Hey everyone! We're back! And here's tireless TOS correspondent Mike MacCollum and his latest jaw-dropping display of cinematic sleuthing...
ARE THE SWEDISH SWINGERS ABSENT WITHOUT LEAVE?
by Mike MacCollum
Back in the olden days of movie promotion — through at least the late seventies —advertising for some renamed/re-released films would provide potential audiences with the original titles of these films. For example, this November 2, 1969 ad for the G-rated Julie Andrews vehicle THOSE WERE THE HAPPY TIMES in the Santa And Register let would-be ticket buyers know that it was “Formerly entitled STAR!”…
And for two slightly different examples, this ad for a double feature in the March 23, 1979 edition of the Augusta (GA) Chronicle advised people who maybe didn’t care so much for Julie Andrews or G-rated movies that something called “DON’T DATE A GIRL WITH FOUR LIPS…ALL YOU’LL GET IS DOUBLE TALK” previously was released as CHATTERBOX, and A CRACK GOES BANANAS was “formerly CRACKING UP”...
As with the examples above, notifications of changed/former titles typically were in smaller text than the new/re-release titles in these ads, but at least they were there… for some movies.
Much more frequently, however, films given a re-release under a new name did not have any information whatsoever about the original title in their advertising. In some of these cases, the distribution companies created re-release ad material with no cast names, and with no tag lines repeated from the original ads — almost as if they were deliberately trying to create an impenetrable barrier that would prevent audiences from knowing the original title and actual content of their film. And that was probably a good idea, from the distributor’s point of view, if the movie they were desperately trying to hype as a nudity-filled jaw-dropper that pushed the boundaries of an R rating was, in fact, a much tamer beast, featuring a lot less sin and skin than the ads and posters implied.
SWEDISH SWINGERS seems to be an example of this — the posters and ads may have featured a single visual clue to its original title, but even if so, that clue is so obscure that the film’s real identity has been a mystery for some time now. What follows does not provide a definitive solution to this mystery, but it will offer an informed guess as to what SWEDISH SWINGERS really was, along with the unlikely story of how a more-or-less random viewing of Michael Jai White’s OUTLAW JOHNNY BLACK led to this guess. So come along, as doors are opened to sights you’ve never seen before (or something like that) — and maybe, by the end, the title I chose for this piece will make sense…
Two or three things we know about SWEDISH SWINGERS…
Before we get to what movie may have been hiding behind the SWEDISH SWINGERS beard for all these years, here is a rundown on what other information about the film is available via search engines, newspaper databases, and so on.
As far as can be determined, SWEDISH SWINGERS first saw the dark of night a little over fifty-one years ago, on May 1, 1974, at nine drive-ins: the Fort, in Leavenworth, KS, plus eight more in Missouri (the 50, in Sedalia; the Parkview, in St Joseph; the Hi-way 50, in Jefferson City; the Sky-Hi, in Columbia; and the Boulevard, the Crest, the Hiway 40, and the Riverside, all in or near Kansas City). It may have opened elsewhere on May 1 as well, but these are the only ones that I could find.
Thanks to the MPAA’s site, we know that SWEDISH SWINGERS was distributed in America (initially, at least) by a company called Sunshine Unlimited, which apparently released only two other movies in the US: GUITAR PICKS & ROACH CLIPS (see Case File #12 from the TOS Endangered List) and FLOSSIE (which seems to have made its US debut on April 9, 1975, at the Budco Regency in Philadelphia).
A side note: As you will see, the movie that I think became SWEDISH SWINGERS did get a theatrical release in both the US and one other country. However, as far as I could tell, the title SWEDISH SWINGERS was used only in the US; if it was shown anywhere else under that title, or with any of the known SS tag lines, I wasn’t able to find such a booking in either of the globe-spanning newspaper databases that I checked. Of course, there are many publications and countries around the world not covered by either of the databases I used, so there’s a possibility that SS screenings may turn up in another country — but as of now, the title SWEDISH SWINGERS seems to have been used only in the US.
Also, that title apparently was not used for anything else in the US besides the theatrical release. Even though there were a few prints of SS still playing drive-ins back in the VHS era, no movie using the title SWEDISH SWINGERS seems to have been released on that (or any other) home video format — and it apparently wasn’t shown on any cable network under that title, either. You might think that something called SWEDISH SWINGERS would have been pretty easy to sell to a home video company or cable channel back in the day — but for whatever reason, it doesn’t seem to have happened. (By the way: Near the end of this article, in the postscripts section, there is a brief section on the release of the movie that (probably) became SWEDISH SWINGERS on VHS in Britain. However, SWEDISH SWINGERS itself — under that title, in that version — seems to have existed only in US theaters, from 1974 to 1983.)
