Sep 172023
 

The Counterfeit Traitor is a 1962 spy thriller starring William Holden. I’m covering it solely for a couple of scenes.

Holden plays Eric Erickson, an apolitical American everyman living in neutral Sweden in the early days of WWII. Allied intelligence blackmails him into working as a spy in Nazi Germany. While slowly paced at the beginning, the tension picks up as Erickson sinks deeper into his cover and becomes entangled into the war whether he wants to or not.

Inevitably, Erickson’s cover is blown, and he has to depend on the resistance network to get him back to Sweden with vital intelligence. His backup contact is just a street address in Berlin. This turns out to be in the city’s red light district, with sex workers standing on the street or posing in windows.

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Apr 192023
 

Lost in Space is a science fiction TV series about a family stranded in deep space. Episode S02E25 “The Colonists” aired March 15, 1967.

Many science fiction or fantasy TV series would include episodes that featured amazonian or matriarchal societies, doubtless for an element of sex appeal and the carnivalesque pleasure of inverting gender roles.

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Dec 272022
 

This is the second film named Venus in Furs released in 1969, also known as Devil in the Flesh or La malizide di Venere. It’s a semi-faithful adaptation of the original 1870 book, unlike some other films which have little to do with the original text. However, there are significant thematic differences.

The film skips the framing story of the book. The film opens in the present day at a retreat in the Swiss Alps, where Severin, a writer, is staying.

When young Wanda von Dunajew, a model, arrives, Severin is immediately taken with her from afar. He later spies on her through hidden peepholes (with the acknowledgement and encouragement of the resort’s female manager). She conveniently takes a shower at that moment, then admires herself in furs, then masturbates. The sequence is framed through the gaps in the wall.

This prompts Severin to flashback to his childhood, when he spies on the maid and the chauffeur having a tryst. 

Voyeurism and exhibitionism is a big part of the first half of this movie. Severin doesn’t just take scopophilic pleasure in watching Wanda, there has to be another person there, usually a man, who also gazes at her. Wanda actively flirts in some cases, courting the gaze. Later, Severin spies on her having an encounter with a younger man. This prompts another flashback to the maid and chauffeur. The maid spots young Severin and, while bare-breasted, slaps him, then cuddles him. 

Severin and Wanda meet face to face, and make out in plain view of a number of people. 

Severin: “In love, there are only masters and slaves. Those who dominate and those who are dominated.”

Wanda shows him a book of photographs of her, including one in an Orientalist chainmail outfit and a riding crop from when she was a stripteaser. 

Wanda: “That was a Tartar Queen number. It was always a big success.”

She apparently has the full costume with her, including the crop, and does it for Severin. She swishes the crop around and accidentally (?) hits him in the face. He finds it pleasurable. She is apologetic. He tells her to whip her again, on his bare back.

After they dance at a club, she says she knew he was spying on her, and enjoyed performing for him. He tells her he wants her to make him suffer. 

Severin talks about how the problem of love is monotony, and the woman should seek other pleasures. She tells him she feels drawn to breaking through limits with him.

Implication of cunnilingus, though no exposure. 

Severin: “I’m very happy when others desire you.”

Wanda: “You really aren’t jealous?”

Severin: “No, as long as I’m part of the game.” 

Wanda: “Then there’s only pleasure for you when I provoke other men while you watch.”

At a ranch, they watch a mare being nuzzled by a colt (young male horse) separated by a low wall. Then the colt is taken away and a big stallion is brought in to mount the mare, complete with visible horse penis. The ranch’s owner, an older man, is present and makes moves on Wanda. 

Severin is turned on by this spectacle. Wanda looks at Severin suspiciously. 

Next scene: Severin coaxes Wanda into seducing a young fisher, Andreas. He watches, of course. He follows them into the woods. Wanda and Andreas start having sex, then Andreas runs off and is replaced by Severin, followed by a sudden rainstorm.

They get married, and he gives her a beautiful fur coat. He also gives her a suicide note that gets her off the hook if something were to happen to him. “I want no limits to your cruelty.”

