France, during the Nazi occupation: A brothel services high ranking SS officers whilst some of the women working there secretly aid the resistance.
This Nazi-sexploitation entry from cult French auteur José Bénazéraf occupies an interesting position. On the one hand it’s clearly a film with something to say and an intelligence behind it. On the other hand it’s limited by the need to present various banal hardcore production numbers.
The film’s setting provides some excuses for its porn-style presentation of sex. The situation of the prostitutes in the brothel broadly echoes that of the actresses in the film, that of the SS men the presumed viewer.
For whether their real motivation is wealth, survival, or political (i.e. secretly serving the resistance) these women are required to make their male partners feel good. If that means lots of writhing, moaning and general acting then so be it.
The men, meanwhile, are desperate: Like their analogues in the audience, they just want to get off, to temporarily forget and get away from everything else in the world.
Bénazéraf, however, refuses to allow this escape, with the scenes inside the brothel being punctuated by news from outside and images of a resistance man going from one contact to another.
The most problematic scenes, from a film-theoretical perspective, are those that present the prostitutes by themselves. Some present insights, by again foregrounding the differences between actor and role and social actor and social role; it’s a nice Sartrean theme if we think of his famous analysis of the waiter who refuses to be reified as just a waiter. Others, however, present the same old pseudo-lesbian stuff for the male gaze in an entirely female situation where the “male gaze” ought to be absent.
Such images give you a sense of a tension between the filmmaker, backer, distributors and the audience. Without them might have something closer to a French version of Nagasi Oshima’s In the Realm of the Senses, an uncompromising, honest and hardcore film exploring limits and boundaries in relation to early 20th century fascism.
Here it’s worth noting that on the version I watched the title card introduces the film as none other than a Thanatos production or presentation: Can we say mass psychology of fascism, eros and civilisation, eros and thanatos, and all that stuff the ordinary raincoater viewer couldn’t give a toss about. (Not that he necessarily should, of course.)
Unfortunately commercial realities seem to have dictated otherwise: Be perverse but not too perverse, and certainly don’t attempt to pervert the idea of perversion.
And yet Bénazéraf has, in his own perverse way, succeeded. For the thing that is odd about the film in relation is perhaps how it is still frustrating from both mainstream and more sadomasochistic / Nazi-themed porn perspectives: If you want a straightforward hardcore film, there’s too much talk and not enough action, with this also being filmed in an at times unconventional manner, as with Bénazéraf’s penchant for mirror-based compositions. If you want something harder, then Bénazéraf declines to really deliver it, even in the climactic SS torture sequence: Certainly it’s still pretty disturbing and perverse, but not in relation to your obscure 1970s specialist pornos.
The key here is that word, frustration. It is, after all, the name of Bénazéraf’s best known film and is arguably the signature term to describe his work, which even on this showing deserves to be better known, especially for fans of Franco, Rollin, D’Amato or the other more usual suspects.
As a bit of bait and switch to further lure in the curious (even if they may then knowingly then be frustrated) I’ll conclude by mentioning that Brigitte Lahaie makes an appearance with brown rather than blonde hair.
Showing posts with label nazisploitation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label nazisploitation. Show all posts
Friday, 20 August 2010
Sunday, 27 July 2008
Le Lunghe notti della Gestapo / Red Nights of the Gestapo
This is one of the more unusual Nazisploitation entries to come out of Italy, with none of the otherwise de rigeur concentration camps and only a few sadistic experiments of dubious scientific value.
Instead what we get is a factually grounded narrative that, by virtue of being based on the book of the same name by Bertha Uhland, the wife of the protagonist, here named von Uhler, and a supporting character in her own right, aspires to be taken a bit more seriously as an exploration of the evils of the Third Reich.
The film begins and ends with intertitles, the former announcing Rudolf Hess's dramatic flight to the UK and the latter the beginning of the invasion of the USSR, with the event depicted in between predicated on the first of these and seemingly contributing in no small way to the latter.
A history lesson
As Hess's underling SS man Manfred von Uhler (Ezio Miani) knows that his loyalty will be called into question by his master's defection and is prepared to commit suicide to preserve his, his family's and the SS's honour when he is taken by other, still more sinister, members of the selfsame organisation.
