Lolita (1962)

After European émigré writer and academic Humbert Humbert (James Mason) confronts depraved, hedonistic playwright and screenwriter Clare Quilty (Peter Sellers) in his rambling, disordered house and shoots him to death, we see the events leading to the murder unfold in flashback. Humbert, four years earlier, stops in the suburban New Hampshire community of Ramsdale for the summer before taking up a teaching appointment in Ohio, and lodges in the house of widow Charlotte Haze (Shelly Winters). Charlotte is immediately smitten by Humbert's old-world charm, but he is captivated by Charlotte's teenage daughter Dolores, nicknamed Lolita (Sue Lyon). Humbert deflects Charlotte's advances until he can figure out a way to stay close to Lolita, and decides to allow Charlotte to believe that her feelings for Humbert are reciprocated. He agrees to marry Charlotte while Lolita is off at summer camp, but his plans are threatened when Charlotte discovers his true feelings. As he puzzles out how to deal with this, fate intervenes and Charlotte is hit and killed by a car. Humbert collects Lolita from camp and the two embark on a cross-country motor trip, in the course of which Lolita initiates their physical relationship. As they wander, Humbert begins to suspect that they are being followed by a mysterious man, unknown to him, but apparently uncannily aware of the nature of Humbert's feelings for Lolita. They settle in Ohio at the end of the summer as Humbert begins his new job and enrolls Lolita in school, but he is frightened by another encounter with the man and they once more take to the road, with the man in pursuit. Lolita is suddenly taken ill and is admitted to a hospital, then vanishes before Humbert can check her out. She remains missing until three years later, when a letter arrives from her, now married, pregnant and in need of money. Traveling to see her, he learns what has become of her and learns from her the identity of the man who took her away from him and how their subsequent relationship ended.

Vladimir Nabokov's novel Lolita was first published in 1955 and rapidly became the decade's most controversial bestseller, and one which finally gave its author a measure of financial independence. Nabokov (1899-1977) was born in St. Petersburg to an affluent, socially prominent and cultivated family descended from minor Russian nobility who fled Russia with the Bolshevik revolution and eventually settled in Berlin via the Crimea, France, and Britain, where Nabokov attended Cambridge. In Berlin Nabokov acquired a reputation among Russian exile literary circles as a poet and novelist, and with the outbreak of World War II, settled with his wife and son in the United States, where he began to work as a university lecturer and to write in English. Lolita was his third English-language novel, and after initial hostility from critics who found the book's narrative of a middle-aged man's obsession with a young girl unpalatable, and a reputation among readers as a "dirty" literary work in the vein of Ulysses and Lady Chatterley's Lover, the book was eventually hailed as one of the great novels of the twentieth century, full of linguistic and literary puzzles, allusions, wry observations on American culture, dark humor and tragedy. The book's title became a common expression for a sexually precocious young girl, or alternately a young girl who is the focus of middle-aged men's infatuation, and the book also gave the language the word "nymphet," a term of Nabokov's coinage meaning a girl on the cusp between childhood and pubescence.

In bringing Lolita to the screen, director Stanley Kubrick had more to deal with than the novel's mostly undeserved reputation as an "erotic" novel (it is better described as a novel with erotic elements, mostly in the opening chapters of the book) and the shocking premise. The book, and the screenplay Nabokov wrote a couple of years after the book's appearance (a screenplay that Kubrick found mostly unusable and rewrote with producer James B. Harris, though Nabokov was credited as sole screenwriter), did not assume the moral simplicity that was enshrined in the Hollywood film industry's Production Code. The novel and screenplay dealt not only with a sexual relationship between a mature man and a young girl, but also with the sexuality of young people and sexuality outside of marriage, striking more or less at the heart of the Code, which existed, in part, to validate current standards of morality. Most Americans were increasingly aware that a gap existed between how sexuality and gender were discussed in popular entertainment and how they played out in personal experience. Chances are, most of these same Americans were probably not yet willing to demand that that gap be addressed in the media, and certainly, institutions like the Production Code, local censor boards and watchdog groups like the Catholic Legion of Decency were still sufficient factors in how the media addressed those issues.

One thing that Kubrick did was bring the Clare Quilty character and subplot into the foreground of the story: he altered the order of scenes so that Quilty's murder begins the film and the subsequent events lead up to it. He found the Quilty character and his role as Humbert's double one of the book's most fascinating themes, and emphasizing this aspect of the story also served to retain the interest of the audience after the question of Humbert and Lolita's relationship is answered. He also omitted just about all of Humbert's backstory -- his lifelong attraction to nymphets and the formative sexual experience with a childhood sweetheart underlying it -- as well as the more unpleasant aspects of his personality, He also raised Lolita's age from twelve to fourteen -- the minimum age that the censors would accept for a girl who is sexually active, and cast a fourteen year-old girl who looked more mature than her age.

