Delphine Seyrig's Feminist Acting Documentary

Barbara Steele, among the interviewees in Delphine Seyrig's SOIS BELLE ET TAIS-TOI.

Finally caught up today with a film I've long wanted to see: SOIS BELLE ET TAIS-TOI ("Look Pretty and Shut Up," shot 1970-76, released 1981), a documentary directed by actress Delphine Seyrig. Shot on prehistoric videotape in grainy B&W, the film finds her interviewing a number of actresses (including Jane Fonda, Ellen Burstyn, Maria Schneider, Anna Wiazemsky, Candy Clark, Cindy Williams, Millie Perkins and others) about the cruel realities of their profession and how unrealistically women were depicted onscreen, at a time when many of the most popular films were about male relationships.

I can't say it's a well-made film - Seyrig doesn't use videotape too differently than audio tape, and the interviews are crudely assembled - but what it contains is of terrific interest as a time capsule of what the female artists of this period were coping with professionally. You might expect it, but there is zero discussion of sexual harrassment - the Seventies weren't that outspoken. 

Jane Fonda, speaking impeccable French in footage added to the film in 1976, talks about filming JULIA (1977) with Vanessa Redgrave and how the men who wrote, produced and directed it were paranoid about telling the story of a close friendship between two women, actually counting how many times they touched in each take, fearing that too much touching would make them appear like lesbians. Fonda is the only woman interviewed who had ever been asked to play the friend of another female character, and none of the women interviewed could recollect ever playing a scene in which they were required to show warmth toward another woman.

Also revealing is a clip of Barbara Steele (pictured), lamenting her work onscreen, which she insists is the absolute opposite of who she is. She admits to having been a cult actress in "Grand Guignol, outrageous kind of horror flicks" and that she's "done a lot of films I didn't want to do" and that she's now [1970] actually stopped working because she hated what she was being offered so. "I have bad karma also, you know," she says. "I think that you should really try and stick with what you want to do, what makes you LIKE yourself. I mean, I have this incredible shyness about it. I feel like hitting people in the head, when people come up and say 'Hey, we loved you in...' and I say 'But THAT'S not me... it's somebody else's image... screw THAT!' Don't tell me that you liked me in THAT because I wasn't even THERE! That was somebody else!"

First Look: VIDEO WATCHDOG 177

The next issue of VIDEO WATCHDOG - now at the printer - will be a Eurocrime special with extensive coverage of the poliziotteschi (po-leet-zio-tess-ky, or Italian cop movie) genre. I'm always a little sensitive about publishing too many photos of firearms in a given issue, but this issue has so many that the NRA should have taken out an ad. So what do the poliziotteschi films have to do with fantastic cinema? you may ask. Well, these films are over the top, for one thing; secondly, they share with Italian horror and fantasy cinema many of their most familiar directors (Sergio Martino, Fernando Di Leo, Umberto Lenzi, etc), and they also share with the best horror cinema a means of using entertainment to reflect socio-political realities that could not be addressed more directly. We have a feature article by George Pacheco offering a concise overview of the genre, and also John Charles reviewing the two Fernando Di Leo Italian Crime box sets from Raro Video as well as a preview of Mike Malloy's forthcoming DVD documentary EUROCRIME! THE ITALIAN COP AND GANGSTER FILMS THAT RULED THE '70s.

Furthermore - and this was pure synchronicity - Larry Blamire weighs in with a Star Turn column devoted to a memorable guest star appearance on Patrick McGoohan's DANGER MAN (aka SECRET AGENT) series. No, not gonna tell you which one - it's a secret! But he's written a remarkable appreciation of a guest star and you'll want to be the first person on your block to know her identity. (Oops! gave you a little hint there - forget I said that!)