Moving on to the poster for SS, you can see verbiage that seems to have been paraphrased from the ads for other films, such as the (almost certainly bogus) claim, “Just released for showing in the United States”. There were several movies making similar claims back in the day, such as Joe Sarno’s SIV ANNE & SVEN, which allegedly had been “Just released from customs!”(and which, like SS, also played up the Swedish connection to cinematic naughtiness that had been hyped in the American publicity materials for movies like ONE SUMMER OF HAPPINESS and MONIKA, THE STORY OF A BAD GIRL since the 1950s).
Similarly, “It catches Sweden with its pants down!” seems like it might be a riff on “Catches Washington with its pants down!”, from Magus Films’ THE SENATOR (1972)…
…though that phrase itself may have been a variation on the line “America caught with its pants down”, from Gerard Damiano’s CHANGES (1970).
Moving beyond speculation about possible paraphrases, we can be certain that two other tag lines on the poster were taken verbatim from the advertising materials for other movies: “Opens the door to sights you’ve never seen before!” was purloined (font and all) from Sam Fuller’s SHOCK CORRIDOR, while “whisper to your friends you saw it!” was lifted from the US release of Jess Franco’s 99 WOMEN.
As for the visuals, several of the images on the poster seem to be of young women (or perhaps more likely, four different pictures of the same young woman, three of these photos appearing twice each). There is also a silhouette illustration (appearing twice) of two people (apparently) making a movie. Finally, near the top right of the poster, we have what would appear to be a young man and a young woman; in the context of the poster, they seem to be partying very hard (and possibly stoned out of their gourds), just as one might expect from Swedish swingers. Indeed, as the caption underneath the image says, “IF IT FEELS GOOD THEY DO IT”.
But it turns out that this image originated in a very different context altogether…
The Glynn Turman Connection… and AWOL
Several months ago, my girlfriend suggested that we watch OUTLAW JOHNNY BLACK on the streaming service Kanopy; I thought that the trailer made it look like it could be worth a look, so I agreed. Before we started to watch the movie, I looked up the cast on the IMDb, and was happy to see Glynn Turman’s name. This made me wonder if GREMLINS was the first movie in which I had seen Turman on the big screen, so I clicked on his name, and started scrolling back.
The answer to my question turned out to be “yes”, but as I looked through Turman’s credits prior to GREMLINS, I noticed a movie that was new to me: AWOL, a 1972 drama about an American soldier, Willy, seeking political asylum in Sweden. Ipt was co-written, co-produced, and directed by Herb Freed, and it was also known as both A.W.O.L. and AWOL - absent without leave, per the IMDb. As frequently happens when I stumble across a movie I’ve never heard of before, I had to learn more. So as soon as OUTLAW JOHNNY BLACK was over, it was off to the newspaper databases.
The first evidence I found for the existence of AWOL (chronologically speaking) was an ad in the San Francisco papers on Sunday, April 23, 1972, indicating that it would open at the Larkin three days later…
And indeed, on April 26, there it was. For some reason, the odd picture on the top right of the tic-tac-toe tapestry in the ad below was the one that first caught my eye. But then I saw that photo at the bottom left, and thought that it looked somewhat familiar. At the time, it had been a while since I’d seen a poster or newspaper ad for SWEDISH SWINGERS, but a side-by-side comparison made it clear: AWOL was the source for the picture of the pair of would-be swinging Swedes in the posters and ads for SS...
The same photo (somewhat resized/recropped) accompanied a vaguely spoiler-ish review of AWOL in the San Francisco Examiner on April 27, 1972, with a caption naming the two actors in the photo as Russ Thacker and Isabella Kaliff, and further noting that the actual context of the photo involved an attempt to get away from a “violent demonstration”. Going back to the IMDb, the only image for AWOL on the site as of now is for the Swedish release of AWOL, under the title AWOL - avhopparen… and there the photo is once more, on the upper left of the poster, recropped yet again.
But even the fact that SS ad materials feature a photo originating from AWOL doesn’t confirm that they are the same movie; after all, SS posters also featured bits and pieces cribbed from both 99 WOMEN and SHOCK CORRIDOR — so maybe whoever created the ads for SS just tossed together some elements from several random older movies to make the SS publicity fritter, with none of the other movies having anything else to do with what was actually in SWEDISH SWINGERS, the film.
