The Olga Series (1964)

Audrey Campbell began in theater, music theater, and television in her home town of Cincinatti, but by the early sixties she had moved to New York, where she supplemented her acting career with modeling and moonlighting in exploitation films, and in 1964 she made her mark in the annals of sexploitation cinema by being that rare thing in the genre, a memorable actress in a memorable role. Just as Tura Satana in Russ Meyer's Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! became a cult icon because she was so right for her character, so Audrey Campbell in the role of Olga Saglo -- dope dealer, white slaver, lesbian, sadist, and all-around villainess -- became a cult idol for her performances in White Slaves of Chinatown, Olga's Girls and Olga's House of Shame, simply by being the perfect choice. These three films, made in quick succession, became perennial favorites in the Times Square grindhouses for years and acquired something of a legendary reputation. Campbell recalled later in life that she was frequently stopped on the street by fans from as far away as South America and Europe, and many of Olga's most ardent admirers were far from being the stereotypical raincoated grindhouse habitué; fans of Campbell and Olga include film critic Andrew Sarris, who stated that he thought Audrey Campbell one of the sexiest women in films, and filmmaker John Waters, who was once quoted as saying "I couldn't get over the title. I have to force myself every day not to think about Olga's House Of Shame." All going to show that filmgoers, even the denizens of Times Square fleapits, love a good baddie.

The Olga films were early examples of what came to be called "roughies" in the trade: nudie films well-spiced with violence, suggestive innuendo, and sleazy atmosphere, all done in a gritty black-and-white style that recalled poverty-row thrillers, B-movies, and stag films. I explained roughies in a previous post, but here's a recap: after about five years of "nudie-cuties" and their light, innocuous pin-up-style aesthetic, the roughies afforded a respite from the fluffiness and vapid premises of nudist camps, artists' and photographers' models, and improbable plot devices, while offering more interesting stories. Even if, as was usually the case, they showed no more skin than the cuties, they seemed "dirtier" because of their use of vice, crime, and illicit relationships as themes, painting fantasies familiar to a generation brought up on puritanical norms about sexuality (and of course their visual style). The Olga films added fetish and kink to the mix, but with a good measure of Hollywood conventions such as the charismatic villain and the damsel in distress. In best cliffhanger style, the films even ended with title cards warning the viewer not to miss "Olga's adventures" in the next installment.

In the Olga films, women are locked up in cages, tied up, tortured with exotic devices (most of which look knocked together from odds and ends from a hardware store, or repurposed from other uses -- the contents of Olga's toolchest rarely recall the wares of a fetish shop), take drugs, and do other things or have things done to them that don't sound very palatable to hear described. Seeing them on the screen is a different matter. It's worth noting here that the films have very few male characters (and with one exception we'll come to in a moment, most of them peripheral), hardly any sex (which in 1964 would have been represented on screen as partially-disrobed "making out") and no fighting with weapons (though there are some catfights for those in the audience who liked that sort of thing). These films weren't aiming for realism, but for an imaginative space for the playing out of fantasies, and the facts that the lash-marks are obviously painted on, that Olga puts her girls through their ordeals with such relish, and that the victims ham up their sufferings in best "will no one save me?" style served the purpose very well. The unrealistic treatment also refers to the long tradition of highly-coded, highly-sublimated and largely unconsciously-used sado-erotic imagery in popular narrative from penny-dreadfuls to monster movies (such as heroines being tied to railroad tracks or monsters carrying off the girl -- a metaphor for rape, basically, or the threat of it -- being a couple of examples).

