Forbidden Divas: The Four Angels of the (Eurotrash) Apocalypse

The return of David Melville Wingrove —

“To me, you aren’t a man. You’re therapy!” – Ursula Andress, Anyone Can Play

If somebody told you they had seen a film starring Honeychile Ryder, Queen Catherine de Medici, the Goddess Minerva and Eva Kant, you might be forgiven for thinking they had lost the plot. But the key to understanding Italian films of the 60s is to realise that anything could happen and – at some point – probably did. A sort of Desperate Housewives all’italiana, Anyone Can Play (1968) is a gaudy and camp-tastic bauble of a sex farce about four friends who go to colourful and eccentric lengths to get a slice of la dolce vita.

According to the credits, our four leading ladies have other names. One of them is Ursula Andress, the archetypal Bond Girl from Doctor No – and star of later masterworks like Stick ‘Em Up, Darlings and The Mountain of the Cannibal God. Another is Virna Lisi, an Italian sex bomb who proved her mettle some decades later and won the Best Actress prize at Cannes for La Reine Margot. A third is Claudine Auger, a former Miss France who was cast in Le Testament d’Orphée by Jean Cocteau – largely if not entirely for her resemblance to an Ancient Greek goddess. (She too became a Bond Girl, to lesser effect, in Thunderball.) Last but by no means least is Marisa Mell, the star of Ken Russell’s first movie French Dressing and the sexy sidekick to a master criminal in Danger: Diabolik.

A dazzling array, I grant you. The question is…what are they actually to do? Not one of these ladies was used as much more than window dressing in the 60s. (Or, in the case of Andress, as a living and breathing work of art who seemed to be forbidden to act on pain of death.) It feels heartening – perhaps even vaguely subversive – to see them all cast together in a film that trades not only on their looks (which are breathtaking) but also on their sly wit and deadpan humour, their campy flair for self-parody and drop-dead sense of style. It is a rare achievement to make a frivolous and wholly inconsequential movie.  Especially one that does not insult its audience or the people who appear in it. But that is what Anyone Can Play contrives not to do.

It starts with Auger as Esmeralda, a strait-laced provincial housewife whose husband is constantly away on business. She works off her frustrations by racing cars at high speed and has her eye on the Monte Carlo Rally. It would be lying to say she did not also have her eye on a hunky mechanic – but then many a successful marriage is founded on lies. Bored with her spouse and his inattention, she decides to go to Rome and pay a call on her three close friends from way back. All of them live in sumptuous apartments that have a panoramic view of the Colosseum out the window. (In fact, it looks suspiciously like the same one.) Yet otherwise, their lives are in a truly parlous state…

Anna (Andress) is suffering from insomnia because she has a Nightmare on Elm Street-style terror of falling asleep. Every time she does, she has visions not of Freddy Krueger but of a hairy, muscular brute who chases her through a psychedelic glass labyrinth while she is naked apart from a long grey chinchilla coat. Hers is the sort of conundrum that Freud never encountered or, at least, never had the imagination to write about. One afternoon she is driving and falls asleep at the wheel. The traffic cop who comes to fine her (Mario Adorf) is – BINGO! – a dead ringer for the man in her dream. She is happily married to a handsome husband (Brett Halsey) but what’s a girl to do? As Oscar Wilde said, “the one way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.”

Her pal Luisa (Lisi) has fallen prey to blackmailers due to her extramarital indiscretions. A petty crook (Lando Buzzanca) has an audio tape of her making love to a strange man in a car. (Fear not, the car was parked this time.) The challenge she faces is twofold. First, to come up with some hush money before her husband (Jean-Pierre Cassel) can find out. She resorts to staging a burglary of her own home. Second, to work out which of her multiple lovers the man in questions actually was. For a lady with such a hectic sex life, that is more easily said than done. Lisi’s acting is by far the most polished of the four; she proves herself a high-style farceuse in the mould of Carole Lombard or Myrna Loy.

The most miserable of the four is Paola (Mell) who is married to a stuffy conservative politician (Frank Wolff). Her husband forbids her to have fun in any form – which is why, perhaps, she jumps at a chance to perform a striptease at a high-class charity concert. In a scorchingly erotic sequence, she parades about in a voluminous white mink cloak while unseen men reach out their arms from backstage and peel off her gloves, her stockings, her shoes. It is all in a good cause, naturally. But what will her husband say when her antics threaten to open up a whole new career? Mind you, even he cannot pretend the money would not come in handy…

The one weakness in Anyone Can Play is that its director Luigi Zampa – who also made the temptingly titled Tigers in Lipstick – does not show enough of these formidable women together as a team. Just think what might happen if they met up on the Via Veneto to knock back some Negronis and swap stories about the general inadequacy of men. This feels like a missed opportunity and it all plays a shade too much like one of those portmanteau films that enjoyed such a vogue in the 60s, only one where the editor dropped some LSD and accidentally spliced their four stories together.

