Abigail Lesley Is Back in Town

Plot synopsis:
During the Edwardian Era, recently orphaned Mary Lennox is sent from her home in India to her uncle Lord Archibald Craven's mansion, Misselthwaite Manor, in Yorkshire, England. Unloved and neglected by her late parents, who were killed in an earthquake, she is a cold, unpleasant girl, unhappy in her new surroundings. Head housekeeper Mrs. Medlock informs Mary she will not be spoiled as she was in India and that her uncle, who spends extended periods of time away from the Manor, will likely not see her. Mary is ordered not to leave her room, but strange noises lead her to explore the mansion on her own. Mrs. Medlock eventually allows her to play outside to keep her from poking about the house. In the expansive grounds of the Manor, Mary discovers her late aunt's garden, which was locked and neglected since her accidental death ten years prior.
Martha Sowerby, a maid, and her brother, Dickon, a nature-loving boy who can "talk" to animals, befriend Mary. Fascinated by the "secret garden," Mary enlists Dickon to help her bring it back to life, gradually becoming a more friendly, happy child in the process. When finally introduced to her uncle, Mary is apprehensive, knowing he was responsible for locking up the secret garden. Fearful he would do it again, Mary evasively asks to plant seeds in an "unwanted" part of the Manor, to which Lord Craven grants permission before leaving the country for the rest of the year. Confident that the garden will remain a secret, Mary and Dickon continue their work.
Hidden away in the gloomy mansion is Mary's cousin, Colin, who has been treated all his life like a fragile, sickly invalid. This has turned him into a demanding, short tempered, helpless boy who has never left his room or learned to walk. Mary eventually discovers Colin and learns the strange noises she has been hearing is him crying. She is taken aback by his difficult nature, but reaches out to him anyway. She shows him that he's not actually sick, and that the outside world is not as dangerous as Mrs. Medlock, who is in charge of caring for him, claims. Encouraged by Mary, Colin decides to go outside for the first time in his life. Mary and Dickon take him to the secret garden and Colin begins his own healing process.
Colin, Mary, and Dickon spend all of their time in the garden, where Colin learns to both stand and walk on his own. Anxious to show Colin's new-found life to his father, they perform a "magic" ceremony in hopes to bring him back home. It appears to work, as Lord Craven awakens suddenly from a dream of his late wife calling him home. He immediately returns to Yorkshire. He discovers Colin walking and playing upon his return, which leaves him dumbfounded with joy. Mary runs off and breaks down in tears, fearful that both she and the garden will be neglected and locked away again. Her uncle reassures her that she is part of the family and promises to never lock the garden up again. He thanks her for bringing his family back to life; they embrace, and then celebrate with Colin, Dickon, and the Manor staff. The film concludes with Mary reflecting in voiceover that "if you look the right way, the whole world is a garden."

Tags: pornographic

Review:
Abigail proves her point and Prissy unwinds a bit.
Any movie the title of which has a person's name followed by "is Back in Town" means that wrong was done to owner of said name and said owner has returned to extract revenge.
Abigail (Jennifer Jordan) was a sex hound whose crime was bedding down with one guy too many—the husband (Jamie Gillis) of the beautiful but tightly wound Priscilla (Rebecca Brooke).
Now she's back, the town tramp, whose quest is to prove to everybody who drummed her out of town (they're all high school buddies from about seven years ago) that they were/still are as sex-mad as she was/still is and place as little value on sexual propriety as she did/still does.
Next come the guys, again one at a time, then mixing and matching with the ladies here and there until there should be uniform numbers and a scorecard to keep track of it all.
Naked bodies everywhere, brightly lit, clearly displayed, much of it likely performed in hardcore but filmed in softcore.No one is going to win any acting awards for the film, though Eric Edwards, as the lovable but somewhat dim Chester (Chester?
Who makes a movie with a character named Chester in it?) tries his hardest.
He'd be happy, too." Bo comes over later and Priscilla tries, but she just can't bring herself to cheat on, of all people, Jamie Gillis.
Wow.Well, Prissy finally goes to see Abigail for some sex counseling and gets it in the form of top-notch oral sex in which Brooke chews up the scenery with her over-reaction to what must be the first orgasm of her life.
Best to watch this scene with the sound turned off.
In the final shot, the happy couple walks through the sand toward the surf and you keep expecting them to make a left turn, but no, they keep walking straight toward the ocean and, who knows, maybe they're going to walk right in and just keep walking.
It's really Amityville, New York, director Joseph Sarno's hometown.
