The Man with the Golden Gun (1974), Blu-Ray review

The Man with the Golden Gun was released in 1974 and it’s not one of the more admired Bond movies. Following a discussion on a recent post here (my review of A View to a Kill) I’ve decided it’s time to revisit this one. The fact that I now own the Blu-Ray release was another reason to do so.

This is the fourth and last of director Guy Hamilton’s four Bond movies, which include Goldfinger, the somewhat underrated Diamonds Are Forever and Live and Let Die.

Scaramanga (Christopher Lee) is a legendary assassin who charges a cool million dollars a hit. His trademark (apart from the fact that he’s the very best in his business) is that he always uses golden bullets. Now it appears that his next target is to be James Bond. He admires Bond and killing him will be the ultimate challenge.

Trying to avoid Scaramanga would be futile. He’s simply too good. Bond’s only hope is to find Scaramanga before Scaramanga finds him. He has almost nothing to go on. No photograph of Scaramanga exists. His present whereabouts are unknown. There is no way of knowing the identity of the client who has hired him to kill Bond.

The one hope is a belly dancer in Beirut. She was with 002 when he was killed by Scaramanga. At least it is assumed that Scaramanga was the assassin. Since the bullet was not recovered this supposition was never confirmed. Perhaps that belly dancer knows what happened to the bullet.

Bond’s search takes him to Macau and Hong Kong, then to Thailand and eventually to Scaramanga’s island. With of course plenty of action on the way - a boat chase, a car chase and a pretty decent fight scene pitting Bond against some martial arts experts who are very good, but not quite good enough.

This time Bond has two assistants, a Hong Kong police detective named Hip (Soon-Tek Oh) and a Miss Mary Goodnight, a charming young lady from the British Secret Service. Miss Goodnight manages to get herself captured but she also manages to plant a homing device that will lead Bond to her, and she manages to get hold of the device that is the key to the whole adventure so on the whole she’s not wholly incompetent.

My first impression of this movie is that it’s trying to be a bit more risqué and a little bit more harder-edged than previous Bond movies. There’s an early nude scene with Maud Adams, obscured by a shower door but she’s clearly naked. And Bond then proceeds to slap her around. Interestingly enough this is getting much closer to the Bond of Ian Fleming’s novels than you normally expect in a Bond movie. There are definite touches of sadomasochism in Fleming’s novels (which may have reflected the author’s own sexual tastes). What’s even more interesting is that Roger Moore (a much better actor than he was ever given credit for) is quite convincing as this tougher crueler Bond.

Of course there’s more than a hint of sadism in Scaramanga’s character, especially in the scene where he uses his gun in some sex play with Maud Adams.

While there are of course many comic moments (some provided by the return of Sheriff J.W. Popper from Live and Let Die) this is overall a darker Bond film, with Roger Moore mostly playing things pretty straight. And Scaramanga is not just a Bond villain, he is a brutal and ruthless killer who enjoys killing very much indeed.

One weakness is the lame solar energy plot. You want a Bond villain to be aiming at world domination, not cornering the market on better solar hot water heaters. In fact that’s the major flaw to the movie - it’s just not ambitious enough or outrageous enough or on a big enough scale for a Bond movie. The final duel between 007 and Scaramanga also seems rather abbreviated (although it is a nice echo of the pre-credits sequence).

There are some gadgets (there’s a flying car and there’s the solar energy gun) but mostly the focus is on the duel between Bond and Scaramanga and that’s going to be settled by their respective skills as killers. This is is a movie in which 007’s skills in that department are absolutely central.

Scaramanga’s island hideaway is pretty cool but it’s the only really spectacular set and it’s not on the scale of some of the more outlandish sets in previous movies in the cycle. On the other hand the tilted sets in the capsized Queen Elizabeth (where M has his Hong Kong headquarters) and Scaramanga’s funhouse are clever and imaginative.

