Threes (1967) from Tuna

Threes, Menage a Trois (1967) is a Nick Phillips nudie film, shot in 1967 in San Francisco.  This film includes the French phrase Menage a Trois in the title because French and Italian films represented additional box office from the art house crowd. IMDb lists it simply as Threes.

Jane Lako stars. As it opens, she is walking along a beach, trying to come to grips with the fact that her husband is dead. She explains their open marriage, her student lover, a porn loop she watched that showed three women, a stripper her husband watched, and finally how he died.

Threes shares many characteristics with most of the Phillips films:

• It was shot in B & W with a minimal plot designed only to bridge the gaps between nude scenes.

• The plot is advanced by narration, rather than dialogue

• There is a score laid down by one of many local jazz trios. Jazz trios were cheap, you could always find one that wanted the work, and Nick liked jazz.

Phillips was prolific, but in order to find a lot of his titles, you will have to combine the IMDb listings for Nick Millard and Steve Millard, two of the dozens of aliases has used.

During that era, nudie films could be exhibited in many major cities in the US with relative impunity, but it was still illegal to make them, and doing so could get you arrested in most places in the US. An exception was San Francisco, where he made many of his films. These movies are, frankly, boring as hell, but have a certain historical importance, and I have a personal connection. I was in San Francisco during this time on a Navy ship, and watched some of these films in North Beach. One of my buddies advocated supporting them, even though they admittedly were not at all good. His reasoning? If they make money, more people will make them, and they will improve. I have to applaud Guilty Pleasures for preserving these on DVD. Not only are they an important chapter of sex in the cinema, but I enjoy the looks at 1960s San Francisco.