Arguably the best of the “Wes Brown” movies, a pseudonym employed by the late great Sam Weston – a/k/a “Anthony Spinelli” – during the first half of the ’70s, SEDUCTION OF LYN CARTER provides a chamber piece setting with a small group of characters and a limited number of locations he would return to when shooting on video over a decade later. While the reasons therefore were on one hand undeniably economic, its pared down structure simultaneously offered him the opportunity to explore people’s nature and motives regarding their sexual needs with an entomologist’s eye for psychological detail. His findings weren’t always pretty as this movie and its equally scorching companion piece PORTRAIT OF SEDUCTION illustrate.
Married for 15 years and mother of an unseen teenage son, elegant Lyn Carter (Andrea True) is the treasured trophy wife of apparently successful business man husband Darrin, persuasively played by Robert Cole (billed as “Peter Gibbs”) who was also in PORTRAIT and Brandon G. Carter’s mesmerizing DEVIL’S ECSTASY. Financially secure, there’s no need for her to work. Along with the fact that she wed the first (and only) man she has ever known sexually, this has created a social vacuum all too easily pried apart by devious Don Juan Sean (Jamie Gillis) during Darrin’s absence while he’s on a business trip. Not coincidentally, Sean just happens to be a psychology student ! They meet and chat at the eye doctor’s office – she has an in-grown eye lash – and he casually invites her for lunch the next day. After a few drinks too many, he lures her back to his place, all but forces her to smoke pot and takes advantage of her. Shocked and confused, Lyn learns she enjoys the treatment, sending her on a downward spiral as she keeps coming back for more humiliation. Initially threatening to tell her family, Sean soon discovers he doesn’t need to resort to coercion in order to keep her in line.
Once the affair between Lyn and Sean takes off, the action becomes practically non stop and it’s down to the thespian talent of Gillis and True that the intensity never lets up. No surprise as far as he’s concerned, but Andrea True has rarely received praise for anything other than her 1976 cross-over disco hit More, More, More. Still living comfortably off its royalties, she was one of the major female adult performers of the early ’70s but seldom recognized as such in retrospect. Presumably, this blatant oversight’s due to her lack of industry longevity, unlike Georgina Spelvin for instance, or the absence of skeletons in her closet, like Linda Lovelace. Always the great actor’s director, Weston drew a searing performance out of her that should be enshrined in the annals of adult cinema history, never putting a foot wrong as she goes from picture perfect middle class respectability to unbridled out of control sexual addiction. Put like this, it sounds like macho wish fulfillment (you know, any prissy demure woman just being a slut secretly waiting to happen) but, trust me, that’s not at all the way Weston allows things to play out on screen. Actions ring uncomfortably true, including the husband’s unexpected response when faced with his spouse’s self-confessed infidelity. In keeping with the film’s modest scope, informed as much by subject matter as budgetary restraint, the form is stark and to the point with intimate camera work by Kenneth Jackson who also did a fine job on Weston’s unsettling NIGHT CALLER. Basically a two character drama with the cuckolded husband added as some sort of bookend figure, its cast is augmented with one shot Italian stallion Tony Russo and the amazing Sharon Thorpe – who would garner considerable praise as well as several industry awards for her indelible work on Weston’s subsequent SEX WORLD – as strange couple Doll and Angelo whose “services” Sean has acquired for Lyn’s on-going debasement. Film’s downer ending may not be what most would expect but it’s honest and refreshingly free of moralizing.
CAST: Andrea True, Jamie Gillis, Sharon Thorpe
