Wendigo Meets FEMALE VAMPIRE (Les Avaleuses,1973)

Wendigo didn't know that Lina Romay had died until I told him, but he knew the name when I said it. He'd first seen her in the pages of Famous Monsters of Filmland, but got to know her better, he's not ashamed to admit, in the pages of Celebrity Sleuth and Celebrity Skin. Because the latter two magazines were fairly informative about their subjects' careers, he had some awareness of the late actress's work and her relationship with Jess Franco, but he doesn't recall seeing any of Romay's films before I showed him Franco's Female Vampire last weekend. He was more familiar with it under the alternate title The Bare Breasted Countess and had a good idea of what he was in for -- but it didn't help much. Wendigo's a Franco skeptic -- he thinks poorly of his Count Dracula, for instance, -- but was willing to give the cult auteur another shot.

We cheated: this is a shot from Erotikill, an alternate version of Female Vampire.

Romay plays Countess Irina von Karlstein, last of an accursed line and vacationing in Portugal. The mute Irina is more like a succubus than a vampire in the current sense of the word, -- except in the alternate Erotikill version -- but Wendigo notes that vampires in pre-modern folklore were not exclusively blood-drinkers, and that a succubus is really just a kind of vampire, or vice versa. In Irina's case, it's succubus with an emphasis on suck. She drains your life force through oral sex -- but she's increasingly unhappy with her plight. The big problem seems to be that her sex partners die
before she can be satisfied.

 

Here's Romay in a mood more typical of the Female Vampire version.

Seeking satisfaction, she can't stop preying on people, or humping her bed, or fellating her bedpost. Recklessly, she drains the masseur of the hotel she's staying in, as well as a reporter sent to interview her notorious aristocratic self. Courting danger, she briefly turns vigilante vampire to break up some sort of torture-snuff ring before falling hard for a morbid poet (Jack Taylor) who wants her to take him "beyond the mists." This isn't just a poetic metaphor; after Irina kills the reporter, we see her escort the bare-breasted victim literally beyond the mists and into a magical forest from which she never returns.

Interview with the Female Vampire, and its sequel

Irina can only show the way but can't follow until the poet's example awakens the idea that she could will her own death. But maybe she won't have to go to that trouble, since the dedicated Dr. Roberts ("Jess Franck"), advised by the inevitable (for Franco) "Dr. Orloff," is determined to track down a vampire perpetrator of recent murders despite the skepticism of the local police. Will the intrepid occult investigator overcome Irina's equally-mute manservant in time to confront the countess in her Kool-aid filled bathtub -- because there's no way Franco's telling us that's blood -- before more people die or Wendigo falls asleep?...

There's your story, but Franco's real subject is ennui -- terminal dissatisfaction despite all efforts. In Wendigo's opinion, that choice of subject inherently limits the film's appeal, because even if Franco succeeds in creating empathy in the audience, their shared ennui would only leave them indifferent to Irina's fate or anyone else's. He might get away with it if Female Vampire were more successful on an artistic level, but Wendigo felt that Franco succeeded only sporadically in creating the right mood. He manages it best in the purely pictorial scenes when Romay wanders through the woods. There are other odd or arguably surreal moments that impressed or amused him. He was tickled by the way Romay would start to flap her arms like bat wings as if about to transform, only to have Franco cut to the flapping bat-winged hood ornament of a limousine as Irina delivers her self-pitying internal
monologues.

I bought a vampire limousine

But there's too much going on in the movie, and not enough, to maintain the tone. The movie suffers, in Wendigo's view, whenever it returns to Dr. Roberts and his desultory investigations. These scenes have a perfunctory quality -- Franco himself is lifeless in the vampire-hunter role -- and the English dubbing we subjected ourselves to was awful. But the real problem is Franco's all-too-obvious desire to film his girlfriend screwing and masturbating. To a certain extent you need these scenes to drive home the theme -- lack of satisfaction is one of the few themes capable of artistic realization in porn -- but Franco doesn't know when to quit. The sex and masturbation scenes just go on and on, far longer than necessary to make any point Franco can think of. They contributed to my own feeling that something like Female Vampire could never really have what we think of as a "director's cut" -- a definitive version of Franco's vision from which nothing can be cut. My hunch is that he thought almost everything he shot was provisional or expendable -- and the history of variants running between 70 and 110 minutes seems to bear me out. This may be the perfect case of a film being less than the sum of its parts. The way Wendigo sees it, Franco failed by succeeding. Female Vampire does inspire the ennui it describes. It leaves one drained and indifferent -- or at least that's how Wendigo felt.

