Sometimes Aunt Martha Does Dreadful Things (1971)

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Usually, when I don’t fully know what to make of a movie, I turn to the Bonus Material footnotes of physical media to search for context.  It turns out some movies cannot be helped.  The regional horror oddity Sometimes Aunt Martha Does Dreadful Things sets itself up to be the Floridian take on Psycho, but instead delivers a domestic melodrama where everyone’s love language is belligerent screaming.  It’s an obvious work of transgression, but also a mystery as to what, exactly, it aims to transgress – recalling other schlock bin headscratchers like Something Weird, The Astrologer, Bat Pussy, and Fleshpot on 42nd Street.  Is it a seedy, Honeymoon Killers-style thriller about two sexual degenerates on the run, or a Sirkian melodrama about a gay couple who’ve been shamed by society into fugitive status, one hiding in drag for cover?  Who’s to say?  All I can report is that David DeCoteau’s commentary track on my outdated DVD copy from Vinegar Syndrome told me more about David DeCoteau than it told me about the movie he was contextualizing.

Sometimes Aunt Martha Does Dreadful Things is like a hagsploitation version of Psycho where Norman Bates never fully gets out of hag drag, stealing a good job away from aging stars like Crawford & Davis.  Or maybe it’s more the hippiesploitation version of Psycho where Norman’s personae are split into two separate bodies: a drugged-out free lover who becomes murderously violent whenever he gets in bed with women, and his fellow fugitive sex partner who poses in drag as the hippie’s aunt to avoid neighborhood suspicion of their sordid romance.  Aunt Martha claims to despise the Mrs. Doubtfire scenario he’s trapped himself in, but when in private never fully undresses into boymode – often taking obvious, lingering pleasure in the feeling of silk & stockings on his balding, hairy body.  When he has to “clean up” the messes (i.e., kill the sexual partners) of his younger, sexually confused lover, the violence only flashes in quick jabs of psychedelic screen-prints & film-negatives.  Mostly, we just spend time pondering what’s the deal shared between the two violent, oddly intimate men at the film’s center, a question one-time director Thomas Casey has never satisfyingly answered.

Despite being an expert in the field of low-budget queer transgression himself, David DeCoteau doesn’t have many answers either.  He spends most of his commentary-track conversation with Mondo-Digital’s Nathaniel Thompson expressing the same exasperation with what Thomas Casey was going for with this confusing provocation, often sidetracking into rapid-fire lists of other low-budget, transgressive queer ephemera from the 1970s that might help make sense of it in context.  It’s a great listen if you’d like to hear about David DeCoteau’s childhood memories about watching The Boys in the Band on TV, or if you’re looking to pad out your Letterboxd watchlist with genre obscurities Sins of Rachel, Widow Blue, and The Name of the Game is Kill. Unfortunately, it also features a lot of DeCoteau complaining that “It’s hard to be politically correct in genre filmmaking” (which is probably true) while casually indulging in some good, old-fashioned transphobic slurs and reminiscing over which trans characters in film have fooled him before their gender situation was revealed vs. which were immediately clockable.  In short, it’s a mixed bag, but it says more about DeCoteau than it says about Aunt Martha.

To Vinegar Syndrome’s credit, they’ve since updated that 2015 release with a Blu-ray edition that replaces DeCoteau’s commentary with a new track by Ask Any Buddy‘s Elizabeth Purchell, a trans film historian with extensive knowledge about Floridasploitation schlock.  If I get any more curious about how to fully make sense of Aunt Martha, I’ll have to upgrade my copy to hear that alternate perspective.  I have no regrets getting to know David DeCoteau better in the version I already own, though, since it’s always been hard to tell exactly how passionate & knowledgeable he is about outsider-art filmmaking in his own work, which can be a little . . . pragmatic, depending on who’s signing the checks.  Besides, it might be for the best that I can’t fully make sense of this one-off novelty from a mystery filmmaker.  As much as I love the rituals & minor variations of genre filmmaking, it’s probably for the best that not every low-budget provocation can be neatly categorized, or even understood.

-Brandon Ledet

Joe’s Apartment (1996)

