All you need is holes: WONDERWALL (1968) and the Entomological Mystery Tour

Thisbe and Pyramus loved through a hole in a wall, and that made it to Midsummer Night's Dream, so surely there's room for a 1968 Britpop film called WONDERWALL that's really more about "all the lonely peepers," like Prof. Oscar Collins (Jack McGowran) at a waterworks entomologist who collects bugs and peeps through a hole in the wall at neighbor and fashion model Penny Lane (Jane Birkin). Through microscope viewer-size holes in their shared wall he can see her modeling for a photographer lad (Brian Walsh) who dresses in Apple records green, and dealing with her two-timing boyfriend (Ian Quarrier, who tries to get her into a menage a trois with Anita Pallenberg) but Birkin is so gorgeous and young, with such heavenly legs and crazy fashions- that we want to see her all the time and less of old Collins. But mostly we see her only in a round hole.

So what is going on? Is this a PEEPING TOM for the Carnaby Street dandies? Why do we spend so much dull time with Collins? When Quarrier visits him to borrow borrow ice and sugar at various times,  the professor always dressed as if hoping to be invited over and it's very, very dispiriting. The film drags on and we learn Penny's pregnant. Will Quarrier help raise his forthcoming baby. Will the professor ride to the rescue? I mean in some capacity other than cocking his head quizzically, as might a beagle trying to understand his master's command, letting us know he's more or less neutered and nothing to fear as far as midnight slashings or pantings or underwear drawer rufflings?

Whatever the motives, the soundtrack is a nonstop feast for the chemically-enhanced ear, with George Harrison's psychedelic melange of sitars, guitars, harmonica, tamboura and Indian horns howling, tinkling, and buzzing like an array of electric insects nearly nonstop. It's an entomological freakfest - a kind of mute Beavis and Butthead if they were just one guy who barely spoke but watched vintage Joi Lansing Scopitones through round holes in a wall, with only Norma Shearer in RIPTIDE (1934) and Isabella Rossellini in GREEN PORNO (2008) able to compete in the insect costume category (and no spider ala Lansing's "Web of Love" to provide a threat) and Harrison's buzzing tamboura and sitar hovering deep inside your ear ossicles.

From top: Joi Lansing, WONDERWALL, RIP TIDE, GREEN PORNO

The source story is by Gérard Brach, who wrote REPULSION and CUL-DE-SAC and THE FEARLESS VAMPIRE KILLERS and Guillermo Cabrera Infante, who penned VANISHING POINT (1972). One gets the impression of Brach's earlier work that he never meant Professor Collins to be any kind of Monsieur Hulot-Chaplin type whimsy generator but a skeevy older version of Terence Stamp in THE COLLECTOR, a fellow who doesn't need to abduct a pretty young specimen for his jar because one lives right next door, and there's plenty of air holes. The idea that Collins loses himself and begins to demolish his apartment to better make a million holes in the wall to peep through is creepy in itself, but doubly so when filmmaker Joe Massott films these actions to a bouncy polka and double projection speed ala Harold Lloyd or Benny Hill. Instead of laughs, what Collins needs a good slashening by Catherine Deneuve's razor, especially once he makes it his business to break into Penny's pad and start nosing around. That's the fundamental problem, or maybe solution, to this film --that young Penny just happens to be trying to snuff it right at the same evening he busts in. Good old Collins!

But maybe it's also because this weird pro-scopophile angle that it's ultimately interesting beyond its basic function as a pretty eye-popping light show showcase for Birkin's heavenly gams. If you go in expecting it to be a dull story of a dweebish scientist shuffling around his apartment in his pajamas, a reverse-gendered REPULSION tale of mental disintegration coupled to some old nudie cutie comedy like THE IMMORAL MR. TEAS, then the pop art YELLOW SUBMARINER tangents will throw you left of field; if you go in expecting a pop art whimsy-fest be prepared to be rather unnerved by the inordinate amount of time we watch Collins "reacting" to all he peeps. Factoring in the Beatles and pop art psychedelic hipster culture elements, Collins is a Mr. Jones / Father McKenzie bowler hat type Brit in a student art film, REAR WINDOW's Jimmy Stewart if he had no friends and didn't even know Grace Kelly, but spied on her and we were somehow expected to root for this delusional creep too shy and out of it to even realize how creepy he's being, figuring a movie about him watching old Grace Kelly through a hole was enough of a movie subject, especially with his imagining having a big duel with her boyfriend for her, using as weapons things like giant oversize pens, lipsticks, and cigarettes while the lime green photographer snaps pictures, all just so she can load his hookah while he stares off into space. Really, if you're going to imagine yourself a young Turk, why not be cool? Who pictures themselves as an old square duffer trying vainly to look hip? That defeats the whole purpose. Something is happening here but you don't know what it is, do you, Mr. Collins?

