70s Cinema: Runaway Trains, Racing toward oblivion, Psycho-sexual machinations, and ‘the self loathing whore’ Part 1


The early seventies witnessed a fertile moment in film-making that reflected a uniquely framed vision of sexual exploration and an ever-changing measurement of morality. The studios too were taking more risks with their films conveying realism. What developed on screen was an explosion of symbolic portrayals featuring sex and violence and explicit imagery for American audiences to process. With the arrival of the women’s movement during the mid-sixties through the seventies, until it was killed off in the eighties by Reagenism, these films did not push forward an evolved perspective or positive representation of women. Often the suggestion of women’s sexual freedom was portrayed as demeaning and counter-productive to women’s empowerment. As feminist theorist and critic Molly Haskell writes “The ten years from 1963 to 1973 have been the most disheartening in screen history.”

Conversely, men were portrayed as rogue outsiders and anti-heroes, not unlike noir figures but pushing the envelope with a hyper-violent masculinity often without the usual fatalistic culmination of judgment and universal law that bound their destiny. When they die, it is their decision, they are in a dance with death, and it is not an unmitigated penalty for breaking the rules. In particular, these themes are seen within the suspense-thriller.

The seventies offered a gritty, stylized world that enhanced and synthesized focus on the dark underbelly of society, cultural unrest, paranoia, masochism, neurosis, and psycho-sexual wiles. From American Cinema of the 1970s: Themes and Variations — Movies and the Exploitation of Excess by Mia Mask, “Women Take Center Stage: Klute and McCabe & Mrs. Miller- “For feminist critics and scholars, Alan J. Pakula’s Klute perfectly exemplifies this period’s ambivalence toward women, particularly in regard to its prostitute-heroine Bree Daniels (Jane Fonda). The film recasts and updates conventions of classic film noir by centralizing the investigatory/confessional pattern while making sexuality figure more obviously in the narrative.”

Klute (1971)

One man is missing. Two girls lie dead. …and someone breathing on the other end of the phone.

You’d never take her for a call girl. You’d never take him for a cop.

“There are little corners of everyone that are better left alone.”

Klute (1971) directed by Alan J. Pakula (The Parallax View 1974, All the President’s Men 1976, producer To Kill a Mockingbird 1962, Love with the Proper Stranger, Up the Down Staircase and director of Sophie’s Choice 1982) written by brothers Andy Lewis and Dave Lewis who mainly wrote for television drama series. Cinematography by Gordon Willis nicknamed The Prince of Darkness (The Landlord 1970, The Godfather 1972, The Godfather II 1974, The Paper Chase 1973, Annie Hall 1977).

Pakula on Willis and setting up the framing of the cinematography- “From the visual point of view, I wanted Klute to be a vertical film. And with Gordon Willis, the director of photography, I tried to go against the horizontal format of Panavision, by seeking out verticals. Horizontals open out, create a pastoral feeling, and I wanted tension. Bree’s apartment should have been seen as if at the end of a long tunnel. I framed a lot of shots with the back of another character in front, to mask a part of the screen, or made use of other sombre surfaces as masks, in order to create this feeling of claustrophobia which reflects the life of this girl.” – from 1972

The evocative score adds to the illusory tension and arresting mood of the film. The music is written by Michael Small (The Stepford Wives 1975, Night Moves 1975, Marathon Man 1976, Audrey Rose 1977, The Postman Always Rings Twice 1981, Black Widow 1987). Small’s haunting lullaby blankets the film in a pensive swaddle, with the uneasy tinkling of a piano like a childlike music box and vocalizations. The score awakens a voyeuristic ambiance as if someone is watching, which they are– throughout the entire film.

“New York City as a site of, and metaphor for, the extremes of urban existence.

It places them in film history, New York City history, and U.S. urban history more generally, finding that they offer an update on earlier century narratives of the connections between urban areas and deviant sexuality. In this modern version, it is not just a moral tale but also an economic one, where, because of the historical decline of the U.S.city and of New York in particular,sex work becomes a plausible, if unsettling means of support.These films find both narrative and spatial terms for advancing the contemporary anti-urban narrative, envisioning New York as an impinging vertical space and seeing possible redemption only in the protagonists leaving the city.” From Stanley Corkin’s Sex and the City in Decline: Midnight Cowboy (1969) and Klute (1971)-Journal of Urban History

The film stars Jane Fonda (who was coming off playing ingenues in Barefoot in the Park and Barbarella when she had her breakthrough performance in Sidney Pollack’s They Shoot Horses Don’t They? 1969) as call-girl Bree Daniels with complex inner life, Donald Sutherland as the quiet spectator detective John Klute, Charles Cioffi as psycho Peter Cable, Roy Scheider as pimp Frank Ligourin, Dorothy Tristan as Arlyn Page, Rita Gam as Trina Gruneman, Vivian Nathan as the psychotherapist, Morris Strassberg as Mr. Goldfarb, the nice old Jewish john who works in the garment district, and Shirley Stoler (The Honeymoon Killers 1969) as Mama Reese. With appearances by Jean Stapleton as Mr. Goldfarb’s secretary, Richard Jordan as the young man who kisses Jane Fonda in the bar scene, porn star Harry Reems at the Discothèque, and Candy Darling. 

The film brings into play various traditions of film noir as it lays out the search for the missing Gruneman and emphasizes the relationship between the cop and the call girl.

Klute was nominated for two academy awards, best actress and best screenplay, with Jane Fonda winning the Oscar.

From Mark Harris “menace seems to choke every frame, contains almost no violence at all”

The use of tape recorders as visually recurring iconography “finally deployed as a monstrous psychological weapon at the film’s climax.”

“When Alan J. Pakula began preparing for the production of Klute (1971), he screened a lot of Alfred Hitchcock films…{…} instead he came away dispirited at the thought that he was about to make might contradict one of Hitchcock’s central principles: “You don’t try to do a character study in a melodrama” Pakula said. “Klute, of course, is a violation of that.”

Klute features Donald Sutherland as the film’s protagonist John Klute, a Tuscarora Pennsylvania private investigator hired to locate a friend Tom Gruneman who has vanished in New York City and may be living a double life. Obscene letters to an NYC prostitute have been uncovered in his desk at work “written by a very disturbed man”. Gruneman went missing six months prior and John Klute offers to leave his suburban shelter to investigate in the big bad city. The trail leads Klute to a complicated and seductive New York call girl Bree Daniels an “emotionally introspective” prostitute (skillfully brought out by Jane Fonda). Bree is an unwitting connection to a brutal murder and Klute becomes her paternalistic protector/lover. Bree is shut off from her feelings, driven by her instincts of suspicion, ambivalence, and low-self esteem. “I wish I was faceless and body-less and be left alone.”

Bree is a complex character who seeks to emotionally remove herself from society through the flawed principle that she is in control of her life and her body. Frequenting a psychotherapist, going on modeling cattle-calls, (similarly, she is peddling her flesh, though legally and publicly) studying acting, smoking grass, and reading books like Linda Goodman’s Sun Signs, a primer of the seventies metaphysical movement. Living in her own private world of her Manhattan apartment with her calico cat, Bree surrounds herself with the only space that truly insulates and isolates her from the vicious and people-eating world. A world of sin, glitter, and wickedness. A world of voyeurs.

Klute watches as well as listens to Bree’s conversations recording equipment to tap her phone from his little dank room as one of her voyeurs. She tells him “Go get those tapes and we’ll have a party.”

“Men would pay $200 for me, and here you are turning down a freebie. You could get a perfectly good dishwasher for that.”

She also admits to him that she’s in the midst of paranoia “I’m afraid of the dark, it’s just nerves I’m a nervous broad.” But this is not paranoia, the fear is real… everyone is watching everyone else.

He watches her when she visits the old Jewish widow where Bree dresses like a cabaret singer, regaling the gentle Mr. Goldfarb of her nights in Cannes with a sophisticated older man not unlike himself. She tells Klute he never lays a hand on her. Klute’s silent, morally superior, unemotional manner seems to provoke Bree’s animosity toward family-type men and uptight provincial.

“What’s your bag, Klute? What do you like? Are you a talker? A button freak? Maybe you like to get your chest walked around with high-heeled shoes. Or make ’em watch you tinkle. Or maybe you get off wearing women’s clothes. Goddamned hypocrite squares!” When he asks her about the john who tried to kill her and beat her up, “he wasn’t kidding, usually it’s a fake out.”

She shrugs Klute off, “Look, will you please just try to get it from my side? A year ago I was in the life full time. I was living on Park Avenue. It was a very nice apartment, leather furniture… and then the cops dropped on me, they caged me. They started asking me about a guy, some guy, that I’m supposed to have seen a year before that. Two years ago! He could be in Yemen. Gruneman… what does that mean? It’s a name! I don’t know him! And they start showing me these pictures, and they don’t mean anything to me. And then they started asking me if I’ve been getting letters from some guy out in Cabbageville.”

After Bree comes down to Klute’s little room in her pajamas and they have sex, she mocks him “Don’t feel bad about losing your virtue. I sort of knew you would. Everybody always does.” Once Bree starts to feel some kind of emotion toward Klute, she feels the need to destroy it, she had more control over her tricks.

During her various appointments with her shrink, Bree asks her “Why do I still want to trick?” Her therapist becomes more forceful explaining that she can’t just fix Bree, telling her she has “no magic potion.”  “Cause when you’re a call girl you can control it. They want a woman and I know I’m good… And for an hour… for an hour, I’m the best actress in the world and the best fuck in the world.” “Why do you say you’re the best actress in the world.” “Well, because it’s an act.”

There is a bit of not only a slight intrusion of a laugh, in the midst of all the darkness when Bree is in bed with a john and she’s doing an acting job as if he’s turning her on while he’s on top of her, she coos for him- “Oh my angel! Oh my angel!” looking over his shoulder at her watch… It’s telling of how Bree can cut herself off from being a sex worker and the men she is with, how she aspires to be an actress, and basically how many women may feel while they are having sex they feel nothing. Bree is great at role-playing believes there is nothing wrong with it morally and doesn’t enjoy it physically.

Bree- “You don’t have to feel anything, care for anybody, just lead them by the ring in their nose. In the direction that they think they want to go in. Get a lot of money out of them in as short of period of time as possible. And you control it, and you call the shots, and I always feel just great afterwards.”

Therapist- “And you enjoyed it?” 

Bree- “No”

Therapist- “Why not? You said there’s nothing wrong with it. Why not?”

Bree- “Well there’s a difference. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it morally, I didn’t enjoy it physically. I came to enjoy it because it made me feel good. It made me feel like I wasn’t alone. It made me feel like I had some control over myself that I had some control over my life. That I could determine things for myself.”

We learn about Bree’s impressions of the world, her motivations, and hints at past trauma through the scenes involving sessions with her therapist (Vivian Nathan). As a neo-noir film, it follows that the heroine experiences alienation and is punished for her female sexuality and excesses. Even as the film opens depicting a scene at a ‘family’ dinner, the intrusion of Bree’s lifestyle shows the downfall and breakdown of the American family. Invading the bourgeois landscape, we see the tableau of desperate junkies, disco dives, and the pimp’s flat, — all decadent and corrupt secret underworlds of the city, damned for their self-indulgence, materialism, and perverted gratifications.

In some ways, there are certain divergences from the noir traditions of the 1940s. There is a linear movement in the narrative with the hero retaining control of the events, in contrast to the revolving story, reversals, and breaks in the plot. In terms of the investigation and the heroine’s sexuality, Bree’s place is different within the story, she is not the catalyst of Tom Gruneman’s fate she is the signpost to discovering his outcome. Therefore the relationship between John Klute and Bree is very different from what is usually the case in classic film noir. In this way, Pakula explores the potential of the genre through a contemporary lens. “The metaphoric power of noir conventions is brought into more conscious play” (Gledhill)

Another consideration of Pakula’s film depicting a feminist backlash is how the women are positioned as ‘objects’ and physical products, emblematic not only by the scenes where Bree is selling her body but where she sits in a line-up with other beautiful women waiting to be chosen for a modeling job. The agency executives’ heads are cut off in the scene which accentuates the human disconnection and impersonal enterprise of being picked for profitability and worth. Each one is scanned and then dismissed because of their perceived faults, both models and prostitutes symbolize the fetishization of desirability and society’s measurement of a woman’s value. If dissecting the film’s symbology more closely there are carefully placed clues as suggested by Judith Gustafson who observes the images behind the model’s impersonal scrutiny and the wall photos behind them of a face dotted in silver-like ‘bullet holes’ on either side depicted by the identical image yet in negative that makes the female face appear as an ‘alien being.’

“Has anybody talked to you about the financial arrangements? Well that depends naturally on how long you want me for, and what you want to do. I know you, it will be very nice. Well I’d like to spend the evening with you if its, if you’d like that. Have you ever done it with a woman before, paying her? Do you like it? I mean I have the feeling that that turns you on very particularly. What turns me on is because I have a good imagination, and I like pleasing. Do you mind if I take my sweater off. Well I think in the confines of one’s house one should be free of clothing and inhibitions. Oh inhibitions are nice, cause its always to nice to overcome. Don’t be afraid, I’m not. As long as you don’t hurt me, more than I like to be hurt. I will do anything you ask. You should never be ashamed of things like that. I mean you mustn’t be. You know there’s nothing wrong. Nothing. Nothing is wrong. I think the only way that any of us can ever be happy is to, is to let it all hang out ya know. Do it all and fuck it!”

