"Get control of myself?! Who the hell are you, white woman, to tell me
to get control of myself?!"
Jerry Ellsworth (Richard Gilden)
Let's take a meandering, diffuse look at the title
track to a movie a.k.a. Brutes and I Crossed the Line: the B&W
exploiter The Black Klansman, which
has relatively little to do with Spike Lee's "serious" film from 2018,
BlacKKKlansman (trailer). About the only thing they
share is a similar name.
Trailer to
The Black Klansman (1966):
This flick here, a product of the great, legendary
"incredibly strange filmmaker" Ted V. Mikels, born Theodore Vincent
Mikacevich (29 Apr 1929 – 16 Oct 2016), is a relatively straight exploitation
movie, if with slightly more serious intent than the average Mikels film.
The
fourth directorial project of Mikels and his last B&W film, The Black Klansman was preceded
by Mikels's sexploitation titles One
Shocking Moment (B&W / 1965 / full film) and Dr. Sex (color / 1964 / full film / French poster below), and
his dull directorial debut, Strike Me
Deadly (1963 / trailer).
When The Black Klansman was released as I Crossed the Line in NYC, it got paired rather oddly with the even
older Japanese color film, Zatoichi the
Blind Swordsman a.k.a. Zatoichi on
the Road (1963 / trailer), the 5th of a series of 27 Japanese
Zatoichi films starring Shintarô Katsu (29 Nov 1931 – 21 June 1997) as the
titular blind, itinerant swordsman and masseuse.
As Talking Pulp puts it, "The Black Klansman isn't Blaxploitation,
it's half a decade too early and it doesn't have the wisecrackin' street slang
of those pictures or the sweet style. However, it does feel like a sort of
proto-Blaxploitation film. At its core though, it is a Civil Rights era
thriller in a similar vein to Roger Corman's The Intruder (1961). This falls more on the exploitation side though." Indeed,
it is pretty much a full-blown entry of what Mondo Digital refers to as
"racesploitation", which "became a movie mainstay in the '70s,
[but] ... was too hot a topic in the volatile '60s to get much traction on the
big screen.*"
* Other films of the time that
pushed the buttons of "anti-miscegenation"-minded
individuals and other Republicans include I
Spit on Your Grave a.k.a. J'irai cracher sur vos tombes (1959 / trailer), Les tripes au soleil a.k.a. Checkerboard (1959 / scene), My Baby Is Black (1961 / trailer), I Passed for White (1960 / trailer), Born Black a.k.a. Der verlogen
Akt (1969) and the decidedly non-exploitive, Oscar-nominated message movie,
One Potato Two Potato (1964 / scene).
The Department of Afro-American Research Arts Culture has the plot to The Black
Klansman: "This melodrama exploits racial tensions with the tale of a
light-skinned African-American (Richard Gilden, of The Unknown Terror [1957 / trailer / full film]), as Jerry Ellsworth] who
impersonates a Caucasian and joins the notorious Ku Klux Klan to get revenge on
the bigots who bombed a church and killed his daughter. Soon after joining, the
vengeful father begins having sex with the clan leader's daughter (Maureen
Gaffney)." Harry Lovejoy, above, plays the KKK daddy.
Film trivia: Richard Gilden was "a white man playing a Black
man playing a white man" [Grindhouse
Database]. Maureen Gaffney (b. 1 July 1943), also found in the
nudie-cuties Pardon My Brush [1964 /
poster above] & Hawaiian Thigh
[1965], the latter of which was distributed by Harry Novak, "is now the artist Maureen Gaffney Wolfson, and she now swings a
paintbrush instead of her boobs". The image below is a print of one of her
paintings, Celestial Concerto of Love, and can be purchased directly
from the artist.
The Black Klansman
was shot in 21 days near Bakersfield, CA – and NOT "in complete
secrecy in the Deep South". "In addition to executive producer Joe
Solomon, the approximately $80,000 budget was supplied by Richard Gordon and distributor Jerry Solway
of Astral Films, Ltd. [...] The Black Klansman was an entry at the 1966 Cannes International
Film Festival, and marked the screen debut of actor Max Julien [the
co-scriptwriter & co-producer of Cleopatra Jones (1973)], and James McEachin. [AFI]"
The script of The Black Klansman was supplied by Arthur Andrew Names
Jr. (25
July 1925 – 9 Aug 2015) and John T. Wilson, who later joined forces to write Mikels's Girl in Gold Boots (1968 / trailer) and Names's only known
directorial credit, Snakes a.k.a. Fangs a.k.a. Holy Wednesday a.k.a. Snakelust (1974). Jerry's white girlfriend in La La Land, Andrea,
whom he later saves from lynching in Alabama, is the only known film role of
Rima Kutner* (photo below), a
"queen of non-reaction".
