Taming the Tittering Tourists: 50 SHADES OF GREY, 9 1/2 WEEKS, EXIT TO EDEN, SECRETARY + SHE DEMONS, Franco, Bunuel, Josef von Sternberg, Alain Robbe-Grillet

Most fans of 50 Shades of Grey--the kinky BDSM bestseller by E.L. James--were wincing (and not in a good way) at last week's debut of the forthcoming film adaptation's conventional, fashion mag-slick trailer - "I didn't like it the the sixth time, when it was called 9 1/2 Weeks!" But no one asked the big question: What's wrong with cinema that it can't seem to capture the sickly turn-ons of a good bondage book? When I saw and heard the conventional sounding Edward of the piece, Mr. Grey (Jamie Dornan), the "masterful" captain of industry and 'wealthy, spontaneous, travel-minded' gentleman (the kind of man every girl with an online personal ad pines for --take it from me, who's lazy, poor, hates travel, and is too cheap to shop anywhere but H&M and Kohl's). I was glad to see he had one of those freaky reptilian-bird-alien-CGI-hybrid faces like old Bob Pattinson's, but his hair, suits, and voice, not to mention age, are as ROTM as a lawyer-cum-porn star in a 90s direct-to-cable office thriller.

There, there. There's always Wild Orchids 2.

Maybe no one now working today could have filled the Mr. Grey part with any degree of affect, except Harvey Keitel (the latter a prospect too odious for the producers to consider seriously, which is exactly why it would have been awesome). It also may have worked if Dornan kept his Irish accent, or wore his hair in a crazed Irish tousle to give himself the air of a coked-up Caligula, but there are just too many  young male models with nothing but gym muscles and hair gel by way of 'gravitas' pretending to be high-powered executives on network TV.  Dornan is beautiful but would he ever make it as a dom outside of a Westworld-style robo-fantasy? I know some girls who are or were dominatrixes for a living. They are terrifying.

And that's the problem with adaptations of bondage books in a nutshell. Shit's Freudian, it runs deep. Anger over one actor playing a character already cast in the mind of every turned-on broad in America is normal but sadomasochistic stuff is doubly difficult because what's so very erotic on the page becomes either too goofy, i.e. tame (Secretary) or too genuinely violent and disturbing (Girl with the Dragon Tattoo).  Too much visual information (facial cues) lead us right out of the sadomasochistic spectator pleasure position, which short-circuits our higher mammalian complexes, recapturing the the age when we tattled constantly on our fellow children in hopes of witnessing their humiliation via their mom's wooden spoon or dad's belt (1). Ideally we evolve past this stage by around third or fourth grade. But on the printed page we can easily override the empathic response (as long as we know it's fiction and not some true crime novel) whereas onscreen our mammalian higher functioning kicks in --presuming we're not sociopaths or high on cocaine (2). Masochism may survive onto the big screen without much damage (as in the films of Josef von Sternberg or Luis Bunuel), but not in the form of traditional leather and lace scenes as books might describe.

According to Gaylyn Studlar, true masochism can only exist in dreams, conjured more out of a need to safely experience the abyss, or to trick out the satisfactory endorphin rush that surges to accommodate sudden pain (or the heroic measure of wasabi or hot sauce); it must be done person or in the mind where we can imagine a transformational ecstasy that ordinary movie watching doesn't accommodate. That's why for example the shocking Times Square marquee or the film capsule review might get our desire fired up but the actual film will never measure up; it's the difference between remembering your own crazy, erotic dream and hearing about someone else's.

There was a small, velvet-lined restaurant in NYC called La Nouvelle Justine (in the late 1990s) that offered a menu that included spanking hot young slaves or being spanked, and an overpriced chocolate mousse cake in shape of a spike heeled boot for parties of five or more. While tourists and bachelorettes snapped pictures and laughed in embarrassment, tame bondage rituals were enacted and pretty slaves marched back and forth, pretending to be thrilled at the prospect of their future lucrative punishments by the diners. We were there for my roommate's orgymongering sister's birthday, so we bought her a hot boy of her choosing to spank, knowing she was no slouch in this department. One light (for her) slap and he jumped up and ran away with a yelp; the bouncers came over to warn her to be gentle. Fuckin' midtown, man.

Hearing is believing (from top): Weekend, Persona

I was into bondage myself, off and on, for years, always more in theory than practice (losing my virginity to "Venus in Furs" helped), and generally turned off by any evidence of it onscreen (see above uncanny valley illus.) why, for example, so many Nerve profiles cite as their favorite sex scene Persona (1966), which has no sex scene at all. What it has a monologue, delivered in a flat, slightly ashamed voice.

As our French correspondent Severine notes: "Most French people would tell you that the image neutralizes the imagination in this field and suggest you to read, or ask someone to read you erotic literature." But then the book sells, gets passed around at private working mom book clubs, and boom, best-seller, so then someone has to make a movie of it. The problem should have already been apparent to us back in the era of 9 1/2 Weeks (see top image), a 1986 film that had a lot of buzz, a bit like 50 Shades has now, and fooled people who saw it into forgetting they hated it. Part of a post-American Gigolo cocaine-modernist penthouse spandex-and wool socks aerobics sexual aesthetic that has not aged well except as camp (see also: The Hunger, Flashdance, Shiver, Last Seduction, Disclosure, Basic Instinct), 9 1/2 Weeks with hot young Kim Basinger and Mickey Rourke (back when he was still pretty) engaged in all sorts of kinky shit with ice cubes and candle wax; it never drew much of a response other than titters at the college Quad when I saw it. Sure I was drunk at the time, and drunk college students in a large group are apt to jeer a terrible film like 9 1/2 Weeks, especially since there's always one or two girls (and Roger Ebert) who loooove it.

