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Jess Franco: 1963

Sunday, June 16th, 2013

You’d think a cowboy movie by Jess Franco would attract a little attention. Yet the one quasi-Western he directed — which takes place in Venezuela rather than the Old American West — is practically unknown, even among Franco fans.

El Llanero (“The Cowboy”, aka “Jaguar”) opens in the mid-1860’s during the Venezuelan Civil War. Colonel Santierra (Georges Rollin, La Muerte Silba un Blues) arrives in Madero looking for the house of the family Mendoza. Getting directions from the local whorehouse madam (whose pianola, yet again in a Franco film, suggests Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil), he and his men ride out to the hacienda… where they massacre the whole family.

Or rather, most of the family. For the Mendozas’ loyal servant Juano, hearing the gunfire, rushes up to the room where the Mendozas’ youngest son José lies sleeping and carries the boy off into the night. As the story proper begins, it’s twenty-some years later: the hacienda Mendoza has long been the home of Col. Saltierra, where he lives with his wife and his pretty young daughter. Saltierra is now the Governor of Madero; his command of the soldiers has now passed to his young adjutant, Kalman. Unfortunately, Saltierra’s and Kalman’s authority is continually being undermined by the activities of a notorious local bandit, known as “The Fox” — excuse me; that’s a different story… of course I mean “The Jaguar”. The Jaguar and his men live in caves in the nearby mountains. Somehow they’re always one step ahead of the authorities. It’s almost as though they have the cooperation of somebody in town…

Somebody like Lolita, the local barmaid. As you might have guessed, judging by Franco’s tendency to recycle names and characters, Lolita is a vivacious dark-haired gypsy (à la Reina del Tabarín) who captivates everyone with her singing and dancing… especially Comandante Kalman. One night when Kalman is safely knocked out from too much alcohol, Lolita sneaks out to the garrison to search through his files. Lolita proves remarkably resourceful at scaling walls and avoiding guards… but there are disadvantages to sneaking around in full-length skirts, and eventually she is overheard. Lolita flees through the garrison, and is only seen directly once: as she runs through the prison, she momentarily awakens the sleeping guard (played by Franco himself). The guard takes one look at the gorgeous Lolita, standing over him without the slightest hint of fear, and figures he must be dreaming… so he simply goes back to sleep.

This time, Lolita’s managed to cadge the secret of a shipment of gold that’s about to be sent across the border. She rushes out to El Jaguar’s secret camp to bring him the news. The bandit, I’m sure you’ll have realized, is José Mendoza grown up. He’s been raised entirely in the mountains by Juano; and now, with his absurdly literal copy of “Little John” and his own band of Merry Men, he behaves as a sort of Venezuelan Robin Hood.

Lolita is not the only woman in town whose sympathies El Jaguar has captured. Col. Santierra’s daughter Inés is also fascinated by the tales she’s heard of the brave bandito. Kalman warns her that the romantic tales are exaggerated… that he’s really nothing more than a common criminal. Certainly José might agree with him: after cleverly robbing the gold shipment, he finds himself faced with the very mundane and businesslike task of deciding how to parcel out the loot. By the time he’s done a thorough accounting of what everybody needs or deserves, there’s very little left in the kitty for day-to-day operations. This doesn’t stop him from doing his duty, though, and giving a portion of his proceeds to kindly Father Francisco, the sympathetic local priest.

One day, José stumbles across Inés having a swim. Though José’s idea of wooing is more or less what you’d expect of a guy who grew up in the mountains with a bunch of burly men, but he manages to get his point across. Soon the two of them are meeting regularly by the riverside. Inés learns who José is right away, but José, though he knows Santierra is his enemy, does not yet realize he’s fallen for the daughter of the man who murdered his family.

When one of the Jaguar’s men spends his share of the gold a little too obviously (having never seen Rififí), Kalman captures him and tries to force him to betray the whereabouts of the Jaguar’s cave. The man doesn’t break at once, though, giving José and Juano time to plan his escape. The jailbreak, like most of the rest of the movie, is played with the same lighthearted tone you might expect from a TV western series of the time; the injured man is taken off to Father Francisco’s church, where the good padre will hide him while he recovers.

Unfortunately, the church is the very first place Kalman thinks to look. When he finds that Francisco has been hiding the fugitive, he takes them both back to the garrison and condemns them to death. Now, the two men know that José will try to rescue them… but their expectations lead them to some more serio-comic misunderstandings, as they mistake the hangman for José in disguse (he isn’t). Still, José hasn’t abandoned them. He engineers a remarkably dangerous-looking escape, which is probably one of the most hair-raising sequences in Franco’s output. Kalman’s men set off after them… but the chase is played for laughs, and ends with some harmless fun that wouldn’t be out of place in a Disney movie.

This whole episode serves to show how Father Francisco ends up as the Jaguar’s very own Friar Tuck. Juano even builds him his very own altar out of scraps in the cave… and in place of a Bible, which none of the men have, Juano leaves a copy of his one and only book: “The Three Musketeers”. It all seems oddly appropriate…

The breezy, kiddie-matinée tone of the film is matched, for the most part, by Daniel White’s music. The main tune of the movie, sung by the South American group Los Machucambos, is a lovely and particularly haunting song; but White’s arrangement of it for the action sequences is just awful… it sounds as if it would be more appropriate for a high school driver’s ed movie of the same vintage. Much better is the fugue for strings that seems to symbolize Inés. White wrote several fugues for Franco’s movies, oddly enough, and this one is particularly interesting in that Inés actually attempts to whistle along with the cantus firmus the first time we see her.

But then, roughly two-thirds of the way through the movie, the tone shifts dramatically. The change begins with the sudden death of one of the major characters, and from that point on the movie becomes much darker. All of a sudden, the cartoonish characters we’ve come to know start revealing hidden depths. It turns out that José is not the only one who has family to avenge… and in the big gun battle at the climax of the movie, Kalman — the jealous suitor of Inés — does something so cruel and unexpected that it no longer seems we’re watching the same movie. The subplot involving Santierra and José’s family is brought to the fore and dealt with in a completely different way than you might expect… though the final fight to the death with Kalman is pretty much what we’ve anticipated from the beginning.

El Llanero isn’t exactly essential Franco. It has no real connection to the style of film-making we’ve come to associate with Jess Franco, and that’s probably one of the main reasons even die-hard Francophiles have ignored it for so long. But it is entertaining, in a kiddy-matinee sort of way… and the sober conclusion balances out the juvenile silliness of the rest of the movie surprisingly well.

(The role of Santierra was the last for Georges Rollin, who died the next year. But for Rollin’s untimely death, he might have gone on to be as regular a participant in Franco’s movies as the better-known Howard Vernon.)


 


I’ve never made any secret of my interest in Jess Franco, and as a result there’s one question my fellow Bad Movie buffs ask me regularly: did Jess Franco ever make a really good movie? An unambiguously well-made movie — the kind that any reasonably well-rounded movie fan could watch and enjoy without apology, without reservations, and without any prior exposure to the rest of Franco’s work?

The people who ask this are generally well acquainted with Franco’s most notorious movies, so I understand the question behind the question: Where’s the evidence we should trust this guy? Is it worthwhile to look for meanings in flicks like A Virgin Among the Living Dead? Was Oasis of the Zombies really the best Franco could do, or are there hidden depths to him? I think it’s reasonable to ask these questions. We all know that Franco was a cinematic rebel, but did he really understand exactly what he was rebelling against?

Gritos en la Noche doesn’t quite fit the requirement: as much fun as it is for the Franco enthusiast, it’s so clearly a hodge-podge of other movies, and shows its seams in so many places that its status as a “classic” is a little tough to defend. Miss Muerte from 1965 probably comes closer, but is so laden with in-jokes for the Franco aficionado that many of its charms are lost on the casual viewer. La Muerte Silba un Blues misses the mark as well, but just barely: its overly-complicated plot and at least one jarringly bad editorial decision keep it from scaling the heights.

Now at last I have the answer. If you’re looking for a Jess Franco movie that’s not a “Jess Franco movie”… that’s the polar opposite of the stereotypical Jess Franco movie… a movie that combines exciting visuals with good storytelling, and which maintains its discipline through to the very end… then the movie you want is 1963’s Rififí en la ciudad.

Franco’s Rififí has only two things in common with Jules Dassin’s classic 1955 film Rififí (Du Rififí chez les hommes). The most obvious is the presence of actor Jean Servais in one of the lead roles. The other point of similarity is its attitude. You may remember from Dassin’s film that “Rififí” isn’t a character: it means something like “dust-up”, a fight just for the hell of it. It conveys a certain a state of mind… the take-no-prisoners, smack-my-bitch-up, not just “gangsta” but genuinely gangster code of tough-guy behavior that the French pull off better than anybody else. 1

It’s ludicrous that in America the French and their culture have the reputation of being somehow weak or effete. But I suppose it’s their own fault, when even French slang that’s supposed to suggest hard-boiled machismo has the word “fifi” in it.

That rififí kind of attitude is everywhere in Franco’s film, from the subtle behind-the-scenes cruelty of Servais’s power-hungry LePrince… to the amoral thuggishness of LePrince’s enforcers… to the single-minded, two-fisted obsession of Frenando Fernán Gómez’s Sergeant Mora, a good cop finally pushed over the line into enforcing a moral code beyond the limit of the Law.

The movie takes place in an unnamed Central American country. French immigrant Maurice LePrince (Jean Servais) is running for the local Senate on a broad populist platform. LePrince had come to this country in the mid-1940’s… “for his health”, according to his biography, but there’s a strong hint that he may have been running from some Nazi connections in occupied France. In the intervening years, he’s managed to become very rich and very powerful, all while keeping his reputation completely beyond reproach. Under his velvet gloves, though, there are iron fists gone rusty with spilt blood. When it comes to drug smuggling, influence peddling, murder… any shady dealings going on in the capital city, chances are Maurice LePrince is secretly involved in it. He’s probably running the whole business.

LePrince covers his tracks very, very carefully. One particularly ethical and hard-working policeman, Detective Sergeant Miguel Mora (Fernando Fernán Gómez), has been working for years to find hard evidence against him; but LePrince always stays at least one step ahead.

