The Seven Minutes Reviews

Meyer, better known for his soft-porn films, tried unsuccessfully to make a serious picture about censorship. It fails, unfortunately, because of his own heavy-handedness. The box-office success of BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS gave Meyer a chance to do this straightforward film in which De Carlo plays an actress who writes a novel under a pseudonym that throws her into the center of the pornography issue. She decides to come forward as the true author after a bookstore owner is arrested for selling her book to a teenager later held for a girl's rape. But the film is too talky to make the audience really care about its censorship issue. In fact, many critics at the time claimed that THE SEVEN MINUTES gave free speech a bad name, stagnantly dividing the world up between the "censorship squares" and the "with-it free speechers." The film was based on the novel by Irving Wallace, who chose Seven Minutes as its title because that was supposed to be the time it takes for a woman to reach an orgasm.