Emmanuelle (1974)

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Sweet Sweetback’s Badasssss Song (1971)

          The lore of Melvin Van Peebles’ breakthrough picture is well known, especially since the maverick auteur’s son, Mario Van Peebles, made an entire movie about the creation of Sweet Sweetback’s Badasssss Song. As it happens, Mario’s highly entertaining behind-the-scenes flick, Badasssss!(2003), is much more accessible than Melvin’s guerilla-style original, in part because Mario’s narrative juxtaposes the overwrought subject matter of Sweet Sweetback with amazing tales about the obstacles Melvin surmounted to get the picture completed.

          That said, Sweet Sweetback occupies a unique place in both film history and sociopolitical history. Perhaps more than any other movie made by an African-American director in the ’70s, Sweet Sweetback captures the rage of the Black Power era by presenting a grim parable about a dude who fights back after getting fucked over by The Man. Sweet Sweetback was famously embraced by members of the Black Panther Party during early screenings, and this groundswell of support helped transform a scrappy little underground project into a surprise hit—despite being made for just $150,000, the movie grossed more than $15 million.

          Melvin Van Peebles’ storyline is lurid and nasty. In a brief prologue, young Mario plays the title character as a teenaged orphan—Sweetback earns his nickname by demonstrating tremendous sexual powers while losing his virginity in an L.A. whorehouse. After the movie cuts to the present, Melvin takes over the title role. (In addition to starring, he wrote, produced, directed, and scored the movie.) Now grown into a regular performer at the whorehouse who impresses crowds with his size and stamina while screwing in public, Sweetback is stuck in a degrading life cycle. Naturally, things get worse. Through a convoluted series of events, Sweetback gets framed for a murder and handcuffed to a Black Panther named Mu-Mu (Hubert Scales). Eventually, Sweetback and Mu-Mu escape police custody, resulting in an extended chase. By the climax of the movie, Sweetback makes a solo run for the Mexican border, surviving through the support of black strangers and, at regular intervals, by trading sex for patronage from women.

          Viewed through the most forgiving lens, Sweet Sweetback is a revolutionary fable that both employs and subverts clichés about African-American male identity. It’s also, unmistakably, a call for open revolution—if not necessarily violent uprisings, then at the very least angry protests against the racially imbalanced status quo. Because the picture is so politically charged, appraising Sweet Sweetback’s merits as a cinematic experience is something of a pointless endeavor—rather than being pure entertainment, Sweet Sweetback is an incendiary statement.

          And, indeed, Melvin’s politics are more evolved than his filmmaking skills. Certain segments of Sweet Sweetback have great power thanks to the use of trippy montages accompanied by dense sound design, and some scenes pack a punch simply because they contain so much sex and violence. But while the director/star brings innate tough-guy charisma to his leading performance, the supporting cast mostly comprises nonactors, giving many scenes an amateurish quality. Further, the camerawork is dodgy, with lots of grainy shots and hard-to-read nighttime photography. Yet in the end, it’s the attitude of Sweet Sweetback’s Badasssss Song that makes the movie so unique, and that loud-and-proud perspective is characterized by a provocative slogan on the movie’s poster: “Rated X by an All-White Jury.”

Sweet Sweetback’s Badasssss Song: FREAKY

Flesh Gordon (1974)

          Although it’s not the out-and-out porn film its reputation might suggest, Flesh Gordon is a cheerfully filthy spoof of the old Flash Gordon movie serials—the picture tries to blend satire with titillation by bombarding viewers with crude jokes, nudity, and sex scenes. The movie is quite awful, of course, but it moves along at a breakneck speed and, in its best moments, approaches an anything-goes party vibe that suggests a low-rent version of the comedy style perfected a few years later by the makers of Airplane!(1980). Obviously, the big difference is that the makers of Airplane! had real actors and a real budget, to say nothing of the fact that the Airplane!team didn’t have to interrupt their movie periodically for lingering close-ups of genitalia.

          The plot of Flesh Gordonis adapted from the first Flash Gordonserial, released in 1938 and starring Buster Crabbe. (Another version of the very same plot was employed for the big-budget Flash Gordon movie released in 1980.) When Earth is bombarded by a sex ray from outer space, which drives victims to uncontrolled lust, dashing adventurer Flesh Gordon (Jason Williams), his new girlfriend Dale Ardor (Suzanne Fields), and kooky scientist Dr. Flexi Jerkoff (Joseph Hudgins) fly into space to find the source of the sex ray and save the Earth. Arriving on the planet Porno, the heroes battle minions of evil Emperor Wang the Perverted (William Dennis Hunt), along the way encountering monsters and other fantastic creatures. This being a sex comedy, those fantastic creatures include the flamboyantly gay prince (Lance Larsen) of a men-in-tights troupe and the Amazonian leader (Candy Samples) of a lesbian cult.

