Roger Vadim’s Pretty Maids All In A Row 1971

A Film about DUALITY….notice the split screen

A new era of free love ushers in an emancipated kind of woman. Betty Smith ready to try anything! The big red book or TANTRIC SEX…

Prelude to the grooming of Miss Smith: She’ll be ready to deflower Ponce

Tiger’s mock sexual overture toward the smitten Betty Smith…

Jealousy rears it’s ugly and dangerous head….A maid wonders…

The Garden of Earthly Delights

How fast would it take to carry a body up the stairs and through the hall in order to dump a pretty maid in the wash room, without being seen?

Deputy Grady carries Miss Craymire through the school to illustrate a point

The inept Chief Poldaski fouls up once again….Back on traffic duty….

Vadim’s tongue in cheek dark humor is ever present in the film….

Just adding insult to Betty’s frustrated sexual encounter with Tiger McDrew. The sexual double entendre appears to her in a sign….Put A Tiger In Your Tank!

Ponce discovers a truth about his mentor and hero. A picture says 1,000 words.

Male posturing…the subtle roll of the shoulders, the head tilted to one side, all to intimidate this young boy who has stumbled into the Tiger’s Den

The Night and Poldaski’s happy flashlight.

No matter how horrible the crime, the film never shows you the actual killings. It is only what remains after the murders have taken place. The violence is suggested.

Ponce discovers more about his hero… he’s not the good man he thought…

Let The Dark Side Come Over…

The lighting, using gobo filters that create these hazy psychedelic balls of light balancing on the pure blackness of the screen lit behind Hudson and Carson create a claustrophobic uncertainty, like spheres of menacing hostility, or the unknown drowning out the senses. Again a very interesting technique used in the 70s

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Roger Vadim and A Few of His Women…

Vadim and Jane Fonda on the set of Barbarella

Vadim and Bardot

Bardot on the set of Don Juan (Or If Don Juan Were a Woman) 1973

Annette Stroyberg

A portrait of John Milton

In Pretty Maids All In A Row, Ponce and Substitute Teacher Betty Smith both read from Milton’s Paradise Lost. The telling of how Satan fell from grace, Adam and Eve were cast out of the garden, the angels fought amongst each other and innocence becomes sacrificed as just part of the epic tale.

John Milton’s Paradise Lost

Adam and Eve being cast out of the garden

William Blake’s painting depicting Paradise Lost

Bosch’s Decent into Hell, form the last panel of Garden of The Earthly Delights

Monsters yelling and gnawing at bowels…

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Other Salient Points Of Interest:

Brigitte Bardot and Jane Birkin in Vadim’s 1973 exploit Don Juan (Or if Don Juan Were a Woman) 1973

Whether or not Vadim is a fetishizing, womanizing soft porn exploitation provocateur, it’s critical that people study his films regardless, because there in lies a lot of vital information that can be digested and used to further the discourse about sexism, misogyny and the social constructs of gender. Shutting down the conversation because we think he is objectifying the female body and perhaps glorifying the sexualization of young women stops us from even asking the questions.

Vadim had an obvious fixation with the Don Juan Mythos as he cast his ingénue Brigitte Bardot in Don Juan ( Or If Don Juan Were A Woman?) 1973. He seems to ponder the question of love and power. Bardot plays Jeanne a woman living in Paris who believes she is the reincarnation of Don Juan.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

The most influential version of all is Don Giovanni, the opera composed by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart with libretto by Lorenzo da Ponte, first performed in Prague in 1787

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A young and handsome Rock Hudson….

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There is much about the film that alludes to elements of Don Juan. Here is a little bit of extra info:

Molière’s & Byron’s Don Juan Mythos

While Lord Byron’s poem satirizes the dreaming romantic anti-hero, Molière speaks more to the heart of Tiger McDrew who does not believe in loving just one beauty, that it would be almost a crime against nature not to succumb to any beauty that presents itself.

Don Juan by Haidee: 1873

Errol Flynn as Don Juan

From Wiki:

“The story of Don Juan first appears in an old Spanish legend concerning a handsome but unscrupulous man who seduces the daughter of the commander of Seville and then, when challenged, kills her father in a duel. In the original version, Don Juan mockingly invites the statue of the father to a feast; the statue appears at the banquet and ushers Don Juan to hell. There are many re-tellings of this story in drama and theatre; Mozart used the story for his opera Don Giovanni. (1787)”

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A Little About Roger Vadim:

In Paris, Vadim attended the Theatre Sarah Bernhardt, there he met film director Marc Allegret. Because of his association with Allegret, Vadim wound up meeting various filmmakers and writers particularly the incredible Jean Cocteau (Beauty & The Beast 1946 and Les Enfants Terribles 1950)

as well as Jean Genet, and Andre Gide.Vadim was exposed to a very progressive salon of creative artists, musicians, bohemians, surrealists. An avant-guarde crowd of post modern intellectuals. Pablo Picasso, Erik Satie, Proust, Amedeo Modigliani, and Édith Piaf were among them.