Now I should preface by saying I adore Michael Powell but I'm too skeeved out by PEEPING TOM to ever see it again, ditto THE COLLECTOR, and I can't stand Monsieur Hulot and all those damned (in my mind) terrible Jacques Tati comedies. And when it comes to the Beatles I'm more a Harrison-Ringo-John fan, and find some of Paul's songs insufferably cheeky and guileless. Paul was always trying to bring in the lonely old timers and bouncy children along on the picnic, dumbing shit down so they understand, while John and George were about leading the brave into the future (and scaring the shit out of children like me in the 70s, who of course loved the Paul songs). And there's that same bouncy children vibe here -- the colorful psychedelic whirligig is seen at arm's length while the drabness of foggy London codgers is front and center, the way, say, the Beatle's MAGICAL MYSTERY TOUR (below, above left) tried to be cheeky fun for one and all but instead was kind of like a banal fever dream - a bus loaded with middle-aged and dowdy working class yobbos instead of lovely upper crust birds and fellas. Just look at the drab washed out image of the four of them in their animal maskies below - as creepy as the brown bear man in THE SHINING or the citizens of Summer's Isle.

From Top: MAGICAL MYSTERY TOUR, SHINING, WICKER MAN

It's sad that Jack MacGowran, the great Irish Beckett interpreter, a titan of the stage capable of great oratory, who was fantastic as the gut-shot bank robber in Polanski's CUL-DE-SAC, is stuck playing a silent observer peeping tom scientist role, his mellifluent orating voice for naught; his hairy face like a feral Einstein, the whimsical electric banana I-am-a-Tangerine psychedelia regularly mystifies him but his playing along on his own side of the wall has a sad quality - wearing a tux that he keeps in a jar by the door.

In short, this is a very, very timid movie - it watches the hippies at play through binoculars like a dirty old man but gussies them up in enough insect coloring to give him the out that it's 'for educational and scientific purposes only.' Even happening to be in a position to come to her rescue, he hangs way back and lets the bobby get the glory and the mouth-to-mouth resuscitation (meant to resemble making out, all the better to agitate old Professor Collins with, my dear). The whole film has the queasy vibe of someone trying to paint a DayGlo PG patina of scientific inquiry on something he knows deep down is prurient, puerile, and pathetic. Penny has to almost die for the prof to have a chance to kiss her without it being creepy but even then he flitters away too scared to remember even how to use a phone.

For all that, again, WONDERWALL can't be dismissed easily -- it has a lot of British fans, like old Liam Gallagher at the band Oasis. And I imagine if you discovered the film like old Liam did, likely at two AM on BBC-4 while coming down off LSD then well then you might write a song about it, too. And seeing it all swanky with pop art colors exploding off of the screen on the blu-ray while Harrison's music flows remastered and earthy-ethereal in a gorgeous remix, there can be no doubt it has druggy pop art allure: both apartments eventually look amazing thanks to set design by art collective (and Beatle haberdashers and mural painters) The Fool, and Birkin is progressively more and more gorgeous. So on the proper chemicals I imagine it would be quite the thing, and for the rest of us can certainly provide some help in the old spatchka department.

But this guy Prof. Oscar Collins is half the show and that's 100% the trouble. If we come to the blu-ray, we come for a psychedelic plasmatic gorgeous pop art happening, presumably, not a kitchen sink Benny Hill, and that we do end up with one addresses the lingering need of British counterculture to address the problem of the judgmental old duffer. We just shush them away now, but in sixties Swinging London, there was only the BBC and cinema --and British cinema has always been a mixed collar bag, with a socialist streak, a hard-lost sense of propriety and a penchant for turning nearly ever genre of film dishwater dull. And if an older fella really wanted to know what was going on in the swinging bird's pad, there was not yet media to let him know he was letting his bourgeois prurience get him in a stiff upper liplock. He might feel he has a right to move in and arrest them all if things look suspiciously salacious through the keyhole (and he can't admit to himself he too wanted to smoke hash with a naked Marianne Faithful on a bearskin rug). And he never doubts we'd love to see him seeing it all - that is to say WONDERWALL continually thrusts forward the idea of the audience needing to see who we're seeing through.

For all his faults, an American filmmaker like Woody Allen at least understood how that works, that basic truth of viewer psychology. Woody's going after girls young enough to actually be his daughters isn't something he feels we'd root for, yet he at least is honest about it and that's the very core of art, an elaborate disguise for something too twisted to convey any other way. In real life, Polanski is on the run, but Allen strides free, and WONDERWALL is somehow convinced it's Allen when it's Polanski, the way Michael Jackson was convinced he was Peter Pan instead of John Wayne Gacy on a short leash; each believing that their artistic drive is coming from somewhere other than the drive to create enough distracting noises to cover up the hideous heartbeat under the Poe floorboards. Allen's years of analysis have given him enough awareness to understand that it is the beating of his own hideous heart, his guilty conscience, and so his distracting noises are conveyed as self-aware comedy. And Polanski's awareness comes from feeling the need to film the heart directly, that the heart is all he can see and so forgive him if he doesn't even deign to make distracting noises. But Joe Massot's WONDERWALL is so distracted by his own distracting noises it forgets all about the heart, and so mistakes its beating as the sound of butterfly wings, and so he never asks himself the tough sordid Flannery O'Connor question: isn't every butterfly collector more liable to sniff through his prey's old cocoon drawer than save her from self-immolating?

