Reviews

Joe's a regular guy, and all the cool kids dig him the most. Stop by Joe's pad and you can blow a reefer, fire up in the mainline, or get an abortion on the kitchen table at the hands of a liquored-up quack that owes ol' Joe lotsa favors. After you're thoroughly strung-out on the hard stuff, Joe'll steer you into a life of prostitution, blackmail, and armed robbery. And oh yeah - if you're a girl and you wanna "join the club," you gotta have sex with five of the hardcore male members, or else no jitterbuggin' and boogie-woogie and dope and good times for you! I was a little surprised to see how graphic this was for 1954, but director Robert C. Dertano pulls out all the stops for GIRL GANG, a pulpy piece of anti-drug propaganda that manages to fail altogether in delivering its political message. Fact is, life at Joe's pad is a gas. What's more fun than a place where you can dance and hook up and get high and never worry about tomorrow? Where all you've got to think about is how much of mommy and daddy's money you can blow on heroin and lipstick and garter belts? Tie me off and let that piano player find his groove, 'cuz we gonna blow the roof off this muther!

Ulrike Ottinger sees things the way nobody else does, and that isn't even her greatest gift. Her greatest gift is her ability to make the spectator see what she sees. It's not like like you, as a viewer, are seeing something you've never seen before, but rather that for the first time you're really paying attention, considering it in a way that you had never previously considered it. I remember watching Ottinger's Aller Jamais Retour for the first time about thirty-five years ago in a symposium on avant-garde feminist film. I can still hear Tabea Blumenschein's red heels clicking across the floor of the airport terminal, see her walking away from the camera instead of toward it, stopping to buy a one-way ticket to Berlin for a booze-fueled blitzkrieg through the city with the likes of Nina Hagen and a homeless woman she picks up along the way.

Still one of the greatest films, feminist or otherwise, that I have ever seen.

This is why I was so thrilled when I stumbled across a streamable version of Johanna d'Arc of Mongolia yesterday on Youtube. Ottinger's work is almost impossible to view and her DVDs equally impossible to find for purchase, so I was really looking forward to this film.

It didn't disappoint.

The story begins among a group of cosmopolitan Europeans on a trip along the Trans-Siberian Railway. The ensemble includes a couple of Russian military officers, female ethnologist Lady Windermere, played by Delphine Seyrig (in what turned out to be her final film role), an uptight German school teacher (Irm Hermann), a young female backpacker, and a Broadway musical star who calls herself Fanny Ziegfeld. There's also a rich young Jewish bon-vivant and Yiddish theater star who gets up to sing "Toot, Toot, Tootsie!" with a trio of female Russian chanteuses, the Kalinka Sisters. The whole thing evokes films like Sternberg's Shanghai Express, which is clearly its intention, but all of the characters, especially the women, are much more than a compendium of stereotypical clichés from movie history. Ottinger caresses these stereotypes, deconstructs them, and in doing so she reveals the complex human beings that reside beneath them.

The western narrative is hijacked - in every sense of the term - when a Mongolian bandit princess and her tribe stop the train and steal away with the female passengers for an extended trip into the exotic landscape of untamed Mongolia. Any notion of a traditional western storytelling is halted as we get lost in this new world, where dialogue gives way to the power of the image. Lady Windermere, both polymath and polyglot who is fluent in Mongolian, convinces the ladies to surrender to the beauty of this singular experience. Essentially, the Mongolians want nothing more than to share their culture with these fellow women, and this is where the full scope of Ottinger's genius is on display. What ensues is a sort of postmodern/feminist take on Montesquieu's Persian Letters in which the women come to realize that to understand themselves, they must understand the other. This is a world where money has no value other than decorative, where broken down motorcycles are pulled through the Taiga by camels, where shamans replace intellectuals and scholars, and where life is every bit as meaningful and rich as it is in the modern and technological world of late-stage capitalism.

It's impossible not to notice how different a story can be when told by female filmmaker intent on not simply repeating the narrative tropes of her male counterparts. The women taken off the train never feel as if they have been "abducted." They do not try to conquer the Mongolian tribe nor do they attempt to escape, which I am sure would be the trajectory of most films centered around a group captive males. The women see this as an opportunity for growth, for adventure, for compassion and understanding.

