Toby Dammit: The Italian Connection #2

The arrival of a vampiric looking English actor in Rome’s Fiumicino Airport is greeted with paparazzi furiously snapping his picture, their flashbulbs blinding him momentarily. Incandescent with rage, he hurls a suitcase at one, hitting and knocking him to the ground.

The actor is Toby Dammit, a stressed-out and booze-sodden mess, unravelling at an alarming rate.

At the top of an escalator, he sees a vision of a pre-teen girl (Marina Yaru) who looks like she might just have stepped off the set of a much more recent J-Horror chiller. Her skin is every bit as pale as his own and her hair is similarly fair. She says nothing but bounces a white ball.

This is a strikingly strange start to any film but things only get more bizarre as events unfold.

Toby Dammit – now there’s a name I doubt you’ll find in your local phone directory – is played by Terence Stamp, in one of his finest performances. The film is the third segment of an omnibus movie Spirits of the Dead (or in Italian Tre passi nel delirio).

The idea of the work was to have three pieces all related by being based on the stories of Edgar Allan Poe. Originally Orson Welles, Joseph Losey and Luchino Visconti were envisaged to helm the film but in the end Fedirico Fellini, Louis Malle and Roger Vadim did so.

Fellini has been a fan of the American author since childhood, and he considered a couple of stories – The Tell-Tale Heart and Premature Burial – before deciding to adapt the 1841 short story Never Bet the Devil Your Head: A Tale With a Moral. And when I say adapt, I mean adapt in the loosest sense. He updated things to contemporary Italy and reputedly didn’t even read the story before making his film.

It’s not a universally loved collection but Fellini’s entry has picked up a whole lot of praise over the years. It’s easy to see why.

Dammit is in Italy to star in the first ‘Catholic Western’ which seems to be telling the story of a cowboy Christ, its title being Thirty Dollars, which is maybe partly a reference to thirty pieces of silver as well as spaghetti western titles A Fistful of Dollars and For a Few Dollars More. Clint Eastwood incidentally was one of a number of actors considered to play Dammit. I can’t see that having worked.

Thirty Dollars is said to be ‘something between Dreyer and Pasolini, with just a hint of John Ford’ a priest acting as a producer tells Toby. He shows no interest in hearing the details. But he is keen to ask about a promised Ferrari sports car.

His career is on the slide, presumably due to his large intake of drink and he likely sees this as a final payday.

He’s whisked off without warning to a TV studio and grilled on a live talk show with rapidfire questions from a variety of hosts. ‘Do you take LSD or other drugs?’

‘Always.’

He’s asked if he believes in God. He doesn’t. He’s asked if he believes in the Devil.

He does.

Next up on his itinerary is a glitzy cinema awards ceremony. People tout themselves and family to him hoping he can help their career in some way, though he can’t help himself. There’s a fashion show interlude with models decked out in futuristic space-age fashions that actually scream 1960s.

Award winners deliver the same short acceptance speech. His stand-in enters the venue on horseback. The actor swigs whisky from his oversize hipflask before taking to the stage to recite some lines from Macbeth. This is followed by a very public breakdown.

Toby storms outside and is finally given the keys to the Ferrari. He puts his foot on the accelerator and speeds off irresponsibly with no fixed destination in mind.

On the streets, he sees mannequins of people and knocks one down. His journey must stop temporarily when he reaches a stretch of road before a collapsed bridge. A man in a mask tells him he must take a detour.

I don’t think I’m giving too much away by mentioning that he will once more see the girl with the white ball.

Fellini had been seriously ill in the lead up to shooting Toby Dammit. He feared death after being diagnosed with cancer of the pleura but recovered.

From the arrival of Dammit in an airport bathed in an unnatural orange-yellow light until the highly memorable and macabre image that ends the film, Toby Dammit is a disorienting watch. Only 37 minutes long, it resembles some extraordinary, surreal fever dream.

Here’s the trailer for Spirits of the Dead.

 

Bande à part (Band of Outsiders): New Waves #15

This time round one of the best loved movies that starred 1960s cinematic icon Anna Karina. Sadly, Anna died on Saturday, with details of her death being released yesterday.

She’ll be best remembered for her collaborations with one time husband Jean-Luc Godard during the heyday of the Nouvelle Vague such as Une Femme Est Une Femme, Alphaville and Pierrot le Fou but most especially for Bande à part (Band of Outsiders).

‘We had fun. Lots of fun,’ Karina told Jason Solomans in 2016 after a screening of the film at the BFI. ‘I have to say we didn’t think about making great careers or things like that – we just wanted to be actors and play.’

Bande à part was shot quickly and certainly appears playful – even though Karina in reality was in a bad place at this time, suffering from depression. Bande à part looks as spontaneous as just about any movie ever made but this is often an illusion. Seeing for the first time, I might have guessed that the famous dance scene was entirely improvised. It wasn’t. Three weeks of one hour’s dance practice each night preceded Godard shooting it. It was by far the most carefully rehearsed scene in the film.

Godard incidentally claimed to have invented the Madison dance but was lying. It was already a craze in the land of a thousand dances just like the Twist, the Stroll and the Cha-Cha-Cha.

Bande à part can be spontaneous too. It was made cheaply and shot in only 25 days. Godard would write much of his dialogue at the last minute, meaning his actors would not have the time to rehearse as thoroughly as they normally would. Additionally, he would generally insist on only shooting one or two takes.

Released in France during the summer of 1964, Bande à part wasn’t the critical or box-office success that you might have imagined. Godard himself was far from fond of it. Over the years its reputation has grown though, and this owes more than a little to Quentin Tarantino repeatedly talking it up during the 1990s, together with his decision to name his production company Band Apart in homage.

With its range of cinema/literature/pop culture references and in-jokes throughout its ninety minute run time, it’s easy to see why he was such a fan.

These include the two male leads, Arthur (Claude Brasseur) and Franz (Sami Frey), jokingly re-enacting the gunfight between Billy the Kid and Pat Garrett; Arthur and Odile walking towards the Place de Clichy at night and passing a shop called Nouvelle Vague; and then there’s the man who bills himself here as Jean-Luc Cinéma Godard narrating early on: ‘The story till now, for people who’ve come in late. Three weeks ago… A hoard of money… an English class… a house by the river… a starry-eyed girl.’

If you want more detail, here you go. Odile (Anna Karina) stays with her adoptive aunt in a large, isolated villa on the outskirts of Paris and by a river, obviously. She’s naive and fragile and studies English in a night-school class with Arthur and Franz. Both predictably become besotted with her and continually compete for her affections. She mentions that a man who very occasionally stays at her home Monsieur Stoltz has carelessly stashed a pile of money in the cupboard of his room. Arthur and Franz being petty crooks, begin planning a burglary with her reluctant help.