White Slaves of Chinatown introduces Olga and her operation, as she gathers innocent young women and breaks them to her will in her dungeons, after which she turns them out to sell drugs and their favors. Between breaking in the new arrivals, punishing others for various infractions, and generally managing her business, Olga has meetings with her own bosses in a shadowy group called "the Syndicate" and occasionally relaxes with a bed partner picked out of her stable of charges. These films were mostly shot MOS (without sound) on weekends without a script or even a written outline, which gives most of the series an off-the-cuff, vignette-oriented feel. The narrative was fleshed in later in editing and the recording of narrations by an anonymous, authoritative voice, along with Campbell as Olga, along with a record of Moussorgsky's Night On Bald Mountain and some festive-sounding Chinese music. White Slaves follows Olga's progress with a woman fresh from the local jail, the voluptuous blonde daughter of a foreign diplomat (played by Leonore Rhein, also known as Gigi Darlene, whom we met in Doris Wishman's Bad Girls Go To Hell), and a young, bohemian-folkie-looking woman lured to one of Olga's "pot parties." The girls don't willingly submit to Olga's will right away, but persistence and ruthlessness prevail in the end. The film was also released as Olga's White Slaves after protests over the film's stereotypical association of Chinese-American communities with drugs and vice. There is even a character named "Lotus Wong" -- billed as being played by someone named "Miss Chinatown," who is very pretty and sweet-looking but definitely not Asian -- who attempts to help one of the new girls escape. The association was not absolutely necessary to the series, fortunately, and the Chinatown color was discarded in subsequent films.

While White Slaves used a fair amount of location footage of the Chinatown streets, Olga's Girls is entirely interior shots, which give an interesting claustrophobic feel. In many ways, it's more of the same: a cigar-chomping character referred to as "The Pimp" arrives with a couple of new girls and haggles with Olga over them. They are soon admitted to the stable, but trouble is brewing as word comes that one of the girls is informing to the cops, and while Olga dons her "cape of persuasion" (basically looking like a sheet of black naugahyde belted around her with a hole in the middle for her head) and sweats the girls one by one until she finds the stoolie, a group of the girls, including Olga's own right-hand-woman, plot to fly the coop and start their own set-up. Other interesting details include some red-baiting as the narrator explains how "Moscow and Peping" control the drug trade, and a fitting punishment for the fink that appears to have been lifted from Herschell Gordon Lewis's Blood Feast. But it's not all cruelty and torture in the Olga universe (though it's interesting enough that some of the tortures shown were suggested by the women playing the victims -- such as being wired to an electrical switch, making the victim jiggle around until her breasts fall out of her bra). The most successful sexploitation films always relied on the old principle of "something for everyone," and the Olga series was no exception. The films had a lot of filler, giving you a chance to chill after those grueling scenes of cruelty as Olga's girls relax on their off-hours smoking reefer, dancing, showering, getting dressed for bed, and other naked-lady activities. In fact, apart from the punishments, working for Olga seems on balance to be fairly light work indeed; you hardly ever see them turning tricks or selling dope, as they were supposed to be doing, though in Olga's Girls you do see a very nicely shot opening sequence of one of the girls walking to an assignation in silhouette down a half-darkened hallway; a very good example of the work of cameraman Werner Rose.

Olga's House Of Shame takes Olga and her operation out of the city entirely, to the site of an abandoned mine in New Jersey, where Olga and her partner Nick (Woody Parker) have moved their operation and must find out who is responsible for some lost items in a jewel shipment. They relentlessly interrogate Elaine (Judy Young), who proves to be much stronger than Olga and Nick expected, but who finally relents, spills all the beans, including who was in with her, decides to work with Olga instead of against her, and proves in the process that she can be just as mean and ruthless. Soon she is delegated by Olga to duties such as administering punishments to recalcitrant girls, while she's also developing a relationship with Nick. The couple are interesting casting, because Judy Young was small, round-faced and cute, and just doesn't come across as an apprentice Olga, while Woody Parker looks like a gay Jacques Tati. This was by far the most lavishly-produced of the Olga films, with on-set dialogue as well as narration (though the same record of Night on Bald Mountain is used) and a considerable amount of outdoor location shooting, and according to Campbell, the abandoned mining site was very dilapidated and very dangerous.

Campbell stated in interviews that her secret in playing Olga lay in not playing her "like a slut," as she put it. She shed her clothes on occasion for the camera, but for the most part her typical outfit in these films was a white blouse and dark skirt or capris, sometimes mixing it up with a bohemian dark turtleneck and well-made Swedish boots, but at no moment was she anything but poised and dignified, steely and determined. She exuded a "crawl, worm!" dominatrix attitude with little else but a grim smile or at most, an occasional manic grimace to show how much she relished putting her "dirty little tramps" in their place. The sluttiness was reserved for the girls in her charge, and they ran the gamut of fantasy types from sweet-faced innocents to tough cookies to trashy tarts, one of my favorites being Ricki Bell, who played Olga's right hand in the first two films and is the perfect mid-sixties tough chick with her tight clothing, deep chest and heavy mascara, at one point in Olga's Girls letting loose, dancing the twist at one of the extracurricular "pot parties" while puffing on a joint that dangles from her lips like an unfiltered Camel.

