The First Nudie Musical (1976)

This bawdy cult comedy germinated in the mind of screenwriter/actor/director Bruce Kimmel during his first year in New York in 1969, where he took a day job waiting for his own break in show business. The job took him past the Times Square district, at the time a notorious tenderloin area full of adult theatres that showed "nudies" -- sexploitation films. He was amused by the titles of the films and their lack of sophistication amd conceived a musical done in the same style, and began to write songs for it, which at least -- at first, anyway -- entertained his friends. But the idea remained and after a few years he was able to write and, co-directing with Mark Haggard, shoot a film (with a distribution deal with Paramount) based on the original concept, but now about a down-at-heels Hollywood studio forced to crank out adult movies to stay afloat.

As the film begins, Harry Schecter (Stephen Nathan), the studio's producer, is meeting with his backers, who are sick of the lackluster business that the Schecter Studio's recent offerings (such as Stewardesses In Cages and Teenage Sex Mutants) are doing and who want to develop the studio lot into a shopping mall, when he has a brainstorm -- the first porno musical. The backers, half convinced, decide to let him go ahead, but give him two weeks to make the picture, or the studio's history. They also stipulate that John Smithee (played by Kimmel), a socially inept nerd who doesn't know how to make films and is not even comfortable around girls (and who is also the nephew of one of the backers), must direct the film. With almost certain disaster hanging over the project, Harry gets to work with the help of his secretary Rosie (Cindy Williams), and a cast of eccentrics including a ditzy Latina (Diana Canova), a confident, cocksure, and inept struggling actor (Alan Abelew), a corn-fed ingenue just in from Indiana (Leslie Ackerman), and the obligatory prima donna female lead (Alexandra Morgan).

The mid-seventies was probably just the right time for a project like The First Nudie Musical: while the nudies that originally inspired Kimmel had been around for years with hardly anyone in the mainstream noticing, everyone in the mid-seventies was talking about the recent advent of hardcore films such as Deep Throat and The Devil In Miss Jones, even to the point of speculating whether Hollywood might succumb to the lure of "porno-chic" and start going hardcore, so the film was timely. It was also a time of George Carlin and Richard Pryor, of the National Lampoon and also of the "midnight movies" such as Pink Flamingos and Kentucky Fried Movie, in short a time of increasingly explicit and adult humor which this film was a part of and which its success helped to encourage.

That success almost didn't happen, because as the film was being prepared for release, one of its stars, Cindy Williams, was hired to work on a new television series by none other than Paramount, the same company that was now contractually obligated to promote and distribute the film. The series, Laverne and Shirley, was a spinoff of the hit Paramount series Happy Days, and was intended to follow it on ABC's Tuesday evening "family hour" programming slate. Never mind that none of the principal actors removed their clothes for the film, or that the film was rated "R" by the MPAA and was intended for general release: Paramount determined to avoid embarrassment at any cost by not scheduling any press screenings or flashy east- or west-coast premieres and designing a one-sheet for the film that omitted the actors' names (the outraged Kimmel did finally get this last changed), and discreetly released the film to small theaters, usually without advance notice, hoping that the film would quietly die at the box office. Only it didn't. The film did very well, was sometimes held over as long as ten weeks, and influential reviewers such as Judith Crist and Newsday praised the film after actually having paid for tickets and seeing it in the theaters. Paramount finally decided to sell the distribution rights back to Kimmel and with a new New York-based distributor, the film did brisker business and became a cult favorite.

The seventies wave of adult humor of which Nudie Musical was a part might have ranged from frank and intelligent to crude and barely funny to borderline-pornographic, but the presiding spirit of this film seems to be Mel Brooks, who delighted in parodying the conventions of showbiz, and especially those of musicals. Brooks, born in a generation that didn't discuss sex openly, relies on suggestiveness and double-entendre, but the difference between his humor and that of baby-boomer Kimmel's is more a difference of degree than of kind. If Mel Brooks had been born in the era of Dr. Spock, sex education in schools, the Pill, gay liberation and the sexual revolution, it's possible that he might have come up with something like the "Dancing Dildos" number: a chorus of antebellum southern belles in see-through hoop skirts and sunhats singing the praises of "a girl's best friend" with four men dressed in vibrator costumes that make them look like missiles with feet as "director" Smithee causes havoc with a crane-mounted camera. It's a moment of inspired vulgarity in the same vein as The Producers' "Springtime For Hitler" number.

The film's pretentions to satirizing porn don't go very far, and don't really have to. In spite of numbers with titles like "Butch, Dyke, Lesbian," "Perversion," and "Orgasm," as well as the obligatory top-hat-and-tails number (about cunnilingus and called "Let Them Eat Cake"), the movie is a comedy about showbiz rather than about sex, and a showbiz comedy that's fairly old-fashioned in its humor to boot, with its "let's put on a show, kids!" storyline, likable, endearing characters and a sweet, uncynical attitude. There's a comfy, approachable feel to Stephen Nathan's harried-striver and Cindy Williams's girl-Friday relationship that's straight out of the old screwball comedies, and an impish, Harpo Marx charm to Bruce Kimmel's characterization. Critics singled out Cindy Williams for praise in this film, and rightly so: she is a remarkably subtle comic actress with an outwardly sweet, prim exterior and equal talents for verbal snark and Lucille Ball-esque physical comedy.

Further notes:

• Many of the cast, including Cindy Williams, Alan Abelew, Bruce Kimmel, and Diana Canova were friends and classmates at Los Angeles City College in the sixties.

• Ron Howard, who spent his boyhood playing Sheriff Andy Taylor's son Opie on the television comedy series The Andy Griffith Show, co-starred with Cindy Williams in George Lucas' American Graffiti, was currently star of the Happy Days television series, and at this time an aspiring director interested in any grassroots film project he happened to encounter, appears in a cameo in the audition sequence, talking with Lynne Marie Stewart, who also appeared with Howard and Williams in American Graffiti and went on to play the ultra-glamorous Miss Yvonne in Pee Wee's Playhouse.

• John Smithee's name derives from "Alan Smithee," a pseudonym used in the film industry by directors who do not wish to be credited on a film.

• A People magazine writer predicted a fabulous singing career for Leslie Ackerman on the strength of her "Lights And Smiles" number, not knowing that Annette O'Toole actually sang the song and that Ackerman couldn't sing a note: she practiced for three days in front of a mirror and came up with one of the best lip-synchs in film.

