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Georgina Spelvin, Harry Reems, Marc Stevens, Levi Richards, Judith Hamilton, Sue Flaken,
The Devil in Miss Jones (1973) is a pornographic film, written, directed and produced by Gerard Damiano and starring Georgina Spelvin. It is widely regarded as a classic adult film, released during the Golden Age of Porn. Damiano made the film after his 1972 success with Deep Throat. Along with Deep Throat and Behind the Green Door, the film is associated with the brief period known as porno chic or the Golden Age of Porn. It went on to spawn numerous remakes and sequels.
Georgina Spelvin plays Justine Jones, a lonely, depressed spinster who decides that suicide is the only way out of her routinely dull existence. While lying in the bathtub, Justine slits her wrists, dying quietly as the water fills with her blood.
Because she has lived a "pure" life, Miss Jones finds herself in limbo. There she meets Mr. Abaca (John Clemens), an angel, of sorts, who informs her that she does not qualify for entrance to Heaven because she has killed herself. Angry that this one indiscretion has left her with only the options of limbo or Hell, she begs Mr. Abaca to let her "earn" her place in Hell by being allowed to return to earth and become the embodiment of lust. After an intense session of pain and pleasure with a menacing man who goes only by the title of "The Teacher" (Harry Reems), Justine has a few bizarre and sexually deviant encounters, the last of which is a graphic threesome.
However, just as she is enjoying her new life of lust, the brief time Justine was given to fulfill herself runs out and she is faced with the eternity of Hell. At first, Miss Jones is horrified at the pain she will be forced to endure, but Abaca is quick to dispel the common human myth of Hell and promises Justine that she will be "quite comfortable..."
Justine, now a raging sex addict, then finds herself confined to a small room with an impotent, sexually uninterested man who is more interested in catching flies than her. She desperately begs the man for sex, but he simply asks her to be quiet while he listens to the buzzing of his imaginary insects.
Trapped in her own private hell, Miss Jones is left screaming in agony for all eternity, thirsting for a climax she will never achieve by her own means.
The movie was given an X rating by the MPAA and premiered at the 57th Street Playhouse in New York City. In many theaters it was shown after Deep Throat as part of a double bill. The Devil In Miss Jones broke the box office record for a pornographic film. It was more commercially successful than both Deep Throat and Behind the Green Door, and successfully competed against mainstream films. It earned $15 million in gross rental at the U.S. box office, making it the tenth most successful film of 1973, just behind Paper Moon with Ryan O'Neal and Live and Let Die with Roger Moore
As with the other films of the Porno chic era, it was reviewed by the film critics of mainstream newspapers. The film's review in Variety said that, "With The Devil in Miss Jones, the hard-core porno feature approaches an art form, one that critics may have a tough time ignoring in the future", and compared its plot to Jean-Paul Sartre's play No Exit. The review went on to say, "Damiano has expertly fashioned a bizarre melodrama", and described the opening scene as, "a sequence so effective it would stand out in any legit theatrical feature." It finished by stating, "Booking a film of this technical quality into a standard sex house is tantamount to throwing it on the trash heap of most current hard-core fare."
According to Peter Michelson there is, "a relatively small corpus of [pornographic] films - e.g., Deep Throat, Devil in Miss Jones, Behind the Green Door - that have a minimal but still sufficient artistic interest to distinguish themselves from the rest of the genre".
Other critics have described it as, along with Deep Throat, one of the "two best erotic motion pictures ever made". William Friedkin has called it a "great film", partly because it was one of the few porn films with a proper storyline. It was one of the first films to be inducted into the XRCO Hall of Fame.
Sexy Sadie's Two Bits:
The Devil in Miss Jones was one of the first high production value films of the Golden Age Porn when it was produced in 1973. It included a full range of sexual activity including oral sex, (blow jobs and cunnilingus) both hetero and lesbian, full frontal nudity, sex showing full penetration in missionary, reverse cowgirl, spooning and doggy positions, enemas, three ways including double penetration as well as money shots.
