EDGAR G.ULMER’S: THE BLACK CAT (1934) “ARE WE BOTH NOT"¦ THE LIVING DEAD?”

“The phone is dead. Do you hear that, Vitus? Even the phone is dead.”

THE BLACK CAT (1934)

THE BLACK CAT (1934) U.S. (Universal) runs 65 minutes B&W, was the studio’s highest grossing picture in 1934. The film was also ranked #68 on Bravo’s 100 Scariest Movies. Directed by Edgar G. Ulmer and written for the screen by Ulmer and Peter Ruric.
Also titled: House of Doom; The Vanishing Body (the alternative British title was used in it’s re-release in 1953 as a double bill with The Missing Head an alternative title for the “Inner Sanctum’s” offering Strange Confession.

Bela Lugosi as Count Dracula — ***Tod Browning’s* adaptation of *Bram Stoker’s* Dracula (1931) starring *Bela Lugosi.***

Boris Karloff in Jame's Whales Frankenstein — *Boris Karloff* in *Jame’s Whales* Frankenstein 1931.

With the success that Universal Studios garnered from Tod Browning’s adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula in 1931 starring Hungarian-born actor Bela Lugosi, and the equally sensational popularity of Mary Shelley’s adapted Frankenstein 1931 directed by James Whale starring Boris Karloff, it would seem only natural for the studio to harness the cult popularity of these two stars, creating horror vehicles to pair them together in. This is the first collaboration between Boris and Bela. Also, both stars were equally billed in terms of their leading roles. In Lew Landers The Raven 1935, Lugosi dominated as Dr. Richard Vollin and in Lambert Hillyer’s The Invisible Ray 1936, the emphasis was more on Karloff’s complex character Dr. Janos Rukh. The Black Cat was a huge success for Universal and opened up the floodgates for seven more films featuring the collaboration of Karloff and Lugosi; Gift of Gab (1934), The Raven (1935), The Invisible Ray (1936), Son of Frankenstein (1939), Black Friday (1940), and You’ll Find Out (1940).

Although The Black Cat 1934 claims in its opening credits that the film is ‘suggested’ by Edgar Allan Poe’s story from 1843 the film bares no resemblance to his short story, nor did Poe ever pen a single word about Satanism in all his volumes of the curiously macabre. The film does evoke the spirit of Poe’s fixation with morbid beauty, the preservation or perseverance of love after death, the suggestive ambiance, the conflation of beauty and death, and the unconscious dread of the uncanny. The architectural lines seem to also evoke the nihilistic sensibilities of Jean-Paul Sartre‘s ‘No Exit’ or a Kafka-esque fantasy of entrapment, with a mood set forth of futility and hopelessness. It also represents a cultural aesthetic that was emblematic of WW1.

Ulmer’s The Black Cat is melancholy poetry that articulates its substance within a half-light dream world. There are overcast clouds of menace, with modern Gothic gloom and impenetrable dark spaces. A wasteland of lost hope, it is a land of the dead.

Karloff is driven by his profane lust and twisted faith and Bela is a ghost of a man n a deadly excursion into a vengeful rage.

“Don’t pretend, Hjalmar. There was nothing spiritual in your eyes when you looked at that girl.”-Werdegast

CapturFiles_3 — **‘the beast’ or the wickedest man in the world Aleister Crowley**

Karloff’s character Poelzig is actually based on the notorious occultist Aleister Crowley. Ulmer and Ruric were inspired by an odd news story circulating in the world press shortly before the making of the film. Stranger than fiction, it seems a naive young couple who were visiting a remote home of a magician, became entangled in the occult rituals involving an unfortunate animal sacrifice, a victimized black cat named Mischette. The magician was Aleister Crowley, and the isolated location was his Abbey of Thelema in Sicily. The press got wind of this when Crowley accused one of his writer friends Nina Hamnett of libel in a London Court. Hamnett had mentioned Crowley in her 1932 autobiography Laughing Torso.

The passage that incited Crowley’s vengeful wrath was Hamnett’s description of his days at the Abbey of Thelema “He was supposed to practice Black Magic there, and one day a baby was said to have disappeared mysteriously, There was also a goat there. This all pointed to Black Magic, so people said, and the inhabitants of the village were frightened of him.” Crowley became known in the public’s perception as ‘the wickedest man in the world.” It was from this story that the seed of sensationalism gave rise to the idea for The Black Cat which emerged as a tale of savagery and horror for Ulmer.

So, in actuality, the title has nothing to do with Poe’s short story at all, as it merely alludes to Dr.Vitus Werdegast’s (Lugosi) all-consuming fear and dread of cats. A more faithful adaption would be The Living Dead (1934) directed by Thomas Bentley, and Tales of Terror (1962). The Black Cat (1941) starring Basil Rathbone was more of an old dark house mystery.

CapturFiles_1 — *Roger Corman* directs *Peter Lorre* in Tales of Terror 1962.

This mysterious and decadent tale was directed by Austrian-born Auteur Edgar G.Ulmer who was part of the vast succession of Ã©migrÃ©s of high-art who came to America, Ulmer passed away in 1972.

It is one of the darkest films of the 30s. The Black Cat is an effusive, atmospheric, and brutal masterpiece of decadent horror among some of Ulmer’s other interesting contributions (People on Sunday 1930, Bluebeard 1944, film noir classic Detour 1945, and the wonderfully lyrical science fiction fantasy The Man From Planet X 1951).

Influenced by the German Expressionist movement, the film lays out a sinister territory, strange and foreboding, unsavory and dangerous, clandestine and provocative. Ulmer worked for Fritz Lang in the early days living in Germany involved in films including Metropolis (1927) and M (1931). He also worked with F.W. Murnau on Sunrise (1927) Ulmer also worked with Max Reinhardt, and Ernst Lubitsch in the 20s, and Robert Siodmak, Billy Wilder, Fred Zinnermann, and cinematographer Eugen SchÃ¼fftan, who was responsible for Metropolis’ miniature sky-scapes and vast edifices.

on the set of The Black Cat copy — **On the set of The Black Cat.**

Boris and Bela in Edgar Ulmers The Black Cat — *Boris* and Bela on the set of *Edgar G. Ulmer’s* The Black Cat.

The Black Cat is considered to be Ulmer’s best film, though his career did start to maneuver its way down into poverty row’s fabulous cinematic gutter toiling in low-budget features, after beginning an affair with a script girl named Shirley Castle Alexander who was married at the time to one of Carl Laemmle’s favorite nephews. At the time Laemmle was head of Universal Studios, and so Ulmer was essentially blackballed by the mogul from Hollywood. Another factor might have been Ulmer’s unwillingness to sacrifice aesthetic sensibilities over commercial profits.

Ulmer and Shirley got married and wound up moving to New York City spending many of his years working on low-budget films. He began this part of his career by making bargain-basement westerns under the pseudonym John Warner directing a series of cheap ethnic-market movies incorporating groups like Ukrainian, Yiddish, and African Americans before he moved on to the more stylish low-budget thrillers.

https://thelastdrivein.com/2021/11/17/31-flavors-of-noir-on-the-fringe-to-lure-you-in-part-1/

By the 1940s Ulmer wound up back in Hollywood but had already resigned himself to making poverty row productions. All of which I find thoroughly enjoyable, such as his Bluebeard (1944) starring the ubiquitous John Carradine, Strange Illusion (1945), and film noir cult classic Detour (1945) starring Tom Neal and Ann Savage whose battered and desolate characters actually fit the noir cannon with an authentic realism despite the anemic budget. I also love The Strange Woman (1946) and another great film noirÂ Ruthless (1948) with Zachary Scott.

Ulmer still remained a very productive director with PRC, even if it was one of Hollywood's bastard children. Studio head Leon Fromkess never gave Ulmer enough money to fund his pictures, Ulmer wanted to produce high-art films and first-class effects as his origin had come from a place where he was such a ”visual artist as well as a filmmaker. The one good by-product of the deal was that it gave him creative license to run with whatever vision he had for a working project of his.

Director Ulmer also doubled as a set designer on The Black Cat to create a work of visual stateliness, beautifully stylish and elaborate with its collection of modernist set pieces, working with the art direction and set design of Charles D. Hall and cinematographer John J. Mescall’s (The Bride of Frankenstein) vision of the striking, uniquely cold and Futuristic Modern Gothic art deco ‘castle fortress’ and it’s interior shots creating the arresting landscape of luxury belonging to the enigmatic Poelzig’s (Karloff) inner-sanctum.

The eclectically sharp and angular camerawork establishes stylish Machine Age imagery and eerie symmetrical aestheticism. Mescall’s camerawork creates a very non-Hollywood and non-stereotypical horror film, filled with a sense of melancholy responsiveness from the heavily influenced authentic Eastern European films of the period. There’s also a quality of cinematic eroticism with Mescall’s use of muting the focus within the shot to create an added emphasis on suggestive sexuality, as the camera dances through various scenes.

The stark use of light and shadow, the well-defined contrast of light and dark with its cold black spaces, and the diffuse whites constructing margins that pay homage to the expressionistic lighting used by German Expressionists filmmakers of the 1920s and early 30s. The atmosphere is oppressive as well as claustrophobic with an added air of perversity that effervesces within the elegant framework.

Ulmer co-wrote the screenplay with Peter Ruric (who used the pseudonym Paul Cain for his hard-edged detective novelettes for pulp magazines, with screenplays such as–Grand Central Murder 1942 and Mademoiselle Fifi 1944). Their script for The Black Cat deals with a deadly game of chess, ailurophobia (fear of cats) rather taboo and provocative subjects such as war crimes, ‘Satan Worship’, human sacrifice, being flayed alive, drug addiction and the underlying perverse fetishism of necrophilia.

Heinz Roemheld’s blustering classical score, with the pervasive use of work from classical composers, all set the stage for a mÃ©lange of sadism, decadence, erotic symbolism, torture, and hedonist themes of pleasure pain, and death. The underscoring of this deliberate use of slow, solemn, and imposing classical music emphasizes the atmosphere of entrapment and hopelessness.

High Priest Mass Karloff close up — *Boris Karloff* as the imposing Hjalmar Poelzig.

Karloff’s character, Hjalmar Poelzig’s morbid and unwholesome preservation of his deceased wife whom he stole from Vitus Werdegast (Lugosi), having manipulated Werdegast’s wife into marrying him telling her that her husband died in the war, ultimately murdering her and then forcibly marrying Werdegast’s daughter is all very salacious material. Werdegast’s wife’s body is kept in a state of suspended animation like a sleeping doll which is visually shocking and gruesome. He tells Werdegast that his daughter too is deceased but in actuality, she is Poelzig’s new young bride. a drugged sexual slave. The film possesses so many strange and disturbing elements. The allusion to incest, sacrificial orgies, and the heightened presence of music drawing heavily from Liszt’s Piano Sonata in B and Schumann’s Quintet in E Flat Major, op.44, Tschaikowsky and most notably for me, Beethoven’s Movement no.7, a personal favorite of mine.

The film was made just prior to the strictly enforced production guidelines of The Hayes Commission that policed all the sin and immorality on the silver screen. Allegedly there were various edits to the production that Universal insisted upon, but the film still bares a very deviant and erotically depraved tenor to the narrative’s mise en scÃ©ne.

When Universal executives both Carl Laemmle Jr and Sr. screened the film they were horrified by Ulmer’s rough cut, they insisted that he edit the film and so they hacked it up and toned it down. And actually, Bela Lugosi himself was unsettled at the thought of his protagonist showing lusty desires for the very young American girl Joan. Ulmer reluctantly went back and edited some of the harsher scenes out, including the infamous ‘skinning’ sequence, A comparison to the original script from the final version shows that many of the most disturbing elements, including a more unabashed orgy at the black mass, were quickly snipped away and scenes which were more violent and containing more suggestive elements were exorcized like the devil.

But in a subtle victory of wile, Ulmer added a few more scenes showing Karloff taking Lugosi through his historical dungeon artifacts of the encased suspended beautiful women in glass, the posed dead bodies in perpetual lifelike form as if by taxidermy, collecting them as his fetish, the idea of possessing them eternally as an ‘object’ in a state of death, the theme of necrophilia must have slipped by the Laemmles.

Women in glass cases preserved — **Poelzig’s women in glass cases preserved. The imagery is reminiscent of Poe’s fixation with death and beauty, and the conflation of the two**

The subject of contemporary Satanism had only been dealt with on the screen once before by Lugosi in his supporting role in the long-forgotten and believed to be lost The Devil Worshipper (1920 German) Die Teufelsanbete.

Universal’s marketing department downplayed the aspect of Satanism in the picture, nervous that the idea of devil worship might not be acceptable to the public theatergoer as entertainment. So in actuality, the original version must have really pushed the boundaries further and been even more sinister. British censors found the film so offensive and unacceptable that the British print of the film, entitled House of Doom replaces any reference to black magic, using less disturbing references to ‘sun worshipper’, (silly) which essentially obliterates the entire transgressive significance and its impact.

