The Bars of Wealth are Locked!

One of the risks of locking yourself in a cage is you might not be able to get out when you want to. Duh. Olivia de Havilland makes this seemingly elementary mistake in the 1964 hagsploitation/delinquent exploitation film Lady in a Cage. The plot is strenuously ridiculous and everyone overacts, especially the director, but its gaudiness has a campy charm.

A wealthy. elderly poetess called Cornelia Hilyard (de Havilland) lives in an enormous, decadently decorated house with her grown son, Malcolm (William Swan). He leaves early in the film and we never see him again. This is so she can be all alone in the house when the massive cage elevator she has installed to take her up to the second floor breaks down due to a power outage.

She only has this thing temporarily because she's recovering from a broken hip. By now you may be wondering--where the hell are her servants? I think we're meant to believe she and her son take care of the place all alone. Even Walter Neff had a cleaning woman come in once a week to his apartment in Double Indemnity. None of the delinquents who wind up busting into Cornelia's house even seem to worry for a moment that a maid or a groundskeeper might show up at some point.

Leading the bunch is none other than James Caan in his first major role. He and his two young cohorts bicker cartoonishly, assuring the viewer that these kids are just as devoid of compassion or morality as anyone reading the newspapers gathers about youths these days in the early '60s.

Caan and de Havilland both give good performances, though they're both dialed up to eleven for the duration. De Havilland very quickly descends into mental breakdown and is hallucinating before the end. There's a message about how she might be partially responsible for her son's possible suicide because she coddled him too much. In a scathing letter, he accuses her of adding another room to the house every time he thinks about moving out, in the process making it seem more incredible she has no housekeeping staff.

The influence of Psycho is clear from the Saul Bass-ish opening titles with animated lines and rapid tempo score. None of Hitchcock's subtlety or psychological insight is present but by the end I couldn't help smiling at the film's heights of absurdity amid its heavy-handed political allegory. When de Havilland stabs Caan in the eyes in an update on Oedipus I was kind of delighted.

Her Name was a Gun

A woman who can't speak goes on a killing spree after being sexually assaulted in 1981's Ms .45. It could be described as Repulsion meets Death Wish, though it's about 85% the latter. Does it really say anything about the reality women in the city have to deal with? I don't think so. But as a nightmare, it's not bad.

For reasons not explained, a young woman named Thana (Zoë Tamerlis) is incapable of speech. She works as a seamstress with a few other girls her age for a small time fashion designer, Albert (Albert Sinkys).

One day on her way home from work, she's raped by a man with a weird, clownish mask. When she gets home, she interrupts a burglary. The burglar rapes her but she manages to kill him with his own .45. Shortly thereafter, she declares war on men, taking that .45 on a rampage throughout the city at night, at first targeting abusive pimps but soon settling for cat-callers or even guys who might possibly, from a distance, look like they might be giving their girlfriends a hard time.

Director Abel Ferrara, despite being clearly influenced by Repulsion, never manages to do what Roman Polanski did with that film--really put you in the head of woman with a deep, intense fear of men. The men and some of the women in Thana's life just seem oddly annoying and pushy. It also doesn't seem realistic that none of her friends or coworkers express concern for her walking alone on the streets of early 1980s New York. Her landlady is cartoonishly abrasive, which made me laugh a few times. In one scene, she's inexplicably wearing grapes on her head, like she's Dionysus.

Like Death Wish, thugs for Thana to gun down are conveniently plentiful and easy to kill, cops and bystanders don't seem to notice her gunfire, and she seems to have become an expert markswoman overnight. Not to mention the fact that she's able to fire her gun as many times as she wants without reloading.

All of these things make the movie more of a nightmare fantasy than a commentary on what women have to deal with from men or a commentary on vigilantism. Thana is less of an avatar for the audience than Charles Bronson is in Death Wish. Her inability to speak and Ferrara's filmmaking not being as empathetic as Polanski's renders her a bit inscrutable. Some of her victims are actually more fleshed out than she is. But Tamerlis is pretty captivating in the role, first as a quiet little mouse, then as the cold vamp. She gets a whole new wardrobe after she's raped and there's no explanation for that, either.