When Klute meets Bree she toys with him, flaunting her independence and manifesting a casual attitude about his investigation. Her self-aligned liberation dictates contempt for convention and criticism. Hard-edged Bree enjoys her freedom though she is seduced by the need to pick up the phone and maintain her high-class status as a pimp-free call girl. Roy Scheider plays her old predatory pimp Frank Ligourin who flashes his Italian silk shirts and his Mephistophelean smile. Ligourin and call-girl Janie McKenna who was jealous of Bree are the ones responsible for sending Bree to the psycho John who beat her up. “put the freak onto Bree.”

Though it’s not what drives the story, in the darkened halls of the film is the sadistic degenerate Peter Cable (first-time actor Charles Cioffi), affluent businessman and friend and associate of the missing Tom Gruneman (Robert Milli), and detective John Klute.

Cable is a psychopathic misogynist who obsessively listens to the secret recordings of his exploits with Bree. He begins stalking her, suspecting that she may reveal his identity as the perverted John who beat her up and murdered her friend Janie and eventually kills another prostitute, a strung-out junkie Arlyn Page (Dorothy Tristan).

“Make a man think that he’s accepted. It’s all a great big game to you. I mean, you’re all obviously too lazy and too warped to do anything meaningful with your lives so you prey upon the sexual fantasies of others. I’m sure it comes as no great surprise to you when I say that there are little corners in everyone which were better off left alone; sicknesses, weaknesses, which-which should never be exposed. But… that’s your stock in trade, isn’t it – a man’s weakness? And I was never really fully aware of mine… until you brought them out.”

Pretty much into the beginning of the picture, we know who the killer is. The plotline is more focused on the journey and relationship/character study of silent John Klute and turbulent Bree Daniels, and drawing the killer out into the open. It is the examination of the darker side of human nature, collective disorder, and the undercurrent of psycho-sexual machinations as one of the central points of the film.

According to Joan Mellen not only is Klute a study in female sexuality, villain Peter Cable is the “projection of Bree’s self-contempt — a materialization of her fear of the dark.” Though the film presents an atmosphere of paranoia the threat is very real. Cable “He also represents what she believes she deserves, the all-destroying punisher who will make her pay for having bartered herself so cheaply.”

Jane Fonda’s Bree Daniels is shown in her room as Willis’ camera pulls back it informs us that she is afraid of the phone ringing and the menacing breather on the other end. This is when John Klute first shows up. There is an interesting correlation between the two men, the cop, and the killer. 

The idea that this film is feminist in nature because of the sexual freedom of it’s central character is best challenged by feminist scholar Christine Gledhill. “The ideological project surrounding this version of the independent woman stereotype is the same as when it emerged in the 1890s under the guise of the New Woman… However fascinating, different, admirable the would-be-emancipated woman, struggling to assert her own identity in a male world, and professing a new, nonrepressive sexual morality, in the end she is really neurotic, fragile, lonely and unhappy.”

Critic Pauline Kael had a much different experience of the film upon its initial release, she called Bree Daniels “one of the strongest feminine characters to reach the screen” Though Fonda’s brilliant performance creates a complexity worthy of analysis, in the end, she is still an object of male fantasy.

While the film’s critics focus mainly on feminist shortcomings there is also the understanding by some that it also shines a lens on masculinity. Klute “lacks dynamism” “sexless” and “out of place” perhaps or virtual psychopaths, and castrated males. Perhaps a commentary on men’s sweeping fear of the women’s movement and the transformations of femininity and masculinity. Also, an interesting observation by Mia Mask is how the protagonist John Klute and psychopath Peter Cable though essentially an antithesis of each other’s persona there is an element of a ‘doppelgänger motif’. Diane Giddis points at the threat of Cable, Bree’s potential killer can be seen as the incarnation of the emotional danger she feels threatened by with the emergence of John Klute. From the beginning of the film, “the two men are almost always shown in juxtaposition.” The morning after Bree gets the eerie ‘breather’ phone call from her stalker, Klute appears at her door.

“Like Cable, Klute appears uninvited at her door. He, too, spies on her through windows and from archways. He, too, violates the privacy of her telephone by secretly recording her calls, just as Cable secretly records his session with her. The film even emphasized these parallels by showing the men in similar shots…{…} Ultimately Klute and Cable are two sides of the same male personality. One side punishes women for their sexuality and power plays; the other neutralizes the threat by inviting child-like dependence.” –Judith Gustafson from Cineaste (1981) The Whore with the Heart of Gold

At the time of Klute’s release, it gave the appearance of not only a straight suspense story but a radical film, filled with contradictions between what feminist critics would say is artifice and what represents women in real situations. Within this ‘new American cinema’ the film purports to be about a ‘liberated’ heroine inhabiting the structure of a thriller with an homage to the femme fatales of film noir. The contradictory implications lie between the film’s ‘modernity’, psychotherapy, and the problem of women places it within a humanist realist tradition of European art cinema’ (Gledhill). Yet it also bares the stylistic qualities –a highly detailed visual polish and ‘baroque stereotypes’ in noir thrillers, an atmosphere predominately summoned by American films of the seventies. “The real world and fictional production” Gledhill asserts that stems from the Women’s Movement rather than studies in film theory. The idea of realism and genre are in total opposition to each other. Klute presents as an independent heroine yet each frame reveals the attack on Bree’s free will.

“While realism embraces such cultural values as ‘real life’, truth or credibility, genre production holds negative connotations such as ‘illusion’, ‘myth’, ‘conventionality’, ‘stereotypes’. The Hollywood genres represent the fictional elaboration of a patriarchal culture which produces macho heroes and a subordinate, demeaning and objectified place for women.”

And beyond the constructs of film noir, seventies thriller genre and criticism by feminist theorists of Pakula’s Klute, Bree Daniel’s conflicts are a universal struggle for women’s assertion of love vs the affirmation of self-determination. Bree’s uneasy self-reflection makes the perspective of a movie prostitute a breakthrough characterization. She isn’t a tragic figure nor is she weak or contemptible. Bree explores her compulsion and potential self-destructive behavior as a sex worker as an externalized symptom stemming from past mental and internalized physical injury and she strives to uncover the answers in her own way.

Pakula re-invents some of the noir traditions and places them within an examination of the modern world. With his masterful film, he strives not only for visual ecstasy, the dramatic flourish of the thriller genre, and though there has been acute dissection of his film, he seeks to divulge a truth that becomes a revelation of acting by Jane Fonda.

In a 2019 interview with Jane Fonda conducted by Illeana Douglas, Fonda refers to Alan J. Pakula whom she worked in subsequent films, Comes a Horseman and Rollover, as a “still director.” “He allowed time for things to happen.” Jane Fonda explains that she loves films from the seventies because there was time left for things to happen. “more silence, than words.”

During the rehearsal for Klute Jane Fonda in order to prepare for her role as Bree Daniels, arranged to spend a lot of time with call-girls, streetwalkers and madams. Prostitutes on the bottom rung, strung out from the underbelly of the city and very wealthy madams, whom Fonda said made it clear the more money the client the weirder the sexual appetites and fantasies. She also talked about her decade living in France where she got to know the legendary Madam Claude, famous for taking beautiful women and molding them into high price call girls. Jane Fonda got to know many of them. Many she met were tough, often sexually aggressive she she said, and also sexually confident. She had learned that often they were the survivors of sexual abuse. What she referred having their ‘agency taken away’. These women inspired Fonda to model Bree after them. This is why Fonda’s performance pivots so well from self-confidence to vulnerability.

Illeana Douglas compliments Fonda by telling her that there’s “something going on in your eyes” which made Fonda recall that acting instructor Lee Strasberg had told her the very same thing in his class, that something was going on in her eyes that made him think that more is going on.

Fonda also had what she calls a ‘hair epiphany’. She had just come off filming cult sensation directed by husband, Roger Vadim’s Barbarella where she had all those blonde waves. Her friend hairdresser Paul MacGregor who lived in the village worked on what is now her iconic hair style from Klute.

Jane Fonda worried that as a white privileged middle class actress couldn’t possibly bring to life a prostitute and make it believable. She insisted to her director Alan J. Pakula that he hire Faye Dunaway instead. Pakula burst out laughing.

Jane Fonda was allowed to add a lot of her own insight into the character of Bree, little details and director Pakula often took them as excellent suggestions that worked well with the story. For instance, it was Fonda’s idea to live in the apartment for weeks. She lay there at night as if she were Bree trying to get inside Bree’s head and summon up the things she would do within her private time. We don’t know the backstory behind Bree Daniels many permutations. We are only to privy to hints of the damage.

Jane Fonda conceptualized many of the set’s subtleties. What would Bree read, what would adorn her little space. She thought of having a cat, because cats symbolize independence and Fonda imagined that Bree’s persona wanted a companion that would be more like herself. In many ways, Jane Fonda dressed the set with these little introspective details. The film became a very personal experience for her. And one that initiated her feminist transformation. Even when she was smoking the spliff in her apartment, it wasn’t in the script but she spontaneously began to sing that little hymn, it was very natural and emphasized how real her character was. Fonda tells of how this was a very spontaneous improvisation as a plot detail that was not in the script but struck her at the moment.

Illeana Douglas also astutely pointed out that there was a lot of glamour to the film. There were moments where Klute was framed with close ups of Bree. Even with the evocative Cymbalon melody – the Klezmer (traditional Eastern European Jewish music) movement that guides the scene it reminds of the languid strut of Marlene Dietrich, the allure of Greta Garbo and had the flavor of night club singers in Paris and Germany. When I watched the incredibly thoughtful and in-depth interview it hit me how much that was true. I saw it as clear as day, that Jane Fonda’s aura did truly give off that mystique that essence of glamour of the great actresses’ personae. Superb fashion and costume designer Ann Roth chose the alluring dress that Bree wears when she visits the old man, Mr. Goldfarb. 

Jane Fonda also points out that Bree could have been a great actress but within her craft something would have triggered her to return to selling her body, which is a violation to the soul, and it’s very different than acting, as it comes from a deep place of trauma and the need to control and not open up her heart.

[voiceover] “I have no idea what’s going to happen. I… I just can’t stay in this city, you know? Maybe I’ll come back. You’ll probably see me next week.”

 This is your EverLovin Joey saying see you on the tracks! Part 2 coming up!

 

Quote of the Day! The Hustler (1961) “You’re too hungry”

“A searching look into the innermost depths of a woman’s heart . . . and a man’s desires!”

The Hustler (1961)

Sarah to Eddie “You’re too hungry.”

Director/Screenwriter Robert Rossen wrote the screenplay for Marked Woman (1937), They Won’t Forget (1937), Dust Be My Destiny (1939), Out of the Fog (1941), Blues in the Night (1941), Edge of Darkness (1943), The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946), Johnny O’Clock (1947), Desert Fury (1947) and wrote the screenplay for Billy Budd. Rossen also wrote and directed All the Kings Men (1949), Mambo (1954), and The psycho-sexual Labyrinth set in a mental institution in the early 1960s starring Jean Seberg-Lilith (1964) perhaps Rossen’s most dark and nihilistic vision of the human spirit yet. He directed John Garfield and Lilli Palmer in Body and Soul (1947). Robert Rossen was a pool hustler himself as a youth. Based on the novel by Walter S. Tevis.

Music by Kenyon Hopkins (12 Angry Men 1957, The Strange One 1957, The Fugitive Kind 1960, Elmer Gantry 1960, East Side/West Side 1963-46, Lilith 1964, television movies, Dr. Cook’s Garden 1971, Women in Chains 1972, Night of Terror 1972, The Devil’s Daughter 1973 and tv’s The Odd Couple 1970-73).

Robert Rossen is one of the most fascinating unexplored American directors, for his interesting viewpoint on alienation in the world and that constant elusive souvenir of the spirit of one’s identity. Rossen has been quoted as saying that his favorite Shakespearean play was Macbeth. In it he said he found a “dramatization of the ambiguity of the human condition… man reaching for the symbols of his identity, rather than the reality, destroying yet finding himself in the tragic process.” 

In Rossen’s collection of works, you can see the more aggressive symbols played out as the representations of male power, domination, and violence as physical love. He told The New York Sun in 1947 that “Real life is ugly… but we can’t make good pictures until we’re ready to tell about it.”

Body and Soul (1947) written by Robert Rossen and Directed by Abraham PolonskyShown: back: William Conrad (as Quinn), Joseph Pevney (as Shorty Polaski), John Garfield (as Charlie Davis)

After his gangster film Johnny O’Clock Rossen was directed with the conventions of the crime genre Body and Soul (1947). Then Rossen directed The Hustler which used a breakthrough in technique and stretched the boundaries of social realism in the way Kazan had. The film like his All the Kings Men is still about the corrupt influences of money but on a deeper level it is driven by a darker motivation-the and illusionary symbols of self-worth, with George C. Scott’s character playing at Eddie’s weakness as a gambler and a seeker, like a devil daring him toward damnation. He is a sadist and ultimately seeks Eddie’s dependency and ruination and Sarah’s self-destruction.