There’s certainly no shortage of glamourous ladies in this movie. We get both Maud Adams (as Scaramanga’s girlfriend) and Britt Ekland as British agent Mary Goodnight. Miss Ekland is actually very good, she shows a flair for light comedy and it’s amusing to have a Bond girl who just never seems to actually end up in Bond’s bed. Her generally light-hearted personality contrasts well with Maud Adams’ very serious approach.

If you judge it simply as a spy thriller it’s quite decent, but The Man with the Golden Gun is a bit low-key for a Bond film. This probably explains its relatively poor box office and certainly explains why the producers decided that the next Bond film, The Spy Who Loved Me, was going to be a much bigger film. It also undoubtedly explains why Roger Moore’s performances in the next couple of films were more extravagant and light-hearted.

What is noticeable about the Roger Moore Bond films is that they’re not only variable in quality but also quite varied in tone and approach. They seem to veer between delirious comic-book extravagance and camp outrageousness on the one hand and attempts to capture the more realistic and slightly dark spy thriller feel of the novels.

Still, you can’t dislike a movie in which Britt Ekland’s bottom plays a crucial part in the plot (almost getting her killed and Bond along with her). The Man with the Golden Gun is enjoyable enough. Recommended.

Babette (Return of the Secret Society, 1968)

Babette (the actual title of the film is Return of the Secret Society) is a 1968 sexploitation feature directed by Peter Woodcock and it’s a kind of vague sequel to his Daughters of Lesbos. But Peter Woodcock is of course a painfully obvious pseudonym and no-one knows who actually directed this movie.

Babette (Linda Boyce) has thrown herself into New York’s underground sex scene, a world in which there is money be made (and Babette likes money) and thrills to be had (and Babette likes thrills). You gain entry to this world by answering contact ads in certain magazines. Pretty soon Babette is doing nude modelling for photographer Ramon, indulging in lesbian romps with one of his other models and offering herself as the entertainment for private sex parties and of course orgies.

Eventually Babette encounters the Daughters of Lesbos and some lesbian hijinks ensue. There’s also an orgy which is a kind of campy precursor to Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut.

Babette is a movie that is not all that highly regarded even by fans of the genre. It doesn’t have the outrageousness and stylistic weirdness of the best 60s sexploitation films. This is pretty much sexploitation at its most basic and straightforward. It’s about getting the actresses naked.

Having said all that it does have a few things going for it. The soundtrack is surprisingly kind of good. And while it might not have much more going for it beyond wall-to-wall nude women the nude women here are rather luscious. The biggest plus though is that it stars sexploitation legend Linda Boyce. She certainly looks very fetching without her clothes on but she also has a genuine and very definite screen presence and when given the chance (which isn’t really the case here) she could act.

A nice touch is the giant stuffed toy bunny rabbit on the bed on which the girls do their nude posing. There’s also the scene with the girl pleasuring herself whilst clutching a toy puppy dog.

This was 1968 and sexploitation movies like Babette were starting to up the ante as far as nudity goes. There is a stupendous amount of female nudity and a fair amount of it is full frontal nudity. This is however still very much a sexploitation movie and it’s still quite a long way from the full-blown softcore porn that would soon dominate the industry. In Babette couples and even threesomes do an awful lot of naked writhing about on couches and whatever it is that they’re doing they are very clearly not having sex. This is not the simulated sex of softcore. It’s more like a kind of simulated nude heavy petting. This is one of the things that makes these movies so appealing - this is a movie that tries desperately hard to achieve shocking levels of decadence but in fact it’s amusingly and even charmingly innocent.

It’s perhaps amusing that there’s only one scene that could truly be described as a simulated sex scene and the male partner is a stuffed toy donkey.

There are attempts to be shocking and perverse and mostly they come across as strange and amusing. The innocent young girl being initiated into the secret society doesn’t seem like she’s being brutalised. She’s relaxed and cheerful and obviously thinks it’s all a great lark.

Go-go dancing enhances any movie. Nude go-go dancing is even more of an enhancement. This movie not only has nude go-go dancing, it has fully frontally nude go-go dancing. Whatever its other faults might be no movie that can make that boast could ever be considered a failure.

