The Crooked Way (1949), with John Payne was surprisingly good, and it’s available on Youtube. Camerawork by John Alton gives it that heavy noir atmosphere that carries it through the weak places in the plot. Another army vet with a piece of metal in his brain who has no past, at least until it catches up with him in L.A. It struck me as a precursor to Memento, as I watched Eddie Rice/Ricardi grope through the present in search of his identity, constantly trying to figure how he should respond to the people who know Eddie, but are strangers to him. The film is quite brutal for its day, something that upset a lot of critics:
The Crooked Way races along as a melodrama should and it has more than enough plot to keep its hard-working actors going from one dangerous situation to another. But there is so much pointless brutality in it that one may seriously question whether the movie people are wise to go on with the making of such pictures. The human family may not be perfect, but why subject it to so-called entertainment that is only fit for savage beasts.”
Coming from Bosley Crowther of the NYTimes, this is a sort of back-handed compliment. Of course, he got the boot when he panned “Bonnie and Clyde;” too out of touch with the new sensibility, but the question does linger. Why, indeed?
Today’s NYTimes had an obituary for Jerry Mander, adman for social causes and author of Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (1978). I read the book when it came out – I was in college – and I suppose it contributed to my radical reduction in time spent watching TV. I think I had given up on television news earlier, enervated and appalled by the nightly viewing of Vietnam War horrors that were visible on the TV as I ate dinner with my parents during high school. For decades now, I have hardly watched TV at all, and certainly not the news. No, not even all those good serials that everyone talks about, Game of Thrones, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, etc.
It seems awfully quaint now to have a book arguing for the elimination of TV, what with the Internet vomiting drivel all over us in every possible moment of our lives. How simple it would have been to regulate and cut off one single technology that was the source of all the…well, he didn’t argue that it provided misinformation…mind numbing non-information. Mander’s thesis was the TV could not truly inform viewers, and that it provided an illusion of depth and analysis that foreclosed the possibility of real thinking on important issues. TV as gentle opiate, and not necessarily for nefarious reasons, but because that’s what it was, and must be, by virtue of its technology. Marshall McCluhan was in the ascendant at the time, recall.
No Orchids for Miss Blandish (1948)The Story of Temple Drake (1933)The Grissom Gang (1971)
When I first read No Orchids for Miss Blandish (1939) by James Hadley Chase, I had no idea what I was in for. After all, this is the crime novel that set George Orwell back on his heels, as he described in his famous essay of 1944, “Raffles and Miss Blandish.“
So much for Raffles. Now for a header into the cesspool. No Orchids for Miss Blandish, by James Hadley Chase, was published in 1939…
Several other points need noticing before one can grasp the full implications of this book. To begin with, its central story bears a very marked resemblance to William Faulkner’s novel, Sanctuary. Secondly, it is not, as one might expect, the product of an illiterate hack, but a brilliant piece of writing, with hardly a wasted word or a jarring note anywhere...
…The book contains eight full-dress murders, an unassessable number of casual killings and woundings, an exhumation (with a careful reminder of the stench), the flogging of Miss Blandish, the torture of another woman with red-hot cigarette-ends, a strip-tease act, a third-degree scene of unheard-of cruelty and much else of the same kind. It assumes great sexual sophistication in its readers (there is a scene, for instance, in which a gangster, presumably of masochistic tendency, has an orgasm in the moment of being knifed), and it takes for granted the most complete corruption and self-seeking as the norm of human behaviour.
I read the Orwell piece years ago, before I encountered Mr. Chase (whose real name is René Lodge Brabazon Raymond), so I read it over again after reading the novel and was puzzled by some of his remarks. A gangster has an orgasm before being knifed? I didn’t read that in the book. Did Orwell read the book, or just go on what he had heard about it? That was before I found out about the complicated publishing history of the novel, detailed in this exhaustive blog post. The violence and sex in the book caused such an uproar that subsequent editions toned down some of it, but Orwell knew only the Ur text. Chase himself, in the early sixties, revised the text to make it seem less dated, so there is a scene in which the gangsters sit watching large television sets, and another in which police helicopters take part in a rescue…while everything else is circa 1935! Getting a hold of that original edition is an expensive proposition, but I’m on the case! I’d also like to know the source of the title, but I’ll get back to that.
