With Sweet Young Foxes, Bob Chinn presented a surprisingly insightful look at the breadth of female sexuality. In truth, had I watched the film by myself, I almost certainly would have missed a lot of the thematic subtleties, but fortunately my wife attended the screening (in our living room) and picked up on them and clued me in. Our conversation after the end credits gave me a much deeper appreciation for Foxes than I would've had on my own.
Ostensibly about three young women - Laura (Hyapatia Lee), Maggie (Cara Lott), and Kim (Cindy Carver) - celebrating the end of their first year of college, the actual story is the complexity of transitioning from girlhood to womanhood.
While the college girls are getting a taste of independence, all three still live at home and have varying degrees of tension with their parents. Laura's parents are divorced and while she lives with her mother, Julie (Kay Parker) their relationship is volatile to say the least.
Julie takes issue with the hours Laura keeps, but you can't help but wonder if she's at least partially envious of Laura's youth and freedom. In a beautifully shot bathroom/shower scene that takes place while Julie's getting ready for her date with two-year beau Raymond (Eric Edwards), Julie examines her womanly body in the mirror, wordlessly conveying push and pull of youth and vibrance against sexual maturity and confidence.
That scene alone would have been enough to win Parker the AFAA Best Supporting Actress Award she received for the film in 1983.
Maggie is constantly self-medicating in order to fight off the misery she feels when she's "straight." Pot seems like her drug of choice, but after getting past the smell, she takes to Scotch okay, introduced to it by Mark (Ron Jeremy) and later offered some by Miranda (Pat Manning), the hostess of the party that acts as a real turning point for each of the ladies (but more on that later).
Kim is an anxious naif. Unlike Laura, who's stoked to be done with school for the year, Kim's concerned about the grade on her final final, fearing her dad will take away her car if she doesn't do well enough. She also admits to Laura that she's been afraid of the dark since she was a girl. Once when she was seven or eight, after her mother tucked her in and turned out the light, she bugged out until her father came in to comfort her. When she was just about asleep, he was about to turn out the light when he froze, with a look on his face that stuck with Kim, torn between what was the right or wrong thing to do: turn off the light to help his daughter learn there was nothing to be afraid of or leave it on to spare her the fear and discomfort. It was a pretty deft way to suggest the concerns and difficulites that come with the increased responsibility of adulthood. When Laura asks Kim if she ever figured out what caused her fear, Kim just replies she, "more or less accepted it. [She's] just waiting for the day [she] grow[s] out of it," making her fear of the dark a symbol of childhood, generally.
After the groundwork is laid for the ladies as "girls," they end up at the aforementioned party that will help turn them into women. As a precursor, though, they spend some time getting ready together, doing makeup and picking out dresses. The common ritual among women of a certain age (or so I've been told) is an important part of trying out different facets of one's personality, or in the case of borrowing clothes, a friend's. When Maggie does Kim's makeup, with bold eyes and lipstick, Laura says she "never knew Kim had a side like that." When Kim puts on a hot little dress to boot, she's a far cry from her polka dot skirt and simple cotton underwear.
For all over her presumed maturity, Laura still had some starry-eyed ideas of romance. Writing in her diary at the beginning of the film, she wondered how she'd make it without her boyfriend Alex (then real life husband Bud Lee), who'd been away for school at Harvard (while she was at Cal State) and was spending the summer in Europe with his parents.
She writes, "All I can do is remember the way he holds me wants me. How he takes me in his arms. Full of desire and emotion. The look in his eyes when he merges his body with mine." All the while, she's fantasizing about making love on a bearskin-ish rug in front of a fireplace, the trope-iest trope of romantic sex ever troped.
At the party, Laura sees Alan (Carl Lincoln) who was a senior when she was a freshman in high school, and confesses that she had a crush on him and was disappointed he never asked her out despite dating every other eligible girl in school. They find themselves an empty room at the party to right that years-old wrong.