Most notable is the fact that it was Allegret who introduced Vadim to sixteen-year-old Brigitte Bardot, who would appear in several of Allegret’s films before attaining stardom with the success of And God Created Woman in 1956 with Vadim. Bardot and Vadim got married in 1952.

Bardot dancing on the table in And God Created Woman

Before his divorce from Fonda, Vadim had relocated to Hollywood. He remained there so that he could direct Hudson in Pretty Maids All in a Row.

Vadim is considered an unapologetic womanizer. He spent the rest of the 70s writing two memoirs based on the infamous love affairs he had with Brigitte Bardot, Catherine Deneuve, Annette Stroyberg and Jane Fonda. Memoirs of the Devil and Bardot Deneuve Fonda.

Vadim fathered a child with Deneuve. Fonda eventually denounced their film collaborations, saying they were exploitative. Atroyberg appeared in Vadim’s adaptation of the Gothic novella by Joseph Sheridan LeFanu’s classic vampire story Carmilla, which he entitled Blood and Roses.

Both Fonda and Bardot appeared in Poe’s adaption of Spirits of The Dead, in which Vadim, Louis Malle and Fellini each directed  the film’s 3 small vignettes.

Vadim was responsible for discovering Brigitte Bardot , casting her and her beautiful posterior in his 1956 sexually charged And God Created Women which was famous for the scene where Bardot dances barefoot on top of the table, showing little nudity, yet showcasing her sensuality.

The press became fixated on the sexual expressiveness of Bardot’s character which created the critical argument about what is art? and what is pornography? Of course like every good controversy, the debate that was sparked made the film an international success.

Interesting enough, as I make the correlation between Tiger McDrew’s character and Svengali, And God Created Women put Vadim on the defensive as a ‘Svengali’ who was exploiting the young naive Bardot. Perhaps, some of Tiger McDrew is Vadim working out his historical demons on film, as many artists are apt to do.

This is how Vadim responded to the allegations:

“I did not invent Brigitte Bardot. I simply helped her to blossom, to learn her craft, while remaining true to herself. I was able to shield her from the ossification of ready-made rules which in films, as in other professions, often destroy the most original talents by bringing them into line.”

One thing that Vadim is actually credited for at least focusing on Bardot’s natural beauty instead of relying on the dramatic artifices of fashion, hair styles and elaborate make-up or lighting to enhance a look that is unreal. It is this naturalism that directors like Jean-Luc Godard and other New Wave directors began to utilize in their films. Vadim is considered one of the primary explorers of the New Wave movement in film.

He had been married to Jane Fonda and was now crushed by their divorce also having directed her in the segment where Fonda plays the sensual yet cruel, Contessa Frederique de Metzengerstein in the Poe adapted film Spirits of The Dead (1968), Pretty Maids was filmed just coming off the success he had with the kittenesque Fonda in Barbarella (1968), the cult classic based on the French science fiction comic strip by Jean-Claude Forest.

The dreamy danish beauty Annette Stroyberg

Vadim went on to do Une femme fidèle 1976 with the beautiful Sylvia Kristel (Emmanuelle 1974, another guilty pleasure of mine) and then he made a very obscure film in 1980, I remember it leaving an impression on me. The film was called, Night Games.

It was a time during the 80s where some of the sensuality in films was branching out into more of a mood that was stylistically slick, perhaps quasi pulp /neo noir & fantasy in tone. Night Games 1980 with Cindy Pickett, was a very mysterious, fetishistic and romantic piece of work.

The character Valerie is very traumatized by a past rape. She meets a man who begins to open her back up by wearing an erotically surreal bird costume, not unlike the French character that Georges Franju adapted to the screen in 1963 Judex.