The central theme of the story is the rape/abduction of a young woman by disreputable thugs. The rape theme is ancient, of course. The word used to refer to forcible abduction, for purposes of gaining wives, concubines, or slaves, not the violent act of sexual assault, which may have followed the taking, of course. We have the Sabine women being raped, Zeus raping Europa,
Abduction of the Sabine Women – Nicolas Poussin
innumerable other seduction/rapes of women by Zeus, and perhaps most relevant, the abduction/rape of Persephone by Hades. For it is into a modern mythical/realistic underworld that Temple Drake and Miss Blandish are dumped.
Sanctuary (1931) by William Faulkner, is built around the stuck up, superficial flirt, Temple Drake, who finds herself abandoned to the desires of Popeye, a sickly, impotent, psycho, and his family of half-wits, booze runners, and semi-human beasts. Faulkner later claimed he wrote it for money, and quickly, and the first draft was rejected by his publisher as too indecent. He thought better of it soon after, but then Faulkner went to work again on the text: Today, it is possible to read the original text as well as the published version, shades of James Hadley Chase and Miss Blandish.
The book was praised by some, but for most, it was a moral outrage to be denounced and banned. However discreet and indirect Faulkner was in his prose, Temple is in fact raped by the impotent Popeye with a corn cob, a rather disturbing image when all is said and done.
I think the theme of Popeye’s rape of Temple is echoed in the 1944 stupendous film noir, “Laura,” when Waldo Lydecker, gay or impotent, not sure which, tries a symbolic rape murder of Laura with a shotgun, but she’s too quick for him.
Whatever else he may have had in mind while he was writing it, the book does blow the lid off many aspects of Southern “gentility,” social hypocrisy, the criminal justice system, and maybe the whole idea of civilization itself, a pretty neat trick for any novel.
The novel has been adapted for the movies several times, but the most famous, or notorious I should say, since it is not well known, is the first, “The Story of Temple Drake” (1933), with a sensational Miriam Hopkins playing the flirty, clueless, seductive and stupid Temple who falls into the world of a bunch of backwoods bootleggers dominated by a slick city gangster named Trigger. This film has brilliant, dark, expressionistic cinematography, and the rape scene by Trigger, standing in for the Popeye half-wit,is truncated with a scream, but the lead-in makes clear what is going on. Corn cobs are all around to clue in those literate enough to have read the original text. Hopkins said, “...if you can call a rape artistically done, it was,” but art or not, the film led to the Hays Code having real teeth so that subsequent films dared not go where Temple had gone. Linking all this together, Trigger was played by Jack La Rue, who reappears in the Miss Blandish film as the murderous Slim.
Miriam Hopkins as Temple awaiting her fate
Jack La Rue as Trigger
At the conclusion, Temple is called to testify in the murder trial of an innocent man whom she can clear if she reveals her dishonored state. After a struggle, she does so, and faints dead away. Faulkner’s Temple perjured herself, leading the innocent man to be lynched.
Fourteen years separate the Temple Drake/Hopkins film from the Miss Blandish/La Rue film, and in between, there was the super best seller, No Orchids for Miss Blandish, a reworking of the Sanctuary story line. This was Chase’s very first novel, and though he was a Brit, he set it in America. That was part of what got Orwell seething; the importation of American low-class vulgarity into the British cultural landscape, but they loved it! The novel completes the transformation of the abductors from a community of backwoods low lifes to an urban crime gang, this time lead by a murderous woman, perhaps inspired by Ma Barker.
Early paperback, original text? (1941)
First American paperback, revised text
Different title, revised text
Another later paperback edition
In Chase’s story, some small-time hoods get wind of a roadside club where Miss Blandish (she’s never named, I believe) is going to go out slumming with her beau, while wearing her diamonds worth fifty grand. They catch up with the drunken partyers but the snatch goes bad when the boyfriend plays the chivalrous knight and knocks down a high-strung thug whose response is to beat him to death. Now with a murder rap hanging over them, the hoods run for their hideout, planning to extort a ransom for the girl, kill her, and make their escape. Their plans are derailed when some members of the infinitely more violent and competent Grisson Gang (Grissom in subsequent tellings, and hereafter in this blog) spot them, put two and two together, and trail them to their hideout.
The goings on at the hideout are grim – that’s where the masochistic crook has his pre-knifing orgasm – and the small timers are rubbed out by the Grissom Gang, led by the murderous, psychopathic, and emotionally childlike Slim. They return to their headquarters with the girl and the jewels. Ma, the brains of the outfit, realizes that the authorities have no reason to suspect their involvement; all the evidence leads to the small time thugs, whose bodies have been carefully hidden and the gang murders several inconvenient people who might have information tying them to the kidnapping. Ma executes a ransom collection for several hundred thousand dollars, planning to kill the girl upon receiving it, but Slim has other plans. Despite having never shown an interest in the opposite sex, Miss Blandish’s beauty has led him to an awakening. He wants to be her Beast…forever, whether she wants him or not. Ma is troubled by this new complication – killing the girl is so much simpler – but her murderous son is not to be crossed or the entire gang could be torn apart.
