BOOK REVIEW: ‘The Authentic Death & Contentious Afterlife of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid: The Untold Story of Peckinpah’s Last Western Film’ by Paul Seydor

Troubled film shoots aren’t exactly a rarity in Hollywood, nor are compromised visions. Factor in everything that conspires against artistic creativity from rewrites to reshoots by way of studio interference, director/producer battles, on-set disasters, overruns, budget reconfigurations and even filmmakers removed from projects, and it’s amazing that movies get made at all, let alone good ones. Sam Peckinpah was a world-class filmmaker as renowned for the visceral intensity of his artistic vision as he was notorious for combativeness. More than most, he found himself often at loggerheads with his studio paymasters. And arguably no more bitter battle was fought than that between Peckinpah and MGM head James Aubrey. The battle was one of the most curious in a career marked by conflict – Peckinpah seemed almost hellbent in provoking an antagonist who already had a fearsome reputation for fucking over directors, but instead of going head-to-head in true Peckinpah style – conducted something more akin to a passive-aggressive war of attrition. The outcome: Peckinpah walked away to make ‘Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia’ and Aubrey shortly found himself sacked. The real victim, however, was the film itself.

And yet ‘Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid’ – never completed, and existing now in no fewer than five versions – had some kind of melancholy magic in its celluloid, some dark resilience, and its punch-drunk, woozy and downright subversive brilliance is still there despite (could one make a case for saying because of?) its flaws. 

All of which is an incredibly longwinded way of saying that, if one considers both the film’s antecedents (historical and creative/revisionist) and its tortured path from conception to big screen, there was always a book to be written about this singular and haunting western, its director’s swansong to a genre he revolutionised and is remembered for. That book is now a reality and it’s an essential addition to the bookshelves of anyone who has a serious interest in cinema. For anyone with a genuine passion for Peckinpah’s work … well, you’ve probably read it twice over by now and you don’t need the 1200 words of this review to tell you how rewarding it is.

In fact, ‘The Authentic Death & Contentious Afterlife of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid: The Untold Story of Peckinpah’s Last Western Film’ – its wonderfully aureate title a nod to Garrett’s own (albeit heavily ghostwritten) account of the Kid’s death, and hereinafter referred to as ‘TAD&CA’ – should need no introduction. Paul Seydor is, after all, the author of ‘Peckinpah: The Western Films: A Reconsideration’, one of the keystone texts on Peckinpah’s work (along with Garner Simmons’s ‘Peckinpah: A Portrait in Montage’ and David Weddle’s ‘If They Move … Kill ’Em’), and an insightful and energetic work of scholarship in its own right. Oh, and he also made the Oscar-nominated documentary ‘The Wild Bunch: An Album in Montage’.

In ‘TAD&CA’, Seydor doesn’t just discuss the making of the film – inclement weather, technical problems, reshoots on the QT after Aubrey forbade the extra spend, an influenza epidemic – and the Peckinpah/Aubrey conflict that took its toll in the editing rooms; he charts a throughline from the historical record vis-à-vis Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, through the dime-store myth-making that began just weeks after the Kid’s death, Charles Neider’s reappraisal of the story as great American literature in his novel ‘The Authentic Death of Hendry Jones’ (as with Seydor’s book, the title is a tip of the hat to Garrett’s ‘The Authentic Life of the Billy, the Kid’), Peckinpah’s first artistic engagement with the material in a screenplay that would have had Marlon Brando as Hendry Jones under Stanley Kubrick’s direction (Brando ultimately jettisoned Peckinpah’s script and parted ways with Kubrick and made the film, retitled ‘One Eyed Jacks’, himself), to the tangled psychodrama that saw Rudolph Wurlitzer’s Kid-centric script develop into Peckinpah’s sombre, reflective and quite definitely Garrett-fixated masterpiece.

That’s the thing about ‘Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid’ – whatever version you may have seen it in (the most widely available cuts are the rather misguidedly titled 1988 Turner Preview Edition and the almost as misleading 2005 Special Edition which was spuriously marketed as being recut based on Peckinpah’s own notes), and whatever the flaws – this scene missing, that scene truncated, a line of dialogue that makes no sense, a bad line reading, an awful performance from a minor supporting player (I’ll “handle a crude situation with remarkable skill” and mention no names) – there’s no doubt the film is just that: a masterpiece.

Seydor’s relationship with it, beyond the chapter it occupies in ‘Peckinpah: The Western Films: A Reconsideration’, is deeper and more complex than usual for a critic or academic – even one as passionate about his subject. Seydor was the guiding hand behind the 2005 Special Edition of the film, put together for the Warner Brothers box set of the Peckinpah westerns – well, four of them: ‘Ride the High Country’, ‘The Wild Bunch’, ‘The Ballad of Cable Hogue’ and ‘Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid’; Sony Pictures were keen the include their restoration of ‘Major Dundee’ and offered Warner very generous terms, but Warner turned them down. (The disinterest in Peckinpah’s legacy that seems to permeate Warner extended to their declining to make a print of the 2005 Special Edition available when the Cannes Film Festival wanted to screen it to mark Peckinpah’s posthumous Lifetime Achievement Award.)

As it is, the box set offers adequate prints of three of the films (’PG&BtK’ has yet to exist in home viewing format that does justice to John Coquillon’s cinematography), but they’re indifferently presented and boringly slipcased; moreover, a proposed new documentary was axed over budgetary concerns, while a collection of essays intended to accompany the set never made it past the press kit. Seydor’s access to the film was limited and he worked for free to assemble the most complete version he could given the strictures of time, money and resources. This, the 2005 Special Edition, was based on a combination of the theatrical release and one of the two preview prints Peckinpah was contractually allowed in his deal with MGM (with great humility Seydor acknowledges that these incarnations, while unfinished, are the only versions of the film on which a restoration can be based with any moral and aesthetic integrity).

It was met with both praise – Kris Kristofferson considers it the best version of the film he has ever seen – and controversy; and here I must admit to some grumblings on this very blog. When I wrote about it during my Peckinpah retrospective in December 2009, I had no idea of the strictures Seydor was operating under, nor how little time he had been allowed to physically work on the editing himself. And while I miss R.G. Armstrong’s “walk across hell on a spiderweb” line and rue the truncation of the Will the coffin-maker scene on the basis of my own Peckinpah-as-Prospero interpretation, I look back at that article now and wish I’d known then what a poisoned chalice Seydor had accepted with the project and how insufficient the facilities afforded him by the studio. Had I known, my words would have been softer. For what it’s worth, let this review stand as correction and apology.

‘TAD&CA’ discusses the 2005 Special Edition at some length, but even Seydor’s own work on the film isn’t the end of the story. The final section, “Ten Ways of Looking at an Unfinished Masterpiece and Its Director”, suggests that Paul Seydor and ‘Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid’ may never entirely be done with each other. The film has a grip on him. I can entirely understand why.

Pat and Billy on The Agitation of the Mind

March is ‘Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid’ month on The Agitation of the Mind. I’ll be reviewing Paul Seydor’s finely researched and monumentally detailed new book ‘The Authentic Death & Contentious Afterlife of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid: The Untold Story of Peckinpah’s Last Western Film’ and curating a Q&A with the author.

I’ll also be reappraising the film itself, both the 1988 Turner Preview cut and the 2005 Special Edition. These reviews will be written in context of Seydor’s book; I’ll be making no reference to the material I produced for my Sam Peckinpah retrospective on this blog in 2009.

Seydor traces, in the early chapters, the various accounts of Billy the Kid, from Garrett’s own (albeit heavily ghostwritten) memoir to Charles Neider’s novel ‘The Authentic Death of Hendry Jones’, by way of Marlon Brando’s ‘One Eyed Jacks’, a production initially slated to be written by Peckinpah and directed by Stanley Kubrick. Accordingly, I’ll be looking at this curate’s egg of a western, not to mention a few other films that treat, or are influenced by, the mythology surrounding Billy the Kid.