While we watched, I suggested that this could be Franco's imitation of a Jean Rollin film, and Wendigo is willing to agree to a degree. Wendigo likes Rollin better because the Frenchman was capable of seeing magic in practically any setting or any object, while Franco, in my friend's opinion, has all the magical sensibility of a Polaroid camera. He has some sense of style, but Wendigo senses an essential absence of ideas or real imagination that limits Franco as a cinematic fantasist. His nice Portuguese location goes largely to waste, for instance, while he spends precious time in Romay's bedroom. We also compared Franco unfavorably to fellow Spaniard Paul Naschy -- you can tell the difference when you consider the awful scenes with Franco as Dr. Roberts. Naschy was a true believer in material like this, but Franco is clearly just going through the motions. Those scenes are just excuses to cast himself and get a Dr. Orloff into the movie -- and all the scenes could easily be cut without harming the story.

Jean-Pierre Bouyxou as "Dr. Orloff" looks up -- to show that he's blind,

while "Jess Franck" (left) looks on.

Wendigo hasn't seen much Franco, and hasn't seen anything that he's liked yet -- though he's curious to see the shorter, blood-oriented Erotikill version of this film. I've seen some that I've liked so I'm still willing to cut Franco some slack, but I can understand Wendigo's frustration. His admiration for Lina Romay's attributes remains undiminished however, and we agree that there is new poignancy now in the final moments when the countess, no longer bare breasted and possibly redeemed, finally walks on her own through the mist into posterity. Like the countess, Lina Romay herself now belongs to the ages.

1954-2012

On the Big Screen: A DANGEROUS METHOD (2011)

David Cronenberg is an exemplary case of thematic evolution in a movie director, having gone from grindhouse-ready horror to his latest lavish historical drama without really changing his creative identity. Known for his emphasis on "body horror," there is a clinical attitude in his work that makes the early days of psychoanalysis an ideal subject for him. That those early days include a lot of transgressive sexuality and human grotesquerie doesn't hurt, either. The Cronenberg touch comes through most clearly in Keira Knightley's performance as subject turned scholar Sabina Spielrein, and in a scene portraying an early sort of polygraph test. In the latter, Cronenberg focuses on the equipment and preparations as if the word-association test Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender) performs on his wife (Sarah Gordon) were a mad-science experiment. As for Knightley, apparently a star pupil at the Natalie Portman Academy for Portrayals of the Disturbed, she contorts herself in such a convulsive, jaw-jutting manner while pantomiming Spielrein's hysterics that you expect her to turn fully into a werewolf.  Knightley's performance is over-the-top but needs to be, I suppose, to demonstrate the danger in the method for the subject and the analyst. It also fulfills Cronenberg's purpose to disturb, and on that score Dangerous Method is a disquieting film on many levels. In a way, it's another horror film, but the subject is intellectual horror subtly expressed, the suspicion raised that no great good has come or can come from the methods of Jung and his erstwhile idol and eventual enemy Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortenson) -- that Freud is right in joking that he and Jung are bringing a "plague" when they first visit America. I can imagine the psychoanalytic community disliking this film quite strongly.

What's dangerous about the method is the intimacy it requires between analyst and subject, given Freud's founding emphasis, which Jung finds increasingly dogmatic, on sexuality. A worst-case scenario confronts Jung in the form of Otto Gross (Vincent Cassel), a Freud protege for whom psychoanalysis has enabled a sex addiction resulting in the serial seduction of his patients. Jung rebels against Freud's monofocus on sex, in part because he entertains notions of parapsychology, but also because he'd like to rebel against the sexual urges building during his treatment of the virgin masochist Sabina. Despite giving in frequently to kinky temptations -- Sabina likes to be flogged -- Jung will continue to rebel by denying his relationship with Spielrein, which means hiding it unsuccessfully from his wife and lying about it to Freud. In time, just as Jung grows out of Freud's shadow, so Spielrein will grow out of Jung's -- but he'll just take up another mistress, living by the classic Victorian double-standard off his wife's wealth while still hoping to find a method to change people for the better.