Our Band of Outsiders are far from the sleek thieves of many modern Hollywood movies who can audaciously rob casinos and banks with forensically detailed plans and high-tech gadgetry. This trio are incompetent to the extent that they might just manage to bungle taking candy from a baby. It’s probably best if the three people planning a robbery aren’t all part of a love triangle.

Bande à part can be great fun and exhilarating, as when the trio dash around the Louvre in an attempt to break the world record for the fastest time to run through the gallery. It can be melancholic too. ‘People always look sad and unhappy in the Métro,’ Odile observes at one point while sitting on a Métro carriage looking clearly sad and unhappy herself.

Quirky and inventive with well cast leads, this is Godard’s most accessible work along with A Bout de Souffle. The director has spoken of the three characters being equals – hence the rapidfire edits of close-ups of them that introduce the film but Odile is the heart of the film. The camera utterly adores her, just as much as Arthur and Franz do, even when she’s wearing a dowdy coat and looking utterly despondent.

Filming Bande à part proved therapeutic for Karina. She later claimed it saved her. She divorced Godard not long afterwards although she still happily agreed to star in his next film Pierrot le fou and says that this was the most fun she ever had while filming.

Of course, Karina didn’t only make movies with Godard. Over her long career, she also worked with Agnès Varda, Roger Vadim, Jacques Rivette, Volker Schlöndorff, Tony Richardson and Rainer Werner Fassbinder to name only six huge talents.

In 1973, she also made a movie herself, Vivre Ensemble (Living Together) which debuted at Cannes. Victoria was her second and final outing as a director came out in 2008. A French-Canadian musical road movie, she appeared in this one too, her acting swan song.

Anna Karina (Hanne Karin Blarke Bayer): September 1940 – December 2019

Oasis of Fear (The Italian Connection #1)

Co-written and directed in 1971 by Umberto Lenzi, this is a film also known as Dirty Pictures or An Ideal Place to Kill.

In the rainy streets of Copenhagen, a young couple run through the city hand in hand accompanied by a breezy and rather cheesy Europop ditty How Can You Live Your Life?

They look fresh, carefree and very much in love. This could be some youth ad from the era. They look so sweet!

Oh wait a minute, this pair of bright young things then enter a sex shop and we learn of their plan to smuggle a stash of legally purchased porn across borders to countries where it remained illegal to finance their cross-continental adventures. Hence the alternative title of Dirty Pictures.

He is Dick Butler (played by Ray Lovelock). She is Ingrid Sjoman (Ornella Muti). Together they scoot around Europe in a zippy wee yellow convertible – decorated with brightly painted flowers – and flog their porn mags.

This is a highly lucrative business. Ingrid is a magnet to every fat lecherous man who strays within gawping distance of her. Of course, they’re only too eager snap up her wares.

The motif of birds is never far away here. This ranges from the patch of a dove sewn over the back of Ingrid’s hotpants outfit through to the couple (or love-birds if you like), dressed in matching white outfits, releasing white doves in a swanky restaurant. ‘We want peace,’ Dick tells his fellow diners. Needless to say, our cut-price John and Yoko are soon kicked out. Why they were let in with so many birds remains a mystery.

They discover they’ve ran out of money but no problemo. They take Polaroids of themselves with no clothes on but this lands them in trouble when Ingrid attempts to sell these to an off-duty cop. They’re arrested and given an exit order. They must leave Italy within 24 hours.

Do they? Nope, our freewheeling duo meet up with some revolutionary bikers, one a budding Evel Knievel. Their new friends invite them to travel with them south to Napoli but steal their cash during the night.

Dick and Ingrid take off again but run out of fuel across from an isolated and luxurious villa – the oasis of the title.

They knock on the door, but the woman inside doesn’t answer. When Dick spots a garage that is open (an unlikely scenario given the way the plot will proceed), the pair push their car into it and then siphon off some petrol from a car already parked there.

This is when we’re introduced properly to Barbara Slesar, played by Irene Papas (Don’t Torture a Duckling, Guns of Navarone). She’s a middle-aged housewife married to a NATO general. She threatens them with the police but then takes pity on them and invites them in for a sandwich.

The free-thinking and feckless youngsters and neurotic socialite find some common ground. Before too long she’s invited them to stay the night. They neck champagne like they’re long lost buddies. Barbara gets up to dance with Dick and there’s definitely an attraction on both sides.

She’s keen to learn more about her guests. Dick recalls to Barbara his first meeting with Ingrid and her feminist friends. ‘They were trying to undress a policeman. I dragged her away just before the paddy wagon arrived.’

‘We’re dedicated missionaries,’ a straight-faced Irene declares to Barbara. ‘Bringing the gospel of sexual freedom to darkest Italy.’

They attempt to come over as amoral in an attempt to épater their bourgeoisie host but she’s not the uptight fuddy-duddy she might superficially appear to be. Even when the pair behave like spoiled children.

This they often do, their antics including Ingrid defacing a painting and scrawling PIG on a mirror with ketchup, an odd echo of the Tate-La Bianca murders, the trial of which was still ongoing as Lenzi was filming.

Let the psychological mind games and sexual shenanigans commence.

This is one of many films made around this time that sets out to be ‘with it’ but misses the mark with Dick and Ingrid coming across as hip youngsters as imagined by an older man. See also Dracula A.D. 1972.

It does err on the sleazy side but hey, it’s 1970s Italian genre cinema and it’s released by Shameless Screen Entertainment, so no surprise there.

Lenzi could be a stylish and inventive director – look at the crash zooms and spiralling camera angles utilised here – but his main mission was to put bums on seats.

This he succeeded in doing over a long career, dabbling in many genres such as spaghetti westerns, poliziotteschi and gialli. He even claims to have kick-started the Italian cannibal craze with his gory Man From Deep River from 1972.

Oasis of Fear is far from his finest work but it is undoubtedly a fun watch.

Ray Lovelock pursued a career in music in tandem with his acting (that’s him singing the film’s theme song during the opening credits). If you’re wondering about his less than Italian name, he was born in Rome to an Italian mother and English father, who’d met during the Allied occupation of the country during World War II. Strangely enough, he is half-English in the film too, which I suppose explains the union jack jacket.

Here he is with the theme tune of Tonino Cervi’s 1970 film Le Regine. This is We Love You Underground by Ray (credited as Raymond) Lovelock.