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Ari Aster’s sprawling nightmare comedy Beau is Afraid earned a lot of automatic comparisons to the insular storytelling style of Charlie Kaufman last year, since Kaufman’s signature works like Being John Malkovich and Synecdoche, New York tend to follow a lonely man’s journey into his own mind similar to the one Joaquin Phoenix takes in Beau.  Looking back, maybe the works of undersung auteur John Payson should’ve been cited in those discussions as well, since the grotesque caricature of New York City that Phoenix navigates in Beau is Afraid is much more similar to the crime-ridden, roach-infested NYC that Jerry O’Connell navigates in Payson’s sole directorial feature Joe’s Apartment.  O’Connell begins his journey as a fresh bus station arrival who’s mugged by three separate, sequential assailants as soon as he steps off his Greyhound chariot.  Outside the bus depot, he is horrified by the discovery of a bloodied corpse on the sidewalk that his fellow, jaded New Yorkers ignore as they scurry about from one hostile confrontation to another.  His walk-and-talks down city streets are frequently interrupted by deadly shootouts between generic, nameless cops & robbers.  Once he lands a place to live, he is tormented by two crooked, roided-out landlords who spend their entire day trying to lethally “evict” him so they can spike the rent.  And, of course, his apartment is filled to the brim with billions upon billions of cockroaches, as every NYC apartment is.  It’s the same paranoid, misanthropic view of Big City urban living that plagues the perpetually afraid Beau of Aster’s film, which equates picking up anxiety meds from the pharmacy across the street to walking through a warzone.  I can’t recall ever seeing anything that explosively chaotic in a Charlie Kaufman picture, since those tend to be controlled & self-serious to the point of stuffiness.

There are a couple very good reasons you won’t often see John Payson’s magnum opus cited alongside the works of Charlie Kaufman, no matter how applicable.  For one, not many people bothered to watch Joe’s Apartment upon its initial release in 1996, when it only earned $4 million box office off of a $13 million budget.  Moreover, it’s also just a deeply silly film, and I’m mostly just goofing off by bringing it up.  I have not yet mentioned that the cockroaches that flood the titular apartment are self-aware beings who sing & dance their way through this roach-themed comedy musical, chirping life advice at O’Connell’s Joe in sped-up Alvin & The Chipmunks speak.  This is the kind of movie that earns a “Roach Songs By” credit in the opening scroll, effectively parodying the nice-guy-in-the-big-mean-city narrative tropes that link it to Beau.  It’s less akin to the headier comedy of a Charlie Kaufman or an Ari Aster than it is a Minions prototype for people who are intimately familiar with the taste of bongwater.  And yet, by the time one of the roaches is introduced as a “cousin from Texas” who lassos and rides a housecat out of the apartment like a rodeo cowboy, I found myself having a great time with it.  Despite all of the slime & grime that coats every surface of Joe’s Apartment, it’s a weirdly wholesome film.  Forever in hiding because humans tend to “smush first and ask questions later”, the roaches decide to reveal their ability to converse with Joe because they love how naturally gross he is.  They feel affinity with the slovenly behavior of the standard-issue Straight Boy slacker, who leaves half-emptied food containers out for the little pests as he sleeps away the daylight fully clothed – body unbathed, clothes unwashed.  When he’s understandably freaked out by their decision to speak to him, they attempt to win him over with song & dance.  It’s cute.  Absolutely fucking disgusting, but cute.

For what Payson may lack in maturity of subject, he more than makes up for in attention to craft.  At the time of release, the big deal about Joe’s Apartment was its innovative use of CGI, which allowed the cockroaches to sing & dance in surprisingly convincing close-ups (an effect created by the animation studio Blue Sky in their first feature film, pre-Ice Age).  The computer-animated shots only account for a small portion of the film’s multi-media approach, though, and more traditional modes of cockroach animation are just as frequently deployed: stop-motion, collage, puppetry, time-elapse photography, etc.  Joe’s Apartment started as a short-film visual experiment in MTV’s psychedelic Liquid Television program.  When it was later developed into a feature film, it was released as the very first project under the MTV Films brand, predating even Beavis & Butthead Do America.  As a result, the movie includes constant cultural markers to posit Joe as a hip, aspirational slacker for a young audience to look up to – having him read Love & Rockets comics when he should be job hunting, decorating his apartment with Sonic Youth posters, and overstuffing the soundtrack with wall-to-wall needle drops to sell tie-in CDs at the shopping mall outside your local multiplex.  The thing is that Payson’s style is inherently cool, though, as long as you have the stomach for it.  When Joe is mugged at the Greyhound station, the camera takes the first-person-POV of the criminals’ fists as they repeatedly pound into his face.  Later, presumably to save money on costly CGI shots, the roaches puppeteer random objects in his apartment to give the production a grimy Pee-wee’s Playhouse effect. I begged my parents to take me to Joe’s Apartment when it first came out because it looked so cool, but they said I was too young to see it.  In retrospect, I realize they just didn’t want to sit through the CGI cockroach musical, which is fair, but I feel like they (and most of America) really missed out on a Gen-X comedy gem.

-Brandon Ledet

Lagniappe Podcast: Tightrope (1984)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss the New Orleans-set Clint Eastwood thriller Tightrope (1984).