But maybe you're only in it for the horror? Well, we have a lengthy review I've written of the German BLOOD AND ROSES DVD that compares the European and English-language versions of the movie, as well as additional coverage of BYZANTIUM, THE CHILDREN, THE HAUNTING, FANTASTIC VOYAGE, HOUSE OF WAX, THE DEVIL'S BACKBONE, SECONDS, SCHLACKEN THE PAINTER (like BLOOD AND ROSES, another J. Sheridan LeFanu adaptation), TERRORVISION, THE VIDEO DEAD, THE UNSEEN, VAMPIRA AND ME... and THE DISCO EXORCIST! Furthermore, back in gun territory, we have John Charles on Grindhouse Releasing's THE BIG GUNDOWN and Kim Newman on the most recent Charlie Chan releases. It's a great, variety-packed issue, if I do say so myself.

It will ship to subscribers and retailers around the second week of June.

A number of you have been asking where the new Digital Edition is. Well, it's coming. The way we are liking to do things is to publish and ship an issue, create the next one, create the previous digital edition once people have had a chance to digest the print version, and so on. Donna is preparing the Digital Edition now, as a matter of fact. We think you're going to love what Larry is doing with the digital version of his column. We're so glad we asked him aboard.

VW 177 Nearing Completion

Donna, John and I are putting the finishing touches on VIDEO WATCHDOG 177, which is going to be a special Italian Crime issue consisting of new contributor George Pacheco's overview of the "poliziotteschi" films of the '70s and John Charles' detailed coverage of Raro Video's two Fernando Di Leo box sets, as well as his review of Mike Malloy's documentary on the subject, EUROCRIME! My own contributions to this issue include an in-depth review and comparison of the Euro and US versions of Roger Vadim's BLOOD AND ROSES and a lengthy look at Jess Franco's 1974 kinkfest THE HOT NIGHTS OF LINDA. Also SECONDS, THE BIG GUNDOWN, THE HAUNTING, FANTASTIC VOYAGE, Kim Newman on the latest Charlie Chan releases, and (I mean it) much more!

10 Cultish Reasons to Vacation with MR. HOBBS

Twilight Time, the extra-mile label that issues limited pressings of major studio films on Blu-ray with isolated music tracks, recently issued Henry Koster's comedy MR. HOBBS TAKES A VACATION (1962) in a limited edition of 3000 units. Scripted by Nunnally Johnson (who squeezes in a winking reference to Nabokov's LOLITA without mentioning the nymphet's name) from a novel by Edward Streeter, the film stars James Stewart and Maureen O'Hara as a pair of kissy grandparents (she's "36-24-36, and still operational," we're told) who, through her orchestrations, arranges for them to spend yet another vacation in the privacy-cancelling company of their entire unhappy family. As the grown kids and their respective families arrive, we  begin to understand why O'Hara is doing everything she can to avoid another vacation of erotic abandon with her martini-mixing husband.  

I recommend this film to anyone who enjoys wry, low-key situation comedy from this period. The Twilight Time disc has some sync issues that may be inherent in the film itself, but it's nevertheless a handsome presentation. Revisiting the film helped me to better appreciate what a cognizant film it was about the pop culture of its times, and how influential a work it became within certain spheres. So here are some reasons, beyond the obvious, why you might want to splurge on a copy or, if your standards aren't so high, to stream it from Amazon.
    

1.) When the Hobbs family - Mr. (Roger), Mrs. (Peggy), teenage daughter Katey (Lauri Peters) and TV-addict son Danny (Michael Burns, later the star of Robert Altman's breakthrough picture THAT COLD DAY IN THE PARK) - arrive at their holiday destination, they find themselves faced with a heavily weathered beachfront manse with the mange. As he's about to venture inside for the first time, Hobbs says "If it was good enough for Edgar Allan Poe, it's good enough for us!" (or words to that effect), which - because I'd recently seen and recorded a commentary for Roger Corman's PIT AND THE PENDULUM (1961) - helped me to see that this was indeed another House of Usher posited on the Pacific coastline! Thus, this throwaway line is very likely the first major studio acknowledgement of the great commercial success then being enjoyed by American International Pictures.

2.) I also strongly believe that MR. HOBBS TAKES A VACATION was one of the seminal influences on AIP's then-forthcoming and highly popular BEACH PARTY series. It was made only one year before the first BEACH PARTY (1963), and according to published sources like Mark Thomas McGee's history of AIP, Lou Rusoff's original script for that film was about young people much closer to Fabian's Beatnik-bearded hot-rodder Joe than the homogenized Italian-American twenty-somethings we finally got in Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello. Here we also get the delicate generational conflicts between the young and the once-young, with Roger Hobbs taking an almost anthropological look askance at the problems and pastimes of his children and the families they've begun, not to mention the voluptuous blonde neighbor who flounces over to his towel to be friendly.

