Original title: Les
Spectres etLe Manoir du diable. Not to be confused with Ty West's feature film,
The House of the Devil (trailer) — this film
here is much older and (Duh!) shorter.
This month's short film,
an early project of the pioneering French Master Georges
Méliès (8 Dec 1861 – 21 Jan 1938), above, is as much of a Goldie Oldie as it is both short
and in bad condition. It is the oldest film we have ever presented here,
beating out the second oldest, Segundo de Chomón's The Haunted House (1908), our Short Film of the Month for October 2018, by a good 12 years. Both films
share a similar theme, experimental joy and tilt (despite the shared "horror"
elements) towards the comical. And, as we wrote back then about The Haunted House, when it comes to The House of the Devil, "We would
be lying if we didn't say that [the film] looks its age but, that said, we
still find this […] an amazing piece of film history, one that can and should
be appreciated as an early visual and special effects treat." Basically, this little film here be the granddaddy of our favorite genre in film: it is to movies what The Castle of Otranto is to the novel.
Yep, House of the
Devil holds a
particularly special place in the history of film, as Wikipedia
[accessed 21 Apr 2021] explains in its introductory paragraph on the film: The House of the Devil, "which
depicts a brief pantomimed sketch in the style of a theatrical comic fantasy,
tells the story of an encounter with the Devil [very much of a Faustian model]
and various attendant phantoms. It is intended to evoke amusement and wonder
from its audiences, rather than fear. However, because of its themes and
characters, the film has been considered to technically be the first horror
film."
More like comedy horror, to tell the truth, as little about the
3-minute short – an "innovative" length for the times – is scary, but
much garners a smile. (Of course, we would all probably react differently to
the short if we didn't have 125 years of films behind us.) Indeed, Georges
Méliès' A Nightmare (1896 / full film), which is
constructed around the first dream sequence in film history (and that, of
course, includes a black face interlude because that is what all white men
dream about at night), is a bit more discombobulating in its horror elements
than the scène fantastique looked at
today, but unlike in The House of the
Devil, all the funny stuff that transpires is a dream and not
"real" – and thus not really horror, at least in our eyes.
Georges Méliès's
The House of
the Devil (1896):
The first ghost film, BTW, assuming you do not count
the three-second appearance of the five floating sheets in The House of the Devil, is the British Photographing a Ghost [1898]; unluckily it is a lost film (so check
your granny's attic). The House of the
Devil was once a lost film, too, but in 1988 a copy was discovered down
under in the New Zealand Film Archive. Proving that Hollywood did not start the trend of
unnecessary remakes (really: Cabin Fever
[2016 / trailer] just 14 years after Cabin Fever [2002 / trailer]?), director Georges Méliès sort of remade
The House of the Devil a year later as The
Haunted Castle /Le
Château hanté(1897 / fragment) – although at
least that film had a new aspect to it: it was in (hand-colored) color.
As common with many of the films back then when the industry was less
an industry than simply teething, the actors are not credited and most are
unknown. In The House of the Devil, the only
thespian known for sure is the woman who comes out of the cauldron: the at-the-time
successful stage actress Jehanne
d'Alcy (20 Mar 1865 – 14 Oct 1956), above, born Charlotte Lucie Marie Adèle Stephanie Adrienne
Faës, who eventually married Georges Méliès in
1925, after his first wife died, and remained with him through thick and the
mostly thin that was to come, until the very end. As a member of his regular
film troop, she went on to appear in what is possibly the first mummy film,
Méliès' lost short Robbing Cleopatra's
Tomb (1899); in one of the possible first films to have (simulated) full "nudity",*
Méliès' After the Ball aka The Bath (1897 / full film); and, again
in Méliès' films, she is probably the first actress to play, on film, the
French heroine Joan of Arc in (Duh!) Joan of Arc (1900 / film), not to mention
probably the earliest iteration of a fairy godmother, in Cinderella aka Cendrillon(1899 / film). (Méliès, you might note, was "first" or
close to first a lot when it comes to film.)
Less definite is whoever it is that plays the Mephistopheles-like devil. Some sources credit the director himself as the actor,
but the general consensus is that the devil is played by the magician Jules-Eugène
Legris (1862 - 1926), who also appeared in a few other Méliès films. In truth,
the condition of the surviving film is too poor to say for sure… but, going by
the beards, we would tend to think that Méliès plays the put-upon nobleman, not the
devil.