mens in black, blondes to the right: 9 1/2 Weeks (1986); Dangerous Game (1993)

Similarly, all that 'R' erotica stuff in the back row of Netflix and Amazon Prime, like Emmanuelle, Justine, or The Story of O is never sexy except in rare instances of almost incidental hotness and of worth only for their non-'erotic' elements --the zooms, the terrible fashions, the hilariously stilted artsy blocking; and sometimes we 'remember' them as hot, since remembering brings eventually us into the same zone as literature, or the dream. We live in an age of STDs like no one in the ancient 60s and 70s could have e'er envisioned; free love has been hidden away so that the jovial bacchanal of 70s XXX is replaced by condoms on gym-muscled dudes pumped with Viagara so a girl doesn't get a break; and stuff that moves off the lip of the familiar and seems genuinely dangerous-- such as the borderline misogynistic mental pummeling of Madonna in Abel Ferrara's Dangerous Game (1993)--stirs our preliminary superegoic shock troops into inner-censorial unsexy PC knee-jerking.

While the trailer reminded me of Adran Lynne's 9 1/2 Weeks and its subsequent deluge of big budget late 80s-early 90s sex thrillers, the uproar reminded me of the last big author of sexy bondage and vampire love stories, Anne Rice, had a surprise S/M novel breakthrough akin to that of 50 Shades with her kinky 1985 novel, Exit to Eden. It was of course picked up by Hollywood, but for some reason they balked at its original conception and cast Dan Akroyd and Rosie O'Donnell in the leads as buddy cops, which made the book's fans feel like Jimmy Stewart when Midge shows him her self-portrait in Vertigo (1958)

Another entry in the mainstream bondage category on the camp side of the valley, Secretary (2002), fails in ways not quite as extreme: seeing Maggie Gyllenhaal walk around an office doing paperwork clamped into a black leather stock is funny, not sexy, but at least she herself is cute and her masochism properly recognized as preferable to self-cutting; her getting spanked for the first time by boss James Spader during office hours is the film's only sexy moment because it's unplanned (could easily win her a harassment lawsuit), dangerous (no safe word), and functional (he's correcting her typo); there is no safe word. But soon the typos are framed along the office corridors, and quirky paint schemes turn the legal office into some madcap Urban Outfitters showroom.

Succubus (1967)

In other words, mainstream directors can't do this stuff with a straight face, so they either have to sink into the softcore sanctimony or look farther, across the pond and back in time, and onto the Blue Underground and Severin DVD labels. and maverick auteurs like Jean Rollin, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and Jess Franco. The latter's Succubus (1967) is a fine example, for here the whole twice removed 'someone else's dream' nonstarter vibe is made active again through a triple reversal - an S/M performance in a film is tepid by nature but if she's killing them for real and no one in the audience knows, then a kind of mecha-medusa-mirroring occurs and the whole Antonioni signifier collapse thing leads us out of the Platonic cave altogether, like the jolt when Samara crawls out of the TV in The Ring.

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BUNUEL, VON STERNBERG

From top: She Demons; Bunuel directing La Belle du Jour

There are rare directors who manage to understand the 'someone else's dream' dilution and reverse it yet again, to take us all the way out of the dream within the movie and out of even our dream of reality and back into their 'privatized' space, like falling asleep and waking up as your own mother and finally knowing what she really thinks about us. Bunuel and von Sternberg bring us into our own psyches as viewers via recreations of the Freudian primal scene, and a grasp of the longing to return to the pre-Oedipal total reunion with the mother, with total and complete annihilation of self and free will, a submission and surrender that overloads the superego with feedback loops until it shatters, freeing our recessive psychic blocks, opening the cellar doors on our subconscious basement prisons and letting all the long-repressed memories and desires escape into the open air. Where of course, they vanish, over credits. But no one ever called them sexy.

This is where French theory comes into play, ala the concepts of masquerade and Deleuze's 'Becoming-Animal' - as in She Demons (1957, above), where castaways wander into a scene of beautiful blonde savages being whipped by Nazis. Our natural desire to help is tempered by the gun (phallic authority of the father) of the Nazi whipper and our possible misunderstanding of what's behind it all (as a child would misunderstand the primal scene as 'mother being hurt by father, the slap of body on thrusting body as spanking etc). In sum, when it is not 'supposed' to be erotic, not built up by smutty directors with kinky sex toys, the woman moaning in dubbed in pleasure or laughter or infantile squeals of pleasure, then and only then is it arousing --because it is so very wrong to be aroused. Because soon after the punishment, the woman reveals herself to have devolved into a gibbering devil, ala the Island of Lost Souls animal men.

