Barbarella (1968)

Posted on April 28, 2013 at 8:34 am by Jeff Kuykendall

My first viewing of Barbarella (1968) was held to commemorate the purchase of a lava lamp, which, in retrospect, was ideal, because the film seems to exist inside of one. Roger Vadim’s science fiction spectacle is at its grooviest when it fills out its backgrounds with psychedelic light shows akin to those that were projected behind bands like Jefferson Airplane and Pink Floyd; there is a surreal loveliness to the scene in which Barbarella (Jane Fonda) strides through the “Chamber of Dreams” of the Black Queen (Anita Pallenberg), with the walls, floor, and ceiling reflecting colorful, swimming, abstract shapes. Here is a fine example of the inventiveness and charm of the pre-CG era. On the other hand, much of the film takes place on sets that look like they’re on loan from one of the lesser episodes of Star Trek. Barbarella flaunts its “contemporary” style and has a distinct sense of fashion, with “It” girl Fonda as its figurehead, but this means that her spaceship is bedecked with shag carpeting at all angles (with Seurat’s famous A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte filling the only un-carpeted wall), and the soundtrack is just as lounge, with the forgotten band The Glitterhouse crooning dated numbers like the title track: “It’s a wonder, wonder woman, you’re so wild and wonderful, ’cause it seems whenever we’re together the planets all stand still…Barbarella, psychedella, there’s a kind of cockle shell about you…”

Barbarella (Jane Fonda) receives her mission from the President of Earth.

That kitschy spaceship becomes a kind of visual representation of the time capsule that Barbarella is. And, in my stranger moods, I wish that certain films could become literal time capsules – that they could be deliberately lost for a few decades so viewers can unearth them and appreciate them in a different way. Think of the caché El Topo (1970) gained from inaccessibility before it was finally released on DVD. Barbarella suffered the opposite fate: overexposure (pardon the expression). Due in no small part by Jane Fonda’s presence in the film – and her opening striptease, crafted by opening titles maestro Maurice Binder – Paramount has kept Barbarella in the public eye fairly consistently over the decades, exploiting its value as a cult item in spite of its initial box office failure. The poster art, an awesome and eye-popping design, was a common sight on video store shelves in the 80’s, and it wasn’t too surprising to see that the film was recently issued on Blu-Ray. But think of encountering this film knowing little to nothing about it, and encountering: the zero-gravity striptease, the pre-Sleeper jokes about antiseptic future sex, the bizarre props, the dream-like sets, the angel and sexual object Pygar (John Phillip Law), and the Excessive Machine, which the villain Durand Durand (Milo O’Shea) uses to assault Barbarella, before her own, liberated sexual energy destroys it. Is the film flawed? Absolutely. But for a moment, appreciate that this film was ever made in the first place.

Excerpt from the "Barbarella" comic by Jean-Claude Forest, as reprinted in 1978 by "Heavy Metal."

It was an adaptation of an influential French comic by the talented writer/artist Jean-Claude Forest, a mix of high-concept science fiction and playful, comic eroticism: really, the perfect choice for the age of the sexual revolution and the rise of European cinema over waning Hollywood. The screenplay credits Forest as one of its “collaborators,” along with an alarming number of names, including Claude Brulé (who co-wrote Vadim’s Les Liaisons dangereuses 1960), the novelist Clement Biddle Wood, Tudor Gates (The Vampire Lovers), and others; but the principal writers are credited as Vadim and Terry Southern, the noted satirist who wrote the novels The Magic Christian and Candy, and who had worked on the scripts for Dr. Strangelove (1964) and Easy Rider (1969). Seeing all these names in the credits almost announces the film as a “happening”; Barbarella is not so much written as thrown together by some fashionable friends over drinks. As for Vadim, he would never find as big a project, but his best films – including the Brigitte Bardot-launching And God Created Woman (1956) and the genuinely poetic Blood and Roses (1960) – were all behind him. Increasingly, he was becoming famous not for his art but for the women in his life: Bardot, Annette Stroyberg, Catherine Deneuve, and now Fonda.

Pygar (John Phillip Law), rejuvenated by Barbarella's sexual energy, flies with her above the Labyrinth of the City of Night.