The headquarters for the local underworld seems to be the notorious Club Stardust. Mora had seemed to be on the verge of a break, when one of his informers — a young punk off the street named Juan, whom he’d personally saved from a life of crime and drug dependence — started working there as a bartender. He’d told Mora that he’d gathered information that would absolutely incriminate LePrince… but unfortunately, Juan disappeared before he can give Mora the evidence. As the movie opens, he’s been missing for days.

Late one night, Mora receives a desperate phone call from Juan: he’s escaped from LePrince’s men, but they’re after him. Mora and his wife try to persuade Juan to come hide at their house. It’s only natural: after all the time Juan’s spent with them, Mora has come to feel the boy is like a son. But Juan insists he doesn’t dare try to make it that far. Instead, he arranges to meet Mora in a public square in 30 minutes.

Juan never arrives.

Mora, sick at heart, fears the worst; he attempts to put some pressure on LePrince, but his plan goes horribly wrong. Late at night, LePrince’s goons throw Juan’s broken body through Mora’s front window and drive off. 2

I think Juan is supposed to be dead in this scene, though his “corpse” blinks obviously several times. Either he’s just mortally wounded, or this is the only moment in the movie that looks forward to the later, careless Jess.

After this, something snaps in the rigidly-moral Sergeant Mora. Against all sense, against all the rules of police work, he goes to the Stardust to confront LePrince (even though LePrince has claimed he has nothing to do with the Club). In one of the movie’s best and most horrifying sequences, LePrince’s men drag Mora into the stairwell and proceed to beat him nearly to death… while in the meantime, just upstairs, the Stardust clients are watching an eye-poppingly tacky musical number. The movie keeps shifting back and forth between the hokum on stage (in which dancers in historic costumes from ancient times up to the present, including a man in a full suit of armor and a girl in a bikini, gyrate to the music) and the brutality unfolding just a few feet away.

Nightclub number from Jess Franco's 'Rififi en la Ciudad'

Jess Franco's 'Rififi en la Ciudad'

Nightclub number from Jess Franco's 'Rififi en la Ciudad'

The thugs’ plan is to drop the unconscious Mora in the ocean and let him drown, thereby ensuring they can get an easy ruling of “natural death” on the coroner’s certificate. What nobody’s been counting on — not LePrince, not the thugs, not even Mora himself — is that there are other people investigating Juan’s disappearance/murder, too. One of these Juana, is a woman who works in LePrince’s business operations. Another is Nina Laverne, a chanteuse at the Stardust, who’s currently enjoying some extracurricular fun with the boss. Another — it may be one of the previous two; it may be somebody else… we just don’t know — is a woman we don’t see on-screen, whose thoughts we hear as voice-overs against lonely montages of the sea and the city. All these women have one thing in common: they were all at one time passionately, obsessively in love with young Juan (Mora is later stunned to realize the number of women Juan was involved with). It’s Juana, with her friend Manolo, who sees LePrince’s men dump Mora’s body in the ocean. At first they think it’s Juan himself, since they haven’t yet found out about the murder. Manolo fishes Mora out of the water before he can drown, and the pair drop him off at the hospital anonymously.

Jess Franco's 'Rififi en la Ciudad'

LePrince is perturbed to find that Mora is still alive. Nevertheless, he and his lawyer pay an official visit to the police station, where they inform the Chief that LePrince will not be pressing charges against Mora for the violent assault he attempted the night before. As for Mora’s condition, well… after LePrince had escaped from the obviously unbalanced detective, Mora had apparently got into a drunken brawl in the Stardust. Whoever beat him up had only been defending themselves. Since Mora had clearly been acting outside his duties and responsibilities as a policeman, the Chief has no other option than to put him on probation while he recovers, and order him to stay away from Maurice LePrince.

Mora is released from the hospital to recuperate. Though he has been relieved of his duties, he still wants to keep watch on the men who injured him — the men he is sure murdered Juan. Things start to get complicated for Mora when one of the men he’s been trying to tail — Ribera, the most sadistic of the three, whose conscience has been starting to give him trouble — ends up being murdered himself… stabbed to death on the same stretch of beach where he attmepted to drown Mora. We get a brief glimpse of the killer, who whispers, “Remember Juan Solano?” before stabbing him. Could it be Mora? Whoever the killer is, he seems to be far more mobile than Mora is, with his broken foot. Yet who else would want to see Ribera dead so urgently? And who else is known to be watching the goons from the Stardust Club?

LePrince gets a call soon afterwards. An unidentifiable woman’s voice asks him if he remembers Juan Solano. The she tells him that Ribera is dead, and his other two thugs will be next. The second killer is dispatched in his own apartment, while his girlfriend is out of the room getting him a drink. When she returns to the dimly-lit bed, she doesn’t realize the man is dead. So, in a delightfully horrifying moment, she starts kissing and caressing the bloody corpse. Realizing almost immediately that something’s terribly wrong, she turns on the light…

Rififí en la Ciudad functions equally well as a political thriller, a film noir, and a murder mystery in which the identity of the killer comes as a real shock. Part of the reason Rififí… is such a solid, coherent piece of work is that Franco derived the script from an award-winning book: “Vous souvenez-vous de Paco?” (1958) by the French crime novelist Charles Exbrayat. The novel provided a very solid scaffold for Franco to construct his movie. But Franco didn’t just make a literal adaptation of Exbrayat’s story: he made a number of changes, some minor (like renaming the dead man “Juan” instead of “Paco”, and giving new names to most of the male characters), and some far more significant… but all of them intelligent.

To take the most obvious example: Exbrayat’s novel had taken place in Barcelona, and Franco realized the Spanish censors would never allow him to make a movie about corruption and revenge in the Spanish government of 1963. Franco also changed his villain’s identity from a Spaniard to an expatriate Vichy Frenchman.

Franco’s screenplay allows Detective Mora to figure out the identity of the killer stalking LePrince; in the novel, that particular mystery was solved after Mora’s part in the story is over. This change makes a crucial difference in the tone of the dénoument. It also moves the conclusion of the murder-mystery portion of the story to just before the confrontation between the detective and the politician, where it makes a great deal more sense. The motivation of the killer is very much the same in both versions, but the killer’s attitude to the detective is drastically different, and is in fact much more believable in Franco’s adaptation. What happens to that killer in the movie is one of Rififí en la ciudad‘s relative weak spots… it involves the usual wild drive off a cliff, though this time, mercifully, the car does not explode.

The climax of Exbrayat’s novel is actually bleaker than that of the film. In the novel, Detective Lluji is a man defined by what he has lost. He’s described as a man “without youth, without love”; his only real attachment is to the Law, and when the Law fails him, he devotes himself utterly to raw Justice. In the beginning of the book, he’s already lost his father to the criminals, and he soon loses his adopted “son”… a son he’s acquired not in the usual, human way, but only through the pain of his work. Lluji’s last confrontation with the crime boss Villar is just another episode of frustration and betrayal; and if Justice is served in the end, the detective is denied an active role in it. By contrast, in Franco’s version Mora stays at the heart of the story all the way through to the end. Unlike Lluji, Mora is defined by what he chooses to sacrifice in the name of what he thinks is just and right.

Jess Franco's 'Rififi en la Ciudad'

Mora’s dramatic confrontation with LePrince is well-handled in the movie, but the action that follows immediately afterwards seems determined more by convention than by the demands of the story. That’s OK, though: Exbrayat’s conclusion may also be predictable by the conventions of the hard-boiled romain policier… still, grim as Exbrayat’s events are, they’re a bit more convincing. Nevertheless, Franco’s changes to Exbrayat’s original all make sense, and are internally consistent with each other. The end result is a thoroughly satisfying film, derived from the novel yet independent of it, which is fully deserving of recognition as a new work.

Visually, Rififí en la ciudad is one of Franco’s most appealing and energetic films. The lighting, photography and screen compositions are all strikingly effective, and a far cry from the zoom-laden, out-of-focus movies he made later on. As far as the actors are concerned, the only slightly disappointing performance is that of Agustín González, as the psychotic Ribera. As Ribera’s conscience begins to get the better of him, González overacts the part and goes way too far. But the film is carried by the rock-solid performances of its two leads, Jean Servais and Fernando Fernán Gómez. Franco considered Fernán Gómez the greatest of Spanish actors; in addition to acting, Fernán Gómez was also a director, writer and poet. 3

Having been given the lead in Franco’s film, Fernán Gómez returned the favor by casting Franco in a major role in his film El Extraño Viaje the following year. El Extraño Viaje was not well received when it was released, but in 1996 it was listed as the seventh greatest Spanish film of all time, in a survey prepared for the centennial of Spanish cinema.

Though Fernán Gómez gives a fine performance, his appearance was part of the reason Rififí… failed on its initial release in Spain: Spanish audiences were used to seeing him in harmless comedies, and were not yet ready to accept him as a serious artist.

According to legend, Rififí en la Ciudad was the movie Orson Welles’s producers showed him to dissuade him from using Franco as his assistant director on Chimes at Midnight. Instead (so goes the story) Welles was sufficiently impressed by the movie that he insisted on hiring Franco at once. On one hand, that story is credible, since Rififí en la Ciudad is Franco’s best-ever internalization of the lessons he learned from watching Welles’s movies. There’s even a crucial scene involving a secret rendezvous in an aquarium, just like in The Lady from Shanghai… though unsurprisingly, the aquarium is a much more modest, low-budget institution in Franco’s film.

Aquarium scene from Jess Franco's 'Rififi en la Ciudad'

On the other hand, the story started with Franco himself. Franco was known to embellish his life story, and it seems likely the Welles anecdote something he made up years later. By this point in his career, Franco hadn’t yet made an embarrassingly bad movie (Vampiresas 1930, which I personally find cringeworthy, was perfectly acceptable by the standards of contemporary Spanish comedy). There was really very little reason for his detractors to try to discourage Welles from working with him! 4

…unless it was because of the dancer in the bikini. The very first bikini to be shown on-screen in Franco’s Spain was worn by Elke Sommer in Juan Bosch’s Bahía de Palma in 1962, and the event caused a national sensation (Pavlović, Despotic Bodies and Transgressive Bodies, p. 8). The censors were not particularly happy about this. While Franco was finishing production on La Muerte Silba un Blues that same year, he shot some extra night club footage in Paris that he hoped to include in the film; but the authorities found the footage much too risqué. This was very likely the first time that Franco had the label “pornographer” applied to him. So it’s just remotely possible that the Spanish producer was worried a bikini was too permissive for Orson Welles!

