Millard (who made movies using countless pseudonyms) was the son of S.S. (‘Steamship’) Millard, one of the legendary Forty Thieves of the exploitation movie business during its heyday from the late 1920s to the 1960s. Nick Millard started making exploitation movies in the early 60s. He made lots of sexploitation features in the 60s and 70s and low-budget action movies in the 80s.
Oddo starts with an American serviceman returning home from a tour of duty in Vietnam. In Vietnam he was a hero. He felt like he fitted in. He got to kill, which he enjoyed, and he got to feel good about killing which was even better. Now he’s back home in San Francisco and frankly he’d prefer to be back in the jungles of Vietnam. He’s been away for two years and he doesn’t understand the world any more. There seem to be lowlifes everywhere. And hippies.
He heads back to his father’s house but there’s not going to be any warm welcome for returning hero. His father is a drunk. And hates his stepmother Jan. Jan is a bad woman.
He is more alienated and lost than ever before and he reacts the way he’s learned to react. With anger. And with violence. He’s like a prototype for Travis Bickle.
He hates the decadence of contemporary America. Particularly the women. Such as his stepmother Jan. And Jan apparently likes girls.
This is one more thing to make him angry. Tramps like Jan need to be punished.
This is the point at which he topples over the edge into madness. We assume that his experiences in Vietnam put him right on that edge although it’s likely that a lousy childhood didn’t help and the lack of any emotional support when he got back home certainly made him a candidate for big problems. When the violence comes we don’t actually see anything but it’s still a shock. This is very dark stuff for a sexploitation movie, in its own way even darker than the films that Michael and Roberta Findlay were making at the time.
The San Francisco setting is at least a little unusual for a sexploitation movie, most of which were shot in LA or New York.
This is a Nick Millard film so you’ll be wondering if there’s any shoe fetishism? The answer is yes. High heel shoes do get lovingly caressed. And of course in a Nick Millard movie you can be confident that all the women will be wearing stockings and suspenders and heels. Or boots. It’s not just that there is sexual fetishism. Everything about the way Millard approaches sex is fetishistic. Even Jan’s beret seems like a kinky touch.
And Millard introduces us to a whole new sexual kink of which I had never heard - topless shoe shines. Yes, you get your shoes shined by a topless girl. What do you mean it doesn’t sound very sexy to you? She’s topless, man. Boobies.
The scene in which the hero (or anti-hero) hires a prostitute and the girl then makes frantic attempts to tease him into arousal is oddly touching. This girl is as desperate and lost as he is. We don’t know why. Maybe Millard is suggesting that the protagonist is right in some ways - this is a society in which we’re all lost.
Nick MiIlard was not a man to worry about fancy refinements like synchronised sound. That stuff costs money! Millard, like his Dad, knew how to keep costs to an absolute minimum. He relies on voiceover narration, although perhaps surprisingly it’s a third person narration.
This movie illustrates a lot of the reasons the movies of the past were better than the movies of the modern era. In 1967, even in a sexploitation movie, there was only so much you could get away with. There was also only so much violence you could get away with. There’s certainly violence in this movie but it’s done in a stylised indirect way, which for my money is always more effective. And in 1967 you were not going to get away with explicit sex, not even explicit simulated sex. So the sex is treated in the same stylised, indirect way which makes it more fetishistic, and also more sexy in some ways than explicit sex. And certainly much more bizarre and disturbing.
It would be fascinating to know if Martin Scorcese ever caught this movie in a 42nd Street grindhouse. Of course I have no idea if Mr Scorcese even frequented such places. There are however definite parallels with Taxi Driver which Scorcese made about seven years later. Not just in theme but in mood. But not in style. If you can imagine Jean-Luc Godard doing an early version of Taxi Driver but with lots of naked chicks you’ll have a vague idea what to expect from Oddo. Not that I’m suggesting that Millard was San Francisco’s answer to either Scorcese or Godard, but he is aiming for something arty and if he doesn’t always succeed at least he gives it the old college try.
Retro Seduction Cinema has released three late 60s Nick Millard films on DVD in their San Francisco Sex Collection. They’re all on one disc which is no problem - these are very short movies. Oddo looks extremely good, good enough to suggest that they may have found a negative rather than just a print.
Even sexploitation fans are not united in praising Nick Millard’s work but I think he was an interesting film-maker. If you want really grungy and incredibly bleak sexploitation you can’t do much better than Millard’s Roxanna or his Lustful Addiction.
Oddo is a strange little film. This is existential angst-driven erotica. Lots of people will hate it. I rather liked it. Highly recommended.
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