marybogens

I wish I would've lived in the 60s or 70s. Those two decades must've been off the hook! I'm giving this one a ten, a perfect ten! It has everything I like about independent films, It is off beat, cool, different, inventive, hilarious, wacky, funny, sexy, wild, surprising and totally entertaining! Jack Palance, yes, leadies and gentlemen, THAT Jack Palance, Hollywood legend (remember his Oscar ripe "Shayne"?) is insanely cool as "Raf", the rock band's wild and crazy manager. And Andy Warhol as the "detective" who spies around with his polaroid camera, is totally insane too, what a combination, Palance and Warhol, but it's these kinds of decision director Lommel made that make this film such an experience! It's only 85 minutes long, but those 86 minutes got it going, ladies and gentlemen. On top of it all a musical score performed by Tom Sullivan and his band, with a bunch of hot songs like "We're just Cocaine Cowboys". I love this film!

Charlie Chaplin made a really great and funny and dangerous film about Nazi Germany, but Ulli Lommel's ADOLF AND MARLENE is nothing less of a masterpiece. This film needs to be discovered, it is as good if not better as the best Fassbinder films, I should add maybe that Rainer Werner Fassbinder produced this film and also has a starring role. Lommel himself appears as propaganda minister Joesph Goebbels and Margot Carstensen, the superstar of many great Fassbinder films, plays Marlene Dietrich, who has several scenes with Hitler, performed beautifully by Kurt Raab, in which she gives the Fuhrer hell. Michael Ballshaus did the camera work. Ballhaus later went to Hollywood and worked with Coppola, Mike Nichols and other greats. He also shot many awesome Fassbinder films, such as Chinese ROULETTE, in which Lommel plays a leading role and the newly restored WORLD ON A WIRE (also with Ulli Lommel as an investigative journalist). It's very hard to get a DVD of this gem, but I saw it in Paris recently at the Cinemateque Francaise, and the 35mm print was pristine.