After beating Miss Blandish into submission, Ma instructs her in her new role in life, to please Slim. With the help of drugs administered continually by a former doctor in the gang, Slim has his sex slave. Ma disposes of the hot ransom money at a discount and seizes a local nightclub from its terrified owner, turning it into a “legit” front for their outfit, and raking in the real money. Miss Blandish is kept in a locked chamber where Slim visits her regularly.
All good things must come to an end. A pesky detective working for Mr. Blandish figures out what went down with the jewel snatch and kidnapping, and locates Miss Blandish. The Grissom Gang is expunged in a hail of bullets, but not before taking out a lot of coppers. Miss Blandish is freed, but throws herself out of a window to her death at the first opportunity. Orwell, perhaps speaking as a typical clueless male of his era, says that she had grown so accustomed to Slim’s caresses that she could not live without them, but to me it is obvious that Miss Blandish was psychologically devastated by her months of being raped, and ended her life out of shame and despair.
After WWII, after Orwell had his hissy fit in “Raffles and Miss Blandish,” we get to a film treatment of the novel. The film is British, and most of the actors in it are as well, and they sound it too, despite that the film is set in the United States. Jack La Rue, the only American actor in the film, casts off Trigger to reappear as Slim, transformed into a slick urban gang leader in the prohibition era USA. Instead of playing with switchblades, he works out his inner demons by endlessly throwing a pair of black dice. In fact, “Black Dice” was considered as a possible name for the film, and it is the name the gang gives to the club they take over. But we are in a different moral universe with this film, derived from a successful stage treatment of the book, and one far removed from Faulkner and James Hadley Chase.
Yes, the Grissom Gang trails the small timers to their lair, there is a gunfight, and the gang takes possession of the jewels and the girl, but these two are already connected. The movie opened with Miss Blandish in the lap of society luxury, receiving yet another enormous vase of orchids in celebration of her engagement, but this one has for a card only a note with two black dice and the words, “Don’t do it!” She tells the servant to send them back. “There will be no orchids for Miss Blandish today.” The title of the novel is never explained in the text: I take it to be an ironic existential comment on her fate.
Linden Travers as Miss Blandish
Ma Grissom
Slim’s gang catches up with the small-timers
Miss Blandish at home in a different sort of society
Once Miss Blandish overcomes her shock at being abducted, she calms down and eventually realizes that Slim was the source of the orchids urging her to not get married. And now they are together! How exciting! She feels alive, truly alive for the first time after a stifling existence among the upper crust. Slim is not the deviant half-wit of the source texts, but a smooth operator, attractive, seductive, a bit violent at times, but wonderful to be with. In one scene, Miss Blandish says, “Oh, I know you’ve killed people. You’re cold, you’re hard, you’re ruthless — but …” All in self-defense: they embrace rapturously. Their lips crunch together in a heavy kiss that set a record for duration at that time in cinema. The end comes in the same way – slick or not, they are gangsters – and Miss Blandish kills herself, this time, for precisely the reason Orwell suggested: She cannot bear to return to society life and be without Slim’s caresses. I wonder if Orwell would have enjoyed seeing his misinterpretation of the novel’s text used to conclude what a number of critics have called the worst movie ever made?
At last, we come to “The Grissom Gang” (1971) by Robert Aldrich. (More than fifty years ago! Time for a remake?) We’re back in the USA, Depression Era, but the film is in painfully full color. Everyone sweats, a lot. Ma and her gang mean business, and Slim is back to being a sadistic, emotionally stunted mama’s boy, but he is humanized, a bit. The book’s plot has been snipped here and there to streamline the story, but the brutality of the gang is dark as the night. Mr. Blandish, payer of the ransom, is played by the Aldrich stalwart, Wesley Addy, and is given a truly nasty character more in keeping with the world of Sanctuary than Miss Blandish: He’d rather his daughter be retrieved dead than alive and thoroughly soiled by the ordeal.
