The German cult actor Udo Kier, born Udo Kierspe, passed on to the movie studio in the sky on 23 November 2025. "Kier was born in Cologne on 14 October 1944, towards the end of World War II. The hospital where he was born was bombed by the Allies of World War II moments after his birth, and he and his mother had to be dug out of the rubble. Kier grew up without a father. In his youth, he was an altar boy and cantor. [Wikipedia]"
He has long been a gay icon, but longer than that he has been a memorable presence in numerous movies, with a colorful career of ups and downs that spans from exploitation and arthouse classics to mainstream Hollywood product to D2V/D2D trash to television series. His always noteworthy presence and thick German accent will be missed.
Although he is in some of our favorite films — the original Suspiria (1977, see further below) and Mark of the Devil (1970, see Part I) and Flesh of Frankenstein (1973, see Part II) and Blood for Dracula (1974, see Part II) and Iron Sky (2012 / trailer), among others — to date only two films that we have reviewed here at a wasted life feature him: Blade (1998) and Iron Sky: The Coming Race (2019). For that, we now honor him and his amazing career with one of our typically unfocused and all-over-the-place career reviews. Enjoy!
Also go to
Exposé
(1976, writ. & dir. James Kenelm Clarke)
Released in the UK in March, 1976, the film is also known as House on Straw Hill and Trauma. During the '80s, in the UK, the uncut video version was labelled a "video nasty", so you know it must have a few plus points. (On its original cinema release, it was cut by about three minutes.)
Trailer to
Exposé:
Co-star Linda Hayden is known to have said that this is the only film that she ever regretted making. As for Kier: "Kier revealed his own antipathy for the film in a 2014 interview with Empire [magazine], bemoaning the fact that his voice was dubbed and that he was never paid. He also dismissed [Fiona] Richmond as a credible actress, saying 'The other girl, Linda Hayden, she was a real actress. Fiona Richmond was just a famous person trying to be naked in a movie.' [Wikipedia]"
Slant magazine describes the movie as "double-barreled exploitation fodder of the tawdriest vintage" and says: "The film still packs a tawdry wallop, for that matter, even if its supposedly graphic content is bound to strike viewers as comparatively tame nowadays. House on Straw Hill owes more than a passing nod to Hitchcock's Psycho (indeed, there's even the requisite murder set piece inside a shower), but Clarke cheekily ramps up the exploitation elements, with the result that the film could have easily served as a rough template for Italian giallo films like Lamberto Bava's A Blade in the Dark (1983 / trailer)."
The plot, with major spoilers: "Udo Kier plays Paul Martin, a writer whose first novel was a big success, but who is now struggling to write the follow-up in a remote country house. He has an expensive and demanding mistress (played by Brit sex star Fiona Raymond) and is getting a lot of pressure from his agent and publisher to finish the book. To help with the writing, a new secretary is hired (Linda Hayden, best known for her precociously sexual teenager in Piers Haggard's The Blood on Satan's Claw [1971 / trailer below]). The movie is rife with sexual tensions (Udo slips on latex gloves before bouts of hot, sweaty sex with his mistress; the secretary spies on the pair going at it and later seduces the mistress in front of the writer), and dreams and fantasies and possible hallucinations intrude — sex, blood, a man lurking outside the house. The secretary is raped by a pair of local thugs and blows them both away with their own shotgun. It's a toss-up who's craziest, the writer or the secretary, but it eventually turns out that she's insinuated herself into his life to get revenge; that first successful novel was actually written by her husband who killed himself when the success was stolen by Martin. [Cagey Films]"
Trailer to
The Blood on Satan's Claw:
"A strange beast indeed, House on Straw Hill [...] constantly straddles the line between art and trash, with Kier's hallucinatory freak outs (accompanied by percussive typewriter keys banging up against the camera) alternating with leering, sleazy sex scenes, including a couple of scenes with Richmond clearly indicating in which direction her career would be heading. (Director James Kenelm Clarke would go on to mount a fake sexy biopic about her called Hardcore [1977 / music] the following year.) Meanwhile Hayden is easily the best thing here, crafting an ambiguous, disquieting presence in a film not exactly drenched in subtlety. As for the button-pushing content, the big scenes involve the aforementioned shotgun scene (which starts very abruptly in every version and is treated with a disturbingly casual attitude) and the final twenty minutes, a string of bloody attacks and chase scenes including a shower attack that mixes female anatomy and knife slashes in a way that still comes as a bit of a shock. [Mondo Digital]"
"Acting-wise, Kier blandly suggests Martin's prissiness and self-regard, but it's a one-note performance. Richmond is slightly better than you'd expect for someone whose normal acting range was perforce restricted to writhing suggestively and moaning 'mmmm yes ... mmmm yes'. Predictably, it's Linda Hayden's show and she rises above the shoddy material in fine style. It's sad that the misogynistic finale ultimately rubbishes the character she manages against all odds (i.e. Clarke as writer and director) to breathe life into. [Agitation of Mind]"
"Whose voice is coming out of Udo's mouth? It certainly isn't his, but it is awesome. OK, between the latex sex gloves and the visions of himself committing suicide, Udo is playing a nut job. What a surprise! [...] Who knew Udo Kier could kick ass? No really, he just beat down two thugs in the street. You go, Udo! Nothing like going to a strange house with a brand new boss and on your very first day of work, sneaking away for some afternoon masturbation. Way to go, Linda. Now for some masturbation outside, in broad daylight, in the middle of a field. I like this Linda. A lot. At the sight of the two men Udo beat up earlier watching Linda in the field enjoying some 'me time', I assume this flick is going down the I Spit on Your Grave (1978 / trailer) path. One minute later: nope, I was wrong. Good on you, movie, for fooling me. And all that was in the first 30 minutes of this film... [Hellnotes]"
"We have a good one today featuring beautiful women nude having deviant sex and a big bloody knife. I know what you're asking...are they having sex with each other or some guy? Yes. The knife! It gets a lot of use here and doesn't cut into the gratuitous heterosexual or lesbian pre-marital sex. Euro-Trash at its best in 1976's The House on Straw Hill [...]. This one is definitely aimed at our prurient interests... not that that is a bad thing. For some steamy and erotic fun,* with much blood and gore, enjoy The House on Straw Hill. [Zisi Emporium for B Movies]"
* "These scenes
only become vulgar in the movie. When you read the script it's [Udo does
smooth voice] 'They make love'. It should just say, 'They have brutal
sex with rocky breasts and rubber gloves!' [Empire]"
Full film on YouTube,
while it lasts:
The presence of Fiona Richmond, whose has "the kind of pneumatic figure that guaranteed her décolletage entered the room five minutes before the rest of her", was due to the financing supplied by her squeeze of the time, the British strip-club owner and publisher Paul Raymond (15 Nov 1925 – 2 Mar 2008): he essentially bought her the part. She had the lead in director James Kenelm Clarke's next two films, Hardcore a.k.a. Fiona (1977 / music) and Let's Get Laid (1978 / review), both of which were produced by Brain Smedley-Aston. Previously, in 1974, Smedley-Aston produced one of a wasted life's favorite films, José Ramón Larraz's Vampyres (1974 / trailer).
