The Kyoto Connection (1973)

The Kyoto Connection (also known as Journey to Japan) is one of a couple of movies that Christina Lindberg made in Japan. The Japanese just loved her, which shows that the Japanese have good taste.

She couldn’t speak Japanese but this movie makes a virtue out of a necessity. She’s playing a Swedish girl who can’t speak Japanese and therefore doesn’t understand what is happening to her. Crucially at the beginning of the film she would never have landed herself in such a bizarre situation had she had even a basic command of Japanese. She speaks her lines in Swedish, with Japanese subtitles, and it works.

Ingrid Jacobsen (Lindberg) arrives in Japan by air. There will be a car waiting for her at the airport. The driver will recognise her by the pink rose she’s carrying. Unfortunately she gets into the wrong car by mistake. She gets into the car belonging to a geeky student (played by Ichirô Araki). I don’t think his name is mentioned so we’ll call him Araki. He daydreams about being a revolutionary and makes very ineffective bombs in his spare time. And he daydreams about women. He is a virgin and he is absolutely hopeless with women. He gets so nervous he can’t speak.

He has no idea what to do when this gorgeous Swedish chick jumps into his car. Eventually he decides to take her back to his apartment. He’s still not sure what to do but he figures that raping her would be a good start. She is a bit troublesome about this so he decides it would be a good idea to chain her up.

Since he can’t get a girlfriend in the ordinary way and he now has a stunning Swedish beauty chained up in his apartment he decides to keep her.

This is where the movie’s cleverness comes in, and where it gets disturbing in a clever way. Because she can’t talk to him she has no idea what he intends to do with her. She can’t ask him if he intends to keep her for a week, or a month, or a year. She can’t negotiate with him. She can’t even promise not to struggle if he promises not to hurt her.

She obviously knows he’s crazy but she doesn’t know what kind of craziness it is. Does he understand what he’s doing? Does he hate women? Or has he, in his own bizarre misguided abnormal way, fallen in love with her? How much danger is she in?

He keeps raping her but she doesn’t seem to enjoy it. And if he’s going to rape her anyway he’d prefer for her to enjoy it. So he buys himself a book on female sexual response and starts exploring these things women have called erogenous zones. She starts to respond. She starts to respond in a big way. Now she seems to really enjoy the sex.

They still can’t communicate so he can’t know if she really enjoys the sex or not. Maybe she likes the sex but hates him.

She escapes but she escapes into something much worse. She ends up at a club where she meets some nice young Japanese people who offer to help her. Then she gets brutally gang raped by them. Araki raped her plenty of times but he was never brutal and never really hurt her. Now she’s really mess up. She’s in a foreign country, she doesn’t speak the language, she has no money, she’s traumatised by the violent gang rape. What can she do? There is no-one to whom she can turn.

But actually there is one person to whom she can turn. Araki. In his weird twisted way he seemed to want to be kind to her.

So the movie becomes a very unconventional love story, of sorts. Ingrid has no-one else. Araki has no-one else.

This is very much a 1970s movie, willing to explore subject matter which is, in our modern repressive age, now totally of limits. It explores this subject matter with intelligence and subtlety. In a weird kind of way Araki is sympathetic. He doesn’t understand women but he is willing to try to do so. He tries to figure out what drives Ingrid emotionally. He wants to reach her. His way of going about it is clumsy and wrong but in a way it’s sincere. Ingrid doesn’t understand Araki but she finds that maybe she needs him so she’ll have to to figure out what makes him tick. He’s done terrible things to her but she starts to see that he is still a human being and is capable of suffering.

This movie has some slight thematic similarities to William Wyler’s 1965 The Collector, also about a weird young man who kidnaps a girl. The protagonist in that film is just as crazy, but also has a kind of love for his victim.

And there are other plot twists to come, as we discover why Ingrid came to Japan.

The language issue is the core of the film. He wants to tell her how he feels but can only do so in Japanese and she doesn’t understand a word. She wants to communicate her feelings to him but can only do so in Swedish and he doesn’t understand a word. It adds a real poignancy to an offbeat love story.

Christina Lindberg became a very famous nude model around the beginning of the 70s. She was Penthouse Pet of the Month in June 1970. Interestingly enough in the early 70s she was briefly the girlfriend of the King of Sweden. She broke into movies and of all the nude models who made the jump into movies she arguably had the most impressive career, making a number of movies that are extremely good and at least two that were superb (Thriller: A Cruel Picture and Sex and Fury). She wasn’t a great actress but in the right part she could be quite effective and at her best she had an extraordinary intensity.

