Word: nymphomaniac
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Despite some genuinely inventive work with a one-way mirror, the last half of the film is grade Z gothic explicitly and ludicrously prefaced by a shot of Nero reading Poe. The story defines a specific supernatural cause-a young nymphomaniac (Italian gothic being more open than the American kind) dead these thirty years-for the hero's obsessions and the events that keep animating the house. Instead of taking quantities of diverse experiences, and showing us the ways we process this material and the ways it obsesses us, the film turns its cultural matter to sensationalist ends, and obstructs...
...point a nymphomaniac stands up and says she likes sex best when she feels guilty. In Good Morning and Goodbye, Vixen and Harry, Cherry and Raquel, Meyer is too involved in the power of titillation to worry about guilt. Men and women come together like harried thunderclaps, unconcerned with motivations and consequences. But the new Meyer has begun to ask the questions he never had the time or money to ask before, and he has saddled his characters with the anxieites of the Silent Majority...
...yell "body snatcher," she is lying nude on the doctor's examination couch (behind a curtain, that is-this play caters only to the playgoer's imagination). In comes the doctor's wife (Jan Farrand), a blonde minibombshell charitably described by her husband as a nymphomaniac. When she makes her usual plaint about Dr. Prentice's lack of expertise as a lover, the doctor replies a trifle uncharitably: "You were born with your legs apart. They'll send you to the grave in a Y-shaped coffin...
...beginning to come apart, to lose himself sexually. At this point, he is estranged from himself only emotionally. But by the time he has been married to a homosexual ship captain, shared a woman with his constantly re-appearing rival Ascyltus, then seen Ascyltus go at a writhing nymphomaniac who is tied spread-eagled in a wagon, and, finally, helped kidnap an albino hermaphrodite (who dies, of thirst)-something's got to give physically as well...
...eventually marries his act partner, reaches Broadway while at home his wife is going insane ("She laughed at me, John. Laughed when I was making love to her"). Reluctantly, Lahr has her committed, almost simultaneously scores a smash hit in his first book show and takes up with a nymphomaniac tramp ("I don't know why, John, you see I was reaching for something ... I was all mixed up. Success, disaster-I had everything"). Eventually, he finds the right girl but is so gun-shy that she marries someone else; then he pursues her until she gets a divorce...