Sweet Alice (1983)

Sweet Alice takes me back. The first time I saw it - well after my initial discovery of the stack of duped VHS tapes in my dad’s closet but before I started this blog - I didn’t know anything about loops. After I watched it, I had a sneaking suspicion that the Seka scenes weren’t filmed for Sweet Alice, but the idea of a film recycling a bunch of sex scenes (six of nine, here) was completely foreign to me. What a wide-eyed naif! In the time since, I’ve seen countless examples, but few (if any) were done as well as Sweet Alice.

The story built to frame the loops is that doofy yokel Billy Joe (Kevin James) has come from New Mexico to Hollywood to find his wife, Sweet Alice (Seka). He hires private investigator Jamie Savage (Honey Wilder) since there’s no way a hayseed like Billy Joe could navigate the mean streets of LA. Turns out, Sweet Alice has become a successful porno star, and the gut-wrenching revelation disavows Billy Joe of any hope of saving his marriage. (But not immediately. First, Jamie had to break it to him by showing him a tape of Sweet Alice and Turk Lyon getting busy. Then, after wandering around for awhile, Billy Joe goes to an adult theater and sees another one of her movies. And then, he needs to see - but not confront - Sweet Alice on a porn set to get closure.) Wouldn’t you know it, though, Jamie falls hard for Billy Joe, and after he accepts that his idea of Sweet Alice was wildly different from who she actually is, he falls for Jamie, too, and they leave LA for New Mexico and a new life together.

In case the plot was too tricky to follow, there’s a main theme that’s reprised (a lot) that lays the whole thing out. It’s called “The Ballad of Billy Joe”, written and sung by “Sandy Bush”, a way off-brand Joan Baez. It primarily accompanies Billy Joe wandering and looking wistful, but once soundtracks Jamie wandering around looking wistful, while the viewer is told that:

Billy Joe's on her mind

Jamie thought about him all the time

Does he want her as much as she wants him?

The integration of the loops is pretty seamless, helped by the fact that there isn’t a substantial difference in film quality (the loops are from just a few years prior to Sweet Alice rather than, like, flashing back to 1971) and cleverly having Becky Savage (who appears in the Friendly Hot Tub loop that’s included for hardcore scenes) talk to “director” Marty (Bill Margold, who described his character as “rather ‘affected’” and sported a signature Swedish Erotica neck scarf).

The two loops that stood out were the scene with Seka, Desiree Cousteau, and John Holmes (from Ski Bunnies 2) and the scene with Seka, Lysa Thatcher, and Jamie Gillis (from Hot Flash). The first because it showed how little the acting mattered when Desiree Cousteau tripped over her line (“Do you want me to rub your bactor...back doctor?”) and they just kept rolling, and because John Holmes is Bob Ross-ing it, big time. The second because in her autobiography, Serena wrote that Jamie brought Lysa into their relationship, presumably as a plaything for the two of them, but became so infatuated that he began neglecting Serena who, in turn, got incredibly jealous. From what I can tell, this loop may have been Jamie and Lysa’s first filmed sex.

Happy little trees, indeed

The hardcore scenes shot for Sweet Alice include one between Cindy (Cindy Shephard), Sweet Alice’s friend and Ron (Jack Mason), Cindy and Sweet Alice’s sex slave, apparently, after a failed attempt at getting Jamie into a menage a trois and two between Jamie and Billy Joe. The first is after a romantic dinner and before Jamie takes Billy Joe to see Sweet Alice filming a scene, the second on a picnic after visiting the porn set, and cementing their new relationship. They’re all fine.

While I was making mental notes for this entry while watching Sweet Alice, the main thing I wanted to discuss (other than some of the buck wild wardrobe choices costumer Nancy Leonarda made for Honey Wilder) was the music. (Although first, those outfits. Yikes.)