The film's ending achieves a sort of beautiful and cosmic equilibrium when another train is stopped by the Mongolian bandits so that the European women can return to their lives in the West. Only this time, there's a new passenger. When I watch the bandit princess, now decked out in haute couture on board the Trans-Siberian, seated in an elegant compartment next to Delphine Seyrig, I can't help but think of Lawrence of Arabia turned inside-out.

In any case, see it before it disappears, because it is a masterwork.

I haven't posted a review in a while because I haven't seen anything worth reviewing, but this little 1969 masterpiece from Ottavio Alessi, TOP SENSATION, hit me on the head like an anvil when I stumbled across it this morning. Maud de Bellroche, looking like a butch dominatrix on the run from Nazi hunters, plays Mudy, an oil Baroness who has taken her demented pyromaniac son out for a pleasure cruise with a couple of swingers and their prostitute girlfriend, the impossibly beautiful Edwige Fenech. They toss sticks of dynamite into the ocean and drop acid and drink whiskey and screw each other, all in the hopes of creating an ambiance that will get Tony, the Baroness's weirdo son, to pop his cherry. Eventually they run into a sandbar and explore an isolated island where Tony falls for a virginal and equally impossibly beautiful goatheardress who shines in brilliantine contrast to the frivolousness of mom and her crew of golddigging pals. All while Rosalba Neri, the other sexpot from the ship, wanders up into the hills to blow the brains out of the peasants' goats.

Of course, things go terribly wrong….

Beba the goat girl and her oafish brute of a husband meet their proletariat demise aboard the ship, and later Tony strangles mother dearest: the girl he really wants to lose his virginity to. In the end, the boat sails off into the sunset with Mommy's Little Madman at the helm. Capital has remained in the hands of the decadent ruling class, and Tony steers his crew of hustlers and murderers towards their next plunder-rich target. Sounds like Antonioni a bit, or even Lina Wertmuller, just a lot more entertaining. In fact, being a filthy, elitist libertine never looked like so much fun.

Melodrama relies heavily on archetype and hyperbole, and when it's done right, when it's pushed to the limit, it almost resembles Noh theatre: human existence as highly stylized ritual; pain, suffering and loss all boiled down into a series of tableaux so rigid that they almost become hieratic. It's a thoroughly unironic and direct means of getting at the truth, and that lack of irony is probably why it's fallen out of fashion. Done wrong, it's unpalatable kitsch. Done right it's high art. Few people understand how far to push it. Fassbinder did, and so did Douglas Sirk.

And so did John M. Stahl…

Unfortunately, Stahl is rarely mentioned alongside those other two stalwarts. In fact, he's often treated like a hack, an unfortunate buffoon who drove Tiffany Productions into the ground and had to resort to producing talking chimpanzee movies in order to survive.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

It's no wonder that Sirk remade three of Stahl's masterpieces: Imitation of Life, Magnificent Obsession, and When Tomorrow Comes. But where Sirk serves up subversion via camera angles, lighting, and a painterly control of Technicolor, Stahl comes right at you with static shots, costuming, big chunks of dialogue. A lot of my filmgeeky friends wince when I tell them that Stahl's Imitation of Life is even better than Sirk's, and it is.

Stahl's 1934 version is as ostensibly political as any Hollywood film I have ever seen, dealing with issues of class and race and gender as directly as Straub-Huillet or Chantal Ackerman, only in the framework of mainstream cinema, which makes it all the more subversive. The fact that it was made pre-code probably has something to do with it, but still, this film pulls no punches. Imagine Marx and Freud filtered through a lens at a back lot in Burbank.

The film, based on a Fannie Hurst novel, follows Claudette Colbert's character, Beatrice Pullman (there is more than one reference to Dante throughout the film, a reminder of the hell we all live in), who gets rich by boxing and mass-producing her African-American maid Delilah's pancake batter (see it for Louise Beavers' performance alone). For publicity's sake, Delilah is turned into an Aunt Jemimah-esque cliché, and later she's abandoned by her light-skinned daughter, who wants nothing more than to pass in the white world. In turn, Beatrice's life is complicated when her own daughter, Jessie, decides she wants to bed mommy's new beau, famed ichthyologist Stephen Archer. Ultimately, the film ends with a grim reminder that in a male-dominated world, female subjectivity, even for someone as insanely successful as Beatrice, is defined by a woman's ability to fill the gaping hole inside her with male adoration.

Again, in the hands of most directors, this would be pablum, camp, kitsch. In the hands of John M. Stahl, it's as real as it gets.