• "Dancing Dildos" was part of a sequence shot six months after the end of principal photography, on Paramount's insistence that the film sagged in the middle. The studio put up US$75,000 (about half the original cost of the film) for the shooting.

• For the week ending September 28, 1977, the industry paper Variety listed The First Nudie Musical as the fourth highest-grossing film after Star Wars, You Light Up My Life, and The Spy Who Loved Me.

• In the film, Harry advises John Smithee to bluff his way through the project by boning up on filmmaking terms and, since he's supposed to be a director of adult films, by peppering his speech with strong language, resulting in my favorite line, at the end of his first-day-of-production pep-talk: "Now, as Mr. Sheckler said, we don't have a lot of time. So I will of course expect hard work, cooperation, diligence, photography, sound and color. Shit, we could make a fucking good bitch of a bastard movie if we all pull together and work as a whore-loving cunt penis team. Thank you."

Filmed on an initial budget of about US$125,000, the film suffered from a number of technical inconsistencies (matting, different film stocks) that marred subsequent video releases, and the camera negative has been lost. The 2002 Image Entertainment DVD release, made from three prints, all rather aged, looks wonderful in all its color-corrected glory in spite of unavoidable artifacts. The film comes with commentaries by Kimmel, Williams and Nathan, an hour-long documentary with many of the cast members, deleted scenes, original trailers and a photo gallery.

Battleship Potemkin (1925)

Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin is one of the great films of the silent era and one of the films that defined the medium aesthetically. It put Russian film on the cinematic map and also made Eisenstein's name as a director and artistic visionary with its extensive use of his evolving theories of montage in cinema. It was also one of the big moments in the short history of Soviet modernism, the brief period when, galvanized by the revolution, writers, composers and visual artists in the new Russia answered the promise of a new society with new, dynamic and advanced art, making Soviet Russia, at least until Josef Stalin took over, the home of some of the most modern artistic ideas in the world.

Originally conceived as part of a series of films relating the events of the year 1905, in which strikes, uprisings and popular sentiment brought the country closer to revolution than at any time before 1917, Battleship Potemkin focuses on one of these events: on an armored cruiser on the Black Sea in 1905, sailors mutinied and sailed for 11 days under a red flag. In the film, tension between sailors and officers explodes over the quality of the food, and the sailors, faced with rifles, turn on their superiors, throw them overboard and hoist the red flag. The people of the port city of Odessa welcome the revolutionary sailors with open arms and are promptly massacred by the Czar's soldiers, for which the Potemkin shells the local military command in reprisal. The sailors of the Potemkin then learn that a squadron of ships is being sent to the area and prepare for battle, not knowing whether they will have to fight or whether their fellow sailors will join them. Potemkin's bold images and masterful cutting orchestrate the emotions of the audience as we share the comradely affection of the sailors, rage at their treatment, indignation at the massacre of civilians, and apprehension and tension as the squadron of ships approaches. Battleship Potemkin is not simply a museum piece, fodder for film historians or simple propaganda: it's also exciting and moving entertainment that engages the brain and the emotions alike.

Originally an engineering student, Sergei Eisenstein went in for the arts after serving in the Red Army during the Civil War. He first worked in theater and began to develop his ideas about montage -- the communication of emotions and ideas through the juxtaposition of visual elements -- in the context of stage production. A film buff since his student days, Eisenstein was aware of American director D. W. Griffith's innovations in film cutting which did so much to establish the unique visual language of film. Another influence on Eisenstein was his study of Japanese, and the system of Chinese ideograms on which Japanese writing is based. Gravitating towards cinema, his first feature, Strike, began to put his ideas about montage into film. Strike was not particularly successful at home, but it did well enough abroad to lead to a commission to make another feature which would result in Battleship Potemkin. Strike also introduced Eisenstein to cinematographer Eduard Tisse, who guided the inexperienced director in the practical problems of putting his visions on film and became a valued friend and collaborator for most of Eisenstein's career.

Potemkin's premiere at Moscow's Bolshoi Theater was an artistic triumph, but as was the case with most of the work of the artists of the new Soviet modernist scene, the film was still too new and too sophisticated for many ordinary Russians, and the film did less well in box office terms. But the effect of the film abroad, especially with Eisenstein's counterparts in the world film community, was nothing short of electrifying: filmmakers all over the world applauded Eisenstein's achievement and he quickly became an international celebrity.

But the export of Potemkin abroad led directly to the problem that has bedeviled the film for eighty years: censorship and the lack of a definitive version. At issue was, of course, the film's politics -- after all, this was a film from the Soviet Union, and it depicted rebellion against state and especially military authority -- and also its violence, especially in the Odessa Steps sequence, in which Czarist soldiers fire on the people. This is one of the most celebrated passages in cinema and a tour de force of Eisenstein's montage technique, but it was also unsparingly violent for its time -- a small boy is nearly trampled to death; his mother, holding his body and appealing to the soldiers, is cut down by rifles; an unattended infant in a perambulator rolls down the stairs; an old woman is slashed in the face by a sword-wielding Cossack. Before Potemkin could be shown in Germany in what was for all practical purposes the film's international debut, the German government required cuts of the most violent and inflammatory content. In this case at least, the required cuts were achieved in consultation with the director, who re-edited the film in order to accomodate the cuts without sacrificing the film's integrity, and a score was written by German composer Edmund Meisel at Eisenstein's request. When the film was shown in other countries, other cuts, not so mindful of the director's vision, were made, and the film was also subject to the prevailing political winds at home: an opening quotation by Leon Trotsky, for example, was excised after Trotsky was expelled from the Party in the late twenties. For most of the film's existence, there have been a number of versions of the film but no definitive version representative of Eisenstein's original intent.

Which is where Kino International's 2007 DVD release of Potemkin comes in. The restored version on this DVD is the fruit of decades of work, in part by Russian film historian Naum Kleinmann, who used materials in the possession of Eisenstein's widow as well as the archives of the state film school VGIK in an attempt to reconstruct the film in the seventies, and by the director of the current project, Enno Patalas of the Deutsche Kinematek, with input from the British Film Institute, the Gosfilmofond in Moscow and the Munich Film Museum. As the only film score specifically written for the film, Edmund Meisel's score is used, as adapted by Helmut Imig (the score was, after all, written for a shortened version of the film) and performed by the Deutsches Filmorchestra. The restoration was completed and premiered in 2005 in honor of the 100th anniversary of the Potemkin mutiny, and is probably the closest to a definitive version we will ever see.