Audrey Campbell left the Olga series after House Of Shame. She didn't do much film work after the Olga films, but did go on to television, particularly supporting roles in soap operas,, with a recurring part in the Gothic soap opera Dark Shadows and later, The Guiding Light and Days Of Our Lives. She passed away in June 2006 at the age of 76. Joseph Mawra (real name: Joseph Prieto), went on to direct one more Olga film, Madame Olga's Massage Parlor (1965), which continued to explore the electrifying chemistry between Judy Young and Woody Parker; this film is lost, though he directed another film for George Weiss, Mondo Oscenita (1966), a pseudo-exposé of sex and perversity in the film business which included a heathy amount of footage from Massage Parlor, as well as the other Olga films. Many of these excerpts explore the ways in which health-club exercise equipment can stand in for mechanical torture devices and are quite weird, though not particularly cruel looking. By the early seventies, Prieto had left exploitation films for good and taken up a quiet career in real estate on Long Island.

There was also one "uncanonical" Olga film that was apparently made to cash in on the Olga notoriety. 1966's Olga's Dance Hall Girls had no personnel from the original films and credits no director. Lucy Eldredge, a woman with a faint physical resemblance to Audrey Campbell but without any of her poise or charisma joins Larry Hunter as Nick (who is also called Vince in the film!) in a dance-hall venture which is really a front for prostitution and ... a Satanic cult of human sacrifice (!). Larry Hunter is memorable here as a smooth-talking sleazeball whose pencil-mustache and slicked-hair look might well have inspired John Waters. The film also features Linda Boyce and Uta Erickson, two fixtures in late-sixties East Coast sexploitation, who for some reason often appeared together in the same films. The irresistable attraction of Olga and her evil ways lived on in the seventies as direct inspiration for at least two fairly successful sexploitation franchises, both of which went a lot further in the violence department than the Olga films ever did. Dyanne Thorne played busty Aryan bitch-goddess Ilsa in Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS (1975) and Ilsa, Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks (1976), two excessively violent but also high-camp films where she got to rule over her own little kingdoms of innocent women. The Ginger series (Ginger, 1971, The Abductors, 1972, Girls Are For Loving, 1973) was an action-adventure series with Cheri Caffaro as a sexy and dangerous secret operative and a heavy emphasis on her ball-busting, no-shit-taking take-downs of male antagonists.

Viewers who, like Olga's girls and countless grindhouse audiences before them, dare to risk finding themselves her helpless minions are directed to two DVD releases which between them offer pretty much everything there is to see. Something Weird Video's 2003 Olga Triple Feature has White Slaves of Chinatown, Olga's House of Shame and Olga's Dance Hall Girls, as well as trailers for all the Olga films, including the lost Madame Olga's Massage Parlor, an early Barry Mahon nudie-cutie short featuring Audrey Campbell as an artist's model, a clip from Mawra's Mondo Oscenita with the above-mentioned Madame Olga exercise-equipment footage, and a booklet with a 1995 interview with Campbell by Charles Kilgore. Olga's Girls is available on a 2005 DVD from Synapse Video with commentary by Campbell (who always refers to Olga in the third person, and with remarkable affection) with film critic Andre Salas.