I guess when one watches a movie like this one does have to ask oneself what exactly is it that can make a person a devoted fan of 1960s American sexploitation movies? I’m told that some fans are so dedicated they’ll even watch such a movie and then sit down and write a review. I really can’t imagine that too many people today would actually watch these movies to get their rocks off. We live in an age in which porn is not merely ubiquitous but almost inescapable. There are countless thousands of videos and millions of images available at the click of a button so if it’s naked women you‘re after you don’t really have to seek out 50-year-old black-and-white movies on DVD.

Of course this odd genre offers much more. Stylistic eccentricity in abundance. Not just cinematic weirdness, but multiple variations on cinematic weirdness. The chance to see movies made by people who either knew nothing or cared nothing about any of the established conventions of film-making. The chance to see movies made by people who often had a very distinctive vision. There’s the decadence, often combined in an unsettling way with innocence. There’s the whole retro thing. 1960s furnishings. 1960s fashions. 1960s hairdos. When the cameras venture outside, 1960s cars and 1960s streetscapes. And of course there’s the fascinatingly different erotic aesthetics of the 60s. There are more than sufficient reasons, apart from the naked chicks, to enjoy these strangely entrancing movies.

But then you must face the slightly unsettling question - would you watch these movies without the naked chicks? I think the answer has to be no. It has to be admitted that the mild titillation induced by the nudity is a part of the appeal.

Babette tries to be sexy and wicked and decadent and actually manages to be sexy and goofy. It’s very much a lesser entry in the genre but it has very attractive unclothed ladies and one of the unclothed ladies is Linda Boyce.

Something Weird have paired Babette with Monique My Love and of course a large selection of extras. The vintage bra and girdle ads are a hoot. Not sure I’d recommend buying this one unless you’re intending to amass a collection of every single one of the Something Weird-Image Entertainment special edition sexploitation DVDs (and I can think of worse ambitions to have).

Cherry 2000 (1987), Blu-Ray review

Cherry 2000 is a movie that I am, perhaps oddly, inordinately fond of. Buying the Blu-Ray release provides the perfect opportunity to revisit this very underrated little 1987 sci-fi flick.

Sam Treadwill (David Andrews) is a recycling executive in Anaheim and he’s had a hard day at work but that’s OK because Cherry (Pamela Gidley) is waiting for him at home. Cherry is not only gorgeous, she’s the sweetest girl in the world. Sam can’t believe how lucky he is to have a woman like Cherry. She is the perfect girlfriend. Tonight she’s made his favourite dinner, and the wine is ready as well. Sam and Cherry start getting romantic (as they always do). Making love on the kitchen floor seems like a really good idea - exciting but still kind of romantic (Sam and Cherry are both romantics). And it would have been a great idea, if only the dishwasher hadn’t chosen that moment to overflow. The water all over the kitchen floor doesn’t slow Sam and Cherry down (it just makes it more exciting) but then the water gets inside Cherry’s circuitry and blows her electronics completely. You see Cherry is a sex robot.

Cherry is however more than just a sex robot. She’s a Cherry 2000. You can’t get them any more. They don’t even make the parts for them now. Among connoisseurs they’re recognised as classics. The newer models just aren’t as responsive. Cherry belongs to the age when pride in workmanship was still a thing. But Cherry is now just a useless collection of electronic junk. Well, not quite. Her chip is still intact. That means her own distinctive personality (like women, every Cherry 2000 is slightly different) is still there. And her memories are still there. The memories of all the wonderful times they had together. All Sam needs to do is to find a replacement body for her.

That’s where things get tricky. Cherry 2000s are very very hard to find. There is a rumour that there’s a warehouse in Zone 7 that has some, still in mint condition. But that means travelling to the Zones. That’s something to think twice about. This is a future world that owes a good deal to Mad Max. The Zones are beyond the reach of the law. They’re seriously bad places. They’re like a nightmare cyberpunk version of the Wild West. No sane person would go there. But that’s the only place there’s a chance of finding a Cherry 2000. And Sam misses Cherry terribly. He wants her back.

