Laura (1944)

Police detective Lt. Mark Macpherson (Dana Andrews) is in charge of the investigation of the murder of advertising executive and socialite Laura Hunt (Gene Tierney), whose body, face obliterated by a shotgun blast, has been found at the door of her posh New York apartment. He talks to the people closest to Laura: columnist and man-about-town Waldo Lydecker (Clifton Webb), who took Laura under his wing when she was a budding career girl and molded her into a social and business success, wealthy aunt Ann Treadwell (Judith Anderson), and her sometime fiancé Shelby Carpenter (Vincent Price), an impoverished Southern aristocrat whose genteel poverty was relieved by frequent gifts from Ann Treadwell before he was hired by Laura's firm. Confused by his suspicions of the three, he is also disturbed by his growing obsessive attraction to Laura herself. Alone in her apartment and preoccupied with thoughts of her, he is shocked to see Laura herself, very much alive and unaware of the events of the past few days, arrive at the apartment. Now he must determine who was actually murdered, who murdered her and why.

Laura had a long, tortured evolution from original story idea to finished film. Author Vera Caspary conceived the story initially as a stage play and, finding herself unable to finish the play, turned it instead into a fairly successful novel, Ring Twice For Laura, which was first published as a magazine serial and then published in book form. Still wanting to see her idea performed on stage -- particularly before any film was made -- Caspary spent a number of months attempting to adapt it for Broadway and again came up against a creative block. This time she used collaborators to help her, one of whom was Otto Preminger, who had recently left 20th Century Fox and decided to focus on Broadway stage productions. Tired of the project on which she by this point spent a number of years on, she washed her hands of it and sold the film rights to Fox, where Jay Dratler would begin to draft a script that was later redrafted with Samuel Hoffenstein and Betty Reinhardt. Preminger decided to go back to Fox and sold the project to studio head Darryl Zanuck, who attached Rouben Mamoulian to the film as director. Hedy Lamarr and Jennifer Jones were considered for the part of Laura Hunt before Zanuck okayed Gene Tierney for the part, breaking her out of a career that exploited her dark, exotic good looks by casting her in supporting roles as ethnics and half-castes -- a Polynesian, an Arab, a Eurasian, a Chinese woman. Laird Cregar was considered for the role of Waldo Lydecker before Zanuck reluctantly (because of Webb's homosexuality) agreed to the casting of stage actor, singer and dancer Clifton Webb, in his first film appearance since the silent era. Meanwhile, Preminger developed creative differences with Rouben Mamoulian and stepped in as director, reshooting all Mamoulian's footage. Even the development of the theme, which was later fitted with lyrics by Johnny Mercer and became a popular, frequently recorded pop standard, was attended by creative difficulties: composer David Raksin, frustrated over his many attempts at a satisfactory melody and distraught over the departure of his wife, propped her goodbye letter on his piano and improvised the first phrase of what would become the final version of the Laura theme.

Laura is both love story and murder mystery, a wartime film that offered a war-weary public an escape into a milieu of high society and wealth untouched by material sacrifices. Although usually filed under film noir for its murder-mystery premise and tough-guy detective hero, the film's elegant and subtle style, witty dialogue, tasteful art direction and stylish, conventional cinematography avoid noir's typical expressionist approach. Laura's consistently high level of craft and style make it a great "late-show" movie, perfect for dead-of-night viewing when in the mood for an old black-and-white picture. But what has made this film a cult classic as well as a golden-age Hollywood favorite is its underlying levels of perversity and decadence, its themes of necrophilia, impotence and moral corruption. Macpherson is a cynic about women who falls in love with Laura who is presumed dead and cannot disappoint his idealized picture of her. The relationship between Ann Treadwell and Shelby Carpenter is essentially that of a wealthy woman and her gigolo; Carpenter himself is a soft character with a weakness for womanizing (even when engaged to Laura, he takes a mistress) who takes money from women and pawns gifts. And there is Waldo Lydecker, a generous friend and mentor who guides Laura to success in business and social circles but also exerts an iron control over her personal life, disapproving of every young man she meets because he is, in essence, impotent and cannot possess her.

