Lynn Lowry in Score . Despite the convenience of the label, truly artistic erotica has always been a rarity in any genre. For every great novel, such as Terry Southern's Blue Movie or Marquis de Sade's Justine , there are a zillion pulp novels from Beeline Books, Pad Library, Saber Books, and other legendary sleaze publishers. For every Mapplethorpe, there are reams of tired commercial porn mags bulging on pornshop shelves.
Cinema is no different.
Of the volumes of material that poured onto grindhouse screens from the '50s on, only a handful even aspired to, much less attained, any significant aesthetic value. Radley Metzger, whose most productive period was the late '60s to the mid-'70s, is surely the standout in this select group. Like many other auteurs working in marginal realms, Metzger was also a film distributor, so he was less at the mercy of others in terms of choosing and realizing projects than his more mainstream counterparts. This makes it easier to say the films are indeed his, though acknowledgment must be made of his superb collaborators, such as Enrico Sabbatini, art director for sumptuous works like Camille 2000 and The Lickerish Quartet , and Hans Jura, the brilliant cinematographer of Therese and Isabelle and The Lickerish Quartet . Metzger was both a key player in, and a catalyst for, the sexual revolution of the '60s, and his career contains several milestones in this area.