’Tis Pity She's a Whore (1971)

I’m moving off-topic a bit here, but actually the more I think about it, the more convinced I am that Giuseppe Patroni Griffi’s ’Tis Pity She's a Whore (Addio, fratello crudele) is very much on-topic even if it is an adaptation of a 17th century play.

It is after all based on a Jacobean tragedy by John Ford (OK if you want to be pedantic it was probably written a year or so after the death of James I in 1625 so technically it’s not Jacobean but in style and content it’s pure Jacobean tragedy). The Jacobean revenge tragedies were among the most significant ancestors of gothic fiction, and gothic fiction is where horror started, so you could in fact argue that it’s a horror movie. And it certainly has more blood and gore than most horror movies!

Giovanni has been away from home for many years studying at the university in Bologna. He’s been away so long that when he returns home he and his sister Annabella don’t even recognise one another. Their re-union proves to be exceptionally warm and tender. Perhaps a little too warm and tender, since they soon realise they are desperately in love. Giovanni’s friend is a monk, and he advises Giovanni to adopt prayer and self-mortification. It is to no avail, and before long brother and sister are lovers.

When Annabella finds herself pregnant she is offered mercy by the Church. Rather than being executed for her heinous sin she must give up Giovanni, and she must marry a man chosen for her by her family, to save her child from the disgrace of illegitimacy. She marries Soranzo, who happens to be an old friend of her brother’s. There’s a nice twist here, since Soranzo turns out to be an attentive and affectionate husband, and he’s very much in love with her. And he’s very handsome. Annabella finds herself reconciled to the marriage. Everything is going swimmingly until Soranzo finds out about her little secret. To say he does not take it well would be an understatement of epic proportions. He vows to take a bloody revenge on every single person involved in bringing shame to his family name. The stage is set for the classic Jacobean revenge tragedy bloodbath ending.

Some elements in this story are going to be difficult for a modern audience to relate to. Soranzo takes his obsession with family honour, and with vengeance as a sacred duty, to an extreme in what seems like the most colossal over-reaction imaginable. The incest theme still resonates though, this being a taboo that remains as strong as ever, and the tragic nature of the love between Giovanni and Annabella retain its impact. They are truly made for one another, their love is strong and devoted, they would have made the perfect couple, but of course no-one is going to allow them to live in peace as lovers.

Charlotte Rampling is extremely good as Annabella, but she’s overshadowed a little by Oliver Tobias’s powerful performance as Giovanni. He doesn’t go over-the-top until the very end, but when he does go he really goes. Fabio Testi as Soranzo is almost as impressive. In fact all the actors are exceptional.

Having originated as a play the movie does run the danger of having a stagey feel. And it certainly does have a very artificial feel, which is probably necessary. A naturalistic approach would have made the events and the responses of the characters seem too implausible, but by embracing artificiality this conflict is avoided. Despite its artificial quality it doesn’t actually feel stage-bound - director Giuseppe Patroni Griffi has gone to great lengths to keep the movie visually interesting and dynamic. He’s aided by some superb settings and some imaginative production design. There are lots of strange wooden structures, wooden statues that look rather Cubist but somehow don’t seem out of place, and odd slightly ominous wooden structures that enclose the characters at vital stages of the action.

One intriguing feature is the way Giovanni is at times filmed to resemble the hero in a spaghetti western, and this is strengthened by the fact that the score is by Ennio Morricone who created so many memorable soundtracks for spaghetti westerns. I suspect this was deliberately done, since revenge is such a dominant theme in the western and especially in the Italian variety. It provides a way for a modern audience to feel a stronger connection with the themes of the story.

The ending is spectacularly bloody, but given the source material that’s really unavoidable. It does provide the movie with some very obvious links to exploitation movies, and there’s some sex and nudity as well, but again it’s very much in keeping with Jacobean drama which was the 17th century equivalent of the slasher film! It’s fast-paced and never in any danger of becoming boring and horror fans will find much to enjoy. It’s a heady mix of art and gore, and it’s worth seeking out if you’re in the mood for something a little different.

