Slippery Blisses

If you think the educational world's fondness for weird elective courses is a relatively recent development, consider the "Lovemaking" class offered at Abingdon College in 1939, in which students gathered on the campus lawn at 2 p.m. and learned such edifying skills as how to swap spit with the opposite sex. Today, former teacher William Cane, author of The Art of Kissing, carries on the great tradition, visiting college campuses nationwide, conducting surveys and teaching tomorrow's tax-paying citizens such eclectic lip locks as the Trobriand Islands kiss. Combining a little history, a little science, and a little ersatz man/woman on the street rumination, Jeannette Lockman's Slippery Blisses serves up a rambling discourse on osculation (without, oddly, ever mentioning the scientific term). Viewers will learn that nearly 300 colonies of bacteria (mostly harmless) are passed on during a kiss, the interesting origins of the phrase "sealed with a kiss," and that the neck is the spot women prefer to be kissed (although one person surveyed is partial to the armpit). With tidbits about the Hays Code (the motion picture guidelines from 1934-1950s that limited screen kisses to three seconds in duration), the differences between "soft" and "hard" Harlequin romances, and speculations on whether kissing holds any evolutionary advantages, Lockman's entertaining little documentary is a wonderful divertissement. The fact that it seems to end abruptly with no summation whatsoever only underscores the scattershot nature of this unfocused effort, which seems to jump back and forth between topics. An optional purchase for larger collections. Aud: C, P. (R. Pitman)