EXTREME HEAT

Is there really such a thing as too much?

Elke Sommer front and center on a vintage poster claiming she’s “almost too hot”? Sign us up. Sweet Ecstasy was originally made in France as Douce Violence—“sweet violence”—and fits loosely into a cycle of films characterized as nouvelle vague, or the French new wave. Director Max Pécas, however wasn’t a new wave director. He was better known for his work at the forefront of the cinéma Z style, also known as the nanar sub-genre, films loosely equivalent, we gather, to eroticized b-movies, meaning sex and stupidity. Pécas is also remembered for a trilogy of 1970s Saint-Tropez erotic comedies. But for Douce Violence he’s an art director, trying to make a significant statement in the same broad category as La dolce vita or À bout de souffle, aka Breathless.

To that end, what you get here is a group of idle twenty-somethings for whom entitled boredom is the order of the day, as they rip around the French Riviera near and within Cannes, seeking thrills and not caring about the future. When Olivier (Christian Pezey) finds himself drawn into this clan of troublemakers living on their parents’ money, their leader Maddy (Pierre Brice) enlists his own girlfriend to be the soft edge of the wedge in a scheme to corrupt the newcomer. It’s for Olivier’s own good, you see, because he’s too bourgeois.

The girlfriend is Sommer, playing a character also named Elke, and she’s in vamp mode here, which means cat-eyed make-up and cumulonimbus hair, as she taunts and teases poor Olivier in her efforts to make him into a fellow disaffected youth. Is she too hot? No. Elke is always just hot enough. She and her pals go water-skiing (really Elke in some of the shots), swimming, boating, driving, and most of all, partying. They question convention, conformity, society, mortality, and all the rest. Like other movies of this type, there isn’t much plot. Also as in similar films, an event galvanizes and changes the group—or seems as though it might.

The main attraction in the film is Elke, and she delivers what early ’60s audiences wanted—an envelope pushing performance amidst a growing wave of censorship-destroying movies. Like Bardot and others, Sommer shows a lot of skin, and almost—almost—goes topless. Though it’s supposed to be gauche to say so about a woman these days (but we don’t care, because sex is why we’re all here, and it’s ultimately all that matters, despite modern attempts to obfuscate it, hide it, police it, and shame it), Elke’s very stimulating. And she doesn’t even look her best here, due to the crazy make-up and hair.

As a final note, we suspect the movie was censored in the U.S. to remove some revealing bikini scenes, some shots of Elke’s asscrack, a bare breast caress by a male character, and (probably) some or all of a sweaty, open-shirted dance by a black character. The poster certainly was censored—no doubt about that. The word “ecstasy” was placed to cover the word “violence.” You can just see it if you squint. So the movie’s title was set to be literally translated, but that was deemed too much for Americans—or at least some Americans (southerners, we suppose). Douce Violence opened in France and Belgium in early 1962, and reached the U.S. today the same year.

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HISTORY REWIND

The headlines that mattered yesteryear.

1935—Jury Finds Hauptmann Guilty

A jury in Flemington, New Jersey finds Bruno Hauptmann guilty of the 1932 kidnapping and murder of the Lindbergh baby, the son of Charles Lindbergh. Hauptmann is sentenced to death and executed in 1936. For decades, his widow Anna, fights to have his named cleared, claiming that Hauptmann did not commit the crime, and was instead a victim of prosecutorial misconduct, but her claims are ultimately dismissed in 1984 after the U.S. Supreme Court refuses to address the case.

1961—Soviets Launch Venus Probe

The U.S.S.R. launches the spacecraft Venera 1, equipped with scientific instruments to measure solar wind, micrometeorites, and cosmic radiation, towards planet Venus. The craft is the first modern planetary probe. Among its many achievements, it confirms the presence of solar wind in deep space, but overheats due to the failure of a sensor before its Venus mission is completed.

1994—Thieves Steal Munch Masterpiece

In Oslo, Norway, a pair of art thieves steal one of the world’s best-known paintings, Edvard Munch’s “The Scream,” from a gallery in the Norwegian capital. The two men take less than a minute to climb a ladder, smash through a window of the National Art Museum, and remove the painting from the wall with wire cutters. After a ransom demand the museum refuses to pay, police manage to locate the painting in May, and the two thieves, as well as two accomplices, are arrested.

1938—BBC Airs First Sci-Fi Program

BBC Television produces the first ever science fiction television program, an adaptation of a section of Czech writer Karel Capek’s dark play R.U.R., aka, Rossum’s Universal Robots. The robots in the play are not robots in the modern sense of machines, but rather are biological entities that can be mistaken for humans. Nevertheless, R.U.R. featured the first known usage of the term “robot”.

1962—Powers Is Traded for Abel

Captured American spy pilot Gary Powers, who had been shot down over the Soviet Union in May 1960 while flying a U-2 high-altitude jet, is exchanged for captured Soviet spy Rudolf Abel, who had been arrested in New York City in 1957.

Cover art by Roswell Keller for the 1948 Pocket Books edition of Ramona Stewart's Desert Town.
Rare Argentinian cover art for The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells.

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