The horror house in not shown in this film, but several scenes were shot adjacent to it.
This was four years before the James Brolin film came out.Of course this movie is not just about naked people.
There is a social message, which is, who are we to judge the horniness of others when we are just as horny as the ones we condemn and would act on it if given half a chance?
Another message is that if you have a camera and a passable script you can get lots of people to take off their clothes for you and watch them have sex with each other.
Effective and ultimately rather engaging soft core from Mr Sarno.
I think it should be said right away that 'soft core' here means something a little more than the usual mincing about that one might imagine.
I reckon but stand to be corrected that some of this is real sex without us actually being shown the graphic detail.
Anyway, suffice to say the sex scenes are believable and erotic.
I am not as stunned by the acting as some seem to be but, I guess for the type of film this is, the acting is surprisingly good.
I don't really know whether the film is a bit stilted at the beginning with its slightly awkward flashbacks or it just took me a little while to get into things but the film certainly seems to get better as it progresses.
By the end when Abigail has managed to 'engage' with the whole cast and encourage almost everyone to also go with each other, in twos, threes and more the fire is well alight.
Very enjoyable and not one scene that seems too long - some achievement!.
This Town Ain't Big Enough for the Both of Us. A mere couple of weeks ago, filmmaker Joe Sarno passed away, leaving behind a legacy of accomplished adult efforts on both sides of the explicit fence.
Sex was more means to an end than goal in itself for him, providing another layer of characterization.
Reeking more of unneeded intellectual excuse for lofty film fans to get down 'n' dirty than a proper appraisal of Sarno's achievements, such monikers merely look good on paper.
Simple truth of the matter is that he was an excellent director, in a measure not just limited to the "adults only" universe though his eventual output puts him smack dab in the middle of it.
Like Claude Chabrol, to whom he could be much more fruitfully compared if such need be, his focus was firmly on the hypocrisy stifling the middle class from doing the things they wanted, but foregoing his customary distancing cynicism.Credit Something Weird's Mike Vraney for first reviving interest in Sarno's body of work, unearthing believed to be lost '60s features like SIN IN THE SUBURBS and THE SWAP AND HOW THEY MAKE IT for new generations of trash cinema enthusiasts on video and subsequently DVD.
When fans go gaga, the mainstream sooner or later takes notice, making Sarno one of the few disreputable directors to achieve a modicum of "real world" appreciation within his lifetime.
In recent years, this begrudging acknowledgment has extended to include his simulated skin flicks shot both home and abroad in Scandinavia during the first half of the '70s but still fails to assess the excesses he was to commit later on, mostly as Karl or Erik Andersson.
Now that French TV's culture channel Arte has ported over Retro Seduction's pristine copy of ABIGAIL LESLEY IS BACK IN TOWN for their upmarket R2 release in their "The Other America" series, can a Cinematheque double bill of THE TROUBLE WITH YOUNG STUFF and SLIPPERY WHEN WET be far behind ?
Ah, if only.Most elusive among his '70s gems, ABIGAIL LESLIE may be the most solemn of a lot that includes the much better known because more widely seen CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG American HOUSEWIFE and LAURA'S TOYS.
Providing a presumably unwelcome dose of angst-ridden reality for fantasy-starved flea pit patrons of the day, it must have made for a tough sell when compared to Sarno's comparatively unencumbered tales of marital infidelity, hence one possible explanation for its subsequent obscurity.
Rising to the surface after three decades of absence, the movie can now rightfully take its place as the director's crowning achievement as well as one of the finest independently produced American films of the decade, an unbelievable statement to some perhaps in light of Sarno's habit of casting hardcore talent in non-explicit roles, all of whom rise to the occasion beautifully.Though her name is in the title, Abigail Lesley's not so much the main character as the catalyst in other people's lives, having left the quiet little fishing hamlet of Baypoint in a huff years ago after being caught in flagrante with married Gordon Howe (the also recently deceased Jamie Gillis in an uncharacteristically subdued performance) by his unsuspecting spouse Priscilla, played to perfection by the exquisite Mary Mendum a/k/a "Rebecca Brooke", Sarno's magnificent muse who - according to persistent rumor - ended up marrying a Muslim extremist !
Their marriage never recovered from Gordon's spur of the moment transgression and she has been conducting a chaste afternoon romance with laid off fisherman Chester (Eric Edwards, better than ever) whose lonely sister Alice Anne (an excellent turn by lovely Chris Jordan, the actor's wife at the time, who sadly passed away from cancer at an early age) is left to pick up the slack as the family's sole bread winner.