(Original title
in Spanish: El bar. Hmmm, wonder
what that means.) Spanish filmmaker Álex de la Iglesia may be one of the better
Spanish-language filmmakers around, but for whatever reason he hasn't yet made
the jump to international mainstream name familiarity à la the Mexican
Guillermo del Toro, despite having helmed two English-language projects, the
highly disappointing Perdita Durango (1997
/ trailer) and a film
we have yet to see, The Oxford Murders
(2008 / trailer). We
might venture to suggest that de la Iglesia's taste and humor is perhaps a tad
too Spanish to translate as well as del Toro's multi-faceted vision of horror,
but that is merely a hypothesis that we wouldn't put money on. But while the
reason(s) that de la Iglesia has remained primarily a homeland filmmaker are
open for conjuncture and argument, what is really evident and true is that the man
makes some truly excellent movies and, at least in our view, is one of Spain's
most interesting genre filmmakers. (See, for example, Acción Mutante [1993] and El día de las bestia [1995], or
even his somewhat less than satisfying La
comunidad [2000 / trailer].)
Spanish trailer to
The
Bar:
El bar is a great film for
our age of paranoia and conspiracy theories. Were the movie not so blackly
funny, it would be a great film for a Q-Anon film night: the government of this
film definitely wants to hide something, and is more than willing to accept the
death of some half dozen Joe and Jane Schmoes to keep face and contain the
damage. Deep state at work! (Or maybe the Illuminati? The Masons? No – surely
the Rothschilds!)
Naw, the
government at play here is the Spanish one, of course, and the events of the
bar occur on a "warm and sunny day" in the happening metropolis of
Madrid, an overrated city if there ever was one (ignoring, of course, the
Prado). The movie opens with an excellently shot street scene that could lead
one to believe that de la Iglesia was trying to pay homage, à la Robert
Altman's first minutes of The Player
(1992 / trailer), to Orson
Welles' famous and far more baroque three-minute-plus single-shot opening scene
in A Touch of Evil (1958 / trailer / shot), but found it
impossible to maintain the continuous camera. Nevertheless, the opening scene
does an excellent job at capturing the noise and speed and chaos of
contemporary urban street life of Spain, even as we are introduced in passing
to four of the protagonists of the film: babe Elena (Blanca Suárez of Eskalofrío [2008 / trailer] & Tiemo después [2018 / trailer]), homeless
nutcase Israel (Jaime Ordóñez), generic businessman-type Sergio (Alejandro
Awada of La araña vampiro [2012 / trailer]), and the
formless housewife Trini (Carmen Machi ofPieles
[2017 / trailer]). They all subsequently converge, for varying reasons, in a
relatively generic Spanish bar where, after some drily humorous exchanges and
interactions and character introductions, the shit hits the fan.
Or, rather: a
bullet hits a head. A man leaving the bar gets his head blown off by a sniper, as
does the city maintenance worker (Jordi Aguilar of Cuerdas [2019 / trailer]) who goes out
to help him, and the once-teeming neighborhood streets are suddenly empty of
all people. But once officials finally show up, they are anything but reassuring
or helpful: anonymous, armed and wearing gas-masks, they clean the street of
the dead and blood, and set tires afire in front of the bar. According to the
news reports on TV, a major fire has broken out in downtown Madrid — of the sniper
deaths nothing is said, much less anything about the people still in the bar.
And then there is a noise in the men's toilet…
Once the first
man falls, the movie does an excellent job at maintaining suspense and tension
up until the final scenes in the city sewers. At the same time, at least for
the period of the film set in the bar and the bar's basement, the filmmakers do
a first-rate job at maintaining a drily effective layer of blackly humorous
dialogue and situational comedy, never once slipping into any excesses of the overly
farcical, as is sometimes the case with de la Iglesia's films (see: La comunidad), if not "humorous"
Spanish films in general.
Trapped behind
the plate-glass windows of the bar and cut off from the world, the surviving
patrons manage to figure out the what and the why of their situation. Disparity
and distrust becomes unity becomes watching out for number one, the differing
attitudes coming in waves driven by the different development arising…
While blackly
funny, The Bar never loses sight of
its thriller aspects nor of its exploration of human nature under enormous
stress. Certain plot aspects do not survive strong scrutiny — the quickness
with which a central Madrid neighborhood is emptied for one, for example, not
to mention the total lack of social-media rubberneckers that such an event
would engender in real life — but the speed and suspense and tension of the
narrative make it close to impossible to notice, much less dwell, on such
flaws. Even the red herring of the rucksack of the character of Nacho (Mario
Casas of the unpleasant but intriguing thriller The Occupant [2020 / trailer] & de la
Iglesia's Witching Bitching [2013 / trailer]) and his almost
slapstick attempt to hide it escalates so quickly that one [almost] forgets to ask
"Why?" in regards to his actions.