But Fonda was the oddest fit in the Vadim universe. As an actress (in films like 1965’s Cat Ballou and 1967’s Barefoot in the Park), she radiates wit and self-awareness. Vadim wrote in 1975 (in Memoirs of the Devil): “She did not enjoy shooting Barbarella at all. She accepted the part because I was very eager to make the film, but she disliked the central character for her lack of principles, her shameless exploitation of her charms and her irrelevancy to the political and social realities of the day…For her, Barbarella was the prototype of woman as an object. Today she still looks back on the part as a detestable symbol of woman’s status in a society of male oppressors.” Fonda saw the women’s lib side of the sexual revolution; Vadim, at his best, saw it as an acknowledgement that women had sexual desires just as men did, and his films embraced guilt-free consensual sex. Barbarella is not too different from those clumsy, major-studio, hippie-oriented cash-ins like I Love You, Alice B. Toklas (1968), but it benefits from having a female lead, and time and again reiterates that Barbarella’s newly-discovered physical sexuality (as opposed to the pill-popping kind she enjoyed on Earth) is her true superpower: with it, she can teach an angel how to fly again, and she can destroy the Excessive Machine with her orgasm. Perhaps Fonda was not as politically invested in the film’s ultimate message, which is that women can have orgasms too.

Barbarella uses her sexual energy to destroy the Excessive Machine of Durand Durand (Milo O'Shea).

As a story, it’s a sloppy affair, and the diffuse efforts of the multitude of screenwriters leave a script with lots of talking and very little coherency. Here, it helps that Fonda delivers her dialogue as though she’s doing Neil Simon again, but the words are a tangle of nonsense regarding a Positronic Ray and the Black Guards and “The Mathmos.” Essentially, the film is as camp as the 60’s Batman TV series, and this approach means it has much in common with the 1980 Flash Gordon, just as its softcore-comic elements link it to the 1974 Flesh Gordon. Camp is fine, but some stronger jokes would help. More deadly is the pacing: the film just keeps lumbering forward from one scene to the next with very little narrative momentum. But there’s a lot here that sticks, and makes the film worth seeing at least once. The bizarre Labyrinth that climbs up a mountain, with its residents wandering the passages like zombies, or partially-absorbed into it (freeze-frame the film to appreciate some very creative makeup work), resembles a surrealist painting. The interiors of the palace of the Black Queen are full of sexual decadence and abstract design. And placing angel wings on a bare-chested John Phillip Law proves to be both the simplest and the most effective special effect Barbarella achieves. Remakes have been attempted and abandoned over the years, most recently by Robert Rodriguez. It’s futile to try to recapture something so rooted in its time, but I admit that I’d love to see someone try.

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Dracula Has Risen From the Grave (1968)

Posted on April 26, 2013 at 4:14 pm by Jeff Kuykendall

The fourth in Hammer’s Dracula cycle, Dracula Has Risen From the Grave (1968) begins where Dracula Prince of Darkness (1966) ended: with the Count (Christopher Lee) frozen beneath the ice in a mountain stream not far from his castle. (Actually, in the prior film his body came to rest in the castle moat, but in every series entry the landscape shifts ever so slightly.) His evil is liberated by the folly of good intentions: Monsignor Ernst Muller (Rupert Davies, Witchfinder General) goes on a quest with a village priest (Ewan Hooper, How I Won the War) to seal the doors of Dracula’s castle with a cross, thus quieting the worries of the locals, but the priest suffers a bloody fall upon the icy river, and that blood finds its way into the slurping mouth of the Count. Once the newly-revived Dracula discovers that the gate to his home is barred by the Monsignor’s actions, he begins an elaborate act of revenge, placing the village priest in his thrall and targeting the Monsignor’s beautiful young daughter Maria (Hammer “discovery” Veronica Carlson) for corruption. Meanwhile, Maria is courted by Paul (Barry Andrews), whose brazen atheism alarms the Monsignor almost as much as the local vampire situation. Paul’s lack of religious conviction becomes a bigger problem when he drives a stake through Dracula’s heart – a stake Drac promptly removes before resuming the fight. To kill the Count, you’ve gotta believe.

Maria (Veronica Carlson) is visited by Dracula (Christopher Lee).