Effective symmetrical shots that wouldn't be out of place in The Conformist; outwith the SS lair and as the film progresses such symmetry and control is carefully lost
They strip him of rank and go through the motions of preparing a firing squad, which Uhler stands before impassively, but unexpectedly then announce that the whole thing was a test, which Uhler has passed, and thus assign him a mission vital to the security of the Reich that, as an ex-SS man whose loyalty to the party may be doubted by all but Himmler's inner circle, he is now uniquely well equipped for.
Uhler is to sound out a number of important civilian elements on the idea of plotting a coup with certain members of the Wehrmacht, in order to weed out those whose devotion to the cause and the war is less than wholehearted. The challenge is that he only has two weeks to bring them all together and acquire the necessary evidence – evidence that, as the film progresses, would in fact seem to be already there and probably not needed given the SS's usually pro-active approach.
Uhler's old friend Helmut von Danzig (Fred Williams), a francophile with no particular enthusiasm for the Reich, provides him with an initial route in while the sexual perversions of most of his targets – one man is obsessed with a particular dancer and actress, another with sucking milk from his partners' breasts as if he were a baby and so on – make it easy to lure them into compromising situations.
Von Danzig's women, with their lesbian tendencies, could also be from Bertolucci's film
As might the child who plays with dangerous toys
It's at this point, as Uhler sets to work recruiting appropriate female company and then lets them loose that the film either begins to lose its way or ups the ante, depending on your tolerance for sleaze, plot holes and sheer repetitiveness – significantly the film runs a comparatively epic 110 minutes rather than the usual 80 to 90 – whether you are willing to credit the filmmakers with attempting to say something meaningful about the nature of fascism thereby, and how far you believe the events depicted are a adequate representation of the truth given that Bertha Uhland presumably could not have been party to them.
Von Uhland and the women he has recruited
The first problem is that it's difficult to get a handle on what Manfred von Uhler is supposed to represent and what we are meant to feel for him.
He isn't an out and out bad guy along the lines of his Salon Kitty counterpart Helmut Vallenberg, being neither power-mad nor much of a pervert but rather a devoted family man and Nazi.
If the tension between these two is never adequately resolved it could be argued that this is quite deliberate and, indeed, makes a point about a contradiction in Nazi ideology – had the issues been explored in a way that made it clear this was indeed the intention.
Similarly, though Uhler sometimes intimates that he has his own agenda he subsequently fails to act on it, despite having foolishly being caught saying this and taking actions that one would have expected to have forced his hand.
Put another way, if Bertha Uhland's goal in telling her husband's story was to exonerate him, she either did a very bad job of it or was misled and / or misused by the filmmakers.
The second major problem is the presentation of the putatively anti-Nazi forces within Germany. Initially they're referred to as prominent members of the intelligentsia, but when gathered at the schloss are presented as a more mixed and sometimes internally conflicted group with those representing of culture and business or new and old money not always seeing eye to eye. Then there is the sense that, as far as the more intellectual types are concerned, they're second-rate figures anyway, furthered by one characters' reference to all those who have left, including the likes of Einstein, Brecht and Mann.
Perhaps more damaging, however, is that the SS are proved right in their intelligence suggesting them to be perverts almost to a man – one is even implied to be a paedophile – such that we're left wondering why their silence and compliance couldn't have been achieved long ago through a spot of judicious blackmail, buying off or other, more permanent means.
The Great Dictator never did this
Certainly, there's little sense of these men being able to take the high moral ground or having the capacity providing any sort of genuinely effective opposition or alternative leadership and every possibility that the unsympathetic viewer will come to regard them as just as bad, perhaps even worse, than Uhler.
This in turn foregrounds the whole question of how far the situation depicted really reflects the truth of Nazi Germany at the time, given the strength of the regime's propaganda machine, the succession of easy victories that already been won and the elimination, imprisonment or exiling of most of Nazi's most obvious enemies, whether real or imagined, during the preceeding eight years – unless we credit the filmmakers with attempting to illustrate the kind of perverse logic by which the regime and / or factions within it needed to be generating new enemies out of a paradoxical self-destructive self-sustenance.
Technically the film is better than most of its ilk, with more convincing period costumes and settings than usual, with the direction and performances also good enough to avoid much in the way of unintentional laughter. Some of the music choices, most notably the SS theme with lyrics in Italian about the sleep of reason breeding monsters – a theme important enough to also appear as an intertitle, albeit mis-spelled in the English translation – and frequent references to the pleasures of the whip, are a bit doubtful.