Girl on the Beach (1969):
As for James Kenelm Clarke (5 Feb 1941 – 29 Jul 2020), as obvious by the easy listening tune above, he was also a musician. In 2010, he received producer's credit on a substantially altered remake of The House on Straw Hill titled Stalker (trailer).
Interestingly enough, despite her stated distaste for the original film, Linda Hayden shows up in Stalker to play the housekeeper, Mrs. Brown, who meets her end at the hands the character she played in the original film. But then, one wonders why Ms. Hayden should dislike The House on Straw Hill so much when she has made worse, like the "comedy" that is 1974's...
Goldflocken
(1976, writ. & dir. Werner Schroeter)
From grindhouse to art house: after the "Euro-Trash at its best" that is House on Straw Hill, Udo Kier's next role was that of Franzl, in Flocons D'or a.k.a. Gold Flakes a.k.a. Goldflocken, an art film by the German art-film director Werner Schroeter (7 Apr 1945 – 12 Apr 2010) released in Germany on 20 May 1976.
Werner Schroeter was a "key person of the New German Cinema of the '70s. His works, mostly shot in 16mm, combine an intense interest and knowledge of German history and personal dramatic and emotional investigations. [imdb]"
Scene from
Goldflocken:
Goldflocken, preceded by Der Tod der Maria Malibran (1972 / full movie) and Willow Springs (1973 / full movie), is the last segment of a three-part filmic meditation about female love, suffering, and death. All films featured Schroeter's "muse" Magdalena Montezuma (1943 – 15 Jul 1984) in the given lead role.
"A multilingual film [and] summary of Schroeter's early films: four episodes about great feelings and emotions, about the search for luck, about destiny and mortality, taking place in Cuba, France and Bavaria. Beautiful dreamlike variations on classic genres, from kitschy Mexican melodrama to [the] poetic realism of French art films to Bavarian Heimatfilm in dialect. As Schroeter said: '[Goldflocken] starts with an introduction conceived like a romantic poem about the general theme of the film: Death.' Les Flocons d'or was Schroeter's last 'super-underground film' for which he could combine a unique international cast. Andréa Ferréol (of The Prize of Peril [1983 / trailer] and The Infernal Trio [1974 / trailer]) gambols erotically with three dogs and recites Poe's The Raven; Magdalena Montezuma incarnates an angel of death; Bulle Ogier (of Irma Vep [1996 / trailer]) personifies 'The Murderous Soul'; and Udo Kier carries a flower into the forest, like Schroeter's hero Novalis, before repeatedly bashing his head into a rock. [Venice Biennale]"
Scene from
Goldflocken:
Or, as LunaJuice says over at Letterboxd: "[A] random load of tat. Like an arthouse Kentucky Fried Movie (1977, with Uschi Digard and Marilyn Joi)."
Kentucky Fried Movie:
Spoiler: Franz (Udo Kier) dies by hitting "his head several times against a stone and rolling down the hill. [Cinemorgue]"
Spermula
(1976, writ. & dir. Charles Matton)
Charles Matton (13 Sep 1931 – 19 Nov 2008), a.k.a. Gabriel Pasqualini, was a renaissance man, to say the least: he was a painter, sculptor, illustrator, writer, photographer, screenwriter, and a movie director.
Spermula was his second & third feature-length movie in one: "There were two versions of the film at the time of the original release, with different dialogue and plot — one in French, and one in English. The French version originally was released with the title L'amour est un fleuve en Russie [Love is a River in Russia] and is less of a space opera than the English-language version, which leans more towards science fiction. [Wikipedia]"
"Spermulites! The rocket ship is ready for your departure. You have but seven stages of the creeping shade to perform your mission. If the Earth is not ready for invasion by that time, our planet of Spermula will disintegrate and we shall die. So for goodness sake, move your ass!"
Big Mother (voice actor unknown)
Dayle's Theme —
written and performed by José Bartel:
The French version, released in France on 7 July 1976, is also about 15 minutes longer than the English version, the latter of which has a few shots added that were taken from Silent Running (1972 / trailer), and features a lot more (softcore) sex. The narratives of the two films are rather different, as is the final edit of each film. Contrary to rumor, the movie was never released as hardcore porn.
"To describe the erotic practices of these sex-ridden morons, at once lewd and ludicrous, would make even an incorporeal vapor lose its lunch."