Sarah tells Eddie “We are all crippled.” Sarah has the insight to see into the future yet she is beyond all the wounds inflicted in her life and can not forestall what will happen outside the confines of their little world that is her cluttered apartment. Sarah and Bert battle it out for Eddie’s soul. It is an ugly power struggle, and there are so many brilliantly executed frames that represent Rossen’s complex themes within The Hustler.

The film also co-stars Michael Constantine, Vincent Gardenia, Murray Hamilton, and Myron McCormick who is always compelling in any role, plays Eddie’s devoted manager Charlie Burns who takes the journey with Eddie at first and winds up being pushed out by the hostile and rancorous Bert Gordon. Murry Hamilton is fantastic as he inhabits the coded gay character of the pretentious and effete gambler Findley.

The Hustler is a moral allegory about life and the inter-relationships of miscreants, losers, and lost souls struggling to find themselves in a gritty, unsatisfying world that permeates the world of the competitive underground sport of shooting pool. Fast Eddie has been working his way up to have a showdown with the reigning legend Minnesota Fats finally. The film is a restless contemplation merged with some dynamic scenes of maneuvering on the pool table.

The film opens with a smoke-filled pool palace in Pittsburgh with a sign ‘gambling not allowed’. It’s a hangout for pool sharks, called hustlers. Paul Newman plays Fast Eddie, a smug young man who was born to take suckers for a ride, feeling that wood between his anxious fingers he can spot a ripe table waiting for him to swoop in for the kill. But Eddie with all his mythological ambition just doesn’t know when it’s time to quit. Eddie goes 25 consecutive rounds with the legendary Minnesota Fats and it appears like he’s got the marathon match in his corner pocket when he starts knocking back the whiskey, and can’t just take the win with the dignity he has to demolish Fats and allow his ego to drive the rest of the rest of the way home. The scene is shot in a dynamic half-hour sequence using gorgeous black and white photography in cinemascope and Schüfftan‘s (who won an Oscar for his camera work) eye for detail he honed on Fritz Lang’s surreal Metropolis, the film he developed special effects for. The sequence of this film is nothing short of riveting. The setup is mesmerizing as we are drawn into a timeless expanse as the different approaches to the game unfold, as the pool stick meets the ball, the balls dance and fill the pockets like cannon fire, while the spectators whose expressions are glued to every move as if in a trance.

Fats who is way more graceful and composed manages to win back his loot and leave the cocky and exhausted Eddie practically penniless. Eddie’s got a keen skill for the game but he doesn’t have self-control or character. Bert Gordon played by actor George C. Scott tempts Eddie like Mephistopheles to sell his soul to him with the promise that he can not only make his dream come true of being the greatest but also avenge the ass-kicking that he took from Fats. As cock-sure as Eddie appears, he has no fortitude and winds up abandoning his honor and his love for Sarah in order to seek the rematch with the Fat man.

Piper Laurie’s character Sarah Packard is a liberated forward-thinking woman who while bares the damage of life, is independent though alienated from the rest of the world because of her open wounds. She is trying to be a writer and drinks too much. She wants to be loved, and Eddie wants to be the best.

And so he sells his soul to Bert Gordon, the film’s Faustian metaphor. The early 60s began an era of films that began to embrace controversial adult-themed narratives, that dealt with race, class dynamics, and the changing roles that were taking place with gender.

[Fast Eddie is bothered because Bert called him a born loser]

Fast Eddie: “Cause, ya see, twice, Sarah… once at Ames with Minnesota Fats and then again at Arthur’s, in that cheap, crummy pool room, now why’d I do it, Sarah? Why’d I do it? I coulda beat that guy, coulda beat ‘im cold, he never woulda known. But I just hadda show ‘im. Just hadda show those creeps and those punks what the game is like when it’s great, when it’s REALLY great. You know, like anything can be great, anything can be great. I don’t care, BRICKLAYING can be great, if a guy knows. If he knows what he’s doing and why and if he can make it come off. When I’m goin’, I mean, when I’m REALLY goin’ I feel like a… like a jockey must feel. He’s sittin’ on his horse, he’s got all that speed and that power underneath him… he’s comin’ into the stretch, the pressure’s on ‘im, and he KNOWS… just feels… when to let it go and how much. Cause he’s got everything workin’ for ‘im: timing, touch. It’s a great feeling, boy, it’s a real great feeling when you’re right and you KNOW you’re right. It’s like all of a sudden I got oil in my arm. The pool cue’s part of me. You know, it’s uh – pool cue, it’s got nerves in it. It’s a piece of wood, it’s got nerves in it. Feel the roll of those balls, you don’t have to look, you just KNOW. You make shots that nobody’s ever made before. I can play that game the way… NOBODY’S ever played it before.”

Sarah Packard: “You’re not a loser, Eddie, you’re a winner. Some men never get to feel that way about anything.”

Rossen wrote the screenplay and directed this gripping story of fast Eddie Felson, as he strives to knock Minnesota Fats down a peg and capture the title of best pool hustler in the country, taking Fats (Jackie Gleason who was perfect as he manifested the character of Fats, well-dressed, reserved and showed a deep reverence and concentration to the game.) on in a high-stakes game that challenges no only his keen gift for shooting pool but on the line is his self-respect and his nebulous masculine identity.

Fast Eddie to Fats: You know, I got a hunch, fat man. I got a hunch it’s me from here on in. One ball, corner pocket. I mean, that ever happen to you? You know, all of a sudden you feel like you can’t miss? ‘Cause I dreamed about this game, fat man. I dreamed about this game every night on the road. Five ball. You know, this is my table, man. I own it.

Along the way, he falls in love with Sarah Packford immortalized on the screen in an arresting performance by Piper Laurie (Kim Novak had turned down the role) who should have won the Oscar for Best Actress with her nuanced, and heart-wrenching interpretation of the vulnerable loner and self-loathing Sarah. Rossen has often dealt with the intricacies within the psychological landscape of his films.

Piper Laurie: The Girl Who Ate Flowers

Sarah Packard is a complicated woman who has a tenuous connection to the world but allows herself to fall in love with Eddie who is driven to succeed and land at the top as the greatest pool hustler. Sarah is a lost soul longing for someone who will love her. She receives a stipend from her wealthy father, but there is no sign of affection or acceptance from him, his is non-existent. Eddie awakens desire in her, but he cannot deliver anything but his hunger and ambition to beat Minnesota Fats and attain the title. Fast Eddie destroys everything he touches. In order to really throw herself into the role of Sarah Packard Piper Laurie actually hung out at the Greyhound terminal at night.

Piper Laurie (Has Anybody Seen My Gal 1952, The Mississippi Gambler 1953, Dangerous Mission 1954, Johnny Dark 1954, Ain’t Misbehavin’ 1955, and director Curtis Harrington’s Ruby 1977, Children of a Lesser God 1986, Dario Argento’s Trauma 1993, The Crossing Guard 1995, The Dead Girl 2006 and television series-Naked City, Ben Casey, The Eleventh Hour) discovered that Paul Newman was indeed down to earth – “He really didn’t believe in himself as an actor at all. He thought he had great limitations and owed everything to other people- the Actors Studio, Joanne- he seemed not to take credit for himself.”

Laurie didn’t make another film over the course of 15 years until she returned to the screen in Brian De Palma’s adaptation of Stephen King’s Carrie (1976), which earned her a second Oscar nomination as the religious fanatic archetypal devouring mother a role that would ignite a new fire under the icons of horror movie fiends and villains.

Sarah and Eddie meet in the bus terminal. They both have a drinking problem, especially Sarah who drowns her self-pity in booze. She was born with a deformity in her foot which makes her limp and gives her a feeling of self-hatred and undesirability that Eddie breaks through with his smooth-talking swagger. He manages to reach in and touch her heart but his reckless abandon to win, overshadows Sarah’s cries for help and her self-destructive nature cannot withstand the competition for Eddie’s soul.

Sarah Packard: I love you, Eddie.

Fast Eddie: You know, someday, Sarah, you’re gonna settle down… you’re gonna marry a college professor and you’re gonna write a great book. Maybe about me. Huh? Fast Eddie Felson… hustler.

Sarah Packard: I love you.

Fast Eddie: You need the words?

Sarah Packard: Yes, I need them very much. If you ever say them I’ll never let you take them back.

To achieve Sarah’s limp, Piper Laurie first experimented with walking around with pebbles in her shoes. “Finally, I just did it without anything, because Rossen didn’t want an obvious limp; he didn’t want it consistent because he felt he wanted the audience to be aware of it sometimes and not other times.”

The two shack up and set up house in Sarah’s apartment that is subsidized by her father’s money. Eddie is obsessed with winning. Their relationship is turbulent and dysfunctional, then enters George C. Scott as Bert Gordon a misanthropic snake in the grass who exploits Eddie and interferes with his relationship with Sarah. Once Bert Gordon slithers into the closed world of Eddie’s pool hustling and his love affair with Sarah, that world is corrupted, and Eddie begins to lose his way.

Ulu Grosbard later noted that the interior of Sarah’s apartment was built in a studio at 55th St. and 10th Ave. He said the actors’ dressing rooms there were very small and, in his memory, without windows, “like cells,” but that Piper Laurie furnished hers “as if she were going to live in it the rest of her life.” It was Grosbard’s impression that Laurie would sometimes spend the night there.

Bert Gordon: Eddie, is it alright if I get personal?

Fast Eddie: Whaddaya been so far?

Bert Gordon: Eddie, you’re a born loser.

Fast Eddie: What’s that supposed to mean?

Bert Gordon: First time in ten years I ever saw Minnesota Fats hooked… really hooked. But you let him off.

Fast Eddie: I told you I got drunk.

Bert Gordon: Sure you got drunk. You have the best excuse in the world for losing; no trouble losing when you got a good excuse. Winning… that can be heavy on your back, too, like a monkey. You’ll drop that load too when you got an excuse. All you gotta do is learn to feel sorry for yourself. One of the best indoor sports, feeling sorry for yourself. A sport enjoyed by all, especially the born losers.

Bert Gordon: You’re here on a rain check and I know it. You’re hangin’ on by your nails. You let that glory whistle blow loud and clear for Eddie and you’re a wreck on a railroad track… you’re a horse that finished last. So don’t make trouble, Miss Ladybird. Live and let live! While you can. I’ll make it up to you.

Sarah Packard: How?

Bert Gordon: You tell me.

Fast Eddie: I loved her, Bert. I traded her in on a pool game. But that wouldn’t mean anything to you. Because who did you ever care about? Just win, win, you said, win, that’s the important thing. You don’t know what winnin’ is, Bert. You’re a loser. ‘Cause you’re dead inside, and you can’t live unless you make everything else dead around ya.

The Hustler is an extraordinary character study of how humans bang into each other like the balls on the table, and no one really wins. It’s got a slick rhythm to its movement and editing by the wonderful Dede Allen and Eugen Schüfftan (Metropolis 1927, Bluebeard (1944), Strange Illusion (1945), The Strange Woman 1946, The Bloody Brood (1959), Eyes Without a Face 1960,  Something Wild (1961) Lilith (1964) Eugen Schüfftan’s style is uniquely dark and almost mythic in its visual abstraction of reality.

IMDb trivia –

The picture was shot by Eugen Schüfftan, who had invented an optical effects process that employed mirrors to create backgrounds. According to crew reports, many of the pool room shots employed this process to varying degrees. The picture was also shot in CinemaScope, a wide-screen process usually reserved for big epics and action pictures.

The camera descends like Orpheus into the seedy smoky hidden world of the American pool hall, gazing at the sweaty mercenaries who hunger to hear the clicking and smacking of the balls making contact as they encircle the pool tables like birds of prey.

According to editor Dede Allen, an entire scene from this film was omitted after much deliberation between Allen and her director Robert Rossen. Even though both agreed that the scene, an impassioned speech by Paul Newman in the pool room, was possibly the best part of his entire performance, they had to throw it out because “…it didn’t move the story.” Newman, though Oscar-nominated, later claimed that the deleted scene most likely cost him the Academy Award. Dede Allen liked working with Robert Rossen because he was the kind of director who shot scenes from every possible angle, providing her with a wide range of cover footage that allowed for various interpretations and possibilities.

American actress Piper Laurie as Sarah Packard in ‘The Hustler’, directed by Robert Rossen, 1961. (Photo by Silver Screen Collection/Getty Images)

The film was also somewhat autobiographical for Robert Rossen, relating to his dealings with the House Un-American Activities Committee. A screenwriter during the 1930s and ’40s, he had been involved with the Communist Party in the 1930s and refused to name names at his first HUAC appearance. Ultimately he changed his mind and identified friends and colleagues as party members. Similarly, Felson sells his soul and betrays the one person who really knows and loves him in a Faustian pact to gain character.