Not "The Ballad of Billy Joe", though, the other music. There was a repeated synth and saxophone song that scored the loops, some romantic synth and strings music during the Billy Joe/Jamie scenes, and a song under the conversation between Jamie, Cindy, and Ron (and subsequently Cindy and Ron fucking) that sounds a whole lot like "Seeking" by Steve Roach and would have been right at home in an episode of Stranger Things. (Incidentally, "Seeking" was released in 1986 - three years after Sweet Alice - which begs a bunch of questions. Was there a different song in the original film with Seeking inserted on a later home video release? Was “Richard Long” credited for the musical score actually Steve Roach who didn’t release the song under his own name until years later? Does this conspiracy go all the way to the top???) The music is solid, for sure. But actually, when I was transcribing (why? Who knows?) "The Ballad of Billy Joe", I was actually struck by the judgment not just of Sweet Alice, but of “porno stars” (women, at least). To whit:

Well Billy Joe found his wife

Leading a different kind of life

Sweet Alice had become a porno star

She made love to men in twos and threes

And women down on bended knees

And she came for all the world to see

Memories of how it used to be

Seem like they all happened in a dream

And fantasies of how it used to be

Destroyed by seeing Alice on the screen

Sweet Alice paid the price

Trading love for the spice of life

Yes she became a porno star

And she found a way

Through the jungle of LA

By keeping all kinds of men hard

Sure, this is stating how Billy Joe’s memories and fantasies were “destroyed”, but there’s something cold and dismissive about Alice “pa[ying] the price” “by keeping all kinds of men hard”, especially considering it’s seems that Sweet Alice is a pretty big “porno star”: when Billy Joe first tells Jamie his wife’s name, she asks if she’s blonde, and real pretty, implying she already knew who she was. And then, when she tells him it’s possible that his wife has changed and may not want to see him, he’s like, “Naw, she’ll be real happy to get back to her friends,” conveniently overlooking the fact that she left her wedding ring on the dresser when she left and she left 53 weeks before he showed up in LA to look for her (both of which the viewer finds out later). The lyrics should have been, “Sweet Alice is a big star and Billy Joe realized he’s a goony idiot.”

I couldn’t hazard a guess at the number of times I’ve heard or read in interviews that actors have seen few to none of the films they were in, but if I were, say, Honey Wilder and watched Sweet Alice, I’d be pretty pissed at how being a “porno star” got dragged in that song. Or, who knows, maybe I’m being overly defensive and she would’ve been like, “So what, I do come for all the world to see?”

Okay, so that was a bit of a tangent. Let’s see why Robert Rimmer deemed Sweet Alice a Collector’s Choice (in "Classics" in the "Update"):

“Trying to dissuade [Billy Joe] from reforming Sweet Alice, Jamie goes to bed with him. The contrasting romantic sex (some of the most caring and believable that you’ve ever watched in an adult film), with Seka/Sweet Alice being her typical dispassionate self and Jamie/Honey being the totally loving woman (she even thales Billy Joe on a picnic), makes this a love story that most women will enjoy. Hurray for Adele Robbins, Honey Wilder, and Kevin James, who prove in this one that even with a simple little love story an adult film can be interesting.”

Women be both shoppin’ and lovin’ a love story, right?

He adds:

“As for the rest of the actors and actresses...they are stereotyped to fit the plot.”

Okay, I can’t bag on him too hard for not pointing out 66.6% of the hardcore scenes were recycled loops since I started this post by saying that the first time I saw Sweet Alice I didn’t realize it, but as I also mentioned, I had an inkling that something was amiss. And, I hadn’t watched thousands of pornos at that point. Presumably, Rimmer was familiar with the Swedish Erotica library. He also misidentifies Turk Lyon as Jamie Gillis.

Overall, I really enjoyed Sweet Alice. Kevin James is a reliable cornball and, as my wife mentioned, is really good at looking sad. 

And the awful Southern drawl slapped onto his native, nasal ‘Sconnie accent is endlessly amusing. Honey Wilder is as earnest and committed to her role as always. I’m going to go nuts and give Sweet Alice my highest rating since the blog’s reboot and issue a CC25!

RANDOM NOTES

° I appreciated the meta touch of “Adele Robbins” as a client of Jamie’s and her connection to Sweet Alice, and...

° That “Jamie Savage” was, presumably, a Jamie Gillis/Becky Savage mash-up. Interestingly enough, according to IAFD, Gillis and Savage never performed together.

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