JACKIE COLLINS MEMORIAL FILM FESTIVAL: Part 2 - THE STUD

The Stud (1978) is a story of the sexual objectification and degradation of manly hunk Tony Blake (Oliver Tobias), and the instrument of his destruction is the sex monster Fontaine Khaled (Joan Collins).  Fontaine is the trophy wife of a wealthy absentee  husband, and owner of the posh disco of which Tony is manager and on-call sex servant.  The male chauvinist ideal of unlimited sex with an endless variety of partners is turned into a job, a chore, a misery and at last a torment before the story is told. Tony is eventually drowning in a nightmarish sea of women, passed from one pair of lips to the next, a sex object to be used and tossed away. The nudity is not merely gratuitous, it is excessive; even I began to wish some of them would just keep their kit on.  Fontaine is a repulsive creature who becomes quite nasty when she is forced to think about, talk about, or do anything other than sex, with a shiny mask-like face from which cutting barbs smoothly issue.  All major characters get very naked quite a lot, and the first half of the picture alternates among that, some excellent disco scenes, and people talking out the plot.  Here's Joan Collins naked with her obligatory sardonic Greek Chorus friend.

 

Like the sex, the plot was beginning to become rather tiresome, and I was mainly waiting for more disco, when everything veers off into surrealism.  Tony begins popping pills at the Aquatic Parisian Orgy Palace, the background music turns into discordant squawks and drones, and it becomes an echoing nightmare of debauchery as Tony reaches the depth of degradation - DUPED INTO GAY SEX.  That motif appeared in Married Men as well, a major character who uses sex to succeed realizing her ultimate degradation when she is DUPED INTO GAY SEX.  In the '70s, homosexuality equals self-hatred.  There are still greater depths to plumb as Tony attempts to flee his fate in the pleasantest part of the movie for me, a lovely driving sequence through damp grey Britain in a red convertible with the radio aerial bent into the shape of a heart. 

Yes, my favorite part of the sex movie was the driving scene.  Alas, he is driving to greater humiliation as odd man at a tedious weekend in a vast stuffy country house, from which he is ejected to huddle unshaven at his parents' working-class flat and queue in the cold at a telephone box trying to hustle the deal that will reverse his fortunes.  But it is only when our hopes and dreams are crushed before our eyes that we can understand the true meaning of freedom.  My feeling throughout was that this movie suffered from too much budget.  Married Men had a parsimonious quality that distanced it from reality, while The Stud seems very much rooted in this actual world.  It was not quite an enjoyable experience unless you enjoy cringe-inducing grappling scenes that seem more like a fight than romance, with affection reduced to a formality - a token to be paid as part of the ritual of animalistic humping.  I am not big on sex scenes in the first place but some of this got to be downright teeth-gritting.  I still have another entire movie of soulless sex monster Fontaine Khaled to enjoy before this insane ordeal ends.  And here is the trailer.