To get to the Zone he will need to find a tracker. There’s one named E. Johnson in the town of Glory Hole that sounds like just the man for the job. Except it turns out that E. Johnson (Melanie Griffith) is a young woman. And she wants Sam to come along when she goes to Zone 7 (she needs someone to ride shotgun). The movie now becomes more of an 80s action movie, but a good 80s action movie with some original and clever set-pieces (the magnetic claw, the enormous drain thing).

In between the action sequences Sam gets to know Johnson. She’s seriously tough and very dangerous but also oddly feminine. Melanie Griffith does not play Johnson as a typical action heroine. We never forget that for all her weirdness Johnson is still very much a woman. And she never forgets it. In her own way she’s a romantic, but like Sam she’s never figured out how to do the emotional relationship with the opposite sex thing, although she’d clearly like to. She’s slightly bewildered by men (in this future world the men are as damaged and deranged as the women) but she really would like to find one of her own. She’s not like any girl Sam has known before. She’s strange but somehow more like a real woman than any of the women you meet in singles bars in Anaheim. And she is a real woman. There’s no need to worry about her circuitry burning out. Of course Sam is still in love with Cherry.

This is a very 80s movie, but it’s 80s in a good way. It has actual style. This vision of the future obviously owes a lot to the Mad Max movies and to the emerging cyberpunk genre but it has a flavour of its own. This is a slowly collapsing society. It’s collapsing economically and it’s collapsing socially. We get a glimpse of what dating is like in this future world, and we can easily understand why Sam is happier with Cherry. In this world a one-night stand requires complex legal negotiations that specify exactly what sex acts are and are not included in the package. We can only imagine how nightmarish an actual relationship would be, if people still had actual emotional relationships. With Cherry Sam does have an emotional relationship and it’s delightfully uncomplicated - he loves her and she loves him. He loves having sex with her and she loves having sex with him. They do sweet romantic things for each other. And they don’t need a lawyer to negotiate a contract for them when they want to make love.

It’s a vision of a future in which buying a sex robot isn’t something you do when you’re a hopeless loser (and Sam isn’t a hopeless loser). It’s something that really seems like the least worst of some very unappetising options.

One of the really appealing things about this movie is that despite the subject matter it isn’t crass or vulgar. It’s a movie about the search for love. It’s a love story. It’s a romantic triangle - a boy, a girl and a sexbot - and it’s handled with sensitivity. When we discover that Sam is having sex with a robot we might be slightly taken aback, but once we get to know him and once we come to understand why he loves Cherry we can’t help feeling that it’s romantic, in a weird sort of way. And as sex robots go Cherry is a very nice girl.

David Andrews is very good. He makes Sam slightly geeky but not too geeky and manages to avoid making him seem creepy or pathetic. Sam lives in a broken world and even if he is in love with a sex robot in a paradoxical way he’s more normal than most of the men in his world. He wants love, commitment and romance.

Melanie Griffith is one of those actresses you love or hate. I like her performance. Even that little girl voice of hers makes her an interesting action heroine. She makes Johnson eccentric and odd but still rather likeable. In her own paradoxical way she’s more normal than most of the women in this world. She seems like she wants to be fiercely independent but she also wants love, commitment and romance.

Pamela Gidney gives Cherry just that very very slight touch of disconnectedness that makes her seem like a robot that is a very realistic simulation of a woman, but just not quite right.

Some critics have fallen into the trap of seeing this as a feminist film. It’s a fine example of the way critics impose their own views on a film and ignore the film itself. This is not a gender-reversal film. While Johnson seems to be cast as the action heroine Sam is not a mere sidekick or a bumbling wimp. He’s an ex-military guy who handles himself just fine in a gun fight. He’s not a male weakling. Johnson wouldn’t be interested in him in that case. She is interested in him because she slowly learns that in his quiet unassuming way he’s reasonably masculine whilst also being caring, a combination that women have been known to fall for. And she learns that she can rely on him.

