Poison Ivy (1953)

Original title: La môme vert de gris

Casablanca, Morocco, still under French colonial occupation. A young lowlife is lethally hit with a bottle in a nightclub under somewhat woozy circumstances. Before he conks in an ambulance, he utters last words that suggest curiously intimate knowledge of the details of a US gold transport. The flics ask the FBI for help.

The FBI send their finest agent, Lemmy Caution (Eddie Constantine). Arriving undercover as some Texan weirdo, Caution tries to find out what the hell is going on, but his contacts tend to end up dead before they can, well, contact him, and the movie’s actual plot is as unclear to him as it is to the audience. At least he quickly realizes that the sister of the deceased lowlife, sexy femme fatale-ish nightclub singer Carlotta de la Rue (Dominique Wilms) and her associate Rudy Saltierra (Howard Vernon) are clearly involved in whatever there is to be involved in. So Lemmy aggressively flirts with women in a way that would get him cancelled right quick today (though I’d say a kick or three in the nether regions would be the better solution here), punches a lot of guys, shoots a couple or three, and eventually somehow finds out why he’s even in the country. Thwarting any evil plans really only needs the application of fists, bullets, and dubious smart remarks thereafter.

When last I wrote about a movie featuring France’s favourite American silver screen pulp hero Eddie Constantine, I was still a little confused by the man’s popularity in France. Having now hereby seen his first movie, and also the first one in which he plays Lemmy Caution, a character he is mostly going on to play even in movies that nominally don’t feature him, I’m not confused about that at all anymore. While Constantine certainly wasn’t a great thespian, he was a great Lemmy Caution, embodying the thuggish type of hard-boiled pulpy crime protagonist in the vein of Spillane’s Mike Hammer perfectly. Constantine really has the right dead glare in his eyes before Lemmy starts beating or shooting someone, suggesting a man who genuinely enjoys the violence and the mayhem that follows him, while thinking himself rather righteous. Constantine is also quite good shifting gears between the thuggish hardman facial expression and the supposedly charming smiles when he flirts. His eyes stay just as dead there, of course, which seems only correct for the type. Add to this ability to embody a certain type the actor’s willingness to throw himself into the physical elements of his chosen genre, and it’s no wonder at all anymore he became big in France.

Apart from Constantine’s fine performance as a pretty unpleasant yet very entertaining to watch man, Poison Ivy has more things to recommend it. Bernard Borderie’s direction may tend to the direct and the unsubtle, but he has a strong sense for movement and pacing, often utilizing cramped spaces (a budgetary thing, I presume) in moments of violence that make punch-outs feel a bit rawer and more intense than typical for this era. Borderie is also able to present spaces as actual spaces, an ability that’s a perfect fit for any kind of action sequence for it always makes things more dynamic. It also tends to lead to effective and meaningful framing and blocking. Just take the short scene in which Lemmy sits in a taxi and realizes he is being tailed. Unlike the typical rear-view mirror set-up, Borderie shoots through the windscreen of Lemmy’s taxi, positioning the characters so that we can see the tailing car through the back window of the taxi. It’s aggressively un-boring filmmaking.

This is of particular import in the world of pulpy hard-boiled crime, where ratiocination always happens via fist and gun. As Borderie films it, this special sort of ratiocination is a lot of fun, which goes for the whole of Poison Ivy.

Past Misdeeds: Cartes sur table (1966)

aka Attack of the Robots

This is a re-run with only the slightest of edits, so please don’t ask me what the heck I was thinking when I wrote any given entry into this section.

Oh no! International bigwigs are murdered by guys and gals in blackface, wearing what we from a more enlightened age can only describe as hipster glasses! The perpetrators are acting kinda weird, too, as if they were some sort of mind-controlled…robots. They are also losing their black-faces when they get killed.