Venus in furs 

It's to Von Sternberg and his Dietrich collaborations in the final analysis, though, to be seductive as well as masochistic. Bunuel is great but I never really feel the need to see most of his movies more than once whereas the JvS-Dietrichs improve and beguile more and more with each successive viewing. If the collective 'we' are to understand why the Grey book is so popular yet the film will suck so hard, it might be wise to join me IN THE REALMS OF PLEASURE: Von Sternberg, Dietrich, and the Masochistic Aesthetic by Garylyn Studlar (Columbia Press, 1988):

"The fatalism of Von Sternberg's films is not simply an acceptance of death as an externally imposed inevitability but the expression of the masochistic urge toward death as a self-willed liberation. In choosing death, an illusionary triumph is created: the illusion of choice,"(48)

...masochisms obsession with death may be interpreted either as the expression of a universal instinctual urge or as the result of the masochistic wish for complete symbiosis with the mother and a return to nothingness,.... Eros is desexualized and resexualized; death becomes the ultimate fetish that fascinates with the promise of a mystical unity." (p. 123)

Only Bunuel and Von Sternberg every seemed to grasp this concept, and it's not for nothing for example that both adapted the same masochistic text, Pierre Louÿs "La femme et le pantin," or that two different actresses play the same character in Bunuel's version, That Obscure Object of Desire, the cocktease girl who continually manipulates the lead and denies him any form of sexual release, a bond she instinctively understands he needs and appreciates. As the rapper Scarface once said, "I'm done as soon as I bust me a nut," - well, some characters never want to be 'done' - it spoils the game, turns a long elaborate twisted ritual into a disappointingly short-lived gratification followed by shame and emptiness. The whole trick to getting what you want is to deliberately want to want rather than have and still want for wanting. Most tricks are part sleight-of-hand and part misdirection, but here misdirection is the whole trick. The slighted hands of the clock are frozen at bedtime, right before mom comes in to kiss you goodnight and turn out the lights. Maybe you never get the kiss, but the lights stay on forever. 

From top: Blonde Venus, That Obscure Object of Desire

FINALE:

 Don Pasquale hits closest to home...

I've never been a fan of The Devil is a Woman or the Bunuel version, That Obscure Object of Desire (1977) but I respect them and I question my own hostile reaction, for the main character, an exploited masochist named Don Pasquale hits closest to home, reminding me of how a girl I loved as a ten year-old exploited my devotion by cheating at Monopoly, borrowing quarters, batting first in wiffle ball and then quitting when it was my turn, over and over. I learned my frickin' lesson, man. And I've always shied away from movies where everyone is money-grubbing like a third world tourist trapper, such as in von Sternberg's version. All the money and gifts are what Atwill stresses in his re-telling of his relationship with Concha (Marlene Dietrich), but plays down any sexual contact (this being the only post-code Dietrich/von Sternberg collaboration) that might or been not made, leaving us with a series of bilking, check-writing, cataloguing of goods, birds, food, baskets of goodies for the mother, and Dietrich with her hair up in baroque headdresses, even singing a merry peasant song about sons of bakers, and florists, 'and other things that aren't so sweet,' as if all attraction was measured in men lavishing gifts on her, and nothing else. It's dispiriting, and gradually we must question whether Atwill is emphasizing these things to Romero to ward him off because the Severin slot is taken and he'd rather not have his friend play 'The Greek' (or in this case, 'the cousin').

For the masochist in the end, the velvet cage is not reminiscent of prison but of infancy, the crib bars past which one cannot crawl in vain search for the mother. In both versions, Don Pasquale watches Carmela make love to the younger bullfighter through a cage which Studlar makes the point is a ground zero witness to a recreated primal scene, the bars ala the bars of the crib that prevents unobstructed maternal access and so triggers the primal scene's return in all its superego smashing, Thanatos-resurrecting glory. This obstruction is duplicated in the filmgoing experience, the frustration of the masochistic (as opposed to the sadistic male gaze described by Laura Mulvey)

oral phase cinema (boys to the left): from top: Blonde Venus, Obscure Object of Desire, Persona

Devil is a Woman

True masochism pre-dates the Oedipal complex, it moves towards total reunion or separation, peek-a-boo, as it were, of delayed polymorphous orgasm of the oral phase, the return to a total reunification with the mother and the annihilation of the self, Eros and Thanatos conjoined. Even without ruining a BDSM fantasy with comedians there's already something faintly ridiculous and sad about it onscreen, ala that night at La Nouvelle Justine, just bondage gear onscreen is kind of a joke. Play bondage in film is like fiction within fiction, a double negative, which may have some value as metatextual abstraction or intellectual discourse, which is why it's so beloved of French intellectuals like novelist/theorist Georges Bataille (Story of the Eye) and filmmaker/novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet (or Lacan and Deleuze), but no matter how arty the lighting and fractured the text, the bondage and discipline stuff in Robbe-Grillet's films always looks a little sex shop goofy.

Gradiva (2006)

When we get similar themes in the films of Alain Robbe-Grillet, many of which are now on DVD, wherein rustic barns, thrift store period costumes, and brand spanking new spankers mix uneasily together to no real affect. Robbe's is an intellectual, take his word for it, and gets the whole Georges Bataille-Deleuze-Lacan thing, but in the end, it boils down to the same goofy handcuffs, provoking little more than boredom and vague feminist ire. Read a book, Alain! And ideally make that book Gaylyn Studlar's In the Realm of Pleasure. You're probably smart enough to understand it. That's called flattery, you craven dog!

NOTES:

1. Though I hear that's not done these days by parents, kids certainly can imagine being abducted thanks to nonstop media hysteria. And I'd add that when the 'child is being beaten' frisson is taken out of the parental sphere, dad loses 90% of his authority (a good dad shouldn't need to punish, but without the threat what power does he have? Now the power is reversed, rather than the kid scared of the dad spanking, the dad is scared of the kid saying he was spanked, leading to arrests and child services). This accounts, in my mind, for the at least part of the shift of the father's role in the house from authoritarian top dog to low dog whipping boy. 
2. When I was studying to be a drug counselor I learned it's common for cocaine abusers to order S/M porn and bondage gear online in the middle of the night during a coke binge, forget all about, then be appalled when it comes in the mail. It's often a factor in what compels them to seek treatment.