Arguably, the
last 15 minutes of The Bar do swerve
a bit too much into the realm of the bodycounter, with the most predictable choice
of all the survivors becoming an almost typically unstoppable killing machine.
That aspect, however, also enables to the movie to ratchet the tension even as
it returns to its exploration of personal growth and sacrifice. Likewise, the
final street scenes could also have been shortened, for although a point is
made (the disinterest of urban society and, in turn, how readily the masses
overlook/ignore the abnormal in a modern urban setting), by extending the event
throughout most of the credit sequence it ends up becoming an example of the
male objectification of women instead of the social criticism de la Iglesia
wants to pretend he's presenting. (Anyone else out there catch the obvious
visual reference to certain photos of one of the greatest objectifiers of all
time, Helmut Newton?) That said, any hetero male would probably agree that Blanca
Suárez is a woman well worth objectifying, and she does look hot even in filthy
skimpies. (Mario Casas's hipster Karl Marx beard, on the other hand, stops him
from being sexy even when he's in his tighty-whities.) Lastly, The Bar also totally ignores (but then
it is a movie and not a TV series) the fact that, in the end, in all likelihood
no virus was contained, for the bodies of two possibly infected people remain
in a place that would be ideal for its quick spread.
Whatever easily
overlooked flaws are found in The Bar,
none in any way hamper the effectiveness of the film as a suspense movie or
black comedy. The tightness of de la Iglesia direction, the sincerity of the
actors, and the speed and twists and humor of the narrative make sure that one
is too engrossed by the events at hand to dwell upon any creative glitches. The Bar is well worth watching, and is
definitely a satisfying filmic experience. And Spanish filmmaker Álex de la
Iglesia really deserves greater international recognition.
Way back in March 2013, when the studly and hirsute Golden Age porn
star Harry Reems (27 Aug 1947 – 19 Mar 2013) died, we began
our long, fat look at his tool career and films: a full 7 lengthy blog
entries! (Links to each are found bellow.) And while length is almost as much
fun as girth, by the time we got to Part VII (1986-2013) we were really ready to roll
over and go to sleep. Which is why we never got around to finishing the
already-started Part VIII: Addendum Parts I
– 4, which looked at the films that we somehow missed or skipped in our
extended and meaty Parts I through VII. And then we went and lost the stick
we had our Harry Reems file on (a lesson in backing documents up, that was).
But recently, while trying to distract ourselves from the
Covid-related death of our paternal parent, we cleaned house in corners we have
never cleaned before — and low and behold! The stick was found, probably where
the cat kicked it.
And so, seven years later to the month, Addendum Part I, much like delayed ejaculation: better late than never. And now, a
month later, here is Addendum Part II.
Not that we actually plan to finish the Addendum(s): we merely want to
finally put online what we had already finished back then, mildly updated. (Way
back when, we lost interest in the undertaking as of the films around 1985.)
We dedicate the rediscovered Addendum(s) to our departed paternal
parent, who inadvertently introduced us to Harry Reems when we, as a late teen,
stumbled upon his VHS copy of Deep
Throat (1972, see Harry Reems Part II) hidden in the VHS box for Key Largo (1948 / trailer).*
*He also had The Resurrection of Eve (1973 / Purple Skies and Butterflies) hidden in his To Have and
Have Not (1944 / trailer) box,
but the 1973 film wasn't funny enough to keep us watching until the end.
Another "documentary" from the
day and age when documentaries were a good way to beat the obscenity laws, Pornography in New York can now be
easily found on the myriad of porn tube sites found all over the web.
Though uncredited,
the "director" is Beau Buchanan
(22 Nov 1937 – 12 Jan 2020), a man who started his film career as an
un-credited student in Blackboard Jungle
(1955 / trailer). In
his interview
at The Rialto Report, Buchanan
claims that when he started this documentary, it was meant to be about the porn
producer Leonard Kirtman and was entitled The Snake in the Big Apple, but eventually he ended up being fired by
Kirtman who then used the existing material himself to make Pornography in New York. Buchanan's
porn masterpiece, in any event, is the legendary production Captain Lust
(1976) — give a listen to The Rialto Report's great podcast
about that movie.
