Paul Verhoeven would love Corporate Assets. There is high drama, wide swings in tone, and a wilder final six-ish minutes than about any adult film I've ever seen.
Tish Ambrose stars as Jill, an employee of the Beutel company. Jill is in charge of a small group of women offered as prizes to top-performing employees and influential men in business and politics at the whim of Beutel bigwig J.W. Sieverson (R. Bolla). While Lisa's the madame, of sorts, she's also expected to be available to men, as dictated by J.W. The harem are jaded, only-out-for-number-one Morgana (Rachel Ashley), sweet, romantic Tanya (Amber Lynn), and brash newcomer Babette (Sheri St. Clair), whose inability to fall in line ultimately has her broken - mentally and physically - by Louis (Herschel Savage), J.W.'s strong-arm thug.
For 12 years, Jill has had a penpal relationship with Winston (Eric Edwards), who was a POW in Vietnam alongside Lisa's brother, who was killed trying to escape. After the war, Winston wrote Jill to tell her what happened to her brother, and over the years, through their letters, they fell in love. With the urging of his "ol' country shrink" (Nick Random in a non-sex role), Winston travels to Los Angeles to meet Jill at long last, in an effort to get him past the visions of war that have plagued him.
We're given a glimpse of his recurring nightmare, which is revealed - during an argument with Jill, later - to be way darker than it initially seemed.
Jill never told Winston what she did for a living, so things are complicated when he shows up at Beutel asking after her. She's ready to move on from her role as madame and make a life with Winston, but J.W. is unwilling to let her out from under his thumb and has Louis keep tabs on her.
The cast is really great. R. Bolla plays J.W. with a cold ruthlessness. While he seems to express a degree of humanity, expressing admiration and affection for Jill during a poolside scene, his later actions left me wondering if he was genuine, or whether it was just the manipulation and gaslighting employed by an abuser....
Eric Edwards's Winston has a vulnerable sincerity. The worldweariness of Jill is palpable even while Ambrose portrays her as a consumate professional. Sheri St. Clair won some awards (1986 AVN Best Acress, 1985 CAFA Best Supporting Actress; I'd say the latter was more deserving than the former. Tish Ambrose or even Rachel Ashely would have been more deserving of Best Actress) as Babette. I'd posit that of all the actors, while Babette's fractured character may have experienced the biggest change (a statement debatable itself), her performance was the slightest. Many surprisingly deep characters were played with better care and nuance.
At 105 minutes (the Vinegar Syndrome release), Corporate Assets is well over my preferred 75-80 minute length, but I didn't feel there was a lot of fat to be cut. In fact, I did a quick comparison against the ~88 minute Vidco release, and what was left out of the shorter version were non-sex elements that would have weakened the story, for sure. I think there were a few of the hardcore scenes that could have been trimmed, but I felt most of the scenes were in service of the story.
Rimmer's take:
This one is so superior to many adult films that you may keep thinking it could have been better, especially if the character J.W. Sieverson...had been better developed.
If all the unrelated sex had been eliminated and the time devoted to a real tug of war between J.W.- not as a totally nasty man but a man who discovers belatedly his need for a loving woman - and Jill and Winston, this would have been a better film.
I don't disagree, necessarily, but I find it interesting that for all of the time Rimmer spends focusing on what women watching the films he reviews will respond to, he advises changing what is essentially a female-focused character piece into a film about J.W.
As for errors, Rimmer misinterpreted an early scene in which Bill Saunders (Harry Reems) has a heart attack during sex with Morgana and Tanya as an assassination orchestrated by J.W. rather than an accident during his "reward" for strong sales.
Corporate Assets also has the distinction of being an AVN 500 pick. They say:
Writer/director Thomas Paine uses common sense to incorporate veteran post-war trauma, the coupling of big business and government, and the sacrifice of emotional morals for material secruity, without drastically burdening the film or creating a grossly contrived product. The situations appear realistic and the dialogue natural; the plot's realism is the film's greatest asset.
High praise to which I agree, so: CC10.
RANDOM THOUGHTS
° Another film where Eric Edwards is cured of impotence (see: Center Spread Girls).
° And another film with an Edwards-featured simulated sex scene (see: Virgin and the Lover).
° Tish Ambrose is in the same face family as Jane Pauley and Brie Larson.
° The romantic sex scene between Jill and Winston in Winston's mountain cabin was cut as a montage and bordered on self-parody. I wouldn't be surprised if it was an inspiration for the sex scene in Team America: World Police.
° Rachel Ashley is a smokeshow.
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Ah, oui, oui! Back to France.
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