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Released by: Magnolia Pictures
Released on: April 14th, 2009.
Director: Matthew Kaufman, Jon Hart
Cast: Some of the swingingest cats you ever did see!
Year: 2008
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American Swing – Movie Reviews:
With American Swing, co-directors Matthew Kaufman and Jon Hart have created a documentary that attempts to tell the bizarre true story of infamous Manhattan swingers club Plato’s Retreat and its founder, the late Larry Levenson. While the club’s final location on West 34th Street is now a large parking garage, for roughly a decade Levenson’s private club was a place where he encouraged ‘free thinking and free living’ adults to come and explore their sexuality together. The film doesn’t do much in the way of even attempting to explain the swinging lifestyle that seemed to peak in popularity during the late seventies, but it does paint a fascinating portrait of what was once one of New York City’s most notorious establishments.
The film begins by talking about Levenson’s early years by showing off plenty of old family photographs, some of which date back to his childhood before detailing his first marriage and discussing the birth of his sons. From there, we learn how the first marriage ended and how Larry, in 1977, decided to open up a swinger’s club on Manhattan’s fairly snooty upper west side on West 73th Street. Named after the famous Greek philosopher (who argued in favor of man-boy relations in some of his writing!), the club became a hit quite quickly. The original location was a former gay bath house where Barry Manilow and Bette Midler were both known to perform, but Plato’s quickly outgrew the spot and moved to the midtown location three years after it opened.
The new location drew bigger crowds, ranging in status from common bus drivers and their wives to celebrities like Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr., Abbie Hoffman (who visited the club while hiding out from the F.B.I.) to porn stars like Jamie Gillis, Annie Sprinkle, Ron Jeremy, Sharon Mitchell and the one and only Long Jean Silver. Politicians, religious leaders, government officials and people from all walks of life would join together each night for drinking, dancing, and a whole lot of bumping and grinding in the club’s various rooms. With sections designated for massive orgies like the infamous Mattress Room (featuring ‘Swiss Cheese’ walls so onlookers could play out their voyeuristic fantasies) to more discrete smaller rooms meant to accommodate more intimate encounters, Plato’s was a living, breathing, sweating cum stained testament to debauchery where consenting adults could fuck until their hearts content, then take a breather and enjoy a notoriously gross buffet.
It all started to crumble for Levenson, who apparently figured he could screw every woman in New York, when the club got shut down for tax evasion. Levenson’s insistence that Plato’s Retreat was a non-profit didn’t hold up in court and he went to jail for a few years. The club went on in his absence, but when he got back things had changed. STD’s and the spread of AIDS was becoming a growing concern, more conservative government officials were cracking down on the city’s sex clubs, and, as Al Goldstein so eloquently put it, ‘swinging had blown its load.’ When the club was finally shut down for good on New Year’s Eve in 1985, Larry, the former self-proclaimed ‘King of Swing’ found himself a lonely, impoverished overweight cab driver with a newfound love for crack cocaine. Despite occasional media appearances on obscure Manhattan Cable Access shows like ‘In And Out With Dick,’ Larry died a lonely sad man at the age of sixty two.
Featuring a massive selection of archival photographs and footage shot inside Plato’s itself, this documentary interviews those who were there and lets them wax nostalgic about times past. Included here are thoughts from the likes of Dr. Annie Sprinkle, Fred J. Lincoln, Jamie Gillis, Ron Jeremy, Al Goldstein, Ed Koch, three of Levenson’s sons, his first wife, and various people who worked at and frequented the club (including a married couple, Charlie and Annie, who managed the club before the IRS got involved – at which point they took off fearing a mafia threat only to wind up on a nationally syndicated game show in Las Vegas!). All involved talk about the establishment and, to a lesser extent, Levenson himself with an obvious affection. They all seem to have had a good time while it lasted and even if it’s obvious from many commentators that Levenson’s theology that he was truly building a community was a bit delusional you can’t help but get the feeling that, despite his raging libido and string of bizarre relationships, Larry was a generally nice guy who in his own way actually meant well.
The documentary lacks all but the most basic psychological context in that it doesn’t try to explain why all involved did what they did. There’s no deep rooted Freudian motivations provided nor are there any suppositions as to how Levenson got into swinging in the first place (it’s simply stated that he was a really horny guy). On that level the documentary feels a little shallow but as a time capsule, it’s invaluable not only for the memories that the interviewees share but also for the footage (most, though not all of which was shot inside the club), photographs and news clippings used throughout. At just over eighty minutes, the film is a little on the short side (personal bias time, however – stuff like this fascinates me and I could probably watch these types of documentaries all day long) but that never makes it any less interesting or any less entertaining.
American Swing – DVD Review:
The quality of the image varies from scene to scene, which is completely understandable when you consider that this documentary is a mix of recently shot interview clips and old, fuzzy archival chunks culled from public access broadcasts and news reports relating to Plato’s. Generally, however, the progressive scan 1.78.1 anamorphic widescreen transfer looks quite sharp. Colors and detail levels, for the newly shot footage, look nice and accurate while black levels stay pretty deep. There aren’t any problems with compression artifacts or edge enhancement to note and the disc is nicely authored. The older footage looks as soft and fuzzy as you’d expect it to, but in a roundabout way that lesser quality helps to set the mood for the movie.
While the film is pretty much all dialogue, the English language Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround Sound track does do a nice job of spreading out the various songs used throughout the documentary to all of the channels in your setup. Bass response is bouncy enough to be noticed while the high end is free of any shrillness. The levels are well balanced and, aside from some archival clips, there are no problems with hiss or distortion. An optional English Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo track is included as are optional subtitles in Spanish only.
Magnolia has supplied almost a half an hour’s worth of deleted interview footage (27:04) shot for but not included in the feature. The highlights here are some of Ron Jeremy’s recollections, a story about how Al Goldstein lost ten grand in a bet against Larry Levenson in regards to how many women he could fuck in a night, and some more hysterical footage with Charlie and Annie, cantankerous couple who used to manage the club. It’s also amusing to hear from one of Levenson’s sons how he and his brothers used to take some of their high school friends to the club for kicks during its heyday.
Aside from that, we get some appropriately kitschy animated menus, chapter selection, and trailers for three other completely unrelated Magnolia Films properties. A commentary would have been very welcome here as I’d wager that Hart and Kaufman have got some interesting stories to tell about some of the people that they corralled for this documentary, but that didn’t happen. Some of the deleted material is gold, however, so be sure to watch it all.
American Swing – The Final Word:
Simultaneously hilarious, disturbing, tragic and fascinating, American Swing should have been a bit longer but is otherwise an excellent look at a strange time in American sexual culture. Magnolia’s DVD looks and sounds quite good and features a nice array of deleted scenes and even if it could have used a little more love in the supplements department, never the less comes highly recommended for those with an interest in such things.