Irene Papas also made an impact musically, releasing a number of albums over the years including Odes, a collaboration with Vangelis from 1979. She’ll be best remembered, though, for lending a vocal to Infinity, a track by Vangelis’ first band, Aphrodite’s Child on their 666 album released in 1972.

When I say vocal, it’s more of a chant that includes her laughing, sighing, whispering, panting, braying, squealing and much more before reaching a hysterical orgasmic frenzy. It’s still one of the most controversial tracks ever released in Greece, the nearest that country ever got to a J’taime. It was banned from radio airplay in Greece and the military junta that ran the country at the time must have despised it, especially as Papas was a notable critic of their fascist regime.

Not one that you’d want to play every day but a remarkable listen all the same. This is Infinity (or ∞).

God Speed You! Black Emperor: New Waves #14

No, not anything to do with the Montreal post-rock band of the same name, this is the 1976 cult documentary by Mitsuo Yanagimachi that the Canadians took their name from.

Goddo supiido yuu! Burakku emparaa, to give it its Japanese title was director Yanagimachi’s debut feature length film. It was produced by his own independent production company, Purodakushon Gunrō.

Shot in 16mm monochrome, it examines a young Japanese biker gang and opens bang in the middle of a confrontation between the Black Emperors and the cops. The young bikers – or bōsōzoku, as motorbike gangs are known as locally – heavily outnumber them, so this is relatively easy.

Bōsōzoku roughly translates as ferocious speed tribes but ferocious might not be a word that would spring to mind in describing the young men here.

Gang names tend to be things like Pants and Vagabond and Beggar and at one point mention is made of a rival gang called the Pink Panthers. Not names that would even strike terror into the hearts of a bunch of bingo playing grannies.

Decko claims to be their leader and to live in a tunnel. Cut to him eating breakfast and watching television in what I’d guess is his parents’ kitchen in a long block of brutalist apartments.

Education was never a priority for these bikers. One even claims he never went to school but it’s probably best not to believe everything they say. Teenage bravado is never far away as we observe them planning rides or discussing the future of their gang.

These bikers resemble their Western counterparts in many respects but there are just as many differences. For starters they have a very different look. While Hell’s Angels at this time favoured long hair and black leather, the Bōsōzoku often have short hair or pompadour cuts and nearly all shun leather. Rather than helmets they wear hachimaki headbands, the gang name written in English rather than Kanji, with a swastika decorating the space between Black and Emperors.

Maybe like earlier Hell’s Angels or early punks in London around the same time, this was adopted to piss off the older generation rather than as a way to signal their political allegiances. Maybe not, the swastika in Japan has many positive connotations and is commonly used on maps to denote Buddhist temples although with the upcoming Olympic games being held in Tokyo, this is to be phased out. I digress.

Anyway, the Black Emperors love being anti-social. They rev their engines at every available opportunity, the motorcycle’s roar being their favourite sound, possibly because it infuriates large sections of the public. Ditto tooting their motorbike horns.

They show off while riding en masse, swaying their bikes as they ride and weaving from one side of the road to the other. They get high. They fight. They goof around while listening to a morbid pop song on the radio.

If they watched the Roger Corman flick The Wild Angels, you could bet your bottom yen that they’d collectively nod their heads in agreement with the sentiment of Peter Fonda’s declaration: ‘We wanna be free. We wanna be free to do what we wanna do. And we wanna get loaded. And we wanna have a good time.’

Not that being in the gang is always a blast. Problems surface with parents and court appearances are always a possibility. Even among their own numbers, punishment beatings are common enough if a member is perceived to have broken gang rules. This takes in slaps, kicks and forced eyebrow shavings rather than the sort of gruesome retributions portrayed in Sons of Anarchy.

Although quitting the gang isn’t approved of, I’m guessing that rather than adhering to the biker code for life like many in the West, these youngsters were only seeking some camaraderie, rebellion and a sense of freedom before adulthood in the shape of marriage and responsibilities beckoned.

In Tokyo, when Yanagimachi was shooting his documentary, the Bōsōzoku were much more common than they are today. In Japan around this time home grown biker flicks were proving very successful at the box-office, with 1975’s Bakuhatsu! Bōsōzoku (Detonation! Violent Riders) starring Sonny Chiba being one of the most popular. And you just know with that title, this has to be something everybody should see. Numbers swelled as the film craze peaked.

Almost forty-five years on, they’re a vanishing breed.

God Speed You! Black Emperor is slowly paced to the extent that modern viewers may judge that some scenes drag on. There’s no huge climax or revelation like so many documentaries today. At times the sound of camera whirr is clear and in the version I watched, the subtitles are poor. But it’s highly watchable. A fascinating glimpse into a world I knew little about.

This is one of the last films to be classified as Japanese New Wave, along with Nagisa Oshima’s controversial In the Realm of the Senses – aka Ai No Corrida. Both released in 1976.

Japan’s ‘Nuberu Bagu’ kicked off around the same time as France’s Nouvelle Vague but lasted longer and judging by those two films, rather than fizzling out, it ended on a real high.

If you like God Speed You! Black Emperor, then you might also like The Leather Boys. It was made in 1964, as the mods versus rockers feud was making front page news in Britain with the two competing groups being seen as the country’s latest folk devils.

It’s the only British new wave film to focus on youth culture – and would make a great double bill with Quadrophenia. I do much prefer the ‘mod’ film, although The Leather Boys is more authentic. The Ace Cafe in North West London, for example, is an important location. This was where many real Rockers spent time drinking coffee, smoking and spinning the likes of Gene Vincent on the jukebox, with rows of Triumph and Norton bikes parked outside. Many of the extras you see are real ton-up boys and director Sidney J. Furie was keen to ask them for their advice on the rocker way of life.

Lead leather boy Colin Campbell featured on the covers of a couple of releases by The Smiths and snippets from the film were superimposed over Morrissey in the video for Girlfriend in a Coma. Doubtless the singer was attracted to the film as he’s such a fan of British movies of this era and The Leather Boys, like A Taste of Honey and The L-Shaped Room, also features a gay character – a relative rarity in the first half of the 1960s.

Campbell died last year, and a convoy of bikers who were Ace Cafe regulars joined the funeral cortege of the London born actor.

Finally, some music from the band God Speed You! Black Emperor. This is East Hastings as used in the soundtrack of 28 Days Later, a movie made when Danny Boyle was taking risks rather than directing cosy high concept cop-outs like Yesterday.

My Little Red Book (Soundtrack Sundays)

I’m guessing it must have been a big deal to Manfred Mann to get the chance to record a Burt Bacharach/Hal David song for What’s New, Pussycat? This big budget comedy extravaganza starred Peter O’Toole, Peter Sellers, and more fantastic looking women than just about any movie I can think of.