GUEST REVIEW: The Theory of Everything

With Eddie Redmayne picking up Best Actor at last night’s Bafta Awards ceremony and the film itself lauded with the Outstanding British Film gong, my good friend Viv Apple picked the right time to cast an eye over ‘The Theory of Everything’.

Eddie Redmayne’s portrayal of Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything is a revelation. He seems to be Stephen, even more than other actors seem to inhabit the characters they play, probably because the characteristics of the renowned scientist are so unique and so familiar: the mechanical yet meaningful smile, the slant of the head, the electronic voice.

We first meet Stephen at Cambridge before he is diagnosed with Motor Neuron Disease, and the film tells the story of how he met his future wife, Jane (Felicity Jones), and their life together up to the time when their marriage ended.

Although some of the incidents are not factually accurate, a common phenomenon in film biographies, this may not be the most annoying feature to anyone who thinks of themselves as a scientist. For this is really a love story, so it is perhaps understandable that the film does not linger on the most important factor in Hawking’s life: science. The film is based on Jane Hawking’s biography, Travelling to Infinity: My Life with Stephen, and there are a few sequences where Stephen is chalking up mathematical equations and talking to professors, but these are almost incidental. This may seem strange but it also seems right, because the film is about relationships - those between Stephen and Jane, and later on between the couple and Elaine Mason and Jonathan Jones, who subsequently become their respective second spouses.

Stephen Hawking himself apparently approved of the film, which is very pleasing to know because the story of his remarkable life is not only fascinating and very moving, it is also incomplete. In his early 20s Stephen was given only two years to live, but at the age of 73 he is still working on the ‘real’ theory of everything.


                                                                                      Viv Apple

The Not Dead

If ‘Drinking for England’ and ‘Feltham Sings’, boiled down to their respective essence, are ‘Alcoholism: The Musical’ and ‘Borstal: The Musical’, then it must have been immediately apparent to Simon Armitage and Brian Hill from the outset that ‘The Not Dead’ would require a different approach. Let’s face it, ‘PTSD: The Musical’ or ‘Survivors’ Guilt: The Musical’ was never going to be an option.

‘The Not Dead’ features three key interview subjects. Cliff served in Malaya in the 1950s, his younger counterparts Eddie and Rob in Bosnia and Iraq respectively. All saw violence, did violence, and had violence done to them. All came back where some of the men they served alongside didn’t. All, more to the point, came back changed men, either physically, mentally or both.

Decades separate their stories but similarities quickly emerge: working class backgrounds; basic training as something easy or even enjoyable; the eventual depersonalisation of the individual so that holding a gun seems the norm, ditto firing it; the experience of killing without enmity; and the difficulty in readjusting to civilian life afterwards. Particularly the latter. The nightmares, the negative effect on relationships, substance abuse as an emotional crutch.

Psychiatry was quick to diagnose Eddie and Rob: post-traumatic stress disorder. Cliff lived longer with the fall out before medical understanding and support networks caught up with him. Years of his GP denying their was any underlying issue. Years of one’s self-worth taking a battering. And when he finally approached the Royal College of Psychiatry and received a referral, the response from his specialist was bleak: he would have to cope with it as best he could. “So that’s what I’m doing,” he concludes with astounding pragmatism: “coping.”

But for all that Eddie and Rob have been able to put a name to their illness more quickly than Cliff did, it’s by no means made things easier for them. Eddie’s saviour is his wife (to whom the most poignant of Armitage’s poems for the film – the deceptively titled ‘Manhunt’ – is gifted); Rob self-anaethetises with drink and drugs. Some days he can’t face going out.

All three men are quietly mesmerising in their interview footage. Cliff, old school in suit and tie, is formal and precise in his diction. He calmly recounts killing a Malayan soldier who had shot one of his comrades. The understated description will leave you reeling. Then, moments later, Cliff reflects “I’ve got him to meet again soon” – the juxtaposition of regret at another’s death and acceptance of his own mortality is shattering. I had to pause the documentary here while I stopped crying.

Eddie, quite softly spoken for such an imposing figure, chooses his words as carefully as Cliff. There is a world of painful experience in the weighing up of every word he uses. Rob’s recollections are a little more freeform, but punctuated by moments of silent reflection. Watching him, you get the feeling that he’s often back there, mind whirling. When he discusses being under fire, or even the waiting for the next attack, the comparison he uses is being mugged or in a car crash – that sense of hyper-realism where the adrenalin of a “fight or flight” response kicks in: “imagine that 24-7,” he concludes; “that’s what it’s like.”

Distilling their individual stories, Armitage created not just a suite of poems and lyrics as per his previous collaborations with Hill, but a book-length sequence. ‘The Not Dead’ is the only Armitage/Hill documentary thus far that has resulted in an accompanying publication. Curiously only two poems from it are reprinted in ‘Paper Aeroplane’, his Selected Poems that was published last year. (Some other pieces reappear in the Bloodaxe anthology ‘The Hundred Years War’.)

Obviously, only a handful of the work Armitage produced could find its way into the film, but the poems which feature are perfectly sculpted to each participant. And their readings are phenomenal. I can’t even begin to imagine what each man went through in not only having his worst moments distilled into short stark lines via the conduit of someone else’s imagination (no matter how sympathetic that imagination) but then reading those lines – reflectively and with gravitas – on camera. Armitage, in interview, has called it bravery. I agree.

Feltham Sings

The poet Simon Armitage used to work as a probation officer. Even if he hadn’t previously worked with Brian Hill on ‘Drinking for England’, this would have made him the perfect collaborator for ‘Feltham Sings’.

Feltham is a Young Offenders Institute (what used in Britain to be called a Borstal) situated near Heathrow airport. From hereon in I’ll be calling it what it is: prison. The various wings of the prison are named after birds; peacocks parade the ground just outside the wires. “They whine all day,” one of the inmates observes; “wake me up at five o’clock. If I could get outside I’d strangle the fucking peacocks.”

The constant backdrop of jetliners heaving themselves into the sky for all manner of holiday destinations must be just as annoying, particularly for the incarcerated New Zealander – a sensitive, well-spoken lad – who took a few pills to a nightclub for a mate, co-operated with the police when arrested and got lumbered with 13 months for possession with intent to supply. He was about to return to New Zealand to begin his studies with the aim of becoming a pilot. He gets Armitage’s only poem, and it’s a sad, poignant, reflective piece that, through careful repetition, builds up a contrast between planes, peacocks and imprisonment.

Elsewhere, Armitage’s contribution is in the form of song lyrics (given a hip-hop aesthetic by composer Dextrous), and it’s hard to imagine any of the other inmates reciting verse as a preference to yawping their stories back in the face of the establishment in gangsta-stylee. Two participants rejected Armitage’s lyrics (crafted, as with ‘Drinking for England’, after extensive interviews) and wrote their own raps. Both created good work, albeit crackling with a certain amount of macho posturing whereas Armitage goes for the emotional truth of his subjects’ states of mind.

As a result, ‘Feltham Sings’ is a different piece of work to ‘Drinking for England’. Music videos have inured us to gangsta imagery; scenes of some hardcase delivering rap lyrics in a dayroom or a cell aren’t as jarring or culturally out of place as some fat-bellied loser cutting loose like a wannabe Roy Orbison in a spit ‘n’ sawdust pub. Even the short-lived karaoke fad doesn’t contextualise ‘Drinking for England’ in the way that music videos do for ‘Feltham Sings’.

Not, however, that your average East Coast “crew” would include Robin, the young man transferred to suicide watch after the death of his father and the news that an aunt has only months to live. Armitage crafts for him a song that counts down from ten various lists juxtaposing prison routine with edited highlights of the fucking lousy hand that life has dealt him. He’s an inexperienced vocalist and his is the only song that Hill provides subtitles to, but that just serves to emphasise the reality.

Likewise McBride: inside for assault and with a family history of institutionalisation (“a boy born in Holloway” as the key line of his song, ‘Boomerang Boy’, bluntly records); his vocal would see him summarily given the elbow on any talent show, but the bitter life experience that Armitage has distilled into the song, and Hill’s staging of it, transforms him into a wounded icon.