Carl Laemmle had given Ulmer free rein on the story’s content but kept a close eye on the director in other respects. Ulmer had not been given the larger budgets that either Dracula or Frankenstein had been endowed with. He was also given a very short span of time to shoot the film, a mere fifteen days. This did not deter or side-track Ulmer at all who was used to working with small budgets and knew how to construct a film that looks as elegant as any largely budgeted project. He began imagining the story, scrapping many scripts that Universal had been collecting. Any pretext associating the picture with Poe’s short story was cast to the wind. And so he created an entirely new vision. At the core, the film works thematically as a revenge piece. But of course, there is so much more bewitching the film’s narrative.

Gustav Meyrink novelist The Golem Prague Jew — **Prague Jew *Gustav Meyrink* novelist The Golem.**

*Paul Wegener* in the adaptation of Czech writer *Gustav Meyrink’s* The Golem

In the 1960s Peter Bogdanovich interviewed Ulmer in ‘The Devil Made Me Do It‘ who recalled another theme that influenced The Black Cat. He had been in Prague"¦ and met novelist Gustav Meyrink the man who wrote The Golem as a novel. Like Kafka, Mayrink was a Prague jew who was tied up with the mysticism of the Talmud. They had a lot of discussions, contemplating a play based upon the Fortress Doumont which was a French fortress the Germans had destroyed with their shelling during World War I. There were some survivors who didn’t come out for years. The commander who ultimately went insane three years later was brought back to Paris, driven mad because he had literally walked on a mountain of bodies and bones. “The commander was a strange Euripides figure.” Ulmer told Bogdanovich. (Euripides is an archetypal figure as a representational mythical hero, an ordinary person in extraordinary circumstances. Also, Euripides voluntarily exiled himself, rather than be executed like his colleague Socrates who was put to death for his perceived dangerously intellectual influence.)

Much of the ambiance of this historic incident is reflected in Bela Lugosi’s dialogue in The Black Cat.

Werdegast-"I can still sense death in the air""¦ — **Vitus Werdegast– “I can still sense death in the air.”**

“And that hill yonder, where Engineer Poelzig now lives, was the site of Fort Marmorus. He built his home on its very foundations. Marmorus, the greatest graveyard in the world.” – Vitus Werdegast

Within The Black Cat is there an aesthetic tension between Expressionist Caligarism and The New Objectivity movement or Neue Sachlichkeit, which begin in Habsburg Central Europe at the dawn of the Nazi era? The New Objectivity espoused a new attitude of public life in Weimar Germany with it’s art, literature, music, and architecture created to adapt to the changing mood of the culture. It was characterized by a practical engagement with the world, which was regarded by Germans to be an inherently American style or the cult of objectivity, functionalism, usefulness, essentially- Americanism. While the film injects a modern wholesome American couple into the plot, they are mired down in the decaying ghosts of the past atrocities and sins perpetrated not only on the land but by the presence of the vengeful and malignant atmosphere. An atmosphere represented within the framework of a very Caligarian milieu. This creates friction or contrast by injecting the fresh American presence into the plot, surrounding them within an environment of an arcane and non-naturalist landscape.

The Expressionist Caligarism was started by director Robert Wiene whose surreal masterpiece Cabinet of Dr. Caligari or Das Cabinett des Dr. Caligari will always be remembered as the iconic ultra-expressionist watershed moment of the genre. ‘Caligarism’ Painters turned set designers Walter RÃ¶hring and Walter Reimann was responsible for the brilliant expressionist style which influenced other films with both the ornamental patterns transfixed in the dysmorphic repertoire of shapes and configurations that permeated the set designs for 20s science fiction films like Andrew Andrejew’s AELITA – Queen of Mars 1924.

Aelita Queen of Mars — **AELITA- Queen of Mars 1924**

The use of the color black or more accurately, the absence of light, can also be seen as part of the symbolism in The Black Cat: We are the voyeurs to this claustrophobic madness, as spectators we see the horror as highlighted by the stark blackness of the clothes, the black trees which are filmed in silhouette against a blackened sky. Poelzig is often silhouetted in distinctive blackness. This use of the color black or again more accurately in lighting it with the absence of any color or ‘light’, is used thematically as a way of installing a sadistic marker of the imagery.

The cast of Characters:

Boris Karloff is Hjalmar Poelzig
Bela Lugosi is Dr. Vitus Werdegast
David Manners is Peter Alison
Julie Bishop is Joan Alison (as Jacqueline Wells)
Egon Brecher is The Majordomo to Poelzig
Harry Cording is Thamal Werdegast’s faithful servant
Lucille Lund is Karen Werdegast
Henry Armetta is Police Sergeant
Albert Conti is Police Lieutenant
John Carradine plays the Organist (uncredited)

Boris Karloff plays Haljmar Poelzig who is perhaps one of his most impressively darker characterizations. His all-black attire, strangely androgynous hairstyle, and exaggerated use of make-up accentuate his features giving him the appearance of extreme and austere wickedness. Karloff’s eyebrows arch, his eyes flare and the use of his black lipstick make him almost deathly. Jack Pierce (The Man Who Laughs 1928, Dracula 1931, Frankenstein 1931 White Zombie 1932, The Mummy 1932 Bride of Frankenstein 1935 ) was responsible for the subtle yet dramatic make-up.

Karloff’s voice, his wonderfully lilting voice is typically modulated within the drift of his dialogue. He is remarkable as the incarnation of profane evil, with his icy cold reserve and detachment from the world.

Both protagonists are enigmatic, Karloff’s Poelzig’s utter malevolence and Lugosi’s hero Dr. Vitus Werdegast who is sympathetic yet also damaged, callous, and obsessed by his lust for revenge, make both these disparate figures, magnetic archetypes that are equally compelling.

Game of Death chess match key on table — *Boris* and *Bela* in a high-stakes chess match, a game of death

The film takes place in Hungary, starting out with scurrying masses boarding the grandeur of the Orient Express. The Allisons are on their way to Budapest, Visegrad for their honeymoon. American Newlyweds Peter a mystery writer and his new bride Joan Allison board the opulent train. David Manners who plays spare hero Peter Allison portrayed Jonathan Harker in 1931’s Dracula opposite Lugosi and again appeared as the leading man with Karloff in The Mummy 1932. Jacqueline Wells plays Joan. At first, the young love birds have their compartment all to themselves until Dr. Vitus Werdegast, psychiatrist and veteran of World War I, a captive who has just been released from a prisoner of war camp after 15 years imprisonment, (Ulmer himself was a refugee of Hitler) enters the compartment due to a mix up needing a place to sleep. He tells the young couple that he is on his way to visit an ‘old friend.’

CapturFiles_1b — **Vitus Werdegast -“So you are going to Visegrad”**
**Peter Allison- “Yes to (sounds like) Gaermbish by bus.”**
**Vitus Werdegast– “Gaermbish is very beautiful, I too am going very near there.”**
**Peter Allison– “For sport?”**
**Vitus Werdegast (raising his eyebrows, looking down, and speaking more to himself) perhaps"¦ I go to visit an ‘old friend'” (spoken with a dark unpinning of hatred)**

While Joan and Peter fall asleep the gentle yet peculiar Werdegast becomes fixated on her, stroking her hair while her husband Peter who is now awake watches silently for a moment. Werdegast explains that his wife and daughter were left behind when he was sent away to prison.

CapturFiles_1f — Vitus Werdegast- “I beg your indulgence, my friend. Eighteen years ago I left a girl, so like your lovely wife"¦ To go to war. Kaiser and country you know"¦ (serious look, deeper inflection) She was my wife. Have you ever heard of Kurgaal? (Peter quietly nods ‘no’) It is a prison below Amsk. Many men have gone there"¦ Few have returned. (taking in a deep breath) I have returned. After fifteen years"¦ I have returned.”

In a premonitory monologue, the driver had spoken of ancient malevolence in Marmorus during the years of the war. “the ravine down there was piled twelve-deep with dead and wounded… the little river below was swollen, a red raging torrent of blood”

When the honeymooners get off the train, it is pouring rain… they agree to share a bus ride with Werdegast, but there is a storm and the desolate rain-soaked roads are treacherous, causing the bus to crash. The bus driver dies, and Joan is injured in the wreck. Needing to seek shelter Dr. Werdegast recommends that they join him at his friend’s home, the Castle Poelzig, so he can take care of the young bride. Werdegast treats Joan’s injury, injecting her with a powerful hallucinogen called hyoscine.

The name Poelzig is an homage to Hans Poelzig set designer/architect of the 1920s whose version of Der Golem was stunning. Real-life Poelzig was responsible for the astonishing Prague set that underpinned the mythic mood of The Golem.

In Hans Poelzig’s own words, “The effect of architecture is magical.” And he meant that literally as he believed that every building was a living thing, had its own musical rhythm and a mystical sound that could be ‘heard’ by those who were initiated into the world of magic. Though a very private man it was known that Poelzig dabbled in magical arts, holding spiritualist seances with his wife at their home and using their daughter as a medium.

According to Poelzig’s biographer, Theodor Heuss, his library was “filled with the works of mystics, the occult sciences and astrology“Â he was in the pursuit of the mysteries of eternal forms that he erected and revered through his sacred work constructing his grand style architectural designs as his ‘magic’ medium. Poelzig also found cinema to be an environment for his magical sensibilities, jotting in his notebook “Film"¦ the magic of form-the form of magic"¦ Devil’s Mass"¦”Â

Poelzig intrigued a lot of people with his mysterious persona. Director Max Reinhardt hired Engineer Hans Poelzig to build sets for his theatrical stages. Ulmer was one of the architect’s junior assistants who later worked on the set of The Golem as a silhouette cutter for Paul Wegeners monumental production. Ulmer had studied architecture in Vienna and so carried that knowledge with him which sheds light on his sense of set design.

Hans Poelzig had a grand imagination, a creative fortitude, and a host of eccentricities, one of which was to be at times a very overpowering presence and domineering personality.

This left an impression on Ulmer, who took those memories from Germany to Hollywood and created a cinematic resurrection of designer Hans Poelzig’s persona in the image of Karloff’s shadowy devil worshiper Hjalmar Poelzig, creating the shades, shadows, and the template for Ulmer’s mystical engineer sadist of The Black Cat’s.

F.W. Murnau’s Faust 1926 too, definitely bears its influence on Ulmer who worked as a crew member on the film. Faust, in terms of the cinema of the Satanic, was a major studio production whose main protagonist was the Devil and who was a complex character, and not merely a vehicle for a simple horror-themed picture, it sprung from a confluence of intellectualism and metaphysical ponderings.

Murnau's Faust 7 — *Murnau’s* Faust (1926).

DEVILS OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION IN CLASSICAL FILM

Stefan Eggeler-illustrations for Gustav Meyrink-Walpurgisnacht-(1922) — *Stefan Eggeler*-illustrations for *Gustav Meyrink-*Walpurgisnacht-(1922).

The Black Cat does seem to be one of the earliest illustrations of the Satanic cult film. While the era of Silent Film had a slew of films that dealt with the devil and black magic, (Dante’s Inferno 1911, The Student of Prague 1913, Henrik Galeen’s The Golem 1914 Thomas Edison’s The Magic Skin 1915, The Black Crook 1916, The Devil’s Toy 1916, The Devil’s Bondswoman 1916, Conscience 1917, Murnau’s Satanas 1919, Der Golem 1920, The Devil Worshipper 1920, Dreyer’s Leaves of Satan’s Book 1920, and 1921’s HÃ¤xan, Nosferatu 1922. The Sorrows of Satan 1926 andÂ F.W. Murnau’s Faust 1926 ) After the economic crash of 1929 these very recognized landmark films seem to disappear. The 30s had The Black Cat 1934 and The Student of Prague (1935), both of these films might be the protracted essence of the Satanic Expressionism of 20s German cinema.

Dante's Inferno devil — **Dante’s Inferno 1911.**

Murnau's Faust 8 — **Director *F.W. Murnau’s* expressionist extravaganza Faust 1926.**

The ‘devil worship’ film or ‘Satanic’ cinema evokes our primal fears, paranoia, and unconscious dread that is implicit toward the ‘Other’ As was in Rosemary’s Baby, Roman Polanski’s adaptation of Ira Levin’s brilliant portrayal of this very paranoia. Satanic films trigger our fears of the intrusion of an outsider who infiltrates society, or rather the comfortability of our moral landscape. It also signposts our secret pleasures which are derivative or surrogate as catharsis by way of the horrors of satanic power. In the 40s the few offerings were William Dieterle’s The Devil and Daniel Webster 1941, Maurice Tourneur’s Carnival of Sinners (1943), and Mark Robson/Val Lewton’s literate and intensely woven The Seventh Victim (1943) and Thorold Dickinson’s imaginative masterpiece The Queen of Spades 1949.

Devil and Daniel copy — **Director *William Dieterle’s* The Devil and Daniel Webster (1941).**

The 7th Victim Lewton — The 7th Victim (1943) is a shadow play about a devil cult by *Val Lewton.*

*Thorold Dickinson’s* story about a pact with the Devil – The Queen of Spades 1949.

While Universal had successes with both Dracula and Frankenstein, The Black Cat is a more intensely layered film with its hidden and not-so-implicit meanings. It has a depth that explores the undercurrent of the 1920s aestheticism and fascination with magic. There are heterogeneous elements that run through both compelling performances by Karloff and Lugosi’s characterizations.