Battleship Potemkin made Sergei Eisenstein world-famous, but his subsequent career was hampered by unremitting frustrations. His work in the Soviet Union was subject to increasing scrutiny from political bosses, and his independently funded project, Que Viva Mexico, collapsed amid time and budget overruns. He did manage to make Alexander Nevsky in 1938, and the first two installments of Ivan The Terrible, a projected epic trilogy of the life of Ivan IV, the king who first declared himself czar (emperor, literally "Caesar") and unified Russia in the 16th century, in 1945 and 1946. Teaching and writing provided solace for the director from the unending, frequently humiliating problems of filmmaking, but overwork and stress overtook Eisenstein and he passed away in 1948 at the age of 50.

A Chinese Torture Chamber Story (1994)

In the eighties, the government of the then-Crown Colony of Hong Kong reformed their film exhibition regulations and instituted three categories of certification: category I, for general audiences, category II, parental supervision, and category III, adults over 18 only. One motivation behind the new certifications was the desire to allow imported films such as The Last Temptation of Christ to be shown in the colony uncut, but be that as it may, the adult-only category also encouraged local film producers to push the envelope of sex and violence in their films and soon, "Category III" became a convenient handle for a particular type of HK film.

Category III films are almost always "spicy" variants of popular genres: there are category III period films, action films, crime dramas, comedies, horror films and romances, all modelled on popular trends with the addition of nudity, adult situations and graphic violence. As one might expect, Category III films are all over the map in terms of quality, tone, and mood, but like Japanese adult filmmaking, they do have a reputation for indulging cruel, even misogynistic fancies, so they can be offensive to some viewers. However, they can also offer unpredictable, weird film experiences unbound by conventional standards of taste.

And speaking of which, A Chinese Torture Chamber Story (original HK title: The Ten Tortures of the Qing) comes from executive producer Wong Jing, a man who has never let pedestrian notions of good taste stand in his way. I talked about Wong Jing a little some time back. Resolutely a commercial filmmaker, his films include relatively small, cheap productions with non-stars as well as large-budget vehicles for big stars such as Jackie Chan, but his penchant for salty, earthy humor remains consistent throughout. His passion for slapstick, absurdity, and vulgarity annoys critics and viewers who appreciate HK film for its style and its sophistication, but Hong Kongers appreciate zaniness, vulgarity, and nonsense in their entertainment to an extent that many of us overseas do not. It explains why Stephen Chow, who has been a top-billing star in HK for many years, has never really broken through in the Western mainstream with his cartoony action-comedies, and why the films to which Wong Jing gave his imprimatur divide overseas viewers.

In fact Bosco Lam, about whom I have no information, directed A Chinese Torture Chamber Story, from a screenplay by Tsui Tat-chor. The film begins with a brief overview of tortures used in Chinese history before opening on Little Cabbage (Yvonne Yung), discovered doused with blood beside the body of her husband Ge, and she is hauled before a Qing imperial magistrate accused of his murder, along with Yang (Lawrence Ng), a scholar and herbalist who had employed Little Cabbage as a maid, accused as an accessory. The magistrate insists that she and Yang were lovers who had conspired to kill her husband because Yang's wife, concerned about his attraction to her, had packed her off in marriage to Ge to avoid her seducing her husband, and compels her to confess with various tortures, but she insists that she was framed. The story unfolds in flashback as we learn how Little Cabbage came to work in Yang's house, discovers his wife's sexual insatiability, her adulterous affair with the magistrate's son and their plot to frame Little Cabbage for his murder.

The story is serviceable but is not really the point of the movie, merely offering the opportunity to linger on a sex scene here, a gag there, and various bits of shock elsewhere, substituting jaw-dropping set pieces of sex, violence, or humor for dramatic tension. Probably the most memorable moment, the moment where Wong's irreverent humor works best is Scholar Yang's encounter with a larger-than-life kung fu hero (Elvis Tsui) and his equally formidable wife who perform the marital act as though it were a kung fu battle, announcing their moves ("No-Shadow Lick from Fushan!!" being an obvious tip of the hat to the Wong Fei-hung mythos) and flying through the air in traditional sword film wirework style. This scene has apparently become a favorite clip on YouTube (can't seem to find the link... sorry!). Less brilliant but equally memorable is the night of the wedding of Little Cabbage and Ge, a parody of the potter's-wheel-and-Unchained-Melody sequence in Ghost, complete with the Righteous Brothers tune played on Chinese instruments.

Much mileage is gotten out of the size of Ge's masculine endowment, the Yang family nanny's anxiety about the size of her breasts, and the Four Lustful Instruments, the toys with which Yang enhances his wife's sexual enjoyment -- and of course exotic tortures involving contraptions of sticks and strings for crushing the fingers, beds of nails, and a stocks-like hanging cage in which the victim hangs by his skull until his neck breaks -- but like a family uncle who constantly makes tactless, tasteless remarks and passes loud, smelly farts at the table but who is still somehow tolerated, the film's constant scurrying around trying to get a reaction -- any reaction -- out of the viewer becomes somewhat trying, and taken as a whole Torture Chamber fails to quite satisfy as a whodunnit, a bit of sexy fluff or even as a good blood-and-guts gore film, going a little bit in one direction and then in another. It's more an a la carte mix of humor, violence and sex offered in little nibbles that might be tasty at times but might also leave you with a belly-ache at the end.

A Chinese Torture Chamber Story was made at a time when period films were especially popular subjects for the Category III treatment. Stars Lawrence Ng and Yvonne Yung were no strangers to this genre. Ng featured in the groundbreaking period-style erotica Sex and Zen, but he has been for the most part a versatile but middle-of-the-road actor, working extensively in television. Yung worked more extensively in category III films, and although she did diversify somewhat with more mainstream roles and a parallel career as a pop singer, she apparently never really left the category III ghetto. Neither one is a particularly charismatic presence, but Elvis Tsui plays his cameo as the kung fu/sex hero with a suitably lusty machismo, laughing heartily and drinking wine out of the jar like a real man. His character's wife is played by Julie Lee, and she's not bad either.

