything by people whose money has insulated them from consequences, yet she quietly takes command by reflecting their fantasies back at them. It is clever, funny, occasionally pretentious and deliberately slippery, with dialogue that can sound like a boozy philosophy seminar held after midnight. But the gorgeous camera movement, strange editing and dream logic give it a hypnotic pull. It feels less like a conventional sex film than an erotic hall of mirrors in which nobody, including the audience, can be sure who is watching, who is performing or where desire ends and invention begins.
This is pure turn-of-the-1970s Euro-erotica, made during that brief period when sexploitation wanted admission to the arthouse and was willing to quote Pirandello at the door. Much of it was shot at Castello Piccolomini in Balsorano, in Italy’s Abruzzo region, whose stone corridors, formal rooms, gardens and surrounding countryside make the family’s home feel both luxurious and faintly haunted. Add the carnival lights, roaring motorcycles, saturated colours and Stelvio Cipriani’s breezy score, and the vibe lands somewhere between a decadent holiday, an Italian Gothic dream and a dirty movie having an identity crisis.
Silvana Venturelli is the film’s knockout attraction: long-legged, beautifully built and cool enough to make every person in the castle look overeager. Her acting is more about physical confidence, teasing glances and shifting personas than emotional realism, which suits a woman who may be flesh, fantasy or both. Erika Remberg provides the mature counterpoint, all polished beauty and guarded hunger, especially when the two women finally test the tension between them. The film includes plentiful breasts, backsides, full-frontal male and female nudity, extended simulated sex and lesbian intimacy, but no hardcore penetration. It is explicit for 1970, yet Metzger shoots the bodies with such sleek, composed sensuality that even the naughtiest passages feel more like erotic cinema than mechanical pornography.
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