Johnson is superficially fiercely independent but in fact it’s very obvious that she’s looking for a man to love her. In this crazy future world finding a mate is extremely difficult, but she wants one. There’s a key moment, usually overlooked, when he happens to see her with her guard down and she gives him the sort of smile that lets him know she’s OK with that. Both Sam and Johnson are in the same boat - despite their surface eccentricities they’re the most normal healthy people in the movie. They both want all the things usually associated with good old-fashioned tradition marriage - love and commitment and dependability and romance. The message of the movie seems to be that these are good things and that a society that doesn’t value these things is in trouble. It’s actually a very socially conservative message.

There’s obviously plenty of satire here but Cherry 2000 doesn’t just take aim at the obvious targets such as the rampant consumerism of the 80s. It’s a movie about social collapse and about the way that the devaluing of human relationships and a society obsessed with pleasure and consumption set up a vicious feedback loop and everything falls apart.

The Signal One Region B/2 Bu-Ray looks great and there are quite a few extras including a director’s commentary track. The commentary is interesting - director Steve de Jarnatt was brought into the project very late and seems to have very little input into the film’s visual style. He was simply a hired gun working with a production team that had already been assembled. He also appears to have had no idea what Michael Almereyda’s screenplay was all about and he still doesn’t understand why the film has gained an enthusiastic cult following.

Cherry 2000 has a great deal of obvious cult appeal but it’s really an intelligent and provocative science fiction film as well as being a fine action flick. Very highly recommended.

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.

A View to a Kill (1985)

A View to a Kill is the Bond movie everybody hates. There are plenty of people who will tell you it’s the worst of all the Bond films. It does have its problems but actually it’s nowhere near as bad as its reputation would suggest.

It’s true that Roger Moore was, in his own words, about 400 years too old to be playing the part once again, for the seventh and last time. But he’s still Roger Moore. He still has the charm.

The plot is a stock standard Bond plot. MI6 have discovered that there’s this super-villain planning something really big but they’re not sure exactly what it is. Bond has to find out. To do that he has to get close to the villain by insinuating himself into the villain’s inner circle. Then Bond will conduct a low-level psychological guerrilla war against the villain, getting him angry enough to make a few mistake. Then Bond destroys him and saves the world.

In this case the super villain is (as in so many Bond movies) a crazed industrialist. Max Zorin (Christopher Walken) is obsessed with horse racing, oil wells, computer chips and world domination. He’s the result of a Nazi science experiment intended to produce geniuses. He is a genius but he’s totally unhinged and psychopathic. Bond gets close to him by posing as a possible purchaser of one of Zorin’s super horses (also the result of an experiment by a crazy Nazi scientist).

On this case, unusually, Bond is given a sidekick. The fun part is that the sidekick is played by Patrick Macnee, posing as Bond’s chauffeur/valet. Macnee was even older than Moore but they make an amusing and effective team.

The biggest problem with this movie is that at 131 minutes it’s much too long. There’s nothing particularly wrong with the first half of the movie except that there’s too much of it and it’s too slow. At about the halfway point the pacing picks up dramatically, the plot starts to become more interesting and we get some pretty decent action sequences. The fire engine chase is particularly good and the action climax with the blimp is justly famous. The taxi chase early on is also terrific.

Peter Lamont was art director or production designer on most of the Bond movies from the early 70s up to the first decade of the 21st century. He could always be relied upon and does his usual fine job here. So A View to a Kill looks good.

Christopher Walken is an interesting Bond villain. He’s definitely creepy although perhaps he needed to make Zorin a bit more larger-than-life. Tanya Roberts as the Bond girl has been much criticised. I don’t know why. She’s not much of an actress but she does what she needs to do, which mainly consists of looking terrific (which she does extremely well) and getting rescued by Bond. As far as the cast is concerned the standout is Grace Jones as May Day, Zorin’s girlfriend and chief henchwoman. She looks bizarre, crazy and scary which is obviously why she was picked for the rôle. She’s actually much scarier and more sinister than Zorin.

The pre-credits action scene with the infamous snowboarding to the sounds of a cover version of California Girls has been accused of excessive silliness. It is silly, but silliness and campiness were things that you just have to accept in Bond films of this era. What’s interesting (and very pleasing) is that once that sequence is out of the way the silliness and campiness disappear and the rest of the movie has a slightly serious if mildly tongue-in-cheek tone that is closer to classic Bond.