3.) This is Valerie Varda as Marika Carter, a heavily-accented buxom beauty who in essence lays the groundwork for Eva Six and particularly Bobbi Shaw in the BEACH PARTY series. 

4.) MR. HOBBS also clearly influenced certain William Castle films yet to come (notably THE SPIRIT IS WILLING, 1965), especially in the way Henry Mancini's wholesomely lazy score (isolated for heightened enjoyment on Twilight Time's Blu-ray) lends ironic gracious-living shadings to the baroque eccentricities of the beach house. This facet also points the way to TV's THE ADDAMS FAMILY which, like THE SPIRIT IS WILLING, was scored by the great Vic Mizzy in a manner that was, I believe, influenced by what Mancini did here but took his principles in an altogether more instrumentally byzantine direction.

  
5.) It's got Minerva Urecal playing a Swedish maid. Minerva (who must have been out-prettied at auditions by Marjorie Main for years) had been haunting B-movies since the 1930s. She was Bela Lugosi's housekeeper in THE APE MAN (1940), among other things, so this was a step up - and she used her leverage from this film to land a key role in George Pal's THE 7 FACES OF DR. LAO (1964).

6.) If you watch this film without knowing anything about it, you are guaranteed to be startled when the name JOHN SAXON dances out onscreen in multicolored lettering during the animated main titles. It's just not a name that lends itself to multicolored dancing letters, but there he is - playing Stewart and O'Hara's academic son-in-law - a guy so far-fetchedly intellectual, he has actually read WAR AND PEACE, and MOBY DICK to boot.

7.) Fabian, whose character inexplicably begins to sprout a beatnik bead part-way through the movie, has a preposterous pop song number ("Cream Puff," co-authored by Mancini and Johnny Mercer - the men who wrote "Moon River," for crying out loud) with co-star Lauri Peters. The playback is riotously out-of-sync with their lip movements, which raises the question of how much better than the live take could the dubbed track possibly be? The song requires Peters to caress Fabian with the term of endearment "Jelly Roll."

8.) I defy anyone to watch Stewart's "beguiling" (NEW YORK TIMES) performance in this film without frequently flashing back to the work he'd done for Alfred Hitchcock, particularly VERTIGO. The dichotomy thus proposed is an object lesson in an actor intent on demonstrating his range and his willingness to please audiences. His performance here is not exactly subversive, but there is something subversive-lite about the film as a whole - the way it gives family life "a gentle poke in the ribs" (VARIETY) - that would not work so well without Stewart (of whom we began to see a much darker side in the post-war work that began with Anthony Mann's WINCHESTER 73) in the driver's seat.

9.) One of the Hobbs daughters is played by Natalie Trundy. PLANET OF THE APES series regular, 'nuff said.

10.) Yes, that's Beaver's grade school principal Doris Packer serving as the dance hostess, and your eyes do not deceive you: the band's trumpet player is none other than Herb Alpert.

   

He Introduced Spider-Man to the World

RIP Dick Ayers, the great Silver Age pencil and ink man who contributed most importantly to the Marvel Age of Comics, who has passed away at the age of 90. Ayers did his own work for titles as illustrious as TALES TO ASTONISH, STRANGE TALES, GHOST RIDER and an impressive 10-year run on SGT. FURY AND HIS HOWLING COMMANDOS, but he may be best remembered as one of Jack Kirby's most beloved inkers in a fruitful run of monster, western and superhero comics including STRANGE TALES' unforgettable "Fin Fang Foom!" and some of the earliest issues of THE AVENGERS and THE FANTASTIC FOUR. Though the interior art was turned over to one of Marvel's most distinctive artists, Steve Ditko, Ayers inked Kirby's art on the issue of the magazine that introduced the Amazing Spider-Man to the world - his single-most iconic assignment in a career spanning 70 years.