Kenneth Anger: The Complete Magick Lantern Cycle

Kenneth Anger (born Kenneth Anglemeyer, 1927, Santa Monica, California) began to make amateur films as a child using the family's 16mm camera and moved rapidly into personal works that explored his interest in myth, magic, and homoeroticism. His first mature film, 1947's Fireworks, caused a sensation and confirmed him in his path as an independent filmmaker. He spent much of his years as a young man in Europe, specifically Paris, returning briefly in the early fifties to make Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954), his first intensive exploration of the mythology of one of his great influences, the English writer-adventurer-mystagogue Aleister Crowley (1875-1947), of whose works and ideas he has made a lifelong study and whose pagan religion, called Thelema, he adopted. He returned to the US in the early sixties and in New York made Scorpio Rising (1964), one of his most sensational and best-known works, after which he moved to San Francisco, where he hobnobbed with figures on the fringes of the sixties counterculture and embarked on his major work Lucifer Rising, a project with many ups and downs which was only finished in 1981. He released no new material for the next two decades, beginning to make new films in 2000. An avid collector of Hollywood gossip, he wrote Hollywood Babylon in 1959, and Hollywood Babylon II in 1986, two books relating the choicest, most scandalous anecdotes of Hollywood stars and directors from the silent era on. This year saw the release by Fantoma of Kenneth Anger: The Complete Magick Lantern Cycle, a two-DVD compilation of his major films which is certain to be the go-to resource for anyone interested in his work.

Fireworks opens the first disc of the Magick Lantern Cycle and shows the surrealist influence which was nearly omnipresent among avant-garde film of the time. Anger plays a young man who dreams that he approaches and is beaten and eviscerated by a group of sailors. A brutal sado-erotic fantasy showing the predilection for strong, muscle-bound types that abound in his work, the film also relays a vivid sense of the insecurity that plagued gay men at a time when anyone who dared to act on his desires was subject to police entrapment (something that had already happened to Anger) or violence. The film was reportedly prosecuted for obscenity on its release. A print of the film was purchased by sex researcher Albert Kinsey for the archives of the Institute for Sex Research (now the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction in Bloomington, Indiana), and he and Anger became close friends until Dr. Kinsey's death in 1956. His only other surviving film of the period is 1949's Puce Moment, a scene from a projected, longer homage to the vamps and sirens of the silent era in Hollywood, in which a young woman, apparently a Hollywood celebrity, chooses from her dresses and perfume and sets out with her borzois (an elegant breed of dog fashionable at the time). A fascination with Hollywood -- its artifice, spectacle and glamor, as well as the sleaze and scandal which populates the pages of Hollywood Babylon, and which is also a constant theme in gay culture -- is evident here.

Rabbit's Moon (La Lune des Lapins, 1950) and Eaux d'Artifice (1953) are the only finished and extant films Anger made during his stay in Europe, during which Anger met French writer and filmmaker Jean Cocteau (also an early admirer of Fireworks) and Henri Langlois, founder of the Cinémathèque Française, who allowed Anger to store materials and to browse the holdings of the cinémathèque. Shot on the unused soundstage of Les Films du Panthéon during the French vacances, Rabbit's Moon was the only film Anger has made in 35mm and is a fabulistic fantasy combining commedia dell' arte figures with a motif from Japanese folklore (Japanese children believe -- much as Western children believe in the man in the moon -- that a rabbit fond of rice cakes lives in the moon, and leave him snacks of rice cakes when the moon is full). The melancholy clown Pierrot offers the moon to the lovely Columbine, who rebuffs him for the wily trickster Harlequin. Shot on a set constructed by Anger, the characters were played by students at Marcel Marceau's school of pantomime. The overall look and feel of the film owes much to Max Reinhardt and William Dieterle's 1935 adaptation of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream starring Mickey Rooney, in which Anger claimed later to have appeared as a child actor (a claim which not borne out by archived studio documents). This was followed in 1953 by Eaux d'Artifice, which was originally conceived as part of a larger work on the 16th-century occultist Cardinal d'Este. The film is a visual study of the many fountains and waterfalls in the water gardens of the Villa d'Este in Tivoli in Rome, as a small, masked figure (allegedly a dwarf referred to Anger by the filmmaker Federico Fellini, chosen to make the setting look bigger) in eighteenth-century costume wanders through the gardens. Printed in cyan with hand-tinting in emerald, the film is tranquil, sensual, and delicate. Both these films are possibly Anger's most accessible and easily enjoyable, even if it is true that the water-garden footage was originally intended as a allusion to Cardinal d'Este's alleged sexual fetish for urination.

