It's hard to know quite what to say about BUCKSKIN BO'SUN, a gay porn film from the dawn of the era (1970), that even at the time must have felt woefully out-of-date.
The action (I hesitate to call it a plot, as it's more a series of events than a coherent narrative) picks up with Buckskin reading a newspaper that states a large number of draftees are about to be called off to war. Fed up with worrying about the draft, Buckskin decides to beat them to the punch and just enlist himself.
Heading down to the enlistment office, Buckskin is first pawed by a Navy recruiter while filling out his forms before finally succumbing to the guy's advances and letting him work over his (largely flaccid) penis in the first of the film's hardcore sex scenes. Swiftly over and with a minimum of involvement from either of the participants, this sequence establishes a tone from which the rest of the film will rarely deviate.
Completely burying the lede ("cowboy joins the Navy!"), the film next joins Buckskin on his ship, where he is already preparing for his first shore leave in San Diego. While Buckskin soaps himself up in the shower, another sailor masturbates while looking at a magazine.
Onshore, Buckskin decides to take in a skin flick (outside a real early porn palace playing a double feature of THE BOX BOY and the mysteriously titled MOTHER LOVER). Inside, the full-frontal loop footage on screen (a guy on a cheap set, stripping off his clothes and gyrating around) spurs Buckskin and the two guys sitting on either side of him in the three-seat "theater" to get into their own action. Buckskin's reticent, as usual, but eventually gets in on the fun and then takes off quickly afterward, leaving the two guys with each other for company.
Strolling along the shore, Buckskin meets another handsome dude and the two head home together. The guy shows Buckskin some (non-sexual) magazines, then Buckskin spills a drink on his crotch, the traditionally flimsy pretext for jumping into the sheets. After the two make it, the beach dude, a tailor, presents Buckskin with a nifty but uncomfortable-looking full-rubber sailor suit, which Buskskin is quite taken with. This apparently makes them lovers.
The two spend the rest of the film together, heading to a bar/restaurant where guys strip and dance around naked, and Buckskin gets fellated in the bathroom by another patron while his poor boyfriend waits at the table. The two next hit up a carnival pier, then head down to the beach and make it behind some rocks. A cute blonde surfer (Richard Steele) watches them in the process and tugs himself off. The two then walk off together up the cliff side. The end.
While BUCKSKIN's clearly not going to win any awards for plotting, what's truly odd is how lackadaisically thrown together it feels. Even calling the narrative "picaresque" is generous - really this is just a film of random stuff happening, that has no idea what it's trying to be. Is it about a cowboy joining the navy? There's never any culture clash, and Buckskin basically just trades in one classic gay fetish outfit for another. Is it about a sailor on shore leave? Closer, but there's still no real chemistry that develops between Buckskin and his beach-front pickup. The film is merely a series of events desperately in search of a story. Its ultimate tragedy is that they never find one.
Numerous technical peccadilloes don't help matters much. Like a lot of early hardcore, the film is shot MOS, but in this case, it belongs to the mid-'60s Doris Wishman school of awkward post-dub, where two or three people attempt to do all the voices and don't even try to achieve sync. Everyone basically just makes up dialogue as the film goes along, often in ways that are radically discordant with the emotions portrayed on screen. The early sequence in the recruiter's office, for example, features Buckskin loudly protesting the recruiter's advances on the soundtrack, while on screen he can barely lifts a hand to fight him away. The film also employs a strange bricolage effect with stock footage, randomly inserting shots of rodeos and naval ceremonies to suggest that characters belong to these milieux, without ever actually attempting to depict them inside them. The sets, all of which have an awkward, campy artificiality, are similarly ludicrous, though at least add a fun touch to the completely unbelievable proceedings. If all of this is going to be patently false, the film at least seems to embrace it, though one wonders why the creators went to so much trouble finding or building all these locales when their story (and hence the locations in which it transpires) is so utterly inconsequential.
These elements embody an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink quality that should make BUCKSKIN a lot of fun, but the complete lack of narrative impact, coupled with a needlessly bloated 80-minute runtime, strangely robs it of any energy. Much more in line with the kind of zany "danglies" people like Pat Rocco were cranking out over the 18-24 months prior, BUCKSKIN BO'SUN is an artifact lost in time. Rather than a Great Leap Forward toward the increased creative potential implied by the new-born hardcore genre (and already proved in films like Tom de Simone's elegant and minimalist DUST UNTO DUST, also from 1970), the film instead represents the last gasp of the all-male nudies, awkwardly going through the motions of hardcore without really knowing the song and dance.
