A Youth in Babylon

David F. Friedman is one of the legends of exploitation cinema. A Youth in Babylon is the first half of what was intended to be a two-volume autobiography although the second part never materialised. The book is like his movies - brash, unsubtle, shameless and joyously trashy.

Friedman started his career in movies respectably enough as a publicist for Paramount, but respectability and life as a wage slave never did appeal to him and in the mid-50s he accepted an offer to work for Kroger Babb, one of the greats of the exploitation movie business. Babb made a fortune from what was a movie version of a travelling medicine show, the centrepiece of which was a corny 15-year-old cinematic morality play called Mom and Dad which he marketed as an educational sex film, accompanied by a lecture by famed sex hygiene expert Elliot Forbes. Audiences were given the opportunity to buy paperback books explaining the mysteries and wonders of reproduction, at just a dollar each or two dollars for the set of two. Since the books cost nine cents to produce the show was a huge money-spinner. Babb had the reputation of being a showman who could sell absolutely anything, a talent that the young Friedman already possessed in abundance but which blossomed under such expert guidance.

The exploitation movie business of the 1920s through to the early 60s was essentially an offshoot of the world of circuses, sideshows and travelling carnivals, and this carney world was Friedman’s natural environment. Friedman went on to be one of the pioneers and leading figures in the sexploitation movie business of the 60s and 70s, producing and writing (and occasionally directing) a series of immensely profitable nudie-cuties and roughies. With his partner in crime Herschell Lewis he also invented the gore movie.

Friedman comes across as a loveable rogue, with no illusions about himself or his movies but with an infectious zest for life. He has some wonderful anecdotes about the fabled
Forty Thieves, the shameless hucksters who created and maintained the bizarre but fascinating exploitation movie genre. They were essentially conmen, selling movies with virtually no sexual content but convincing audiences they were about to see a veritable feast of naked flesh. They were imbued with the carney spirit. You were either “with the show” meaning you were one of those who understood the rules of the game, or you were a mark.

It’s all highly entertaining and it provides a wealth of information on this vanished cinematic world. The book covers Friedman’s career up to the mid-60s. It’s a great pity that the projected second volume has never appeared. A Youth in Babylon is highly recommended to any serious cult movie fan.

The Golden Claws of the Cat Girl (1968)

A more literal translation of La louve solitaire would be The Lone She-Wolf and this movie was released under that title also, but the copy I saw had the infinitely superior title The Golden Claws of the Cat Girl. It’s another European (in this case Franco-Italian) comic-book style crime caper movie, and while it’s not the best of its breed it’s still worth a look.

Françoise (played by Danièle Gaubert) is a cat burglar. She was a trapeze artist and tightrope walker until a plane crash killed the rest of her troupe and she had to look for a new career. It proved to be a very successful career change, until she has an unfortunate encounter with the chief of the Paris drug squad. She is now facing a long prison sentence, but he offers her a deal. If she does one job for the police, she can go free. The job is a tricky one, involving a break-in at an embassy. A member of the embassy staff is involved in an international drug ring, but the annoying problem of diplomatic immunity makes it necessary for the police to adopt unconventional means to use this courier to lead them to the Mr Big of the drug trade.

For this job Françoise is given an assistant, an expert lip-reader named Bruno. The police don’t want to cause an international incident by bugging the embassy, so they use Bruno to keep tabs on their suspect. Using his lip-reading skills and a powerful telescope he can effectively listen in on conversations in the embassy. The job doesn’t turn out quite as planned, complications and plot twists ensue, Françoise finds herself pursued by both the cops and the drug smugglers whilst also becoming romantically involved with Bruno.

There are a couple of neatly executed visual set-pieces as Françoise does her high-wire burglary thing. There’s nothing particularly wrong with the premise, in fact it’s pretty good, and the plot twists are effective enough. But somehow it doesn’t turn out quite as well as you might expect. Danièle Gaubert is reasonably good as Françoise, who is of course (as any good cat-burglar should be) both beautiful and sexy. The other members of the cast are at best adequate. The big problem seems to be the lack of any romantic chemistry between Françoise and Bruno, which makes the love story sub-plot fall rather flat which in turn gives us less reason to care about the fate of the characters.