Kim, meanwhile, is chatted up by Greg (Blair Harris). When they find themselves an empty room, Kim frets that she should have said something to Laura and Maggie before heading off, and explaining that Laura is sort of her guardian angel, and the despite Maggie getting high all the time, she's actually quite sensitive. Greg cuts her off to ask if she doesn't ever talk about what kind of person she is, and that she seems kind and sensitive. Even if it's just a line (though Greg does seem sincere), it's enough to throw caution to the wind and get hers.
Finally, Maggie meets Miranda who gives her a tour of the house. Settled into their own private room, Miranda introduces Maggie to the wonder of a woman's touch. Turn about being fair play, Maggie makes sure Miranda gets hers, too.
The natural flow of the scene is in sharp contrast to Maggie's scene with Mark. Where Miranda is comfortable and confident, Mark is pompous ("You're over your freshman year. Nobody smokes grass anymore.") and condescending ("No, I don't think you're a virgin or something, but I don't think you've been made love to the way a woman should be.") After Mark finishes, giving Maggie the facial she (literally) asked for, Ron Jeremy gave Cara Lott a "boop" on the nose that caused her to flinch.
Despite it being punctuated with a tipmani strike in the soundtrack, I'd wager it was unscripted, and Chinn couldn't have asked for a better second-and-a-half to demonstrate the difference between Maggie's hetero- and homosexual encounters in the film. It also shed a whole different light on Maggie's earlier assertion that she's miserable when she's straight....
The morning after the party, Laura has gone from wondering how she'll make it three months without Alex to how she'll find time for all the men filling up her dance card (including her dance teacher).
At the very least, she'll have ample freedom and opportunity since her mother is moving to St. Paul with Raymond (oh, right, over dinner Raymond told Julie he was offered a job in St. Paul that would allow him to do the research he really wanted to do and he wanted her to go with him; Julie was conflicted, but his position ultimately won out. And by position, I mean legs-on-shoulders, hey-o!)
...and with Maggie's father saying she should keep Laura company and Kim's parents in Europe 'til Christmas.
My one beef with the film is the title. A viewer would be more than forgiven expecting a light-hearted romp featuring insatiable nymphets. That film, this ain't. Even something as simple as Laura, Maggie, and Kim would suffice (even if that might imply there'd be a sapphic three-way or two).
Let's see what Rimmer's take was:
Good dialogue, nice sharp color, and a slice-of-life story that's interesting to watch.
Accurate. Way to go, Bob.
It's always interesting to see a Collector's Choice, award-winning film with weak magazine reviews (Adam Film World and Hustler Erotic Video didn't think much of the picture, apparently). I really do believe it was a marketing issue though. If you do away with any preconceived notions from the title, this is a really solid movie that I'll rate a CC25.
RANDOM THOUGHTS
° The opening credits point out that Pat Manning was Hustler's October '82 centerfold.
The magazine leaned into Manning (or Shirley, as she's named in the mag) as being 50 years old (a claim parroted by Robert Rimmer), despite her reportedly being born in 1940, which would've only made her 42. I guess if mature porn star is your hook, you might as well go for it.
° A couple of names that jumped out from the credits were DP Jack Remy (tip of the cap to him; the movie really looked great) and Production Assistant Jim Holliday.
° Bob Chinn had a nice little Hyapatia Lee Suite in 1983, releasing Body Girls, Let's Get Physical, Sweet Young Foxes, and Young Like It Hot (four of Lee's first five features, in fact), all but one (Body Girls) getting a Collector's Choice from Rimmer. (He thought Hyapatia and Bud Lee - who wrote it - missed too many opportunities to ratchet up the comedy and that Hyapatia wore too much makeup.) Hyapatia Lee's non-Chinn '83 movie, Naughty Girls Need Love Too, also got a CC.
° The December 1983 Erotic Film Guide was a Hyapatia Lee feature, including previews of three of her films and and interview.
° Paul Thomas conducted the interview and wrote two of the previews (Let's Get Physical and Body Girls) and were fun little reads.
Unfortunately, the uncredited preview of Sweet Young Foxes sucked.
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Onward!
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