Two-Fisted Tales: Cutlass Empire by F. van Wyck Mason (Jarrolds, year unknown [1949/50?])

As I have probably mentioned here before, there is a tradition in the area in which I live that sees people, apparently unable or unwilling to pay a visit to the charity shop of their choice, leaving all manner of unwanted objects – furniture, books, children’s toys, random junk – outside their homes, inviting neighbours and passers-by to take what they please.

Usually, the boxes (or merely piles) of books that turn up on an almost weekly basis yield little of interest, but – sometimes – you strike gold.

Sir Henry Morgan (1635-1688) presumably needs no introduction here, but the details of his life and death remain absolutely extraordinary, even before they received the F. van Wyck Mason treatment. (Interestingly, Morgan also provided the inspiration for John Steinbeck’s first novel, ‘Cup of Gold’ (1929), which I’d imagine must make an interesting contrast with the accounts of his exploits found here.)

F. van Wyck Mason (1902-1978) meanwhile was a prolific pulp writer of the 1920s and 30s who seems to have switched his attention to historical novels from the ‘40s onward, penning upward of fifty such volumes prior to his death at the age of 76 – presumed drowned whilst swimming off the coast of Bermuda, apparently.

Wikipedia summarises Mason’s writing style as “colourful though straightforward”, and indeed, this claim is more than borne out by a few random-page-openings of ‘Cutlass Empire’, in the spirit of which, I offer you the following;

pp. 11-12:

“Aware of a powerful and steady growing appetite, Harry turned his steed into a very narrow and dark cobbled street that reeked of manure, sewage and cooking odours. He Smiled. At the other end of this noisome thoroughfare lay the Angel Inn – and Anne. Darkly demure, she should be waiting, eagerly, tenderly.

A wider grin curved the rider’s sun-cracked lips. And then there was always Clarissa to be enjoyed, providing she had not gone a-visiting up-country. Plague take it, he’d far from forgotten the curious golden-white loveliness of her hair and the fresh pink of her complexion.

He urged his mount to a faster walk. No telling when a window might open and, to a cry of ‘Ware slops!’, a bucket of swill, excreta or trash might come raining down upon the greasy cobbles.

In his mind’s eye Harry Considered Anne Pruett. Like most people born in the West Country, she wasn’t tall and her soft, dark brown hair would be caught up by a bow over the nape of her neck; there was something infinitely provocative about her slightly upturned nose and grey-green eyes, and short but vividly tinted features. Heigh-ho! A sturdy, generously built wench was Mistress Pruett’s daughter, and just blossoming into a bountiful maturity. Certes! Anne’s curves seemed designed by nature to fit, ever so comfortably, into a fellow’s arms.

Would three weeks’ separation have softened her resistance? Harry assured himself it must have. A perplexing lass, this Anne Pruett – ‘twasn’t often one came across a tavern keeper’s brat who cried ‘No!’ and seemed to mean it.”

pp. 107-108:

“Enoch Jackman long since had reeled in to sprawl, snoring like a dozen foghorns, across the untidy, earthen floored bedroom, but Captain Achille Tribitor, master of a brigantine just returned from a moderately fortunate cruise off the coast of Cuba, continued singing louder than ever. More than half drunk, he plucked at a Potuguese guitar and happily serenaded the various gecko lizards reposing themselves against the palm thatch roof of Anytime Polly’s ramshackle ordinary.

As for Morgan, he sat glowering at an earthenware jug of fiery rum which had cost him the exorbitant sum of two pistoles; the stuff wasn’t worth even a tenth of that sum, but, in Cayona, one had to expect such brigandage.

The more he considered old Watts’ contemptuous dismissal of his plea for even a small independent command, the more resentful he grew. Not one of the other captains had led his men so successfully that his command had not been reduced by a single casualty.

‘The Devil fly off with that old wrinkle-belly,’he gloomed. ‘If only he wasn’t Susan’s father –-‘

[…]

Ready good nature mercurially restored, Morgan bellowed with laughter at the vision of a pagan god perched among the elms shading the old walled farm in Llanrhymny. He remembered now if whom the the ‘Red Rose against the Grey Wall’ reminded him.

Susan! By heavens – was it not utterly amazing that so charming and delicate a maid could thrive on the roistering coast of this barbaric island – like a beautiful flower on a dung heap?

