You never realize just how sleazy most Rod Stewart tunes are until they’re used as the backdrop for the seduction of a teenage boy; I know this not from personal experience, mind you, but from the fact that the filmic wet dream Private Lessons uses at least three different Rod songs for this erotic purpose.
The summer’s here and all Albuquerque rich-kid Philly (Eric Brown) and his requisite chubby bud want is to see a girl naked. That perverted wish comes true — and a whole lot more than that — when sexy maid Ms. Mallow (Sylvia Kristel) moves into his mansion, sexually teasing and sensually taunting him until, in the middle of surprisingly graphic intercourse, she dies of apparent heart failure.
By the way: In case you haven’t figured it out yet, Philly is only about 15 years old when all this is going on.
Panicked, he enlists his chauffeur, Dr. Johnny Fever Lester (Howard Hesseman), to help him get rid of that fine body; little does Philly know, however, that it is all part of an extortion plan that, sadly, takes the movie’s view off of the adolescent sexual experimentation and, instead, on a lame crime subplot that wraps up neatly with a minorly madcap chase scene.
Private Lessons has, embarrassingly, been a longtime favorite film of mine since secretly viewing cable airings of it, repeatedly, as a kid in the early ’80s. Star Eric Brown was pretty much the luckiest kid on TV at the time — besides this film, he also got it on with statuesque Sybil Danning in They’re Playing with Fire, as well as being cast as Buzz on the first season of Mama’s Family. What a resume!
Not to be outdone, French delight Kristel — high on both her marriage to Ian McShane and mounds of cocaine, possibly at the same time — is a tempestuous delight, even if for half the nude scenes she’s using a body double, for reasons I don’t understand and, honestly, don’t care to explore unless “Tonight’s the Night” is blaring in the background. —Louis Fowler