Slim and Miss Blandish
Ma preparing for the end
Sweaty and angry Miss Blandish
Daddy Blandish reunited with daughter
Ma and the gang have died in a blaze of gunfire – Ma enjoying every minute of it – and Slim is trapped with Miss Blandish in a barn surrounded by the cops. He declares his love for her; after all, if not for him, Ma would have bumped her off long ago. But he does truly love her in whatever simple and twisted fashion is possible for him, and now it’s time for her to return to her home, so there’s nothing in the world for him but to go out and face the bullets and die. Miss Blandish, who has never become hardened to the killing around her during her ordeal, begs him not to go. “Don’t die for me Slim. I’m not worth it.” She realizes that Slim’s wretched love is the only love she has ever had, and she is grateful for it. But he does go, and he is shot to pieces.
Miss Blandish mourns her abductor, rapist, and worshipper
After gazing on Slim’s corpse for a few moments, Miss Blandish is confronted by her father who is clearly disgusted to see her in such a state. She tries to explain: “I was just trying to stay alive. He loved me…” Dad doesn’t understand. He stalks off, telling her that Mr. Fenner, the detective who cracked the case, will see to her. The final scene shows the two of them driving off in a car, she looks back at the barn, bewildered. They’re off to that hotel Fenner has arranged for her, away from the prying press. Will she jump out of the window as she did in the book? Aldrich doesn’t tell, but it certainly seems a good bet.
The Strange Love of Martha Ivers: A shot to the gut in a Coketown liebstod, but there was no Wagner playing.
Star Trek: What are Little Girls Made Of? Another shot to the gut, no music, but the same lovers clutch ending in murder. No suicide though. Oh, and she’s an android.
Double Indemnity: Neff plugs Phyllis. “Goodbye, Baby.” Barbara Stanwyck again. No Wagner here, although his Prelude to the Liebstod was playing in the scene when Neff takes Phyllis’ stepdaughter, Lola, to the hills behind the Hollywood Bowl. Neff would have made it to Mexico except that he couldn’t resist coming clean to the dictaphone in Keyes’ office. The old urge to confess did him in.
A lot of the flicks I watch are movies that came out when I was a kid, but that I didn’t get to see, or didn’t quite understand. I have seen Cool Hand Luke (1967) before, but my primary recollections of it are from the Mad Magazine satire, “Blue Eyed Kook” July ’68. I just watched it, and though it has its appeal, I found myself remarkably detached and uninterested in the fate of this white chain gang somewhere in the troglodyte South. What did strike me was depth of the Christ symbolism and story in the representation of Luke’s journey/Passion.
Luke is imprisoned for some drunken tomfoolery, and set to work on a road gang, mostly clearing brush. He figures as a kind of existential beat-era anti-hero, with his laconic apercus, e.g., “Sometimes having nothing is a pretty cool hand,” when he thoroughly bluffs his way to wining at poker and is anointed with his sobriquet by Dragline (George Kennedy.) He is temperamentally compelled to sass and rebel, although it comes out in bursts between periods of apparent cooperation with the “system.” In a final soliloquy in an abandoned church where he gets his death wish fulfilled, he asks God why He made him “this way.” The dialog is totally stagey and false: nobody who has his impulsive and uncooperative character is likely to have the self-awareness displayed in those last words of his.
That he has a death wish is made clear several times in the film, including one moment when he explicitly implores God to strike him down. His personal relationship with the “Old Man Upstairs” is one element of his Christ status: Like Jesus, he has a heavy burden to bear, and he does not always feel up to it. That burden is to bring light to the darkness of the prison, the uneducated, beaten-down, spiritually defeated inmates. After being initially hostile enough to him to pulverize him in a boxing match, Dragline becomes his indefatigable promoter and apostle, amplifying his message of purpose and life through his endless storytelling and myth-making. The boxing match was simply one of Luke’s trials to endure, as he establishes himself as The Messanger.
At each violent juncture in Luke’s stay in the camp, the inmates react, usually positively. They are inspired by him, and live out their hopes and aspirations through him, so much so, that Luke must admonish and rebuke them for “hanging on him.” They should “get out there,” themselves, he tells them after one failed escape attempt returns him beaten but unbowed to the camp, instead of feasting on his stories of freedom outside. Soo…why did he send them that faked photograph of himself with two women that got the men going so much? Was he mocking them? When Luke is finally reduced to a pitiable, pliable, obedient state through a night of grueling torture, the men turn on him and regard him with contempt, flicking their cigarette butts at him, and turning away, as though they could have done better. He let them down. His burden is heavy…
There’s lots of explicit Christian symbolism in this film: Luke is left in a crucified posture after he ingests fifty hard boiled eggs to win a bet, a bit of (unintended?) comedy. No surprise he meets his end in an abandoned church. After all, the church, established religion, has abandoned him. As has society. After all, we are all simply alone. And we can’t even get help from one another – there’s that “failure to communicate” business.