According to the iafd,
Harry Reems is in the documentary somewhere — an assertion not supported by
most other film sites... But: if the list of trailers included in this film
supplied at the imdb
is right, then he is there due to I Wish
I Were in Dixie (1969), which we looked at in Harry Reems Part
II.
Other non-Reems trailers and/or inserts used come from Sweet Taste of Joy (1970 / poster above), 101 Acts of Love (1971
/ full
NSFW film), Carlos Tobalina's I Am
Curious Tahiti (1970 / poster below) and the West Coast "documentary"
Pornography in Hollywood (1972),
the last of which we took a look at in Babes
of Yesteryear – Uschi Digard, Part
VI: 1972.
At Uschi Part VI, BTW, we mention that "Leonard Kirtman, in any event, had a
long and productive career as a pornographer, with a few odd horror movies
tossed in as well, but he seems to have disappeared soon after video took over.
(But then again, maybe he just changed careers. Look his name up at Contact Out.)
At rame.net, they write:
"Even though Gerard Damiano has nothing to do with this documentary film,
this can be viewed as a follow-up to his documentary film named This Film Is All About... [a.k.a. Changes, looked at further above]
because a couple of the NYC places and people featured in his film are also
featured here. First is the unknown redhead, who (as far as I know) also
appeared in Sex USA (1971, see Part
II), A Time to Love (1971,
see Part
II), and a loop named The
Pick-Up which is featured in TFIAA.
Second is Nancy* who I will get to below. [...] This documentary is nowhere near
as good as TFIAA, but it is still
worth watching. The film is in Black & White, but it is well shot and has
excellent sound. [...] Nancy* gets a guy erect by stroking him with her hand.
Then she makes a cast of his dick with plaster (she was a real sculptress) and
she shows off some of the dildo's she has made from other guys. [...] The film
ends with the reporter saying: "8mm, 16mm, 35mm, live action, black &
white, color, stereo, you can get it all in Times Square." As you know,
this is not the way Times Square is now. That's Nancy at work below.
*Nancy [Godfrey],
now a lost and forgotten name of the past, never parleyed her artistic
intentions and work as far as another woman of her day did, namely: Cynthia "Plaster
Caster" Albritton [see
her website]. Take a look at the entry on Changes in Addendum I for more info on Nancy.
Trailer to the
documentary
Plaster Caster (2001):
The free porn site erogarga
might add: Pornography in New York "belongs
to the genre of pseudo-documentaries, which justifies or allows an essentially
pornographic movie to be shown. The sex scenes are not, by present standards,
hardcore, although they are not soft core either. Film begins with the supposed DA of Nassau County talking about pornography and
the law with emphasis on his duties in relation to obscenity. This is cover for
what follows: a survey of various sexual practices, straight and gay, in the early
'70's in New York. [...] The movie [is] 'hilarious' due to the serious way it
presents raunchy material."
During our online search for material on Pornography in New York, we came upon two advertisements for the film, one presented above and one below. At the 9G Drive-In in Hyde Park,
NY, the documentary was paired with Joseph W. Sarno's somewhat older sexploitation
drama, The Swap and How They Make It
(1965 / full
movie). In Andy Warhol's place of birth, Pittsburgh, it was screened at the
Art Cinema (now Harris)
with Michael and Roberta Findlay's Take
My Head (1970), which we looked at in our Babe of Yesteryear feature on Uschi
Digard (Part
III: 1970, Part II)
Hard softcore sexploiter, typically
violent and perverse in that special way common of Findlay films: Rosebud is yet another obscurity from
the legendary and reclusive Roberta Findlay who, among many films, also
directed the so-bad-it's-fun horror movie The Oracle(1975 / trailer below).
Trailer to
Findlay's
The Oracle:
As for Harry Reems, is he in this
forgotten movie, or is he not? Once again the French site encyclocine.com
stands more or less alone by claiming that Reems is there (credited as Stan
Freemont) — and while virtually no other site claims that ,the good old imdb mildly clarifies the matter by
listing Harry Reems (as Stan Freemont) as "credited only". Interesting
to note: Harry Reems, credited as "Stan Freemont", does actually appear
in Findlay's previous project, the first feature film that she made after
splitting with her husband Michael
Findlay(27 Aug 1937 – 16 May 1977),*Altar
of Lust (1971, see Part
II). Fact is: Harry Reems ain't in it, but let's look at Rosebud anyways.
