Tag Archives: 1968

Apocryphally Weird

54*. FANDO AND LIS (1968)

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Fando y Lis

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“…tragedy and Grand-Guignol, poetry and vulgarity, comedy and melodrama, love and eroticism, happenings and set theory, bad taste and aesthetic refinement, the sacrilegious and the sacred, ritual death and the exaltation of life, the sordid and the sublime…”–‘s recipe for Panic drama

Weirdest!

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Sergio Kleiner, Diana Mariscal

PLOT: Sometime after an apocalypse, Fando and the paraplegic Lis leave a ruins to search for the legendary city of Tar, wheeling Lis on a cart along with their only possessions, a phonograph and a drum. They meet many strange characters on the road, including an androgynous Pope and a doctor who drinks Lis’ blood. Finally, Fando gets fed up with carting Lis about and kills her.

Still from Fando y Lis (1968)

BACKGROUND:

  • Alejandro Jodorowsky directed the movie without a script, just a one page outline, working from his memory of fellow Panic society member Fernando Arrabal‘s play of the same title (which Jodorowsky had previously directed many times).
  • The movie’s premier at the 1968 Acapulco Film Festival caused a scandal: viewers rioted, and Mexican director Emilio Fernandez swore he would kill Jodorowsky. After one more screening in Mexico City, the film was banned in Mexico, and had only a few unsuccessful international screenings thereafter.
  • Never released on VHS, Fando y Lis remained virtually unknown until ABKCO restored and re-released it in 2009 as part of their major Jodorowsky revival.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Fando and Lis painting their names on each others’ half-naked bodies, and then on the bare white walls of their dwelling, before dousing everything in sight (including each other) in buckets of black ink. It’s hippies having a blast, a groovy south-of-the-border happening, Panic-style.

TWO WEIRD THINGS: Flaming piano; syringe-using vampire

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: If you’ve ever seen a Jodorowsky movie before, you know what to expect. Fando y Lis is a parade of fantastical, shocking imagery, including snakes that penetrate a baby doll and a man who begs for blood (he extracts a donation with a syringe and drinks it from a brandy snifter). It’s not as polished and conceptually grand as later Jodorowosky masterpieces, but the basis of his style and major preoccupations can be seen along the dusty road to Tar.


Restoration trailer for Fando y Lis (1968)

COMMENTS: Fando y Lis is Alejandro Jodorowsky’s most Surrealist movie (the black and white cinematography reinforces the connection)—although not necessarily his most surreal movie Continue reading 54*. FANDO AND LIS (1968) →

Apocryphally Weird

50*. TOBY DAMMIT (1968)

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“I am always displeased by circumstances for which I cannot
account. Mysteries force a man to think, and so injure his
health.”–Edgar Allan Poe, “Never Bet the Devil Your Head”

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING:

PLOT: Toby Dammit, a once famous actor whose career is in jeopardy because of alcoholism, accepts a role in a “Catholic Western” to be shot in Italy, on condition that he be given a Ferrari. Drinking throughout the evening of his arrival in Rome and increasingly incoherent, Dammit bumbles his way through a television interview and an appearance as guest speaker at an awards ceremony. Finally, he jumps into the sports car and races through the deserted streets of Rome, but becomes lost in an increasingly unreal city.

Still from Toby Dammit (1968)

BACKGROUND:

  • “Toby Dammit” was originally filmed as an entry in Spirits of the Dead, an anthology based on Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories.  ‘s version of “William Wilson” and ‘s “Metzengerstein” were the other entries. “Dammit” is inspired by Poe’s “Never Bet the Devil Your Head,”  an unusually comic outing for the macabre author, but takes almost nothing from the short story’s plot.
  • Terence Stamp traveled to Italy to make this film with Fellini, and stayed for several years afterwards. His very next film project was the lead role as the mysterious seductive stranger in Pasolini‘s Teorema.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: In Poe’s story, the Devil was an old man, but Fellini chose to recast Old Scratch as a young girl (the actress was actually 22, but appears much younger). Fellini said he felt that Toby’s personal devil should represent his own immaturity. Fellini again demonstrates his genius with faces, as the pallid, mysteriously grinning girl is as devilish and chilling as waifs come.

