The Devil in Miss Jones - Critical Reception

Critical Reception

As with the other films of the Porno chic era, it was reviewed by the film critics of mainstream newspapers. The film's review in Variety said that, "With The Devil in Miss Jones, the hard-core porno feature approaches an art form, one that critics may have a tough time ignoring in the future", and compared its plot to Jean Paul Sartre's play No Exit. The review went on to say, "Damiano has expertly fashioned a bizarre melodrama", and described the opening scene as, "a sequence so effective it would stand out in any legit theatrical feature." It finished by stating, "Booking a film of this technical quality into a standard sex house is tantamount to throwing it on the trash heap of most current hard-core fare."

According to Peter Michelson there is, "a relatively small corpus of films - e.g., Deep Throat, Devil in Miss Jones, Behind the Green Door - that have a minimal but still sufficient artistic interest to distinguish themselves from the rest of the genre".

Other critics have described it as, along with Deep Throat, one of the "two best erotic motion pictures ever made". William Friedkin has called it a "great film", partly because it was one of the few porn films with a proper storyline. It was one of the first films to be inducted into the XRCO Hall of Fame.