* Roberta Findlay: "I moved
in with Mike, and we got married. I was in love with him — for about 2 weeks.
Somehow I stayed with him another 10 years. [Rialto
Report]"
As in most Findlay films, the good
filmmaker did everything but star in it: as Jason S. Martinko points out in The XXX Filmography, 1968-1988, aside
from her credited activities as writer, producer, director and cinematographer,
"She also wrote the original music (as Robin Aden) and worked in the
lighting department (as Robert Marx). Film editing was done by Charles
Schwartz." (Odd thing about Mr. Schwartz is that his only other known film
credit is for Altar of Lust [1971],
which sort of indicates it too is a pseudonym there, too.) Rosebud is currently easily found on DVD as part of a triple feature
of Findlay films — the other two being Altar
of Lust and Janie (1970, 4:35 mins., poster below),
all of which feature a notable fascination (obsession?) with incest.
For a long time, the only plot description
online was the one on a DVD's back cover: "Rosebud (Darby Lloyd Rains) becomes a drifter after finding daddy
in bed with his mistress, has incestuous fantasies about daddy, resulting in
rape."
Just this very year (on 23 Jan 2021), however, Video
Zeta One put a full blow-by-blow description along with great photos,
not one of which shows Harry Reems anywhere. It reads (without the photos) in
parts: "[...] Jamie Gillis (20 Apr 1943 – 19 Feb 2010) plays Don,
Rosebud's boyfriend — before she killed herself. Don listens to her last words,
recorded on the reel-to-reel. The downward spiral really began when she caught
her father (Richard Towers [20 May 1927 – 27 Feb 2016]) with a woman named
Marie (Arlana Blue). Rosebud admits on the tape that she has incestuous
feelings toward her father. [...] Rosebud is traumatized and runs away from
home. […] Rosebud goes to live at a hippie commune. [...] The character of
Rosebud is depressed and miserable for the entire film. [...] Rosebud moves
out of the commune and gets a cat. There's a knock at the door... Terry has
arrived and she's brought her friend (Tamie Trevor). [...] Terry and her friend
try to convince Rosebud to come back to the commune. Back at her father's
place, Kate (Helen Wood a.k.a. Dolly Sharp) is visiting. Kate and dad
have a roll in the hay. Rosebud arrives just in time to see the action. Rosebud
can't help herself; she masturbates while she watches. [...] Rosebud is out of
the frying pan and into the fire. She's pursued by a rapist (Alex Mann [24 July
1941 – 6 July 2010]). [...] Rosebud faints, and the rapist undresses her while
she's passed out. [...] She wakes up and finds she's been raped. She decides at
that point to commit suicide. [...]."
Room Service 75
(1972, writ. & dir. Fred Baker)
Fred Baker (26 July 1932 —
5 June 2011) was a Renaissance Man active in music, stage, film and
writing; he did uncredited production work on the critically acclaimed
documentaries The Battle of Algiers
(1966 / trailer) and The Murder of Fred Hampton (1971 / trailer), directed the documentary
Lenny Bruce Without Tears (1972) and the seldom-screened time capsules Events (1970 / trailer further below)
and White Trash (1992), and had bit parts in Lizzie Bordon's Working
Girls (1986 / trailer)
and Romero's Dawn of the Dead (1978 / trailer). His company, Fred Baker Film & Video Company (nee Fred
Baker Films, Ltd.), distributed films such
as David Lynch's Eraserhead
(1977 / trailer),
Alfred Sole's Tanya's Island (1980 /
trailer from hell) —
and this movie here, Room Service 75,
which was screened at The First Annual New York Erotic
Film Festival, an event about whichJonas Mikas (24 Dec 1922 –
23 Jan 2019) once wrote: "I am a perfect victim for any capitalist
swindler. Which this festival probably is, a big capitalist swindle."