Ms .45 is available on Shudder.

Defined by Knives

On the hard streets of, I think, L.A., girl gangs with amazing hair rule the fast food joints in 1975's Switchblade Sisters. The hair and the clothes are part of the film's fetching sense of style but it's the genuinely absorbing tangle of emotions between the large group of characters that make it compulsively watchable.

The star gang is actually called the Dagger Debs and, after they've menaced a repo man in an elevator (on one of the film's many conspicuously cheap sets) we find them cooling their heels at what appears to be a Wienerschnitzel.

It could be the one on Convoy Street in San Diego. At the very least, this film was shot in California.

A new girl, Maggie (Joanne Nail), starts a fight with the gang just before everyone winds up in juvie. Maggie starts to quickly move up in influence in the gang after Dominic (Asher Brauner), the leader of the Debs' associated male gang, the Silver Daggers, rapes her.

The Debs' leader, Lace (Robbie Lee), isn't sure what happened between the two but she starts to feel like a sucker for having trusted Maggie so early on. Another Deb, Patch (Monica Gayle), also has it in for Maggie because Maggie bested her in a fight at the Wienerschnitzel.

The heart of the movie is Lace. No-one here is a genius performer but Robbie Lee as Lace genuinely comes off as someone with a lifetime of emotional scars, the kind that makes it tough for any emotion to get in or out except a steady fury. It wouldn't surprise me to learn if the actress was kind of like that in real life. In any case, it emphasises the tragedy in her complicated feelings for Maggie.

Director Jack Hill does a good job, though, of creating a world where everyone is at least a little messed up. Asher Brauner is electric as a dumb scumbag. Kitty Bruce as a Deb named Doughnut is a good mixture of sad sack and apathy.

The Switchblade Sisters is available on Shudder.

Here's One Girl Who Knows How to Drive

Cars and sex are all teens seem to think about in 1957's Dragstrip Girl. Among exploitation B-movies of the '50s, this one shines a bit above the rest with its clear-eyed, flirty screenplay and hip conceptualising. There's no heavy handed moral here, just kids who want to race cars and have sex.

Fred (John Ashley) and Jim (Steve Terrell) are a pair of hot-rodding buddies with nothing but blue skies and shiny chrome ahead of them until a chance encounter with the beautiful Louise (Fay Spain).

After an improvised street race, the three know they're going to be fast friends. Except how's two guys and one girl supposed to work? Louise invites them over to her place and suggests they "come together" in one of the film's many suggestive lines.

Surprisingly, Louise's parents like both boys and they even don't mind her drag racing. Louise's dad likes Jim because he knows his way around a car engine and Louise's mom like Fred because his parents are rich.

They fall into an arrangement where Fred takes Louise out one night and Jim the next, alternating. But eventually, tensions flare up. Jim becomes the good guy, no longer wanting to risk racing on public streets, while Fred gets it into his head that Jim has somehow always stood between him and what he wants. But John Ashley in the role remains a charismatic disciple of Elvis Presley and even as he becomes outright villainous no-one loses sympathy for him.

The gang of screwy teens hang around at a pizza shop. Among them is Frank Gorshin who was already captivating with his broad but inventive mannerisms.

But Fay Spain is the real main event as the titular girl. She's beautiful, poured into every outfit, and always has a deadly sparkle in her eye. She's a pleasure to watch.

Hardly a House

I suppose it's not a very profound observation to say that 1972's Last House on the Left isn't nearly as good as Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring. But Wes Craven's remake of the Ingmar Bergman film isn't merely inferior, it's astonishingly bad. Instead of moral questions about assault and revenge, I was asking things like, "Why isn't the subject in frame?" "Why aren't we seeing this character's reaction?" "Is that really the most emotion this person can muster?" And now, nearly half a century later, the film doesn't even have the dubious asset of shock value with every second or third episode of your random HBO series to-day easily outdoing the film in rape and murder. Though, come to think of it, even The Virgin Spring was more shocking. Things do tend to have more impact when they're in frame.

Sandra Peabody plays the young, virginal Mari who becomes a victim of a gang of escaped criminals. According to her Wikipedia entry, Peabody was traumatised by actor David Heiss who played the leader of the gang. He was a method actor who stayed in character and he tormented Peabody offset. This kind of thing worked well with Shelley Duvall in The Shining but it goes to show that even when an actress is actually feeling traumatised it doesn't always actually translate to good film.

Maybe the reason she's so often out of frame is that she had constant difficulty with the material. She's established as being a normal teen, rebelling against her parents just a little. Bergman's version of the character was vain in a very innocent way as most children who get all the attention would be. That she has faults makes her fate all the more terrible because of her evident humanity. Mari, on the other hand, feels more like an off the shelf "type".

Her parents are even worse, though. When they discover her body, her father (Richard Towers), who's a doctor, says, "She's dead," with all the passion of a train conductor announcing a routine stop. And we're supposed to believe this guy's driven to bloody revenge.

I think Craven misunderstood why Max von Sydow's character takes so much time before killing the murderers in Virgin Spring, whipping himself with birch leaves and taking a seat on his accustomed throne in the hall. These ceremonial gestures, designed to invoke religious and cultural meaning on a world that had suddenly become senseless are replaced in Craven's film by Mari's father setting up cheap booby traps and her mother (Eleanor Shaw) seducing one of the guys.

Earlier in the film, Craven had cut to the parents making a cake and setting up decorations for their daughter's birthday accompanied by corny music, apparently the intention being to satirise the ideal American family. Frequent cuts to bumbling local sheriffs are equally obnoxious, shallow satire.

Craven seems to have been more interested in the gang, a splashy, larger than life group--a muscle-bound guy (Hess), an older man (Fred Lincoln), a sexy girl named Sadie (Jeramie Rain), and a young man named Junior (Marc Sheffler), who seems to be a version of the little boy in Virgin Spring but in his whiny cowardice does nothing to introduce the moral tangle of the kid in Bergman's film. The fact that all three guys apparently have sex with Sadie also removes part of the motive for rape in the original film and never replaces it with anything especially interesting, just a kind of random sadism.

Last House on the Left is available on Amazon Prime with commercials but you're better off watching The Virgin Spring on The Criterion Channel.

Twitter Sonnet #1352

A single skate implies a pair of feet.
The rolling legs deliver eyes and ears.
Adventure waits beyond the cushioned seat.
A silver watch recounts forgotten years.
Reducing flour eased the kitchen down.
The earth encompassed arms and legs below.
Across the year, the soil makes the town.
A sky of roots a tangled dream bestowed.
Delivered paper comes the brainy work.
Historic pies present percentage whole.
Assorted toppings make the gooey perk.
A bread too hard and dry for any bowl.
A newer day dissolved before the old.
A drumming heat recurs beneath the cold.

Something Like a Deadly Brawl

A diverse group of beautiful women are forced to fight to the death in 1974's Arena. They fight with swords, chains, and even lettuce in this clearly low budget exploitation film. The screenplay is silly and the editing by a young Joe Dante is laughable but there are points in the film's favour including some surprisingly decent cinematography by Joe D'Amato and terrific performances from Pam Grier and Margaret Markov.

Look at this pretty shot of Markov. This is how we first meet her character, a pagan priestess of some kind in Roman Britain. Her name is Bodicia, a name possibly inspired by Boudicca. Roman slavers round up her and some of her followers and then there's a cut to what is presumably Africa but looks like a few yards away, at most, and we see Grier being similarly captured.

They quickly become the clear leaders of the group of women brought as slaves to the arena. Also prominent is a ditzy alcoholic girl named Deirdre who is really funny sometimes. A rivalry emerges between Mamawi, Grier's character, and a Roman slave named Livia (Marie Louise). This leads to an incredibly silly food fight in the kitchen. My favourite thing about it is all the lettuce that's thrown in from offscreen. And of course everyone gets her faced shoved into pie or tomato sauce at some point. Did you know they didn't have tomatoes in Ancient Rome? It's just possible there are one or two other anachronisms in this film.