Rose! That’s what Susan was – a rose. Morgan smiled to himself – a wise, private little smile. Dear Susan. After the soul-dulling brutalities, the crass savagery, the unbelievable obscenities he had experienced in the past three years, her presence was like a long cool draught to a sailor perishing of thirst.

Tribitor struck a loud chord on his guitar. ‘One observes,’ he remarked, ‘that you, mon ami, are at heart a poet and a great trouveur. Surely the angels in le bon Dieu’s heaven must be envious.’

‘Aye, I’m a poet,’ Morgan admitted. A rare, a supremely wonderful, inspiration was kindling his imagination. What of that golden rose from the bishop’s palace? True, he had been saving that superb example of the goldsmith’s art for an especially auspicious occasion, but by heavens he wasn’t going to wait! Tonight – yes, this very night, gallantly, humbly and devotedly – he would toss his golden rose through Susan’s window!”

pp.230-231:

“Hopeful, but not yet satisfied, Morgan watched a gradual change cover over those dark and predatory faces. Tongues slipped out to lick sun-cracked lips for all the world like those of so many cats congregated about a fishmonger’s barrow.

Morgan leaped into the circle of firelight, glared at Gascoigne and shouted him down by sheer lung-power. Out on the ships anchored in the river, crews heard his bellowings and grinned.

‘E Lord! Old ‘Arry’s giving ‘em wot-for tonight.’

‘Do you know what this timorous fugitive from a school for young women is going to say? I do! He’s going to warn you that Porto Bello is guarded by five strong castles--’

‘Five?’ demanded Harrington. ‘Gods mercy, you can’t be serious.’

‘Aye, there are five, but there’ll be no call to reckon with more than two of ‘em – maybe only one – provided you follow my orders to the letter. From the stone on which he stood Morgan’s large and vivid black eyes flickered from one to another of his captains’ faces.

‘Well, Harry,’ Jackman invited. ‘Speak your mind. I’ll at least listen to ye – ye’re damn seldom mistook in yer tactics.’

‘I intend to attack the city from its rear and so ignore those great forsts at the entrance to the harbour. Now listen.’ Like the skilful speaker he had become, he lowered his voice. ‘Hearken, all of you. I intend to descend to Estera Longa Lemos, land our forces five miles to the north of Porto Bello and then circle inland to gain the city’s rear. Since the greatest part of their batteries point to seawards, and since the Dons have no suspicion of our presence, why, we’ll be into their town before they half wake up!’

‘But, nom d’un chien!’ Gascoigne roared. ‘The Spaniards are commanded by Castellon himself – the best and bravest of their generals!’”

And so on. You get the general idea, I’m sure.

A work of almost incalculable entertainment value, ‘Cutlass Empire’s 422 uninterrupted pages of this-sort-of-thing first saw print in America in 1949, so we can presumably date this British edition to some time shortly thereafter.

FRANCO FILES: Justine (1969)

AKA:
‘The Marquis de Sade: Justine’, ‘Justine de Sade’, ‘Justine & Juliet’, ‘Justine Ovvero le Disavventure Della Virtù’, ‘Les deux beautés’, ‘Deadly Sanctuary’.

Context:
The financial backing provided by maverick producer Harry Alan Towers allowed Jess Franco to produce some of his best ever work during the late ‘60s, but also resulted in some of his worst. Unfortunately, ‘69’s ‘Justine’ falls soundly into the latter category. Budgeted as a modest historical epic, featuring numerous familiar faces and running to an interminable 125 minutes, the film is a total misfire, perhaps the biggest blunder in either man’s catalogue (which is saying something).

Set in France and filmed in Spain with the cast speaking Italian, with an English producer and funding from West Germany, Liechtenstein and the USA, it is at least a great example of the way that Jess Franco films began to completely defy any idea of national identity, but sadly little of this variety is visible on-screen.

Content:
Apparently the intention here was to reinvent the Marquis DeSade’s philosophical novel ‘Justine’ as a kind of ‘Tom Jones’-esque bawdy romp, with Romina Power (a charisma-free young actress whom Franco claims was ‘imposed’ upon him by Towers) in the title role as the virtuous convent girl whose moral scruples land her up to her neck in cruelty, poverty and vice, whilst her amoral harlot of a sister (Maria Rohm) by contrast does very nicely for herself.

Applying such light-hearted treatment to such ponderous source material is a questionable decision at best, and, whilst I’m no fan of DeSade, even I can recognise that the banal episodic shenanigans and jaw-droppingly crass moralistic ending that Franco and Towers come up with here is a complete travesty of his work.