00:00 Welcome

01:15 Columbo (1971 – 2003)
03:45 The Not-So-New 52
07:22 American Fiction (2023)
13:20 Stalker (1979)
24:45 Party Girl (1958)
29:55 White Heat (1949)

35:45 Tightrope (1984)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Podcast Crew

The Not-So-New 52: Justice League — Crisis on Two Earths (2010)

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Welcome to The Not-So-New 52, your digital Swampflix comic book (adaptation) newsstand! Starting in 2007, DC Comics and Warner Premiere entered the direct-to-home-video market with animated features, mostly in the form of adaptations of well-received event comics or notable arcs. This Swampflix feature takes its name from the 2011 DC relaunch event “The New 52,” and since there are (roughly) fifty-two of these animated features as of the start of 2024, Boomer is watching them in order from the beginning with weekly reviews of each. So, get out your longboxes and mylar sleeves and get ready for weekly doses of grousing, praise, befuddlement, recommendations, and occasional onomatopoeia as we get animated for over fifteen years of not-so-new comic cartoons. 

After the personal disappointment that was Superman/Batman: Public Enemies, I was pleasantly surprised to see that not only was the next movie on the docket one that I had seen before, but that it was one that I unabashedly love: Crisis on Two Earths. This one and the film that follows, Under the Red Hood (which I love so much it was the Movie of the Month for May 2018), are back-to-back great films, and the perfect way to wash out the lingering bad taste of Wonder Woman and Public Enemies. An interesting bit of trivia is that this narrative was originally supposed to be produced years earlier as a film that would bridge the gap between Justice League and its follow-up/continuation Justice League Unlimited, both of which I’m fond of. At the end of the former, longtime teammate Hawkgirl was revealed to be a mole for an invasion of Earth by her people, the Thanagarians, before she ultimately chooses to side with the people she was sent to spy upon, and the final arc saw the destruction of the JL’s “Watchtower” headquarters. At the beginning of the latter, the titular team of titans have a newly expanded roster (hence the “unlimited” moniker) and a new Watchtower base, the design of which is the same as the one that appears under construction at the end of this film. From this and other details, it’s easy to see where this would slot in between those TV seasons, but there’s enough that’s different that the viewer is still in for some surprises. 

Our film opens with two men we know as villains, Lex Luthor and the Joker (here known as The Jester) breaking into a facility and stealing a small piece of equipment, pursued by two shadowy figures. The Jester sacrifices himself to give Luthor time to escape, giving himself up to two silhouetted figures who appear to be Hawkgirl and Martian Manhunter, but who are revealed as twisted versions of the same. Luthor then transports himself to “our” world, where he immediately turns himself over to the police and demands to speak to Superman. We quickly learn that this version of Luthor comes from a world where the characters we know as heroes are instead replaced by villainous versions: in place of Superman (Mark Harmon), Ultraman (Brian Bloom) runs the Crime Syndicate, an organized crime outfit that he leads with Owlman (James Woods) as his lieutenant instead of Batman (William Baldwin) alongside Superwoman (Gina Torres) rather than Wonder Woman (Vanessa Marshall), Johnny Quick (James Patrick Stuart) in place of the Flash (Josh Keaton), and Power Ring instead of Green Lantern (both Nolan North). Luthor (Chris Noth) has come to beg for the help of the Justice League in order to defeat their evil counterparts and save his world. When they do join him in his crusade, they find themselves in conflict with that world’s U.S. president, a non-evil version of Wade “Deathstroke” Wilson (Bruce Davison), and Martian Manhunter (Jonathan Adams) finds himself falling in love with the president’s daughter, Rose (Freddi Rogers). 

This one is a lot of fun, and one of my top favorites of this franchise, even before beginning this watch project. One of the most compelling elements is the relationship between Owlman and Superwoman, who is not a version of Wonder Woman in this world but is instead a twisted mirror of longtime character Mary Marvel, as evidenced by the fact that her crew of “made men” consists of other Shazam-related characters. James Woods may be a name we only speak in soft whispers now in order to avoid catching his attention like the Eye of Sauron now that he’s gone completely fascist, but he gives a great vocal performance as a soft-spoken nihilist in comparison to the normal gruff brusqueness that we have come to expect from the Caped Crusader, and he becomes the true villain of this piece when his philosophy leads to him attempting to wipe out all Earths in every dimension. Convinced that all decisions are meaningless due to the fact that every choice made everywhere creates a new parallel dimension, leading to an exponentially large number of worlds, the number of which is so vast it is indistinguishable from infinity, he decides that the only “true” decision anyone can make is to destroy all of them. For her part, Superwoman, who is at first motivated solely by the desire to conquer and accumulate wealth, is completely on board with this idea once he explains it to her, and Gina Torres sells her ruthless fanaticism beautifully. The fact that she is, in reality, a teenage girl who has simply chosen to live as her adult superhero alter ego at all times makes the whole thing that much creepier and more fun to watch. 

