Softcore Reviews

He’s had a career spanning five decades, working in every genre from drama to comedy, from softcore to hardcore. So here’s our list of Joe Sarno’s best work…

Here it is. The softcore film to end all softcore films. The softcore film so hard it’s almost hardcore. I mean, the hardcore film that’s so sensual, it must be softcore. Huh? Well, which is it?

The films of Joe Sarno’s greatest period, the 1970s, are all well-known, but his movies from a decade earlier are lesser-known and in many cases lost forever. Here’s one such movie except—lo and behold, in 2008, somebody found a pristine negative in a vault.

Twenty years or so after his last film, Joe Sarno returns to the director’s chair for Suburban Secrets, a modern day movie that returns to subject matter he explored in the 1960s and 1970s. So, Joe: what’s it like to return to the set? Says he, “It was like I had never left!”

Joe Sarno approaches perfection here with a simple tale of a married couple and how they deal with the presence of another woman. I could go on with my usual flights of fancy, about the Ingmar Bergman-like treatment of the relationship, or the way that the island scenery reflects the cloistered nature of said relationship, and after the jump, I will…