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Medusae of Asia: THE SHANGHAI GESTURE (1941), RAIN (1932)

Pre-code neo-Jacobean Tragedy's final venomous wheeze, THE SHANGHAI GESTURE (1941) sinks its cobra fangs deep into the mongoose of censorship, self-abasement, and social taboo, to levels only Josef Von Sternberg dared go, Josef, wrangler of Marlene! Bunuel and Chaney but coarse brutes by comparison. Exploring an array of sins that the Breen Office demanded over 30 script revisions to obscure, it stars Dietrich's old 'sewing circle' pal, Ona Munsen (1) as a dragon lady named Mother  Gin-Sling, owner and operator of a Shanghai casino structured like the rings of Dante's Inferno: as the wheel spins and a Russian threatens to kill himself there's also gigolo-ing, gold-digging, murder, drug addiction, alcohol, white slavery, elaborate revenge, smoking, and Super Masochist Sublimation Power, though by then that power was reduced in wattage. Based on a play by John Colton, GESTURE bid 1941 America pretend Shanghai wasn't then locked in a death struggle with the Japanese. What are you going to do? Pearl Harbor was drawing near.

We've always needed a slinky broad for these Pacific fantasias to sizzle properly: TERRY AND THE PIRATES would be nowhere without the Dragon Lady; RAIN would be a mere drizzle without Joan Crawford; KONGO (1932) would be pure misery without Lupe Velez; RED DUST (1932) lost without Jean Harlow; MANDALAY (1934) an empty shell without Kay Francis shimmering as Spot White; THE MASK OF FU MANCHU (1934) a lot of bluster and skulking without the celestial and unworthy daughter Fah Lo Suee (Myrna Loy) and Josef von's whole oeuvre just chiaroscuro exotica if not for the enigmatic Marlene. THE SHANGHAI GESTURE (1941) would have been perfect for her. She was even the right age. Where was she? Munson has charm, and is commanding and regal, but so was Helen Gahagan in the 1935 SHE.


Munson, her headgear wild enough to play an 'Oriental' Medusa in Flo Ziegfeld's Mythology Revue, is certainly commanding but can't infuse a single glance or wave with enigmatic playfulness and subversive innuendo, or radiate hypnotized cobra calm like Dietrich could. Gale Sondergaard's relaxed but stiff-upper-back regality instead infuses her aura. Munson has great things going, like a cokehead's way of caging her formal dialogue with nasally enhanced sonorous jubilance and no accent whatsoever. She's great in all respects but, in the end, her headgear is what we remember no matter how sublimely her balance of camp and dramaturgy. There's a splash of Norma Desmond in there, too... claws bared.

Munson split our mortal plane in '55 with a note that read "This is the only way I know to be free again...Please don't follow me." Classic Munson.

The other players, meanwhile, seethe and stagger about the casino's few sets but never quite find a frequency they can all share: Gene Tierney pouts and sulks so much Poppy, an obnoxious daddy's girl gone wild, we wonder why Victor Mature (as Mother's perennially fezzed gigolo-pimp-procurer, Dr. Omar) is so interested. Seducing her with Song of Solomon quotes and lines like: "My mother was half-French and the other half was lost in the dust of time, related to all the earth, and nothing that's human is foreign to me," he's actually a perfect match. Then there's Walter Huston as a tycoon buying up her block and planning to evict her (at least it has nothing to do with morals). Maria Ouspenskaya hovers below decks as Mother's pint-sized Mongolian assistant; Eric Blore provides a welcome breeze as the casino's accountant and political connection forger; Mike Mazurki is a 'coolie' rickshaw spy (there's no real Chinese stars in the film, as far as I could see); Michael Dalmatoff the Russian expat bartender; Ivan Lebedeff about to blow his own brains out as an unlucky Russian expat gambler, and of course, looming on the horizon... Walter Huston. With eyes calmly alight, Mother Gin-Sling encourages our confidence that she has a plan, but it all depends on fate's fickle finger dialing her New Years dinner party into a third act denouement of MADAME BUTTERFLY self-immolation with Huston as the prize goose. Bad drugs, drink, gambling, and sex only worsen Poppy's abrasive moods make up the difference. Tierney here is more than a bit like Tippi Hedren in parts of MARNIE, i.e. so busy trying to act bratty and deranged they forget to still be charming (Marlene never forgot!)

It's not up to his Dietrich collaborations at Paramount, but part of this could be the relative blurriness of the 'they did what they could' restoration. Part is also the attempt to have myriad threads instead of focusing on one character, the way Marlene was the focus in his earlier work. In those we had a very vivid feeling of the street or train in relation to the interiors, to each room. We entered Dietrich's domiciles via slow moving crane shots through rainy exterior street windows. In GESTURE, we have to take Von Sternberg's word for it that the bar and upstairs of the multi-tiered casino are even in the same building. There are some good crowded Shanghai street scenes early on and towards the end, during the big Chinese New Year celebration, shot in the same writhing cacophony of Chinese hustle and bustle (lots of rickshaws) that made the opening of SHANGHAI EXPRESS so effective, but again, they never feel connected to the casino nor the casino connected to its adjacent rooms and bars. Von Sternberg's ornate mise en scene surrounds Munson in exotic murals. Turns out they painted by Keye Luke, who--though Chinese--doesn't appear. The not-adding up things keep adding up. But Tierney is beautiful enough that disinterest seems a small price to pay. Even as you come to hate her character, you just know you'd jump off a bridge if she asked you to.

That said, slowness and pointless bits of business are the side effects of JVS's style--where every character is always moving towards or away from sex or death.  Here, unlike many of his later films there's no feeling this was ever taken out of Von Sternberg's fussy hands by anxious producers (i.e. Howard Hughes with the leaden MACAO or the genuinely sexy JET PILOT).