She’s excellent in The Kyoto Connection. I don’t need to tell you that she’s also stunningly beautiful. There’s a fair bit of nudity. The sex scenes are quite tame. The rape scenes are not graphic - their shock value comes from the emotional impact they have on Ingrid rather than from being graphic.

Ichirô Araki is extremely good as well, managing to make us care about a character against our will.

Miss Lindberg has had mixed fortunes as far as home video is concerned. Most of her movies are available on DVD but they’re mostly from the early days of the format and the transfers are pretty iffy. Thriller: A Cruel Picture seems to be the only one that has had a Blu-Ray release. This is a pity because several of her movies are much better than you might expect, and more than just softcore porn. Sex and Fury and Exposed (Exponerad) are both excellent. And while Anita: Swedish Nymphet is nothing more than softcore erotica it’s very good if that’s the sort of thing you like.

Cheezy Flicks is a company that doesn’t have much of a reputation and it’s easy to see why. This is far from being an impressive transfer. It’s perfectly watchable but the image quality is of the standard that we happily accepted at the beginning of the DVD era but which most viewers will not accept today. It is at least a 16:9 enhanced transfer. For some reason Miss Lindberg’s movies are not making it to Blu-Ray so for the moment this is the best you’re going to get and it’s an interesting obscure movie and I think the DVD is worth buying anyway. The transfer might not be pristine but it’s OK.

The Kyoto Connection is odd and unconventional. There are occasional moments of offbeat humour. It’s obviously erotic. Any movie in which Cristina Lindberg gets naked this often is going to succeed as erotica but it has plenty of engaging weirdness and a love story that is strangely moving. It’s a very very good movie which really deserves a Blu-Ray release and it’s highly recommended.

Anita: Swedish Nymphet (1973)

The opening credits of Anita: Swedish Nymphet (Anita - ur en tonårsflickas dagbok) tell us that this is the true story of a nymphomaniac. This might lead you to expect that you’re about to see a typical 1970s sex comedy. But this is a Swedish erotic film. These are the people who gave the world Ingmar Bergman. There are no laughs in this movie. It takes itself very seriously, and it’s somewhat self-consciously arty.

This might sound a trifle dull, but don’t despair. This film does star Christina Lindberg, and she can make absolutely anything worth watching. It might also be worth mentioning that she’s naked for a considerable proportion of the movie.

She plays a teenager named Anita whose life is being destroyed by her compulsive need for sex. To make things more difficult for her she can only have sex with any man once, after which she will have nothing further to do with him. Since she needs to have sex several times a day she faces a major problem. Sweden does not have a large population, and she’s rapidly running out of men.

She’s also earned herself a somewhat dubious reputation in her home town. No-one at her school wants to know her. Her parents constantly compare her unfavourably to her studious good girl sister. The town’s prostitutes regard her as unfair competition. These factors, along with the man shortage, have driven her to hanging out at the local railway station where she snares men from out of town and drags them off and has her way with them.

Things are getting a little desperate when she meets a rather quiet young male college student. Erik lives in a household full of musicians but he’s a psychology student as well as being a musician. He becomes very interested in her case, genuine full-blown nymphomaniacs being fairly rare, and decides to take her on as a psychology project. He’s also rather drawn to her which is not altogether surprising since apart from being a nymphomaniac Anita is a rather sweet girl. But knowing her history he is determined not to have sex with her. That’s rather a challenge because Anita finds it very difficult to spend more than a few minutes with a man without trying to get his trousers off.

Erik soon realises that Anita’s sex obsession has two main causes. The first cause is that she regards herself as worthless because her parents neglect her emotionally and favour her sister. The second cause is that despite spending most of her waking hours engaging in sexual acts she has never had an orgasm. Diagnosing the causes of her nymphomania was easy, but now he has to find a way to overcome these twin obstacles to her happiness.

The very earnest tone of the film, especially when combined with the lurid subject matter, the huge quantities of sex and nudity, and the half-baked pop psychology could easily invite ridicule. That it doesn’t collapse into utter silliness and pomposity is due entirely to star Christina Lindberg. Ms Lindberg may not be the world’s greatest actress but she’s competent and the role is well within her acting range. She also has undoubted charisma, and she has an intensity that works well here. And most importantly she’s able to make Anita extremely likeable, and she also manages to avoid any wallowing in victimhood. In addition to which Ms Lindberg is of course a remarkably beautiful woman.

The mixture of high moral seriousness with outrageous exploitation elements makes this a rather amusing movie. Nobody could possibly take it as seriously as it takes itself but Anita herself is sympathetic enough and engaging enough to make the seriousness bearable.