"Next time I go to Niagra Falls" — **“Next time I go to Niagra Falls.”**

Werdegast “You sold Marmorus to the Russians"¦ scurried away in the night and left us to die. Is it to be wondered, that you should choose this place to be your house? A masterpiece of construction built upon the ruins of the masterpiece of destruction"¦ the masterpiece of murder. (he laughs) The murderer of ten thousand men returns to the place of his crime. Those who died were fortunate. I was taken a prisoner to Kurgaal, Kurgaal, where the soul is killed"¦ slowly. Fifteen years I rotted in the darkness. Waited"¦ not to kill you, to kill your soul"¦ slowly. Where is my wife Karen and my daughter?!!!!”

Poelzig– “Karen? Why what do you mean?”

Werdegast –“I mean you told Karen I had been killed, I found out that much in Budapest. I mean you always wanted her in the days at Salzberg before the war, always, from the first time you saw her. I mean that after you saved your own hide and left us all to die in Marmorus, you took Karen and induced her to go to America with you. I traced the two of you there. And to Spain and to South America and finally here. Where is she?”

The film is also powerful in its evoking of the horrors of World War I, which was still a very haunting specter in the public psyche. Most Universal films offered escapism, in contrast, The Black Cat confronts the viewer with a bit of historic retelling of the nightmares of war, more penetrating than the usual concocted monsters the studio was proffering.

CapturFiles_36 Where is shejpg — **“Where is she?”**

CapturFiles_37 after being asked where Karen is — **Poelzig- “Vitus.. you are mad”**
**Poelzig “She died two years after the war”**
**Vitus Werdegast -“How?”**
**Poelzig “Of pneumonia, she was never really very strong you know.”**
**Vitus Werdegast- “(crying) And the child"¦ our daughter?”**
**Poelzig “Dead…”**

Karloff’s aloof and restrained malevolence guided by the subtle intonations of his melodious voice tethered to Lugosi’s sympathetic and often poignant performance as the broken Vitus Werdegast, in particular the scene when he first sees his dead wife Karen exhibited as if in a museum, suspended in death, evoking authentic tears, “Why is she like this?” All set to the maudlin Ludwig Van Beethoven’s ‘Symphony No. 7: Second Movement.’

Beethovin’s symphony no. 7 often used in films and a most powerfully contemplative piece underscores Karloff’s soliloquy as the camera glides through the dark and dank dungeon of Marmorus taking us on a tour of the decaying deathly oxygen of the place.

Poelzig leads Werdegast through the subterranean enclosures of Marmorus. It is here that Werdegast sees his wife who had died two years after he was in prison, and that his Karen (Lucille Lund) is now encased in glass.

Poelzig reveals the perfectly preserved body of his wife in necrophilic stasis, that he’s encased in glass like an immoral specimen of his unholy fetishism. This might be the only other reference to Poe and his morbid preoccupation with beauty in death. He reveals the dead body of ‘their’ beautifully angelic wife, encased in her crypt-like glass vessel. Poelzig lies to Werdegast telling him that his daughter is also dead.

Werdegast is devastated and demands retribution but Poelzig insists that fate must wait until the ‘outsiders’ are gone. Of course, Poelzig intends to kill the Americans, sacrificing Joan, but forces Werdegast to play a diabolical game of chess the outcome for which the lives of the young couple hinge upon. Werdegast loses and Joan is then taken to another room to await Poelzig, as she is to be his next sacrifice at the black mass ritual during the dark of the moon, in his Bauhaus ceremonial inner sanctum of worship, his sepulcher of debauchery, his sadistic sanctuary, the archaic shrine to the devil.

CapturFiles_43 Very well Vitus I'll shall take you to her — **“Very well Vitus I shall take you to her.”**

Being led to the bowels — **The camera focuses on the darkened spiral staircase heading downward toward the dungeon and then again as Poelzig and Werdegast ascend from the subterranean nightmare.**

CapturFiles_43 — Poelzig “Come"¦ Vitus"¦ come are we men or are we children? Of what use are all these melodramatic gestures? You say your soul was killed, that you have been dead all these years. And what of me"¦ did we not both die here in Marmorus fifteen years ago ?"¦ Are we any the less victims of the war than those whose bodies were torn asunder? Are we not both, the living dead? For now, you come to me playing at being the avenging angel"¦ childishly thirsting for blood. We understand each other too well. We know too much of life. We shall play a little game Vitus. A game of death if you like. But under any circumstances, you shall have to wait until these people are gone. Until we are alone.”

CapturFiles_50 She died almost two years after the war — **“You will find her almost as beautiful as when you last saw her… Do you see Vitus I have cared for her tenderly and well.”** “**Is she not BEAUTIFUL… “**

CapturFiles_51 I wanted to have her beauty always — **“I wanted to have her beauty always.”-**

CapturFiles_51 Why's she"¦ why's she like this... — **“Why’s she"¦ why’s she like this…?”-Â**

CapturFiles_62 — **Poelzig has finished his nihilistic sermon. The camera as spectator angles back on the two men walking slowly again. Whatever remained of the man, Vitus Werdegast has now been annihilated.**

The essence of this makes the film as disturbing and queasy as any in this contemporary age of violent horror films. Ulmer convinced Laemmle Jr to let him make a film in the European Caligari style, surreal, post-modern, and artistic. The one condition was that he use Poe’s title for the picture. The storyline is hallucinatory, dream-like, and nightmarish, framed within the architecture of a set that becomes part of the character of the plot. Poelzig is revealed is the High Priest of a Satanic Cult, there is a scene where we catch sight of him reading a book entitled The Rites of Lucifer, which promotes the customary sacrifice of virgin blood while Werdegast’s beautiful blonde daughter Karen is believed to be dead, sleeps next to him most likely kept in a drug-induced cataleptic state, to maintain her appearance of a morbid deathly slumber in order to feed Poelzig’s penchant for conflating sexuality with death.

The dark of the moon, tis tonight — **“The dark of the moon, this tonight.”**

Hjalmar Poelzig owner, engineer, and designer of the castle is an intense and eccentric man whose castle rests upon the bloody ruins and remains of Fortress Marmorus and the slew of graves where the dead betrayed soldiers, victims of his treason during World War I are buried. Poelzig is as removed from his treacherous past as is his Modern castle which denies its bloody legacy.

Werdegast accuses Poelzig of betraying the Hungarians to the Russians, while he was the commanding officer of the Fort during the war. Telling him that he was responsible for leaving him and the other soldiers to die or be captured. He also believes that Poelzig stole his wife and child when he was sent to prison and that they must still be in the fortress somewhere. Poelzig has a room secretly hidden especially for his satanic black masses. As the conflict unfolds, the young couple becomes the unwitting hostages of these two men.

One of these men is an unorthodox heretic who is consumed with power, death, sublimation, and perverse sensuality. The other is blinded by revenge and hatred for the man who destroyed his life. He also has an all-consuming fear of cats, and early on in the film kills Poelzig’s black cat, although Poelzig is seen carrying around a black cat with him while he glides around his house as he revisits the women he has encased in glass.

We are first introduced to Poelzig as he is laying on a bed with his young wife Karen, a quite provocative image by 1934 Hollywood standards. The vision is sterile and hypothermic, surrounded by glass, chrome, and steel. As the camera moves into Poelzig’s bedroom lair, we see him as he rises up from a prone position emerging in silhouette like a wraith.

Once Joan enters the castle Poelzig is drawn to her, as she is young and attractive possibly bearing a resemblance to his dead wife. As the narrative progresses, it becomes even more strange and uncanny, as Poelzig’s dead wife is revealed to have been married to Werdegast, who believed he died during the battle of Marmorus. She marries Poelzig but he murders her soon afterward, raising their daughter, and then in an imbroglio of incestuous lust, marries the ethereal young girl, it’s so creepy and blasphemous.

CapturFiles_71b Please child, listen to me we're all in danger, Poelzig is a mad beast I know — **“Please child, listen to me we’re all in danger, Poelzig is a mad beast I know.”**

CapturFiles_77 'He took Karen my wife murdered her and murdered my child' — **“I know… I’ve seen the proof-‘He took Karen my wife murdered her and murdered my child.”**

Werdegast tells Joan “Did you ever hear of Satanism, the worship of the devil of evil? Herr Poelzig is the great modern priest of the ancient cult. And tonight at the dark of the moon, the rites of Lucifer are recited. And if I’m not mistaken, he intends you to play a part in that ritual. a very important part. There child, be brave, no matter how hopeless it seems. Be brave it is your only chance.”

CapturFiles_87 I'm Karen madam Poelzig — **“‘I’m Karen… Madam Poelzig.”**

CapturFiles_88 Karen do you understand me, your father has come for you — **“Karen do you understand me, your father has come for you.”**

When Poelzig wins the chess game, Peter Allison is chained up and locked away in the dungeon below. Werdegast is spiraling into madness now and has his loyal servant Thamal merely pretend to be loyal to Poelzig in order to help his true master Werdegast. Joan meets Werdegast’s daughter Karen who wanders into her room like a lithe spirit. She introduces herself as Madam Poelzig. Joan tells her that her father is actually alive and in the castle waiting to rescue her. When Poelzig finds out he brutally kills Karen and leads Werdegast to find her body in order to torture him further.

Poelzig ascends the grand staircase as his cult guests begin to gather around him. The image is pictorial and impressive. as they ready themselves for the Satanic ritual. The soulless expressions on their faces is quite chilling.

Poelzig begins his intonations to the dark master as Joan is led toward the altar.

Karloff improvises giving a compelling invocation to Satan yet actually consists of a few harmless Latin non- sequesters, phrases he used from his college Latin, like Vino Veritas which basically means ‘In wine there is truth’. Cave Canum, ‘Beware of the dog’ and Cum grano salis which is ‘With a grain of salt.’

Werdegast and his servant Thamal (Harry Cording) stop the ceremony, interrupting the sacrifice, and eventually avenge his wife’s death and the plundering and despoiling of his beautiful daughter. They rush Joan away from the ceremony and hide her from Poelzig.

This is when Joan tells him that his daughter is quite alive and has now been forced to marry Poelzig. Joan’s screams alert Peter who can not enter the barred room. He thinks Werdegast is assaulting her when he is trying to help her find the key to the door and so Peter shoots him, but he lets them escape.

Thamal has been wounded by Poelzig’s servant but rushes to help his master. The two men strap Poelzig to his Art Deco-inspired contraption, an embalming rack that looks like an angular cruciform, while Werdegast rips away Poelzig’s shirt, grabbing a scalpel he begins to skin his adversary alive.

I’ll leave it here. It’s enough that you’ve seen Poelzig flayed alive. The film deserves a fresh re-viewing. I hope you’ve enjoyed my little overview of this striking masterpiece of Gothic horror featuring two of the most iconic genre stars Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi. Please let me know what you think, and please… be kind to black cats…

Your Black Cat-loving MonsterGirl

A Trailer a Day Keeps the Boogeyman Away! Strait-Jacket (1964)

“HER HUSBAND…HER ROOM… AND ANOTHER WOMAN”

STRAIT-JACKET 1964

One of William Castle’s tautly macabre psycho thrillers written by the prolific Robert Bloch (Psycho). Robert Bloch went on to write the surreal story The Night Walker (1964) starring Barbara Stanwyck. This frenetic yet subtle Grande Dame Guignol style flick in the spirit of Robert Aldrich’s Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte (1964), stars the inimitable Joan Crawford as Lucy Harbin, who after 20 years in an asylum for the double axe-murder of her cheating husband and his lover, returns home to stay with her daughter Carol (Diane Baker) where the tension starts to boils over. As Lucy’s daughter Carol prepares to get married, the bodies start piling up, or I should say the heads start to roll once more. Has Lucy become an axe-wielding murderess again?

Also co-starring Lief Erickson, Howard St John, and George Kennedy.Â

Crawford replaced Joan Blondell in the role of Lucy Harbin after Blondell was injured and couldn’t finish the film. Also, Ann Helm had originally been picked to play the role of Carol, but Crawford insisted on them using Diane Baker. There was a lot of product placement of Pepsi-cola as Joan Crawford was on the Board of Directors of the soft drink empire.

Ann Helm and Elvis in Follow That Dream — *Ann Helm* and *Elvis* in Follow That Dream 1962.

Keep your heads… MonsteGirl

The Night God Screamed (1971) – Leave Your Faith, Fear and Sanity at the Water’s Edge. Part II

“Scream – So they’ll know where to find your body!”

THE NIGHT GOD SCREAMED (1971)Â

Directed by Lee Madden (Angel Unchained 1970, The Manhandlers 1975) he offers us another cult hippie psycho drama feeding off the unsettling vibe and turbulence of the Charles Manson hysteria.

**The notorious mass murderer Charles Manson.**

No matter how often I think I’ve uncovered the most obscure cult thriller there’s always another lurking under a rock somewhere for me to feast my wide eyed stare upon, mouth agape and mind working over time to integrate the confluence of cultural debris that emerges like the dregs when you roil the sediment secretly settled on the bottom of the cinematic barrel. This is one such obscure film.