I first viewed A Chinese Torture Chamber Story several years ago on a VHS distributed by Tai Seng Video: it was released on DVD in 2007 in the US by Discotek Media. Part of the charm of the old VHS releases of Hong Kong films was their use of HK theatrical release prints which, by law (at least before the handover of the Colony to China) were subtitled in Chinese and English. The English subtitling of Hong Kong films often furnishes amusement by its frequently unidiomatic translation. The DVD features a fairly accurate and idiomatic translation but also has an optional "crazy Hong Kong" subtitling, taken from the original HK release, that can be selected.

(Keep in mind the following: A Chinese Torture Chamber Story is not really a date movie: it has full frontal female nudity, adult situations, and scenes of violence and torture that might induce some discomfort in sensitive viewers.)

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.

Bettie Page (1923-2008)

Some sad news today. Betty Mae Page passed away last night in Los Angeles at the age of 85.

She will be missed.

Via Metafilter.
Some classic Page images at Flickr.

OTR: Richard Diamond, Private Detective (1949-53)

I probably picked up the interest in old time radio (OTR) from my father. He was never a huge collector of programs, but he occasionally bought albums available of various radio shows, or borrowed them from the library. I recall he was mostly into old radio comedy and Westerns, and pulp-style heroes such as The Shadow. My own tastes in OTR run mostly in the direction of detective series, and one of my current favorites is Richard Diamond, Private Detective. Part of the reason is star Dick Powell (1904-1963) the first, and my favorite, cinematic interpreter of Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe character in Edward Dmytryk's Murder My Sweet (1944).

Powell's initial stock-in-trade was as a singer. Signed to Warner Bros. in 1932, he debuted in Blessed Event as a singing bandleader, and for twelve years he sang and hoofed in musicals such as 42nd Street, Gold Diggers of 1933, Flirtation Walk, and On The Avenue, often appearing opposite Ruby Keeler. But he couldn't do the boyish roles he was known for forever, and in 1944 he landed a completely different role in Murder My Sweet, and entered on a new phase in his career as a tough-guy lead in crime and detective features. He also parlayed the new persona into radio, starring in a number of detective series in the forties and fifties.

Richard Diamond, Private Detective debuted on NBC in 1949, and ran until 1953. Sponsored at first by the Rexall drug chain and then by Camel cigarettes, the series' principal producer and writer by Blake Edwards, who was later to create the television series Peter Gunn and the Pink Panther film series. Beginning with a dramatic sting, segueing into a happy-go-lucky whistled rendition of "Leave It To Love" by Henry Russell, the series combined hard-boiled action and intrigue with a light touch of humor. Richard Diamond was a wisecracking shamus who, in typical private-eye fashion, was catnip to the women, handy with a gun, got knocked over the head and roughed up a lot, and narrated the episodes Philip Marlowe-style. He also had a knack for discovering dead bodies and had an adversarial but affectionate relationship with homicide detective Lt. Walt Levinson (Ed Begley), whose stomach always cried out for a bicarb of soda when Diamond was around, and his dim sidekick Sgt. Otis (Wilms Herbert) with whom Diamond frequently traded insults. Diamond's romantic interest was socialite Helen Asher (Virginia Gregg), whose cushy Park Avenue digs were a frequent destination after a tough case, and to whom he frequently sang a song at the conclusion of the show.

Parenthetical comments: other voice talents heard on the show included Alan Reed, who also played Lt. Levinson in some episodes and who is best known to people of my age as the voice of Fred Flintstone. Also heard on Richard Diamond was Jim Backus, best known as the voice of cartoon character Mr. Magoo and as Thurston Howell III on television's Gilligan's Island, as well as a frequent comic actor in films. Also, an interesting announcement heard on some of the episodes sponsored by Camel cigarettes informs listeners that smokers pay an over fifty percent tax on the cigarettes they buy -- a whopping eight cents a pack in Federal taxes and three or four cents more in state or local taxes. More interesting than how the price of a pack of smokes has changed over the years is the tone of the announcement, implying that smokers are performing a civic duty when paying taxes on a pack of cigarettes, an attitude that has certainly changed in the decades since this announcement aired.

Dick Powell went on to a third career in movie and television production with his Four Stars production company, and from 1957 to 1960 brought Richard Diamond to television starring David Janssen. Powell passed away in 1963, his stomach cancer rumored to be the result of his work on the Howard Hughes film The Conqueror, which was filmed on Nevada land where nuclear weapons had been tested; many members of the cast and crew of this film (most notably among them John Wayne) contracted cancer later in life.

The internet-based Old Time Radio Researchers group is a collection of volunteers dedicated to documenting and preserving old radio programs, and they occasionally put together "certified" collections of programs, along with any further information available about the programs. The OTRR certified collection of Richard Diamond, Private Detective hosted permanently at the Internet Archive contains, with the exception of a few missing or repeat episodes, the complete run of the series in five .zip files each of which is roughly the size of a CD-ROM, or together will fit on a data DVD. Along with the programs, most of which are high quality 128kb MP3s apparently taken from original transcription recordings, comes a great deal of documentation, including photos, bios, scripts and other information about the series. The collection also has specially-created artwork suitable for burning discs of the programs. Single episodes from the series are also available if you don't have a fast connection or you only wish to sample a few episodes from the series.

Baba Yaga (1973)

After meeting a mysterious woman who calls herself Baba Yaga, fashion photographer Valentina (Isabelle de Funès) begins to experience strange dreams and visions and weird happenings, including the deaths of people whose pictures were snapped by one of her cameras the mysterious woman had handled. Convinced that the woman (Carroll Baker) is a witch who is trying to place Valentina under her control, she tries to convince her skeptical boyfriend Arno (George Eastman) to help her break Baba Yaga's supernatural influence.

The story of a lesbian witch who attempts to psychologically control another woman by cursing a camera and sending a familiar in the form of a doll in revealing fetishwear -- who sometimes assumes human form (Ely Galleani) to do Baba Yaga's bidding -- is also the story of compromises in terms of casting, control over the finished work, and to some degree censorship. Neither Isabelle de Funès nor Carroll Baker were Corrado Farina's first choices for the roles they played, but they did very well -- especially Carroll Baker -- under the circumstances. Corrado Farina's finished cut of the film was subjected to some irreversible (and unauthorized) negative cuts as well, and the film was contracted to a financially troubled distributor who could not promote the film properly, so the film sank at the box office and was Farina's second and last feature.