Amongst the roll-call of should-have-known-better thespians taking a deep sigh and collecting a cheque that probably bounced, the great Mercedes McCambridge (Johnny Guitar, Touch of Evil) plays a hardened convict who breaks Justine out of jail, and Klaus Kinski turns up to play the Marquis in a framing narrative that supposedly sees him penning the novel from his cell in the Bastille. In keeping with his other performances for Franco, Kinski essentially earns his pay by doing nothing whatsoever, sitting around in a powdered wig, looking bored out of his skull as somebody else (I think it might actually be Jack Palance?) intones his voiceover narration.

And speaking of Jack Palance, the movie’s sole saving grace (and the only bit that actually seems much like a Jess Franco movie) comes when Justine falls into the hands of a sect of sex-mad libertine monks led by Palance, who gives every indication of being smashed out of his gourd, delivering a truly crazed performance that must rank as one of the best/worst (delete as applicable) that the great man ever subjected us to during his years in Europe. For one scene that calls for him to walk from one location to another, he seems to have refused to move, and is instead inexplicably wheeled across the screen on some sort of cart as he stands motionless, with his hands raised in a kind of Nosferatu-like ‘doom claw’ posture. Damnedest thing I ever saw.

Kink:
For a project that ostensibly sees a meeting between Jess Franco, a bunch of money and The Marquis DeSade, I’m sad to report that ‘Justine’ is staggeringly un-erotic. You get some dream sequence flogging during the Kinski scenes, intermittent boobs elsewhere, but beyond that we’re in ‘sizzle not the steak’ territory here really. Dated nudge-wink type crap and tame jabs at authority that might have passed for ‘satirical’ in the 1780s predominate, and Jess only seems to work up any real enthusiasm during a brief visit to Jack Palance’s sex dungeon, where we get to witness a bit of sexy acupuncture (a motif that was to turn up again in a number of Franco’s later, more explicit films), spilling over into a super-imposition heavy psychedelic montage and… wow, I just typed the words “Jack Palance’s sex-dungeon”. But I’m afraid I’m still only giving this 2/5.

Creepitude:
Nothing doing. Admittedly, it’s not supposed to be a horror film, but by the standards of any genre, much of the movie is blandly photographed and horribly over-lit, and although the production seems to have a bit of cash behind it, most of the sets and costumes still end up looking like a West End musical. Again, best advice is to fast forward straight to the Palance section, which at least has cool lighting and echoy psychotronic music, and Howard Vernon smirking in a really terrible wig. 1/5

Pulp Thrills:
Perhaps if for some reason you’re totally obsessed with powdered wigs, hoop dresses and second rate 18th century bawdiness, you might get some fun out of this…? If so, I wish you all the best. Just in general. 1/5

Altered States:
The only psychotropic effect you’re likely to experience during ‘Justine’ is unquiet sleep, haunted by candy-coloured annoyance. Did I mention it’s over TWO HOURS long..? Christ. I know from my descriptions above it maybe kinda sounds like fun, but even by Franco standards this thing drags like a bastard. 1/5

Sight-seeing:
Much of the film is shot on sets, and pretty dodgy looking ones at that. In between however, we can at least enjoy some extensive location work in and around Barcelona, with Franco presumably using the clout that accompanies a modestly budgeted historical epic to shoot beside the fountains in the Parc de Montjuïc and the magnificent frontage of the Palau Nacional, in addition to the more traditional b-movie surroundings of a ruined abbey, a clifftop fort masquerading as a Parisian women’s prison and… oh look, a beautifully strange looking Gaudi-designed folly/gatehouse type thing! Bonus points for that. 3/5

Conclusion:
A textbook example of the way that period settings, literary subject matter and relatively big budgets stymied Franco’s creativity, his direction here is workmanlike at best, so lacking in all the things that usually make his films enjoyable, he might as well have not even bothered turning up. I mean, there are better people to hire if you just want someone to point the camera in the right direction, y’know?

Franco completists and those who’ve picked this up on one of the Anchor Bay box-sets might want to give it a go for the Palance sequence, which is a pretty good laugh with a few recognisably Franco moments, but aside from that, this is an extremely poor effort, and even a score from the usually reliably bad-ass Bruno Nicolai turns out to be overblown orchestral rubbish. Offered a choice between watching this and reading the book, my money’s on doing neither and just listening to The Rangers song a hundred times.