Starring screen beauty Jeanne Crain (Leave Her To Heaven (1945), Pinky (1949) A Letter to Three Wives (1949). The Tattered Dress (1957)

who probably would have rather been given a better role and script, plays the frail and persecuted Fanny Pierce. Alex Nicol plays Fanny’s husband the man in search of his own prosperous church in a better neighborhood. Preacher Willis Pierce (How could we ever forget Nicol’s wonderfully grimy, pathetic, and bizarre character Mickey in 1958s The Screaming Skull, or his dizzying performance as the drunken loser husband Jay Fowler in Look in Any Window 1961) No… he’s gotten to play a man’s man plenty, but he is sort of a victim magnet.

Alex Nicol Ruth Roman Look in Any Window — *Alex Nicol and Ruth Roman* in the provocative **Look in Any Window 1961.**

Alex Nicol as Mickey in the-screaming-skull — *Alex Nicol* as soiled oddball Mickey in one of my favorite cult classics **The Screaming Skull 1958.**

Dan Spelling plays the bourgeois Judge Coogan’s son and irritatingly preppie Peter. Barbara Hancock plays sister Nancy Coogan, Dawn Cleary plays sister Sharon and very busy actor and stuntman Gary Morgan plays little brother Jimmy.

The Night God Screamed opens with a foreboding shape floating as if gliding on top of water, through the eerie sylvan landscape wearing a monk’s robe, his large draped cowl-like hood obscuring the man’s face altogether. He grips an arcane cruciform staff. He approaches a small pond inhabited by the frolicking free love rejects, society’s much-reviled flower children of the 60s & 70s sub subculture. In other words, as South Park’s irreverent and outrageous Eric Cartman would say ‘dirty hippies’ having lots of random sex and getting high.

The pervasive cut-off tone reveals that they belong to a Manson-esque cult, who is led by the vitriolic Billy Joe Harlan, a fanatical cult leader who baptizes a few followers and then proceeds to spout a trippy fire and brimstone rant, his own distorted anti-socially virulent version of the Gospel. Much like Manson, his rhetoric engenders a lot of animosity toward the establishment, law enforcement or if you will ‘pigs’, citizens squares, and anybody who doesn’t see the world through Billy Joe’s lens.

Billy Joe is a violent sociopath who commands his fledgling minions to destroy any phony preachers, combat pigs and try and bring his new version of the Gospel to the youth of America.

Hung up on how Christ was betrayed, he riles his flock of murderous flower children to manifest the power to punish those who do not follow his gospel. To make an example of the dangers of dissension and betrayal he chooses a young girl who has refused to be baptized. And so he gives the word to his faceless hooded angel of death named ‘The Atoner’ to drown her in front of the flock.

“They was all just a bunch of sinners, Lord, fighting and bothering each other…but I saved them, Lord! I showed them that using dope was the way to turn on to You!”

“We got trouble! The Heat won’t leave us alone! They want to bust us for being hooked on You! Them pigs is watching us, Lord…they don’t dig our kinda thing!”

As this soldier of God, known as THE ATONER executes the young girl in front of the mindless youth, the rest of the nasty flock watches without doing a single thing to help the poor girl as she is submerged under the baptismal waters, causing her to drown.

The film cuts away, to a scene where the wife and good Christian Fanny Pierce (Jeanne Crain) is bringing groceries to the mission where her preacher husband (Alex Nicol) is feeding a hungry collection of bums and down and outers. Right before she can make it inside with her bag of groceries, a very unsavory bum with quite an unattractive tongue, mugs her for the brown paper bag of food, leaving her standing ironically empty-handed and assaulted right outside the very soup kitchen where she and her husband have been trying to bring the good works of Jesus to these poor destitute men.

Fanny starts to have her own crisis of faith and becomes disillusioned with her husband and his mission. Preacher Willis Pierce appears more worried about the loss of the groceries than concerned for his own wife’s safety. He possesses a resolute patriarchal hubris with his grandiose dreams of bringing the gospel to his people, much like Billy Joe, yet not imbued with vengeful and malevolent fortitude.

Willis wants to build a sizable church in ‘better areas of town’, which would mean more money, more offerings, and more notoriety to his name. This is the kind of man Billy Joe despises and is on a crusade to annihilate with his cult of venomous sycophants.

Fanny tells Willis- “God isn’t going to make our house payment!”

In a ridiculous gesture, Willis’ scheme is to erect his new mammoth wooden cross at the revival meeting he plans on holding later on that night. He believes that this will help bring in enough cash for ‘offerings’ to start up his new church. So, without consulting Fanny, Willis spends an enormous amount of money on the large, ludicrously enormous artifact that symbolizes Jesus’ sacrifice but smacks of Preacher Willis’ own egoism. He has used all their savings on this religious ‘manstrosity’, that he will erect in the revival hall which he has rented in a more affluent part of town.

As they haul the large wooden totem across the countryside on top of their old truck, the tension between Fanny and Willis grows. Fanny tells Willis that she’s sacrificed over twenty-five years of her life in service to his cause. Willis tries to convince her that the giant cross will be their ‘meal ticket.’

While stopping at a gas station, Billy Joe and one of his religious biker culties Izzy (Richard Smedley Brain of Blood, The Abductors 1972, The Naughty Stewardesses 1975 ) espy the Pierces and their truck with the cross-tied on top and pull in alongside them with their motorcycle. It’s here that sets forth the moment of confrontation with fate, and the narrative’s tragic and violent relinquishment of faith sparks.

Billy Joe begins to question Preacher Willis, fascinated with his sizable wooden cross, and wants to know what he plans to do with it, asking about the plans for the revival meeting.

It is a moment that points out the deliberate contrary notions of religion, while simultaneously forging an ironic relationship between the extreme zeal, and the unfettered fanaticism of the two very self-styled evangelists.

Willis is prideful and avidly enthusiastically offers his fund-raising motivations for his ‘mission’. Billy Joe begins to formulate his vexation, and sets out to dispense Willis with his wrath for his being a false and ‘plastic prophet’. And so as the Pierces continue on their road trip to the revival meeting, Billy Joe summons his nefarious apostles and unleashes his craving to destroy Preacher Willis.

“We’re going to a revival meeting tonight… We’re going on a crusade! Just you, and me Izzy… And the Atoner!”

At the College Lecture Hall, Preacher Willis gives his sermon. Unfortunately, it does not bestow upon him the funds needed for his plans to build up his church in a ‘good’ neighborhood. After the sermon, Fanny and Willis’ assistant Paul go outside, leaving Willis by himself in the revival hall.

In a scene that is quite disturbing as the events happen mostly in an utter bluish darkness or diverted to the realm off camera, the cult attacks Willis. They are draped in shadow. Billy Joe begins to persecute Willis, pronouncing him a ‘ false prophet’ and demanding that he be put to death. And so while Billy Joe’s followers restrain and torture poor Willis, the Atoner slowly and painfully nails Willis to his own mundanely magnificent cross.

Fanny is startled by the screams of her husband who is crying out in agony. She comes back inside the hall, but shrouds herself in the darkness, afraid for her own life, As he cries “Fanny Help me For God’s sake Help me.’ She remains motionless, doing nothing to help him"¦ he is left to die alone now a Christ-figure of the film.

The scene switches to a courtroom, where Billy Joe and his cult followers are all on trial for the murder of Willis Pierce. Judge Coogan pronounces a death sentence on the hippie messiah. Billy Joe explodes into a tirade.

“You son of a bitch! You DUMB son of a bitch! YOU’RE MAKING ME A MARTYR! AHAHAHAHAHA!”

While Billy Joe is convicted and sentenced to death, the remaining cult members encircle and besiege Fanny vowing revenge for Billy Joe. Fanny who was already starting to devolve in her encumbered world, now anguished with guilt for not having helped her husband Willis in his moment of horrific need, wanders away in a somnolent haze.

She remains in this state of disassociation for the rest of the film. The judge hires Fanny as a sort of matron to help with his two sons and teenage daughters who need to be kept in line, shown morals, and keep from acting too wild while their parents go away on a weekend vacation. The Judge grounds the kids and makes them stay in the house with Fanny who is still wholly uptight and out of her mind with guilt over her husband’s brutal death.

This breathes even more agitation into the film which is saturated with male hubris and female hysteria, the archetypal hysterical woman lives once again in the embodiment of Fanny Pierce.

On the way to bringing Fanny to his house for the weekend, the Judge dismisses her worries about the two hippies on motorcycles who seem to be following them and then goes on to instill some social relevance in the bigger picture. “Those kids, like the ones who murdered your husband… they come from broken homes… poor education… they’re just dropouts! Not like ‘my’ kids!”

Of course, we are to understand that this is a cue of foreboding irony, reflexive and dilating, as Fanny is charged to take care of the Judges adult teens, who inadvertently become mixed up in the nightmare, as the Atoner and remaining worshipers take siege of the household and terrorize Fanny and the teenagers. Fanny becomes even more unhinged, amidst an ensemble of entitled youths who are the binary figures of the film’s contemporary youth culture. One set of outliers rebelling against a system that reviles them, and the other is just as combative and anti-social, yet given the opportunities to reflex their personal freedoms because of affluence, and social capital. Dan Spelling as Peter Coogan, the judge’s eldest son, is a bit of a social superior, a quiet sociopathic teen whose poison is brewing under the surface of his perfectly pressed pants and yuppie tennis sweater.

Continue reading “The Night God Screamed (1971) – Leave Your Faith, Fear and Sanity at the Water’s Edge. Part II” →

Let’s Scare Jessica to Death (1971) & The Night God Screamed (1971)-Leave Your Faith, Fear and Sanity at the Water’s Edge. Part I

“All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.” — Edgar Allan Poe

CapturFiles_20 take me to the water's edge — ‘Leave Your Faith, Fear, and Sanity at the Water’s Edge – *Jo Gabriel*

As quoted in W. Scott Poole professor of history at Charleston South Carolina University’s remarkable book Monsters In America he opens his chapter MONSTROUS BEGINNINGS with “There are terrible creatures, ghosts, in the very air of America.” -D.H. Lawrence

Taken from his chapter The Bloody Chords of Memory, which I think is very appropriate for this discussion, Poole states that, “it would be too simplistic to view monster tales as simple narratives in service of American violence. The monster is a many-headed creature, and narratives about it in America are highly complex. Richard Kearney describes the appearance of a monster in a narrative, in a dream, or in sensory experience ‘as a signal of borderline experiences and unattainable excess.’

In 1971 two films were released with a sort of queasy verisimilitude, using a monochromatic color scheme and protracted themes of insanity, fanaticism and self-annihilation. One drawing more of its flicker from the time of cult murders by religious fanatics, and an anti-establishment repudiation reflected in the cult fringe film. The Night God Screamed utilizes as its anti-hero the motorcycle gang who hates ‘citizenship’ and phony institutionalized prophets. These outliers are dirty, rebelliously dangerous hippies, who are hyped up and deluded into following a charismatic cult leader, a Neanderthal named Billy Joe Harlan performed with a Shakespearean griminess by Michael Sugich.

CapturFiles — *Michael Sugich* as the maniacal Mansoneseque cult leader Billy Joe.

He’s quite a Mansonesque figure with his malefic unibrow. This offering aptly called The Night God Screamed, even boasts a scene where the cult actually crucifies the clean-cut minister Willis, a man of the tradition gospel played by Alex Nicol. They essentially nail him to his own pridefully giant wooden phallic cross. Leaving his wife Fanny (Jeanne Crain) to scramble in the darkened halls, conflicted as to whether to try and help her husband or save herself from the cult’s ferocious blood lust, driving her into a numb moral and cognitive stasis of unresponsiveness, reason, and human connection. I will talk about this film in Part II.

Let’s Scare Jessica To Death (1971) is a film that hints at a post-modern Americana Gothicism permeated by a rustic folksy style of vampirism, with its small town coteries, paranoia, and the archetypal hysterical woman in a sustained level of distress and adrift on a sea of inner monologues and miasma of fear. I’ll begin in Part I with my much-loved classic horror…

LET’S SCARE JESSICA TO DEATH 1971

“Leave your insanity at the door.”

Let’s Scare Jessica To Death 1971, is not only the far better film but probably unintentionally the more iconic 70s trope for what was so extraordinary about the special clutch of horror films that were birthed in the 70s epoch.

Continue reading “Let’s Scare Jessica to Death (1971) & The Night God Screamed (1971)-Leave Your Faith, Fear and Sanity at the Water’s Edge. Part I” →

Coming next to The Last Drive-In: A Chilling Double Feature

I feel like it’s time to show some love to one of my most very treasured classic horror films of the 1970s, a film that I’ve placed within my top 25 best horror films of all time. I’m talking about the atmospheric and illusory!

Let’s Scare Jessica to Death (1971) Starring Zohra Lampert

I’ll be covering this chilling gem in the next week and have decided to couple it with another rare oddity of the obscurely horrific 70s genre that is quite brutal and I feel works well as a companion piece. Starring Silver Screen beauty, Jeanne Crain in The Night God Screamed (1971).

So keep your genre fan eye’s peeled for my upcoming-

Let’s Scare Jessica To Death (1971) & The Night God Screamed (1971)- Leave Your Faith, Fear and Sanity at the Water’s Edge.