Further notes on the stars:

• Although Gene Tierney (1920-1991) never regarded her own performance in Laura as more than "adequate," the film did establish her as a leading actress and she was to co-star with Vincent Price again the next year in Leave Her To Heaven as an emotionally disturbed murderess. Her subsequent career was hampered by personal tragedy, marriage and relationship problems and mental illness, making her less prolific an actress than she probably would have been otherwise.

• Dana Andrews (1909-1992) first realized his potential as a leading man in Laura, but despite other memorable performances in films such as The Ox-Bow Incident (1943) and The Best Years Of Our Lives (1946), he remained an underrated talent, though managed to stay busy through the early eighties.

• Judith Anderson (1898-1972) had a long and distinguished career on the stage parallel with her film career. A native of Australia, she became Dame Judith Anderson when awarded a CBE in 1960.
  

• Clifton Webb (1891-1966) went on to more film work as a result of Laura, mostly typecast as an ascerbic, waspish bachelor. He created the very popular character Mr. Belvedere in Sitting Pretty (1948) and went on to play him in a number of sequels.

• Vincent Price (1911-1993) became synonymous with horror film in the fifties, sixties and seventies in a seemingly endless string of roles in films like House of Wax (1953), The Fly (1958), The Masque of the Red Death (1964), and The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971), to which he brought an indefatigable sense of fun and eye-twinkling good humor. His unusually sporting attitude to what most other actors would have considered a career dead-end was undoubtedly due to his off-the-set passions for fine art and cuisine. He authored or co-authored a number of books about art and cooking, lectured on art and aesthetics, and donated a number of works in his collection to East Los Angeles College for a gallery founded in his and second wife Mary's names.

20th Century Fox Home Entertainment released a DVD edition of Laura as part of its Fox Film Noir series. The Laura DVD includes two commentary tracks (one by film historian Rudy Behlmer, and another by film professor Jeanine Basinger with remarks by Laura's composer David Raksin), along with English and Spanish dialogue and subtitles, theatrical trailer, and two documentary programs from A&E Network's Biography series on stars Gene Tierney and Vincent Price.

(BTW: A stage version of Laura finally debuted on Broadway in 1948.)

The First Nudie Musical (1976)

This bawdy cult comedy germinated in the mind of screenwriter/actor/director Bruce Kimmel during his first year in New York in 1969, where he took a day job waiting for his own break in show business. The job took him past the Times Square district, at the time a notorious tenderloin area full of adult theatres that showed "nudies" -- sexploitation films. He was amused by the titles of the films and their lack of sophistication amd conceived a musical done in the same style, and began to write songs for it, which at least -- at first, anyway -- entertained his friends. But the idea remained and after a few years he was able to write and, co-directing with Mark Haggard, shoot a film (with a distribution deal with Paramount) based on the original concept, but now about a down-at-heels Hollywood studio forced to crank out adult movies to stay afloat.

As the film begins, Harry Schecter (Stephen Nathan), the studio's producer, is meeting with his backers, who are sick of the lackluster business that the Schecter Studio's recent offerings (such as Stewardesses In Cages and Teenage Sex Mutants) are doing and who want to develop the studio lot into a shopping mall, when he has a brainstorm -- the first porno musical. The backers, half convinced, decide to let him go ahead, but give him two weeks to make the picture, or the studio's history. They also stipulate that John Smithee (played by Kimmel), a socially inept nerd who doesn't know how to make films and is not even comfortable around girls (and who is also the nephew of one of the backers), must direct the film. With almost certain disaster hanging over the project, Harry gets to work with the help of his secretary Rosie (Cindy Williams), and a cast of eccentrics including a ditzy Latina (Diana Canova), a confident, cocksure, and inept struggling actor (Alan Abelew), a corn-fed ingenue just in from Indiana (Leslie Ackerman), and the obligatory prima donna female lead (Alexandra Morgan).