Luciano Rossi as a bearded intellectual
Tom Felleghy appears sans moustache as the head of an asylum who has managed to condition sadistic, masochistic and nympomaniac female patients in the hope that they might prove useful to the Reich – it won't ruin anything to say that they do – while Luciano Rossi is cast against type not as a Nazi pervert but as a relatively upstanding anti-Nazi professor.
A genuine oddity that's worth a look for curiosity value alone.
Instead what we get is a factually grounded narrative that, by virtue of being based on the book of the same name by Bertha Uhland, the wife of the protagonist, here named von Uhler, and a supporting character in her own right, aspires to be taken a bit more seriously as an exploration of the evils of the Third Reich.
The film begins and ends with intertitles, the former announcing Rudolf Hess's dramatic flight to the UK and the latter the beginning of the invasion of the USSR, with the event depicted in between predicated on the first of these and seemingly contributing in no small way to the latter.
A history lesson
As Hess's underling SS man Manfred von Uhler (Ezio Miani) knows that his loyalty will be called into question by his master's defection and is prepared to commit suicide to preserve his, his family's and the SS's honour when he is taken by other, still more sinister, members of the selfsame organisation.
Effective symmetrical shots that wouldn't be out of place in The Conformist; outwith the SS lair and as the film progresses such symmetry and control is carefully lost
They strip him of rank and go through the motions of preparing a firing squad, which Uhler stands before impassively, but unexpectedly then announce that the whole thing was a test, which Uhler has passed, and thus assign him a mission vital to the security of the Reich that, as an ex-SS man whose loyalty to the party may be doubted by all but Himmler's inner circle, he is now uniquely well equipped for.
Uhler is to sound out a number of important civilian elements on the idea of plotting a coup with certain members of the Wehrmacht, in order to weed out those whose devotion to the cause and the war is less than wholehearted. The challenge is that he only has two weeks to bring them all together and acquire the necessary evidence – evidence that, as the film progresses, would in fact seem to be already there and probably not needed given the SS's usually pro-active approach.
Uhler's old friend Helmut von Danzig (Fred Williams), a francophile with no particular enthusiasm for the Reich, provides him with an initial route in while the sexual perversions of most of his targets – one man is obsessed with a particular dancer and actress, another with sucking milk from his partners' breasts as if he were a baby and so on – make it easy to lure them into compromising situations.
Von Danzig's women, with their lesbian tendencies, could also be from Bertolucci's film
As might the child who plays with dangerous toys
It's at this point, as Uhler sets to work recruiting appropriate female company and then lets them loose that the film either begins to lose its way or ups the ante, depending on your tolerance for sleaze, plot holes and sheer repetitiveness – significantly the film runs a comparatively epic 110 minutes rather than the usual 80 to 90 – whether you are willing to credit the filmmakers with attempting to say something meaningful about the nature of fascism thereby, and how far you believe the events depicted are a adequate representation of the truth given that Bertha Uhland presumably could not have been party to them.
Von Uhland and the women he has recruited
The first problem is that it's difficult to get a handle on what Manfred von Uhler is supposed to represent and what we are meant to feel for him.
He isn't an out and out bad guy along the lines of his Salon Kitty counterpart Helmut Vallenberg, being neither power-mad nor much of a pervert but rather a devoted family man and Nazi.
If the tension between these two is never adequately resolved it could be argued that this is quite deliberate and, indeed, makes a point about a contradiction in Nazi ideology – had the issues been explored in a way that made it clear this was indeed the intention.
Similarly, though Uhler sometimes intimates that he has his own agenda he subsequently fails to act on it, despite having foolishly being caught saying this and taking actions that one would have expected to have forced his hand.
Put another way, if Bertha Uhland's goal in telling her husband's story was to exonerate him, she either did a very bad job of it or was misled and / or misused by the filmmakers.
The second major problem is the presentation of the putatively anti-Nazi forces within Germany. Initially they're referred to as prominent members of the intelligentsia, but when gathered at the schloss are presented as a more mixed and sometimes internally conflicted group with those representing of culture and business or new and old money not always seeing eye to eye. Then there is the sense that, as far as the more intellectual types are concerned, they're second-rate figures anyway, furthered by one characters' reference to all those who have left, including the likes of Einstein, Brecht and Mann.
