Franco Files: La Muerte Silba un Blues /‘Death Whistles a Blues’ (1962)

NOTE TO READERS: having recently posted several truly epic Jess Franco reviews that ended up sprawling across a fairly untenable word-count, and with over thirty Franco films potentially awaiting review (god help me), I thought I’d best shake things up a bit, in an effort to present a greater variety of the director’s work, before I (and more to point, YOU) start to lose interest entirely. As such, I’ve decided to go to work on what will hopefully be some shorter reviews, sticking the section-headers and ratings I’ve previously been using at the bottom of the post, in order to instead present a single block of (hopefully slightly more concise) text. Hope that’s ok with everyone?

Though often dated to 1964 (or even 1966, when it was re-released in France under the title ‘O77: Opération Sexy’, in a dubious attempt to jump onboard the Eurospy craze), ‘La Muerte Silba un Blues’ (‘Death Whistles a Blues’) actually dates back to 1962, and it appears to have been Jess Franco’s immediate follow-up to his first breakthrough in the international movie market, The Awful Dr. Orlof.

Largely unseen in the modern era prior to the emergence of a fan-subbed Spanish TV-rip I found floating around on the internet last week (and seriously, GOD BLESS the hard-working, multilingual movie obsessives who are able to anonymously bring us this sort of treasure on a semi-regular basis these days), this modest crime thriller has been rather overlooked by Franco fans, and is usually only mentioned in reference to the oft-repeated anecdote about how Franco got the job working as assistant director to Orson Welles, when the latter arrived in Spain to shoot ‘Falstaff’ (aka ‘Chimes at Midnight’) in 1965.

The story goes that Welles had somehow got hold of Franco’s name, and asked his Spanish backers whether he might make a good assistant. They attempted to dissuade Welles, telling him that Franco was a useless hack (a reputation that apparently proceeded him even this early in his career), and, just to prove their point, they arranged to screen one of his films. Unfortunately for them, the film they chose was ‘La Muerte Silba un Blues’, which contains a number of stylistic nods to Welles’ own work. His ego perhaps tickled by this, Orson apparently liked the film so much that he immediately offered Franco the job, and invited him on a memorable “getting to know each other” location-scouting road trip, much to the chagrin of his producers.

The way that that working relationship ended is another story for another day, but, returning to the film at hand, it is easy to see why Welles might have been impressed. ‘La Muerte..’s script may be forgettable b-picture nonsense, and its performances strictly average,* but there is nonetheless a real sense of visual style at work here, with striking compositions, fine black & white photography and smooth, gliding camera movements in evidence throughout. In purely technical terms, it finds Franco at the absolute top of his game, working on a level that will prove quite a shock to those who know him primarily for his sloppier ‘70s and ‘80s work.

Following a sketchy opening that sees a pair of bohemian gun smugglers meeting a sticky end at a police check-point on their way into a city that purports to be New Orleans, we are ushered into a Golden Age Hollywood style nightclub scene that really takes off once Franco's camera begins to concentrate on the band (including Jess himself on sax, if I’m not mistaken), who are playing some pretty rollicking ‘50s style be-bop.

The way this sequence is edited, intercutting tight shots of the musicians with expressionless close-ups of glamorous onlookers making eyes at each other, strongly recalls similar scenes in Venus In Furs, a film that seems to have benefited from the use of more than a few re-fried riffs from this one. (I mean, if you’re taking notes here, ‘La Muerte..’s opening credits play over the image of a lonesome trumpet player laying (apparently) dead on a beach, even though the events pertaining to this circumstance subsequently move us forward, rather than backward, in time.)

Next we move to a bird-like aerial crane-shot panning in over a swimming pool towards a man reclining on top of a diving board – just a few seconds of the film, and of zero narrative import, but a pretty breath-taking bit of stylistic extravagance in terms of what you’d expect from a low budget film in 1962, and it’s hard to imagine Orson sitting through it without immediately deciding that he’d found his man.

Much of what follows is the kind of standard Euro-decadence business that was big at the time in the wake of ‘Le Dolce Vita’, with yachts, swimming pools, nightclubs, beautiful ladies, endless parties, and travelogue shots of places that REALLY don’t look like anywhere within easy reach of New Orleans. The details of the plot-line are fairly standard programmer stuff really, so I shan’t bore you with the specifics.