Always destined to be one of the most heavily hyped comedies of the 1960s, the buzz around it was also aided by the success of the theme tune with those swashbuckling vocals by Tom Jones, whoa, oh whoa, oh whoa, oh whoa. Sorry that should really have been WHOA, OH WHOA, OH WHOA, OH WHOA! (no holding back there, Tom). This was a sizeable hit on both sides of the Atlantic and earned a nomination for an Oscar in the Best Original Song, albeit it didn’t win.

Manfred Mann’s My Little Red Book on the other hand was a minor hit at best. In the film, it follows a snatch of a slowed down instrumental take of the tune that bears more than a passing resemblance to the theme song of grimy British sitcom Steptoe and Son. My Little Red Book then soundtracks Peter O’Toole’s Michael grooving with Paula Prentiss’ Liz in a Parisian club, while being spied on by Doctor Fassbender, played by Peter Sellers in a terrible wig and a red velvet Austin Powers suit. Come to think of it, didn’t Bacharach appear in the Powers movies?

If you think the piano sounds as if Bacharach could be playing it, then you’re correct.

As the band began their recording session in Abbey Road’s Studio 2, Burt Bacharach dropped by accompanied by then partner Angie Dickinson. The thought of the consummately gifted songwriter and beautiful actress watching on combined with the clock ticking in the studio, made the keyboard man more than a wee bit nervous. After failing to nail his piano part a number of times, Burt suggested he play along with him. This didn’t go quite to plan either. As Manfred explains it: ‘Burt looks thoughtful, and after a pause, with tact and crushing sympathy says: “Manfred why don’t I play it and you tell me what you think?” ‘

Manfred thinks he won’t better it. So it is Burt on the piano that is used on the single and original soundtrack. Not that Bacharach was ever that keen on that version. ‘It’s just a very nervous sounding record, he once told Ken Sharp in a Record Collector interview. ‘They were uncomfortable with that song.’

Manfred Mann re-recorded the track for their Little Red Book of Winners album, improving it with added flute, a very prominent Hammond organ and more passionate delivery from Paul Jones.

Burt meanwhile put out his own version on the B-side of his take on What’s New Pussycat? Released under the moniker of Burt Bacharach & His Orchestra featuring Tony Middleton, I do love those glorious horns, bombastic drums and Middleton’s flamboyant vocals which soar wonderfully at one point. I bet you could spin this on a Northern Soul night and fill the dance floor.

What’s New, Pussycat? proved to be one of the highest grossing movies of 1965 and one of the most popular comedies that had ever been released (although I’ve never been a huge fan myself, it does have its moments but just tries too hard for my liking).

Arthur Lee of Love was one of the many cinema-goers to see it. He taught his band the song from his memory of it at the cinema, and he struggled to remember it entirely accurately. The track lost Bacharach’s sophistication, but gained a jerky garage band stomp and urgency. Wow, does that bass throb.

On the original, Jones didn’t sound emotionally shattered. Lee does.

Chosen to open the LA quintet’s eponymous debut album in 1966, the track was also issued as a single (and decades later was included on the end credits of High Fidelity).

So how did Burt regard this one?

‘There were a couple of chords that were wrong and it would have been better with the right chords,’ he complained in the same Record Collector interview quoted earlier. ‘But I liked their energy on the song and I liked that it was a hit.’

Here they are playing on Dick Clark’s American Bandstand:

Finally, Interstellar Overdrive. Why? Believe it or not the seeds of this psychedelic freakout originated when Syd Barrett heard early Pink Floyd manager Pete Jenner humming Little Red Book – which Jenner only half-remembered and couldn’t remember the name of. Guitar in hand, Syd began strumming along. So was born the principle melody of a track that became a live favourite of the Barrett-led band. And we all know this was the peak of Pink Floyd, don’t we?

I do find it amusing that, even unknowingly, the madcap young prince of London’s lysergic underground scene created this psychedelic freakout via a tune penned by the bow-tie wearing smoothie king of easy listening.

Not that the two songs sound alike.

Here’s a snippet of Interstellar Overdrive live at what looks like a quiet night at the UFO Club in 1967. Had all the regulars had taken off on the hippy trail to India or Tibet to find themselves by this point?

Scott Derrickson chose Interstellar Overdrive to feature on the soundtrack of his film Doctor Strange, which I haven’t seen and have little desire to ever see.

What’s Up Pussycat? is released on blu-ray by Eureka Masters of Cinema on 02/12/19. For more on the film: https://eurekavideo.co.uk/movie/whats-new-pussycat/

The Blank Generation: American Indie #9

I’m likely atypical on this one. I’m guessing we’ve all heard people speculate about the period of history and place that they would most like to witness if a time machine existed that could transport them back. Suggestions tend to involve grand events, being able to see the first Olympics in ancient Greece or getting a gander at Michelangelo as he painted the Sistine Chapel.

Me? I’d like to be able to see some shows by the likes of The Sex Pistols and The Clash in London in 1976. Or take in early appearances by the New York punk acts just a little earlier at iconic venue CBGB.

Luckily young film school student Julian Temple had the nous to take his camera along when he had the chance to document the Pistoleros and Clash live before they’d ever issued even a single, so at least I can get a flavour of events.

Over in NYC, Amos Poe was already doing something very similar along with Czech born musician Ivan Král.

Amos Poe had been born abroad too, in Tel Aviv. In the States, he got to know guys like Richard Hell and Terry Ork while working for New Line Cinema, when it was an independent film distribution company. He hired Král as his assistant and, in their spare time, the pair began filming a number of new bands together.

Choosing Král was an inspired choice. This was a young man with an intersting backstory. As a teenager he’d scored a hit in Czechoslovakia with a band called Saze (translation: Soot), but this success came just after his family relocated to America, where they had to be protected by the FBI as the Communists regime there were desperate to imprison his father for publicly condemning the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia at the UN. Ivan became involved with glam rockers Luger, who played Max’s Kansas City and often supported Kiss in their early days. More significantly, he briefly joined an embryonic Blondie and then the Patti Smith Group, two bands at the heart of the burgeoning New York punk scene. On his own accord he’d already recorded some footage of Iggy and The Stooges on his dad’s Yashica Super 8, before teaming up with Poe.

Actually, Král partly shot live bands as aide memoirs of his stay in New York in case he was ever deported back to Communist Czechoslovakia. Thankfully, he wasn’t.

When he and Poe had filmed enough bands, the pair decided they could assemble it into something that might do the rounds of America’s often lucrative midnight movie circuit.