Perhaps more damaging, however, is that the SS are proved right in their intelligence suggesting them to be perverts almost to a man – one is even implied to be a paedophile – such that we're left wondering why their silence and compliance couldn't have been achieved long ago through a spot of judicious blackmail, buying off or other, more permanent means.
The Great Dictator never did this
Certainly, there's little sense of these men being able to take the high moral ground or having the capacity providing any sort of genuinely effective opposition or alternative leadership and every possibility that the unsympathetic viewer will come to regard them as just as bad, perhaps even worse, than Uhler.
This in turn foregrounds the whole question of how far the situation depicted really reflects the truth of Nazi Germany at the time, given the strength of the regime's propaganda machine, the succession of easy victories that already been won and the elimination, imprisonment or exiling of most of Nazi's most obvious enemies, whether real or imagined, during the preceeding eight years – unless we credit the filmmakers with attempting to illustrate the kind of perverse logic by which the regime and / or factions within it needed to be generating new enemies out of a paradoxical self-destructive self-sustenance.
Technically the film is better than most of its ilk, with more convincing period costumes and settings than usual, with the direction and performances also good enough to avoid much in the way of unintentional laughter. Some of the music choices, most notably the SS theme with lyrics in Italian about the sleep of reason breeding monsters – a theme important enough to also appear as an intertitle, albeit mis-spelled in the English translation – and frequent references to the pleasures of the whip, are a bit doubtful.
Luciano Rossi as a bearded intellectual
Tom Felleghy appears sans moustache as the head of an asylum who has managed to condition sadistic, masochistic and nympomaniac female patients in the hope that they might prove useful to the Reich – it won't ruin anything to say that they do – while Luciano Rossi is cast against type not as a Nazi pervert but as a relatively upstanding anti-Nazi professor.
A genuine oddity that's worth a look for curiosity value alone.
Monday, 21 July 2008
Le Deportate della sezione speciale SS / Deported Women of the SS Special Section
Though featuring the expected elements of sex, sleaze, sadism, shocks and showers, this 1977 Nazisploitation entry from Rino De Silvestro is unusual in other regards, evincing a comparatively serious and sombre tone at times and featuring a few scenes which hint at a challenge to the viewer's pleasure in watching the film.
De Silvestro makes his bid for authorship
Set in the dying days of the Third Reich, the film begins with the transportation of a mixed group of female prisoners by a filthy but perhaps surprisingly roomy cattle car.
Flashbacks establish our main protagonist, Tanya Nobel, an aristocrat of German extraction who has renounced the Reich and the Volk in favour of her Polish resistance lover; as is usually the case in the filone story takes priority over history.
Erna Schurer and John S
Tanya immediately earns the enmity of Trudy, who is determined to become a Kapo once they arrive at their destination. Trudy's character is more sketchily drawn, however. While there is an element of class resentment to her remarks – “Leave her alone” “Oh yeah! Just who the fuck do you think you are! Your aristocratic background doesn't mean shit here! You're up to your neck in it just like the rest of us!” – it isn't that clear why she is a prisoner rather than a Nazi in this regard beyond her lesbian proclivities, though I certainly suspect that she is something of an anti-social element who could not be relied upon to put the values of the Reich above her own gratifications rather than a leftist.
Whatever the case, it soon emerges that this is another one of those films where the activities of the Nazis themselves don't seem particularly geared towards the instrumentally rational goal of winning the war nor the value rational one of ridding the Reich of those they deem undesirable; while the two goals were perhaps not altogether incompatible when the war was going well by the time the film is set they almost certainly were in terms of suggesting conflicting deployments of men and material.
A Suspiria-style lightbulb shot and a row of less than happy campers
As the train pulls into the station, Tanya and another prisoner make a bid for freedom. Trudy notices and alerts the guards. Tanya is thus recaptured while the other woman is gunned down; again, students of Nazi crimes rather than their representation in the Nazisploitation filone might have cause for pause here as to the probability of this scene.
From the station, the prisoners are transferred to the camp, apparently located in an old castle. Trudy gets her wish to become a kapo and thus gets to dish out rather than receive the same humiliation and brutalisation as the others as they are processed and assigned new duties.
