A Free Ride
A Free Ride | |
---|---|
Directed by | "A Wise Guy" |
Produced by | Gay Paree Picture Co. |
Cinematography | "Will B. Hard" |
Release date |
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Running time | 9 minutes |
Country | United States |
Languages | Silent film, English intertitles |
A Free Ride, also known as A Grass Sandwich,
Plot
A Free Ride's opening intertitle denotes the film's setting as "in the wide open spaces, where men are men and girls will be girls, the hills are full of romance and adventure". The film shows two women walking home together alongside a rural road. A wealthy male motorist in a right-hand-drive 1912 Haynes 50-60 Model Y Touring Car[2] arrives and offers them a lift. After some hesitation, the women accept his promise to behave properly, and sit beside him in the front seat. However, the man immediately kisses and fondles them, before they get underway.
Some time later, the man stops the car and steps out of sight into the trees to urinate, but the women follow and voyeuristically watch him, returning to the car as he finishes to conceal that they have done so. After his return, the women go the same spot themselves to urinate. He secretly follows, watches them, and becomes sexually aroused, also returning to the car before he is discovered. The women return to the car, and accept the man's offer of liquor.
The man asks one of the women to accompany him into the woods, and they
Production
British author Dave Thompson, in his book Black and White and Blue: Adult Cinema from the Victorian Age to the VCR, notes that D. W. Griffith is credited by one source as director on A Free Ride. But this claim is rejected by film historian Kevin Brownlow and Thompson himself.[3] The identities of the cast are not disclosed in the credits (the title card says "starring the Jazz Girls"). Thompson asserts that the cast do not resemble identifiable contemporary silent film stars. He claims the crew strove to make the cast unidentifiable, noting that the actor wears a large fake mustache and a hat. When the actor's mustache became detached before the end of the film, he hid his face until the mustache was reattached.[3] Thompson notes that some historical accounts, which he describes as "casual histories", have suggested that the cast of early pornographic films were drawn from among people with low social status such as the homeless, drug addicts, the mentally ill, prostitutes, and petty criminals. Thompson argues that there is almost no documentary evidence for this claim, and suggests that the actors likely had higher social status.[4]
A Free Ride was shot outdoors.
Release
A Free Ride was reportedly first shown to its target audience in 1915.
Critical analysis
According to Williams, A Free Ride is a typological representative of a genre of early pornographic movies that included
Journalist Luke Ford writes that sex is given emphasis over story in A Free Ride.[23] The film uses humor in its opening credits through false cast and crew names, such as A. Wise Guy as director, Will B. Hard as photographer, and Will She as the title writer.[12] Williams describes this as "crude humor" and asserts it was common in American stag films produced from this time.[10] Professor Frank A. Hoffman of University at Buffalo writes that the film's production standard indicates that there had been previous experimentation with stag films.[24] O'Toole writes that despite the elementary nature of movies like A Free Ride, stag films became "rigidified into a restricted visual experience" in a short period of time.[22]
Hoffman notes that A Free Ride contains many fundamental constituents which are the characteristics of an archetypal pornographic film. He identifies these basic constituents as a carefully planned but not complicated state of affairs to provide introductory motivation, visual stimuli to sexually excite the women, a theme that is generally rare in reality, a straightforward and very quick seduction, and the sex acts as the film's central theme.[24]
Reception and legacy
A Free Ride was a well-known stag film of the 1910s[14] and, according to Williams, is regarded as a classic pornographic film.[19] It is one of the three earliest pornographic films, along with El Satario and Am Abend, in the collection of the Kinsey Institute.[25][26] The 1970 documentary film A History of the Blue Movie includes scenes from this film.[27] The Museum of Sex in New York City showed A Free Ride at its 2002 inaugural exhibition.[28] Lisa Oppenheim, a New York–based film director, remade the film in 2004 using no actors; instead the events of the film were represented by "the landscape and trees".[3]
The film is featured in the 2022 horror film Pearl.[29]
See also
Notes
- ^ a b Slade 2001, p. 9.
- ^ S2CID 145712805.
- ^ a b c d Thompson 2007, p. 39.
- ^ Thompson 2007, p. 40.
- ^ Lauro & Rabkin 1976, p. 47.
- ^ Ross 1993, p. 6.