At the First Annual New York
Erotic Film Festival, Room Service 75
was amongst the films seized when the festival was raided by the boys in blue,
alongside celluloid like Al Di Lauro's Old
Borrowed and Stag (1971, poster below), Arch
Brown's now lost Tuesday (1971)
and John Knoop's short Norien Ten (1971). (Tuesday is so lost, that it doesn't even appear on most current Brown filmographies.) Charges were dropped
for all but one film: "The exception was Arch Brown's Tuesday, which was the only gay male film at the festival. Although
many of the films had hardcore sexual content, the homosexual orientation
of Brown's film was perhaps the sticking point for the judge, who, according to Screw, claimed that 'it was the worst
film I've ever seen.' [Sex Scene: Media
& the Sexual Revolution, ed. Eric Schaefer]" (Interestingly
enough, the judge was obviously not bothered by the hardcore two girls and a
dog scene found in Room Service 75.)
Prior to his death, Baker also began the
extremely readable blogSlink, a "non-fictional
novel" based on his life that will, of course, now never be finished.
Trailer Fred Baker's experimental film
Events (1970):
An intriguing cascade of facts:
The narrative of Baker's film prior to Room
Service 75, Events, tells of "a wannabe directing team
turning to porn as a means of financing a documentary about Lenny Bruce";
and Baker's first film(s) after Events
was a documentary on the stand-up comedian entitled Lenny Bruce: Without Tears (1972) and this one.
We could find very little info
on Room Service 75 online, though we
did find the "explicit hardcore porn documentary" itself online here
at daftsex. Aside from
the known participation of Harry Reems ("Herb Streicher") and Arlana
Blue, the film also features Kristen Steen, Myron "Butch" Oglesby and
Peggy Windsor. Another credit of note: "Toys and Drawing by Tom
Ungerer" (28 Nov 1931 – 9 Feb 2019)... less known is the
inclusion of a lot of vintage pornography (as in B&W and from before you're
mother was born), including two girls and a dog.
Ungerer's drawing above is from
one of the two known posters used for the film; and as seen by the page below
from the 8 Sept 1972 issue of the York Daily
Record from York, Pennsylvania, the film was also screened at least at one
location outside of NYC, the now-gone Southern Theatre and
present-day Asamblea de Iglesias Cristianas Puerta de
Salvcion.
In Whitney Strub's book Perversion for Profit: The Politics of
Pornography and the Rise of the New Right, she
mentions that Lucille Iverson, a reporter of Women & Film and "no fan of films in which 'women are
degraded, submissive, adoring of the large erect penis'" saw Room Service 75 and found that the
movie "showed lesbians captivated by 'the myth of supposedly
greater satisfaction achieved via the big male cock,' but [that] the film had
redeeming qualities in other scenes, where 'the women are treated equally with
the men" and "the clitoris is important and so is fondling and
kissing'." Doesn't really seem to correspond to what we saw online, but if
anyone has any further information about the movie, feel free to share...
A year after Room Service 75, in 1973, Baker (as "Vance Farlowe")
wrote and directed a narrative porn film, Different
Strokes a.k.a. Spikey's Magic Wand
and Over Exposure. At the time we
tooka look at that movie in Harry
Reems, Part III (1973-74), it was not general knowledge that "Vance
Farlowe" is supposedly Baker — which is why we offered our own conjecture
regarding who really wrote/made that movie...
Below is Fred Baker 1962 short On the Sound which, according to Mi Shorts,
"was his first film and it won the coveted USA Golden Eagle the following
year, representing the US at international festivals in Berlin, London and
Edinburgh. The original score is by legendary saxman and composer, Gigi Gryce."
Fred Baker's short
film
On the Sound (1962):
A Place Called
Today
(1972, writ.
& dir. Don Schain)
A.k.a. City in Fear. X-rated not as in X-rated porn, but as in X-rated
adult themes ala Midnight Cowboy
(1969 / trailer), A Clockwork Orange (1971 / trailer) or Last Tango in Paris (1973). Today, such
films would be R-rated or, at worst, NC-17, like Henry & June (1990 / trailer) or A Dirty Shame (2004 / trailer).
"Don Schain (26 Feb 1941 – 26 Dec
2015) and his partner Ralph T. Desiderio conceived the idea for the notoriously
trashy 'Ginger' exploitation picture trilogy in 1970. Schain wrote and directed
all three of these immensely popular cult films: Ginger (1971 / scene),
The Abductors (1972, see Part
II) and Girls Are for Loving
(1973 / scene). The
'Ginger' flicks starred brassy blonde Cheri Caffaro as a sexy yet tough female
James Bond-style crimefighter who used harsh and aggressive methods to nail the
villains. Don subsequently directed Caffaro in ... equally sleazy drive-in items...