          Ninety-nine percent of the jokes in Flesh Gordon are painfully stupid, the performances are terrible, and the editing is so choppy that some scenes appear as if from nowhere. However, writer/co-director Michael Benveniste and his collaborators cleverly shield themselves from legitimate criticism by framing the movie as a campy goof—the worse the acting gets, the better. Yet some aspects of the picture run perilously close to real filmmaking. For instance, the flick includes several elaborate scenes of stop-motion animation fused with live-action, leading to Harryhausen-style scenes of real actors fighting stop-motion monsters. This stuff is executed fairly well, given the budget constraints.

          That said, the way Flesh Gordon devotes long stretches of screen time to pure adventure would seem sure to infuriate the heavy-breathing crowd more interested in Flesh than Gordon. But then again, that’s why Flesh Gordon is so peculiar—it’s a kiddie movie for pervs. Consider this amusingly infantile chant, delivered by bottomless cheerleaders (!) in Wang’s palace: “Emperor Wang is the one for me—without him, the planet Porno would be ever so forlorn-o.” Or consider the very strange finale, which involves a giant, cloven-hooved monster who chases after the heroes while speaking in smooth, lounge-lizard patter. (Craig T. Nelson, the only familiar actor involved with the project, voices the monster in one of his earliest film performances, though he’s not credited.)

          FYI, there are two versions of Flesh Gordon in circulation. The original 78-minute version carried an X-rating, even though it’s not hardcore, and the 90-minute version available on home video is unrated. In the 90-minute version, the only full-on porn action involves a few extras making out on the periphery of crowd shots. Oh, and one more thing: Howard Ziehm, who co-directed and co-produced Flesh Gordon, resuscitated the character by directing a 1989 sequel, Flesh Gordon Meets the Cosmic Cheerleaders, with an almost entirely new cast. Suffice to say the picture was not well received.

Flesh Gordon: FREAKY

Last Tango in Paris (1972)

          Few ’70s films have provoked as much discussion as Last Tango in Paris, for myriad reasons. The movie’s filled with rough sex, leading man Marlon Brando’s performance has been described as everything from juvenile silliness to Method-driven genius, and the opaque storytelling leaves all sorts of room for interpretation. Plus, thanks to the sophisticated images created by director/co-writer Bernardo Bertolucci and master cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, Last Tango in Paris looks like art of the highest order—so it’s hard to reconcile the film’s elegant sheen with its exploitive nature. Because, make no mistake, Last Tango in Paris exploits leading lady Maria Schneider to an absurd degree. Although Brando never flashes more than a brief glimpse of his derriere, Schneider reveals every inch of her body, often performing scenes wearing nothing but a scarf. On a deeper level, she exposes cringe-inducing vulnerability, especially in the notorious scene of Brando’s character sodomizing Schneider’s character.
          And just as Schneider portrays a sexual plaything, it seems she was a pawn in Bertolucci’s and Brando’s macho mind games. The stench of male ego is everywhere in Last Tango.
          Set in modern-day France, the picture begins with fortysomething American Paul (Brando) screaming in the streets, obviously lost in some sort of private grief. Then pretty young Frenchwoman Jeanne (Schneider) walks by him and continues on her way. Moments later, they both end up examining a vacant apartment. As they haggle over who’s entitled to rent the place, an attraction develops between them, and they have intense sex within moments of meeting each other. Paul then proposes an arrangement—he and Jeanne shall meet in the apartment regularly for trysts, but they won’t share any personal information with each other. As this unusual relationship develops, the movie shows the lovers in their private lives. Paul is a hotel owner whose unfaithful wife just committed suicide, and Jeanne is a confused youth on the verge of marrying a narcissistic filmmaker.
          Paul’s existential crisis is clear, but the reason Jeanne agrees to the illicit relationship is never explained in a satisfactory fashion. That is until one reads about the making of the film, and discovers that the storyline grew out of Bertolucci’s sexual fantasies. Since the film shows Paul tormenting his lover by violating her in painful physical ways and by demanding that she do the same to him—to say nothing of calling her demeaning names and flailing a dead rat in front of her face—Bertolucci’s fantasy life seems a horrific place, or at the very least a realm highly unfriendly to women.
          In fact, were it not for the scenes of Jeanne in her private life, Schneider’s character would come across as little more than a bag of flesh that Brando’s character periodically fucks. That’s because Brando’s performance seethes with egotism. Yes, Paul’s in agony because of betrayal and loss, but he inflicts his pain on everyone in his path, as if he’s the only person who’s ever been hurt by life. Thus, unsuspecting Frenchmen and Frenchwomen are subjected to his tantrums and whining, and viewers of Last Tango in Paris are subjected to nonsense dialogue that reportedly arose from a combination of improvisation and scripting. At one point, Paul advises Jeanne to “go right up in the ass of death to find the womb of fear.” One suspects this stuff meant a lot to Brando (and Bertolucci) while they were in the crucible of artistic creation, but seen from a more rational perspective, certain behavior and dialogue comes off as dross.
          Still, because of the fundamental tension between its cinematic beauty and its narrative ugliness, Last Tango in Paris is a unique statement. And for some, obviously, it’s a powerful one—among other accolades, the movie earned two Oscar nominations, for Bertolucci (Best Direct0r) and Brando (Best Actor). Therefore, it’s impossible to arrive at a full understanding of what ’70s cinema means without investigating the mysteries of this startling picture, which bore an X-rating during its original release. Just beware: You’ll never look at butter the same way again.