It is a curious feature of the Dracula films that his villainous actions are so petty – typically concentrating on a single family or circle of friends rather than any grand plot. (The exception is the series’ pulpy conclusion, 1973’s The Satanic Rites of Dracula.) After being killed twice, you’d think that he’d have greater ambitions than a single Monsignor and his innocent daughter. But even in the cycle’s best films, plot is never a particular strength. Atmosphere is what’s important, and to this end, director Freddie Francis delivers in spades. Dracula Has Risen From the Grave was the first film in the series not directed by the brilliant Terence Fisher, but Francis, an Oscar-winning cinematographer, proves an inspired substitute. (Fisher would have helmed, but broke his leg while the film was in pre-production.) Francis takes a rather paint-by-numbers script by Anthony Hinds (under his pseudonym, John Elder) and transforms it into a lush nightmare, with colored filters providing feverish reds, golds, and purples to frame Lee’s arrival in a scene. A spectacular set at Pinewood Studios emphasizes the film’s Bavarian fairy-tale quality. This is a film of hushed bedrooms and raucous taverns of frothing taps, all huddled against the shadowy evil just outside the windows. We don’t often see citizens walking the streets. We see them taking clandestine journeys from one bedroom window to another, because the set – constructed at Pinewood Studios – is a spectacular landscape of touching rooftops, hills of them that disappear into the matte-painted background, calling to mind the German Expressionist films The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) and Faust (1926).

Lovelorn barmaid Zena (Barbara Ewing) cares for the inebriated Paul (Barry Andrews).

The film is consistently popular among Hammer fans, though of the Dracula sequels, I prefer the Van Helsing romp Brides of Dracula (1960) and the more subversive Taste the Blood of Dracula (1970). It may be that the ideal sequel can only be assembled from elements of all the films – and from Grave, I would borrow that downright Jungian Pinewood set. I am sure many fans would also find the lovely Veronica Carlson to be indispensable. (Carlson – a talented portrait artist – would subsequently appear in two more Hammer pictures: the terrific Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed and the offbeat, underrated Horror of Frankenstein.) But as central as Maria is, over repeated viewings I find myself absorbed by the tale of the doomed barmaid, Zena, played by a cleavage-touting Barbara Ewing (Torture Garden). I couldn’t care less whether Paul converts to Catholicism to win the approval of Maria’s father and defeat the evil of Dracula. But when the sexy, funny Zena drags a drunken Paul back to his bedroom, plants a kiss on his lips, and then gives him a long, sad look as he fails to react, it’s oddly heartbreaking. She only has a few brief scenes, but her unrequited longing for the young man is palpable, and so it’s dismaying to see her fall under Dracula’s spell and, ultimately, get fed to a fireplace by Ewan Hooper’s corrupted priest. I would have sent the script back for a rewrite. She deserves her own set of fangs, and vengeance – on the drunken sots of the village who leer and harass her night after night. I see her on Dracula’s arm, sporting red and black before riding the carriage back to the castle. That, to me, would be a happy ending; but still, the film does deliver Christopher Lee impaled on a cross, writhing, tears of blood streaking down his cheeks, and in the grammar of the Dracula series, this is a satisfying conclusion.

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Confessions of an Opium Eater (1962)

Posted on April 21, 2013 at 11:13 am by Jeff Kuykendall

The opening titles proclaim this to be “Thomas De Quincey’s classic Confessions of an Opium Eater.” Make no mistake, this has nothing to do with the landmark account of drug addiction from 1821 (Confessions of an English Opium-Eater); and, perhaps by excuse, the lead character is called Gilbert De Quincey. No, this is a low budget exploitation picture from 1962 – alternate title, Souls for Sale – with one foot in the Roger Corman AIP films of the era, and another in politically-incorrect pulp fiction from decades past: the sort populated by Chinese gangsters and dragon ladies. There is some opium-eating, but not much. One can imagine the quick discussion at Allied Artists. What’s a title people recognize that won’t cost a dime in rights? Good; has anyone actually read that book? No? Perfect! At the helm was Albert Zugsmith, director of College Confidential (1960), in which Steve Allen is accused of corrupting college students with his unseemly interest in the topic of sex. The screenplay was by Robert Hill, who had worked with Zugsmith on the Mamie Van Doren vehicles The Private Lives of Adam and Eve (1960, with Mickey Rooney) and Sex Kittens Go to College (1960). Vincent Price, between The Pit and the Pendulum (1961) and Tales of Terror (1962), was tapped to play Gilbert.

Human cargo is dumped violently into a boat in the film's surreal opening.

