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Rating: Jack Hill - "The Swinging Cheerleaders"
The Swinging Cheerleaders is now a cult movie! I thank the immense video library of cinephile and videomaker Mr. Francesco Lomuscio for allowing me to re-enjoy in a private viewing this American flick that swam on old color TVs many years ago. For those who remember it, the film was in heavy rotation along with Mr. Freedom on the most forgotten private TVs in the west of Lazio, and in the late '70s version, it even had an Italian soundtrack, with a namesake title, written by Il Segno dello Zodiaco,
whose 45 rpm is listed on eBay. Dear Francesco, alas, your raisat version is in its original language with the stormiest scenes cut; my old VHS that has self-remastered by fading, was in Italian and had the censored scenes. Unfortunately, the original from which it was taken was already an old film clouded by yellowing and little lines like planetary rings
that give you a good idea of a film's age, then it also got demagnetized; it's the famous "film damage" effect often recreated by videomakers. "The swinging cheerleaders" - translated into Le ragazze pon pon (fanno sempre din don) - reached cinemas and then private TVs with a title resonating with the cultured lemma "fellatio", that is, Pon Pin. The plot: the students of Mesa State College do not just cheer for their team mates; they have a sexual life all to be discovered.
A young feminist sociologist -Jo Johnston- passes the admission tests to become a cheerleader - and thus enters the closed circle of some college girls, all very cute and uninhibited.The team the cheerleaders are rooting for is Mesa State, in the southwest USA, which is winning the championship thanks to its very strong athletes.
But she intends to secretly study the environment and write a university thesis on them to demystify a sporting ritual dear to millions of Americans. The one who knows the truth is her boyfriend, a politically engaged student, an anti-Vietnam activist who looks like an absurd doppelganger of Bob Dylan straight out of the songwriter's posters on the wall; their sociological dialogues almost immediately end in a... pep rally. Our heroine, also passing the brawny champion of the team, a cheerleader's boyfriend - the beautiful Colleen Camp - daughter of the Mesa president, accidentally uncovers a scam to rig games and win bets. As the launch phrase suggests (... they always go din don), it is a soft porn disguised as a college movie, in which the characters are increasingly negative from one to the other.
And between a hand going inside panties and a blowjob, a cheerleader and a rape, a bet and a game, the film reflects a terrible sociological painting: the left-wing and enlightened Bob Dylan, the film's only protester, is a no-good cokehead and marijuana user, betrayed by the sociologist, he turns into a group rapist of a virginal girl -Rainbeaux Smith; the chancellor is a mafia boss, the coach is a delinquent, the professors are corrupted, the sporty boys are silly, the girls are sluts... and finally the police persecutes the innocent.
Moral: school more than a life teacher is a black mirror of society. A film that created a real category, I must say it has aged well over time: if back then it attracted me during winter afternoons to watch naked women -sure I didn't dwell on its engaged side!- I must say that the filthy things I witnessed live at high school confirmed the film's ahead-of-time themes; and it is the fresco of an era: cheerleaders, alas, are going extinct, -like Mennonite women or the giraffe girls from the Karen-Padaung ethnicity- like the film's automatic change turntable, or the jukebox in bars - the one in the film is a Rock-Ola 440 Psychedelic, like the non-siliconed breasts of the protagonists...
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