Think Pink: Sex & Fury(Norifumi Suzuki, 1973)

Thus far in this series we’ve been looking at films with a contemporary setting, but there were also quite a few pinky violence-affiliated films with a period setting - attempts to incorporate the 'violent female action' sub-genre into the more traditional confines of the ninkyo (‘chivalry’) films pioneered by Toei during the ‘50s and ‘60s, presumably with the aim of rejuvenating the latter genre’s fading box office appeal.

Of the three films I’d consider a rough ‘holy trinity’ of these kinds of cross-overs, two - Toshiya Fujita’s ‘Lady Snowblood’ and Teruo Ishii’s startling ‘Blind Woman’s Curse’ – are very much borderline entries that I’d be reluctant to place under the ‘pinky violence’ banner. The third though – ‘Sex & Fury’ – certainly makes no bones about its alignment to the genre, as the reliably manic Norifumi Suzuki drags all the chaos and sleaze of his girl gang and WIP films back in time, with (needless to say) hugely entertaining results, working with what looks to have been an unusually lavish budget to create a movie that's basically the closest thing the world will ever see to a Pinky Violence Historical Epic.

As distinct from feudal era Samurai films, ninkyo movies are usually set in the Meiji era, which began with the end of Japan’s isolation from the wider world in 1868 and officially ended in 1912. A period of vast social change and political turmoil, the Meiji era can (in filmic terms at least) be roughly equated to Japan’s own ‘Wild West’, with the heroes of these movies – gamblers and gangsters attempting to uphold the traditional virtues of chivalry in the face of strife, corruption and malign foreign intervention – perhaps veeery roughly equating to the last-real-men-in-a-doomed-world heroes of a Leone or Peckinpah western.

I mention this background simply because it plays into ‘Sex & Fury’ to a considerable extent. Our tale begins in 1886 (or Meiji year 16) with a young Ocho seeing her father (a police detective) killed by yakuza. (Funny isn’t it how so many PV films feature daughters avenging their fathers, a fairly rare turn of events in Western revenge films?) He dies clutching a handful of hanafuna playing cards, providing the transition in to a wonderfully stylised opening sequence that sees Ocho, now grown up into the shape of Reiko Ike, tattooed and wielding a short-sword, striking combat poses amid a brightly-lit pop-art fantasia that reproduces the imagery from the bloody cards on a huge scale – a pretty striking visual device that immediately marks out ‘Sex & Fury’ as something a bit grander in ambition than your average PV flick.

This impression is underscored by the fact that the credits are immediately followed by a lightning fast history lesson, with captions and still photographs giving us the skinny on significant Meiji era events, including the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese wars, leading all the way up to 1905 (Meiji 38). “Now is a civilised era of enlightenment”, the on-screen text concludes, on what we already know is going to be a blackly ironic note.

An independent woman par excellence, the grown-up Ocho seems to be doing alright for herself pursuing her interests as a gambler, sword-fighter and compulsive pick-pocket, but fate swiftly takes a hand when she steps in to aid the escape of an apparently crazed anarchist who has just tried to assassinate a big-shot politician named Kurokawa. (Very much a ‘modern’ sort of chap, he is seen engaging in internationalist power-broking in baronial, Western style surroundings.)

After Ocho subsequently witnesses an entirely unconnected (or is it..?) murder at a gambling house she frequents, the boss of the house apparently dispatches a gang of armed men to take her down, leading directly to what is almost certainly the film’s overall highlight, an absolutely breathtaking sequence that sees our heroine leaping nude from the bath and slaughtering about a dozen warriors in glorious slo mo – as the snow falls on the ornamental garden outside, naturally. I’ll admit that even on my second viewing I wasn’t *entirely* sure what’s supposed to be going on here plot-wise, but who cares frankly – the sight of Reiko Ike, blood-soaked, tattooed and naked, performing acrobatic leaps and dives as she severs limbs and slices throats surely has to be one of the quintessential images of all Japanese exploitation cinema.

It’s an exhilarating bit of filmmaking, inexplicably accompanied by a jaunty tune that sounds like something off a Herb Alpert album, and the crazy echo on the sword swoosh sound effects alone blows my mind. Aside from anything else, it’s a testament to the professionalism of the film’s editors, technicians and fight choreographers that they managed to cut together a five minute, multi-angle sequence in which a naked woman spins around a room fighting multiple assailants, without once breaking Japanese cinema’s pubic hair embargo. And if the rest of ‘Sex & Fury’ never quite manages to top this scene, well, it’s certainly not for want of trying. Unexpectedly throwing in a sequence that outdoes the finale of 90% of action movies in the opening fifteen minutes sets the bar pretty high for the subsequent seventy five.