I would say that Price is miscast, but that would presume I had an inkling of what the filmmakers were aiming for. Gilbert De Quincey is a tough man-for-hire in the film noir vein, who, following some suggested adventures in China (the film introduces him as though he’s a character in an ongoing series that we’ve never heard of), arrives in San Francisco’s Chinatown looking for a new job. He’s hired by an unseen gang boss – via the film’s requisite dragon lady, Ruby Low (Linda Ho) – to infiltrate the rival Tongs following the death of a Tong leader, the editor of the Chinatown Gazette. At least, that’s about as much as I can make out through the dialogue, an almost impenetrable mix of calculatedly broken English, overwrought hard-boiled narration, and failed stabs at poetry. When De Quincey first encounters Ruby Low, Price passionately recites a delirious voiceover: “There is a devil in the drunkard and a ghost in the poet. Devil and drunkard, ghost and poet was I. But once to every man there comes a premonition of destiny. In that first instant of her image passing the lenses of my eyes, I felt that I was hanging in the immensity of space, and she was floating with me, chained, locked inextricably together, arms, brains, heart pulsations, unable to flee, unable to break apart, sinking, sinking through the inexhaustible depths of time. I forgot the long journey by the sea. I forgot the pain, I forgot my mission. Was it the heavy, drifting perfume of the incense, or some feverish fantasy searing my brain? Whatever it was, as I looked at her for a heartbeat, I knew, whoever she was, whatever she might be, this woman had to be a kind of…fate, for me.” While Ruby Low lights a funerary candle, Price takes her match and puts it to his cigarette. She scowls and says, “I am not sing-song girl to light cigarette!” He replies, “Sorry, I got carried away.”

Gilbert De Quincey (Vincent Price) descends below Chinatown to investigate human trafficking.

The style of the film is a bizarre mix of Fu Manchu clichés and quasi-psychedelic surrealism. Price is constantly finding secret, sliding doors and hidden passages and elevators, descending deeper into Chinatown. He passes through one door and finds a bathhouse. Another door – behind a bathroom stall – and he finds an opium den, where he smokes a pipe and hallucinates spook-show images. Another and he encounters women in bamboo prisons, including an unexpected ally in a courtesan dwarf whom he mistakes for a child, even though she’s played by Yvonne Moray, born in 1917 and a cast member from The Wizard of Oz. (The moment when he touches her middle-aged face and announces, “You’re no child!” is just part and parcel with the film’s nonstop weirdness.) Zugsmith sometimes slows the action, speeds it up, reverses it, or even removes the soundtrack and lets silence dominate. Much of this is for effect, but sometimes it’s just to disguise the film’s limited resources, such as the awkward moment when Chinese prostitutes are dumped onto the deck of a boat. A staccato series of images is edited together to give the impression that they’ve been violently dropped from the suspended net, when in actuality they are carefully posed from one frame to the next. Brief shots like these can seem accidentally avant-garde. The same goes for the film’s final scene, as two of the Chinese fugitives watch Price drifting downstream through an underground canal. In one of the shots we see them moving in reverse. Presumably in the editing room it was discovered they needed a few more beats. But the result just adds to the film’s strange atmosphere.

Yvonne Moray helps Price sabotage the Tong conspiracy.

Chinatown, here, is a Western set hastily dressed with Chinese signs, and Price crashes in slow-motion through a balcony as though he’s part of a Wild West stunt show. The soundtrack, by the prolific B-movie composer Albert Glasser, is often dominated by theremin, which is always a plus. The odd moments are countless. A fake seagull drops from the sky to land at Price’s feet. There’s a villain talking from behind a bearded porcelain mask, battles with axes and swords, and an extended scene involving “exotic” dancing girls, one of whom has her wig suddenly removed to reveal her baldness (or obvious bald cap, anyway) – “She has no hair!” one of the men screams, and she’s chased off. It is a strange, strange little film, and one that in recent years has gained a reputation thanks to the Psychotronic Film Guide, occasional screenings on Turner Classic Movies, and Joe Dante’s enthusiastic endorsement on Trailers from Hell. The Warner Archive’s recent DVD release is therefore most welcome. Mind you: the movie is a disaster, ill-conceived, hastily produced. But its appeal lies in its genre mash-up script, its confused attempts at profundity, and Price’s always-game performance (when an expression of embarrassment might be more appropriate). Don’t watch it during the light of day and reason.

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