Pessimism pervades Cronenberg's film of Christopher Hampton's script. By recounting the follies of a century ago, Dangerous Method also recalls the doomed optimism of the more modern sexual revolution. The film seems certain that neither sex itself nor any objective frankness about it will save the world or any individuals. Jung's hope that psychoanalysis (he pronounces it "psyche-analysis" to Freud's disappointment) can help people become what they're supposedly meant to be butts against Freud's almost conservative feeling that the best it can do is tell us why we are the way we are. The film's Freud is a condescending conservative if not a suspicious reactionary -- it's a great performance by Mortenson -- more concerned with defending his gains and fending off expected attacks than in pushing forward toward the greater discoveries Jung hopes for. The script is subtle enough to let us judge Freud either way. When he dismisses Jung's interest in telepathy and related subjects, it could simply be commonsense materialism or it could be closed-minded dogmatism. We see how factors of class and religion complicate the doctors' intellectual relationship. While Freud's home looks like a comfortable oasis of civilization to us, it can't help but look cramped and cheap compared to Jung's luxurious quarters. Is Freud jealous? Perhaps not, but in one of his last scenes he confides to Sabina, a fellow Jew, that ultimately gentiles like Jung can't fully be trusted. An epilogue confirms this to some extent, reminding us that Freud barely escaped the Nazi occupation of Vienna, and that Spielrein did not escape when the Nazis invaded Russia. There's no suggestion that Jung himself is anti-Semitic, but the inescapable awareness for Freud of widespread anti-Semitism is one of the factors that complicated and possibly compromised his thinking, just as Jung's was compromised by innumerable forces in his life. Were they really any better for their discoveries? The most the film can say is that at least Spielrein isn't having screaming fits like she used to, but Knightley undermined that message somewhat through her inability -- faithful to life or not -- to relax. But it's the film's own idea that a certain madness -- the pedantic-seeming Freud notwithstanding -- is necessary to the method. The film's moral could easily be: Analyst, heal thyself.

For me, the fact that the movie has me thinking of getting books on Freud and Jung is probably proof of A Dangerous Method's success. I confess to not knowing enough about the two, not to mention Spielrein, to know whether Hampton and Cronenberg have been fair to them. But I found the movie intellectually stimulating as well as disturbing in the characteristic Cronenberg manner. Right now I don't feel that I can just leave the things it brought up behind at the theater. I thought the film succeeded visually as well, apart from the CGI rendering of the doctors' transatlantic voyage, while Howard Shore's score was, if you can imagine it, subtly Wagnerian. The acting was impressive all around, Mortenson truly proving himself in a non-action role, Knightley fulfilling her purpose to disturb through excess, and the much-hyped Fassbender giving the best performance I've seen from him yet -- the moustache practically makes him a different man. The film got lost in the awards shuffle, perhaps because of its implicitly skeptical attitude toward psychoanalysis, but I'd have no problem saying it's one of the best 2011 films I've seen so far.

DELIRIUM (Delirio Caldo, 1972)

You know as soon as you see Mickey Hargitay eyeballing a young woman in a pub that he has bad intentions. Sure, he's all helpfulness as he offers her a lift to a nightclub, but he can't stop himself from trying to feel up inside her miniskirt. The outraged girl demands that he let her out, and he complies. Of course, then he follows her, despite her dropping her shoes for speed, to the bank of a rushing river, where our man seems confused over whether to rape, strangle or drown her. She still ends up dead, the latest victim of a sex maniac the police have been unable to track down, despite the best efforts of consulting criminal psychologist Herbert Lyutak. Well, they're probably not his really best efforts, since he's our killer.

Herb's got problems at home. He loves his wife and she loves him back, but he's been unable to perform his husbandly duties. It seems that he can't get aroused unless he's strangling somebody. Marzia Lyutak (Ria Calderoni) worries that hubby is holding something back and urges him to indulge any impulse he has, so long as he'll do it with her. It gets pretty hot for a while. Just the sight of the Lyutaks making out gets the maid to licking her shoulder and fondling her own breasts. But Herbert simply can't rise to the occasion unless he takes it, or her, by the neck. For all the Mrs. knows, this is just a game of erotic asphyxiation. She doesn't realize that this is a two-way street as far as pleasure goes, though she might not be coming back. But no: Herbert won't let himself do this to his beloved. He realizes he has gone too far. He must end his murderous career.

That should be simple enough. He can confess to his police pals, right? But they might not believe him if he tells them. He has to show them. So he calls them and explains that, thanks to his advanced "meteoropsychic" analysis, he can predict the time and location of the killer's next attack. The cops just need to stake the site out and set up a decoy to lure him. All is arranged as he wants, and on cue he arrives at the park and approaches the designated victim. But he can barely strike up a conversation with her when they hear a woman's scream. The killer has struck; a woman is dead. Lyutak's analysis was virtually perfect, the police admit, but the doctor himself is quite perplexed. After all, isn't he the killer?

Thus writer-director Renato Polselli drops us through the trapdoor into the utter wackness that is Delirio Caldo, one of the greatest love stories ever rendered on celluloid -- as long as you leave morality or sanity out of the equation. We're in the amour fou zone here with a lead couple each of whom looks to the other in vain as an anchor of normality in a turbulent sea of compulsions. Marzia, for instance, clings to Herbert while dreaming of lesbian romps with the maid and Marzia's own niece, Joaquine. The highlight of the film is a red-lit nightmare sequence in which Marzia envisions herself and Herbert writhing and shackled as Joaquine and the maid get it on on the floor. Joaquine frees Marzia while Herbert thrashes and grimaces as only Mickey Hargitay can, and the loyal wife descends for a female threesome, only to see the other girls laughing at her. Fighting these urges, Marzia will do anything to keep her husband, if you get my drift. But she isn't dreaming Joaquine's own urges, which make the niece just as determined to drive the couple apart. And all the while the bodies keep piling up. The dead ones, I mean.