The action (I hesitate to call it a plot, as it's more a series of events than a coherent narrative) picks up with Buckskin reading a newspaper that states a large number of draftees are about to be called off to war. Fed up with worrying about the draft, Buckskin decides to beat them to the punch and just enlist himself.
Heading down to the enlistment office, Buckskin is first pawed by a Navy recruiter while filling out his forms before finally succumbing to the guy's advances and letting him work over his (largely flaccid) penis in the first of the film's hardcore sex scenes. Swiftly over and with a minimum of involvement from either of the participants, this sequence establishes a tone from which the rest of the film will rarely deviate.
Completely burying the lede ("cowboy joins the Navy!"), the film next joins Buckskin on his ship, where he is already preparing for his first shore leave in San Diego. While Buckskin soaps himself up in the shower, another sailor masturbates while looking at a magazine.
Onshore, Buckskin decides to take in a skin flick (outside a real early porn palace playing a double feature of THE BOX BOY and the mysteriously titled MOTHER LOVER). Inside, the full-frontal loop footage on screen (a guy on a cheap set, stripping off his clothes and gyrating around) spurs Buckskin and the two guys sitting on either side of him in the three-seat "theater" to get into their own action. Buckskin's reticent, as usual, but eventually gets in on the fun and then takes off quickly afterward, leaving the two guys with each other for company.
Strolling along the shore, Buckskin meets another handsome dude and the two head home together. The guy shows Buckskin some (non-sexual) magazines, then Buckskin spills a drink on his crotch, the traditionally flimsy pretext for jumping into the sheets. After the two make it, the beach dude, a tailor, presents Buckskin with a nifty but uncomfortable-looking full-rubber sailor suit, which Buskskin is quite taken with. This apparently makes them lovers.
The two spend the rest of the film together, heading to a bar/restaurant where guys strip and dance around naked, and Buckskin gets fellated in the bathroom by another patron while his poor boyfriend waits at the table. The two next hit up a carnival pier, then head down to the beach and make it behind some rocks. A cute blonde surfer (Richard Steele) watches them in the process and tugs himself off. The two then walk off together up the cliff side. The end.
While BUCKSKIN's clearly not going to win any awards for plotting, what's truly odd is how lackadaisically thrown together it feels. Even calling the narrative "picaresque" is generous - really this is just a film of random stuff happening, that has no idea what it's trying to be. Is it about a cowboy joining the navy? There's never any culture clash, and Buckskin basically just trades in one classic gay fetish outfit for another. Is it about a sailor on shore leave? Closer, but there's still no real chemistry that develops between Buckskin and his beach-front pickup. The film is merely a series of events desperately in search of a story. Its ultimate tragedy is that they never find one.
Numerous technical peccadilloes don't help matters much. Like a lot of early hardcore, the film is shot MOS, but in this case, it belongs to the mid-'60s Doris Wishman school of awkward post-dub, where two or three people attempt to do all the voices and don't even try to achieve sync. Everyone basically just makes up dialogue as the film goes along, often in ways that are radically discordant with the emotions portrayed on screen. The early sequence in the recruiter's office, for example, features Buckskin loudly protesting the recruiter's advances on the soundtrack, while on screen he can barely lifts a hand to fight him away. The film also employs a strange bricolage effect with stock footage, randomly inserting shots of rodeos and naval ceremonies to suggest that characters belong to these milieux, without ever actually attempting to depict them inside them. The sets, all of which have an awkward, campy artificiality, are similarly ludicrous, though at least add a fun touch to the completely unbelievable proceedings. If all of this is going to be patently false, the film at least seems to embrace it, though one wonders why the creators went to so much trouble finding or building all these locales when their story (and hence the locations in which it transpires) is so utterly inconsequential.
These elements embody an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink quality that should make BUCKSKIN a lot of fun, but the complete lack of narrative impact, coupled with a needlessly bloated 80-minute runtime, strangely robs it of any energy. Much more in line with the kind of zany "danglies" people like Pat Rocco were cranking out over the 18-24 months prior, BUCKSKIN BO'SUN is an artifact lost in time. Rather than a Great Leap Forward toward the increased creative potential implied by the new-born hardcore genre (and already proved in films like Tom de Simone's elegant and minimalist DUST UNTO DUST, also from 1970), the film instead represents the last gasp of the all-male nudies, awkwardly going through the motions of hardcore without really knowing the song and dance.