Presented by Odd Obsessions

On February 24th, 1977, the Music Box Theatre dimmed the lights on its stint as a purveyor of second run pornography with Gary Graver’s 1975 classic, 3AM. While the Music Box did return a month later as a traditional second run theatre, reopening with MARATHON MAN and THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR, Graver’s film has languished in obscurity – far too arthouse for the hardcore crowd, far too explicit for the mainstream – a victim of its own fully realised ambition. 3AM might just be the finest hardcore film ever committed to celluloid, as much for its unconventional, interleaving, non-linear structure as for its genre-defying narrative, acting, and setting, all of which evoke the best of the French and Italian New Waves.

If a hardcore film in which as much affection and detail are paid to the filmmaking as to the sex itself doesn’t interest you – and anyway, who wouldn’t be drawn in by the Hitchcockian story of a love affair gone wrong between a middle-aged husband and his wife’s sister and the ensuing sexual fallout as the extended family humps the pain away in a series of vignettes which mix experience, memory, and fantasy – then perhaps the greatest lesbian sex scene in cinema history will. Edited by Orson Welles (as a way of freeing up Graver, his then-current and final cinematographer, and others to work on THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND) and gorgeously shot with all the grit, grain, deep hues and dutch angles one could muster, Georgina Spelvin’s lengthy shower encounter with Judith Hamilton might just dim the lights at the Music Box once more, 40 years to the day later.