Rollerball (1975)

I think of Hollywood in the seventies as a sort of "silver age" for American cinema after the "golden age" of the Hollywood studio-system years (the 20s to the early 50s). An influx of young, film-school-trained talent, new influences from Europe and the independent film scene, and an admirable consistency in craft, style and intelligence characterizes many films in the late sixties and the first half of the seventies (Point Blank, Midnight Cowboy, Five Easy Pieces, Dog Day Afternoon, etc.), and the congenial environment for new ideas and approaches benefited many middle-of-the-road films as well, such as the one we are looking at today. It was also a fertile time for science-fiction films, as titles like 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, Silent Running, Planet of the Apes, Westworld, Soylent Green, THX-1138, and The Andromeda Strain injected social commentary into a view of the future that went beyond the space-suited clichés of the space-opera.

In 2018, corporations have replaced nation-states in a world order without war, poverty, or crime, and the global masses thrill to a spectator sport called rollerball, where two teams, on skates and motorbikes, vie for possession of a heavy steel ball shot onto the sharply-inclined circular track, attempting to get the ball into the opposing goal. The play is fast, exciting -- and violent: players can be hurt, crippled or killed in the normal course of play, which is part of the appeal for the game's fans. One of the world's top rollerball teams is the Houston team, sponsored by the Energy corporation and led by captain Jonathan E. (James Caan), who is the sport's longest-lived and most successful player. After a victory over Madrid, Jonathan is taken aside by Energy executive Bartholomew (John Houseman) and asked, quietly but firmly, to retire. For rollerball has an important social function: it is not a game in which individuals are supposed to matter, but a lesson in group effort over individual ambition, and Jonathan's success and fame are running counter to the intentions of the game. Jonathan, not comprehending why he should retire when he and his team are at the top of their game, refuses. While he refuses to budge and attempts to find out what he can on the corporate social order and how decisions are made, rule changes are announced, making the game much more dangerous and it becomes obvious to Jonathan that he may not leave the field alive.

Rollerball was based on a short story, "The Rollerball Murders," by William Harrison, who in his career as a professor at the University of Arkansas was engaged in research on management methods at multinational corporations, private entities many of which were dwarfing political states in economic size and power, and who conceived his story while watching the crowd at a university basketball game. Director Norman Jewison was intrigued by the story and paid Harrison for the film rights to it and to write a screenplay. In addition to the phenomenon of giant transnational corporations, Harrison and Jewison were also observing the increasing popularity of televised spectator sports and their escalating emphasis on violence, conflict, and warlike behavior on the playing field and among fans. American football, as well as ice hockey (a sport which the Canadian Jewison grew up on and came to regard with increasing ambivalence), were obvious models for rollerball, but there was also the phenomenon in Europe and especially the UK, where Jewison spent a lot of time, of soccer hooliganism, in which fans of rival clubs engaged in pitched battles in the stands and outside the arena. Another obvious comparison would be Roman gladiatorial games, the proverbial example of violence being used to placate the masses.

The two elements of Rollerball's premise -- multinational corporations and the exploitation of violence in mass media -- give the film a solid footing and a prescience which can be seen today, when the multinationals of Harrison's time have become even bigger and more powerful and popular entertainment has become even more atavistic and focused on violence. The film's visual impressions of the future, while dated in details (which comes with the territory: all films set in the future show their age at one point or another) still look great: Jewison's view of the future (designed by production designer John Box) recalls Kubrick's approach in his futuristic films 2001: A Space Odyssey and A Clockwork Orange with their chilly formalism -- combined in the latter with visceral violence and deft editing. Like Kubrick in A Clockwork Orange, Jewison chose his locations carefully, heading to Munich where the world's largest circular sports stadium was built for cycling events at the 1972 Olympics, and where the headquarters of BMW was located. For Jonathan's trip to Geneva to consult with the world's most advanced computer, Zero, on corporate society, the old League of Nations building located there was used.

Most memorable are the game sequences, so absorbing and yet appalling that Jewison was predictably accused of what the film opposes, exploiting violence. The uniforms, based on the gear for American football -- helmets and protective pads under numbered jerseys -- were familiar to American audiences, yet subtly alienated by the alterations: the lack of mascots or logos, the nasty-looking studs on the gloves and the helmets, and the futuristic looking font of the numbers on the jerseys. The game itself was designed by Harrison and Jewison and refined by the stunt team in rehearsal, who apparently enjoyed the game so much they played it even when the cameras weren't rolling (a man in Texas who saw the film reportedly expressed interest in starting a real rollerball league). Director of cinematography Douglas Slocombe and editor Anthony Gibbs keep the action fast and furious, while the sound design prefigures the pounding, bass-heavy presentation of more recent cinema films. The violence is jarring but mostly bloodless in the hygienic style of much Hollywood violence -- a real rollerball game would undoubtedly be much bloodier.

Offsetting the film's strong concepts and the execution of its game scenes is a frequently plodding and heavy-handed narrative. Harrison and Jewison have constructed such a difficult labyrinth for their characters that Jonathan cannot form a coherent understanding of the nature of the society that he lives in. It's an age when books are nearly extinct as the world's libraries go through a process of being "transcribed" and "summarized" into electronic form: in essence, rewritten and destroyed. The Geneva sequence shows something of this process as the head librarian (Ralph Richardson in one of the film's real treats, by turns comical, surreal, and pathetic) takes him to see Zero, the central computer, while chatting to him offhandedly about that morning's loss of the entire 13th century: "just Dante and a few corrupt popes ... poor old 13th century." Living memories of pre-corporate society are vague and selective, like those of his older friend and trainer Cletus (Moses Gunn). So Jonathan cannot develop the knowledge which might lead to a coherent opposition. His personal grievances against the corporations -- the losses of his wife Ella (Maud Adams) to an executive who wanted her and used his privileges to get her, and of his friend and teammate Moonpie (John Beck), brain dead after a blow to the head on the track in Tokyo -- are classic Hollywood, in the tradition of the movie cop who only gets serious about going after the bad guys when they do something to his wife, family or worst of all, his partner.

Therefore Jonathan's main motivation ends up being, in essence, "you're not the boss of me," which leaves his defiance of the system hollow and futile, and the much-vaunted pro-individualist message of the film rather silly. And it seems rather silly of Bartholomew and his fellow executives not to see that Jonathan's success and fame aid their cause in the long run rather than threaten it, as we see in an era of disposable cults of personality, and the cultivation of "individuality" through the consumption of dress, music and politics. They (Bartholomew and his cronies, that is) have forgotten that while their drama has played out, the masses who chant Jonathan's name from the stands are still as ignorant and passive as when it began.

Further notes on the film:

• One of the film's nods to Kubrick is its classical music soundtrack by André Previn, who conducted the orchestral selections with the London Symphony Orchestra, played the organ music (the pregame's corporate anthems and hymns, as well as J. S. Bach's Toccatta and Fugue in D Minor for the title sequence), and also came up with the futuristic music (a sort of soul groove with Moog flourishes) for the party sequence which ends with the guests recklessly setting fire to trees with a flare-gun (an indictment of the decadence and indifference of the people for whom this society is run). Unfortunately the film depends heavily on Tomasso Albinoni's mawkish Adagio for Strings at the moments when it wants to really tug on the viewer's emotions, and overall lacks Kubrick's gift for choosing music for his films that was not only apposite thematically but also fresh and unexpected.

• Rollerball was remade by John McTiernan in 2002, an awful film gutted of the original's intellectual content, elegant design and even its futuristic setting, and symptomatic of the fetish for recycling old material that has gripped Hollywood in recent years.

• James Caan (b. 1939), a longtime sports and rodeo enthusiast off the set, began in films in 1963 with a bit part in Irma La Douce, but his career only took off with his appearance as Sonny Corleone in 1972's The Godfather. His star burned brightly during the seventies, dimmed in the eighties, but revived somewhat in the nineties as he began to specialize in character roles.

• John Houseman (1902-1988) was born in Bucharest to an Alsatian father and an English mother and turned to writing and the theater in the thirties, collaborating with Orson Welles on many theater projects, most famously the Mercury Theater, which spun off into radio projects and finally Citizen Kane (1941), a project over which the two men quarrelled and split. After the war he produced many distinguished films while working as producer and director for many New York stage productions and also teaching theater at Vassar. He is best known for his creation of the redoubtable Professor Kingsfield in the law-school drama The Paper Chase (1973) a role he reprised on television in the seventies and eighties. His combination of gentility, aristocratic bearing, and daunting intellectualism was used to great effect in a series of commercials for an investment firm I remember well in which he concludes "We make money the old-fashioned way ... we earn it."

• The filmography of Norman Jewison (b. 1926) is a mixed bag, ranging from romantic comedies to musicals to satire to serious dramas, though he is reputed a craftsman whatever the value of any particular project. Born in Toronto, he began his career in British, then Canadian, then American television before turning to feature films. His films include Send Me No Flowers (1964), The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming! (1966), Fiddler On The Roof (1971), Jesus Christ Superstar (1973), ... And Justice For All (1979), and Agnes Of God (1985).

I viewed Rollerball on a 1998 double-sided DVD release from MGM Home Entertainment, containing a letterboxed wide-screen version and a pan-and-scan version, featuring dialogue and subtitles in English, French and Spanish, commentary track by Norman Jewison, a featurette made at the time about the film (what we would now call an EPK or electronic press kit), an illustrated booklet, and an "exciting interactive rollergame" which turns out to involve rearranging scrambled scenes from the film into their original order ( ... fun). No trailers, teasers or stills, but what the hell; it was cheap. I understand there have since been DVD re-releases of the film which contain more material, including a commentary track by screenwriter William Harrison.

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.

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.

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.

Quiet Days In Clichy

Quiet Days in Clichy appeared in 1970 and was stopped at the border when Grove Press, having done reasonably well with distributing another controversial film, I Am Curious (Yellow), attempted to import the film for distribution in the US. After a court battle and a brief distribution in the US, the film disappeared and only in recent years has been viewed again, and is now on this DVD put out by Blue Underground a couple of years ago.

By a coincidence, this film, made in the Place Clichy area described in the book, was being shot at the same time that another film adaptation of Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer starring Rip Torn, was being shot, also using authentic locations in a neighboring quarter. Both this film and IAC(Y) have tended to overshadow this film's reputation during its long absence, as has the court case surrounding the film, one of many battles that Grove Press's Barney Rosset fought against US censorship. Rosset was inspired to go into publishing by Henry Miller, and had fought in court to publish his books in the US, so it was appropriate for them to follow up IAC(Y) with something adapted from Miller.

Directed by Jens Jørgen Thorsen, a filmmaker, artist, and prankster associated with the Situationists and close to the radical art and intellectual life of Europe in the sixties, I liked the film for its spontaneous style and rough, underground feel, as well as Country Joe McDonald's soundtrack, but I wasn't bowled over by it. More artsploitation than art film, the story concerns an American writer named Joey (Paul Valjean) and his French buddy Carl (Wayne Rodda, who was originally Australian, as it turns out) as they live for the day, cadging meals and bedding chicks, mostly the latter. There is nothing too terribly experimental in the film apart from its frank depiction of sex which is somewhere in between the simulated writhings of sexploitation and the clinical closeups of the adult feature film of later in the decade. No politics intrudes or diatribes against the bourgeoisie or the military industrial complex, just Joey and Carl living life to the full, which apparently entails looking for "cunt" (one of Miller's favorite words) and a day trip to Luxembourg, shown mostly in stills.

Quiet Days in Clichy was probably appealing to those who wanted a movie with sex but found I Am Curious (Yellow) too boring and full of politics. It wears badly today mainly due to the sexism of its storyline and its dialogue. Miller was a long-winded writer, but blunt to the point of callousness on the subject of sex, not using any flowery circumlocutions or euphemisms, and he was very much a product of his lower middle-class, turn-of-the-century Brooklyn upbringing, as comes across right away in this film. Probably the crudest attitude comes from Rodda as Carl, who takes in a simple-minded teenage runaway and keeps her around to cook, clean and provide sex until her parents come to pick her up, and who says about one woman, "She's got a cunt like a suction pump." The persistently insensitive comments and general attitude about women was not, for me, a reason not to watch the film, but there were plenty of moments that made me cringe. You just don't hear that kind of talk anymore, or at least I don't, and there are definitely folks who don't want to hear it, and they are probably better off giving this movie a miss.