Yet the film is still a delight. Given half a chance, any one of its leading ladies could knock out the cast of Desperate Housewives or Sex and the City with one elegantly gloved hand tied – with a Bulgari bracelet, naturally – behind her shapely Fendi-clad back. They did not let just anybody become a star in those days.

David Melville

Forbidden Divas RIP: Help Me, Rhonda!

David Melville Wingrove’s latest Forbidden Divas piece seems like a suitable way to close out The Late Show for 2020. Though the film itself is not a particularly late one in its star’s life (or that of its director or anyone else), it is also an obituary, and you can’t get any later than THAT.

FORBIDDEN DIVAS RIP

Help Me, Rhonda!

“It was to save your life that I became…what I am”

~ Rhonda Fleming, Queen of Babylon

A weird numinous glow seems to emanate from movies you loved as a child. When I was eight years old, I thought that Queen of Babylon (1954) was quite simply the most wonderful film I had ever seen. It was a flashy, splashy, trashy Italian epic about a feisty red-haired shepherd girl named Semiramis (Rhonda Fleming) who rose to become queen of a vast empire.  Not that she was driven by anything as crass as a lust for power. It was true she got married to the evil King Assur. But she only did it to save the man she loved – a dashing rebel leader named Amahl (Ricardo Montalban) – from being tossed into a giant swimming pool and eaten alive by hungry crocodiles. This was my introduction to the fact that any and all relationships involve some form of compromise.

Watching Queen of Babylon today, it is hard to imagine a movie better calculated to appeal to a gay eight-year-old. The wardrobe worn by Rhonda Fleming is the sort a drag artiste would kill for. She does an erotic dance before the king in a bikini made of aluminium foil. It is eerily similar to the one worn by Ursula Andress in The Tenth Victim (1965). OK, so she stops short of firing bullets out of her bra. But she still makes short work of a gorgeous half-naked slave boy, who has been placed in the middle of the dance floor for just that purpose. She marries the king in a crown that looks like a silver filigree flower pot perched on her head. The fate of empires may hang in the balance, but this movie is less about politics than about fashion. That can only ever be a good thing.

An actress who never quite scaled the heights of Hollywood stardom, Rhonda Fleming is the ideal protagonist for a movie like Queen of Babylon. That is because her acting is never marred by subtlety or underplaying of any sort. Her every pose and expression is designed to fill a vast Technicolor screen. Her eyes blaze imperiously in every close-up. At each crisis – and one arises, reliably, at intervals of five minutes or less – she raises an arm in front of her face to indicate shock. She has remarkably beautiful hands, with long and sinuous fingers. But she repeats this gesture so often and so energetically that we fear she is about to gnaw her arm off at the elbow. This bothered me not the slightest as a child. After all, what was the point of acting if nobody could see you act?

So bowled over was I by this bravura display that Rhonda became, albeit briefly, my Absolute Number One Favourite Star. She was supplanted a year or so later by Brigitte Bardot in Viva Maria (1965). I was desperate to see Rhonda in other movies – but, alas, by the 70s she and the films she made had fallen out of favour. She had drifted into doing guest spots in TV cop shows or ‘witnessing’ on evangelical Christian broadcasts about how Jesus had helped her through her countless divorces and remarriages. Like her friend Jane Russell, she was a devout Born Again Christian and a staunch right-wing Republican. But she seemed a remarkably nice lady for all that. To put it bluntly, Rhonda Fleming talking about Jesus was more fun than most other people doing most other things.

It took me years to catch up on the rest of her career. Born in Los Angeles in 1925, she was perhaps the only female star to be discovered by the infamous gay super-agent Henry Willson. (She seemed like a girl who would have baulked at sleeping her way to the top; with Willson as her agent, it is a safe bet she did not have to.) Her debut at the age of 19 was as a mental patient in the Alfred Hitchcock thriller Spellbound (1945) Her character was meant to be ‘a nymphomaniac’ – and Rhonda confessed years later she had not the faintest idea what that word meant. She went home, looked it up in the dictionary and was profoundly shocked. But she played the role with undeniable gusto. Along with the Salvador Dalí dream sequence, Rhonda Fleming is the liveliest thing in that film.