Delirium is a film on the cheap. Our detectives operate out of a police headquarters which looks neither official or public and is pretty obviously somebody's house with a couple of guys dressed up as bobbies. And did I mention that this impoverished Italian film is supposed to be set in Britain? Polselli won't do anything so obvious as tell you this, but you can figure it out from the bobbies, the "TELEPHONE" booth one victim hides in, and the habit one comedy-relief murder suspect has of uttering an occasional English phrase.

This is Britain.

Polselli can't even be bothered with stock footage or anything that might slightly suspend your disbelief in the Englishness of it all. But he seems to have trouble with the basics of cheap cinema. In one scene, Hargitay is driving a car at night. You'd expect some kind of process shot to create the illusion of a moving background, but what you get looks for all the world like a pinwheel made of rocks that rotates counterclockwise rather than a scrolling image from right to left. At times the cheapness of Delirium is almost embarrassing, but at others it actually enhances the starkness of the situation. Hargitay's first murder scene is dark, clumsy and protracted, but the notion you get that it had to be an unpleasant experience for the actress playing the victim gives the scene a certain primitive power.

Let's face it, anyway. You don't need big or even plausible sets to convey Delirium. A film like this depends entirely on its actors, and that's where Mickey Hargitay comes in. Mariska's Dad earned his nutjob credentials for all time when he played Travis "Crimson Executioner" Anderson in Massimo Pupillo's Il boia scarlatta, better known in America as Bloody Pit of Horror. If anything, Hargitay is ever screwier here, where he has to play a conflicted antihero with a guilty conscience, than when he played that more famous narcissistic maniac. With his fevered expressions and his bad hair, he looks quite convincingly like someone at the end of his rope. For all I know, showing up in this project meant that he was at the end of his rope. I notice that he did only one more movie in Italy, again for Polselli (The Reincarnation of Isabel) before retiring. That's regrettable, though maybe not from his own standpoint, because he could have given many more crazy performances in the years that followed. But I guess that makes the few he actually did, like this one, more precious. His female colleagues aren't far behind, Calderoni keeping at a constant level of hysteria and Christa Barrymore as Joaquine exploding over the top late in the picture.

Rita Calderoni and Christa Barrymore play very rough in the last act of Delirium, but it leaves them very relaxed afterwards.

Objectively speaking, I'd probably have to call Delirium a bad movie, but it's bad in an entertaining way. As an exploitation film, it presses most of the right buttons, and I'd definitely recommend it to fans of female nudity and guileless overacting. At the very least, Delirium comes closer to truth in advertising than most movies do.

If there was an original trailer for Delirio Caldo it doesn't exist online, but GialloTrailers has uploaded an unofficial trailer featuring the movie music of Gianfranco Reverberi.

BLOOD MANIA (1970)

Mill Creek Entertainment is moving up in the world. Our favorite purveyor of public domain oddities is now selling licensed properties, including some of the library of grindhouse stalwart Crown International Pictures, acquired from the defunct BCI Eclipse. One of Mill Creek's first Crown offerings is a 12-film collection called Gorehouse Greats. Blood Mania shares one side of a DVD with Al Adamson's Blood of Dracula's Castle. Is that worthy company?

Here's Mill Creek's synopsis of the film: "A nightmare of unspeakable terror, this Gothic-like horror tale is about a young doctor who's haunted by a questionable past and entrapped in a hopeless present by jealousy, blackmail and finally, murder!"

Here's the trailer Crown International made for it. Plenty horrific, yes?

Here's another poster advertising the film. The co-feature is apparently a 1961 Most Dangerous Game knockoff being revived as a cannibal film. Blood Mania itself appears to have been offered in some sort of Taste-O-Vision process from what the poster copy suggests.

Crown was only the distributor of this Jude production, and that fact makes me wonder whether Jude or Crown had the bright idea to sell Blood Mania as a horror film or, for that matter, to call it Blood Mania. That title does not prepare you for what you finally see, and, admittedly, neither does the credit sequence, a spooky episode featuring a blond in a diaphanous outfit on the run, stalked by a mysterious and colorfully lit menace seen only in close-up who seems intent on strangling the woman. Gary Graver is listed as one of two cinematographers for this film, and I suspect that this opening bit is his work.