Mention should be made of Duran Duran’s pretty good title song which also hits the right tone for a proper Bond movie.

If you compare it to another much-disliked Bond movie, the lamentable Die Another Day, which I reviewed here recently then A View to a Kill doesn’t seem too bad. At least, unlike Die Another Day, it feels like a proper Bond movie.

With a bit of tightening up in the first half and with a bit more energy and enthusiasm from Moore and Walken this could have been a very good Bond movie.

Henry’s Night In (1969)

Henry’s Night In is a 1969 American sexploitation movie that falls into a fairly select genre - sex comedies that actually work.

Henry is an inoffensive rather nerdy sort of guy with a passion for building model ships. His marriage is not going well. His wife would prefer it if he took a bit more interest in her body and a bit less interest in his model ships. To say that she is sexually dissatisfied would be putting it mildly.

She regards Henry as a weakling. In fact she despises him. Of course this might be part of the reason for the lack of bedroom action in their marriage. Her shrewish behaviour is not exactly calculated to kindle the fires of passion in a man.

Then Henry goes to an auction and finds that he’s bought a mysterious trunk. He’s not sure exactly how he managed to buy it since he didn’t want it. The trunk contains one item, a diary. It’s the diary of an invisible man, and it contains instructions for achieving temporary invisibility. Surprisingly enough it works. All you have to do is to swallow the chemical formula and then sneeze and you become invisible. If you sneeze again you become visible again.

The erotic possibilities are obvious and they’re not lost on Henry. Maybe in ordinary life he’s no stud but that’s because he’s nervous and awkward and repressed. Possibly an invisible Henry would not have those problems. His inhibitions might disappear. And that’s exactly what happens.

Of course the first thing that occurs to Henry is that he could sneak into the house of Sandy, the attractive brunette who’s just moved into the neighbourhood. It’s just a few doors from his own house. Since his invisible the brunette has no idea there’s a man in her house and Henry gets to watch her parading about the house naked. This is something she spends a good deal of time doing. As we’ll soon find out, all the women in this neighbourhood seem to spend most of their time naked when they’re home alone. Of course an invisible man can also do more than just look. All he has to do is wait until they turn the lights out, then hop into bed with them and have sex with them. Since all the local women are having love affairs they’re not the least bit surprised by a man slipping into bed with them. They just assume it’s one of their lovers.

Pretty soon Henry has sampled the delights of most of his female neighbours.

His wife soon notices that he’s behaving strangely and disappearing at odd times. She’s determined to find out what’s going on.

There’s actually a bit more than this to the plot. There’s the question of the identity of the mysterious Jack who has been pleasuring all the women in the neighbourhood, but none of them can say what he looks like. He only makes love to them with the lights out. Is he invisible as well, or does he have some other secret?

The invisibility idea provides a neat solution for one of the problems facing sexploitation movie-makers in the mid to late 60s. Nudity was no problem, but they had to be very cautious about sex. Even mildly explicit simulated sex was a no-no. But if only the girl is visible she can be as uninhibited as she likes in simulating sex with her invisible partner and some of the girls in this movie do get very uninhibited indeed.

There’s an enormous amount of nudity, including lots of frontal female nudity (since the ladies’ sex partner is invisible there’s no need to worry about male nudity). The girls are mostly pretty attractive, and this being a 60s sexploitation movie they do look like real women rather than super-models or the products of plastic surgery.

As you may have guessed from the plot outline (invisible men ravishing unsuspecting women and the women loving every moment of it) the political incorrectness levels here are absolutely off the scale. In spite of this it’s a remarkably good-natured little flick. It should be noted that neither Henry nor Martha (his wife) has given up entirely on their marriage. Henry actually does love Martha and he would very much like to be able to satisfy her physical needs. Martha loves Henry, and if only he could perform his husbandly duties in the bedroom with a bit more energy and enthusiasm she’d be quite happy with him. She isn’t really a shrew after all, she’s just incredibly frustrated sexually and emotionally. It’s pretty upsetting for a gal if her husband doesn’t want to make love to her.

