Seventies hardcore gets literary with THE NAUGHTY VICTORIANS, on Blu-ray/DVD combo from Vinegar Syndrome.

When her father decides that a marriage with a schoolmaster in fiancé Jack (Beerbohn Tree, ANYONE BUT MY HUSBAND) is unsuitable, Alice (Susan Sloan, WINTER HEAT) pays him a visit at his home for the first and last time only to be caught up in a sudden storm. Although it would be improper for her to stay without an escort, Alice is frightened enough of the weather to take shelter in Jack's snuggery, a soundproofed study that houses some unusual gymnasium equipment and adjustable mirrors on the ceiling. It is here that Jack traps her with the intent of conquering her maidenhead with the promise that she will soon be begging him for pleasure. When Alice continues to resist him, he takes her with violence but manages to awaken in her forbidden lusts and a capacity for sadism. Although she takes part in Jack taking the "other" maidenhead of her lady's maid Molly (Angel Barrett, HIGHWAY HOOKERS) and is just as enthusiastic about taking vulgar Lady Bunt (Jennifer Jordan, SOMETIME SWEET SUSAN) down a peg by way of her virginal daughter Cecily (Heather Austin), Alice cooks up a scheme to return the favor in kind of Jack.

Although loosely based on the anonymous Victorian erotic novel "A Man with a Maid", the title THE NAUGHTY VICTORIANS seems to allude to scholarly works about Victorian sexuality from the sixties onward including Steven Marcus' "The Other Victorians"; and, indeed, the film in its plotting is more of a commentary on Victorian sexuality, double standards, and male domination through force, the law – Jack proclaims that to Molly that it is well within his right to spank "wicked servants" – and through the possession of sexual knowledge. Alice is able to both experience a forced sexual awakening and to later feel violated when she realizes that Jack is more obsessed with conquering maidenheads and exerting power over women than actually expressing any desire for her after he has had her. She becomes complicit in his pursuits to satisfy her own desires but becomes disgusted when she sees her violation enacted upon another innocent; as such, the ending is more of an overturning of Victorian erotic tropes than a Sadean reversal in which violence enacted upon one's sexual initiator is evidence of the initiate's sexual and sadistic maturation. Tree, an actor who only appeared in a handful of adult films, gives a studied performance in contrast to Sloan who at first is gratingly awful with her fake accent only for the pitch of her performance to become suited to the satirical approach to the genre, with her later non-verbal reactions being all the more effective as the tone of the film changes. Director Robert Sickinger came to adult film from the stage, and his experience in staging is in evidence through the compositions, the film's use of optical devices, and an economic sense of production value that seems to anticipate Ken Russell's erotic Victorian chamber piece SALOME'S LAST DANCE more so than the similarly BDSM-themed and enclosed THE IMAGE. The film was photographed by Joseph Mangine who moved back and forth between sexploitation (LUSTFUL FEELINGS) and exploitation (SQUIRM) throughout the seventies with more mainstream credits like ALLIGATOR and ALONE IN THE DARK to come in the eighties while art director Francis J. Pezza (OUTBREAK) went on to a career largely in mainstream television.

Although given a theatrical release with a healthy amount of publicity – including reviews in magazines like SCREW and even a "audiences are raving" style theatrical trailer – THE NAUGHTY VICTORIANS has been difficult to see since. Vinegar Syndrome's 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.85:1 widescreen Blu-ray from a 2K scan of the original camera negative is quite attractive, with the attentiveness of Sickinger and cinematographer Mangine to the film's lighting and their attempts to make the few exterior scenes seem convincingly British not betrayed by the enhanced resolution. The DTS-HD Master Audio 1.0 mono track is fairly clean, consisting of both live and post-synched dialogue as well as Gilbert and Sullivan music cues, and optional English SDH subtitles are included that include one or two gaffes ("creature comforts" is bewilderingly transcribed as "feature compass").