The stories that Hill and Armitage uncover are tellingly similar: drugs, booze, parental failings, a yearning for a lifestyle that crime might provide but the kind of shitty minimum wage job that constitutes their only other option certainly won’t. True, these are kids who have done some pretty vicious and anti-social things, but the degree of self-reflection that they bring to their interviews suggests a correlative degree of victimhood. The guy who talks about the babysitters who routinely sexually abused him between the ages of three and five, for example. Inhumanity begets inhumanity.

Ditto the two jive-talking smartarses who suddenly, and apropos of nothing, have a conversation about karma, speculating as to whether the times they got away with it were because they fucked over someone just as dodgy who had it coming and that fact that they’re now doing time is because of what they did to “a good person” who was “just getting on with their life”. Or the guy who writes letter after letter to his mother; he can’t send them – he doesn’t know where she is – so his testimony to her remains in a bundle in his cell. 

The great triumph of ‘Feltham Sings’, in just 48 minutes, is to mine numerous moments like these, revealing the human being beneath the uniform, without ever eliding the reality of life at Feltham and why its “guests” have found themselves behind bars.

Drinking for England

Okay. Imagine Werner Herzog’s doctrine of “ecstatic truth” taken to the extreme in the documentary form. Imagine a documentary where the subjects are interviewed, said interviews are reshaped into poetry and song lyrics by Yorkshire’s favourite probation officer turned versifier, then handed back to the original subjects who either recite the poems or sing the lyrics … while cameras follow them through their own personal hell (or otherwise) in a frank and unsparing look at drinking culture, denial, chauvinism and alcohol dependency.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Brian Hill and Simon Armitage’s ‘Drinking for England’. Made in 1998, the year before Armitage delivered arguably his best work as a poet with ‘Killing Time’, his thousand-line deconstruction of millennial angst, ‘Drinking for Britain’ already shows its age a bit with scenes of smokers chugging away in pubs (was the smoking ban really a post-millennial construct? it seems a lot longer since I walked into a pub and the ceiling was obscured by a fog of nicotine) and the spit ‘n’ sawdust joints that a couple of the interviewees favour and probably owned by Wetherspoons now.

‘Drinking for England’ clocks in at just under an hour and follows twenty-somethings Ami and Kerry, who get sloshed in their flat before heading out to a winebar where they freeload off oiky lads; middle-aged incapacity scrounger Shaun, who treats his wife as a pub-to-house taxi service; single mum Jane, whose decision to enter rehab gives the documentary at least a glimmer of hope; unrepentant booze-hound Duncan, who seems to be the only participant who enjoys being an alkie; and moneyed retiree Denis, whose world-class case of denial is frankly staggering.

As a cross-section, this not-quite-wild bunch range across half a century in terms of their ages and Hill’s immediate achievement with the documentary is to explode the myth that binge drinking, stupid behaviour and the exponential capacity to make an utter fucking prat of oneself is solely the mandate of the young. Ami and Kerry slur their words as they try to recite Armitage’s deliberately simple cadences, they giggle and stumble and fall over, but in their more reflective moments they realise that this is merely a case of something to be got out of their system during their twenties; they see little point to intoxication for its own sake beyond their thirties. The others, however …

Jane has made it to thirty-eight and is bringing up her thirteen-year-old son almost single-handedly. Her tipple of choice is sherry and she talks of it both as a constant companion and a guilty secret. Her account of frequenting different retailers in order to disguise the amount she’s buying is a sad but telling moment. Armitage responds with a lyric that turns sherry into Sherry, an alter ego who is both Jane’s tormentor and dependent. Jane performs the song with what I can only describe as weary gusto. I know that doesn’t make sense as a turn of phrase, but watch the documentary.

The next best song is ‘Thinking and Joking’, in which these two words replace “drinking” and “smoking” in a witty romp through Duncan’s devil-may-care lifestyle. Duncan’s story is the least cautionary of these tales – he’s loquacious, witty and charming in a rough diamond sort of way, and all too easy to like – but what he lacks as a role model, he makes up for in raw honesty. He’s certainly better company than Shaun, who is basically a wanker on a cosmic scale. He neglects his wife for the company of boorish chauvinists, downs lager like he’s not just drinking but trying to swallow the glass, orders his ten pints per night in halfs, and he huffs out tired self-pitying rhetoric as if he were the victim. Shaun is the most odious character, fictional or non-fictional, that I’ve seen onscreen in a long time, and this is coming from someone who’s just sat through two months of venal exploitation movies.

Denis is more companionable than Shaun, but no less boorish albeit that he speaks in a cut-glass accent rather than Shaun’s fags-and-terrace-chants sandpaper rasp. It’s when he comes out with these two particular statements that Denis shows his true colours. The first is in respect to drink-driving legislation, which he thinks should allow for long-term drinkers who can demonstrate tolerance and a low-accident history. His rationale? That he’s unable to drink as much as he’d like down his local because he has to drive there. The second deserves quoting in its full head-in-the-sand glory: “I wouldn’t say I have a drink problem personally, but it does govern the way I live my life.”

Although the film’s title suggests a correlation of drinking culture and geopolitical history, Hill steers clear of obvious or moralistic point-scoring, nor does he try to make some big overarching statement. Armitage’s poetry and lyrics distil (bad word; sorry) the subjects’ experiences and voices into poignant vignettes sculpted to their personalities. It’s a small triumph of director and writing completely shelving their own egos and agendas so that what remains is purely a record, never mind that it’s arrived by the most curious artifice.

WINTER OF DISCONTENT: Contraband

Lucio Fulci’s immortality in the annals of genre film rests principally on his unique brand of extreme yet dreamlike horror movies (most notably the loosely connected “Gates of Hell” trilogy) and a quartet of world-class gialli in ‘Murder to the Tune of Seven Black Notes’, ‘Don’t Torture a Duckling’, ‘A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin’ and ‘Perversion Story’. But how does he fare with a straight-forward crime movie? Let’s find out.

‘Contraband’ was made in 1980, on the cusp of his last great throw of the dice as a filmmaker with ‘City of the Living Dead’, ‘The Beyond’ and ‘The House by the Cemetery’. Already, a sense of ennui was entering his work, as ‘The Black Cat’, ‘The New York Ripper’ (a film whose very notoriety can’t quite eclipse a sense of its director’s total disengagement) and ‘Manhattan Baby’ all date from this period. Within just a few years, he would arrive at the dreary final stage of his career, from ‘Aenigma’ to ‘Door to Silence’.

But let us not dwell on such stuff. ‘Contraband’ is a cops ‘n’ mobsters crime thriller about the Naples underworld, smuggling, power plays, betrayal and violent death. And – with a caveat that we’ll get to in just a moment – it’s a pretty entertaining outing that demonstrates Fulci could pull off the car chases, shoot outs and hand-to-hand stuff just as well as, say, Enzo G. Castellari with ‘The Heroin Busters’ or Fernando di Leo with ‘Milano calibro 9’.

What Fulci doesn’t quite achieve is the narrative focus of Castellari’s film or di Leo’s ability to plot the hierarchical structure of the underworld. Indeed, ‘Contraband’ often seems like it doesn’t know exactly what it wants to be – a revenge thriller, a poliziotteschi, an examination of the mechanics of drug smuggling à la ‘The French Connection’, or an epic of warring crime families in the vein of ‘The Godfather’. Sometimes it seems like Fulci has just assembled a collection of scenes homaging his favourite crime flicks and never mind that there’s no real through line or that he’s happily introducing new characters with barely a smidgin of context or explanation right up until the bullet-riddled final act.

Which isn’t to say that things don’t start out very plot-heavy. In short order, following a commendably actionful speedboat chase, we’re introduced to Luca (Fabio Testi) and his wife Adele (Ivana Monti) who are enjoying the high life (although Adele balks at the company her husband keeps) from the profits of a cigarette smuggling operation. Luca and his brother Mickey (Enrico Maisto) work for playboy capo Perlante (Saverio Marconi), one of a number of mob bosses involved in an uneasy fraternity called The Order of the Blue Motorboat. (I’m not making this up.)