The action scenes in this one are very exciting too, in a way that hasn’t been as memorable for me in several of these movies. The level of destruction wrought in Superman: Doomsday was impressive, but it was ultimately a lot of punching back and forth. Wonder Woman had the action as one of its high points, between the monsters vs. Amazons fight at the beginning and the rematch at the end (which included the raising of the dead and forcing the Amazons to fight the corpses of their own reanimated sisters), but this one is chock full, and some of the moments are fascinating in just how small they actually are. Batman, who initially stays behind when the rest of the League goes to the Crime Syndicate dimension as he thinks it falls outside of their purview and that they need to get their own house in order first, ends up facing off against the evil Marvel family on his own, and it’s just our luck as viewers that they appear on the Watchtower at a time when he’s in an Aliens-esque power loader, which makes the fight dynamic more interesting. Once it’s down to just him and Superwoman, he attempts to throw a punch while she has him pinned down, and she calmly tells him that this move will cost him a rib, and she casually breaks one of his by simply applying a tiny bit of pressure with her thumb. It’s deeply unsettling, and I love it. 

If there is one plot element that I’m not fully sold on, it’s the relationship between Martian Manhunter and Rose Wilson. There’s something to be said for Rose’s character’s refusal to lie down and roll over for the Crime Syndicate the same way that her father has, at the threat of great danger to her life. That Martian Manhunter conceals himself among her secret service detail and is forced to reveal himself in order to prevent her from assassination at the hands of that world’s evil version of Green Arrow is a fine narrative choice, but the romance that blossoms between them feels a bit tacked-on, even if its presence is supposed to serve as a reflection of what a love based on mutual admiration and fondness looks like, in contrast to the “love” between Owlman and Superwoman. I don’t love that Martian Manhunter mind melds with her after a single kiss (she tells him that this is how they show affection on Earth, and he demonstrates that on Mars they do the same through telepathic contact) and they share all of their thoughts with one another. It’s not merely that he doesn’t really explain this to her before doing so — and, in so doing, gives her a lifetime of his memories and gets all of hers, which makes it feel … less than consensual, especially since she now has firsthand memories of the genocide of the Martians from the point of view of their last survivor. It’s also that his memories include the death of what appears to be his wife and child, which makes the age gap between them feel weirder. I’m not really interested in weighing in on the current obsession with age gap discourse (other than to say that anyone who doesn’t see that the malicious adoption of this discussion by bad faith actors is a ploy to eventually move from “Eighteen-year-old women’s brains are still developing!” to “A woman can’t make rational decisions until she’s 25!” with the ultimate goal of getting to “Women shouldn’t be allowed to make their own decisions!” is a fool, and the insufficiently critical young leftists who are participating in this campaign are doing damage that will take decades to undo), but it does feel a little gross, given that we never really know how old Rose is supposed to be. 

I really want to call out Lauren Montgomery here, who shares directing credit with Sam Liu. Montgomery helmed Doomsday, Wonder Woman, and Green Lantern: First Flight, and she’s doing excellent work here as well. Liu’s previous work in this particular franchise was on Public Enemies, which also was nothing to scoff at, especially since I don’t blame him for that film’s egregious art style, any more than I blame Montgomery for the sexist elements of 2009’s Wonder Woman. This one is the best looking of all of them, with the tightest storytelling and the most interesting premise, which manages to feel fully realized despite this film having the same 75-ish minute runtime as all of the other movies so far. In some cases, that’s been the sole positive selling point for these movies, that with their minimal time investment, there’s no reason not to give it a shot. This one feels complete and unrushed in that time while still telling a full and compelling story, and I love that about it. This one gets the biggest recommendation from me yet. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Krewe Divine 2024

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For Carnival 2017, a few members of the Swampflix crew joined forces to pray at the altar of the almighty Divine. The greatest drag queen of all time, Divine was the frequent collaborator & long-time muse of our favorite filmmaker, John Waters. Her influence on the pop culture landscape extends far beyond the Pope of Trash’s Dreamlanders era, however, emanating to as far-reaching places as the San Franciscan performers The Cockettes, the punkification of disco, and Disney’s The Little Mermaid. Our intent was to honor the Queen of Filth in all her fabulously fucked-up glory by maintaining a new Mardi Gras tradition in Krewe Divine, a costuming krewe meant to masquerade in the French Quarter on every Fat Tuesday into perpetuity.

There’s no telling how Krewe Divine will expand or evolve from here as we do our best to honor the Queen of Filth in the future, but for now, enjoy some pictures from our 2024 excursion, our sixth outing as Swampflix’s official Mardi Gras krewe:

Eat Shit!