Big Mother (voice actor unknown)
French trailer to
Spermula:
"From the title, this 1976 French picture sounds like a low-budget porn vampire spoof (cf: Suckula [1973], Sexcula [1974], Gayracula [1983, VHS box below]*), but no — it's a weird mix of art and sex, with the sort of bizarre adult comic book science fiction premise found also in the likes of Zeta One (1969 / trailer) or Toomorrow (1970 / trailer). The doomed planet Spermula ('where no man has ever penetrated') is populated by intelligent gas beings ruled by Big Mother, who gets to talk a lot and explain things you'd never get from what you see onscreen — a dark force is overwhelming the planet, and so some gas creatures turn into humanoid women to infiltrate the Earth, which the Spermulans intend to occupy after their expedition has rendered the entire male population impotent through vampiric fellatio leading to the extinction of humanity. The invaders look like fashion models, dress in copies of gowns shown in a 1930s fashion magazine (we're told Earthmen are so stupid they won't notice the anachronism) and occupy a chic chateau in rural France to begin their campaign of mass seduction, but — as often in stories about incorporeal beings who take on human form (cf: [...] grottier porn films like Diary of a Space Virgin [1975])** — the Spermulans start to enjoy their bodies too much, and even the leaderine Spermula (Dayle Haddon [26 May 1948 – 27 Dec 2024]) eventually goes against Big Mother. Spermulan Werner (Udo Kier), who came out male — with tiny genitals that he complains about ('try using tweezers') — by mistake, [...] whines that he isn't having any fun on the mission. [...]*** [Kim Newman Website]"
* All three are easily found online at NSFW streaming sites.
** Diary of a Space Virgin a.k.a. The Sexplorer a.k.a. The Girl from Starship Venus is on Quentin Tarantino's list of "Top 20 Grindhouse Classics". Like the previously mentioned three vampire porn films, The Sexplorer is easily found online at any number of NSFW streaming sites.
*** Spoiler: Werner "drives with a car into an empty pool. It is zoomed on his dead body. [Cinemorgue]"
"This is the missionary position, or one-on-one. Its animal-like thrusts can dislocate your contact lenses. It is recommended by the Church, though attempts to actually enjoy it are discouraged."
Big Mother (voice actor unknown)
written and performed by José Bartel:
"The original French film, L'Amour est un fleuve en Russie (Love is a River in Russia), a superior film to the English dubbed Spermula, which is more widely known. [...] Plot: In the 1930s, a notorious secret society known as Spermula — centered around the 'rapture of being' achieved through a total liberation of the senses — disappeared from 'civilized society'. They were rumored to have developed supernatural powers. Over time they have honed their powers, and put in motion a plan to return from the future and conquer the world that once exiled them. An elite force of commandos — in the guise of several beautiful females — are charged with the task of neutering the male population. This is to be achieved by extracting the male reproductive fluids (orally), allowing the decadent human race to eventually die off from natural attrition. Ingrid (Dayle Haddon), leading the Spermulan assault, sets about neutralizing the leaders of the community in which they have established the invasion's beachhead ... and then plans to gobble up the rest of the male population in one lavish orgiastic party. Unfortunately, as Ingrid herself has foreseen, members of her cadre begin to succumb to the unfamiliar temptations of the flesh, and develop emotional attachments to their intended victims. Blighted by the curse of emotional love, the invaders are forced to withdraw ... for now. [ocoee96 at imdb]"
Générique Fin —
written and performed by José Bartel:
Fantastic Movie Musings and Ramblings notes, "Quite frankly, I expected porn, and given the title, can you blame me? [...] Granted, there are several versions of this movie out there (and I hear tell that the English-language version is very silly), but the French version I saw, while still clearly an adult film of sorts, is more stylistically surreal than openly erotic; even when the sex shows up, I was more entranced than aroused. It's not an easy movie; much of it is confusing, and it takes a bit of work to sort through the characters, but it did catch my interest enough that I think it might be worth revisiting."
"The newly human — and beautiful — Spermulites arrive on Earth in their little spaceship amidst much solarising effects [...]. They move into an art-deco mansion, lie around naked a lot, drive a Rolls-Royce and wear gorgeous vintage clothes. Big Mother warns them not to fall in love, and be seduced by the acts they have to perform. She gives them a robotic example of a (black) man to practice their techniques on. [...] There's also a strange cabaret/freak show in town which includes a dwarf, a contortionist (who pleasures himself), a hermaphrodite and some female dancers. The local priest, along with a painter and his girlfriend, will also play their parts. [...] Quite a beautiful little film in its way, Spermula is well worth a view as an odd entry in the pantheon of seventies sex cinema. [Girls, Guns & Ghouls]"
Tristan Et Cascade —
written and performed by José Bartel:
Ever the contrarian, the Worldwide Celluloid Massacre rates the film as "Worthless", saying: "Bizarre and campy erotic movie about the Spermulites who come to Earth in the form of women to suck all the virility and sperm out of men permanently, and thereby save their planet. They are warned not to succumb to the pleasures of the flesh. Udo Kier stars as a technical error who came to Earth as a man with a tiny penis, and there's a side sex show with midgets and transsexuals thrown in for no good reason. It's not as fun as it sounds but the dialog is campy and amusing."
Cyborg:
Erinnerung an die Leidenschaft
(1976, dir. Martin Hennig)
After Spermula, Udo Kier's next appearance was in this obscure German-language TV movie broadcast in West Germany on 16 December 1976. The title roughly translates into "Memories of Passion" — or, possibly, "Memory of Passion": online, there seems to be no consensus whether the movie title is "Erinnerungen" (plural) or "Erinnerung" (singular). At his website, however, Hennig himself goes for the singular Erinnerung an die Leidenschaft. (The imdb goes for Erinnerungen.) To date the only long-film directorial project of Martin Hennig, a Swiss man of letters, the project was probably written by him — but even he fails to clarify that with certainty at his website.
"Swiss author Martin Henning [...] calls his first television film a 'summary of disillusionment': the 'partly autobiographical' story of a student who flees abroad disappointed after 1968 and returns in the mid-1970s [...]. [Spiegel]"
Once upon a time, in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, someone named Birgit Weidinger apparently wrote (in German, natch): "[Erinnerung an die Leidenschaft is] the story of a student who fled abroad after 1968 and returns in the mid-seventies, in search of finding his place... His impressions are marked by disillusionment and disappointment; melancholy and a poverty of communication determine the landscape; the rhythm and message of the film are lost in dull mourning."