When it was necessary to show some of the trickier shots, 14 time world billiards champion Willie Mosconi (who was also the film’s technical advisor) would play the stunt hands.

Otherwise, Jackie Gleason who was already an accomplished pool player and Paul Newman had never held a pool cue before he landed the role of Fast Eddie Felson. He took out the dining room table from his home and installed a pool table so he could spend every waking hour practicing and polishing up his skills

This is your EverLovin’ Joey saying wrack ’em up and then join me for another go around here at The Last Drive In

 

Film Noir ♥ Transgressions Into the Cultural Cinematic Gutter: From Shadowland to Psychotronic Playground

“Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways.”
Sigmund Freud

“Ladies and gentlemen- welcome to violence; the word and the act. While violence cloaks itself in a plethora of disguises, its favorite mantle still remains sex.” — Narrator from Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965).

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Tura Satana, Haji, and Lori Williams in Russ Meyer’s Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! 1965

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Françoise Dorléac and Donald Pleasence in Roman Polanski’s Cul-de-sac 1966.

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Constance Towers kicks the crap out of her pimp for shaving off her hair in Sam Fuller’s provocative The Naked Kiss 1964.

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Peter Breck plays a journalist hungry for a story and gets more than a jolt of reality when he goes undercover in a Mental Institution in Sam Fuller’s Shock Corridor 1963.

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Bobby Darin is a psychotic racist in Hubert Cornfield and Stanley Kramer’s explosive Pressure Point 1962 starring Sidney Poitier and Peter Falk.

THE DARK PAGES NEWSLETTER  a condensed article was featured in The Dark Pages: You can click on the link for all back issues or to sign up for upcoming issues to this wonderful newsletter for all your noir needs!

Constance Towers as Kelly from The Naked Kiss (1964): “I saw a broken down piece of machinery. Nothing but the buck, the bed and the bottle for the rest of my life. That’s what I saw.”

Griff (Anthony Eisley) The Naked Kiss (1964): “Your body is your only passport!”

Catherine Deneuve as Carole Ledoux in Repulsion (1965): “I must get this crack mended.”

Monty Clift Dr. Cukrowicz Suddenly, Last Summer (1959) : “Nature is not made in the image of man’s compassion.”

Patricia Morán as Rita Ugalde: The Exterminating Angel 1962:“I believe the common people, the lower class people, are less sensitive to pain. Haven’t you ever seen a wounded bull? Not a trace of pain.”

Ann Baxter as Teresina Vidaverri Walk on the Wild Side 1962“When People are Kind to each other why do they have to find a dirty word for it.”

The Naked Venus 1959“I repeat she is a gold digger! Europe’s full of them, they’re tramps… they’ll do anything to get a man. They even pose in the NUDE!!!!”

Darren McGavin as Louie–The Man With the Golden Arm (1955): “The monkey is never dead, Dealer. The monkey never dies. When you kick him off, he just hides in a corner, waiting his turn.”

Baby Boy Franky Buono-Blast of Silence (1961) “The targets names is Troiano, you know the type, second string syndicate boss with too much ambition and a mustache to hide the facts he’s got lips like a woman… the kind of face you hate!”

Lorna (1964)- “Thy form is fair to look upon, but thy heart is filled with carcasses and dead man’s bones.”

Peter Fonda as Stephen Evshevsky in Lilith (1964): “How wonderful I feel when I’m happy. Do you think that insanity could be so simple a thing as unhappiness?”

Glen or Glenda (1953)“Give this man satin undies, a dress, a sweater and a skirt, or even a lounging outfit and he’s the happiest individual in the world.”

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Ed Wood’s Glen or Glenda 1953

Johnny Cash as Johnny Cabot in Five Minutes to Live (1961):“I like a messy bed.”

Dr. Moreau (Charles Laughton) Island of Lost Souls: “Do you know what it means to feel like God?”

The Curious Dr. Humpp (1969): “Sex dominates the world! And now, I dominate sex!”

The Snake Pit (1948): Jacqueline deWit as Celia Sommerville “And we’re so crowded already. I just don’t know where it’s all gonna end!” Olivia de Havilland as Virginia Stuart Cunningham “I’ll tell you where it’s gonna end, Miss Somerville… When there are more sick ones than well ones, the sick ones will lock the well ones up.”

Delphine Seyrig as Countess Bathory in Daughters of Darkness (1971)“Aren’t those crimes horrifying. And yet -so fascinating!”

Julien Gulomar as Bishop Daisy to the Barber (Michel Serrault) King of Hearts (1966)“I was so young. I already knew that to love the world you have to get away from it.”

The Killing of Sister George (1968) -Suzanna York as Alice ‘CHILDIE’: “Not all women are raving bloody lesbians, you know” Beryl Reid as George: “That is a misfortune I am perfectly well aware of!”

The Killing of Sister George
Susannah York (right) with Beryl Reid in The Killing of Sister George Susannah York and Beryl Reid in Robert Aldrich’s The Killing of Sister George 1960.

The Lickerish Quartet (1970)“You can’t get blood out of an illusion.”

THE SWEET SOUND OF DEATH (1965)Dominique-“I’m attracted” Pablo-” To Bullfights?” Dominique-” No, I meant to death. I’ve always thought it… The state of perfection for all men.”

Peter O’Toole as Sir Charles Ferguson Brotherly Love (1970): “Remember the nice things. Reared in exile by a card-cheating, scandal ruined daddy. A mummy who gave us gin for milk. Ours was such a beautifully disgusting childhood.”

Maximillian Schell as Stanislaus Pilgrin in Return From The Ashes 1965: “If there is no God, no devil, no heaven, no hell, and no immortality, then anything is permissible.”

Euripides 425 B.C.“Whom God wishes to destroy… he first makes mad.”

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Bette Davis and Joan Crawford bring to life two of the most outrageously memorable characters in Robert Aldrich’s What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? 1962.

WHAT DOES PSYCHOTRONIC MEAN?

psychotronic |ˌsīkəˈtränik| adjective denoting or relating to a genre of movies, typically with a science fiction, horror, or fantasy theme, that were made on a low budget or poorly received by critics. [the 1980s: coined in this sense by Michael Weldon, who edited a weekly New York guide to the best and worst films on local television.] Source: Wikipedia

In the scope of these transitioning often radical films, where once, men and women aspired for the moon and the stars and the whole ball of wax. in the newer scheme of things they aspired for you know… “kicks” Yes that word comes up in every film from the 50s and 60s… I’d like to have a buck for every time a character opines that collective craving… from juvenile delinquent to smarmy jet setter!

FILM NOIR HAD AN INEVITABLE TRAJECTORY…

THE ECCENTRIC & OFTEN GUTSY STYLE OF FILM NOIR HAD NOWHERE ELSE TO GO… BUT TO REACH FOR EVEN MORE OFF-BEAT, DEVIANT– ENDLESSLY RISKY & TABOO ORIENTED SET OF NARRATIVES FOUND IN THE SUBVERSIVE AND EXPLOITATIVE CULT FILMS OF THE MID TO LATE 50s through the 60s and into the early 70s!

I just got myself this collection of goodies from Something Weird!

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There’s even this dvd that points to the connection between the two genres – Here it’s labeled WEIRD. I like transgressive… They all sort of have a whiff of noir.

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Grayson Hall -Satan in High Heels 1962.

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Gerd Oswald adapts Fredrick Brown’s titillating novel — bringing to the screen the gorgeous Anita Ekberg, Phillip Carey, Gypsy Rose Lee, and Harry Townes in the sensational, obscure, and psycho-sexual thriller Screaming Mimi 1958.

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Victor Buono is a deranged mama’s boy in Burt Topper’s fabulous The Strangler 1964.

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Catherine Deneuve is extraordinary as the unhinged nymph in Roman Polanski’s psycho-sexual tale of growing madness in Repulsion 1965.

Just like Alice falling down the rabbit hole, Noir took a journey through an even darker lens… Out of the shadows of 40s Noir cinema, European New Wave, fringe directors, and Hollywood auteurs brought more violent, sexual, transgressive, and socially transformative narratives into the cold light of day with a creeping sense of verité. While Film Noir pushed the boundaries of taboo subject matter and familiar Hollywood archetypes it wasn’t until later that we are able to visualize the advancement of transgressive topics.

Continue reading “Film Noir ♥ Transgressions Into the Cultural Cinematic Gutter: From Shadowland to Psychotronic Playground”

Edward Dmytryk’s Walk on the Wild Side (1962) At the Doll House; “When people are kind to each other why do they have to find a dirty word for it”

As part of The Barbara Stanwyck Blogathon hosted by The Girl With the White Parasol

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Barbara Stanwyck in Samuel Fuller’s Forty Guns (1957)

WALK ON THE WILD SIDE (1962)

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The Graphic Genius of Saul Bass post here:

In Edward Dmytryk’s Walk on the Wild Side Barbara Stanwyck is no ordinary ‘Jo’

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Stanwyck was the epitome of independence and determination. She had a streak of non-conformity, toughness, and resilience.

Stanwyck was born Ruby Stevens in Brooklyn, July 16th 1907. A New Yorker like me and a fellow Cancerian. Her mother died and her father disappeared when she was 4, leaving her and her brother in the care of her older sister Mildred and foster homes where she’d often run away. At age 9 Ruby toured with her dancer sister, a John Cort Showgirl practicing the routines back stage. Watching her idol Pearl White on the big screen inspired her to go into showbiz. She quitt school at age 14, followed her sister’s lead and became a Ziegfeld Follies girl.

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Ziegfeld Girl 1924 Barbara Stanwyck.

In 1929 Stanwyck had the lead in the road company production of the Broadway hit ‘Burlesque’ which was a hit in theater. She shared the stage with Mary Tomlinson, a clergyman’s daughter who most likely ran away from home because she was a lesbian. Mary changed her name to Marjorie Main and become the quick talkin’ ‘Ma’ in the raucous Ma and Pa Kettle series from ’49-’57.

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Marjorie Main as the unflappable Ma Kettle.

One of her good friends during those years was pianist Oscar Levant who said Stanwyck was “wary of sophisticates and phonies.”

Ruby became Barbara Stanwyck at age 19 while she had the lead in ‘The Noose’ on Broadway. At 21 she was introduce by Levant to Frank Fay star of Vaudeville and ten years older than she, a closet homosexual, alcoholic and abusive husband. They married and moved to Hollywood in 1929 when Stanwyck was on her way to becoming a star of the silver screen. They used her money and bought a mansion in Brentwood. That’s how she and Joan Crawford (married to Franchot Tone at the time) became neighbors and close friends.

At first Stanwyck starred in a few B movies but began getting attention for her roles in Ladies of Leisure30, Illicit ’31, Night Nurse ’31, and Miracle Woman ’31.

Stanwyck in Illicit
Stanwyck in Illicit 1931.

While working with Frank Capra on Ladies of Leisure he taught her that much of acting was conveyed with the eyes and that unless the audience was drawn in, the dialogue didn’t matter. This was her breakthrough movie. Edward Bernds who worked with Capra said “That first take with Stanwyck was sacred.”

Stanwyck’s first Academy Award nomination was for the downtrodden mother Stella Dallas ’37 where her old friend Marjorie Main played her mother-in-law.

Three nominations followed for Ball of Fire ’42 with Gary Cooper, Double Indemnity ’44, and Sorry Wrong Number ’48 with Burt Lancaster. Stanwyck was now on her second marriage to another gay man, the handsome Robert Taylor. Their ’39 marriage was arranged by the studio. The couple had separate bedrooms.

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Barbara Stanwyck and Robert Taylor on the cover of Movie Life

Some assert that Stanwyck had a lifelong relationship with her publicist Helen Ferguson. It’s not for me to wager yes or no nor to be concerned with her private life one way or the other. If she wanted us to know it was her choice to share it.

In ’35 she played the rugged farm girl living in a man’s world– Annie Oakley, a masculine woman who was great with a gun.

Annie Oakley

She did a slew of romantic comedies with charismatic co-stars. Twice with Henry Fonda in the screwball The Mad Miss Manton ’38, and Preston SturgesThe Lady Eve ’41. Remember The Night ’40 opposite Fred MacMurray was her first film with costume designer Edith Head.

Some of my favorite films of her’s were: playing opposite co-star William Holden in Rouben Mamoulian’s Golden Boy ’39. Then Meet John Doe 1941, Lady of Burlesque, and the immortal femme fatale Phyllis Dietrichson in 1944 Double Indemnity, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers ’46, The Two Mrs. Carrolls ’47, Cry Wolf ’47, B. F.’s Daughter ’48, Sorry, Wrong Number ’48, in 1950 The File on Thelma Jordan, No Man of Her Own  & The Furies. Fritz Lang’s tumultuous Mae Doyle opposite Robert Ryan in Clash By Night ’52, Witness to Murder ’56, There’s Always Tomorrow ’56, Crime of Passion ’57 & Forty Guns ’57.

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Phyllis Dietrichson is brought to life by Barbara Stanwyck in the noir staple Double Indemnity ’44.

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Stanwyck and MacMurray Double Indemnity ’44.