The Touch of Her Flesh (1967)

The Touch of Her Flesh has the reputation of being one of the more sleazy sexlpoitation films of the 60s, so of course I just had to see it.

The three movies in the Her Flesh trilogy were made by the legendary husband-and-wife team of Roberta and Michael Findlay (they co-wrote the scripts, Roberta did the cinematography, Michael directed and edited and acted as well), this one, the first of the series, appearing in 1967. All three are included on the one DVD from Something Weird.

Michael Findlay plays a slightly nerdy weapons collector who finds out his wife Claudia is having an affair when he returns home early from a business trip to find her in bed with another man. He runs into the street, distraught, and is knocked down by a car. The accident leaves him blind in one eye and half-crippled. He vows to have his revenge, not just on Claudia but on all women, especially those who display themselves naked and sell themselves, tempting men with their bodies. He’s not a happy camper, and he’s not really quite all there any more. He lives alone in a grungy apartment, and he broods a lot.

He starts his campaign of revenge in the burlesque theatres of New York, but he’s also tracking down Claudia. She’s been working as an artist’s model for a woman painter, and he intends to find out where her studio is. There’s the expected showdown in the studio, and that’s pretty much all there is as far as a plot is concerned.

These films have a reputation for extreme misogyny, but while there’s some truth in that contention it isn’t really any worse in that respect than any one of a dozen big-budget Hollywood crime thrillers. It’s just a bit more honest. The later movies in the trilogy are however reputed to be considerably more violent.

The most noticeable thing about the movie is that it’s very competently made. Roberta Findlay’s black-and-white cinematography is thoroughly professional, and there are some reasonably nifty and ambitious sequences, especially late in the film. The acting on the other hand is bad even by the standards of sexploitation movies, although Michael Findlay’s performance does manage to be fairly unsettling. There are some nicely atmospheric scenes in the burlesque clubs, and as always with these types of movies some fascinating glimpses of 1960s New York street life.

The sex and nudity are quite tame by later standards, and there’s very little graphic violence. It’s the subject matter that is disturbing (which is the case with most of the sexploitation “roughies” of this period).

The obsessiveness of Michael Findlay’s performance and the stylishness of the production make this one worth watching, and Something Weird have done their usual superb job with the DVD transfer.

And there’s go-go dancing, always a plus in my book.

Sisters of Death (1977)

Although the release date is usually given as 1977 Sisters of Death was apparently made several years earlier. It’s an interesting little murder mystery thriller with a dash of horror, not a great movie but an underrated and reasonably entertaining one.

An initiation at a sorority house involving a game of Russian roulette with an antique pistol goes horribly wrong, and a girl has her brains blown out. That’s before the opening credits. Then we move forward seven years in time. Five of the sorority members receive anonymous invitations to a reunion. They’re picked up by two guys in a station wagon and driven miles out into the desert to a mysterious house in an incredibly remote location. And left there. OK, if it was me, I wouldn’t even have have gotten into the car, but this is a horror movie and if we’re going to have a movie it’s necessary for the cast to do the obligatory Really Dumb Things.

At the house they find champagne and food laid out, the house is luxurious, there’s a pool and they each have a nifty separate bedroom laid on for them. But there’s no sign of their hostess (at this stage they’re assuming that another member of the sisterhood must have arranged all this). Their two drivers decide that it would be a pity to leave five beautiful girls all alone without any male company, so they (rather unwisely) decide to stay and party rather than just leaving the girls. Then they discover that they can’t leave. No-one can leave. They’re trapped behind an electrified fence with a lunatic, and the events of seven years previously have come back to haunt these young women. Elizabeth, the girl who was killed at the initiation, is going to be avenged. The inquest had come down with a finding of accidental death, the assumption being that it was all a horrible mix-up. But what really happened?

As you might expect, our seven hapless party-goers are going to be picked off one by one while the aforementioned lunatic tries to figure out which one of them was responsible for Elizabeth’s death.