Who plays who is anybody's guess, but going by the photo above, the student was played by either Udo Kier or the other similarly successful German character actor Jürgen Prochnow* (of Apocalypse.Com [1999 / Part I, with Simon Newby]).
* In the early 1980s, Prochnow was in a relationship with Austrian actress Antonia Reininghaus (1954 – Oct 2006), whom he met when they both were filming So weit das Auge reicht / As Far as the Eye Sees (1980) and had a daughter, Johanna. In November, 1987, the by now single mother and has-been actress Antonia poisoned their then seven-year-old daughter Johanna and tried, unsuccessfully, to kill herself. She got off a prison sentence thanks to psychiatric assessments, and subsequently retired to her flat in Graz, where she lived in seclusion until she killed herself in 2006. Her death wasn't noticed for two weeks.
Bolwieser / The Stationmaster's Wife
(1977, writ. & dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder)
Udo Kier makes his first film with Rainer Werner Fassbinder (31 May 1945 – 10 Jun 1982). Bolwieser, or The Stationmaster's Wife, as the movie was titled for its theatrical release for the English-speaking market, was originally made as a (3 hours and 21 minutes long) two-part television film in Germany that made its broadcast debut on 31 July 1977. The theatrical version, converted to 35mm widescreen from 16mm, is roughly 112 minutes long. The movie is based on the 1931 novel Bolwieser, by Oskar Maria Graf (22 Jul 1894 – 28 Jun 1967),* seen below in a portrait painted by the "degenerate" artist Georg Schrimpf (13 Feb 1889 – 19 April 1938). The film appears to be the first filmic adaptation of any of the novelist's works.
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* "Graf was a novelist, poet, and dramatist, active in left-wing circles after the First World War, who fled Germany after the Nazis' coming to power and eventually (in 1938) settled in the United States. One of the great stories about him tells how he fled to Vienna in 1933 and, on discovering the Nazis weren't planning to burn his books, published an article in an Austrian newspaper ('Burn Me!') urging them to do just that. Which they duly did in '34. [Not Coming to a Theater Near You]"
Trivia: Though this film is the first Kier made with Fassbinder, it is not the first film that Fassbinder offered him: Per Udo, Fassbinder had previously "offered me a part in a movie called Fox and His Friends (1975 / trailer). I read the script and I didn't want to do it; the story didn't interest me. He never forgave me, but later he asked me to play a role in The Stationmaster's Wife, which I accepted. [Index]"
K. 334 Mozart Divertimento No. 17 in D major, III Menuetto:
The plot: "Bolwieser (Kurt Raab), stationmaster in a little Bavarian town in the 1920s, feels that with his marriage to Hanni (Elisabeth Trissenaar), daughter of a brewery owner, he has achieved happiness and good social standing. But the entire city knows that Hanni turned to the tavern owner Merkl (Bernhard Helfrich) long ago. When Bolwieser hears about the rumor, Hanni and Merkl report the worst 'slanderers'. He even commits perjury in order not to lose his wife. However, he is unable to live without the illusion of his idyllic marriage. The human tragedy takes its course: Bolwieser begins to drink, his wife leaves him for the hairdresser (Udo Kier), and the stationmaster is even sentenced to jail because of perjury. Hanni files for divorce. [Fassbinder Foundation]"
Udo does more than hair:
Aside from playing the character of Schafftaler, the hairdresser, in Bolwieser, Udo Kier was also one of the three assistant directors. As for the Fassbinder regular Kurt Raab (20 Jul 1941 – 28 Jun 1988), who is also found in Ulli Lommel's The Tenderness of Wolves (1973 / trailer), he was an early victim of AIDS back in the forgotten days of Fear & Silence = Death: "Before Raab died, he worked to raise awareness about HIV/AIDS in West Germany. [...] However, the illness remained poorly understood and Raab was placed in quarantine-like conditions in the Hamburg Tropical Institute. [...] Prejudice about AIDS was also evident when Raab's body was refused burial in Steinbeißen, the Lower Bavarian town in which his family had settled in 1945. He is buried in Ohlsdorf Cemetery in Hamburg. [Wikipedia]"
While it lasts —
the full film:
"Udo Kier's relationship with Rainer Werner Fassbinder predates his acting career. The pair were teenage hustlers together on the streets of Cologne before they became lovers and collaborators later in life. 'When I was 16 there was a kind of a working-class bar in Cologne,' recalls Kier. '[...] I went there because I like to watch people. And I met a young man, 15 years old. And that was Fassbinder. We would drink Coca-Cola and just watch people argue until 10pm when we would get thrown out of the bar because we were minors. And then when I was 20 and I was in England working on my first film, I bought the German magazine Stern and I open it up and I look. And there is Fassbinder under the headline: The Alcoholic, The Genius. And I thought that's Rainer. So I went to Germany and he had a group of people around him because he had a theatre group in Frankfurt. And he offered me a role in his film but I didn't like the role. So then he offered me a second role in The Stationmaster's Wife. So then we started making movies together and started living together. [Irish Times]"*
* Although Kier moved in with Fassbinder around this time, and despite "conventional wisdom" that they were a couple, Kier has regularly stated that they were never anything more than friends, colleagues and roommates.
