Oona (1970) watch online HD

Emerging from a thousand mediocre soft X porn films is the forgotten OONA, a showcase for the talents of the equally unknown Lilla Allen. This one-day wonder's a winner.

Title is a misnomer, evidently stemming from a post-production marketing decision. The correct moniker would be MARSHA, name of the central character played by untalented Ming Toy Epstein (she beat Whoopi Goldberg to the punch with that stage name). There's no Oona in the movie, but apparently that's a sexier title for softcore exploitation than MARSHA, unless you're making a Marsha Jordan starrer, which this is not.

Film begins with Ed Goodwin (well-hung John Marshall) picking up a hitchhiker Sally Merriweather (lovely Lilla Allen), who takes him back to her "hippie pad". There she screws the heck out of him, and while Ed's in the bathroom freshening up apres-sex, she rifles through his pants pockets to find his address. As Sally relates to her buxom roommate Flower (Mary Lou Orsfield), she plans to visit the Goodwin household in the suburbs and introduce his sheltered wife to the free-love life style.

Both roommates are well-educated to '60s morays, taking Abbie Hoffman's tome "Revolution for the Hell of It" as their marching orders. Cryptic scene has the girls just about to kiss when a fadeout precludes the expected lesbian scene. Since Mary Lou was on the payroll and shown fully nude, why she didn't get a simulated sex scene in the movie makes no sense.

Sally, dolled up in a babushka and looking prim & proper, rings the Goodwins' doorbell and is greeted by Marsha (Epstein). She's posing as a representative of the Sexual Research Institute, and with just a little coaxing of the naive Marsha (who's never even heard of an orgasm, let alone had one) soon has given her a crash course in lesbian lovemaking plus Masturbation 101.

Ed arrives to catch the duo in the act, and after a brief expression of outrage joins in for a threesome.

Later reels of the film drag it way down from potential classic status, as it veers into highly conventional "mate-swapping" mode, so popular in softcore movies of the '60s. Ed & Marsha can't wait to tell their best friends, Tom Morris (horrendously overacted by mustachioed Ron McCally) and Betty Morris (bosomy Tina Baury) about their sexual liberation as a result of meeting Sally. Scene is very, very corny, with Tom even declaring: "It's getting hot in here" as a cue for everybody to start disrobing.

The foursome soon trade partners and film ends with everybody happy, and Ed even confessing to his wife that he "knew" Sally before he caught the two of them in the act.

Movie almost moved into the loss column for me with the intrusion of Ron McCally as Tom. He's a stammering, overwrought ad libber who's never funny (unlike his many XXX counterparts like Keith Erickson, Marc Stevens, Bobby Astyr and R. Bolla), and he literally dominates and thereby drags down his scenes. Fortunately Tina as his wife is good in the softcore sex department.

This being 1970, film features lots of footage of Marshall's johnson, while avoiding showing him erect. Also included, de rigeur, are tight closeup split beaver shots of Lilla.

Lilla Allen is an amazing find: a beautiful, natural redhead with peaches & cream complexion, she has a soothing speaking voice and smooth flair for improvisation that had me begging for more. Instead of my usual "why didn't she become a porn regular or even star", this one-shot struck me as deserving a mainstream acting career. I would surely have cultivated her as religiously as other luckier '70s beauties like Mimsy Farmer and Sydne Rome, both of whom found stardom awaiting them in Europe.

Epstein in the central role of Marsha is neither attractive enough nor acting-ready to merit the assignment. Other than McCally, rest of the cast is okay. One footnote, which I've already sent as a correction to IMDb - the odd cast member Kitty Kat (as Pussy) turns out not to be human but an actual tabby cat who in effect steals the scene lying on the bed beside the copulating Lilla and John. This motif is common to many porn films, since the ASPCA does not monitor X or XXX shoots, permitting filmmakers to be just as cruel or exploitative to animals as they are to what Hitchcock used to call the "cattle".

My, oh, my...what a blast. From the past. I have no recollection as to how this 1970 bit of soft-core made it onto my radar, but there it was, helping me along a couple of treadmill strolls.

The immediate response is one of a form of nostalgia, or perhaps, because nostalgia carries at least a bittersweet connotation, a long- forgotten memory, of long narrow adult bookstores, with a curtain across a door at the back, and beyond, some number of filmstrip booths or machines, hungry for quarters. The quarters were usually fed to them with a prayer, to who exactly I'm not sure, that the machine would accept the offering and play the silent filmstrip, and that the said filmstrip would in some way resemble the small, dim, faded 'posterette' on the machine. And, oh yes...that no one else would draw closer, trying to judge the relative merits of the 'program' on the basis of the viewer's response and persistence.

Oona is half a notch above such fare, the only differences being the length of the show (about 65 minutes vs. 7 or 8 minutes for the 8 mm show) and the attempt to weave a modicum of, if not plot, then context, around the titillation. On second thought, perhaps those characteristics are as much a reason to place Oona a half notch below the peep shows.

Oona was released less than 2 years before Deep Throat – oh, how the landscape changed, and so quickly. It shows quite a bit, but not everything and certainly not all that was shown a short time later. And, aside from titillation, there isn't much there: crew- and camera-aware 'actors', extremely sparse and dated sets, even for 1970; a ludicrous attempt at plot and dialogue, an errant cat (there should have been a 'no animals were hurt...' announcement), and abrupt cuts. What is there, then? A 1970 hippie groove reminiscent of Spinal Tap in the period before their attempted tour, a few reasonably attractive people, as long as you can judge appearance, grooming and style by the 1970 standard, and, really, a time capsule into that relatively short time interval, between the time when erotica was solidly underground (and stag films were exactly that), and the emergence of Deep Throat and the entire porn business as we know it today.

Enjoy it if your perspective on erotica includes a curiosity that is so broad as to include an interest in how it was handled over the eons. Otherwise, skip it – there many, many much better ways to spend your time.