The Brutalisation of Franz Blum

Typically, a left-wing prison flick sounds like a rather revolting prospect as such works are typically created by idiotically idealistic do-gooder types sporting proverbial 'good guy' badges with a seemingly autistic understanding of human nature and who have no concept of reality nor the drastically culturally different people that they self-righteously profess to defend, yet somehow I managed to get into the quasi-commie kraut work Die Verrohung des Franz Blum (1974) aka The Brutalisation of Franz Blum directed by Reinhard Hauff, an auteur who has displayed his solidarity with left-wing activism and commie terrorists with critically acclaimed but not mostly forgetten works like Messer im Kopf (1978) aka Knife in the head and Stammheim - Die Baader-Meinhof-Gruppe vor Gericht (1986). Luckily with The Brutalisation of Franz Blum, Hauff had the help of real-life bank robber turned writer/actor Burkhard Driest (Cross of Iron, Querelle), who not only acted as the lead villain in the film, but penned the script based on his own experiences in prison, thus lending a certain visceral authenticity to the film that would escape bourgeois leftists activist types. Responsible for penning the unreleased Nazi-themed black comedy Son of Hitler (1978) starring Bud Cort and Peter Cushing and playing the pernicious gangster who belittles the title protagonist of Werner Herzog’s Stroszek (1977), to being accused (but vindicated) of rape in 1980 by German actress Monika Lundi, Driest is undoubtedly lived an interesting life in film and otherwise and his less than sensationalized depiction of prison life in The Brutalisation of Franz Blum seems to ring more true than most prison films. The story of a young man and educated bank employee who drove the getaway car in a bank robbery and who refused to name his co-conspirators, The Brutalisation of Franz Blum shows how a supposedly morally noble yet criminally inclined individual transforms into an authoritarian criminal mastermind as a result of his ‘brutalization’ via prison corruption, namely that revolving around his fellow inmates. A film that essentially makes the statement that prisons do not “reform criminals” (not shit!) but instead turns them into hard fascists who are willing to use every and any individual and/or underhanded scheme to get his way, The Brutalisation of Franz Blum, like many contemporary works of jailhouse cinema makes a mere critique, but like virtually all idealistic leftist works, offers no real solutions. Starring internationally acclaimed German actor Jürgen Prochnow of Das Boot (1981) and The Da Vinci Code (2006) in one his very first roles, The Brutalisation of Franz Blum is a raw reminder that one probably learns a great deal more about human nature from a prison sentence than from going to college to get impractical knowledge. 

 Franz Blum (Jürgen Prochnow) has made the mistake of being involved with a bank robbery that will ultimately result in him losing the best years of his life after he is given a prison sentence. During one of his first days in the slammer, Franz cries like a little bitch because he has a migraine and a lanky leftist lunatic intellectual named Bielich (Eike Gallwitz) gives him some aspirin to help. To express his gratitude to Bielich for being kind in an unkind place, Franz acts as a witness after Bielich is attacked by prison bully Walter 'Tiger' Kuul (writer Burkhard Driest), who is carrying on a gay relationship with a man named “Marie” (Lutz Mackensy). Being the undisputed alpha of the prison, Kuul naturally seeks revenge against Franz and beats him nearly an inch away from his life, which inspired the novice convict to make a failed attempt at suicide via slitting his wrists with his trusty razor. After learning that forming a gang can make one's time prison go much smoother, Franz, who joins up with a baker turned child molester named Goh (Karl-Heinz Merz), gets his own criminal enterprise running and in no time, he has countless minions who back him. Unfortunately, although he is not a genius, crazy Kuul is still undisputed Führer of the prison underworld. After drugging Kuul’s food via tranquilizers, Franz, who has given up being fair a long time ago, is able to get enough leverage to beat up his Neanderthal-like nemesis. By dealing tobacco, coffee, and other products at a lower rate, Franz soon becomes the king of the jail house, but he soon consolidates even more power after becoming in charge of the prison’s sports department. While Franz manages to get everyone on his side, Bielich finds his new behavior absolutely deplorable, that his methods are as “cynical as the system,” and threatens to tell everyone about his parasitical ways. To prove he is an equal opportunist and diehard democratic, Franz gives Bielich the platform to makes his plans, but the other inmates shout him down, stating things like, “what do you want weirdo?” Of course, Franz's ‘scheme’ works out as his prison underlings force Bielich, who has a heart condition, to run with them, which ultimately kills the noble anti-fascists. Ironically, Bielich dies in the same spot where Franz originally helped him after Kuul attacks him. Things get even more ironic when Franz is released from prison that same day for “good conduct,” thus making his efforts to become the dictator in the prison all in vain. 

 Beginning as a supposedly sensitive and noble man who is willing to help anyone in need, Franz transforms into a tyrannical dictator who utilizes seemingly unlimited conspiratorial tactics, including screwing over formers and even murder by proxy. Of course, anyone with a shred of common sense, aside from loony liberals, knows that prisons aren't designed to rehabilitate anyone, but are rather used to punish the individual and hopefully get them ‘scared straight’ enough after their sentence to quit committing crimes. Naturally, being a leftist, director Reinhard Hauff goes one step further by insinuating that prison turns convicts into ‘degenerate fascist cavemen’ who subscribe to irrationalism, brute force, and collectivism as a form of underworld self-rule. While I certainly would not want to have a stay at the Teutonic prison featured in The Brutalisation of Franz Blum, the prison life featured in the film is not much worse than a high school environment, except with a little bit more extortion, theft, violence, and other related uncivil behavior. Indeed, while the lead antagonist attempts to force Franz to give him a blowjob (he bites his cock instead) and he gets a good beating too, there is no rape, bodily dismemberment, successful suicides, nor gangster prison guards (though they take bribes), no situation featured in The Brutalisation of Franz Blum would have realistically change the protagonist from a “good guy” into a “bad guy” unless he already had such sadistic propensities inside of himself all along, hence his involvement in the bank robbery that landed him in prison in the first place. Undoubtedly, The Brutalisation of Franz Blum is not the HBO prison drama Oz (1997-2003) where nefarious neo-Nazi's rape white alcoholic lawyers and female prison guards begin steamy romances with cons. If anything, The Brutalisation of Franz Blum is interesting because it shows less barbaric prisons, especially those in Europe, during the early 1970s than prisons of today, which are multicultural sewers owned by private companies that train crooks and thieves to turn into murders and gay rapists. The fact that writer/actor Burkhard Driest was able to leave prison and become an esteemed writer and actor and able to be involved with The Brutalisation of Franz Blum without suffering an emotional breakdown just goes to show that director Reinhard Hauff is a neo-marxist pansy who would have probably benefited from a prison stay because, if nothing else, he would have at least developed some testicular fortitude and realized his message with The Brutalisation of Franz Blum is ultimately whiny at best and ridiculously redundant at worse. Jürgen Prochnow would later star in the film Die Konsequenz (1977) aka The Consequence directed by Wolfgang Petersen playing a pederast prison inmate who falls for a 15-year-old lad in a role radically more repulsive than the one he played in The Brutalisation of Franz Blum.  Needless to say, one could argue that getting softly sodomized by your elder gentleman lover could be a bit more brutal than getting the shit beat out of you. For the closest thing to a kraut equivalent to the rather underrated American cult prison flick Fortune and Men's Eyes (1971), The Brutalisation of Franz Blum is undoubtedly your best bet, minus the forced anal entry.

