Man of Taste: The Erotic Cinema of Radley Metzger. By King, Rob, New York: Columbia University Press, 2025. 253 pages. ISBN: 978‐0‐23‐121405‐6

Rob King's authoritative critical biography of the life and work of American pornographic film auteur Radley Metzger is a passion project, written to a high academic standard. It will be of interest to all film studies scholars, not just those who are specialists in the Golden Age of Porn or familiar with Metzger's works. Starting with an introduction that briefly summarizes Metzger's early life as a young Jewish-American cinephile growing up in New York City during the 1930s and 1940s, King places Metzger firmly in the same territory of cinephile auteur as such Cahiers du Cinema-affiliated French critics as Jean-Luc Godard and such mainstream American cinema peers as Metzger's fellow New Yorker, Martin Scorsese. Where Metzger's career trajectory differed from Godard and Scorsese's, however, was in his choice to embrace the lurid aspects of early arthouse films and found Audubon Films in 1961. This distribution firm repackaged low-quality European films for an exploitation audience that associated foreignness in cinema with the tasteful nudity seen in the films of Ingmar Bergman and other European auteurs who incorporated sexuality into their cinematic language. However, Metzger did not begin his career as an auteur of adult cinema until 1964, when he directed the in-house production The Dirty Girls. As discussed in chapter one, this early stage of Metzger's career was one where he wore many hats in the film industry and was only just beginning to find his voice as the “man of taste” he would present himself as at the height of his career, a worldly gentleman who wedded serious contemplation of the erotic to high-culture aesthetic values a la Hugh Hefner. Despite Metzger's positioning of himself as a high-class erotic auteur through the use of European location sets and the adaptation of canonical literary classics to the erotic domain in such films as Camille 2000 (1969) and Carmen, Baby (1967), his films’ suturing of high and low culture led to accusations of middlebrow taste by many of his early critics. This criticism extended to his most commercially successful softcore film, 1970's The Lickerish Quartet, which was pilloried as a rip-off of Pier Paolo Pasolini's 1968 film Teorema. Though this was the peak of Metzger's career, as described in chapter two, Metzger wasted his brief period of mainstream acceptance (including mainstream film festival awards and an appearance at the Museum of Modern Art on January 26th, 1971, for a screening of The Lickerish Quartet) on a poorly conceived dramatic thriller loosely based on the life of Evita Peron and the low-performing but later rediscovered early queer film Score (1973). As seen in chapter three of the book, Metzger had no choice but to reposition himself from a softcore erotica auteur to a director of hardcore pornography, which was the new trend in “porno chic.” He made an essential choice in these new productions, however, by opting to produce them under the name Henry Paris. King argues that Henry Paris, though a legal fiction meant to subvert obscenity laws, was as much a part of Radley Metzger's image as a “man of taste” as his birth identity, and that both the films attributed to Metzger and the films attributed to Paris were of a cut above their respective softcore and hardcore peers. Furthermore, as seen in chapter four, such “Henry Paris” films as The Opening of Misty Beethoven (1976) and Barbara Broadcast (1977) dealt with many of Metzger's key themes—the nature of the image, pornotopia, sex as aristocracy, and Borscht Belt humor—in ways that registered them as auteurist works even when their quality as film products waned. Indeed, it was not until the 1980s that Metzger's career became truly dire, as described in chapter five. After a final attempt at mainstream success with the non-pornographic film The Cat and the Canary (1978), Metzger fell into the domain of straight-to-video pornography via movies produced for the nascent Playboy Channel. His last film production was a five-part video series titled Conversations on Homeopathy (1990), an educational series on alternative medicine that marked the ignominious end of a career that had made significant contributions to the depiction of sexuality in American cinema. However, Metzger was rediscovered and embraced by the New Queer Cinema of the 1990s, owing to his early queer representation in films such as Score. As porn studies became a domain of media studies scholarship, his last years saw several retrospectives and deluxe home video editions of his films, now lauded as landmarks of the Golden Age of Porn that was hagiographied in Paul Thomas Anderson's 1997 film Boogie Nights. Though King's book is an excellent historical record of Metzger's life and work, it is also a stellar analysis of many of the key themes and motifs of his work. King positions Metzger as both a “man of taste” producing porn as a lifestyle brand and as a serious director concerned with creating art, noting that many of Metzger's early features contain visual experimentation derived from the 1960s avant-garde cinema. He also notes that much of Metzger's work is metatextual and self-reflexive, though he connects these traits more to the works of Resnais and Bergman than to the Brechtianisms of Godard. King thus validates Metzger as a unique auteur working in one of the gutter domains of cinema, concerned with what erotic film could say not only about the erotic but also about film, the social, and the futural. Though Metzger and the porn industry never quite succeeded in making the “blue movie” part of mainstream film production, his efforts at defanging censorship laws via the successful defense of Audubon's releases by the company's lawyers and via the aesthetic content of his works make him an essential precursor to directors as varied as Zalman King, Luca Guadagnino, Adrian Lyne, and Bernardo Bertolucci. Man of Taste is, therefore, a necessary read for anyone concerned with eros on film and the erotic film industry. Data sharing not applicable to this article as no datasets were generated or analyzed during the current study.