Even if Welles’s Spanish producer had wanted to convince him that Jess Franco was a terrible hack, it’s very unlikely he’d have seized on Rififí en la Ciudad as the evidence. It’s not just a good Jess Franco movie… it’s a good movie, period. On the basis of Rififí…, it would have been clear to anybody watching that Franco was a capable and talented director.

Jess Franco's 'Rififi en la Ciudad'

TRIVIA NOTE: At one point, just before Juan’s body is thrown through their window, Mora and his wife are seen watching a terrible Zorro show on TV. This is actually an excerpt from Joaquín Romero’s 1962 film Shadow of Zorro, which Franco co-wrote.

Jess Franco: 1962

Sunday, June 2nd, 2013

An unnamed civil war, in an unnamed country. A truck carrying a shipment of fruit and vegetables is stopped crossing a bridge, and subjected to unusual scrutiny. The soldiers find a cache of weapons hidden in the fruit crates; the truck drivers — De Castro and Smith — try to escape, but Smith is wounded and De Castro is killed.

Ten year later, in New Orleans, De Castro’s widow Lina (Perla Cristal) goes to a club. The leader of the club band, an old, sad-eyed trumpet player, seems to recognize her. The trumpeter’s face is at first hidden from us by the bell of his horn; and even when we get a clear glimpse of him, it isn’t easy to recognize the prematurely aged Smith. Lina certainly doesn’t recognize him. Smith turns to his band members and asks if they remember an old number called “Blues de Tejado”. It’s been a while since any of them have played it… but Smith calls out G-minor, and the band (with Jess Franco on sax) launches into a melancholy number.

Once she hears the music, Lina realizes who the bandleader is. A look of anguish crosses her face…

And suddenly, through the worst set of edits in all Franco’s early films, we find Lina on a boat, sailing back to her home in Jamaica. The transition is so abrupt that at first I thought I was watching a bad print. I’ve since been able to cross-reference with other versions of the film, and they’re all edited the same. The pacing of these edits is all wrong… it would have been better for the flow of the picture if they’d skipped any attempt at transition and just cut from the club back to Jamaica.

Lina’s new husband, Paul Radeck (Georges Rollin), is fascinated to hear that Lina’s run into such an old, old friend. He wonders what they talked about, but Lina merely says they had a desultory conversation. Radeck asks if Smith had asked about him; Lina laughs and tells him Smith didn’t even know they’d been married.

By strange coincidence, Julius Smith the bandleader is run down by a car outside the New Orleans club shortly afterwards. Before he dies, he confides to a New Orleans policeman, Inspector Fenton, the truth about the old arms-running days: he and De Castro had been betrayed by their third partner, Vogel, who wanted them out of the way so he could build his own criminal network. It’s Vogel, he’s certain, who’s caught up with him and run him down…

Meanwhile, back in Jamaica, a new singer named Moira has been lined up for Radeck’s night club. Moira cheerfully tells Radeck that she might know a pair of his old friends, whom she used to run into back in Spain: their names are De Castro and Vogel. Vogel? says Radeck. That name doesn’t ring a bell. But De Castro? Federico De Castro? (Moira says yes). That’s impossible, says Radeck. The Federico De Castro he knew is dead.

And Radeck should know. For Radeck is Vogel. He’s the man who arranged for Smith and De Castro to be caught on their last arms run. What could Moira mean by confronting him with evidence of his past life? She seems utterly unaware of what a dangerous game she’s playing — if she’s working some sort of scam, what she’s doing so obvious it’s stupid. But Moira does not appear to be a stupid woman. What’s really going on? Vogel/Radeck’s concerns only deepen when he receives the news that Smith didn’t die at once after being hit by the car… he had time to give some information to the cops. How much is known, and who knows it?

In the meantime, a tough, seemingly dull-witted sailor has just landed at the docks in Kingston. He calls himself Joao (Conrado San Martín), though this is clearly not his real name. Joao gets along well with the feisty but friendly community around the docks. After he’s built up the trust of the locals, he starts asking questions about a certain Mr. Radeck. The locals warn him to stay away from Radeck, whose hands are very dirty indeed.

Strain and paranoia begin to gnaw at Radeck. His marriage is also starting to fray, and just to torture himself he decides to throw on an old LP of Julius Smith and his band, playing “Blues de Tejado”… the song De Castro had written for his then-wife, Lina. As he wallows masochistically in the sound, he goes through his correspondence… and his staggered to find a letter addressed to him as Vogel. The letter describes his activities peddling adulterated penicillin on the black market during the war, and how he betrayed his two associates to keep his underhanded dealings a secret. The letter is signed by the long-dead De Castro. Radeck compares the handwriting to the inscription from De Castro on his Julius Smith LP: they’re the same.

That very night, sailor Joao breaks into Radeck’s mansion. He seems to know his way around. Not only that, he also seems well-versed in Radeck’s personal habits: he guesses the location of Radeck’s wall safe, and it takes him only a few minutes to get it open. Joao takes a gun and a sheaf of papers from the safe. On his way out, he puts the recording of “Blues de Tejado” on the turntable and raises the volume…

La Muerte Silba Un Blues is a moderately enjoyable film noir. With the exception of the terrible editing in the transition between the New Orleans jazz club and Radeck’s house in Jamaica, the movie is very competently shot. The musical score by Anton García Abril (Tombs of the Blind Dead) is excellent, and is rounded out by some good small-ensemble jazz by Franco himself (which is much to be preferred to his music from Vampiresas 1930).

The movie runs into problems because of the ridiculous complexity of its plot. Most of the characters (living or dead or both/neither) seem to have at least two identities. Radeck is really Vogel; Joaoa turns out to be a detective named Al Pereira; and though we understand Moira is clearly not who she appears to be, it doesn’t make things any easier when we’re introduced to her wearing a blonde wig… when we see her next, she’s no longer wearing the distinctive wig, and she looks like a completely different person! When all our mixed-up characters subsequently show up at a costume party, we’re tempted to just give up trying to keep them all straight.

In spite of the confusion, La muerte… manages to work up a decent amount of suspense. There’s a gripping fight scene that takes place in a boathouse, in which Joao struggles for his life against Radeck’s henchman Carlos Moroni. Note that Franco remains true to form here, giving Radeck’s henchman the same name he had in Labios Rojos (1960). Note, also, that this is the very first appearance of the detective Al Pereira, who would show up (in name, anyway) more regularly than practically any other character in Franco’s repertoire (even Orloff). This is the most competent incarnation of Al Pereira we’re ever going to see: Franco called Pereira “One of [his] favorite creations… [A] private detective who takes on the dumbest cases for miserable compensation.” (Pavlović, Despotic Bodies and Transgressive Bodies, pp. 108). Similarly, this is the most believable, human incarnation of the villainous Radeck in Franco’s output.

(Thinking of returning characters, the cast of Le Muerte Silba Un Blues is very similar to that of Gritos en la Noche, with Perla Cristal [Arne] and Conrado San Martín [Inspector Tanner] figuring among the leads, and Ricardo Valle [Morpho] and María Silva [Dany] filling in minor roles. Howard Vernon had originally been intended to play Radeck, but was unable to get along with the movie’s producers. Many references, including the IMDb, list La Muerte… as having been made in 1964, but most Franco-specific resources give the date as 1962; the proximity to Gritos en la Noche is made evident by the large number of returning cast members.)

On the down side, Franco seems to have had no idea what New Orleans was really like: he uses stock footage of (what looks like) Broadway to set up the club scene. He does a better job of suggesting Kingston, Jamaica by including some footage of the actual city… The Spanish Mediterranean coast looks more like Jamaica than New York City resembles New Orleans. Years later, when he made Night of the Skull, Franco set the movie on Louisiana’s rocky, mountainous coast, so I guess he never learned much more about the area.

On the whole, though, La Muerte Silba Un Blues is a solid thriller… so solid, in fact, that viewers who know Franco only from his uneven later work are in for a real shock. According to Franco, it was La Muerte Silba un Blues that first attracted the interest of Orson Welles, who subsequently hired him as second unit director on Chimes At Midnight. At least that’s the version recounted by Tohill and Tombs in Immoral Tales; according to an interview with Howard Vernon, it was Tenemos 18 Años that Welles was impressed by. Of course, the whole story may be apocryphal — according to other sources, the two directors were simply introduced by a mutual friend. But there’s enough of Welles’s influence evident in the movie to make the story believable. There are even a few quotes: e.g., Quinlan’s habitual refrain, “I don’t drink!” from Touch of Evil is used in the setup of a joke in Franco’s film. Furthermore, La Muerte…‘s plot seems to be trying to outdo The Lady from Shanghai in confusing the hell out of the audience. Then, too, there’s a good deal of planning and craft evident in the structure of the movie, which is not something we normally associate with the work of Jess Franco. For instance, the movie begins with death on a blocked bridge, and ends with death on a pier, giving the story the feel of a completed arc. Of course, that last sentence represents the sort of pretentious film-school striving for meaning that Franco detested… so maybe I’d better quit while I’m ahead.


 


Seven movies into Franco’s feature-film output, the firsts continue to pile up: La Mano de un Hombre Muerto (“The Hand of a Dead Man”, aka “The Sadistic Baron von Klaus”) marked Franco’s first collaboration with composer Daniel J. White. The two men had a similar propensity for working fast; and having nearly been killed during World War II, White’s outlook on life — do what you love, and to hell with the rest — meshed perfectly with Franco’s. The two men worked together in remarkable harmony, with White frequently providing production assistance in addition to his duties as a composer.

It’s White’s hands that are seen playing the piano in the shot which opens the French cut of the film. It’s rare to see hands on a piano in a film, and have the fingers match the music! The hyper-romantic piano piece that serves as the principal theme of the movie seems to be based on a four-note idea taken from Franz Liszt’s famous “Second Hungarian Rhapsody”, but transformed beyond recognition into something much more languid and French-sounding (it starts in the key of E-major, and eventually comes to rest on B-flat, spanning the interval known as the “Devil in music” and giving us a subtle hint of what’s to come…).