Last Tango in Paris: FREAKY

What Do You Say to a Naked Lady? (1970)

          After years of milking cheap laughs out of his Candid CameraTV series, which used hidden cameras to capture the reactions of real people drawn into fake situations, producer/director Allen Funt decided to move his franchise onto the big screen—and he decided that adding nudity and swearing would justify the transition. Hence What Do You Say to a Naked Lady? Although technically a documentary, since most of the people who appear onscreen are not actors, this is really just a weak attempt at sex farce. Unfortunately, as so often happens when unimaginative filmmakers traffic in ribald humor, shock value quickly wears off, thereby revealing the lack of underlying substance. Plus, even though Funt features perhaps a dozen vignettes of nude women wandering into unexpected places—office-building hallways, rural motorways, university classrooms, and so on—not a single onlooker provides the type of howlingly funny reaction one might expect. Instead, responses range from barely concealed leering to polite awkwardness to timid solicitousness (as when onlookers offer nude women clothing).

          One suspects that Funt realized his concept was a flop, because he pads the movie with lots and lots of supplemental material. In addition to a pair of vignettes involving nude or semi-nude men, just for balance, Funt includes copious amounts of man-on-the-street interviews about sex-related subjects. At its worst, the movie collapses bland footage into chipper montage sequences that are set to awful songs by Steve Karmen, a veteran of the dirty-movie genre. One of Karmen’s songs is a bouncy ditty about rape (!); another asks whether a man will disrobe if other men around him do so (try humming the lyrics, “Will they be testing his virility, ask him to follow obediently?”); and Karmen even provides a cringe-inducing title song with a Burt Bacharach-style “whoa-whoa-whoa” refrain.

          About the only time the movie rises above adolescent snickering is the scene in which Funt interviews a middle-aged woman who claims to have a voracious sex life including aspects of S&M and other alternative practices; in that moment, Funt becomes a lowbrow successor to famed sex researcher Alfred Kinsey. Throughout the rest of the picture, Funt just seems like a creepy voyeur ogling the eye candy on display during the Sexual Revolution. Oh, and don’t be fooled by the fact that the picture originally carried an X-rating—frank talk and full-frontal nudity aside, this is tame stuff. (Available as part of the MGM Limited Collection on Amazon.com)

What Do You Say to a Naked Lady?: LAME

The Gore Gore Girls (1972)

Splatter-movie titan Herschell Gordon Lewis’ final flick before a 30-year directing hiatus, The Gore Gore Girls is pure cinematic sludge, leavened only by a lowbrow sense of humor—although the jokes don’t actually justify watching the movie. In the opening scene, a mysterious maniac attacks a stripper in her home, kills her, and then mutilates her corpse. As Lewis’ camera lingers to savor every detail, the murderer decapitates the woman, carves off her face, and pummels the bones and muscles of her skull into a pulp decorated by one intact eye. Since Lewis’ camerawork is as clumsily amateurish as his team’s makeup effects, this scene isn’t so much horrifying as unpleasant; there’s no illusion of reality, of course, but it’s hard to stomach the idea that Lewis thought such atrocities should be filmed. Once the story proper gets underway, attractive reporter Nancy Weston (Amy Farrell) hires aristocratic private investigator Abraham Gentry (Frank Kress) to search out the identity of the killer. Gentry plunges into the world of low-rent strip clubs (all the victims are exotic dancers), so Lewis gets to complement scenes of bloodletting with grungy vignettes of strippers plying their trade. Inexplicably, comedy legend Henny Youngman shows up as a strip-club proprietor, so Youngman delivers crude jokes like this one: “We just got the news that Tom Jones crossed his legs quickly—he’s in critical condition!” (Jokes about Jones’ reputedly impressive manhood were already growing mold by the time The Gore Gore Girls was filmed.) It’s hard to know whom The Gore Gore Girls was meant to please, since the comedy scenes undercut suspense and the murder scenes are so absurdly extreme the movie was originally rated X. However, one hopes Lewis was aiming for irreverence with touches like the title card that appears after the final scene: “We announce with pride—this movie is over!” Would that it had never begun.

The Gore Gore Girls: SQUARE