Bettie Page (1923-2008)

Some sad news today. Betty Mae Page passed away last night in Los Angeles at the age of 85.

She will be missed.

Via Metafilter.
Some classic Page images at Flickr.

OTR: Richard Diamond, Private Detective (1949-53)

I probably picked up the interest in old time radio (OTR) from my father. He was never a huge collector of programs, but he occasionally bought albums available of various radio shows, or borrowed them from the library. I recall he was mostly into old radio comedy and Westerns, and pulp-style heroes such as The Shadow. My own tastes in OTR run mostly in the direction of detective series, and one of my current favorites is Richard Diamond, Private Detective. Part of the reason is star Dick Powell (1904-1963) the first, and my favorite, cinematic interpreter of Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe character in Edward Dmytryk's Murder My Sweet (1944).

Powell's initial stock-in-trade was as a singer. Signed to Warner Bros. in 1932, he debuted in Blessed Event as a singing bandleader, and for twelve years he sang and hoofed in musicals such as 42nd Street, Gold Diggers of 1933, Flirtation Walk, and On The Avenue, often appearing opposite Ruby Keeler. But he couldn't do the boyish roles he was known for forever, and in 1944 he landed a completely different role in Murder My Sweet, and entered on a new phase in his career as a tough-guy lead in crime and detective features. He also parlayed the new persona into radio, starring in a number of detective series in the forties and fifties.

Richard Diamond, Private Detective debuted on NBC in 1949, and ran until 1953. Sponsored at first by the Rexall drug chain and then by Camel cigarettes, the series' principal producer and writer by Blake Edwards, who was later to create the television series Peter Gunn and the Pink Panther film series. Beginning with a dramatic sting, segueing into a happy-go-lucky whistled rendition of "Leave It To Love" by Henry Russell, the series combined hard-boiled action and intrigue with a light touch of humor. Richard Diamond was a wisecracking shamus who, in typical private-eye fashion, was catnip to the women, handy with a gun, got knocked over the head and roughed up a lot, and narrated the episodes Philip Marlowe-style. He also had a knack for discovering dead bodies and had an adversarial but affectionate relationship with homicide detective Lt. Walt Levinson (Ed Begley), whose stomach always cried out for a bicarb of soda when Diamond was around, and his dim sidekick Sgt. Otis (Wilms Herbert) with whom Diamond frequently traded insults. Diamond's romantic interest was socialite Helen Asher (Virginia Gregg), whose cushy Park Avenue digs were a frequent destination after a tough case, and to whom he frequently sang a song at the conclusion of the show.

Parenthetical comments: other voice talents heard on the show included Alan Reed, who also played Lt. Levinson in some episodes and who is best known to people of my age as the voice of Fred Flintstone. Also heard on Richard Diamond was Jim Backus, best known as the voice of cartoon character Mr. Magoo and as Thurston Howell III on television's Gilligan's Island, as well as a frequent comic actor in films. Also, an interesting announcement heard on some of the episodes sponsored by Camel cigarettes informs listeners that smokers pay an over fifty percent tax on the cigarettes they buy -- a whopping eight cents a pack in Federal taxes and three or four cents more in state or local taxes. More interesting than how the price of a pack of smokes has changed over the years is the tone of the announcement, implying that smokers are performing a civic duty when paying taxes on a pack of cigarettes, an attitude that has certainly changed in the decades since this announcement aired.

Dick Powell went on to a third career in movie and television production with his Four Stars production company, and from 1957 to 1960 brought Richard Diamond to television starring David Janssen. Powell passed away in 1963, his stomach cancer rumored to be the result of his work on the Howard Hughes film The Conqueror, which was filmed on Nevada land where nuclear weapons had been tested; many members of the cast and crew of this film (most notably among them John Wayne) contracted cancer later in life.

The internet-based Old Time Radio Researchers group is a collection of volunteers dedicated to documenting and preserving old radio programs, and they occasionally put together "certified" collections of programs, along with any further information available about the programs. The OTRR certified collection of Richard Diamond, Private Detective hosted permanently at the Internet Archive contains, with the exception of a few missing or repeat episodes, the complete run of the series in five .zip files each of which is roughly the size of a CD-ROM, or together will fit on a data DVD. Along with the programs, most of which are high quality 128kb MP3s apparently taken from original transcription recordings, comes a great deal of documentation, including photos, bios, scripts and other information about the series. The collection also has specially-created artwork suitable for burning discs of the programs. Single episodes from the series are also available if you don't have a fast connection or you only wish to sample a few episodes from the series.