George Franju’s hero Judex

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I know a lot of people think that Vadim is a sexist bastard which he undoubtedly is, but his sense of erotic style touches me in a way not unlike Anaïs Nin if she had set out to be a film maker instead of a writer, perhaps she’d me more empathetic toward women in her treatment of their sexual identities, but she too objectified them one could argue just as lovingly, in her written work, which I am a huge fan of still. I wonder if any University film or literature professors have made any correlations between the eroticism of Nin and Vadim. I would be interested to know that. My first job was working in a library. I would sneak up to the stacks so I could privately read Delta of Venus and Little Birds. I later named a song Little Birds and Ladders To Fire

Nin however did appear in the Kenneth Anger film Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954) as Astarte

Anaïs Nin

Interesting that Nin herself had an elaborate love life, where she set something up called The Lie Box, having been married to 2 men at the same time.

“

[Anaïs] would set up these elaborate facades in Los Angeles and in New York, but it became so complicated that she had to create something she called the lie box. She had this absolutely enormous purse and in the purse she had two sets of checkbooks. One said Anaïs Guiler for New York and another said Anaïs Pole for Los Angeles. She had prescription bottles from California doctors and New York doctors with the two different names. And she had a collection of file cards. And she said, “I tell so many lies I have to write them down and keep them in the lie box so I can keep them straight.” FROM WIKI: personal life

The explosion of the feminist movement in the 1960s gave feminist perspectives on Nin’s writings of the past twenty years, which made Nin a popular lecturer at various universities; contrarily, Nin disassociated herself from the political activism of the movement.

FROM WIKI: Later life and legacy

Anais Nin in the 70s NYC

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There is a question as to whether or not the character of Tiger McDrew is a hero, or anti-hero?

Hero or Anti-hero

There is an aspect to Tiger McDrew where I’ve read that he’s a likable character. A sort of anti-hero. Although there was the potential for McDrew to be carved out of some depth, to me, he was never a likable character. He was opportunistic and a rampant narcissist who was completely motivated by self satisfaction and self preservation. He is neither funny, kind, nor can I relate to him. He is not a Hannibal Lecter.

Lord Byron’s poem begins “I want a hero”; that is, “I need a hero for my story.”

Is Don Juan a hero or an anti-hero? Has Byron changed him from the original Don Juan in the same way that Vadim has with his reworking of the original story?

What people say about Tiger McDrew is that he dares to do what he wants. He is a libertine. There is forgiveness for his infidelities, even though he is corrupting and despoiling young girls. I’ve also read that it’s one of the first funny serial killer movies, in a sense that’s very true. But I stop at the point where viewers describe their affinity to McDrew saying that they admire him. He is a sort of homicidal Don Juan who elicits not only sympathy but kudos for getting away with lechery and murder. Is it because he is a lone yet liberated thinking man who is only doing what other men would not dare do?

Byron’s Don Juan is possibly a parody of the romantic hero who is not the aggressor yet rather he is acted upon.  He is merely clay in a wiley woman’s hands. He loses all his dignity and power.

McDrew is a type of hero at the end to be feared and respected, nevertheless yet pathologically compliant, which might create something attractive about him. And is he in part likeable for the very things that make him NOT a traditional hero?

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The Educated Intellectual Woman

She tears away any symbolic remnants of her intelligence, in order to become the ‘object’ of sexual desire…

In terms of the Don Juan from Lord Byron’s imagination, he also satirizes the educated woman. Mary Wollstonecraft ‘Shelley’, whom the poem might have been based upon, after arguing for a better education for women, had to reassure her readers that they need not fear that women would then become “masculine.”

In Pretty Maids, the one intellectual woman in the film is Miss Betty Smith. She is also the one who seduces young Ponce. Is this Vadim’s view point also that by Betty being the aggressor, it gives her a certain power, which transposes her into a man?

Byron’s treatment of the educated woman could be perceived as hostile. Byron denied any connection to his attitude toward his wife Mary Shelley, from whom he separated after only one year of their marriage.

What is supposed to be satirical about Byron’s poem is the all too common assumption that the educated and intellectual woman will be aggressive and domineering. Look at how the press and mainstream media, treat Hillary Clinton. The focus is on her pant suits, not her critical thoughts.

In Byron’s epic poem Don Juan (1821) he presents a satirical young lover who is a romantic dreamer. Byron pokes fun at philosophical and metaphysical conceptions of life and love

Byron tells us that we would be better off living in our physical reality, not unlike McDrew’s mentality.

Byron also suggests that ‘Platonic idealism’ is not based in reality, advocating that physical pleasure is the only reality and that such idealized thoughts about of devotion to love are again hypocritical, leading to self-deception. Like a mask, you wear, in order to hide your true nature.