It’s included in the Region 2 three-movie set Swedish Erotica from a company called Revelation. It’s fullscreen and the picture quality is deplorable but it is a Christina Lindberg movie and if you’re a fan of hers you’ll want it anyway, and the set includes another very good movie of hers called Exposed which makes it a reasonable buy.

Exposed (1971)

Exposed (Exponerad) was one of the movies that launched Christina Lindberg as a major star of exploitation and softcore erotic movies. But this was 1971, when the line between porn and art had become very blurred, and Exposed tries to be both. And it succeeds surprisingly well.

Director Gustav Wiklund was an actor who had been trying unsuccessfully for quite some time to get his first break as a film director. By 1971 he’d come to the conclusion that the only way to do this was by making a softcore sex film, such movies being a highly profitable sector of the Swedish film industry at that time. The great advantage of such movies (and of the American sexploitation movies that had boomed in the preceding decade) was that as long as you included the requisite quantities of sex and nudity you could do pretty much what you wanted to do. In that respect they resembled the Hollywood B-movies of the 40s which also offered (provided you had the talent) more artistic freedom than mainstream movies.

What Wiklund clearly wanted to make was an arty psychological mystery thriller, and that’s basically what Exposed is. And it’s a pretty good one. Lena (Christina Lindberg) is a Swedish teenager who’s become involved with a slighty unsavoury older man named Helge. Helge takes nude photos of her, which she has no objections to at the time although later he threatens to blackmail her with them. Helge’s parties are fairly wild and involve a good deal of promiscuous sex, which again Lena is quite happy about. Her boyfriend Jan is not quite so pleased.

Growing tired of the demands of both men Lea hits the road, and while hitchhiking is picked up by an uninhibited couple. She takes them to Jan’s cottage in the country, which causes her more problems when Jan turns up to find them all lying about naked.

This is one of those movies where it is clear that not everything we are seeing is happening at the time we see it, and some of the events may not have happened at all. We see events through Lena’s eyes, and she’s something of an unreliable narrator. These kinds of movies can be annoying and frustrating but this one isn’t, mainly because it’s obvious right from the start that we can’t accept everything we see at face value. Whether we’re seeing Lena’s memories or the products of her imagination is something that remains enigmatic.

What makes Exposed more interesting is that it doesn’t have clear-cut villains. Even Helge is not a mere stock villain or monster, and the exact nature of his feelings for Lena remains uncertain. Perhaps he loves her. Perhaps she loves him. There are many different kinds of love, and not all of them are necessarily healthy. The sexual games she plays with Helge belong to the same ambiguous category - she is certainly a willing partner, but that doesn’t mean these games are good for her. It also doesn’t mean they’re necessarily bad for her either. Her own sexuality is something she’s in the process of exploring and she intends to follow this path of exploration even if it leads to some dark places. How much of this exploration takes place in her own mind and how much takes place in objective reality are open questions.

The film is helped by generally strong acting performances. Heinz Hopf is excellent as Helge, slightly creepy but never going overboard. Christina Lindberg may not be the world’s greatest actress but she’s certainly competent, and she has the presence that is even more important in the world of exploitation movies. She is extremely good at projecting a mix of innocence and depravity, of vulnerability and strength. She’s also very likeable so although her behaviour isn’t always wise we never lose sympathy for her. Lindberg is a suprisingly subtle actress who never seems to be doing much acting and yet she generally manages to make us believe in the characters she plays, however unlikely they may be.
Combining art and erotica can be a difficult balancing act, but this film has enough to satisfy both grind-house and art-house fans. The former will be pleased by the amount of time Ms Lindberg spends naked while the latter should find enough psychological and existential puzzles to keep them satisfied as well. Wiklund’s direction is workmanlike but effective and the movie is never in danger of becoming boring.

The Region 2 DVD release from Revelation Films shows quite a bit of print damage and the colours are a little washed out at times. On the other hand it’s very cheap, being included in a three-movie set of Christina Lindberg’s films. Exposed is an effective blend of classy erotica and art, and it’s entertaining as well. Recommended.

Thriller: A Cruel Picture (They Call Her One Eye, 1974)

Thriller: A Cruel Picture (released in the US in a savagely cut version as They Call Her One Eye, 1974) is one of only three films made by Swedish writer-director Bo Arne Vibenius, all of which encountered serious distribution and censorship problems.

A young girl was raped as a child and the trauma has left her a mute. She now lives an idyllic existence on a country farm, or at least she did until she encountered Tony. He kidnaps her and forces her into a life of drug addiction and prostitution. But Tony makes one fatal error. He gives the girl (now named Madeleine) one day off per week. She uses her days off to train herself to be the perfect killing machine. She studies martial arts. She becomes a crack shot with a rifle or handgun, although her favoured weapon is a good old-fashioned double-barreled shotgun. She also learns advanced driving techniques from a rally driver.