The other young ladies in the neighbourhood aren’t overly outraged about being ravished - it was all very exciting and romantic.

In tone this is really a very late nudie-cutie. It’s an excuse for copious amounts of female nudity combined with light-hearted fun. There’s zero violence, the worst thing that happens to anybody is that the girls get frightened by invisible mice. And of course they do what any woman would do in those circumstances - they immediately take all their clothes off.

Henry’s Night In was paired with The Girl from S.I.N. in a Something Weird double-header DVD. The Girl from S.I.N. is actually one of the best and most entertaining of all 60s sexploitation features and in this case the two movies make a perfect double feature, since The Girl from S.I.N. is also a fun light-hearted sex comedy dealing with invisibility. Henry’s Night In gets a pretty good transfer. The black-and-white image quality is quite acceptable. This is one of Something Weird’s best DVD releases.

Henry’s Night In is sexy and it’s amusing. It could even be described as a feelgood sexploitation movie with an offbeat love story. Highly recommended.

Everybody’s Girl (1950)

Everybody’s Girl is a 1950 burlesque movie, which means it’s an actual burlesque stage show that was filmed. In this instance it was a show at the Follies Theater at Third and Main in Los Angeles.

Burlesque movies were filmed stage shows, but usually without an audience. That’s understandable enough. Trying to record the sound live with the added complication of an audience would have been a technical headache best avoided on the very very limited budgets these films would have had. Of course the lack of an audience does mean you miss some of the atmosphere. It’s slightly disorienting watching the comedy routines with no audience response. Whether the strip-tease routines would have benefited from hearing an audience’s appreciative response is harder to say - without the audience I guess they do seem more tasteful (and they’re pretty tasteful anyway).

This one does have a subtly different feel to Midnight Frolics. The show seems to have a bit more glamour and style, the strippers are prettier and the strip-tease routines are just a tiny bit more daring.

Which raises an interesting point. It seems quite likely that the comic routines have been cleaned up a bit for the purposes of filming. It’s also possible that the strip-tease routines have been toned down a little. In the case of a burlesque movie like Midnight Frolics it seems pretty certain that the girls have toned down their acts. The acts in Everybody’s Girl are slightly more risque but possibly still not quite going as far as they might go in a normal show.

Of course one of the interesting features of burlesque is that the risque nature of the stripping could vary quite a bit from town to town. In some towns stripping down to bra and panties was about as as the girls would dare to go, but when they played in other cities they could get away with much more and in some places they might even be tempted to risk full nudity. The problem for anyone making a burlesque movie in 1950 was deciding just how much of a risk you were going to take.

I’m quite intrigued as to what kind of an audience these movies find today. I’m inclined to think that this sort of thing would appeal more to women than men. There are some very beautiful women, they have fabulous hairstyles and wear gorgeous costumes and they dance and they project glamour and sensuality rather than overt sexuality. And there’s no actual nudity. I know that there are quite a few women these days who are fascinated by the world of burlesque.

What is particularly striking when you watch these movies today is that it’s sexiness rather than sex that they’re selling. It’s flirting and teasing and it’s good-natured and playful, which is why I’d imagine that women would enjoy them more than men. Unless of course you’re the sort of man who finds watching women indulging in flirting and teasing and playful sexiness very appealing.

This is a movie that offers us a glimpse into an erotic world that seems like a foreign country, albeit an oddly appealing one.

If you have an enthusiasm for the lost art of the strip-tease there’s plenty here to enjoy.

Everybody’s Girl is one of the six (count 'em, six) feature-length burlesque movies in Something Weird's two-disc Strip Strip Hooray set. They have found a very good print. In fact it’s good enough to suggest they may have found the original negative. Obviously filming a stage show imposes severe limitations but Everybody’s Girl is photographed rather well, and obviously with more than one camera. Overall it looks very good. Recommended, if it’s a subject that interests you.