See ya at the water’s edge-MG

Postcards from Shadowland No. 8

Ace in The Hole 1951 — Billy Wilder’s Ace in The Hole (1951) Starring *Kirk Douglas* and *Jan Sterling*

***Jules Dassin’s* prison noir masterpiece-Brute Force 1947 starring *Burt Lancaster, Hume Cronyn, and Charles Bickford***

citizen kane- — Orson Welles- Citizen Kane (1941) also starring *Joseph Cotten*

devil and daniel webster — *William Dieterle’s* The Devil and Daniel Webster 1941

hangover square — Directed by *John Brahm*-Hangover Square 1945 starring *Laird Cregar , Linda Darnell and George Sanders*

House by The River — ***Fritz Lang’s* House By The River 1950 starring *Louis Hayward, Lee Bowman and Jane Wyatt.***

i cover waterfront-1933 — I Cover the Waterfront 1933- *Claudette Colbert, Ben Lyon and Ernest Torrence*

Jewel Mayhew and Wills Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte — ***Robert Aldrich’s* Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte 1964 starring *Bette Davis, Olivia de Havilland, Joseph Cotton, Mary Astor, Agnes Moorehead and Cecil Kellaway***

***John Huston’s* Key Largo 1948 Starring *Edward G Robinson, Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall***

***Stanley Kubrick’s* Killers Kiss 1955 Starring *Frank Silvera and Irene Kane.***

Lady from Shanghai(1947) — ***Orson Welles* penned the screenplay and stars in iconic film noir The Lady from Shanghai 1947 featuring the sensual *Rita Hayworth*, also starring *Everett Sloane***

lady in cage james caan++billingsley — Lady in a Cage 1964 directed by *Walter Grauman* and starring *Olivia de Havilland, James Caan, and Jennifer Billingsle*y.

long dark hall — The Long Dark Hall 1951 Starring *Rex Harrison and Lilli Palmer*

lorre M — ***Fritz Lang’s* chilling M (1931) Starring *Peter Lorre***

Mark Robson The Seventh Victim — ***Mark Robson* directs, *Val Lewton’s* occult shadow piece The Seventh Victim 1943 Starring *Kim Hunter, Tim Conway and Jean Brooks***

Meeting leo-Ace in the hole with leo 1951 — ***Kirk Douglas* in Ace In The Hole 1951 written and directed by *Billy Wilder***

mifune-and-yamamoto in Drunkin Angel 48 — ***Akira Kurosawa’s* film noir crime thriller Drunken Angel (1948) starring *Takashi Shimura and Toshiro Mifune***

Panic in the Streets — ***Elia Kazan’s* socio-noir Panic in The Streets 1950 starring *Jack Palance, Richard Widmark, Paul Douglas, Barbara Bel Geddes and Zero Mostel***

persona — ***Ingmar Bergman’s* Persona 1966 starring *Liv Ullmann and Bibi Andersson***

Saint Joan of the Angels 1 — **Director Jerzy Kawalerowicz’s beautifully filmed Mother Joan of The Angels 1961 starring Lucyna Winnicka.**

shanghai express — *Josef von Sternberg’s* Shanghai Express 1932 Starring *Marlene Dietrich, Clive Brook* and Anna May Wong

***Robert Wise’s* The Haunting 1963. Screenplay by *Nelson Gidding* based on the novel by *Shirley Jackson*. Starring *Julie Harris, Claire Bloom, Richard Johnson, and Russ Tamblyn***

the Unsuspected_1947 — ***Michael Curtiz’s* The Unsuspected 1947 starring *Claude Rains, Joan Caulfield and Audrey Totter***

**Luis Bunuel’s Viridiana 1961 Starring Silvia Pinal, Fernando Rey and Fransisco Rabal**

**Robert Aldrich’s cult grande dame classic starring Bette Davis and Joan Crawford-What Ever Happened To Baby Jane? 1962**

Just in time for Yule & Christmas… The Last Drive In warns: Beware of Bad Santas!

A moment from Freddie Francis’ Tales From The Crypt (1972)

Pay back is a psychotic escapee from the local asylum when Joan Collin’s whacks her husband with a fire iron to get his large life insurance policy. In the 1st segment calledÂ And All Through The House

Just one of the five stories told by the crypt keeper Ralph Richardson, to the five guests who learn of the ways in which they have met their deaths. Based on E.C. Comics, it’s Classic horror at it’s very best!!!!!

And remember…Don’t open the window, door or chimney flue to anyone in a red flannel suit and phoney white beard unless it’s your jolly uncle Stanislaw-MonsterGirl

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.Â 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 andÂ FranÃ§oise DorlÃ©ac 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 byÂ Bernardo SegÃ¡ll 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 DreadedÂ 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.Â 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

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 StrangersÂ (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 hisÂ ingÃ©nue 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:

MoliÃ¨re’s & Byron’s Don Juan Mythos

While Lord Byron’s poem satirizes the dreaming romantic anti-hero, MoliÃ¨re 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 Ã‰dith 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 doÂ Une femme fidÃ¨le 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 unlikeÂ AnaÃ¯s 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.

AnaÃ¯s 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.

[AnaÃ¯s] 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 AnaÃ¯s Guiler for New York and another said AnaÃ¯s 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.Â 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 MoliÃ¨re’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, DoÃ±a 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 1972,Â Aimee 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.

The Face of Marble (1946) An Odd John Carradine Obscurity with an “Identity Crisis”

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 passÃ©. 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 ofÂ Flowers of Evil, calledÂ “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 RODDENBERRYÂ 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 andÂ 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.Â 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).

Boris Karloff’s anthology tv series: It’s a THRILLER!

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 MoliÃ¨re & Lord Byron’s Don Juan with a smattering of Svengali, as a homicidal Pedagogue in a Nehru Jacket.”

PRETTY MAIDS ALL IN A ROWÂ 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 byÂ 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,Â 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?”-Â 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 beggingÂ ” 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 aÂ protÃ©gÃ© 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.Â 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,Â 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.

Goldie Hawn was taken from tv’s Laugh-In.

Also implicit in the film’s narrative is how Vadim extracts the satire by showcasing the insanity of putting sports before the safety of the girls and the slayings taking place at this upscale High School in suburban California. This is Vadim’s very obvious vilification of American customs and traditions. It’s a dark commentary on the priorities of American culture, the middle class, and the observances we honor while ruthlessly stabbing at the heart of humanity.

Vadim seamlessly weaves the eloquence of the classic suspense film, within the dark satire gearing up to its conclusion with a sangfroid and well-humored calm that grows darker ever so subtly to the open-ended question of male preeminence in society and the making of the mainstream suburban monster. Hudson’s comfortableness in the role lends to a realism that makes the film spare, at times sullen and capricious. I think of how the film also predates the revelations of a society that engenders a Ted Bundy or the BTK Killer.

The 70s was the time to subvert the American dream, and the ethics of the nuclear family, ripping the skin off the shiny surface and exposing the dark underbelly of society and the not-so-family values. It was time for rebellion from the comfortable Hollywood cinema. After the 60s exploded with its ‘self-hood’ backlash of Americana 50s values, which gave rise to the sexual revolution, and experimentation with drug use, The 70s was ripe for its exploration into and subversion of the ‘American Family’ and ‘The Family Man’, in the case Tiger McDrew.

Hudson‘s McDrew is shown as a family man only after we see him in the midst of having carnal knowledge of an underage yet highly developed young high school girl. Unlike Bluebeard who killed his wives, McDrew strives to balance his secret life of womanizing, with his being the devoted family man. It’s only when one of his concubines reaches beyond seduction in order to grasp a commitment from him, does the feeling of being trapped and threatened, trigger his murderous nature.

In this way, he is a monster of convenience. A monster of necessity, like so many sociopaths to follow.

“The word “svengali” refers to a person who, with evil intent, manipulates another person. The Svengali may use pseudo-kindness, artfully or deceitfully, to get the other person to do what the Svengali desires.”

John Barrymore and his nose, in the 1931 film Svengali

There’s also a stripe of Svengali, (Svengali, a fictional character in George du Maurier‘s 1894 novel Trilby) to Tiger, who charms and lures these eager young maidens into his den of sensuality, lust, and eventual demise. All the time controlling and manipulating their willful burgeoning womanhood. He moves about the high school like an erudite mentor, spouting intellectual ideas, and secretly sending out pheromones to the pretty young maids.

He mentors the special boys who are meant for greatness in leadership or show athletic prowess as Tiger reigns over the students as a self-proclaimed Socratic mentor teaching them about sexual freedom, the boys to tap into their as he puts it ‘animal’ selves. The girls are merely chosen for one thing. The one thing they excel at, in his mind, is in offering up their bodies for sexual nourishment.

The film opens with the breezy song, “Chilly Winds”, a deceptively whimsical piece with an underlying darkness to it. The music was written by Lalo Shifrin, lyrics by Christian songwriter Mike Curb, and sung by the Osmond Brothers.

Yes, I admit it. I had a crush on Donny Osmond and owned every 45 records and album of theirs. Saw them in concert at Madison Square Garden too. I played Chilly Winds over and over again on my little record player. Go ahead, have a good laugh. You probably still have some old Back Street Boys laying around in the back of the closet in a dusty plastic crate from Target.

As I’ve noticed about the film, one theme that pervades Pretty Maids, is not only a condemnation and backlash of the sexual exploration of freedom and promiscuity that lingered over from the 60s and evolved into a self-absorbed, self-submerged culture whose new exploration of sex and drug indulgence bled into the 70s. It also pokes fun at the educational system.

The film opens with our young protagonist Ponce riding his scooter to high school. He is bombarded with images of nubile girls, emerging into their ripening womanhood, wearing tight-clad skirts, showing off their blossoming figures, full breasts and asses peaking out of panties that hemlines hardly obscure.

We and Ponce are inundated with images of emerging sexuality, yet he is still quite a youngish milk-fed boy, who cannot control what is happening to his body. The turbulent hardening of his penis at the mere sight of the opposite sex. He seems insignificant amongst these girls who are obviously in reality, older than high school age. He seems less apt to grab a young girl’s attention as he is clumsy, ambiguous, and lacking the necessary confidence so much so that he might just fade away in the throngs of students buzzing around him.

Vadim and Rocher’s fetishized camera close-ups and perspectives are obsessed with breasts, legs, and asses. We are being shown that these girls are ripe for the picking. Ponce, is an outsider still, on the precipice of manhood, with no sense of his own masculinity.

Interesting that the choice of name for our protagonist is Ponce based on Ponce de Leon the Spanish explorer who was associated with the legendary Fountain of Youth. Ponce Harper does exhibit a certain perpetual innocence, or youth, amidst the rest of his classmates who are far more sexually energetic.

Ponce de Leon.

Vadim’s tongue-in-cheek with the use of his character’s names is playful as it is obvious. Tiger is just that, a predator, and Sam Surcher is a seeker of the answers to the mystery of the killings. The only character asking the right questions. Even Angie Dickinson’s character Betty Smith, is the most mundane, and generic all-American woman’s name, as she is representative of the growing number of women in the 70s who began the pursuit of their own sexual gratification.

Set the scene we are now in class. The substitute teacher, generically and innocuously named Betty Smith (Angie Dickinson) sticks her ass in Ponce’s face, then turns and asks what his report is on. He tells her about John Milton. She is impressed “Ah Paradise Lost” (further allusions to innocence dying ) just to further torture him, as she walks over to the next desk she bumps her breast into his face.

Ponce has trouble with constant erections, so we can see by his face that he is struggling. He excuses himself to go the bathroom, holding his notebook over his crotch to hide his bulging erection. While sitting in the stall we see his boots resting next to his feet, the chalky white lifeless feet of a female.

He asks who’s there, and goes to investigate. The camera gives us a very depersonalized angle. This is not the intimate moment in a thriller one would expect, the shot is sterile almost austere, viewed from the ceiling showing us a girl with her dress hiked up, revealing white panties, face down, slumped over the toilet. In this way, it is almost more horrific, as it lacks a dramatic spirit. it is brutally real.

A single piece of paper is pinned to her panties..a sparse classical piano piece is setting the pace of the scene. Ponce opens the door to the adjoining stall, asks if she’s alright, and removes the note,Â as the dead body of the girl slides to the floor. There’s a look of panic on Ponce’s face as he starts to stammer. He begins to call out for the school principal Mr Proffer, Ponce runs through the halls. It is only Ponce’s panic that flags the heightened tenor of the film’s veracity and ugliness.

Ponce keeps running thru the halls screaming for Principal Proffer. We see the Guidance Counselor’s office door, the orange/pink neon TESTING light is on. ( It might as well say FUCKING) Now we’re in the room, and there is a silken naked girl on top of Tiger McDrew. They are having sex.

Ponce barges into the principal’s room, where he is sitting at his desk. Ponce starts screaming.

“In our lavatory, she’s in our lavatory” pointing in ‘that’ direction. Proffer looks only slightly moved by this outburst. In McDowall’s inimitable snobbish manner, he asks “Who?” “Jill Fairbutt, she’s up there in the boy’s lavatory” Proffer answers “That is very much against the rules!” “It’s not that sir, she… it’s nothing immoral…she’s dead.”