As usual in his thrillers, Franco is having a lot of fun here with genre tropes, but without hitting the pastiche too heavily. The scene in which the trumpet-player (who survived his earlier scrape on the beach, it transpires) is run-down by a car outside the night-club, his smashed horn at his side, has a wonderful sense of pulp poetry to it, and some shots later in the movie perfectly capture the ‘beach houses & Venetian blinds’ essence of ‘40s L.A. noir, without ever rubbing it in our faces or turning it into a joke. I get the feeling that homages to specific shots from movies of that era are frequent, but I’m too dumb and scatter-brained to definitively place any of them, so instead I’ll just sit back and enjoy.

The most welcome surprise in ‘La Muerte..’ though isn’t its technical acumen, but its pacing. Somehow or other, this one manages to almost completely avoid the stretches of procedural padding and ‘down time’ that weighed heavily on just about every subsequent thriller or detective story Franco attempted. So whilst we might not really give a hoot about the story or characters here, it’s hard to deny that there is always *something* happening on screen to maintain our interest - and furthermore, it’s often happening at great speed too! (Some of the action sequences and car chases are even under-cranked to lend them extra velocity – a pretty startling occurrence, given the sort of languorous drift we’ve learned to expect from later Franco productions.)

Events frequently veer off into totally random digressions, showcasing a great deal of garrulous, somewhat charming humour. But, rather than serving merely to pad out screen-time (as might have been the case in a later film), some of these sequences, such as the one in which the hero engages in an arm-wrestling showdown with a couple of guys in a waterfront bar, absolutely explode with life – exhilarating bits of romantic-realist cinematic business that momentarily take the film completely outside its hum-drum generic trappings, recalling the kind of thing you might see in a ‘50s Fellini movie, and suggesting the presence of a young, live-wire director straining at the leash to make ANY kind of film.

For the finale, Franco even stages a chaotic masked ball in a vast, baroque ballroom, as the gun-toting characters fight their way to a showdown through a haze of streamers and confetti, elbowing aside throngs of outlandishly costumed revellers – an overwhelming visual spectacle that the director would recreate almost exactly a few years later in his decidedly strange eurospy effort ‘Lucky The Inscrutable’ (1967).**

The presence of a much remarked upon “Lina” amongst the central characters (the other cast members say her name a lot) initially seems positively eerie, coming a full decade before Franco began working with the much-missed Ms. Romay… until that is, we remember that it was Franco who chose Romay’s screen-name for her in the first place, stealing it from a slightly known Mexican actress and jazz singer, no less. Given this movie’s jazz theme, the pre-existing Lina Romay may have already been on the director’s mind when he threw the script together, and so, as is ever the case in the endlessly self-referential and culturally aware world of Franco, things come full circle in the end.

Francophiles will be equally unsurprised to learn that the millionaire bad guy in ‘La Muerte Silba un Blues’ is named Radeck, or that, in a final reel twist, the heroic undercover police detective turns out to be none other than one Alfred Periera (perhaps making his first screen appearance?).

Despite lacking just about all of the surface level trademarks of the Franco’s later oeuvre (no sex, no horror, no dreamy weirdness), those in the know will instantly recognise ‘La Muerte..’ as a Jess Franco film. Not just the character names, but also the scene set-ups, plot developments and camera angles - even the hair & make-up choices - all seem to cast uncanny echoes into the future, reminding us of tropes that would turn up again and again in his later career, their origin(?) in this film lost or barely acknowledged. Even the ‘Roof Blues’ itself, which plays a significant part in the film’s storyline, will sound distantly familiar to Franco fans; though perhaps not instantly recognisable, it is a melancholy melody that I’m sure I remember reappearing in some form on the soundtrack to many of his other movies.