As if economic reality's not hitting these people hard enough, bad girl Abigail (the highlight of Jennifer Jordan's checkered career) returns to the place of the crime, hell-bent on wreaking even more havoc in retaliation for having been wronged.The plot's twists and turns could be construed as pure soap opera if it weren't for the compelling earnestness with which they are presented, aided immeasurably by plausible characterizations and the convincing bleakness of a small town forever out of season, courtesy of another haunting Jack Justis solo guitar soundtrack and the autumnal shades of Bill Godsey's intricately composed shots.
Skin display's frustratingly frugal - for a reason - during the slow build-up, only to explode by the halfway point when it's basically one sex scene after another.
The masks of respectability come off as characters are forced to confront each other and, perhaps even more frighteningly, themselves.
None of this comes off as tedious because Sarno has already worked up a full head of steam narratively by this stage.
The seemingly liberated Abigail, whose carefree attitude hides unrequited longing, has simply put the inevitable clockwork mechanism into motion and now it won't stop until all the guilty secrets have come out.In addition to those already mentioned, and since no good cast should go unpraised and porno people are rarely the recipients of such, Jennifer Welles has a field day as Priscilla's naughty aunt Drucilla, hunky beau (and future Kentucky Governor wannabe until his illustrious past caught up with him) Sonny Landham in tow.
Hiding behind the pseudonym "Anne Keel" and playing bitchy buddy Tracey is carnal cult favorite Susan Sloan, best remembered as the star of Robert Sickinger's lavish adaptation of anonymous Victorian porn novella A MAN WITH A MAID a/k/a THE NAUGHTY VICTORIANS..
She hightailed it after a scandal but now ABIGAIL LESLEY IS BACK IN TOWN and the old gang's creamin' their jeans, let me tell ya.
They all knew each other back in high school when they either lusted after or had sex with each other and now, ten years later, it's happening all over again, their marriages be damned...
Joe Sarno's oneiric 1975 (im)morality tale has a number of superstars from The Golden Age Of Porn (Jamie Gillis, Jennifer Welles, Eric Edwards) doing softcore (where a modicum of acting replaces penetration) and guess what- nobody breaks the suspension of disbelief or embarrassed themselves.
This may be softcore porn but it inhabits the same universe as it's XXX brethren -a world where sexual fulfillment is the most important thing in life.
It's the only thing, in fact, and if it isn't, there's something wrong with you, like Priscilla (Rebecca Brooke).
I was down with it but tremors began to crack the terrain when a couple of characters professed their love at the end (Abigail to Priscilla, Priscilla & Chester to each other) and I had a Scarlett O'Hara moment when I thought, "But where will they go?
What will they do?" because not one of them worked or did much of anything besides think or worry about sex when they weren't actually having it.
In this universe there's nothing wrong (as Priscilla found out) that a little liberation can't cure so I was gobsmacked when Priscilla told Chester that the only way they could be happy was to "leave this place".
The cock-blocking mixed message confounded me but the film's anatomical and pastoral (a New England fishing village) tableaux were so nice to look at, I didn't care.
It was filmed in Amityville, Long Island but I'm not reel sure what possessed writer/director Sarno.
I was surprised beautiful leading lady Rebecca Brooke (aka Mary Mendum) wasn't the titular vixen but her Priscilla was the film's focal point and she its star.
Brooke was found floating in a Boca Raton, Florida canal a couple of years ago, "accidently drowned" but I can't find out anything more about it..
A Sarno Classic that fans of the genre must watch.
Joe Sarno was a prolific & respected Writer/Director of numerous sexploitation films.
This is one of Sarno's best and an example of how sexploitation can be a quality movie, not just fluff.
This is strictly soft-core, sex is more plot and character development.
Even if you never watched or purposely avoided watching a sexploitation movie before, you might want to try this gem.
Abigail Lesley has a cast of actors mainly known for hardcore, but as proven here, they actually can act.
It often is not common knowledge that many started or had aspirations of Broadway plays or Hollywood films.
There are some good quality albeit not Oscar winning performances.
The script & story written by Joe Sarno is very engaging.
The story definitely comes before the sex (again strictly soft-core) in importance although as often the case with his movies, sex though not necessarily the act, is what drives the story.
Sarno also has a habit of strong woman characters as here contrary to what Hollywood has done until recently.
Often the sex does not make sense without following the dialogue, one of the traits of a quality sexploitation film.
It should be noted this movie was done on a very small budget, filmed in days not months.
Yet as an example of how great Sarno was as a Director, it does not play as such.