She feels tempted, and he wants to unleash her. 

Roadside fellatio on him from her.

Severin and Wanda check into a house in Spain, near Costa Brava. 

Severin: “I’d like to be treated just like an oriental slave.” 

Severin takes the role of her chauffeur, complete with uniform and hat. Part of the game is them cuddling in public, playing at violating the class hierarchy. People stop and watch. 

They also hire two white maids (instead of three African maids) who have their own sadomasochistic relationship. The younger of the two maids develops a crush on Severin, and exposes herself to him, meeting only with indifference.  This maid returns to the older maid, who beats her for infidelity. 

Severin urges Wanda to approach an artist, but complains when she spends an hour out of his sight with the artist. After the artist paints Wanda nude and holding a riding crop, Severin literally pushes her into the artist’s arms. 

Fitting with the source text, there’s a lot of voyeurism and cuckoldry. Sacher-Masoch treated the cuckold scene as the ultimate expression of his fantasies, the worst thing a woman can do to him, to make him watch as she submits to another, stronger man. The problem is that in such a triad (“bull”-woman-cuckold/observer), there’s always the possibility of removing the woman from the scene like a redundant term in an equation. What’s left is one man dominating another. 

In the book, Severin was obsessed with pairing Wanda with the hypermasculine man known as “the Greek”. Here, it’s a big macho guy named Bruno, but Wanda is the one who picks him up off the road and invites him back to the house. Severin alternates between griping to Wanda about Bruno’s presence and mutely watching him as he dominates Wanda. 

In the last of Severin’s fantasy sequences, Bruno has completely taken over the house. He has Severin wearing a mask like a dog’s muzzle, and “makes” him watch as he lords it over Wanda and the two maids. 

After he drives away, Severin spots a group of sex workers by a gas station. One of them, Paulie, is also played by the same actress as Wanda, though in a blonde wig and with a mole on her cheek. 

In a hotel room with Severin, Paulie comes off like a tough woman, but he suddenly turns on her and strangles her. The hotel staff come into the room and break it up, but Paulie tells them to leave him alone and that he was her friend. The staff leaves, confused but resigned. 

She falls to her knees before him and says that his violence towards her was beautiful. She tells him she wants to be “your woman” and give him all the money she earns; in other words, have him be her pimp. She offers herself to him, and asks what he wants her to do. 

The final scene is of Paulie happily whipping Severin. It suggests that what Severin really wants is a woman who will perform the role of the dominatrix, but remains below him in the privilege scale. 

This version of Venus is difficult to watch. While it looks pretty, there’s an undercurrent of misogyny in its treatment of women. For a movie based on the ur text of male masochism, there are many scenes of women being slapped and beaten. They don’t even enjoy it in a masochistic way. They just cry and beg. In one of Severin’s fantasy sequences, he imagines her being dragged into a dungeon by hooded men, bound, stripped and beaten; one of the men removes his hood, revealing himself to be Severin. 

This is in keeping in the source text, in which Severin, after his experience with Wanda, ruthlessly dominates women. (It also echoes Bitter Moon in which the male protagonist oscillates between sadism and masochism towards women, one requiring the other.)

Director Massimo Dallamano directed a number of Italian giallo films, and also worked as a cinematographer. His credits include classic spaghetti Westerns like A Fistful of Dollars (1964). Laura Antonelli (Wanda) had a long career as an actress, while Régis Vallée (Severin) only appeared in three other films. This appears to be the only screen credit of the screenwriter, Fabio Massimo.

Jun 292021
 

Before there was Dyanne Thorne as Ilsa, there was Audrey Campbell  as Olga. 

The Olga films were a series of exploitation “roughies” or “kinkies” released in the 1960s, all directed by Joseph P. Mawra, and starring Audrey Campbell as the sadistic mob boss, Olga. These films were released under several different titles and release dates. 