* Rima Joy Kutner (14 Jan 1936 – 5 Oct 1988),
the model/actress and 1958 Northwest
University-graduate daughter of "Luis Kutner, lawyer, author, lecturer,
artist, entrepreneur, poet, athlete, and musician, [who] was born in Chicago on
June 9, 1908, the son of Paul Kutner, a house painter and decorator, and Ella
Kutner. Kutner's religious background was Jewish, and he described his ancestry
as 'mixed French, English, Spanish, German, and Russian.' An inveterate
romantic, he liked to tell newspaper reporters that when his mother was a young
Russian-Turkish girl she was kidnapped at the age of 11 and forced to become a
dancing girl in the harem of a Turkish pasha. She was rescued from her
captivity at age 15 by some Russian sailors who took her to the Crimea where
she was protected by a young painter and opera student, Paul Kutner, whom she
later married."
Okay, but enough about the movie and other tangents,
let's get to the soundtrack – but not the film music by the great
Bolivian-American composer Jaime
Mendoza-Nava (1 Dec 1925 – 31 May 2005), who also scored such
masterpieces as Orgy of the Dead
(1965 / great trailer), The House Near the Prado (1969) & The Hanging of Jake Ellis (1969), both with Charles Napier, The Cut-Throats (1969) & The
Midnight Graduate (1970), both with The Great Uschi, Grave of the Vampire (1972 / trailer), The Town That Dreaded Sundown (1976 / trailer), Vampire Hookers (1978 / trailer) and so much more.
No, let's give a listen to and then look at the title
track, entitled (Surprise!) The Black Klansman, by Tony
Harris, which even had a one-sided 45-rpm release back when the film came out
(somehow we doubt it got much airplay). You can't really dance to this one,
which starts with the stanza:
"The Ku Klux Klan killed my little Girl.
Now I'm alone in this hostile world.
My plan for vengeance may seem odd,
but with the help of God,
I will destroy them from within...
disguise myself and be the Black Klansman!"
Yeah, the lyrics are a hoot and basically explain the plot
of the movie, a movie which tends to generate pure denegation and rare praise.
("Stark, violent and
stuffed with upsetting imagery, The Black Klansman is
just as distressing in 2018 as it was in 1966. [BirthMoviesDeath]")
But the song is pretty good, particular if you're into classic garage rock like
that found on the fabulous Nuggets
compilation LPs of the 80s. In this case here, the song has an intriguing,
almost proto-Californian country garage rock appeal – hardly a surprising tone
for the song, once you hear some of the other music Tony Harris was doing
around the time.
Tony Harris's title track to
The Black Klansman:
Tony Harris was an active man in the 60s and early
70s, as is revealed over at West
Coast Fog, but then he disappeared. So we checked our attic, and found out that
there is a guy out there named Anthony Harris who, just like Tony Harris, is
the son of the American film producer and distributor Jack H. Harris (28 Nov 1918 – 14 Mar
2017), the man who brought us The Blob (1958), Master of Horror (1965 / trailer) a.k.a. Obras maestras del terror (1960), and
his own and only directorial project, Unkissed
Bride a.k.a Mother
Goose a Go-Go (1966 / trailer).
Dare we assume that Anthony and Tony are one and the same person? (Anthony,
b.t.w., is married to an Alizon; if you look them up online you'll notice that
some people seem to not like them or the recording studio, Power Studios Inc, that they run [ran?] from
their pleasant-looking, 97-year-old home on Orlando Ave in West Hollywood.) Anthony, in any event, supposedly helped script Larry Hagman's Beware! The Blob! (1972 / trailer) and possibly produced some of the
music, including the theme Son of Blob, by Mort Garson (20 July 1924 – 4 Jan 2008).
But years ago, way back in 1965, when Anthony
was still only Tony, the young Harris released an interesting "psychedelic
acoustic garage" single, Scorpio, backed with the even better
psychedelic garage rock ditty, Honey. He followed them with a
decidedly "raw and snotty folk-rock ode to the superhero in the vein of
the Turtles best work", a novelty garage rock song entitled Super Man (below), backed by the
far-better slice of psychedelia, How Much Do I Love You. The how and why he ended up
doing the title track to The Black
Klansman is unknown to us, but all of Tony Harris's early work (i.e., 60s
to the 70s) is worth a listen.
Tony Harris sings
Super Man:
To connect the dots to a title track we recently
covered here at a wasted life, and as evidence of how
incestuous regional music scenes tend to be, one of Harris's earliest known
songwriting credits is for the surf instrumental Carmen P., first recorded by the totally unknown LA group The Citations, a songwriting credit he
shares with John Marascalco and Richard Delvy (20 Apr 1942 – 6 Feb 2010). Delvy
"might be remembered by some as one of the founding forces of Surfer
music: as a drummer, he began his career in music with The Bel-Airs (listen to
1961's Mr. Moto) and The Challengers (listen
to 1962's Surfbeat)." He was also the
arranger (and we presume the drummer) on the great title track to The Green Slime (1968), as we mentioned
here at Film Fun: Music
from Movies – The Green Slime (USA/Japan, 1968).
Last but not least, Tony Harris was, like Anthony
Harris, extremely active as a music producer. The same year that he was playing
in Pacific Ocean, a psychedelic band now
remembered primarily as an early footnote in the career of its vocalist, actor Edward James Olmos, he also lent his talents as
producer and arranger to...
Milton Berle's "truly wretched"
Yellow Submarine (1968):
No comments:
Post a Comment