By the time we’ve got our breath back and poured a stiff drink, an ambitious and convoluted tale has already begun to unfold, honouring the film’s historical setting with a real Dickensian sprawl of intersecting storylines, packed with intrigue and melodrama to beat the band.

First off, it turns out that the anarchist whose life Ocho saved is desperately in love with a foreign spy named Christina. Not only “the foremost female gambler from a Western country”, but also apparently “the most popular dancer in the stormy city of London, England”, Christina is played by none other than Scandinavian sexploitation goddess Christina Lindberg. Unable to even speak the same language, it seems its love at first sight for these two, prompting all manner of star-crossed shenanigans, set against some pretty complex political machinations. Christina’s ‘handler’ is a chap named Guinness, an Englishman and guest of Kurokawa who secretly aims to bring Japan under the influence of the British Empire by means of “starting a second opium war in this barbaric country”.

As an aside, can anyone help me ID the actor who plays Guinness? IMDB has him down as one ‘Mark Darling’ in his only screen appearance, but I’m SURE I’ve seen the guy in a few Euro-horror movies and such. Anyone care to jog my memory?


Like any good pinky violence heroine, Ocho has her own gang of loyal female buddies, time in the form of a sisterhood of fellow orphan pick-pockets who operate as part of a kind of benevolent Bill Sykes / Fagin type operation overseen by the big-hearted lady who describes herself as their adopted mother. Then there’s a sub-plot about Ocho taking up the cause of a dying gambler who was trying to raise money to stop his sister is being sold into slavery. Oh, and of course she’s also trying to identify the coded yakuza animal tattoos that identify her father’s killers, in order to wreak the necessary vengeance upon them.

So seriously, there’s all kindsa shit going on, all realised on the kind of scale that Western exploitation flicks of the same period barely even attempted. Suzuki certainly doesn’t skimp on the sex or the fury either though, happily rocketing through his usual line-up of OTT set-pieces, this time taking in a battle with switchblade-wielding nuns onboard an express train to Osaka, and Lindberg in a cow-girl outfit whipping a chained Ike to the accompaniment of spookshow organ music in a weird Christian chapel / torture chamber straight out of ‘School of the Holy Beast’ (what is WITH this guy’s thing for cowgirl outfits and Xtian imagery anyway..?). One particularly eye-popping / credulity-stretching scene even features Ocho’s pick-pocket friends being tied to the ceiling and beaten with sticks in a darkened room that looks like one of Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable concerts, prints of Japanese military exploits projected on the wall overlaid with psychedelic lighting and flashing strobes.

Plenty of the usual rapey unpleasantness is also in evidence of course, but even several lengthy (semi-consensual) sex scenes don’t slacken the pace – they’re excitingly shot with kinetic camerawork and some winningly kinky details (the bit where Ocho kills a vengeance-recipient by smearing her body with poisoned perfume is worthy of Jess Franco’s fevered imaginings). Many things ‘Sex & Fury’ may be, but it’s NEVER boring, the beautiful, lively photography full of fast cutting, crash zooms and focus shifts, detailed close-ups and solid blocks of bright colour, reminiscent of both Jack Hill’s better exploitation efforts and the technicolor frenzies of Seijun Suzuki’s ‘Toyko Drifter’.

As with many of Norifumi Suzuki’s films, ‘packed with incident’ scarcely does the maximalist approach on display here justice. To all intents and purposes, it’s a‘70s exploitation fan’s wet dream come true, a rollercoaster ride through everything that made that decade’s popular cinema so wild and vibrant, and a directorial high wire act that serves up enough sex and fury to satisfy the audience’s appetites ten times over, with vast swathes of barbed socio-political commentary, historical melodrama and pop art visual excess thrown in for good measure – the kind of densely-packed, rip-roaring 90 minute entertainment that shows up today’s slack-ass multiplex directors for the time-wasting clowns they are. God bless you Norifumi, you freakin’ maniac.

Surprisingly, about the one thing this movie doesn’t manage to cram in is an enka ballad, so instead here’s a nice English language voice-over segment in which Christina Lindberg discusses the sad lot of a female spy.