The character of Abigail Lesley is who drives the plot and binds together all the other characters.
She returns to the town to cause trouble of course.
But the main character is Priscilla played by Rebecca Brooke who has also been credited as Mary Mendum in other films.
She started performing in plays and shows her acting ability here.
The rest of the cast including Eric Edwards, Jamie Gillis and others also give very credible performances.
This is an excellent movie even if the sex scenes were removed although they are a definite part of the story.
Sarno.
I've seen better porn - I've seen worse art house film.
I first saw the film Abigail Leslie is Back in Town in the 1970's  shortly after it had been made.
As a then enthusiastic consumer of 'lesbian porn', I remember enjoying it a lot at that time.Recently some inspired promoter re-issued the film on DVD; as I was highly curious about whether or not it had stood the test of time, I bought a copy and watched it.The movie was originally issued as a 'soft core' art film.
Even the erotic moments are extended beyond the attention span of the average porn viewer.
And the connective 'soap opera', which centers around the title character's return from exile after sleeping with the husband of the most uptight woman in town, leaves something to be desired.
She returns for revenge and, like Puzo's literary Don Corleone, knows well the Sicilian proverb that 'revenge is a dish best served cold.
Unfortunately these connective scenes drag on and on, with long shots of gorgeous New England winter filling them it.
It's a very beautiful porn film, but it simply doesn't work on that level.Does it work as an art film?
To me it's still remarkably long winded, with all these beautiful shots of a cold and bitter New England winter.
But some art film critics love that.
And, of course, do I have the credentials to make a judgment about an 'art film'?
All I can say is that, though it's still long and awkward in places, I found it enjoyable and interesting.
Rebecca Brooke, who plays the 'most uptight woman in town', has a "deer in the headlights' quality to her performance which more than matches her material, which allows her to be shocked and hurt any number of times.
Easily the best performance in the film, she might have had a career as a successful mainstream supporting actress had she tried hard enough.All in all, an enjoyable film but not one that lives up to memory well..
A typically absorbing & erotic soft-core winner from the great Joe Sarno.
The drab and uneventful tranquility of the sleepy affluent coastal community of Baypoint gets rudely ripped asunder when the notorious sexually voracious and insatiable bisexual harlot Abigail Leslie (the smolderingly hot Jennifer Jordan) unexpectedly returns to the dreary hamlet after a lengthy absence.
Demure and uptight socialite Priscilla (the luscious Rebecca Brooke) is especially perturbed, although her smarmy and licentious husband Gordon (legendary porn star Jamie Gillis) is more than eager to have an adulterous fling with the wanton and willing Abigail.
Pretty soon Abigail's infectiously sensuous presence causes everyone in town to toss aside their morals and inhibitions for the sheer sake of carnal pleasure, indulgence and debauchery.
Among the folks who fall under Abigail's seductive and irresistible spell are feisty, friendly, but unfulfilled fisherwomen Alice Ann (Chris Jordan), Alice Ann's shy, sweet, soft-spoken brother Chester (Eric Edwards), Priscilla's snobby gal pals Tracey (Anne Keel) and Lila (Julie Sorel), Priscilla's raunchy aunt Drucilla (Jennifer Welles), and hunky resident stud Bo (handsome, muscular Sonny Landham, who later went on to act in such 80's mainstream action features as "48 Hours" and "Predator").Acclaimed soft-core director/screenwriter Joe Sarno expertly crafts a highly absorbing and arousing soap opera-style small-town slice-of-life melodrama which not only delivers the expected sultry and alluring goods (the sex scenes are fairly explicit and steamy, but never too graphic or sleazy), but also serves as a perfectly trenchant and provocative critique of very conservative and puritanical small town mores (best represented by the frustrated Priscilla and the unhappy Alice Ann), hypocrisy (Priscilla's friends Lila and Tracey blithely partake in Abigail's lascivious fun and games despite the fact that they are both married), and repressed passions and desires (Priscilla pines for Chester, but is too timid to pursue her romantic interest in him).
The uniformly excellent acting from the first-rate and attractive cast is a substantial plus: Brooke, Jordan and Edwards in particular are outstanding, with sound support from Welles, Keel, Sorel, Jordan and Landham.
Moreover, both Bill Godsey's pretty, polished cinematography and Jack Justis' hauntingly sad, moody, tuneful acoustic guitar score further enhance the film's sterling quality, thereby lifting this movie well out of the rut of your standard mindless skin-flick.
All in all, this picture rates as another involving, intelligent and impressive thinking man's soft-core outing from the always reliable Joe Sarno.