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Stanwyck and Wendell Corey in The File on Thelma Jordan 1950.

Clifton Webb who co-starred in Titanic 53 called her his “Favorite Hollywood Lesbian.” It’s pretty significant that Barbara had finally played her one and only screen lesbian in Walk on the Wild Side ’62. Barbara Stanwyck’s sexual orientation has been called ‘the best kept secret in the movies’ by Axel Madsen who wrote the very engaging The Sewing Circle. It’s a hell of a read!

Three years later she created a new image for herself as the gutsy matriarch Victoria Barkley in the television western The Big Valley. Stanwyck loved her character ‘an old broad who combines elegance with guts.’ 

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Stanwyck as classy & rugged frontier woman Victoria Barkley  in 60s television show The Big Valley 1968.

Walk on the Wild Side was Barbara Stanwyck’s return to the big screen since playing Cattle Queen Jessica Drummond in Sam Fuller’s sexually charged western Forty Guns 1957 which had this fantastic line, `Can I touch it?’ asks Jessica referring to Griff Bonnell’s (Barry Sullivan) gun. Griff tells her, ‘It might go off in your face’  Stanwyck was in love with the Western genre.

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Stanwyck and Sullivan Forty Guns ’57.

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She was thrilled to accept a good part in a film, that of Jo Courtney the iron-willed lesbian madame of a ritzy bordello named The Doll House in New Orleans. The film still maintains that clichéd whiff of mothballs from The Celluloid Closet holding the mystique and stereotypes of homosexuals and lesbians who are all either sad souls, psychopaths, or villains. Yet Stanwyck’s Jo Courtney poured from concrete and as dangerous as a steel trap conveys a pathos transcending the caricature of a predatory lesbian. It’s probably what made her such a beloved lesbian icon. Stanwyck proved she could go head to head with any man or woman who came her way. And although she never came out of the closet she went through two marriages to gay men without a hitch of scandal.

in 1962 the film sets this lurid lesbian melodrama and peek at the underbelly of bordello life, down in the midst of the underworld revisiting the archetypes of gays being part of the illicit subculture of society. Revisiting the ‘sexual ghetto’ in quite the same way the briefly liberated films of the early Thirties depicted them. As Vito Russo says in The Celluloid Closet, “The movies simply reflected what little they could identify of a hidden world and, in both pre-Code and post-Code times saw Homosexuals solely in sexual terms because that what had always been sold.”

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For over thirty years the subject had not been talked about, so when the ban was lifted, filmmakers picked up where they had left off. The film was able to represent the whore house openly as just that, a house of prostitution.

Walk on the Wild Side is the story of a New Orleans brothel and the seductive melodrama surrounding an obsessed drifter in search of his lost love, the lugubrious courtesan who is ensnared in a tangled web of vice, decadence, and the lesbian madame who desires to possess her.

The bordello is stocked with liquor, a bartender who never quits pouring, and a full jazz ensemble who plays fabulous bluesy melodies that cater to their clients while the employees all seem to suffer from a collective languorous state of mind.

Languid ladies of The Doll House

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Stanwyck’s Jo Courtney’s villainous nature accepts her own lesbianism. Instead of killing herself like Shirley MacLaine’s Martha in The Children’s Hour ’61, Jo decides to declare her power by opening up a brothel and selling sexuality on her own terms.

Jo lusts after and loves her object of desire Hallie, played by model-actress Capucine. But the love that dares not speak its name finds itself disrupted once smooth-talking Texas farmer Dove Linkhorn (Laurence Harvey) comes looking for Hallie. Three years prior Hallie and Dove swam and kissed each other and danced themselves silly til Dove was hopelessly hooked on the lovely divinity that he refers to as his ‘religion.’ Dove had to wait for his ailing father to die before he could come and claim his love.

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Jo bitterly resents the intrusion of Dove and feels threatened by this young buck’s presence. The camera frames his coming between Jo and Hallie.

The film was not the huge success they thought it would be despite the adult themes and stellar cast. Probably because of its screenplay which doesn’t allow Algren’s novel to freely express its most provocative and sociological themes. Nelson Algren’s book focused on the seedy underbelly of New Orleans during the Depression Era 30s. Screenwriters, Fante, Morris, and Hecht while synthesizing the essence of the story, their observations gloss over the grittier descriptiveness and atmosphere of Algren’s murky brothels filled with even more vile and violent pimps. A world that showcased fetishistic patrons and sullen whores who wade around in the muck hoping for a better life. While the film has a way of self-moralizing the plot to death at times, Algren’s novel did not show contempt for his prostitutes. It had a real strain of class-conscious angst and didn’t sermonize about the unpalatable people who lived on the fringe of society but rather focused on those in power who exploited them. In some ways the film hones in on the story making it a more intimate venture into melodrama.

Continue reading “Edward Dmytryk’s Walk on the Wild Side (1962) At the Doll House; “When people are kind to each other why do they have to find a dirty word for it””

MonsterGirl’s 13 Days of Halloween: Obscure Films Better Than Candy Corn!

13 Days of schlock, shock…horror and some truly authentic moments of terror…it’s my pre-celebratory Halloween viewing schedule which could change at any time, given a whim or access to a long coveted obscure gem!

No doubt AMC and TCM will be running a slew of gems from the archives of Horror films to celebrate this coming Halloween! Films we LOVE and could watch over and over never tiring of them at all…

For my 13 days of Halloween, I thought I might watch a mix of obscure little gems, some vintage horror & Sci-Fi, film noir, and mystery/thriller. Halloween is a day to celebrate masterpieces like The Haunting, The Tingler, House on Haunted Hill, Curse of The Demon, Pit and The Pendulum, Let’s Scare Jessica To Death, and Psycho just to name a few favorites.

But the days leading up to this fine night of film consumption should be tempered with rare and weird beauties filled with a great cast of actors and actresses. Films that repulse and mystify, part oddity and partly plain delicious fun. Somewhat like Candy Corn is…for me!

I’ll be adding my own stills in a bit!…so stay tuned and watch a few of these for yourselves!

The Witch Who Came From The Sea 1976

Millie Perkins bravely plays a very disturbed woman who goes on a gruesome killing spree, culminating from years of abuse from her drunken brute of a father. Very surreal and disturbing, Perkins is a perfect delusional waif who is bare-breasted most of the time.

Ghost Story/Circle of Fear: Television Anthology series

5 episodes-

The Phantom of Herald Square stars David Soul as a man who remains ageless, sort of.

House of Evil, starring Melvin Douglas as a vindictive grandpa who uses the power of telepathy to communicate with his only granddaughter (Jodie Foster) Judy who is a deaf-mute. Beware the creepy muffin people.

A Touch of Madness, stars Rip Torn and Geraldine Page and the lovely Lynn Loring. Nothing is as it seems in the old family mansion. Is it madness that runs in the family or unsettled ghosts?

Bad Connection stars Karen Black as a woman haunted by her dead husband’s ghost.

The Dead We Leave Behind stars, Jason Robards and Stella Stevens. Do the dead rise up if you don’t bury them in time, and can they speak through a simple television set?

Night Warning 1983

Susan Tyrrell plays Aunt Cheryl to Jimmy McNichol’s Billy, a boy who lost his parents at age 3 in a bad car wreck leaving him to be raised by his nutty Aunt. Billy’s on the verge of turning 17 and planning on leaving the sickly clutches of doting Aunt Cheryl and she’ll kill anyone who gets in the way of keeping her beloved boy with her always…Tyrrell is soooo good at being sleazy, she could almost join the Baby Jane club of Grande Dame Hag Cinema, making Bette Davis’s Baby Jane seem wholesome in comparison.

Also known as Butcher Baker Nightmare Maker...

Murder By Natural Causes (1979 Made for TV movie)

Written by Richard Levinson and William Link the geniuses who gave us Columbo, this film is a masterpiece in cat and mouse. Wonderfully acted by veteran players, Hal Holbrook, Katherine Ross and Richard Anderson, and Barry Bostwick. Holbrook plays a famous mentalist, and his cheating wife has plans to kill him.

Tension 1949

from IMDb -A meek pharmacist creates an alternate identity under which he plans to murder the bullying liquor salesman who has become his wife’s lover. Starring Richard Basehart, Audrey Totter, Cyd Charisse, and Barry Sullivan

Messiah of Evil aka Dead People 1973

A girl arrives on the California coast looking for her father, only to learn that he’s disappeared. The town is filled with eerie people and a strange atmosphere of dread. She hooks up with a drifter and they both uncover the true nature of the weird locals and what they’re up to. They learn the horrific secret about the townspeople…This film is very atmospheric and quite an original moody piece. Starring Marianna Hill, Michael Greer, Joy Bang, and Elisha Cook Jr.

Devil Times Five aka Peopletoys 1974

This film is a very unsettling ride about a busload of extremely psychopathic children who escape after their transport bus crashes. Finding their way to a lodge, they are taken in by the vacationing adults and are eventually terrorized by these really sick kids. Claustrophobic and disturbing. Stars Sorrell Booke, Gene Evans. Leif Garrett plays one of the violently homicidal kids.

The Night Digger 1971

Starring the great Patricia Neal, this is based on the Joy Cowley novel and penned with Cowley for the screen by the wonderfully dark Roald Dahl, Neal’s husband at the time.

From IMDb -Effective psychological love story with a macabre twist not found in the original Joy Cowley novel. The dreary existence of middle-aged spinster Maura Prince takes an unexpected turn with the arrival of young handyman Billy Jarvis, but there is more to Billy than meets the eye. This well-crafted film, full of sexual tension and Gothic flavor, was Patricia Neal’s second after her return to acting, her real-life stroke worked deftly into the story by then-husband Roald Dahl. Written by Shane Pitkin

They Call It Murder (1971 Made for TV movie)

A small-town district attorney has his hands filled with several major investigations, including a gambler’s murder and a possible insurance scam. Starring Jim Hutton, Lloyd Bochner, Leslie Nielsen, Ed Asner and Jo Anne Pflug

A Knife For The Ladies 1974

Starring Ruth Roman and Jack Elam, there is a jack the ripper-like killer terrorizing this small Southwest town. Most all the victims are prostitutes. A power struggle ensues between the town’s Sheriff and Investigator Burns who tries to solve the murders.

Born To Kill 1947

Directed by the amazing Robert Wise ( The Haunting, West Side Story, Day The Earth Stood Still )this exploration into brutal noir is perhaps one of the most darkly brooding films of the genre. Starring that notorious bad guy of cinema Lawrence Tierney who plays Sam Wild, of all things, a violent man who has already killed a girl he liked and her boyfriend. He hops a train to San Francisco where he meets Helen played by Claire Trevor who is immediately drawn to this dangerous man.

The Strangler 1964

Starring the inimitably imposing Victor Buono, who plays mama’s ( Ellen Corby/Grandma Walton) boy Leo Kroll, a psychopathic misogynous serial killer, under the thumb of his emasculating mother. Kroll’s got a doll fetish and a fever for strangling young women with their own pantyhose. The opening scene is chilling as we watch only Buono’s facial expressions as he masturbates while stripping one of the dolls nude by his last victim’s body. Part police procedural, this is a fascinating film, and Buono is riveting as Leo Kroll a psycho-sexual fetish killer who is really destroying his mother each time he murders another young woman. Really cool film by Allied Artist

Murder Once Removed (1971 made for tv movie)

A doctor and the wife of one of his wealthy patients hatch a plot to get rid of her husband so they can be together and get his money. Starring John Forsythe, Richard Kiley, and Barbara Bain.

Scream Pretty Peggy (1973 made for tv movie)

This stars Bette Davis who plays Mrs. Elliot. Ted Bessell plays her son Jeffrey Elliot a sculptor who hires young women to take care of his elderly mother and his insane sister who both live in the family mansion with him. Also stars Sian Barbara Allen. What can I say? I love Bette Davis in anything, specially made for tv movies, where something isn’t quite right with the family dynamic. Lots of vintage fun directed by Gordon Hessler

The Man Who Cheated Himself 1950

A veteran homicide detective witnesses his socialite girlfriend kill her husband. Then what ensues is his inexperienced brother is assigned to the case. Starring Lee J. Cobb, Jane Wyatt, and John Dall.

The Flying Serpent 1946

Classic horror/sci-fi flick that just doesn’t get the attention it deserves. Almost as fun as The Killer Shrews.  Starring veteran actor George Zucco

The Pyjama Girl Case 1977

This more obscure Giallo film was directed by Flavio Mogherini and starred one of my favorite actors Ray Milland, Also starred Mel Ferrer and the beautiful model/actress Delilah Di Lazzaro. I’ve left my passion for Giallo films in the dust these days, but I decided to watch one that was a little off the beaten track.