By the end of the film we more or less resolve this episode in Collins' life, but for the rest of us we can't help but feel like Woody Allen trapped on that sad sack train at the start of STARDUST MEMORIES if the entire movie was spent with him watching Sharon Stone blow kisses through a window. But hey - it was 1968! The director, Joe Massot, had one more trick up his sleeve. In 1976, he was hired to make Led Zeppelin's SONG REMAINS THE SAME. He was Page's neighbor and had been pestering him and manager Peter Grant about it and they'd all knew WONDERWALL, his only other film, had Beatles mystique behind it (and they hadn't seen it, which would have been a dealbreaker). And so they hired him work unseen for SONG (and then fired him halfway through). I saw SONG for the first time on TV after a wild party, with no expectations, and a bunch of friends of some girl I was halfway hooked up with (a tale for a different post-here!), and tripping on too much acid to find fault with it, and I loved it. So set and setting are everything, but most importantly, no Professor Collins, no Monsieur Hulot, are present in SONG, just the crazy, violent, talented, dangerous, beautiful young adults of the Zeppelin. And while WONDERWALL is a worthy curio for Beatles fans and Britpop lovers, I'd rather not be reminded how long ago that wild party was -and that I'm now just a peeper, a spy in the house of love, a fool on on the hill. So take your concern for the bowler hat chaps and shove it where no one comes near. All the lonely people hate looking at images of lonely people looking at images. Cut out the mediary who'd pin Jane Birkin's wings to the wall so you can pay him for a glimpse, and free her with thine own electric eyes! If she never comes back, you never really saw her to begin with, and so, Monsieur Collins, adieu! J'snooze!

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Waiting for Katelbach, Dorleac: CUL-DE-SAC

Long unavailable on DVD in the US, Roman Polanski's awe-inspiring CUL-DE-SAC (1966) is now on Netflix streaming, in a not-bad-looking transfer. So go there! I did and can now appreciate the wobbly genius of Catherine Deneuve's sister, Francois Dorleac, and the way this amazing film links the male posturing of KNIFE IN THE WATER with the cold-eyed sexual hysterics of REPULSION, and even connects with other films of the era, like WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF, SPIDER BABY, and L'AVENTURA, PERFORMANCE, and plays like Samuel Beckett's WAITING FOR GODOT meets Strindberg's DANCE OF DEATH.

The plot line is more like a series of events that spiral in and out of control, making 'plot' per se merely something to confuse and bait the viewer with: Donald Pleasance is George, an artist who's had an apparent mid-life crisis, sold everything to buy an isolated castle fortress (where Sir Walter wrote: "Look there's his original quill!") and stock it with a much younger French bride, Teresa (Francois Dorleac). Depending on which one of them you ask, everything is fine until a desperate, wounded criminal, Richard (Lional Stander) breaks in to steal eggs and demand their help in rescuing his gut-shot partner, Albie (the able and Joyce-ish Jack McGowran).

Though the stage seems set for tense DESPERATE HOURS, KEY LARGO, HE RAN ALL THE WAY, or PETRIFIED FOREST-style tension, Polanski deliberately skews it, pretending like he's about to fall into gangster-noir cliche, then righting himself back up, and winking at us like we're nosy fellas. After dealing with endless unwelcome drop-in guests--including a very rotten child (the closest thing the film has to a true villain) and an aloof Jacquelin Bissett--George finds the relative humanity and grounded 'realness' of Brooklyn-accented yank thug Richard and pill-bottle glassed intellectual Albie almost a relief. By the end of the night, Richard has bonded, kinda, with both Teresa and George over over homemade vodka and it all begins to seem like a weird metaphor for western-allied relations in WW2 and one of those unhinged lower class invigorating the ennui-ridden jet set kind of thing, ala PERFORMANCE, THE CABLE GUY, RULES OF THE GAME, SWEPT AWAY...., or even BARTON FINK. the keen observations and brute good-nature of Richard make him less threatening, which only makes his outbursts of violence that much more traumatic and scary.

As with so many of his 60's films, Polanski seems to draw on his experiences as a Jewish child struggling for survival in the Warsaw ghetto during the Nazi occupation. He makes use of his first-hand witnessing of true inhumanity to man, and where other directors would speed up and simplify -- good guys vs. bad, winning vs. losing--as the narrative coheres, Polanski slows down and muddies the water. At which point do hostages become complicit? Can contact with gangsters help a 'civilized' man finally shed his veneer and start throwing out unwanted guests like a rabid maniac? Mmmmaybe.

With its groovy Ronald Stein-ish score (attributed to Komeda), the CUL DE SAC vibe recalls the uneasy luncheon centerpiece in Russ Meyer's masterpiece, FASTER PUSSYCAT, KILL! KILL! or the arrival of unwanted guests in Jack Hill's 1968 cult classic SPIDER BABY. KNIFE IN THE WATER devotees will recognize, as will REPULSION fans, the ease with which Polanski dispenses with a singular point of view or any 'reliable' perspective of reality, removing any indication that any one character is 'right' in the perception of events over any other, no matter how warped.

Then there's the tale of two sisters: As opposed to Catherine Deneuve, who allows us to gaze lengthily at her spider-watching-the-fly features in Polanski's REPULSION, her sister Dorleac is always in motion, long lovely Francois Hardy hair in face, dark rings around her eyes hinting at little sleep, less sanity, probably drugs, to the point where it's hard to get a full beam on her features. This is not meant as a critique, merely an observation that puts her in the same warper class as Anita Pallenberg in PERFORMANCE, who also plays a crazy cross-dressing hermit's companion and nutball butterfly of shifting allegiances and facial features. (Check here for my 'many faces of Pallenberg' post)

Though both Dorleac and Pleasance are fine and even have subtle but real rapport, the true stand-out in the film is gangster character actor Lionel Stander. His big pug-ugly mug and gravely voice belie a great charm (he was the kindly bartender in ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST) and its heartwarming to see him get to 'steal' a whole movie. Stander was one of those unlucky victims of the blacklist, which probably explains his presence in so many European films in the 1950's through 70's (such as this one). Luckily he came back to the U.S. once the hysteria died down, and became memorable for his role in the long-lived Hart to Hart TV series.  Huge and menacing but comic and jovial in a salt-of-the-earth fashion, with that awesome gravel truck voice, Stander is heavy as a chunk of lead but light on his feet as a feather, able to go from menacing to sweet and good-natured on 1/19 of a dime.

