Dir: Will Tremper
Star: Barbara Benton, Klaus Kinski, Hampton Fancher, Roman Murray
a.k.a. The Naughty Cheerleader,
or How Did a Nice Girl Like You Get Into This Business?

Boy, this is a strange animal. With a title which translates as “I Always Enjoyed It,” through the various alternate names, it positively promises to ooze sleaze and nudity. The reality? It’s positively PG-rated [maybe PG-13, at a stretch], and more of a bildungsroman, to use that good and appropriately German word. For it depicts the formative years of Lynn Keefe (Benton), from her first sexual experience, through an unwanted pregnancy, and various exploits in the Catskills, Boston and abroad, to discovering true love, in the arms of her Italian boyfriend, Gino.

Gino is played by the man who, a decade-plus later, would go on to write the first script for Blade Runner, Hampton Fancher. Also present here are Ed Begley Jr., playing a bell-hop at the hotel where Lynn works; Lionel Stander (best known for his role as the chauffeur Max, in Hart to Hart) in the part of an admiral whom she charges a hundred bucks for a romp on a bus; and Hugh Hefner, playing himself – he gets off a plane with Lynn standing next to him, which drives the tabloid press into a frenzy. Beside this, Kinski’s presence as a Spanish pimp seems almost reasonable, although his name – at least in one of the dubs – is less so: Juan José Ignatio Rodriguez de Calderon. There’s a reason the English language version calls him “Sam”.

There’s certainly the potential for copious amounts of gratuitous nudity here, which makes its complete absence all the more surprising. It’s especially unexpected, because Benton got her break into film and TV appearing alongside Hefner as an 18-year-old on Playboy After Dark, the previous year. Here’s a story too good to skip: according to Wikipedia, Hefner asked her on a date. She answered, “I don’t know, I’ve never dated anyone over 24 before,” to which he replied, “That’s all right, neither have I.” But it must have worked, as she was on the cover of Playboy four times, between 1969 and 1985, and well as inside on several occasions. In this, her feature debut, she’s more Julie Andrews… Well, if Julie Andrews were playing a teenager who had just discovered sex, anyway. Which would certainly have made The Sound of Music interesting.

Anyway, the story here unfolds in flashback, Lynn telling the story of her to life to a duke she meets by the side of a hotel swimming-pool. It starts with her approaching age sixteen and with a boring boyfriend, Ronnie, when she falls instead for the archetypal “bad boy”, Nick, who rides a motorcycle. He takes her virginity while on the back of the bike, which as a feat, can only be applauded, albeit certainly counting as severely “distracted driving.” She dumps Ronnie for Nick, which works only until their busy sex-life leads to the inevitable: Lynn gets pregnant. Nick will have nothing do with her, and she runs away from her home in Scranton, PA, vowing not to return until she has found a loving husband.

After brief stints in the hotel and modelling industries, and having suffered a miscarriage – yeah, this isn’t exactly your typical softcore plot! – the next significant takes place in Boston, where she gets a job as an elevator girl. There. she catches the eye (and other organs) of Frank Blake (Murray), a record company executive. She eventually agrees to be the honeypot in a sting operation, her underage charms the perfect lure into blackmail and subsequent loyalties of Bob Greene, the most influential DJ in the city. [From a 2016 perspective, I was getting a severe and pretty creepy Jimmy Savile vibe here. How times have changed…] Rewarded with a stake in the company, she’s eventually bought out by the other partners, who realize she can be “replaced by an $80 a week secretary.”

Now relatively well-off, she decides to try her luck in Miami Beach, which is where Juan José Ign… dammit, let’s call him Sam, comes in. On arriving at her hotel, Lynn is mistaken for one of the entrants in the imminent Miss Universe pageant, which gives Sam the pimp a great idea. Drawn by the beauty queens, there are a lot of well-heeled men rattling around, who’d pay up big cash for the opportunity to dally with a beauty queen. So he sets Lynn up in a suite and rents her out as Miss Luxembourg. Which goes well, until it gets exposed that he is running exactly the same scam with another girl in another room on the same floor – also calling her Miss Luxembourg. Was Miss Lichtenstein not available?

A necessarily quick exit for the pair later, they head for Europe, in particular to Rome where, after the Hefner cameo mentioned above, Sam introduces Lynn to “film producers”. Who mostly don’t appear to be, and if they are, appear only interested in having her get her kit off. But it does bring her across the path of Gino, who appears to love Lynn for herself, rather than very specific bits of herself. Sam’s eyes light up with dollar signs, since Gino is the son of an Italian millionaire, but his relationship with Lynn leads to him being cut off, and he is utterly useless at earning any legitimate income. Which brings us full circle, and back to Lynn at the side of the swimming pool.

The lack of anything even remotely explicit probably works in the film’s best interests, since you will remember it, when a million soft-core flicks of the decade have long been forgotten. It’s apparently based on a book by the real Lynn Keefe, under the “How did a…” title. Though I imagine it’s probably as truly “autobiographical” as the book on which Nastassja’s Passion Flower Hotel was supposedly based. But, from the loss of the heroine’s pregnancy on, it seems to zig when you think it’s going to zag, and is all the better for it. I’ll even forgive the obvious stunt casting, since Sam’s fashion sense is a perfect time capsule of the era. There’s a certain tasty irony present, both in the character he plays and in him being on the receiving end of Lynn’s freak-out when she discovers he has blown all their cash.