TWO WEIRD THINGS: Bouncy-ball escalator game; waxwork chef run down by sports car

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Fellini and Poe are an unexpected combination, but the Italian director takes to the American writer’s gloominess like a libertine takes to laudanum.  Fellini’s carnivalesque portraiture easily bends towards the ghastly. The director never tried his hand at another outright horror movie, but “Dammit” makes you wonder what might have been.

Trailer for Spirits of the Dead (1968) with “Toby Dammit” clips

COMMENTS: “Toby Dammit” is an interstitial work which Fellini Continue reading 50*. TOBY DAMMIT (1968) →

Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: A QUIET PLACE IN THE COUNTRY (1968)

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DIRECTED BY: Elio Petri

FEATURING: Franco Nero, Vanessa Redgrave, Georges Géret, Rita Calderoni, Gabriella Boccardo

PLOT: After relocating to a run-down mansion in an attempt to recharge his imagination, a famous painter begins to suspects that the ghost of the previous owner, a beautiful young woman with nymphomaniac tendencies, may be endangering his sanity.

Still from A Quiet Place in the Country (1968)

COMMENTS: A filmmaker has to know what he’s doing when he opens a film called A Quiet Place in the Country with a cacophonous opening credit sequence, flashing snippets of famed pieces of art (which will be visually referenced throughout the film) to the sounds of percussive crashes from Ennio Morricone and the improvisational ensemble Nuova Consonanza. Sure enough, the only thing noisier than those titles is the mind of our protagonist, whom we first meet tied to a chair, nearly naked and surrounded by unnecessary electric appliances bought by his hot girlfriend. This ought to be a moment of supreme satisfaction, an introduction to someone at the top who is about to be brought low for our entertainment and edification. But Leonardo, the handsome and successful painter with money and public adulation and said hot girlfriend, is already in free fall. The point of the movie is to show how much further he’s going to go.

Nero plays a man in the grip of maddening dissatisfaction. He’s stricken with a drought of creativity; the works he produces are dissonant blotches of color, and he seeks inspiration in images of war, famine, and smut. His libido is barely under control: he molests women on the street (or imagines he does) and he greedily collects skin mags at the local newsstand despite knowing that Redgrave (arguably looking as beautiful and certainly as overtly sexual as she had ever been on film) is waiting at home for him. He’s desperately seeking something, and it isn’t until he comes across a decrepit mansion on the outskirts of the city that he gets anywhere close to figuring out what it is.

Did I mention that A Quiet Place in the Country is a giallo? The house contains a supernatural murder mystery, with the previous tenant allegedly gunned down during the war, but the townsfolk may be keeping some secrets about her, especially the old groundskeeper. Leonardo’s obsession with the woman leads him to have bloody, violent thoughts that he doesn’t do a great job of keeping in check. The threats only grow, while Leonardo’s grip on his sanity slips. He attacks a photographer, he terrifies his live-in housekeeper (although he seems to accept her absurd assertion that the young man sharing her bed is her little brother come to keep her company), and he grows ever more paranoid about his girlfriend Flavia. He dreams of her killing him, and sees visions of her everywhere he goes, often pushing him around immobilized in a wheelchair. By the time insanity erupts into violence, it seems inevitable.

Perhaps that’s what leaves me cold about A Quiet Place in the Country. Director Petri (whose work I have reviewed previously) has unquestionably put together an efficient piece of shock cinema with a highbrow veneer. But because Leonardo seems pretty unstable from the outset, there’s not really any suspense or surprise in his story. He’s like a jack-in-the-box: you know he’ll pop, and it’s only a question of when. And because we are rooted in his point of view, the twist ending loses a lot of its punch. Rather than recontextualizing all that has come before, it just reinforces the fact that we’ve been watching everything through the lens of a crazy person. That makes A Quiet Place in the Country an interesting piece of art, even unique. But it doesn’t linger. Once it’s through, we’re on to the next piece in the gallery.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…one of the weirder, more vaguely satirical contemporaries of Argento’s definitive Italian post-BLOW-UP giallo; it’s the brother, not the son, the cool uncle the Argento generation never sees anymore except on rare holidays when they can get away to visit him at the ‘funny’ farm… It defies expectations for a giallo while riffing on them in a deadpan absurdist abstraction that puts it more aligned with Spasmo and nothing else.” – Erich Kuersten, Acidemic Journal of Film and Media

(This movie was nominated for review by joe gideon. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)     

A Quiet Place in the Country [Blu-ray]

A Quiet Place in the Country [Blu-ray]
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Capsules

CAPSULE: THE BLISS OF MRS. BLOSSOM (1968)

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DIRECTED BY: Joseph McGrath

FEATURING: Shirley MacLaine, Richard Attenborough, James Booth

PLOT: Mrs. Blossom, the bored wife of an eccentric and oblivious bra manufacturer, hides her lover in the attic.

