The Playbirds

London, the late 1970s. Someone is killing the models of porn magazine Playbirds. With no real leads to go on, the police decide to send one of their own undercover / uncovered in a bid to make the maniac reveal himself from amongst the suspects already identified / proposed. They are:

• The Playbirds photographer with a history of violence.
• The politician who preaches virtue in public and practices his vices in private.
• The Christian prophet of doom.
• The Playbirds owner who finds that his sales increase with each new murder.

Now, when you consider that the film is the product of the real life Playbirds owner David Sullivan, you can immediately strike two of these four suspects off the list, namely the men making their livelihoods off the porn industry. Concomitantly the likelihood of either of the anti-porn types being the killer is doubled.


Alan Lake as / is David Sullivan

Not that the film really open up space for discussing pornography anyway, other than to mock the anti-porn types of the time – as Sullivan did by naming another of his magazines, Whitehouse, after the religious puritan campaigner of the same surname. Still, the way in which his own alter-ego is presented seems somewhat curious. For he is crass, lacking in taste, obsessed with his horse racing (“use the whip!”) and generally someone you would very much like to see get his comeuppance.

We also get some footage of the mechanics of porn business, with copy upon copy of Playbirds being printed and stapled, rolling off the presses and being bundled up and into boxes for distribution: Fascinating from a documentary point of view, but distinctly anti-erotic.




The work of porn in the age of mechanical reproduction

Much the same can be said of the glamour shoots: Although the intention is clearly to make things seem sexy and exciting, the very fact that we're aware of this intentionality, or a lack of spontaneity and authenticity serves to distance us.

This emergent auto-critique also applies to the funniest and sleaziest moment in the entire film, in which Inspectors Porno and Bribeasy – er, Holbourne and Morgan – interview volunteers for going undercover and uncovered as a model in a bid to root out the maniac. Bump and grind music plays on the soundtrack as a succession of unsuccessful candidates strip off, the camera retaining a detached, observational eye throughout. Then, when glamour star Mary Millington steps into the breach, the camera becomes an active participant, moving around her and going in for close-ups as her routine continues.


Cue obligatory pseudo-lesbian scene

As with the giallo-inspired murder set-pieces, it's a moment of spectacle that makes us all the more aware of the banality of the bulk of the film, be it the detectives at work or 'Sullivan' at the racetrack.

Willy Roe is also the kind of point-and-shoot director whose attempts at visual style, such as a hand-held mirror based sex scene, don't really come off anyway.

Like other Sullivan productions most of the cast divides into two camps: Besides the models and porn types who cannot act but are happy providing the nudity and simulated sex, we also have various slumming thespians happy for just about the only work available them at the time.


Suzy Mandel

Somewhere in between, in uncredited roles, there are also some interesting other figures: unlikely 50-something porn performer Derek Aylward as a client in a massage parlour, candidly / knowingly acknowledged as the front for a brothel that the police are fully aware of, and performance artist / musician Cosey Fanni Tutti as a model; while her work within the British porn industry was also part of her wider art project – she posed for Sullivan's magazines and mounted an exhibition called Pornography – the film does not address this subject.

Playbirds goes off the rails a bit towards the end and finishes with one of those shock endings commonly found in weaker thrillers.

Yet if it leaves you dissatisfied and feeling cheated, this is perhaps apropos given the film's milieu, of a product which promises more than it can ever deliver and leaves you wanting more. (Not that such charges can only be levelled against porn...)

Insofar as the film is essentially 1959's The Cover Girl Murders revamped for a more permissive age and filtered through contemporary exploitation trends, intertexts are not difficult to find: The politician recalls the judge in Night after Night; the use of computer profiling in an attempt to narrow down the list of suspects The Bird with the Crystal Plumage; the glamour/model/sleaze setting Strip Nude for Your Killer, Delirium: Photos of Gioa and so on; the Playbirds of reality/Playbirds of fiction element the diegetic and non-diegetic Tenebres; the cod occultism Virgin Witch or Satanic Rites of Dracula; and fetishistic shots of black gloves around women's necks and a clue concealed in the photographic blow-up countless gialli.


The hands of doom


The white heat of the Scotland Yard computer system

The film also features plenty of jaw-droppingly funny / bad and just plain distasteful dialogue (“O goody, I'm going to be raped, I've never been raped before”) and some nice location shots of Soho for good measure.

