Smart Alec (1951 American film)

Smart Alec, aka Smart Aleck, is a 1951 pornographic film.[1] The silent short, which is no more than 20 minutes in length and was filmed in black-and-white, was one of the most famous and widely circulated of the early underground pornographic era.[1] It has been called "iconographic",[2] "the best known of all American stag films",[2] and the "apogee of the American stag tradition".[3] The leading actress, then known as Juanita Slusher, a buxom young woman of age 16[3] who appeared substantially older, later went on to fame as the stripper Candy Barr.[1][2] Barr was working as a prostitute at the time, and was forced to feature in the film by one of her clients.[1] At the time there was a rumour that the man was Gary Crosby, son of Bing Crosby.[2] It was shot in a Dallas hotel, which was the setting for several other pornographic shorts of the period.[2] Other sources, such as the Internet Movie Database, report that the stag film was shot in San Antonio and the young Juanita was inveigled into appearing in it by a patron of a Dallas strip club where she worked as a cigarette girl and had sex with generous tippers.[4]

Barr herself told a men's magazine that she made the stag film because she was broke and hungry. “I went to the address a friend gave me. The man behind the desk looked me over. He told me I had a great figure. Then he explained he wanted me to act in a risqué film. Then he opened his wallet and counted a bunch of ten-dollar bills. He counted them out on the desk before me, one by one. The purse I clutched in my hands contained exactly seven cents. I made the film."[5]

The film led to Barr being called "the first porn star".[1] With Barr's cooperation the FBI subsequently prosecuted the producer for exploitation of a minor.[1] Barr later sued Playboy magazine when it printed a still from the film.[1] Luke Ford, the gossip columnist who wrote A History of X: 100 Years of Sex in Film, said of the stag film "It ruined her life. She regretted it all her days."[4]

“Only when my hunger was gone could I think straight. But I was still too young to understand fully just what I had done," Barr told the men's magazine. "I’m still sick with shame over what I did, but when you’re (young) and all alone and your insides are crying for food, you can’t always figure out right from wrong.” [5]

The film is included in many compilations of historic pornographic films.[1] Smart Alec was among the films featured in Alex De Renzy's A History of the Blue Movie in 1970.[6] It was later made available on video under the title Smokers of the Past, Vol. 1.