He also toned down the eroticism of the novel and turned up its dark, ironic humor and sardonic observations on American sexual hypocrisy. Charlotte Haze is a lonely and sexually frustrated woman whose protested fidelity to the memory of her spouse does not prevent her from having an afternoon fling with Clare Quilty after a speaking engagement with her women's club (an encounter of which Quilty recalls only having met Lolita beforehand), any more than it prevents her pursuit of Humbert. Charlotte's neighbors, the Farlows, reveal themselves, through code-words like "broad-minded," to be enthusiastic suburban swingers: they even send their daughter, Lolita's best friend Mona, off to summer camp every year to facilitate their spouse-swapping. Charlotte, in order to pursue Humbert without interference from Lolita -- whom she seems to regard less as a daughter than as a rival -- packs her off to this camp as well, which is called Camp Climax, and is where Lolita has her first sexual encounter with a boy. Lolita starts off her seduction of Humbert (rather than the other way around) by playfully confessing her summer-camp experience to Humbert. Quilty has a conversation in the lobby with the sniggering night desk clerk, Mr. Swine, who comes across something like a pimp or pander. And Lolita herself plays Humbert against Quilty, whom she finds attractive for his sophistication and his artistic accomplishments, in other words for much the same star-struck reasons her mother was attracted to him and carries on an affair with him after leaving Humbert, only leaving when Quilty demands she participate in his depraved lifestyle, including appearing in the pornographic "art films" which are his hobby. The most orthodox relationship in the book and the film is only seen at the end, when Humbert encounters Lolita for the last time, pregnant and married to Dick (Gary Cockrell), an earnest but struggling laborer who knows nothing about her past. What is astounding is that all this lurid Peyton Place soap-opera is expressed quite indirectly, though the viewer never mistakes what is meant. The best innuendo in the film must be in the early scene of prospective lodger Humbert being taken through the house by Charlotte, and being thoroughly unimpressed by her inane chatter about her fine art reproductions and her prize-winning cherry pies until he begins to politely beg off, when she desperately tries to hook him with a view of the back garden, where he sees Lolita for the first time and immediately agrees to move in. When asked what was the decisive factor, he improvises the answer "Your cherry pies!"

Neither the novel nor the film offer much insight into the character of Lolita: the novel is mainly concerned with Humbert's dysfunctions and mental instability, his rationalizations and his attempts to recapture his own past, while the film focuses on the dark humor of the situations and gives a detached, ironic picture of human relationships divorced from sentiment. Lolita's character is more humanized in the film because of the nature of the medium, but Lolita's own feelings are not given center stage in either book or film: she is not so much a person as a way things happen, as well as a prize the possession of which is contested by the film's adult protagonists. The storyline of Lolita is a parody of a love story, and is not meant to be a cautionary tale about messing with minors. Lolita's lack of a point of view has been extensively considered by critics of the book and the film, and has also been considered in various other adaptations of the book and in derivative works such as the 1995 novel Lo's Diary. Iranian writer Azar Nafisi also wrote in her memoir Reading Lolita In Teheran about teaching Western literature, including Nabokov's book, in a women's reading circle in the Islamic republic and draws parallels between Humbert and Lolita's relationship and life in Iran.

Lolita was the first film made after Kubrick, in search of greater creative freedom, relocated to the UK. Some rear-projection, connecting and establishing footage was shot in the US, mainly on streets and roads, with the balance of the film being made on British soundstages, using mostly Canadian and American actors based in the UK. There are some trademark Kubrick visual flourishes, such as the backwards tracking shot, but the shooting style of the film remains mostly in the traditional Hollywood mode.rather than the classic wide-angle style associated with Kubrick's later films. He would return to the theme of sexual obsession in his last film Eyes Wide Shut (1999).

Further notes:

• Even with the film's attempts to make Charlotte Haze unlikable, Shelly Winters (1920-2006), who began as a chorus girl and developed into an actress whose loud, brash public image belied a subtle and sensitive talent, gives a performance as sympathetic as her character is unattractive. My own familiarity with her work is sketchy, and so my experience of her is rather eclectic: I liked her in Mambo and Night Of The Hunter (both 1955), and in a film adaptation of Jean Genet's The Balcony (1963).

• Like Richard Burton, James Mason (1909-1984) was known as a "classy" British actor who starred in some great films and some real turkeys. In addition to some fine moments, such as that opposite Judy Garland in A Star Is Born (1954) and North By Northwest (1959), he also appeared in Mandingo (1975) and The Boys From Brazil (1978).