Tanya is earmarked to be a field whore serving in the Joy Division until the camp commander Erner notices her name on the roster. As another flashback explains, Erner is infatuated with Tanya, althought she had always refused his attentions.
Erner thus decides to keep Tanya in the camp and resolves to make her love him, resulting in a battle of wills between the two as the other inmates struggle to survive amidst the capricious wardens and kapos that all builds to a dramatic and suspenseful climax...
Kapo Trudy wielding her phallic baton
As is often the case in the filone, the reasons for the prisoners being in the camp – whether their 'crimes' are ethnic/religious, sexual, political or otherwise – are not specified with the exception of Tanya.
Unsurprisingly the incidence of homosexuality – as a 'perversion' – is presented as be far higher amongst the Nazis and their confederates than the prisoners, with two wardens getting into a catfight over their respective claims over one piece of live property:
“She's my whore”
“Oh yeah, fuck you. What are you going to do about it?”
“I'll show you! [slap]”
Far more surprising and interesting, however, is the scene of male homosexual activity between Erner and his devoted underling, Dobermann [sic] by virtue of giving the implied male heterosexual audience something they didn't expect or desire; as one IMBD reviewer remarks: “This was the last thing I was expecting to see [...] Needless to say, a big turn off.”
Ernst and Dobermann
Significantly this scene is also presaged by one of the battles of wills between Tanya and Erner, as she pointedly refuses to gaze at his humiliation of two other field whores by compelling them to make out with one another and then fellate him, before then moving to seduce Dobermann – a combination cumulatively suggesting a somewhat Sartean dynamic of looking and refusing to look that, while being about power, cannot be reduced to male / female, active looking / passive to be looked at ness. (“You have to look! You can't refuse my spectacle!,” as Erner screams at Tanya.)
Despite this difference, one of the problems with the Nazisploitation filone more generally that again emerges is that of scale. These low-budget films lacked the resources to convincingly depict a larger-scale camp with hundreds or thousands of prisoners, only ever being able to present small-scale and somewhat specialist facilities with only a couple dozen inmates at most at a time.
Their production design also tends to be that bit off, as when the rows of improbably comfortable looking beds and the showers with abundant hot water and soap for those long shower scenes come across as more appropriate to a prison, convent or girls' school – a lack of specificity which further highlights the ease with which the same basic stock scenario, situations and sets could so often be redressed by a simple substitution of mother superior for head warden or SS doctor.
Tanya refusing to gaze...
... making a defiant, resistant gaze of her own...
... and as the laughing woman...
On the plus side, the direction is more accomplished than many others of its kind, with some effective camera set ups and movements. Likewise although the inmates – including Stefanio D'Amario and Sara Sperati – are as usual that bit too healthy and well-fed looking to really convince as the real thing, they and the other performers – including Erna Schurer, Solvi Stubing and John Steiner amonst the Nazi contingent – are uniformly committed to their roles and, within the melodramatic, operatic and campy boundaries of the filone, more than adequate.
Stelvio Cipriani' score is another asset, although some of his cues are recognisable from elsewhere, such as the lush, romantic piano piece that build ups to the Countess's murder in Bay of Blood.
De Silvestro makes his bid for authorship
Set in the dying days of the Third Reich, the film begins with the transportation of a mixed group of female prisoners by a filthy but perhaps surprisingly roomy cattle car.
Flashbacks establish our main protagonist, Tanya Nobel, an aristocrat of German extraction who has renounced the Reich and the Volk in favour of her Polish resistance lover; as is usually the case in the filone story takes priority over history.
Erna Schurer and John S
Tanya immediately earns the enmity of Trudy, who is determined to become a Kapo once they arrive at their destination. Trudy's character is more sketchily drawn, however. While there is an element of class resentment to her remarks – “Leave her alone” “Oh yeah! Just who the fuck do you think you are! Your aristocratic background doesn't mean shit here! You're up to your neck in it just like the rest of us!” – it isn't that clear why she is a prisoner rather than a Nazi in this regard beyond her lesbian proclivities, though I certainly suspect that she is something of an anti-social element who could not be relied upon to put the values of the Reich above her own gratifications rather than a leftist.