What follows looks less like a nightmare of unspeakable terror than like a Lifetime Original Movie, only with lots of boob shots. The vision turns out to be the nightmare of Ridgely Waterman, an ailing millionaire, doted on by his daughter Victoria and treated by Dr. Craig Cooper, the object (I should say an object) of Vicki's lust. The poolboy is another object of said lust, but he's heard of women like her and doesn't like her. Dr. Cooper also resists; he seems to be happily married, but a shadow crosses his life in the form of a blackmailer (identified in the credits as "Blackmailer") who wants $50,000 from Cooper in order to stay quiet about his sordid past as an abortionist. Roe v. Wade was still three years away.

Maria De Aragon puts the moves on Peter Carpenter (below) and the audience (above) in Blood Mania.

While Mrs. Cooper selflessly offers her body to the blackmailer in return for his silence, the doctor offers his body to Vicki Waterman, who offers a shortcut to $50,000 in the form of a murder plot against her father. She eliminates him with a fatal dose of amyl nitrate, though there is a sort-of-horror movie moment when he suddenly bolts upright in his death throes. And now comes the reading of the will by Alex Rocco and the crushing revelation that the bulk of the Waterman estate will go to younger sister Gail Waterman (future Playmate Vicki Peters)-- the blond from the opening credits. To this point, Maria De Aragon has played Vicki as a rampant tramp. Now she gets an all out mad scene, screaming, rolling her eyes and pulling faces in a tantrum of hatred worthy of notice by all aficionados of bad acting. Her most famous subsequent performance, if IMDB can be believed, is in the role of Greedo in Star Wars! I don't think Lucas got full value from her.

Greedo must have seemed like a natural next step for De Aragon following "Greedy" in Blood Mania.

So Vicki doesn't get the money, and now it looks like she isn't going to get the doctor, either. Having shaken off all remaining scruples against sex for money, Craig now goes after Gail, despite a hint from her older female companion that he may have a rival already. All seems to go well, however, as he treats the blond to a day at the Renaissance Faire, a romp on the beach, and a romp in front of the fireplace, interrupted only by Gail's inexplicable inheritance of her late father's nightmare vision of her violation. All the while, amateur artist Vicki paints with broad red strokes.

The trailer has told you about the last fifteen minutes. Psycho may have its shower scene, but Blood Mania stakes out its own territory with a definitive bathroom-sink scene in which Vicki commits sororicide with a statuette.

She calls Craig over so she can have the satisfaction of showing him Vicki's bloody corpse. She only sneers when the blubbery doctor whimpers, "Why???" then makes him dump the body in his car for future disposal. Then she draws him into her triumphant embrace before the moment of supreme horror that climaxes this tawdry affair.

Blood Mania was the one and only produce of Jude Productions. The director, Robert Vincent O'Neill, may be best known for the Angel series of vigilante-prostitute films from the 1980s. Our male lead, Peter Carpenter, co-wrote the film and would pull the same double-duty once more before an untimely demise in 1971. I can't help but believe that they all had something other than "Blood Mania" in mind when putting this together, but since there really wasn't such a thing as the "erotic thriller" genre yet, they must have thrown in some horror elements to make their project more exploitable, if Crown International didn't do that for them. Whoever's responsible, they did the right thing, for the shock and horror bits are the only elements of interest, apart from the toplessness and Maria De Aragon's histrionics, in this mostly mundane movie. I put it into the machine expecting a proper horror film for the season, so I'm naturally a little disappointed in Blood Mania, but people who watch it with a better idea of what to expect may be gratified by the more campy or sleazy aspects of the story. I hope this helps.

Sexploitation and Slavery in GOODBYE UNCLE TOM

When the Italian filmmakers Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi visited a Southern plantation sometime in the early 1850s, their plan to conduct an inquiry into the peculiar institution of slavery was met with polite skepticism from their hosts and various other guests. While an envious Harriet Beecher Stowe decided on the spot to write Uncle Tom's Cabin in order to scoop the strangers from the flying machine, others at the dinner table questioned the researchers' motives. Noting that they were Italian and Catholic, one man opined that the visitors were slaves of a sort themselves -- "slaves to the fascination of sin."

Of course, this was but a hint of self-awareness if not self-criticism on the part of the infamous duo, not to mention a warning of their methodology in the making of Goodbye Uncle Tom. Tom is meant to be an anti-racist film in order to make up for misinterpretations of their African documentary. As Quentin Tarantino might put it, their way of answering critics amounted to putting out fires with gasoline. Their challenge was complicated by a more persistent charge against them: that their affectations of seriousness only masked a sleazy cynicism that approached its subject matter in a spirit of exploitation. Their films from Mondo Cane forward were called "shockumentaries," not documentaries, as if sensationalism belied any claims of serious purpose on the part of J&P.

