Score: Radley Metzger's Witty, Grown-Up Eros

Radley Metzger is the most misfiled director in American cinema. Shelve him under adult film and you lose what made him singular; treat him as a straight art-house auteur and you have to explain away his subject matter. The truth is that Metzger built a small, immaculate body of work in the 1960s and 70s that took frank sexual material and dressed it in the production values, wit and formal control of European art cinema — jet-set locations, elegant widescreen photography, dialogue that crackles like a stage comedy. Score, from 1974, is the clearest demonstration of what he was doing, because it strips the glamour back to a single house and four people and lets you watch the machinery work.

The film began as an off-Broadway play by Jerry Douglas, a chamber piece about a sophisticated swinging couple who make a game of seducing a more conventional pair. Metzger acquired it, kept the theatrical bones, and shot it in Yugoslavia, in and around a handsome villa standing in for a fictional resort town called Leisure. Claire Wilbur, who had originated her role on stage, carries the film’s tone: worldly, amused, entirely in control. Around her Metzger assembles a cast that includes Gerald Grant, the doomed Lynn Lowry — a fixture of 1970s genre cinema — and Calvin Culver, credited as Casey Donovan, whose presence points to how far Metzger was willing to push the frankness of what he was depicting.

The set-up, kept above the line

The premise is pure drawing-room farce with the drawing room removed. Elvira and Jack, a glamorous married couple, keep a private scoreboard of seductions, competing to conquer new partners and reporting back to each other with the relish of collectors comparing acquisitions. Into their orbit comes Betsy and Eddie, a younger, more buttoned-up couple — she curious and half-willing, he anxious and conventional. Elvira wagers that she can seduce Betsy before Jack can get to Eddie, and the film becomes an evening-long campaign of manipulation, flirtation and gamesmanship conducted across cocktails, a telephone repairman’s visit, and the shifting alliances of two couples circling one another.

What matters above the line is the shape of it, and the shape is theatrical: unity of place, unity of time, a small cast, a wager, and a series of manoeuvres that peel back each character’s pretences until nobody is quite who they claimed to be at the start. Metzger keeps the film moving on dialogue and glances long before anything else happens, and the frankness of the material — including a matter-of-fact bisexuality unusual for a commercial film of 1974 — is handled with a lightness that treats it as comedy of manners. The details of who ends up with whom I keep below the line, because the pleasure is in the reversals.

Why it works: theatre discipline and a straight face

The craft lesson of Score is what a limitation can do for a filmmaker. By confining himself to one location and a handful of players, Metzger forces the interest onto performance, timing and blocking — the tools of the stage — and he had the taste to keep the dialogue witty and the actors playing subtext rather than announcing it. The film is genuinely funny, and the humour is the point: Metzger treats adult desire as a legitimate subject for sophisticated comedy, the way Noël Coward treated adultery, with arched eyebrows and impeccable diction. The characters are articulate about their appetites, which makes them adults in a way that most films on this subject, then and now, never bother to attempt.

Metzger’s visual signature is present even at this reduced scale. He and his regular collaborators favoured a clean, bright, unfurtive look — no grubby shadows, no apologetic lighting — that insists the material is nothing to be ashamed of. The camera moves with confidence, the compositions are balanced and airy, and the whole thing has the sun-warmed, continental gloss of a European co-production, which is exactly what it was. That polish is the argument. By photographing seduction the way another director might photograph a garden party, Metzger removes the flinch, and without the flinch the comedy can breathe.

The performances hold it together, and Claire Wilbur is the key. Her Elvira is a wonderful comic creation — supremely assured, faintly bored, always three moves ahead — and Wilbur plays her with the relaxed authority of an actor who has lived in the role on stage. The film needs a character who is genuinely in command of the game, because the comedy depends on watching that command tested, and Wilbur supplies it. Around her the others play well: Lynn Lowry brings a fragile curiosity, and the men supply the anxiety and vanity the women are toying with.