The Blank Generation is mostly shot at CBGB but The Bottom Line in Greenwich Village and Max’s are two of the other locations utilised.

The handheld camera is restless throughout, swish panning around. Shot in 16mm black and white, it opens with two Patti Smith tracks. There’s Gloria followed by her take on the Velvet Underground’s We’re Gonna Have a Real Good Time Together. Not the whole songs, a chunk of the former and just a snippet of the latter. One minute Patti’s in a biker jacket, the next in some kind of poncho dress, then she’s in a T-shirt. At one point, book in hand, she’s obviously giving a poetry reading. The sound is not synched, and no effort has gone into attempting to make it appear as if it might be.

This is because Poe, who did the bulk of the editing in the space of 24 hours, wanted to reference Jean-Luc Godard, who’d been keen to make viewers very aware they were watching a movie back when he was directing Nouvelle Vague classics like Breathless and Bande à part. Think of that famous dance scene in the latter when the jukebox music is repeatedly faded out to make way for some narration.

Next up is Television with Tom Verlaine displaying the kind of sunken cheekbones that suggest he could have been doing with a decent plate of scran. Heroin chic before that term had been coined. We get Little Johnny Jewel and Mi Amore (and then some more Little Johnny Jewel for no easily identifiable reason).

Again snippets only and out-of-synch sound. Which is becoming more and more disconcerting the longer I watch.

Time for some salvos of speed bubblegum in the shape of The Ramones. LoudmouthShockTreatmentIDon’tCareBlitzkriegBopLoudmouth. Hell, yeah. We’re then treated to a young and preppy looking David Byrne and Talking Heads looking suitably tense and nervous as they perform Psycho Killer. At this point Tina Weymouth could still be termed a beginner on the bass but this bassline is one of the most perfect you will ever hear.

After these CBGB superstars, we have a stream of bands that mostly might be called CBGB Division 2.

The Tuff Darts play down n’ dirty rock’n’roll. And it strikes me that it might have been an idea to flash up the band names along the way rather than leaving it to the end to let us know who some of these people are. Wayne (now Jayne) County is certainly recognizable enough, though, as he/she puts his/her own spin on Are You a Boy or Are You a Girl?

In among the Division 2 bands like The Marbles, The Miamis and The Shirts are Blondie. This might seem surprising, but the band were initially not thought of very highly by many. When Charles Shaar Murray crossed the Atlantic to cover the burgeoning scene for NME at the tail-end of 1975, he predicted that ‘Blondie will never be a star because she ain’t good enough.’ We all get things wrong, CSM.

Debbie loves the camera but not as much as the camera loves those cheekbones and that pout of her’s. Here she wants to be platinum blonde, just like Marilyn and Jeane, Jayne, Mae and Marlene. This sequence with some live footage and some messing around on a fire escape and three of the guys pushing a car down a road could work as a video in its own right, albeit a particularly scuzzy video.

Rather than anything remotely punk, Harry Toledo’s Knots sounds like ominous psych. So ominous that you could imagine it having been written and recorded in the immediate wake of some awful late 1960s event like Altamont or the Tate-LaBianca murders. I like it a lot. According to the booklet that accompanies the Max’s Kansas City 1976 album, Harry had disappeared from the music world by the start of the 1980s, leaving only one EP produced by John Cale. A shame.

New York Dolls track Funky But Chic isn’t one of their strongest and maybe they just look too respectable as they perform it. By the Doll’s standards anyway. They no longer look like the future but The Heartbreakers, who end the film do. This is when Richard Hell was part of the band and the song that would become the anthem of New York punk was a highlight of their set.

Backstage, Lizzy Mercier Descloux poses moodily with Richard Hell and we also see glimpses of the CBGB New Year’s Eve party of 1975. Oh look, there’s Tina Weymouth. Wow, a smiling Debbie’s partying too. Is that John Cale in the festive paper hat? It sure is.

The film premiered at CBGB on a night that also saw The Heartbreakers play live. Since then Poe has made many films and even had a shot at writing for Hollywood. It wasn’t for him. He’s been described as ‘the titan of the No Wave Cinema Movement’ and ‘the progenitor of punk cinema’.

In her new autobiography Face It, Debbie Harry writes about how she and Chris Stein once planned to produce a remake of Godard’s Alphaville, with Debbie in the Anna Karina role and Robert Fripp playing Lemmy Caution. Godard thought they were crazy but sold them the rights anyway. Although he didn’t own them. Their record company resisted the idea of them taking time off to pursue such a project anyway, and not too surprisingly, the Poe, Harry and Stein Alphaville never got off the ground. Probably for the best.

Today Amos spends much of his time painting and teaching film.

Ivan went on to compose music for some other Poe films including Subway Riders. After playing with Patti, he joined up with Iggy Pop.

A sometimes frustrating but utterly fascinating watch, The Blank Generation remains a crucial document of the emerging mid-1970s music scene and I am very grateful to Poe and Král for chronicling so many of the key players in an age before concert-goers had the chance to spend most of their time aiming iPhones at the stage.

I would have liked to have seen Suicide but hey, they didn’t play CBGB at all in 1975 when most of The Blank Generation was shot. A wee bit of research tells me they did play in the summer of 1974 in a support slot with The Fast and didn’t return until three nights in December 1976 in a support slot for The Ramones. This ended with a show on the night of the 25th. How Christmassy that must have been? Yo ho ho.

Come on inventors, get a move on. I want a time machine ASAP and if I ever get one you can bet I might just set those controls to the Bowery on that particular Christmas night.

For more on The Blank Generation: https://theblankgeneration.com/

For more on Amos Poe: http://www.amospoe.com/

For more on Amos Poe, Ivan Ivan Král : http://www.ivankral.net/

Wanda: American Indie #8

This week saw the final ever episode of The Deuce, one of the best TV series of the decade. The show also featured one of the finest television performances in recent memory, Maggie Gyllenhaal as Eileen Merrell, aka Candy Renee.

Wry, conflicted but business-headed, Candy Renee was partly based on Candida Royalle. Like Renee, this former porn star made the move to behind the camera and started shooting ‘erotic’ pornos aimed more at females.

At its end, The Deuce fast-forwarded almost three and a half decades to a coda where Vincent roams around the soulless, corporate and Disneyfied Times Square of today. Here he was to find out that his old pal had not only shot 89 pornos, she’d also made a film with real artistic merit called Pawn in Their Game.

Rather than anything in Candida Royalle’s oeuvre, though, the idea of this film was inspired more by a little known independent movie by Barbara Loden called Wanda.

Born and raised in North Carolina in 1932, Loden later described herself as a ‘hillbilly’s daughter’.

