Mondo Topless (Russ Meyer, 1966)

A bombastic and alliteration-loving narrator (All the President's Men's John Furlong) describes San Francisco, "the birthplace of the topless dance," before introducing us to a number of busty dancers with unclothed upper torsos, including "bouncy" Babette Bardot (allegedly half-French and half-Swedish), "buxotic" Darlene Grey, "rambunctious" Pat Barringer, "yummy" Diane Young, "luscious" Sin Lenee, "delicious" Darla Paris, and "exciting" Donna 'X', who shake their money-makers while listening to transistor radios and talk about themselves and their occupation in voiceover. Padding out the film is stock footage from Meyer's 1963 film Europe in the Raw, featuring the stage shows of Belgium's Veronique Gabriel, Berlin's Abundavita (wearing a mask with two feathers sticking up from either side, while Berlin is described as half under "cruel" Communist control); France's Denice Duval (who does a "muff dance" that apparently involves two kinds of muffs, though the more salacious one is not shown), Gigi La Touche ("the girl with the throbbing guitar," though she's clearly not actually playing her sparkled instrument at a few points), and Yvette Le Grand (who has a cowgirl outfit and uses a hobby horse and a tripod-mounted ball in her act); and Denmark's Greta Thorwald (alarmingly described as a "blonde Aryan beauty") as well as an appearance by Lorna Maitland, the star of Meyer's film Lorna, in this reviewer's opinion not one of his strongest films.

Most of Russ Meyer's films, from the immortal Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! to the Roger Ebert-scripted Beyond the Valley of the Dolls bear two things in common: gorgeous and sex-crazed women with spectacular breasts, and sex-starved and not overly bright men. Well, there's not much in the way of male presence in this movie, but plenty of pneumatic topless women for those who can't  get enough of same. It's almost enough to make up for the fact that the ladies' description of their life and career isn't particularly deep, although some of it is interesting, including one describing how she was rejected as a Playboy playmate because her breasts were deemed too large, another saying that drunken (male?) customers sometimes start undressing and dancing themselves, and still another saying she's got three kids!!! Bardot (who claimed to be distantly related to Brigitte and to have once modeled for Picasso!) gets most of the screen time, despite having a very tenuous grasp of the English language. Although, even the girls who speak it fluently don't deliver their own lines very convincingly. Meyer is quoted in Jimmy McDonough's superb biography Big Bosoms and Square Jaws as once saying, "A good actress! I'd rather have a big-chested stiff who can barely pronouncer her own name." That said, I'm sure the guys (and maybe even a few gals) who saw this film in the '60s weren't really concerned about that, and it more than accomplishes what it set out to do.

The Delinquents (Robert Altman, 1957)

Scotty White (future Billy Jack Tom Laughlin), a good-natured 18-year-old soon headed to college , is distraught after his 16-year-old girlfriend Janice Wilson's (Rosemary Howard) parents forbid him to see her, saying they're too young to go steady. Heading to the drive-in, he sulks in his car while Bill Cholly (Forbidden Planet's Peter Miller) and his gang of hoodlums let the air out of one of the tires of another gang that recently crossed them. The rival gang falsely assumes Scotty is responsible and accosts him, but Cholly and his buddies come to his rescue, and they drive off together. When Scotty tells his new friends about what happened with Janice, Cholly suggests a plan where he makes Janice's parents think she's going on a date with him (wearing a suit and lying about having a nice job in order to make him look palatable to the Wilsons), and then brings her to Scotty. The young couple join the gang at a party at an old abandoned house, where Cholly's right-hand-goon Eddy (Dick Bakalyan, who played a number of JDs early in his career, and later did pictures such as Von Ryan's Express and Chinatown) gets Scotty to drink some gin and gets more than a little untoward while dancing with Janice, causing them to leave. When the cops show up soon afterward to take everyone into custody, Cholly and Eddy become convinced Scotty tipped them off.

Besides an early turn by Laughlin, this film is also notable as the first feature-length film written, directed, and produced by Robert Altman, who would go on to such immortal films as Nashville (by the way, in my personal Wold Newton Universe, Karen Black's singer Connie White is Scotty White's first cousin) and McCabe and Mrs. Miller. Prior to this, Altman had mostly done short documentaries, and while it doesn't quite have the tone of his more famous work (e.g., naturalistic dialogue and characters talking over each other), his talent is still quite evident. Laughlin is surprisingly convincing, considering he's playing a character eight years younger than he himself was at the time, and Miller and especially Bakalyan are great at playing slimy punks, though the rest of the gang aren't nearly as memorable. Howard is passable but hardly a standout in her one and only acting gig, though she did some modeling in the '60s and '70s. Altman's script thankfully doesn't do much proselytizing, although United Artists tacked on some narration at the beginning and end blaming the negligence of society in general and parents in particular for the rise of juvenile delinquency, and suggesting the church and youth groups among others as alternatives. Altman was not pleased about that, understandably. It's also interesting to note that Altman's daughter Christine plays Scotty's little sister Sissy, her only film work apart from Ron Mann's documentary Altman. The Delinquents is well worth watching to see a future auteur's beginnings.