Quick Look: SORCERER on Blu-ray

Still an editing nightmare that spends its first hour elliptically globe-hopping to introduce four losers we never get to know, William Friedkin's SORCERER arrives on Blu-ray with jungle foliage newly the color of a Jelly Belly Green Apple bean. Unlike Clouzot's original THE WAGES OF FEAR, this not-a-remake isn't an exercise in unbearable suspense so much as an attempt (to paraphrase Franju) to "twist the audience's head off" with extended scenes of miserable cyphers enduring the worst a South American Mother Nature can deal out as they run a fool's errand. Hardly the best film Friedkin ever made, as he claims, but probably not the worst film ever made by someone pretending they were Werner Herzog. The harrowing bridge scene still makes the misguided trip moderately worth taking, and the original emerges from its shadow all the more impressive. No extras, but the BD Book packaging includes a 40-page chapter about the film from Friedkin's autobiography. There is also a letter from the director, in which he basically admits that the film came about because his new house in Bel Air was getting to him. (Warner Home Video, $27.98)

My First Animated Skeleton

This bizarre artwork is a detail from the dust jacket of the US hardcover edition of Ngaio Marsh's 1949 mystery novel A WREATH FOR RIVERA. When I was a kid, my mother and grandmother sometimes took me to Salvation Army thrift stores in our neighborhood, where I was turned loose in the used book department while they did their own foraging and rummaging. One day, they took long enough at their shopping that I exhausted the store's supply of comics and children's books and began browsing outside my usual perimeters.

I found this.

A WREATH FOR RIVERA became the first adult novel I ever owned - the beginning of a life-long collection. I remember having to talk Mom and Granny into it; they said it was too grown-up for me, but something in me responded to this cover art and I had to have it. I'm sure I saw this before I ever saw Ray Harryhausen animate skeletons in JASON AND THE ARGONAUTS - and I didn't see 7TH VOYAGE OF SINBAD until its 1970s reissue - so this was the first animated skeleton, so to speak, in my experience.

Long story short, I was allowed to have it - it was only a quarter or something. As it happens, I never did read it, probably because I couldn't find any passages about a skeleton drummer inside, but I kept it for a long time. from that day forward, whenever we returned to the local Salvation Army store, I went straight to the book department in search of more cool covers. As a result, I acquired a fairly sophisticated collection of fiction (mostly paperback) at a young age; one of my favorite childhood memories dates back to a visit from my out-of-towner Uncle Larry, who looked through my collection and called out to my mother, "Hey, Bones! This boy of yours has good taste!" I think I must have become a critic then and there. (Yes, my mother's nickname was Bones. Interesting, isn't it?)

I remembered this old book and its cover art out of nowhere a couple of nights ago and went looking for a scan of the dust jacket. The picture isn't exactly how I remembered it - for some reason, what I told myself in memory was that the cover showed a dozen or so skeletons firing Lugers at each other - but nope, this is definitely the book that nudged me into the wonderful world of vintage used hardcovers at the age of five or six.

Pow!
_______________

Update April 2, 2014:

Reader John Seal writes: "You may be interested to know that LA art punks Monitor cribbed the Marsh book cover for their 'Beak/Pet Wedding' single in 1979. Great band – I saw them open for Cabaret Voltaire in late 1980."

Some Forbidden Swedish Cinema

An instance of PERFORMANCE-like decadence from Mai Zetterling's NIGHT GAMES.

Last night I treated myself to an evening of forbidden Swedish cinema (forbidden in the sense that it's not commercially available here), beginning with Mai Zetterling's bizarre NIGHT GAMES (Nattlek, 1966), a film which won some stateside notoreity when Shirley Temple resigned from the board of the San Francisco Film Festival when they refused to bar the film - which she considered obscene - from exhibition. It's a garish film to be sure, aggressively weird in that faux-Fellini way, and it contains at least one scene (between Ingrid Thulin and the young actor playing her pre-pubescent son) that would never be permitted today, but as the point of the story became clearer, I found it winning me over to its side. This started happening when I realized that the film had been the missing visual link - in my own cinematic education - between Losey's THE SERVANT and Cammell and Roeg's PERFORMANCE; like those films, NIGHT GAMES is about people who don't get enough sunshine, whose homes fester into a second skull housing their increasingly baroque and dangerous games of cat and mouse. Made pretty much exactly between those two films, we can clearly see ordinary decadence becoming both sick and psychedelic here.