- ^ Cavendish 2009, p. 559; Nathan 2008, p. 23; Rutherford 2007, p. 24; Schaefer 1999, p. 7; Slade 2001, p. 9; Spencer 2008, p. 85; Thompson 2007, p. 37.
- ^ Jones, Jay (August 2, 2009). "Porn museum nestled in Sin City". Los Angeles Times. Archived from the original on March 13, 2012. Retrieved March 15, 2012.
- ^ Williams 2007, p. 61.
- ^ a b Williams 2007, p. 62.
- ^ Brownlow 1990, p. 28.
- ^ a b Thompson 2007, p. 38.
- ^ Spencer 2008, p. 85.
- ^ S2CID 191623073.
- ^ a b Cavendish 2009, p. 559.
- ^ Andrews 2006, p. 263.
- ^ Leun, Gerard Van Der (June 24, 2001). "Twilight Zone of the Id". Time. Archived from the original on 2014-12-19. Retrieved March 8, 2012.
- ^ English, Bella (April 25, 2010). "Manhattan museum takes sex seriously". Boston.com. Archived from the original on July 10, 2012. Retrieved March 8, 2012.
- ^ a b Williams 2007, p. 68.
- ^ Lewis 2007, p. 39.; Thompson 2007, p. 196.
- ^ Lewis 2007, p. 196.
- ^ a b O'Toole 1998, p. 63.
- ^ Ford 1999, p. 15.
- ^ JSTOR 538281.
- ^ Lewis 2007, p. 196; Livingston 2009, p. 15; Staiger 1995, p. 515.
- JSTOR 1191714.
- ^ Alex de Renzy (Director) (1970). A History of the Blue Movie (Motion picture).
- ABCNews.com. Retrieved March 8, 2012.
- ^ Bilodeau, Matthew (September 16, 2022). "The Adult Film In Pearl Is Real Movie From The Era, Says Director Ti West [Exclusive]". /Film. Archived from the original on September 20, 2022. Retrieved July 2, 2023.
References
- Andrews, David (2006). Soft in the Middle: The Contemporary Softcore Feature in Its Contexts. ISBN 978-0-8142-1022-2.
- Brownlow, Kevin (1990). Behind the Mask of Innocence. ISBN 978-0-394-57747-0.
- Cavendish, Marshall (2009). Sex and Society, Volume 2. ISBN 978-0-7614-7907-9.
- Ford, Luke (1999). A History of X: 100 Years of Sex in Film. ISBN 978-1-57392-678-2.
- Lauro, Al Di; Rabkin, Gerald (1976). Dirty Movies: An Illustrated History of the Stag Film, 1915–1970. Chelsea House.
- Lewis, Jon (2007). Hollywood V. Hard Core: How the Struggle Over Censorship Created the Modern Film Industry. ISBN 978-0-8147-5143-5.
- Livingston, Paisley (2009). The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film. ISBN 978-0-415-77166-5.
- Nathan, Debbie (2008). Pornography. ISBN 978-0-88899-767-8.
- O'Toole, Laurence (1998). Pornocopia: Porn, Sex, Technology and Desire. ISBN 978-1-85242-395-7.
- Ross, Jonathan (1993). The Incredibly Strange Film Book. ISBN 978-0-671-71296-9.
- Rutherford, Paul (2007). A World Made Sexy: Freud to Madonna. ISBN 978-0-8020-9256-4.
- Schaefer, Eric (1999). "Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!": A History of Exploitation Films, 1919–1959. ISBN 978-0-8223-2374-7.
- Slade, Joseph W. (2001). Pornography and Sexual Representation: A Reference Guide. ISBN 978-0-313-31519-0.
- Spencer, Kristopher (2008). Film and Television Scores, 1950–1979: A Critical Survey by Genre. ISBN 978-0-7864-3682-8.
- Staiger, Janet (1995). Bad Women: Regulating Sexuality in Early American Cinema. ISBN 978-0-8166-2625-0.
- Thompson, Dave (2007). Black and White and Blue: Adult Cinema from the Victorian Age to the VCR. ISBN 978-1-55022-791-8.
- Williams, Linda (2007). Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the "Frenzy of the Visible". ISBN 978-0-520-06652-6.
External links
- A Free Ride at IMDb