Erotic Adventures of Candy

After the roughie debut Hot Summer in the City, which today elicits disgust as a racist exploitation flick and as an alleged image of its creator’s submissive fantasies, Gail Palmer set out on a stellar career in mainstream porn chic production. In this respect, Erotic Adventures of Candy is a focused star-making project, both for lead actress Carol Connors and for the director/screenwriter/producer herself. Palmer serves as the film’s narrator and even speaks to the camera at the beginning, thus presenting herself and her perspective. Thanks particularly to the filmmaker’s onscreen presence, the concept of adapting Voltaire’s Candide as an exaggerated porn-bimbo comedy thus proves to be an imaginatively daring approach, making it possible to make a porn flick that fulfils all of the standards of the time in terms of style, the required reach and the mandatory sex scenes, as well as in terms of gender clichés, while also exaggeratedly and self-reflexively subverting everything. Candy thus goes out into the wide world from her family’s home, where her strict upbringing by a prudish father made her a naïve girl. The trysts in which she later engages revolve around the absurdly moronic ways that men try to get between her legs. Despite Candy’s stylisation into a cartoonishly naïve bimbo, she never comes off as a victim. In fact, the director focuses mainly on her and her pleasure during the sex scenes. Contrary to the standard of the time, she instead fragmentised the men, only rarely showing their faces, thus reducing them to genitalia giving the protagonist pleasure. What stands out in her sexual encounters (with the exception of the humorously conceived mandatory orgy, which was one of the few at the time to include gay sex), are both the ode to masturbation as the physically and psychologically safest form of sex and the depiction of the protagonist’s first time. In the scene in which Candy loses her virginity, Palmer contrasts Candy’s romantic notions of sensitive lovemaking with the slapstick banging with the handsome Mexican gardener (who is both a racist stereotype and a parody of that stereotype in equal measure). In the film’s overarching idea, where the men think about how to trick the protagonist, who instead is the one in control, we can see not only the filmmakers’ view of the gender dynamics of the time, but also of the porn industry itself, which at that time could legitimately present itself as progressive thanks to directors like Svetlana and Gail Palmer. (21.08.2022)