From IMDb- Two seemingly separate stories in New South Wales: a burned, murdered body of a young woman is found on the beach, and a retired inspector makes inquiries; also, Linda, a waitress and ferry attendant, has several lovers and marries one, but continues seeing the others. The police have a suspect in the murder, but the retired inspector is convinced they’re wrong; he continues a methodical investigation. Linda and her husband separate, and there are complications. Will the stories cross or are they already twisted together? Written by <jhailey@hotmail.com>

Cul-de Sac 1966

Directed by Roman Polanski starring Donald Pleasance and  Françoise Dorléac as Teresa

A wounded criminal and his dying partner take refuge in a seaside castle inhabited by a cowardly Englishman and his strong-willed French wife. A bizarre dynamic unfolds as this eccentric couple once captives of the criminals at first, their relationship strangely begins to evolve into something else.

Dr Tarr’s Terror Dungeon aka Mansion of Madness 1973

This is a mysterious and nightmarish excursion into the “the inmates have taken over the asylum” theme. Based upon Edgar Allan Poe’s The System of Dr. Tarr and Professor Feather

Blue Sunshine 1978

Three women are murdered at a party. the wrong man is accused of the crimes. yet still more brutal killings continue throughout the town. What is the shocking truth behind this bizarre epidemic of …people losing their hair and turning into violent psychopaths?

Homebodies 1974

Starring Peter Brocco, Francis Fuller, William Hanson, the adorable Ruth McDevitt, Ian Wolfe, and Paula Trueman playing elderly tenants who first try to thwart by rigging accidents, a group of developers from tearing down their building. Old homes and old people…It turns into murder! This is a wonderfully campy 70s-stylized black comedy/horror film. I love Ruth McDevitt as Miss Emily in Kolchak: The Night Stalker series.

The ensemble cast is brilliantly droll and subtly gruesome as they try to stave off the impending eviction and relocation to the institutional prison life of a cold nursing home facility.

A modern Gothic commentary on Urban Sprawl, the side effects of Capitalism on the elderly and their dust-covered dreams, and the fine balance between reverence for the past, and the inevitability of modernity.

The jaunty music by Bernardo Segáll and lyrics by Jeremy Kronsberg for “Sassafras Sundays” is fabulous!

The Evictors 1979

Directed by Charles B. Pierce whose style has somewhat of a documentary feel ( The Town That Dreaded  Sundown 1976 Legend of Boggy Creek 1972) This film has a very stark and dreading tone. Starring one of my favorite unsung naturally beautiful actresses, Jessica Harper ( Suspiria, Love and Death, Stardust Memories, and the muse Pheonix in DePalma’s Faustian musical Phantom of The Paradise ) and another great actor Michael Parks. A young couple Ruth and Ben Watkins move into a beautiful old farmhouse in a small town in Louisiana. The house has a violent past, and things start happening that evoke fear and dread for the newlyweds. Are the townspeople trying to drive them out, or is there something more nefarious at work? Very atmospheric and quietly brutal at times. Also stars Vic Morrow

Jennifer 1953

Starring Ida Lupino and Howard Duff. Agnes Langsley gets a job as a caretaker of an old estate. The last occupant was the owner’s cousin Jennifer who has mysteriously disappeared. Agnes starts to believe that Jennifer might have been murdered. Is Jim Hollis the man whom she is now in love with… responsible?

Lured 1947

Directed by Douglas Sirk and starring Lucille Ball, George Sanders, and my beloved Boris Karloff!

There is a serial killer in London, who lures his young female victims through the personal ads. He taunts the police by sending cryptic notes right before he is about to murder again. The great cast includes Cedric Hardwicke, George Zucco, and Charles Coburn...

Love From A Stranger 1947

A newly married woman begins to suspect that her husband is a killer and that she is soon to be his next victim. Starring John Hodiak and Sylvia Sidney

Savage Weekend 1979

Several couples head upstate to the country and are stalked by a murderer behind a ghoulish mask.

The Beguiled 1971

Directed by the great Don Siegel ( Invasion of The Body Snatchers 1956, The Killers 1964 Dirty Harry 1971 This stars Clint Eastwood, Geraldine Page and Elizabeth Hartman. Eastwood plays John McBurney who is a Union soldier imprisoned in a Confederate girls boarding school.  A very slow yet tautly drawn web of psycho-sexual unease forms as he works his charms on each of these lonely women’s psyche.

The Mad Doctor of Market Street 1942

An old-forgotten classic horror, starring Lionel Atwill and Una Merkel. Atwill plays A mad scientist forced out of society when his experiments are discovered. He winds up on a tropical island, there by holding the locals hostage by controlling and terrorizing them.

The Man Who Changed His Mind original title (The Man Who Lived Again) 1936

Directed by Robert Stevenson. Starring my favorite of all Boris Karloff, and Anna Lee of Bedlam

Karloff plays Dr. Laurence, a once-respected scientist who begins to delve into the origins of the mind and soul connection.

Like any good classic mad scientist film, the science community rejects him, and so he risks losing everything for which he has worked, shunned by the scientific community he continues to experiment and further his research, but at what cost!…

The Monster Maker 1944

This stars J. Carrol Naish and Ralph Morgan. Naish plays Dr Igor Markoff who injects his enemies with the virus that causes Acromegaly, a deformity that enlarges the head and facial structures of his victims.

The Pyx 1973

I love Karen Black and not just because she let herself be chased by that evil Zuni doll in Trilogy of Terror or dressed up like Mrs Allardice in Burnt Offerings. She’s been in so many memorable films, in particular for me from the 70s. Here she plays Elizabeth Lucy a woman who might have fallen victim to a devil cult. Christopher Plummer plays Detective Sgt. Jim Henderson investigating the death of this heroin-addicted prostitute. The story is told using the device of flashback to tell Elizabeth’s story.

Five Minutes To Live 1961

Johnny Cash, the immortal man in black, plays the very unstable Johnny Cabot, who is part of a gang of thugs who terrorize a small town. This is a low-budget thriller later released as Door to Door Maniac. I could listen to Cash tune his guitar while drinking warm beer and I’d be satisfied, the man just gives me chills. Swooning little me…….!

The Psychic 1977

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In this more obscure EuroShocker, a clairvoyant… the gorgeous Jennifer O’Neill, suffers from visions, which inspire her to smash open a section of wall in her husband’s home where she discovers a skeleton behind it.

She sets out to find the truth about how the victim wound up there, and if there’s a connection between their death and her fate as well!

Too Scared To Scream 1985

Directed by actor Tony Lo Bianco A killer is brutally attacking several tenants that live in a high-rise apartment building in New York City. Mike Connors stars as Detective Lt. Alex Dinardo who investigates the killings. Also stars another unsung actress, Anne Archer, Leon Isaac Kennedy, and Ian McShane

Violent Midnight 1963

An axe murderer is running loose in a New England town! Also known as Psychomania not to be confused with the fabulous British film of devil-worshiping bikers who come back to life starring Beryl Reid. This film features Dick Van Patten, Sylvia Miles, James Farentino, and Sheppard Strudwick. It’s got it’s own creepy little pace going for it.

When Worlds Collide 1951

Another classic sci-fi world is headed toward destruction film, that I remember from my childhood. Starring Barbara Rush and John Hoyt, two of my favorite character actors. It’s a lot of fun to watch and a well-made film that’s off the beaten path from… Forbidden Planet and War of The Worlds.

All The Kind Strangers  (1974 made for tv film)

Starring Stacy Keach, Sammantha Eggar, John Savage, and Robby Benson

A couple traveling through a backwoods area is held hostage by a group of orphan children who want them to be their parents. Whenever an adult refuses to participate in the delusion, they are killed. Great disturbing made for tv movie.

The Todd Killings 1971

Directed by Barry Shear and stars Robert F. Lyons as Skipper Todd, a very sociopathic young man who holds sway over his younger followers like a modern-day Svengali. Also starring Richard Thomas, Belinda Montgomery, and the great Barbara Bel Geddes as Skipper’s mother who takes care of the elderly.

From IMDb-“Based on the true story of ’60s thrill-killer Charles Schmidt (“The Pied Piper of Tucson”), Skipper Todd (Robert F. Lyons) is a charismatic 23-year old who charms his way into the lives of high school kids in a small California town. Girls find him attractive and are only too willing to accompany him to a nearby desert area to be his “girl for the night.” Not all of them return, however. Featuring Richard Thomas as his loyal hanger-on and a colorful assortment of familiar actors in vivid character roles including Barbara Bel Geddes, Gloria Grahame, Edward Asner, Fay Spain, James Broderick, and Michael Conrad.” Written by alfiehitchie

This film has a slow-burning brutality that creates a disturbing atmosphere of social and cultural imprisonment by complacency and the pressure to conform, even with the non-conformists.

Todd almost gets away with several murders, as the people around him idolize him as a hero, and not the ruthless manipulating psychopathic killer that he is. Frighteningly stunning at times. One death scene, in particular, is absolutely chilling in his handling of realism balanced with a psychedelic lens. This film is truly disturbing for it’s realism and for a 1971 release.

To Kill A Clown 1972

Starring Alan Alda and Blythe Danner. Danner and Heath Lamberts play a young hippie couple who couple rent a secluded cabin so that they can try and reconnect and save their marriage.

Alan Alda plays Maj. Evelyn Ritchie the man who owns the property and who is also a military-raised- sociopath who has two vicious dogs that he uses as an extension of his madness and anger.

 

Provocateur Roger Vadim: Svengali of the New Wave Cinema of Sensuality: Pretty Maids All In A Row 1971 Part II ” I Wonder Why do they always seem to die with a smile on their face?”

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 is 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 its 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 washroom, 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…

This just adds 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 is, the film never shows you the actual killings. It is only what remains after the murders have taken place. 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 creates 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 in Vadim’s Blood and Roses 1960.

 

 

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 therein 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 a 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 the 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, where 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, and 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 a 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.

Interestingly 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 is at least focusing on Bardot’s natural beauty instead of relying on the dramatic artifices of fashion, hairstyles, 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 when 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 filmmaker 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 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 an 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, nor 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 the 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 likable 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 Don Juan from Lord Byron’s imagination, also satirizes the educated woman. Mary Wollstonecraft ‘Shelley’, on whom the poem might have been based, 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 viewpoint also that Betty being the aggressor, 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 pantsuits, 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. 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 his 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 in 1972 and Mandingo in 1975, Margaret Markov wound up in Black Mama, White Mama in 1972 and The Hot Box in 1972, Joy Bang was in Woody Allen’s Play It Again, Sam in 1972Aimee Eccles was in The Concrete Jungle 1982 (a favorite cult/exploitation film of mine) and Group Marriage 1973 and Gretchen Burrell, wound up being the 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 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.

John Carradine-I am a ham! Part 1

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 the 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 post public 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 Baudelaire’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 its 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 his role as a 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, 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 judgment 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 is an instrument of death…an arm of the law that exposes the boredom of modern life?

“The narrator claims that he and the reader complete this image of humanity: One side of humanity (the reader) reaches for fantasy and false honesty, while the other (the speaker) exposes the boredom of modern life.”

(The albatross could be the girls, threatening to chain Tiger to a commitment. Yet they are things of beauty, at times)

“The speaker continues to rely on contradictions between beauty and unsightliness in “The albatross.” This poem relates how sailors enjoy trapping and mocking giant albatrosses that are too weak to escape. Calling these birds “captive kings,” the speaker marvels at their ugly awkwardness on land compared to their graceful command of the skies. Just as in the introductory poem, the speaker compares himself to the fallen image of the albatross, observing that poets are likewise exiled and ridiculed on Earth. The beauty they have seen in the sky makes no sense to the teasing crowd: “Their giant wings keep them from walking.”

(I find yet another correlation between this piece of work by Baudelaire and the film. McDrew finds the girls beautiful to a point, yet he sees them as limited. Like ‘captive queens’, they are only good for that one moment in time, when they are having sex with him, or “the graceful command of the skies.” The girls are his Albatross.)

In the poem”Benediction,” he says: “I know that You hold a place for the Poet / In the ranks of the blessed and the saint’s legions, / That You invite him to an eternal festival / Of thrones, of virtues, of dominations.”

(Tiger has a sense of privilege to savor the secrets of the world in which he has created outside his marriage and the tenets of society. He defines beauty, he chooses who he wants to sleep with. Who are the ‘exceptionally gifted’ Tiger has a God complex, and thinks of himself as God-like.)

The divine power that Baudelaire writes about in another of his poems as part of  Flowers of Evil, called  “Elevation,” has the narrator rising like a god to the throne of heaven.

“His ascendancy is compared to the poet’s omniscient and paradoxical power to understand the silence of flowers and mutes. His privileged position to savor the secrets of the world allows him to create and define beauty.”

(We know from his pedantic mentorship and the evidence of his philosophy documented on tape that McDrew considers himself a great thinker, social innovator, and perhaps a sexual being like Baudelaire’s poet, whose aestheticism elevates him to levels of sensual ascendancy. The pretty maids are his flowers of evil, the temptations that will drag him to hell.)

” A MYTHICAL WORLD OF HIS OWN CREATION” ” LAND OF FREEDOM AND HAPPINESS” There, all is nothing but beauty and elegance, / Luxury, calm and voluptuousness.”

From “The Head of Hair and Exotic Perfume”

Baudelaire’s poetry has often been described as the most musical and melodious poetry in the French language.