She certainly intends to have her vengeance, but she has infinite patience. She has accumulated quite a hoard of money, by offering extra services to her clients. She will wait for the right moment. Although her revenge is a long time coming the movie is never dull. In fact it’s perfectly paced, with the long process by which Madeleine hones her killing skills inexorably building up the tension.

The plot is a fairly standard revenge plot, and although in 1974 female revenge movies were comparatively rare they were soon to become quite a considerable sub-genre. The plot doesn’t really matter in this type of movie, which is just as well because this one really stretches credibility to the limit, with the girl becoming a hopeless junkie within about week, and apparently unable to escape because if you go 36 hours without a hit it means instant death. What does count in this kind of film is the execution, and this one is done with considerable style.

The element that really makes this one something special though is Christina Lindberg as Madeleine. Lindberg has a rather minimalist acting style (which seems to be a common characteristic among Swedish actresses, including the truly great ones), but it works extremely well. In scenes where many actresses would be tempted to go over-the-top with emotional outbursts Lindberg takes an exceptionally subtle approach. But you can see Madeleine internalising her pain. She embraces it, because it’s her pain that makes her strong. While Lindberg is best known for her many softcore porn movies during the late 60s and early 70s she was an interesting and effective actress in the right role.

Thriller: A Cruel Picture ran into major censorship trouble almost everywhere at the time of its original release. The Synapse DVD release seems (judging by the running time) to be completely uncut, and it’s difficult to understand why it upset the censors so much. But then trying to make sense of something as absurd as censorship is the sort of thing that can send you mad. There’s a lot of nudity and some sex scenes and some sexual violence, but considering the subject matter that’s unavoidable and the sex is handled with remarkable restraint. There’s also plenty of violence, but again it’s done with restraint. By 1970s standards there’s very little gore. I can only assume it was the drug-taking scenes that aroused the wrath of the moral guardians, and considering that the movie takes such an extreme anti-drugs stance that’s just one more instance of the stupidity of censors. The movie is certainly much less harrowing than some of the other female revenge movies of the time, such as I Spit On Your Grave.

The Synapse DVD is disappointingly short on extras but it’s a nice transfer and most importantly the film is uncut. This is a classic of exploitation cinema, and a must for cult movie fans.

Sex and Fury (1974)

Norifumi Suzuki was one of the most interesting of 1970s Japanese exploitation directors, helming such pinky violence classics as Girl Boss Guerilla, School of the Holy Beast and the truly stupendously wonderful Terrifying Girls' High School: Lynch Law Classroom. Sex and Fury (Furyô anego den: Inoshika Ochô) is a little different, being a period piece set during the Meiji Restoration, although it’s still very much in the pinky violence sub-genre.

It opens in 1885 with the murder of a detective. His young daughter finds him clutching three cards, with pictures of a butterfly, a boar and a deer. These are the clues to the identity of his killers. Cut to 1905, and the daughter, Ocho Inoshika, is a successful gambler and thief, still bent on avenging her father’s murder. The incredibly byzantine plot encompasses various internal Japanese political conspiracies as well as British government plots involving the beautiful British spy Christina (played by Swedish actress Christina Lindberg). Christina is also a famous gambler, and she and Ocho face off cross the gambling table in a memorable scene. Christina, who’s rather handy with a pistol, is in love with a Japanese revolutionary. Ocho’s preferred weapon is the sword.

Th many sub-plots are tied together reasonably well, but the plotting isn’t the reason for watching this film. This is a movie to watch for some superlative and inventive visuals, including some spectacular set-pieces that demonstrate Norifumi Suzuki’s main strengths as a film-maker. The nude sword fighting scene (the sort of thing you’re only going to see in a Japanese movie), the confrontation on the train involving a gang of swithblade-wielding Japanese Catholic nuns and the staircase fight scene are especially notable. The sex scenes (of which there are many) are exceptionally well done, with flair and originality.

Sex and violence are what pinky violence films are all about, and Sex and Fury doesn’t stint in either of these areas. But in a good pinky violence movie the sex and violence is done with style, and this one really excels here. This is sex and violence done with baroque splendour, and with a superb use of colour and light. Being a pinky violence movie, be warned that there are some uncomfortable scenes of sexual violence.

Reiko Ike, one of the the three great female stars of 1970s Japanese exploitation cinema, plays Ocho, and it’s an energetic and impressive performance. Christina Lindberg is odd but strangely effective, with a definite presence.

This is trash art at its best, succeeding equally well as both trash and art. A movie that looks gorgeous and delivers non-stop entertainment. And for a low-budget movie the period detail looks very impressive as well.