La Mano de un Hombre Muerto takes place in a German village called Hölfen. Hölfen is a location created by Franco for his films — like Thomas Hardy’s Wessex, or Ramsay Campbell’s Brichester, or Franco’s other stomping ground, the fictional French town of Hartog. Hölfen was formerly the demesne of the family von Klaus. The first Baron von Klaus was a legendary sadist, who is said to have sacrificed young village girls to the Devil… or if not to the Devil, then worse: to his own unspeakable lusts. Some say the old Baron never really died, but wanders forever through the swamps around Castle von Klaus, looking for fresh victims… or at least, that’s what Hansel, the village odd-job man, tells the visitng Professor Kalman (remember: “Kalman” is the name Franco often gives to his relatively minor subordinate character. This Kalman is a researcher, come to research the folklore of the Hölfen region for a book he’s preparing).

Hansel has even more disturbing things to tell Kalman: the return of the evil baron’s ghost is supposed to be foretold by certain signs, and according to Hansel the signs have begun to appear. It’s just the way things happened fifty years ago, when Hansel was a child. There had been a series of terrible murders, and the locals had blamed the current Baron von Klaus. The then-Baron had fled into the swamp and drowned… just like his ancestor.

Meanwhile, up at the castle, the dowager Baroness lies dying. Her last, urgent wish is to see her son Ludwig (Hugo Blanco) again, and her younger brother Max (Howard Vernon) promises her that he is on his way. When Ludwig finally arrives with his fiancée after a 180-kilometer journey, the Baroness insists on speaking to him alone. With her last breath, she tells him about his grandfather’s secret torture chamber in the depths of the castle. They key is hidden in a secret compartment in her bureau; he must go to the hidden room, confront the terrible secret of the von Klaus family, and then destroy everything. She makes him promise to leave Hölfen forever once he’s done it, and Ludwig swears he will.

At the same moment, Hansel and his partner Theo have just discovered the body of a young woman lying in the snow. The sadist killings have begun again, after all these years! Naturally, the von Klaus family falls under suspicion; but the younger man wasn’t anywhere near the area yet, and the older brother seems to have a solid alibi. Inspector Borowsky (Georges Rollin) seems unable to make any progress figuring out the killing, but he has soon gets help from a journalist named Karl Steiner. Steiner writes for a rag called “Maidens and Murder”, but in spite of the lurid name of his magazine he’s much cleverer than Borowsky… and much less bound by the rules of investigation.

La Mano de un Hombre Muerto could have been much better. If it had been filmed with a little more attention to style, it could have eclipsed even Mario Bava’s The Evil Eye as the seminal proto-giallo. As it is, the script — written for the most part by Pío Ballesteros (Vampiresas 1930) — is heavy on talk, and light on actual action. When something does happen, for the most part the results still aren’t very interesting… for examle, when a character goes to see the police, the camera insists on following her from her door, all the way across the square, down a long alley, and finally to the door of the police station; then, when she comes back, the camera follows her again every step of the way. Now, all the while, she’s being stalked by a black-clad killer, and this would have been the point of the same sequence had it been shot by, say, Bava. But in Franco’s film, there’s so little attention paid to the waiting killer that there’s never any real sense of suspense.

The movie really only springs to life at a couple of points: there’s a moderately suspenseful episode in which the killer, foiled at the last moment, runs through the shadowy streets of Höfen with a growing crowd of villagers behind him. Miraculously staying a step ahead of his pursuers, he tries to shake them off by running through the swampy woods. The villagers pick up torches — yes, torches! It makes sense under the circumstances — and follow him, but stop when they see him disappear into the cemetery. Beyond those gates the villagers will not go. Karl Steiner is with them, however, and he insists the killer is no ghost. He plunges into the cemetery… only to see the killer apparently disappear into one of the tombs. The name on the mausoleum? Von Klaus.

Best of all is a torture sequence that pops up near the end. The killer first arouses, then flogs and kills a naked young girl. Up to this point, the story has only been hinting at its potential to be disturbing. Suddenly, with this sequence, it commits itself to the sort of giallo-esque mayhem it’s been promising all along. The music and the photography suit the action perfectly, though they seem out-of-place compared to the staid setup we’ve have in the movie so far. Here, too, we have the mad killer realizing for the first time that he really is the killer. He achieves this moment of self-awareness because at that moment, for the first time, his compulsion has driven him to kill someone he really cares about. If only the rest of the movie lived up to this one fervid scene!

Franco does succeed in creating a suitably grim atmosphere around Hölfen in deep winter. The snowy fields around the town don’t seem in the least picturesque; when the police are out examining a body in the snow, you can feel their discomfort in the damp and chill. We remember the impression later on, when characters are slogging through the nearby swamp… that water has got to be cold! Unfortunately, that atmosphere is about all the movie has going for it, until that wonderful moment of sadism later on. There’s never any real mystery about the identity of the killer — though the movie pretends there is, and keeps the murderer’s face hidden until very near the end (as if the Dying Mother scene didn’t give the whole game away, just look at the English title!). Karl Steiner’s detective work wouldn’t hold up for a moment in the courts of any civilized country in the world; and though he realizes some of his hunches are wrong, he generally admits this only after the wrong person has been arrested.

With its theme of the sins of the fathers literally haunting the sons, this movie seems like it would fit in among Franco’s Bad Father films. Actually, the connection is a little hard to justify. The ghostly grand-father never makes a physical appearance, and the voice the killer hears in his head at the very end of the film is very likely only in his head… Though the killer seems to have some personal recollections of the dead grandfather, that’s impossible, since the old man died half a century earlier. The conclusion of the movie does look forward very clearly to Franco’s ultimate Bad Father movie, A Virgin Among the Living Dead… though here the conclusion seems less tragic than funny: as the killer slips into the quicksand of the swamp, Inspector Borowsky and the police (perhaps realizing they’re about to be saved a mess of paperwork) don’t lift a finger to save him.

La Mano de un Hombre Muerto was considered a lost film for a while, but around the turn of the millennium a print of the French edition was found and released on DVD. While it’s a wonderful thing that the movie’s been brought back from oblivion, it’s unlikely to win Franco any new friends. It’s certainly competently made, but the story drags, and the visuals are far too uninteresting for the lurid sort of mystery it should have been. There’s at least one more Franco in-joke buried in the script: at one point, a hotel employee being interrogated insists he’s too new to know anything. His previous employment had been at the Negresco, from Vampiresas 1930.

Jess Franco: 1961

Sunday, June 2nd, 2013

To review La Reina del Tabarín, Jess Franco’s 1960 musical, I had to watch both the Spanish and French versions of the film several times. La Reina del Tabarín is Franco’s least typical film, a painfully uninteresting romantic comedy with a singularly unsympathetic male lead. Yet I would gladly watch that film — either version, or both — over and over and over, if it meant I never had to watch Franco’s next film, Vampiresas 1930, ever ever again.

Like his previous film, Vampiresas 1930 was intended as a vehicle for Mikaela (Wood). In this film, she plays Dora, a major star of the silent screen; she’s a vampiresa in that her agent has decided she should play up the whole Theda Bara act and make herself as mysterious and sexy as possible. Privately, she’s fed up with her public image as a frail, ethereal creature, prone to fits of overwhelming emotion. What she really wants is a nice plate of cheese.

Yves Massard, Fernando from La Reina del Tabarín, plays a struggling musician named Tony. He and his friend Daniel (Tenemos 18 Años‘s Antonio Ozores) play jazz at a little Italian restaurant to make ends meet. One day, a young girl newly arrived in Paris stumbles into the restaurant — her name is Carolina (Lina Morgan), and she’s starving. She’s also really cute, so Tony and Daniel rush to offer her some of their own food. When customers come in, Tony and Daniel rush to the piano and break into a number; whereupon Carolina’s eyes light up. She runs to the unattended double-bass and begins playing along. She’s not only a jazz musician herself, she’s a darned good one.

Tony and Daniel take her back with them to their lodgings. They live in a sort of commune for out-of-work musicians, where jam sessions are always breaking out unexpectedly, and where the landlady doesn’t want a security deposit — she wants an audition. Well, everybody bursts into a number, and Carolina gets to singing and dancing like mad. She’s in.

Tony and Daniel’s other job, the one that really pays the bills, is as technicians on the movie sets. Daniel is a stuntman, whose duties include riding a car into an exploding building. Tony provides mood music for the actors during the shoots… particularly for Dora, who thinks he’s just dreamy. When Tony makes a special visit to Dora’s dressing room to speak to her, she’s thrilled. When she finds out he’s there to ask for help getting Carolina some work, she’s heartbroken… though in fact it’s Daniel who’s got a thing for Carolina. Dora manages to get Tony to agree to a date at her place…

… which strikes her agent as pure publicity gold: a handsome musician for the notorious vamp! The scandal sheets will love it! This leads to a halfway-amusing scene in which Tony shows up for his “date”, not realizing there are reporters stuffed in every closet, under every piece of furniture, and behind every screen.

Now then: I’d go on about the various turns of the plot, but it turns out there’s no point. The whole story comes to an abrupt halt when it’s suddenly announced that the Talking Pictures have arrived. The silent studios have all gone bankrupt, and everybody’s out of a job.

Some of you reading this synopsis may already be starting to clutch your heads in pain. No wonder: it’s obvious the first half of the flick is a heavy-handed “homage” (sic) to Singin’ in the Rain… with Yves Massard in the Donald O’Connor role, and Antonio Ozores — yes: bug-eyed, round-faced, Jerry-Lewis-meets-Peter-Lorre Antonio Ozores — in the Gene Kelly role.

Vampiresas 1930: our heroes Singin' In The Rain: our heroes

It’s Ozores who gets to plunge into an exploding building, just like Gene Kelly:

Vampiresas 1930: Kaboom! Singin' In The Rain: Kablam!

Dora the vamp is actually costumed to look suspiciously like the character Olga Mara, who appears a couple of times in Stanley Donen’s film and has (as I recall) a single line.