Still from The Bliss of Mrs. Blossom (1968)

COMMENTS: Oh joy, a ‘60s European sex comedy! Wait, this can’t be right, where are the boobies? (Checks label.) Oh damn and blast, we brought home a British sex comedy by mistake! That means not even a peep of skin, only coy hints of sex, and a plot that’s rather stingy with the comedy too. Mrs. Blossom is an amusing and light-hearted romp, though, and a quaint period piece for die-hard mondo-60s collectors. Just be advised, even though Shirley MacLaine headlines, her performance here is far from Terms of Endearment caliber—she almost stifles a yawn between lines. As for Attenborough, he does his mutton-chopped best to liven things up a notch. Presumably the paychecks kept the cast in tea and crumpets until they could wend their way to loftier productions.

Meanwhile the sets do most of the acting. Beautifully shot at screwy camera angles in psychedelic Technicolor, the Blossoms’ mansion is decorated like it was intended as a water-colored playhouse for children’s  theater, while outside, London has never looked more swinging. McGrath partitions the pedestrian narrative between slices of abrupt, surreal chaos: gauzy garden-swing dream sequences, Three Musketeers homages, a St. George and dragon fantasy. And just when you’re about to give up on the movie, it pulls a cameo out of its hip pocket (Cleese was paid by the microsecond to portray an unhelpful postal clerk, and then was gone before he could outshine the rest of the production).

While Mr. Blossom (Attenborough) is a workaholic bra magnate, Mrs. Blossom (MacLaine) is a listless trophy wife and part-time portrait artist. When her sewing machine breaks down, the factory sends ‘round the blandly charming repairman Ambrose Tuttle (James Booth), whom Mrs. Blossom undertakes to seduce—but actually adopts, as one would a stray kitten—over an improbable game of pool. She later hides him in her home’s attic, which is spacious enough to furnish as a second home. There the situation stabilizes for years, while Mr. Blossom remains obliviously cuckolded. He is more fixated on his music fetish—not that he plays music, but he air-conducts on the balcony to prerecorded opera. Meanwhile, a sewing machine repairman’s disappearance is apparently noteworthy enough to attract detectives, investigating in a sputtering sidecar of a subplot.

So far this film doesn’t sound very invigorating, but its saving grace is an air of magical realism that feels like it might have been ad-libbed by the crew on the spot. Scotland Yard detective Dylan (UK acting legend ) turns in a campy performance of dogged investigation while remaining just inches shy of exposing the infidelity. But it’s when we meet Mr. Blossom’s shrink, Dr. Hieronimous Taylor (UK game show host Bob Monkhouse) that we get a real glimpse of weirdness. Dr. Taylor’s office interior set, equipped with piles of vaguely-threatening cyberpunk devices and animated neon pub signs twinkling and spinning in the background, would not look out of place in A Clockwork Orange. Mr. Blossom is seeing a shrink because, you see, he keeps hearing strange noises in his home—due to Ambrose, who is as stealthy as a brass band falling down stairs—and noticing that things keep disappearing, so of course he must be going daft.

While The Bliss of Mrs Blossom isn’t going to top anyone’s weird movie list, the surreal bits and whimsical plot threads accumulate to ultimately charm its way into quirky movie territory. Between the fantasy sequences with a romanticized theme and the gadget-filled psychiatrist’s office, you might be tempted to think Terry Gilliam saw this on his way to making Brazil. You can tell that somebody loved this movie and had ambitions for it that it could not deliver, but it’s so sweet and cheery, even to the end, that you can’t stay disappointed in it. Deep and meaningful cinema this isn’t, but it’s an interesting page in 1960s UK mod film history.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Frankly, the whole film was a mess, a colourful mess but all over the place just the same.. The jokes were mild at best, but in the hope that we wouldn’t notice they were placed in a selection of near-psychedelic visuals… Joseph McGrath worked up a selection of visuals which truly took advantage of the Technicolor, and in opening up the play to downright oddness, this was quite something to behold, if not great at all.”–Graeme Clark, The Spinning Image

 

 

Capsules

CAPSULE: THE GIRL ON A MOTORCYCLE (1968)

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DIRECTED BY: Jack Cardiff

FEATURING: , Alain Delon, Roger Mutton, Marius Goring

PLOT: The newly married Rebecca (Marianne Faithfull) absconds from her marriage bed and rides her motorcycle to meet her lover.

