Cinema
More flaming films
Kenneth Robinson
Flesh Gordon Directors: Michael Benveniste, Howard Ziehm Stars: Jason Williams, Suzanne Fields, Joseph Hudgins. 'X' London Pavilion (105 minutes).
The Spiral Staircase Director: Peter Collinson. Stars: Jacqueline Bissett, Christopher Plummer, Gayle Hunnicutt. 'A' Warner West End (105 minutes).
Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry Director: John Hough. Stars: Susan George, Peter Fonda, Adam Roarke. 'X' Rialto (95 minutes).
Flesh Gordon is travelling in an airliner when it enters a sex-beam from the planet Porno. Passengers are overcome by sex-madness and soon the floor is littered with naked bodies'. When the 'captain and his crew join in, Mr Gordon (Jason Williams) escapes by parachute, carrying a half-naked girl (Suzanne Fields) in his arms. The whole earth has also gone sexcrazy, so they promptly join a scientist on a world-saving mission. He hustles them into his phallus-shaped rocket, whisks them off to the degenerate planet and from then on the story appears to have been adapted from lavatory walls.
The film is continually smutty and sometimes obscene. It is also frequently funny. The humour comes whenever pornography is used to send up science fiction. The rocket-inventor (Joseph Hudgins) is not simply an absent-minded professor; he is also an absentminded lecherer who fingers naked girls in a crude way as he is talking. And the Flesh Gordon equivalent of King Kong doesn't merely stride about holding the heroine in the palm of his hand. He undresses her, uses naughty language about her anatomy and then tumbles to his death muttering the four-letter word currently used in the American cinema instead of `oh bother'.
Because the film is so funny it is easy to forget that it is basically dirty, decadent rubbish. When comedy is brought into pornography it can have a disarming effect. As the heroine of this piece is tied naked to a wheel, succumbing to all kinds of physical teasing — from mechanical feather-tickling to assault by a black Lesbian — it is tempting to believe the filmmakers are making fun of pornography as well as sci-fi. When the peg-legged Chief Nellie inspects her harems' breasts and buttocks, stroking them with her hooked metal hand, we could see this as a satirical jibe at the near-pornographic world of the horror comic. And so it is. But it is also a clever way of including scenes that would not otherwise get past the censor.
I should hate to get involved in the old censorship argument about how much a society's standards of decency influence its standards of morality. But this film has gone well beyond the barriers of decency without, it seems, upsetting the ridiculous body of men who work under Lord Harlech to keep our cinemas reasonably clean. You may have noticed that these gentlemen are advertising for a new secretary to lead them in their pitifully-inadequate deliberations. Let me warn the successful applicant that he and the censorship board will soon be seeing a sequel to Flesh Gordon, and that in pornographic matters he should be wary of the insidious effect of humour. • And now, from the sub-slime to the ridiculous. The Spiral Staircase is a marvellously-unconvincing thriller about a girl who cannot talk, but is caught in a series of situations where screaming is essential. She lives with a fich old lady in the same house as two uncles, a secretary, a nurse and a manservant and his wife. By the end of the film Uncle Christopher Plummer has strangled both the manservant and the secretary. He is about to strangle the girl (Jacqueline Bissett) when his sick mother drags herself across the landing and shoots him in the back. "I'm terribly sorry Steven," she says to her other son, "but I always thought that you were the killer."
"Oh, that's all right Mom," says Steven, stepping cheerfully over the bodies of his brother and his mistress. And while we are still laughing at this understatement of the film-year, the heroine is on the telephone getting her voice back. It seems she lost it when her husband and daughter caught fire.Considering what most of the characters say to each other — including the lovely Gayle Hunnicutt, who is ever-sodeep-South when she remembers — it seems just as well we do have a dumb heroine who cannot tell us what she is thinking.
If you do like silent movies the modern counterpart is the carchase film, where mechanisation takes over from people. Well, it may not be completely silent, with all that reving and braking and colliding, but at least there is very little talking. The latest film of this kind is Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry, a silly title for an engaging piece about a girl who tags along with two men escaping from the law. There is not much plot in this magnificent series of car chases. Mary (Susan George) starts by fancying Larry (Peter Fonda) but ends up in the back seat with Deke (Adam Roarke). Nobody says very much, but these irresponsible people become more likeable the more irresponsibly they behave.
Incidentally, this film ends in flames, which we also have a lot of in The Spiral Staircase and in Flesh Gordon. In fact, Mr Gordon gives us here the flaming-nude love scene we only just missed getting in The Towering Inferno. I'm always amused by such small, meaningless trends in the cinema. For some time we can be fairly sure of characters catching fire. But not, I fear, ideas.
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