As per JVS' usual tricks, there's very few daytime exterior shots and only one bit of Shnaghai stock footage letting us know that it might seem like midnight in the casino ("Never Closes" is their motto) but it's actually a weekday morning. I love the idea of coming out of what seems like only a few hours of nightclubbing at a busy casino, drinks and decadence in full flower, to find the sun is up and fresh-scrubbed bright-eyed people are going to work etc. It brings back a lot of memories.

That would seem to conclude the tour, so what of the antagonist? What of the... Huston?

Maybe it's his clipped delivery and rigid military posture, dart-like rapid sudden movements, the way he kind of leans back as if ready to hurl himself across a table at his quarry as his vowels shorten, but Huston always excelled as inflexible moralist captains of industry, those never hip to their own flaws. He was a cop fond of beating the truth out of suspects in BEAST OF THE CITY, a tough-ass warden in CRIMINAL CODE, a King Lear-ish rancher in THE FURIES, and he bullied and cajoled threatened witnesses to testify. The rafters shook at his inflexible (but blind to its own prejudice) moral indignation. He was like the Old Testament of male authority, just as the New would become embodied by Spencer Tracy. I know it's a side note, but Tracy never worked with Howard Hawks, and I can see why: Hawks had a code, and it had nothing whatever to do with the following the letter of the law. Tracy's characters were law fetishists, treating the strict rules of conduct like Jimmy Stewart treats his flag. At his worst, Huston would use his moral weight to ruthlessly intimidate tribes of Congolese with juju magic tricks; Spencer might do similar things, but would think he was the good guy doing it, because he'd have a bible. He would do with a dopey smirk meant to win a Hepburn heart. Huston had no interest in being seen as good or attractive, only in achieving his grand design. Surely his son John drew on that persona for his own quintessential titan of industry in CHINATOWN.

So it's this paragon who goes up against Mother Gin-Sling. At a climactic "Chinee New Year" she tells him the lurid portrait of her grim early life feigning happiness after being abducted and sold to a 'pleasure boat,' and having pebbles sewn into the bottoms of her feet after she tried to run away (and these grim details survived the 30 rewrites!) And Mother Gin Sling even gives a New Years' eve floorshow out in the street in front of the casino, of girls being hauled up in cages as a reminder of the old white slave auctions. And that survived the rewrites too!

Chinese New Year, celebrating five thousand years of white slavery.

For Huston, it turns out, all this slavery and oppression hits close to home, especially as Poppy's his daughter and she's in debt to the casino, hooked on gambling, drinking, and presumably opium, and it's up to dad to pay her tab, like he's Colonel Rutledge in THE BIG SLEEP. And Huston's tycoon is his own worst enemy, as doomed to confront his past crimes the general in UGETSU. Alas, UGETSU this ain't, and the total of its parts adds up to a shocking denouement that leads inevitably to tragedy. Walter Huston always realizes sooner or later he's his own worst enemy, and that's a sad, crazy day. He's like the censor finally realizing he's cutting off his own genitals every time he cuts a film. He forgot he had a whole other world below his own belt and when he saw that thing rising up from the bedsheet depths in the morning he thought it was a cobra.

RAIN (1931) finds Huston trying to do the reverse, to get a very young Joan Crawford out of tropical prostitution but you know how it is. Once she learns he's arranged to haul her back from the tropics to stand trial (these expat prostitutes are always on the lam after murdering either a violent john or pimp, but it was in self-defense!) she gets religion and he finds her, finally, attractive. Turns out he re-baptizes slutty Christians only so he can corrupt them anew.

There's a great scene in RAIN I was lucky enough to see by chance while tripping one afternoon, wherein Joan's angry as hell, trying to escape up a set of stairs while he stands at the bottom, reciting the lord's prayer over and over again while she screams and yells and then starts moaning and sobbing in despair at the thought of going back to the states and certain execution. I never liked Joan until I saw this scene, on shrooms, watching as she went slowly in perfect modulation during the long single take, moving expertly from demanding him to leave her alone, to begging for mercy, to pleading for her life, to sobbing in despair, to finally joining him in his prayer. Somewhere along the line their two voices entwine, entrain, and she starts reciting the prayer too, stands up, super calm, walks down the stairs, ready to go; in her darkest hour, she finds the lord. Maybe it was the mushrooms that afternoon but I've felt ever since that RAIN is a horror movie. With her thick make-up, Crawford's Sadie Thomson has a ghoulish obscene demeanor; Dr. Mirakle in MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE or Irving Pichel in DRACULA'S DAUGHTER could borrow her lipstick; and Huston is her Van Helsing, but thanks to being swamped into a remote midway station on his way to the interior to convert missionaries, he takes it as his duty to convert her back from vampirism, only to turn bloodsucker himself. Naturally because of the code (though it was still weak in '32) there has to be a redemption possible in the form of a Marine who just wants to marry her and lead her into a bright light of avoidance, ala Dorothy Mackaill in DOORWAY TO HELL.

As Marlene said in MOROCCO, "there's a Foreign Legion of women, too."

Kongo (1932)

But that's the thing, if there's an entrainment of the lord, there's an entrainment of the jungle, too. And it entrains Huston's Henry Davidson just as the lord's doctrine entrains Sadie. Huston who clearly doesn't have her interest at heart, but is just a sadist, adhering to the letter of the law out of a kind of continual self-denial, the way senators campaign against gay rights and then go have a men's room tryst.