When Mickey is assassinated, Luca suspects Perlante’s immediate rival Scherino (Ferninand Murolo) and ill-advisedly launches a one-man vendetta. Scherino disabuses him of his suspicions – and has a henchman beat the crap out of him for good measure – but before Luca’s investigations can lead him elsewhere, Naples explodes in a welter of violence as the Order’s cigarette smuggling ring is targeted by ruthless drug smuggler Marsigliesi (Marcel Bozzuffi). How ruthless is this gentleman? He puts a beatdown on a female drug runner and burns her face off with a Bunsen burner when she demands the wrong price in a transaction. Not one for negotiation, Marsigliesi.

As mentioned above, Fulci doesn’t do a particularly coherent job of teasing out the rivalries and interrelationships, and as ‘Contraband’ moves towards the hour mark, simple storytelling is replaced by a succession of sequences which generally end with gunblasts and chunks of flesh flying everywhere. Eventually, he stops pretending the film’s anything but an exploitationer and has Adele fall into Marsigliesi’s hands: cue graphic misogynistic violence on par with anything ‘The New York Ripper’.

What Fulci does achieve, however, is an effective contrast between the old guard of Naples’ criminal class – weary; retired; old men long out of the game – and the new breed of flashy, shallow, venal hoods who have replaced them. Fulci also has a hell of a lot bringing them back into the game, under the leadership of the pragmatic Morrone (Guido Alberti), when they decide enough is enough and teach the young pretenders a lesson.

‘Contraband’ is no classic and there are moments – Adele’s travails; a cluster of the assassination scenes – where Fulci delights in violence at the cost of narrative momentum; but on the whole it moves at a decent pace, the cast are on-form and Sergio Salvati’s cinematography grittily captures Naples: its streets and harbor and its sense of menace.

WINTER OF DISCONTENT: The Big Bird Cage

Our story starts in 1971 with Jack Hill's 'The Big Bird Cage', a fairly standard example of the women-in-prison genre (or more particularly of its especially sleazy subgenre which locates said prison somewhere in the wilds of a politically unstable tinpot South American country) which was enlivened no end by Pam Grier in a supporting role. It was only her second film appearance and it kicked off a four-movie relationship with Hill that spanned the first half of the 70s and made Grier a blaxploitation icon.

Fast forward to 1972 and Hill made an in-name-only sequel, 'The Big Bird Cage', this time with Grier in the lead. She plays Bloosom, an hilariously inappropriate name for a Marxist revolutionary who's as handy with a gun as she is with her fists. Blossom is committed to the revolution, even if her leader - and lover - Django (Sid Haig) is content to postpone the glorious moment to a never-ending parade of tomorrows as long as he can swing on his hammock and drink wine and have a small army of followers defer to him.

Said followers, however, are a tad disaffected that Blossom is the only woman amongst them and exclusive in her favours to Django. They, too, dream of revolution but more fervently so of female company. A two-birds-one-stone solution presents itself when they learn of a women's prison run by a sadistic warden (is there any other kind?) by the name of Zappa (Andres Centenera). More work farm than penitentiary, the inmates labour at a giant mill known as the bird cage and are occasionally pimped out to visiting dignitaries.

The revolutionary front decide to liberate this facility (and hopefully score some new recruits). To this end, Blossom finds herself "volunteered" to get arrested and shipped out to the prison, whence she will foment rebellion; the plan is for Django's troops to provide firepower to assist with the break-out. So far so excessive force, but what none of them realise is that the prison's latest detainee, American party girl Terry (Anitra Ford), owes her arrest to a case of misidentification arising from Django and Blossom's actions earlier in the film.

Indeed, 'The Big Bird Cage' focuses as much on Terry as it does Blossom, perhaps more so in the early stages as Terry negotiates the prison's power structure, learns who to befriend and who to be wary of, and looks out for fellow wrongful arrestee Rina (Marissa Delgado).

Naturally, the Blossom/Terry plotlines eventually coincide, but the outcome isn’t what you might have been expecting, one of several unexpected swerves Hill makes with the material. Likewise the ongoing feud between aggressive lesbian Karen (Karen McKevic) and smart-mouthed Mickie (Carol Speed): when Mickie is forced into harm’s way at Zappa’s hands, rather than take advantage of the situation, Karen reacts with righteous fury.

Perhaps the oddest thing Hill does, though, is during the mid-section where Django infiltrates the camp by getting hired on as a guard. Zappa, keen that his staff keep their hands off the inmates (there is a general “no sex” rule at the camp that’s only repeal when Zappa wants a visiting politician or businessman to have a good time), hires only gay guards. Django expedites his employment opportunities by allowing himself to be picked up by chief of guards Rocco (Vic Diaz) in what seems to be a gay bar in the middle of the jungle.

While all of this malarkey is as stereotypical and risible as the lesbian bar scene in ‘Foxy Brown’, the absurdity somehow makes it not only palatable but outright entertaining. There’s something about Sid Haig – Sid fucking Haig, ladies and gentlemen – pretending to be gay that totally rewires the synapses and leaves your head spinning.

By the time Blossom, Terry et al stage the break-out, a set-piece that occupies the last quarter of an hour and delivers explosions, shoot outs, chases and Rocco suffering the proverbial fate worse than death (another moment that has to be seen to be believed), ‘The Big Bird Cage’ has not only careened through a deliriously inclusive exploitation checklist, but upended most of them even as it ticks them off. It thumbs its nose at intellectualization, renders redundant the reviewer, and glories in its gorgeous and strikingly iconic heroines. ’Nuff said.

WINTER OF DISCONTENT: Foxy Brown

Of the four films Pam Grier made with Jack Hill, ‘Foxy Brown’ is easily the most famous. In fact, it’s one of the most famous blaxploitation movies of all time. Perhaps only ‘Shaft’ can lay claim to being better known as the key exemplar of the genre.

This perplexes me, since ‘Foxy Brown’ – while, after a slowish start, undeniably entertaining – is nothing compared to ‘Coffy’ as an example of the revenge thriller; and nowhere near as subversive as ‘The Big Doll House’ or ‘The Big Bird Cage’.

It certainly gives its heroine a lot to be vengeful about, though. The opening sequence has Foxy (Grier) called upon to rescue her feckless brother Link (Antonio Fargas) from a beating. Link’s been running numbers but has screwed up to the tune of twenty grand, which leaves him with the twin requirements of a place to hide and a means of raising the do-ray-me. Foxy willing provides the former and inadvertently the latter.

You see, Foxy’s boyfriend, Michael (Terry Carter) is an undercover cop who has just undergone reconstructive surgery and been given a new identity as a protective measure against underworld duo Steve Elias (Peter Brown) and Katherine Wall (Kathryn Loder). That Steve and Katherine are still at liberty suggests Michael’s investigations haven’t been worth a damn, but hey ho! Link intuits that Foxy’s “new” beau is Michael, masquerading under his new persona, and sells him out without a second thought.

In short order, Michael gets whacked and Foxy gets medieval on Link’s ass. Link gives up the goods on Steve and Katherine and Foxy goes out for revenge. Discovering that Katherine operates a modeling agency as a front for high class call girls – whose charms she uses as leverage on judges and local politicos to keep her crew out of jail and her and Steve’s drug running operation off the radar – Foxy gets taken on the books.
So far, so ‘Coffy Part 2’, but whereas ‘Coffy’ begins with its heroine already out for revenge and remorselessly working her way up through a criminal hierarchy, ‘Foxy Brown’ takes a bit of time to get to Michael’s assassination and then puts Foxy in Steve and Katherine’s orbit very quickly. There’s no sense of Foxy having to scheme or improvise or overcome obstacles to get close to her nemeses. Nor does she exploit any of several opportunities she has, before Katherine sets her up with a corrupt judge, to simply take the biatch out. Instead, Foxy recruits junkie hooker Claudia (Juanita Brown) to her scheme and they set out to humiliate said judge in an attempt to ruin Katherine’s judicially-preferential relationship and provoke a reaction from her.

