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.

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 Olga Series (1964)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kenneth Anger: The Complete Magick Lantern Cycle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stupid white people.

A friend has been after me to start a Facebook account, which I intend to do at some point, when I actually have the time. Or at least, that was the plan... then I discovered People Who Said Nigger Today, a blog that shows screenshots of white people (with a couple of exceptions) using the n-word on their Facebook walls. And with few exceptions, these people are posting under their own names, proud to proclaim themselves as fearless individualists defying the political-correctness police by pronouncing racist epithets, repeating unfunny ethnic jokes, and defying the wrath of the Islamic world ("FUC ALLA") in unpunctuated tweet-speak, served up with snarky comments. This page will take your breath away, and then depress the hell out of you as it slowly dawns how many of your compatriots are walking billboards for Ugly America.

Today the blog has a whole raft of "sand nigger" posts as the nation remembers 9-11.

The blog has been in existence only since the beginning of the month, allowing you to read pretty much all the posts at a sitting, after which you will stand up a confirmed misanthrope. This stuff tends to lead me into a paranoid fantasy that someone hatched a plan a generation or so ago to grow a compliant, docile populace by making it progressively more ignorant, superstitious, self-absorbed, anxious, angry and fearful. If so, it seems to be working like a charm. Read it and scream.

Hey Nifty!

Just learned from Metafilter that Alex Cox, who directed Sid And Nancy and Repo Man, and who also presented a cult film program, Moviedrome on the BBC for a number of years, has some free stuff on his site for the downloading, including his book on spaghetti westerns, 10,000 Ways To Die, and a number of his informative Moviedrome introductions (in pdf format), and some Quicktime clips.

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.

Child Bride (aka Child Bride of the Ozarks, Dust To Dust) (1938)

Child marriage in the mountain hinterlands is the topic of this low-budget exploitation film, billed as "A throbbing drama of shackled youth." Progressive schoolteacher Miss Carol (Diana Durrell) fights to abolish the institution of child marriage in her native community of Thunderhead Mountain with the help of her fiance Charles (Frank Martin), who works in the state capital as an assistant state's attorney, while crooked moonshiner Jake Bolby (Warner Richmond) schemes to wed young Jennie Colton (Shirley Mills) by framing her mother for her father's murder, much to the dismay of Jennie's sweetheart, Freddie (Bob Bollinger).

Sensation and scandal were the stock-in-trade of exploitation films, which were made on low budgets by independent studios and producers. Like many exploitation films of the time, it used socially redeeming messages to justify the showing of titillating content that the large studios, who subscribed to Hollywood's self-regulating Production Code, wouldn't touch. These films were calculated to be shocking, but their shock value usually diminished over time until they eventually came to be appreciated by audiences mostly for their unintended humor. In contrast, Child Bride might well be more shocking to viewers today than it was intended to be by its makers, director/screenwriter Harry J. Revier and producer, Raymond L. Friedgen.

What makes Child Bride shocking today is its flirtation with pubescent eroticism, the only non-standard feature of an otherwise standard poverty-row potboiler. Twelve-year-old Shirley Mills occupies center stage on two levels: an actress whose talent is immediately appearent, her Shirley Temple-like style of acting and irrepressible presence standing out in the midst of a mostly mediocre cast, but also a nymphet costumed in obviously outgrown dresses which highlight her legs and budding breasts. She also shows more skin in this film than would have been possible for an adult actress at the time, mainly in a swimmin'-hole sequence in which she is spied upon by Jake. It's a sequence that, to my mind, is more sensual than sexual when viewed in context, and shows her innate propriety and natural lack of shame. It also spotlights Jennie's puppy-love relationship with Freddie, which is affectionate and intimate without being sexual, but it's also a sequence that no amount of defense will redeem to someone determined to find something inappropriate (to give some context, art-house director Catherine Breillat, in her films of recent decades, treats the theme of pubescent eroticism more seriously, and more explicitly: compared to films such as 36 Fillette and Fat Girl, Child Bride comes out looking like Little Women). It has to be said about Jennie that there is nothing sexually precocious about her character, nor is she shown to be an object of lust to anyone but Jake, who's had plenty of chances to be pegged as a villain by this time, and it goes without saying that she comes through her experience in the film with her innocence and faith in human nature intact.

The film's treatment of Jennie hits present-day sensitivities in a way that nearly guarantees that we forget the other elements of the film: the lurid melodrama, the cartoonish picture of mountaineers, the confusing and sudden finale, in a word all the bad-movie characteristics we have come to cherish. Actually, the outdoor scenes are effectively and beautifully shot, and if the characters are mostly corn-pone stereotypes, the extras used in this picture have an appropriately hard-bitten look that suggests the hard life of the mountains. Some typical bad-film moments include Charles's pleas to the governor to support anti-child marriage legislation, Miss Carol's narrow escape from a tarring and feathering by Jake and his henchmen for stirrin' up trouble, and the appearance of midget Angelo (Angelo Rossitto, credited as Don Barrett) along with his dim, oversize buddy Happy (Al Bannon), along with a typically jolly Rin-Tin-Tin-like dog named Ritz.

The film benefits greatly from Shirley Mills's (b. 1926) appearance, which was her first in films and shows her as a skilled professional even at the age of twelve. She went on to a busy career in the forties and fifties in films and later, television, a career highlight being John Ford's The Grapes of Wrath (1940) in which she appeared as Ruthie Joad. In addition to acting in feature roles, she was a talented dancer and appeared in several films during the war with a dance group called the "Jivin' Jacks and Jills." She also worked in photo and ad modeling, night clubs and the stage. She went into business in the sixties, first in the computer data processing field and later as an independent entrepreneur. After retirement she made frequent appearances at movie conventions. In 2009, the 83-year-old Mills ceased to make public appearances due to bad health. We wish Ms. Mills all the best. Her official website has a page devoted to Child Bride as well as to other films of her career.

Because the film has passed into the public domain, I found this film at the Internet Archive, where it is hosted in a few formats including one suitable for burning to DVD. But according to the Internet Movie Database, the film is also available commercially on DVD through Amazon.

Laura (1944)

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

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

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

Further notes on the stars:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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