This Italian thriller was based on the comics character created by Guido Crepax, an artist whose comic strips were a great fascination for director/screenwriter Corrado Farina since they began to be serialized in the magazine Linus in the mid-sixties. Crepax's strips were some of the most sophisticated and challenging works in the medium, using a bold black-and-white style and laid out using the logic of film editing. Full of references to art, literature, psychoanalysis and classic film, they were also graphically sexual and often perverse, thoroughly modern and designed for well-read, broad-minded adults. As a filmmaker, Farina had followed the attempts of the time at films based on comic strips with interest (Mario Bava's Diabolik, Joseph Losey's Modesty Blaise, Roger Vadim's Barbarella) but found them less true to their sources than he would have liked, and decided to try his hand at a comics-inspired film more integrated with Crepax's cinema-inspired comics. As he himself admits, he was only partly successful, using sequences of high-contrast still photographs in repetitive patterns in imitiation of Crepax's graphics.

In the dream and nightmare sequences which punctuate the action, the film is a little more successful in conveying the phantasmagoria of the Valentina stories. The comics' attempt at being intellectually well-versed comes off a bit superficial in the film: Valentina's studio-apartment is modishy littered with books by Marx, Mickey Mouse, Sade, Beardsley, and there is an art book open to Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon next to the clear lucite telephone, she attends showings of films like The Golem, and the dialogue is littered with sometimes embarrassing attempts at intellectual chatter. This turned out to be the second and final feature film from Corrado Farina, so Baba Yaga remains a one-of-a-kind thriller that is stylish and interesting in spite of the compromises made: intelligent, sexy, creepy, and a suspicion of kinkiness.

Baba Yaga is available as a DVD from Blue Underground, a company specializing in European exploitation films, with an interview with director Corrado Farina, a DVD-ROM feature (a .pdf file showing comparisons between Crepax's comics and stills from the film), and a short film by Farina on Crepax's comics, Freud in Color.

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.

Teenage Cruisers (1977)

Musician, filmmaker, veteran LA scenemaker and cult film maven Johnny Legend is a jack-of-all-trades who worked in various capacities in the LA pre-hardcore skinflick scene and then in early hardcore adult features, his quick wits and gift of gab serving him well as film scorer, publicity man, maker of trailers, and finally as producer and director of films like the pre-hardcore, hippy/psychedelic/mondo-style Sexual Sensory Perception and this hardcore feature recently rereleased on DVD on his own Raunchy Tonk Video label.

The original concept was to do what was then called a "loopfest," in which short soundless 16mm hardcore films or "loops" (then commonly for sale in adult bookstores or through ads in magazines) were compiled with extra footage and/or narration to wrap it all in one cheaply made, feature-length package. But then the concept grew as Legend threw a cruising-Sunset-Boulevard theme and various subplots into the connecting material as well as enlisting friends from another project he was involved in, a band called the Rollin' Rock Rebels, one of the first bands of the rockabilly revival in seventies LA. He also threw in a couple of shorts he had made and the result was billed "the first X-rated rock 'n' roll movie."

Full of lowbrow but genuinely funny humor, the film brings together a vivacious teenager (seventies porn star Serena) eagerly and hornily waiting for her soldier boyfriend (John Galt), a "notorious nuthouse nympho" escaped from the local loony-bin (Christine DeShaffer) who raids a local adult boutique for various, ahem, items, and kidnaps stuffy teacher Dr. Flinch (Bill Margold), and perverted voyeur Willie ("Wild Man" Tony Conn) tries to pick up teenyboppers' lascivious conversations on his tape recorder, and a pair of dim-bulb cruisers (Colin Winski and Jerry Sikorsky) meet with mishaps on the Sunset Strip. Meanwhile KRUZ deejay Mambo Remus (Legend) spins rock'n'roll tracks and everyone meets up at "the end of the line" for a rockabilly rave-up.

Teenage Cruisers was not so popular with the raincoat crowd (not enough porn), but with the couples and porno-chic slummers it was a hit and did what few run-of-the-mill pornos did in the LA theaters it played, which was sell out houses. Part of it might have been the prominent billing of John Holmes and Serena, though Holmes is present only in one of the loops acquired for the film, and Serena, under indictment for obscenity at the time (as well as beginning to be visibly pregnant), decided to only shoot softcore scenes so as not to make her situation worse. Bill Margold, who in George Plimpton fashion was a writer who entered the porn industry in order to write about it, was in similar legal trouble, but decided anyway to perform with then-girlfriend Christine DeSchaffer in the only hardcore sequences actually shot for the film, as "Notorious Nuthouse Nympho Babsy Beaudine" tries to satisfy her insatiable cravings on Dr. Flinch with the aid of a forest of sex toys, a sex-instruction record, a Spanish fly and an endearing gooniness.

There is indeed a lot that is endearing about this film, in part because it is such a low-budget, garage-type project that someone and a bunch of his friends did. Johnny Legend clearly was having fun making the movie, and it shows. Shot MOS (without sound), the audio tracks being dubbed in later by Legend, along with his sister Lynnie (who appears intermittently in the film) and a couple of others, in a dense mix of little gags, throuwaway lines, and bits of incidental music that would appeal very much to today's cult-film audience. And the featured tuneage is good too, with the cream of LA's rockabilly scene contributing: Wild Man Tony Conn, Alvis Wayne, Billy Zoom (best known as guitarist for the LA punk band X), Rollin Colin Winski and Ray Campi.

Keep in mind that the film is sexually explicit and that the humor is fairly raunchy. But the sex scenes do not overpower the rest of the movie, nor is the humor nasty or mean-spirited. Johnny Legend has continued to front bands in the LA area, rerelease cult film titles theatrically and on video, appears on several commentary tracks for Something Weird Video, and making the occasional film, his most recent effort a shot on video feature combining sex and Mexican wrestling called Nympho Libre.

In other news: Thanks to Greg K. in Minneapolis for his efforts in getting me hardware-capable and back on the web and hopefully a more regular posting schedule. While I start gathering my material again after two years of a comatose computer, I will probably be spending a little time straightening the drapes and emptying the ashtrays, but more writing about film is on the stove as we speak.

