Pauline Edwards’ Girls Who Like Girls (2001) is a sort of That’s Entertainment that deals almost exclusively with the work of softcore maestro Radley Metzger. It’s a film made up of clips from other films. There are no behind the scenes sequences or interviews. There’s just Pauline Edwards.
Edwards penned a passable script to accompany the footage that is read by Betty Ward. This voiceover, which makes only the most general observations, works to structure the film by indicating what it is in these images that changes from the late fifties through to the seventies. Betty Ward’s voiceover, while competently performed, adds little that the audience cannot see for themselves in the in these excerpts.
The interesting thing about Girls Who Like Girls is that this quasi homage to Metzger is authored by a woman filmmaker. Over the course of the film little is offered as a counterpoint to Metzger’s singular brand of lesbian spectacle. Girls moan and grasp each other’s breasts right and left in these clips without any investigation into why this was ever tantalizing enough for Metzger to have made a career out of staging such scenes in front of the camera. Any enjoyment of deeper understanding of our cultural history to be found in Girls Who Like Girls is actually inferior to the experience of watching The Alley Cats (1966) or Lickerish Quartet (1970) in its entirety.
Perhaps the usefulness of Girls Who Like Girls resides in its ability to introduce its audience to the sexploitation genre as it was in the mid-twentieth century. However I suspect that, given when this film was produced, it was intended as a sort of “greatest hits” for male viewers and fans of the genre.