“Pleasures a sin…and sometimes sin’s a pleasure” – Lord Byron

Portrait of Lord Byron by Richard Westall

It’s a very cynical view of love. Perhaps Vadim too was counseling us much in the same way. That in reality love is just a diversion of mutual pretense, leading up to the one true objective, to pleasure one’s self. To feed one’s desire.

Byron’s poem might be commendable for the writer’s honesty, railing again false virtue and his perceived hypocrisy of fidelity.

Among the best known works about Don Juan are Molière’s play Dom Juan ou le Festin de pierre (1665),

From Wiki:

“Don Juan is a rogue and a libertine who takes great pleasure in seducing women (mainly virgins) Later, in a graveyard, Don Juan encounters a statue of Don Gonzalo, the dead father of a girl he has seduced, Doña Ana de Ulloa, and impiously invites the father to dine with him; the statue gladly accepts. The father’s ghost arrives for dinner at Don Juan’s house and in turn invites Don Juan to dine with him in the graveyard. Don Juan accepts and goes to the father’s grave, where the statue asks to shake Don Juan’s hand. When he extends his arm, the statue grabs hold and drags him away to Hell.”

Do we know where Tiger McDrew goes in the end? Is it Brazil or Hell?

Rebel Angels battling between Heaven and Hell…

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Excerpts from:Roger Vadim’s autobiography entitled

Memoirs of The Devil when discussing the casting of the Pretty Maids,

Vadim recalls the casting of the students in Pretty Maids All in a Row: “…I had auditioned over two hundred boys and about the same number of girls. Most of the girls who applied in the roles of high school alumni were aspiring actresses, though some were local students who merely found the whole thing amusing.”

He also mentions that not one of the “pretty maids” wound up becoming a major star but a few went on to do several exploitation and cult films: Some below-

Brenda Sykes was in Black Gunn 1972 and Mandingo 1975, Margaret Markov wound up in Black Mama, White Mama 1972 and The Hot Box 1972, Joy Bang was in Woody Allen’s Play It Again, Sam 1972,  Aimee Eccles was in The Concrete Jungle 1982 (an favorite cult/exploitation film of mine) and Group Marriage 1973 and Gretchen Burrell, wound up being one-time girlfriend of recording artist Gram Parsons.

Aimee Eccles in Group Marriage Stephanie Rothman film

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Vadim also specifically ordered the wardrobe department to dress the girls in micro skirts and tight fitting shirts. Mostly all were NOT wearing bras in Pretty Maids.

Vadim recalls again in his autobiography, “When I started shooting Pretty Maids All in a Row for MGM-

“There was not a single other film being made in any of the six main Los Angeles studios. It was a strange paradox that the only director working at that time in the legendary stronghold of the cinema was a Frenchman. The vast MGM studio complex was like some western ghost town. Three thousand people were still employed in the offices and in the workshops, but the famous faces that had set the world dreaming were no more than shadows, the machinery continued to turn, but to no purpose, like a train running along the track when the driver is dead…Apart from one or two television series, my film was the only production at the time and had three thousand MGM people working on it…Only in Russia have I seen such a cancerous bureaucracy.”

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MISOGYNY:

“[Misogyny] is a central part of sexist prejudice and ideology and, as such, is an important basis for the oppression of females in male-dominated societies. Misogyny is manifested in many different ways, from jokes to pornography to violence to the self-contempt women may be taught to feel for their own bodies.”
Michael Flood is an Australian sociologist at the University of Wollongong. Flood gained his doctorate in gender and sexuality studies from the Australian

Flood defines misogyny as the hatred of women, and notes:

“Though most common in men, misogyny also exists in and is practiced by women against other women or even themselves. Misogyny functions as an ideology or belief system that has accompanied patriarchal, or male-dominated societies for thousands of years and continues to place women in subordinate positions with limited access to power and decision making. […] Aristotle contended that women exist as natural deformities or imperfect males.

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Also an easy correlation to be made is Tiger McDrew to that of Casanova…

Giacomo Casanova 18th century womanizer who wrote about his exploits

“I begin by declaring to my reader that, by everything good or bad that I have done throughout my life, I am sure that I have earned merit or incurred guilt, and that hence I must consider myself a free agent. … Despite an excellent moral foundation, the inevitable fruit of the divine principles which were rooted in my heart, I was all my life the victim of my senses; I have delighted in going astray and I have constantly lived in error, with no other consolation than that of knowing I have erred. … My follies are the follies of youth. You will see that I laugh at them, and if you are kind you will laugh at them with me”- Casanova’s opening memoirs.