❤ Krewe Divine ❤

Below the Belt (1980)

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There are plenty of legitimate things to complain about in the modern streaming era, from the exorbitant cost of subscribing to multiple services to the illusion of availability, which obscures the fact that most movies from before the 1990s are not currently available on any of those platforms.  Those complaints do not apply to The People’s Streaming Service™, though.  Tubi is the one beacon of hope in our streaming-era dystopia, offering a library of titles deep enough to rival cinema freaks’ fondly remembered video store days at the universally affordable price point of Free.  All you have to put up with to access that library is frequent ad breaks, which can be jarring when watching high-brow classics like Un Chien Andalou but feels warmly familiar when watching the kind of schlock that pad out the late-night schedules of broadcast TV.  For instance, I have a distinct memory of catching the final half-hour of the forgotten pro wrestling drama Below the Belt on a broadcast channel like MeTV after working a graveyard shift at a pub kitchen.  I had no idea what I was watching or how I would ever get to see the rest of the picture, so I stayed awake through a few commercial breaks to soak up whatever scraps I could.  About a decade later, Below the Belt is just sitting there on Tubi, out in the open, with fewer commercials and the same lack of fanfare.  I can watch it start to end at any time.  Our new streaming paradigm might be discouraging for people who grew up in households that could afford cable, but for those of us raised on service industry tips and antenna rods, there are some ways in which things have clearly gotten better.

It turns out watching Below the Belt in out-of-context scraps on broadcast TV was surprisingly true to how the movie plays in full.  Filmed in 1974 but delayed for release until 1980, it has a similar troubled production history as the punk road trip drama Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains, which was also mostly remembered & rediscovered as a staple of late-night TV broadcasts.  The same way The Fabulous Stains was shelved until it could be retooled for a post-MTV cash-in, Below the Belt was shelved until it could be marketed as a pro-wrestling knockoff of the massively popular Rocky series.  It’s likely no coincidence that these two specific films were treated as low priorities for distributing & marketing, since they’re both women’s underdog stories set in creative industries run by men.  The Fabulous Stains is about an all-girl punk band; Below the Belt is about women wrestlers working the regional circuit in the American South.  The difference is that The Fabulous Stains‘ compromised form only becomes apparent in a last-second time jump that was clearly tacked on to cash-in on the rise of MTV.  Below the Belt is an absolute mess throughout.  This rise-to-regional-fame pro wrestling story has a convincing flair for low-budget melodrama, but it suffers from a crippling addiction to plot-summarizing montages that betrays its scrappy production history.  There are tons of great raw footage & isolated scenes to work with (and many years of stagnation to work with them), but it still feels like the product of a panicked editing room.  It’s as if they had a week to edit after five years of forgetting what they shot.

Actor-turned-psychologist Regina Baff stars as an unlikely recruit for the wrasslin’ business.  She starts the film as a scrawny NYC diner waitress drowning under a mop of red curls, but she’s quickly scouted for her talent for brutality when she knees a coworker in the balls for sexually harassing her mid-shift. In the erotic thriller curio White Palace, that take-no-shit diner waitress scrappiness is rewarded with a months-long fuckfest with James Spader.  In Below the Belt, it’s rewarded with a road trip to the American South, where she learns “the ropes” of the wrestling trade with a collection of jaded colleagues who’ve already seen it all.  The story was “suggested by” the novel To Smithereens by Rosalyn Drexler who, appropriately enough, went on to write the novelization of Rocky under the pseudonym Julia Sorel.  To Smithereens is a personal account of Drexler’s brief career as a wrestler in the 1950s, which helps explain the movie’s episodic, disconnected assemblage of wrasslin’ anecdotes.  It’s not a story so much as it’s a collection of interesting characters, some of whom are played by real-life wrestlers, and the most memorable of whom is played by cult-cinema legend Shirley Stoler.  Stoler only has a minor part as a road-weary wrassler with a handgun fetish, but she makes the most of it, screeching “Give me my gun back, you bitch!” in perfect camp pitch.  The other MVP on the crew is R&B musician Billy Preston, whose increasingly loopy lyrics in his constant musical montage narration makes the whole movie feel maddeningly incomplete . . . in a mostly endearing way.

By the time the dozenth montage masks unintelligible wide-shot dialogue with song lyrics about “alligators in the chitlin trees,” “burly Birmingbama ham,” “taking baths in the sweet magnolia blossoms with the possums,” or whatever other Southern cliches Preston cooked up in a half-hour of studio time, it’s clear that Below the Belt was a compromised production.  By the time the decreasingly credible, increasingly repetitive stock footage of the wrasslin’ crowds starts looking like it was shot on handheld super-8 cameras instead of professional equipment, the illusion of competence is fully broken.  I was just as fascinated by the film in its full, fractured form as I was catching parts of it out of context on TV broadcast, though, simply because the retro fashions, characters, and mise-en-scène were so specific to a bygone era of regional professional wrestling.  In that way, Below the Belt is more satisfying as a makeshift documentary than it is as a scene-to-scene drama, which means that I should make reading Drexler’s To Smithereens memoir a high priority this year.  It’s perfect Tubi programming in either context, though, since the intrusion of commercial breaks can’t disrupt what’s already a chaotic narrative flow, and since the film is such an obscure curio that you’re grateful someone cared to host it in the first place (in HD, no less). 