This is where ‘Foxy Brown’ starts running into problems. Simply taking out Katherine and Steve would achieve both of her ends: vengeance for her lover’s death, and severing the connection with the justice system that’s keep scumbags on the streets. Humiliating the judge only achieves the latter objective and tips off Katherine that something’s amiss. Moreover, there’s no reason for Claudia, whose family Katherine is using as leverage against her, to involve herself. When Katherine, predictably, reacts by sending her goons after them, Foxy puts herself in harm’s way in order to protect Claudia. 

Harm’s way here refers to drug-pushing misogynists Brandi (H.B. Haggerty) and Slauson (Boyd ‘Red’ Morgan), to whose “ranch” Katherine orders the swiftly captured Foxy be sent. A narrative development, this, which serves no other purpose than woman-in-peril tropes and a sleazy rape scene. Once Foxy contrives an escape route, the real business resumes and she targets Steve’s drug running set-up by conniving her way into the affections of Hays (Sid Haig), a pilot contracted to bring the stuff in.

Once Hill arranges his ducks in a row for the big finale, ‘Foxy Brown’ ticks enough of the boxes to emerge as a decent thriller. But the narrative peregrinations by which Foxy does pointless things for the middle third just to push the film towards feature length annoy. As does a schizophrenic tone which sees outright nastiness cheek-by-jowl with goofy humour (several action scenes are played as slapstick); this is nowhere more in evidence than in a pointless set-piece in a lesbian bar that is horrible in its stereotyping, even by the standards of the 1970s. Also, Loder – so good in some of her other roles – doesn’t even begin to suggest the level of villainy required to make Katherine a credible mob boss.

Still, as in ‘Coffy’ – indeed, as in anything in her filmography – Grier is iconic. She looks amazing and kicks ass with wince-inducing proficiency. Having laid a beatdown on Link and left him in no uncertainty that it’s only kinship that’s prevented her from killing him, Link’s dazed and disbelieving girlfriend gasps, “Who does she think she is?” “That’s my sister,” Link replies shakily, “and she’s a whole lotta woman.” Amen to that.

WINTER OF DISCONTENT: Coffy

Most revenge movies leave the actual revenge till the final act. 'Savage Streets' - a Winter of Discontent pick a couple of years ago - is a good example. There's plenty of set-up: the protagonist's life and relationships and what's at stake; the perpetration of the act for which vengeance must be exacted; the planning of said revenge; then, finally, payback. In Jack Hill's 'Coffy', the pre- and immediate post-credit sequence has its eponymous heroine (Pam Grier) blow two scumbags away with a double-barrelled shotgun and snarl a line of dialogue about her sister and drugs. It's an attention-grabbing opening and you might be forgiven for expecting that a flashback detailing the sibling's travails is about to ensue.

But no. Having kicked off his blaxploitation classic in media res, Hill just keeps powering forward, the narrative as relentless and single-minded as Coffy herself. This is a film unencumbered by subplot or digression. The plot is utterly simple: Coffy avenges her sister by tracing a drugs ring back to its source and, uh, eliminating everyone along the way. Even more impressively, she does so - during the early stages of her vengeful rampage, anyway - while holding down a day job as a nurse and keeping her extra-curricular activities secret from activist and wannabe congressmen boyfriend Howard Brunswick (Booker Bradshaw). 

Things start to go pear-shaped when the trail leads to King George (Robert DoQui) who’s not an actual member of the British royal family but a fancy-pants pimp with connections to mob boss Arturo Vitroni (Allan Arbus). First up, King G’s other girls don’t take to Coffy at all, which leads to a Coffy-vs-a-roomful-of-hookers cat fight, the sole aesthetic purpose of which is for all participants to have their blouse or boob-tube ripped off at some stage in the proceedings. It’s a scene so needless, so ludicrously protracted and so utterly shameless in its intent that I’d be hard pressed to mount an argument against anyone who calls it in Jack Hill’s favour as Greatest Exploitation Movie Director Of All Time.

Secondly, Coffy’s attempted hit on Vitroni is thwarted by the intervention of his sleazeball enforcer Omar (Sid Haig). Although Coffy uses the situation to drive a wedge between George and Vitroni, she finds herself in woman-in-peril territory, and it soon becomes apparent that Brunswick isn’t going to be pulling any knight-in-shining-armour shtick any time soon.

'Coffy' melds propulsive storytelling with a total commitment to all things exploitative that doesn’t come at the cost of craftsmanship – Quentin Tarantino famously, and accurately, described Hill as “the Howard Hawks of exploitation filmmaking” – and it’d be a hell of an entertaining picture even if it were peopled by cheap-jack actors straight from the lumber yard. But, oh my sweet lord, 'Coffy' boasts some genuinely charismatic acting talent. Grier is magnetic: purposeful, resilient, tough, sexy as all hell, but with a recognizably human centre always underpinning her characterization. Let’s face it, she plays a nurse whose surname is Coffin, which is about the most unsubtle way of announcing one’s anti-heroine as an angel of death, and her modus operandi involves flaunting her ample curves until her antagonists drop their guard (generally about the same time as something else rises). It’s all too easy to imagine this being made a decade later with A. Gregory Hippolyte directing and Shannon Tweed in the lead role and the whole thing being glossy and static and unengaging. Grier gives Coffy a heart and the film soul.

Elsewhere, Sid Haig plays the vicious henchman as only Sid Haig can. How can I describe the Sid Haig experience? Imagine he was in a Bond movie, muscle for hire to Blofeld, and he surprised 007 in the act of infiltrating Ernst Stavro’s secret base. If Sid Haig squared off against Bond, all bets would be off and there’d be a fucking good chance of SPECTRE achieving the world domination plan.

William Elliott puts in a sympathetic performance as Coffy’s former boyfriend Carter, now that rarest of beasts, an honest cop in a tough neighbour. A scene where they almost reconnect, where (it is oh so subtly hinted) Coffy could possibly abandon her actions and let Carter pursue the matter through official channels, is underplayed and the more impactful for it. Predictably, though – for this is an exploitationer after all – the moment is violently interrupted and no such hesitation stills Coffy’s hand for the remainder of the running time.

As you’ve probably gathered, I dig 'Coffy' immensely. A phrase I keep coming back to as the highest accolade I can offer in these Winter of Discontent review is “good unclean fun”. That’s why I seek out exploitation movies. That’s why I wade through untold hours of cinematic depravity. That’s why the Winter of Discontent is my favourite season on this blog. And 'Coffy' is entirely the kind of movie that justifies it.

WINTER OF DISCONTENT: Pam Grier mini-season

As December skis down the icy slope towards Christmas and everything is bedecked with tinsel and decorations and fairy lights, a warm and fuzzy feeling permeates humankind. It’s the season of peace on earth and goodwill to all.

Except here.

On The Agitation of the Mind, we’re still snowed in by the howling storms of exploitation, cynicism, violence and the despicable excesses of man’s inhumanity to man. Because, let’s face it, it’s always men who fuck shit up. Only now, the Winter of Discontent has its very own angel.

Angel of vengeance, that is.

Over the next week or so, the undisputed queen of blaxploitation, Pam Grier, will be gracing these pages and there will be no goodwill whatsoever to the men who find themselves on her bad side. None.

WINTER OF DISCONTENT: Sex and Fury

After the kitchen sink aesthetic of ‘Anita: Swedish Nymphet’, the unmitigated tedium of ‘Maid in Sweden’ and the “is it an exploitation movie or isn’t it” what-the-fuckery of ‘Exponerad’, finally we have a Christina Lindberg starrer that delivers the kind of good unclean fun that trash fans approach these kind of movies for in the first place. And how could it not? It’s called ‘Sex and mother-loving Fury’, y’all. Sex. And. Fury. Has there ever been a better title for an exploitation movie? Hell, it’s not just a title, it’s a statement of intent.