As the film progresses, Richard develops a fine, borderline respectful rapport/borderline misogynist rapport with the equally mercurial Teresa: she brings him a vodka after his partner dies, but then later a hotfoot while he's napping in the sun ("that's called a bicycle!") and he responds by whipping her with his belt (!) then punching her in the side of the head ("that's called a 'klomp'!) Clearly, such kinky discipline is not something George would ever muster, so, like the love triangle of KNIFE and the real and imagined rapist/suitors that come to call and get dispatched in REPULSION, it becomes very difficult (intentionally one presumes) to chalk out a line between what goes 'too far' in trying to appease the contrary aspects of feminine sexual desire: women want to be dominated, possessed utterly, ravished, but only when, where and with whom their whim dictates.

Men struggle with this all the time: when does Fabio-style ravishing become sexual assault? Do women really 'need' to get slapped or choked once in awhile or is it just the fantasy, some genetic memory going back thousands of years into the past, grappling the same slippery slope by which Stockholm syndrome helped ensure the survival of her DNA, via her ancient relative becoming wife to the man who's tribe overrode her village and killed her previous husband? Does this all stem (for Polanski) from the Nazis, the way, say, 95% of pedophiles were themselves abused as children? Or is that just Polanski's deep-seated (as some claim, re: his rape charges) misogyny and ambivalence? To that, of course, it's wise to defer to Paglia-versed female film critics, like Kim Morgan:

...stuck in the house like a more spirited, extra primal Virgin Suicide sister, (Teresa) engages in childlike activities to amuse herself. She tears around the house barefoot, applies exaggerated eyeliner (or helps her husband with his), messes with rifles and, the best, most hilarious, lights a sleeping Stander's feet on fire with burning pieces of newspaper between his toes ("It's called a bicycle" she taunts). Oh...you just don't do that to Lionel Stander. Or perhaps, you do. Between these two mismatched misfits, it's disarmingly sexy. These characters don't establish things like "safe" words nor do they understand the concept of such a thing, so the perversity, stark beauty, the isolation, the bleakness, the menacing sexuality and the insanity make the whole experience a strangely good time.

In addition to raising chickens for their eggs, Teresa makes her own vodka, and proceeds to get both men drunk later that night and into the morning. This very strong alcohol serves to utterly confound all sense of allegiance and purpose (just like real life!) and soon George and Richard are bonding, then fighting again, then rambling off in their own directions. The feeling that this is all happening in real, linear time over the course of a night and into the dawn is awesome. A true genius in both extending and collapsing linear time, Polanski scores big on CUL-DE-SAC, or maybe I just love films where characters drink and party past sunrise, or that the photography is black and white and the music slinky jazz with lots of bass and funky sax. Oh and there's smoking! How retro! Who in 1966 could have imagined that in just 40 years booze, blonde ambivalence, psychosexual sadism, and cigarettes would one day be considered 'old-timey'?

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A Star-Spangled Salute to America's most Acidemic Cinematic Women

My whole life changed--from nerdy punk to liberated hippy--sophomore year, 1986, when I met Sabrina and Kelly (not their real names), two gorgeous blond, LSD-quaffng, dope smoking, rock star-chasing maniacs who were (me coming from central NJ) the most beautiful and non-stuck-up-about-it girls I'd ever seen. I fell madly in love with both of them, platonically, which was good since they ruined soccer players right and left and a steady stream of hot guys paraded through our lives, looking sad and dejected and sitting in a table across the bar from our long back row at Chuck's (in Syracuse, NY), while I always sat in the center of their universe, never paying for a single pitcher. But I learned so very much from them and had my feminine ideals jacked to the moon.

For instance: watching Kelly wake up in my friend Max's bed in the dorms (for we would congregate in his room for morning/afternoon bong hits). She would stretch and yawn like a cat and, and as the morning sun streamed through the windows, take a massive cannonball (huge gravity bong hit / slam a funnel of cold Becks / then exhale), smile sweetly, and pick up her acoustic guitar and purr out a gorgeous suite of Joni Mitchell songs, as relaxed and gently focused as if she'd merely had a nibble of honey-covered toast and a sip of herbal tea, not even a single belch...the morning sun shining through her golden locks, her voice sweet and high singing "I want to shampoo you / I want to renew you again and again." Yes my mountain flower, yes I will...thought I, feeling, for the first time in my life, connected and accepted by people I actually wanted to be accepted by... the star children Eloi. Connecticut were raising my soul up out of Morlock, New Jersey. 

I love these girls still, though both have since both have married with kids and all that stuff and I see them only once every few years. But I've found mirrors of these girls in cinema, and for the July 4th holiday, what could be better than to salute cinema's most acidemic American gals?! If not for them, this blog wouldn't exist, at least not in this form.