In The Godfathers of Mondo Franco Prosperi says that "violence is another form of objectivity." You can see what he means: violence is a necessary component of showing the world as it is, or at least as he and Jacopetti see it. But can violence be viewed as objectively as Prosperi wants? In their own script for Tom, that crack about "the fascination of sin" hints at how the choice to show violence or other sins might betray a lack of objectivity on the part of the filmmakers. And if the fascination of sin influences their pictorial and editorial choices, what will the audience make of it all? I've described Tom as an attempt to show compassion toward the victims of slavery. But someone might well question whether it's compassionate to stare at someone's absolute subjugation and humiliation -- or to have people re-enact the subjugation and humiliation of their ancestors. After all, as some racists believe, the Bible relates that Noah cursed Ham and his son Canaan, turning their descendants black, because Ham stared at Noah's drunken nakedness. Jacopetti & Prosperi's reading of scripture raises the stakes even further. They have a white preacher state that Ham and Canaan were cursed for castrating Noah. This may have been another, even more subconscious warning to the audience about the implications of what they would see in Tom.

The American cut of Goodbye Uncle Tom is supposed to be toned down from the Italian original (or its modern incarnation as the 2003 Director's Cut), but that toning down turns out to be no more than a dumbing down of the film's present-day political context. The American cut is at several points more violent than the Director's Cut, for instance, and it retains most of the Italian version's sex scenes. The one exception is significant, as is the fact that the scenes that stayed are rape scenes. One has a gang of four poor white "Crackers" invading a slave compound and raping several women. The other has a teenage "mare" delivered to Jason, the imbecilic prize stud of a slave-breeding farm.

Both scenes are brutally filmed but scored to disturbing counterpunctual effect by Riz Ortolani with soaringly romantic yet more insistently percussive variations on the movie's theme song. Ortolani is a master of this kind of counterpoint, as he'd show again with the pastoral lyricism of Cannibal Holocaust. The intent of composer and filmmakers alike is to convey idealism under physical assault, but the effect is not necessarily unlike a more conventional sex scene scored to build toward a climax. It's understandable if critics wonder whether J&P want to have it both ways, outraging and infuriating some viewers but titillating and arousing others. But I doubt whether anyone has ever admitted being aroused by these scenes from Tom. However, if they presume that others will be titillated, isn't their only evidence their own feelings? Beware "the fascination with sin"...

More problematic yet is the sex scene left out of the American cut. In the Director's Cut, a wax museum proprietor relates the legend of Madame La Laurie and her companion Caesar, who purchased slaves for the purpose of stocking a unisex harem of opium addicts upon whom the devious pair could play out all their perverse whims. Caesar tends to go overboard with them sometimes the way Lennie does with mice, while the Madame practices a more refined sensuality. Here she is almost literally swimming in an undulating pool of black flesh, in a scene more insistently, indisputably erotic than the rape scenes.

But look out! All of a sudden it's Bathory time, and out come the pliers. I don't know if this legendary personage made as much use of precious bodily fluids as her Euro counterparts, but what we see is bad enough. It's as if this time J&P dared you to be aroused by the waves of nudity they present, only to throw the pliers at your head. There's an evil sensuality on display in Tom, not so much because sensuality is evil but because evil has a sensuality of its own.

The sensuality and sexuality is an important part of the story of slavery as told by Jacopetti & Prosperi. Slavery as practiced on the plantations had an inevitably sexual aspect because of the intimacy shared by slaves and masters. Tom makes the controversial and perhaps unacceptable suggestion that sex was not only a way for masters to dominate slaves, but also a way for slaves to negotiate their standing with masters. We see a heavy-footed Mammy castigating a girl for going to bed with Massa while still a virgin, and a supposed 13 year old girl urging the man behind the camera (in the Director's Cut this is supposed to be a historical person relating an actual experience, but in the American version it may be one of our time-travelling narrators) to take her maidenhead. She helpfully offers the man a whip in case he needs that to get into the right frame of mind.

At the slave market the diminutive General, whip in hand like a ringmaster, takes us on a tour of the seamier side of human commerce. In separate compartments slave girls learn to dance sensuously, a flaming white man body-paints twin pairs of boys for the trade that dare not speak its name, and the piece de resistance stands stoically like a cartoon ghost under a sheet. What's so special about this guy? "He's got three!" the General explains gleefully, "One, two, three!" The thrice-endowed individual himself has the self-respect to put his hands in front of the camera before the "three what?" question is answered.