However, it seems much likelier to me that SS and AWOL will turn out to be the same movie (or, at the very least, essentially the same, with some footage possibly trimmed from AWOL, and/or other footage added in, to make SS). Consider this — both 99 WOMEN and SHOCK CORRIDOR apparently played on a pretty decent number of American theater screens back in the day, so the posters and ad mats for these three likely would have been fairly broadly distributed, and thus familiar to whoever stitched together the SS poster.
AWOL, on the other hand, seems to have run for two weeks at one theater, in one city — it was replaced at the Larkin by a double bill of THE WILD CHILD and THE PASSION OF ANNA on May 12, 1972 — and then seems to have vanished from American theatrical screens. While it’s possible that AWOL played elsewhere in the US under that title, if it did so, I have not found any ads for it with that title anywhere else. And since AWOL was apparently so little-seen in 1972, it seems unlikely that an image from that film would appear on ads and posters for SS if the latter had no other connection to AWOL, since whoever made the poster probably wouldn’t have heard of AWOL otherwise. (Also, while the Swedish Film Database does say that AWOL - avhopparen was released in Sweden on June 12, 1972, it seems even more unlikely that the SS ad designers would have heard about AWOL because of that. And while a brief piece in the July 23, 1973 issue of BOXOFFICE claimed that AWOL was “currently in worldwide distribution”, the Swedish theatrical release was the only one that I was able to find outside of the US, for whatever that’s worth.)
Moreover, there is yet one more possible/plausible link between part of the SS ad materials and AWOL. I watched AWOL on the streaming service Cultpix, which is the only place to see it online, as far as I can tell. About twelve minutes into AWOL, Willy (Thacker) —an American soldier who has fled to Sweden so he won’t have to kill or possibly be killed — tries out for a role in a porn film, and we see the director of the film, along with other members of the crew… just as there are two silhouette images of film crew members on the SS poster. (And for anyone wanting to see where the photo of Thacker and Kaliff on the SS poster appears in AWOL, check around the 49:20 mark on the Cultpix print; the closest I could get to a screen shot of that image is below…)
There are also a few more tenuous possible links between AWOL and SS. First, in a May 4, 1978, article by Dwight Chapin in the San Francisco Examiner to promote his next feature film, HAUNTS, Herb Freed claimed that he had “made substantial profit” from AWOL. Perhaps he meant that somehow, he himself had emerged flush with cash from making AWOL - maybe from selling the foreign rights, and/or from the Swedish release (though I don’t think either would have made *that* much money for Freed). Or maybe he just could have been exaggerating his windfall from AWOL — if so, he certainly wouldn’t be the first person in show biz to claim that a project was a much bigger success than it really was. In any event, it seems like an odd statement for a movie with such a brief US theatrical release — unless maybe, just possibly, he was referring to the money from AWOL getting re-released as SWEDISH SWINGERS?
Also, while SWEDISH SWINGERS seems to have been shown in quite a few places in the US over the years, it also apparently skipped San Francisco, the one city where AWOL had a confirmed theatrical booking — or at least I could find no trace of SS in San Francisco. Of course, that could be just a coincidence, and nothing more — or maybe SS did play at a theater there, and I just couldn’t find that booking because there was no directory listing (easily read by a newspaper database’s optical scanner), and none of the tag lines in the newspaper ads were legible to an optical scanner during this putative SF theatrical run. But again, playdates for SS can be found fairly easily in many other cities across the US besides San Francisco — and so it’s at least possible that distributor Sunshine Unlimited was aware that AWOL had been at the Larkin in 1972, and withheld SWEDISH SWINGERS from San Francisco so that no one who had seen AWOL would realize what was going on.
In addition to the SS posters and ads taking elements from other movies besides AWOL, there is at least one other reason to doubt that SS and AWOL are one and the same, that being the “Other Woman” in the SS ads…
Well, the one thing that I can tell you about her with certainty is that she is not in AWOL. But as many of you no doubt already know, it was not entirely uncommon for ads and posters for certain movies in the seventies to feature an image or two that did not come from the movie in question — and perhaps that was the case here: someone took a few photos (or got some images from a clip-art library , or something like that) and pasted them into the SWEDISH SWINGERS ads and posters in an attempt to make it look naughtier than it is. Or maybe she was in some new footage, shot later on by others, and edited into AWOL to make the SS version a bit spicier. But I suspect that she is only in the ads and on the posters for SS, simply because it would have been a lot cheaper to shoot a few stills and put them in ads than it was to shoot new film footage and cut it into a film.
