Toys Are Not For Children (1972)

My nominee for the Feel-Bad Sex movie of the 20th century. Produced, directed and starring people who did few movies before or after. Released through a booking company which specialized in grindhouse films. Found in many 16mm rental catalogs over the years. And finally, unleashed on DVD as part of a "sexy seventies shockers series". In other words, a movie you have to really, really seek out.
Poor little Jamie (Marcia Forbes, who seems to have acted in this one movie) has a problem. Her father abandoned her while she was a little girl. Her mother is the Bitch From Hell who constantly screams at her. Jamie's only solace is playing and sleeping with the toys her estranged father continues to send her year after year. She finds a job in a toy store where she gets to be around the things she loves. Soon, she's a model employee ("She makes the toys come alive!" the store owner exclaims), but attracts the attention of a coworker, Charlie (Harlan Poe). She also makes the aquatintence of a woman who comes into the store and turns out to be a call girl with a sleazy pimp boyfriend. When her mother discovers her new friend is the very woman who lured daddy astray, she kicks Jamie out of the house. Jamie relunctantly agrees to marry Charlie, but he discovers on their wedding night that she just wants tucked into bed. Bummer. Charlie soons abandons his new bride for the hot babes at a local bar and Jamie takes up with the call girl. In a strange turn of events, Jamie becomes a sex worker specializing in fantasy scenes. But it all comes to a tragic end when, spurned by her new protege, the call girl sends Jamie to a special client: her very own father.
Editied into a non-linear story, it can be a little hard to follow. The marriage of Jamie and Charlie, for instance, occurs at the beginning of the film, as does it's dissolution. But you don't see his courtship of her until the half-way mark. It would seem the director wanted the inevitablity of the ending pounded into the audience. Again, I can only imagine what the stroke-daddies who went to see this painfest must have resembled when the credits rolled.
Watching Toys are Not for Children can only be compared to reading a short story by Charles Birkin. A master of the cruel tale, Birkin was alway great for running anything good about your day. Billed as a sexy movie, Toys is anything but. Imagine an Oliver Twist where everybody wants to fuck the orphan and he gets tossed out on the street.
This is not to say we have an art film here. This movie looks to have been lensed on cheap stock. The actors are OK, but not oscar material. Even the sets look left over from an educational film. I'm sure there is a story waiting to be told as to how this thing ever got made.
A perfect antidote to all those Swedish erotica movies.