Do you see a problem here? J&P claim that they want us to sympathize with the plight of the slaves, but our initial assumption of sympathy often depends on a further assumption that the slaves desire freedom. But what we see more often than not is accommodation, behaviors that begin to look like self-degradation rather than survival strategies. Think about it a little and you may realize that the filmmakers are trying to say that all of this is forced on the slaves, that it's a consequence of slavery rather than proof of their suitability for slavery, as the whites take it to be. But Tom's argument that slavery degraded blacks while fueling a simmering shame-based hatred for whites that limited their political imagination is itself, however well-intended, unacceptable for many American viewers. We want to believe in an unassailable dignity and perseverance that could only have been expressed in the sort of perpetual resistance that J&P do not show. If the filmmakers don't give these traits to the slaves, it makes people think that J&P do think slaves are subhuman. Worse yet, there's one scene that I haven't discussed yet that does seem, in some way, to blame blacks for their own degradation, but I want to save that for the next post, in which I try to determine whether Tom is, in fact, a racist film.

ZABRISKIE POINT (1970)

The last time I tried to watch Michelangelo Antonioni's American debut was about twenty years ago, when I rented a VHS from the always-abundant Albany Public Library. My interest was prurient. I had heard that there was a large-scale orgy scene in the middle of the film. Watching the tape, I was impatient for the orgy to appear. It ended up disappointing me; it wasn't as pornographic as I'd hoped. The orgy done, I hit the stop button and rewound the tape.

Zabriskie Point was also known to me for being a great flop when it came out, another manifestation of Hollywood's desperation over reaching the new youth audience. The beginning of the Seventies was a time when the studios seemed ready to throw money at anyone from Antonioni to Russ Meyer, and the money often ended up going right out the window. My younger self had heard of Antonioni, and had even tried to watch L'Avventura some time earlier, without really appreciating it, though I had better luck with Blow-Up. Since then, and quite more recently, I was lucky enough to see The Passenger on a big screen. So when I heard that Zabriskie was coming out on DVD, I decided to give it another chance, as a real movie this time, and the Library dependably acquired the disc this month.

The one detail I remembered well apart from the orgy was the opening student radical rap session. I'm something of an historian, so this bit interested me even back then. I think people make a mistake when they look for something substantive or meaningful in plot terms in all the talk. It's really meant, I think, to create an atmosphere, a feeling for the moment in history. This seems to be Antonioni's approach throughout. Zabriskie Point is an immersion in the sights and sounds of American circa 1970, and this type of protest conclave was part of the collective mindscape. There are moments of amusement for the attentive (Black radical: "White radicalism is a mixture of bullshit and jive.") but it's not meant to inform or enlighten you. Agitprop it ain't. What ends up being relevant is our protagonist Mark's dissatisfaction with all the deliberation. "I'm willing to die, too," he tells the group, "[but] not of boredom." A friend explains that "Meetings aren't his trip," but another radical remarks: "That bourgeois--bourgeoisie individualism that he's endorsing is gonna get him killed." Because of what follows, we might be tempted to take this as the story's moral in advance, but I don't think Antonioni and his team of writers are really that interested in morals or politics. When someone closes the scene by saying, "denounce bourgeois individualism," it's more of a punch line than an editorial statement.

Mark is simply impatient. "The chick at the meeting said people only move when they need to," he tells his pal, "Well, I need to sooner than that." He stocks up on guns, making things easier for himself by telling the gun-store owner that he lives in a "borderline" neighborhood and "we just have to protect our women." Peaceful demonstrations just get his friends put in jail, and he ends up doing a little time himself when he tries to bail his pal out. A dumb cop asks for his name. He gives, "Karl Marx." "How do you spell it?" the cop asks.

Looking for action, he finds the cops about to storm a campus Liberal Arts building occupied by black radicals. When the pigs blow away one of the men, thinking he was going to pull a gun on them, Mark decides to pull his gun on the pigs. But before he can draw or fire his weapon, he hears a shot and sees a cop go down. "I wanted to, but someone else was there," he later explains. Assuming that he'll be a suspect, he steals an airplane with ridiculous ease and flies it into the desert. On his way, he playfully buzzes a car driven by Daria, who's driving through en route to her boss's lair in Arizona. This is meeting cute on a gigantic scale, and Antonioni doesn't fake a thing. That's Mark Frechette in the plane, and there aren't any soundstage pick-up shots in this near-parody of North by Northwest.

Daria is an alienated young woman who works for a vaguely alienated, vaguely unscrupulous boss played with vague authenticity by Rod Taylor. Earlier in her trek, she was menaced by a pack of feral kids who play amid overturned cars and broken pianos and say such cute things as, "Can we have a piece of ass?" After that, being harassed by an airplane might have seemed somewhat less menacing. After Mark lands, they make friends and then make love after some typical hippie babble. Daria smokes, but Mark doesn't. "This group I was in had rules about smoking," he relates, They were on some reality trip." "What a drag," Daria commiserates.

