Kama Sutra

Practically a lost film, KAMA SUTRA began life as an India-based production financed by Germans, titled THE BELOVED INDIA. In the original version, a pair of Indian couples - one young, one older -- kiss, fondle and talk about sex in a vaguely documentary-type format that also contains plenty of dramatic scenes. A young Persis Khambatta, who later become a major star in the West, is the girl in these scenes. When distributor Trans American picked up THE BELOVED INDIA for release in the U.S., it tossed out many of the existing content and hired sex movie director Robert Rimmer to shoot new scenes for the planned U.S. release, now titled KAMA SUTRA. The new scenes were an amalgam of drug taking, wife swapping and an orgy, all of which the actors in the original Indian movie disowned and debunked at the time. In the U.S. version, which was rated "X" by the MPAA upon release in 1970, the bulk of the new film focuses on a narrator who relates quotes from the Kama Sutra Buddhist love manual, which are presented as little more than leering descriptions of the sex act. While he talks, couples demonstrate whatever passages he is describing. A real let down, overall, and one that was popular with the "white overcoat" crowd of the 1970s.