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While not killing his wives, McDrew does have a proclivity toward strangling his female lovers like that of the legendary Bluebeard….

John Carradine in Edgar Ulmer’s version of Bluebeard 1944

BLUEBEARD

From Wikipedia:

“Bluebeard” (French: La Barbe bleue) is a French literary folktale written by Charles Perrault and is one of eight tales by the author first published by Barbin in Paris in January 1697 in Histoires ou Contes du temps passé. The tale tells the story of a violent nobleman in the habit of murdering his wives and the attempts of one wife to avoid the fate of her predecessors. Gilles de Rais, a 15th-century aristocrat and prolific serial killer, has been suggested as the source for the character of Bluebeard as has Conomor the Accursed, an early Breton king. “The White Dove,” “Mister Fox” and “Fitcher’s Bird” are tales similar to “Bluebeard”.

Notice how all the nicknames for Bluebeard, bear the moniker of an animal, Fox, Bird, Dove, and of course there is our Anti-Hero, Antagonist ‘Tiger’ McDrew.

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And of course, the idea that Tiger McDrew held sway over these young maids by power of persuasion as if by some gift of mesmerizing them into his bed, and under his control….Vadim was accused of being a Svengali when it came to his young bride Brigitte Bardot

SVENGALI

John Barrymore & Marian Marsh in 1931 Svengali

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SOME CRITICAL REVIEWS:

Roger Ebert wrote,

“One thing you can say about Pretty Maids All in a Row. Rock Hudson sex comedies sure have changed since Pillow Talk…The movie itself is, finally, embarrassing. It’s embarrassing because Vadim’s personal hang-ups don’t fit the nature of his material, and so he tries to bend things.”

David Thomson wrote in The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, calling Pretty Maids All in a Row

“a film of disturbing insights in that its central character – an amused Rock Hudson (once all that Universal allowed to the lovelorn) – does not separate his f#cking of campus nymphets from his murder of them. Too unreal to know in bed, these chicks are plastic enough to be disposed of. The sexual idea in Pretty Maids All in a Row has become psychotic, acting out the dismissal of human reality that has always been implied in the method. And yet the film is tritely playful and the succession of postpubic children are gilded by the loving photography of that veteran, Charles Rosher, who once caught the rapture of Janet Gaynor in Sunrise.”

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I also find a connection with certain aspects of Beaudelaire’s The Flowers of Evil

The Flowers of Evil
Charles Baudelaire
Spleen and Ideal, Part I

Excerpts from http://www.sparknotes.com/poetry/flowersofevil in quotes:

I use this correlation to try and distill even more of Tiger McDrew’s character and what he might be thinking. How he sees himself in relationship to and his participation in the human condition.The reality of death, and who must be it’s sacrificial victim. Is he the arm of the devil, does he truly believe in ‘free love’, and free will or as duplicitous as he is, can it merely be part of the contradiction, that he feels trapped by role as family man. He has a voracious appetite for sex. I could make the argument again, that it is an addiction. Why else would he keep risking everything once the police are on the scene and investigating the first murder. He is a family man with desires that don’t fall in line with society’s rules. Therefore he must destroy the very thing that draws him in, and threatens his other life. His world is filled with sin, and beauty and evil. Is he not the calibrator of all three?Is he not the fine line between the contradiction?

“Baudelaire says “One side of humanity reaches for fantasy and false honesty, while the other exposes the boredom of modern life. ”

The film is a condemnation of modern life. The hypocrisy of ‘NORMAL’

Baudelaire famously begins The Flowers of Evil by personally reaching out to his reader as an accomplice to the evolution of his poetry:

“Hypocrite reader–my likeness–my brother!” In “To the Reader,” The narrator evokes a world inhabited by degradation and sin… hypocrisy, and decay. A world that is dominated not by God but by Satan.

Baudelaire, claims that it is the Devil and not God who controls our actions. That we are the puppets and Satan pulls the strings. That we have no free will of our own. That we are bound for  hell, by our self destructive instincts.

(Is McDrew not a distorted arm of a vengeful law, that inflicts its judgement on the girls, because of their promiscuity and their threat to break up the conventional life he has with his wife? To reveal his false honesty, his boredom with modern life?

And that human beings are merely ‘instruments of death.’ “more ugly, evil, and fouler” than any monster or demon.”from the poem.

Tiger McDrew an instrument of death…an arm of the law that