You can tell there was an attempt to cut before this woman's modern panties became visible but the editor just wasn't up to the task.

Some real tension builds as it seems like the women, who've become friends through their shared misery, will have to kill each other. This ends up getting deflated in an absolutely absurd climax, though. The movie's essentially softcore porn and most of the cast looks great naked. Grier's final gladiator costume is fabulously absurd and emphasises her large breasts appreciably but her performance is so good, especially in the tense moments where it seems like she might have to kill someone, she wouldn't have seemed out of place in a more sincere film on the topic. Arena is available on Amazon Prime.

Notes but Not Quite a Melody

From the title of 1974's Lady Snowblood: Love Song of Vengeance (修羅雪姫 怨み恋歌 ) you'd think its main character's motivation would be clear even if nothing else was. Unfortunately, this isn't so. This sequel to Lady Snowblood, also directed by Toshiya Fujita, finds its title character, again played by Meiko Kaji, quite unable to gain traction after the sharp focus of the previous film. The makers of the sequel display a greater interest in supporting characters but seem unaware of their own preferences as Kaji's character remains the camera's favourite subject. We just never seem to get around to discovering why she does the things she decides to do.

Moving over a decade ahead in time from its predecessor, Love Song of Vengeance is set just after the Russo-Japanese War in 1905 and the influence of western culture is gaining ground in Japan. We catch up with Yuki, aka Lady Snowblood (Kaji), wearily fending off groups of men trying to capture her for her various crimes. Wearing a kimono and wielding only the short blade normally kept concealed in her umbrella, its difficult for the choreography to make it believable that she's managing to continually win against groups of ten or fifteen men. It is a fantasy film of a kind, though, so perhaps we're meant to take Kaji as the wearied but persistent traditional spirit of Japan fighting for survival. I'm not sure that neatly squares with the film's leftwing politics, though.

After she finally gives herself up, she's rescued by the head of the Secret Police, Kikui (Shin Kishida), whose household decor looks more like it belongs to a flamboyant gangster.

He wants her to pose as a servant to an anarchist writer named Tokunaga (Juzo Itami). She starts her job but, although it's never spelled out, her sympathy shifts to his side, presumably because of his sympathy for those living in the slums which the film portrays as convincingly miserable.

We spend a lot more time listening to him talk. He's not unlike a similar character in the first film but in that case the leftist writer's motive never eclipsed the primary thread about Yuki's quest to kill those responsible for murdering her parents. In Love Song of Vengeance, this character is made more of the focus before he's pushed aside and his slum dwelling brother takes centre stage as he cares for an injured Yuki. This man, Shusuke Tokunaga, is played by Yoshio Harada, whom one suspects the filmmakers would much rather had been the main star.

Arguably the real successor to Toshiro Mifune, Harada had an effortless, rough charisma and hair trigger reflexes. His appearances in Japan's copious exploitation films of the 70s led to greater, more experimental roles in films like Zigeunerweisen and an adaptation of One Hundred Years of Solitude called Farewell to Ark. In the last half of Love Song of Vengeance, the director milks every one of Harada's scenes for all they're worth, upgrading him to Yuki's collaborator and focusing much more on his physical anguish, cutting now and then to beautifully composed but pretty static reaction shots of Yuki.

His motives are clear but pretty simple, the resulting film feeling muddled and uncertain of its own motives. But there is a lot to appreciate in its performances and its compositions and, of course, there's plenty of the old ultra-violence.

Twitter Sonnet #1110

The final step to Panda Inn was cold.
Above the shuttered shops a zombie reads.
The plaster weeps its tears of straw and mould.
In rainy seasons now the river feeds.
A gauzy coin ascends resembling fluff.
Rebounding like a light, the feather goes.
A starry night is waiting on your cuff.
A leak's outside the tank and faintly glows.
They're busy placing drinks on lofty hills.
A trembling hand delivers tea to blue.
Related words bequeath a term in wills.
In unison the pod pronounces true.
Intriguing bow's retrieved in empty box.
Of this no arrow, hair, or viol talks.