Anger returned briefly to the United States after shooting Eaux d'Artifice on the occasion of a death in the family, and renewed his ties with the local artistic-bohemian community in Southern California. Invited to a costume party held by artist Renate Druks and her husband Paul Mathiesen with the theme "Come As Your Madness," he conceived the film Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954), and asked some of the other attendees to appear in the film. The film was shot at the home of Samson De Brier, who at one time worked in Hollywood but had since become a recluse noted for his collection of jewelry, curios, Oriental furniture and artworks. In the film a number of figures from the Egyptian and classical pantheons gather and share a magical, vision-inducing potion. De Brier appears in the film in a number of roles, including Osiris, Shiva, Nero, Cagliostro and the Great Beast 666. Others in the cast include Marjorie Cameron, widow of American Crowley disciple Jack Parsons, Curtis Harrington, a boyhood friend of Anger's and a fellow filmmaker who began with experimental works and became a director of low-budget Hollywood films such as Queen of Blood, the novelist and diarist Anaïs Nin as the moon goddess Astarte (and whose account of the original party and impressions of Anger can be found in the published version of her diaries), and Anger himself as the Greek goddess Hekate, who brings the hallucinogenic brew. With a visual sense influenced by Art Nouveau design and glowing Kodachrome greens, reds and yellows, the film's images sometimes border on kitsch (I tend to hear Les Baxter rather than the Janacek the filmmaker chose for the soundtrack), but the imagery is also well thought-out and well paced and represents Anger's first successful attempt to convey in film the Crowleyan mythology he had been studying as well as Crowley's emphasis on spritual exploration through drug-induced trances and sexuality. Inauguration also pioneers cinematic psychedelia with its heavy use of multiple superimpositions. The film was praised and won prizes in Europe, and he would prepare a special three-screen version for the 1958 Brussels World Fair, as well as a "Sacred Mushroom Edition (intended to be experienced under the influence of hallucinogenics) in 1966.

Anger returned to the US in the early sixties, and his vision became less surreal and precious, and more harder-edged and montage-oriented. Probably Anger's best known and most popular film, Scorpio Rising (1964) follows the lives of a loose group of motorcycle enthusiasts he found hanging out under the roller coaster at Coney Island in New York City. He filmed them working on their bikes, preening, fooling around at an impromptu beer-blast, and racing at a bike rally where one of the competitors wiped out on his bike, fatally breaking his neck in front of Anger's camera. He embellished the verité portions of his footage with Nazi iconography, images from popular culture alluding to death and rebellion, footage of a cheap religious film of the life of Jesus Christ that had been mistakenly been delivered to his doorstep and which he incorporated into the film, and Tom Of Finland-esque images of muscular bikers in black leather. He particularly followed one of these bikers, a blond, speed-snorting, comics-reading, James Dean-obsessed ex-marine named Richard McAuley, or Bruce Byron, depending on who you believe, but who was called Scorpio after his astrological sign (a sign referring both to the sex organs and to machinery), as he primps, goes out, and harangues, Nazi-style, an imaginary audience in a derelict church. Set to a soundtrack of pop songs by artists such as Bobby Vinton and Peggy March, the film builds, montage-style, a vision of youth culture as a gathering force with the potential to overturn the old Christian order. By any standard, Scorpio Rising was a sensational film: if Fireworks made some people take notice, and Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome garnered accolades, then Scorpio Rising made Anger an out-and-out celebrity in the world of underground film and in the rising counterculture of the sixties. He moved to San Francisco where he made Kustom Kar Kommandos (1965), a film initially conceived as something of a Scorpio for the custom car culture, but which ended up as a three-minute film of a young man polishing his hand-built dragster, set, like Scorpio, to a popular song (the Paris Sisters' "Dream Lover"), with equal fetishistic attention given to both his tight jeans and the powerful, exquisitely crafted machine he has built.