[imdb]"
Like this "message" film, A
Place Called Today.
Harry Reems, who also showed up in The Abductors (credited as "Herb
Stryker") to play a cop, pops up as an un-credited extra in this flick as
a construction worker in a crowd scene: that's him above, to the far right
below.
Over All Movie,
Hal Erickson says, "City in Fear
was an attempt at socio-political commentary by soft-core porno star Cheri
Caffaro and her director/husband Don Schain. The film takes place during a
heated political campaign, wherein the 'race card' is played up for all it's
worth. The bigoted whites attack the blacks, the militant blacks attack the
whites, and gallons of blood are spilled. […] Originally released as A Place Called Today, this is no more
or less than an ultraviolent sexploitationer masquerading as a 'statement.'"
Down
Among the "Z"Movies, who unlike us is not a Caffaro fan, says: "Cheri Caffaro has
had a cult following, though I've never understood it. Her 'Ginger' films are
like all other hardboiled woman action sleaze, except that Caffaro would get
naked — actually, she'd always get raped, which, given that the director (Don
Schain) was her husband, is creepy. She gets raped again in this film, again
directed by her husband, and then killed, as she isn't the star of the film for
once. Neither is Lana Wood, who has a bigger role [...]. The 'star' of the film
is social and political commentary, of which the film is replete. The film
consists largely of static shots of people very angrily shouting about racial
conflicts, usually straight into the camera. [...]"
Scene from
A Place Called Today:
The basics of the plot, as explained at Johnny
LaRue's Crane Shot: "J. Herbert Kerr Jr., who did little of note
on film, is earnest enough as Randy Johnson […], a black man with a plan to run
for mayor by inciting violence behind the scenes and more or less scaring the
Caucasian Establishment sheep into voting for him. Helping him are white
revolutionary Carolyn (a miscast Lana Wood [...]) and black Steve Smith (former
footballer Timothy Brown). On the other side of the election are Ron Carton
(Richard Smedley), Carolyn's lover who believes in the Establishment and is
also making time with wealthy debutante Cindy Cartwright (Caffaro), a goodtime
party girl who backs the current mayor (Peter Carew) basically because her
daddy tells her too. [...] As for lovers working together, Wood met Smedley on
this film and married him. In her autobiography, she claimed A Place Called Today was his first
film, but he had in fact acted in several soft- and hardcore sex films prior to
it and continued to do so after their wedding. He's a dreadful actor, and
Schain's self-important dialogue really leaves him hanging. Wood trashed this
movie in her book, though she claimed it was ruined in the editing. I don't
think it was edited enough."
Speaking of Richard Smedley, that's him
above with his future wife, the pneumatically talented Lana Wood. Prior to this
movie, as "Dickie O'Toole" — synergy: one of Lana Wood's most famous
roles is probably that of "Plenty O'Toole" in Diamonds Are Forever (1971 / trailer) — Smedley
worked with the Great Uschi in Affair in
the Air (1970 — see: Uschi
Part II) and, as 'Bigi Dicki', in Skin
Flick Madness (1971 — see Uschi
Part V). Later, in 1974, he also worked with Marilyn Joi in Al
Adamson's The Naughty Stewardesses (1974
— see: Marilyn
Joi Part II). While his marriage to Lana Wood was over by 1976, his exploitation
film career was pretty much dead by 1974, when he had his last "feature
film" role in the swan song [sex] movie of forgotten Western and TV
director Oliver Drake (28 May 1903 – 19 Aug 1991), Angelica: The Young Vixen a.k.a Wild and Sexy (German poster below). In 1979, the Texan-born Smedley (Snyder, TX), who worked
in the oil fields prior to college, moved to Midland, TX, with
"the love of his life, Johni" and "re-entered the oil
business". Born 3 Oct 1946, Richard
Paul Smedley died at the age of 73 on Sunday, 8 Dec 2019, in Midland, TX, after
a four-year fight with cancer.
But to return to the movie. "Since it
was filmed at a time when plugged-in directors were engaging the Black Power
movement head-on, the plot of A Place
Called Today is weirdly old-fashioned, like a racially tinged riff on some
old Edward G. Robinson potboiler. Furthermore, the filmmakers' attempts to
integrate elements of jet-set debauchery and youthful rebellion fall flat.