A movie of this type is inevitably going to be compared to Mario Bava’s Danger: Diabolik!, which is easily the best movie of this type ever made. The Golden Claws of the Cat Girl just doesn’t have the extraordinary style and the wit of Bava’s film, and the two leads don’t have the charm and the chemistry that John Philip Law and Marisa Mell had. It also lacks truly memorable villains. It also doesn’t possess the energy and the manic humour and sheer craziness of Jess Franco’s Lucky, the Inscrutable . In fact humour is another key ingredient that this film desperately needs more of.

Having said all that it’s not by any means a bad movie, and it’s a painless way to kill an hour-and-a-half. It’s stylish, it has a very sexy female cat-burglar, and some fun 60s interior design and clothes. As long as you’re not expecting something in the same league as Danger: Diabolik! it’s a fairly entertaining little movie.

This is another movie that unfortunately requires a certain amount of tracking down.

Lucky, the Inscrutable (1967)

Lucky, the Inscrutable (Lucky, el intrépido) is one of Jess Franco’s earlier films, dating from 1967, and it sees him doing one of the things he’s always done best - a comic-book style movie. In this case it’s a comic-book style eurospy caper movie.

Lucky the Inscrutable is a master spy who is on the trail of an international counterfeiting gang after a beautiful woman dressed as Cleopatra dies in his arms at a costume party. She gave him the first vital clue before she died. He finds himself working for the mysterious Archangel, a kind of crime-fighting syndicate run by international financiers.

A good spy spoof movie should always have a plot that is as silly and as incomprehensible as possible, and this movie qualifies on both counts. After all the whole counterfeiting conspiracy is just what Hitchcock used to call a McGuffin, an excuse to have Lucky racing about exotic parts of Europe and getting involved with various beautiful, glamorous and mysterious women.

Lucky hooks up with an enigmatic young man who appears to be a fellow spy but whether he’s really on the same side as Lucky is something we’re not sure about. They fly into Albania in an old biplane and promptly get shot down. They are captured by the Albanian secret police, and threatened with all manner of grievous tortures unless they reveal their secrets. But the beautiful female secret police chief soon succumbs to Lucky’s charms.

Franco keeps things moving at a suitably frenetic pace. He didn’t have the budget for any spectacular stunts or action sequences but he makes up for it with pacing and general zaniness. It’s all very tongue-in-cheek of course, and there are some very good visual gags, and plenty of amusing dialogue. The market of spies, where the spies go to buy and sell secrets, is a particularly nice touch. I always like the way people keep getting shot from unexpected directions. There’s also a clever use of comic-style speech balloons.

There are lots of running gags, such as Lucky being a master of disguise even though he always looks exactly the same, and despite having a budget of virtually nothing we still get some silly spy gadgetry. There are outrageously unlikely plot twists, and there’s a diabolical criminal mastermind. The movie looks cheap, but it gets away with it by not trying to look anything else, so the cheapness becomes part of the humour.

Ray Danton as Lucky manages to avoid being annoying although the character certainly had that potential. Rosalba Neri makes a great glamorous secret police chief. Uncle Jess contributes a cameo as a mad Hungarian on a train. Since this was 1967 it’s all very innocent by Jess Franco standards, although he still manages to find room for one of his trademark sexy cabaret sequences. The scene is very tame compared to similar scenes in later movies but it’s still fun.

Franco would return to this style of comic-book movie again and again, notably in The Girl from Rio and the two Red Lips movies. They all have their charms but Lucky, the Inscrutable is probably his funniest attempt at this genre. It’s a total romp, and it’s great entertainment.

Lucky, the Inscrutable has been released under several other titles, including Agente speciale L.K., but sadly it’s not currently available on DVD.

The Agony of Love (1966)

The Agony of Love is a 1966 Harry Novak-produced sexploitation feature that tries to combine sleaze with artiness, and actually succeeds reasonably well.