And speaking of the sexiness that the ads and posters for SWEDISH SWINGERS were trying to sell — yes, the MPAA did give SS an R rating, and AWOL (which doesn’t seem to have been rated by the MPAA) almost certainly would have received an R as well… but it would have been a fairly soft R, methinks. Yes, there is nudity in AWOL — but no full frontal (at least not in the print on Cultpix, unless it’s onscreen very briefly, and I missed it). Also, the scenes with nudity and other raunch (like a scene in a porn shop — which precedes Willy’s attempt to be in an adult film — and some of the scenes depicting the eventual romantic relationship between Willy and Inga, the character played by Isabella Kaliff) constitute maybe 15-20% of the running time at most. The bulk of AWOL’s running time is taken up with the main character’s life in Sweden (applying for political asylum, his initial loneliness, and his interaction with other Americans avoiding the war — one of them played by Glynn Turman), along with political issues (the Vietnam war, demonstrations, the CIA, and so on). In any event, if SWEDISH SWINGERS really was AWOL, anyone who saw SS back in the day probably experienced severe disappointment if they were expecting to see a movie all about “Sweden with its pants down”. But even if AWOL is most definitely not the hard-R smutfest promised by the ads for SWEDISH SWINGERS, it’s still entirely possible that they are essentially the same movie, since (as noted above) more than a few movies back in the day sold tickets based on posters and ads that were less than scrupulously honest.
Closing the door on sights you’ve never seen before…
In spite of the doubts expressed above, my best guess is that AWOL and SWEDISH SWINGERS are the same movie… more or less. Yes, some footage may have been scissored from AWOL to turn it into SWEDISH SWINGERS — maybe a scene or two centered around political issues, possibly a minutes-long argument between Inga and a character played by Stefan Ekman, and probably the pre-credits home movie footage of Willy as a child in America, which would be an early clue that AWOL was neither as Swedish nor as swingy as advertised. And yes, maybe some R-rated footage of the Anonymous Mystery Woman could have been added on to AWOL as well — but again, I strongly suspect that AWOL and SWEDISH SWINGERS are essentially one and the same.
Or maybe AWOL has nothing to do with whatever SWEDISH SWINGERS the film itself really is, and the only thing uncovered here is that one key image in the posters and ads for SS came from AWOL. There’s no way to be 100% certain either way, unless and until someone finds a contemporary review of SWEDISH SWINGERS (if there were any), or a copy of SS itself — and since there were at least nine prints showing on May 1, 1974, then maybe one of them still survives, somewhere.
And even if a print of the complete film never surfaces, at least one copy of the trailer for SS still is extant, and it was shown at the Music Box Theatre in Chicago on September 17, 2023, as part of Chris + Heather’s 16mm Big Screen Blowout. I didn’t know about this screening until after the fact, unfortunately, so I don’t know whether or not the trailer contains any footage from AWOL. But perhaps some screen shots from the trailer — or better yet, the trailer itself, in full — will be posted online somewhere, eventually.
For now, though, if you want to see what you think for yourself, head on over to Cultpix and watch AWOL… and then, whisper to your friends that you saw it.
Postscripts: Images and otherwise
San Francisco Chronicle, April 27, 1972
San Francisco Examiner, May 1, 1972
For anyone who isn’t familiar with Glynn Turman’s life and work, this 2020 Rolling Stone article/interview by Alan Sepinwall is a pretty good place to start. AWOL isn’t mentioned, but Turman’s acting debut in the original Broadway cast of A RAISIN IN THE SUN is covered, among many other things…
As noted above, AWOL did get a VHS release outside the US — in England only, apparently, but on two different labels there. Video Unlimited was the first one…
…and Take 2 Plus was the other. The link below has an image for the cover of that release, along with a review, and additional information:
And speaking of Cultpix, AWOL isn’t the only movie referenced in this piece that can be streamed there — as of June, 2025, at least, SHOCK CORRIDOR, FLOSSIE, CHANGES, ONE SUMMER OF HAPPINESS, and SIV, ANNE & SVEN all can be seen there as well (along with LOTS of other movies, too).
By the way — if anyone out there has any additional information, please let us know! If SWEDISH SWINGERS was shown anywhere besides American theaters, for example, or if AWOL was released anywhere else around the world — or in any US theater besides the Larkin — I would love to hear about it.
Also, thanks to Raleigh Bronkowski and his FB page, The Scene of Screen 13, for posting an ad with a variant title for “DON’T DATE A GIRL WITH FOUR LIPS…” a while ago; I had not been aware of this alternate title — or the re-release title for CRACKING UP — until I saw that post.
And finally, my favorite booking for SWEDISH SWINGERS, of all the ones I’ve seen so far…