And then there’s the rest of its credentials: it was directed by Noribumi Suzuki (who made the controversial and thoroughly depraved ‘Star of David: Beauty Hunting’, a film that I can only describe as the ‘Cannibal Holocaust’ of sexploitation); it stars Reiko Ike, the authentic poster girl for the pinkie violence movement (random picks from her filmography: ‘Women’s Violent Classroom’, ‘Terrifying Girls’ High School: Animal Courage’, ‘The Lustful Shogun and His 21 Concubines’); and it features gambling, prostitution, political treachery, shoot-outs, sword-fights, whippings, flick-knife-wielding nuns, snow, blood and nudity.

Just taking those last three items as a baseline aesthetic, there’s a scene fairly early on where gambler and vengeful swordswoman Ocho Inoshika (Ike) witnesses a murder at a gambling den. Later, a team of assassins attempt to silence her at a bath-house. One of them gives himself away and Ocho blinds him with a well aimed flick of a playing card. Nasty things, paper cuts. She then grabs her swords as the others come piling after her and the ensuing five minutes of sword play spills out of the bath-house and into a snowy garden outside. Oh, did I mention that Ocho is naked throughout the entire altercation? That, ladies and gentlemen, is how Noribumi Suzuki rolls.

But anyway, what’s a nice(ish) girl like Ocho doing in a seedy gambling den in the first place? Well, in a short and bloody prologue set in the late 1880s, Ocho as a young girl is walking with her father, a detective investigating political corruption, when he’s jumped by three antagonists, repeatedly knifed and some key evidence taken from him. Their faces are hidden, and the only identifying marks are their tattoos: a deer, a boar and a butterfly respectively.

Twenty years later, Japan an expanding empire in the early years of a new century, Ocho is all grown and deadly with it. A pickpocket, a gambler, a stone-cold killer, she’s doggedly tracking down her father’s killers. It’s a mission that brings her into contact with anarchist Shunosuke (Tadashi Naruse) and Yuki (Rie Saotome), sister of the man murdered at the gambling den and to whom she made a promise, in his dying moments, to rescue Yuki from a life of sexual servitude to businessman Iwakura (Hiroshi Nawa). Iwakura is in cohorts with gang boss turned statesman Kurokawa (Yoshikazu Kawazu), a man with big and not necessarily legal plans for the new Japan.

Meanwhile British spy master Guinness (Mark Darling) – handler to the glamorous but conflicted agent provocateur Christina (Christina Lindberg) – races to uncover Kurokawa and Iwakura’s plans before Shunosuke succeeds in assassinating Kurokawa. Oh, and the reason Christina’s conflicted? She and Shunosuke used to be an item.

That, believe it or not, is a simplified synopsis. For an 88-minute flick that’s principally concerned with blood-letting and female nudity, ‘Sex and Fury’ is almost manically obsessed with its own complexity. Maybe Suzuki genuinely felt that he was making the pastel-coloured equivalent of a John le Carré espionage thriller (but with tits) and went all out to achieve a fully immersive investigation of the shifting sands of double cross and triple cross that can leave even the most seasoned and cynical of operatives confused as to where their loyalties lie and who they can finally trust. Or maybe the script was hammered out over a couple of nights during which industrial quantities of saki were consumed and, of the three credited writers, one wrote the espionage stuff, one wrote the fight scenes and the other got far too excited at the thought of all the naked ladies.

The middle third of ‘Sex and Fury’ dedicates itself to the first half of the title as the narrative’s pinball-like progress basically stops dead so that one bit of softcore nookie after another can languorously play out for the audience’s viewing pleasure, culminating in a ménage-a-trois between Christina, Iwakura and one of Iwakura’s geisha girls. By this point, you almost feel sorry for the guy who got stuck writing the plot.

Still, the plot and the softcore writhings prove a lot more effective than the fight scenes (‘Sex and Fury’ being ever so slightly let down by the fury), which are ludicrous even by the standards of the genre, and edited in such a way as to leave you wondering whether Suzuki was trying to be avant garde and failing miserably, or some poor editor found himself desperate to disguise the leading lady’s lack of facility with a sword.

Minor gripe, though. ‘Sex and Fury’ powers through a running time that stays exactly the right side of an hour and a half, cheerfully thumbing its nose at good taste and as blood erupts over all the place, nudity abounds and the closest any character comes to a happy ending is that their death scene is more iconic than their opponent’s death scene.

Mercifully for all involved, they are served by Motoya Washio’s glorious cinematography, a widescreen orgy of Technicolor extravagance. Granted, there are still plenty of pinkie violence titles I have yet to acquaint myself with, but I doubt the subgenre has anything to offer that’s more genuinely beautiful than this. Suzuki and Washio conjure some genuinely poetic imagery from the raw material of abject sleaze. Art cinema, eat yer heart out.

WINTER OF DISCONTENT: confessions of a lazy blogger

Well, not lazy. Not really. I’ve been preoccupied with other things. As the regular reader will know, I maintain a long-term relationship with this blog and occasionally cheat on it by writing poetry behind its back. Poetry’s a strange thing: I can go weeks without producing anything, to the point where I begin to doubt if I can even do it anymore, then poems spring to mind unbidden in a chaotic cluster, all demanding to be written. In the last week, I’ve written six new pieces and had a big push on submitting work.

But now I’m back and tomorrow will see the Christina Lindberg mini-season reach a belated conclusion with a certain pinkie violence classic, after which I’ll be counting down to the Christmas break with some of the most iconic appearances of blaxploitation’s most kick-ass heroine, then seeing out the year with a bruisingly cynical offering from Lucio Fulci.

There were more grubby, grimy, lewd and lecherous titles I had in mind for the Winter of Discontent, but – hey! – there’s always next year, right?

WINTER OF DISCONTENT: Exponerad

I’d had it on good authority that Gustav Wiklund’s ‘Exponerad’ (a.k.a. ‘Exposed’) was the ne plus ultra of Swedish erotica, though – looking back – no other reason was offered than the presence of Christina “is that a bazooka in your pocket or do you just have a functional libido” Lindberg.

Nor, to be perfectly honest, have I undertaken a rigorous enough study of Swedish erotica to offer an educated opinion*. So, for the purposes of this evening’s review, let’s assume that ‘Exponerad’ (a.k.a. ‘The Depraved’) is indeed the high point of the genre – the Beethoven’s 9th of the top shelf, the ‘Ring Das Niebelungen’ of the dirty mac brigade – and see how it measures up to its fearsomely priapic reputation.

In doing so – in fact, in discussing ‘Exponerad’ (a.k.a. ‘Diary of a Rape’) in any remotely worthwhile detail – it’s necessary that I hoist the jolly SPOILER ALERT.

You see, there’s two levels on which to read ‘Exponerad’ (that’s “read” as in “watch”, by the way; and that’s “watch” as in “feel ashamed of yourself”):

1. As a rites-of-passage genre in which an impressionable 17-year-old gets passed from dippy boyfriend to free-spirited couple to Svengali-esque manipulator who hosts sex parties, blackmails our heroine with nude photos and generally acts like a right nasty bastard who, once he’s got his claws into her, won’t let go …

… which is to say, for much of its running time, ‘Exponerad’ (I’m all out of alternative titles, by the way) is kind of like what ‘Lolita’ would have been if it had been written by a particularly filthy-minded Swede, the titular heroine was four years older, and Humbert Humbert was devoid of all his wit and wordplay and wore crap turtleneck sweaters;

or:

2. As the incredibly boring story of a moony 17-year-old who, left alone while her parents go off on a long weekend, constructs an elaborate fantasy life in order to stave off the dullness. Albeit an elaborate fantasy life which involves being sexually objectified, blackmailed, pawed over by a total gimp of a boyfriend (Bjorn Adelly) and even-worsed-over by a stalker-ish older man (Heinz Hopf). Which, I’ve got to say, is nowhere near the sort of fantasy I’d construct if I had a few days to kill and nothing better to do with them. Actually I’d spend them surfing the net for downloads of these kind of movies and writing about them for the blog.

Subject of which, back to business. ‘Exponerad’ (a.k.a. ‘Fuck You, Dude Who Recommended This POS’) starts with Lena (Lindberg) arguing with the BF; he slaps her and she walks off sullenly. Walks to the outskirts of town where she hitches a lift from a middle-aged businessman who forces himself on her … then drops her off a few minutes later with a cheery smile. Each of these incidents is accompanied by a wash of faded white light across the screen (how can white be faded, you ask? it was a crappy print) at which point it occurred to me – I’d like to say suddenly, but actually I saw it coming like an ocean liner on a duck pond – that they existed purely in Lena’s imagination.