Just how many movies had women of adventure expatriating in some remote tropical outpost, either servicing the local sailors, or just drinking with the other refugees? Oh, countless. But it all stemmed from two things:

1. Miscegenation -  It's important to remember that censors weren't just patriarchal prudes, they were racist: pre-code never meant no censorship, just less 'clear' rules of conduct: sex outside wedlock between two white people could occur if the woman was a divorcee or widow, or if it occurred in the land of savages--Africa, the tropics, Asia-- where they're more or less the only 'civilized' people around, and the jungle entrainment rules; usually the only thing remotely like a white authority figure is a drunk or junkie priest or doctor or ship's captain under some sort of fever or addiction, to further break down the veneer of modern civilization so that morality can't help but buckle. MGM was the worst, in films like RED DUST: being around 'the coolies' with only a small number of white people around, well the censors were so nervous about miscegenation breaking out that the white-on-white adultery and call girl-trysting was overlooked. A trick still used on racist parents by manipulative white high school girls to this day!

2. Maugham -Just advertising your film as about some hottie who thinks she killed a man taking it on the lam to the tropics where she hooks up with a junkie doctor means you want the public to associate it W. Somerset Maugham, the E.L. James of the 30s. Any film that wanted to have 'steam' just cherry picked plot points from his RAIN, SEVENTH VEIL, and THE LETTER.

2. Prohibition - Only America could be crazy enough to try to enforce such a law, so voyaging abroad where liquor didn't taste like Turpentine became double sexy. Also in the Post-WWI economy, the dollar went farther than most, so one could live the high life in Europe on a pittance, and the kingly life in the tropics. It was on everyone's mind. .

3. Exotica - There would still be flak from minority groups, but the Great War had forced us to get social; we came back interested in the art and cultures, keeping and even further weirding up the aesthetics, creating a picture of the 'other' as kinky, lurid, savage, totally class-conscious, but with exquisite and bizarre taste.

And the Brits always loved Egypt.

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Pre-Code Capsules - SCARLET EMPRESS, LADIES THEY TALK ABOUT, THE BARBARIAN, FRIENDS AND LOVERS, THE RICH ARE ALWAYS WITH US

SCARLET EMPRESS, THE
1934 - ****
Von Sternberg was a genius but one could argue he never quite entered the sound era, preferring the language of symbols, small gestures, posed tableaux, and intertitles -all of which nearly suffocates the first half of SCARLET EMPRESS. Taken from the then still-sizzling diaries of the sexually voracious Catherine II of Russia, the film begins in a flower-encrusted choke-hold as the life of a regimented life of a young Austrian noble (Dietrich, in curls) is contrasted with the DeMille-level lurid tortures of the Proletariat at the hands of the Cossacks. The handsome, brooding, impeccably-uniformed John Lodge suddenly materializes like a tall shadow person with sable highlights in the stuffy Prussian parlor of Catherine's mother, and things start looking up, but the pompously over-orchestrated Russian melodies and airless claustrophobia is a long time going. One unbearable matriarch after another pokes and prods Dietrich like a piece of meat at the butcher's until your feminist blood is curdling, and it's only after Lodge has whisked her fully off to Moscow that we feel we can start to soak up the glories of the snow and the richly photographed sable wraps. But Moscow is just more poking, at the hands of the reigning queen in Russia, a perennially-cranky 'dowager empress' (Louise Dresser overplaying to near Shelly Winters-ish levels), and her no-good nephew Peter (Sam Jaffe), the half-wit prince and Catherine's betrothed, prefers prowling through the Satanic art-bedecked corridors of the royal palace like Harpo Marx on meth crossed with MESA OF LOST WOMEN's Dr. Leland rather than bedding his young wife. She's fine with that, but the dowager is ranting about needing a male offspring out of her, in a way that makes Bette Davis' mom in Now Voyager seem a model of compassion.

Well, if Peter won't bed her, she better find someone who can, fast, and keep it on the DL. Between all the horses marching tediously along by the hundreds past the camera (JVS digs filming his "1,000 extras"),  intertitles ("Pushed like a brood mare into a marriage with a royal half-wit"), drab nature shots, lockets falling gently down the length of vast trees, interminable liturgies droned in candle-lit churches, endless ringing bells, and strangely modern, rather overwrought Satanic sculptures at ever turn, this may be the most staid, stuffy, boring film that ever included shots of topless women being flogged and branded.

That said, if you're in the right frame of mind (the kind wherein you dig falling asleep to the molasses-slow poetic kink of Jean Rollin) you can forgive Von Sternberg being a little too obsessed with the sadomasochistic double bind of Marlene being forced to brood mare it up, and dig how Peter's drilling holes through his mom's walls so he can spy on any lesbian hanky panky reflects  JVS' own predilection for the peeping camera, and sponge up the aesthetic gloom overkill and be able to just lean back and watch Dietrich age quicker than her character does over the course of the film thanks to (based on what Von Sternberg writes in his Notes from a Chinese Laundry) the cruelty inflicted on his icy star.

LADIES THEY TALK ABOUT
1933 - ***1/2
"Watch out for her. She likes to wrestle," notes convict Lillian Roth of a cigar-smoking lesbian who looks not unlike famed sewing circle ringleader Mercedes De Acosta (lover of Garbo). It's only one quick shot during a long and engaging women's prison tour Roth gives new inmate Barbara Stanwyck and though she never came out of the closet it's interesting to find Babs semi-mocking a (possible) fellow sewing circle sister onscreen. But at least the gay/lesbian reality was represented, at Warner Brothers, where fey tailors and stern masseuses (such as a recently restored scene of one taking Cagney's measurements in PUBLIC ENEMY) were winked at but never bullied, which is at least more than they'd get after the code, when they'd have to just disappear, deep back into the closet.