Baba Yaga (1973)

After meeting a mysterious woman who calls herself Baba Yaga, fashion photographer Valentina (Isabelle de Funès) begins to experience strange dreams and visions and weird happenings, including the deaths of people whose pictures were snapped by one of her cameras the mysterious woman had handled. Convinced that the woman (Carroll Baker) is a witch who is trying to place Valentina under her control, she tries to convince her skeptical boyfriend Arno (George Eastman) to help her break Baba Yaga's supernatural influence.

The story of a lesbian witch who attempts to psychologically control another woman by cursing a camera and sending a familiar in the form of a doll in revealing fetishwear -- who sometimes assumes human form (Ely Galleani) to do Baba Yaga's bidding -- is also the story of compromises in terms of casting, control over the finished work, and to some degree censorship. Neither Isabelle de Funès nor Carroll Baker were Corrado Farina's first choices for the roles they played, but they did very well -- especially Carroll Baker -- under the circumstances. Corrado Farina's finished cut of the film was subjected to some irreversible (and unauthorized) negative cuts as well, and the film was contracted to a financially troubled distributor who could not promote the film properly, so the film sank at the box office and was Farina's second and last feature.

This Italian thriller was based on the comics character created by Guido Crepax, an artist whose comic strips were a great fascination for director/screenwriter Corrado Farina since they began to be serialized in the magazine Linus in the mid-sixties. Crepax's strips were some of the most sophisticated and challenging works in the medium, using a bold black-and-white style and laid out using the logic of film editing. Full of references to art, literature, psychoanalysis and classic film, they were also graphically sexual and often perverse, thoroughly modern and designed for well-read, broad-minded adults. As a filmmaker, Farina had followed the attempts of the time at films based on comic strips with interest (Mario Bava's Diabolik, Joseph Losey's Modesty Blaise, Roger Vadim's Barbarella) but found them less true to their sources than he would have liked, and decided to try his hand at a comics-inspired film more integrated with Crepax's cinema-inspired comics. As he himself admits, he was only partly successful, using sequences of high-contrast still photographs in repetitive patterns in imitiation of Crepax's graphics.

In the dream and nightmare sequences which punctuate the action, the film is a little more successful in conveying the phantasmagoria of the Valentina stories. The comics' attempt at being intellectually well-versed comes off a bit superficial in the film: Valentina's studio-apartment is modishy littered with books by Marx, Mickey Mouse, Sade, Beardsley, and there is an art book open to Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon next to the clear lucite telephone, she attends showings of films like The Golem, and the dialogue is littered with sometimes embarrassing attempts at intellectual chatter. This turned out to be the second and final feature film from Corrado Farina, so Baba Yaga remains a one-of-a-kind thriller that is stylish and interesting in spite of the compromises made: intelligent, sexy, creepy, and a suspicion of kinkiness.

Baba Yaga is available as a DVD from Blue Underground, a company specializing in European exploitation films, with an interview with director Corrado Farina, a DVD-ROM feature (a .pdf file showing comparisons between Crepax's comics and stills from the film), and a short film by Farina on Crepax's comics, Freud in Color.

Alley Tramp (1968)

Herschell Gordon Lewis is best remembered as the pioneer of gore and splatter in such grindhouse bloodbaths as Blood Feast, 2000 Maniacs, and The Gore-Gore Girls. But he started his career making nudies with partner David F. Friedman, and after the two amicably dissolved their partnership, apparently kept his hand in with the occasional skinflick, such as this campy troubled-teen/family drama in which scrubbed, wholesome Marie Barker (Julie Ames), a cute perky teenager in the mid-sixties Patty Duke Show mold, accidentally sees her parents in bed together and turns virtually overnight into a cynical, calculating, sexually voracious little wench. Beginning by seducing her third cousin, Phil (Steve White), she goes on to cut classes for trysts with Phil at local cheap motels and adopting an insolent attitude when confronted about her school attendance. When she catches her mother (Ann Heath) having an affair with a barfly named Herbie, she blackmails her into giving her a blank check for doing what she pleases, with whomever she pleases. It'll come as no surprise that this situation won't last for long.

In classic exploitation fashion, Alley Tramp takes the pseudo-moralizing approach to rationalize all the skin and sin being represented on screen. Marie's "serious case of nymphomania" is explained as the product of parents who are too busy squabbling with each other and pursuing their own selfish interests to take an interest in their daughter. Dad is too busy at the office, where he's having it off with his secretary, and Mom, notwithstanding the witnessed bed scene, is sexually neglected by her husband and seeks solace in booze and extramarital affairs of her own. After a hilarious montage of Dad dandling his secretary on his lap, Mom going with various pick-ups, and Marie in bed with Phil and with various other men who grab her fancy, it all comes down with a bump: an unplanned pregnancy, a botched abortion, a trip to the mental home, and Mom and Dad resolving to come together and make their family a happy one again.