"[T]he film is often compared to Madame Bovary, but the overall effect is closer to that of Von Sternberg's The Devil is a Woman (1935, trailer below), where a couple not only remains obsessively stuck in infatuation-degradation gear, but the visual beauty of the images is rigorously questioned by purposeful dissonance, surface lyricism ruthlessly undercut by a caustic inquiry into the nerves underneath. [...] Raab's lumpy cuckold is eventually dragged to prison while Trissenaar's hausfrau takes off with her greasy hairdresser (Udo Kier), yet even when the loop is finally broken, the characters are still unable to sort hate from love — Hanni sobbingly rushes to get one final kiss from Xaver then later files for divorce, while Xaver's prison rants against Hanni invariably shift from growling threats to yearning endearments. [...] [T]he characters in The Stationmaster's Wife are to remain incarcerated in the artist's cruel-tender gaze, denied freedom yet exalted into a cosmic luminosity, puppets yet irretrievable projections of Fassbinder himself. [Slant Magazine]"
The Devil is a Woman:
"Even in this cut version, excising intricate subplots, [Fassbinder] lets the movie ramble and includes drossy scenes along with extremely fine ones, seeming as though he doesn't care or know the difference, though of course that is never actually the case with the meticulous and assiduous Fassbinder. But thanks to Michael Ballhaus's striking Eastmancolor cinematography, this is a handsome-looking film, which is extremely well made and exquisitely acted by the fine cast, though, as always with this director. [Derek Winnert]."
"When Rainer Werner Fassbinder is good, he is very, very good. And when he is bad, he makes Bolweiser. [...] Bolweiser [... is] about a stupid provincial stationmaster and his nymphomaniac wife, and about assorted other citizens in a town where everybody behaves like eighth-graders. This is the first movie I've seen, by Fassbinder or anyone else except Jerry Lewis, in which the adult characters pout, scream, cry, fib and clam up like kids. They also spend a lot of time in passionate embraces, which seem scarcely more mature. This full-length movie would be over in 15 minutes if the stationmaster were not so incredibly slow to realize that his wife is having an affair with the village butcher. [...] [Fassbinder] made a lot of good films. He made a lot of bad films that were interesting. Bolweiser is one of his few films that are interesting only because they are bad. [Roger Ebert]"
The last 14 minutes:
Belcanto oder Darf eine Nutte schluchzen?
(1977, dir. Robert van Ackeren)
Two years after Der letzte Schrei (1975, see Part II), Udo Kier appears in another Robert van Ackeren movie a.k.a. Bel Canto or May a Hooker Sob?
Released in West Germany — anyone remember the days when there were two Germanies? — on 3 November 1977, this obscure slab of B&W semi-experimental social satire is "based" on the novel Empfang bei der Welt by the German author Heinrich Mann (27 Mar 1871 – 11 Mar 1950), the elder brother (and rival) of the somewhat more famous German author Thomas Mann. The novel has yet to be translated into English, despite having been written while Mann was in exile in the USA, "a time when Heinrich Mann was forgotten by everyone". This movie appears also to have been pretty much forgotten by everyone...
Empfang bei der Welt translates roughly into "Reception of the World", and Udo Kier plays the part of Poulailler, a thief. "Robert van Ackeren's approach to the book is not along the lines of classic narrative; the filmmaker is more interested in effects, stylisation and artificial salon photography: a truly Mannerist film — in the good sense of the word. One can even speak of an extreme theatricalisation here. The characters stylise the traditional acting art that is still rarely seen in opera houses — the film is set in an opera house. And what the characters say is nothing but disgusting intrigues, in the name of culture (with a big C), noble money and the parasites of high society. Belcanto is an amazing film, incredibly sophisticated, in short it is difficult to make a more morbid film. [Film Fest Gent 1981]"
"Arthur (Kurt Raab), the director of an opera house, gathers the representatives of the money, life and art worlds at a soirée in order to rehabilitate himself and the opera house in one fell swoop. But the plan to give himself and culture a new lustre fails. [...] Belcanto oder Darf eine Nutte schluchzen? is certainly the most unusual adaptation of a novel by Heinrich Mann. Van Ackeren stages his story of the impostor in stylised, natural tableaux, his characters sing their lines a capella, standing in what seem to be floating backdrops. The narrative style and character design question traditional patterns of vision and refuse to conform to classical narrative cinema. [Film Friend]"
"Robert van Ackeren was the first of the German auteur filmmakers to hire Udo Kier for the 1974 film Der letzte Schrei. Van Ackeren remained perhaps one of the lesser-known of these filmmakers, as he invented a completely unique aesthetic for each of his films. Belcanto oder Darf eine Hure schluchzen? is also a singular invention that goes against the established conventions of cinema. The static camera shows moments of a soirée. The guests stroll around chatting. The fact that Arthur's opera house is on the verge of bankruptcy doesn't seem to concern the living images. The impending catastrophe doesn't stop the impostor-like art society from continuing to shamelessly monologue past each other and reminisce about the good old days. They have no interest in each other, aside from taking money out of each other's pockets, but still they feign that their bodies want to lustfully fall over each other. And yet, apart from caviar and vintage champagne, everyone is far too chilled for lust. Their masks have become their actual faces. Only the 'hooker' seems honest. She is played by the transgender nightclub owner Romy Haag, who made her debut in Belcanto. Udo Kier is captivating in the role of a master thief. [Time Is Sin, Udo Is Love]"
Romy Haag, BTW: "Edouard Frans Verbaarsschott was born in Scheveningen, in the Netherlands. He was an intersex child and was bullied at school for his effeminate looks. At 13 he left school and worked with Circus Strassburger as a clown. At 16 Romy was working as a female impersonator at the Club Alcazar and Le Carrousel in Paris. After a friend set their apartment on fire, she stowed away on a merchant ship to the US, and found work performing at Fire Island and Atlantic City, where she met and loved a Berlin street singer and they moved to West Berlin together. At the age of 23, they opened a nightclub, Chez Romy Haag featuring Disco and mainly transgender artists — one of whom was Peki d'Oslo (Amanda Lear) whom Haag had met in Paris. The club became the place for celebrities to go. David Bowie and Mick Jagger had affairs with Romy. [...] In 1983 she sold her nightclub and spent a year touring the world. On return she had sex-change surgery in Switzerland. She then toured with her stage act. She has been in 26 films [... and] has released 17 albums. In the mid-1980s she was the lead figure of Queen Zero, a performance-art video installation at New York's Museum of Modern Art. In 1997 she received the Jackie O. Music Award in New York for her interpretations of Berthold Brecht's music. Also the same year she was awarded the Teddy Award at the Berlin International Film Festival for lifetime achievements in GLBT film. In 1999 she published her autobiography. [A Gender Variance Who's Who]"
Less experimental than Belcanto, but nevertheless arguably the best cinema adaptation of a Heinrich Mann novel we here at a wasted life have ever seen, would probably be East Germany's The Untertan (1951), a.k.a. The Kaiser's Lackey, directed by Wolfgang Staudte, which, oddly, was banned in West Germany until 1957.*
* Others might argue the best adaptation to be Der Blaue Engel / The Blue Angel [1930 / trailer], which is possibly more famous than the book itself, Professor Unrat.