Venom and Eternity (1951)

Jean Isidore Isou co-founded and was principal theorician for a postwar avant-garde movement called lettrism. So called for their emphasis on the letter as the essential element in poetics (as opposed to the word or phrase), they worked in the Paris of the forties and fifties much as the prewar European avant-garde groups such as futurism, dada and surrealism before them did: through manifestos and polemics and public events such as recitals of lettrist poetry, which usually took the form of rhythmic repetition of vocables divorced from lexical meaning. Today they are remembered more for their attitude than for their contributions to aestheitics and culture -- Greil Marcus writes about them as a sort of prototype for the punk subculture in his book Lipstick Traces.

Isou's ideas extended into other areas than literature, and Venom and Eternity (Traité du Bave et d'Eternité) is an example of his idea of "discrepant cinema," the deliberate sundering of the unity between sound and image in film. Perversely, from the standpoint that film is usually considered a visual medium, Isou privileges the heard over the seen in Venom and Eternity supplying a coherent narrative through dialogue and narration on the soundtrack while the visual component consists of randomly selected stock footage, black and white leader, footage of Isou walking through the streets of Paris, and cameos of various leading lights of French literature and film (such as poet-filmmaker Jean Cocteau and novelist André Maurois). As the film runs the visuals progressively become more fragmented and incoherent as footage is repeated, run backwards and upside down, and embellished with scratches and paint. Meanwhile the narrative on the soundtrack, concerning a young filmmaker named Daniel recalling his debate on the aesthetics of discrepant cinema with a hostile crowd in a cinema club and going on to musings mostly on his relationship with his girlfriend Eve, ticks along nicely like a radio play with visual accompaniment, making this film one of the more accessible that I have seen.

Venom and Eternity is intriguing for its rejection of assumptions shared by conventional and experimental filmmaking alike. But from the perspective of today, where yesterday's avant-garde technique is tomorrow's music video or commercial for soft drinks, questions can still be asked about the film: for example, why should the soundtrack be so coherent and straightforward, given the author's advocacy for poetic language and speech liberated from sense? Why is the material chosen so autobiographical in nature, or at least why does it seem so? Wouldn't lettrist poetry or texts have been an equally appropriate choice, if not more so? The basic idea of discrepant cinema is interesting and also inviting to the non-professional: theoretically you could do it without a camera -- today, you could do it without film. The film questions audio-visual unity, to an extent it questions narrative, and it certainly questions image. It does not question authorship though, and it doesn't question the romantic myth of the artist as visionary. All this leads for me to the almost unavoidable identification of the author Isou with his fictional mouthpiece Daniel -- what with Daniel's advocacy of discrepant cinema and lettrism coupled with the countless instances of Isou's handsome mug ( Isou definitely pioneered the Elvis look before its time) through the film -- and to a hard-to-miss sense of egotistical self-promotion which, given Daniel's high-handed treatment of his opponents, his emotional callousness towards the women in his life, and his general appearance of being a loudmouthed jerk, gives the film an unpleasantness that's difficult not to carry to the author. But maybe that's just me.

Films of the week 4

Zatoichi (dir. Takeshi Kitano, 2003). The Zatoichi series was the longest-running and most perennially popular chanbara or period sword-film of the sixties and seventies, beginning in 1962 and running for some 27 installments, in which the itinerant blind masseur of the title uses his mastery of the cane sword on behalf of the common people he meets on his travels through late Edo-era Japan against brutal yakuza clans and corrupt feudal officials. The series populist appeal was what made it unique, then in the theater and now on video, so it was natural that someone, in this case Takeshi Kitano, whose stock is high both in the Japanese entertainment industry and among Western fans of Asian film, would try to revive the character. However, in spite of his success with the public at home and among festivalgoers, I wish I liked this film more. The script is very good; Zatoichi's cleanup of a rural town torn apart by rival clans of yakuza is very much in the tradition of the series, but Kitano as Zatoichi is a lot less approachable than Shintaro Katsu, who played the character in the series. The blind masseur was a mix of crafty peasant and lone outsider, played with more than a dash of self-deprecating humor, an everyman who just happened to be very good with a sword, while Kitano plays him more as a swordsman who happens to be a blind masseur, a shift in emphasis which makes all the difference. It's the supporting cast here, and some good, well-placed bits of slapstick, that makes up for Kitano's lack of likability, and the closing finale, a festival dance that combines Western-style tap dance, also helps warm up the film a little. And while it might be a tossup as to whether this film's CGI-enhanced violence or the pressurized blood-sprays of yesteryear were more realistic, the CGI here sticks out like a sore thumb. Avoid the optional English soundtrack on Miramax's DVD presentation and stick with the Japanese with subtitles: the pseudo-Japanese accents are embarrassingly lame.

Juliet of the Spirits (Giulietta degli Spiriti, dir. Federico Fellini, 1965). Fellini's first color feature was not a success financially or critically on its release, but has showed staying power over the years since. Fellini's wife Giulietta Masina plays the wife of a philandering Mario Pisu coming to terms with her failing marriage, encountering spirits of the departed, and tempted by the decadent playmates of her hedonistic neighbor (Sandra Milo). As is so often the case with Fellini, autobiography is a strong element: both Fellini and his wife shared an interest in the paranormal, and Federico was a womanizer. Complicating things was the centrality of Masina's character in the film, the script's candidness about the state of the Fellini's marriage, and Federico's insistence that Masina "play herself" in the film. Well, she wasn't playing herself; she was playing herself as her husband imagined she should be, and doing so in a maddeningly passive way to boot. Still and all, Juliet of the Spirits is an impressive, extravagantly gorgeous film to watch, and Masina plays "herself" with a quiet inner strength notwithstanding her husband's stacking of the deck.

The Trip (dir. Roger Corman, 1967). Corman might not have invented "psychsploitation," (Vincent Price having injected himself with LSD in 1959's The Tingler), but this film, scripted by Jack Nicholson, certainly helped to establish psychedelia in the movies. The title pretty much says it: TV-commercial director Peter Fonda takes LSD for the first time and then spends the rest of this hour-and-twenty-minute feature tripping his brains out. Corman was seriously intrigued by the drug culture emerging at this time, took LSD himself as part of his research, and maintains a consistent neutrality on the subject, neither unquestioningly championing LSD nor unquestioningly condemning it. American International did not find this balanced position good enough and added a preface to the film that warned of the dangers of drugs, as well as a shattered-glass optical printing effect over the closing freeze-frame of Fonda's face. Of course there is no real way to capture the subjective experience of hallucinogens on film, but in trying to evoke it for the uninitiated Corman made use of the panoply of visual effects seen hitherto in rock clubs and in the West Coast underground film scene -- op-art and oil-and-water projections, mutiple exposures, diffusing filters and fragmenting lenses, combined with flash-editing and post-production optical printing -- more or less taking out the patent on the psychedelic style used in numerous films to follow.