Interpol finds out that these killers – at least the ones they can get their hands on after their deeds – are all people who mysteriously disappeared before now turning up all minstrel show-y. The only connection between these disappeared is their shared blood group – rhesus zero (scientific fact: the film’s science might be ever so slightly dubious). Some very vague clues point to a charming tourist spot in Spain. Because they really want a rhesus zero blood type kinda guy to investigate things in Spain, and there’s a disturbing lack of them in active service, Interpol rope their former, rhesus as well as brains zero, agent Al Pereira (Eddie Constantine) back in. Al isn’t too happy about the whole thing, particularly because a “Chinese” gentleman with the extremely probable name of Lee Wee (Vicente Roca) wants him to do the same job too, but he’s actually even too stupid to properly say no to anyone, be it Lee or Interpol. Well, at least Al’s pretty good at punching people, and charming the ladies (pheromones, I guess?).

These awesome talents will be put to good use once Al attracts the attention of robot people builders Lady Cecilia Addington Courtney (Françoise Brion) and Sir Percy (Fernando Rey) and their entourage, as well as the ire of the Chinese, and the interest of one Cynthia Lewis (Sophie Hardy).

I don’t actually know much about French genre films beyond Oughties horror, a bit of 50s swashbucklers, and Jean Rollin, but I do know the French had a – somewhat inexplicable, so I assume comparable to Jerry Lewis – thing for Eddie Constantine, hero of a quintillion of pulpy crime, spy and Godard movies, and not exactly the most inspiring actor ever to come from America, what with his difficulties expressing those “emotions” people talk about so much. One thing Constantine – as far as I know, and as Cartes as well as the Godard connection suggests – really had going for him was that he was clearly game for anything at all, with no unhelpful ideas about personal or thespian dignity. Just like Sir Ben Kingsley, now that I think about it.

Which obviously makes him the ideal lead in this relatively early directorial outing of my favourite Jesus, Jess Franco, because like all Eurospy films Franco made, Cartes sur table quickly turns out to be a Eurospy farce full of bat-shit insane ideas. The film, of course, does not make the slightest attempt to do stupid and boring stuff like tell a sensible, logical story (as if that had much risk of happening in any Franco film) in a sensible logical way, and instead throws bizarre dialogue, weird shit, and various incredibly fake looking but awesome and spirited punch-ups at its audience until it will either run off in a huff, or roll with it laughing and grinning, and having as much of a time as Constantine seems to have. Sure, the man wasn’t a great actor, and I don’t think one of the great low budget charismatics, but he sure seems to enjoy his time on screen so much it’s difficult for me not to share in the fun. So, unlike with Jerry Lewis, the our French neighbours were right.

Having fun with the possibly insane is made to look (and feel) particularly easy by Franco, of course. At this stage of his career, when he actually needed to make movies that didn’t exclusively cater to himself and his obsessions (which I actually love him and his films for, quite a lot), Franco’s films couldn’t quite get away with the full self-indulgence, so this Eurospy comedy can’t spend the time on the moments of leisure and boredom that soon became so important in the director’s films.

Fortunately, this is so early in Franco’s career too, he doesn’t just get bored with the whole affair and shoots some random crap, takes his cheque, and makes three other films with that money. Instead, Franco chooses a classic and simple one damn thing after another approach we, the easily distractible, always will enjoy. Among these damn things are some Franco mainstays, like two (alas only very short) improbable night club numbers of the kind I generally find impossible to describe effectively (because that’s what the movies are for, and I’m not Jess Franco), a main villainess with a bit of a kinky handle on villainous life and a charming dominatrix personality, the inexplicable business with the black-face robot zombie people, bizarre asides like the scene where Constantine finds his hotel room smashed after a Chinese goons versus robot goons fight in his absence, fetches a porter to complain, only to find a perfectly fine room again because the surviving Chinese have – for no reason I could make out, of course – taken it upon themselves to clean up behind themselves once they are alone in the room. All the while, Cynthia watches the proceedings through an absurdly large hatch in the wall. The Chinese only miss two corpses, but what the heck, right? Plus, that gives the film the opportunity for some corpse joke business taking up the next five minutes.


And if that doesn’t convince you Cartes sur table may be slightly atypical Franco but also very fun Franco, I don’t know what could.

On ExB: Cartes sur table (1966)

aka Attack of the Robots

In this night’s episode of Clash of the Titans, we’ll take a look at what happened when France’s second favourite American Eddie Constantine met my favourite Jess Franco.

It’s quite the thing, obviously, and you can, and most probably should, click on through to my words (possibly building sentences) about the film over at the not-at-all robotic Exploder Button.

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