Overall, I found ‘Death Whistles a Blues’ to be a wonderful surprise. Though its boilerplate script and self-consciously ‘minor’ ambitions stop it from ever attaining the level of a capital letters GREAT MOVIE, it is nonetheless one of the most technically impressive and unpretentiously entertaining films Franco made during the ‘60s, and probably one of the best thrillers or crime films he *ever* made, so it is a shame that circumstances have seen it more or less lost to history as a footnote to a footnote in the big book of obscure movie-making anecdotes. Given the film’s aforementioned lack of sex, horror and strangeness, the low-ish scores awarded to it below do not really reflect the extent to which I enjoyed it, and I would certainly encourage curious fans, or those who enjoy off-beat ‘60s genre movies in general, to track it down.

Kink – 2/5
Creepitude – 1/5
Pulp Thrills – 4/5
Altered States – 1/5
Sight-seeing – 3/5

* No big names or Franco favourites are present in the cast, but some IMDB clicking reminds us that much of the supporting cast from ‘..Dr. Orlof’ reappears here, including Perla Cristal, Conrado San Martín and María Silva, thus lending weight to the idea that the films were made at around the same time.

** And there was me thinking that 'Lucky..' ripped off the opening to George Franju's 'Judex', released a year after this film...

Witches, Zombies, Hair Metal and Orson Welles: February Film-Watching Journal Part # 1

I had a couple of weekends to myself last month: no social events, no responsibilities to take care of, no plans, nothing. Meaning? A few perfect evenings to catch up on the backlog of horror movies I’ve been acquiring recently you’ll be unsurprised to hear, as I’ve yet to start a damn blog about staring at the ceiling in existential anguish, or building cathedrals out of matchsticks or something.

Rock N’ Roll Nightmare (John Fasano, 1987)

First into the DVD player one Friday night was Rock n’ Roll Nightmare, which I’ve read about here and there over the years and, speaking as someone who takes an interest in just about any rock n’ roll / horror crossover movie, no matter how bad, you can appreciate that I was looking forward to some enjoyably stupid, rampagin’ fare. God, what a disappointment. “Cult classic” my ass, this film fucking stinks. I mean, I’ve seen some uninspired, slapdash, “will this do?” filmmaking in my time, but can you imagine the lack of commitment necessary to take the following concept - ‘80s hair metal band led by charismatic glam-rock barbarian called Thor go to deserted old house with their girlfriends, fight goo-dripping Evil Dead style ‘80s monsters - and produce a movie that is not only a crass, ugly and deeply stupid work (as might well be expected), but is also utterly lacking in any kind of entertainment value…? How can this be? Couldn’t you just, I dunno, put the rockers, the girls and the monsters in a room, tie a camcorder to ceiling and let nature take it’s course, and still emerge with something that’s at least…. kinda fun? To screw up this badly takes a special kind of incompetence.

Don’t get me wrong here. I mean, I’m not being some witless “films should be coherent and well-made” bore, writing an Amazon product review to reveal to the world the shocking truth that “Werewolves On Wheels” isn’t actually very good. I love all kinds of objectively *bad* films: mysterious-bad films, weird-bad films, funny-bad films, sublime-bad films, culturally interesting-bad films… but Rock n’ Roll Nightmare is just a downer on every level that fails to throw the audience anything to reward them for sitting through the damn thing. A bad-bad film.

I can’t even think where to start in shooting this thing down, there are so many easy targets. The supposedly creepy, isolated old house is right next to a main road, is mainly filmed in overcast daylight, and looks like a Barrett Home! Nothing at all happens, for ages! When the inevitable monster/death scenes do turn up, they’re short, crap and filmed in such a joyless manner they might as well have not bothered, and just had the characters declare “ok, I’m dead now”, and wander off, which in some cases they pretty much do! They can barely even be arsed to make clear who’s alive and who’s monster-ised at any given point! The band is so boring and polite they make Stryper look like Mayhem by comparison, and we have to watch them playing all their dull-ass, six minute songs in their entirety! Much of the rest of the running time seems to be taken up with awful, awful dryhumping sex scenes – soundtracked by Thor’s own love ballads, natch – that it’s fair to say NOBODY wanted to see.