She started out in the business as a model and chorus-dancer and performed at New York’s Copacabana. As an actress, Loden commenced her career in theatre and was a lifetime member of the renowned Actors Studio. She played Warren Beatty’s sister in Elia Kazan’s Splendor in the Grass in 1961 and later married the director. In 1970, she directed her one and only feature film Wanda.

She also took on the role of the titular character, as well as writing the screenplay.

Silently an old woman prays, rosary beads in her hands. A baby sobs angrily despite some attention from a woman who is presumably its mother. The mother’s partner (again I’m guessing) slams the door as he leaves the house. This is likely to wake a woman lying asleep on a sofa in the living room.

This is Wanda.

Set in a working-class town in Pennsylvania, the house she’s staying at overlooks a coal quarry. This could be some bleak town in the Soviet Union of the time.

Wearing curlers on her blonde hair, she slips out and borrows some money from an old-timer scavenging for coal, not that he can afford to give her much. The pace is slow and has a real cinéma vérité feel.

Loden cuts to a court room where a man, Wanda’s husband, is explaining that she detested him and their children and walked out on them. She would lie around all day, drinking and paying no attention to their young boy and girl.

He now wants a divorce and custody of the kids. ‘That’s just like her,’ he observes, when her name is called out and she’s nowhere to be seen.

Wanda does finally arrive. Curlers still on and smoking, she freely admits that her kids would be better off staying with their father, and that he should be granted a divorce.

This is not someone who would ever imagine where she’ll be in, say, five year’s time. She’d be lucky if she planned anything five minutes in advance.

Wanda isn’t going to be an easy character to root for. She even fails to acknowledge her kids in the courtroom. No question, she’s a negligent mother, living a numbed existence although Loden isn’t interested in spelling out any reasons behind her attitude.

She drifts around town. She sleeps with a man for money. She goes to see a melodramatic musical in a Hispanic cinema. She falls asleep and wakes up to discover that somebody has thieved the money from her purse.

This isn’t her day. It’s safe to assume it’s never her day.

Wanda then inveigles her way into a bar which is already closed. She goes to a dingy toilet and washes. She asks for a towel, and we see that there’s a barman lying gagged on the floor behind the bar. The man she thought was a bartender is cold-hearted robber.

Norman Dennis (Michael Higgins) rushes her out and buys her some spaghetti in a late night cafe. The messy way she eats it annoys him. Most things annoy Dennis. He doesn’t like nosey people. He doesn’t like friendly people. He ends up in bed with Wanda in a cheap hotel room, barking out demands when they both wake in the middle of the night. Please and thank you don’t appear to belong in his vocabulary.

Mr. Dennis, as Wanda always refers to him, is what in Scotland might be described as crabbit – mean and cantankerous. Clyde Barrow, he ain’t, and Wanda and Mr Dennis are not going to be a match made in heaven.

Loden chose to examine the lives of those with no real talents, no great ambitions, and no advanced education. But people like this can be fascinating, just as films about enormously successful or inspirational people can be borefests.

‘She’s trapped, Barbara Loden explained in a contemporary interview in the New York Times, ‘and she will never, ever get out of it and there are millions like her.’

If you were to compare it with another film, it would likely be something by John Cassavettes. And at one point I did imagine Cassavettes’ wife Gena Rowlands in the central role.

Wanda premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 1970, and won the Pasinetti Award for Best Foreign Film. Despite this boost, it was little seen afterwards. According to the New York Times, it ‘failed to create excitement at the box-office’. It wasn’t given much of a chance to. Only one cinema in New York screened it, and it was never given any kind of run in the rest of the country.

Pauline Kael derided it as ‘an extremely drab and limited piece of realism’ and described the character of Wanda as ‘an ignorant slut’. Writing for Criterion, Amy Taubin noted that when she first showed it to the feminist film classes she taught in the mid-1980, the reaction of her most students was similar.

Wanda would remain the only feature-length work directed by Loden. She didn’t disappear, though. She directed theatre productions and made two short films.

The Edinburgh Film Festival had attempted to revive the film’s fortunes in 1979, when it was featured in its Women and Film strand.

Since then its reputation has slowly grown. It’s even been called a feminist classic although Loden didn’t see it as feminist when she made it and if you’re looking for strong female role models here, you’re going to be very disappointed.

It’s a film that is more of an interesting watch than an enjoyable one, although Barbara Loden is superb as Wanda. I much preferred the first half, which is more of a character study. The second half is more plot driven although nothing in the plot will surprise anyone.

It’s a little too long and I would have ditched the final five or so minutes but I would recommend you seeing it without hesitation.

Loden did look like she might direct a second film, based on Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, but illness prevented this happening.

She died of cancer in New York City in September 1980, aged 48.

For more on Wanda, click here

Finally this week, it’s back to the aforementioned Candida Royalle. Candice Marion Vadala as she was christened, wasn’t just a porn star and porn director. She also performed with hippy avant-garde theatre group The Cockettes, played Divine’s daughter in a play, and in 1975 collaborated on some tracks with Patrick Cowley (who himself supplied the soundtracks to a number of gay porn flicks).

The Royalle and Cowley recordings were eventually released in 2016 by Dark Entries Records as a 5-track EP titled Candida Cosmica. Not really my thing although they were way ahead of their time.

Here’s a taster:

Blood on Satan’s Claw: Folk Horror #4

Happy Halloween, everyone. This time round, a 1970s chiller usually considered as one of the ‘unholy trinity’ of folk horror films, along with Witchfinder General and The Wicker Man.
 
Late 17th century England.

A ploughman Ralph (Barry Andrews) is startled when, in the course of his work, he churns up a skull with a gigantic intact eyeball, across which a worm wriggles. It’s hard to tell what kind of animal the skull once belonged to. It resembles a human in some ways and a livestock animal in others.

According to Ralph: ‘It was more like a fiend.’

He feels the need to report on his find to a visiting bigwig – that’s bigwig as in an important person locally, who also wears a big wig as bigwigs did back then. Actually that’s where the term bigwig comes from, isn’t it? I digress. This is a man known as the Judge, after his profession, and he’s played by Patrick Wymark in his final screen appearance. Sceptical, he tells Ralph: ‘Witchcraft is dead and discredited,’ but he is persuaded to take a look, although the skull is gone by the time Ralph shows him the furrow where he’d found it.

The setting here may look as idyllic as a Constable painting but soon it is engulfed in wyrd goings on. Very wyrd goings on.