As the film went on, there was a lot more faded light washing across the screen.

While there are some films that play their ultimate “it was all in the protagonist’s head” card to devastating effect (entries on Fincher and Scorsese’s filmographies spring to mind) and leave the audience reeling, ‘Exponerad’ – which could have been a suitably sleazy study of a nymphet finding herself in above her head; ‘Exponerad’, which could have built towards a tense, nasty woman-in-peril finale; ‘Exponerad’, which could have been the jewel in the crown of its starlet’s limited CV – not only benefits in no discernible way from using this device but is actually a weaker film for it.

So, yeah. ‘Exponerad’. SPOILERS END. Ditto this review. With one caveat: to he who made the recommendation – there’s a bus leaving town in an hour; be under it.



*Expressions of disbelief and outright sarcasm may be logged in the comments section. That's what it's there for.

WINTER OF DISCONTENT: Maid in Sweden

This is something I’ve mentioned during previous Winters of Discontent, but it bears repeating in light of this evening’s offering: the worst thing an exploitation movie can do – its cardinal sin – is to be boring.

Ladies and gentlemen, Dan Wolman’s ‘Maid in Sweden’.

Let’s quickly waltz through the film’s basic dynamic: cosseted small town girl Inga (Christina Lindberg) goes to spend the weekend in with her sister Greta (Monica Ekman) who has relocated to the big city and is living in sin with douchebag boyfriend Casten (Krister Ekman). Casten is initially resentful of Inga’s intrusion into his love-nest and decides to palm her off onto his artist friend Bjorn (Lief Naeslund). Subsequently, he begins to covet Inga only for his overtures to be discovered by Greta.

All of which sounds like it should occupy the first half hour or so, a curtain raiser to an examination of the bonds of sisterhood, male sexual rivalry impacting upon the bonds of friendship, and the temptations of the city at night weighed against the simpler existence of rural life. Not so. That synopsis, dear reader, is pretty much the life in its entirety.

And it’s dull.

How dull? Take the opening credits sequence: Inga journeys by train from the country to the city; there are vignettes of her parents reluctantly seeing her off, and Greta awaiting her arrived; there are endless shots of Lindberg staring out of a carriage window; there are interminable cuts to aerial shots of the train ploughing through the Swedish landscape. It’s as if, having hired a helicopter for the afternoon and filmed a train making its entire journey, they wanted to make sure every bit of that chunk of the budget was onscreen. The whole misbegotten sequence is scored to horrible folk music and clocks in at ten minutes. This in an 80 minute movie!

It doesn’t get much better once Inga arrives. There are endless scenes of Inga and Greta traipsing around urban locations; endless scenes of Casten being a twat; endless screeds of dialogue in the bland interior of Greta and Casten’s apartment. Occasionally, Inga peels off a skin tight jumper or dons a low cut number to remind us why Lindberg got the part.

The Inga/Bjorn thing doesn’t happen till halfway through the movie, when the latter inducts her into the pleasures of the flesh in the most ambivalent scene since Del Henney paid a call on Susan George in ‘Straw Dogs’; but whereas Peckinpah’s film deals in a psychologically coherent analysis of the human capacity for violence, Wolman’s is just plain trash. Whereas Peckinpah’s most notorious scene in ‘Straw Dogs’ has a genuine emotional dynamic at its centre, Wolman’s is just plain distasteful. And once he’s crossed this particular threshold, rather than the film being yanked out of its inertia, it just settles back into dullness again. 

Made the same year as ‘Exponerad’ (a.k.a. ‘Exposed’) and only two years before ‘Anita’, ‘Sex and Fury’ and ‘Thriller – A Cruel Picture’, it’s as if the Christina Lindberg of those movies and the Christina Lindberg of this one are two different people. The damaged, vengeful icon of ‘Thriller’; the emotionally devastated nymphomaniac of ‘Anita’; the out-of-her-depth Lolita in ‘Exponerad’; the dangerous siren in ‘Sex and Fury’ – all of these were committed performances that prove Lindberg was more than just a pretty face and a figure that could make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window. In ‘Maid in Sweden’, she’s just an object. And that’s the film’s biggest disappointment.

WINTER OF DISCONTENT: Anita: Swedish Nymphet

I haven’t seen Lars von Trier’s ‘Nymphomaniac’ – or ‘Nymph()maniac’ if you want to dabble in that oooh the middle of the title looks like a vagina nonsense that is really no cleverer than French Connection UK hanging signs saying “FCUK” outside there shops, and that frankly is not very clever at all – and the reason I haven’t seen Lars von Trier’s ‘Nymphomaniac’ is that I can’t shake the feeling that it’s basically a remake of Torgny Wickman’s ‘Anita: Swedish Nymphet’ dragged out to four hours.

Wickman’s film clocks in at 95 minutes and it’s difficult to imagine any treatment of this subject matter being substantially longer. Difficult, and a little bit depressing.

There was something I wasn’t prepared for in approaching a film by the man who made ‘The Lustful Vicar’ and ‘Swedish Sex Games’ – a film, moreover, that has the phrase “Swedish nymphet” as its subtitle – and that was how fucking dour it was going to be. Aided by Hans Dittmer’s almost brutally utilitarian cinematography, Wickman presents a vision of urban Sweden that’s as loveless as any of the broken concrete UK landscapes that Ken Loach has given us, and about as far from the dreamy romanticism of, say, ‘Elvira Madigan’ as it’s possible to get without, oh I don’t know, inviting Lars von Trier to the party and assuring him the ratings board is nothing to worry about.

In other words, ‘Anita’ is a joyless, unsexy film. And when your leading lady is one of the most doe-eyed, seductive, voluptuous brunettes ever to have sashayed in front of a movie camera, making an unsexy film can only mean one of two things: (a) you absolutely meant to because you were taking a sober and serious-minded approach to the material, or (b) you were basically a shit director.

I repeat at this point that Torgny Wickman was the man behind ‘The Lustful Vicar’ and ‘Swedish Sex Games’. Oh, and ‘Love Play: That’s How We Do It’. And ‘Practice Makes Perfect’. Not to mention the supposed documentary ‘Language of Love’, i.e. the porno movie that Travis Bickle takes Betsy to see in ‘Taxi Driver’.

And yet … and yet …

I can’t shake the feeling that with ‘Anita’, Wickman wanted to make a serious film. The style is pure social realism. There’s no attempt to prettify anything. Even Anita’s brief sanctuary at a house communally shared by a group of orchestra members presents their lives in such a ‘kitchen sink’ fashion that it de-romanticizes the frequent recourse to classical music on the soundtrack during this section of the film. There’s a moment where Anita and the sympathetic Erik (Stellan Skarsgård – yes, that Stellan Skarsgård) take a walk through a field and past a lake while ‘Spring’ from Vivaldi’s ‘Four Seasons’ prances away on the soundtrack and it should be the biggest cliché you can imagine, but Dittmer leaches every bit of colour from the scene, leaves it flat and drab and gives you nowhere to hang the word “pastoral”.

Likewise the loosely assembled collection of scenes that make up the first third – scenes of Lindberg’s Anita approaching various men, being warned off by various girlfriends, suffering mockery as she trawls the streets, stoically dealing with being treated as a pariah at school, and wordlessly sitting through endless scoldings by her parents, who delight in pointing up all the ways her butter-wouldn’t-melt younger sister is so much better than her – are genuinely demoralizing to watch, and that’s before we factor in the variety of horrible examples of masculinity with whom she debases herself. And by God, Lindberg captures every nuance of her character’s self-loathing and abject loneliness.