• Working initially in his parents' stage comedy act and serving in the Royal Air Force in World War II as a camp entertainer, Peter Sellers (1925-1980) came to prominence in the fifties as a writer-performer on the long-running BBC radio series The Goon Show and in a number of British films, At times, Lolita seems more than a little indulgent of his prodigious gift for creating and inhabiting characters -- much of his dialogue seems ad-libbed or at least very freely interpreted -- but his performance as Clare Quilty is creepy and funny and furnished much of the comic aspect of this black comedy. Sellers bettered this performance when he worked again for Kubrick in 1964, playing three separate roles in Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb; the same year, he also created his most memorable character, Inspector Clouseau, in The Pink Panther. He continued to work through the sixties and seventies -- including a number of Pink Panther sequels -- before giving the performance of his career in the 1979 Jerzy Kosinski adaptation Being There.

• Sue Lyon (b. 1946) had done modeling work and appeared on television (The Loretta Young Show, Dennis The Menace) before appearing in Lolita, which appears to have been the moment that defined her career and her image; she appears forever destined to be associated with the heart-shaped-glasses-and-lollipop image of the film's poster (the glasses and lollipop don't appear in the film, by the way). The film netted a number of nominations in different categories for the Academy Awards, BAFTA, Golden Globe, and Venice Film Festival, but Lyon was the only one to actually win an award -- a Golden Globe for Most Promising Newcomer. Though she continued to work on and off in films and television until 1980, her major film roles came in the years immediately following Lolita (Night of the Iguana, 1964, 7 Women, 1966, and The Flim-Flam Man, 1967). Along with ups and downs in her acting career came also a number of personal setbacks and difficulties, including marriages and divorces, some physical injuries and difficulties with manic-depressive illness. Retired from acting, she shuns interviews and the limelight generally.

• The pop tune playing on Lolita's transistor radio when she and Humbert first meet was composed by Nelson Riddle and was meant to parody what most people thought of teenage-oriented pop music at the time -- childish, vapid and kitschy, with nonsensical lyrics. Nevertheless, under the title "Lolita Ya Ya" and released under Sue Lyon's name, it became a hit single, and a cover version by instrumental surf-guitar group The Ventures also became a popular and much anthologized tune. The novel and its eponymous character has also been worked into popular songs by the Police, Katy Perry, Celine Dion, Marilyn Manson, and others.

• After the success of Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov relocated with his wife to Montreux in Switzerland, where he lived and wrote for the rest of his life. Some of his works from this final period include Pale Fire, Ada, and Look At The Harlequins!

• Nabokov's novel was brought to the big screen again in 1997, with Humbert being playd by Jeremy Irons and Lolita by Dominique Swain. While truer to the book than Kubrick's, the film lacked the comic bite of the original, opting to play it straight. The film's release was delayed due to the subject matter and the film more or less flopped at the box office. The novel has also been adapted to the stage many times and has also inspired derivative literary works and parodies.

I viewed Stanley Kubrick's Lolita on Warner Home Video's 2007 DVD package, which includes theatrical trailer, English and French soundtracks, subtitles, and a list of awards and award nominations.

Branded To Kill (1967)

Elliptical, surreal, and absurdist, Branded To Kill is an assassin film stripped down to the essentials and twisted to near-unrecognizability as a genre film. Although the plot is actually very simple (when an assassin botches a job by accidentally killing a bystander rather than his target, he is marked for death by his employers), the film takes more than one viewing to really take in, and more viewings only underline the weirdness of the film that ended director Seijun Suzuki's career at Nikkatsu.

Goro Hanada, played by Nikkatsu action stalwart Jo Shishido, is known as "Number 3," his ranking among assassins. Just back from vacation with a new bride in tow, he is in need of money and takes on a job picking up a man (Koji Nanbara) and keeping him protected while delivering him to his destination. Having finished the job, his car breaks down and his is picked up by a mysterious, death-obsessed woman, Misako (Annu Mari), who returns with a proposition for the fatally botched hit. Now a marked man, he is nearly killed by his wife, who is having an affair with his superior Yabuhara (Isao Tamagawa), and then Misako, with whom Hanada has fallen in love, attempts to kill him, hoping to die herself in the process. He escapes, as he does from subsequent setups against his opposite numbers in the organization, until he finally faces the Phantom No. 1, the master assassin whom no one has seen.

Born in 1923, Seijun Suzuki first learned the ropes of cinema production at Shochiku in the late forties after taking an exam to become an assistant director, but by the early fifties, the long lines of ADs waithing to direct their first films at Shochiku left Suzuki with few prospects for career advancement with that company. Nikkatsu, to this day Japan's oldest existing film company, had lost its film production unit in the early forties in a government-mandated consolidation of the film industry, but in the early fifties the domestic market was favorable enough for Nikkatsu to seriously consider starting up film production again. The career tracks were faster and the pay was better, so Suzuki went over to Nikkatsu and by 1956, he was directing films.

