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The Back Row
Rating: 4 Stars
1972 version written and directed by Doug Richards (Jerry Douglas). Music by William R. Cox. Starring Casey Donovan, George Payne, Robin Anderson, David Knox, Warren Carlton, Chris Villette, Arthur Graham, and Robert Tristan. 2001 version produced by Joe Slade. Directed by Chi Chi La Rue. Written by Jerry Douglas. Videography by Hue Wilde. Edited by Scott Coblio. Music by Sharon Kane. Starring Kyle Kennedy, Ryan Zane, Chad Hunt, Ethan Richards, Mark Slade,, Dante Foxx, Rob Kirk, Danny Lopez, and Tanner Hayes.
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Chi Chi LaRue has remade the porn classic The Back Row in a way that both salutes the 1972 theatrical film and comments on the differences between porn then and now. Exhibiting insight and taste, Channel 1 Releasing has paired both films in a two-cassette package. LaRue's homage to Jerry Douglas (Honorable Discharge, The Dream Team), who wrote and directed The Back Row as Doug Richards, sticks to the original screenplay and matches Douglas's work scene by scene and sometimes shot by shot, yet comes out feeling brand new. Its closest mainstream analog, Gus Van Sant's 1999 retread of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, was less inspired and less justified.

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Dispensing with dialogue­ the 1972 version was made without synchronized sound­ the scenario follows a young New Yorker around town as he pursues, and is pursued by, a hunk in a cowboy hat who has just arrived from Montana. Key sequences take place in gay porn cinemas. In the original, the late Casey Donovan, a charismatic blend of patrician golden boy and sexual guttersnipe, played the New Yorker; dark-haired, dreamy-eyed George Payne was the guy from Montana. Their 2001 counterparts are Kyle Kennedy, who seems younger and wilier than Donovan, and Ryan Zane, who actually looks as if he'd be at home on the range.

The choreography of cruising is more nuanced in the 1972 version. In the remake, LaRue throws extra participants into the first and last sex scenes and comes up with new configurations; his direction of a men's room orgy is superb. But the pre-AIDS original retains a no-holds-barred intensity that LaRue, despite his skill, can't quite replicate. What may be missing in the new Back Row is a factor that director Bill Clayton, in commentary on the DVD edition of his condom-free Other Side of Aspen (1978), identifies as "no fear of semen." Both Back Rows are mandatory viewing, however.