Love Is a Four Letter Word
Love Is a Four Letter Word
| 03 February 1966 (USA)
Love Is a Four Letter Word Trailers

Reality and fantasy blur as a sexually frustrated college student turns to voyeurism to satisfy his deviant urges. Looking beyond his prudish girlfriend and sleepy town to fulfill his needs, he travels south of the border for an orgy of peep shows and pills - but his lust pushes him to the brink of insanity.

Reviews
Ameriatch One of the best films i have seen
GazerRise Fantastic!
ChicRawIdol A brilliant film that helped define a genre
Plustown A lot of perfectly good film show their cards early, establish a unique premise and let the audience explore a topic at a leisurely pace, without much in terms of surprise. this film is not one of those films.
Perception_de_Ambiguity The whole film (62 long-drawn-out minutes) is just a guy watching naked girls who range from barely acceptable to decently attractive because apparently all he ever thinks about all day is nude girls and he never learned how to rub one off which means we have to sit through heaps of footage of women presenting their bodies with the typical music tooting and bongoing and twaning uninspiredly away on the soundtrack. He watches them in their bathroom through windows (while his girlfriend is taking a shower next door), on a moviola (if that's the right term) at some smudgy store, at a home party where a libertine party guest dances for the others, with some friends he watches strippers dance, he watches them on his 8mm projector (after a doctor advises him to "take in some movies" to "get his mind off his problems"), he peeps through the window of a sorority ceremony, he goes to a hooker,... Now I have given you a detailed synopsis of the plot. So we sit there watching that guy watch others, sometimes being bored by what he sees and being frustrated about the fact that he is bored and sometimes being somewhat titillated, kind of reflecting my mood as a viewer if we can ignore the "titillated" part.All I really cared about though was to find out what that guy's deal is. He's in a very questionable relationship with a girl, what kind of relationship is anyone's guess. From what I understood she is his girlfriend and they haven't had sex in a while because he can't help getting rough with her when having sex. So her solution is to keep being his girlfriend but to just not have sex with him anymore. She also doesn't care if he is whoring around or should I say if he is looking at nude girls aaaaall day and aaaaall night long (the guy can't sleep because he has some kind of obligation to look at nude girls), she's certainly not the type of woman to ask many questions when you come home late. Doesn't make much sense, does it? Well, that's the most sense I got out of it.If you don't want to have the sho-sho-shocking ending revealed skip the next paragraph but I don't advise you to do so.So his last peeping session is fatal because he watches his quasi-girlfriend and a female friend of hers stripping FOR each other before getting it on WITH each other. That gives him the rest, reason being that he is in love with that chick...in some weird way...so he popped some pills he shouldn't have popped, or at least not so many of them and OD'es in his tear-soaked bed. The movie (or should I write "movie") has one of the great last lines, spoken by a doctor from the off: "Wonder what his problem was. Hell, if I had his looks I woulda been making out with every girl on the campus." Yeah, I wondered too, ever since the start of the movie and I'm none the wiser now that it is over.The movie would have been a lot less dreadful (even WITH this thin drama-free script) if the camera would have done more than just photographing naked skin without transporting much personality. That it was shot in B&W and many of the ladies wore your grandmother's lingerie didn't help much either to be a titillating picture. I can think of one thing the movie is good for, though. For a drinking game in which the viewers have to drink a shot every time the filming crew is visible. Mics almost poking the actors, camera shadows on faces, a director cameo as a reflection in a mirror, no scene would have been complete without such a goof.
dragonslayor I'm disappointed to find few if any details of this film here. I recall seeing it while in college and recall being entertained and engaged by the story line as much as by the photography. A scene depicting an initiation dance in which the members danced in robes carrying candles in a ring around the novitiate with haunting music as the robes first opened and then fell as particularly effective. A low camera angle added a dramatic touch. An early B/W film of the nudie genre, going credibly beyond simple exploitation. Surprisingly memorable.