DELUXE SWEET

Overindulge and you'll start to feel a little queasy.

Above you see more art from Italian illustrator Averado Ciriello, whose effort here was for the cult farce Candy, known in Italy as Candy e il suo pazzo mondo—“Candy and her crazy world.” The cast of this, first of all, is tremendous. In addition to Aulin, featured are Richard Burton, Charles Aznavour, Marlon Brando, James Coburn, John Huston, Ringo Starr, Walter Matthau, Elsa Martinelli, Sugar Ray Robinson, Anita Pallenberg, Florinda Bolkan, Marilù Tolo, and Nicoletta Machiavelli. That’s unreal.

The film is a sort of coming of age tale that spirals off into various weird realities, with Aulin becoming a passenger on a military plane, getting a front row seat in an operating theatre attended by the black tie set, and other imaginings from screenwriter Buck Henry, based on Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg’s 1958 source novel. That sounds like it has potential, but the movie goes wide of the mark, with Aulin’s voice seemingly dubbed, Walter Matthau as a military crank wearily channelling Buck Turgidson, Ringo Starr playing a Mexican, accent and all, and Brando as a bindi laden guru who travels the land inside a semi-trailer layered with shells and broken mirror glass.

These characters are all supposed to be part of a satire about female sexuality and men, but its deeper meaning has been lost across the decades, and its humor is deflated by stagy overacting that stopped working for film audiences probably the very year the film was released. For such a movie to remain worthwhile it has to remain relevant, but its take on male-female relations has aged poorly. A man doesn’t have to be outwardly weird to be predatory. We’ve all learned that by now, hopefully.

The movie is long, too—a full two hours before Aulin finally trods through the final highly symbolic set piece and possibly into a realm of cosmic mysticism. Candy is one those films that supporters will say is over the heads of detractors, but not according to Hoffenberg—he considered his own co-creation half joke and half junk. Those qualities certainly filtered into the film. Candy premiered this week in the U.S. in 1968 and finally reached Italy today in 1970.

Jane Fonda takes a trip through outer and inner space.

We’ve shared plenty of promo material from the watershed 1968 cult landmark Barbarella. Why wouldn’t we? It’s one of the most visually beautiful sci-fi movies ever made. In order to be complete in our coverage we needed to include two of its very best promo posters—this pair painted by Kája Saudek for its run the former Czechslovakia, where it opened today in 1971. Saudek was a legend in the world of comics, so he was a natural choice to put together posters for a film that itself grew from a comic character created in 1962 by French illustrator Jean-Claude Forest. You’ve heard us say it before but we’ll say it again anyway—you don’t see movie posters like this anymore. After all, why pay a brilliant artist when you can underpay a graphic designer and rake off the savings for the shareholders? Profit seeking always eventually cannibalizes the industries it first nurtures.

There isn’t a person reading this website who doesn’t already know what Barbarella is, at least anecdotally. Jane Fonda stars as the titular character, a five-star double-rated astronavagatrix, who’s physically superior (duh), if perhaps overly credulous. The film’s far distant, fur-lined, unsubtly phallic future is brought to life with outrageous costumes, acid-drenched visual effects, small scale models, and fantastic sets sometimes built at huge scale. Fonda occupies the center of all this dazzle as a government agent charged with locating a missing scientist named Durand Durand before he teaches the inhabitants of the galaxy’s Tau Ceti region the workings of a weapon he invented—the positronic ray. The universe is at peace. At least, the center of it is. But the positronic ray and all it represents could spread “archaic insecurity, selfish competition, and war.”

The gag that runs through the movie is that, superior though Barbarella may be, she hasn’t experienced the more corporeal pleasures of life. In other words, she’s never had any dick. Some contrarians think—or at least pretend to think—that Barbarella being sexually inexperienced indicates anti-woman attitudes. But she isn’t sexually inexperienced. She’s hyperexperienced in a form of sex that is super-advanced—i.e. completely psychic. Other forms of sex are considered where she

comes from to be primitive, therefore worthless, if not even taboo. But not out in Tau Ceti. The physical pleasures out in the galactic boonies throw Barbarella for a loop, but the subtext isn’t about women or feminism, but merely the idea that the future must be sleek, clean, and controlled. Barbarella’s non-coital status, then subsequent embrace of sex in all its sticky joy is an anti-corporate, anti-repression, anti-assimilation message.

But as an enduring cult classic promoting unashamed attitudes about sex, Barbarella is ripe for revisionism and deliberate misrepresentation. Ultimately, it’s not a movie that holds up long to big-brained academic analysis because it’s no more than a contradictory fun-filled romp made by horny filmmaker Roger Vadim. There are unavoidable pro-feminist tropes, but also unavoidable anti-feminist clichés. It’s unavoidably steeped in the liberation ethos of the era, but also portrays the sort of non-diverse fantasy world fascists adore. Digging deep into Barbarella is like parsing the lyrics of a ’70s disco song. It was probably never meant to be anything but fun. It’s a voyage through deep space with a simple premise allowing Fonda to tease the audience with flashes of skin. That’s more than adequate.

We hear there’s a new version in development, but we don’t have hopes for anything good. Yes, we were wrong about Blade Runner‘s sequel, but that was the only time. The sexual insouciance of the late 1960s that gave us Barbarella is gone. Journalist Kim Newman insightfully remarked that the film was the product of a generation “that thought sex was, above all, fun.” So what can result from a generation for whom sex is dangerous, not only because of more disease than in the past but because of government enforced consequences? With the original Barbarella‘s glowing sex positivity dissipated only cynicism can remain. But we’ll give the filmmakers credit for guts. It’s a bold move to remake a movie that helped define the term cult classic.

Sights, sounds, and sentiments from the thirty-four countries that made up the Europe of the time.

Above is the cover of the July 1967 issue of Continental Film Review, a magazine produced by London based Eurap Publishing, which updated readers on the latest developments in European cinema. This issue focuses on the Netherlands, Yugoslavia, Sweden, Greece, Italy, and the Cannes Film Festival.

Here’s an interesting quote from within: An indication of Italy’s mammoth production appeared in an Italian trade journal a few weeks back which listed thirty-eight films premiered in the previous few weeks, seventy-six ready to be premiered, twenty being edited, forty-four in production, twenty-one about to start shooting and thirty-one being prepared, making a total of 230 films (including, of course, co-productions).

You probably think that’s an enormous number, but last year Italy released 356 films. It’s amazing how much there is to see from other countries if you care to look, and that’s largely what Continental Film Review was about. We have twenty-plus scans below, and other issues scattered here and there in places around the website.

The Tyrant has no clothes.

Today, nudie mags seem to be the last refuge of women whose careers are failing, but back in the day such publications were instrumental in launching careers. This photo of Italian actress Anita Pallenberg appeared in the Italian nudie mag Playmen in 1965, two years before she scored her first film role, and three years before her iconic turn as The Great Tyrant in the cult classic Barbarella. Other women who used Playmen as a stepping stone to stardom include Brigitte Bardot, Patty Pravo, Ornella Muti, and Barbara Bouchet. Pallenberg, in addition to acting, became a famous companion to Keith Richards and moved briefly into fashion design. But fame was a turbulent ride. She dealt and consumed drugs, became involved in the occult, and was even acquitted of manslaughter charges in 1979. There’s too much to tell in one small post. Maybe we’ll revisit this interesting person at a later date.

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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 panting 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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