Whatever the case, it soon emerges that this is another one of those films where the activities of the Nazis themselves don't seem particularly geared towards the instrumentally rational goal of winning the war nor the value rational one of ridding the Reich of those they deem undesirable; while the two goals were perhaps not altogether incompatible when the war was going well by the time the film is set they almost certainly were in terms of suggesting conflicting deployments of men and material.
A Suspiria-style lightbulb shot and a row of less than happy campers
As the train pulls into the station, Tanya and another prisoner make a bid for freedom. Trudy notices and alerts the guards. Tanya is thus recaptured while the other woman is gunned down; again, students of Nazi crimes rather than their representation in the Nazisploitation filone might have cause for pause here as to the probability of this scene.
From the station, the prisoners are transferred to the camp, apparently located in an old castle. Trudy gets her wish to become a kapo and thus gets to dish out rather than receive the same humiliation and brutalisation as the others as they are processed and assigned new duties.
Tanya is earmarked to be a field whore serving in the Joy Division until the camp commander Erner notices her name on the roster. As another flashback explains, Erner is infatuated with Tanya, althought she had always refused his attentions.
Erner thus decides to keep Tanya in the camp and resolves to make her love him, resulting in a battle of wills between the two as the other inmates struggle to survive amidst the capricious wardens and kapos that all builds to a dramatic and suspenseful climax...
Kapo Trudy wielding her phallic baton
As is often the case in the filone, the reasons for the prisoners being in the camp – whether their 'crimes' are ethnic/religious, sexual, political or otherwise – are not specified with the exception of Tanya.
Unsurprisingly the incidence of homosexuality – as a 'perversion' – is presented as be far higher amongst the Nazis and their confederates than the prisoners, with two wardens getting into a catfight over their respective claims over one piece of live property:
“She's my whore”
“Oh yeah, fuck you. What are you going to do about it?”
“I'll show you! [slap]”
Far more surprising and interesting, however, is the scene of male homosexual activity between Erner and his devoted underling, Dobermann [sic] by virtue of giving the implied male heterosexual audience something they didn't expect or desire; as one IMBD reviewer remarks: “This was the last thing I was expecting to see [...] Needless to say, a big turn off.”
Ernst and Dobermann
Significantly this scene is also presaged by one of the battles of wills between Tanya and Erner, as she pointedly refuses to gaze at his humiliation of two other field whores by compelling them to make out with one another and then fellate him, before then moving to seduce Dobermann – a combination cumulatively suggesting a somewhat Sartean dynamic of looking and refusing to look that, while being about power, cannot be reduced to male / female, active looking / passive to be looked at ness. (“You have to look! You can't refuse my spectacle!,” as Erner screams at Tanya.)
Despite this difference, one of the problems with the Nazisploitation filone more generally that again emerges is that of scale. These low-budget films lacked the resources to convincingly depict a larger-scale camp with hundreds or thousands of prisoners, only ever being able to present small-scale and somewhat specialist facilities with only a couple dozen inmates at most at a time.
Their production design also tends to be that bit off, as when the rows of improbably comfortable looking beds and the showers with abundant hot water and soap for those long shower scenes come across as more appropriate to a prison, convent or girls' school – a lack of specificity which further highlights the ease with which the same basic stock scenario, situations and sets could so often be redressed by a simple substitution of mother superior for head warden or SS doctor.
Tanya refusing to gaze...
... making a defiant, resistant gaze of her own...
... and as the laughing woman...
On the plus side, the direction is more accomplished than many others of its kind, with some effective camera set ups and movements. Likewise although the inmates – including Stefanio D'Amario and Sara Sperati – are as usual that bit too healthy and well-fed looking to really convince as the real thing, they and the other performers – including Erna Schurer, Solvi Stubing and John Steiner amonst the Nazi contingent – are uniformly committed to their roles and, within the melodramatic, operatic and campy boundaries of the filone, more than adequate.
Stelvio Cipriani' score is another asset, although some of his cues are recognisable from elsewhere, such as the lush, romantic piano piece that build ups to the Countess's murder in Bay of Blood.
Wednesday, 9 July 2008
Kaput Lager Gli Ultimi Giorni Delle SS / Achtung! The Desert Tigers
Kaput Lager Gli Ultimi Giorni Delle SS
The title card is odd, half in German and half in Italian.
