Deep Throat: The real thing

DIRECTED BY Gerard Damiano, 1972

STARRING Linda Lovelace ('as herself'), Harry Reems (Dr Young)

CERTIFICATION R18: Contains strong images of real sex, or fetish material, intended for sexual stimulation

RUN TIME 62 mins approx, Hot Rod

COVERLINE 'How far does a girl have to go to untangle her tingle'

WHY YOU SHOULD SEE IT In 2000, the BBFC relaxed its views on depictions of sex on screen, though not violence. This more adult perspective resulted in the release of a panned-and-scanned version of Deep Throat, easily available on the high street, and an R18 certificate for the original hardcore film, which is the one reviewed here.

THE PLOT (Such as it is) Famously, the character Linda Lovelace can't achieve orgasm and finds sex disappointing; the solution, as we all know, lies elsewhere. Initially Linda's flatmate, Helen, suggests they experiment with a series of men but, when this doesn't work, Linda visits Dr Young. He discovers her clitoris in her throat. Struggling to meet the twin attentions of his nurse and Linda, he casts the latter as his physiotherapist to look after some of his patients. Linda meets a man with a 13-inch penis who can satisfy her.

THE FILM Deep Throat was based around Linda Lovelace's felicity for the act with which she and the film have become synonymous but it does feature a broader range of sex acts than fellatio. The movie is graphic, and rubbish, but it became a rallying point for anti-censorship campaigners in the USA. I borrowed this copy from a gay American (male) friend for whom the film had sentimental value.

Deep Throat can be characterised as a hardcore musical, with bad lines between the sex scenes. The first such scene in the movie features a delivery man going down on Linda's flatmate, Helen, while she puffs on a cigarette. 'Mind if I smoke,' she asks the grocery boy, 'while you eat?' 'What's a nice joint like you doing in a girl like this?' asks a man who interrupts their orgy later. The sex scenes are accompanied by a kitsch soundtrack that takes the place of any live sound. A very graphic scene featuring Linda and Helen engaged in anal sex and a threesome, respectively, is accompanied by a song, 'Love is Strange'. 'Blowing Bubbles' is another theme.

Linda is portrayed as a sexual romantic: 'There should be more to sex than a lot of little tingles. There should be bells ringing, dams bursting, bombs going off.' 'Sounds like you want to wreck the city,' is her flatmate's sardonic response. When Linda meets Wilbur, who is in love with her, she tells him the man she goes out with has to have a nine-inch penis. 'I'm only four inches away from happiness,' he complains, before ringing Dr Young for help. The result is predictable: 'He can cut it down to any size you want,' Wilbur tells Linda. Their happiness is assured without the need for surgery.

KEY SCENES 27:11 Linda performs 'deep throat' on Dr Young, an event that is greeted with footage of bells ringing, fireworks exploding and a rocket launch.

34:15 Linda pays a house call, dressed in nurse's uniform, on Albert Fenster. To the accompaniment of a song called 'The Real Thing' he inserts a cup into her vagina and proceeds to drink Coke from it through a straw.

49:50 Linda is interrupted while shaving her pubis by another character, Wilbur Wang, who can only have sex if he sees it as a rape fantasy.

WHAT HAPPENED NEXT 'It was the first time respectable, middle-class women went to porn theatres,' declares Camille Paglia at the start of Inside Deep Throat (2005) of what she calls this 'epical moment'. Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato's documentary is keen to establish Deep Throat's credentials as the 'most profitable film ever made' - from a $25,000 budget it went on to gross more than $600million, they claim - before exploring the censorship, and personal, issues that surround this hugely successful movie.

Screen sex began nine years after poet Philip Larkin's Annus Mirabilis: Deep Throat opened in the then-notorious Times Square, New York, on 12 June 1972. It was an immediate cause célèbre, dubbed part of the new 'porno chic' by no less an authority than the New York Times. As with Baise-Moi in France more recently, the religious right was particularly vociferous in its hounding of the movie. The film was closed down in New York and went on to being banned in a total of 23 states in the US but worse was to come: in 1973 the Supreme Court tightened US obscenity laws while in 1975 117 people connected to the film were charged with conspiracy.

Most prominent among them was one of the film's stars, Harry Reems, who became something of a poster boy for the anti-censorship brigade. Reems had originally been assigned to the film as a production assistant but his wacky central turn is one of the film's only redeeming features; he was paid $250 for the role but now faced five years in jail. Charismatic and a good deal more eloquent than Linda Lovelace, he was happy to debate the film and obscenity law publicly but was found guilty by a unanimous jury. He was saved from imprisonment by a typical legal sleight of hand when it was found, on appeal, that his participation in the film took place before the 1973 ruling.

Inside Deep Throat is a very well-formed look at three decades of censorship in the USA since the early 1970s, featuring many of the usual suspects: John Waters, Gore Vidal and Dr Ruth Westheimer (pity Dennis Hopper, who has to deliver the film's overwrought narration) - as well as that all important 'money shot'. The introduction of VCRs in the mid-70s is signposted as a crucial moment when DT director Gerard Damiano's vision of a mainstream, high-value sex film industry was pushed aside.

Links are also drawn from Nixon's 'moral leadership' to Ronald Reagan's attack on the porn industry in 1986; in both cases scientific opinion was ignored. A coda suggests that censorship would again be pursued more vigorously if officials weren't so busy combating terrorists. Inside Deep Throat is ultimately poignant: its protagonists, even the film's persecutors, are imbued with nostalgia.

Reems was passed over for any mainstream acting roles and turned to drink and drugs; he found himself through religion and qualified as a real estate agent. Linda Lovelace - originally Boreman - is portrayed as always eager to please; when the tide turned against pornography, she publicly denounced Deep Throat and said she had been coerced into appearing in it (certainly her mentor at the time, ex-partner Chuck Traynor, appears to have had an unhealthy hold over her). She struggled to hold down a regular job and decided, in her fifties, to cash in on her notoriety. She died in a car crash in 2002.

KEY QUOTE 'No wonder you can't hear any bells, you don't have a tinkler' - Dr Young

BONUS CURIO (1) Director Gerry Damiano was a hairdresser who was inspired to make porn movies by what he heard in his salon.

(2) Linda Lovelace had a cat called Adolf Hitler due to a black patch shaped like a moustache above its mouth.