Radley Metzger

[26][27] Radley Henry Metzger was born on January 21, 1929, on the Grand Concourse in The Bronx, New York City, and was the second son of Jewish parents, Julius and Anne.

During the Korean War, Metzger served in the U. S. Air Force with the 1350th Photographic Group, which interrupted his graduate studies at Columbia University.

[29] The newly founded distribution company specialized in importing international features, some of which were marketed into the gradually expanding adult erotic film genre.

Metzger's skills as an editor were employed in re-cutting and augmenting many of the features Audubon handled, including The Twilight Girls (FR,1957) and, their first runaway success, Mac Ahlberg's I, a Woman (DN/SW,1965).

[37] Metzger's second directorial effort, The Dirty Girls (shot in 1963 and released in 1965), marked his emergence as a major auteur in the adult erotic film genre.

His subsequent films were often shot in Europe[38] and adapted from novels or other literary sources, including Carmen (by Prosper Mérimée), La Dame aux Camélias (by Alexandre Dumas), L'image (by Catherine Robbe-Grillet), Naked Came the Stranger (by Penelope Ashe),[39] Pygmalion (by George Bernard Shaw), Six Characters in Search of an Author (by Luigi Pirandello),[31] The Cat and the Canary (by John Willard),[38] and Thérèse et Isabelle (by Violette Leduc).

[40] He cites John Farrow, Claude Lelouch,[21] Michael Powell, Alain Resnais[41] and Orson Welles as influencing his work.

[38] Metzger's signature film style of his "elegant erotica"[45] had developed into being "a Euro-centric combination of stylish decadence, wealth and the aristocratic".

[49][50] Metzger's films are typified by high production values, especially The Private Afternoons of Pamela Mann (1975)[6] and The Opening of Misty Beethoven (1976), and are generally critically celebrated.

[1][51][52] Some historians assess The Opening of Misty Beethoven, based on the play Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw (and its derivative, My Fair Lady), as attaining a mainstream level in storyline and sets[53][54][55] and is considered, by award-winning author Toni Bentley, the "crown jewel" of the Golden Age of Porn.

That was a personal thing, to work against the clichés in cinema when I was growing up.Some of the adult erotic "Henry Paris" films, including Score (1974),[56][57] have also been presented in softcore versions.

Schartoff and a producing partner, Judith Mizrachy, considered making a documentary overview about Metzger and his films, but the project currently is unfinished.