Pat Barrington is Barbara Thomas, married to a successful businessman, with a beautiful house and all the material goods anyone could wish for. But her husband is just like her father. He gives her money and things, but he doesn’t give her his time or his love. She’s bored and feels worthless, and she suffers from severe existential angst. She deals with this by having a secret life as a high-class call-girl. She becomes Brandy. If men are prepared to pay for her, it means they want her, and she feels worthwhile. She only feels she’s worth anything to men in bed.

She sees a psychiatrist, but she feels (quite correctly of course) that he only pays attention to her because he pays him. But she doesn’t mind that. To her, love and attention are something you buy with money. Her dreams are of her father, and of money, and of men paying attention to her in the only way she understands, by having sex with her. When she entertains a client she tells him that since he’s paid for her, she’ll do anything he wants. Which is more or less the way she sees her marriage.

In some ways it’s a low-budget version of Luis Buñuel’s masterpiece Belle de Jour, although in fact it pre-dates Buñuel’s film. It also anticipates Alan J. Pakula’s underrated Klute in its emphasis on the psychological motivations of a prostitute. Those films of course had the advantage of great actresses in the persons of Catherine Deneuve and Jane Fonda. Pat Barrington isn’t exactly in their class! But the best sexploitation movies of the 60s, such as Joe Sarno’s films, had a way of making virtues out of their limitations. In this case Ms Barrington’s non-acting adds to the atmosphere of alienation, and the stark sets and harsh lighting have a similar effect.

That’s one of the joys of these sexploitation movies, seeing them using the kinds of techniques that were used by artistically respectable movements in film such as cinéma vérité, the Nouvelle Vague and Dogme, but they’re doing it mostly to compensate for having practically non-existent budgets! But at times it can work almost as effectively.

There’s also the joy of seeing the sleaze which had to be there to satisfy the grindhouse audiences being employed to good effect to add to the feel of alienation and ennui. In this case the nudity is fairly tame and the sex is so tame it would barely warrant a PG rating, but it has that existential sleaze vibe to it! And while this was the era of the “roughie” there’s virtually no violence at all in this one.

Writer-director William Rotsler made this movie in a kind of film noir style, even to the extent of telling the whole story in flashback. The opening sequence is superbly done, with Barbara running through the streets of night-time LA but at that stage we don’t know what she’s running from. There’s the same sense of being trapped, of being doomed without quite understanding why, that you get in the best examples of film noir. And like the classic film noir hero, she isn’t a bad person, she’s just lost her way somewhere along the line.

There are shades of the Doris Wishman technique at times, of shooting inanimate objects like telephones rather obsessively while the characters are supposed to be having sex. And there are even touches of the foot fetishism that for some reason crops up so often in these sexploitation movies. It’s also worth mentioning the soundtrack, which is rather engagingly bizarre.

I’m not suggesting this movie is in the same league as movies like Belle de Jour and Klute but its artistic aspirations are not entirely futile, and like so many exploitation movies it’s more interesting and more entertaining than most of the big-budget major-studio productions of its era. It’s also worth pointing out that at a time when (as feminist film critic Molly Haskell has pointed out) Hollywood was becoming increasingly obsessed with male-centred movies such as buddy films and cop thrillers sexploitation was one of the few areas where the focus was very much on female protagonists and female issues.

As usual Something Weird have managed to find a remarkably good print of this forgotten grindhouse classic. The disc includes another William Rotsler sexploitation movie plus several shorts, only two of which I’ve had time to watch as yet. Pat Barrington on Acid is basically just a naked girl gyrating to acid rock with typical 60s acid-trip special effects. It could have been fun but goes on too long. As for Lesbian Hooker Turns a Trick it’s pretty much what the title promises, with a woman earning her living having sex with men while fantasising about having sex with other women. They’re just amusing oddities but they make fun extras.

If you’re a fan of this genre then The Agony of Love is very much worth getting hold of.

F for Fake (1973)

Although some of his unfinished projects have subsequently been released after being completed by other hands, F for Fake was the last film by Orson Welles to be completed by the man himself. This ultra-low budget movie is a real oddity, showing that the 58-year-old Welles who made it was still as brilliant, audacious, unconventional and experimental as the 25-year-old boy genius responsible for Citizen Kane.