Vampiresas 1930: Dora Singin' In The Rain: Olga Mara
Rear view:
Vampiresas 1930: rear view Singin' In The Rain: rear view

Dora’s director is a carbon copy of Roscoe Dexter, the stressed-out director in Singin’ in the Rain.

Vampiresas 1930: the director Singin' In The Rain: the director

Two other minor characters, the elderly impresario we meet in Mr. Radeck’s night club and his young blonde girlfriend, may also be patterned after Rita Moreno’s character “Zelda Zanders” and her boyfriend, the “eligible bachelor”.

Vampiresas 1930: etc. Singin' In The Rain: etc.

Here’s the trouble: Franco’s movie so far has been a painfully ordinary romantic comedy. Singing’ in the Rain, on the other hand, is not only one of the best movies ever made, it’s one of the best movies about movies ever made. It’s a spectacular exercise in pure cinema — one that delights in its artificiality, while at the same time commenting on the artificiality of the movies (my favorite line in a movie stuffed full of favorite lines is given to R.F., the producer, just after Gene Kelly’s Don has finished pitching the “Broadway Melody” number [“Gotta dance!”]. We’ve just been treated to a show-stopping, 13-minute production number of such stunning virtuosity that it’s hard to believe any movie could contain it. Just after this incredible sequence, Don turns to the producer and asks him what he thinks of the idea. R.F. replies, “I can’t quite visualize it…”)

Cinema — love of the cinema, passion for the cinema, understanding of the cinema — is woven into the fabric of Singing’ in the Rain from beginning to end. The plot device of the coming of the Talking Pictures is central to its story. In Vampiresas 1930, on the other hand, the advent of the Talkies comes as a complete shock. It’s introduced by newspaper headlines. Sure, newspaper headlines had heralded the triumph of The Jazz Singer in Singin’ in the Rain, but the bad news had been built up to gradually (not as though we didn’t know what was going to happen). Nor did ruin come to the characters right away, the way it seems to do in Vampiresas…. Far from building up a sense of comic foreboding, as Donen and Kelly did, and examining the change’s impact on the characters, Vampiresas… only shows up newspaper clippings. One states that 24 silent stars have all killed themselves in despair. Ha. Ha. Ha.

Vampiresas 1930: announcing the demise of the silent film Singin' In The Rain: announcing the demise of the silent film

Now, you can’t really blame Franco for the disparity between Vampiresas… and the movie it depends on for its first half. The story and screenplay were the fault — ahem, work of Pío Ballasteros, with dialogue provided by Franco. Who was Ballasteros? I have no idea; I do know, however, that the film was made at Estudios Ballasteros, so you can read into that anything you want.

But when we come to the second half of the flick, I am willing to assign plenty of blame to anybody who had anything to do with it.

You may have noticed I mentioned the name “Radeck” very briefly in my description above. In Franco’s films, “Radeck” is the name of the villain — the name first turns up in 1960’s Labios Rojos, and would continue to signify the Bad Guy all the way through Franco’s career. There’s been no room for a stock Bad Guy in the movie so far, just as there was no place for one in Singin’ in the Rain. That’s about to change: earlier, Daniel and Carolina had gone out for a night on the town, and while dancing in Radeck’s night club, had become so carried away by the music that they’d jumped onstage and given an impromptu performance with the band. We’re given the impression they’re about to be discovered by an elderly producer, who (just as in La Reina del Tabarín) just happens to be in the audience. That’s not what happens. The real point of the sequence is to introduce Radeck and his associates… the photography changes style drastically when we meet Radeck, becoming all noirish and Wellesian.

Radeck’s nightclub is really a front for his nefarious activities. When one of his underlings tries to double-cross him and rob the club, Radeck sneaks up on him and shoots him dead. Radeck and his girlfriend dump the body in a Paris park, but they neglect to remove the stolen money from the corpse. The next morning, when the starving Dora and her friends sit alone in the park, the stolen money blows across the park. Dora and the others find the money just as a passing policeman finds the body… and soon the four friends are on the run, under suspicion of murder.

Yeah, I know… it sounds like the scriptwriter ran out of ideas halfway through, and decided to throw in a chase scene. If only it were so innocuous. In fact, either Ballasteros or Franco had seen (and been impressed by) Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot, which had come out a year or so before. In Wilder’s film, Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis played musicians on the lam, who disguised themselves as women and joined up with an all-girl band. Because of its cross-dressing theme (and Joe E. Brown’s infamous final line), Some Like It Hot had been held up by the Spanish censors, who did not allow it to be released in Spain until 1963. Perhaps Ballasteros and Franco thought they could subvert the censors by turning the second half of their movie into a near-remake of Wilder’s film. Perhaps they thought they could rip off Wilder, and nobody would notice… since the original film hadn’t been released yet to a local audience. Whatever their motivation may have been, rip off Wilder is exactly what they did; and if the thought of Yves Massard and Antonio Ozores in drag scares you, you’ve only scratched the surface of the horror in store.

To give you a better idea of what’s to come, the French title of Vampiresas 1930 is Some Like It Black. And they’re not talking about coffee.

You see, the four fugitives need to find some way to sneak out of Paris to avoid the police. While Dora and Tony are waiting to speak to their agent, they overhear a phone conversation with Radeck: it seems he’s hired an all-black jazz band to play at his Club Negresco in Nice (you see where this is going, don’t you?). Tony, Dora, Daniel and Carolina rush off to the train station, where they meet the jazz band disembarking. Since the players don’t speak much French, they’re very happy when these four friendly Parisians offer to help them find their connecting train to Nice. They don’t notice that the “helpful” quartet has really put them on a train for… Siberia. Ha. Ha. Ha.

With the actual band out of the way, this means that not only Dora, Tony, Daniel and Carolina, but the entire population of the musicians’ boarding house are free to dress up in drag and blackface, and go down to Nice to take their place.

Ladies and gentlemen, behold the result:

Vampiresas 1930

No, no… take a good long look; I insist:

Vampiresas 1930

Bear in mind we’re really only halfway through the picture. We have a good long time to suffer through this miserable indignity. To pad out the plot, it turns out that the Club Negresco is actually Radeck’s front for a major counterfeiting operation. Our terribly convincing and not-at-all offensive pseudo-black musicians have gone from one criminal mess straight into another.

Clearly this movie presents a lot of problems for a modern audience. But one of the problems it ran into early on stemmed from its origin as a vehicle for Mikaela. The trouble was, Vampiresas 1930 also featured the cinema debut of the gamine-ish Lina Morgan, who was an established stage actress and a natural physical comedienne. Miss Morgan wiped Mikaela off the screen with her every appearance. Take, for example, one of Mikaela’s big emotional numbers at the musicians’ boarding house: there she is, singing her heart out in a loving close-up… and over her left shoulder is Morgan, pretending to play the double-bass, making Harpo Marx faces and stealing the show. I guarantee that not a single eye in the theater was watching Mikaela while that scene went on. Mikaela’s career stalled after Vampiresas 1930, but Morgan’s was only beginning.

Vampiresas 1930

If Franco’s film had ended halfway through, Vampiresas 1930 might have made a good intro for Morgan. Unfortunately, once she starts doing Harpo Marx in blackface, her performance goes from charmingly eccentric to horrifying. Her “ethnic” schtick becomes so broad that it brings to mind every ghastly minstrel-show stereotype. Her antics are highlighted by the fact that nobody else seems to be trying in the least to do anything with their roles in disguise. All together, the band’s stage show performances are certainly unique: you can’t bear to watch them, but you can’t look away, either.

The nadir comes when the band is caught onstage after discovering the counterfeiting plan. Their way offstage is blocked by gun-wielding thugs, so they have to keep repeating and repeating and repeating the same tepid number (“Lara-Lara”, written by Franco himself) while they mosey en-masse through the crowd from one exit to the next. By this point, Massard’s shoe-polish makeup is already starting to rub off; the fact that the piano continues to play on the soundtrack even after Massard’s got up to join the others is a relatively minor problem by comparison.

Vampiresas 1930 is (so far) my single least favorite Jess Franco film. Admittedly, there are a whole raft of mid-eighties Franco flicks I haven’t seen yet; but since Vampiresas… contains so few of the (ahem) qualities we associate with a Jess Franco film, I find it unlikely that any of his more characteristic work will inspire such loathing. The Spanish DVD doesn’t help anything by cropping the frame to the wrong aspect ratio.

At the very end of the film, I kept waiting for the members of the real jazz band to come back from their inadvertent trip to Siberia and beat the living shit out of the principal cast. Alas, that’s not what happens… but it’s a beautiful dream.


 


While they were in Nice filming the latter half of Vampiresas…, Franco took the producer Sergio Newman to see Terence Fisher’s Brides of Dracula. Franco later claimed he loathed the Hammer horror films. “Terence Fisher is one of the worst film-makers that ever was,” said the director of Lulu’s Talking Asshole (Obsession: The Films of Jess Franco [Balbo/Blumenstock/Kessler], p. 244). But at the time, Franco seemed to find the Hammer films’ approach inspirational: if only their lurid, explicit approach to horror could be extended to the erotic implications of the stories, then, maybe, there’d be something worth watching…

Out of that experience in Nice emerged Franco’s first horror film, and his best-known film of any kind: Gritos en la Noche (“Screams in the Night”, aka “The Awful Dr. Orlof”).

Gritos en la Noche opens in the very early 20th century, as a series of abductions is terrorizing the town of Hartog. Young girls are disappearing off the streets at random, never to be seen again. In fact, they’re being abducted by the awful Dr. Orlof (Howard Vernon), a former prison surgeon who needs young bodies for his medical experiments. His dirty work is done by his blind, disfigured, zombie-like servant Morpho, a psychopath rescued from prison at the expense of his mind; Morpho subdues his victims by tearing out their throats with his teeth. Orlof’s goal is to restore his daughter Melissa to life. She had been burnt in a fire, and now languishes in a coma, her once-beautiful face scarred beyond recognition.

On the trail of the disappearances is a policeman called Inspector Tanner (Conrado San Martin). Tanner has some good ideas: for example, he is seen to virtually invent the facial composite during the course of the movie (though I think the practice was already in use by that time). But overall, he’s a bit of a blockhead. Most of the real detective-work in the movie is done by Tanner’s fiancée, the danseuse Wanda Brodsky, with some help from a clever, sharp-eyed beggar named Jeannot.