She played a few more minor roles in major movies – she appears, for a few minutes each, in The Spiral Staircase (1946) and Out of the Past (1947) – but it was major roles in minor movies that made Rhonda Fleming a legend. She was Cleopatra in the riotous no-budget Serpent of the Nile (1953). Even a dance by Julie Newmar, with her body painted gold all over, could not quite upstage Rhonda. Her greatest roles were in two films by Allan Dwan. In the homoerotic Western Tennessee’s Partner (1955) she is the madam of an establishment called The Marriage Market. It is decorated in red plush and gilt and is all too obviously a whorehouse. In the Technicolor film noir Slightly Scarlet (1956) she plays a nice upstanding girl with a trashy nympho sister (Arlene Dahl). As the film progresses, we learn that the ‘bad’ girl is really not all that bad – and that the ‘good’ girl is really not that good!

Her role in Queen of Babylon is both a ‘good’ girl and a ‘bad’ girl depending on the scene. Hence it is more complex than that of her co-star Ricardo Montalban. The devastatingly handsome Mexican actor is given little to do apart from shake his great big sword in defiance of tyranny. Then he gets captured, stripped to the waist, tied up and tortured in as many sadistic and photogenic ways as possible. I can think of no more satisfying use for his talents. The director Carlo Ludovico Bragaglia lays on the depravity and gore to a degree Hollywood at that time would not have dared. The mass catfight in a dungeon rivals the Sapphic excess of Prisoner of Cell Bock H. And if Ben-Hur (1959) is famous for its chariot race…well, this movie has a scene where monkeys race around a banquet hall in chariots pulled by dwarfs. Dare I confess I enjoyed this race a whole lot more?

Somehow I doubt Rhonda Fleming talked much about Queen of Babylon in later years. When she flew to Rome to make it, she had not yet learned a lady does not do anything she cannot reminisce about at Republican Party conventions. Her last years were dedicated to charity and good works and her death in 2020 – following those of Olivia de Havilland, Juliette Gréco and Lucia Bosè – made me fear that almost nobody I like will be left alive by the end of this epically awful year. Queen of Babylon is the sort of movie little gay boys dream about in their sleep. It says that you too may one day grow up to be a queen, if only you wish hard enough.

David Melville

Forbidden Divas RIP

Lucia Bosè’s death earlier this year wasn’t much publicised in the UK — David Melville Wingrove discovered it months later, and wrote this beautiful piece. Some more months later, I’m finally publishing it, with apologies.

Imitations of Lives

“There are many ways to commit suicide and still go on living.”

~ Lucia Bosè, Of Love and Other Solitudes

There are stars whose off-screen life is a thing entirely apart from their on-screen image. Then there are stars whose lives on and off the screen seem to intersect in uncannily intimate ways. The Italian (and later Spanish) actress Lucia Bosè was emphatically a star of the second type. In 1967, the whole of Spain was agog at the break-up of her marriage to Luis Miguel Dominguín, the country’s most illustrious matador. Two years later Bosè starred in Of Love and Other Solitudes (1969) – a bleak and anguished drama of marital dysfunction and break-up. This was not so much a case of Art Imitates Life as one of Life or Art, What’s The Difference?

For most of the 50s and 60s, Bosè and Dominguín had been the premier glamour couple of Franco’s Spain. They lived in a palatial villa, had three gorgeous children and their inner circle included Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, Jean Cocteau and, more ominously, the dictator General Franco himself. “I can’t say anything bad about Franco,” Bosè remarked years later. “To me he was just a normal man. But my husband was more franquista than Franco, in any case.” It is comments like that which reveal the marriage was not a happy one. There can be no doubt that Bosè married her bullfighter for love. But as the years wore on, she felt increasing dismay at his right-wing politics, his compulsive womanising and his stubborn refusal to allow his wife to work. It did not help that she hated bullfighting and nothing would induce her to attend a corrida.

Anyone could see the couple came from radically different worlds. Lucia Bosè had been born in great poverty on a farm outside Milan. She had little if any formal education and had to work from the age of twelve. As a teenage girl, she survived the Allied bombing and saw the corpses of Benito Mussolini and his mistress, Clara Petacci, hanging upside down in the main city’s square. “I learned that horrible things happen every day,” she said. “All you can do is pull yourself together and keep going.” By the age of sixteen, she landed a job behind the counter at Galli, the city’s most elegant patisserie. One day a dashing older man walked in, took one look at the girl and declared she ought to be in movies. The name of this man was Luchino Visconti. It appears he had no ulterior motives; he was gay and had eyes at the time for his young and handsome assistant, Franco Zeffirelli. But he took Bosè under his wing and groomed her systematically into a star.