There are some nifty plot twists, and there are some classic horror clichés that are used rather wittily (such as the dreaded gigantic tarantula used as a weapon of mayhem and the equally dreaded rattlesnake guarding the cellar). The tension is built up and maintained fairly effectively although it does drag a little at times. The ending has a wonderfully over-the-top use of a gatling gun!

The main drawcard for this movie at the time was probably the presence of 1970 Playboy Playmate of the Year Claudia Jennings in the lead role. That might lead you to anticipate lots of nudity but in fact there’s none at all. Jennings (who died tragically in 1979 at the age of 29) is actually reasonably good. The acting in general is fun in a cult movie kind of way - lots of scenery chewing! There’s virtually no gore, despite the presence of the gatling gun, but the initial shooting is still reasonably shocking, probably more so because it is a horror movie so you’re expecting it to happen.

The public domain print I saw was so awful that it’s impossible to make any judgments at all about the cinematography. I believe it’s available on DVD in a somewhat better although still not fantastic print.

If you don’t go into it with excessively high expectations this is an entertaining enough movie. Worth a look.

Juve contre Fantômas (1913)

Juve Against Fantômas (Juve contre Fantômas) is the second installment of Louis Feuillade's 1913 Fantômas serial, which had an immense influence on the crime, adventure and horror movie genres. And despite being almost a century old it’s still great fun.

This second installment is itself divided into four parts with a total running time of around an hour. The diabolical criminal mastermind Fantômas is up to more wickedness, and is once again being pursued by his arch-nemesis, Inspector Juve of the Sûreté. Plot coherence has been more or less thrown out the window this time around, but it doesn’t really matter. As long as there are dastardly deeds afoot and we know that Fantômas is behind them and as long as the action keeps coming we don’t need to worry about details. After all, Fantômas is a master of disguise so who can tell exactly which crimes he might be responsible for?

There are links to the first installment, with Lady Beltham (the mistress of Fantômas) making another appearance. The master criminal is using her villa as his secret hide-out. And Juve is once again assisted by the energetic journalist Jérôme Fandor. Fantômas is also plotting to eliminate the witnesses to his earlier crimes, by destroying an entire train carriage by uncoupling it and leaving it in the path of a speeding express train.

It would be another decade or so before film-makers learnt the art of using a moving camera but Feuillade is clearly already aware of the limitations of the static camera. And he has found a number of ways to overcome this limitation. He uses depth of field, with action taking place in the background as well as the foreground, to maintain visual interest. And he makes sure there is always movement within the frame. These techniques are enough to give his movie a sense of dynamism so that you really don’t notice the stationary camera. The camera may be static, but his compositions never are. The use of different coloured tints also helps.

He also makes considerable (and effective) use of location shooting. Apart from adding a sense of excitement to the film this also gives us some wonderful glimpses of Paris street life before the Great War. In several scenes you can see passers-by suddenly noticing the film crew!

And although this is 1913 there are special effects, with some quite impressive model shots.

The acting is fairly naturalistic, which works well since the subject matter is so melodramatic that you don’t want the actors getting too histrionic. The costumes are great and you have to keep reminding yourself that these weren’t really costumes as such, it really was 1913 and the actors were simply wearing contemporary dress!

There are some very fine visual set-pieces - the train hijacking and especially the shoot-out on the beach among the wine barrels still seem imaginative after all these years. And there’s even an attempted murder by python. Fantômas makes a series of dramatic escapes, but Inspector Juve sticks to his trail with dogged determination.

It’s wonderful that these serials survive at all, but what’s even more pleasing is that they’re complete and in exceptionally good condition, and they look absolutely splendid.

Fantômas has influenced countless cinematic bad guys (and heroes as well) in the century that has passed since his first appearance on celluloid. He’s still a compelling villain, and Feuillade's serials remain fascinating and highly entertaining.

Devil's Partner (1962)

Devil's Partner is a little unusual for a 1962 American horror movie in being a supernatural horror setting in a contemporary setting. When you see a small town on dusty highway in movies of this era you’re always expecting giant bugs to appear, but this one is about black magic.