In San Francisco Anger networked with the counterculture forming in the area, performed public rituals at the Straight Theater, and began to conceive a new film, Lucifer Rising, a film intended to evoke the god Lucifer, not the Devil of Christian mythology but a being of light and beauty heralding a sort of millenial period called "the Aeon of Horus" by Crowley. Believing that the person who would play Lucifer in his film must be a living embodiment of Lucifer, he at first thought he found his Lucifer in a struggling young musician, Bobby Beausoleil, who agreed to appear in the film on the condition that he be allowed to form a group to record the film's soundtrack. The relationship between the two men resulted in a falling-out, after which Beausoleil became involved with Charles Manson and his "Family," and went to prison after carrying out a murder at Manson's bidding. Anger went to London in 1968, where he met the Rolling Stones' Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, and Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page, who was also interested in Crowley. He used much of the footage he had shot for Lucifer Rising, as well as footage shot in London, for Invocation Of My Demon Brother (1969). Set to a soundtrack improvised by Mick Jagger on a recently-acquired Moog synthesizer, Invocation is a twelve-minute montage of ritual, arcane symbols, footage of Jagger, Richards and Richards' girlfriend Anita Pallenberg, and young men sleeping and wrestling, all running past the viewer as quickly and furiously as a tab of DMT, ending with a joke uncharacteristic of Anger as a dressed-up lawn jockey holds a sign: "Zap You're pregnant That's witchcraft", and all bracketed by three circles arranged in a triangle, first pointing upward, then pointing downward as though to mark the close of the ritual; Anger has always considered his films to be magical invocations; he has been quoted comparing making a film -- any film -- to casting a spell, and he has also referred to cinema as his own "magickal weapon."

Meanwhile Anger still intended to make Lucifer Rising, and managed to obtain a grant of £15,000 from the British National Film Finance Corporation, which enabled him to shoot scenes in Egypt and in Germany as well as in Britain. He initially wanted Mick Jagger to play the part of Lucifer but eventually found a young steel-worker named Leslie Huggins to play the part. After initially enlisting Jimmy Page to record the soundtrack, the two men had a quarrel and Anger decided not to use Page's music, and Bobby Beausoleil, now serving his time in prison, and with whom Anger had reconciled in the meantime, wrote and recorded a progressive-rock soundtrack with the help of fellow inmates and an advance for equipment from Anger. The film opens with Isis and her consort Osiris; we also see Lilith, played by Marianne Faithfull, and an adept played by a Canadian biker named Hayden Couts, and Anger himself plays the Magus, abolishing Chaos (played by a dotty old man named Sir Francis Rose, once a Crowley associate) from the magic circle, all cut with footage of volcanoes erupting and images of Huggins as Lucifer in a rainbow-colored jacket. Here my grasp of the esoteric symbolism fails me, but the film flows with a stately pace and shows what Anger could do with a real budget (large enough to make a small indie feature). Special effects such as a flaming opening title and flying saucers appearing over one of the giant Egyptian monuments appearing in the film (something which Anger claims actually did happen during the shoot and which he took as a sign) were supplied, gratis, by Wally Veevers, who was a member of Stanley Kubrick's special-effects crew in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Osiris was played by Donald Cammell, who directed Jagger and Anita Pallenberg in the film Performance.

Lucifer Rising was shot around 1970 and was only completed in 1981. He came out of his period of retirement from filmmaking in 2000 and has made a number of shorts over the past decade, one of which, The Man We Want To Hang (2002), a short documentary of an exhibition of Crowley's paintings and drawings, is included on The Complete Magick Lantern Cycle.

Anger, now 83, lives in Los Angeles, a proud (often to the point of vanity) and mercurial (sometimes to the point of malice) and fiercely independent artist who has stuck to his guns and his own vision over six decades. He has also prepared but not published (due to a section on Tom Cruise and the notoriously litigous Church of Scientology) a third volume of Hollywood Babylon. His official website can be seen here.

In addition to the major works of Anger's career (all digitally restored) and the more recent film The Man We Want To Hang, Fantoma's two-DVD set of Kenneth Anger: The Complete Magick Lantern Cycle includes commentary on all films by the filmmaker, in addition to an alternate soundtrack to Invocation of My Demon Brother (using recordings made by the band Bobby Beausoleil assembled for the original version of Lucifer Rising), restoration demonstrations, and a booklet featuring appreciations by directors Martin Scorsese, Guy Maddin, and Gus Van Sant, along with an account by Bobby Beausoleil of his relationship with Anger and the recording of the Lucifer Rising soundtrack.