-Ty E

Insignificance

In a sense, virtually all of English counter-culture auteur Nicholas Roeg’s films are ‘failures,’ but, at the very least, most of them make interesting failures due to the director’s propensity for taking risks and experimenting with narrative structures, complex themes, morality, etc. Unfortunately, Roeg is not simply a rogue filmmaker, but also an unrepentant leftist, cinematic deconstructionist and cubist, and dubious weirdo who had an obsession with seeing his then-wife Theresa Russell cinematically murdered, molested (by a horrid Heeb like Art Garfunkel no less!) and/or mutilated on the silverscreen and who has displayed a nauseating knack for xenophilia and ‘noble savage’ fetishism as depicted in Walkabout (1971), a perturbing admiration for Freudian psychoanalysis and ardent Philo-Semitism in Bad Timing: A Sensual Obsession (1980), and a seething hatred for American/Southern whites in Track 29 (1988), thus making the director the product of a degenerate and largely ethno-masochistic zeitgeist. Of course, I was not surprised to learn that Roeg hates Joseph McCarthy, loves and empathizes with Albert Einstein, and has a sort of feminist revisionist opinion of the more tragic and sad than titillating and sexy Marilyn Monroe as depicted in his work Insignificance (1985). Of course, seeing as the film was based on a screenplay/play written by British dramatist Terry Johnson, who was inspired to write the play after learning that an autograph of Albert Einstein was among Marilyn Monroe’s possessions at the time of her premature death, one cannot simply give Roeg all the credit for the incendiary ideas/scenes featured in his film Insignificance, set in New York City in 1954, dramatizing a fictional interaction between American icons Marilyn Monroe, Joseph McCarthy, Joe DiMaggio, and Albert Einstein, who are never mentioned by name but are simply called The Actress, The Senator, The Ballplayer, and The Professor as their uncontested popularity makes even mentioning their names rather insignificant as their popular public personas as icons have transcended them as sort of American archetypes that were born in a cultureless nation following the prosperity of the nation as a result of victory during the Second World War. A sort of sardonic yet ultimately apocalyptic black comedy that shows what happens when culturally and politically diametrical American cultural bigwigs bump heads, Insignificance is an innately iconoclastic yet ultimately 'politically correct' work that attempts to connect the past to the present by presenting the 1950s, like the 1980s when the film was made, as a ‘reactionary’ time fueled by materialism, philistine celebrity worship, mass-mindedness, and anti-communist ‘witch hunts.’ As someone who considers Marilyn Monroe nothing more than ‘Hebrew Hollywood’s greatest whore’ and superstar Shiksa who did more to ruin the reputation of blonde women (despite being a natural redhead) than Nazi propaganda would, considers Einstein a cousin-copulating racist zionist who convinced FDR to work on the atom bomb so Germany could be wiped out and whose contributions to mankind were ultimately more negative than positive, and that Joseph McCarthy was right, if not ineffective, I found Insignificance to be a sometimes interesting cinematic experiment riddled with left-wing cliches, obnoxious overacting, and artistic pretensions, but nonetheless an interesting experiment in celluloid quasi-esoterism.

It is 1954 and tons of horny men have gathered outside to see the naughty bits of an actress (Theresa Russell), presumably Marilyn Monroe, in what will prove to be the iconic scene from Billy Wilder’s aesthetically deplorable and insanely overrated Freudian farce The Seven Year Itch (1955) where the seemingly half-retarded female protagonist’s dress is blown up in a manner that seems nothing less than absurdly orgasmic. Naturally, the Actress’ husband, The Ballplayer (Gary Busey), who is clearly modeled after Joe DiMaggio, is irked by the fact that virtually every man in American will be able to see the same unclad legs that are supposed to be his and his only. Meanwhile, a nauseatingly neurotic yet equally narcissistic Jewish scientist that goes by ‘The Professor’ (Michael Emil), who is clearly modeled after Albert Einstein—horrendous Heeb-fro and all—is minding his own business solving math problems when an absolutely heinous and barbaric fellow that goes by the name ‘The Senator’ (Tony Curtis, who starred along aside the real Marilyn Monroe in Billy Wilder's Some Like It Hot (1959)), who is clearly a conspicuously crude caricature of Joseph McCarthy, shows up and demands that the poor and innocent Hebraic sage go before a committee to investigate his very probable communist-related activities. Of course, The Professor turns The Senator down and not long later the Semitic scholar receives a visit from the ostensibly Aryan Actress. To his shock, The Actress is no shit-for-brains Shiksa but a startlingly smart seductress who is able to give an almost vaudevillian demonstration of the Theory of Relativity via toy cars, soldier figurines, flashlights, and balloons. Despite being married to a belligerent Guido, The Actress is apparently a sapiosexual and admits to The Professor in an amorous manner that he is a the top of the list of people that she would like to share carnal knowledge with. While The Professor is eventually convinced to have sex with The Actress, he is completely cockblocked when The Ballplayer, who wants to talk to his wife about their marriage, shows up. Of course, The Professor realizes that he is no match for the martial prowess, so he changes rooms and meets an ‘Uncle Tom’ Cherokee Indian Elevator man (played by Will Sampson of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975) fame) who claims he is no longer a Cherokee because he watches too much television, but that the scientist is because his Theory of Relativity is similar to some ancient and arcane Indian belief. While The Actress and The Ballplayer discuss their dubious marriage, the baseball maverick has already fallen asleep when his wife tells him that she thinks she is pregnant. The next morning, The Senator, who is revealed to be sexually impotent in the typically Hollywood Freudian fashion, arrives to The Professor’s hotel room, only to discover The Actress laying stark naked in a daze in the bed. Being an evil reactionary anti-communist, The Senator threatens to expose The Professor and The Actress, who he mistakes for a hooker, and even punches the little lady in the stomach, thus causing the superstar to have a miscarriage. Eventually, The Professor arrives and sees The Senator stealing his papers. Instead of allowing the Senator to have them, The Professor throws all his research out of the window and the politician finally accepts defeat and leaves. After discussing her marital problems with The Professor, The Ballplayer learns from his wife that their marriage is over. Of course, The Professor has worse things to worry about than The Ballplayer as he knows he is indirectly responsible for a bunch of Japs getting nuked during the Second World War, hence his constant looking at his broken watch, which is stopped at 8:15 a.m. (the time when the Americans dropped the nuke “Little Boy” on Hiroshima), and being h by hallucinations of Nazis and scorched Japs throughout Insignificance. Sensing his glaring guilt, The Actress finally bitches enough at The Professor for him to admit his feeling of responsibility for the nuking of Germany. At 8:15 a.m., he has a vision of a nuke covering The Actress and the hotel room in flames. In the end, the personal problems, as well as the iconic legacies, of The Actress, The Senator, The Ballplayer, and The Professor seem rather petty and insignificant.

While most of the characters featured in Insignificance seem like crude caricatures, director Nicholas Roeg and writer Terry Johnson did their damnedest to deconstruct these world famous 1950s American icons and portray them as individuals plagued with pestering personal problems just like everyone else, thus demystifying them in the process yet paradoxically adding to their 'mythos.' Of course, despite being a consistently experimental filmmaker, Roeg follows in the grand Hebraic Hollywood tradition of cinematically canonizing Albert Einstein and odiously obliterating Joseph McCarthy as if these softcore commie cinematic clichés were not infectious enough. Personally, I have always had nil interest in the American cultural icons featured in Insignificance and find baseball, Hollywood pseudo-divas and Playboy models, democratic politicians, and ‘eccentric’ Jewish scientists to be exceedingly dull symptoms of the contrived and ultimately worthless non-culture of America and that, as an ex-colony, the United States of America, never nor will ever have the great artists, divas, statesmen, philosophers, and poets Europa once had. If one were to rate America’s history, especially within the past century, in context, within world history, it would barely even warrant a footnote. Of course, America’s sole claim to fame is the atom bomb, which was largely the creation of German-Jewish minds who were kicked out of the Fatherland, which Insignificance alludes to when The Professor's sailboat is destroyed by a bunch of naughty Nazi brownshirts. Like Italian maestro Luchino Visconti’s penultimate work Conversation Piece (1974) aka Gruppo di famiglia in un interno, Insignificance is undoubtedly a rather idiosyncratic and underrated chamber piece among the filmmaker’s larger cinema oeuvre. Of course, like virtually all of Roeg's films, Insignificance suffers from its outmoded and now anachronistic leftist 'revolutionary' pretensions, as if some jaded Judaic jackass like Bill Maher or Jon Stewart shit in the director's brain. Still, to see abortion-addict Norma Jean's dress in flames and bosom covered in blood, as well as Einstein's pathological guilt over being largely responsible for contributing to one of the most deleterious inventions in human history, makes Insignificance worthy of the admission price, even if the film itself is largely insignificant in itself in its overall influence on cinema history.  

-Ty E

A Woman in Flames

 In describing the varying types of femininity in his magnum opus Sex and Character: An Investigation Of Fundamental Principles (1903), Viennese philosopher Otto Weininger concluded that the two archetypal extremes of the fairer sex are the “mother” and the “prostitute,” arguing, “Prostitution is not a result of social conditions, but of some cause deep in the nature of women; prostitutes who have been "reclaimed" frequently, even if provided for, return to their old way of life. . . . I may note finally, that prostitution is not a modern growth; it has been known from the earliest times, and even was a part of some ancient religions, as, for instance, among the Phoenicians.” If the prostitute type is an inborn quality of certain woman, it would most certainly describe the protagonist of erotically-charged sub-arthouse flick A Woman in Flames (1983) aka Die flambierte Frau directed by Dutch-German cinematographer-turned-auteur Robert van Ackeren (Harlis aka The Sensuous Three, Purity of Heart aka Die Reinheit des Herzens). The superlatively salacious story of a childless housewife who leaves her life of relative bourgeois luxury to become a high price call-girl who eventually makes the major mistake of starting clearly a foredoomed relationship with a bisexual hustler who dreams of being a restaurant owner, A Woman in Flames is a decidedly depressing yet strangely jocular and teasing, sin-saluting cinematic work featuring a curious collection of sexual spastics, fucked fetishists, closet queens, fascistic leather-men, cultivated cocksuckers, and other repressed perverts who must patronize prostitutes to get the sort of lurid loving that they so deeply and pathetically long for, but cannot find elsewhere. Like virtually all of debauched director Robert van Ackeren’s sex-obsessed works, A Woman in Flames features weak cuckold men, ‘strong’ and sexually promiscuous women, sadomasochism and eclectic fetishism, and a risqué romance between two troubled yet strangely sexually complimentary lovers. Undoubtedly director van Ackeren’s most popular, successful, and commercial work to date, A Woman in Flames is virtual softcore pornography for leftist intellectuals, feminists, and other members of the vogue kraut bourgeoisie. Featuring passive men that cannot ‘assert’ themselves, aggressive women who use whips as pseudo-phalluses, and a naughty nympho as a sort of high-dollar-whore hero who empowers herself by peddling her puss for cash as opposed to giving it away for 'free' to her husband, A Woman in Flames ultimately makes for an absurd look at the human byproducts that have been created by feminist brainwashing, kosher capitalism, and the destruction of traditional genders that came as a result of the Second World War. 

 Despite living a lavish lifestyle, owning a nice home (courtesy of her husband’s income!), and spending her work-free days listening to records and talking with friends on the phone, Eva (Gudrun Landgrebe) hates being a domestic housewife. After her husband complains about the fact she used his razor to shave her legs, forgot to buy wine, put glasses in the wrong places, and has done virtually nothing all day, Eva freely admits she is the opposite of the ideal wife due to being a horrible cook, a failure at setting the table, an awkward dancer, as well as someone who failed both her driving and medical exams, and a total failure when it comes to learning both math (numbers and formulas make her ‘dizzy’) and languages. Since her self-absorbed spouse couldn't care less what she says regarding her lack of domestic talents, Eva decides enough is enough and leaves her hubby a goodbye note stating, “I don’t love you anymore,” and she packs her bags and walks out of the house without him ever noticing. In no time, Eva makes the acquaintance of a madame/female pimp named Yvonne (van Ackeren regular Gabriele Lafari) who teaches the disgruntled housewife everything she needs to know about peddling her flesh, including how the normal work requires that she lay on the bed and spread her legs, and that if a John wants out of the ordinary, it will cost him extra. A failure as a wife who seems to hate all rules and institutions, Eva has a hard time carrying out even the most fundamental aspects of her job, including simply spreading her legs and becoming the passive “love servant” of a bastard of a businessman who expects to get cash for cunt any time he wants. Of course, Eva has yet to find her true calling when it comes to being a sex worker. One night, while hanging out at a ritzy bar, Eva is approached by an effete bisexual gigolo named Chris (European arthouse superstar Mathieu Carrière), who makes a great impression on her after facetiously stating, “Why are you staring at me? I find you vulgar and badly made-up.” While the two high-class prostitutes become a couple, problems arise when Chris’ sod sugar daddy Kurt (Hanns Zischler) becomes jealous of the happy heterosexual relationship the two have together. Meanwhile, Eva runs into her ex-husband at a bookstore and he demands that she have sex with him one more time, but she naturally turns him down and states in defense regarding her new degenerate profession, “I’m a woman who does men like you a favor. A married woman doesn’t take money for it. Unmarried women who live from men are sluts. And when you do it as your profession, you’re a whore. And I’ll be the best paid whore, because I offer the least.” 

 Of course, once she realizes she derives pleasure from humiliating an anal retentive beta-male (nothing says beta like a white man married to an Asian woman!) by calling him gay and making him wear a woman’s apron and lipstick, Eva finds her natural calling as a ball-crushing and fag-flagellating dominatrix. Eva even expresses her love to Chris in a somewhat sadistic manner by telling him that she loves him because his eyes are too blue, his nose is too large, and his mouth is too narrow, but not without finishing him off with a blowjob. Not long after, Eva and Chris rent out a flat together which they use as their own live-in brothel, but naturally problems arise when the two lovers regularly see each other having sex with customers, but to be fair, the lady of the house never screws her Johns, but merely beats the shit out of them, including a brutal scenario where she crushes a man’s fingers by stepping on them with stilettos. With the help of cultured colon-choker Kurt, Eva and Chris are even able to pretend to be members of high society while entertaining intellectuals and scholars. Eva even tells some pompous dinner guests that she is writing a thesis on “melancholy and boredom” and Chris purports to be a ‘freelance photographer’ (his specialty being ‘ID photos’). As Chris states, “Eva and I love the same books, the same films and the same music. We think and feel always the same. We are ideal lovers,” and, indeed, he is right, but trouble arises when he confesses his dream of opening a restaurant with Kurt. Additionally, a conflict of interest brews when Eva tells Chris she wants to have a daughter (with blonde hair, like when “she was a child”), but when the kind gentleman asks her to marry him, she states she is not the kind of woman that wants to get married. After fighting with Eva over the fact that she gets paid for “disdaining men,” Chris goes to a Querelle-like gay bar (incidentally, director van Ackeren played a small role in Fassbinder’s 1982 adaptation of the Genet novel) with Kurt and dances like a gay robot to some Kraftwerk-esque synth song. Over time, the bizarre love triangle between Eva, Chris, and Kurt turns into an all out war. Eva attempts to intimidate Kurt by stripping in front of him, which disarms the dandy fairy, but he has a lot of money and Chris needs his sugar daddy so he can achieve his lifelong dream of opening a restaurant. Without asking his girlfriend's permission, Chris uses his and Eva’s money, which is in a joint bank account, to buy a restaurant, which inevitably destroys what is left of their relationship. After Eva refuses to kiss Chris, he punches her in the face, douses her with vodka, and sets her on fire with a lit candle, thus turning her into a literal “woman in flames” (or not). In the end, Eva is somehow still alive and empowered by the fact she is an ‘independent woman’ (or something), even visiting her ex-boy toy Chris’ restaurant just to spite him. 

 Featuring a musical score by Fassbinder’s best friend/main composer Peer Raben and a small performance from German dandy auteur Werner Schroeter’s muse Magdalena Montezuma as an uptight bourgeois type, A Woman in Flames is technically a work of German New Cinema, but with its too-slick production values, Basic Instinct-esque eroticism, and quite clear appeal to pompous perverts who do a lot of wine-sniffing, A Woman in Flames seems more like a blue movie for impotent bluebloods and upper-middleclass types suffering from a midlife crisis than a serious work of celluloid art. Of course, I am sure there are many bourgeois feminists and cuckolds out there that could come up with a clever argument as to why A Woman in Flames is a piece of socially empowering and sexually liberating work that portrays the ghastly traditional institution of marriage as something worse than prostitution and ‘female empowerment’ as more important than being with someone you love. Ultimately, A Woman in Flames is a film about marginally attractive individuals with majorly appalling and rather repulsive personalities who inevitably reap what they sow, thus they deserve not even the smallest inkling of the viewer’s sympathy. While protagonist Eva of A Woman in Flames flirts with the idea of a having daughter, she knows deep down that she is and will always be a lonely streetwalker with an incapacity for normal love. As Otto Weininger described in Sex and Character, “The prostitute is the great seductress of the world, the female Don Juan, the being in the woman that knows the art of love, that cultivates it, teaches it, and enjoys it,” yet Eva goes a step or two further as someone who derives great pleasure from humiliating and torturing men and she does a great job doing it, but she would probably make about as good a mother as Jeffrey Dahmer would make a father. As she demonstrates when she contemptuously tells her lover Chris when breaking off their relationship, “I fell in love with a gigolo… I don't want to grow old with the owner of a restaurant,” Eva is the sort of woman who would rather be in a relationship with a capitalist cocksucker with AIDS than be with a clean man who runs a legitimate business. When comparing the sort of men that hookers are attracted to, Weininger argued, “The prostitute, on the other hand, is most attracted by a careless, idle, dissipated man. A man that has lost self-restraint repels the mother-woman, is attractive to the prostitute. There are women who are dissatisfied with a son that is idle at school; there are others who encourage him. The diligent boy pleases the mother-woman, the idle and careless boy wins approval from the prostitute type.” Indeed, it is no coincidence that the sort of men Eva gets paid to beat as a dominatrix are rich businessmen and the men she enjoys sharing carnal knowledge with are degenerates who blow old men for money. 

 With prostitution being made totally legal in Germany in 2002, A Woman in Flames now seems rather outmoded, yet the film is still marginally ‘important’ in its depiction of how far the Fatherland has degenerated since having ‘democracy’ forced on it after the Second World War. While Rainer Werner Fassbinder did a much better job with his BRD Trilogy (The Marriage of Marian Braun, Veronika Voss, Lola) in depicting how the chaos of World War II and the subsequent “Wirtschaftswunder” (“Economic Miracle”) forced an entire generation of German women to become both literal and/or figurative whores and turned an entire generation of men into cuckolds, betas, and bitches, A Woman in Flames goes a couple steps further in its explicitness as a cinematic work that is more a symptom of the cultural decay it portrays and glorification of prostitution as opposed to a critique of such things. As a filmmaker who would direct two porn flicks, Deutschland privat - Eine Anthologie des Volksfilms (1980) and Deutschland privat - Im Land der bunten Träume (2007), utilizing footage sent to him from couples around Germany who wanted their homemade sextapes forever immortalized, director Robert van Ackeren certainly deserves credit as Deutschland’s foremost anti-völkisch pornographer! 

-Ty E

A Bell from Hell

Attempting to dig up a decent horror-related film that I had yet to see became a rather redundant task for me a while ago and I have essentially given up on attempting to defend the genre (with a couple exceptions, of course), but when I do end up happening upon a surprisingly decent film from the genre, it happens to have at least one (but usually both) of the following qualities: 1. It's European 2. It is at least over 30 years old. Of course, it was no surprise for me that my latest noteworthy horror-related discovery, A Bell from Hell (1973) aka La campana del infierno, was not only made over a decade before I was born and is a Spanish-French coproduction, but also features a fairly decent cast, including French actor Renaud Verley (who played the troubled young man Gunther Von Essenbeck in Visconti’s high-camp masterpiece The Damned (1969)) in the lead role and Swedish-born veteran actress Viveca Lindfors (who horror fans will recognized for her performance as ‘Aunt Bedelia’ in Creepshow (1982) segment “Father’s Day”) in the role of an evil wheelchair-bound cripple aunt who perniciously plots to steal the protagonist’s inheritance. Featuring a quasi-psychopathic and highly charismatic anti-hero who beats Alex in Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971) in terms of sadistic suaveness and aberrant allure as the lead character, A Bell from Hell is undoubtedly a character-driven work yet it also a scandalously sardonic scare-fest featuring a startlingly idiosyncratic hodgepodge of surrealist, gothic, and Mondo Cane-esque imagery to the point of almost aesthetic overload. In fact, like most great films, A Bell from Hell is so chock full of captivating imagery and cleverly naughty nuances that a mere single viewing of the film will not suffice for the viewer to appreciate what a truly lavish and meticulously assembled work ill-fated Spanish auteur Claudio Guerín (The Challenges aka Los desafíos, The House of the Doves aka La casa de las palomas) assembled. Surprisingly Buñuel-esque in its absurdist attacks on the Spanish bourgeoisie, yet all the more brutal due to its utilization of then-totally-taboo horror imagery, including blood and guts, full-frontal nudity, and incestuous eroticism, A Bell from Hell is a radically rare piece of left-wing gothic-gore that actually manages not to bore the viewer due to its patently political persuasion. Foretelling the psychosexual sadism that would dominate Italian cinema in the late-1970s but with the poesy aesthetic cultivation of Italian maestro Mario Bava (Black Sunday, Blood and Black Lace) and the more interesting works of Hammer Films, A Bell from Hell also manages to reconcile the aesthetic and thematic differences of the horror genre of old and new in a most strikingly seamless manner. In fact, A Bell from Hell was penned by Santiago Moncada, who also wrote the script for the Bava flick Hatchet for the Honeymoon (1970) aka Il rosso segno della follia and actress Christina von Blanc appeared in the Jess Franco/Jean Rollin flick A Virgin Among the Living Dead (1973), thus illustrating the ‘range’ of horror talent in Guerín’s artful horror-thriller. The wantonly and recklessly witty tale of a black sheep of a bourgeoisie who gets out of a mental institution and seeks revenge against the aunt and relatives who put him there so as to steal inheritance, A Bell from Hell is the kind of conspicuously class-conscious cinematic work you would have been directed by a bloodthirsty Bolshevik revolutionary with a scathing and seemingly Satanic sense of humor and a cultivated bourgeois talent for cinematic art. 

 John (Renaud Verley)—a rather peculiar pretty boy with a seemingly sadistic yet good humored knack for elaborate practical jokes and creating realistic mask replicas of his own face—is randomly released from a mental institution on probation and given a summons for his upcoming hearing in two months regarding whether or not he is sane enough to become a productive member of society.  John moves into his deceased mother's home, which is somewhat dilapidated and dust-ridden due to be being unoccupied for what seems like a number of years. Although bourgeois by way of blood and a rather large inheritance, John decides to take up the less than glorious work-class trade of working as a butcher (actor Verley gutted a cow in real-life for the film), but he suddenly quits after he’s “learned enough” as it seems he wants to utilize his new slaughtering skills on a more bipedal sort of animal. Even more endlessly explicit than the bloody slaughterhouse scene in Fassbinder’s In a Year of 13 Moons (1978), A Bell from Hell spares no viewer in depicting the grizzly process it takes to turn cute cows into ground beef. Although destined to inherit a hefty fortune due to his mother tragically committing suicide by way of apparently jumping off a cliff, John believes his wheelchair-bound witch of an aunt Marta (Viveca Lindfors) wants to get rid of him so she can get the money and that his stint in the loony bin was a result of his aunt bribing a doctor to declare him insane. Marta also has three gorgeous teenage daughters that include Esther (Maribel Martin), Maria (Christina von Blanc), and Teresa (Nuria Gimenol), the latter two seeming to be still attached to their mother by the umbilical cord due to their groveling natures. It is quite apparent upon reuniting with his trio of cute cousins that John and his blood kin share incestuous feelings, which is further supported by the fact that he has nude photos of one of them on his wall. John also has feelings for an elder woman (Nicole Vesperini) who he is most mad at for selling-out and marrying an old bourgeois bastard named Pedro (Alfredo Mayo), so he plays an elaborate practical joke on her by pretending to rip out both of his own eyes, which causes the petrified woman to faint. Of course, the pernicious prankster does not stop there as John also takes off the panties of the newly married woman after she passes out and makes it seem like he molested her so as to play another vengeful joke on her. An uniquely unhinged yet contradictory young man, John becomes a hero the same day by saving the local town hermit shepherd’s daughter from being raped by some bourgeois hunters, which includes pernicious prick Pedro, after showing up on his motorcycle like a knight in shining amour. Pretending to break his arms, which are in ridiculous wing-like casts, John plays a joke on prick Pedro by convincing him to hold his cock whilst pissing in a urinal. Meanwhile, John begins constructing an elaborate torture chamber at his mother’s home, which he has also redecorated entirely with a curious combination of pop-art and gothic themes. John has also filled his house with wild animals, including monkeys, birds, turtles, etc. and when his aunt asks him why he has so many animals, he matter-of-factly states, “I like animals…they're real…they eat when they're hungry…they sleep when they're tired…and they fuck when they're in heat,” thus hinting at what he believes is the soulless, pretentious, repressive, suppressive, and oppressive nature of the bourgeois, especially in regard to his own family. In a postmodern tribute to horror films of the past, John madly plays an organ like The Phantom of the Opera while a black Poe-esque raven sits perched to his side. When John has his aunt and three cousins come over for a special dinner, he arrives at the conclusion that he must take total revenge against his relatives after pleading to Marta, “Give me back my passport…you’ll never hear from me again, I swear it,” and she turns him down.  It becomes quite apparent in this scene that aunt Marta not only wants John's inheritance, but it seems that she is even more concerned about her naughty nephew 'tainting' the reputation of her incestuous family.

 A mental young man with a more bitter than sweet nostalgia for the past, John fanatically watches old homemovies and looks at pictures of his family, reminiscing over singing the French nursery melody “Frère Jacques,” and even sentimentally declaring to one of his cousins, “We were all free then…the past didn’t exist and the future wasn’t a threat. We weren’t trapped in a web.” Unwilling to break with the past, John sets to take revenge against his relatives and his first target is aunt Marta, who John, after nursing her to sleep in her wheelchair by sociopathically acting like a truly empathetic gentleman, unleashes a horde of bees on her in a scene in the spirit of Curtis Harrington’s TV-movie Killer Bees (1974). Not long after, John ties up his most innocent cousin Esther after sexually seducing her and then goes to his room where he finds succubus Maria, who he has presumably had a sexual relationship with in the past as his cousin begins to undress and attempts to seduce him. After rejecting her sexual advancement, bragging about killing her mother, and proudly proclaiming, “I don’t know the difference between right and wrong…and do you know why?!...there is no difference” as a man who has gone beyond good and evil, John slaps and smacks his unclad cousin Maria around and subsequently ties her up. Teresa, the most intelligent and perceptive yet bitchy of the cousins who once made up a complete fabrication about her cousin raping her to help get him committed to a mental institution, is the last of the titillating threesome to be tied up, but he rapes her for real beforehand in an act of perverse poetic justice and she actually begins to enjoy it. With their clothes stripped off, mouths taped shut, and hands and feet bound, the three cousins’ disrobed bodies are hung from meat racks by John, who intends to slaughter them like the bourgeois cattle that they are, but he does not have the gall to go through with it and the girls ultimately escape after Pedro’s wife rings his doorbell to confront the boy about his pigheaded pranks. Not long after, John goes outside and is hit on the head with a shovel by Pedro, who is in cahoots with aunt Marta, who, although disfigured, has surprisingly survived the bee attack. Pedro, aunt Marta, and cousins Maria and Teresa have John tied to the rope of a new church bell, where he will be hanged the next day at a Catholic sermon celebrating the new church. Before he is left to die, John asks his aunt if he really is insane or if she had him setup and she callously responds without the slightest sense of guilt, “A malignant tumor must be cut out. I could not sleep as long as you were alive,” thereupon expressing her lack of guilt for her conspiratorial deceit.  Assumedly dead, John still manages to have the “last laugh” against senior Pedro with the help of the eccentric shepherd whose daughter he saved from being vaginally pillaged from bourgeoisie bastards of the village.  Not not does John have the literal and figurative 'last laugh,' but his murder inspires his sweetest and most rebellious cousin Esther to leave the family and move faraway, thus the anti-hero's spirit lives on in a sense as his cousin vicariously enjoys the freedom he had always sought but failed to obtain.

 Rather ironically yet somewhat karmically, A Bell from Hell director Claudio Guerín fell to his death in real-life from the tower containing same title bell responsible for killing the angst-ridden anti-hero John of his film. Although it will forever remain unknown whether Guerín committed suicide or just simply fell in what was a senseless freak accident, I like to think he took his own his own life as such nihilistic and self-destructive tendencies are certainly reflected in A Bell from Hell via anti-hero John, who although extremely talented and artistic, cannot seem to stop himself from sabotaging his own life as a self-loathing member of the illiberal bourgeois who will do every and anything to uproot himself from his background. Made during the last years of Francisco Franco’s reign in Spain, A Bell from Hell is not only an aesthetically and thematically subversive work, but also a lurid far-left-leaning satire of the sort of ‘repressive’ bourgeois church-going types who helped the Spanish dictator stay in power for so long. The fact that the protagonist of Guerín’s film was institutionalized by his aunt after he ran off to London and became a hippie libertine only goes to show the traditional Catholic background in regard to the 'unconventional' villains of A Bell from Hell. Unfortunately, aside from one other (and ultimately inferior) feature-length film, The House of the Doves (1972), directing a segment from the omnibus film The Challenges (1969), and a couple shorts and one TV show, talented auteur Claudio Guerín never directed any other notable works aside from A Bell from Hell, which is indubitably his magnum opus. After his tragic death via falling from a real-life bell from hell on the last day of shooting A Bell From Hell, Juan Antonio Bardem (incidentally, the uncle of popular actor Javier Bardem), who, like alpha-surrealist Luis Buñuel, faced persecution under Franco’s regime, was responsible for editing/finishing the film. One can only guess where Guerín’s career would have went had he not tragically fallen to his death at the mere age of 33, but few other horror filmmakers can boast directing a horror film so masterful, nicely nuanced, and poetically allegorical as A Bell from Hell, which is undoubtedly one of the most underrated works of not just the 1970s, but in the history of the mostly disposable genre. 

-Ty E

The American Friend

  

Compared to a Fassbinder, Schroeter, or Syberberg, Wim Wenders is, at best, only of minor interest to me when it comes to the great filmmakers of German New Cinema. Whether reading one of his books, listening to him doing an audio commentary or interview, or watching a good a percentage of his films, Wenders puts me to sleep with his plodding meanderings, pseudo-existentialist excursions, and seemingly prosaic and passive personality. Like many filmmakers of his generation, including Volker Schlöndorff who attempted to become French and Werner Schroeter who attempted to be totally cosmopolitan (although I believe his heart was in the Mediterranean!), Wenders, who has oftentimes referenced his steady diet of America culture growing up and did not direct a “Road Movie Trilogy” for no reason, attempted to dissolve his German identity (although, to be fair, he is ½ Dutch) and become an ‘American’ filmmaker, with his transitional film being the neo-noir West German-French co-production The American Friend (1977) aka Der Amerikanische Freund. Loosely based on a then-unpublished manuscript entitled Ripley's Game (although the novel was ultimately released before the film in 1974) written by American psychological thriller novelist Patricia Highsmith, The American Friend would be Wenders’ first international breakthrough and provide him with the reputation that would ultimately land him in Hollywood and enable him to work for Francis Ford Coppola's American Zoetrope studio. Featuring seven distinguished auteur filmmakers (although if one counts the director’s cameo as a bandaged man, it is really eight) playing the roles of criminals, including Nicholas Ray, Dennis Hopper (whose role was originally meant for John Cassavetes), Sam Fuller, Gérard Blain, Daniel Schmid, Jean Eustache, and Peter Lilienthal, The American Friend is a sort ‘filmmaker’s film’ and a cinephiles’ wet dream, especially for diehard fans of American film noir, old school gangster flicks, and French New Wave, which are not exactly my favorite film genres/movements, but all these cinematic ingredients surprisingly come together in Wenders’ quasi-arthouse take on Highsmith’s charismatic anti-hero Tom Ripley. In fact, with the possible exception of Paris, Texas (1984) and to a lesser extent Wings of Desire (1987), The American Friend is the only Wim Wenders flick that stops me from completely disregarding the self-loathing kraut expatriate auteur altogether. 

 Tom Ripley (Dennis Hopper) is a criminally wealthy and completely cunning and charismatic American psychopath living in the North German city of Hamburg and his current scheme involves driving up the bids of forged paintings created by an artist named Derwitt (Rebel Without a Cause director Nicholas Ray, whose slow and miserable death via cancer Wenders morbidly chronicled a couple years later with the 1980 documentary Lightning Over Water), who has faked his own death. While attending an auction for one of the Derwitt fakes, Tom meets a picture framer named Jonathan Zimmermann (Bruno Ganz) who absolutely offends the charismatic conman by stating “I've heard of you” in a derogatory fashion and refusing to shake his hand. Tom learns from a friend that Jonathan is apparently dying of a rare and unmentioned blood disease, hence his rude behavior. Offended by Jonathan’s belligerent behavior; Tom begins plotting a scheme so as to heal his wounded pride. After getting an unexpected visit from a French gangster named Raoul Minot (Gérard Blain), who asks him to murder somebody for him because he owes him a big favor, Tom finally finds a way to payback Jonathan’s hospitality. While Tom tells Raoul, “Listen. I know rock musicians. I know lawyers. I know art dealers, pimps, politicians. But murder? I don't want to be involved. Period,” the American comes up with a conspiracy that will solve both of their problems. Using friends and corrupt doctors, Tom spreads rumors everywhere that Jonathan is dying from the blood disease and that by assassinating a couple of rival criminals for Raoul, the picture framer can secure financial security for his family by working as a contract killer before he kicks the bucket. Since Jonathan is not a professional gangster but a mere picture frame shop owner, Minot also agrees with Tom that he makes for the perfect discrete killer. Although Jonathan initially turns Minot down for the offer to kill for cash, after getting a second opinion (which Minot ultimately has the doctor alter) on his illness at a high tech French hospital, he finally gives in after grief and realizing his family might not be taken care of. Jonathan’s mission is to kill an “American Jew from New Jersey” (Highsmith was no fan of the Jews) named Igraham (Swiss high-camp auteur Daniel Schmid playing a rather unfitting but certainly provocative role) by stalking him around in a French subway and shooting with a gun hidden under his trench coat in what is one of the most intense and iconic scenes of The American Friend. When Jonathan comes back to Hamburg after his successful assassination of a Hebrew gangster, Tom pays him a visit at his picture frame shop and the two begin to develop an unlikely friendship. Of course, Jonathan is totally unaware that sick Yank psychopath set him up to become an assassin and spread the false rumors regarding his supposedly fatal condition. Due to his strange attraction to Jonathan, Tom becomes angered when Minot asks the picture framer to kill another gangster on a train using a mere garrote. Due to the complex and dangerous nature of the assignment (the gangster has multiple bodyguards), Jonathan expects to die while executing the second murder and tells Minot to give his wife Marianne (Lisa Kreuzer) the money. Jonathan nearly botches the job on the train, but luckily Tom randomly appears out of nowhere and helps him dispose of the gangster and his bodyguard. After the assassination assignment is completed, Tom finally has the decency to admit to Jonathan that he setup him up with Minot because he was offended by his behavior when they initially met at the art auction, stating, “Remember that day we were introduced at the auction? You said, "I've heard of you." You said that in a very nasty way.” Tom even rejects the assassination money and when Jonathan asks what he wants instead, he states, “I don’t know what I could possibly want from you….I would like to be your friend…but friendship isn’t, uh, possible.” 

 Ironically, Jonathan begins confiding in Tom—the maniacal criminal mastermind who got the simple picture framer in the dangerous situation in the first place—regarding his problems with his wife, who rightfully believes that her husband was doing more than just going to doctor appointments while on his assassination missions. Jonathan also lets Tom know that he is scared about random anonymous calls he has been receiving at home, which he believes are from the mafia. After stumbling from what is clearly his declining health, Jonathan receives a visit from Minot, who tells him that his flat has been bombed by rival gangsters. Tom tells Jonathan to come to his house and they wait for the gangsters, who are led by an elderly American gangster (played by American cult auteur Samuel Fuller). Jonathan manages to kill a dorky gunman and not long after they spot the old Yankee gangster and his cronies hiding out in an ambulance. Jonathan and Tom manage to kill the gangsters in a somewhat anti-climatic manner (most of the deaths featured in the film are rather 'softcore'), but a problem arises when Marianne somehow magically finds her husband and his American 'friend' at the scene of the crime. A truly devoted wife, Marianne agrees to help her husband and Tom, who is driving the ambulance full of bodies, to the beach so they can dispose of the criminal corpses. Assumedly, to payback Tom for his pack of lies, Jonathan leaves his criminal compatriot at the beach. Unfortunately and quite ironically, Tom’s lies prove to be true as Jonathan dies suddenly while driving at warped speed, almost killing his wife in the process. Of course, in the end, Tom Ripley comes out the situation rather unscathed, but minus one kraut ‘friend.’ 

 A film about a wealthy and psychopathic American who completely corrupts an artistic and kindly family man who does not like “people who buy paintings as an investment,” The America Friend is a cleverly concocted allegorical work about the deleterious effects of America’s occupation, colonization, and continued cultural hegemony over not just Europe/Germany in general, but also Occidental cinema. Indeed, it is no coincidence that Swiss auteur Daniel Schmid, one of the most idiosyncratic filmmakers of his era as the man behind Tonight or Never (1972), La Paloma (1974), and Shadow of Angels (1976), played the first gangster killed in The American Friend as his excess-ridden high-camp auteur pieces could have never been made in America under any circumstances. Additionally, it is also no coincide that American auteur Sam Fuller (Pickup on South Street, Shock Corridor) is the final gangster killed after a long and brutal fall down some stairs as he was a filmmaker whose work was essentially ignored for most of his life and was totally at odds with Hollywood and it was only until his works were praised by European film critics/filmmakers, especially those involved with the French New Wave, that he developed a cult following and his oeuvre was regarded as having actual artistic merit. 

 Undoubtedly, The American Friend, which was incidentally the director’s first film featuring an onscreen death, is easily Wim Wenders’ most action-packed and ‘thrilling’ work, which I guess does not say much considering the filmmaker's initial association with German New Cinema and being the director behind such seemingly endless works as Until the End of the World (1991) aka Bis ans Ende der Welt. In my humble opinion, Wenders, the son of a doctor and a member of the German bourgeoisie, would have had little, if any, interest in film noir and other Hollywood genres had he not been born during 'Germany Year Zero' (1945) and forcibly spoon-fed American cinema growing up as a member of a conquered nation and colonized continent, hence why the director’s work The American Friend is so aesthetically far removed from the genre it pays rather reluctant tribute to as a European film haphazardly disguised as an American genre flick. Ironically, what makes The American Friend most interesting and enthralling, especially for a born turncoat like myself, is its innate Europeanness, which is all the more underscored by its utilization of American stars/filmmakers and Hollywood genre conventions. Of course, the European character of The American Friend is all the more highlighted when compared to the big budget Highsmith adaptation The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999), which instead of feeling like an auteur work like Wenders’ film, seems like a masturbation piece for star Matt Damon to show off his acting talents. In fact, upon first seeing The American Friend about a decade ago, I had not even the slightest idea it was based on the same character as The Talented Mr. Ripley, which might as well have been directed by a robot programmed by Steven Spielberg. 

 Despite Wenders’ insights and negative view of American’s culture-distorting influence on Europe, he decided to go to Hollywood after The American Friend and direct the Francis Ford Coppola produced work Hammett (1982), another homage to American film noir. Despite being a filmmaker himself, Coppola was just as malicious as any Hollywood art-antagonistic producer, only ultimately using 30% of the footage Wenders shot and reshooting the rest of the film himself, thereupon destroying the German auteur's authorship and film in the process. Although he already knew better before he ever arrived in the United States, Wenders stated regarding the artistic disaster of Hammett, “Coppola and I realized it after some time. Two different systems had clashed. I didn’t want to give up my position as an independent director, and Francis wanted to be a producer the way he had pictured it. The American studio system and European auteur film are so different.” Wenders' collaboration with Coppola was so bad that the German filmmaker's celluloid compatriot Rainer Werner Fassbinder even offered to beat the shit out of the director of The Godfather at the 1980 Oscars as payback for destroying Hammett. Of course, it would have made for one of the greatest anecdotes as well as metaphors in film history if Germany's greatest wunderkind auteur gave a beating to one of American’s most overrated industrial filmmakers. That being said, maybe it is about time Wenders directs a loose sequel to The American Friend where a German general arrives in Iraq to train members of the 'multicultural' American army and the GIs ends up killing tons of innocent civilians, as well as their own men in 'friendly fire,' as it would make for a great allegory for how Hollywood aesthetically defiled the kraut auteur’s vision when they remade his work Wings of Desire (1987) as the pile of philistinic and sentimentalist celluloid shit City of Angels (1998) starring Meg Ryan and Nicholas Cage and directed by the cinematic genius behind Casper (1995).  Indeed, only in America could a filmmaker responsible for directing children's films be given the opportunity to remake a commercially successful European arthouse flick.

-Ty E

Harlis

Out of all the great filmmakers of the 1970s belonging to German New Cinema, Dutch-German auteur Robert van Ackeren (Blondie's Number One, The Last Word aka Der letzte Schrei) is probably the director who stands out most as an unwaveringly rampant heterosexual with a naughty and seemingly nihilistic knack for black humor. Originally a prolific cinematographer who was responsible for some of the most important films of German New Cinema, including Werner Schroeter’s Eika Katappa (1969) and Rosa von Praunheim’s gritty celluloid agitprop homo-manifesto It Is Not the Homosexual Who Is Perverse, But the Society in Which He Lives (1971), as well as Roland Klick’s kraut cult classics Bübchen (1968) and Deadlock (1970), van Ackeren would inevitably become a director in his own as the foremost heterosexualist auteur of female-flesh-fetishizing sinema, which is rather ironic considering his past camera work on some of the gayest films of the post-WWII era. Although a proud breeder, van Ackeren was certainly no prude and decadently demonstrated his affinity for lipstick lesbianism with the sardonic and darkly comedic melodrama Harlis (1972) aka The Sensuous Three aka Eine Handvoll Zärtlichkeit starring Fassbinder superstar turned director Ulli Lommel (Love Is Colder Than Death, Blank Generation) and redheaded counter-culture diva Mascha Rabben (Der Bomberpilot, World on a Wire aka Welt am Draht). A sort of snidely satirical Sapphic take on Bob Fosse’s Cabaret (1972) meets Werner Schroeter’s excess-ridden and history-obscuring take on the Third Reich, Der Bomberpilot (1970), Harlis is the melodramatically ridiculous and sometimes raunchy tale of a cross-dressing and SS-uniform-sporting lesbo cabaret dancer who falls in love with a man for the very first time in her entire life, only to spark jealousy and hatred among her sassy Sapphic cabaret troupe, not to mention an even more deleterious situation with her male lover’s brother and sexually-repressed fiancé. Exaggerating the conventions of traditional Hollywood melodramas to the point of sadistic satire with some film noir, Hitchcock, and ‘mad scientist’/James Bond villain conventions thrown in for good measure, Harlis is probably director Robert van Ackeren’s most accessible and least serious yet paradoxically most idiosyncratic and aesthetically ambitious work to date. While a true blue(balled) heterosexual, van Ackeren has demonstrated a keen interest in ball-crushing cuckoldry, male submissiveness, and sexual sadomasochism and Harlis is certainly no exception in expressing these dubious testicle-terrorizing themes, but unlike most of his subsequent films, the director’s Sappho SS S&M comedy makes for a more pleasantly palatable flick due to its lack of seriousness with said themes. A brazen black comedy of the rare hetero-camp variety, Harlis is a film for those who found the Hebraic Teutophobia of Mel Brooks’ The Producers (1968) to be about as humorous as a hernia and the camp value of Fosse’s Cabaret as being just too plain gay and Liza Minnelli as just too plain unbelievable as a sex icon/diva.