Still from Girl on a Motorcycle (1968)

COMMENTS: Rated X and released in 1968, The Girl on a Motorcycle wants to be a lot of things: erotic, trippy, rebellious, and philosophical, as well as a sex kitten vehicle for pop star Marianne Faithfull. But most of all, it wants to be a motorcycle movie about free love. Complicating matters, it’s also about S&M.

Girl was adapted, shot, and directed by Jack Cardiff, the foremost British cinematographer of the day. Cardiff used inventive (at the time) methods to shoot said girl on said motorcycle: rear projection, bike strapped to a flatbed, and, for mid-to-long shots, using professional motorcyclist Bill Ivy as a stand in. None of these are very convincing though, which is unfortunate since great swaths of the movie focus on Rebecca (Marianne Faithfull) on her bike while we hear her thoughts in voiceover.

The content of the voiceover doesn’t help the movie’s cause much either. Most of it is Rebecca pining ecstatically for her lover. Other parts seem like outright pandering to the youth, e.g., “Rebellion is the only thing that keeps you alive.”

This voiceover track plays while newlywed Rebecca rides through the French countryside clad only in a leather catsuit (hence the name of the American release, Naked Under Leather). Her motorcycle was a wedding gift from her lover, Daniel (Alain Delon). During this extended ride—which in reality would only take a couple of hours—she has plenty of time to ruminate about how square her husband is, how superior free love is, how marriage will soon be a thing of the past, and how great a lover Daniel is. Oh, and how much she loves her motorcycle. (Loves like Titane loves that Cadillac Coupe DeVille.)

Ostensibly, the ride is to take her to Daniel, a pretentious philosophy professor who treats her poorly and at times violently. But a lot happens along the way, including a psychedelic dream sequence, a psychedelic road trip montage, and a few psychedelic sex scenes.

During one stop along the road to writhe in grass, Rebecca is passed and leered at by a military convoy, which leads her to rant about how joining the military proves you hate your own freedom and likely have never had sex and probably can’t. This is a weird and jarring separation from the theme of the movie and sticks out as another attempt to pander to the youth of the day.

Other scenes also stand out as odd. In the very beginning there is a dream sequence in which Rebecca and Daniel are psychedelically going at it but are abruptly interrupted by clown faces. The husband plays cello in the center ring of a circus while Rebecca stands balanced on a moving motorcycle and Daniel, the ringleader, whips pieces of her one-piece leather suit off of her.

Another odd scene shows Rebecca contemplating a gray, straight-lined gas station. She’s complaining about it as a symbol of a society with no freedom (we get it already!) when an attendant in a bright orange jumpsuit comes out. At the sight of him, she freaks out—mouth open, trembling—and drives away.

Let’s not forget the post-coital motocross highlight reel.

Sadomasochism is never overtly mentioned, but Rebecca is choked and whipped and flogged with roses. Late in the movie, she realizes what she has with Daniel is not free love. She is attached to him and loves the control he exerts over her.

After sitting in a German café weighing her husband—a kind man who loves her but is boring—against Daniel—a cold man who doesn’t love her but is exciting—she chooses Daniel again. Riding off in an ecstatic state (facilitated by the vibrations of her motorcycle), the inevitable happens—inevitable in any ‘60s film about free love and motorcycles: a fiery crash. Less predictable is the helicopter pullback from the crash, at least a year before Easy Rider.

What makes this film truly unique is its audacity in continuously showing Faithfull over-emoting on a bike she isn’t riding. Nevertheless, as a vehicle to turn her into a sex symbol, it worked. Full-frontal nudity will do that.

Girl isn’t a good movie, but for viewers who appreciate kitschy ‘60s exploitation, it’s not a bad way to spend 91 minutes.

In 2023, Kino upgraded their Girl on a Motorcycle DVD to Blu-ray for the first time. It ports over Cardiff’s original commentary track from the DVD and adds an alternate commentary from film critic Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, who analyzes the film through a feminist lens.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“A countercultural curio of almost painterly beauty…”–Joseph Jon Lanthier and Budd Wilkins, Slant (Blu-ray)