By the time this film was made, this moral pretense was getting a little old-fashioned: exploitation films were losing the tongue-in-cheek lectures in favor of straightforward wallows in sleazy wish-fulfillment. But it works for this film, largely because it matches the acting to a tee: bad, broad, heavy-handed and loud. When Julie Ames does her "I'm not a child anymore, I'm a woman and I'll do as I please" speech, it's in a top-of-her-lungs screech and very obviously read from a script off camera... and priceless. Ann Heath similarly clobbers her role with overwrought gestures and community-theater emoting.

The style of the film only underlines the enthusiastic but unnuanced performances. A pragmatic filmmaker who always realized that his audiences didn't give a damn about stylistic niceties or mise-en-scene, Lewis always reached for the simplest solutions: if you can get the point across in one take, do it in one take. So when Marie goes to her bedroom to change into something sexy for Phil before seducing him, the tripod-mounted camera spends three minutes following her around in roughly moving pans, tilts and zooms as she peels off her clothes, admires herself in the mirror, selects some new clothes, puts them on, and leaves. Similarly, a walk in a very large, scenic park shot on location, until it is time for the outdoor love sequence, when the two collapse behind a bush and -- cut -- fall onto a carpet of artificial turf on a soundstage, shot from overhead with a tree branch and the sound of birds for some continuity and the two are soon engaged in a naked tussle that accidentally turns up the corner of one of the sheets of turf.

Alley Tramp is rich in this kind of bad-film detail, and the results add up to what I think is an accessible and entertaining film experience and one that might serve as an introduction to sixties sexploitation for those who like "cult films" but might not have had too much experience with this particular genre. The nudity is not particularly graphic, and the camp elements give newcomers a handle of sorts to acclimatize themselves to a genre that over the past several years has been coming out on DVD format, often after decades of obscurity. This film comes on a double-feature edition by Something Weird Video along with Over 18... And Ready, a story of the sleazy world of sexploitation pictures, as well as a few appropriate short subjects.

Teenage Cruisers (1977)

Musician, filmmaker, veteran LA scenemaker and cult film maven Johnny Legend is a jack-of-all-trades who worked in various capacities in the LA pre-hardcore skinflick scene and then in early hardcore adult features, his quick wits and gift of gab serving him well as film scorer, publicity man, maker of trailers, and finally as producer and director of films like the pre-hardcore, hippy/psychedelic/mondo-style Sexual Sensory Perception and this hardcore feature recently rereleased on DVD on his own Raunchy Tonk Video label.

The original concept was to do what was then called a "loopfest," in which short soundless 16mm hardcore films or "loops" (then commonly for sale in adult bookstores or through ads in magazines) were compiled with extra footage and/or narration to wrap it all in one cheaply made, feature-length package. But then the concept grew as Legend threw a cruising-Sunset-Boulevard theme and various subplots into the connecting material as well as enlisting friends from another project he was involved in, a band called the Rollin' Rock Rebels, one of the first bands of the rockabilly revival in seventies LA. He also threw in a couple of shorts he had made and the result was billed "the first X-rated rock 'n' roll movie."

Full of lowbrow but genuinely funny humor, the film brings together a vivacious teenager (seventies porn star Serena) eagerly and hornily waiting for her soldier boyfriend (John Galt), a "notorious nuthouse nympho" escaped from the local loony-bin (Christine DeShaffer) who raids a local adult boutique for various, ahem, items, and kidnaps stuffy teacher Dr. Flinch (Bill Margold), and perverted voyeur Willie ("Wild Man" Tony Conn) tries to pick up teenyboppers' lascivious conversations on his tape recorder, and a pair of dim-bulb cruisers (Colin Winski and Jerry Sikorsky) meet with mishaps on the Sunset Strip. Meanwhile KRUZ deejay Mambo Remus (Legend) spins rock'n'roll tracks and everyone meets up at "the end of the line" for a rockabilly rave-up.

Teenage Cruisers was not so popular with the raincoat crowd (not enough porn), but with the couples and porno-chic slummers it was a hit and did what few run-of-the-mill pornos did in the LA theaters it played, which was sell out houses. Part of it might have been the prominent billing of John Holmes and Serena, though Holmes is present only in one of the loops acquired for the film, and Serena, under indictment for obscenity at the time (as well as beginning to be visibly pregnant), decided to only shoot softcore scenes so as not to make her situation worse. Bill Margold, who in George Plimpton fashion was a writer who entered the porn industry in order to write about it, was in similar legal trouble, but decided anyway to perform with then-girlfriend Christine DeSchaffer in the only hardcore sequences actually shot for the film, as "Notorious Nuthouse Nympho Babsy Beaudine" tries to satisfy her insatiable cravings on Dr. Flinch with the aid of a forest of sex toys, a sex-instruction record, a Spanish fly and an endearing gooniness.