Secondly, I watched Joseph W. Sarno's YES (shot 1966, released 1968) - which I believe was shot under the title THE MANNIKIN but was later retitled TO INGRID, MY LOVE, LISA (under which title it's actually available from Something Weird Video). It's the story of Lisa, a bisexual fashion designer who falls a bit too conveniently in love with Ingrid, the shy, lanky blonde farm girl next door after moving into a new house. She lures her into a modelling job in an effort to seduce her, but Ingrid is so pleased to be away from her inexperienced boyfriend in the country that she starts sleeping with every man she can find. In the end, Lisa does have her way with Ingrid, but afterwards, as if having repaid her gratitude to Lisa, Ingrid gets up, gets dressed and flees the scene, leaving Lisa in tears - and then goes outside, where (in view of a church, no less!), she takes the hand of the first man she meets, as if desperate to prove to herself that she's not queer.

YES turned out to be conspicuously different to the Swedish-language version I'd seen before. Kvinnolek (which I'm told means "Girl on Girl" - not to be confused with his 1974 Marie Forsa film GIRL MEETS GIRL) is not just different in the musical way that INGA (made immediately before it) is different to its Swedish version. It's nearly a 10 minute difference. Kvinnolek includes several scenes that weren't in the copy of YES I watched:

1) In the first party scene, a blonde guest on the dance floor strips down to her panties and dances until one of the male guests carries her off and throws her on a bed;

2) Ingrid visits Lisa's office and makes the acquaintance of one of her male business associates, whom we subsequently see (even in the YES version, with omits their meeting) dating and making love;

3) After Ingrid seduces a member of a rock band and tires him out, she redresses and takes to the street in frustration where she meets another man within view of a church, who takes her to his apartment, removes her dress and begins making love to her (if this sounds familiar, it's because the US version removed this portion and used the first part to create a more conservative finale);

4) Kvinnolek includes a brief night exterior of Ingrid running toward camera down a street, but omits the set-up for this shot found in YES, where she is accosted by two drunken men after leaving the previous man's apartment - the scene humorously plays itself out with two louts deciding they are happier with each other than chasing a broad;

Finally, the climactic lesbian scene between Ingrid and Lisa unfolds differently in the two versions. In Kvinnolek, their initial standing kiss cuts to a full length shot of the two women, covered by a white sheet, then the scene cuts to them in bed, Lisa kissing Ingrid's face everywhere but on the mouth. Then, the scene fades to white (a most unusual touch for 1966) and we see the two women waking together and having what appears to be - it's in Swedish, so I can't tell for certain - a happy, conciliatory conversation which then fades to black as the exit music plays.

The scene, as it plays in YES, adds in roughly a full minute of graphic yet non-explicit footage of two body doubles sucking and grinding away, and then fades to black before fading in to Ingrid's awakening and furtive departure. I couldn't help wondering if this was the only instance where Sarno recut the US version of one of his Swedish films to make it both more sexually explicit, yet at the same time, more sexually conservative?

Catching Up With Five Mean Years

Last week, I decided to fill a gap in my Greil Marcus collection by acquiring his book THE DOORS : A LIFETIME OF LISTENING TO FIVE MEAN YEARS, which I was able to pick up in hardcover from an Amazon Market seller for the princely sum of one penny, plus $3.99 postage. Though I was cautioned that the book was used, upon opening the package, I found the book not only in mintish condition but the dust jacket bore an "Autographed Copy" sticker. I couldn't believe it, but I looked inside and, sure enough, there was the great man's signature, looking for all the world like a length of pliered wire.