Orlof’s method is to woo young girls with champagne and jewelry, convince them to go off with him, and then leave them to Morpho. Unfortunately for him, one of his victims loses the necklace he gave her in the struggle; when the beggar Jeannot finds it and sells it to a jeweler, its unique design is recognized by a policeman who was among the last to see the girl alive. While Tanner struggles to figure out what to do with this information, Orlof and Wanda encounter each other. Orlof is enthralled, because Wanda is the living image of his daughter Melissa (the two women are both played by Diana Lorys). Wanda, however, recognizes Orlof from Tanner’s attempt at creating an Identikit, and realizes that he must be the monster. Without telling Tanner what she’s up to, Wanda disguises herself as a prostitute and starts visiting the bars where she last saw Orlof. She hopes she’ll be able to attract his attention again, so she can get close to him and find out what he’s really up to…

But poor Wanda hasn’t bargained on the existence of the half-human Morpho, and soon finds herself in over her head. She’s able to send a last-minute emergency message to Tanner, but the Inspector (dunderhead that he is) thinks it’s just another false lead and refuses even to read it… until it’s nearly too late. While he dithers, Wanda attempts to escape, and discovers the hideous truth behind Orlof’s experiments. In the meantime, Orlof makes a bad mistake in his dealings with his ex-lover and assistant, Arne (Perla Cristal), which may spell doom for all of them…

Gritos en la Noche exists in two main versions: the better-known international version, which contains some notorious footage of bare breasts, and the version made for release within Franco’s conservative Spain. The Spanish version, while missing the nudity, is actually longer than the international version, and holds together slightly better. The brief nudity has drawn all sorts of notice in books and articles on Franco, but it’s really pretty uninteresting today: there’s a scene in which Dr. Orlof draws a scalpel between the breasts of his victim on the operating table, and a second scene in which the lust-crazed Morpho tears the dress off the heroine. The first of these scenes never made much sense to me: why (other than for giggles) is he working on her chest, when he is supposed to be cutting off her face? The footage has also been shoehorned in, in a very sloppy way that doesn’t match the surrounding sequences. The second of these scenes was shot using a stand-in, since Diana Lorys refused to do it herself. So neither of these famous moments is really integral to the film. (Nice boobies, though!)

In the Spanish cut, the opening credits extend into the first scene as far as the moment in which the drunk girl, soon to be a victim of Morpho, peers at herself in a mirror. This explains the weird disconnect between the action and the music — wonderful, avant-garde improvisation involving keyboards, percussion and slide whistle… Because the credits are missing, the action and the music seem totally at odds with each other in the international version… and this gives the opening an eerily-appropriate feeling of malaise. Thus the Spanish cut has a slightly more conventional feel, though it’s well worth tracking down as a valid and enjoyable alternative version.

Orlof and his blind henchman Morpho are lifted from the old Béla Lugosi film, The Dark Eyes of London. Lugosi had played a dual role of Dr. Orloff (with two “f”s) and kindly Professor Dearborn; though the movie was based on a novel by Edgar Wallace, the name “Orloff” did not appear in the book (in which the villain’s real name was Judd… “The Awful Dr. Judd” just doesn’t have the same ring to it). Lugosi’s Orloff had been aided by his lumbering, disfigured henchman “Blind Jake”, who’d ended up turning on his master in much the same way Morpho ends up turning on his.

Melissa and her disfigured face are clearly derived from Georges Franju’s Les Yeux Sans Visage (“Eyes Without a Face”, 1960), the hugely influential art-horror film that inspired a decade of European rip-offs. Franco would return to Franju’s original many times throughout his career, most notably in his 1987 film Faceless. The Awful Dr. Orlof is sort-of an anti-Franju film, since Les Yeux Sans Visage was specifically intended to avoid all the exploitative elements and horror-movie clichés that Franco’s film wallows in.

Orlof is Franco’s most famous film, but it’s not his best. The screenplay is crammed with terrible expository dialogue — which is unfortunate, considering how effectively Franco uses visual cues alone to convey Morpho’s ability to hunt by sound. Inspector Tanner’s investigations slow the movie to a crawl whenever he’s on screen; and no matter how clever his “Identikit” idea may be, it’s hard to believe that anyone would really be identified through the terrible drawings that result.

The actual horror elements of the movie work much better. The black and white photography lends everything a dank and decadent atmosphere (Franco’s use of light and shadow in his black and white films is very effective; he would not make another film in color until 1967!). The scenes of Morpho hunting his prey through an empty house are certainly disturbing, but there are quiet, subtle moments as well: when Howard Vernon’s Orlof sits considering his prospective victim, he’s captured in half-shadow, while the eyes of the girl he’s watching are fully illuminated. Vernon thus appears so dark by comparison to the girl, yet is so clearly visible, that he almost seems to be a living negative image (which is appropriate).

Orlof

 
Morpho

Vernon himself was an inspired choice for the sinister doctor. Born Mario Lippert, this Swiss-American actor had played important roles in films by Jean-Pierrre Melville, and could have gone on to a career making Important Films. He didn’t want a career like that, though. He preferred the unusual, the unexpected and the outré… which is why he got along so well with Franco, and continued to make films with him for most of the rest of his life. Vernon approached his roles in Melville’s Le Silence de la Mer and the Franco-scripted Zombie Lake with equal commitment and enthusiasm, and that’s the attitude that endeared him not only to Franco, but to legions of bad movie fans everywhere.

Still, even the horror aspect of the movie makes very little sense. There’s no reason why poor Melissa’s state should hinge on the condition of her face. There’s also no real explanation for the fact that once Orlof dies, Melissa dies, too. It’s absurd, but in this case the absurdity constitutes the core of the movie. The two are entwined in a sick, quasi-incestuous, quasi-necrophiliac sort of relationship; Melissa’s ailment might be more charitably described as poetic rather than clinical. Orlof and Melissa are two of Franco’s most important recurring characters. Various Melissas return throughout the Franco filmography, and in his bizarre tarot deck the “Melissa” card tends to suggest both innocence and doom. In The Secret of Doctor Orloff (two “f”s), a Melissa must lead her zombified father to his final death; in Erotic Rites of Frankenstein, Melissa is the blind bird-woman “daughter” created by Howard Vernon’s Cagliostro as an answer to Frankenstein’s male creation.

As for Orlof, he represents the first appearance of the Bad Father in a Franco film. Names recur often in Franco’s movies: Orlof(f), Radeck, Kalman, Al Pereira… sometimes these names have a symbolic significance (or at least, they assume this significance over time): for example, “Linda” is usually the innocent to be corrupted; “Lorna” often represents the corrupting influence. Other names and roles are taken from their literary sources: de Sade’s Eugénie, Justine and Juliette make repeated appearances throughout his filmography. But the Bad Father is different… actually, it’s one of the few elements in any of Franco’s movies that seems to go deeper than the surface. With Gritos…, such an early movie, we can’t tell yet what deeper significance the Bad Father may have. We’re still mostly in monster movie territory. But we’ll be revisiting the Bad Father many times as we go through Franco’s output. I have yet to decide if the depth of the image is real or apparent… but then again that’s exactly why I’m watching so many Franco films in chronological order.

Orlof again

Lastly, if there’s one truly awful thing about Dr. Orlof, it’s the English dubbing on the international version. I have the old Image Entertainment DVD, on which the viewing options are either English or French with no subtitles. Fortunately, my dimly-remembered high school French is quite enough to carry me through the French version. The English dialogue is so bad it’s unlistenable.

PS — the terrible opera seen briefly in La Reina del Tabarín is identified in Gritos en la Noche as Giacomo Meyerbeer’s Faust. Meyerbeer never wrote an opera based on Faust. He did wrote a very similar opera called Robert le Diable… but this ain’t it.

Jess Franco: 1959/60

Sunday, June 2nd, 2013

I’ve already written a full review of Jess Franco’s first film, Tenemos 18 Años (“We Are 18”, 1959). Tenemos 18 Años was a virtually plotless road movie; it followed two girls on a trip across Spain in an absurd yellow car. The girls are hoping for excitement, but all they get are car problems and road fatigue. So they begin to imagine picaresque adventures for each other, and these fantasy sequences — which blend uneasily in with reality as the movie progresses — form the main part of the film. Midway through the movie, the lead male actor (comedian Antonio Ozores, playing the character “Mariano” — an in-joke reference to Ozores’s brother, the director Mariano Ozores) has his own fantasy sequence that turns into a 15-minute horror film parody. This bizarre sequence is filmed in a completely different style from anything else in the movie, and quotes many of the familiar horror tropes that would become Franco’s stock-in-trade for most of the rest of his career.

Unruly, scattershot, chaotic, unconstrained by narrative… Tenemos 18 Años certainly was a far cry from the typical Spanish comedy of the time. Franco hoped the movie would come as a breath of fresh air, and would inspire both audiences and film-makers to start looking for new directions in their light entertainment. But there was a reason most Spanish comedies of that time were so conventional and repetitive: they were still heavily controlled by the government of that other Franco. By the mid-50’s, satirical films and parodies had started to appear, questioning the values presented by the state-approved españoladas and other cozy depictions of an isolated Spain; but a first feature from a brash young unknown was much more likely to attract the scrutiny of the censors than the work of established artists. With his very first film, Jess Franco found himself in trouble with the Authorities.

Tenemos… was kept from release by the state for two years. Ostensibly, this was because of a fantasy sequence involving escaped prisoners: one of the girls imagines falling in love with a convict and helping him evade the law, and this was considered unacceptable. In fact, there’s much more about Tenemos… that ran counter to the tenets of fascist entertainment: Tenemos… did not present a picture of Spanish youth, or of Spanish femininity, that conformed to the image the censors wanted to convey. Here we had two 18-year-old girls on their own — traveling freely, expressing themselves freely, exercising their imaginations, being thoroughly independent… neither madonnas to be worshiped nor whores to be redeemed; neither idealistically-depicted domestic figures, nor victims of that same repressive idealism. They were just a couple of girls, engaged in a free-spirited rite of passage that had only been imaginable, up to this point, as a journey for young Spanish men (Pavlović, Despotic Bodies and Transgressive Bodies, pp. 109-110).