Mercedes De Acosta - right / Dyke in LADIES - left

The bulk of the film deals with a love affair between gang moll Babs and moral crusader Dan Slade (Preston Foster), the kind where each has to continually top the other in sacrifice and honesty. He gets her off after she's busted as a bank job accessory, so she confesses she was really guilty. He sends her to the joint, so she gets even by tearing up all his pleas to help her. Dan's terminal earnestness is all but mocked openly by WB screenwriters, but they give Stanwyck full license for two-fisted feminine shots at chin of the status quo, the kind of target Sharon Stone aimed for in Basic Instinct but never really shattered like Babs does here. The huge gaggle of female convicts are (a few exceptions aside) all friends, the bull-ettes are nice if you behave; hell, this women's jail seem almost like Vassar except. When Lillian Roth sings "One Hour with You" while mooning over a glossy of Joe E. Brown, you know that hetero-wise, things are pretty desperate.

THE BARBARIAN

1933 - **1/2
It’s one of those films that could only have been made in the pre-code era at MGM, the studio who had the hardest time being truly subversive and often wound up just kinky and deeply racist instead. Egyptian guide Emil (Ramon Navarro) begins the film saying a tearful good-bye to a rich white European tourist lady on the outgoing Cairo train, and afterwards affixes himself to a striking British socialite played by Myrna Loy. Naturally, it being MGM, miscegenation would be out of the question, except that --like all British socialites visiting Egypt who catch the eye of skulking Arabs--she has an Egyptian mother (or rather 'had' - they're always dead before the film starts, saving any alleged social discomfort with the all-white side of the family). In Egypt to visit her indefatigably British fiancee (Reginald Denny) and his unbearably controlling mater, she's blessed with the king of 'harrumph' - C. Aubrey Smith (lower left) as a more understanding pater. Clearly MGM is pointing towards two 1932 hits for its box office hopes ---Universal's THE MUMMY and Columbia's BITTER TEA OF GENERAL YEN. But it's still MGM and therefore falls woefully short of Paramount's surreal charms or Universal's lurid expressionism, even Columbia's humanist handball, even if the pyramids are superbly evoked and the whole scene mad with magic.

 Emil first worms his way into her flower-choked hotel room via offers of service as a guide, enduring the casual cruelties he's subjected to at the hands of the lordly British and then turning the tables. If you imagine what it would be like if MUMMY star Zita Johan went off into the MOROCCO desert to endure SWEPT AWAY-style whipping and dominance head games at the hands of General Yen, well you'll find the erotic Myrna Loy bathing scene to be approximately sexier than Claudette Colbert’s milk bath in SIGN OF THE CROSS, which if these things matter to you, is nowhere near as awesome as Maureen O’Sullivan's nude swimming in TARZAN AND HIS MATE. Frankly I’m ashamed of myself for knowing all this, and so is Ramon Navarro, or will be, once he’s caught by Myrna’s coterie of harrumphing Enlganders.

Erich taunts his wife with Adolphe's love letters

FRIENDS AND LOVERS

1931 - **

British officer Laurence Olivier goes a bit bananas as the other man who loves nymphomaniac Lily Damita in this stuffy, tangled FAREWELL TO ARMS-meets D.H. Lawrence-ish saga set partly in London, partly in Paris, partly in.... India, and always squarely on the MGM stage. The best parts are in the beginning with porcelain collector Erich Von Stroheim (as Damita's aesthete husband) lolling languidly in the surf of Menjou's discomfort as one of his wife's lover caught with a lame alibi. It turns out Erich's habit is to blackmail his errant wife's many lovers, charging Menjou $10,000. because "porcelain is... expensive." We root for Erich all the way, especially since Damita is such a wearying screen presence. She can be charming, but when she's not 'on' she radiates a restless peevishness, like she's been kept waiting all day and is tired of being prodded and mussed by the make-up lady. Nice legs, though. Too bad that fellow Damita-schtupper Olivier later tries to shoot Menjou in a fit of jealous pique (by this time Damita already has another fiancee in the wings).

This all seems to be enough of a climax for MGM and the ending abruptly dumps everyone out on the curb after weekending at beloved old character actor Frederick "Here's to the House of Frankenstein!" Kerr's estate, and though he's cool with underhanded business, eh wot? his shrewish wife boots them out for conformity's sake. It's a lot familiar (for the era) triangle business that adds up to little more than the bros-before-hos credo 'tested' and broken on the rocks of Damita's scattered lips and alleged sex appeal. Better we should have followed Erich von Stroheim's porcelain, to the floor in shards if needed!

THE RICH ARE ALWAYS WITH US

1932 - **1/2

Divorce, scandalous, risque and o-so progressive in and of itself, was still enough of a subject for a films back in 1932, even at the already risque and progressive Warner Brothers, so here's novelist Julian (George Brent) pestering newly-divorced rich socialite Ruth Chatterton into marriage. She wants to have a little fun in Paris first but secretly wants him to come out and pester her, presumably but Brent always presumes that is the case, which is one reason I dislike him. His whole attitude reflects the gateway rationalization of rapists. Meanwhile, as Chatterton talks on the phone from Paris, her kid sister-like college chum Bette Davis tries to steal Julian away, but in a Midge kind of semi-joking manner that never works, until maybe the very end, (unless the man you're stealing is Frank Sinatra).