It also demonstrates conclusively that the popular view of his career as one long downhill slide after Citizen Kane is utter nonsense. F for Fake is a solid gold masterpiece. It’s also breath-takingly ahead of its time. It has more in common with 21st century styles of television and movie production than with the accepted practices of its own day. It’s not a conventional narrative fiction film, it’s not a straight documentary, it’s not a mockumentary, it’s not reality TV, but it’s all of these things and more. And, fittingly for someone with a lifelong passion for magic, it’s an elaborate magic trick.

The movie in fact starts with Welles (who appears in the movie as himself and as the narrator) performing a magic trick. This leads him to consider the question of trickery, of fakery, and this leads on to the main interlocking strands of the film - an examination of art and literary forgery, of art as fakery, and of his own career as a film-maker, a film-maker being perhaps the ultimate faker and the ultimate illusionist. And of course acting is all about faking. But is faking the same as lying? And is art, as Picasso said, a lie that leads us to the truth?

Welles put the film together by taking an existing TV documentary (made by François Reichenbach who was a friend of Welles and was also involved in the making of F for Fake) on the career of the most notorious art forger of modern times, Elmyr de Hory, pulling it to pieces, adding some new footage and some footage from unfinished projects of his own, and then reassembling all the pieces into something quite different. This is the cinematic equivalent of collage, a concoction that jumps about all over the place in a bewildering and mesmerising fashion but somehow ends up coming together in the kind of unexpected fashion that characterises any good magic trick.

There’s no plot as such, but there are many plots, some involving Elmyr de Hory, some involving Elmyr’s biographer who turned out to be a forger himself, but of the literary variety (he produced a completely fraudulent biography of Howard Hughes). Other plots involves Hughes himself, Welles himself, Pablo Picasso and a stunning young woman named Oja Kodar who happened to be the longtime girlfriend of Welles. At the beginning we’re told that everything we are about to see in the next hour is true, which (like everything else about the film) is both absolutely true and an absolute lie.

Technically this movie is as great an achievement as anything in the career of this great maverick of the film-making art. It’s a movie composed entirely of editing. Very little of it was actually filmed by Welles, but it’s more of an Orson Welles film than almost anything else he ever did. This piece of filmic trickery was engineered entirely by Welles at his editing desk. There are no actors in the movie, everyone plays themselves, but everyone in the movie is acting. Even those who didn’t know they were in the movie.

This is Welles at his most playful, but that does not imply that F for Fake is a lesser Welles work. Quite the opposite. It’s also as entertaining as anything with which he was ever involved, a rollercoaster ride of fun and games. Welles is clearly enjoying himself immensely as the master magician, and the spell he weaves is irresistible. Magnificent!

When Worlds Collide (1951)

When Worlds Collide was another of producer George Pal’s 1950s science fiction epics, filmed in Technicolor and picking up a best special effects Oscar. This time it’s the end of the world.

An astronomer has discovered that a star and its orbiting planet (named Zyra) are both hurtling towards the Earth. The planet will pass by, its gravity causing mass devastation through tidal eaves and earthquakes. That’s the good news.The bad news is that its accompanying sun will splatter our world completely. Of course the politicians and the other scientists won’t listen to him until it’s too late, but luckily private enterprise comes to the rescue and gives him the cash to build a giant rocket, a kind of Noah’s Ark (the movie is awash in clumsy biblical references) that will transport forty people to the new planet.

Of course no-one knows if Zyra has a breathable atmosphere, or any atmosphere at all for that matter, but the movie does not trouble itself with such annoying details. The forty lucky people will be selected by lot, except for a chosen few who will automatically be included in the crew (the scientist himself, his daughter, her ex-boyfriend, her new boyfriend and a rich wheelchair-bound businessman who is putting up most of the money). While the spaceship is being built the scientist’s daughter tries to decide which of her two admirers she wants to marry.

The constant biblical references are heavy-handed enough, but the romantic triangle is handled in an even more ham-fisted way. The characters are cardboard and the acting is uninteresting. The addition of some very saccharine sentimentality doesn’t help.