Last night, I finished it. Like a number of its readers, I was somewhat disappointed. The entire book, short as a lark, appears to have been prompted by Marcus' listening to the now-out-of-print 4-CD Rhino Handmade set BOOT YER BUTTS!, which I don't have and have never heard; it was widely condemned for its poor sound quality but he makes it sound spottily appetizing and in some instances astounding - so he put me on the scent for a copy. As always, Marcus is a stimulating thinker (when he makes the otherwise unacceptable comment that "Not To Touch The Earth" is "musically incoherent," I have to stop and evaluate precisely what he's saying) and I admire all that he ropes into the discussion, but though Marcus has always lead me on topics like Bob Dylan, I felt he had less to teach or offer me about these guys. And his project is further handicapped because he only seems to admire certain aspects of the Doors' recorded works whereas I find much to value in those middle albums he has no use for. If anything, I much prefer those to the drunk tank blues of L.A. WOMAN, which he likes more than I do. I was glad we were agreed on the Oliver Stone film, though, which he made me want to watch again.

Good deal for a penny, though. Try your luck.

First Look: VIDEO WATCHDOG #176

Now at the printer! We'll start shipping when it returns in a couple of weeks.

RIP Calvin Floyd (1931-2014)

Leon Vitali (BARRY LYNDON) as Victor Frankenstein in Calvin Floyd's TERROR OF FRANKENSTEIN.

Producer Jeffrey C. Hogue has written to inform me of the passing last week of Swedish-born writer-composer-director Calvin Floyd. He is best remembered in this country for his documentary IN SEARCH OF DRACULA (1975, narrated by Christopher Lee) and probably the most faithful of all Mary Shelley adaptations, the Swedish-made TERROR OF FRANKENSTEIN (aka VICTOR FRANKENSTEIN, 1977).

Among Floyd's other films are a production of FAUST (1964), the crime thriller CHAMPAGNE ROSE IS DEAD (1970), and the period suspense film THE SLEEP OF DEATH (1980).

Calvin Floyd was 82. He is survived by Patsy Impey (his companion of 25 years), and also his son and daughter.

It's the 12th Annual Rondo Award Nominations!

The 12th Annual Rondo Award nominations have been posted and, to my surprise and great pleasure, VIDEO WATCHDOG and I are once again among the nominees - me with five nominations of my own, and VIDEO WATCHDOG with six!

VIDEO WATCHDOG Nominations:
Best Magazine (please bear in mind our Digital Edition while casting your votes - it's not mentioned elsewhere on the ballot!)
Best Article (Bill Cooke's "Roman Polanski Double Feature," VIDEO WATCHDOG 173)
Best Themed Issue (Quentin Tarantino picks his 50 Best Sequels, VIDEO WATCHDOG 172)
Best Column (Ramsey Campbell for "Ramsey's Rambles")
Best Column (Douglas E. Winter for "Audio Watchdog")
Best Cover (Charlie Largent's BLACK SUNDAY cover for VIDEO WATCHDOG 173).

TIM LUCAS Nominations:
Best Audio Commentary (Redemption's THE AWFUL DR. ORLOF)
Best Article ("Citizen Clarke" in LITTLE SHOPPE OF HORRORS 31)
Best Interview (Quentin Tarantino in VIDEO WATCHDOG 172)
Best Column ("Tales From The Attic" in GOREZONE)
Best Blog (Video WatchBlog)

Mind you, I - as well as a good many other worthies - are also eligible for two write-in categories: Best Writer and Best Reviewer.

Congratulations to Bill, Ramsey, Doug and Charlie on our team, but also to ALL the nominees and their worthy products and projects!

Donna and I would certainly appreciate your votes, but most importantly, just get involved and make the results better informed with your participation! 

You can find the ballot here:

www.rondoaward.com
or
http://monsterkidclassichorrorforum.yuku.com/topic/53676/RONDO-XII-OFFICIAL-BALLOT-IS-HERE#.UyZDpM6GOMS

Voting ends at 12:00am midnight, May 5!

You'd Drink Too: Here's To June Squibb

June Squibb in Alexander Payne's NEBRASKA.