Suzuki hit on his signature style in 1963 with Youth of the Beast: a mix of slick, colorful visuals and strange juxtapositions, frequently undercutting tragedy with black humor. But he always considered himself a director of program pictures; he was assigned his scripts and his stars, and his stated aims were always to make entertainment, not art. In pictures such as Gate Of Flesh (1964, which I discussed in these pages), Story of a Prostitute (1965), Tokyo Drifter and Fighting Elegy (both 1966), he beguiled the boredom of making by-the-numbers genre pictures by experimenting with color, framing and continuity. Suzuki had an intuitive grasp of the artificiality of narrative film without all the critical and aesthetic baggage that usually goes with such insights. He realized that as long as a film cut together, all sorts of liberties could be taken with continuity and logic and the results could still be interesting. Branded To Kill shows how many of the conventional rules of creating a coherent and realistic story-world could be ignored while still creating an entertaining film, and Suzuki accomplishes this without being programmatic or theoretical.

The violence in action films, compared with real life, is frequently fanciful: hundreds of rounds of ammunition are expended without hitting anyone, fist-fights don't result in broken noses, cheekbones, jaws or teeth (or knuckles, for that matter), swordfights in Japanese films result in aerosol sprays of blood; in the finale of Brian De Palma's Scarface, Al Pacino practically stops his own weight in hot lead, shooting all the while from an incredibly heavy-looking machine gun, before he finally succumbs. But Branded To Kill dares to be preposterous: Hanada kills one target by shooting him between railroad cars from a billboard advertising cigarette lighters, timing it so that he gets the fatal shot when the giant lighter's lid hinges up; he kills another target by shooting him in the head through the drain-pipe of a sink (a little piece of business Jim Jarmusch paid homage to in his film Ghost Dog), and escapes from another hit by floating away on a balloon. He stops one pistol shot with a belt buckle, and later a certainly fatal shot to the head with one of Misako's plastic hairbands.

Thus Suzuki deftly undercuts the pretensions of the action genre to serious dramatics, showing its relation to comedy and even farce, which is one thing that might have irritated Nikkatsu studio head Kyusaku Hori. But Suzuki doesn't stop there; one of Hanada's peculiar pleasures is the smell of cooked rice, a pleasure bordering on fetishism. Other motifs are rain, birds, and dead butterflies and moths, all associated with Misako, a death-obsessed woman who only yields to Hanada's advances when she is convinced that Hanada will kill her. A quasi-mythological creature (Hanada reaches for her in one scene and comes away with a handful of mashed-up moths), Misako is one of the creepiest and weirdest femmes fatales in cinema, using the presence of Annu Mari (whose exotic looks reportedly derive from mixed Japanese-Indian parentage) to great effect. There is also the mystery of the top-ranked killer, "Phantom Number One" who in the final act engages with Hanada in a cat-and-mouse game to end all cat-and-mouse games. After an initial siege which keeps Hanada holed up in his high-rise apartment, the two spend a day or so together in the apartment under an uneasy truce where they sleep, eat, and go to the bathroom together (a sequence which again turns the typical matching-of-wits of two killers into hilarious farce as Number One sleeps with his eyes open and urinates in his pants in order to keep his vigil on his target) until the finale in a boxing stadium. Although Number One is shown doing, well, number one, he is also a character who is apparently everywhere and sees everything.

Today, Branded To Kill is considered Seijun Suzuki's masterpiece and is often compared to the films of David Lynch, a filmmaker frequently accused of incomprehensibility on his own part, and who uses genre clichés to suit himself in an intuitive and subversive fashion. But in 1967, Suzuki was not an "artiste," but a contract director at a studio known for youth-oriented action films that was also struggling to stay afloat in a film market losing audiences in droves to television. Suzuki remarked in 1997 that by the time he did Gate of Flesh, he was being warned by the company just about every time he directed a new picture, and Branded To Kill was the last straw. He was fired by Nikkatsu, and Kyusaku Hori was quoted as saying that Suzuki's pictures did not make money, and did not make sense (though Nikkatsu did release the picture more or less as delivered to the studio). There was some outcry from students, intellectuals and film fans to Suzuki's dismissal, but to no avail. Suzuki responded by taking the studio to court for breach of contract, and eventually prevailed, though it took years and left him blacklisted by the industry for ten years.

When Suzuki returned to filmmaking, it was as an independent. He made Tale of Sorrow and Sadness in 1977, and the three films known as the "Taisho Trilogy" (1979-91): Zigeunerweisen, Heat Haze Theater and Yumeji. Suzuki's post-Nikkatsu films have been praised by critics, but are also, from what little I have been able to see or read of them, very different from his earlier periods, going much further in the direction of strainge imagery and narrative incoherence. In 2001 he revisited -- sort of -- his earlier film and made Pistol Opera, which returns -- again, sort of -- to the universe of Branded To Kill, in which the current Number 3 killer, played by Makiko Esumi (known to aficionados of more serious Japanese cinema from Hirokazu Kore'eda's Maborosi) must run the gauntlet of even more eccentric ranked assassins and meets a figure of death in the form of a cute and lovable little girl, as well as the old Number 3 -- now a retired and foolish old fart with an inflated sense of his own importance (but alas, not played by Jo Shishido). Bringing together his earlier visions of action cinema with his later work in nonsensical surreal art film, Pistol Opera makes his earlier film look almost normal. Viewers less interested than I am in the oeuvre of Seijun Suzuki, or who might have less of a penchant for the cascading torrents of surreal eye-candy, but who just like to watch beautiful, elegant and deadly East Asian femmes fatales on occasion (and I think that includes most of us) might still enjoy this picture for Esumi's performance.