-Brandon Ledet

Podcast #205: The Boy Friend (1971) & Ken “The Mad Lad” Russell

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Welcome to Episode #205 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Britnee, James, Brandon, and Hanna discuss four cult classics directed by madman provocateur Ken Russell, starting with his Busby Berkeley-style backstage musical The Boy Friend (1971).

00:00 Welcome

01:16 Krewe Divine
03:13 Coonskin (1975)
11:48 Possum (2018)
14:35 The Parallax View (1974)
19:45 Schultze Gets the Blues (2003)
24:10 Queenpins (2011)
27:14 Lenny Cooke (2013)
33:20 The Butterfly Effect (2004)
40:03 Fish & Cat (2013)
43:40 Joe’s Apartment (1996)

47:07 The Boy Friend (1971)
1:05:13 Lisztomania (1975)
1:19:43 Altered States (1980)
1:36:00 Crimes of Passion (1984)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Podcast Crew

Double Indemnity (1944)

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When Fred MacMurray’s horndog insurance salesman meets Barbara Stanwyck’s femme fatale at the start of Double Indemnity, she’s dressed only in a beach towel, fresh from sunbathing.  After changing into a knee-length dress, she entertains him in the parlor, pretending to be interested in purchasing car insurance from his company but really feeling out his potential to help with the murder of her husband.  He immediately catches onto her scheme (a hunch confirmed by her conversational shift away from automobile insurance to “accident” insurance), but he sticks around to flirt anyway, mostly for the vague promise of adultery.  When Stanwyck uncrosses her bare legs during this uneasy negotiation to draw MacMurray’s attention to her girly ankle bracelet, it hit me; I had seen this exact dynamic play out before in Basic Instinct.  I was watching a horned-up dope flirt with an obvious murderess in her cliffside California home, mesmerized by strategic flashes of her lower-body flesh.  After I had already retitled the film Double Instinctity in my head, I later retitled it The Insurance Man Always Files Twice, following the clever “accidental death” of Stanwyck’s husband (only to later learn that the novel Double Indemnity was written by the author of the novel The Postman Always Rings Twice, James M. Cain).  By the time the adulterous couple’s alibi for murder involving the anonymity of public train transportation had me retitling it Dangers on a Train, it became clear this was an immeasurably influential American crime picture that was directly imitated and alluded to throughout Hollywood long before Verhoeven arrived to sleaze up the scene.

Although it was released years before the term was coined by a French critic, Double Indemnity did not invent the film noir genre.  Even if the genre hadn’t gotten its start in dime store paperback novels, Humphrey Bogart had already been led to his onscreen doom by Mary Astor’s femme fatale in Double Indemnity‘s suaver older cousin The Maltese Falcon a few years prior.  Stanwyck’s own femme fatale archetype is also named Phyllis Dietrichson, a winking reference to earlier femmes fatale played by Marlene Dietrich in her pre-Code collaborations with Josef von Sternberg.  Still, it’s early and iconic enough that modern audiences get to watch it establish the core tropes of film noir in real time, to the point where it plays like a pastiche of a genre that hadn’t even been named yet.  Before MacMurray is hypnotized by Stanwyck’s anklet, he moseys around her dusty parlor and directly comments on the room’s shadowy lighting and Venetian blinds – two standard visual signifiers of classic noir.  That narration track rattles on at bewildering speeds throughout the entire picture, referring to Stanwyck as “a dame” (when in 3rd person) and “Baby” (when in 2nd person) so many times that it verges on self-parody.  That narration also frames the entire story as a flashback confession to the reasoning behind the central murder, a narrative structure echoed in classic noir melodramas like Mildred Pierce and director Billy Wilder’s own Sunset Boulevard.   Double Indemnity is not the first of its kind, but it is the Platonic ideal of a major studio noir, the same way Detour exemplifies the ideal of the genre’s Poverty Row variety.  And even Detour‘s femme fatale Ann Savage starred in her own shameless knockoff of the picture initially titled Single Indemnity, before it was sued by Paramount Pictures into changing its title to Apology for Murder.