Now the mousy and fussy Harriet Craymire (Susan Tolsky) Proffer’s bespectacled secretary says to Ponce, “Mr. Proffer That’s exactly how it started in other schools…a moral breakdown, values completely disintegrated”

Ponce keeps calling out to her until he gets her attention,Â “Miss Craymire it’s alright she’s dead…”

The darkly funny yet ironic nuance of truth makes farcical the idea that it’s alright if she was immoral because she’s paid the price…she’s dead.

Keenan Wynn who plays the bumbling simple-minded local sheriff Chief Poldaski is on his way. The halls are buzzing with students. An entire crowd of people are now onlookers at the crime scene, as Principal Proffer looks inside the stall, down at the dead girl. Ponce is looking over the man’s shoulder. He says to Proffer,Â “This is my first murder, but should everyone be crowding in here?”

Proffer emits a response. At first, you would think is one of concern but he follows up his confusion with one of the ironic gists of the filmÂ “I don’t understand this, we’ve always kept our academic averages so high.”

There’s a quick cutaway to the heavy breathing of Tiger still making it with a young girl. Back to the crowded hallway. and the appearance of Chief Poldaski on the scene. In a very telling scene, Poldaski grabs the first black male student he sees, and says, ” Just a minute you, not so fast!” The film has injected the idea of racial profiling and the law assuming that the disturbance must be related to a black man. Another student has to redirect him to the bathroom.

Again we see Principal Proffer, who looks upset yet void of compassion, more disturbed by the nuisance of it all. He utters the words that reverberate thru the film.

“Uh…she was such a terrific little cheerleader.”

Proffer moves as if to get sick in the sink. Ponce tells him please if there’s any evidence it’s being trampled by all the people in the room. The Chief comes in growling like a grizzly bear, ordering everyone to get back, as he approaches the stall. He pushes the door to the stall in such a clumsy bull in a china shop fashion that he lets it hit him in the face.

Proffer with the aide of Ponce tells Chief Poldaski “Don’t you think there’s enough evidence trampling going on here” He picks up the cue and makes it his own idea. “Alright everybody stop tramplin’ on the evidence and that means everybody… so shut up!” The man is an idiot. Proffer closes his eyes as if pained.

Ponce begins to give the Chief an account of how he discovered the body. Poldaski walks over ignoring what he is trying to tell him and says “Aren’t you the football water boy? He tells him he’s the student manager. Proffer corrects Poldaski and tells him the assistant carries the water. Poldaski writes this down. The entire scene is a farce of mistakes, and carelessness amidst the seriousness of the situation. There’s a dead girl in the stall with a note pinned to her ass.

The idea of American Sports, in this case, Football, is invoked and all the concern goes out the window. We see that Vadim is telling us what the priorities are here. A school that only cares about its appearance as upholding moral values, reverence for athleticism, and the outward look of propriety.

Ponce continues to try and give information and is interrupted once again by the idiot Poldaski who asks how he thinks the team will do against Valley High. The Chief and Proffer talk about football while Ponce keeps pushing his voice thru the madness to tell his version of the events that led him to find the dead girl.

Cut to:

The naked Tiger McDrew is framed from the knees down, while we see the languid nude girl lounging on the couch. The state police arrive. Tiger looks out the window through the blinds and remarks that he wonders what’s happened.

Telly Savalas as Detective Sam Surcher is cool, and as well-oiled as his pre-Kojak enters the bathroom. We get a ceiling view of the room as if looking down at a cubicle filled with mice. Again a very antiseptic point of view of the situation. Surcher asks to get a test for the presence of molestation and sperm sent to the lab. He is very serious, in the midst of the rest of the people who are trampling the scene with their passive ineptitude.

Surcher tells Ponce to go to Proffer’s office to be more comfortable when giving his account, but Chief Poldaski tells him he doesn’t need Ponce’s story he’s got it right there, and the note that was “pinned to her butt.” Surcher looks quietly amazed (with that sexy squint Savalas has) at the utter stupidity of this bungling law officer,Â who now pulls the note out from his back pocket. Unfolding it a little, rubbing his fingers all over it to clean it off from his pocket lint.

A SET OF MAZE-LIKE SHAPES FOR LAB RATS.

Handing it over to Surcher. who rubs his eyes and asks ” Let me understand this” He grabs a latex glove to handle the mangled note. ” You found this on the girl’s body” now laughing at that classic sardonic cackle of his,Â “and you removed it” More jeering now ” and then you folded it?” grinning widely “Carefully.”His voice trailing off into a caustic vapor.

Poldaski answers, “Otherwise you might have lost a very valuable piece of evidence…you know I’ve some very good ideas about this killing.” Surcher is mesmerized by this man’s ineptitude. He responds, “And I’m gonna need all the help I can get from you Chief” He chuckles to himself. “Starting right now.”

Quick cut to the little silver whistle being blown by the Chief as he is now assigned traffic detail.

Tiger McGrew is wrapping up his sexual encounter with the young girl when he gets the phone call from the principal’s office to come down. He acts surprised. Walking thru the halls the kids are asking him if he’s heard what’s happened. They are flocking to him like he is a patron saint. He heads into Proffer’s office and again we hear him on the phone saying, “She was a fine girl and a really terrific little cheerleader” Ponce is frustrated by all the inane, insensitive chatter about sports and the significance of cheerleading.

Now in Principal Proffer’s office.

Tiger: “Yes we’ve had quite a run of exceptional young men thru here…and women (with a slight hesitation) Jill was one of the finest.”

Proffer: “She was such a terrific” Ponce interrupts, ” little cheerleader…dammit Mr. Proffer don’t you think she’d want to be remembered for something besides leading a bunch of stupid yells” Proffer looks surprised.
Ponce is twisted into a pretzel of frustration.

Surcher sees that Ponce is agitated and switches to asking about getting the time sequences straight.
“When you looked into the booth you recognized her…you turned and then you ran for help?”
Ponce: “Well actually I didn’t recognize her at first….( he shifts in his chair uncomfortably) we’ll I was facing her from sort of an unusual angle….and I didn’t recognize her, until after she toppled over.”
Surcher: ” Well how’d she topple over son?”
Ponce hesitates, scratching his chin, his body language gives away his skittishness. “I think I leaned on her.”

The camera pans to Proffer’s bewildered-struck expression.

Surcher, his sunglasses poised atop his tan bald head, “You leaned on her…how?” he says with a curious and sarcastic air to the question.

Ponce rubs his legs with both hands. “When I bent over to read the note.”

Surcher leaning on Proffer’s desk turns his body back in order to look at Tiger McDrew’s reaction, and then faces Ponce again. The camera pulls back to give us a wide-angle view of this awkward interrogation. Surcher gets up from the desk and comes to lean in closer to Ponce, cupping his hands. “What are you, what are you so nervous about?” laughing, his question breaking away from his satyr-like grin.

Now the camera frames a serious expression on Tiger’s face. His mind is waging an artful thought.

Ponce continues to answer, “Because I….keep wondering if…maybe I did it on purpose” He finally looks up into Surchers’ face, a childlike innocence washes over Ponce’s face. Like a little boy asking for his father’s approval.

Surcher calmly follows up,Â ” Did what”, but William Campbell as Grady, Surcher’s right-hand man says, “Come on kid tell us what you did to the body” he says in a low, growling unsavory way.

Ponce gets more composed, ” I leaned my hand on her bottom as I said….you think I’d do anything else to a dead girl?” he adds some forcefulness to his voice. ” I haven’t even had a live one yet” he laughs pathetically.

The scene ends and now we’re outside with Tiger and Ponce by the soda machines. Tiger asks “Love life problems huh?”Ponce tells him, “What love life,” he says acting angry and wounded by the pronouncement. “I’m 17 years old and I haven’t as much touched a girl’s breast yet.”

“Well, maybe you haven’t found the right girl,” Tiger asks if anything is bugging him. If he’s worried about acne or bad breath. Ponce begins to tell him about his trouble having constant erections. “Perhaps there is one physical thing I should have mentioned…I have kind of a problem with a…you know…erections…”

Just as he says this 2 leggy girls walk by, and Ponce moans in pain.Â “Is the problem constant Ponce or does it vary?”
“No, ah, it’s pretty constant” he crosses his legs. “Does anything seem to help?” “Yes, they don’t seem to happen as often if I take cold showers.”

Tiger looks amazed, as Ponce continues,Â “When I’m with a girl the only thing that helps is if I do multiplication problems in my head…but that kinda interferes with conversation” As Ponce is relating this to Tiger, we see Betty Smith walking slowing, a vision of pure beauty as she drifts into view.

Tanned and golden cleavage emerges out of a tight white blouse. She walks over to tell Ponce that it must have been terrible finding that poor dead girl, as she goes to shake hands with Tiger introducing herself, once again her breast pushes into Ponce’s face.

We see the wheels turning in Tiger’s head. As she walks away, we watch her long legs in her short brown suede skirt carry her out of view.

The scene breaks and now we see the pink neon TESTING sign lit up again on Tiger’s office door.
Listening to classical music on the radio, representative of an intellectual mindset, the students are sitting at various desks. One young man gets up and tells Tiger he is done, handing him his paper.

Tiger tells him very well and begins to talk to the skinny young man in glasses.

“Incidentally… I’m putting your name down for track, next semester.” “Ah come on now Tiger, that sports scene is a drag,” he says with indignation. “I don’t know how you got hooked on it.”

Tiger answers him, “You can’t spend the rest of your life reading a book, Harald.” The boy answers, “Ah geez.”

Tiger pats him on the shoulder “ The animal body needs animal exercise.” Harald says disdainfully, “Right.” Tiger leads him out of his office with both his hands planted firmly on the boy’s shoulders now.

“I’m gonna teach you to feel man…to live” Harald leaves, as Tiger slaps his back heartily. Here is the indication that he is preaching to the male species to stake his claim as the sentient being, apt to conquer all. The physicality he preaches is a lesson in taking what’s rightfully his as a male animal.

McDrew is not only a misogynist but an Elitist who can afford to groom these young dissenters as they are from an entitled class.

Stripping away the intelligent shell of herself, paring it down to just a sexual object. Hair comes down and the glasses come off…she has deconstructed the intelligent girl symbolically.

He closes the door turns around and finds the other young girl left in his office is now starting to undress herself. Still wearing glasses herself, she is starting to shed her studious shell and offers herself to this man who is old enough to be her father. The scene ends with her taking the last ounce of evidence of her intellect and studiousness away. She metaphorically is taking away her power and reducing herself to an ‘object’.

Cut to:

We are at a beach house, It is here that the polarity of Tiger’s nature is revealed to be that he is a “family man”. The dichotomous role as husband/lover -mentor/murder – inspirer/ destroyer.

Pulling up in his Mercedes Benz, a dog comes running up to him, barking happily. As he says hello to it, we are clued into this Southern California, American iconoclast’s separate life as a traditional white picket fencer.

As he is about to walk into the wooden door that leads to his backyard. Lalo Shifrin’s score is as easy breezy as a shampoo commercial for that Breck girl’s fresh beauty. A gay tune with a male voice sputtering la la’s all over the screen. Reminiscent of the typical 60s & 70sÂ far out, pop culture mood. It an almost Burt Bacharach thematic style that used the ‘la la’ as a musical phrase, and lots of flutes, shakers, and strummed guitars. In a word….groovy.

Perhaps Lalo Shifrin was giving a nod to his fellow composer because of the presence of Angie Dickinson who had been married to the songwriter at the time. Remember those Martini & Rossi commercials?

Just a note: Shifrin and Bacharach were huge influences on me as a songwriter.

The film now introduces Tiger’s wife, as stated in a Breck shampoo commercial, she comes swaying up the sidewalk. A buxom beauty, A brunette with shoulder-length hair breeze blown and lips pursed. She looks at him as if she is a seductive stranger, and he at her as if he has never seen anyone as beautiful, emerging out of the blue. There is a moment, a flash of romantic mystery. Who is she? La la la…

They walk up to each other. As the music continues, the camera pans around. She looked at us, looking at Tiger sideways, sizing him up. we are circling the screen as she is circling. A camera technique is often seen in films of the 60s and 70s.

“Hello, live around here…can I offer you a drink?” the scene cuts quickly to a little girl who comes running over to them. We are now fully shown the other side of Tiger. The family man and the father.

The musical mood is broken as the little girl shouts Daddy Daddy. As he picks her up into his arms, they all smile, the American dream is realized. The duality is exposed. He hugs her. His wife asks about the murder. “What is school turning into?”, “You heard?” ” On the news it’s awful,” he says dryly “shocking” Then he tells her that he’s talked to the police, they never want to tell you anything, Just questions. He mumbles about it, as they walk off-screen.

End scene.

Now on the lawn of the high school, the theme music Chilly Winds is playing. Students are lounging on the grass. It is the Garden of Earthly Delights in Southern California.

The camera once again focuses on bare legs, and panties, as Ponce is lying on his stomach, most likely holding back an erection, as he watches the girls walking by. One girl bends over, revealing her ass in skimpy panties, as she fixes her shoes, she says to Ponce, “Shopping?” She’s very aware that she is selling herself, using her tightly clothed barely covered body as a visual offering.

