This is, be warned, a Really Guilty one. But what’s the point of Guilty Pleasures if there’s no guilt involved? Listen, folks: one reason that a critic, like anybody else, goes to movies is to see beautiful people doing naughty things. In a word: sex! So flash back to the early 70s, when porn was briefly chic, and its makers fearlessly tested the bounds of legal behavior. Back then, hardcore had a naive vitality. It also produced a mini-masterpiece, School Girl, directed (pseudonymously) by San Francisco’s Paul Gerber and starring the sweetly enthusiastic Debra Allen as a college student researching a paper on local subcultures. She chooses the swinger scene, which leads to a half-dozen specialty numbers: boy-girl, girl-girl, group grope. In the most intriguing scene, a lithe young woman “directs” an erotic encounter with her husband and Debra. As firm and bossy as any auteur, the woman finally joins the deux to make a ménage à trois. It’s a funny, telling comment on how directors bring an audience’s gamiest desires to life, and on how power helps define any human relationship. But School Girl is also, ho-boy, sexy—or it wouldn’t be a guilty pleasure, would it?
All-TIME 100 Movies
TIME's Richard Corliss updates our All-TIME 100 list of the greatest films made since 1923 — the beginning of TIME — with 20 new entries
School Girl, 1971, David Reberg, U.S
Full List
Behind the List
A - C
- Aguirre: The Wrath of God
- The Apu Trilogy
- The Awful Truth
- Baby Face
- Bande à part
- Barry Lyndon
- Berlin Alexanderplatz
- Blade Runner
- Bonnie and Clyde
- Brazil
- Bride of Frankenstein
- Camille
- Casablanca
- Charade
- Children of Paradise
- Chinatown
- Chungking Express
- Citizen Kane
- City Lights
- City of God
- Closely Watched Trains
- The Crime of Monsieur Lange
- The Crowd
D - F
G - J
K - M
N - P
Q - S
T - Z
Great Performances
Guilty Pleasures
- Gone With the Wind, 1939, Victor Fleming, U.S.
- Tenth Avenue Angel, 1949, Roy Rowland, U.S.
- Sailor Beware, 1951, Hal Walker, U.S.
- Diabolique (Les Diaboliques), 1955, Henri-Georges Clouzot, France
- School Girl, 1971, David Reberg, U.S
- There’s Something About Mary,1998, Bobby and Peter Farrelly, U.S.
- Anatomy of a Murder, 1959, Otto Preminger, U.S.
- Gun Crazy, 1949, Joseph H. Lewis, U.S.
- The Incredible Shrinking Man, 1957, Jack Arnold, U.S.
- Joe Versus the Volcano, 1990, John Patrick Shanley, U.S.
10 Best Soundtracks
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