Pete Jensen is a bad-tempered and very much disliked (and very scruffy and dirty) old man living in a shack on the outskirts of a miserable little town named Furnace Flats. As the movie opens he’s performing some kind of ritual that leads to his death. Shortly thereafter his nephew Nick arrives in town. He seems a harmless enough sort of guy, although he is curiously unaffected by the stifling heat in this desert town.

He becomes friendly with Nell, the daughter of Furnace Flats’ lovable old doctor (played by Edgar Buchanan who was a specialist in annoyingly loveable roles). Nell is engaged to be married to David Simpson who owns the gas station. Some unexplained odd events start to occur. An elderly patient of Doc Lucas dies after drinking goat’s milk from Pete Jensen’s goat. David is mauled by his beloved pet dog and left horribly disfigured. Nick volunteers to take over the running of the gas station while he’s recovering. Everyone agrees that Nick is a remarkably helpful young man, although David seems to think he’s a little bit too nice. Especially towards Nell.

When the town drunk becomes very friendly with Nick and is then discovered dead, in puzzling circumstances, the suspicions of the sheriff and Doc Lucas are aroused. Where exactly did this Nick character come from? Why have odd things been happening since he arrived? And why on earth is he never affected by the heat even on the hottest days?

There’s a very low budget feel to this production, the pacing is a little off at times, and some of the acting is pretty wooden. Ed Nelson though brings a very effective and very subtle creepiness to the mysterious Nick.

The combination of the black magic storyline with the stark desert landscape and the sleepy dusty small town environment of Furnace Flats is interesting and unusual. That’s probably the movie’s biggest strength. The script avoids most of the expected cliches associated with witchcraft. There are no sexy female witches. No decadent aristocrats. No crumbling gothic mansions. It has a very seedy feel to it, an air of boredom and desolation, of black magic as something a person would turn out to out of hopelessness, frustration, bitterness and anger. The entire motivation for the villain seems to be a kind of despairing spitefulness.

Horror movies often rely on atmosphere or gore to compensate for the deficiencies of the screenplay, so this movie is unusual in that the script is its strongest feature. There’s no gore at all, not much violence, no sex. There is a certain amount of atmosphere, and the setting in some ways anticipates the way American horror would go in the following decade with its emphasis on horror in decaying rural settings.

It was directed by Charles R. Rondeau about whom I know nothing apart from the fact that he mostly worked in television. And it does have a bit of a TV movie feel.

The public domain print I saw was extraordinarily bad, which is a pity because the movie has enough original features to make it worth checking out. It can be downloaded legally for free, so for that price it’s worth a look!

And the amazingly lurid poster has nothing whatsoever to do with the content of the movie!

Mad Youth (1940)

The 1940 exploitation shocker Mad Youth (later re-released as Girls of the Underworld) is another delightfully lurid little movie from the wonderful Girls Gone Bad: The Delinquent Dames Collection boxed set.

This one deals with some of the great social evils of the 1940s - male prostitution, white slavery and jitterbugging. Lucy Morgan is a middle-aged woman with a teenaged daughter. After years of being trapped in a loveless marriage Lucy is now divorced and she’s decided she wants to have the things she missed out on. Mostly what she wants is good-looking young men in her bed. She starts hiring male escorts. The latest escort sent out by the agency is the Count DeHoven (of course it goes without saying that he isn’t a real count but that’s all part of the fantasy that the agency sells). He’s happy wining and dining her but he haughtily informs her that if she requires any additional services she’ll have to pay extra.