The mid-seventies was probably just the right time for a project like The First Nudie Musical: while the nudies that originally inspired Kimmel had been around for years with hardly anyone in the mainstream noticing, everyone in the mid-seventies was talking about the recent advent of hardcore films such as Deep Throat and The Devil In Miss Jones, even to the point of speculating whether Hollywood might succumb to the lure of "porno-chic" and start going hardcore, so the film was timely. It was also a time of George Carlin and Richard Pryor, of the National Lampoon and also of the "midnight movies" such as Pink Flamingos and Kentucky Fried Movie, in short a time of increasingly explicit and adult humor which this film was a part of and which its success helped to encourage.

That success almost didn't happen, because as the film was being prepared for release, one of its stars, Cindy Williams, was hired to work on a new television series by none other than Paramount, the same company that was now contractually obligated to promote and distribute the film. The series, Laverne and Shirley, was a spinoff of the hit Paramount series Happy Days, and was intended to follow it on ABC's Tuesday evening "family hour" programming slate. Never mind that none of the principal actors removed their clothes for the film, or that the film was rated "R" by the MPAA and was intended for general release: Paramount determined to avoid embarrassment at any cost by not scheduling any press screenings or flashy east- or west-coast premieres and designing a one-sheet for the film that omitted the actors' names (the outraged Kimmel did finally get this last changed), and discreetly released the film to small theaters, usually without advance notice, hoping that the film would quietly die at the box office. Only it didn't. The film did very well, was sometimes held over as long as ten weeks, and influential reviewers such as Judith Crist and Newsday praised the film after actually having paid for tickets and seeing it in the theaters. Paramount finally decided to sell the distribution rights back to Kimmel and with a new New York-based distributor, the film did brisker business and became a cult favorite.

The seventies wave of adult humor of which Nudie Musical was a part might have ranged from frank and intelligent to crude and barely funny to borderline-pornographic, but the presiding spirit of this film seems to be Mel Brooks, who delighted in parodying the conventions of showbiz, and especially those of musicals. Brooks, born in a generation that didn't discuss sex openly, relies on suggestiveness and double-entendre, but the difference between his humor and that of baby-boomer Kimmel's is more a difference of degree than of kind. If Mel Brooks had been born in the era of Dr. Spock, sex education in schools, the Pill, gay liberation and the sexual revolution, it's possible that he might have come up with something like the "Dancing Dildos" number: a chorus of antebellum southern belles in see-through hoop skirts and sunhats singing the praises of "a girl's best friend" with four men dressed in vibrator costumes that make them look like missiles with feet as "director" Smithee causes havoc with a crane-mounted camera. It's a moment of inspired vulgarity in the same vein as The Producers' "Springtime For Hitler" number.

The film's pretentions to satirizing porn don't go very far, and don't really have to. In spite of numbers with titles like "Butch, Dyke, Lesbian," "Perversion," and "Orgasm," as well as the obligatory top-hat-and-tails number (about cunnilingus and called "Let Them Eat Cake"), the movie is a comedy about showbiz rather than about sex, and a showbiz comedy that's fairly old-fashioned in its humor to boot, with its "let's put on a show, kids!" storyline, likable, endearing characters and a sweet, uncynical attitude. There's a comfy, approachable feel to Stephen Nathan's harried-striver and Cindy Williams's girl-Friday relationship that's straight out of the old screwball comedies, and an impish, Harpo Marx charm to Bruce Kimmel's characterization. Critics singled out Cindy Williams for praise in this film, and rightly so: she is a remarkably subtle comic actress with an outwardly sweet, prim exterior and equal talents for verbal snark and Lucille Ball-esque physical comedy.

Further notes:

• Many of the cast, including Cindy Williams, Alan Abelew, Bruce Kimmel, and Diana Canova were friends and classmates at Los Angeles City College in the sixties.

• Ron Howard, who spent his boyhood playing Sheriff Andy Taylor's son Opie on the television comedy series The Andy Griffith Show, co-starred with Cindy Williams in George Lucas' American Graffiti, was currently star of the Happy Days television series, and at this time an aspiring director interested in any grassroots film project he happened to encounter, appears in a cameo in the audition sequence, talking with Lynne Marie Stewart, who also appeared with Howard and Williams in American Graffiti and went on to play the ultra-glamorous Miss Yvonne in Pee Wee's Playhouse.

