Four on the Floor

Of zero interest to anyone but a film antiquarian, Four on the Floor is a wall-to-wall sex film from the late softcore era. Some driving around footage, with heroine Priscilla at the wheel of her Jaguar XK-E convertible, accounts for its title. The idiot self-appointed "film historian" who wrote the liner notes for SWV has a mind so limited to sex, he couldn't even figure out the automotive reference of the title!

Primitive film-making is stalled here back in the Silent Era: no sound recording; one line of looped dialog for Priscilla, and much of the action "explained" in inter titles, just like they did back in the '20s. Priscilla goes to a couple of swinging parties, hooks up with her tardy boyfriend Red, and as one inter title reads: "Priscilla splits". She's driving the sporty car at the finale when the sound effect of a car crash (familiar from its comical use by various AM rock & roll deejays of my youth) implies a bad end.

Despite femmes dancing around sporting full-frontal nudity, sex here is tame and repetitive, with the guys always keeping their underpants on. Times Square theater marquees oddly display two 1968 Argentine imports: Unsatisfied Love and The Female, as well as Box Lunch, last-named too obscure for even IMDb inclusion.

Strangest thing is that the principal credits all appear to be pseudonyms, but music is credited to a roster of real-life '60s British composers. This is perhaps the only case of carefully crediting library music to its actual composers I've ever encountered with a porn film.

As the previous reviewer has accurately stated, this film borders on the ludicrous in the ineptitude of its making. Yet, in some perverse way, it is its very badness that piques my interest in it at the moment.

The sex is, indeed, minimal, not simulated but rather suggested, almost incidental. For me, that is no detriment; it is even redeeming in a way. The blunt-force, wearily mechanical, dogmatically formulaic approach to erotic filmmaking of the hardcore era onward often leaves me variously bored, numbed or depressed. Perhaps that makes the partying, group-groping, sixties-style dancing and general silliness of the kind seen in this film somehow attractive, even a little refreshing. Or maybe I just like watching naked girls swaying under any pretext.

In any case, here I find people who look like they're having fun portraying people having fun (usually themselves anyway, pseudonyms or not), and they come off very genuine as a result. What value this film has lies there, and it's considerably more than trivial. The rest is awkwardly inept packaging, comical but not hard to ignore.

This film is an oddity, unique in a so-bad-it's-almost-half-good sort of way. It has the appearance of something made by a some enthusiastic amateurs still unsure what all those buttons on the camera really do, winging it as they go along, pointing the camera at whatever catches their eye at any given moment, and knitting the results together afterward with a vague hint at a plot and those hand-made silent-era-style cards, all on a lunch-money budget, more for the fun of it than any real aspirations to serious film-making.

Perhaps this is a project by a little bunch of friends who weren't trying to make something for public release at all, and were later encouraged to do so by some viewers who liked it. They might well have added music, title and inter-title cards and that one bit of dialogue to flesh it out enough to sell. That might account for a very unusual omission in the various cards and graphics: there is no copyright notice anywhere I can find on my copy.

The photography uses something I call the ENTD/TL technique (Everything Not Too Dark Is Too Light), with audio non-quality to match. For me that's a challenge to haul the thing into an NLE and see what can be done with it in a reasonably short time. Turns out that I had some little success, and with the audio as well, and the film is a little more watchable as a result. As it happens, I rather like the library piece they chose for the main theme, so beefing up the audio did pay off in one way. And it was strangely fun to reverse the direction of the rolling wheel in the open. I'm not sure if it's canonical film grammar that a wheel in that kind of scene should roll clockwise, but it seemed somehow subtly wrong going the other way. It seems to go along with the left-to-right rule of cinematography.

I don't know where one could get a copy of this; it seems to have evaporated from the only source I know of, that being SWV's catalog, possibly due to minimal sales. Still, I don't begrudge the cost of my copy.