The two versions, and the honesty of the record

Score exists in more than one cut, and that fact is part of its history rather than a scandal to be tiptoed around. Metzger shot the film during the brief window when explicit material was crossing over into ambitious mainstream-adjacent cinema, and different edits circulated for different markets and eras — a more explicit version and a softer one that trims the frankest material. For decades the film was hard to see in any complete form; a restoration by Cult Epics eventually returned the fuller cut to circulation and let audiences assess what Metzger had actually made. The point worth holding onto is that even in its franker form the film’s interest lies in its wit and structure, and the restoration confirmed rather than complicated Metzger’s reputation as a stylist who happened to work in adult material.

That is the collector’s distinction that keeps Metzger from being merely a footnote. He was making films with the ambitions of European art cinema — the dialogue of a stage comedy, the look of a continental co-production, the confidence to treat sex as a subject for grown-ups — during a period when almost everyone else working in the same commercial territory was making product. Score is the film where that ambition is easiest to see, precisely because there is nothing to distract from it.

The collector’s note

Metzger’s own filmography is the first place to go next. His most formally ambitious picture is The Lickerish Quartet, a reality-and-illusion puzzle shot in an Italian castle that shows the same director reaching for high-modernist gamesmanship; and his lushest is Camille 2000, a mod, op-art update of Dumas that swaps the chamber-piece intimacy of Score for jet-set spectacle. Watch the three together and you have the full range of his sensibility, from stripped-back stagecraft to design-magazine excess.

Beyond Metzger, the useful cross-reference is the strand of serious cinema that treated erotic subject matter with tact and intelligence rather than exploitation. Luis Buñuel’s Belle de Jour shares Metzger’s conviction that the surface of bourgeois elegance and the material underneath it belong in the same frame — Buñuel cooler and stranger, Metzger warmer and funnier, both refusing the flinch. Metzger admired the European masters and quietly aspired to their company, and Score is where the aspiration reads clearest.

The verdict, above the line

Score is the ideal introduction to a director who deserves rescuing from the wrong shelf. It is witty, well-made, adult in the true sense — concerned with articulate people negotiating their desires like grown-ups — and it treats its material with a lightness that has aged far better than the earnestness of most of its contemporaries. Everything above this line is safe to read. To discuss how the wager resolves, and what the film’s final reversals actually reveal, I have to give away the ending, so the rest goes below.

Spoilers below

The pleasure of the last act is watching every character’s stated position turn out to be a pose. Betsy and Eddie arrive as the conventional couple, the marks in Elvira and Jack’s game, and the film’s comic engine is the discovery that the seducers have badly misjudged their targets. Both younger partners prove far more willing, and far less naive, than the swinging pair assumed; the seduction that was meant to be a conquest becomes, for Betsy in particular, an awakening she embraces with more appetite than her would-be corrupters expected. The hunters find they have caught something that was ready to be caught, and the wager collapses into a general free-for-all in which the supposed innocents turn out to have been curious all along.

The joke, and the film’s small sly moral, is that the sophisticated couple’s cynicism is itself a kind of innocence. Elvira and Jack believe they understand desire because they have organised it into a game with rules and a scoreboard, and the evening teaches them that the people they marked as prey were never as simple, or as reluctant, as the game required. Metzger lets the reversal play as comedy rather than punishment; nobody is destroyed, everybody is a little more honest by dawn, and the scoreboard turns out to have been beside the point.

That refusal to moralise is what dates Score least. A film made in a punitive spirit would have humiliated someone; Metzger, working from Douglas’s play, prefers the grown-up’s shrug — desire is a comedy of misjudgement, and the joke is on whoever thought they were in control. My verdict: this is the most accessible door into Metzger’s work and a genuinely witty adult comedy, a reminder that this material once supported films with the timing of a stage farce and the polish of a European art house. Watch it, then follow the same sensibility into The Lickerish Quartet, where Metzger swaps the drawing-room comedy for a hall of mirrors.