“The Flowers of Evil evokes a world of paradox already implicit in the contrast of the title. The word “evil” (the French word is “mal,” meaning both evil and sickness) comes to signify the pain and misery inflicted on the speaker, which he responds to with melancholy, anxiety, and a fear of death.”

“But for Baudelaire, there is also something seductive about evil. Thus, while writing The Flowers of Evil, Baudelaire often said that his intent was to extract beauty from evil. Unlike traditional poets who had only focused on the simplistically pretty, Baudelaire chose to fuel his language with horror, sin, and the macabre. The speaker describes this duality in the introductory poem, in which he explains that he and the reader form two sides of the same coin.”

“Together, they play out what Baudelaire called the tragedy of man’s “twoness.” He saw existence itself as paradoxical, each man feeling two simultaneous inclinations: one toward the grace and elevation of God, the other an animalistic descent toward Satan. Just like the physical beauty of flowers intertwined with the abstract threat of evil, Baudelaire felt that one extreme could not exist without the other.”

(McDrew tries to draw out the animalistic in his male students. He is a man of ‘twoness’ his life is a paradox and his desire for beauty fuels a very realistic horror of sin and ultimately death. And as Baudelaire adeptly points out, one extreme can not exist without the other.)

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GENE RODDENBERRY  by the Museum of Television. Includes an entire list of Television and Film Credits.

http://www.museum.tv/eotvsection.php?entrycode=roddenberry

About Composer Lalo Shifrin.

Film credits include: just to mention a few: Cool Hand Luke 1967, The Fox 1967, Bullitt 1968, Coogan’s Bluff 1968, Dirty Harry 1971, Enter the Dragon 1973, and Telefon 1977.

Lalo Schifrin (born in 1932) is an Argentinean-born composer, conductor, arranger and pianist who has contributed to various films and  Television programs. He was the pianist and arranger for Dizzy Gillespie. Shifrin became one of the most notable film and TV composers of the 1960s and ’70s.

Peace- MonsterGirl (JoGabriel).

Libertine Roger Vadim’s Dark Satire: Pretty Maids All In A Row (1971): Part 1: Rock Hudson’s Killer Casanova & The Garden of Earthly Delights “And she was a terrific little cheerleader too”

Hieronymus Bosch (c. 1450–1516) The Garden of Earthly Delights

The film is bathed in hazy colors similar to that of Bosch’s epic painting.

This intricate panel of images appears in the film several times as a motif. Vadim knew exactly what he was informing us or leading us to think about. It goes to one of the chambers of the heart in the narrative and bares no resolution for us the ‘voyeurs’ by the film’s end. Betty Smith (Angie Dickinson’s character has this painting in her apartment, we sit it in several sequences, even close up and studied by the camera).

It’s the pictures that got small! – “Good Evening” Leading Ladies of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour Part 1

Bosch’s painting serves as a prominent motif throughout the film.

Close-ups in the film at varying viewpoints of Bosch’s painting.

The painting depicts nude figures in the garden of temptation, which ultimately sets them forth into an eternal dance with damnation.

From Wiki:

The left panel depicts God presenting Adam to Eve, while the central panel is a broad panorama of sexually engaged nude figures, fantastical animals, oversized fruit, and hybrid stone formations. The right panel is a hellscape and portrays the torments of damnation.

“Art historians and critics frequently interpret the painting as a didactic warning on the perils of life’s temptations.[5] However, the intricacy of its symbolism, particularly that of the central panel, has led to a wide range of scholarly interpretations over the centuries.[6] 20th-century art historians are divided as to whether the triptych’s central panel is a moral warning or a panorama of paradise lost. American writer Peter S. Beagle describes it as an “erotic derangement that turns us all into voyeurs, a place filled with the intoxicating air of perfect liberty.”

One could say that this suburban American High School Anywhere USA acts as a similar landscape depicted in Bosch’s painting. The school is ripe for sexual and conventional anarchy, abound with young flesh, exploring a ‘perfect liberty’ flitting about in micro skirts and no bra, amidst the intoxicating air of youth and temptation.

Leaving them vulnerable to being tempted by demons like Tiger McDrew who come and prey upon their alluring innocence. As Beagle says about the painting, this film has a sense of erotic derangement that turns us into every bit the voyeur. The film acts as a composite of several questions that intersperse into a concoction of moral ambiguities and historically systemic hierarchical and hegemonic dilemmas.

Then add Vadim’s European self-proclaimed Libertine sensibilities, his view of American culture and you get a psychopathic Don Juan, voyeuristic close-ups of supposed adolescent young girls, and a society that condemns and perpetuates both.-

An alternative title to this blog post could be “The Americanization of Debauchery, Perversion, Panties, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights transfixed on the modern high school campus. Milton’s Paradise Lost, The Socratic Infusion of Free Love & the Sexual Revolution. With traces of Bluebeard, Casanova. Sexism & Misogyny, the POV of the new wave European Aestheticism of the female body as Fetish. Pom Poms and The Cult of American Hero worship Molière & Lord Byron’s Don Juan with a smattering of Svengali, as a homicidal Pedagogue in a Nehru Jacket.”

PRETTY MAIDS ALL IN A ROW  From the nursery rhyme, Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary.

Rock Hudson romantic leading man of the 1950s and 60s.

Pretty Maids All In A Row 1971 directed by Roger Vadim. (And God Created Woman, Blood and Roses &Barbarella)Written and Produced by Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry. Film score by Lalo Shifrin

THE PRIMARY CAST:
Rock Hudson, Angie Dickinson, Telly Savalas, Roddy McDowall, Keenan Wynn, introducing John David Carson as Ponce and William Campbell as Deputy Grady.

Director of Photography Charles Rosher. Lalo Schifrin the original music song Chilly Winds music by Lalo and lyrics by Mike Curb The Screenplay is by Gene Roddenberry based on the novel by Francis Pollini. Produced and Scripted by Roddenberry ( Star Trek, Have Gun -Will Travel )
Director Roger Vadim’s first motion picture in the United States.

Cinematography by Charles Rosher Jr.
Distributed by  Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
MGM was trying to appeal to the “youth market”. The indie films of the late 60s and 70s were taking over, and MGM was in financial trouble, it would completely cease production by 1976 and by 1979.

Pretty Maids All In A Row was released on April 28, 1971, and did a Limited run In Theaters:

Rock Hudson is ‘Tiger’ McDrew
Telly Savalas is Captain Sam Surcher
Angie Dickinson is Miss Betty Smith
John David Carson is Ponce de Leon Harper
Roddy McDowall Is Principal Proffer
Keenan Wynn is Chief Poldaski

William Campbell is Sheriff Deputy Grady (Dementia 13 Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte, Best remembered by Star Trek fans as the Klingon commander in the iconic “The Trouble with Tribbles” episode.)
James Doohan as Follo is best known for his role as ‘Beam me up’ Scotty on Stark Trek the original series.

Susan Tolsky is Miss Harriet Craymire
Barbara Leigh as Janet McDrew -She was cast as the original “Vampirella” and has done two Playboy celebrity pictorials (May 1973, January 1977) Also had affairs with Steve McQueen and Elvis Presley.

THE PRETTY MAIDS
Brenda Sykes: Pamela Wilcox

On the far right Joy Bang as Rita

With Peter Duel in God Bless The Children 1970 the pilot for the tv series The Psychiatrist.

Co-stars Gretchen Burrell: Marjorie, June Fairchild: Sonny Swangle, the always-laughing student, Aimee Eccles: Hilda Lee. Margaret Markov: Polly and Diane Sherry: Sheryl.

Joanna Cameron: Yvonne Millish, actress Cameron played super goddess ISIS on the Saturday morning kid’s show that was part of the SHAZAM hour.

June Fairchild: Sonny Swangle, the always-laughing student.

Pretty Maids, was the U.S. film debut of French New Wave director Roger Vadim, known for his sensually soft-core eroticism My particular favorite of his is the beautiful “Et mourir de plaisir” or Blood and Roses 1960 Based on Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla, starring Mel Ferrer, Elsa Martinelli, and Vadim’s first wife Annette Stroyberg. The film is a surreal masterpiece.

Pretty Maids was not received well upon its first release at the box office, however. The film reviews were fairly mixed. Part of the controversy is not only for the film’s perceived glorification of underage girls having sex with a predatory adult. It was the inherent portrayal of misogyny that was repulsive to many viewers and critics and is still widely held by some reviews I’ve read.

I happened to catch it when it first aired on television in the 70s, as it was boldly slated for mainstream viewing. Apparently, Vadim did not return to film another movie in the U.S. for quite a while after the initial reaction to this misunderstood film.

It’s a guilty pleasure of mine, of those Halcyon days of film in the 1970s perhaps filled with a little kitsch, guys with ambitious sideburns and actresses in long leather vests seemed to have far more sublime sensuality than most today posses. And yet it seems to make other people just recoil at its misogynistic tone. Since I view everything now deriving a lot of insight from living with a sociologist, I experience a lot of things now vicariously through the lens of a let’s say ’empathy’ with the feminist theory my partner espouses.

Let me say this, the film does not offend me, yet does what a lot of good films should do, while Vadim himself bares the refuge of an affectionate exploitation of the female anatomy,  some might think the script is salacious, rather I think it shines a light on several themes using satire as a reflective weapon. Although there lacks Vadim’s trademark elegant decadence and art-house flavor such as his Les Liaisons dangereuses (1959) and La Ronde (1964), there is an Americanism that fluctuates between satire and plain cruelty, at times tactless and insensitive with a growing sense of disorder and I think that was the entire point which makes the film truly disturbing for it’s day. It is clear to me, regardless of his excusal of the fixation and fetishism he places on the female anatomy behind the camera and on film, that Vadim is a provocateur in every way.

At the time of Pretty Maids release, Rock Hudson’s career had sort of come to a standstill he hadn’t yet transitioned to television with his hit TV series McMillan & Wife. It was an interesting casting choice and one against type for the Hollywood heartthrob that once graced the screen with the lily-white Doris Day. Considering this departure for him, he gave a really unselfconscious performance, looking almost sleazy and drained at times. The irony of his playing this sexist lady killer is that with the exception of a few small Hollywood insiders, no one knew that Hudson was gay.

Pretty Maids is an obscure dark comedy, a deviant piece of satire I would say slightly bedroom farce, a light sleazy cult film thriller of the 70s. It fascinates me because it steeps in my brain, leaving a myriad of impressions. It’s not just a coolly directed picture with a quirky ensemble of glorious seasoned actors, it’s also filled with campy dialogue…

“I wonder why they always seem to die with a smile on their face?”-  Officer Follo (James Doohan) asks the question.

…and gruesome and distasteful aspects to the narrative. And of course, there’s the element of nostalgia for me, such as the beloved actors, in particular, Angie Dickinson (probably one of my favorite roles was the lusty Sheila Farr in Don Siegel’s 1964 remake of The Killers with Lee Marvin)and her performance as Chris in the 1967 John Boorman film Point Blank again with Lee Marvin.

On the set of Siegel’s The Killers 1964.

Great image from MGM promo shot from Point Blank (1967) via Cinema is Dope blog site:

The film also has the presence of a fantastic musical score and memorable theme song ‘Chilly Winds’. There is something brewing in the breezy Chilly Winds’ composition, part honey and part kerosene, that first goes down simply but disturbs in that really good way. The film leaves thoughts that keep bubbling up to the surface for me as I watched it again after so many years.

I just want to say briefly that Dickinson’s (“Pepper Anderson” on Police Woman (1974-78) role as Betty was one of the highlights of the film for me. Her decision to play this character was very bold, to be an older woman in the same position as Tiger McDrew, with a heightened libido, deflowering a virgin teenage boy. She was taking a risk playing the instigator of sex, where there is a power differential. Today, the same role would have branded her as a perpetrator brought up on charges of statutory rape. Ponce initially calls Miss Smith ‘ma’am’ which also signals to us, that there is a power differential, as well as Ponce, is still self-identifying as a subordinate, pupil, and underage young boy. His calling her ma’am adds a perverse standpoint to their impending sexual relationship.

So if we are to suspend our moralizing gaze and consider Angie Dickinson’s performance as just a kinder, gentler Mrs. Robinson, she manages to balance her playful sex appeal, with an elegant sexuality that’s charming, funny, awkward, and yes intelligent. She does not play a dumb blonde but a highly educated teacher, who wonders about the number of stars in the heavens and reads Milton’s Paradise Lost like it’s foreplay.

At Betty’s tutoring session at her apartment. She asks Ponce to describe Milton. He asks “Milton who?” “John Milton” is silly. Ponce fumbles around a summary “He describes the way in Heaven in which Satan was expelled and his evolution into the Devil…by corrupting…his finest creation…Woman, uhm Mankind.”

Betty starts to slowly and methodically recite Milton herself. Rosher gives us a close-up of her moistened full lips, she begins the passage.

“I fled but he pursued though more it seems inflamed with lust, than rage, and swifter far, I overtook his mother, all dismayed and in embraces forcible and foul engendering with me, of that rape begot these yelling monsters that, with ceaseless cry surround me as thou sawest hourly conceived and hourly born with sorrow infinite to me for when they list into the womb, that had bred them, they return and howl and gnaw my bowels, their repast (she pauses)…Isn’t this exciting!