Although Fred MacMurray easily racks up Double Indemnity‘s highest word count on the narration track, he’s not the cast’s MVP.  If nothing else, veteran character actor Edward G. Robinson fast-talks circles around him as his nosy business partner who unravels the adulterous couple’s perfect insurance-scam murder simply by following the hunches in his stomach (which he refers to as his “little man”).  The two insurance men have a great, intimate rapport that plays like genuine affection, whereas MacMurray’s carnal attraction to Barbara Stanwyck is purely violent hedonism.  Stanwyck is the obvious choice for MVP, then, as being led around on an LA murder spree by the leash of her anklet is such an obviously bad idea, but she’s a convincing lure anyway.  Like Michael Douglas’s dipshit cokehead detective in Basic Instinct, MacMurray knows this woman will lead to his doom, but he still gives into her schemes because the sex is that good – a business deal sealed when she appears at his apartment in a wet trench coat for their first act of consummation.  She isn’t afforded nearly as much screentime as MacMurray, but her every appearance is a cinematic event, from her initial beach towel entrance to her unflinching witness of her husband’s murder, to her grocery store appearance in Leave Her to Heaven sunglasses and a Laura Palmer wig.  Barbara Stanwyck’s Phyllis Dietrichson may owe thematic debt to the Marlene Dietrich femmes fatale before her—among other pre-Code influences—but she’s clearly striking and conniving enough to truly earn the term “iconic” that gets tossed around so liberally these days.  MacMurray’s job is just to play the stooge who drools at her anklet-adorned feet, which he does with humorous naivete.

It’s difficult to imagine how shocking the seediness of Double Indemnity would have registered in the 1940s, when noir was still taking its first baby steps.  It took Wilder years to get a version of the script approved for production, since unrepentant murder & adultery were still fictional taboos instead of standard soap opera fodder.  Along with cowriter (and noir novelist in his own right) Raymond Chandler, Wilder drives the wickedness of his characters home in a climactic double-crossing argument where Stanwyck declares both she and her duped insurance man are “rotten,” and he coldly replies, “Only, you’re a little more rotten.”  With barely suppressed pride, she spits back, “Rotten to the heart.”  There is little in the way of whodunit mystery to the script; it’s working more in the howcatchem style of a Columbo or Poker Face.  The real mystery is just how rotten these characters are at heart, a contest Phyllis Dietrichson wins in a walk.  By the time major-studio noir had its revival in Hollywood’s erotic thriller era, Double Indemnity‘s shock value had to be ratcheted up by films like Basic Instinct and the Postman Always Rings Twice remake to catch up with a jaded, seen-it-all audience.  The rotten-hearted cruelty of Stanwyck’s femme fatale remained deliciously evil as times changed, though, and even Sharon Stone’s bisexual murderess in Verhoeven’s version could only play as an homage rather than an escalation.

-Brandon Ledet

My Week with Marlene

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I know for a fact that there was a recent time when Marlene Dietrich’s numerous, star-making collaborations with director Josef von Sternberg were streaming on The Criterion Channel.  I know this because I happened to watch one of the lesser titles from that collection, The Devil is a Woman, during that window.  If I had known how difficult it would be to access the Dietrich/von Sternberg oeuvre just a few years later, I would’ve pushed myself to stream them all when I could, not just the one that jumped out at me because it had “Devil” in the title and was set during Carnival.  Currently, none of von Sternberg’s collaborations with his sexual-anarchist muse are streaming on any online platform (legally, at least), which means you’re either coughing up $100 for Criterion’s DVD box set (The Blu-Ray discs are currently out of print) or you’re waiting patiently for them to return to their streaming platform some distant, wistful year.  Well, I’ve unlocked a secret third option: buying used DVD copies of whatever Marlene Dietrich movies I happen to stumble across in thrift stores.  Sure, I’ve still never seen Morocco or The Blue Angel—two of her most beloved collaborations with von Sternberg—but I’ve managed to pick up a few of their shared titles in the meantime to help me get through this unexpected streaming drought.

1932’s Blonde Venus finds von Sternberg in awe of Dietrich’s charisma . . . and her stockinged gams.  She stars in this pre-Code adultery drama as a woman who is simply too fabulous to cut it as a housewife, too magnetic to not be onstage, so badass it’s criminal (in this case to her marriage’s peril).  As flattering as von Sternberg’s movie is to Dietrich’s plentiful charms, he still dramatically puts her through the ringer.  Blonde Venus opens with Dietrich and fellow, unnamed actresses skinny-dipping – their naked flesh just barely obscured by reflections on the surface of the water.  They’re naturally peeped on by group of horny fuckboys, one of whom is smooth enough to talk Dietrich into a date after her next performance.  Years later, she’s married to the galoot, raising their son, and worried that their family won’t be able to survive the financial burden of her sickly husband’s skyrocketing medical expenses.  Of course, this leads her to return to the stage to earn quick cash (in a time when “dancer” effectively translated to “prostitute”), where she quickly is led astray by a young, wealthy, hunky Cary Grant who throws her marriage into a death spiral.  Blonde Venus is extremely dated to 1930s sensibilities, by which I mean Dietrich’s stage numbers get real racist real quick, with her first performance featuring a gorilla suit and a bevy of buxom dancers in blackface.  It’s dated in all the right ways too, though, laying on so many double-entendre line readings and horned-up “come hither” glances that you’re tempted to say von Sternberg has “The Lubitsch Touch“.  Of course, he’s actually got his own touch, which mostly shows in the lighting’s gorgeous play with silhouettes & shadows and in the drama’s gloomy mood, which is something you won’t find in most of Lubitsch’s pre-Code sex comedies.