I viewed Branded To Kill on the 1999 Criterion Collection DVD, which includes an interview with the director from that time, as well as a gallery of film posters from the collection of musician John Zorn, who also writes a short introduction to the film in the package's booklet. Those who are interested may also see Pistol Opera on DVD from Media Blasters' Tokyo Shock label.

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.

The Notorious Daughter of Fanny Hill (1966)

The two main centers of American sexploitation film production in the sixties and seventies were New York and Los Angeles, and the films from each city had such distinctive character that I often find it convenient to refer to East Coast and West Coast styles or "schools" of sexploitation. East Coast sexploitation had a gritty, crude, "underground" feel, while the West Coast pictures were usually slicker, more entertainment-oriented and more obviously influenced by Hollywood film. One of the exemplars of the West Coast style was producer David F. Friedman, who came to LA in the mid-sixties after a period of partnership with Herschell Gordon Lewis. He and Lewis came early to nudie movies, making such light and fluffy "nudie-cuties" as The Adventures of Lucky Pierre and Goldilocks and the Three Bares, while also making the first "gore" films that were to define Lewis's career, Blood Feast and 2000 Maniacs, as well as a prototype of what would be called the roughie, Scum of the Earth. After they agreed to go their separate ways, Friedman settled in LA where he went into business with Dan Sonney, whose involvement in exploitation movies went back at least to the forties and fifties.

Friedman's first LA film was The Defilers (1965), a slick, competently-made film directed by R. Lee Frost that further defined the roughie genre, which became one of the mainstays of sexploitation film after the initial wave of nudie movies wore out its novelty with audiences. Roughies spiced up the nudity with violence, action, and lurid stories and mature themes like crime, vice and deviance, as well as a stark black-and-white style. The film did well and was praised by his colleagues on both coasts. But Friedman was imaginative and not married to the roughie genre, and for his next film planned a nudie costume picture to be shot in 35mm color.

The Notorious Daughter of Fanny Hill (1966) had the light-hearted, humorous touch which defined many if not most of Friedman's productions, and was an early example of Friedman's interest in cross-genre hybrids. The costume picture had a long history as an old Hollywood standby and was defined not so much by period authenticity as by a conventional staginess and escapism, and most Americans had grown up on these pictures just as they had grown up on Westerns and other genres, so it was not surprising that someone would hit on the idea of giving the nudies some period flavor.

When Friedman got to work on the picture, the first legitimate American edition of John Cleland's 1749 novel Fanny Hill; or the Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure had recently been published by G. P. Putnam's Sons. Today the novel can be read both as the first full-length work of erotic fiction in English, and as an example, alongside the works of Fielding, Richardson and Smollett, of the early English novel. In the novel the eponymous heroine arrives in London a penniless orphan and makes her way as a prostitute and as a kept woman before retiring on a bequest from one of her protectors and reuniting with the man who took her first flower and to whom she has remained emotionally, if not physically, faithful. It's a charming book and surprisingly tame by today's standards, lacking crude language and with a protagonist whose attitude to sexuality is neither prudish nor reckless. It's also a book that isn't actually referred to much by the script: instead it's about the "daughter" of Fanny Hill (no offspring is mentioned in the book) and only took some period inspiration and possibly the idea for one of the sequences from the book, the rest of the script being a figment of Friedman's, writer Jim Markham's and director Peter Perry's imagination: so that the film richly deserved the description in the trailer (also written by Friedman): "After two centuries of suppression: a story that was never told, a manuscript that was never read, a book that was never published became the motion picture that could not be shown."

In the film, "Kissey" Hill (Stacy Walker), Fanny's putative daughter, spends a day entertaining aristocratic clients, seducing her gardener, and engaging in some light-hearted erotic games with a group of young blades before a surprisingly downbeat ending in which she gets her comeuppance from the jealous wife of one of the aristos. Friedman came from a carny and burlesque background and was a great believer in the value of the tease: so there is very little skin shown and the sex scenes consist of series of closeups of hands, feet, flying clothes, and faces, edited with an upbeat sense of pacing.