The Untertan (1951):
Suspiria
(1977, writ. & dir. Dario Argento)
"Suspiria is a bit like taking a big bowl of sticky ribbon candy, tossing in a bit of red paint and LSD, and cramming it directly into your brain. [Final Girl]"
Trailer to
Suspiria:
"Here's the plot, for the little it matters. [Jessica] Harper plays Suzy Bannion, an American woman who turns up to attend a prestigious dance academy in Germany. She soon starts to realise that the place is a bit odd, and other girls start to disappear (due to them being killed by mysterious, unseen, forces). [For It Is Man's Number]"
"Bad luck isn't brought by broken mirrors, but by broken minds."
Dr. Frank Mandel (Udo Kier)
Suspiria was trimmed prior to its release in the US and elsewhere, so different versions exist. The original — and thus uncut — length is 98 minutes. Inspired in parts by Thomas De Quincey's Suspiria de Profundis (1845), a never-completed collection of prose inspired by the author's opium addiction, Suspira is the first of Argenta's "Three Mothers" trilogy, and was later followed by the movies Inferno (1980 / trailer) and Mother of Tears (2007 / trailer, also with Udo Kier).
The original Suspiria is one of those classic horror movies that all true fans of modern horror movies should see at least once, though it remains much harder to "like" than, say, the original Night of the Living Dead (1968) or Tobe Hooper's Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) or Black Sunday (1960) or Cannibal Holocaust (1980). A vibrant, visual and violent movie, Suspiria was not exactly met with open arms when released. Even today, the movie leaves few people indifferent: it remains a love it or hate it movie.
Edgar Wright on
Suspiria:
Udo Kier has an uncredited and short appearance in this, one of a wasted life's favorite horror films, as Dr. Frank Mandel, a character so minor that Kier's appearance — especially since he seems a bit young for the part — almost breaks the magic of the film. One imagines that Argento and Kier must have met and gotten along while Kier was filming the Argento co-scripted Season of the Senses (1969, see Part I), so Argento decided to fit him into the cast — somewhere, anywhere — while making his unique masterpiece of horror.
According to Suspiria's trivia section at imdb: "Udo Kier's appearance was so rushed that he had little time to completely read the script when it was given to him. Since the movie was filmed without sound and was later dubbed, a crew person lying on the ground (behind the stone bench where he was sitting in his scene with Jessica Harper*) was telling him his lines as he gave them to her." Suspiria also features the final film appearance of Joan Bennett (27 Feb 1910 – 7 Dec 190), who plays Madame Blanc, the head of the ballet school.
* Apparently Suspiria was originally going to star Italo cult Scream Queen Daria Nicolodi (19 Jun 1949 – 26 Nov 2020), director Dario Argento's girlfriend at the time and co-scriptwriter. The studio, however, supposedly insisted that an American actress be cast for the lead to make the film more marketable. Dario Argento then cast Jessica Harper as the lead after seeing Harper's debut performance in Brian De Palma's Phantom of the Paradise (1974 / trailer).
"They [witches] are malefic, negative and destructive. Their knowledge of the art of the occult gives them tremendous powers. They can change the course of events and people's lives, through harm. You don't believe me? Their goal is to accumulate great personal wealth. It can only be achieved by injury to others. They can cause suffering, sickness, and even the death of those who for whatever reason offended them."
Dr. Frank Mandel (Udo Kier)
"Suspiria is one of the most important and influential genre movies ever made and essential viewing for all horror fans. Argento's first major non-Giallo directing job doesn't stray too far from the style he established in his previous film Deep Red (1975 / trailer), but Suspiria's overall charm resides in its technical triumphs and visual style, and not so much its story or surprise twists. Taking his cues from Mario Bava, Argento, together with his director of photography Luciano Tovoli, creates a vibrant, colorful film quite apart from the standards of the genre. Argento's masterful use of intense primary colours [...] and stunning set designs gives the whole film a hallucinatory intensity. The dissonant, throbbing score composed by Argento and performed by his frequent collaborators, Italian rock band Goblin, drives the picture with the occasional distorted shriek of 'Witch!'. A strange combination of the arthouse and horror film [...]. Surreal and frightening, however, Suspiria still shocks audiences decades after its original release. [Tilt Magazine]"
"A coven deprived of its leader is like a headless cobra: Harmless."