The definition of an acidemic woman: she never judges or condemns, but seeks a good time with tenacity, rolls with life's punches; she lives on the edge of her own forward momentum, never stopping to 'settle down' according to bourgeoisie mandates. These women have limited but undeniable telepathic ability. They've assumed an archetypal resonance that makes them transcend duality. They're afraid of nothing, not even of dying young or winding up in rehab. They may destroy themselves on the altar of decadence, or sell-out to the suburban exhaust pipe dream, but who am I to judge? They once burned so very brightly, and sometimes once is enough.

In originally doing this list I noticed more than 3/4 of the most obviously acidemic women were from Europe--especially Germany and England. Since it's the Fourth of July, I tailored the list back to just being aus der Amerikanische fraulienin und Filmen!  I had to disqualify Anita Pallenberg. I also disqualified femme fatale types who kill or seduce men into killing mainly for revenge or profit, as this counters the basic benevolence of the true acidemic lady. A femme fatale schemes to get somewhere at the cost of those around her - an acidemic woman is already somewhere, and brings us along if we ask real nice.

Here we go,
STAR SPANGLED SALUTE TO AMERICA'S
TOP TEN ACIDEMIC WOMEN!

Sharon Stone as Catherine Trammell in BASIC INSTINCT (1992)
 

 We all remembered and dug Sharon Stone as Arnold's hot murderous wife in TOTAL RECALL, and our suspicions of her genius were confirmed for Verhoeven's follow-up, this kinky explosion of noir and late night Cinemax trappings into the realms that dwells above camp, high art. Stone's Trammell is apparently Lecter-level smart thanks to a "Bachelor's in Psychology," so you know this is the liberal arts major's version of Fantasia. Stone even manages a straight face telling the cops lines like "I enjoyed fucking him," and smiles beautifully to herself at all the things she's not saying to Michael Douglas, no doubt even more cutting than her ice pick, because she likes "jagged edges." What could be more American than a ballsy character like Trammell? If she was French, you wouldn't even notice how cool she is, but as an American, she's "cracked it wide open." She derails the whole film and then snorts the rails. 

Angelina Jolie as Lisa Rowe in GIRL, INTERRUPTED (1999)
 

That she rides her own strait-jacket insanity like a surfer too cool to admit that being sucked under half the time is slowly choking the soul right out of her is part of what makes Jolie's character not only cool and tragic, but realistic. I dated a chick just like that and though she almost killed me, I still wish her well. In a 2008 entry I compared Jolie's character to Johnny Boy (De Niro) in MEAN STREETS about whom Pauline Kael wrote:

His madness isn't explained (fortunately, since explaining madness is the most limiting and generally least convincing thing a movie can do). When you're growing up, if you know someone crazy daring and half-admirable (and most of us do), you don't wonder how the beautiful nut got that way; he seems to spring up full-blown and whirling, and you watch the fireworks and feel crummily cautious in your sanity." (08)

Crummily cautious, man. Pauline Kael knew the score... and Jolie, Jolie Jolie, Please don't take yourself away from our pop movie screens just to have kids and Oscars. 

Edie Sedgwick as herself in CIAO, MANHATTAN! (1972)

You could argue she's kind of tragic here, but just look at Edie, slamming vodka with her cute rabbit headphones on, living in the bottom of an empty pool, for Christ's sakes! Why should she bother to be coherent when she's already 'made it' to the other side? The film itself is kind of a mishmash between this new footage in the pool and earlier black and white stuff of Sedgwick and her friend waking up in some strange guy's apartment, stealing his stash of cocaine ("Look at all these drugs!") and hitting the streets, heading to the factory for random footage of Brigit Polk babbling about how her fat thighs just right for popping speed. Sedgwick is beautiful, strung-out, and occasionally hilarious throughout, but the rest of the non-factory 'connecting' footage can pretty tepid, so step strong.

Lori Williams in FASTER PUSSYCAT, KILL KILL! (1967)

Of the three strip club motorists in Russ Meyer's ingenious (strangely nudity-free) sexploitation "car club" film, Lori Williams is the one you most want to bring home to mom. The other two --Tura Satana and Haji--are kind of creepy Goth butch (and I mean that as a high compliment, as you know), and anyway you step between those two coded lesbians and you get a tire chain across your back, so for fantasies of driving off into the sunset to the Bostweeds, Lori is your girl.

The other two girls are bad, "like a velvet glove cast in iron, and like the gas chamber." Lori on the other hand is just out looking for kicks. She rolls with Varla (Satana) and Rosie (Haji) because they're the most dangerous company in town but she's not really evil. Once she finds a big muscly moron and his Cutty Sark-swilling pappy "sitting on piles of loot," she promptly begins seducing the one ("I don't know what you're trainin' for, but as far as I'm concerned... you're ready.") and guzzling the liquor of the other ("Let's drink to trains!"), concluding her one-girl party with the immortal lines, addressed to her terrified kidnapee: "You know what Tiny Tim? When I have too much of this stuff, it's been known to be passin' out time. And it's just about passin' out time!" Come on son, let's take her in the house.