As Betty’s breasts are at eye level with Ponce, he answers in a heightened level of sexual arousal slowly in a fevered groan, he moans, “Oh yeah.”

As he slumps down in the chair, Betty asks “What’s the matter Ponce?” she says this reminiscent of an adult talking to a little child they’re telling a bedtime story “You don’t think I”m going to eat you do you?” Ponce, sighs…looking up at her, his eyes begging  ” Oh yes”, ah… no… Miss Smith.”

Any way you look at her, it’s Angie Dickinson’s blazing smile that gets me every time.

In part 2 of this blog post, I talk about Byron’s ‘Intelligent Woman’ in regards to his poem Don Juan as being that type of woman is feared as ‘masculine.’ You could make the correlation that Betty Smith is an educated woman who is acting as the aggressor, a perceived male function.

Angie in her role as Pepper Anderson on Police Woman

In April 1971 an issue of Playboy Magazine published an article about the movie co-scripted by Vadim himself. It included a nine-page photographic spread of actresses Angie Dickinson, and Gretchen Burrell, Aimee Eccles, and Margaret Markov, a few of the Pretty Maids.

Roddy McDowall lovable character actor as Cornelius in Planet of The Apes 1968

I also adore Roddy McDowall as well, he is one of my favorite actors. (Legend of Hell House 1973, Night Gallery 1969, Planet of The Apes 1968, Columbo (1971-2003) episode Short Fuse, too many roles in film and television to mention.) When he’s not playing a conniving prig, he’s got a urbane sexiness, that’s endearing. And you know I never realized how attractive Telly Savalas was until I started noticing how really sensual bald men are. Except for his role as the psychotic Maggot in Aldrich’s fantastic war film The Dirty Dozen 1967, Savalas was very androgynous in the role of Captain Sam Surcher, predating his iconic role as Kojak, with his orally fixated lollypop, here in Pretty Maids, it’s his cigarette and ever-present sun glasses that are the props and projected appendage of his libido.

Telly Savalas as Theo Kojak

A Little Plot Summary:

Rock Hudson romantic leading man of the 1950s and 60s, invokes the character of the sexy master manipulator, Michael Tiger McDrew, All-American Football hero, faculty adviser, groovy high school guidance counselor/guru /Pedagogue at Southern California’s upscale suburban Ocean View High School. He’s a libertine and a veneered adoring husband and father, when in fact he possesses an aesthetic breed of misogyny. I’d even compare him to a Svengali, for his mesmerizing yet not obviously enigmatic, for he’s very cool and calculating to be that standout and manifest.

He does have a discernible fluidity in his ability to control the situation. In particular, the “Exceptionally Gifted” boys and girls he sets his gaze upon. McDrew’s got a Master’s Degree in Psychology, which Surcher finds impressive as he lights his ever-present cigarette. This signals to us that Capt. Surcher’s got his eye on McDrew for the murders.

He’s a modern-day Casanova & Don Juan, a contemporary Bluebeardesque serial killer who’s mastered the art of seduction yet fiercely loves his wife, the primary woman in his world, and so will never kill her thus by nature of self-preservation and will untangle himself from any young nymphet from the collection of underage high school girls that have sex with him and then, threaten to expose his duplicity, therefore, ruin his ‘ideal marriage.

Michael ‘Tiger’ McDrew dispatches his victims, by strangling them. Leaves dismissive and cryptic notes with quips like “so long honey” & “keep cool, honey’, pinned on the pantied asses of the half-naked bodies he dumps in plain site like fodder from his spoils. Honey is a term used to depersonalize and dehumanized the girls, as they are merely objects for his pleasure only.

‘KEEP COOL, HONEY.”

“POOR, POOR HONEY”

Coming out of the 1960s with Free Love and Flower Children, McDrew uses these images of the sexual revolution to reach out to his students. There are images of hip posters hanging on the walls of his office. He makes himself very accessible to all…but in particular a select group of kids. He’s turned down several jobs at Universities because “This is where it’s at.”

Tiger McDrew takes on a protégé in Ponce de Leon Harper (John David Carson who has a John Molder Brown baby face of innocence) a neurotic, naive yet very bright nail-biting teenager who is probably the only boy in the school not having sex yet. He must hide his perpetual erections by shielding them with his clipboard and books.

Eventually, Tiger sets substitute Betty Smith on Ponce to deflower the youth. This he does by demonstrating to Miss Smith how to make love in a mock session that drives the smitten Betty Smith to the brink, only to leave her frustrated and clumsy at the hands of his manipulation. A boy who by the start of the film sputters on his scooter, and by the film’s end is riding a motorcycle, the transformation into manhood is complete with chrome and sexy blonde passenger.

Dickinson is as adorable as Betty Smith in this film, which could have been humiliating to any other actress. Captain Sam Surcher is called in to investigate the murders of these girls after Ponce discovers the first victim in the boy’s washroom. From the very beginning Surcher suspects that Tiger McDrew has something to do with the murders. The prim Principal Proffer (Roddy McDowall) is mostly preoccupied with appearances and utters the ubiquitous phrase throughout the film “SHE WAS A FINE GIRL AND A REALLY TERRIFIC CHEERLEADER.”

The rest of Pretty Maids All in a Row reveals to us Ponce’s primal awakening into manhood and the ensuing police investigation of the serial murders at the school conducted by Telly Savalas as State Police Captain Surcher. Aside from the assemblage of the various young actors and actresses, there is also the presence of Keenan Wynn who plays local Sheriff Poldaski, a bumbling hick who manhandles the evidence and winds up being put on traffic duty. The film also co-stars Barbara Leigh as Tiger McDrew’s wife Janet.

As an aside, I believe Tiger’s wife Janet, knew on some level what he was up to by the end of the film. The narrative portrays her as possibly the only female he considers an equal, we are shown that she beats him at chess, an ‘intellectual’ game of calculation, which could be code for their matched wits, and his sexual maneuvering with the young girls as a side ‘game’ to their relationship.

During the chess match, the music underscores the mood with pared-down single notes glistening from a Fender Rhodes keyboard reminiscent of the 70s ‘dreamy’ sound, Tiger says to Janet ” Guard your Queen”

It’s in her eyes…Janet McDrew.

To me, this is anticipating the future of things to come for Janet and ‘the family.”

Essentially Janet knows where her husband’s allegiance lies and the chess games show her superior mind, the equally powerful one in the marriage thus the respect he gives her, also that she has a calculating mind, at the end being able to figure out the ruse for his possible escape. The film leaves us wondering about a lot of things.

There is the possibility that she is part of his sick game, allowing it and actually aiding him to allude to the police. He respects her and is devoted because of this. There is something in her eyes. Plus it’s obvious Tiger and his wife have a fruitful sex life. While Tiger tries to prevent anyone from finding out the truth behind his ruse as a hero, by the end, things unravel at a fast pace, and so I do believe that he ultimately allows Janet in on his secret.

This also speaks to something that started happening in horror films, which I think Pretty Maids could easily be tagged as a subgenre, the psychopathic serial killer. In the 70s, films started to portray the American family as not necessarily the sanctuary of wholesome goodness and normalcy.

Films started to blow the lid off the hidden fact that sometimes the monster came from within and not the invaders that were prevalent in the 50s and 60s which were really just code for fear of the bomb and communism.

The 50s gave us, Don Siegel’s masterpiece Invasion of The Body Snatchers 1955 Hysteria, losing your identity and the Communist Scare. The Enemy from without.

Now it was a very personal expedition to flip the presumption of American family values and invert it into something nightmarish and threatening.

Not that Pretty Maids is by itself a family horror film, but there is the framing of Tiger and his wife as the American family creating the axis of the McDrews (suburban) family which revolves around a series of deceptions and misconduct and crimes, ultimately effecting the entire community. It is this reservoir of depravity and indulgence that creates the story’s core narrative. That conventional society breeds monsters that are palpable yet unremarkable people.

Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates an All-American Mama’s Boy.

Mia Farrow as Rosemary Woodhouse, with Ruth Gordon. She’s going to have a baby!

From Hearths of Darkness: The Family in The American Horror Film by Tony Williams

From the introduction: Assault in the American Horror Film

“During the 1970s an unusual event affected Hollywood’s representation of the American family. Generally revered as a positive icon of ‘normal’ human society, the institution underwent severe assault. The antagonist was no external force such as the Frankenstein monster, Count Dracula or Cat Woman: instead, the threat came from within. In Night of The Living Dead 1968, a young girl cannibalizes her father and hacks her mother to death. In Rosemary’s Baby 1968 Satan decides to reverse two thousand years of Christian hegemony by sending his messiah to destroy American society from within. Polanski’s film anticipates an assault that continues in The Exorcist 1973 and The Omen 1976.” continued. ” In The Last House on The Left 1972 and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 1974 and The Hills Have Eyes 1977, typical American families encounter their monstrous counterparts, undergo ( or perpetuate) brutal violence, and eventually survive full knowledge of their kinship to their monstrous counterparts. All these depictions contradict normal idealized family images in mainstream American film and television.  They disrupt the ideological norms of family sitcoms such as Father Knows Best, and Leave It To Beaver.”

Here in his Chapter Sacrificial Victims, he writes

“Family horror films of the seventies reveal intense contradictions.” he continues by saying this very relevant piece.

” Michel Foucault’s definitions of discourse and power-knowledge formations, horror film monsters are defined according to a particular set of institutional guidelines as ” abject” due to their antagonistic protest against family restraint.”
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Tiger appears to respect Janet. She can be considered the only Alpha female in the film, the only woman he is somewhat subordinate most of the time. That is why she is the only one he would not kill the only one he can be devoted to. In this sense, he would always return to his domain, with her as the primary lover in his life. She has also bared his child. So no one must obstruct, threaten or invade his conventional strata with his primary mate.

Whenever one of the girls demands more than just a secret liaison in his office, or whoever threatens the silent contract Tiger has with his wife,  the sort of freedom, the secret indulgence he feels entitled to have, objectifying the girls he was meant to mentor, they have to be silenced, therefor killed. They are mere ‘honeys’ accessible for his sexual gratification only.

THE DEVIL’S SMILE…

To Tiger, women only excel as objects for sexual usage. Whereas, boys could expand their imaginations and flex their strengths in sports and intellectual endeavors. We see this in Tiger’s interactions with his students. It appears very black and white in Tiger McDrew’s fundamental understanding of gender roles and identity as he is an alpha male in a society of women who are starting to self-express themselves all over the place. Coming of age in a post-Free Love society is like the metamorphosis into butterflies. ‘Painted Ladies’ is a certain variety of butterflies.

The most notable inception of the teenager having sex = death in film started with Halloween & Friday The 13th.

What’s interesting to note is that the environment, the atmosphere of the high school campus with these young nymphets fluttering around gives the impression that Vadim is trying to expose the dichotomy of the male exploitation of the female body, and the girls themselves as the exploiters. It is an intricate system of archetypes. And not an easy one to disassemble as you cannot blame the girls for their own deaths. Can you blame the victims?

With the ensuing 80s slasher cannon, if you were a promiscuous teenager you automatically had to die. Are the girls the only victims in this film? Is the virginal Ponce a product of a careful framework of suggestions set up by society that he follow Tiger’s lead, and emerge an objectifying male himself. Ponce also starts out as an innocent (fountain of youth), a ‘Chrysalis boy’ before he morphs into a womanizing male by the film’s conclusion.

The film celebrates the glorious All-American pastime of Pom Poms and The Gridiron. The sweat of heroic athleticism as patriotism, and the cosmetic appearances of the morality of the middle class, while the hedonism left over from the sexual revolution of the 60s bleeds underneath the suburban pall. The uncomfortable friction and hostility of conformity vs freedom to express oneself, and the backlash of self-indulgence in an unforgiving cultural undercurrent of conservatism.

The ’60s and early 70s were a time when there was an urge to ‘find oneself’ a period of societal change. Political and Social groups were trying to influence and shake up the ‘status quo.’

There was a ravenous appetite for autonomy. Kinsey, Masters & Johnson, the emancipating ‘pill’ and changes toward sexual attitudes created an environment for even more sexual exploration and indulgence. There was a dramatic shift in traditional values relating to sex and sexuality. Freud had already peeked into our bedrooms, even though sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. There were profound shifts in people’s behaviors and institutional regulations. People were just more expressive about their sexuality.

The institutionalization of young girls

Throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s given the counterculture movements and availability of the birth control pill, women were offered a chance to shed their chains of moral confinement. Women had permission to seek sexual pleasure for themselves. Of course still within the parameters of the institution of ‘heterosexual marriage’ and the suburban conformist edict, in terms of what was expected from men and the male protocol.

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A Metaphor: The Sexual Revolution. Sexuality& Modernity

“and the regulation of man’s sexuality in public. D.H Lawrence may have shocked an earlier generation with Lady Chatterley’s extramarital sexual independence, but it was not until the 1970s that women’s sexuality outside marriage became widely accepted.” – From Sexuality & Modernity: The Sexual Revolution of the 60s.