Blond Velvet (1976) 720P

Jennifer Welles plays Eva Kovak, a madame of Hungarian descent with memories of war as a young woman. In a black and white flashback sequence, Eva is raped by a Hungarian soldier. Later in life, her syndicate sets out to blackmail members of the United Nation Security Council with hidden cameras in an athletic-club brothel. Eva finds two of the special agents carrying sensitive documents and successfully turns one of them (Mark Slade played by Robert Kerman but credited as Richard Bolla) to her side.  The two devise a plan where Slade works as a double agent and they let the Russian and English politicians infiltrate their athletic-club brothel to get their sensitive documents after the 5 millions dollars has been transferred. They stage the death of Slade and with the money at their disposal, the movie ends with them flying off to help the children’s hospital in the homeland.

On a comedic note, Bobby Astyr appears as Doctor Weird Love, an amusing plastic surgeon fixated on amputating male genitalia, and provides a good level of inappropriate comedic relief in the film. At the end, Eva says to the camera that she will give the negatives of the men having sex to his friend “Dexter Eagle”, which is a plug for the producer Bill Milling.

Cast: Jennifer Welles, Alexandria Cass, Eva Henderson, Jeanette Sinclair, Jennifer Jordan (credited as Sara Nicholson), Sharon Mitchell, Susan McBain (credited as Suzanne McBain), Ursula Austin (credited as Gerry Austin), Bobby Astyr, Jake Teague, Robert Kerman (credited as Richard Bolla), Roger Caine, David Innis, Carter Stevens (credited as Steve Mitchel), and Robert T. Fish.

The producer/Director in Blonde Velvet featured here is William P. Milling, who is also known by several aliases including Bill Milling, Bill Eagle, Dexter Eagle, John Eagle, William Digs, and Lin Cho Chaing (The eastern alias used for a hardcore karate movie - Vixens of Kung Fu 1975). Born on May 30, 1946, as best as we know, Milling served in the United States Army during the Vietnam War (many of the adult film producers, directors, and writers worked as photographers or correspondents for the military in Vietnam). His work began during a time of significant change in adult filmmaking, as the supreme court loosened the grip of obscenity laws, allowing the genre to become more mainstream. Milling worked on iconic movies such as The Devil in Miss Jones (1973) (uncredited) and Debbie Does Dallas (1978). Milling worked in the industry and then started his own production company, making several adult films. He is credited with incorporating sophisticated storytelling and production techniques into adult films. He pretty much disappeared from the scene around 1991. No one is sure of his present whereabouts. He was also involved in drug trafficking and associated with various criminal organizations. He used aliases regularly at different points in his life, especially when he was a fugitive and evaded capture for extended periods. Each name change was likely an effort to navigate the criminal underworld and avoid detection. 

Most hardcore movies required a substantial investment by the film producers, and they usually borrowed the money from shady loan sharks, because it was very hard to find investors otherwise. The cost of color film in the 1970s was quite exorbitant. 35mm color negative film cost $50 for a 400 foot roll. There were also processing fees of up to 50 cents a foot. At 24 frames per second, 4 minutes of 35mm fil $250 to shoot and process. As a result, lower quality color negative film stocks, such as Kodak's Koda-color, were commonly used in adult films during the 1970s to help reduce the budget pressure. Also, there were no second shoots. Because of this, you can see the stars hesitate in delivering their lines in an attempt to remember what they were supposed to say from a script handed to them usually that morning. Occasionally, overhead microphones would be caught in the shot too. See if you can pick these out in this film. What also stands out is how Milling relied on a number of royalty free classical music pieces to add dramatic effect to the scenes.