Natasha Henstridge as Lt. Melanie Ballard in GHOSTS OF MARS (2000)

She's got legs - she knows how to use them, like kicking your big leather boy KISS-bodyguard face in if you try and stop her from catchin' the ghost train. As I once wrote back in 2003: 

In pre-modern cultures, the approximate age of motherhood would be the age of the babysitter today, and just as (SPOILER ALERT) Michael Meyers is revealed to be Jamie Lee Curtis' brother in the TV extended version of Carpenter's Halloween, just as Norman Bates turns out to be his own mother in Psycho, or Ripley gives birth to herself in the Alien series, surely if there was time in a theatrical-release Carpenter film for big psychological twists,  Melanie would realize she is the mother of the Martian spores she rejects, probably via another flashback. As it is, we must hunt for clues, such as when Big Daddy Mars is able to sense Melanie watching him from beyond a hill with binoculars. He stops, turns to look in her direction with a sudden sneaking recognition, and then leads his gang towards her with all the ferocity of a rejected child can muster.

Another clue is when she actually does become possessed by a Martian spore and is left outside to turn into a ghost of Mars by Desolation and Jericho (note that they can't kill her outright, instead this becomes their non-dwarf version of putting Snow White in a glass case.) Jericho doses her with a hit of clear (a psychedelic drug on Mars) from her stash to "fuck with anything that's in there," i.e. the rock and roll Aldous Huxleyan last rite. With the help of this "spirit guide," rather than become possessed by the Martian intelligences, she has a vision of ancient Martian civilization, where Big Daddy Mars is conducting a massive rally of his army, generating cheers and hooplah. The drugged Melanie witnessing all this from outside their time, becomes their holy virgin "Big Other" for whom such ceremonies and rallies are conducted (perhaps Big Daddy Mars 'remembers' the feeling of this Big [m]Other's gaze from the aeons ago when he held that rally, which is why he can sense her looking at him?). ( Acidemic 2003 )  

 

Fay Adler as Miss "Pygmy" Allen - in MY LITTLE CHICKADEE (1940)
 

My buddy Max and I did a lot of drinking to WC Fields movies in the 90s. CHICKADEE isn't the best by a long shot of Fields' oeuvre (or co-star Mae West's for that matter) but it has its moments, such as a barroom scene wherein Fields runs into a pint-sized drunk billed in the credits as Miss "Pygmy" Allen. She only has one scene with Fields--who is tending bar, wherein she asks, slurring, if her husband had been in. Fields replies he doesn't know who he is and she cuts him off, slurring out: "ah, I don't care.." then launches into a drunken speech about how the worst woman is too good for the best of men, knocking over some drinks in the process. Fields orders her to a table (an old rule from the days when free-roaming prostitutes would try and steal johns from the bar's in-house girls) and she finally says "okay, you big tomboy!" Then Fields' perma-frowned old man co-bartender walks up during all this and asks, "Where's the funnel?" Max and I loved that --- so random -- a question we asked ourselves all the time in college, when funneling was the only way to drink enough cheap beer (all we could afford) to get a proper buzz. Somehow or other this amazing chick Fay Adler was only in one other film, Fields' next picture, The BANK DICK. But Fields should have married her instead of Mae West in CHICKADEE and they would be like a lot the happily dysfunctionally drunken parents of people I know!

Pamela Sue Martin in THE LADY IN RED (1979)
 

I love you, Pamela Sue Martin! I discovered this Roger Corman's New World gem randomly on late night cable and never stopped loving it. Martin plays the girl who was with Dillinger the night of the Biograph assassination, but who didn't rat him out, goddamnit. Thanks to a witty, feminist-communist-anarchist script by John Sayles, Martin makes all the Corman/depression-era gangland stops--from exploited farmgirl to sweatshop rioter to women's prison inmate to prostitute to bankrobber, and rolls with the punches every step of the way. And man, is she cute, and tough.

Myrna Loy as Nora Charles in THE THIN MAN (1933)
 

Seventeen words: "All right, will you please bring me five more martinis, Leo? and line them up right here." Yeah, throughout the marriage-embattled Hollywood years of 1929-2009, there was  one woman any man would knock off a bank to wed: Myrna Loy in THE THIN MAN. As the series progressed, the code frilled her out a bit, but in this first film she's just a sexy, indulgent, compassionate, witty, never jealous or judgmental, heiress, with a brilliant dog, Asta and the willingness to match her alcoholic husband drink for drink, until the ends of time. Yes, they wake up in the middle of the night to have drinks; yes they drink in the morning and yes they drink in between but you're only immortal once, so make it count, and they did.

Catherine Keener as Maxine Lund in BEING JOHN MALKOVICH (1999)

 Much as I love the ingenious scripts of Hollywood's misanthrope "it"-boy, Charle Kaufman, I wish he'd make his lead male characters just a hair less despicable. A rare example of how great his characters could be when such less a hair is found in BEING JOHN MALKOVICH. As the foxy new employee at hairy puppeteer-slacker John Cusak's new half-floor office, Keener blazes through the dimness in a shockingly cool white dress, calls Cusak "Craiggy" and treats him like a cat treats a drunken, amorous mouse. Keener manages to get everyone in the cast in love with her while never committing to anyone or anything, just coasting on a groove, wittily presuming everyone wants to sleep with her (and they do)... and drinking at the Stuck Pig with a sense of comfort in her own merriment that's seldom been seen since.

Clara Bow as Nasa Springer in CALL HER SAVAGE (1933)

The weird trippy energy of Bow is ahead of even our time today -- she moves from emotion to emotion in the same “totally there” way as someone would on psychedelics, but she’s like that all the time. She’s one of those in-the-moment bad influence trouble girls who you meet and within five minutes are broke but ready follow her penniless and barefoot into the desert, and come weeks back later, even broker, drug addicted, insane from syphilis and announce: “I regret nothing!” Don’t you regret either, pilgrim!

Clara’s grandfather is a wildcat mountain man who sleeps with a load of lassies as he leads a wagon train west through Indian-covered Texas; one of his ill-begotten daughters marries an absentee rancher and grows up “comforted” by a stoic Native American with whom she doth beget Clara Bow. The rancher doesn’t realize that’s why a daughter presumably from his own boring loins could ever be so wild. And wild? She goes around acting like John Belushi–she can smash a good guitar–in Animal House, but even sexier! Just seeing her wrestle with a big dog or whip a half-breed (above) is enough to change your life forever, but when she tussles with Thelma Todd? You will want to gouge out your eyes and keep them on the mantle, cuz you know it will never be that good again. (BLAD/09)

So that's the list. Happy Fourth! xoxoxo

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Ich liebe dich so, Anita Pallenberg

I love Anita Pallenberg, extra much today. I've always loved the Nordic blonde goddess types, not the bland automaton types but the ferociously alive yet cold-at-the-core Teutons. As I listen to Rolling Stones' "Angie," I think about what the Stones would have been without Anita and Marianne Faithful to guide them, the twin muses of the twins Glimmer. The allure of Faithfull lay in her archetypal depth, her timeless beauty, both dating back to Camelot and the Celts. Pallenberg's appeal was/is more elusive; you can't even really remember what she looks like because her face is so liquid, so alive from second to second with crazy emotions, artistic freestyle, Brian Jones, ferocious carnality, sensory exultation, long teeth, and innate fashion sense. She's a wolf and 18 djinn poured into a German model's body. All I can do is offer screen captures culled from PERFORMANCE to try and hang some random adjectives on her clotheshorse from Valhalla appeal:

 

With the arrival of James Fox's gangster into their psychedelic love den, Anita Pallenberg and Mick Jagger launch a series of wigs to conceal the hooliganism of Chaz (Fox) so he isn't found by his old gang. Anita initiates the red wig and against the red decor she seems like a whole new character, but it's just a mirror of Fox's original disguise, a hideous red shoe polish hairdo, and he will eventually wear the red wig himself... and lipstick.

 

Drugs play a huge part in this transformation. Though many contemporary shamen and Buddhists don't think drugs are needed, shaman Anita swears by them, and without those shrooms, Fox's transformation would be incomplete -- like trying to reach Nevada on foot instead of in an air-conditioned limo. To choose to walk instead may add 'authenticity' but smacks of puritanism and dogma. To paraphrase Ed Wood, if God had meant for us to walk, he wouldn't have given us wings... and to insist on always walking is just as dogmatic and dorky as never walking. Taking the van to go down the driveway for the paper, for example, smacks just as bad... but hurts so good.

Films of the late 1960s and early 1970s were full of political incorrectness and drug orgies but PERFORMANCE was directed and written by Donald Cammell, a man who lived and breathed drug orgies. The difference is like night and so much later that night that it's the breaka dawn.

Speaking of which, why am I letting yet another nice day go by writing blog entries? I'm  scared of all the tourists outside, and would rather be up in my own bescarved den of creativity, hiding from the world til it's dusk and the tourists are gone, the year of the Cat. I'll leave you with a link to my earlier PERFORMANCE piece and the beautiful ode to the song, "Wild Horses" by a writer with many of Pallenberg's alluring qualities, Sunset Gun's Kim Morgan.

And check her black wig in BARBARELLA (1968)!

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Great Acid Movies #2: PERFORMANCE (1968)

In Marianne Faithfull's highly recommended autobiography, she discusses the germination (in 1968) of the film PERFORMANCE (directed by Nicholas Roeg and Donald Cammell), recounting a particularly LSD-drenched evening with Mick, James Fox and Fox's androgynous girlfriend, Andee:

The carpets undulated in little ripples of apricot and ivory. Andee and I were slave girls of the great pharaoh languidly reclining on the royal barge [Mick's huge bed]. The pharaoh was fondling James. (It was going to be a very tactile trip...)

Later she describes vibrating beyond sex and duality in what might be described in lesser hands as 'tripping your face off' -- for what are faces if not masks?

I was in love with everybody. Actually, I was everybody... it was such a blissful state that you could easily fall in love with a chair, with your own shoes. What an absurd thought, someone belonging to someone else! God, and to think they started the Trojan War over stupidity such as that!

Sooner or later something was going to take place on this bed and tonight was evidently going to be the night. It was raison d'etre for the bed --- if Mick couldn't get Keith into bed, this (James) was the next best thing... No one knew about our little evening, of course, not a soul. But somewhere out in the drab, damp London night, the chief Dracula of this scene, director Donald Cammell, opened up his window and snatched it out of the air....

By which she means, PERFORMANCE --  a movie that was then shelved for two years (released in 1970) and is still way, way ahead of its time.

it was a "seething cauldron of diabolical ingredients: drugs, sexual relationships, role reversals, art and life all whipped together in a bitches' brew (147-8)

The cast of the film mirrored this menage a quatre to a T: Faithfull's bosom chum Anita Pallenberg played her part; the adrogynous Michele Breton played James Fox's androgynous real-life girlfriend, Andee. James Fox and Mick Jagger played more or less themselves -- chameleons.. Cammell-ions, if you will.