Director Peter Perry was, according to Friedman, a former acting student from Chicago, and his first credits in exploitation film date from 1956 as writer and associate producer on The Flesh Merchant. His Internet Movie Database listings show a baker's dozen of directorial credits, mostly in nudie-cuties or sexploitation titles, signed with pseudonyms such as A. P. Stootsberry, A. J. Gaylord, and Seymour Tokus, and with a predilection for stagey, fanciful costume pieces. In My Tale is Hot (1964) a nudie-cutie piece starring diminutive burlesque comic "Little" Jack Little as a faithful husband in spite of all the temptations the Devil, in a horned cowl, cape and trident and a lot of makeup, puts in his way, and in which is a fanciful set of Hell, where the Devil is henpecked by a shrill but sexy wife. Three films he did for Friedman's rival, Harry Novak, and his company Boxoffice International, feature a bawdy presentation of a Shakespeare play (The Secret Sex Lives of Romeo and Juliet, 1969), another devil fantasy set in Biblical times (The Joys of Jezebel, 1970) and the historical burlesque The Notorious Cleopatra (1970), all with fanciful built sets and costuming, with lots of humor and a lively sense of parody (not listed at the IMDB are films for Novak signed by Bethel Buckalew, but according to Novak, actually directed by Perry: films like The Pigkeeper's Daughter and The Dirty Mind of Young Sally). The Notorious Daughter of Fanny Hill, Perry's first costume adult film, lacks the comedy and entertaining ensemble acting of his later films, and the reviews of this film cited by the IMDB are nearly unanimous in slamming the film. Most of them are a little too snarky for this writer, who clearly sees the wafer-thin plot and the dug-out-of-a-trunk look of the art direction for what they are, but still can enjoy the film, in part because of the excellent work of cameraman Lazslo Kovacs, who would become one of Hollywood's most respected cinematographers, and for the appearance of sexploitation's mystery woman, Stacy Walker.

So the story goes, Walker (nee Barbara Jean Moore) dropped out of college in Texas to go, on a whim, to Los Angeles and was sleeping on a beach at Santa Monica Pier when she was found by Friedman, who had not settled on an actress for the part of Kissey, and who decided to hire her on the spot. A blue-eyed blonde with a strongly sexual presence and a hint of cruelty, she was intensely photogenic and had the potential to be a prolific actress in sexploitation, and might possibly have had a shot at a legitimate film career: Friedman had arranged a meeting for Walker with an executive at Paramount and discovered that Walker had vacated her furnished flat to go back to Texas. Her filmography consisted of just three films, including a short, But Charlie, I Never Played Volleyball, and a black-and-white roughie, A Smell Of Honey, A Swallow Of Brine.

The cast also included Linda Cochrane, a brunette who first worked for Friedman and Lewis in 2000 Maniacs, and then for Friedman in The Defilers. The film also featured James Brand and William Rotsler, who would appear in Perry's The Secret Sex Lives of Romeo and Juliet. A science fiction writer by trade, Rotsler also directed pictures for Harry Novak, including The Agony of Love, The Girl With Hungry Eyes and A Street of a Thousand Pleasures.

The Notorious Daughter of Fanny Hill is available on Something Weird Video's 2001 DVD double-feature package with another Friedman-produced costume piece, The Head Mistress, inspired by the tales of Boccaccio and featuring the directorial talents of another member of Friedman's stable, Byron Mabe. This is one of many SWV releases with audio commentary by Friedman, whose gifts as a raconteur and memories of the old days are even worth hearing on the first viewing of the films. The trailer gallery features spots for other period-oriented films such as Barry Mahon's own series of Fanny Hill films (Fanny Hill Meets Lady Chatterley, Fanny Hill Meets Dr. Erotico, and Fanny Hill Meets The Red Baron). Viewers who are disappointed by The Notorious Daughter of Fanny Hill and want to see Perry at his tacky, light-hearted best are directed to another double-feature DVD released in 2002 by Something Weird, The Secret Sex Lives of Romeo and Juliet, which manages to juggle a sexed-up version of Shakespeare's plot with rapid-fire humor and lots-o-girls, like an adult cross of Fractured Fairy Tales and Laugh-In, along with The Notorious Cleopatra.

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.

Alley Tramp (1968)

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

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

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

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

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

The Yellow Teddybears (1963)

Salvation Films, a UK-based video company specializing in cult films, releases British exploitation films under their "Jezebel" imprint with the tagline "Sexy Retro from the Saucy Seventies," attempting to evoke freewheeling, mod visions of Swinging Britain through colorful, retro package design and hot-cha-cha copy, however, the films included on their Sex-a-Go-Go 3-DVD set, all made before the seventies, suggest at the very least that exploitation in Britain took awhile before finally hitting its stride (at least in comparison with the trailers for other, later films the set includes on the discs). None of the films on this set are truly memorable, but all have their interest: the latest film on the set to appear, 1969's Zeta One, an improbable spoof of both sci-fi and spy films, is the film that shows the most skin (and some endearingly cheesy costuming and set design) and features a performance by Charles Hawtrey, the comedian best known for his work in the low-brow, Benny-Hill-esque Carry On films; while Secrets of a Windmill Girl (1966) began life as an attempt by producers Tony Tenser and Michael Klinger, who, as the Compton Cinema Group, had acquired London's Windmill Theatre (from the thirties to the sixties a London institution with its distinctive brand of spicy variety theatrical programs), to document the Windmill "revudeville" shows and ended as the story of a dancer's rise and fall from Windmill girl to stripper, and featured an early performance by Pauline Collins, an actress who later established herself (and received an OBE) through prestigious television and Broadway performances. Earliest, lowest on the meter in terms of salaciousness, and to my mind the most interesting is 1963's The Yellow Teddybears, the focus of today's discussion.

Painfully earnest and preachy (and -- unless we are talking about a "Continental" version of this film which also circulated for a while that featured spliced-in scenes with completely different actors -- without nudity or really any suggestive content) the film is a drama about premarital sex among teenage girls who go to a particular suburban school. The title refers to small teddy-bears which are worn by a clique of girls at the school, the significance of which is inadvertently found out by their biology teacher (Jacqueline Ellis): only girls who have slept with a boy may join the club and wear the insignia. Only a few years out of university herself and also sexually experienced, she is shocked, not because these girls are having sex, but because they are having sex for the wrong reasons, and she confronts them in class for using sexuality for competitive and status purposes instead of its deeper and more personal significances. Meanwhile, one of the "teddybears," Annette Whitley, has been keeping her pregnancy a secret, and when her attempt to obtain an abortion is discovered by her father, she runs away to London, and her enraged father blames the school for corrupting his daughter's morals.

The final scene which unfolds from this development lays the film's agenda out on the table for you, as Ellis is called to a meeting with the headmistress and the board of governors of the school for her remarks to the Teddybears, and the scene is a veritable kangaroo court of the forces of hypocrisy, respectability, and repression versus Ellis's honesty, understanding and candor, as her frank admission of having had sexual intercourse before marriage (with, it is implied here, her fiance who is a drawing teacher at the school), which was made to the girls as part of her advice against promiscuity, is inflated into charges of corrupting morals by a group of self-righteous characters obsessed with what effect this scandal might have on the school. Meanwhile a subplot concerns Whitley's classmate (Georgina Patterson) who, having sat in the bedroom with her boyfriend while he sleeps off too much drink at a party, is then mistakenly considered to have qualified for the wearing of a teddybear.

As it happens, I watched this film as the US Food and Drug Andiminstration approved a new vaccine for human papilloma virus (HPV), a sexually-transmitted disease which can lead to cervical cancer. The requirement that the drug be administered to girls before they are sexually active has occasioned a furor among parents and religious groups who are worried that inoculation against a disease that leads to some 4000 deaths a year from cancer be construed to make premarital sex seem "okay." It is a little depressing waching this film and noticing that the attitudes it shows -- that sex before marriage is some sort of taboo which must be enforced by ignorance and vulnerability to negative consequences -- are still with us today. The point that social pressure to be sexually attractive and active must be met by a response more compassionate than rigid repression allows is impassionedly made by Ellis to the governors, who present a wall of hostility, arrogance, and superiority: "You ask for charity, we ask for chastity," says one of them, a smarmy lawyer played by Raymond Huntley. Meanwhile, Whiteley, last seen hitching a ride with a creepy, randy young truckdriver on her way to an uncertain future in London, is deemed not of great importance to the school's governors, since she has left the school and the district; the possibility of scandal besmirching respectability trumping any compassionate considerations.

Director Robert Hartford-Davis never made much of a name for himself as a director, going on to make a number of other exploitation films before going to America where he directed television before passing away in the late seventies.

Gate of Flesh (1964)

The 1960s and '70s were a fertile period for genre cinema in Japan: they impress me in much the same way as Hong Kong film of the eighties and nineties do with their combination of freewheeling creativity, style, and exploitation values, and probably no other filmmaker of the period did it as distinctively as Seijun Suzuki. He began making films at the Nikkatsu studios in the fifties but hit his full stride in the early to mid-sixties. They seem weird and arty today, with lots of bright color, weird visual flourishes and a cocktail-lounge cool, but art was the last thing on Suzuki's mind when he made them. To this day Suzuki maintains that he was not motivated by visual aesthetics or symbolism, or even a particular passion for film: it was just his job. He was a B-movie director, he will say, who worked on projects assigned by the studio, projects destined for the second-feature slot on the triple-feature programs which were standard in Japanese moviehouses at the time. Nevertheless, no one made pictures quite like Suzuki, and his influence is seen all over in Japanese exploitation film.

Gate of Flesh (Nikutai no mon, 1964) was my introduction to Suzuki's work, a melodrama set in postwar Tokyo during the early months of the Allied occupation, a time when devastation and poverty are everywhere and where survival is the main preoccupation. Maya (Yumiko Nogawa), a girl who has come from the countryside looking for work, joins a group of prostitutes: in exchange for their protection, she must abide by their code of conduct, rule number one being never to sleep with a man for free. Girls who break this rule are severely and brutally punished before being turned out to fend for themselves. Into this tight-knit group comes Shin (Jo Shishido), ex-soldier and petty criminal, wounded and on the run from the Allied MPs after stabbing a GI, and his guts and charisma prove attractive to all the girls, provoking infatuation and then dissension: when Maya finally sleeps with Shin, the others turn on them both, drumming Maya out of the group and betraying Shin to the local yakuza.

Gate of Flesh was based on a novel by Tajiro Tamura which was originally filmed in 1949 and has been filmed again twice since Suzuki's version. This was intended as a vehicle for Jo Shishido, a star who was a major box-office draw and one of the more out-there of Nikkatsu's tough-guy leads, and who worked with Suzuki on a number of films and always seemed to have a handle on what Suzuki was doing. Charismatic and tough in a very Japanese way (it's been my observation that just about every culture seems to have its own distinctive flavor of tough guy, at least as far as film is concerned), Shishido had a distinctive face (thanks in large part to cosmetic surgery early in his film career), a sonorous baritone and a crazy fire in his eyes that made him ideal for heavies and especially anti-heroes. As good as he is in this film, it is Nogawa who shines in this torrid and often bitter film as her character is whipped through all sorts of extreme emotions and appears to grow up before the viewer's eyes from a hungry, frightened and childlike newcomer to a coy and flirty teenager to the heartbreak and suffering of adulthood. Misako Tominaga is also noteworthy as an older member of the group who does not share the girls' dress, aggressive "American" manners, or their simplistic view of men and sex as a meal ticket.

The strongly drawn characters make for torrid drama, but Gate of Flesh is also memorable for its expressionistic visuals, its bitter and angry view of Japan's defeat in the war, and its pioneering venture into "pink" or softcore sexual content. Much of the Suzuki look has to do with longtime collaborator Takeo Kimura, who did production design for many of Suzuki's films, and much of it also has to do with the low budgets Suzuki had for his projects and the ways Suzuki and Kimura devised to get the most out of those budgets. Postwar rebuilding had eliminated most if not all traces of the devastation of the war, leaving no suitable locations, so a set was built from a warehouseful of scrap lumber being stored on Nikkatsu's lot, using labor that was recorded as routine cleaning and maintenance. Much has been made of the "symbolic" meaning of the color coordinated outfits, a color for each character, that Maya and her fellow hookers wear, but the main purpose of single colors was simply to distinguish them from the other hookers in the neighborhood, and it led to my favorite sequence when each of the girls shares her private thoughts about Shin in settings that match their outfits and have almost no continuity with the rest of their surroundings. Also, superimposition is used to show characters' points of view and reactions, as when a closeup of Nogawa's face, both anguished and ecstatic, is superimposed over Tominaga's punishment for her liaison with a mild-mannered schoolteacher.

Gate of Flesh's view of the aftermath of the war from the perspective of the Japanese is also interesting because it differs so much from the way we especially in the US have been taught about the Occupation. In 1964, anyone old enough to attend this film would probably have had some vivid memories of the period: its hardship and poverty, and the humiliation of living under the boot of foreigners. Suzuki himself had been called up towards the end of the war, and his own wartime memories were of retreating from the Phillippines and being shipwrecked after American fighters bombed his ship, and he has recalled candidly that his own view of the Americans at the time he made Gate of Flesh was less than positive for just this reason, and the sadness, bitterness, and anger of defeat hangs over the film like a cloud. Tominaga's character is a widow who lost her husband in the war, and Maya's brother was lost in Borneo, and Shin is a constant reminder to them both. For his part, Shin is cynical about politics, as are all the characters; they have the point of view of people whose lives have been up-ended by war, and who have little time for arguing over politics. The most moving passage of the movie on the topic of the war is when Shin and the girls get drunk together and Shin, his head shrouded by a rising sun flag covered with the names of his comrades, sings a soldier's song which fades into quiet weeping, and this flag figures in the end of the film, floating in the gutter, as the camera moves up and takes a long shot of the city and the Stars and Stripes flying in the distance.

Finally, Gate of Flesh is notable as a harbinger of what would eventually become a staple of Japanese genre film: sex. While small indie producers and distributors were already making softcore adult films, Gate of Flesh was reportedly the first major-studio film to go in the adult softcore direction with its nudity and disturbingly sadistic punishment scenes, scenes that even today will not sit well with many viewers, especially in the West. Japanese genre cinema would go further in the ensuing decades, and here we see the beginnings of what would become a major trend: nudity and themes of obsession, perversion and misogyny, which is hard to justify on moral or social grounds but also puts the "sex-obsessed" Western media in some perspective.