At first, Visconti had plans to star her opposite Gérard Philipe in a film called A Tale of Poor Lovers. But the funding fell apart so he introduced his protégée instead to Michelangelo Antonioni. She became that director’s first muse and starred for him in Chronicle of a Love (1950) and The Lady without Camellias (1953). She went on to work for other European auteurs, notably Juan Antonio Bardem in Death of a Cyclist (1955) and Luis Buñuel in Cela S’Appelle L’Aurore (1956). This was the career she gave up in 1955 in order to marry Dominguín and lead, essentially, the life of an upper-class Spanish housewife. At the time, she assured the world’s press that her marriage was worth every sacrifice. (One can assume Dominguín was phenomenally good at something apart from killing bulls!) But after twelve years, Bosè decided enough was enough and made her break for freedom. She demanded – and won – sole custody of her children and became the first woman in Spain since the Civil War to be legally granted a divorce.

The events in Of Love and Other Solitudes are in no way as dramatic as these. María and her husband Alejandro (Carlos Estrada) are a well-heeled couple who live in a villa on the outskirts of Madrid. He is an economist and university professor; she is an artist who works in stained glass. Her job, of course, is symbolic. (Be warned this is one of those movies where literally everything is symbolic of something.)  The art of stained glass is not primarily the art of creating anything new or even of reshaping objects in a new way. It consists almost entirely of altering the light in which things appear, of making them look new when in fact they are not. The couple have a son and daughter and a sizable domestic staff. But their house, with its long wood-panelled corridors and walls of clear glass, looks more like an expensive hotel than a family home.

The most annoying thing about Alejandro is that he does not do any of the things that bad husbands in movies traditionally do. There is no reason to believe he is cheating on his wife. Apart from one feeble effort to chat up a girl at his office, he seems to lack the imagination or the energy an affair would require. This is not so much a bad marriage as one that has gone stale. The husband and the wife have simply run out of things to say to one another, assuming they said much in the first place. María consults a psychologist who tells her: “Everyone who gets married is convinced their marriage will be different from the others – and then it isn’t.” What is interesting in this film is not the drama (there is virtually none) but the arid bourgeois lifestyle it evokes. Alejandro and María lead superficially modern lives, but in a country where social and religious attitudes have changed hardly at all since the Middle Ages.

María is the one character who seems in any way aware of this disjunction. Her family background is that of the pro-Franco upper class. A full-size portrait of Franco hangs just inside the front door of her parents’ house. In the next room, in a glass display case, are her father’s medals from the Civil War. She has an obscure sense this is not the world she belongs in – and expresses it in odd and somewhat childish ways. On one wall in her studio hangs a poster of Theda Bara in Cleopatra. In World War I this star was Middle America’s image of the Vamp, the Temptress, the morally and sexually transgressive Apostle of Sin. But it now takes a great deal of naïveté to see Theda Bara as threatening or subversive in any way. She entirely lacks the sophistication and sexual autonomy of the silent Italian divas – most notably, that of Francesca Bertini whom Bosè oddly resembles.

With her vast and haunted dark eyes, her ivory skin and her lustrous torrent of black hair, Lucia Bosè has all the allure of the silent divas and then some. There are stray moments in Of Love and Other Solitudes where she suggests Leonardo da Vinci’s portrait of the Mona Lisa – who has casually stepped out of her frame and deigned to wander about among mere mortals. There are other moments where we notice her chunky and ungainly hands, her way of walking that is at once elegant and strangely awkward. Details like this do not destroy the illusion; they only make us like her more. This film proved a succès d’estime for Bosè and her writer-director Basilio Martin Patino. She followed it with a string of increasingly odd movies. In Arcana (1972) she plays a witch who spits live toads out of her mouth. In La Messe Dorée (1975) she is a socialite who hosts an orgy based on the Roman Catholic mass and winds up giving a blow-job to her son. Was it entirely an accident that her ex-husband’s friend General Franco dropped dead not long after?

She survived into old age as a truly glorious eccentric. At eighty she sported bright blue hair and a designer punk wardrobe and said she had every intention of living to 105. She appeared occasionally in movies but her true passion was a museum she opened to display her art collection, which was made up entirely of images of angels. Her closest companion was her son Miguel Bosé, Spain’s first out gay pop star and the transvestite Femme Letal in the Pedro Almodóvar film High Heels (1991). One almost wishes Almodóvar had starred his mother in a flashy, trashy remake of Travels with My Aunt or Auntie Mame. She could have played either or both roles to perfection and would, in fact, have barely needed to act.

Lucia Bosè passed away in March, 2020 due to complications arising from Covid-19. She was the first famous person in any country to fall ill and die in what would become a global pandemic. Her life was spent knowing that terrible things happen every day and the one choice we all have is to pull ourselves together and keep going. In the world as it is today, that stands as a legacy in itself.

IN MEMORIAM LUCIA BOSÈ (MILAN 1931-SEGOVIA 2020)

David Melville