First, the actors were untrimmed and unshaved and looked like the men their bodies developed into, ungroomed and without makeup so their pre-pubescent-looking crotch would make their dick look bigger or so they would look more like a child.
These movies were made when men were men and glad of it.
They were also all bareback because there was not yet the kind of plague where everyone you knew was dead.
I don't understand all the "bareback" fucking in porn today where they pull out and put the semen all over someone's face or body just the same as if they ripped off a condom in time for the money shot. And I esp. don't understand why they pull out in time to prove they are cumming, and then push back inside to release the rest. So much for any pretense of "safe sex" and in that case, pulling out is purely for the camera and has nothing to do with letting the climax go uninterrupted to completion.
Personally, I'd rather see them orgasm inside and pull out afterwards so we can get the ritual visual proof by having the well-loaded condom hanging heavily and well loaded, drooping off the end of the spent and softening cock and conspicuously displaying its abundant contents.
But maybe that is just me. At least the barebacking then now not a fetish or notably irresponsible, it's just how men had anal sex. It allowed for spontaneity. Now, the magical appearance and disappearance of a rubber is a convention we have become used to in our videos, and is really just one more convention to be accepted, as in musicals or operas where the convention is that everything really important is actually communicated by singing. Actually, not any more distracting after a while to the notion that a couple dancing means they are making out, or that a couple kissing means she is having an orgasm when she lifts one foot off the floor.
In B westerns, the cowboy's six-shooter was more likely a 600-shooter, but why bother to count? Was that the point? Get over it.
Even so, there is at least some distraction by the demand for overcoats so as not to encourage the spread of misery and death. Often, it does not matter, but when the story is that two guys hook up at the beach or pool or bunkhouse or are two teens at a summer camp losing their virginity, being fully equipped with the medically approved wardrobe rather limits credibility for me.
Which brings me back to Vintage, where hitchhikers, farm boys playing in the hay, and other lucky studs just get it on the same on camera as they would as if there were no director. Lets you focus on the action rather than some annoying convention, however necessary.
Also, men had real bodies. Most were not bodybuilders, just built. They were not gym rats. If they had muscles, it might be because they were ditch diggers or furniture shifters and got their shape the old-fashioned way. They looked, in short, like real people, ordinary run of the mill horndogs doing the things hot studs do when they have a chance, not the top of the line from Central Casting.
And then, hard to believe I know, these movies almost all had stories, as if real men in real life situations were having real sex in the course of the lives because they were uninhibited and open to whatever possibilities they might encounter. It is a cliche now, but originally, there were not aisles of VHS tapes devoted to pool boys or pizza deliveries. And it was not yet a cliche that any horny dude on his own would end up having sex with the first horny dude he ran into on the road or in the woods.
And if urban sophisticates were cruising back alleys or taking advantage of dark back rooms, they looked like the guys you would actually expect to find there– young, hard, loaded. Since a bunch of this stuff came out of NYC, tan lines were not a feature or focus either.
There was not necessarily a lot of story to clutter up the action, but there was a sense all around that what we were watching was the kind of encounter we would like to think could happen, and maybe was happening at times for the men strutting their baskets around on unconscious display for those so-inclined to fantasize about what they did when we were not looking. The idea that some man of interest might be active or willing to be active in a way we would esp. enjoy lead to an activity called Cruising, looking for possible pickups. Again, something that happens in real life, where maybe none of the guys is either strait or gay, just randy and ready and willing. Not much of a gay-strait fetish going on there.
Down at the old garage at the auto/bike repair shop, all those hunky workingmen, it turns out, actually were getting it on with each other all time time in the movies, just as people liked to imagine they did. Also, all hairy, hung, versatile, juicy... the standard stuff that dreams are made on.
And face it, some of those "ordinary" guys were great lookers. Casey Donovan of Boys in the Sand was the first superstar of the new genre of fuck films shown in theaters to audiences of highly active and interactive viewers, happily indulging themselves playing along as inspired by what was up on the big screen. I have often wondered what happened to Lee Marlin, for example. Did Bolivian marching powder do him in? Nobody seems to know.
Btw, one byproduct of those early hardcore feature fuck fests is that they often came out with large magazine-style picture books telling the story. In the days before home video, DVDs, and computers, that was one way to bring home the memories and relive them over and over. It also made for good promotional material to lure people into the local orgy theater to watch the actual picture excerpted in carefully selected action stills.
Good times.