The Sin Syndicate (1965)

With nudie-cuties obviously getting perilously close to being past their use-by date (nude volleyball could no longer be guaranteed to drag in the customers) American exploitation film-makers came up with a new genre, the roughie. Roughies were invariably shot in black-and-white and ranged from moderately sleazy to very sleazy indeed. They didn’t come much sleazier than Michael Findlay’s films. The Sin Syndicate, from 1965) is one of his earliest efforts.

The plot (and I’m stretching things to call it a plot) concerns four young women who tell us, in flashbacks that occupy almost the entire 70-minute running time, how they ended up as zero girls. Zero girls are hookers for the Syndicate. They provide sexual favours to anyone for whom the Syndicate thinks it’s in their interests to provide such favours. We’re told that being a zero girl is the end of the line.

There’s some vague gangster stuff with Syndicate big wheel Lansing testifying in front of a Senate committee. These scenes are entirely unnecessary and completely irrelevant. They pad out the running time but at the cost of extreme tedium since this subplot goes nowhere at all.

Dolores had been a dance in Cuba before the Revolution. The violence of the Revolution and the coming to power of Castro meant it was time to leave Cuba. Lorna (Judy Adler) and Candy (June Roberts) had been born in wartime England while Monica (Darlene Bennett) hailed from small town USA. The flashbacks include lots of stock footage of wartime bombings and other horrors. It’s possible that Findlay was suggesting that these experiences of war left the girls damaged and facilitated their slide down the slippery slope of sexual degradation. Or maybe he just liked the war footage. Or maybe he just wanted to pad the film out. Having seen the film I would hesitate to claim that I have any real idea what Findlay thought he was doing.

The women drift in erotic dancing and then prostitution the way such things usually happen - they’re tempted by the thought of easy money. Working for the Syndicate certainly means money but easy it’s not. The Syndicate’s policy with new girls is to break their spirit. They find that a few days of non-stop rape and beatings invariably achieves this objective. They then have suitably docile employees who no longer have any sexual inhibitions because they don’t care any more.

Findlay is often thought of as being one of the more overtly misogynistic sexploitation film-makers and his infamous Flesh trilogy would seem to provide ample evidence for this. Curiously The Sin Syndicate provides plenty of evidence pointing in the opposite direction. The girls have really been guilty of nothing more than naïvete. We’re clearly expected to be sympathetic towards them, and we are. The men in the film on the other hand are total sleazebag scum. I suspect that the explanation is simple. Michael Findlay didn’t hate women at all. He regarded the entire human race with equal contempt. This is a very very dark movie.

Roughies can at times be a bit confronting, and this one is particularly so. We have four young women who are harmless and even likeable. But roughies were sexploitation movies and their primary purpose was to provide sexual titillation, which was mostly provided by scenes of women being subjected to violence and degradation. In this movie a stark illustration is provided by the rape scene on the truck. The Syndicate disciplines its girls by having them repeatedly raped and beaten. Lorna gets her dose of this discipline in the back of a moving truck. We can’t help being horrified by her terror. On the other hand the scene is clearly intended to be a thrilling blend of violence and eroticism. And it has to be said that the scene is executed in an extraordinarily effective manner. So can we enjoy the scene and be horrified at the same time?

Findlay pulls some clever surprises, one of them being the shower scene. Now when one of the girls is taking a shower and one of the other girls asks if she can join her we know we’re in for the obligatory lesbian sex scene. But it doesn’t happen. What we get is two girls who are emotionally starved displaying physical affection. It’s done in a way that makes it crystal clear that there is nothing even remotely sexual going on and that there is not a trace of sexual attraction between the two women. The lesbian sex content is zero. You’d think this would be a big mistake in a sexploitation movie, but oddly enough the scene is very erotic and quite touching at the same time. It’s the fact that there’s emotional hunger combined with affectionate playfulness rather than sexual hunger on display makes us feel immense sympathy which perhaps in a strange way makes the scene more arousing. The fact that the two girls are extremely hot doesn’t hurt.

You can’t judge the acting in movies like this by conventional standards. In a Michael Findlay film you probably can’t say anything at all about the acting one way or the other although in the rape scene mentioned earlier the actress convey’s the character’s terror and desperation well enough. The actresses include June Roberts and Darlene Bennett, familiar faces to devotees of this genre.

Of course in a Findlay film the eroticism is dulled by the relentless air of hopelessness, desolation and degradation. If you do find parts of his movies erotic you always end up feeling that perhaps you shouldn’t have. There’s eroticism on offer but it sure ain’t healthy.

Findlay does manage to pull off the occasional moments of visual near-inspiration. They are of course mixed in with much more frequent moments of out-and-out cinematic chaos and/or tedium and/or incomprehensible weirdness.

But give the guy his due, whatever his faults Michael Findlay had a style. His movies are instantly recognisable. He had a vision, even if it was a vision most people would be happy not to share. And they have a weird and unsettling fascination. The intriguing thing about The Sin Syndicate is that what you actually see on the screen is mostly incredibly tame. The violence and the sex are either offscreen or they’re shown in an indirect manner or at the very least they’re shot so you see no details. In the case of Lorna’s rape, content-wise it’s a very tame scene but the mood builds to an utterly maniacal fever pitch of intensity. But it’s the responses of the women coupled with what you know they must be feeling that  will leave most viewers feeling decidedly uneasy.

Something Weird’s release includes two other films, Sin Magazine (about which I know nothing) and She Came on the Bus (which is just as sleazy and chaotic as The Sin Syndicate). This triple-feature is not for the faint-hearted.

The Sin Syndicate is one for dedicated fans of sleaze only, but they’ll find it more than interesting.