Some of the opening half of PERFORMANCE gets a little tedious, with all the thick gangster slang, crosscuts, and seething leatherboy power plays. Until we get to Mick and Anita's house, the beauty is in short supply, and what there is gets uglied up pretty fast, such as a long scene of Chaz (Fox) pouring acid (wrong kind!) on a Rolls Royce and shaving the chauffeur's head, with Roeg cutting back and forth to Parliament in session. Whoa! But cross cutting like that is annoying sometimes, especially now when it's been done to death and even ruined a potentially great James Bond movie (QUANTUM OF SOLACE). It was new enough then, one supposes, to be cutting edge, but it's still overly jarring--a cheap way to cover mismatched shots rather than to effectively convey any sort of "statement" (as in, wow, parliament is just gangsters in wigs! Who'd a thunk it?)


The film hits its high "now its kicking in!" moment about 1/3 of the way through, when Turner (Mick) calls Chaz (Fox) up from his basement room, planning to kick the bugger out. Chaz is desperate to stay, and Turner is artistically blocked enough to feel him out like a character study, or just too f*cked up to figure out how to get rid of him. (If you've ever had to kick a jonesing townie out of your hippie house, or vice versa, while tripping on acid, you'll relate.) As Turner tries different weird passive-aggressive intimidation tactics, Chaz defends himself with feigned stupidity and music hall clownery. Whatever Chaz does in his defense, Turner may not buy it, but he files it into his own bag of tricks. He decides to keep him in a kind of jaded rock star "slumming" way, as when Joe Buck and Ratzo get invited to the psychedelic party in MIDNIGHT COWBOY. 

Chaz is initially so clueless about the current entertainment world that he bills himself as a juggler--which is a very easy lie to get caught in (if you can't juggle, which he certainly can't). From there Anita decides to feed Chaz psychedelic mushrooms and soon he's hallucinating into a table ("I'll buy it from you!") and Turner and Anita start teasing the lad, breaking down his psyche, stripping off the learned layers of rude boyishness, dolling him up in a hippy wig and various flashy Carnaby Street outfits, and in the end he shacks up with Breton, finally opening up and resembling a real person. And the peak keeps climbing and overflowing all the way to the tragic and confusing ending. I read an interview with Cammell where he talks about the shot of the limo driving away suddenly turning and being in New York City! But I didn't see New York, man. So what's up with the ending?

Flaws don't matter with a film as subversively noble as this one. I quoted Faithfull at length above because I value her openness and clarity on drugs and the shifting locus of perception and subjectivity that is required to be truly that free. It isn't just "LSD talk" or "perversion" or "oooh ooooh Mick wanted to sleep with Keith." It's deeper, man, a scissor slash at the very fabric of our society, a challenge not just to the whole idea of "ownership" in sexuality and set gender identity but to the notion of identity in and of itself. In the trysts at play on both sides of the mirror--Faithfull's encounter with Fox and Jagger and Co., and the film version of same, wherein Faithfull swaps places with her best friend Anita Pallenberg.

Anita herself is already a mirror twin of a Stone - the dearly departed Brian Jones (see their matching mouths above left), elaborating the whole strange psycho-sexual link with Mick who at times switches places with Breton (who has Mick-length hair and a similarly skinny, androgynous body). It can be read as a call for everyone to be openly bisexual and loose-masked. But it's even more than that... it blows the lid off all notions of personae, racing clear past mere granolification and into the dark recesses of the void beyond identity and duality, the realm of madness, "the only performance that really makes it".

Bergman had tread into this realm with PERSONA (1966) and HOUR OF THE WOLF (1968), but no one took it as deep and clear-eyed druggy as PERFORMANCE. Bergman approached it from a more Nordically removed, intellectual angle (though I'm sure he at least 'dabbled'), while Cammell and Co. plunged headfirst into the madness, and never fully returned (Fox, they say, took years to recover, Breton never made another film, Cammell's career was destroyed, Mick was traumatized, Keith was furious, and so on.)

Jack Nitzsche's score is worth getting on CD even if you also get the DVD, which you must. This is a music movie and even contains what may be the first MTV-ready video (MTV from Hell), for "Memo from Turner." In that photo below you can see how Jagger taps the vein of homoerotic sadism that runs under the "chip chip cheerio" surface of British Imperialism and then trickles down to the Harry Flowers underclasses. It would make a damned good triple bill with DELIVERANCE and GUNGA DIN!


Lastly, there's Mick himself as Turner. Always an interesting screen presence, here Mick relishes the chance to play a darker, more genuinely Satanic version of himself. According to Faithfull, Jagger really wasn't into Satanism and black magic per se, he just liked to pose in the clothes and do shamanic gyrations. Under the warlock-ish spell of Cammell however, Jagger lets loose into some terrifying and funny places. At one point just shaking a stick to one of Jack ("The Lonely Surfer") Nitzsche's instrumental tracks (which Turner is supposed to have written), you get a sense of how truly sublime and mind-altering Mick's snake charmer dancing is. Later he even plays guitar and sings Robert Johnson's "Come on in my Kitchen," and if you never understood what Johnson's blues had to do with the devil, now you know. Mick may not be the devil, but he's a hell of a good recruiting officer. There's got to be some sinister reason he and Keith are still alive, kicking, and even in their withered shells, super sexy.

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