A young woman suddenly goes mad without any rational explanation, and her hand becomes a disfigured claw . A child, Mark Vespers, disappears and is found dead. Mysterious fur patches begin sprouting on the bodies of some young villagers – ‘the devil’s skin’ as this phenomenon is known as.

Something disturbing is affecting most of the area’s schoolchildren. As their teacher Reverend Fallowfield puts it: ‘There is growing amongst you all an insolent ungodliness which I will not tolerate!’

This warning does little good. Most of them stop attending his classes and take to gathering around an old church in ruins next to the local woods.

Angel Blake, his most rebellious pupil, pays him a midnight visit and attempts to seduce him although he rejects her advances.

Afterwards, at the funeral of Mark, she insists to her father that Fallowfield molested her and attempts to implicate him in the murder of Mark.

Her eyebrows also grow in size and change colour, although I’m still not sure why. Is this to do with the devil’s skin or does she just think it makes her look more fiendishly foxy?

It’s not long before a satanic panic has gripped the village, leading to a clash of the generations. The older folks tend to support the church and law and order, while Angel and her mainly teenage followers take part in pagan rituals and run wild in the country. In fact, by this point Angel does look like she could have just returned from a visit to the first Glastonbury Festival in 1971, the year the film was made.

Blood on Satan’s Claw is very much a product of its time. Pushing the boundaries of sex and violence was in the air, with Straw Dogs, A Clockwork Orange and Get Carter being only three examples of British movies that courted controversy around the same time.

Inevitably, and I rarely say this, Blood on Satan’s Claw was deservedly given an X-certificate. This was mainly down to a ceremonial rape scene where Cathy, a servant girl who isn’t one of Angel’s cult, is scourged and then gang-raped by members of the new satanic tribe while others leer as they watch on.

As Brian Senn pointed out in his book Twice the Thrills! Twice the Chills! screenplay writer Robert Wynne-Simmons was inspired by equal parts Arthur Miller’s The Crucible and the case of Mary Bell, an eleven year old from Newcastle who had recently murdered two boys aged three and four, showing no remorse afterwards. I doubt rivals Hammer would have ventured into such dark territory for inspiration and this does make the film an even more distinctly queasy watch, even almost fifty years after it was shot.

This is another movie made by Tigon British Film Productions, an independent production and distribution company, that deserves far more than just a footnote in the annals of horror. Founded by Tony Tenser, a man dubbed ‘the Godfather of British Exploitation’, Tigon’s output aimed at a more realistic portrayal of horror then their competitors and Blood on Satan’s Claw is certainly more gruesome than any Hammer movie I can think of. Just try and avoid wincing when a doctor flays a circle of hairy flesh from a female’s thigh, let alone the aforementioned rape scene.

Director Piers Haggard completed the film on a budget of only £82,000, which even at the dawn of the 1970s was inexpensive by just about any standard. ‘If you stay on budget’ Tony Tenser liked to declare, ‘you stay in business.’

As Hammer floundered financially and artistically as the 1970s progressed, Tenser considered buying the company. A fascinating what-if scenario.

I digress again.

Tigon will be best remembered for Witchfinder General but much of their output is worth seeking out, and Blood on Satan’s Claw is right up there with their best.

Despite this, it wasn’t initially successful although the New York Times did heap praise on it. In Britain and the States, it was teamed up on a double bill with another Tigon horror, The Beast in the Cellar, playing everywhere from drive-ins in New Jersey to Glasgow’s art house cinema, the Cosmo.

Over the years its reputation has grown, especially after Mark Gatiss – in his BBC4 A History of Horror series – enthused about it, calling it a ‘folk horror’ – a term originally coined by Haggard.

Okay, some suspension of disbelief may come in useful as the story progresses but there is much to enjoy over the course of its 93 minute run time.

Piers Haggard is an underrated director. He began his career in theatre and worked at the Royal Court, Glasgow Citizens and the National, and was a TV veteran by the time he began work on his cinematic debut, 1970’s Wedding Night.

Here he brings out the best in his cast, no mean feat as many were so young. Linda Hayden is particularly good.

From the very first scene, there’s some inventive camerawork on display. Few films have ever utilised so many low shots, some even being shot by cameras placed in large holes dug up by the crew. A devil’s eye view you could say.

Cinematographer Dick Bush really excels here and would later go on to work on Ken Russell’s Tommy (1975) and Lair of the White Worm (1988).
The film also boasts an exceptional score by Marc Wilkinson, which incorporates the ondes martenot, an early electronic instrument that sounds similar to a theremin, and the cimbalom, which for more than a hundred years has been associated with the Devil.

Footnote: Maybe by coincidence, the decaying church that we see at various points (St. James in Bix, South Oxfordshire) was to be desecrated in 1974, with presumably a number of young people taking part in some black magic rituals and breaking into coffins.

On a happier note, a grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund in 2015 has helped preserve the Norman church.

 

Kiki’s Delivery Service & Belladonna of Sadness: An Anime Double Bill

There may be those out there that think Japanese anime begins and ends with Studio Ghibli.

Hayao Miyazaki’s Kiki’s Delivery Service is one of the favourites in their catalogue and it’s easy to see why so many young people adore this gem.

Kiki is a young wannabe witch, who aged thirteen moves on the night of a full moon to the picturesque seaside town of Korico. There, as part of an age-old tradition, she must spend a year alone as she trains to become a fully fledged witch – and learn to become independent and think for herself. Okay, I say alone but luckily she is able to take her talking black cat Jiji with her.

A budding young entrepreneur, Kiki sets up in business, offering a courier service for food deliveries. And she becomes adept at her job, flying across the sky on her broomstick, which handily means no traffic delays, albeit the weather can be a problem.

Kiki’s Delivery Service is timeless – made in 1989 it evokes the 1950s – and it’s charming as hell and without Hollywood animation’s usual tendency towards sickly sentimentality.

It’s one of the few animated films that turn me into a big softie as I watch and it left me, well, it left me bewitched.

Belladonna of Sadness is also an animated movie about a witch but there the similarities end. This was aimed at adults. There’s rape, corruption, famine, plague and death. If you thought Korico might be the perfect environment to live, the village where Belladonna of Sadness is set will strike you as a living nightmare.

While Kiki’s Delivery Service was a box-office smash in Japan and hugely popular around the planet, Belladonna of Sadness helped bankrupt its production company Mushi and was hardly seen outside Japan and certain parts of Europe.

Directed by Eiichi Yamamoto and inspired by Jules Michelet’s 1863 book Satanism and Witchcraft (which has often been debunked over the years), this anime has been called ‘disturbing animated feminist porn’, ‘an experimental rape-revenge jazz musical anime’ and ‘a glorious mindfuck.’

