The Opening of Misty Beethoven

When it comes to the ‘great’ works of the Golden Age of Porn, chances are megalomaniacal Hebrew pornstar/pornographer Jamie Gillis (Water Power, New Wave Hookers) is featured in it performing some ungodly sexual act on some seemingly naïve goy gals and/or guys and such is certainly the same, at least to some extent, in regard to Radley Metzger’s The Opening of Misty Beethoven (1976) aka Misty Beethoven; a loose (in more ways than one) and lecherous erotic adaption of Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw's play Pygmalion (1912), as well as the hokey Hollywood musical adaption My Fair Lady (1964) directed by George Cukor. A work following a psychopathically charismatic and wantonly wisecracking sexologist of the discernibly Semitic persuasion who in his unwavering narcissism believes he has the sexual skills to turn a prudish and erotically challenged wasp prostitute named Misty Beethoven (Constance Money) into the most wild, wicked, and desired whore of the posh pussy-peddling sort, The Opening of Misty Beethoven, whether intentional or not on the director’s part, as a whole, makes for an audacious allegory for the Hebraic influence over eroticizing and oversexualizing the Christian Occidental with its Semitic sexologist as the suave Svengali teacher of a neurotic Nordic babe who, quite symbolically, has the same Germanic surname as one of the greatest musical composers of human history, thus making its inclusion of three major Western cities (Paris, Rome, New York City) all the more meaningful and perversely penetrating. Directed by Radley Metzger (using the pseudonym ‘Henry Paris’), a man who got his start in the filmmaking world editing trailers for Janus films (the parent company of The Criterion Collection) of François Truffaut and Ingmar Bergman films but would become one of the greatest, if not the greatest, artsy fartsy pornographers who ever lived, and starring Jamie Gillis, the actor and director apparently had a connection that transcended the mere obsession of defiling blonde beastesses of the super sexy Shiksa sort. As Benson Hurst wrote in the liner notes of the DISTRIBPIX INC. DVD release of The Opening of Misty Beethoven, “Radley seemed to have a soft spot for Jamie. Though they hadn’t seen each other in years, they lived in the same city and would often ask after each other. They seemed content to conduct an invisible dance around each other, like two old Jewish compadres not wanting to break the magic spell of their separation.” Unsurprisingly, Constance Money (born Susan Jensen) – a woman who went from an A+ high school student and cheerleader turned a woman who had one of the most seen vaginas in the world (her stint in porn was mainly to help pay for her college tuition) – has less than fond memories of The Opening of Misty Beethoven due to the fact she made virtually nil money (she claims to have never signed a release nor got paid and hated Metzger) from starring in one of the most monetarily and critically successful porn flicks ever made, but also because she started an off-screen romantic fling with co-star Jamie Gillis that got a bit too sexually violent for her taste, thus acting in stark contrast to her character’s ‘last laugh’ at a former sex sage turned cuckold. 

 As Constance Money once stated regarding her experience with starring in The Opening of Misty Beethoven, “"Misty" is a good movie because it is real. The incidents in the film were happening to me at the time, especially my relationship with Jamie [Jamie Gillis]. Henry Paris [director Radley Metzger] made me that character. He told me I couldn't act, so I fit the part.” Indeed, as a woman who does not know how to apply lipstick without looking like a crack-addicted ghetto drag queen and soullessly advertises that she accepts compensation for her costly cunt in the form of credit card via an especially anti-erotic American Express t-shirt, Miss Misty looks and acts like a dead dud in bed would, but things change when super suave sexologist Dr. Seymour Love (Jamie Gillis) – who clearly studied at a different university than Magnus Hirschfeld and Alfred Kinsey due to his rampant heterosexuality and hypnotic playboy personality – takes up the challenge of rigorously training her to be the most sexy and salacious streetwalker in the world after seeing her give a haphazard handjob to thee Napoleon Bonaparte (whose less than bold boner is almost pulled apart, but he inevitably gets off) in a Paris movie theater. A libidinous lady’s man of the dually 'cocky' and devilishly charming conman sort, Dr. Love has a feisty female assistant named Geraldine Rich (Jacqueline Beudant) to help give Misty a more female yet fiery touch in the art of love in a rather rigorous sexual training that involves facials, blowjobs, handjobs, sodomy, girl-on-girl action, and just about everything besides standard vanilla sex because, after all, The Opening of Misty Beethoven stars Jamie Gillis; a semen demon of the bisexual, sexually versatile kind. As her guru of lascivious yet loveless sensuality, Dr. Love has Misty get some practical experience of the eclectically erotic sort, including giving hope to the homosexually hopeless by helping an impotent make-up-wearing art dealer (played by fashion model turned gay porn star Casey Donovan; star of Wakefield Poole's 1971 gay porn hit Boys in the Sand) of the poofter persuasion to achieve orgasm via juicy vaginal stimulation and performing a virtual magic act by causing a trio of dapperly dressed butlers to achieve orgasms simultaneously while standing in unison. After evolving into a masterful madam of the job, be it of the blow, hand, rim or otherwise, Misty steps things up by competing in a carnal knowledge contest at a wild porn party at the home of famed pornographer publisher Lawrence Layman (played by Ras Kean aka Ras King and modeled after Hugh Hefner) so she can be creamed and eventually crowned with the glorious title of “Goldenrod Girl.” Needless to say, Misty wins via her wild wantonness and develops an ego larger than the cocks she routinely polishes and thus turns the tables on Doc Love, leaving his dick in the dust as a professional playboy turned pathetic pushover who hopelessly lusts after a stupid Shiksa that he transformed into a virtual baroness of blowjobs and buggery. 