While Mrs Morgan is out on the town with her gigolo her daughter Marian is indulging an equally pernicious vice - jitterbugging. She invites her friends over and pretty soon jitterbugging leads inevitably to strip poker. But while Marian and her friends are mostly just having innocent fun they will soon pay the price for the shameful neglect displayed by their parents. When Marian’s friend Helen gets into trouble from her grandmother fir sneaking out at night she decides she’s had enough. She’s going to run off and get married. She’s met a man through a matrimonial agency but she has an unpleasant surprise in store for her. He’s actually a while slaver! And when Helen writes to Marian inviting her to come and stay for a few days Mrs Morgan is happy to get her daughter out of the way, since the daughter and the gigolo had been getting way too friendly for her liking. This will give Mrs Morgan the chance to have the Count all to herself. But her selfish lusts will indirectly lead Marian into the clutches of the white slavery ring, and the hapless teenager finds herself imprisoned in a brothel.

At this point the plot takes a slightly unexpected turn as the Count turns out not to be quite the sort of man we’d taken him to be. But will Marian be saved from the white slavers before she suffers a Fate Worse Than Death?

This is a fairly typical example of the classical exploitation movie made, distributed and exhibited outside the boundaries of the Hollywood studio system and the rules of the Hollywood Production Code. In this case it’s from Willis Kent Productions who made some of the better known examples of the genre. They generally promise more lurid delights than they actually deliver. It’s what David Friedman, one of the greats of the exploitation movie business, terms “selling the sizzle rather than the steak.” What makes this one slightly unusual is that you do get some actual steak - the content really is fairly salacious. It’s also a little more polished than is usually the case with these movies.

It has the padding provided by a series of variety acts that was such a common feature of these movies. As soon as the characters walk into a night club you know you’re going to be treated to some fairly bizarre routines. It has the square-up that was one of the essential ingredients of the exploitation film. The square-up was the earnest moral message, usually in the firm of a title card at the beginning of the movie, explaining that what you are about to see may be shocking but the producers are bringing you the movie as a public service to expose a dangerous social evil! This then justifies the film-maker in presenting an hour or so of scandalous titillation and throughly enjoyable sin. In this one the square-up comes in the form of a couple of speeches delivered in a wonderfully pompous manner. It turn out it’s all the fault of the parents!

There’s no actual nudity, but there is the obligatory scene of the girls in the brothel lounging about in sexy lingerie. The print included in this set does seem to be a little short of the stated running time so it may have been cut. Of course the nature of these films meant that often there was no definitive cut - there were different versions for exhibition in states with differing censorship regimes so there may have been a “hot” version that is now lost.

The acting is of the standard you expect in such low-budget features. Willy Castello (who plays the Count) was something of a fixture in Willis Kent exploitation flicks. Mary Ainslee is reasonably good as Marian and Betty Compson is entertainingly lecherous as Mrs Morgan.

Mad Youth is more entertaining than most exploitation movies of its kind. The jitterbugging sequences are rather fun and it’s reasonably fast-paced, and the final shot of the movie gives it an unexpected kick. It goes without saying that movies of this type are going to be viewed mainly for their appeal as camp, and Mad Youth doesn’t disappoint in that area. Along with Dorothy Davenport’s The Road to Ruin it’s a fine introduction to this enjoyably sleazy genre of American film.

The Lodger (1944)

John Brahm’s 1944 movie The Lodger was the third (but certainly not the last) movie adaptation of Marie Belloc Lowndes’ 1912 novel, based loosely on the career of Jack the Ripper.The first film version was made in 1927 by a young up-and-coming English director named Alfred Hitchcock. Brahm’s version is the most celebrated one, and it’s certainly the boldest and most unusual.

The novel, which doesn’t mention the Ripper but refers to the mysterious killer as The Avenger, had been set in contemporary London, and Hitchcock had followed suit by setting his film in the London of 1927. Brahm and screenwriter Barré Lyndon on the other hand made their movie specifically about Jack the Ripper and set it in the London of Jack’s time, in the late 1880s.

The movie opens with one of the Ripper’s murders, and then we see a very large and very imposing man appear on the doorstep of a middle-class household, having answered an advertisement for a room to let. The man calls himself Mr Slade, but the name is false, taken from the name of a nearby street. This Mr Slade (played by Laird Cregar) is a rather diffident softly spoken man, who wants to rent the attic rooms in the house as well, ostensibly to be used for his medical researches (he is a medical man of some description).