There is indeed a lot that is endearing about this film, in part because it is such a low-budget, garage-type project that someone and a bunch of his friends did. Johnny Legend clearly was having fun making the movie, and it shows. Shot MOS (without sound), the audio tracks being dubbed in later by Legend, along with his sister Lynnie (who appears intermittently in the film) and a couple of others, in a dense mix of little gags, throuwaway lines, and bits of incidental music that would appeal very much to today's cult-film audience. And the featured tuneage is good too, with the cream of LA's rockabilly scene contributing: Wild Man Tony Conn, Alvis Wayne, Billy Zoom (best known as guitarist for the LA punk band X), Rollin Colin Winski and Ray Campi.

Keep in mind that the film is sexually explicit and that the humor is fairly raunchy. But the sex scenes do not overpower the rest of the movie, nor is the humor nasty or mean-spirited. Johnny Legend has continued to front bands in the LA area, rerelease cult film titles theatrically and on video, appears on several commentary tracks for Something Weird Video, and making the occasional film, his most recent effort a shot on video feature combining sex and Mexican wrestling called Nympho Libre.

In other news: Thanks to Greg K. in Minneapolis for his efforts in getting me hardware-capable and back on the web and hopefully a more regular posting schedule. While I start gathering my material again after two years of a comatose computer, I will probably be spending a little time straightening the drapes and emptying the ashtrays, but more writing about film is on the stove as we speak.

Venom and Eternity (1951)

Jean Isidore Isou co-founded and was principal theorician for a postwar avant-garde movement called lettrism. So called for their emphasis on the letter as the essential element in poetics (as opposed to the word or phrase), they worked in the Paris of the forties and fifties much as the prewar European avant-garde groups such as futurism, dada and surrealism before them did: through manifestos and polemics and public events such as recitals of lettrist poetry, which usually took the form of rhythmic repetition of vocables divorced from lexical meaning. Today they are remembered more for their attitude than for their contributions to aestheitics and culture -- Greil Marcus writes about them as a sort of prototype for the punk subculture in his book Lipstick Traces.

Isou's ideas extended into other areas than literature, and Venom and Eternity (Traité du Bave et d'Eternité) is an example of his idea of "discrepant cinema," the deliberate sundering of the unity between sound and image in film. Perversely, from the standpoint that film is usually considered a visual medium, Isou privileges the heard over the seen in Venom and Eternity supplying a coherent narrative through dialogue and narration on the soundtrack while the visual component consists of randomly selected stock footage, black and white leader, footage of Isou walking through the streets of Paris, and cameos of various leading lights of French literature and film (such as poet-filmmaker Jean Cocteau and novelist André Maurois). As the film runs the visuals progressively become more fragmented and incoherent as footage is repeated, run backwards and upside down, and embellished with scratches and paint. Meanwhile the narrative on the soundtrack, concerning a young filmmaker named Daniel recalling his debate on the aesthetics of discrepant cinema with a hostile crowd in a cinema club and going on to musings mostly on his relationship with his girlfriend Eve, ticks along nicely like a radio play with visual accompaniment, making this film one of the more accessible that I have seen.

Venom and Eternity is intriguing for its rejection of assumptions shared by conventional and experimental filmmaking alike. But from the perspective of today, where yesterday's avant-garde technique is tomorrow's music video or commercial for soft drinks, questions can still be asked about the film: for example, why should the soundtrack be so coherent and straightforward, given the author's advocacy for poetic language and speech liberated from sense? Why is the material chosen so autobiographical in nature, or at least why does it seem so? Wouldn't lettrist poetry or texts have been an equally appropriate choice, if not more so? The basic idea of discrepant cinema is interesting and also inviting to the non-professional: theoretically you could do it without a camera -- today, you could do it without film. The film questions audio-visual unity, to an extent it questions narrative, and it certainly questions image. It does not question authorship though, and it doesn't question the romantic myth of the artist as visionary. All this leads for me to the almost unavoidable identification of the author Isou with his fictional mouthpiece Daniel -- what with Daniel's advocacy of discrepant cinema and lettrism coupled with the countless instances of Isou's handsome mug ( Isou definitely pioneered the Elvis look before its time) through the film -- and to a hard-to-miss sense of egotistical self-promotion which, given Daniel's high-handed treatment of his opponents, his emotional callousness towards the women in his life, and his general appearance of being a loudmouthed jerk, gives the film an unpleasantness that's difficult not to carry to the author. But maybe that's just me.