I love Bruce Dern. I have always loved Bruce Dern, and I took notice of him early, when he was terrorizing Teresa Wright on THE ALFRED HITCHCOCK HOUR. He's always real, always wonderful. He's wonderful in NEBRASKA too, but - I feel - not exceptionally so, at least not in comparison to everything else he's done. Not in comparison to the work he did in, say, Joe Dante's THE HOLE or in Coppola's TWIXT. Of course, if he wins the Oscar, I'll be a happy man - just to see his customary brilliance formally recognized and carved into stone along with the other greats. It's a respectable performance and a very decent deadpan film about the importance of human dignity, even illusory human dignity. But, to me, the one thing that really surprised and delighted me about NEBRASKA was June Squibb as Dern's wife.

Oh. My. Lord.

"If you were married to your mother, you'd drink too."

June Squibb is nominated for Best Actress in a Supporting Role and I hope the voters will remember her and pay their respects.

GODZILLA: The Bigger, Better "We're Screwed" Machine

Today the official GODZILLA trailer was unveiled and it looks very impressive. But, as I watched it, I found myself reflecting on how, each year, billions are spent to bolster our military while other billions are simultaneously spent to produce epic apocalypse entertainments that engage us by showing us that, when push comes to shove, we don't stand a chance in hell. I wish I could see this trailer and simply welcome the coming of a new monster movie, as I once did, but as I watched this unquestionably exciting promo, I also found myself wincing a bit at our collective need to see this particular fantasy made so punishingly realistic.

Of course I look forward to seeing it, but sometimes I also sing along with Morrissey when he sings "Come, come, come - nuclear bomb."

BLOOD AND ROSES German Import: Some Frame Grabs

Annette Stroyberg Vadim as Carmilla Karnstein in BLOOD AND ROSES.

Roger Vadim's BLOOD AND ROSES (... Et mourir de plaisir, 1961) was one of the most widely-seen European horror imports of its period, its much ballyhooed lesbian elements (which are very slight) and Vadim's reputation for introducing Brigitte Bardot to the Western world helping it to achieve the unthinkable: major studio distribution (Paramount) as well as mainstream crossover. (Mel Ferrer appeared on THE TONIGHT SHOW WITH JOHNNY CARSON to promote it!) However, since then, it has become one of the most difficult Euro horror titles to find, particularly in its original Technirama 2.35:1 screen ratio. To date, the only US release of the film in the entire home video era has been its brief VHS distribution on Paramount's budget label, cropped and available only at the four-hour LP speed.

However, the film was recently issued on DVD for the first time anywhere in Germany under the title ... Und vor Lust zu Sterben by the German label Big Ben Movies. Here is a representative sampling of screen grabs to tide you over till VIDEO WATCHDOG tackles its in-depth review of the title. 

 

 

As you can see, the color is too hot, the color correction is variable (showing some green-yellow bias) and there is some vertical banding noise, and certain shots are much too dark - for instance, this subjective shot of the chateau's kitchen server Lisa, which I offer here first as it appears in the feature presentation and second as it appears in the German trailer also included:

So the presentation is far from ideal - yet it's the closest the film has come to a properly framed official release in more than 50 years. The disc offers a choice of French or German audio - both crackly - with optional English or German subtitles.

We obtained our copy from Diabolik DVD, who sold out their initial shipment of this 1200-copy limited edition the day they received it.

Eric Rohmer's Horror Movie

Though I have not often written about him or his particular importance to me, Eric Rohmer has always been one of my favorite filmmakers. His literary, beatific films about love and communication, infatuation and miscommunication, human nature and Mother Nature have always exercised an almost unique capacity to soothe me, while at the same time sharpening me to higher wavelengths of reception. He clears away the cobwebs for me - put it that way.

It was not until I did some exploring through Potemkine's new mammoth import box set of ERIC ROHMER L'INTEGRALE ("The Complete Eric Rohmer") that I became aware that this most urbane and least haunted of directors had also made a horror film. Quite early in his career, in 1954, he did what Curtis Harrington did almost a decade before him and made a rather ambitious short film based on a story by Edgar Allan Poe; Harrington chose "The Fall of the House of Usher," but Rohmer curiously chose Poe's story of amour fou, "Berenice." It is included among the (un-subtitled) supplements of the second disc in the Blu-ray/DVD combo set, which is devoted to his early short "La Boulangère de Monceau." Like that film, "Bérénice" runs slightly more than 22 minutes. It might be a contemporary telling, but something about it is not quite contemporary, suggesting more of a temporal halfway point between Poe and Rohmer. Let me walk you through it.