Live Like a Cop, Die Like a Man (Ruggero Deodato, 1976)

Dark-haired Alfredo (Don't Torture a Duckling's Marc Porel) and blond Antonio (Django Kill...If You Live, Shoot!'s Ray Lovelock, who sadly passed away on Friday) are mellow Special Force cops who manage to get results despite their incredibly reckless methods of bringing down crooks, to the chagrin of their captain (Danger: Diabolik's Adolfo Celi). Besides muggers and hostage takers, they attempt to bring down ruthless gambling club owner Roberto "Bibi" Pasquini (Rocco and His Brothers' Renato Salvatori), who has the Superintendent of police in his pocket.

Italy is one of my favorite countries in term of cinema, and they are just as adept at the crime genre as horror and Westerns. This is a film that could only have been made by Ruggero Deodato, the man behind the unbelievably brutal but thought-provoking Cannibal Holocaust. Just as Robert Kerman's character in that film wondered who the real cannibals were, Live Like a Cop... will leave you wondering who the real psycho criminals are. Alfredo and Antonio get into a high-speed bike chase through the streets of Rome (something Deodato did not get a permit for, which was more common than you might think for exploitation films of that era), talk dirty to the Captain's secretary (who reciprocates, calling men "phallocrats"), set a bunch of cars and two tied-up thugs on fire, apparently have sex with their cleaning woman's niece (did I mention they share an apartment?), and torture two of Pasquini's men by giving their genitals a good hard squeeze. Alfredo also shoots one of Pasquini's men in the mouth, and before that he slaps the gangster's sexy sister Lina (Flavia Fabiani), after which he and then Antonio have (consensual) sex with her. I have often thought that television cops get away with shit real cops would be at least suspended for, but our two heroes-by-default take the cake. Luckily, Porel and Lovelock are good enough actors that they manage to make their characters somehow likable despite making Dirty Harry look like Joe Friday. Of course, as with Cannibal Holocaust, Deodato manages to get in a lot of gore. Besides our leads' methods, the chopper-riding muggers' victim gets her head bashed against a lamppost, a blind man's seeing-eye dog gets run over in the subsequent chase (not sure if they really killed the dog, like the genuine animal slaughter in Holocaust), and Pasquini puts out the eye of a gambler who owes him a substantial debt, though surprisingly the latter is not shown in much detail. And of course lots of people get shot. Plus, the ending is literally explosive, if somewhat out of left field. The screenplay by Fernando di Leo (himself an adept writer of Italian crime films) is entertaining, and the music by Ubaldo Continiello (Deodato's Last Cannibal World) is quite competent, even if he's not on the level of the great Riz Ortolani of Cannibal Holocaust fame, and Lovelock himself delivers two cool folk songs. Lovers of trash cinema all'Italiana cannot miss this one!

International Crime (Charles Lamont, 1938)

Lamont Cranston (the magnificently-named Rod La Rocque) is an amateur criminologist also known as the Shadow who hosts a nightly true crime radio broadcast for the Daily Classic newspaper. Tipped off to a possible crime by his assistant, the somewhat scatterbrained Phoebe Lane (Astrid Allwyn), Cranston rushes to the scene, but it turns out to be a false alarm. However, a very real crime occurs across a town, involving a financier who is killed in the midst of a robbery. The police, in the form of Commissioner Weston, suspect ex-safecracker Honest John of the crime, but Cranston thinks otherwise, and with the help of Phoebe, Moe the cabbie, and Classic reporter Burke, he identifies the true culprits as a pair of European ne'er-do-wells.

