30: Agony of Love (1966, William Rotsler)

Owned version: The 2004 DVD released by Something Weird as a double feature with another Rotsler feature The Girl with the Hungry Eyes.

Acquired: Probably in December of 2010 from eBay after Something Weird announced that all their Harry Novak-produced titles were going out of print.

Seen before?: Once from this disc - June 8th, 2011.

"Don't you see that the money and the way you get it is not a very satisfactory substitute for love? I think what you want, Barbara, is normal love. Isn't that everything you really need?"

So says a psychiatrist to Barbara (Pat Barrington), a lonesome and disaffected housewife ignored by her business-minded husband and thus summing up the key tension of the film for those too slow or horny to get it. As a way to deal with her spiraling feelings of emptiness, Barbara fills her ample free time by adopting the alias Brandy and doing some light prostitution. Agony of Love has a certain number of plot beats in common with an acknowledged masterpiece of world cinema and indeed often feels like the grimy off-brand version of it, to the point where an alternate title could have easily been Hell de Jour (though it preceded the Bunuel by a year). It even dips into a couple of dream sequences, though Rotsler is hardly working in the puckish, mysterious register of Bunuel - the descent into the fantastic here is as blunt as the psychiatrist's diagnosis, baroque on-the-nose nightmares of sex and money and hostility in which dollar bills are threaded together into chains and horror-movie strings shriek their panic out over the Dutch-angled visuals. (The voiceover repeating the word "Barbara" and then switching it up to "money" is a fun touch.)

This, clearly, is not a subtle film. But then, sexploitation isn't a subtle genre, especially the grimly moralistic roughie (of which this is a fairly mild iteration). Taken in relation to its brethren, Agony of Love is a pretty good time. Rotsler, making his directorial debut, keeps things moving briskly - the sex scenes come at regular intervals but don't run so long as to become tiresome - and he manages to make his ragged inexperience into an asset at certain points, like a ragged pair of zooms at the end into the faces of Barbara and her husband respectively. I also like the depiction of the husband - instead of a typical lout, nebbish or philanderer, he's portrayed as a regular (if awkward and uncomfortable) guy who really loves his wife so thinks he needs to work as hard as he can to get her everything she needs and furthermore would never dream of so much as looking at another woman. It lends an unexpected bit of genuine tragedy to the expected downbeat ending, which is tough to pull off in this oft-callous genre.

Plus, there's the scene with the man billed as "The Eater," which is one of the most delightfully wackadoo things I've seen in one of these films. And Pat Barrington? She has excellent breasts. I'm only human.