Wouldn't a kaput lager be a broken camp?
Maybe if it's the last days of the SS then it might make sense.
Whatever, it certainly cues us in as to the kind of thing to expect from this late Nazisploitation entry from Luigi Batzella, directing under his Ivan Kathansky pseudonym, and starring Richard Harrison as the heroic US commando, Gordon Mitchell as the camp commander and Lea Lander as the sadomasochistic lesbian doctor.
Rather than the European theatre of war, our location is North Africa, as a mixed group of British and American soldiers, along with some Arab alllies, mount a daring raid on a German base.
Some murkily photographed confusingly directed action scenes follow, the kind where the confusion seems less the filmmakers's attempt to convey the reality of a firefight than basic lack of ability.
A dangerous mission
An over-confident doh! moment
Major Lexman (Harrison) and company lay their demolition charges and blow stuff up, but are captured as they make their getaway and sent to the nearest POW / concentration camp, where von Stolzen (Harrison) gets a chance to strut his stuff and ve have vays voice, ordering that a Jewish prisoner be whipped regardless of the small detail that he is already dead.
Next, the action shifts to an Arab settlement, where the Nazis drag off some women, whom they take to Dr Lessing (Lander) for her inspection and approval. The story's location again makes things a little odd, as Lessing spouts the obligatory Nazi racial inferiority stuff as if her prisoners were the more usual Slavs or Jews. Then again, it could be the filmmakers' attempt at subtly critiquing the notions of race, along the lines of Arabs also being a Semitic people, although this would probably once more be to grant them too much credit.
Later, von Stolzen takes Lexman around the camp's dungeons, including the castration of some Bedouins who attacked his staff car, while Lessing turns her attentions to the Jewish virgin who has conveniently been brought to the camp for normal service to be resumed. The girl's humiliation arouses Lessing, who then tries to get it on with the English nurse / prisoner, Clara, begging that she be whipped. “I've been dying for it for so long,” she explains, in what is presumably not intended as an ironic reference to the Nazi's actual treatment of homosexuals nor as a commentary on the attraction / repulsion dynamic often bubbling away barely beneath the surface of fascist sexual ideologies but rather as the checking off of another generic requirement or two.
The wonders of point of view: note how we are positioned on the same side of the bars as the prisoners, looking out at our / their tormentors.
The worst crime that the film commits is not this parade of bad taste – this synopsis only takes us about one-third of the way in – given that this is after all what we expect from a Nazisploitation movie and watch it for. Rather, it is being boring.
Yet, this is also a charge that could be levelled against most entries in the filone, with their tendency to present a few moments of jaw-dropping what-were-they-thinking material strung together with longer passages of utter banality.
The obligatory degenerate Nazi orgy scene
As such, the real problem is that even the sex, sadism and sleaze set-pieces just aren't that memorable, lacking the delirious qualities of their counterparts in SS Experiment Camp – no line here comes close to topping the all-time classic of “you bastard, what have you done with my balls” – and Batzella's more notable contribution to the cycle, The Beast in Heat, which may have an equally awkward mix of Nazisploitation and war movie tedium but at least has those completely over-the-top performances from Macha Magall and Salvatore Baccaro to enliven the former aspect.
The whip and the body...
In this regard, the biggest surprise is perhaps the presence of Lander, given that she is better known for her appearances in classier fare like Blood and Black Lace, where she appears as Lea Kruger, and Rabid Dogs.
That Lander appeared as Lea Kruger can be put down to her more famous cousin, Hardy Kruger. Seeing as he disliked playing Nazi roles because they reminded him of his own time in the Hitler Youth and Wermacht, one wonders if he had any thought of his cousin's involvement here, or just recognised it as part of the reality of being a working actor in Italy circa 1977.
Marcello Giombino provides entertainingly cheesy score as appropriate to the proceedings as it would be inappropriate to anything more serious, complete with kitschy lieder playing over Lander's sexy scenes as a twisted leitmotif.
Monday, 9 June 2008
Holocaust parte seconda: i ricordi, i deliri, la vendetta
The opening titles, consisting of slow drums and white noise playing over real photographs of Nazi rallies and the death camps and their victims, lead you to expect something grim and harrowing.