But a George Pal film is all about the special effects, and the model effects are well done. The spaceship is goofy but fun, and the launching ramp is pretty cool. The launch sequence is particularly well done. Unfortunately there’s a matte painting used at the end that is so awful that Ed Wood would have been embarrassed to use it, which rather spoils things.

The scenes of devastation are strangely muted, and although the movie runs for a mere 83 minutes the plot takes a long time to really get going. There was intended to be a sequel, based on the sequel to the original novel (dating from the early 30s) but it never happened.

Overall it’s probably the most disappointing of Pal’s sci-fi movies. It’s not the lack of modern special effects that is the problem (personally I prefer the model effects used in this film to the overblown CGI of contemporary sci-fi movies), it’s the lacklustre script and the absence of any characters with sufficient personality to make us actually care what happens to them. To me it doesn’t quite have the necessary qualities to succeed as an exercise in camp, and as a serious science fiction movie it just falls a little flat.

It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955)

It Came from Beneath the Sea was one of the earlier films to showcase the special effects talents of Ray Harryhausen, and his stop-motion animation is the main reason for seeing this one.

The plot is your basic stock-standard 1950s giant monster plot. Lurking in the deepest depths of the oceans are gigantic octopuses (or octopi), far larger than anything known to science. Living so deep beneath the surface of the sea they do very little harm until they are disturbed by (yes you guessed it) H-bomb tests. The now radioactive giant octopus is unable to obtain its normal food supply because its usual prey now knows it’s radioactive and keeps well out of its way (as you would). So naturally the mammoth cephalopod comes to the surface looking for alternative food, and naturally that alternative food supply turns out to be people!

As you may have gathered by now this is science fiction with the emphasis on the fiction. But silly pseudoscience is one of the reasons we watch 50s giant monster movies, so that hardly counts as a fault. The octopus starts attacking and sinking shipping, ad then finally figures our that if you want lots of people to eat a city is the best place to find them. So it attacks San Francisco, causing mayhem in the streets. You may be wondering how a purely aquatic creature can cause mayhem in the streets, but it’s a really really big octopus with really long tentacles, so it can sit in the bay and reach out and swat folks in the streets.

In this movie you won’t get any of that bleeding heart “we must catch the beast alive and study it” nonsense - everyone including the scientists just wants to blow the creature to kingdom come, even though we’re actually responsible for making the poor critter radioactive in the first place. In that respect it makes an interesting contrast to the basically sympathetic treatment of the monster in Universal’s Creature from the Black Lagoon series made around the same time.

There is of course a romantic triangle sub-plot, with noble scientist Dr John Carter (Donald Curtis) and square-jawed heroic submarine captain Pete Mathews both competing for the affections of the obligatory beautiful female scientist. Carter treats her with respect and as an equal while Mathews is a moronic sexist pig, so naturally she falls hopelessly in love with the latter. Outrageous sexism is practically compulsory in US sci-fi movies of the 50s, but at least in this one we do get some criticism of such attitudes. The beautiful female scientist must naturally fall in love with one of these men, to prove that even though she’s a scientist she’s still 100 percent woman. Faith Domergue is quite good as the beautiful female scientist, although the rest of the acting is a little on the wooden side.

In some ways this is one of the more disappointing Harryhausen efforts because he only gets to create one monster. Usually in the movies he worked on half the fun is wondering what he’s going to come up with next, but in this one once you’ve seen the monster you’ve seen the monster. But it’s a pretty good monster, even if the integration of the stop-motion sequences into the live-action sequences isn’t as seamless as in his later work.

And this is classic 50s giant monster stuff, with panic in the streets, lots of explosions, a nuclear submarine battling a gigantic octopus, plenty of people getting squashed by the monster and even the Golden Gate Bridge being demolished by the enraged sea monster. It’s all good clean fun, and if you’re a fan of this sub-genre you can’t possibly not enjoy this film. Although be warned - even by the standards of the era the sexism is especially outrageous in this film.

The Region 4 DVD includes the same extras as all the other Harryhausen movies released here, but it’s a fairly nice print.