Showing posts with label Helmut Berger. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Helmut Berger. Show all posts

Friday, August 15, 2014

SALON KITTY 1976

The controversial Italia-Franco-German production Salon Kitty was released in the United States in 1977 under the title Madam Kitty (because we Yanks do need to have things spelled out for us), but I honestly have no direct memory of its original theatrical run, nor can I recall ever reading anything about it at the time. Which is really weird given: a) It stars dreamboat  #1, Helmut Berger, going full-frontal (why hadn’t my friends told me about this?!!?); b) It’s an X-rated, European art-house exploitation flick, which, if you knew me in my film-school days, was practically catnip; c) It’s a semi-musical with Ingmar Bergman star Ingrid Thulin channeling Cabaret and doing her best Sally Bowles impersonation as the singing proprietress of a decadent, high-class Berlin bordello in 1939; e) It reunites the stars of Luchino Visconti’s 1969 opus The Damned (Thulin & Berger) in an over-the-top, trash/camp vision of Nazi Germany worthy of Ken Russell.
How is it that I somehow missed the release of Salon Kitty, a film of almost operatic poor taste and visual excess?

With so much about Salon Kitty so perfectly suited to my oddball tastes, I really am at a loss for understanding how this film failed to capture my attention back in 1977. Except to note that when I Googled the original US release poster, what I found was a poster so tacky and cheap-looking, with "X-rated" plastered all over it, there's a pretty good chance that I mistook Madam Kitty (Salon Kitty) for a run-of-the-mill porn film and never even bothered to read the credits. In the end, perhaps it was all for the best because, as I understand, the US version was severely edited, and I'm happy that my first exposure to Salon Kitty (just last month!) was through the restored director's edit (Italian director Tinto Brass, of Caligula infamy) currently available on DVD.
Helmut Berger as Helmut Wallenberg
Ingrid Thulin as Madame Kitty Kellerman
Teresa Ann Savoy as Margherita
Bekim Fehmiu as Hans Reiter
John Ireland (!) as Cliff
Inspired by a true story (movie-speak for “outside of the basic premise, we essentially made everything up”) Salon Kitty is about an apolitical madam (Thulin) who runs the most popular whorehouse in Berlin during the early days of WW II. Salon Kitty is a luxurious bordello/nightclub democratically catering to an international clientele of foreign dignitaries and high-ranking members of the Nazi Party (“Himmler…Von Ribbentrop…they are all my clients!”).

Under the orders of icy SS General Biondo (John Steiner), ambitious secret security officer Helmut Wallenberg (Berger) closes down Kitty’s Berlin brothel and sets her up in a new location in the more remote Grünewald district. Only instead of being allowed to keep her stable of multi-ethnic call girls, (who he deports, kills, or sends to prison camps), Kitty is obliged to accept and train a specially selected all-German cadre of prostitutes-in-training chosen for their devout National Socialist loyalty. Kitty thinks she is doing her part for the morale of the German army, but unbeknownst to her, each of the rooms of her new bordello has been outfitted with bugging devices intended to secure information leaked by German military officers during pillow-talk sessions. Information that might prove useful for blackmail or the unearthing of treasonous behavior.

What ultimately happens when Kitty discovers she is being used as a pawn in Nazi espionage, or what revenge an otherwise reprehensibly unsympathetic recruit (Teresa Ann Savoy) plots after falling in love with a disillusioned Luftwaffe Lieutenant (Yugoslav heartthrob Bekim Fehmiu, whose US career sank without a trace after appearing in the flop Harold Robbins sudser The Adventurers in 1970), serve as mere backdrop for Salon Kitty's most pressing concerns: the wholesale depiction of sexual depravity, the display of naked male and female flesh as often as possible, and allowing for Helmut Berger to strut around like Norma Shearer in one outlandish fetish uniform after another.