What's so fascinating this time around is the idea that ex-married couples can still be friends and look out for each other. Ruth's investment broker ex-husband starts losing his clients once he's seen snoozing the night away at ritzy clubs with his new, younger Paris Hilton-esque wife. So Chatterton comes home and throws her weight around to keep him afloat, rather than marrying the sappy and sacharine Brent, who's fond of purring bad lines like, "Will you think I've fallen out of love with you if I light a cigarette?" like it's the cleverest string of words ever uttered.  Davis' dialogue is, on the other hand, pretty smart, and the issues of marriage and divorce are rather adultly presented. Alfred E. Green (BABY FACE) directs with plenty of that old WB pepper but there's only so much you can do with this sort of material. No sooner has the bitchy new young wife announced on the drive home that she's pregnant but doesn't want to have the baby since it would ruin her figure and tie her down to some squawling brat, for example, she's instantly killed in a car wreck. But at least she got to say what everyone's thinking. Julian would be better off with Davis, but that's not to say Chatterton doesn't have great ditzy appeal; she's the living hybrid stop between Carole Lombard and her mother in MY MAN GODFREY (1936), and I mean that as a compliment.

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Red is the color of my true love's helmet: QUEEN OF BLOOD, JET PILOT

Top: Queen of Blood (Florence Marley) / B: Jet Pilot (Janet Leigh)

On Netflix Streaming comes a film that--were it not so beautifully restored--would be much harder to watch: QUEEN OF BLOOD (1966). As it is, the colors have been freshened up and the footage fairly glows. And what footage! recycled from a bunch of Russian science fiction films like 1965's MESTRE NASTRESHU, it's almost Bava-esque in its deep reds and eerie gel lighting, and the AIP-shot material is directed by Curtis DEVIL DOG Harrington!

Dennis Hopper and John Saxon are the recognizable faces amidst the astronauts, who in the ALIEN-prefiguring plot are sent to Mars where a delegate from another galaxy has crash landed. Get the picture? Do I need to draw you a map to Mars' orbiting moon, the Island of Phobos? Why not ask the ancient remains of Basil Rathbone, still sharp as a tack and nutty as an heir of Frankenstein, as the lead scientist of earth?

 

Acting as a fine mirror to issues of gender as well as Soviet-American relations of the era, the footage is matched brilliantly to its respective sides - the Dionysian and ornate deep red Russian footage for the female vampire martian - while the Earth scenes and space ship interiors are re-shot on threadbare Apollonian sets by Harrington (with some Russian film crowd scenes spliced in). The result is a perfect metaphor for the repulsion/attraction between the US and Russia...one side an ornate red samovar, the other an institutional gray cafeteria. Together it's like an unholy union written in the stars and read by lovers holding hands across the Berlin wall. When the astronauts of both planets get together for the flight home, the hypnosis starts and the blood drinking and the orders from on high not to harm the specimen follow. This time however, everyone but John Saxon agrees: save the queen! If she wants to drink Dennis Hopper's blood, fine, just warn her: the thorazine is long gone!

 

The point is, if if you ever watch Mario Bava with the sound off just for those great lighting schemes and purple gel spots, you'll love QUEEN OF BLOOD. All the metatextual Russia/Dionysian/Female/Plant/foreign-shot exteriors vs. US/Apollonian/Male/Us interior-shot/mammal dichotomies are just gravy on the train... the GHOST OF MARS train! And Judi Meredith as Laura James. She's got enough black eyeliner to darken the sun, and a sexy smoker's voice. In short, the film would be a great double bill with Josef Von Sternberg's JET PILOT (1957) and is clearly meant for a double bill anyway since it's so short (78 minutes).

 JET PILOT comes directed (mostly) by Josef Von Sternberg and produced by Howard Hughes, so you can imagine the arguments. Apparently Sternberg walked off at some point, objecting to Hughes' Russ Meyers-esque mammarian American obviousness, so like QUEEN, JET has a split identity which works meta with the Red meets White and Blue in bed scenario. The film has its flaws, but Wayne as the gruff Yank pilot ain't one, and neither is Janet Leigh as the hot, defecting Soviet pilot. They cram as much lust into their restricted gazes as the censor will allow while the cold freeze of the empty gray sky makes a great metaphor for the general iciness that is the post-code American perennial stalemate battle of the sexes.

 

 
It's a suitable metaphor not just for sex, but for bad sex… cold sex, post-children (no privacy) sex; Hughes’ sex, in short; the most unsexy of sex. Like an early version of Roger Vadim or John Derek, Howard Hughes was notorious for seducing pretty girls and making them stars via inert films with awesome posters (like THE OUTLAW), and usually firing the original director along the way in order to ensure no scrap of fun or originality survived. But in this case, Von Sternberg at least got in some good subtextual masochism in depicting the attempt of a pair of red star-crossed lovers to escape their respective ideologies and just get it on, alone, for a few hours. And in doing so, JVS mirrored perhaps his own problems trying to make a good movie with Hughes sending him a zillion contradictory memos. The Russia/US divide angle also illuminates the disparate polarities’ lack of ultimate difference: when her Soviet relations cockblock it’s because of proletarian group living conditions; when Wayne's US relations cockblock it’s because of a temporary housing shortage. Either way, it's enough to send a pervy masochist like Von Sternberg into paroxysms of ecstasy and Lenny Maltin to award it a scant two stars as if begging to be punished. Find it hidden deep in an old John Wayne set that includes--Lenin preserve us, THE CONQUEROR: John Wayne - An American Icon Collection (Seven Sinners/ The Shepherd of the Hills/ Pittsburgh/ The Conqueror/ Jet Pilot)

Thanks to Another Film Blog for some of the above stills!

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