• John Smithee's name derives from "Alan Smithee," a pseudonym used in the film industry by directors who do not wish to be credited on a film.

• A People magazine writer predicted a fabulous singing career for Leslie Ackerman on the strength of her "Lights And Smiles" number, not knowing that Annette O'Toole actually sang the song and that Ackerman couldn't sing a note: she practiced for three days in front of a mirror and came up with one of the best lip-synchs in film.

• "Dancing Dildos" was part of a sequence shot six months after the end of principal photography, on Paramount's insistence that the film sagged in the middle. The studio put up US$75,000 (about half the original cost of the film) for the shooting.

• For the week ending September 28, 1977, the industry paper Variety listed The First Nudie Musical as the fourth highest-grossing film after Star Wars, You Light Up My Life, and The Spy Who Loved Me.

• In the film, Harry advises John Smithee to bluff his way through the project by boning up on filmmaking terms and, since he's supposed to be a director of adult films, by peppering his speech with strong language, resulting in my favorite line, at the end of his first-day-of-production pep-talk: "Now, as Mr. Sheckler said, we don't have a lot of time. So I will of course expect hard work, cooperation, diligence, photography, sound and color. Shit, we could make a fucking good bitch of a bastard movie if we all pull together and work as a whore-loving cunt penis team. Thank you."

Filmed on an initial budget of about US$125,000, the film suffered from a number of technical inconsistencies (matting, different film stocks) that marred subsequent video releases, and the camera negative has been lost. The 2002 Image Entertainment DVD release, made from three prints, all rather aged, looks wonderful in all its color-corrected glory in spite of unavoidable artifacts. The film comes with commentaries by Kimmel, Williams and Nathan, an hour-long documentary with many of the cast members, deleted scenes, original trailers and a photo gallery.

Battleship Potemkin (1925)

Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin is one of the great films of the silent era and one of the films that defined the medium aesthetically. It put Russian film on the cinematic map and also made Eisenstein's name as a director and artistic visionary with its extensive use of his evolving theories of montage in cinema. It was also one of the big moments in the short history of Soviet modernism, the brief period when, galvanized by the revolution, writers, composers and visual artists in the new Russia answered the promise of a new society with new, dynamic and advanced art, making Soviet Russia, at least until Josef Stalin took over, the home of some of the most modern artistic ideas in the world.

Originally conceived as part of a series of films relating the events of the year 1905, in which strikes, uprisings and popular sentiment brought the country closer to revolution than at any time before 1917, Battleship Potemkin focuses on one of these events: on an armored cruiser on the Black Sea in 1905, sailors mutinied and sailed for 11 days under a red flag. In the film, tension between sailors and officers explodes over the quality of the food, and the sailors, faced with rifles, turn on their superiors, throw them overboard and hoist the red flag. The people of the port city of Odessa welcome the revolutionary sailors with open arms and are promptly massacred by the Czar's soldiers, for which the Potemkin shells the local military command in reprisal. The sailors of the Potemkin then learn that a squadron of ships is being sent to the area and prepare for battle, not knowing whether they will have to fight or whether their fellow sailors will join them. Potemkin's bold images and masterful cutting orchestrate the emotions of the audience as we share the comradely affection of the sailors, rage at their treatment, indignation at the massacre of civilians, and apprehension and tension as the squadron of ships approaches. Battleship Potemkin is not simply a museum piece, fodder for film historians or simple propaganda: it's also exciting and moving entertainment that engages the brain and the emotions alike.

Originally an engineering student, Sergei Eisenstein went in for the arts after serving in the Red Army during the Civil War. He first worked in theater and began to develop his ideas about montage -- the communication of emotions and ideas through the juxtaposition of visual elements -- in the context of stage production. A film buff since his student days, Eisenstein was aware of American director D. W. Griffith's innovations in film cutting which did so much to establish the unique visual language of film. Another influence on Eisenstein was his study of Japanese, and the system of Chinese ideograms on which Japanese writing is based. Gravitating towards cinema, his first feature, Strike, began to put his ideas about montage into film. Strike was not particularly successful at home, but it did well enough abroad to lead to a commission to make another feature which would result in Battleship Potemkin. Strike also introduced Eisenstein to cinematographer Eduard Tisse, who guided the inexperienced director in the practical problems of putting his visions on film and became a valued friend and collaborator for most of Eisenstein's career.

Potemkin's premiere at Moscow's Bolshoi Theater was an artistic triumph, but as was the case with most of the work of the artists of the new Soviet modernist scene, the film was still too new and too sophisticated for many ordinary Russians, and the film did less well in box office terms. But the effect of the film abroad, especially with Eisenstein's counterparts in the world film community, was nothing short of electrifying: filmmakers all over the world applauded Eisenstein's achievement and he quickly became an international celebrity.

But the export of Potemkin abroad led directly to the problem that has bedeviled the film for eighty years: censorship and the lack of a definitive version. At issue was, of course, the film's politics -- after all, this was a film from the Soviet Union, and it depicted rebellion against state and especially military authority -- and also its violence, especially in the Odessa Steps sequence, in which Czarist soldiers fire on the people. This is one of the most celebrated passages in cinema and a tour de force of Eisenstein's montage technique, but it was also unsparingly violent for its time -- a small boy is nearly trampled to death; his mother, holding his body and appealing to the soldiers, is cut down by rifles; an unattended infant in a perambulator rolls down the stairs; an old woman is slashed in the face by a sword-wielding Cossack. Before Potemkin could be shown in Germany in what was for all practical purposes the film's international debut, the German government required cuts of the most violent and inflammatory content. In this case at least, the required cuts were achieved in consultation with the director, who re-edited the film in order to accomodate the cuts without sacrificing the film's integrity, and a score was written by German composer Edmund Meisel at Eisenstein's request. When the film was shown in other countries, other cuts, not so mindful of the director's vision, were made, and the film was also subject to the prevailing political winds at home: an opening quotation by Leon Trotsky, for example, was excised after Trotsky was expelled from the Party in the late twenties. For most of the film's existence, there have been a number of versions of the film but no definitive version representative of Eisenstein's original intent.

Which is where Kino International's 2007 DVD release of Potemkin comes in. The restored version on this DVD is the fruit of decades of work, in part by Russian film historian Naum Kleinmann, who used materials in the possession of Eisenstein's widow as well as the archives of the state film school VGIK in an attempt to reconstruct the film in the seventies, and by the director of the current project, Enno Patalas of the Deutsche Kinematek, with input from the British Film Institute, the Gosfilmofond in Moscow and the Munich Film Museum. As the only film score specifically written for the film, Edmund Meisel's score is used, as adapted by Helmut Imig (the score was, after all, written for a shortened version of the film) and performed by the Deutsches Filmorchestra. The restoration was completed and premiered in 2005 in honor of the 100th anniversary of the Potemkin mutiny, and is probably the closest to a definitive version we will ever see.

Battleship Potemkin made Sergei Eisenstein world-famous, but his subsequent career was hampered by unremitting frustrations. His work in the Soviet Union was subject to increasing scrutiny from political bosses, and his independently funded project, Que Viva Mexico, collapsed amid time and budget overruns. He did manage to make Alexander Nevsky in 1938, and the first two installments of Ivan The Terrible, a projected epic trilogy of the life of Ivan IV, the king who first declared himself czar (emperor, literally "Caesar") and unified Russia in the 16th century, in 1945 and 1946. Teaching and writing provided solace for the director from the unending, frequently humiliating problems of filmmaking, but overwork and stress overtook Eisenstein and he passed away in 1948 at the age of 50.

A Chinese Torture Chamber Story (1994)

In the eighties, the government of the then-Crown Colony of Hong Kong reformed their film exhibition regulations and instituted three categories of certification: category I, for general audiences, category II, parental supervision, and category III, adults over 18 only. One motivation behind the new certifications was the desire to allow imported films such as The Last Temptation of Christ to be shown in the colony uncut, but be that as it may, the adult-only category also encouraged local film producers to push the envelope of sex and violence in their films and soon, "Category III" became a convenient handle for a particular type of HK film.

Category III films are almost always "spicy" variants of popular genres: there are category III period films, action films, crime dramas, comedies, horror films and romances, all modelled on popular trends with the addition of nudity, adult situations and graphic violence. As one might expect, Category III films are all over the map in terms of quality, tone, and mood, but like Japanese adult filmmaking, they do have a reputation for indulging cruel, even misogynistic fancies, so they can be offensive to some viewers. However, they can also offer unpredictable, weird film experiences unbound by conventional standards of taste.

And speaking of which, A Chinese Torture Chamber Story (original HK title: The Ten Tortures of the Qing) comes from executive producer Wong Jing, a man who has never let pedestrian notions of good taste stand in his way. I talked about Wong Jing a little some time back. Resolutely a commercial filmmaker, his films include relatively small, cheap productions with non-stars as well as large-budget vehicles for big stars such as Jackie Chan, but his penchant for salty, earthy humor remains consistent throughout. His passion for slapstick, absurdity, and vulgarity annoys critics and viewers who appreciate HK film for its style and its sophistication, but Hong Kongers appreciate zaniness, vulgarity, and nonsense in their entertainment to an extent that many of us overseas do not. It explains why Stephen Chow, who has been a top-billing star in HK for many years, has never really broken through in the Western mainstream with his cartoony action-comedies, and why the films to which Wong Jing gave his imprimatur divide overseas viewers.

In fact Bosco Lam, about whom I have no information, directed A Chinese Torture Chamber Story, from a screenplay by Tsui Tat-chor. The film begins with a brief overview of tortures used in Chinese history before opening on Little Cabbage (Yvonne Yung), discovered doused with blood beside the body of her husband Ge, and she is hauled before a Qing imperial magistrate accused of his murder, along with Yang (Lawrence Ng), a scholar and herbalist who had employed Little Cabbage as a maid, accused as an accessory. The magistrate insists that she and Yang were lovers who had conspired to kill her husband because Yang's wife, concerned about his attraction to her, had packed her off in marriage to Ge to avoid her seducing her husband, and compels her to confess with various tortures, but she insists that she was framed. The story unfolds in flashback as we learn how Little Cabbage came to work in Yang's house, discovers his wife's sexual insatiability, her adulterous affair with the magistrate's son and their plot to frame Little Cabbage for his murder.

The story is serviceable but is not really the point of the movie, merely offering the opportunity to linger on a sex scene here, a gag there, and various bits of shock elsewhere, substituting jaw-dropping set pieces of sex, violence, or humor for dramatic tension. Probably the most memorable moment, the moment where Wong's irreverent humor works best is Scholar Yang's encounter with a larger-than-life kung fu hero (Elvis Tsui) and his equally formidable wife who perform the marital act as though it were a kung fu battle, announcing their moves ("No-Shadow Lick from Fushan!!" being an obvious tip of the hat to the Wong Fei-hung mythos) and flying through the air in traditional sword film wirework style. This scene has apparently become a favorite clip on YouTube (can't seem to find the link... sorry!). Less brilliant but equally memorable is the night of the wedding of Little Cabbage and Ge, a parody of the potter's-wheel-and-Unchained-Melody sequence in Ghost, complete with the Righteous Brothers tune played on Chinese instruments.

Much mileage is gotten out of the size of Ge's masculine endowment, the Yang family nanny's anxiety about the size of her breasts, and the Four Lustful Instruments, the toys with which Yang enhances his wife's sexual enjoyment -- and of course exotic tortures involving contraptions of sticks and strings for crushing the fingers, beds of nails, and a stocks-like hanging cage in which the victim hangs by his skull until his neck breaks -- but like a family uncle who constantly makes tactless, tasteless remarks and passes loud, smelly farts at the table but who is still somehow tolerated, the film's constant scurrying around trying to get a reaction -- any reaction -- out of the viewer becomes somewhat trying, and taken as a whole Torture Chamber fails to quite satisfy as a whodunnit, a bit of sexy fluff or even as a good blood-and-guts gore film, going a little bit in one direction and then in another. It's more an a la carte mix of humor, violence and sex offered in little nibbles that might be tasty at times but might also leave you with a belly-ache at the end.

A Chinese Torture Chamber Story was made at a time when period films were especially popular subjects for the Category III treatment. Stars Lawrence Ng and Yvonne Yung were no strangers to this genre. Ng featured in the groundbreaking period-style erotica Sex and Zen, but he has been for the most part a versatile but middle-of-the-road actor, working extensively in television. Yung worked more extensively in category III films, and although she did diversify somewhat with more mainstream roles and a parallel career as a pop singer, she apparently never really left the category III ghetto. Neither one is a particularly charismatic presence, but Elvis Tsui plays his cameo as the kung fu/sex hero with a suitably lusty machismo, laughing heartily and drinking wine out of the jar like a real man. His character's wife is played by Julie Lee, and she's not bad either.

I first viewed A Chinese Torture Chamber Story several years ago on a VHS distributed by Tai Seng Video: it was released on DVD in 2007 in the US by Discotek Media. Part of the charm of the old VHS releases of Hong Kong films was their use of HK theatrical release prints which, by law (at least before the handover of the Colony to China) were subtitled in Chinese and English. The English subtitling of Hong Kong films often furnishes amusement by its frequently unidiomatic translation. The DVD features a fairly accurate and idiomatic translation but also has an optional "crazy Hong Kong" subtitling, taken from the original HK release, that can be selected.

(Keep in mind the following: A Chinese Torture Chamber Story is not really a date movie: it has full frontal female nudity, adult situations, and scenes of violence and torture that might induce some discomfort in sensitive viewers.)

3 by Doris Wishman

Doris Wishman's films are some of the most unusual in the field of sexploitation. Coming from a background in distribution, Wishman (1912-2002) began in the early sixties to write, produce and direct her own films. Her films developed along with the prevailing whims of the market, beginning with nudist-camp films, moving into black-and-white roughies, and in the seventies into color features. Along the way, Wishman developed a style of filmmaking quite unlike that of any other filmmaker, in the exploitation field or out of it.

It's hard to do justice to the Wishman style in words. She began making movies without previous production experience, formal training, or apparently even a grasp of conventional notions of film technique. Her camerawork is haphazard, her editing is eccentric and full of non-sequiturs, and her stories are often wildly improbable and fantastic, with bizarre premises, weird tangents or odd endings, a sort of Ed-Wood-goes-nouvelle vague, with moments that seem to be edging sideways into avant-garde experimentalism.

In front of us are three films from the mid-to-late sixties, Wishman's period of black-and-white roughies. Bad Girls Go To Hell (1965) is a great title and evocative of Wishman's pulpy inspiration. A young married woman (Gigi Darlene) accidentally kills her building superintendent when he attempts to assault her and has to leave home and husband for New York, where she hopes to lose herself in the crowd. Alone and without money, she is taken in and then has to leave a succession of creeps and deviants. She crashes on the couch of a kind and respectful guy (Sam Stewart) who turns out to be a closet abusive alky; she goes on to stay with a woman named Della (Darlene Bennett) who in spite of her kindness and relative stability is a lesbian, and the husband of a married couple with a room to rent tries to have his way with her. Finally she finds a sweet old lady who needs a live-in assistant, but the killing she is trying to escape still threatens to catch up with her. Preposterous but also brilliant in its context, the twist ending makes me expect SCTV's Count Floyd to appear on screen and try to save the situation with his trademark "Woo-ooo-ooo!" The moral to the story seems to be that if you must do housework wearing only a black lace nightie, put on a housecoat before you try to take out the trash.

In a lot of ways, My Brother's Wife (1966) is one of the better showcases of Wishman's parallel-universe approach to making movies. The story itself is a standard pulp-novel tale of a shady character named Frankie (Sam Stewart again), who shows up at the door of his older brother Bob (Bob Oran) and his new bride Mary (June Roberts). Sexually unfulfilled with her new hubby, Mary yearns for the caresses of virile but slimy Frankie, not knowing that he has also looked up old flame Zena (Darlene Bennett), with whom he is cooking up a scheme for rooking Bob and Mary out of their savings and blowing town. A standard B-movie plot really, but the big interest of My Brother's Wife is its spotlight on Wishman's weird approach to editing and camerawork: its tendency, for instance, to show people listening to dialogue spoken off-camera and then cutting to the first speaker, who listens to the other's reply, and then back again. Or there is her predilection for cutaways of random objects as though they had some sort of significance in the story, only they don't: a wastebasket, a shotglass of liquor, a Buddha statuette. This brings up another one of Wishman's visual quirks: her tendency to shoot in really tackily decorated locations, and during this period, in apartments full of pseudo-Oriental decor. There's also an interesting tangent in the story which has only a negligible effect on the plot, the weekend visit of Zena's lesbian cousin, who also happens to be named Della, and who, just to make it even stranger, is played by Darlene's twin sister Dawn in the height of sixties sexploitation-lesbian glory in boots, leather jacket, stirrup pants and a really sticky bouffant.

In concept, the above two movies are in familiar sexploitation territory with their respective roughie and B-movie premises, but 1967's Indecent Desires moves out of that realm into unexplored areas of more improbable and surreal cause and effect. As the film begins, skulking, reclusive pack-rat Zeb (Michael Alaimo, here billed as Michael Lawrence), who spends his time scavenging for interesting cast-offs on the street, finds a child's doll and crackerjack-box ring, and discovers that if he wears the ring and touches the doll, he can magically caress the flesh of attractive blonde Ann (Sharon Kent), a secretary he has been admiring from afar. But when he does, poor Ann can't understand why she feels invisible hands running over her body, and thinks she's losing her mind. Sometimes Zeb is solicitous in his long-distance relationship through the doll (as when an utterly distraught Ann goes down to the harbor with thoughts of jumping in and teeters over the edge, only to be held back by an unseen force, which is Zeb catching the doll from falling from the table it's standing on), but he's also jealous of Ann's blandly handsome boyfriend Tom and doesn't hesitate to take his rage out on the doll, with predictably unsettling results on the other end. The film feels at times like a parable about objectification or a treatment of the "stalker" phenomenon decades before the term was coined, which is interesting from a director who, notwithstanding her status as a woman in a male-dominated field, steadfastly maintained that she was not a feminist.

Doris Wishman would go on to work in color in the seventies, and her vision got weirder and wilder with such titles as The Amazing Transplant, The Love Toy, and especially with the pair of films she made starring Chesty Morgan (whose main attraction as an actress can be readily inferred from her name), Deadly Weapons and Double Agent 73. The premises became more bizarre, the acting more underplayed, and the art direction -- if one can call it that -- tackier. Those films and others are out there too, but my affection remains with the earlier black-and-white films, in part because black-and-white is so appropriate for sordid, sleazy atmosphere and because of the abundance of familiar faces from the world of east coast skin flicks in the films, Darlene Bennett and June Roberts being foremost among them. These two, along with Sharon Kent, Gigi Darlene and Jackie Richards (the mature brunette with the world-weary aspect who plays Kent's friend and co-worker in Indecent Desires) share the common characteristic of having racked up impressive filmographies for east-coast skin auteurs such as Wishman, Joe Mawra, Barry Mahon, Joe Sarno, and Michael Findlay in the same roughly six or seven-year period before disappearing from films for good in the late sixties. Michael Alaimo appeared as Michael Lawrence in a goodly number of exploitation films during this time, but went on to a fairly busy if not illustrious career in television, mostly in one-off character roles.

Bad Girls Go To Hell, My Brother's Wife and Indecent Desires have all been released on DVD by Something Weird Video, but I saw the first of these on a 5-disc compilation, Girls Gone Bad: The Delinquent Dames Collection from Passport Video.