Daria Halprin has a healthy appetite for life in Zabriskie Point. Spin that dress, girl!

She suggests that "It'd be nice if they could plant thoughts in our heads, so nobody would have bad memories." Mark is before long planting something else in her, but this seems to plant thoughts as well. This is the famous orgy in the desert, which is really Daria's erotic delusion of polymorphous perversity (is she imagining she and Mark multiplying their own bodies?) and universal love covering the world in twos, threes and fours.

Mark approaches things more prosaically.

Mark: I always knew it would be like this.
Daria: Huh?
Mark: The desert.

Despite knowing himself innocent, Mark seems to be having final thoughts. After nearly killing a cop who passes through, he dumps his ammo on the sand and decides to return the plane he "borrowed" after applying a semi-psychedelic, semi-sophomoric paint job to it. Quite abruptly we're left without our hero, or this film's equivalent of one, with twenty minutes to go.

So Daria carries on with her trip and arrives at Taylor's lair. And I do mean lair. This little palace seemingly carved out of a mountain looks worthy of a small-time Bond villain, and ends up rather the same way, at least in Daria's mind.

The movie's infamous finale is a bookend to the orgy. Having learned via car radio of Mark's fate, Daria's romantic idealism is destroyed, and like Mark and many others of his generation, she succumbs to fantasies of absolute destruction.

Two things about Zabriskie Point seemed to trip up initial audiences. First, there was an assumption that Antonioni was making some sort of personal political statement and that it wasn't flattering to the United States. People reacted as if he endorsed the opinions expressed in the rap session or advocated the detonation of refrigerators and bookshelves Daria fantasizes about. They harped on his constant attention to billboards, logos and other advertising art as if they assumed he was condemning it all. If that's so, then mine is a perverse appreciation of the film, since those details make it a realistic reproduction of the world of my childhood. I don't think that this foreigner's attention to superficial details means that he's condemning some perceived American superficiality. Rather, it's just the easiest way to define America in cinematic terms, and no different in that respect than his soundtrack, which ranges from Pink Floyd and Jerry Garcia originals to "The Tennessee Waltz" in one old cowboy's moment of serenity over beer in a bar and Roy Orbison singing, "Zabriskie Point is anywhere" over the end credits. One can go overboard with a thesis contrasting the ad-ridden city with the purity of the desert because...well, it's a desert! A fine place to have a be-fruitful-and-multiply fantasy, don't you think? As a matter of fact, yes it is, because Antonioni likes deserts, and one suspects that the location was kind of an end in itself for him.

One man's scathing critique of consumerism (above) is another's blatant product placement. If Antonioni had real critical intent behind his commercial imagery, it'd probably be lost on many modern viewers; some might even call him a sell-out.

The other detail that riled people was the self-evident amateurness of neophyte stars Mark Frechette (soon to be a real-life criminal) and Daria Halprin (soon to be Mrs. Dennis Hopper). But dare I suggest that they're supposed to be shallow, and that we aren't meant to see them as brilliant, lovable individuals who undergo intersecting character arcs and complete each other? Let's face it, anyway: lots of us know people in real life who are pretty much ciphers like these. Once you understand that Zabriskie Point is a broad-stroke sketch of the U.S. with a Euro sensibility indifferent to concerns for closure or other narrative niceties, and mainly a pretext for Antonioni to let rip with masterful self-indulgence, the sooner you'll lower your expectations of the actors and accept them for the types they are. There's a certain sensibility that needs to care for characters and will never appreciate films like Zabriskie, but movies are about more than characters and can sometimes thrive even without careful attention to them in the novelistic manner. Some people will never accept that, but I hope they might at least stop confusing their preferences for aesthetic laws.

Dean Tavoularis did wonders as Antonioni's production designer. You have to see this bit in motion with the waving flag and the rotating clocks on Taylor's TV screen to get the full effect.

That VHS from twenty years ago was not letterboxed. That made a world of difference, because the widescreen DVD reveals Antonioni's vision in its proper proportions. Whether he's taking in the sprawl of the desert or filming Rod Taylor in his office, nearly every image in the film (some seem to be stock or news footage of student protests) is a marvel of composition. Antonioni is the Michelangelo of widescreen (for who else could be?) and Zabriskie Point is art run amok. I hope the snips have made that clear. It took a while, but I learned how to appreciate this film. I commend it to the faster learners in the wild world of cinema.

The trailer (uploaded from TCM by foxter65)offers a fair sample of airplane antics, billboards and orgy action. Check it out.