Willie (Herschel Savage) is an immigrant who works at a supermarket making deliveries, and when he knocks on the door of prostitute Wanda (former exploitation star Sharon Kelly turned "Colleen Brennan"), he takes the opportunity to sabotage her apartment door and then sneak in to steal her savings. Hiding under her bed when she returns home early, he learns of her plan with corrupt lawyer Segal (a convincingly sleazy Jon Martin) to provide eager immigrants with Permanent Residency (Green Cards) through arranged marriages for a sum of $2,000, which pushes Willie to propose to Wanda, seemingly bewildered but too desperate to refuse. Her refusal to kiss him during the consummation of their "wedding night" provides one of several subtle touches that enrich this grotesque and unnerving narrative. Soon, Willie finds himself embroiled in Wanda's nefarious scams from a shabby "operations center," with the complicity of a gang of criminals led by Jimmy "the Jinx," played by Pachard himself.
One of the last truly remarkable 35mm films, the relentless and depressing "Getting Personal" seems forged with the dramatic fire of social critique and the misery of a pair of low-level criminals trying to redirect their destiny, fearlessly risking the alienation of a genre audience that had already become more intellectual by 1985. Ron "Arthur Ben" Dorfman's melancholic cinematography wallows in the grime of the dark and seedy San Francisco Bay Area dive bar, where much of the adult and all-around action takes place. An uncompromising script by Ron Sullivan (AKA Henri Pachard) is brought vibrantly to life through some of the most earnest performances ever seen in an adult film. Top honors must go to the peerless Brennan, who manages to imbue the pathetic Wanda with humanity as she struggles to make ends meet. Here, she allows herself to look objectively gaunt, though without becoming a sexually unfavorable element. This is still porn, after all, and the sex is all the more memorable for being dramatically justified and fully integrated into the characters.