Despite being one of the most strikingly stylized and elegantly assembled porn flicks ever created, a relative 'honor' no doubt, The Opening of Misty Beethoven is oftentimes an exceedingly anti-erotic celluloid affair that would probably mostly appeal to sadomasochistic lesbians of the bourgeois persuasion, as well as cultivated cuckolds who prefer to be on the receiving end when it comes to copulation.  In short, The Opening of Misty Beethoven, although flagrantly farcical, is, like a good percentage of porno flicks, a fiercely fetishistic work that, in terms of its professed 'eroticism,' will mostly appeal to the sexually dysfunctional, hence its debauched lace curtain setting among the rich and sexually powerless.  Naturally, it takes a proletarian pussy to whip these blue-balled, bluebloods into shape.  Probably most famous/infamous for an extraordinarily emasculating “pegging” scene involving a butch bourgeois bitch with a dyke haircut named Barbara (played by then 46-year-old Gloria Leonard), Misty, and quasi-poof publisher Lawrence Layman (it has been said by his former bunny concubines that the real-life Mr. Hefner needs a steady diet of Viagra and gay porn to “rise to the occasion”); a fellow that is apparently powerful in the pornographic print world but whose idea of a good time is being anally penetrated by a social-climbing hooker.  The Opening of Misty Beethoven must have gotten some people hot and bothered, especially among passive men, as few adult films, even of the 'porn chic' sort, have developed so much prestige to the point of being the closest X-rated work to crossover into the mainstream and being taken seriously by film critics and academics.  On top of Radley Metzger winning the award for "Best Director" from the Adult Film Association of America for The Opening of Misty Beethoven, along with the film winning "Best Film" (and being one of the first films to be inducted in the XRCO Hall of Fame) Jamie Gillis (who was inducted in the XRCO Hall of Fame later as an 'actor' in 1985) won the award for "Best Actor" for his performance, but apparently the greatest honor he received for his work came from a random Rebbe at a Purim party. As Benson Hurst wrote, "The sign of true success is when art penetrates popular consciousness and appears in the unlikeliest of places. Mark Jacobson, writer, journalist and esteemed chronicler of New York life, recalls attending a Purim party with Jamie somewhere in deep Brooklyn...it turned out to be way wilder than any Hebrew school grad might have imagined...Rabbis were stumbling around with empty Jack Daniels bottles, their beards sopped with vodka. Several fights broke out. Jamie was a little amazed by this. "Jews! Drunk and fighting!" he kept saying, like a New York Post headline. As they stood there, one of these orthodox types hurtled himself in their direction, his thick, Torah-studying glasses flying off his face and landing right at Jamie's feet. Jamie picked the glasses up and handed them back to the man...The rabbi adjusted his glasses, taking care to flop his paises in the proper position. Now able to see again, he took one look at Jamie and said, "You! You I know! Misty Beethoven!" Then he stumbled happily toward the door," which is quite the Hebraic honor for a Jewish man who shares the same birthday with Adolf Hitler and is, in part, best known for playing an evil enema bandit who cleaned the intestinal pipes of unsuspecting goy gals.

 In its utilization of themes from works by George Bernard Shaw, Dali-esque set design, and art deco architecture, The Opening of Misty Beethoven is just as much of a sexual ravaging of European kultur as it was for Constance Money, which was created at a time where prostitution and smut-peddling had replaced empires and high art in the Occident due to the apocalyptic conditions spawned by the Second World War. After all, it is a grand tradition of conquerors to pillage the conquered people’s women and take them as corrupted concubines and the same thing can generally be said in the context of art. As Jamie Gillis’ onetime-roommate and fellow Judaic porn performer Robert Kerman aka R. Bolla (Cannibal Holocaust) once stated, “I hope that porn is the most unrighteous thing I do. If we go out of our way to be scumbags, that's the sin, when I do porn, I offend Shakespeare more than God,” and I think it is safe to say that Mr. Shaw (incidentally, the Greek mythological figure ‘Pygmalion’ that inspired his play also influenced Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale) would be less than enthralled to learn that his art was turned into sensually stylized cinematic smut of the Semitic sort.  Indeed, while the Hebrews certainly take the kosher cake when it comes to dominating ownership and propagandistic propagation of pornography, Aryans undoubtedly dominate when its comes to pulchritude and sexual stamina, or as the great antisemitic Semite Otto Weininger once wrote, "The Jew is always more absorbed by sexual matters than the Aryan, although he is notably less potent sexually and less liable to be enmeshed in a great passion," and the anti-climatic (at least for Dr. Love) conclusion of The Opening of Misty Beethoven, quite unintentionally I am sure, shares the same sentiment.

-Ty E