[See also: http://www.beardyfreak.com/rvbirds.php
http://www.hysteria-lives.co.uk/hysterialives/Hysteria/the_playbird_murders.html ]

Dario Argento o la alquimia del miedo

Just flicked through this Spanish book, Dario Argento or the Alchemy of Fear.

My Spanish is non-existent, but it looks like a decent alternative or companion to the likes of Maitland McDonagh in English or Jean-Baptiste Thoret in French for those who read the language.

First there's a thematic overview, identifying key motifs in Argento's films - e.g. the elements (agua), animals (gatos) etc.

Then there are chapters on each of his films through to The Phantom of the Opera.

Then there is a 1999 interview with Argento, conducted at the Sitges film festival.

Finally the are portraits of important collaborators such as Morricone, Goblin, Nicolodi and Cozzi.

More: http://www.ciencia-ficcion.com/limites/lm0177.htm

Due maschi per Alexa / Fieras sin jaula / Two Men for Alexa

The opening moments of this 1970 noir-esque thriller from Juan Logar nicely establish its basic operating principles, that we have to pay attention and do some work in piecing together the fragments for ourselves.


A Citroen DS = France

Three scenes are intercut with one another, introducing the four main characters around whom almost all the action will revolve: Caterina expresses her concerns for her father Roland, that his second wife Alexa (Rosalba Neri) only loves his money and is possibly unfaithful. Simultaneously Alexa demonstrates her infidelity by making love with her boyfriend Pietro (Juan Luis Galiardo) on a beach, as an older man – Roland (Curd Jurgens) – drives to the property nearby, observes the couple, and makes various preparations.




Unmotivated use of colour filters in a 'normal' scene

Some time later, Roland catches Alexa and Pietro in bed together and pulls out a gun and shoots himself. As Pietro goes to open the door, Roland's trap is sprung: Steel shutters close over the windows and doors, locking the three of them in the room together.

As the lovers desperately search for a way out and increasingly crack under the pressure, we see what led to this tragic, as in inevitable, denouement...


The dead man who speaks

Two Men for Alexa should particularly appeal to at least two audiences.

The first are fans of leading lady Rosalba Neri. There are no issues here, not least since as the film provides not only ample demonstration of her physical charms but also of her often underrated acting abilities.

The second are those who like stories about twisted relationships and situations that can only end badly. Some directors and films that come to mind here as reference points are Fritz Lang's Scarlet Street, Claude Chabrol's L'Enfer, Luis Bunuel's The Exterminating Angel and Roman Polanski's Bitter Moon. The issue here, is that these films have the respectability and name recognition value that this low-budget French-set, Spanish-Italian co-production, as an apparent piece of European trash cinema, doesn't.

For while Two Men for Alexa certainly has elements of this, it is considerably more intelligently written, directed and performed than this blanket label might suggest.

One scene that immediately comes to mind is the first encounter between Alexa and Pietro: Inasmuch as it occurs in a nightclub and plays out against a groovy Piero Piccioni theme, it initially seems a classic case of retro kitsch.

But then we have consider that Roland is also present and very much out of place in this youthful setting. And there is the wordless exchanges of looks between the trio at the fateful moment: Alexa and Pietro's sense of recognition in finding another like themselves – young, attractive, vivacious and in search of the easy life – alongside Roland's world-weary resignation that this is the beginning of the end for his and Alexa's relationship.










The fateful encounter

The film in general is replete with little poetic touches like these, with objective and subjective, imagined and real deliberately taken to the point of confusion or indiscernibility. The use of voice-off is particularly noteworthy in this regard: The summing up of the case presented by the dead or dying narrator is a familiar noir trope if we think of the likes of Double Indemnity and Sunset Boulevard.

The first difference is that Roland has a degree of self-awareness throughout that his younger counterparts in these films do not, in explicitly telling Alexa he's offering his wealth in exchange for her youth. Gloria Swanson's character in Sunset Boulevard may be an ageing vamp and coded as a kind of vampire, but she is never quite so up front as this about feeding on her young writer lover/prey.

The second is that we also get Alexa and Pietro's perspectives on the same events, such that we also hear from the fatal man and woman as well as from their victim/fall guy. Or perhaps this is itself yet another point of distinction, that there is no one victim here, nevermind an innocent one.

Credit is due to those at Cinemageddon who reconstructed the film from Italian and Spanish language sources and provided English subtitles.

Rollin on UK TV

http://salvation-films.com/default.aspx

Il castello dalle porte di fuoco / Blood Castle / Ivanna / Scream of the Demon Lover

This turn of the decade Italian-Spanish co-production from Jose Luis Merino is very much the product of its time, having one foot in the 1960s past and the other in the 1970s future. As a 1960s film, it is rich in Gothic atmospherics. As a 1970s film it is that bit more explicit in terms of nudity, violence and perversity.

Set around the turn of the 20th century, the plot sees biochemist Dr Ivanna Rakovski (fotoromanzi fixture Erna Schurer) hired to assist Baron Janos Dalmar in his researches. The baron has a bad reputation amongst the locals, being suspected of the murder of several young women and of his older brother, Ygor.


Schurer voices off

But it is hard for Ivanna to know how much credence to put in these peasant stories, not least because the man who agrees to take her to the Dalmar castle attempts to rape her en route.

Whatever the case, Baron Janos is initially reluctant to employ Ivanna, having apparently not realised that she was female, beautiful and eligible when he contracted her via an agency. She is equally reluctant to leave, however, and soon wins him over with a display of professionalism, although predictably their relationship equally quickly begins to extend beyond work.


The Baron's first appearance, via Dracula and Black Sunday.

It emerges the Baron is continuing his late brother's research into tissue regeneration; having died when his laboratory blew up Ygor is also the experimental subject, with his charred remains being preserved in a vat of chemicals.

The Baron tries to blame these chemicals for inducing the extraordinarily vivid hallucinations or nightmares Ivanna soon experience, which see her being taken to the castle dungeon and tormented by an unseen figure...

Blood Castle's greatest assets, besides lead Erna Schurer's breasts and her willingness to display them at every opportunity which presents itself, are its visuals. Take out the scenes of Schurer wandering around the passages and chambers of the castle and the film would probably be half the length. But they are so beautiful to look at that it almost doesn't matter.

This is all the more so since the film is, like many of its kind, decidedly less satisfactory when it actually comes to telling a story. Besides the usual infelicities of translation and dubbing (some of the supposedly Slavic characters speak with Cockney accents in the English version) we get an awkward kitchen sink of supernatural, mad science and mad man motifs that recall superior predecessors and intertexts featuring only one or the other: The Virgin of Nuremberg, via the torture chamber and a (not so) mysterious disfigured figure; The Whip and the Body, via the ambiguous S&M scenarios and the Byronic baron; and The Horrible Secret of Dr Hichcock, via a Hitchcockian glass of drugged milk.

It's this aspect which also demonstrates how Blood Castle is a perfect illustration of the division between Anglo-American and European approaches to fantasy-horror, as proposed by Tohill and Tombs in Immoral Tales, that between the narrative logic of the former and the cinematic logic of the latter.

Appuntamento in nero / Scandal in Black

Angela (Mirella Banti) is the wife of a diplomat, John Baldwin (Andy J Forest). One day she visits a down-market cinema and is attacked in the toilets by a maniac. The incident proves the last straw for John, who is secretly having an affair with Angela's live-in friend Eva (Mary Lindstrom), a model. Not wanting to divorce Angela for fear of scandal, John decides to murder her and blame it on the maniac at large...

Even when presented in this form, Scandal in Black has an obvious plausibility concern in why a respectability-obsessed career politician would be living with the (perhaps lesbian coded) friend of his wife to begin with: Wouldn't this in itself be scandalous enough or at least provide plausible cause for scandal when manipulated by the media and rivals or enemies?

Things get worse when we consider the way in which Angela's supposed rape in the toilets is handled by the police, with no sign of their making any sort of forensic examinations. For, had they done so, they might have realised that Angela faked her attack.

The reason why isn't entirely clear: It could have something to do with a traumatic incident fifteen years previously, as shown in a pre-credits sequence. But if so there's no definite and convincing point of connection ever really established. Instead, the initial trauma feels somewhat shoehorned in because that's what the textbook dictates a giallo should have. Yet in its presentation, with rape prominent and the identity of the attacker obvious rather than concealed, it also seems to be aiming at something more.

Whatever this something more is remains obscure, however, quickly leading to the conclusion that Scandal in Black is best approached by not questioning things too much and going with the flow.

What we get are various reversals of fortune amongst the conspirators, very much a case of who is screwing who, both metaphorically and literally; various well-worn filone tropes including black gloves, blades, damaged dolls, blackmail subplots, threatening phone calls, shower scenes and a death (specifically decapitation) by power tool; all topped off by some of the most consistently defective detective work around:


“Did you realise last week’s hit and run victim worked in the same movie theatre where Mrs Baldwin was attacked?”
“How do you know that?”

Or how about:

“Even in a small city like this hundreds of women are molested every week. Most of the time that’s the end of it; nothing else ever happens.”

And this from a female officer who was once molested herself. Perhaps something is lost in translation, but even so...


Shower abstraction of female form


And clear blade

Throughout all this the main tension in the film, one that is never quite satisfactorily resolved, is between the erotic thriller and slasher film aspects of the giallo. There are more softcore sex scenes and fewer murder set pieces. This slows things down somewhat, since the sex scenes rarely advance the plot.


The doll

The real issue, however, is that the continuing presence of violence numbers makes the sex-violence interface that bit more evident and thus detracts from enjoyment of the sex scenes. This would be fine if a Laura Mulvey styled “visual unpleasure” was the aim, but it's not, at least in general terms.






Sexist, or a critique of sexism?

The opening scenes encapsulate this tension perfectly: First we have the rape scene, which is not supposed to be sexy. Then we have Angela driving in her sports car en route to the cinema, seductively dressed and very much performing for the camera and the male spectator. Taken together we have a pleasure which is at best a guilty one.

As a whole it feels as though the filmmakers have taken the plot of a Lenzi “psycho-sexy” giallo from the late 1960s and filtered it through the lens of an Argento psycho-sexual giallo from a few years later. This would be fine, but for the fact that when Lenzi himself worked in an Argento idiom, as in Seven Blood Stained Orchids, he did so as an alternative to his own earlier approach. Thus when one character is killed with an electric drill within that film, the effect is more an impressive piece of splatter than something uncomfortably psycho-sexual: The drill may be phallic, if one wants to interpret it that way, but it is first and foremost a drill. Here, by contrast, we have an approach that is too self-conscious for its own good, as when Angela remarks of her phantom attacker that “He used the bottle neck as if it were a phallus”.

The Lenzi connection may seem less arbitrary when we consider that leading man Forest was a regular in Lenzi productions of this time. His performance here – to the extent any performance can be judged through a bad English dub – is somewhat one note if suitably unlikeable. Leading lady Banti is perhaps best known for her role as one of the lesbian victims in Tenebre. She acquits herself well enough, as does the more decorative Lindstrom, in what appears to have been her only film appearance.


Hedman plus posters

Also in the cast are Franco Citti and Marina Hedman. The former, though most associated with Pasolini, appeared in the odd filone production, such as The Cat with the Eyes of Jade. The latter, a hardcore porn performer, is amusingly cast as one of the employees of the cinema, whose walls are adorned with posters for the likes of Fatal Temptation and Emmanuelle 5.

The scoring, by Marco Rossetti, is decent, but suffers from that artificial, synthetic quality, where every drum beat has exactly the same pre-programmed sound. Had the film been made in 1975 rather than 1990 you could imagine it all being more organic (read real instruments, and a Hammond B3 rather than a synth), and much the better for it.

In sum, entertaining enough if you can turn off your critical faculties, which I was not able to do...

Torremolinos 73

Madrid, the early 1970s: Alfredo works as an encyclopaedia salesman for Montoya publications. The Spanish public is less and less interested in the 3,000-plus page multi volume collection on the history of the Spanish Civil War, complete with complimentary scale bust of Franco’s head; he’s behind in his rent; his wife Carmen is desperate for them to have a baby, and has just lost her own job in a beauty parlour.


Illusion




Reality


Fascist spectacle reduced to kitsch


A world drained of colour

Soon thereafter Alfredo’s boss Don Carlos summons him and the three other remaining salesmen to a hotel for a conference weekend. They’re given two choices: Start making educational documentary films with their respective partners for a Danish magazine and film series on sexual practices throughout the world or look for a new job. The other two couples present leave in disgust. Alfredo and Carmen stay behind, at least for the time being, along with the single Juan Luis. (We soon find out more about his sexual practices, probably only legal in the Danish market...)


The white coater

Alfredo proves a natural filmmaker and is soon offering the Danish director who has come to train him suggestions, leading to his being given a megaphone that was supposedly given the Dane by no less than Ingmar Bergman when he was his assistant. Whatever the truth of this, it only enhances Alfredo’s determination to do a good job.

With Carmen persuaded by virtue of the purportedly educational nature of the film, that it will only be screened in the Scandinavian territories and – above all – the money they can make, the money which will help pay for a baby, she consents to appearing with her husband.

The finished product is a bit raw and ready but Don Carlos and his Danish partners are nevertheless pleased and want more from Alfredo and Carmen. They oblige, purchasing a new car, television and various other consumer goods with the money that is now rolling in. The only thing that is still lacking in their lives is a child.


The erotic charge of the personal over the impersonal pornographic?

Alfredo seeks to turn their frustrations into art, scripting the Bergman inspired Torremolinos 73 for Carmen to appear opposite a respected actor. Don Carlos agrees to bankroll the project and even to pay for a professional – if small – Danish crew.

What Alfredo doesn’t realise, or doesn’t want to realise, is that he can have all the existential angst he wants, as long as there is still some sex...


70s discotheque, beautifully reproduced

Let’s get the negative out of the way first: Torremolinos 73’s central premise doesn’t seem completely plausible in itself nor quite worked through as dramatic license by writer-director Pablo Berger. To realise this, however, does probably require a bit more knowledge of the ins and outs (groan) of porn cinemas of the period than the typical viewer perhaps cares to acquire.

To explain: The white coater sub-genre of porn, in which an educational premise was used as a pretext for showing sex on screen, essentially belonged to a period when porn qua porn was not yet permitted. But in Denmark all pornography was legalised in the late 1960s, making a white coater premise seem unlikely for Danish films from 1972/73. Even if we grant that the white coater shown to the Spaniards serves to reassure/dupe them into believing that what they are doing is scientifically justified, there’s then the issue of believing that amateur Spanish productions was really what the market wanted. Alfredo’s films are shot on 8mm (yet somehow acquire sound) with him functioning as cameraman and director as well as male performer – an unlikely combination in a pre-gonzo/POV era. The amateur aspect is also undermined by the hint of formula emerging in some of the porn stereotypical scenarios, of the trades- or delivery man turning up at the housewife’s door. For what we don’t get here (unless we are meant to assume some meta-commentary on Alfredo and Carmen’s fantasies as conveniently mirroring those of professional pornographers and audiences, which is possible) is anything about emergent porn conventions. There is nothing about close ups of the action, for instance, while the money shot is only referred to in relation to Torremolinos 73 itself.








Product over process

Having said all this, it is true that the film is a comedy-drama and not a documentary. Moreover, comparable criticisms could be levelled at Boogie Nights. For instance, Dirk Diggler is basically John Holmes, yet Holmes’s Johnny Wadd films are also referenced diegetically as something Diggler wants to get away from in his rival Brock Landers series.

Torremolinos 73 is far stronger when it is on home soil, in representing and critiquing the final years of the Franco regime in Spain. Even before the encyclopaedia is introduced, we have Alfredo standing before a massive billboard for the Paradise Apartments, whose representation looks little like their reality, which he then has to trudge across a field to reach. And, once there, inevitably the lift is out of order. Or then there are the references to child-star Marisol and “Spanish weekends,” by which Spanish filmgoers would cross the border into France to watch forbidden films such as Last Tango in Paris. Or there is the top of the range colour TV Alfredo buys, only to find that programming is still in black and white.

In terms of look and feel the filmmakers get the early 70s look down beautifully, whether its cars, clothes, hairstyles, decors or music. It’s probably no exaggeration to suggest a disco/nightclub scene could be cut in into a Paul Naschy vehicle from the period without any but the most astute being able to notice the difference. (If this was an Italian film, there would be prominently displayed J&B bottles, Punt e mes and Fernet Branca somewhere.)

The performances are impressive, with leads Javier Cámara and Candela Peña proving equally adept at comedy and drama and beautifully channelling the hopes and frustrations of their parents’ generation; interestingly Peña has more recently appeared in the similar sounding Los años desnudos, about the Spanish ‘S’ film boom of a few years later.

By turns funny and touching, Torremolinos ’73 is a film that the cult film fan should enjoy, reservations notwithstanding; its treatment of the intersection between art and commerce in erotic and pornographic cinema may appeal particularly to the Jesus Franco or Lina Romay fan.