Ok, so vaguely on the up-side, Jon-Mikl Thor manages to pass himself off quite well as a likeably earnest and engaging…uh… protagonist (I’m reluctant to say ‘hero’, as he doesn’t actually do much), and it would be fun to see him strut his stuff in a better film. He seems like a nice enough guy. The legendarily ludicrous ‘trick ending’/final battle sequence/flying starfish bit is pretty funny, in a ‘would provoke some chuckling if you stumbled across it on late night TV’ kinda way, but, if you’re sufficiently bored, I’m sure you can probably find it on youtube without slogging through an hour’s worth of aimless, lifeforce-suffocating crap to get there (here ya go).

Somewhat unfeasibly, my DVD of ‘Rock n’ Roll Nightmare’ is a ‘collector’s edition’, packed with ‘special features’, a circumstance that seems akin to putting a new rocket engine in a slug. They’d better be pretty damn special, that’s all I’m saying.

The Witching (Bert I. Gordon, 1972)

Another one well worth avoiding. Director Bert I. Gordon was responsible for b-movie classics such as ‘The Amazing Colossal Man’ and ‘Village of the Giants’ back in the ‘50s, but squandered the resultant goodwill by spending much of the rest of his career turning out the occasional bit of unremarkable hackwork. If you were feeling particularly cruel, you could say Orson Welles did much the same, only, y’know, with ‘Citizen Kane’ and ‘Touch of Evil’ to look back on instead of ‘War of the Colossal Beast’.

Certainly, ‘The Witching’ would seem to mark a definitively depressing example of the decline of both men, as Gordon sets about directing it with all the flair and atmosphere of a public information film about crop blight. Apparently, this movie was originally released under the title ‘Necromancy’, with all the nudie witchcraft scenes cut out, a strategy which I can only assume was an attempt to create the most boring 70 minute film on record, but hey, what do I know? Maybe there was a big gap in the family movie market in ’72 for really dull, PG rated witchcraft thrillers featuring former cinematic luminairies sitting in a big, uncomfortable chairs muttering to themselves. Anyway, the nekkid witches and occasional bits of bloodshed were reinstated (they were part of the original production, not later inserts) when ‘The Witching’ got a second chance at life on the ‘80s home video market, and that’s the one I’m watching here.

Things start on a high with a pretty enjoyable satanic ritual scene, as Orson’s coven initiate a new witch by slicing a chunk out of her chest and trying to persuade her in turn to stab a voodoo doll which causes the death, hundreds of miles away, of Pamela Franklin’s unborn child. From there the action (and henceforth I use the term loosely) cuts to Pamela and her husband (played by Michael Ontkean – Sheriff Truman in Twin Peaks), who are driving across the desert en route to the isolated small town – called ‘Lilith’, would you believe - where Welles rules supreme in his capacity as a sinister patriarch/warlock type guy. Hubby has been offered a new job there you see, with the town’s sole employer – Orson’s toy factory.

From this not entirely unpromising opening however, the rest of the movie basically just reheats scraps from ‘Rosemary’s Baby’ in flat TV movie fashion, as the townsfolk try to get the new couple interested in joining their hip, swinging witch cult (they “worship pleasure” you see, which in Lilith seems to amount to holding cocktail parties where lots of housewives lounge around in witch gear with their tits hanging out), and Pamela, understandably though boringly, gets all ‘I-don’t-like-it-here’ and ‘am-I-hallucinating-or-are-they messing-with-my-mind’ and ‘why-did-they-bring-us-here’ and ‘can-I-still-trust-my-husband-or-what’ and BLAH BLAH BLAH.

As for Orson Welles’ performance, about the best thing you can say about it is that, well, at least he turned up, and allowed them to point the camera at him for a bit, which is more than can be said for certain other occasions on which his services were engaged during the ‘70s. Obviously overcome with disgust at being reduced to appearing in such a crappy motion picture, Orson spends his scenes motionless, lethargic and grumpy, delivering his lines in a resentful, semi-coherent monotone as if reading them off an autocue. A fun, powerful performance from a decent character actor as the villain could have livened this picture up 100%, but Welles is a complete charisma vacuum throughout. Still, at least Gordon got to stick “starring Orson Welles” on all the marketing without even having to lie about it, thus presumably increasing this otherwise lousy movie’s distribution/profit potential by a factor of ten, which was probably the point of persuading the big O to do it in the first place. Hell, I know curiosity re: ‘Orson Welles + witches = ??’ is what suckered me into watching it.