Dr. Frank Mandel (Udo Kier)
"Jessica Harper is Suzy, a new student at a German ballet school filled with less than savory characters running it. Joan Bennett, in her last role, is presumably the head of the school and there are odd ducks like the stern ballet teacher; the tall assistant server with false teeth due to gingivitis; a cook who must know something about the school as she holds a glinting knife in one scene; a blind pianist with a seeing-eye dog who is fired, and several female ballet dancers who prance across the screen though we never get to know them. We get an early scene of a student stabbed to death and then hung from the ceiling after seeing a black cat's eyes outside her room window. Another student fearing for her life (Stefania Casini), while warning Suzy that something weird is happening at the academy, is later seen falling into a bed of razor wire! Meanwhile, Suzy gets weak and barely dances in this movie, and she keeps falling asleep after drinking wine and sporadically eating her dinner meals. She also confronts a bat and beats it to death. Oh, I can't omit a man whose throat is ripped apart by a dog. [...]. [Jerry Saravia]"
Scopophila first saw this film back in the late '80s and it left them, like many, cold: "The majority of the problem is Dario Argento's over-direction. The sets and color schemes are wildly over-the-top bordering on camp. Had he pulled back even a little it might have been visually impressive, but instead gets obnoxious. The atmosphere, like everything else, is overdone creating a dream-like fantasy feel that has no connection to reality and therefore not very compelling. The music, which was done by a group called Goblin, is interesting to some extent [...]. It also gets overplayed and is too loud coming off like a spoiled child demanding your attention, which creates less tension and more distraction instead. The special effects don't live up to billing. When a man gets attacked and then eaten by his own dog is the only good part simply because it's unexpected. Otherwise the blood and gore is average and even lacking. The majority of it is at the beginning where we see a young, frightened woman squirmy around on the floor while she gets stabbed and to a degree looks like some interpretive dance routine. The shot of a body coming out of a ceiling and then hung from a rope doesn't work because it is clearly a mannequin and if you look real closely her face already has a strangled expression on it before the head goes through the noose."
Here at a wasted life, we have always seen Argento's Suspiria as comparable, in a way, to Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich's Jazz Suite: full of highs and full of lows and sort of all over the place, it really shouldn't work but nevertheless somehow manages to congeal as a complete and impressive whole.
In 2015, Luca Guadagnino released a re-imagination of Suspiria starring Tilda Swinton and Dakota Johnson to international acclaim and success. We here at a wasted life have yet to see it...
Trailer to
Suspiria (2015):
But to return to Argento's Susperia for a moment. Over at Empire, Udo Kier once said: "I was very lucky to be in Suspiria. I think it's one of the best films Dario ever did. [...] It's interesting, Dario is still a talented director but you feel — and this happens with some people — that he is missing the love for filmmaking that he had before. [...] But Dario was a great director, so maybe he'll come up with a new film which will be sensational."
La deuxième femme
(1978, dir. Pierre Clémenti)
"Don't get me started on the bisexual, androgynous heartthrob Pierre Clémenti (28 Sept 1942 – 28 Dec 1999), who was BOTD in 1942 and died in 1999 at the premature age of 57. The louche, sexually ambiguous, carnal Clémenti worked with so many great auteurs, including Bunuel, Bertolucci, Pasolini, Garel, Cavani, Costa-Gavras, Rivette, Ivory, and many more. He infamously played the fine young Medieval cannibal soldier in Pasolini's Porcile [Pigsty] (1969 / trailer below) and the perverse chauffeur who reveals his long hair to the young Marcello who shoots him when he tries to rape him in Bertolucci's The Conformist (1972 / trailer). [Bruce la Bruce @ Instagram]"
Trailer to
Pasolini's Porcile [Pigsty]:
Pierre Clémenti's career was slightly derailed when, in 1972, he was arrested in Rome for possession of LSD and cocaine, drugs that many who read this blog have probably taken themselves.
Acquitted due to insufficient evidence after 17 months in prison, among his first post-prison films was the scandal film Sweet Movie (1974). In general, if Clémenti's name is on the cast list, the movie will probably be interesting; he died much too early of liver cancer.
Sweet Movie:
Clémenti was also involved with the French underground film movement, and directed numerous films which often featured fellow underground filmmakers and actors, including this one, La deuxième femme, which is less a movie the a composition of visuals of the kind that art students make and watch and Ohhh! and Ahhh! over and then blather about the rhythm, composition, and texture, all the while pretending that they aren't as bored watching it as they are. Udo Kier is one of the many fellow film-involved faces that are to be found in cinematic journal.
synopsis: "Over the course of more than fifteen years, Clémenti films a series of intimate diaries, starting from daily encounters. In La deuxième femme, we see Bulle Ogier and Viva, Nico and Tina Aumont, Philippe Garrel and Udo Kier, a performance by Béjart, a piece by Marc'O, concerts by Bob Marley and Patti Smith (not always recognisable)... It's like a maelstrom of psychedelic images that are passed through a particle accelerator. [Film Affinity]"
La deuxième femme —
the full film:
"Clémenti's formal genius as a filmmaker lies in his editing. Constantly reworking footage and repurposing imagery across films, Clémenti had lifetime access to editing facilities at the Centre Pompidou. It was there that three fully formed works were discovered among hours of 16mm rushes a decade after his death. Devoid of audio Clémenti would have likely added, these two silent films [Souvenirs, Sounvenirs and La Deuxième Femme] accentuate the pure lyricism of his image-making [...]. La Deuxième Femme is a whirlwind across family and life on set, dense with frenetic montage and hallucinatory dissolves. The film's title refers to his second wife Nadine, but its convulsive tempo and multiple subject matters unleash others resonances. A love letter to his mother, Nico, or Viva; a collective portrait with cameos by Bob Marley, Patti Smith, Richard Nixon, and I Dream of Jeannie; a lifetime of creative projects — Clémenti's gift for filling the frame two-or-three times over matches his boundless passion for life and art. [Moma]"
Das fünfte Gebot / The Fifth Commandment
(1978, writ. & dir. Duccio Tessari)
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A.k.a. Verdammt bis in der Tod; released in West Germany on 10 August 1978. The feature film has pretty much slipped into obscurity and apparently has yet to have a DVD release (there was a French-language video in the '80s; good luck finding it).
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Full film in German:
Although announced as a "Michael Lentz production" in the opening credits of the embedded film above, Michael Lentz's co-scripter Duccion Tessari (11 Oct 1926 – 6 Sept 1994) is the credited director.