It’s a real period piece, this film. It fits so well into the culture of anti-establishment gestures and rhetoric, the scorn, ridicule, and distrust that were heaped on previously respected institutions as a result of the 60s counterculture, and most of all, the horrible war in Vietnam. But seen at the remove of fifty-five years, it seems pretty tame. Almost innocent. Would that our problems were so clear cut and easily identified.
The only scene in this movie that stays with me as something truly impressive rather than contrived is the meeting between Luke and his dying mother. A marvelous scene, and his mother (Jo Van Fleet) was wonderfully acted.
Watching Star Trek is always an exercise in déjà vu, because I was nine years old when it premiered, and because just about everything in it is borrowed from something else. Maybe the borrowings are on purpose, maybe they are just accidental in the sense that some themes are always “in the air” at certain times, but the shows are always a bricolage of themes and images. Part of the fun…
In this episode from the first season, Kirk is trapped on a planet with a lost scientist who has transformed himself into an android to preserve his mind when his body was dying of frostbite. (Mind-body issues run rampant through Star Trek). It takes a while for the doctor’s true nature to come out, but he is surrounded by androids he has constructed as part of his insane scheme to overrun the universe with superior beings, you know the drill. Andrea is one of them, clearly designed for more than protection and conquest, much to the chagrin of the doctor’s erstwhile fiancee who has joined Kirk on his search for the missing scientific hero.
Ruk, an android surviving from the old days of the planet, looks like he escaped from a local production of Pagliacci, is played by Ted Cassidy, aka Lurch, who, it happens, lived just a few minutes from where I was growing up in Woodland Hills, and whose ashes (he died prematurely) are scattered in the house’s back yard. He is easily befuddled and tricked by Kirk’s superior logical wit.
Kirk on the run, after flummoxing Ruk, makes use of a handy phallic formation for protection. You have to wonder if he’s just playing hard to get. The episode is filled with “transgressive” same-sex kissing and fondling, as is the norm for Star Trek’s intrepid exploration of racial and sexual taboos.
The android love nest gets to be too much for Andrea, who “loves” her maker, and who can’t abide rejection. Another correspondence: The Strange Love of Martha Ivers comes to mind.
Barbara Stanwyck and Kirk Douglas (hey, another correspondence!) are locked in their love-death embrace in the finale.
Not exactly clear who pulls the trigger, but it’s curtains for the two of them, the only way it could be.
A final correspondence: As Captain Kirk is being duplicated into an android Kirk, he shouts out an insulting phrase about Dr. Spock being a half-breed, knowing that the android will then repeat the sentiments when he is sent to the Enterprise to impersonate himself. Of course, Spock, receiving the insult, realizes that the “Captain” is an imposter, and takes proper action. It’s all reminiscent of the “Rolo Tomassi” sequence in L.A. Confidential, the best part of that flick, I think.
Melville House Publishing calls Giorgio Scerbanenco the “godfather of Italian noir,” in its blurb for A Private Venus, first published in 1966. Well, could be – how would I know? It’s part of The Milano Quartet, a look at the black, dirty underside of that city that seems to have a lot of noir in its cultural history (Manzoni, Stendhal) if you stretch the term a bit. And Duca Lamberti certainly is a classic noir male [anti]hero:
Then he took his Lisa Ussaro and drove her home. At the front door, they even shook hands, they might as well have said, “Thanks for the company.” He went back to the Cavour feeling completely nauseated with everything, starting with himself, but not with her.
And he doesn’t think to highly of the human species. He’s babysitting his sisters infant:
“…at one she drinks two hundred grams of milk with her eyes closed, almost without waking up, has a pee at the same time, and then she’s out like a light until tomorrow morning at six or seven. I’ve always thought that kind of vegetable life is the most civilized. I think civilization ends, at least for the human race, as soon as brain activity starts.”
Surely he understands that non-humans don’t have civilization, but his crackling cynicism sure is entertaining!