Does this swastika make me look fat?
Although it all sounds positively loony in synopsis, as stated, Salon Kitty is based on actual events culled from a 1972 book by Peter Norden about a madam (Kitty Schmidt, name changed to Kellerman for the film) whose brothel was indeed used for the purpose of spying by SS agents. The chief difference being that in real life, Kitty was aware of the wiretapping but was threatened with the non-option of either cooperating or being sent to a POW camp. But in a Tinto Brass film, the prurient always takes precedence over the political, so, much like one of Ken Russell’s fervently overheated biographies of famous composers (The Music Lovers, Lisztomania), Salon Kitty is less a look at civilian-coerced Nazi espionage, than a full-tilt wallow in the kind of “divine decadence” that Cabaret could only hint at.
The controversial "recruitment" scene

Salon Kitty was recommended to me by Netflix on the strength of the 5-star rating I gave Visconti’s The Damned after I watched it for the first time last year. I’m not a big fan of films about Nazi Germany; in fact, I tend to go out of my way to avoid them. but Visconti’s film was like The Godfather to me: a nihilistic epic of evil couched in a cutthroat family saga. I liked its scope and visual opulence, and I particularly liked Visconti’s artful way of distilling an epoch of unspeakable inhumanity down to an emotional scale which didn’t allow the watchful observer the easy-out of being able to say, “That could never happen here.”

Alas, while Salon Kitty feels and looks on the surface like a companion-piece to Visconti’s The Damned, in truth it’s more a well-heeled example of a (mercifully) short-lived cinematic sub-genre known as Il Sadiconazista (or Nazi exploitation film). These were films that, in the wake of controversial arthouse successes The Night Porter (1974) and Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975), sought to capitalize more on the sensationalistic depiction of the sexual/sadomasochistic side of Nazism with only superficial, contextual attention paid to the political.  
SS Commander Biondo leads Wallenberg through a gymnasium of bottomless fencing students

Salon Kitty attempts to dramatize the rise of National Socialism in Germany by equating the decadent conduct of aristocratic culture with the gradual erosion of individual morality that was at the center of the dehumanizing, sadomasochistic recruitment practices of the SS. It shows, rather effectively, that the only way to turn people into obedient drones is through the dismantling of self. And undeniably, much of what is on display is in accord with what we’ve come to learn about the controlling, brainwashing techniques of cults, religions, extremist groups, and most recently in the U.S., unscrupulous political parties

But in placing so much emphasis on all things sexual, and in taking events so far over the top as to appear stylized, Italian director Brass not only weakens the seriousness of these themes, but makes it all too easy to focus exclusively on the downright bizarre set-pieces and often hilariously clumsy dialogue: “A soldier also wants to shoot his bullets, not just those the army gives him!”
Or perhaps this exchange:
Wallenberg- “You have to close your nightclub.”  Kitty- “What a pain in the ass!”

What, for example, is the appropriate response to a scene in which a prostitute literally goes mad and starts foaming at the mouth after a German official, upon placing a loaf of bread shaped like an enormous phallus between her thighs, bites off its head?
One of Madam Kitty's girls with a client

In The Damned, a character attributed the following quote to Hitler: “Personal morals are dead. We are an elite society where everything is permissible.” I have no idea if Hitler actually said this, but if the wall-to-wall debauchery depicted in Salon Kitty could be said to exist in service of anything beyond cheap exploitation, I’d say it serves to decry the basic criminal degeneracy of the Nazi movement and the moral decay fueling their particular brand of fascism. Too bad that point has to wade through a lot of laugh-inducing absurdity in order to be made.


WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM
People (myself included) often use the phrase, “Only in the '70s” when referring to a certain unbridled, anything-goes lunacy characteristic of movies of that decade. In most instances it’s said in a pejorative way; but when I say it it’s with an almost proprietary, boastful pride. I’m happy to have discovered film in an era when filmmakers, giddy with the newfound freedom of relaxed censorship and permissiveness, took chances and were allowed to cater to adult tastes, not required to pander to adolescent fads.
John Steiner as Commander Biondo
Far from being a work of art, a film of such questionable taste as Salon Kitty gets a major thumbs-up for me simply because, in light of the corporate, committee-sanctioned analgesics passing for movies today, I can’t help but admire a film that pushes boundaries so recklessly. Wholly independent of whether or not I approve of the boundaries being pushed.
Fascism as Fetish

PERFORMANCES
While I tend to be of a mind to say a bad performance is a bad performance in any language; European films with international casts pose a unique problem, what with the widespread practice of post-production dubbing. In Salon Kitty I can’t tell if the often disembodied-sounding voices are due to dubbing, poor sound recording, or simply poor performances. But outside of the leads (and just what is Joan Crawford's Queen Bee and I Saw What You Did co-star, John Ireland [fully clothed, thankfully] doing here?), I think it’s fair to assume most of the cast was selected for their willingness to appear in various states of undress first, for their acting ability second.

The beauteous Helmut Berger is certainly easy on the eyes, but I’ve always considered him to be more a presence than an actor. He has a kind of brittle intensity that I like, but mostly I just regard him as a kind of male Garbo…just looking at him is enough. He has undeniable star quality, and the camera clearly loves him. When he's onscreen it's often difficult to watch anyone else.

By far, the best and most entertaining performance in Salon Kitty is given by Kitty herself, Swedish actress Ingrid Thulin. (Thulin began her career as a star in several Ingmar Bergman films. The same year Salon Kitty was released in the US, Bergman's own Nazi-themed film, The Serpent's Egg was also released.)
Kitty & Wallenberg attempt to make beautiful Teutonic music together

As the resilient, pragmatic whorehouse madam, Thulin is like a character out of Isherwood’s Berlin Stories. With her expressive, wry mouth, and that magnificent face that can look both masculine and feminine at the same time, Thulin plays her role to the hilt, cannily never really letting on whether she’s playing it straight or playing to the camp, melodramatic heights of the material. The earthy zeal with which she attacks the role breathes vibrant life into Salon Kitty's austere, unerotic eroticism.
Life is a cabaret at Salon Kitty

THE STUFF OF FANTASY
While Salon Kitty at times makes a pretty persuasive case against the perils of fascism and the abuse of power, I have to say, after sitting through the entire 133-minute director’s cut, the strongest images I come away with are those depicting decorous depravity, and those highlighting the visual splendor of the sumptuous art nouveau décor and the eye-catching costumes.
Not since the excesses of Lucille Ball's Mame (1974) has the drag queen aesthetic been given such full rein in costume design. Credit Jost Jacob & Ugo Percoli
Always dressed for the occasion, Kitty attempts to enlist the aid of a client (Stefano Satta Flores)
 in a plot to turn the tables on Wallenberg
You know it's a high-class whorehouse when the girls wear gowns inspired by Hollywood designer, Adrian. In this instance, a black and white number worn by Joan Crawford in Letty Lynton (1932)

THE STUFF OF DREAMS
Salon Kitty features scenes of orgies, whippings, sadomasochism, lesbianism, homoeroticism, voyeurism, animal slaughter, and some things I could only look at through the fingers covering my eyes. Although unpleasant at times, none of it ever feels purposeless. Indeed, when Salon Kitty is at its best--that is to say, when it stops to take itself and its themes seriously--the explicit barbarism depicted feels calculated precisely to prevent the viewer from “enjoying” the film’s eroticism independent of its monstrous context of impending death camps and genocide.
Humanity Reclaimed
"Man belongs to mankind...not to a country, or to a race or religion."
But for all the baroque displays of violence, degeneracy, and depravity, Salon Kitty’s most chilling moment and most powerful anti-Nazi indictment comes in a quiet sequence that takes place in an aquarium. A Jewish family encounters a group of Hitler Youth girls, and as the family attempts to avoid a confrontation, their small son accidentally drops a small wind-up toy at the feet of one of the girls. A tense moment transpires as the child stares innocently into the face of one of the sternest girls (later to become one of Wallenberg’s recruits) who proceeds to methodically crush the toy under her foot without once breaking her gaze from the child’s confused eyes.
This scene, played without dialogue, packs a serious wallop and should clue those who would dismiss this film out of hand for its excesses, that there is perhaps a method to Tinto Brass' madness, and the whole of Salon Kitty is likely greater than the sum of its outrageous parts.
Salon Kitty bid you Willkommen