It’s tempting to wonder what might have happened to Franco’s development if Tenemos… had been given a fair chance. As it stands, the trouble Franco ran into with a relatively harmless movie like Tenemos… only deepened his distrust of the Authorities, and paved the way for the truly transgressive films he’d make later on.

Aside from Antonio Ozores’s prophetic turn as the monstrous “Lord Marian”, this first film introduces one of the most important recurring elements in Franco’s career: the decision to place his story, however insubstantial, firmly in the hands of his female characters. Men in Franco’s films tend to think they’re the ones controlling the situation, and indeed Franco often encouraged his actors to believe this was the case. In fact, these men are usually helpless fools who can’t do anything without the women’s help. Franco never told his actors that this was his intent: he was afraid that if he told them they were supposed to be saps, they’d play their parts too broadly. Thus he encouraged them to think of themselves as typical movie leading men. In the context of a Franco film, this made them look like “incorruptible idiots” (Tohill & Tombs: Immoral Tales, p. 107).


 


Many of Franco’s later films would follow Tenemos… and center on two strong female protagonists. His very next film, Labios Rojos (“Red Lips”, 1960, also starring Tenemos…‘s Isana Medel, who was his girlfriend at the time), featured two young women who ran a private detective agency. At the request of a mysterious man named Kalman, the “Red Lips” detectives try to track down a jewel thief named Radeck. Neither the jewels nor the thieves turn out to be what they seem, and soon the girls are on the run, wrongly accused of murder…

Labios Rojos is, if not a lost film, at least an elusive one. I’ve never been able to track down a copy. Obsession: The Films of Jess Franco (Balbo/Blumenstock/Kessler) says the file “seems to have disappeared totally from circulation” (p. 37), and bases its own review on the photonovel that was derived from the movie. Nevertheless, the Red Lips girls returned many times throughout Franco’s filmography: Sadisterotica (aka Rote Lippen, 1967) is a sort-of remake of Labios Rojos, and that film was followed by a sequel, Bésame, Monstruo (Kiss Me, Monster) the same year. Les Emmerdeuses (“The Pains in the Ass”, 1974) was yet another reboot of the concept, with the lesbian subtext of the girl-girl partnership made explicit; while La Chica de los Labios Rojos (“The Girl with the Red Lips”, 1986) condensed the two girls into one, probably for budgetary reasons. The last appearance of the two female detectives came nearly 40 years after the first, with Seda Roja (Red Silk, 1999).

But the Red Lips girls aren’t the only recurring characters to be introduced in Labios Rojos. “Radeck” — a name taken from a Georges Simenon novel — went on to become one of Franco’s stock names for his villains, just as “Kalman” became shorthand for a character that was uninteresting in himself, but was still important to the plot. Franco recycled the name of the henchman, “Carlos Moroni”, as a generic henchman name several times in his early films, but discarded it before long.


 


Before Franco could get his directing career started in earnest, he still had some journeyman’s jobs to do. At the same time Franco was making his first two films, he also provided screenplays for a couple of films by León Klimovsky. When Klimovsky backed out of doing a musical, his producer Sergio Newman remembered Franco, and thought the energetic, imaginative young man would make a good replacement. That’s how Franco, the man who thought he was going to revolutionize Spanish comedy with Tenemos 18 Años, ended up making the safest, most conventional movie of his entire career: La Reina del Tabarín (“Queen of the Tabarin Club”, 1960).

La Reina del Tabarín was a Spanish/French co-production, with Newman sharing credit (at least on paper) with the legendary French producer Marius Lesoeur. It was intended as a vehicle for a rising star named Mikaela Wood, aka “Mikaela”. In spite of its Spanish setting, the story of La Reina del Tabarín is puerile Ruritanian comic-opera nonsense, about a poor-but-honest girl of the street who falls in love with a callow nobleman and gradually teaches him to love truly.

Now, in spite of its hackneyed, uninteresting plot, there are several reasons to pay attention to La Reina del Tabarín. First, most obviously, this was Jess Franco’s third feature film — out of nearly 200 — and as his least characteristic film, it’s noteworthy if only as a curiosity. Even in such a conventional film, there were still a couple of opportunities for Franco to express his own emerging style; there are several moments in the film, some only seconds long, that are recognizably Franco’s, and which probably would not have succeeded as well had they been left to Klimovsky.

But the main reason to study La Reina del Tabarín — its chief appeal to the Franco-ologist — is this: it’s La Reina… that introduces us to the Franco Version Problem.

Now, as a devotee of the symphonies of Anton Bruckner, I am very familiar with Version Problems. But the catalog of Jess Franco is probably the ultimate example of the phenomenon. As if it wasn’t confusing enough that he frequently re-used his own scripts — sometimes for movies of completely different genres — his films often went through so many changes in post-production that it’s hard to tell if some versions should even be considered the same movie… or even be considered a Jess Franco movie at all. Sometimes Franco himself was responsible for the changes — for example, he shot a version of Erotic Rites of Frankenstein in which the actors were always clothed for distribution in conservative, pre-destape Spain, and an entire second version with much more nudity for distribution in the rest of Europe. But for the most part, the edits were likely to be done without either Franco’s knowledge or permission. For example, his first Marquis de Sade adaptation, Justine (1968), was heavily censored by its Anglo-American producers (AIP!); while A Virgin Among the Living Dead (1971) was completely recut by Eurocine, first with extraneous softcore inserts… then with hardcore inserts… then, in the early 1980’s, with terrible zombie attack footage shot by Jean Rollin… before finally being edited out of all recognition and showing up on US home video as “Zombie 5”. So it went throughout Franco’s career.

And the troubles all start here.

I’ll explain by providing a synopsis of the Spanish version, which is the longest. The movie begins with credits displayed over footage of the streets and rooftops of Madrid. The background music is a collage of all the movie’s songs, in the manner of an operetta overture (This opening, too, has a sort of backhanded appeal for the Franco fan: at some point in his brief time at Film School, before he got thrown out, Franco must have heard one of his teachers explain that a good way to create visual interest in the frame is to include one of the many antique street lamps that feature in Spain’s urban architecture. Certainly in some of Franco’s later films, El Conde Dracula (1969) and Dracula, Prisoner of Frankenstein (1971), street lamps and hanging signs feature so often they deserve their own credits. Well, in the opening credits of La Reina del Tabarín, there’s a street lamp in nearly every shot).

The movie opens with a neat crane shot that gives us an overhead glimpse of our heroine, Lolita (Mikaela), singing and dancing for coins in the streets with the help of her uncle and brother. Lolita’s performance is blocking traffic; and it just so happens that one of the people stuck watching her is a theater manager, who’s very impressed by her voice and her beauty. He puts a generous contribution in her tambourine, and tells her to come see him about a job. Her uncle and her brother, who are tired of being poor and hungry, are thrilled… but Lolita insists she will never compromise herself by singing as somebody else’s servant.

Once they all get home, though, Lolita finds it difficult to maintain her defiant attitude. In spite of some bad comedy and a pretty good song — “La luna me engañó” — Lolita can no longer ignore her family’s hunger. So she goes to rent some decent clothes and audition for the theater manager. Of course, the show for which she’s auditioning, like the revue-within-the-musical in “Guys and Dolls”, is just awful… an intentionally-overdone example of the worst kind of amateur show. The club concièrge doesn’t want to let Lolita and her family in, thinking she’s a non-paying customer; but Lolita gets the attention of the management by singing such a fiery flamenco number that the producers can’t even hear the rehearsal any longer. Lolita starts her audition — but before she’s even begun, one of the producers gooses her. That’s enough for Lolita.

In the meantime, we’re introduced to Fernando (Yves Massard), who appears to be a harried commercial traveler saying farewell to his belovèd before going away on a long business trip. However, no sooner has he parted from one girl than he’s run into the arms of another — a harried commercial traveller, just returning to his belovèd from a long business trip. In fact, he’s not engaged to either girl, and he’s not a businessman: he’s a wealthy nobleman who serves in the Spanish diplomatic corps. He’s engaged to a young French heiress named Monique, the daughter of a diplomat… but until he’s actually married, he’s determined to play the field as aggressively as possible.

Sneaking away from Girl No. 2, he returns to his mother’s home just in time to join a costume party. He’s had a double planted in costume to give him an alibi for his wanderings, and he quickly exchanges clothing with him. Brushing off yet another young lady who’s recognized him as her sometime-boyfriend, Fernando rejoins Monique as though nothing had happened.

The sounds of the party carry out into the street, where a despondent Lolita and her family are dragging home their cart and barrel-organ. Realizing that these rich people must have more than enough food, and remembering her success fighting her way into the audition, Lolita climbs over the villa walls. Pretending to be part of the scheduled entertainment, she bursts into song. The partygoers are thrilled by her singing and dancing, and since it’s a costume party nobody thinks twice about her shabby clothes. Fernando’s mother rewards her for her performance by promising her a good meal.

On her way to the kitchen, Lolita bumps into Fernando, who’s bringing champagne for Monique. Lolita mistakes Fernando’s military costume for servant’s livery; Fernando, seizing his chance to get to know this pretty young girl, goes along with the misunderstanding. He tells her he’s “Rigoberto” (“Roberto” in the French version), the valet. Fernando/Rigoberto watches as Lolita unselfconsciously polishes off an entire chicken. He helps her carry food out to her cart, and promises to come see her with more groceries the next day.

Fernando tries all his usual pick-up lines with Lolita, but the streetwise girl sees through all of them. Fernando is horrified when he catches himself actually blurting out the truth about who he is and what he does — our first indication that he’s seriously falling for Lolita. As the two grow closer, he comes to see her when she performs at a local restaurant. Unfortunately, others in Fernando’s circle also go to this restaurant, and one of his peers catches sight of him and Lolita in mid-snog. Soon their affair is the subject of gossip all over town, and the news eventually reaches both Monique and Fernando’s mother.

The grande dame summons Lolita at once. The girl thinks she wants to hire her to entertain… but when she finds out Fernando’s true identity, she’s devastated. Fernando’s mother is amused that the girl had no idea who her son really was, but insists that this impropriety cannot be allowed to continue. Why (she chuckles), the very idea of a man in Fernando’s position being seen with a mere street singer! Lolita bristles: which of them is it, really, who has been behaving disgracefully all this time?