Shanghai Express, from the same year, doubles down on the gloomy drama, trapping Dietrich in a series of locked train cars where are no stages for the fräulein with the redrawn brow-lines to model sparkly outfits or sing cabaret.  Instead of locking horns with a fellow horned-up cabaret dancer named Taxi (whom she insults in Blonde Venus by asking “Do you charge for the first mile?” in perfect ice-queen bitchiness), Dietrich is instead paired with an equally gorgeous & charismatic actress who genuinely poses a threat.  Shanghai Express is a rolling cage match in which Dietrich & Anna May Wong are locked in tight quarters to compete for the title of most alluring femme fatale; I’m afraid Orientalism wins out in the end, but it’s still a beautiful fight.  Like in Blonde Venus, things get real racist real quick, with every character casually tossing around the word “chinaman” and musing about the moral corruption of The East in practically every scene of dialogue (and with the villain appearing in yellowface to seal the deal).  I very much understand the movie’s appeal to those who rank it highly in the Dietrich von Sternberg catalog, especially as a political thriller in which a train of innocent passengers are held hostage & tormented by corrupt Chinese officials in an increasingly tense stalling of their lives.  The government corruption, moralist Christian hypocrisy, and opium trade maneuvers that drive the plot are all intriguing enough in this Dietrich von Sternberg bottle episode, but I just couldn’t get past the Orientalist stink of the premise & setting.  As perfectly cast as she is, Anna May Wong is herself a victim of that racist streak, with her screentime greatly diminished in comparison to Dietrich, who stars as the infamous “coaster” (coastline sex worker) Shanghai Lily.  Dietrich lands some great zingers about how “respectable people” are “dull” and how she & God are “not on speaking terms”, but they’d all be better served in a film where she’s a bawdy cabaret performer instead of an expatriate political refugee.

1931’s Dishonored splits the difference between Blonde Venus and Shanghai Express, combining the best parts of both films to achieve the highest highs of this thrift-store-purchase trio, despite having the lowest name recognition.  Dietrich stars as a sex-worker musician and as a political agitator, using her alluring beauty & party-girl charms to infiltrate Russian forces as lady-spy X-27.  Dishonored is the most visually showy von Sternberg film I’ve seen so far, layering shadows, dissolves, and foreground props in what could’ve been a very straightforward wartime espionage drama otherwise.  It’s also got plenty of pre-Code shocks, most lovably in a rare Carnival sequence that credibly conveys the debauchery of the holiday (even more so than in The Devil is a Woman).  It’s ideal TCM broadcast fodder all around, with lines of dialogue like “I suppose I’m no good, that’s all,” and “The more you cheat and the more you lie, the more exciting you become” registering as all-timers that should be just as iconic as “Here’s looking at you, kid” and “Of all the gin joints in all the world, she walks into mine.”  It’s a bleak, bleak, bleak picture, even for its time – featuring two suicides in its opening half hour and concluding on an unflinchingly brutal execution.  At the same time, von Sternberg leaves plenty of room for ribald joviality, with Dietrich joking about the difference between “serving her country” as a spy vs “serving her countrymen” as a streetwalker.  Like in Shanghai Express, she doesn’t sing any cabaret numbers, but she does play plenty of piano, and her director is going so buck wild with his lingering dissolves and long-distance push-ins that you hardly have time to notice she’s not performing on a stage.

I cannot claim that Dishonored is the best of Marlene Dietrich’s collaborations with Josef von Sternberg, because I am working with an incomplete data set.  I can only report that it’s the best of their collaborations that I currently have access to.  It seems almost criminal that any of the seven films they made together wouldn’t be currently available to the public on a streaming service, but scarcity of access is a constant in any cinephile’s life.  Unless you’re lucky enough to have the made-up, mythological resource of “disposable income”, it’s likely you’re used to having your film selections dictated by access points like library cards, video store rentals, thrift store purchases, and shared streaming-service passwords; I know they’re what drive the programming on this humble film blog, anyway.  I’m committed to catching up with Morocco, The Blue Angel, and The Scarlet Empress the next time they’re conveniently available to me, but I will admit there was an unbeatable thrill to finding used copies of a few other blind spot titles in the Dietrich von Sternberg catalog to hold me over until then – especially since Dishonored & Blonde Venus ended up being such rewarding pre-Code dramas that might’ve felt more anonymous if I watched all seven movies at once.

-Brandon Ledet