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.