Joseph W. Sarno, the cult director of “Sin in the Suburbs,” “Moonlighting Wives” and other films that helped establish the sexploitation genre and break down the taboos against erotic content in American cinema, died on April 26 in Manhattan. He was 89.
Joseph Sarno, in a 1968 photograph, directed movies like “Moonlighting Wives.”
Something Weird Video
Audrey Campbell in a scene from the 1964 film “Sin in the Suburbs.”
The death was confirmed by Michael J. Bowen, who is writing his biography.
Mr. Sarno bridged the gap between the nudist and nudie-cutie films of the late 1950s and early 1960s and the hard-core genre that developed after sexually explicit films like “Deep Throat” came on the scene in the early 1970s.
His early films were straightforwardly, even single-mindedly erotic, although flashes of nudity came only intermittently and the sex act took place outside the frame. Shot in a self-consciously artistic style, films like “Red Roses of Passion” (1966) and “Odd Triangle” (1968) explored the anxiety-haunted, tentative steps toward sexual liberation of middle-class suburbanites born too early to experience the uninhibited self-expression of the baby-boom generation.
“He was one of the pioneers of the American sexploitation film and a driving force in the sexual revolution of the 1960s,” Mr. Bowen said. “The films were gritty, down to earth, with a very distinctive style. At their best they were very dirty — they just did not have explicit sex.”
Joseph William Sarno was born on March 15, 1921, in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, and grew up on Long Island in Amityville. His father was a bootlegger, and his mother was a socialist labor organizer. He enrolled in New York University but dropped out immediately after Pearl Harbor to enlist in the Navy. As an airman, he saw action in the South Pacific.
He married for the first time before shipping overseas. That marriage, and a subsequent one, ended in divorce. He is survived by his third wife, Peggy Steffans Sarno; three daughters, Stephanie Colantoni of Manhattan, Patricia Vicoli of Tamarac, Fla., and Eleanor Fossen of Sebastopol, Calif.; two sons, William, of Highland Mills, N.Y., and Matthew, of Brooklyn; four grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren.
After the war Mr. Sarno found work as an advertising copywriter and sold ripping-yarn feature stories to digest magazines like Coronet. His film career began when the Navy, mistakenly believing that he had filmed bombing runs during the war, asked him to direct training films. He accepted the offer and then headed off to buy a book on cinematography.
Over the next several years he made dozens of training films for the Navy and industrial films for military contractors. His first venture into feature films came when an independent producer approached him to write the screenplay for an erotic film, “Nude in Charcoal,” which was released in 1961 and shown, like all of Mr. Sarno’s films, in grind-house theaters.
Mr. Sarno wrote the screenplays for all 75 of the 35-millimeter films he made over the next 15 years, and for his subsequent hard-core films. The first film for which he received sole directing credit, “Lash of Lust” (1962), was never released. Atypically, it was an erotic costume drama about Gaul in the time of the Romans, shot in the forests of upstate New York.
With “Sin in the Suburbs” (1963), Mr. Sarno hit his stride. His glimpse into the sex lives of bored suburbanites was commercially successful and helped kick-start the sexploitation genre.
“I went for the ragged, realistic look more than anything, and I was more interested in psychology and character development than most of the other filmmakers at that time,” he said in a 2006 interview for the Torino Film Festival.
Mr. Sarno began shooting in color with “Moonlighting Wives” (1966), about an ambitious suburban housewife who organizes a prostitution ring to solve her money problems. In 1968, seeking to capitalize on the success of “I Am Curious (Yellow),” an avant-garde Swedish film whose sexual content had made it an international hit a year earlier, he traveled to Sweden to film “Inga,” a sexual-awakening story. Its success, and the thrill of filming at a studio used by Ingmar Bergman, inspired Mr. Sarno to make an annual trip to Sweden to film with Swedish crews and actors for the American market.
In the early 1970s Mr. Sarno made some of his most joyous and accomplished films, notably “Confessions of a Young American Housewife” (1974), “Abigail Lesley Is Back in Town” (1975), “Laura’s Toys” (1975) and “Misty” (1976). But the onrush of hard-core films eliminated the market for his style of sex film.
After 1977 he made dozens of explicit sex films, all shot on video and none under his real name. Although he had filmed “Deep Throat II,” a soft-core sequel to “Deep Throat,” in 1974 and worked with some of the hard-core industry’s biggest stars in films like “All About Gloria Leonard” (1980) and “Deep Inside Annie Sprinkle” (1981), he had virtually no interest in simply filming sex acts.
He stopped working in 1990, but as younger film scholars and filmmakers rediscovered his early films, he became the subject of tributes and retrospectives in the United States and Europe.
He re-entered the sexploitation arena in 2004 with “Suburban Secrets,” a film that harked back to his glory years. Many of his films from the 1960s and early 1970s have been reissued by companies like Something Weird Video.
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