Caffaro plays the horny daughter of a corrupt businessman, Lana Wood plays an
earnest activist, and both of them sleep with a white reporter (Richard
Smedley) determined to uncover the black politician's scheme. So what the hell
is A Place Called Today trying to
say? That everyone is misguided? That conscientious white people need to save
African-Americans from themselves? That sex makes everyone insane? Compounding
the muddiness of its rhetoric, A Place
Called Today suffers from leaden pacing, wildly inconsistent acting, and a
vile portrayal of women. [...] In sum, if you're looking for an inept movie that
contains both gratuitous nudie shots and lengthy debates about the pros and
cons of capitalism, then A Place Called
Today was made for you. [Every
70s Movie]"
8 Minutes of the
Movie:
For all scorn and derision A Place Called Today gets, there are a
few, lone voices to the contrary out there, like Obscure
Video & DVD, which raves: "A very well-made film about a young
black lawyer running for Mayor in a large city and all the racial tension he
creates to win the race. The film may be timely today as all American elections
are run on dishonesty and crime, this film really packs a wallop. [...] Gorgeous
Cheri Caffaro is the daughter of a high and mighty political backer who really
flaunts her body and actually gives the best political speech I have ever
heard!! J. Herbert Kerr Jr. gives a great performance as the young black lawyer
on the rise and who soon regrets what he has done, especially when he orders
Caffaro raped and killed to make a point about violence. If you get a chance,
see this film, you won't forget it."
Of the cinemas given in the adverts above
— Fine Arts and DeMille of NYC, and Loew's Mid-City of St Louis
— none still exist today.
Her Way to
Star
(1972, dir. Still
Unknown)
For a short
time, Vinegar Syndrome tried to establish
its own streaming service, Exploitation.tv,
specializing "in all
things sleaze, trash, drive-in, and genre film from the '70s and '80s". It failed — now Amazon does the
streaming for them. But while Exploitation
was around, it practiced Vinegar Syndrome's aim of uncovering and presenting lost
and forgotten obscurities. Including this unknown porno flick from the early
days, once lost and forgotten and now found everywhere on the web (like here at
tubepornclassics).
Virtually all
names involved remain unknown, but the lead man-meats are those of Harrry Reems
and the omnipresent Jamie Gillis. Of the multitude of rent-paying women, the
only identified name is that of "Bertha Jones", an attractive
brunette whose limited known film career consists of this film and Carter
Stevens's Collegiates (1973), also with Reems (see Part
III).
The X-rated
fuck-film comedy has gained little to no attention in general, although some
guy named Michal Pekár, who likes to make music videos to cool
songs using obscure film material, did use Her Way to Star in 2018 as
material to his music video to Beck's 1996 song Hotwax.
Beck's Hotwax
set to
Her Way to Star:
The only person
so far who has seen the film and thought to write about it is Davian_X, who on 12
March 2016 wrote a lot more at the imdbthan
what we present here: "Her Way to
Star is the kind of half- interesting storefront junker that gestures
toward the pleasures of the genre without coming off as particularly
distinguished. The nominal plot centers around one woman's (Bertha Jones) attempts
to make a splash in the X-rated film industry. […] "I'll do anything! On
top, on bottom, girls, boys, animals, anything!" […] Part zany parody and
part desultory sex flick, Her Way to
Star offers a good example of the sort of madcap clowning that was often a
product of fly-by-night early X-rated productions. Actors without a clearly
defined character archetype (zany director, sleazy producer, etc.) often seem
to be playing themselves, and frequently either struggle not to break character
or begin wryly commenting on the action in a scene they're participating in. […]
The film is charmingly self-deprecating, and these interludes provide a fun and
zany perspective on the world of sex films circa 1971/72. […] That said, while
engaging fairly playfully with the one- or two-day-wonder production model, Her Way to Star inevitably falls victim
to it as well. The sex scenes, while decently performed by a game and generally
attractive cast, are nevertheless not much to write home about […] and
frequently slow the film down between its more engaging plot-based scenes.
While the film makes an admirable attempt at combining the two from time to
time, as well as at providing a winking nod toward the slap-dash milieu from
which it sprang, it's ultimately not quite enough to fully rescue the
proceedings, making this worth a watch but hardly a candidate for repeat
viewing."
BTW: The World Theatre used to present the
film's title at the beginning is the same World Theatre we looked at
briefly above in The Corporate Queen (1969).
Taken over by Embassy Theatres in the early 80s, it was razed in 1987.