Films of the week 3

Star Trek: The Motion Picture (dir. Robert Wise, 1979). After the cancellation of the original Star Trek television series in 1969, creator Gene Roddenberry made a number of attempts to revive Star Trek through the seventies. Finally, after an abortive attempt at a second series entitled Star Trek: Phase II, the script concept for the the two-hour series premiere was developed into a theatrical film with a full-on budget, and fans of the original series saw the starship Enterprise as they never had before. Production was on a tight schedule necessitating some cutting of corners, but when the film opened it was a hit, and Paramount soon realized that it had a highly lucrative franchise on its hands. The rest, of course -- ten theatrical films and counting, five spinoff television series, and innumerable additions to the Star Trek mythology -- is, as the man says, history. For fans, the Enterprise crew's mission to intercept a vast sentient machine before it reaches Earth is familiar territory, and serves well before it sort of evaporates into quasi-mystical gibberish at the end. In fact, this re-imagining of Star Trek has a lot going for it, but still had a way to go; the majestic largeness of the production tends to make the cast and its chemistry (always the show's main strength) look insignificant, and it took another sequel (1982's The Wrath of Khan) before the formula was just right.

Born in '45 (Jahrgang 45) (dir. Jurgen Bottcher, 1966). As a result of an action of the government of the German Democratic Republic banning a number of films that featured new styles, themes and techniques, this film did not see its premiere until after reunification, in 1990. Rolf Romer and Monika Hildebrandt are a young couple whose marriage is showing signs of strain, which causes Romer to leave his wife and drift through Berlin, trying to figure out his life and whether it will continue to have Hildebrandt in it. Director Bottcher and cameraman Roland Graf were heavily influenced by Italian neo-realism and what could be seen of the French and Czech new wave film in this poetic and realistic drama about young people in the GDR. Bottcher, who never made another narrative feature, was just one of many filmmakers whose careers were impacted by the government's ban (he became a documentarist and a painter), and the ban profoundly affected the subsequent development of cinema in Germany.

2001: A Space Odyssey (dir. Stanley Kubrick, 1968). This is arguably Kubrick's best film, one that significantly influenced the genre of science fiction film, and always worth seeing again just one more time, though I find that this time it is mostly to see the favorite bits. Those who are mostly into space opera tend not to like the obscurity of the story, though summing up the plot is actually easy: an unknown extraterrestrial intelligence, through the placement of a strange monolith among a troop of prehistoic anthropoids, have spurred them to discover the use of tools, leading to the anthropoids evolving into modern humans and eventually to space travel, and have planted a similar monolith on the moon which, when discovered and unearthed by the humans, emits a signal directed to the planet Jupiter, where Keir Dullea, Gary Lockwood and the sentient computer HAL 9000 wend their way on the spacecraft Discovery to encounter a third monolith -- and possibly to an evolutionary leap more profound than the discovery of tools.

His Kind of Woman (dir. John Farrow, 1951). A straightforward film noir suddenly goes deep into left field when Vincent Price joins Robert Mitchum and Jane Russell at a fancy and moderne resort in Mexico. Mitchum has been sent there for a purpose unknown to him, but it involves a payoff of fifty grand and deported mob kingpin Raymond Burr. Russell is a self-styled heiress and Vincent Price is a star of Hollywood swashbucklers she is trying to snare. When Mitchum finally realizes the jam he's in, it's up to Price to swashbuckle his way in and save the day. Howard Hughes owned the studio, RKO, and put his name on the picture, so expect to see prominently displayed two of the tycoon's obsessions: airplanes and Jane Russell's cleavage.

Films of the week 2

Under the Flag of the Rising Sun (dir. Kinji Fukasaku, 1972). You are not likely to find a film that lays out the themes and concerns of the late director (1930-2002) as straightforwardly or as powerfully as this one. Fukasaku (The Yakuza Papers, Battle Royale) was a teenager when Japan surrendered to the Allies in 1945, and his experiences in postwar Japan proved indelible and formed the creative wellspring of his career in films. Sachiko Hidari is a war widow who seeks our surviving members of her husband's garrison, and their conflicting, Rashomon-like accounts of the death of his husband (Tetsuro Tamba) illuminate the brutality and dehumanization of war and indict postwar Japanese society's denial of its past. Praised by Japanese critics as a superb antiwar film, the film goes beyond denunciation of war to confront issues that even today are close to untouchable in contemporary Japanese discussions of the war.

Phantom of the Opera (dirs. Rupert Julian, Edward Sedgewick, Ernst Laemmle, 1925). The was no real tradition of horror in Hollywood when this mystery-melodrama was made, but its dark mood and Lon Chaney's gift for transformation through makeup certainly nudged Hollywood -- and Universal Studios, where this was made -- into that direction. Gaston Leroux's story of a deformed man who inhabits the catacombs beneath the Paris Opéra and falls in love with a young singer is a potboiler, the performances of leads Norman Kerry and Mary Philbin often insipid, and principal director Julian's work less than inspired, and the film itself went through a number of rewrites, reedits and reshootings and was nearly shelved, and does not exist today in a definitive version. But Chaney is spellbinding, not only for his transformational talents but also for his surprising gift for movement, and Ben Carré's atmospheric set designs pioneer the Hollywood Gothic soon to be born. This Image Entertainment DVD release includes the 1925 original release and the 1929 sound rerelease version, the copy of which in the archives at the Eastman House is probably the best in existence. This last has been tinted, a special 2-color tinting process used for one scene simulated, and an experimental 2-strip Technicolor sequence restored. The whole is truly beautiful and gives an idea why this is one of the all-time great works of the silent cinema.