When Lolita confronts Fernando with his deception, Fernando assures her that whatever he meant to do at first, he has now genuinely fallen in love with her. He’ll give up his position, he says — he’ll cut the ties with his family, and he’ll break off his engagement with Monique — if only she’ll elope with him. He promises to return to her tomorrow, a free man; and Lolita, not fully believing him, shakes his hand sadly in parting.

In fact, what Fernando does next is look for the guy who betrayed him. Finding him drunk, he knocks him out and throws a glove in his face… challenging him to a duel. In the duel the next morning, Fernando deliberately fires his bullet into the trees. His “friend” does no such thing. Fernando is not killed, but is left grievously wounded. Naturally, he never shows up to run off with Lolita; and Lolita thinks he has abandoned her (which, really, he has). When an impresario from Paris hears her perform and offers to take her back to France with him, Lolita accepts.

In Paris, Lolita gets the full Pygmalion treatment from her impresario and his associate, Professor Picardi, who turn her from a coarse Spanish spitfire into a sophisticated Parisian chanteuse. She makes her début at the Club Tabarin as “Lola Miranda”, and quickly becomes a national sensation. Because of her artistry, she’s celebrated as a social equal by everybody-who’s-anybody. Back in Madrid, the convalescent Federico reads of her success. “Quickly!” he cries to his valet, “We must go to Paris…!”

And you can fill in the rest yourself.

Here’s where the fun begins: when La Reina was released in France, Eurocine’s Marius Lesoeur considered it his movie. To make this clear, he made some drastic changes to the film. First, he took most of the Spanish crew’s names out of the credits, which he also altered by removing the shots of Madrid. The French version opens with a backdrop of the Tabarin Club, advertising the performances of “Mariquita, la Belle du Tabarin”. One one hand, this alteration suggests that the important part of the film is the portion that takes place in Paris. On the other hand, the change suggests the producer never actually watched the film… since “Mariqita” is the name of a song Lolita sings at the club, not the name of the performer.

The next important change Lesoeur made was to cut out the entire first 15 minutes of the film. This meant a couple of songs were cut from the picture, but no matter: the French version even cut the references to those songs out of the music for the opening credits! Thus La Belle du Tabarin begins with Federico rather than Lolita.

This is a very big change, and one that affects the entire tone of the picture. The original Spanish version is Lolita’s story all the way through; in spite of the movie’s conventionality, this emphasis makes it thematically consistent with Franco’s later work, in which the female characters are almost always at the heart of the action. The French version has Lolita intrude unexpectedly into Fernando’s story — and considering Fernando is played by a French actor, we can perhaps see why. Whatever the reason, though, it’s a mistake. Fernando is a despicable cad at the beginning of the movie, and by the end, “happy ending” notwithstanding, he still seems like a despicable cad who doesn’t deserve a second chance (of course, the movie’s finale takes place on New Year’s Eve 1913-14; considering what the next year hold for everybody it’s not really much of a “happy ending”, in either version). His decision to provoke a duel, then deliberately lose the fight, suggests that he would rather die than be honest with the women in his life; and though Lolita’s male friends see his survival of the duel as proof of his masculinity and honor, in hindsight it looks like nothing of the sort.

Most tellingly, the French version changes the very last scene of the movie. In the Spanish original, Fernando and Lolita walk off into the breaking dawn, talking about how nice it will be to get the hell out of Paris and go back to beautiful, sunny Spain. In the background, we hear the energetic Spanish song “La luna me engañó”, from earlier in the film. Fin. But in the French version, the song has been cut out — just as it was cut from the first part of the film, along with the whole opening 15 minutes. It’s been replaced by a continuation of the sedate, romantic theater music from the scene before. The dialogue has also been removed: the lovers take their walk without saying a word to each other. There’s no mention of Spain at all.

So even as early as Jess Franco’s third film, producers were meddling with his work. Lesoeur managed to turn Franco’s movie, slight and uninteresting though it might have been, into something worse… without his knowledge or permission. Perhaps it was destiny.

Here are some other notable facts about La Reina…: To begin with, Franco gives classical music a ribbing. He presents it as stuffy and pretentious, and inferior to the “music of the streets” or even the music of the Club Tabarin. We get to see a few moments of a hilariously awful opera, shot in a broad comic style, which emphasizes all the stereotypes of Grand Opera (French opera, that is; not the Wagnerian type, which has stereotypes all its own)… The heroine cries, “No!” The villain sings back, “Yes! Ha! Ha! Ha!” The heroine cries, “No!” The villain sings back, “Yes! Ha! Ha! Ha!” And so on. It’s no wonder that Fernando and Monique walk out. Then, later on, Professor Picardi gives a soporific recital. In the French version, he introduces Beethoven’s 1808 “In Questa Tomba Oscura” by saying, “Now, my dear friends, I have the honor to present a new song…

Thinking of music, the song “Amor, amor” — which is featured prominently in Franco’s The Awful Doctor Orlof, makes its first appearance in Franco’s work here… in the scene where Fernando challenges his “friend” to a duel.

Next, there’s the case of the actress Dora Doll, who’s credited with a Special Appearance in the film. She plays another singer at the Tabarin Club, who at one point sings “La Petite Tonkinoise” (made famous by Josephine Baker and later featured in Richard Elfman’s Forbidden Zone (1980)). Dora Doll had a fairly busy career in European cinema; but by the mid-eighties, she’d ended up making terrible movies for Lesoeur’s Eurocine studio with director Andrea Bianchi (Burial Ground). One of her movies for Bianchi, by most accounts her worst, was the Franco-scripted Mengele Commando (1986).

More significantly, La Reina… marked the first screen appearance of an actress who became very important to Franco’s development. Her name was Soledad Miranda, an astonishingly beautiful young woman who was one of the small army of actors and artists who hung out around Mikaela. Franco gave her a brief cameo as a French noblewoman in the audience at the club. The brief appearance helped her get her foot in the door of the industry; she continued to appear in a succession of minor roles and minor films until Franco had the opportunity to cast her as Lucy in his version of Dracula. From then on, he cast her in a succession of wild and sexy starring roles. She became his muse, his inspiration… and then she died at the height of her career, after a horrible car crash. Franco was devastated by the loss.

And finally, in spite of the generic nature of the movie, there are a handful of scenes in which Franco manages to create some real visual interest. One of these is the duel scene, for which Franco seems to have unleashed his inner Orson Welles. Part of the duel is filmed from underneath the doctor’s carriage, which at first seems like a pointlessly arty setup… until the final shot is fired; the horse starts, and the carriage shakes. Suddenly the reason for the odd framing becomes clear.

The climax of the duelling scene

The other places where Franco’s camera seems to come alive are the several club scenes. All through his career, Franco never passed up an opportunity to put a some kind of stage show in his movies. Here, at least, the idea makes sense as part of the plot. He would never again have the chance to mount something so big… so elaborate… so eye-killingly colorful. It’s obvious why Newman wanted Franco to take over from Klimovsky: what works in La Reina del Tabarín works because Franco made it work.



 

Operation: Jess Franco

Sunday, June 2nd, 2013

The (in)famous Spanish director Jesús “Jess” Franco died on April 2, 2013. I found out about his passing on April 3, as soon as I got home from a funeral. Immediately I checked the B-Masters’ site, to see if any of my colleagues had heard the news and posted something on the subject. That’s when I first noticed the B-Masters’ site had gone down. Just when you think a day couldn’t get any worse…

Naturally, on hearing of Franco’s death my instinct was to sit down and watch one of his movies. That turned out to be impossible: April 2013 just got worse for everybody the longer it dragged on. Eventually things calmed down a little. But by the time I finally got a chance to sit down and savor a few Franco flicks, I really couldn’t decide which film or films made the best memorial. Oasis of the Zombies? Female Vampire? Lust for Frankenstein? (OH GOD PLEASE NO!)

Suddenly it hit me: Tim Lucas has always insisted that to understand Franco properly, you had to see all of his films. So why not watch everything of his I could get my hands on? The idea made a surprising amount of sense. If I forced myself to watch as much of his filmography as I could stand get my hands on, in chronological order, I might finally come to terms with the whole Jess Franco phenomenon. I would get a better idea about his creative choices, his treatment of his material, his thematic concerns… and I could finally figure out exactly how I felt about him. Franco has always been a divisive figure in film history, so I guess it’s no wonder he’s divisive even in my own brain: half of me loves him, half of me thinks he’s a total fraud. Perhaps it was time to find out which half had the strongest argument.

So that’s what I intend to do. And I’m going to post my thoughts here, as I go over Jess Franco’s output year by year, from Mariquita to Mari-Cookie, from Doctor Orlof to Doctor Wong.

Now, let me be clear: I don’t intent to review everything he ever did, or even directed… some of his movies are lost, others were left unfinished, and some — honestly — I just don’t feel like tracking down. This is particularly true of his porn films: I’ve suffered through Lulu’s Talking Asshole; I don’t feel I need to see Lulu’s Lollipop too. I’ll watch A Crack for Two if I must, but is A Cock for Three really necessary? I’m also not going to torture myself by trying to track down every version of the movies I do watch. Most of Franco’s films exist in multiple versions, some prepared by the man himself, others done without his knowledge or permission. Keeping them all straight is a nightmare. I’m not trying to make a definitive statement, à la Lucas or Pete Tombs; I’m just trying to come up with my own suitable memorial for a man who — whether I like the idea or not — has been an important part of my movie-going life since I was a child.

The tip of the iceberg.

The Tally So Far:

1959
Tenemos 18 Años

1960
Labios Rojos — not reviewed (lost?)
La Reina del Tabarín

1961
Vampiresas 1930
Gritos en la Noche/The Awful Dr. Orlof

1962
La Muerte Silba un Blues
La Mano de un Hombre Muerto/The Sadistic Baron von Klaus

1963
El llanero
Rififí en la Ciudad

1964
El Segreto del Dr. Orloff

1965
Miss Muerte/The Diabolical Dr. Z

1966
Cartes sur table/Attack of the Robots
Residencia para Espías/Golden Horn