Freud and Fumetti

I like Corrado Farina’s obscure first film, THEY’VE CHANGED THEIR FACES, even more than his better-known cult second, BABA YAGA, but the latter is still an impressive oddity, attempting to combine sex, kink, fantasy and politics and succeeding as a kind of surreal snapshot of seventies youth, incorporating traces of BLOW UP, gialli, soft porn and youth protest. All this and a camera which kills, and Carroll Baker as a lesbian dominatrix. You can’t complain you’ve been shortchanged.

The source material is Guido Crepax’ perverse comic books devoted to Valentina, a lanky beauty with a bob, inspired by Louise Brooks who was apparently delighted to become a bdsm graphic novel porn star in her sixties. She had previously become a cartoon heroine in the Dixie Dugan strip of the twenties and thirties, which were maybe slightly racey but nothing like this. (In a striking bit of cross-medium pollination, Brooks became Dixie who became Alice White in two feature films inspired by the strip, the recently-rediscovered GIRL and SHOW GIRL IN HOLLYWOOD.)

Valentina later became a Berlusconi TV series, worthless like every cultural outpouring of the bunga-bunga sleazemaster, but here she’s Isabelle de Funes, niece of Louis, with bulbous manga-babe eyes and loose, fleshy lips making her something like an elongated Barbara Steele, but minus the fierceness. She’s an impossibly cute, rather sympathetic presence — a great shame this was the last feature for both her and her director.

A lesser shame is that the film can’t quite connect the political musings of the main characters with the elusive plot — a lot less elliptical and dreamlike than the freeform meanderings of the comic, but still pretty fluid and free-floating. But where the various interests of the filmmaker do converge, there are glimpses of a blend of arthouse and grindhouse which could have conceivably given rise to a whole new form of Italian cinema.

Kink-wise, the movie has a real enthusiasm for costume-box dress-up, but uses Crepax’s uniform fetish to evoke fascism and state menace, which hovers in the background throughout, connected to the main plot by obscure, irrational tendrils. It’s often hard to know how to treat perverse fantasies which seem sinister but aren’t really, as they’re only fantasies — in film, an innately fantastical medium, a bondage fantasy has as much reality as anything else, and can seem too “heavy” — I think BELLE DE JOUR gets this right, because it establishes a boundary between the real and unreal, then artfully blurs it.

BABA YAGA contains a whipping scene played like straight horror and more disturbing than erotic, for all the stylised red paint slashes. Maybe Valentina needed more of Barbarella’s “Whatever” approach to sexual situations, which the comic book character, essentially a horny sleepwalker, certainly has.

Dixie

Alice White and her… zombie beatnik chorus?

When you’re feeling poorly, a pre-code can be a tonic, or else it can be about all you can handle. Although some of them are rather spicy, and some (THE BOWERY) even toxic, so you have to watch out. Fiona had a very good week, during which we ventured out of early thirties Hollywood and ran L’AUBERGE ROUGE, but then she’s had a couple of bad days so we ran for cover into the soothing crackle of Vitaphone.

A SHOW GIRL IN HOLLYWOOD is a 1930 Warners dramedy, or dromedary if you will, with an interesting history. The character of Dixie Dugan sprang from two novels by J.P. McEvoy (IT’S A GIFT), was adapted into a comic strip with Louise Brooks serving as model for the showgirl’s design, and then found her way to a Gershwin-scored Broadway play (Ruby Keeler in the lead), and thence to the screen, embodied by Alice White in 1928’s SHOW GIRL (which I haven’t managed to see) and its sequel.

Gargantuan clown weeps chorines: a staple of entertainment in the ’30s.

This being 1930 means the studio with the most pre-code paprika hadn’t quite hit its stride — Mervyn LeRoy directs, but he lets everybody take their time (even Herman Bing, though playing a character called Bing, just does not bring the Bing), and everybody being somewhat miscast and the material being somewhat thin, the film kind of just lays there. Still, it’s interesting.

One reason for this is the behind-the-scenes stuff, which we’ve been wallowing in lately. Though the movie isn’t particularly abrasive in its portrayal of Hollywood, it does feature a musical number interrupted by shots taken from inside one of the soundproof booths, which means they must have crammed TWO cameras in there, one filming the other. The motor whir is pretty loud, alright. This fine post covers most of what I’d have said about that.

Another reason is Alice White, who fascinates. She has natural oomph, and it’s not that she can’t act, exactly — she just seems to not know what’s going on around her most of the time. Her quicksilver shifts of facial expression are enticing, but not strictly tied to anything in the scene, they’re more like hats being tried on for size. A more intelligent performance might have focused and injected fizzle into what are often quite flat scenes. It’s not really clear if Dixie is a gold-digger, a ditz, or what, and White’s reading of the snappier lines is uncertain enough to suggest Dixie is repeating things she’s overheard, rather than minting her own witticisms.

Third reason is Blanche Sweet, in one of only three early talkies she made, rather cruelly cast as a past-her-prime actress. “I’m thirty-two,” she confesses, though Sweet was actually a little older. Still, point taken — Hollywood’s search for the new, the young, is a merciless thing. Sweet had a perfectly good voice, in fact she made her living in radio and on the stage when the movies stopped calling, so her decline can be credited purely to the changing of fashion. I guess when movies began yapping, people were excited to see their favourite stars give voice, but less-celebrated players couldn’t compete with imports from the New York stage or elsewhere, who could be marketed as the next big thing.