The girls are armed with provocative clothes and suggestive demeanors, all to titillate and tease, only to damn Ponce when he is drawn in by it. This also might suggest that the narrative is blaming the girls for the men objectifying them. While the extreme misogyny on Tiger’s part is reprehensible, the idea that the female body is seen as an ‘object’ is not unfounded.

The bell rings, we hear nondistinct laughter, the students still buzzing about, and then we are in a lab room, where one of the girls is being questioned. Hilda asks Detective Surcher in a very inquisitive tone,Â ” Was she raped Captain?”Â he tells the young woman that he’ll ask the questions, as he coolly lights up a cigarette. He’s got a very smooth air about him. Always collected and purposeful.

The criticism or I should say cynicism of the whole ‘feel good’ vibe of the 60s and 70s sexual revolution is apparent in this case where the girl spouts “I love you” to the Surcher.”

“I’m surprised that embarrasses you, well isn’t sex involved in some of the crimes you investigate?”

” Yes now and then….now about those boys, Jill used to date….were any of those boys in the habit of calling her Honey?” He turns around to show her the note, he is holding in his hand. She laughsÂ “Yes, well, probably all of them.”

“See our generation is not afraid of feeling…affection….or expressing it. For example…I love you”

She looks up at him, with innocence, smiling. She is an open flower, she is also numbing in her vapidness. Captain Surcher comes around her, takes his sunglasses off, and says “And I love you.”

He takes her by the hand and leads her up out of her chair. He continues genuflecting up to the sky

“And the world must learn to love one another” He grunts a laugh, and she chuckles a vacuous laugh to meet his grunt. Clueless that he is mocking her. He points her out the door as if he is a gay choreographer, lilting his hand to show her the way out. ” I’m afraid that will be all” He calls her by her last name, but she corrects him ” Hilda” he responds to her ” Hilda” She still laughing, while acting adult, progressive in her thinking she reveals herself as a silly vacuous child in terms of Surcher’s opinion. He responds in a mocking tone as she leaves, he puts the cigarette to his lips, still grunting and mimicking her simple-minded intoxication with life.

Off-screen we hear “next” as if it is a cattle call for wanna-be starlets. As one beauty, or Pretty Maid walks out, another enters.

The camera watches her walk with precision. As if we are auditioning them. Again the camera assigns us the role of Voyeur. Every hip tilt, each swagger, her bare legs bringing her closer to us.

“Good afternoon Miss Melish” She corrects him as well. “Yvonne” both young girls are so hyper-sexual toward this man who is much older than them. Foisting their first names on him, trying to personalize their encounter. They are being conditioned early to be the object. And Tiger is not the only one objectifying these girls. These girls are offering themselves up as well. As told through Vadim’s lens. End of scene.

Now in a classroom setting with Tiger leading a discussion. A student asks “Doesn’t every survey show that the police are oriented very conservatively?” Tiger answers ” So are many Americans.”

A devious mind…

Ponce, “But if the police represent just one point of view…that could be very dangerous”

“Ponce hey come on, my dad’s dangerous, ’cause he’s conservative?” ” Your dad does have the power of repression,” He says emphatically.

Tiger asks, “Do the Police repress us? ” The class sat around in a circle, some playing chess. Tiger is clearly giving these kids the freedom to express themselves with an unconventional style of teaching.

Tiger enjoys the turmoil and conflict that he has stirred up in the class discussion, partly because he truly enjoys the critical thinking that he has engendered and also because of his egoism, it is the vast manipulation that he reinforces by planting ideas in their grasping minds.

There is also the aspect of his being a true believer in the freedom of will to do what one wants. His own philosophy that he is trying to impart to the males in particular, but the grooming of the girls to embrace their sexual freedom as well, so that they will be objects to be offered up.

The class empties out, flooding into the halls like worker ants out of the hill. In another satirical moment, Ponce has to squeeze between two girls, causing their breasts to squeegie him in the process.

It’s at this point in the film, while spying on Betty Smith in the hallway, that Tiger conspires to set Ponce on her, as to deflower him, and his awkward virginity. Using his own charms to lure her into his plan, knowing that she is obviously attracted to him, he uses this to manipulate her into sleeping with this gawky young man. When he asks her to get together in his office, she obviously gets flustered. Tiger once again, is the master manipulator.

Scene fade:

McDrew’s reel-to-reel tape recorder is on screen close up, and we hear his sage voice spouting his philosophy on childhood development. This is where I believe we get a glimpse of the genuine pathology behind some of his behavior. His tenets are legitimate to him.

“In a typical high school, it would be difficult to invent a system more destructive of a child’s natural creativity. Only in the most backward penal institutions does one discover equally oppressive rules of silence, restriction of movement, constant examination of behavior.”

We see that it’s Surcher who is listening to Tiger’s voice on the reel-to-reel machine. Studying the message, developing ideas about this man in his instinctive bald head.

“A world in which one must learn to work, eat, exercise and sometimes even defecate by the clock.”

As Surcher listens Tiger walks into his office and sees that his tapes are being listened to. His private world invaded.

Tiger mentions that Jill had a very good figure.

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At one point when the school staff headed by Principal Proffer is sitting around a table discussing whether or not to close the school, Surcher tells them all, that “the killer is part of the school, there isn’t any more doubt about that” while McDrew starts to look pensive, almost silently hostile. Proffer starts to question whether or not they shouldn’t just close the school. One of the staff members says that they won’t win against Carverton anyway. Before adamantly adding his voice, he looks suddenly over at Surcher. It’s when McDrew chimes in “We play on Friday” that Surcher looks interested in McDrew. McDrew comments as if a warrior who will not let his men be beaten,

” Once you start retreating"¦life will drag you down.” Surcher looks over at him slightly stunned.

Again, the football game is the primary consideration, over the tragic killings of the girls, and the safety of future victims. And McDrew almost exposes his more brutal antagonism toward convention, referring to being dragged down could be an allusion to drag down to hell, as the painting would suggest.

MOLIERE’S DON JUAN and the correlation and emphasis the film puts on McDrew’s fixation with the Don Juan Mythos enacted in the scene where he has the students read a telling excerpt from the story…

Set the scene:

Under a tree, with pretty maids lying around on the grass, Tiger reads from an author.

“Why would you have me tie myself down, for the first woman who comes along"¦give up the world for her and, never"¦ look at anyone else, you see"¦.what a fine thing that would be, to be tricked into fidelity "¦to bury yourself in one passion forever"¦.and to blind from youth on to all the other"¦.beauties” He looks at brenda sykes “That might catch your eye”

Surcher asks a young redhead what is he reading, she tells him it’s from ” Moliere’s Don Juan,

“Beauty delights me where ever I find it…

We hear Tiger still reciting n the background, from Moiliere’s Don Juan.

“And I easily give over to the sweet violence which directs me. Whatever happens, I can’t refuse loving. What is lovable, and as soon and as soon as a beautiful girl asks for love, If I had 10,000 hearts I’d give them all to her. The act of falling in love has an undefinable charm about it. But all the pleasure in love lies in the fact that it doesn’t"¦"¦.(There’s a pause, as he sees Surcher watching him recite from Don Juan, worried and sweaty, he says the last word, the pertinent word)…Last”

**********************************************************************************************

We are A Fetishistic Society & aÂ society filled with Voyeurs and Voyeurism.

And of course, one of the other blaring themes is the fact that American society is callous and uncaring about victimization. Everyone appears to be elated, and euphoric, while all these girls are being killed. In the midst of this horrific reality, all the players, with the exception of Ponce at times, and Savalas’ Surcher are very dour and earnest about the situation. Whilst the entire school body etc, are celebratory and disrespectful. No reverence for the dead. Murder as a spectator sport. Just like a football game with its cheerleaders.

Surcher: A moral man against the world

The scenes of football games, the locker room of athletic cupped Roman soldiers,Â the media swarming to the high school, the crowds watching the athletes, watching Surcher watching Tiger, all spectators…Us watching them watching. As I created stills from the film, I saw how Vadim, carefully shot the characters specifically and very intentionally watched each other.

The film acts as a microcosm of a ‘critical discourse event’ in which the event is the catalyst to synthesize a sensational story that becomes part of the mainstream conversation for the community, specifically focused, on the high school itself.

For instance, consider the OJ Simpson trial which created a mainstream sensation by this single act of violence. IT effected the entire cultural landscape by way of the media, creating a collective trend, focus, conversation, and collective consciousness about domestic violence and the cult of celebrity…

…forming a spectatorship. The murder of the girls has created a ‘critical discourse event. Or the ironic satire that the film is drenched in showcases that it’s less about the victims and more about the self-participation in the event that’s the stimulus. It galvanizes the school around the wrong person and focuses as a group more on their connection to football and it’s related heroes that is the contradiction and leaves the question open for debate. Are we really like that as an American society?

Ultimately Tiger McDrew remains the hero in the story. The players with the exception of Surcher, the protracted wheel of ethical conscience, and perhaps simply raw justice as a working machine all perpetuate the institution’s flaws. Nothing has changed in the deaths of these girls.

It creates, influences, and informs an entire cultural mythos. It allows Tiger’s philosophy to thrive… his killing the girls, as a magnet for the high school institution to merely continue its hegemonic roots of classism, racism, and sexism prevails, and expands outward to the local media, and the surrounding community. They all become involved in the process. Perpetuating narcissism, voyeurism, objectification, fetishism, and ego-driven mania.

A FATHER FIGURE, A HERO, A DEVIL BOUND FOR HELL AND DAMNATION

Tiger McDrew is just part of the story, it’s really about the US the spectator. Society feeds off of sensationalism. The myth of American cultural egoism and Ego centric rituals we partake in as individuals, spans out to reach the wider phenomenon of collective narcissism and voyeurism.

Vadim and cameraman Rosher use interesting frames, not unlike Neo-Noir, reveal angles with doors to the right corner of the screen, as a frame within a frame. Example: Surcher waiting in the corner of the screen behind a door frame, as a long view of McDrew comes out of his office, walking into view all framed within yet another frame of the school hallway.

There is a sense of spareness, voyeurism, and spectatorial that Vadim involves us in, perhaps this is what the tape recorder represents. Yet another way of presenting the voyeurism, as McDrew likes to revisit the wisdom that he has documented. We see the tape rolling. The young girl uses the tape to show herself off to McDrew and us. Ponce discovers the tape recording and snapshot. We hear the sexual ecstasy of the young girl through the tape recording, as it happens off-screen.

The camera, strategically placed in Tiger McDrew’s office.

our little friend the reel-to-reel tape recorder, shows up enough it should have been on salary.

As I’ve said, this is yet another aspect of the American cultural phenomenon, the collective Voyeurism. feeding on the sensational news, and also being a witness to the events as well. Feeding off the frenzy of the gory and graphic details making us participate.

There are a lot of shots of the tape recorder. What is this emphasis and does it symbolize the narcissism prevalent in the film? Does it also represent the entrapment…voyeurism, eavesdropping, and revisiting of the dictums of McDrew as he collects his ideas for his future book.

And is it a mechanism to tantalize and beckon the demise of the young girl whose unfortunate mistake it is to ‘capture’ the eventual sex act with McCrew on tape, to be played over and over? Another behavior revealed is the idea of addiction.

Tiger is such a narcissist he records himself on tape, and listens back. Furthering the release, his psycho-sexual release as he revisits his control, his god complex he wields over the young influential teenagers he mentors, tutors, and guides. He’s writing a book. He thinks of himself as a master, like De Sade who collects youth as his chattel.

By now, Ponce has given Betty a much-needed roll in the hay, after an unscrupulous Tiger has aroused her and left her ripe, in order to prime her and ignite her arousal so she will have sex with Ponce. He has also informed Miss Smith that Ponce can not get an erection. Tiger’s manipulation of Betty Smith is every bit a sexual act of power and control as if he slept with her all the way, and not just fondling and dry-humping her on the desk.

It’s the power that Tiger thrives on. By the film’s end Betty’s drive has been unleashed and she now moves on to more young men to feed her sexual appetite.

While Ponce holds up the mantle of Tiger’s womanizing he also starts to exhibit a tinge of excitement during the flurry of tv crews, he rebounds to show repulsion at the revelation that his hero and mentor is in fact a serial murderer when he discovers the snapshot and taped evidence, but by the film’s end it is too late for Ponce as he is impressed upon and transformed.

Only until Tiger’s ambiguous death, does Ponce truly emerge as a complete and total Don Juan himself as the ending scene/coda of the film illustrates or hints at.

FROM BOY NAIL BITER TO HANDS FIRMLY IN POCKETS, THE MALE STANCE.

Will he also become a killer himself? He will in fact utilize the newly found masculinity that Tiger has given him, by way of the gift of Betty Smith. While Betty has been offered up as an object, in this environment of sexual freedom, she too exploits, the youthful boyhood, that she now has been given permission and access to satisfy herself with.

Tiger has transformed this institution vicariously through his deeds. American culture and traditions go on after Tiger is ‘gone’ as Tiger is a symptom of society and not the complete and lone monster in this play.

The monster here is the American culture and exploitation of beauty, youth, and appetite for self-satisfaction, heroism, and culturally engendered role models that girls and boys, women and men uphold throughout their adult lives.