As you can probably guess from the synopsis, this film, a sequel to The Shadow Strikes, doesn't have much to do with Walter Gibson's pulp novels. La Rocque's Cranston doesn't have a slouch hat, twin .45, Inverness cloak, girasol ring, or hawklike features, and is a pretty nondescript-looking fellow with a thin mustache. Neither does he possess an eerie laugh or any of the other abilities his prose counterpart possesses. So as a fan of the pulps in general and the Shadow in particular, you can imagine how disappointing to me it is in that regard. I do have to give the movie some small props though, as unlike The Shadow Strikes it does try to adapt some of the familiar characters. Commissioner Weston, Burke, and Moe are all from the pulps, although I don't recall the pulp Moe Shrevnitz ever being described as having a thick Yiddish accent. Phoebe Lane is of course derived from the radio show's Margo Lane, who was not incorporated into the pulps until 1941, a move that proved controversial with readers. Phoebe is not nearly as capable as Margo, and provides much of the film's comic relief, none of which is funny. The message of nearly every line she speaks seems to be "Ha-ha, look at this dizzy dame trying to be a detective!" (Excuse the alliteration.) Needless to say, this is a little unfortunate to modern viewers, as is a scene where Burke gets a shoeshine from an African-American man who behaves somewhat stereotypically, and repeatedly calls Burke "Boss"; Burke, in turn, calls him "Boy," though I'm sure the poor guy is in at least his twenties. In an otherwise good movie, I might have been willing to look past the sexist and racist elements, but here it's just cringeworthy in a film that already is a letdown. If you're a Shadow completist then by all means check this film out on Youtube, but otherwise don't bother.

Four Dimensions of Greta (Pete Walker, 1972)

Wow, has it really been three years since my last post? Anyway, your ole cineaste buddy Sean has decided to revive this blog for the purpose of posting film reviews. Since my tastes run from arthouse cinema to exploitation flix, you should be seeing a wide variety of films covered here. Tonight's film definitely fits into the latter category.

Pete Walker is a director I've heard about for years, but never got around to watching. Most of his output, from the years 1959-1983, consisted of sexploitation and/or horror. You can probably guess from the poster which one this is. Hans Weimer (Australian Tristan Rogers, better known to soap opera fans such as myself for later playing Robert Scorpio on General Hospital, doing a not overly convincing German accent) is a reporter for Der Stein assigned by his boss (and fiancee's father) Herr Schickler to travel to London to do a story about au pairs. Schickler's friends the Grubers ask Hans to also find out about the whereabouts of their daughter Greta (Leena Skoog, who was actually Swedish), a student who went to England to study grass(!!!). Arriving in the U.K., Hans meets Greta's former employer Mrs. Marks, who says she quit after a week. Mrs. Marks tries to hit on him, but he wants none of the "middle-aged English sow." Hans contacts an old girlfriend, Sue, who is now "practically married," (although, as she pointedly tells Hans, "I've never been a very practical person,") to help him. They head to a club where they find Serena and Kirsten, who used to share a flat with Greta, who forced them to give her all their money. When they were attacked by some "sex-crazed hippies" they found Greta in bed with, they threw her out. At Serena's recommendation, Hans goes to a strip club ("They get naked and they move. They don't wear G-strings," hawker Big Danny repeatedly declares outside), where the huge-afroed Cyn (or "the original Cyn," as she calls herself) tells him Greta worked there until a police raid, and that the money man behind the club, gangster Carl Roberts had the hots for her. With the help of Greta's pro footballer boyfriend Roger Maitland (Robin Askwith from the Confessions of a... film series, sporting truly impressive muttonchops), Hans and Sue finally unravel the whole story.

Four Dimensions of Greta was the first British feature film to use 3-D, in the flashbacks filling us in on what Greta's been up to in London. Most of this involves sex or general nudity, although we do see Greta holding a banana up to the camera (nudge nudge wink wink) twice, and Roger brandishing a broken bottle after catching Greta in the act with Roberts. Despite that, the sex scenes aren't all that eye-popping, even though pretty much all the women who doff their knickers are well-endowed, to be sure. The characters are mostly cookie-cutter, and the attempts at humor (such as a slow-motion romantic scene between Hans and Sue that ends in Hans hitting a waiter in the face with a pastry) tend to fall flat. That being said, I always enjoy seeing Swinging London on screen, and I dug the theme song by "Huckleberry Fynn"(!!!) asking if Greta is "angel or devil." There's also a lot of memorable dialogue, much of which is quoted above. In the film's most self-aware moment, Hans declares near the end, "This is starting to become like a bad British sex comedy!" Indeed. But still very much worth a look for fans of the genre.

For those who use Amazon Prime, you can click here to watch it (complete with 3-D, though you'll need to supply your own glasses), but if you're undecided feel free to check out the trailer first. Word of warning though, it is definitely NSFW.

A Feast Unknown

Check out my review of this great (if controversial) novel by Philip Jose Farmer at She Never Slept!

Review by a dear friend, edited by me

I have just edited and posted my blood brother Henry Covert's review of Jinx, the new album by legendary Goth rock band Coven, on She Never Slept, the site run by Henry's equally awesome wife Sarah! Enjoy it, won't us?