You’re sold, aren’t you?

The plot?

‘Once upon a time… a kind young man and beautiful young woman were joined in love,’ as the song that opens the film puts it. ‘Jean and Jeanette dancing in the shy of bliss. Smiled upon by God. Drunk on happiness.’

Needless to say, their loved-up honeymoon bliss isn’t going to last long.

As is the local tradition, the couple make an offering to a man who appears to be the feudal lord of the village. They gift him their only cow. He demands ten.

The animation here might strike modern viewers as rather antiquated, with the camera panning up, down and across large artworks. Aubrey Beardsley is definitely an influence, as is the art of Austrian expressionists such as Egon Schiele. Most of the images are created by thin washes of watercolour paint accompanied by gorgeous, sinewy lines, although in places the lines became blotchy like early Andy Warhol illustrations.

The imagery is often pretty psychedelic too – although released in 1973, the film was six years in the making, work starting as psych-rock was being taken up by a new breed of Japanese musicians.

In many ways, this is sometimes a tough watch but it is always a fascinating one and if you know of a better experimental rape-revenge jazz musical anime, please let me know.

After falling largely into obscurity, it was recently given a 4K digital restoration, and even gained a small scale theatrical release in 2016. It’s available to buy on Blu-ray.

Multiple Maniacs: American Indie #7

You have never, and I mean never, seen any movie remotely like Multiple Maniacs.

LA Free Press

During the late sixties I felt like a fish out of water. As the rest of my generation babbled about peace and love, I stood back, puzzled, and fantasized about the beginning of the “hate generation.” Woodstock was the last straw. Sitting in the mud with a bunch of naked hippies and their illegitimate children and listening to Joan Baez was hardly my idea of a good time.

John Waters: Shock Value (1981)

A couple of years ago, I got my hands on a copy of John Waters’ second feature length film on blu-ray. Released by Criterion, it was pricey but a great package – even though the music originally utilised by Waters had disappeared, due to copyright issues. The release boasted an impressive set of extras, including new interviews with Waters regulars like Mink Stole and George Figgs; a video essay by Gary Needham and a booklet with liner notes by Linda Yablonsky. Best of all was a new audio commentary featuring Waters.

The strange thing is I think I preferred this to watching the film ‘straight’.
Waters is clever and funny, a natural raconteur with a genuine subversive streak. Interviews with modern directors can often bore me rigid, as they constantly try to be complimentary about their cast and crew and desperately attempt not offend anyone who might just possibly stump up some cash and pay to see their films, but Waters is always a delight to listen to, even when I disagree with what he’s saying.

As a young director, he embraced bad taste and embarked on a mission to wind up absolutely everybody from conservatives to leftists and liberals and everyone in between. Most of his ire in Multiple Maniacs, though, is directed against Catholicism, the religion he was indoctrinated in to as a child but I’m sure other branches of Christianity might find themselves similarly infuriated if they bothered to watch.

Waters made the movie on a laughably low budget in his beloved Baltimore. As in all his early work, he adopted guerilla filmmaking techniques before that phrase was in common use and drafted in his Dreamlander regulars such as Mink Stole, Cookie Mueller, Edith Massey and of course Divine, who is in his fat Elizabeth Taylor phase here.

In Multiple Maniacs, a master of ceremonies known as Mr David (David Lochary), lures in suburban passers-by by promising they will see all manner of depravities should they enter ‘the sleaziest show on earth’ – Lady Divine’s Cavalcade of Perversions.

Mr. David’s warning that the show is full of ‘acts that would make any decent person recoil in disgust’ is no idle patter. There is a woman seemingly sexually attracted to a bicycle saddle, a man who eats his own vomit and a drug addict going through cold turkey.

The audience are dully disgusted, but they’re about to experience something far worse. Lady Divine is about to reveal the true purpose of the cavalcade. The whole travelling freakshow is a subterfuge, as onlookers at points across the country are only invited in so they can to be robbed – and murdered if they fail to co-operate.

Now, if you spend a moment analysing this, you will conclude that while this ruse might work once, the fact is that the police would interview witnesses afterwards, making it easy for them to track down the uber-eccentric misfits that comprise the crime gang, a true band of outsiders if ever there was one. Let’s face it, in the early 1970s, a grossly overweight transvestite would hardly be the most difficult suspect to track down.

Safe to say that realism is not the aim of Waters. Fun and shock are.

Lady Divine is Mr David’s girlfriend but Mr David – and he is only ever referred to this way – is tiring of Lady Divine’s out of control killing sprees. What’s almost as bad is that she also rejects the idea of letting ‘copraphrasiac and a gerontophiliac’ Bonnie (Mary Vivian Pierce) join the show.

Unknown to Lady Divine, Bonnie is Mr David’s secret girlfriend, and in the aftermath of her rejection, the pair hatch a plot to murder the serial murderess.

She is meanwhile getting fed up with Mr David and his attitude. When she receives a phone call from a blabbermouth bar worker (Edith Massey), she explodes in anger and heads out with payback on her mind.

Raging, she meets up with two glue sniffing men, one with a beard who wears a dress. They rape her.

Miraculously, Lady Divine then encounters a biblical figure, the Infant of Prague, who leads her to a nearby church. As she contemplates recent events, a young lesbian (Mink Stole) approaches her. She tells Lady Divine that she is known as the Religious Whore and seduces her, finding a use for a set of a rosary beads that the Catholic Church is never going to endorse.

Paul Swift, the actor who earlier portrayed the drug addict reappears, this time playing Jesus. This is followed by some graphic cannibalism.

And then things get really outrageous!

On the Trashometer, Multiple Maniacs is undoubtedly a ten but as a film it wouldn’t merit top marks.

The acting? It’s like a bunch of LSD casualties had taken over an am-dram group. The movie goes on too long and a middle section where Lady Divine imagines her version of the Stations of the Cross, it would have to be said, is frankly a drag.

Sometimes it just tries too hard to offend – such as the mentions of the Manson murders. It was shot before those awful events had led to any arrests and it’s occasionally hinted that one cavalcade member was heavily involved.

It isn’t nearly as good as many of his later works like Polyester, Hairspray, and Cry-Baby. Watching this in the 1970s, few would have predicted that Waters would go on to enjoy anything resembling the mainstream success that he managed later in his career with that trio of movies.

On the plus side, Multiple Maniacs is certainly original, and only one man could possibly have made it. As that quote at the top of the post says, if you haven’t already seen it, then you will never have seen any movie remotely like Multiple Maniacs.

Unless that is, you’ve already seen his follow up, Pink Flamingos, but that is maybe for another time.