High School is the leaping off point, for the future, sexualized post-pubescent girls, women boys, and men and the expectation of masculinity. It is not only tolerated it is reinforced in American culture and the collective institutions that prevail.

Waiting for Tiger to come back to the car to have sex, a pretty maid sucks her thumb

Tiger is an extreme teacher in this structure of hegemonic masculinity and emphasized femininity whereas the girls in this story actually self-perpetuate these paradigms by their willingness to inhabit the role they have been given. Young girls striving to become women. A hypersexualized woman as well.

Ponce is finally transformed into a male animal. In Tiger’s symbolic death…Ponce thus takes up the mantle of womanizer and objectifier. Ponce’s body language goes back and forth from the timid boy who bites his nails, to an erect, standing straight up and hands in pockets, confident male.

Tiger also struggles with his own duality as he straddles his psycho-sexual philosophical beliefs and lives as the father and family man to wife and daughter. At certain times in the film, close-ups of Hudson’s pensive eyes and expression are downright chilling as we see a dark side to this American hero and quote ‘family man.’

We see throughout as Vadim frames his facial expressions in close-up, that he lives in this conflict. Sometimes cocky arrogant and entitled, too little eye pangs of guilt and self-awareness that he is committing acts of immoral behavior. As I’ve said his wife Janet too is compliant in this because on some level she knows what he is doing.

Notice how Vadim & Rosher have framed Janet McDrew in between the two men good vs evil. She gives a knowing glance to the camera and us.

Here again, the American Dream is not what it appears to be, for under the surface, the ugly truths and dark deeds that occur in the American family are manifest here with the McDrews.

And in the American town or city, where the illusion of the family, the heroism of the male, and the objectification of the female are twisted into a grotesque parody of conformist thinking. What society creates, is sexualized females through cheerleading, hyper-masculinity through our athletes being warriors, sports being conflated as patriotic, and girls divesting of themselves, and their bodies because that’s what they’re here for.

Lecturing his warriors, Tiger McDrew at half time.

McDrew’s Warriors. The Football Team.

Men who are great thinkers are here to train other men to live this model and perpetuate other great warriors to follow. To thrive off the energy, to tap into the ‘animal’ instinct. On the larger scale is the community pack mentality, the Romans cheering at the Christians being thrown to the lions in the arena, the blood lust, that these characters display at the expense of the girls who become sacrificed, as merely ‘honeys’ they are not even given names. They are depersonalized and de-emphasized as having little or no worth.

The crowds at the football games are fevered with this blood lust. The American appetite for blood, and sensationalist fodder to feast themselves on. The microphones are always being thrust into someone’s face, to turn them into a celebrity for that moment. The need for America to romanticize ‘Celebrity’

The film is a black comedy satirizing how ridiculously overzealous we become about our heroes and our rituals. Even while supposed little girls, if you consider that they are high school age, are being killed. There is no seriousness. Vadim emphasizes this, by showing the mania of the high school staff, the principal, and even Surcher’s assistant cops are cocky and morbidly unmoved by the actuality of these crimes.

The strain of humor and irony set against Savalas’ cool demeanor has a certain sophistication to it.

Ponce oscillates with this stimulation, too, but ultimately he succumbs and becomes a more unrefined version of Tiger. This garden of earthly delights has corrupted him. The serpent has infected him. Betty has tempted him. The chocolate duck filled with liquor was the apple, he sat on it, instead of eating it is the only difference between the parallel stories.

The staff of the high school, Proffer and his spinster secretary Craymire, Betty, and Ponce, all show their enthusiasm for the 2nd American past time grisly sensational crimes in the news, American sports are the primary pleasure in American society, but murders are an exciting event. American culture thrives on sensational news stories.

Instead of concern for the victims, the high school institution joins in the exploitation of the young girls. There’s no privacy, with the bodies exposed in panties baring the notes that bespeak the no-name “honey”.

It’s an expose and commentary on the American culture, of sensationalism and exploitation.

The film lenses the contradiction, and the condemnation of free society, and delves into sexual experimentation and idolization of the youthful body as God. The female body is an object of desire and seduction and degradation, a beautiful art form, a thing of grace, and retribution and transgression. A Madonna and a whore. The female body has a dual essence, which embodies a force that we revel in, and at the same time condemn it.

I also noticed Ponce’s demeanor once he’s not a virgin anymore, he becomes part of the pack mentality his innocence corrupted by the taste of sin, he has become a sexual being who is now more enthusiastic in the rituals of the American high school experience. He blends in with the reporters, and the crowds at the football games. His facial expressions have changed from dour concern to excitement as he has now been corrupted in the garden of earthly delights.

It’s been called deflowering, I like to call it, ‘the rime is off the wheat’ all thanks to Betty Smith, introducing him to as he quotes with the afterglow of great sex ” Oh Brave new world, with such people…Shakespeare The Tempest.”

Oh, Brave New World with such people…

Ponces is finally into the publicity and the notoriety that the school is getting from the murders. While Ponce once had an ethical streak, it’s only now Telly Savalas’ character as the constant moral instrument that calculates the hypocrisy, absurdity, and tragedy of the situation.

Rosher shot the film with lots of interesting angles. The bathroom scene, in the beginning, looks like a lab maze for rats, all closed in. There’s a scene where Surcher is sneaking into Tiger’s office, as the camera frames his sunglasses and bald head, at an upward angle. A lot of Odd angles for a very odd film.

Everyone in this ordinary American town is shot from odd angles.

Then when Betty sleeps with Ponce we see them looking at us, looking at them in the mirror. The gaze is turned on us. They are the objects simultaneously becoming the voyeurs now, while we are the voyeurs looking at them, we are exposed.

We’re looking at them, looking at themselves looking at us. The gaze is turned on us.

Vadim’s cameraman Chuck Rosher, also used the camera to focus a lot on body parts, ogling in particular panties and breasts. Like close-ups on Betty’s lips, the positioning of the dead girl in the boy’s bathroom was strategically posed for the viewer’s benefit as much as it was for the police. there is an emphasis on the physical form in this film. At times the close-ups are quite incisive in particular when Tiger is having one of his liaisons with a pretty maid.

At other times the camera is signaling to us with visual metaphors for sex and ejaculation as in the scene that follows the night that Miss Smith initiates Ponce into a world of orgasmic bliss, the following morning the scene cuts to sprinklers spurting water like streams of cum on the lawn, just before we see 2 victims lying outside on the football field. Again, yet another theme, the violent, often integration of sex and death.

The style of the film, I would say is Neo Ribald…like a modern-day story like D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterly’s Lover, a post-modern romantic/erotic romp of reckless abandon and the bedroom farce.

He’s cured!!! Betty had been told by Tiger that Ponce could not get an erection. She’s genuinely happy for the young man.

A film framed in a deviant world. The colors are sensual and vivid. The emphasis is on sensuality and doesn’t bother moralizing, in the face of older adult guardians breaking the rules of what is acceptable and actually sleeping with their students. These are represented as high school kids.

So does the film celebrate sex with underage children?

The physicality and sexual appetite between Betty, an older woman, who exudes erotic urges, and the virgin adolescent Ponce, crosses over so many boundaries. Yet the film treats this relationship even more casually than it does Tiger and his inappropriate behavior with the young girls.

It’s not the age of the girls that is emphasized so much as it is, McDrew’s duplicity with his married life, and the fact that he murders the girls, when they ask for a commitment.

The inappropriate sexual nature and the aspect that they are underage is not clearly drawn out from the narrative. But again, Vadim comes from a mindset that celebrates youth as beauty and exaltation.

Directed by David Hamilton. With Patti D’Arbanville Bilitis 1977 Erotic Euro softcore porn. Again one of my personal guilty pleasures. D’Arbanville before she hooked up with Don Johnson. Bilitis and the awaking of a very young girl…

It was in the opinion that Pretty Maids was nothing but female -kiddie -porn and that the close-up shots of the pubescent girls not wearing a bra were shocking. I’m of the opinion that these girls did NOT look like adolescent teens. Though I understand full well that they are being represented as such.

While it’s true that Vadim does fetishize the female anatomy, don’t many Western cultures do the same? The question is are the girls truly underage?, Do they appear underage? yes, they represent adolescent girls, but again, they are far too obviously mature for it to be considered believable. Not that I am condoning films that celebrate this reprehensible behavior, I want to be clear about that. But I think that it was the intention of Vadim and Roddenberry to suspend the reality in this case.

But understand, that while American films and filmmakers have often objectified women and yes girls, the mentality of some European films and their sensibility approaches the feminine image as art.

That it is an aesthetic object rather than merely a sex object. That the female form possesses a primal and erotic life force. There’s a difference between eroticism and pornography. Vadim is very focused on the female anatomy. Females walking away coming towards us, showing us the male gaze and the male stance, and the female gaze as well. Still, coming from an aesthetic of art objects, not just sex objects.

Vadim seems to adhere to this belief and thus he isn’t afraid to reveal the female body as naked as a statue to admire. Every female was sexualized in the film, the point was that the attitudes, the social behavior of that time period was systemic.

Are teenagers not having sex in high school now? the statistic shows that the reported incidence of sex amongst pre-pubescent children has been on the rise for years. Ads are sexual enticements. the images are everywhere. Condemning this film for being racy and inappropriate is highly hypocritical and applied against most things that kids view today, on tv in films and via video games, toys that assign gender roles,Â the clothes that are manufactured, the images that are disseminated to young girls broadly sexualize them over and over in a mechanism of mainstream adaptation.

It comes closer to being a little more provocative and pathological when Betty bathes Ponce in the tub like a mother would her little boy after he messes up his clothes accidentally sitting on the chocolate duck filled with liquor that he brings Betty. Looking for the soap, she grabs his penis, under the water and says “Oh I’ve got it” Then Ponce pulls the actual soap bar in his hand to show her he’s got the soap. It’s definitely an unorthodox slapstick moment.

Tiger has created an environment of ‘earthly delights’ as in Bosch’s painting, out of the high school campus. The campus is analogous to Bosch’s painting. The environs with nubile maidens. The painting is used subtly throughout the film, strategically placed, as a motif. The garden here is the school, its campus, and the lazing youths.

Tiger McDrew’s own personal stable of beauties from the garden of earthly pleasures.

Again, Vadim uses colors that are very Renaissance and Bosch-like. There is a juxtaposition of the youth lying, languidly around on the grass, freely, uninhibited which is similar to the feel of the naked figures in the painting.

The connotation is that this is where Michael ‘Tiger’ McDrew can pick from his own personal garden of earthly delights. The long-view camera shots appear to mimic the Bosch landscapes a little. clutters of people, on the green. bodies in a languid pose or collectively gesticulating in the daylight

I know Vadim is accused of being a womanizer, objectified, and soft porn peddler, but the film winds up being thoughtful anyway. Roddenberry shot a lot of short-skirted women as well, but Star Trek was a beloved iconic contribution to the philosophical sci-fi community that dealt with issues of race, class, and war.

McDrew is not insane in the conventional sense he is sociopathic and amoral. He knows right from wrong as he has a strong sense of self-preservation. he just has a code he lives by, by which enforces his sense of sexism and self-preservation.

Just the fact that he dumps the first 2 girls’ bodies by plumbing, speaks to the idea that they are to be discarded when done with, and that it’s their parts, their plumbing that they are only good for.

This is also Vadim telling a modern day story, about power and control, using Tiger as the hedonist emperor ruling his domain, a type of Roman leader like its most infamous Caesar, Caligula who ruled and led his men unabashedly and violently with a philosophy of self-fulfillment. Tinto Brass’ adaptation in 1979 collaborating with Bob Guccione of Penthouse filmed a rather bleak and brutal version of the Roman leader’s life.

Tiger loves to play mind games, etc, he loves manipulating Ponce, taking this raw innocent lad and creating or grooming him for manhood as he sees it. He has a collection of warriors on the football team and athletes and his concubine. The football team is lensed like Roman warriors while the women are in modern dress but clearly, the camera objectifies them as maidens up for the offering. Plenty of bare legs and breast shots. Asses laid bare in pretty panties, The boys are groomed as gladiators or philosophers, thinkers, and lovers.

For Tiger, this laid-back Caligula who balances on a skateboard for exercise, it’s about feasting on the young women’s youthful bodies, and the boy’s physical and mental aptitude and prowess.

He has a beautiful wife, he isn’t interested in Betty Smith because she is too old for his tastes. She is also an educated woman, an intellectual woman. An intelligent woman is a threat. Janet his wife, while she possesses guile, she isn’t portrayed as an educated female.

The young girls can be manipulated and won’t necessarily want to marry him. One was “ready for marriage” as McDrew relates, which strikes an odd chord in Surcher, who as I said, was very onto Tiger McDrew from the beginning.

Why doesn’t Ponce tell the police that Tiger is the murderer? McDrew tries to kill Ponce or does he?

Why then is Ponce loyal to the monster?

By the film’s end, we see him as confident in his predatory posturing, embracing every girl in school each one, Tiger once slept with. Is this a signal that Ponce will uphold the mantle of not only a womanizer, and objectifier but has Tiger unleashed an entitled manhood that will eventually also consume Ponce’s sexual desires? Will Ponce feel the need to kill them once and if they put demands on him. It’s a curious hole that Vadim leaves gapingly open at the end.