And that’s yer lot really. I can’t really recommend wasting your time on this one, unless you really, really, really like topless witches and watching Orson Welles looking sleepy, and have already exhausted the possibilities of all the other motion pictures in the world that feature such things.

Day of the Dead (George A. Romero, 1985)

After all that, I felt like I REALLY needed some real solid horror, with guts and substance. So I’ll admit it, I just watched “Day of the Dead” again. Job done. And as with my most recent viewing of “Night of The Living Dead” a few months ago, this time around I found myself mainly contemplating how fiendishly effective George Romero’s manipulative good cop / bad cop characterisations can be, and the way he employs them to undermine expected audience reaction.

For instance, I’m sure I’ve watched ‘Night..’ upward of a dozen times over the years, but it was only on the last viewing that I finally realised that arch-asshole Mr. Cooper actually purveys pretty sound survival advice throughout the film, and that, if they’d listened to him rather than to Ben, they might conceivably have all lived through the night (assuming they could bring themselves to behead the infected kid). But neither characters nor audience take heed of this, even after obsessive repeats viewing in my case, because, y’know, he’s such an unbelievable asshole, what kind of world could this be where he could actually be right about stuff?

Similarly, on maybe the fifth or sixth viewing of “Day..”, I still manage to get me all hot and bothered, thinking, christ, those soldiers are SUCH inhuman jerks, and the helicopter pilot and the radio guy are SUCH solid, likeable, no nonsense awesome dudes; I vow that when the apocalypse arrives, I’m gonna be like them (at least until I die of hyperglycaemia)! There I am, putty in George’s directorial hands, as per usual. Of course, he doesn’t repeat the same subtle morality vs. practicality turnaround used in ‘Night..’, but instead concentrates on ratcheting up the audience’s hatred for the ‘bad guys’ until it comes time for them to suffer stomach-turning, visceral deaths at the hands and teeth of the undead, at which point you’re caught thinking HA HA, THAT’S RIGHT, DIE YOU…. oh my god, there are maybe only a dozen human beings left alive in the world of this film, and I’m here CHEERING as half of them get their entrails ripped apart and their throats torn out by walking corpses….? – at which point things take on a distinctly unsettling resonance for us liberal humanist type viewers.

Analysis of Romero’s zombie films (prior to his heartbreakingly awful recent efforts at least) has often tended to dwell on their oft-praised social/political commentary, but to me those elements sometimes seem shallow and heavy-handed (in ‘Dawn’ and ‘Day’ at least – admittedly you could write whole books on the cultural resonance of ‘Night’), taking a definite backseat to his truly subversive mangling of character dynamics and narrative expectations.

Planet Terror (Robert Rodriquez, 2007)

After the failure of that fateful Friday’s attempt to get with some simple-minded, gory fun, the following evening’s viewing began with a flick that’s SURELY got to deliver: Robert Rodriguez’ ‘Planet Terror’. Now, let it be said that I’m not generally a fan of Rodriquez’ somewhat chauvinistic, stylised action movie aesthetic, but I , like all good people, adore ‘From Dusk Till Dawn’, I loved Tarantino’s ‘Kill Bill’(both parts), I think the two directors joint b-movie fascination tends to bring out the best in both of them and, well… essentially this is a movie in which Rose McGowan from out of The Doom Generation fights zombies with a machine gun for a leg. Ok, I realise Rose McGowan may have been thoroughly blanded out by over a decade doing stuff like ‘Charmed’, made-for-TV Stephen King adaptations and an unfortunate stint as Marilyn Manson’s ladyfriend, but to me she’ll always be Rose McGowan out of ‘The Doom Generation’, and, in this movie, a post-ironic b-movie-pastiche blockbuster staring out at me from the shelves of Fopp with a £4 pricetag, she fights zombies with a machine gun for a leg.

If you think I’m not gonna watch it, you give me more credit than I deserve.

So how was it for me? Well, by way of a review, simply close your eyes and imagine the sensation of drinking four beers in quick succession, then open your eyes and heed my words as I say, MAN - THAT WAS FUCKING AWESOME.