The Life of Oharu (dir. Kenji Mizoguchi, 1952). Mizoguchi is commonly grouped with Yasujiro Ozu and Akira Kurosawa as one of the three finest directors to work in Japanese film, and his work is distinguished by his long, stately pacing and his special interest in stories about women. The story for this film was taken from a seventeenth-century novel by Saikaku Ihara, about the decline of a lady-in-waiting at the Imperial court who falls in love with a lower-ranking retainer, losing her post and disgracing her family. From there she becomes a concubine to a feudal lord, a courtesan, a lady's-maid to a merchant's wife, briefly wife of a small tradesman, and finally an impoverished streetwalker. At every turn Oharu's hopes for love and happiness are thwarted by social rank, male callousness, moral disapproval and the turns and twists of fate. Ihara's original story was a little more salty and earthy, but carried as well the Buddhist homily that only suffering and unhappiness are caused by attachment to the things of this world. This view comes through in Mizoguchi's more sympathetic retelling, but also a muted protest against the social constraints on women that is very much his own.

Wild at Heart (dir. David Lynch, 1990). Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern are head-over-heels lovers who hit the road in search of a happily-ever-after in California, pursued by Dern's mother (Diane Ladd, who happens to actually be Dern's mother), who wants Cage dead. Lynch's visions frequently slam the giddily naive and wholesome together with black psychotic evil, and in this one he definitely had it down to a science: it's one of his most accessible films story-wise, with strong, steamy love interest, satisfyingly nasty villains and his left-field, stylish visual sense. More than a bit of camp, too, what with the references to Elvis and The Wizard of Oz. But subsequent efforts like Lost Highway, Mulholland Dr. and Inland Empire show Lynch has never felt the need to stay in one place at once.

After the Thin Man (dir W. S. Van Dyke, 1936) Based on characters created by Dashiell Hammett, the Thin Man comedy-mystery franchise featured William Powell and Myrna Loy as Nick and Nora Charles, a retired gumshoe and his wealthy socialite wife who trade wisecracks, sip cocktails and solve murders; in this first sequel in the series it's the philandering husband of Nora's cousin. The chemistry between Loy's kittenish spunk and Powell's suave daffiness carry the picture, but the supporting cast, including Elissa Landi, Alan Marshall, Joseph Calleia, a young James Stewart and of course Nick and Nora's dog Asta, doesn't hurt either.

Films of the week 1

Well, I suck. I still have not solved my personal laptop problems, which hampers my ability to update this blog just as I would like. But, I still watch a lot of movies, take a lot of notes, and still want some sort of activity on this thing, so as a sort of compromise I am going to start listing the films I have seen on a recently, with some short and very tentative comments as appropriate. Your comments are welcome, don't forget to leave a comment, so here is some of my viewing over the past week.

Dracula, (dir. Tod Browning, 1931). Introduced Hungarian-born Bela Lugosi to the film public and defined to generations how a vampire should look, act and speak, and also inaugurated the classic era of Hollywood horror. The strange cadences of Lugosi's speech owed to his being taught his lines phonetically; the cape, evening dress, and old-world blueblood demeanor came from the popular stage play on which the film was based: Lugosi created the part on Broadway, but other actors originated the style when it toured Britain in the twenties. However, the strange charisma that Lugosi brought to the role was entirely his. Modern audiences may find the film a little creaky, Lugosi's performances a little hammy, but there is still a sense of dread, muted eroticism and the excitement of new ground being broken.

Solaris, (dir. Andrei Tarkovsky, 1972). Like Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, this brings the pace and sensibility of art film to the genre of science fiction. Based on the novel by Stanislav Lem, the title refers to the distant planet being studied from a station over the planet's vast ocean, which may be an alien intelligence. A psychologist is sent from earth to the Solaris station to find it in disrepair, the remaining scientists prey to odd behavior and delusions, and discovers that the ocean is materializing his own thoughts and memories. More obscure by several degrees than 2001; Solaris is somehow also more humanly approachable; like a still-life painter, Tarkovsky shows the surroundings and the inanimate objects scattered in them as more eloquent than the characters themselves, giving this account of contact with alien intelligence a strong element of loss and nostalgia.

Zigeunerweisen (dir. Seijun Suzuki, 1980). Suzuki made his name directing action programmers for the Japanese studio Nikkatsu in the sixties until he was fired, after the release of 1967's Branded To Kill, for making films that, to paraphrase Nikkatsu execs, made neither money nor sense. A ten-year blacklist from the industry followed, broken in 1977 when he made A Tale of Sorrow and Sadness, which was a critical and box-office flop, for Shochiku. But Zigeunerweisen, an indie project, turned Suzuki's fortunes around and inaugurated his "Taisho Trilogy," films set in the Taisho period (1912-26), Japan's tumultuous "jazz age" of radical political changes and rapid assimilation of Western culture. Based on a story by Hyakken Uchida, a writer of the time, the film follows two intellectuals, a staid professor and a bohemian wanderer, through their increasingly tangled webs of sexual betrayal with each other's wives. In his post-Nikkatsu career, Suzuki pushed his penchant for style and visual brilliance over narrative sense in ways Branded To Kill could only hint at, but the film is grounded in the atmosphere of ero-guro-nansensu (erotic-grotesque-nonsensical), a current in literature that had its start during Taisho and much drawn upon since by many Japanese filmmakers, most famously Yasuzo Masumura and Teruo Ishii.

The Joke (Jaromil Jires, 1968). From the heady days of the Czech New Wave comes this dark comedy based on a story by Milan Kundera. A student's life is turned upside down when he sends a politically irreverent postcard to a girl he wants to woo and ends up spending six years at hard labor, and as a middle-aged man he attempts to revenge on the man responsible by seducing his wife. Bitter, gritty depiction of the Stalinist 50s in Czechoslovakia with an absurdist twist.

Where the hell have I been?

My laptop suffered another failure and it has been somewhat difficult in my current hand-to-mouth existence in order to get it fixed. I hope to have it up and running by the New Year and to continue Plastic Exploding for both of you loyal fans, and to have a kitty started for a spare after that. I am just glad the damn thing is still up after all this time.

Richard Kern, again

Folks who read my post about the films of R. Kern are directed to this page at the wonderful archive of avant-garde culture Ubu Web: two films by Kern, My Nightmare and Thrust In Me are available there for download, along with other material by Nick Zedd, Jon Moritsugu, Tessa Hughes-Freeland, and others, and also a manifesto of the "Cinema of Transgression" by Zedd. The films are in .avi (xvid) format and range from about 3mb to over 260 mb.

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.