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Dec 132019
 

Now that 2019 is ending and Gwyneth Paltrow’s GOOP is selling bondage gear and floggers, it’s important to remember that, not that long ago, BDSM was seen as a sign of mental illness. Case in point: The Sensuous Woman by “J”, published in 1969.

The Thing That Turns Him on You Think Is Sick

If he wants to resort to whips and chains or have you urinate on him or something of that nature, I agree with you, I think he’s sick — and he should let you alone and go find a simpatico sickie or, better yet, get professional help.

[Pg. 131]

Note that the author assumes that the reader will be turned off by such activities.

The relevant passage
Nov 072019
 
Pets playbill from May 1969

In my discussion of Pets, I neglected to mention that it was based on an off-Broadway play. The Temple of Schlock has a post on the history of the original work and its adaptation into film.

Pets was originally three one-act plays, first produced in May 1969, all based on the idea of women being kept as pets.

It’s not surprising that few critics gave PETS a clean bill of health. Newsday‘s George Oppenheimer summed it up by writing, “Mr. Reich has given us three playlets which, to put it kindly, stagger the imagination,” while Daphne Kraft of the Newark Evening News commented, “PETS, the three one-act satchels of emotion which got hurled on the stage of the Provincetown Playhouse last night, suffers from bad dialogue. The plays sizzle like wet firecrackers and make all of life look like exercises in hysteria.” In the Manhattan Tribune, Clayton Riley wrote, “Nothing to recommend but a superb air-conditioning unit at the Provincetown. Doubtless it will outlive, by a good while, Richard Reich’s slender trio.” Worst of all were the opinions of a critic in Cue: “Richard Reich is a playwright who has discovered a fascinating new toy — sadomasochism. So enthralled is he by the S&M mystique of discipline, power, sexual mastery and submission, torture and self-flagellation, that he has written no less than three one-acters in which people cage, whip, stab, and rape each other with gay abandon, all the while pontificating in language duller than an Abnormal Psych textbook.”

The film combined the three young women characters into one character, Bonnie, combined two older women into Geraldine, and added a few other scenes.

Oct 252019
 

One Shocking Moment (IMDB) is a 1965 exploitation drama film, written and directed by Ted V. Mikels. Unlike some other movies discussed in this project, it has a coherent narrative and recorded dialog.

Newlyweds Cliff and Mindy leave their home town so Cliff can get a big corporate job in LA. They settle into an apartment complex. This is the sleazy side of the sixties when everybody smoked like chimneys and drank like fish, and men cheerfully belittled and objectified women. Cliff even does so right in front of his new wife, with only her mild objections. Cliff starts an affair with his boss’ secretary, while lonely Mindy drifts into an implied lesbian affair with her neighbor Tanya, a lesbian nightclub owner.

Tanya (Verne Martine) gets down to business
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Oct 232019
 

The Girls on F Street, also known as The Maidens of Fetish Street, is a 1966 exploitation film (IMDB), directed by Saul Resnick. A lot of the film is padded out with the voiceover sermonizing, and shots of 1960s downtown Los Angeles, including landmarks like the Flight of Angels inclined railway.

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Oct 232019
 

The Abnormal Female (IMDB) is a 1969 exploitation film, a collection of softcore sexual vignettes loosely tied together by the voiceover narration of a psychiatrist and his female patients talking about their sexual experiences and fantasies.

Publicity poster for The Abnormal Female (1969)

In BDSM terms, the only segment of note is the first, in which a brunette woman known as Vickie, said to be a sadist, describes dominating a man. The film shows her doing just that, wearing a black leather minidress and boots, and carrying a bullwhip. However, she doesn’t actually use it as a whip, and instead uses it to tie a man’s arms behind his back. She rips off his clothes, forces lemon juice into his mouth, rubs pieces of fruit on him and ends with implied 69. It’s not clear in the diegesis if this is actually happened or is something she’s imagined.

This is the only known film work of the director George Rodgers. None of the actors turn up anywhere else (likely pseudonyms). The Abnormal Female came at the end of the softcore sexploitation era, just before the hardcore era of the 1970s.