The film is not a sequel, though there was an Italian TV movie called Holocaust that it was likely retitled to cash in on
The reality
The reconstruction; note the absence of yellow stars
What ensues, however, is a frankly boring piece of Nazisploitation that it is not only difficult to take seriously but which also fails to provide the usual concentration of camp, sleaze and bad taste.
Given the subject matter, that of a group of Nazi hunters tracking down their quarry in 1970s Italy, it might at a pinch be construed as an attempt to convey Hannah Arendt's “banality of evil”. Certainly at one point a Nazi does indicate that he was “only obeying orders.” Even so it hardly makes for entertaining or engaging viewing on the level of, say, SS Experiment Camp or The Beast in Heat – here bracketing any consideration of how distasteful most would undoubtedly find it for anyone to admit to enjoying these films – and completely fails to stimulate deeper thought, other than of the sort one must engage in here in an attempt to make sense of the film for a review.
Part of the trouble is that nothing within the film can really match up to the horror of those initial images – images not seen in most of the other, less self-consciously serious entries – while the flashback sequences fail to convince even by the standards of low-budget war movie reconstructions.
The greater issue, however, is that the way in which the Nazi hunters are presented makes them perilously close to being as bad as their quarry, as they strive to make each revenge attack different from the last and thereby difficult for the authorities to connect together, while also taking a rather broad view of who counts as a legitimate target.
Thus, the son of one Nazi is deemed an acceptable substitute because his father is in hiding, while the wife or daughter of William Berger's ex-officer is stripped naked, has ropes tied around her limbs and is spreadeagled before having her neck broken. (Berger fans should note that, while top billed, he is only on screen for a couple of minutes right at the start.)
An acceptable revenge image
Getting somewhat dubious
One of the curiosities of the film, albeit one which it has in common with a number of other Italian Nazi / Holocaustsploitation entries is that, despite the Holocaust 2 title, it skirts around actually identifying the non-Nazi characters as Jewish. Instead, they are presented as undefined enemies of the regime, although when some of the flashbacks show children rather than adults it is difficult to square this with these selfsame enemies being anything other than ethnically / religiously defined.
Not recommended, except for the completist.
The film is not a sequel, though there was an Italian TV movie called Holocaust that it was likely retitled to cash in on
The reality
The reconstruction; note the absence of yellow stars
What ensues, however, is a frankly boring piece of Nazisploitation that it is not only difficult to take seriously but which also fails to provide the usual concentration of camp, sleaze and bad taste.
Given the subject matter, that of a group of Nazi hunters tracking down their quarry in 1970s Italy, it might at a pinch be construed as an attempt to convey Hannah Arendt's “banality of evil”. Certainly at one point a Nazi does indicate that he was “only obeying orders.” Even so it hardly makes for entertaining or engaging viewing on the level of, say, SS Experiment Camp or The Beast in Heat – here bracketing any consideration of how distasteful most would undoubtedly find it for anyone to admit to enjoying these films – and completely fails to stimulate deeper thought, other than of the sort one must engage in here in an attempt to make sense of the film for a review.
Part of the trouble is that nothing within the film can really match up to the horror of those initial images – images not seen in most of the other, less self-consciously serious entries – while the flashback sequences fail to convince even by the standards of low-budget war movie reconstructions.
The greater issue, however, is that the way in which the Nazi hunters are presented makes them perilously close to being as bad as their quarry, as they strive to make each revenge attack different from the last and thereby difficult for the authorities to connect together, while also taking a rather broad view of who counts as a legitimate target.
Thus, the son of one Nazi is deemed an acceptable substitute because his father is in hiding, while the wife or daughter of William Berger's ex-officer is stripped naked, has ropes tied around her limbs and is spreadeagled before having her neck broken. (Berger fans should note that, while top billed, he is only on screen for a couple of minutes right at the start.)
An acceptable revenge image
Getting somewhat dubious
One of the curiosities of the film, albeit one which it has in common with a number of other Italian Nazi / Holocaustsploitation entries is that, despite the Holocaust 2 title, it skirts around actually identifying the non-Nazi characters as Jewish. Instead, they are presented as undefined enemies of the regime, although when some of the flashbacks show children rather than adults it is difficult to square this with these selfsame enemies being anything other than ethnically / religiously defined.
Not recommended, except for the completist.
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