Inserts

I would guess that the audience for 1975's INSERTS must be comparatively small.  Especially in light of another certain film Richard Dreyfuss made the same year.   But the actor has long championed his work in writer/director John Byrum's highly theatrical piece of cinema as some of his best.  He even participated in an appeal against the Motion Picture Association of America when the film, a major studio production, was given the dreaded X-rating.  In the '90s, the rating was changed to the equally dreaded NC-17.   Warranted?  I believe so.  Here's a perfect case study of how when one examines pornography, the study itself must necessarily be pornographic.

Well, maybe slightly.  Definitions vary among us.  INSERTS unfolds in the early 1930s in the Hollywood mansion of a once highly lauded film director who hasn't kept with the times, and has fallen to the margins.  He is identified only as "Boy Wonder", especially ironic as he has been unable to make the transition from silent to talkie.  His alcoholism hasn't helped.  Nary a minute passes without the hoist of a bottle.  So now the Boy Wonder, who also refuses to abandon his experimental, hand held camera stylistics, shoots stag films.  Nudies.  Pornos.  He has a small set with a bed and big Hollywood lights in his parlor.  Convenient, as his apparent agoraphobia keeps him housebound.  

We meet his leading actress - the childlike, drug addicted Harlene (Veronica Cartwright) and actor "Rex the Wonder Dog" (Stephen Davies), an essential stunt cock whose main gig is as a mortician's assistant.  The Boy Wonder badgers and manipulates them to get his scene, a particularly lurid rape.  Rex, who aspires to appear in "real" movies, gets a little too into it, necessitating his director smash a bottle over his head.  Arriving just after this circus is the film's crude producer Big Mac (Bob Hoskins), with a young actress named Cathy (Jessica Harper) in tow.  He hands out wads of cash and heroin and wonders aloud why he works with the testy, annoyingly verbose Boy Wonder. 

INSERTS' action remains in two rooms (save a tragic discovery in a bedroom).  Byrum's direction never quite achieves the desired cinematic.  Maybe by its very claustrophobic nature.  This all would be perfect for the stage, and actually went there some years later.  The house set is always nice to look at.  It is described as crumbling and rotting by its characters.  The plumbing doesn't work.  But it still looks habitable, too much so.   Had it looked more like the Grey Gardens maybe this movie would've really had the gritty feel it so desperately wants.

But the material makes up for that.  The dialogue is raunchy and graphic, even by today's standards.  The rape is shown.  The women (and Rex) are frequently undressed.  Harper spends one half hour topless.  She, by the way, steals the movie.  Really holds her own against Dreyfuss, whose work initially felt as it it relied too much on his characteristic huffy laugh and patented mannerisms, but developed nicely.  Cathy may also be the best written character, and her dynamic certainly announces the film's devious subtext.  Then she performs her final scenes with a smooth emotional transition.  Solid work.

I was expecting to hate INSERTS, but Byrum and company keep everything fascinating and entertaining.  Its tagline calls it a "degenerate film with dignity" and I guess that's accurate.  The main complaint I would have is that Byrum's dialogue just isn't as clever and quotable as he thinks it is, especially when it's repeated.