The middle-aged couple who own the house have a daughter, Kitty (Merle Oberon), a rising music-hall actress. It becomes apparent that Mr Slade strongly disapproves of actresses, and his disapproval seems to stem from some deep personal reasons.

One really bold decision made by Brahm and Lyndon was to make it clear right from the outset that Mr Slade is indeed the Ripper. This is not a spoiler - it’s not only absolutely clear, but it’s also essential to the success of the film that we should know from the start that he is without a shadow of a doubt the killer. Such suspense as the film offers comes from the fact that the other characters in the movie, most notably Kitty, do not know he is the murderer, and in fact they believe fairly strongly in his innocence.

An even bolder decision was to give Cregar more or less a free hand to interpret the part as he saw fit, and to put the emphasis of the film on the killer’s psychology. And equally bravely, to make the killer a strangely sympathetic character, a man tortured by his own demons and driven to kill by his sexual obsessions. Cregar, who was homosexual and who had major problems accepting his own nature, gave the character not just homoerotic overtones but also added an incestuous obsession with his dead brother. Mr Slade gazes longingly and lustfully at a portrait of his deceased brother as he bitterly tells Kitty how the young man was destroyed by his love for an actress. Mr Slade hates women as destroyers, but loves them for their beauty. The most extraordinary thing about all this is that somehow or other both 20th Century-Fox and the Hays Office appear to have completely missed the blindingly obvious sexual aspects of Cregar’s characterisation.

Brahm makes extensive use of low-angle shots to emphasise Cregar’s bulk, which contrasts oddly yet effectively with his very quite very soft voice. It also serves to heighten the strange menace of the character and the way he dominates the other characters so completely. George Sanders gives a very muted performance as the police inspector in charge of the investigation who falls for the charms of the glamorous Kitty. Sanders and Cregar were friends, so it’s possible that Sanders deliberately played the role in that subdued manner to allow Cregar to dominate the movie. It actually makes the movie more effective since it keeps the focus squarely on Mr Slade. Merle Oberon is exceptionally good as Kitty.

There’s a rather funny scene where Sanders is chatting Kitty up while showing her through the grisly displays of murder weapons and killers’ death masks in Scotland Yard’s Black Museum. While most female characters in a 1940s movie would be inclined to swoon in horror or shudder with distaste, Kitty is entirely unaffected - she has the undivided attention of an attractive man and that’s all that matters, and if anything she seems mildly excited by the exhibits. The scene is not just amusing but also very effectively sums up Kitty’s character and her priorities.

Brahm and cinematographer Lucien Ballard shot the movie in a very Expressionist and very excessive gothic style with enormous quantities of both fog and shadows. There are some wonderfully effective shots, and there are plenty of unusual camera angles but the effect is never merely gimmicky. The movie is absolutely awash with over-the-top gothic atmosphere. The use of lighting is superb. The visual aspects of the movie and Cregar’s performance are the two factors on which the movie’s success is based. The plot has some serious logical deficiencies and some gaping holes, but the plot is of very little importance. As a suspense film or a mystery film it doesn’t really succeed, but as a fascinating character study of psycho-sexual aberration it succeeds so well that its weaknesses as a suspense movie are of little consequence. And mercifully there’s none of the puerile comic relief that ruined so many American horror movies of this era.

The DVD includes a host of extras, including an amazingly poor commentary track by Alan Silver and James Ursini. There’s a brief featurette that adds little of importance. It’s a compelling argument for not wasting money and effort on providing worthless extras. Kim Newman does provide a few good insights on the featurette - a commentary track from him would have been a much more worthwhile extra.

This is a strange but undeniably intriguing movie to have been made by a major studio in 1944. It’s also much much better than the other films of Brahm’s film that I’ve seen.
Despite some minor flaws it’s one of the most interesting horror films of that decade, a movie worthy to stand alongside Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie and Son of Dracula as one of the four or five best American horror movies of the 40s.