On the other hand, the plot often drifts into silliness, particularly the late-in-the-game revelation of Erik as a student of psychology who takes it upon himself to psychoanalyse and determine a cure for Anita’s nymphomania, all the while falling in love with her. Had the character remained an earnest and slightly shy musician who takes an interest in her on a sympathetic level rather than becoming romantically entangled, the dynamic might have been less forced. The horribly contrived dialogues about the psychology of nymphomania might also have been reduced to something meaningful. As it is, most of Erik’s screeds exist of the level of “ooooh, aren’t we being the daring young early 70s things, having all these frank conversations about nymphomania, ooooh madam, let me set it again: nymphomania, nymphomania, nymphomania”. Ditto, the eventual Anita/Erik consummation is every kind of excruciating given the total lack of chemistry between the leads.

Two other scenes seem awkward and ill-suited to serious filmmaking: a striptease that Anita stages to provoke her parents (their non-response is simply unbelievable), and a lesbian scene that I’m guessing was shoehorned in because the producer turned up on set on day, cleared his throat, tapped Wickman on the shoulder and barked an instruction along the lines of “Hey buddy, I’m funding a sex movie here, now shoot some girl-girl stuff, pronto!”

Still, there’s a solemn and non-judgmental piece of work operating throughout about 60% of ‘Anita’ and it seldom feels like the exploitationer I took it for. The nudity is intermittent at best and there’s little actual sex. What there is won’t trouble the cold setting on your shower. It’s not an entertaining 95 minutes and I personally can’t imagine sitting through it again. Nor does its final analysis of nymphomania go much beyond Anita’s own description of the condition: more or less, “I feel worthless so I sleep with someone, and it helps for a while then I feel ashamed of myself so I do it again”. What the film does prove, however, is that while Lindberg’s B-movie legacy is founded mainly on her looks and the sheer notoriety of at least half of her filmography, she was more than capable of crafting a character onscreen and communicating that character’s inner feelings on an emotional and empathetic level.

WINTER OF DISCONTENT: Christina Lindberg mini-season

Really! What kind of an exploitation movie fiend do I take myself for? Can it be that apart from ‘Thriller: A Cruel Picture’, reviewed as part of the inaugural Winter of Discontent season back in November 2010, I haven’t featured a damn thing on this blog that features Sweden’s premiere exploitation poster girl, Christina Lindberg?

Better get that little oversight sorted out, hadn’t I?

Join me from tomorrow when we’ll be looking at three of the Scandinavian siren’s most notorious appearances (four if I can track down a copy of ‘Exponerad’ in the next 72 hours*).



*And, no, before you ask, ordering the ‘Christina Lindberg Swedish Erotica Box Sex’ from Amazon is not an option.

Polite notice (that’s “polite notice” as in “final warning”, by the way)

Although I encourage comments and discussion on this blog, and despite the fact that I post some right dubious stuff during the Winter of Discontent, I will not countenance comments that consist of nothing but links to pornographic sites. Three consecutive posts were today targeted by this kind of thing, all posted by the same user. I’ve posted a polite request to this effect before; if it happens again, you’ll be reported to Blogger’s administrators.

WINTER OF DISCONTENT: Delirium: Photos of Gioia

Roughly speaking, the glory days of the giallo spanned 1964 (when Mario Bava stylistically defined the template with ‘Blood and Black Lace’) to 1987 (when Dario Argento made his last great throw of the dice as a filmmaker with ‘Opera’). But even that last flowering of Argento’s genius is the exception rather than the rule, and the giallo as a genre was already on the wane by the late ’70s.

Despite a falling off in both quality and active production from the ’80s onwards, gialli have never entirely disappeared. Argento made ‘Sleepless’ in 2001 and ‘Giallo’ in 2009. Eros Puglielli made a truly great contemporary giallo in 2004 with ‘Eyes of Crystal’. Helene Cattet and Bruno Forzani put a knowing contemporary arthouse spin on the genre’s conventions with ‘Amer’ in 2009 and ‘The Strange Colour of Your Body’s Tears’ (a film whose title alone references at least five classic gialli) in 2013.

As a rule of thumb, though, gialli made after, say, 1977 are generally rubbish. A couple of Argento films buck the trend. As do a couple of Bavas. Not Mario, though. By this point in the genre’s development, we’re focusing on the work of his son.

Lamberto Bava made his directorial debut in 1977 with ‘Shock’, which he co-directed with his father. His graduation was more or less immediate and his next two outings – ‘Macabre’ and ‘A Blade in the Dark’ – were minor giallo classics. ‘A Blade in the Dark’ in particular demonstrated what a subjective, prowling camera and a shoal of red herrings could achieve above a limited budget and a single location to film in. Following a handful of lesser genre flicks (including ‘Monster Shark’ and ‘Demons’), Bava made ‘Delirium’ and took all the lessons he learned with ‘A Blade in the Dark’ and applied them to beautiful effect.

Having said that, ‘Delirium’ opens like a Channel 5 trouser-arouser directed by A. Gregory Hippolyte: a slideshow of the voluptuous Serena Grandi in various lad’s magazine poses, in and out of swimsuits. Turns out this sequence is actually sketching in the backstory for us (ain’t Bava thoughtful?): Grandi’s character, Gioia, was a former pin-up model who now owns a glamour magazine called Pussycat. It soon becomes apparent that someone is murdering the Pussycat cover girls (ah, after the semi-intelligent reviews I posted earlier this year, here I am halfway through the Winter of Discontent typing a sentence like “someone is murdering the Pussycat cover girls” without batting an eyelid!) and the roster of suspects is as all-encompassing as you’d suspect.

Is it Mark (Karl Zinny), Gioia’s wheelchair-bound, gun-loving neighbour who spies on her through a telescope and harasses her with pervy phone calls? Or her untrustworthy, narcissistic actor boyfriend Alex (George Eastman)? Is it Evelyn (Daria Nicoldi), Gioia’s brittle PA? Or Flora (Capucine), the business rival who is sexually fixated on her? How about shady photographer Roberto (David Brandon), who runs a studio with Gioia’s brother Tony (Vanni Corbellini) and disapproves of Tony sleeping with the models? Or could it even be an elaborate orchestration by Inspector Corso (Lino Samelle) – who by his own admission is more often taken for a mobster than a cop – to get closer to Gioia?

Whoever it is, they swiftly despatch cover girls (Trine Michelsen) and Sabrina (Sabrina Salerno) and organise their bodies in front of wall-size pictures of Gioia in a perverse parody of the photoshoots that have been Gioia famous, both as model and editor. They also have a skewed perception: in the film’s most infamous sequences (the models are stalked in typical giallo fashion from the killer’s POV), the killer hallucinates their faces as, respectively, a large eyeball and an insect. Clearly, this is someone whose psychology is a tad wonky. Fortunately, though, come the big reveal there’s none of the “morbid fear of tennis balls bouncing in the night” silliness that mars the final act of ‘A Blade in the Dark’.

High fashion was always a favourite backdrop for gialli, from outright classics like Bava pere’s ‘Blood and Black Lace’ and Emilio Miraglia’s ‘The Red Queen Kills Seven Times’ to such tawdry division three entries as Andrea Bianchi’s ‘Strip Nude for Your Killer’ and Carlo Vanzina’s ‘Nothing Underneath’. If Bava fils doesn’t quite hit the heights with ‘Delirium’ it’s mainly because its an ’80s movie and therefore its retinue of power-dressing and big hair could never have been as cool as anything set in the same milieu but made during the ’60s or ’70s.

Narratively, the red herrings come thick and fast and just about everyone in the cast is given their “hmmm, I wonder” moment and they generally make the most of it. Grandi, whom I’d always regarded less as an actress than a lingerie model who’d somehow managed to wander onto a handful of film sets during in her career, carries the film adequately for what it is. Eastman is Eastman with everything that observation applies, but at least he doesn’t rip anyone’s entrails out.

Visually, it’s nicely filmed exercise in architecture porn. There are one or two quirky compositions, but nothing that comes close to, say, Argento at his most grand guignol. Put simply, ‘Delirium’ is a giallo that’s fun to watch and ticks most of the required boxes but leaves you yearning for some excitingly distasteful flock wallpaper and an interior designer with a morbid tendency towards stained glass and rococo furnishings.