The Problematics: The Supposedly Good-Hearted Nostalgia of ‘Porky’s’ Ain’t What It Used To Be

New Orleans-born director Bob Clark spent most of his professional life making movies in Canada, working prolifically and in an unusual variety of genres. Did he have a wide range of interests? Yes. But it’s also very likely that the Canadian tax laws of the 1970s, which allowed film productions to serve as tax shelters (provided stringent filing deadlines were met) also determined the character of his productions.

Without getting into the details, which were indeed byzantine, films produced with tax shelter bucks were more often than not made because they could be, not necessarily because the filmmakers had a particular itch to make them. It is this, more than any notion of eclectic auteurism, that practically accounts for Clark’s mid- ‘70s to early- ‘80s run. (Probably, I hasten to add.) The films of this period include the intense “Monkey’s Paw” variant Death Dream, the immortal Black Christmas, the surprisingly lively Sherlock Holmes picture Murder by Decree and the very classy Jack-Lemmon-starring theatrical adaptation Tribute.

Which was immediately followed by Porky’s, a movie as crude and raucous as Tribute was sentimental. Today marks the 40th anniversary of the movie’s release — at least in South Carolina and Colorado, two territories less likely to give it a hostile greeting than New York. For despite being a Canadian production, Porky’s was at heart a regional U.S. picture and in fact an extremely personal one for Clark. He based his screenplay on his reminiscences of growing up with a bunch of horndog high school buddies in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, in the relatively repressed Eisenhower era.

This is a movie with one foot in National Lampoon’s Animal House, a few toes in American Graffiti, and a heel or some other section of a metaphorical foot in crass softcore porn. It’s also a weird primer in what revisionist Southern liberal virtues thought they ought to be, and jaw-dropping in that respect.

Porky’s, or as the opening title puts it, “Bob Clark’s Porky’s” reveals its sensibility from shot one, or so, which depicts high-schooler “Pee Wee” Morris’s morning wood pitching a tent in his bedding. Awake and scrambling, Pee-Wee, portrayed by extremely game actor Dan Monahan, gets up to measure his erection and is dismayed to learn “it’s getting shorter.”

Then it’s off to Angel Beach High, where Pee-Wee’s better-endowed buddies are hatching a prank that involves the hiring of a “colored guy,” who’s a “regular Zulu.” One of the buddies starts dropping the N-word and is chastised by his companions. I gather this is a realistic depiction and it’s repellent. But by 1981 standards, the viewer was meant to understand the less intense levels of racism some of the characters espoused was reasonable and acceptable. Hence, it’s okay to go along on their ride. And also okay to laugh, later on, when the prank is executed. It involves several of the high school boys, now naked; a local woman of ill-repute; and the aforementioned person of color, who breaks through a door and makes as if to chop up undressed the high school boys with a machete. Oh the hilarity.

While De Palma’s 1970s Carrie depicted its contemporary high-school characters as oversexed, the 1950s kids of Porky’s are pathologically obsessed. Clearly this is meant as a rebuke. Clark means to depict the image of a squeaky-clean New Frontier as an utter lie. Which is, to some extent, commendable. But that doesn’t make the bit in which some of the more experienced female students bait a freshman girl into asking one of Pee-Wee’s gang why he’s nicknamed “Meat” any more palatable.

Then there’s the movie’s idea that peeping into the girl’s shower isn’t an act of sexual violence, but merely a sign of hormonal high spirits. And the naming of the rotund girl’s Phys-ed instructor: Beulah Balbricker. And the running joke about why the younger PE coach, Kim Cattrall’s very fresh Miss Honeywell, is nicknamed “Lassie.” Hoo boy.

The boy’s sexual banter is occasionally stomach-churning. In their premature anticipation of the order in which they’re going to enjoy sexual congress with Susan Clark’s “Cherry Forever,” Pee-Wee (I think) says to a guy who he thinks will be going fifth, “You can scrape her off the mattress.” In the words of Edwin Starr, Good God.

The engine of the movie’s plot is the title establishment, a strip-club-cum-brothel about 70 miles into the swamps, overseen by an appropriately porcine Chuck Mitchell, with former footballer Alex Karras (Clark’s real life husband) as the businessman’s brother, also conveniently the sheriff around those parts. Porky and his bastard cop kin humiliate the boys once, and when one of their number, Mickey, goes back solo to take revenge, humiliate, and wallop that party not once but twice. After which Art Hindle’s own lawman, Ted, older brother of the vengeance-bound Mickey, and someone who was once burned by Porky in his own feckless youth, determines that something must be done. (I must say this movie features a surprisingly complex network of familial relations.)

But what, exactly, is to be done? The answer hinges on Brian Schwarz, whose character is an object for the movie’s main teachable moment. Played by Scott Colomby, Brian is the school’s perhaps only Jewish student, and Cyril O’Reilly’s Tim is constantly needling him. Tim’s dad is not only a bigot, but a recently released felon who’s a bully to everyone, including his kid. Once things reach a boiling point with Brian and Tim there’s a fist-fight, in which Brian easily bests him, winning the uneasy semi-acceptance of the gang. One of the fellas tells Brian, apropos Tim, “Even though he’s a schmuck…he’s still our buddy, you know?” Whoa! Cue up the song “Racist Friend!” Either by the Specials or They Might Be Giants, makes no difference here!

Brian turns détente into embrace when he masterminds a scheme to get back at Porky and Porky’s, without getting in trouble with the law on either side of the county line.

While the movie may want to make a statement that bigotry is unacceptable from any human ethical and moral perspective, what it actually ends up saying, in its way, is that this particular Jewish person is ultimately acceptable because he’s useful.

All this nonsense occurs as the movie gives hints to the rather more interesting story it could have been: The mid-section scenes between Mickey and Ted have a thematic pull that could have been teased out well by a John Milius or Walter Hill. But the movie persistently returns to cartoonish sex japes that barely split the difference between Playboy and, well, Hustler.

“The movie persistently returns to cartoonish sex japes that barely split the difference between Playboy and Hustler.”

The less said about the shower peeping scene, the better, particularly as one of its jokes involves Pee-Wee’s view blocked by an obese subject. The penis-grabbing and yanking by Balbricker does briefly launch the movie into a far vicinity of John Waters territory, and its trying-to-keep-from-laughing follow-up scene provides some of the movie’s few honest laughs, even though it was done better a couple of years before in Monty Python’s Life of Brian. The picture spawned two sequels, 1983’s Porky’s II: The Next Day, in which the fellows stay horny and mess with the Klan, and 1985’s Porky’s Revenge, which Clark had no say in. They should have followed the boys out of high school so they could discover Sandy Koufax and have their youthful idealism shattered by the JFK assassination. Or not. Few here will disagree that Clark was better off following his muse, or maybe Canadian tax shelter money, to 1984’s A Christmas Story, in which his own sense of nostalgia plays well off of Jean Shepard’s, and which remains a classic of both irreverence and no small sentiment.

Veteran critic Glenn Kenny reviews‎ new releases at RogerEbert.com, the New York Times, and, as befits someone of his advanced age, the AARP magazine. He blogs, very occasionally, at Some Came Running and tweets, mostly in jest, at @glenn__kenny. He is the author of the acclaimed 2020 book Made Men: The Story of Goodfellas, published by Hanover Square Press.

Where to stream Porky's