Mary Mendum
Mary Mendum
photo sourced here.
Profile
American, appeared in the broadway musical Hair, did a couple of films in France for Radley Metzger and Max Pecas, then became the American porn star, Rebecca Brooke. --http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0111736/ [Jun 2004]
The Image (movie) [...]
Anne is played by Mary Mendum, and The Image came immediately following her appearance in the Broadway version of Hair.Les Mille et une Perversions de Félicia/Felicia (1974) - Max Pecas
Directed by Max Pecas. Fans of sexy films (and of L'Image star Rebecca Brooke) are in luck, with this opportunity to see Brooke and wildly sexy Christine Alberola in their DVD quality glory in Pecas' engagingly twisted drama of a young woman staying with family friends who insinuates herself into their emotional lives, and their bed. We've learned a lot by studying this uniform Spanish DVD edition of original (soft) Pecas' later sexploitation films. When both "hard" and "soft" version of films exist, it's easy to assume the film was made as XXX, and then censored, but for European 1970s sex films, that's often not the case at all. Pecas' FELICIA and EVERYBODY'S, Sarno's BUTTERFLIES and Wickman's ANITA are all examples of films made primarily as highly polished "soft" films that were crudely re-worked for American (and sometimes German) XXX release. In Europe there were mainstream commercial venues for artistic soft-x in the early 1970s, whereas America had a two tier system of regular movie theatres and adults only theatres. When ANITA came out in 1973 it was too provocative for regular theatres, but the US adult theatres were already showing only XXX films, so the real ANITA couldn't have played anywhere in the US. Similarly, FELICIA was envisioned primarily as a handsome soft-X film, but throughout the production, some XXX sequences were shot to be incorporated into a separate porn-theatre release. The porn version is good, but disjointed, with an odd mix of beautiful production values and haphazardly photographed shots. Now we know why! The XXX shots were done at the same time, but without much artistic care as to lighting quality, composition, etc. This original (soft-x) FELICIA is a completely different movie, with much different material, and much of it in different order. This is plainly how the film was intended to be, since the story makes more sense emotionally and normatively. The ideal version would be somewhere in between the two, but the world is what it is. Actors: Christine Alberola, Rebecca Brooke, Roland Charbaux, Nicole Daudet, Béatrice Harnois, Eva Khris, Stéphane Maury, Mary Mendum.The Image (1975) - Radley Metzger [...]
- The Image aka The Punishment of Anne (1975) - Radley Metzger [Amazon US]
The Image is a disturbing, erotic, scary, elegant movie that probably only Radley Metzger could have made. Most directors of 'erotica' concentrate on gynecological close-ups to the exclusion of all else; Metzger's hallmark has always been to tell a story and explain the characters and their situation without ever resorting to the patronizing smirk, relying as much on the actors' eyes as on the dialogue. The S&M scene is as alien to me as peanut-butter-and-pickle sandwiches (which I am also told some enjoy), but in The Image I can see the gamesmanship, the role-playing and the unspoken psychological leveraging that makes it all so compellingly complex. Would I show this film to Grandma? Uh-uh. But then, that's just MY grandma, yours may well have a side you never suspected. This film is hot, fascinating, and, in this gorgeous and UNCUT (thank you, thank you!) video transfer, stunningly beautiful as well. --ssmithee for amazon.com - The Groove Tube (1974) - Ken Shapiro [Amazon US]
This collection of satirical sketches about television was released in 1974, the heyday of obvious pop-culture humor along the lines Cheech and Chong. With Saturday Night Live still a few years away, Chevy Chase made an appearance here, and one can see the acute sensibility that would redefine television comedy in its early form. Some of the gags work well but most are pretty dispensable; some are a bit crude. On the plus side, it's nice to see Richard Belzer (from TV's Homicide) in his sharp-tongued, formative stage. While not brilliant, the film did serve as one influence on the rise of ironic humor in the '70s.--Tom Keogh, amazon.com [stars Mary Mendum in a sex olympics scene]your Amazon recommendations
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