The film opens with a pitch black screen, a spoken title, and a scream - years before THE TINGLER pitched a scream in the dark.

Then the story begins with a telling exterior shot of the house where our narrator lives with his cousins. It's a day shot, but strikingly in tone with what Roger Corman later did with his Poe features. "The house is the monster..."  

Rohmer himself stars as Aegeus, and also narrates the film. He lives with his two cousins, Berenice (Teresa Gratia) and a younger female, who are introduced playing outside the house, chasing each other around a table arranged for an outdoor meal with a phonograph positioned nearby.

Aegeus' inner ramblings are interrupted by the girls, rapping at the window for his attention.

After examining them first in their mirrored reflection, he turns to face them - resulting in this striking composition. (The film was photographed by Jacques Rivette, himself destined for great things as a filmmaker.) Now only he and Berenice share the frame, albeit with his own divided image.

Aegeus joins his cousins outside for a snack and, as Berenice's lips part to expose her overbite, his more-than-passing interest is confessed with a jolting close-up.

When we next see Aegeus, the narration has taken him into his study, which Rivette photographs in bold darkness; he is pressed up against a bookshelf as if both transfixed and repelled by the light emanating from a single candle.

The sequence in the study continues, beautifully photographed in light only a step or two above total darkness. We see Aegeus slumped over in a chair, smoking and filling an ashtray with butts. At one point, the camera dips down to study the detail of a Persian carpet below - and Aegeus' hand drops suddenly into the dark composition in a contortion of anguish, then rises with the camera to show him still seated at the table, lost in a dolorous haze.

Hereafter, Aegeus looks almost petrified in his poses of abstracted romantic obsession. At another picnic outside, Berenice falls to the ground in an epileptic fit. Again, her front teeth show through her parted lips as she convulses. The camera studies her body.

The child cousin races over to Aegeus and shakes him out of his deep reverie to come help. He does, but when he reaches the side of Berenice, he does something quite unexpected.

Ignorning the convulsing Berenice completely, he raises the needle of the phonograph and lowers it onto a recording.

In a manic fit, he conducts the music with macabre joy. In time, Berenice recovers from her seizure and sits up.

He recalls another encounter with Berenice, seen here sitting in a solarium, when their relationship suddenly took a bold turn.

While checking herself in the indoor mirror before going for a walk, Berenice checks her teeth in her reflection. Suddenly, her cousin can no longer contain himself and he accosts her.

She laughs, taunting him, goading him on until he lowers his mouth...

 ... to kiss her teeth.

That night in his study, Aegeus is beset with fantasy images of Berenice that come to haunt him. In a remarkable trick shot, Rivette's camera pans left to drink in the full circumference of the room with a different Berenice laughing in every corner.

But then comes the inevitable day of her premature death, and Aegeus was led to her body as it lay in state in his study. Knowing that he will never see her misshapen smile again, he takes steps to preserve it.

Tragically, this entire final sequence is too dark to be properly appreciated. As Aegeus turns away from Berenice, he virtually vanishes from view, though a flash of something silver is briefly seen in the blackness.

A male relative finds Aegeus in the study, seated and looking fixed and catatonic. When he touches him, he finds his upraised hand stained with blood.

He sees various tools, including pliers, on the table. Aegeus reaches for a small silver box on the table, turns it upside down and spills its contents like so many dice. The pulled teeth of his beloved Berenice.

Rohmer's "Bérénice" is perhaps only slightly more than juvenalia, but it confirms that this sunniest of filmmakers had a dark side that he might have explored in his films just as well. What raises it above its humble origins are Rohmer's performance, which is quite adept and stylized in the manner of a silent film performance; the daring cinematography of Rivette with its occasional stark expressionistic flourishes and its courageous attempts to engage with the story's darkness; and the sick extremity of its love story, which had precedents in the work of Evgenii Bauer and Luís Buñuel but still seems at least a decade in advance of what was then acceptable in the horror genre.