German scriptwriter, director and producer Michael Lentz (9 Sept 1926 – 30 Nov 2001) is familiar to us as the co-producer of the suck-ass Kamikaze 89 (1982), while Tessari, "an Italian film director, screenwriter and actor, [is] considered one of the fathers of Spaghetti Westerns. Born in Genoa, Tessari started in the fifties as documentarist and as screenwriter of peplum films. In 1964 he co-wrote Sergio Leone's A Fistful of Dollars (1964 / trailer), one year later he gained an impressive commercial success and launched Giuliano Gemma's career with A Pistol for Ringo (1965 / trailer) and its immediate sequel, The Return of Ringo (1965 / trailer). [Wikipedia]"
Goliath and the Vampires (1961):
Plot descriptions of The Fifth Commandment are rare and short. For example: "A notorious gang of robbers threaten the Ruhr region of Germany in the 1920s [MTDB]" or "Interesting 'Nazi-exploitation' piece directed by Duccio Tessari. A troubled youth finds a role in life when he joins the Nazi party in the 1920s. Cast includes Helmet Berger, Peter Hooten and Udo Keir. More art than horror, but rare and worth the purchase. [Cinefear]"
Udo Keir, in any event, doesn't play one of the robbers, he plays Peter Dümmel, an ex-classmate of theirs and the policeman that tracks them down.
"Duccio Tessari is well known for his staircase shots and for his ability to direct anything... Here he tries his luck at period drama, a genre that wasn't very popular in '77, at least in Italy. With [Helmut] Berger, [Umberto] Orsini, [Evelyne] Kraft & Kier in the cast, Alabiso at the editing table, and [Armando] Trovajoli behind his piano, you'd think that you can't go wrong, no? Well, not quite. [...] It's all told in a very classic manner, with almost no bloodshed and the story insisting on character psychology rather than linear progression. Which can bring the viewer on the verge of sleep quite rapidly... Evelyne Kraft is gorgeous in the few scenes she's appearing, and coupled with Trovajoli's joyous score, these are the only two elements worthy of attention here. [...] [imdb]"
"Berger is quite good in this and some of the scenes focusing on the dynamics between the two brothers [the second of which is played by Peter Hooten] are quite effective, yet for the most part this is quite dull. A way too schematic script, way too much throwaway Nazi stuff even most TV movies would have deemed too obvious, except for two atmospheric scenes set around a coal hill not much eye for location. All in all so little energy on display, it really is not quite clear what the intention was here. [Dirtylaundri @ letterbxd]."
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Tessari's wife Lorella De Luca (17 Sept 1940 – 9 Jan 2014) plays the mommy of the robber brothers; The Fifth Commandment is one of nine films she made with her hubby. Evelyne Kraft (22 Sept 1951 – 13 Jan 2009) is of course familiar to bad-film fanatics due to her appearance in such fine films as The French Sex Murders (1972 / German trailer), Lady Dracula (1977 / German trailer) and the wonderful Mighty Peking Man (1977). American actor Peter Hooten is perhaps best known for being the first actor to play Marvel's Dr Strange, in the TV movie (and failed TV pilot) Dr Strange (1978 / trailer), but his feature-film oeuvre consist primarily of the type of trash we here at a wasted life love — Bruno Mattei's Night Killer (1990 / trailer) or Joe D'Amato's 2020 Texas Gladiators (1983 / trailer), anyone? Pre-alcohol-bloat bisexual icon Helmut Berger (29 May 1944 – 18 May 2023),* who is also found in Salon Kitty (1976), among others, made this movie the same year he made Umberto Lenzi's substandard The Biggest Battle (1978 / trailer).
* "Except for Helmut Berger, there are no interesting women today." – Billy Wilder
Katonák
(1978, dir. Bódy Gábor)
Here's an obscure one: A.k.a. Soldiers, Katonák is a 90-minute-long TV movie from Hungary, which was possibly aired on 10 February 1978 and based on a play by Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz (12 Jan 1751 – 24 May 1792) titled The Soldiers. Lenz's play had already been adapted for television in Germany in 1962 with Harry Buckwitz's Die Soldaten (1962), and Bernd Alois Zimmermann (20 Mar 1918 – 10 Aug 1970) used it as the basis of his opera Die Soldaten (1957-64), "which is regarded as one of the most important German operas of the 20th century" and was later adapted as a TV opera in 1989 by Hans Hulscher and Zimmermann.
The director, "[a.k.a.] Gábor Bódy (30 August 1946 – 24 October 1985) was a Hungarian film director, screenwriter, theoretic, and occasional actor. A pioneer of experimental filmmaking and film language, Bódy is one of the most important figures of Hungarian cinema. [Wikipedia]" Bódy, who may have collaborated with the Hungarian secret police (1973-83), died under mysterious circumstances in 1985: Hungarian authorities claim that he killed himself, while his widow claims that "unidentified parties" killed him. No official investigation followed and Bódy's fate remains a mystery to this day [Wikipedia]. Bódy met Udo Kier at the International Film Festival in Mannheim (1976) where Bódy's "diploma film", Amerikai Anzix / American Postcard / American Torso (1975) won the Grand Prix. Katonák is the first of four film projects Udo Kier was to take part in directed by Gábor Bódy, the most famous of which is surely Narcissus and Psyche (1980), which was the largest Hungarian production of its time.
Roughly 4 minutes of
Amerikai Anzix:
In The Soldiers, Udo Kier plays a soldier that looks like a "strangely beautiful woman". "The soldiers of whom the film speaks belong to the Rococo aristocracy. But we wanted to accentuate their decadent elegance with this unusual make-up. In the eyes of the contemporary bourgeois these privileged few looked like unearthly beings; who were hated and idolized at the same time, who were outside the laws of civilian life did not apply to; they had only one single duty: to die for the king. In a sexually-heated story, Lenz's 'comedy” delineates the nature of the élite's affinities and aversions. [...] The structure of The Soldiers is similar to a present day script. Short scenes, with big changes in locations and a Shakespearean exaggeration of gestures. Disregarding essential cuts, there were few alterations in the television adaptation. [Gábor Bódy – A Presentation of His Work]"
The plot appears to deal with a bourgeois girl (Agnes Bánfalvy) who is seduced by an officer (István Farádi).
Coming eventually —
R.I.P. Udo Kier Pt. IV: 1979-81
A public service announcement from a wasted life:
