Introduction to Lady of Burlesque by Jimmy Vargas

I was very pleased to hook Jimmy Vargas as guest presenter for Monday night's screening of Lady of Burlesque. While a reading of the text below cannot hope to capture the screwball energy and enthusiasm of Jimmy's delivery, imagine an overcaffeinated carnival barker with the zeal of a holy ghost evangelist, and maybe, just maybe, you're getting close to the brilliance of Mrrrrr Jimmy Vee...

LADY OF BURLESQUE

LADY OF BURLESK aka STRIPTEASE LADY, a 1943 release by United Artists, directed by WILLIAM WELLMAN, starring that platinum blond with the soft boiled heart BARBRA STANWYCK.

A 101 definition of Burlesque would be, that it's inherently VAUDEVILLE WITH IT'S CLOTHES OFF. Even though its roots were begat in 16th century Italy, as a theater of dissent and satire, called the Commedia Dell'Arte, it is generally regarded as an American phenomenon. It's peak of popularity was from 1910, through the depression of the 30s into the early 60s, when it expired as an art form, under the angry wave of sex-ploitation, porno chic, and feminism. Only incidentally enjoying a new release and revival both here in Sydney and the U.S. in the past decade, gestating out of the punk and neo 50s rockabilly roots scene.

American Burlesque was an low theater hybrid in which the art of the Striptease was the axis on which it shimmied and swung. The stripteuse' act was built on the premise of tease, the hint of flesh, the daring deshabille of filmy garments, but never fulfilling the promise of complete nudity. The sizzle not the steak was it's mantra.

The female ecdysiast for the first time in the history of show business became the draw-card. The male performer, erstwhile known as the tit serenader, the banana ( comedian,) or candy butcher were brought in to service the strip as humorous bookends forever trying to corral the carnal power of the independent female, inevitably to bawdy results.

In relation to the legitimate American Theater of the time such as Broadway, the National Ballet and Opera, Burlesque was the tart sister that they sneeringly referred to as all " bow legs and low comedy". In actual fact, the plot axis of the movie LADY OF BURLESQUE is driven by that very class conceit and social prejudice. And it is this very polemic that moves the plot along to it's final violent retribution.

BARBRA STANWYCK, the LADY OF BURLESQUE in question came to the movie set with her own Burlesque and Hollywood legendary status intact. No Demi Moore was she. Before she hit Hollywood, STANWYCK worked as a chorine, hoofing it for a decade before the obligatory studio agent saw her backstage at the Orpheum in Los Angeles, upon where she was subsequently offered the standard seven year peonage with one of the Big Five. A marriage to Vaudeville soft shoer, radio sqwaubler and movie star FRANK FAY, cemented her Hollywood royalty, and showbiz diva status status.

STANWYCK had already done a burleycue movie role the year before in 1941, when she starred opposite another cool blond, GARY COOPER in BALL OF FIRE. The flick was a huge hit, catapulting STANWYCK into box office boffo acclaim. The movie LADY OF BURLESQUE in some way can be seen as a career sequel of sorts for STANWYCK.

This flick however is more vaudeville than raunchy burleycue. It must be viewed not as a three tone color love poem to burlesque, but a muted black 'n' white paean, with the hooche cooche bump and grind tempered to a couple of swivel hips and boop boop de woops. LOB is basically a chocolate box replica of the art form to fit into the parameters of zealous decency and high family values, so set by the American Catholic League and Hays office, the chief censors of the time. However STANWYCK, under the superb direction of WELLMAN, still seduces, and her terpsichoreal scenes breathe with an whistle-baiting earthy vivacity, not to mention an nostalgic bawdity, placing the cinema audience in the orchestra pit.

The hubba hubba opener of PLAY IT ON THE E-STRING DROP IT ON THE G-STRING, is a grand panoramic overture, in which your ears and eyes will steam at the sinuendo. If not a convert to the magic of burlesque, you will be at the end of this particular piece, kneeling to the insteps of STANWYCK, as a blubbering Fred Mc Murray ala Double Indemnity.

The movie itself, like the subject, possesses a salome-ayic deception however. The stripping of behind the scene production notes, reveal more veils and more veils.

STANWYCK stars as DIXIE DAISY, a burleycue queen with the fast lipper and the slow zipper.
Her character is modeled on GYPSY ROSE LEE, the original Queen of American Burlesque fin the 30s to the 40s, who was the only ecdysiast of her time to cross-over to national appeal.
The characterization is deliberate, for it is the book G STRING MURDERS aka STRIPTEASE MURDERS written by GYPSY on which the movie is based.

There is conjecture however that GYPSY herself used a ghost writer. The author attributed to this dime-store classic is CRAIG RICE who incidentally also masked her own real name of GEORGIANA RICE for reasons unknown. However the story G STRING MURDERS is so specific in its detail of burlesque tradition, superstitions and vernacular one can only assume that GYPSY did the dictating while CRAIG RICE may simply have finger danced with the Remington.

It is most ironic that the public and Hollywood at the time could totally accept BARBRA STANWYCK as a burlesque Queen, but not the original. Though GYPSY, herself was signed to 20th CENTURY FOX in the late 30's, the studio in fear of the Hays office and the pentecostal cinema going public would desert or boycott the theaters if they'd known a jezebelle stripper was appearing at their local Palace or Bijou. DARRYL ZANUCK of 20th Century forced GYPSY to only used her real name ROSE LOUISE HOVICK in her two poorly received celluloid outings.

GYPSY got even with Hollywood when she went on to create the Broadway show Gypsy, based on her own showgirl memoirs of the same name. She held principal rights to the theatrical production, and was able to sell back to the Hollywood the story of her gazeeka box life, rights plus percentages. Her estate is still pulling in serious coin from various productions ever since.

Also as a side note, Gypsy herself also dallied with Hollywood royalty as Barbra Stanwyck before her. Enjoying an affair with noir director OTTO PREMINGER of LAURA, and THE MOON IS BLUE fame. Ironically, too it was OTTO PREMINGER who broke the power of the Hayes office that had so stalled GYPSY's career, fifteen years later with his own MOON IS BLUE, a subject about the loss of virginity. The unusual coupling of PREMINGER and ROSE LEE produced no movies, but an heir son to their fascinating showbiz blood lines, whom they called ERIK LEE . He has since penned his own memoirs of burleycue life with mother, entitled GYPSY and ME, which incidentally has been optioned by HBO this year, mooted to star SIGOURNEY WEAVER as the original and greatest LADY OF BURLESQUE in her later post stripper years. Due for release in 2009.

© JIMMY VARGAS 1947 / 2008

Contact Jimmy Vargas at jimmy@jimmyvargas.com or check out his website on the "links of note" sidebar.

Machine 1: This week at Cinematheque

Live music returns to the Chauvel Cinematheque this week with Machine 1, a multimedia extravaganza by Rich Machine; a small collective of Sydney artists and musicians led by percussion legend Richard D’Adonna.

The show includes short films, spoken word and performance and the music draws on elements of improv jazz, electronica, Latin rhythym, even Eastern philosophy. Rich’s own experimental films, collectively known as the Dream Dial Journeys, make extensive use of digital manipulation to create abstract, psychedelic patterns, and will screen with live musical accompaniment. Also on the bill are Bee Perusco’s performance art piece Homeless, Glenn Lockitch’s short film, Taxi and Popular Girl’s spoken word The Ghan.

Click to enlarge the flyer.

Lady of Burlesque - this week at the Chauvel Cinematheque

Lady of Burlesque USA/1943/B&W/90mins/16mm/NFVLS Dir: William A. Wellman.
Cast: Barbara Stanwyck, Michael O'Shea, J. Edward Bromberg, Charles Dingle, Frank Conroy.

Based on the novel The G-String Murders by the famed striptease artist Gypsy Lee Rose, this backstage mystery-comedy has Stanwyck as a burlesque queen who also arbitrates frequent disagreements between the chorus girls. This well mounted independent production by a veteran ex-Metro producer has an authentic backstage atmosphere and is directed at a fast pace by Wellman. It also attracted an Oscar nomination for the song, "Take it off the E-string, Play it on the G-string" performed by Stanwyck while dancing a 'strip' number.

Also on the program:

Take Off USA/1972/B&W/10mins/16mm/ NFVLS Dir: Gunvor Nelson. A feminist satire on striptease that confounds conventional voyeuristic expectations.

“A grim and funny cosmic satire.” June M. Gill, Film Quarterly

and

The Stripper USA/1960/1min/16mm/NFVLS Dir: Siew Hwa Beh.

Introduction to Black Sunday

Hi everyone and welcome to this special World Youth Day screening of Mario Bava's 1960 gothic horror film, Black Sunday. Are there any pilgrims here today?.. No, it's probably just as well, because this film, like many of the best horror films, is a reminder of how the sins and evils of the past, in this case, the persecution of "witches", can come back to haunt the present.

I didn't program this film specifically as a response to the events of WYD. It was just one of those fortunate accidents that it happened to coincide with the Pope's visit to Australia and it only dawned on me earlier in the week that the film had some relevance, however tenuous, to the papal visit. I don't want to put the boot in too much, as I am a Catholic (lapsed) myself and have enjoyed seeing all the pilgrims about town. I even saw some singing nuns on the bus the other day and for a minuteI thought I was stuck in a 1970s disaster movie, but I did think it was a bit rich for the Pope to come all the way to Sydney just to preach about the perils of violence and sex in the media, especially considering the most violent film in recent memory is a film based on the crucifixion, and that collectors of erotica have long envied the Vatican collection, the largest collection of erotic art and literature in the world. With all the things wrong in this world, I think violence and sex on TV, in the movies, and on the internet are way down the list.

The star of today's film, Barbara Steele, is (like the Pope) a vehement critic of violence in the movies. Her role in this film made her a star, or at least a scream queen, and although she made a nice career and appeared in dozens of horror movies in Italy, the USA and Britain, Steele used to call the audience for her movies "sexually disturbed teenage boys." Talk about biting the hand that feeds you!

This psychopathologisation of the audience for horror movies goes back at least to the Universal horror movies of the 1930s, but it was 1960, the year that saw the release of Black Sunday, Psycho and Peeping Tom, that the idea of horror movie viewer as pervert began to get some traction in the public consciousness. The film that best dramatises this idea is Michael Powell's once-derided, now classic Peeping Tom. The film explicitly equates movie viewing and movie making with voyeurism and even murder. As the sixties progressed this idea crops up in the work of Susan Sontag in her famous essay On Photography, in Yoko Ono's avant-garde film Rape and in Laura Mulvey's seminal essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. This idea of the horror movie fan as psychopathic continues even today. The most recent example I can think of is the hit movie Scream, where the murderers are revealed to be the nerdy horror movie loving geeks. The teenage male murderers absorbed so many horror movie cliches they turned into one.

I haven't seen Black Sunday for over twenty years, so I'm not going to say much about it, except that there are several different versions of the movie. There's the Italian version, filmed in polyglot with the actors speaking in their native language and dubbed into Italian. There's the British version, which was revoiced by English actors and trimmed of its more violent excesses and then there's the version you are about to see, the American version, which was revoiced by American actors, again trimmed of some of the more grisly moments and rescored by the then popular composer Les Baxter. Although this is hardly the definitive version, no amount of censor trims or cheesy orchestral scoring can diminish the impact of Bava's eye for set design, lighting and cinematography or his ability to create a wonderfully spooky atmosphere. If you saw Barrie Pattison's recent lecture on the history of Italian popular cinema you would have seen the early Bava educational film, Geometry Lesson. Even in a staid educational film, Bava was able to weave his macabre magic.

If you like the film, I would recommend reading Tim Lucas' wonderful book on Mario Bava, All the Colors of the Dark. There is also a box set of his films available from Umbrella Entertainment in Australia. Enjoy the movie and hope to see you next week for Lady of Burlesque.

Introduction to Roger Corman: King of the B's

Hi everyone and welcome to the Chauvel Cinematheque for this Roger Corman double feature. Roger Corman began his career as a director reknown for delivering fast, cheap B-movies for American International Pictures and his own company Filmgroup, before largely retiring from directing to establish New World Pictures and later New Horizons.

Corman is best known as a producer and mentor to what became known as the film school generation of American cinema. By equal parts accident and acumen, Corman became a sort of Godfather of the American independent cinema. The role call of talent Corman mentored is well known (Coppola, Scorsese, Bogdanovich, etc.), but it wasn’t until they escaped from Corman’s monsters/bikinis/rock 'n' roll aesthetic that they could make truly personal and interesting films.
First up today is a rare screening of Hollywood’s Wild Angel, a 1978 documentary that features extensive clips from Corman's films as well as testimonials from his many and various better known proteges, including a very wired looking Martin Scorsese.

Following this is the 1957 film, Rock All Night, directed by Corman, written by Charles B. Griffith and starring Dick Miller, Jonathan Haze and Mel Welles. This team together comprised a sort of ensemble behind Corman’s best films, The Little Shop of Horrors and Bucket of Blood.

Corman regular Dick Miller (above) was hardly leading man material, however his range as an actor made him a key figure in Corman's repertory. As adept at playing a tough guy as he was an ordinary schlub, his work with Corman made him a cult star. After this turn in Rock All Night, Miller was so impressed with his own performance, he took out a full page ad in trade paper Variety touting his acting chops, but outside of Corman’s films, his appearances were largely confined to bit parts in Joe Dante’s films, Gremlins, The Howling etc.

Jonathan Haze, who appears here as a thug, was also a versatile actor, and is best known for his role as the nebbish in Corman’s best known film Little Shop of Horrors. Mel Welles, who also appeared in Little Shop... as Haze’s boss and nemesis, Gravis Mushnik, here plays beatnik impressario Sir Bop, a part originally written by Griffith for his friend, jazz eccentric Lord Buckley, which accounts for the almost non-stop hep-talk. When Buckley became unavailable, Welles took on the part. Griffiths called Welles the most inventive actor he’d worked with – on a par with Jack Nicholson.

While Corman is widely praised for his abilities as a mentor and a producer, his skill as a director is his ability to keep the story moving and the action interesting. Apart from his knack for pacing and a bare-bones but effective visual style, his reputation as a director is largely based on the qualities that made him a great producer – his ability to put together an interesting cast and crew. The real genius behind his best films is neglected sidekick Charles B. Griffith, who wrote all of Corman’s best films – Little Shop of Horrors, Bucket of Blood, Creature from the Haunted Sea, Not of this Earth, It Conquered the World, and later The Trip, Wild Angels and Death Race 2000. The off-beat wit and jazzy dialogue of Griffith’s scripts combined with the verve of Corman's direction transcended the low budget limitations of these films and made them the classics they are today.

When Quentin Tarantino was asked who his favourite screenwiriter was, he replied without hesitation, Charles B. Griffith. The hip talk and jazz like perambulations of Griffith's work in Rock All Night and the other films I mentioned are echoed in Tarantino’s acclaimed work. In the famous Jack Rabbit Slims sequence in Pulp Fiction, Tarantino pays homage to his inspiration by having a poster for Rock All Night featured prominently in the background, while the title page of his screenplay for Kill Bill carries a dedication to Griffith.

Like many of Corman’s films, Rock All Night is a patchwork of ideas and even other films. Always on the lookout for the fastest and cheapest way to make a film, Corman often used footage from other people's movies, added some outtakes and/or reused scenes from his own back catalogue, then shot new footage to try and make sense of it all. This Frankensteinian approach, or sampling if you like, creates a marvellously disorientating and delirious effect on the viewer.

For Rock All Night, Corman bought an hour of musical footage of The Platters, who had just had a big hit with Only You, The Blockbusters and Norah Hayes. Needing some way to recontextualise the footage, Corman bought the remake rights to an Emmy award winning TV drama, The Little Guy, and had Griffith rewrite the script to acommodate the music footage. The results await you today in Rock All Night.

Introduction to Sex and Hygiene Program

Hi everyone and welcome to the Chauvel Cinematheque for this program of short films entitled Sex and Hygiene. The six short films you are about to see are interesting not for their educational value but rather as a barometer for society’s attitudes towards sex and sex education. With the exception of of the first film, For Your Information, these films were shown to children and were part of a loose program of social engineering designed to foster healthy attitudes towards sex and hygiene.

I remember seeing my first sex education film as a 4th grader – a battered copy of Sexual Aspects of Puberty on a clattering 16mm projector at Denistone East public school. The film was shown outside of school hours and I was accompanied by my mother who after the film said warily, "Did you learn anything from the film?" I remember my reply was, "No, I already knew all that." Along with a terse, “If you’re going to do anything obscene, do it with the blinds down", from my father, this was the sum total of the sex education I ever received from my parents.

Years later, I found a copy of the film, and recognized it immediately due to the animated diagrams of the reproductive process. I even thought the film could possibly be the same copy. It was the first 16mm film I had ever seen and was to profoundly influence me – here I am today, still showing battered copies of 16mm sex education films.

I’ve programmed these films chronologically to give you a feel for the changing attitudes towards the subject – from the fear-mongering of the WW2 era For Your Information, intended for female recruits in the Canadian air force, to the enlightened view of the 1980s pro-condom film Condom Sense. There are a few missing links in this chain of chronology. Sex education films are highly sought after by film collectors and command huge prices on ebay and elsewhere when they are offered for sale. This program largely misses films from the 1960s and 1970s where the pendulum swung from the fear mongering right wing scare campaigns to the more enlightened view of the films from the period of the sexual revolution.

What’s interesting about these films is the way they reflect parental anxieties over sex education. This is particularly explicit in Human Reproduction, the second film I will screen today. Produced in 1947, this film sparked a controversy in America about the role of sex education in American public schools, a debate that is still (unbelievably) going on today. The information in the film is delivered in the usual animated diagrams with lecture format and is framed by sequences set in a 1940s suburban living room, where Mum, Dad and Little Johnny are discussing the arrival of a neighbour’s baby. This leads Little Johnny to the inevitable question of where babies come from, and with much nervous gulping and knowing glances to his wife, little Johnny’s father begins to talk on the subject and the film dissolves into the lecture w/diagrams format. The film is centred not so much on the facts of life, but on the anxieties Mum and Dad feel about presenting the facts of life to their children. These sequences are funny today because they reflect the nervousness around the subject.

You can view Human Reproduction here:

http://www.archive.org/details/HumanRep1947

Next up is How Billy Keeps Clean. Although not strictly a sex education film, this film is a good example of the hygiene film, a related genre of educational film shown to primary schoolers as a sort of warm-up for the full blown sex-ed film they would see later in high school. What makes these hygiene films compelling is the way they prime their audience to think about hygiene in the same way they will (hopefully) think about sex - not as a source of pleasure or intimacy but as a sort of battleground of desire, discipline and microbiology.

I am very excited about the prospect of screening the next film, Dance Little Children, a rarely seen 1961 educational film by cult director Herk Hervey, director of the B&W horror classic Carnival of Souls. In an earlier program I screened Hervey’s remarkable short film Leo Beuerman. I am obssessed with this filmmaker and hope to put together a two hour program of his industrial and educational films sometime in the future. In Dance Little Children, a film made for the Kansas Board of Health, a a Twist dance craze is the trigger for a syphillis epidemic in a small town. Produced as a narrative short film in gaudy colour, it is a unique little comic gem, and can be described as a suburban, film-noir, VD scare film.

The hard-hitting 1972 documentary film Vasectomy, unfortunately didn't arrive with the rest of the films and won't be screening. I guess you could say Vasectomy has had the chop!

The pro-condom film, Condom Sense, that closes the program, was produced in 1980 and is haunted by the spectre of the AIDS virus. Released just months before the first widespread reports of the virus, the film was rendered instantly obsolete. It's still worth seeing though as it encourages teenage boys to be more responsible for birth control and equates this responsibility with respect for women. The film doesn't moralise. Instead it works from the assumption that teenagers are having sex, and in stark contrast to the nervousness of the films of an earlier era, treats the subject with a light and humourous.

So I hope you learn something today. And if you know all this stuff already... remember to shut the blinds first.

Thank you.

The Other Italian Cinema: Black Sunday

The Chauvel Cinematheque's mini season of popular Italian cinema concludes this week with a rare theatrical screening of Mario Bava's acclaimed gothic horror film from 1960, Black Sunday (La Maschera Del Demonio) starring Barbara Steele, John Richardson and Arturo Dominici.

Bava's first film as a director after a distinguished career as a cinematographer is a landmark of the horror film and the perfect foil for the World Youth Day celebrations, dealing as it does with the Catholic Church's historical oppression of women.

A 17th century witch and her lover are executed with a spiked devil's mask. Two centuries later they are revived and return to destroy her cursed family. The story verges on fable, while the images and prowling camera have the power of delicate nightmare with moments of rarely surpassed beauty and horror. Steele's double role as the virginal Katia and the sexual witch presents the only two options allowed for women in such religious imagery: Madonna and whore. The ending suggests the possibility of merger.

“One of the cinema’s preeminent examples of gothic horror.” Nick Schager, Lessons of Darkness
“An elegant and disturbing film that discloses the strange beauty of horror.” David J. Hogan, Dark Romance

Screening with the film is Bruno Bozzeto's animated short, Self-Service, that satirises Prohibition and the madness of a petroleum-based economy.

Don't miss this timely and provocative intrusion of the past into the present - this week at cinematheque.

The Other Italian Cinema: Viva Italia

A mini season of popular Italian cinema continues this week at the Chauvel Cinematheque with the Oscar nominated 1977 portmanteau comedy, Viva Italia (I Nuovi Mostri), starring Vittorio Gassman, Ugo Tognazzi, Ornella Muti and Alberto Sordi and directed by Mario Monicelli, Ettore Scola & Dino Risi.

An anthology of nine short sketch comedies on the theme of the human condition, this charming film touches on politics, religion, old age and love, and is a poignant view of society’s shortcomings. See the best acting, writing and directing talent the commedia all’Italiana has to offer - all in the one movie.

35mm print in Italian with English subtitles.

“A farewell to a fantastic era.” Imdb.com

Spring 2008 Program

Click to enlarge the new program.

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Blogger VS Safari

Apparently, blogger is not very compatible with the macintosh browser Safari. This is the reason all the recent posts look a bit weird. I guess I will have to switch to firefox to rectify the problem. Sorry if the posts are a bit dishevelled looking and hard to read, but the problem should be fixed soon.

Thanks,

Brett 

A Response to Blood & Sandals: The Other Italian Cinema by Pia Santaklaus

Hey Brett,

Thanks for an interesting presentation today, THE OTHER ITALIAN CINEMA.

Barrie Pattison brought in and presented a fine, diverse selection of films. I enjoyed the short ‘art’ film ‘The Geometry Lesson’ (early 50s?) of which little is known. In arty black and white, just looking at some of the fantastic shapes formed by manipulating 3 coordinates (x, y, z), I couldn’t help but imagine Salvador Dali had seen this exact film back then and it may have inspired some of the fantastic shapes in his own paintings of that period. Dali was a mad keen enthusiast of mathematics and physics.

I appreciate the selfless gusto and passion with which Barrie presents his stuff. Always interesting, he deserves a much larger audience. It’s pitiful how little nostalgia and care exists for so many old films. Such difficult-to-preserve disappearing treasures become victims of eternity; one wave follows the next and too much gets swept away in the tides of time.

Long live Cinemateque!

To me, Barrie’s like the proverbial old soldier who never dies even when he knows he’s defending a losing war.At least with presentations such as today, he wins battles along the way. Barrie Pattison champions the neglected, guards the overlooked and might be seen as a saint of the forgotten...his dedication and energy is admirable.

And again, thanks Brett for working well under pressure today. I imagine you had a very difficult job to do and with only a little preparation; it turned out well.

Pia

A Taste of The Three Men

Never heard of The Three Men, the stars of this weeks feature Ask Me If I'm Happy? Here's a taste of their comic talents taken from one of their old TV shows.