Ulli Lommel, with his signature slicked back jet-black hair, plays a somewhat monetary privileged fellow named Raymond and he is enjoying the view at a lesbian cabaret where two beauteous babes named Harlis (Mascha Rabben) and Pera (Gabriele Lafari) are performing as cross-dressing, finely dressed and butt-darting officers of the infamous Schutzstaffel. Although he does not know, Harlis and Pera are not just dance partners but also longtime sexual partners, so when he goes to meet the girls backstage he is in for quite a surprise when he learns that men are “not in fashion.” Pera wastes no time letting Ray know that she thinks that “men are shit,” but Harlis, who has never displayed an interest in men in her entire life, falls head over heels for the tall, dark, and handsome gentleman. A rather assertive broad with a seemingly unquenchable sex drive, Harlis wastes no time asking Raymond “your place or mine?” so they can get straight to business, which rather shocks the masculinity of the novice lesbo-lover, who remarks “usually it’s the man that asks that.” While Harlis finds sex with Raymond to be nothing less than enjoyable, as a longtime lily-licker, she still needs a woman to fulfill her salacious abberosexual appetite, so she continues to maintain her relationship with her longtime girlfriend Pera. Unfortunately, Harlis has a rather pernicious and stereotypically Hebrew-like (in the Nazi propaganda sense, of course!) brother named Prado (German junky/ex-convict Rolf Zacher) who takes an instant dislike to Harlis (although he secretly wants her all to himself), as well as a pesky and pestering girlfriend/fiance named Ria (Heidy Bohlen) who makes the ultimatum, “You better decide soon. I can’t go on this way much longer…either we get married or I’ll buy out your share.” Raymond’s interest in Ria is solely monetary as the two symbolically own a butcher shop/grocery store business, but he is getting tired of being a bloated bourgeois boob and a romantic relationship with Harlis grants him the perfect great escape from a very potentially dreadful marriage. Of course, when sneaky prick Prado walks in on Harlis and Pera rubbing pussies on Raymond’s bed, he wastes no time tying up the two naked girls in bondage and giving his brother the naughty news. A truly ideal cuckold boyfriend, Raymond forces his bastard brother to untie both girls and really couldn't care less if his girlfriend is still a committed carpet-muncher, but when Prado tells his brother’s longtime girlfriend Ria about her cheating boy toy's new lesbo girlfriend, things get ugly for everyone involved. On top of that, Pera makes an ultimatum to Harlis that it is either her or Raymond, so she gives the now-subversive sexual persuasion of heterosexual monogamy a try. Raymond ultimately breaks it off with both his girlfriend Ria and brother Prado and the two odious cast-offs have the brilliant idea to get together (and eventually orchestrate a marriage), in part to spite that ‘little bitch’ Harlis.

Naturally, being a lifelong lesbian, Harlis has some reservations about her newly found quasi-heterosexuality and admits to Raymond, who like a good cuck is applying nail polish to her toenails, that, “My future looks very uncertain now. A man loves a woman who loves women…he tries to teach her to make love like a normal woman but he doesn’t succeed…and she loves him except there are complications…and when he finds her in the embrace of another woman…he wants to die because he is so naïve and too sentimental” but also that, “This is the first time I have ever felt fear…because I’m so happy.” Of course, Harlis should also fear Raymond's extremely jealous and patently perverted brother Prado as he wants the lipstick lesbo all for himself and he is willing to do just about anything to obtain, including committing a number of ungodly crimes. Among other things, Brother Prado sinisterly stalks Harlis and when he catches her, he rapes her from behind after jamming her head in a car window. And when Raymond tries to comfort her, she says it is too late as the damage has already been done.  In a heat of vengeful passion, Ray smacks his pussy brother around like a little girl. While Raymond attempts to make a honest heterosexual real woman out of Harlis, she is still physically and metaphysically enslaved to sourpuss Pera. After having her lesbo crew call in Raymond, Harlis, who is sensually caressing her girlfriend Pera in a provocation fashion, states, “I want you to know the truth about me….I’ll never change,” which absolutely stuns the emotionally brutalized boyfriend. Thoroughly depressed, Ray makes a pathetic attempt at suicide by poisoning himself like a Hollywood Golden Age diva but Harlis walks in on him before he drops dead. Of course, Ria swoops in on wounded dove Raymond while he is recuperating in the hospital, but the lily-licker-loving mensch rebuffs her and gets back with Harlis. Ultimately, Raymond and Pera agree to share Harlis in a sort of seemingly science fiction Ménage à trios comprised of a heterosexual man, lesbian woman, and novice bisexual. When Raymond, Harlis, and Pera join new couple Prado and Ria to celebrate the odious odd couple's wedding, things get a bit ugly, especially after the groom expresses his undying affection for another woman. Jealous of the fact Raymond has Harlis at least ½ to himself, Prado freaks out on his new fiancé Ria due to her ‘normativity,’ stating to her with the uttermost contempt, “Yes, that’s exactly what revolts me…The fact that you’re so ordinary…the fact that you’re like all other women…so conventional, so maternal, so virtuous, so industries, so boring…you’ve got a cash register between your legs.” In the end, Prado strangles his bride to death and Raymond, Harlis, and Pera live happily ever after as a novel cabaret act/sexual trio.  Harlis concludes with a man from the cabaret audience remarking the famous last words, “what times we live.”

Despite winning the prestigious Ernst Lubitsch Award in 1973, Harlis is all but forgotten today, even in its native land of Germany, and has yet to be released in any home media format in the United States. What makes Harlis especially interesting and reflective of contemporary German culture is that director Dutch-Teuton Robert van Ackeren utilized an aberrant assortment of Lubitsch/Mel Brooks/Josef von Sternberg Hebraic humor (with a sprinkling of Hitchcock thrown in for good measure!) to the point where the film seems like a satire of Judaic directed comedies satirizing Germans/Nazis (after all, Hollywood never distinguishes between the two!) and the melancholy score by Gustav Mahler only adds to the maniacal melodramatic absurdity of it all. Of course, Harlis is much darker than the films that it takes influence from as a sort of Über-nihilistic distortion of German history that utilizes Hollywood’s own reality-distorting melodramatic conventions against itself in an uncompromisingly cynical way to the point of recalling the grotesquery of the Le Théâtre du Grand-Guignol. While director Robert van Ackeren would continue to direct sexually explicit and romantically nihilistic themed films, including his best known work A Woman in Flames (1983) aka Die Flambierte Frau—a film about a bourgeoisie housewife turned high-priced hooker—as well two “Heimatfilm porn” flicks, including Deutschland privat - Eine Anthologie des Volksfilms (1980) and Deutschland privat - Im Land der bunten Träume (2007), where he placed ads in newspapers convincing good patriotic German couples to send him their own homemade porn flicks which he turned into kraut cock-and-cunt compilations, he has yet to direct another film as thematically brazen and sardonic as Harlis. Indeed, forget flabby fanboy Kevin Smith’s retarded romantic comedy Chasing Amy (1997), Harlis, at least as far as I know, is the greatest film ever made about what happens when, “A man loves a woman who loves women,” and naturally it does not take itself even remotely serious, even if it features lavish wardrobes, statuesque Sapphos, aesthetically exquisite tableaux. Advertised as “A Larmoyant Comedy,” Harlis provides some of the most charmingly campy fun you will ever have watching rape, suicide, and uxoricide.  For those looking for comic relief from the fact that Deutschland and the rest of Occident is a culturally vapid and seemingly apocalyptic multicultural nightmare where women act like men and vice versa, Harlis is probably your best bet as a totally titillating piece of celluloid tragicomedy created at a time when Ulli Lommel was a great leading man and had yet to be regarded as one of the worst filmmakers who had ever lived and New German Cinema diva Mascha Rabben had yet to fall off the face of earth.

-Ty E