And what more is there to say? A whole bunch of stuff happened, I don’t quite remember it all, and in retrospect it probably didn’t make much sense, but it seemed reasonable at the time. There were a whole crew of weird, entertaining comic book type characters, and loads and loads of hideous gross-out violence and a hospital full of mixed up zombies, lovable redneck cops, nasty crooked mutant soldiers, and loads of guns and bombs everywhere! Gunshot wounds that do a big, satisfying SPLAT like in an old Peckinpah movie only more so, and sleazy b-movie injokes, severed limbs and goofy, interesting sub-plots and really, really cute girls riding around on motorbikes, wielding shotguns and doing go-go dances and kung-fu and stabbing guys with syringes (but they have real characters and are tough and idiosyncratic and kick-ass and stuff too, so the modern day “not being a misogynist bastard” rules say it’s allowed). Oh my lord, it was good.

And that’s that! It’s a film that consciously avoids any kind of intellectual engagement, so I’m gonna respect its wishes and not give it any. It’s clearly the best mainstream Hollywood movie in years, just by default! It rules! Even the music was quite good! It wins my Oscars! The End!

I know I should be grumpily discussing how conspicuously Rodriquez fails in his brief as regards making a modern day recreation of a ‘70s exploitation movie. For one thing, ‘Planet Terror’ is half an hour longer than any actual b picture, it’s far too carefully planned out/shot/edited, and any one of the aerial shots, explosions, car crashes or stunts that it lays on by the screaming dozen would be beyond the reaches of the blowing-the-budget finale set-piece of a genuine grindhouse effort. Not to mention the incongruous appearance of faces like Bruce Willis, which make the whole conceit seem a little flimsy (I mean, that would be like what – Cary Grant turning up in a H.G. Lewis flick or something?).

BUT, I don’t think that’s really an issue. As with ‘Kill Bill’, the true intent here is not the authentic recreation of a b-movie, but an attempt to bring to life the kind of film that the more crazed and imaginative b-movie directors COULD have made, had they had access to the budget, time, technical ability and talent necessary to fully realise the majestically fucked up panaramas of awesomeness that we fans would like to think were buzzing around their heads as they set out with joy in their hearts to film some fuzzy footage of lingerie models doing amateur kickboxing moves in the desert, or whatever.

‘Planet Terror’ often succeeds very well in capturing this spirit, but…. I can’t help but feel maybe it succeeds TOO well, in some ways. In the midst of its modern day Hollywood excess, it perhaps ends up crushing to death the very b-movie essence it seeks to reserve. After all, one of the basic prerequisites of b-movie fandom is to realise that you WILL be disappointed, that the movies will very rarely live up to the decadent depravity of their advertising. But, if you’re lucky, you may find instead that they make amends by offering something a little more strange, touching, funny or disturbing than the unaffordable/unfilmable adolescent wish fulfilment of their posters ever could. That's what we love 'em for really.

By laying on it’s expectation-surpassing gore/action/sex with all the restraint of a 12 year old psychopath and then throwing the results into a contemporary multiplex context, a film like ‘Planet Terror’ can easily lose this mixed up charm where ‘Kill Bill’ was (arguably) stylish and idiosyncratic enough to retain it, cracking the legitimizing veneer of post-modern trash homage, and leaving, well…. what exactly? A soulless parade of girl-porn, gun-porn, explosion-porn, car-porn, gross-medical-disaster-porn, flying limb-porn and more girl-porn (although strangely little porn-porn) that plays to a patronising, reductionist idea of what a male audience wants to see just as thoroughly as a lowest common denominator ‘chick flick’ plays to the assumed idea of what a female audience wants to see? Although the inherently patriarchal nature of the film industry and movie fandom allows ‘Planet Terror’ a far greater level of critical acceptance than ‘Confessions of a Shopaholic’ is liable to receive, are they not, in some sense, flipsides of the same grim, exclusionary coin?

And I swallowed the whole damn thing, hook, line and sinker.

GOD, that’s depressing.

Me and my stupid brain! Why did I have to pay attention to it? I was having so much fun! Stupid, crappy ‘thinking’! Whose idea was that anyway? Fuck!