Duca is a doctor who has been barred from practicing, and spent time in prison, for a misstep early in his career when he empathized too much with a very sick old patient. His father was a policeman who was relegated to a desk job after his arm was mangled in an assassination attempt down south, where he was battling the Mafia. He wanted, “my son, the doctor,” but the son is a bit too much like the father, and shares his tendency to move outside the rules. That gets him in dangerous trouble. But he’s quite good at the crime gig, after all:
But Signor A had not appeared. They called him Signor A rather than Signor X, because the man wasn’t an unknown quantity: he was something specific, the chief pimp. Duca didn’t know his name or physical appearance, but he knew he existed. It’s like when you say the fattest man in Milan: you’ve never seen him, you don’t know if he’s a chemist or a restaurant owner, if he’s fair-haired or dark, but you know he exists, it’s just a matter of finding him and weighing him, and then you’ll immediately recognize him because he’s the one who weighs more than anyone else in Milan.
Very logical and systematic: he gets results. Faster than his friends, the police.
The plot is a bit haphazard at times, but the suspense propels it forward, and Duca’s character. You want to know if he will destroy himself or not. There’s an emotionally damaged young man he’s hired to wean off of drink, a job tossed to him by the police chief who is an old friend; the kid’s engineer-martinet father, a plot element that’s a bit of a red herring; a couple of young women with an awful lot of nerve and a bit too much intellectual curiosity; and some very creepy types running an European sex-traffic operation. The title isn’t mentioned in the text, but the racket uses a photo-album to allow customers to pick out the girls they want delivered: Everyone gets his private Venus, I guess.
The Mafia is a major presence in the book, but only as background, and as the unseen masters of the sex-ring. Like the book Takedown, and the Italian films, Mafioso and Gomorrah, its take on the mob is totally unsentimental and unromantic: they are a bunch of brutal, murderous, gangsters, a cancer on the body of society. It’s hard for me to imagine an Italian claiming, as people have for The Godfather, that the mob, even in fiction, is somehow a critical representation of capitalism…
…than are dreamed of in your philosophy. That’s what Svengali keeps telling people in this movie – I guess he liked Hamlet, and he does have strange powers.
Svengali (1931) was based on the very popular late 19th century novel, Trilby, by George du Maurier that went through several incarnations on the stage and film, including a recent production not yet released. The most famous is this one, with John Barrymore and Marian Marsh. Of course, Svengali has become a byword for an evil charismatic figure. His character in the novel was clearly a standard anti-semitic stereotype, and elements of that are still present in this film, although he is simply presented as an exotic and bizarre eastern-European, albeit with a Yiddish-sounding accent.
The film was made before The Code took force, so it contains a few spicy bits of dialog, as well as some daring views of Marsh. In the image below, Svengali is riding with Tribly, whom he has abducted, and he gently covers her bare leg: the scene gives the impression that he has sexually violated her as well as taken her away.
Trilby is an innocent cleaning girl who can’t sing a note, despite her marvelous “sounding board, and a roof of her mouth like the Pantheon.” Under Svengali’s spell, she sings like a diva, and becomes one: they are the toast of Europe, playing to packed houses everywhere.
Evil mad genius though he is, he falls in love with Tribly who cannot reciprocate: she still pines for little Billee, the Englander who courted her in Paris. Svengali asks her, what does he have that Svengali lacks, he with his silly paints?
He hypnotizes her into feeling love for him…
It works! She says she loves him!
But he’s no fool. He pushes her away…
Her voice is only her master’s voice talking to himself.
Tribly is pursued by Billee, which disrupts Svengali’s concerts. He cannot maintain his spell over her when Billee is present, so his fortunes fail, and he is reduced to playing cafes in French Morocco. Billee follows on, and Svengali confronts him. He knows he is beaten, and the end is near. When he dies in mid-concert, Tribly collapses onstage. Cradled in Billee’s arms, her last word is “Svengali!…” True love after all.
[The film is in English, but the sound was so poor, I used sub-titles.]
Kris Kool (1970), by Caza (buy it here), a bit of Peter Max, Alphaville, Barbarella, and a whole lot of other stuff, including of all people, Jean Dominique Ingres!
Here he encounters a Flower Woman for the first time…
And here he learns the secrets of their life cycle, of which he, for an all too brief idyll, will be a part…
I have to think his style, the languid eroticism, the fluid line, owes something to Tiepolo: I saw this drawing at the Morgan a few weeks ago.
Of course, there’s this too. I, The Jury, a Mike Hammer film/novel. Kris Kool is a lot nicer guy than Mike, though.
That’s Peggie Castle about to get plugged. Her legs are featured in 99 River Street to good effect. How would I know about this stuff without theFilm Noir Foundation?
Posted by Lichanos 
Journey to Perplexity 