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2014

Friday, March 8, 2013

DORIAN GRAY 1970

Playwright Oscar Wilde's only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (published in 1890), has been adapted to film at least ten times, not counting several silent versions and numerous movies made for television. Of these, I've seen a kind of low-rent, Dark Shadows-esque version produced by Dan Curtis in 1973; a visually well-turned-out and significantly altered 2009 British theatrical adaptation for the Twilight generation; and the uniformly excellent 1945 film version which boasts George Sanders playing what is essentially Addison DeWitt five years before there was an Addison DeWitt.
Each film possesses its own unique assortment of assets and liabilities, but by no stretch of the imagination could any be labeled the definitive translation of Wilde's allegory of the corporeal vs. the spiritual. So, being that as far as I know, the definitive adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray has yet to be made, I proffer this, my absolute favorite version of Wilde's oft-told-tale: the irresistibly loopy Dorian Gray - 1970. It is a film that stands head and shoulders above the rest for its appealingly tawdry Eurotrash aesthetics, flawless evocation of Swinging '60s mod, and its flagrant, unabashed sleaze factor.

Loaded with entertainment value every bit as visually exquisite and shallow as its protagonist, Dorian Gray (titled The Secret of Dorian Gray or The Evils of Dorian Gray in Europe) is a deliciously prurient Italian/German collaboration produced by American schlockmeister Samuel Z. Arkoff (the "brains" behind virtually every Beach Party or outlaw motorcycle gang movie made in the '60s) and released through his American International Pictures.
Helmut Berger as Dorian Gray
Herbert Lom as Henry Wotton 
Marie Liljedahl as Sybil Vane / Gladys Mormouth
Richard Todd as Basil Hallward
Margaret Lee as Gwendolyn Wotton
Directed by onetime Sergio Leone cinematographer Massimo Dallamano, Dorian Gray is Oscar Wilde's Victorian Gothic provocatively updated to Swinging Sixties London at the peak of the Sexual Revolution. It remains reasonably faithful to the novel's Faustian plot concerning a handsome young innocent --led down the path of hedonism and debauchery-- whose portrait comes to reflect the decay of his soul, while he himself remains the unsullied ideal of youth and beauty. This Dorian Gray is, in every and all aspects, a Dorian Gray that could only have come out of the late '60s.
Mac Daddy Dorian
WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM
There is something conceptually so perfect about positing Dorian Gray smack in the middle of the youth-obsessed '60s. Removed from the wholesale repression and prudery of Victorian-era morality, this particular incarnation proposes what seems to me to be a far more compelling question: When arbitrary ethical judgments of good and bad are replaced with the freedom to do what one wishes in a world that worships self-fulfillment, beauty, youth, and living for today, of what authentic value is a moral code?

In the year this film was released, folk rocker Stephen Stills had a Top 20 hit with a song whose lyrics espoused the then-popular "free-love" philosophy: "If you can't be with the one you love, love the one you're with." (Which in itself is a retooling of an E.Y. Harburg lyric from a song from the 1947 Broadway musical, Finian's Rainbow: "If I'm not near the girl I love, I love the girl I'm near.”) The timbre of the times literally reflected the philosophy of Dorian Gray's Hedononist-in-Chief, Henry Wotton: life is to be enjoyed freely and openly, and youth is a briefly bestowed gift best utilized to its fullest while one possesses it.
Prince Charming and Juliet
Prior to embarking on a long-term love affair with himself, Dorian falls into
idealized love with virginal (albeit not for long) aspiring actress Sybil Vane

The '60s atmosphere of moral relativism would seem to suggest that this particular incarnation of Dorian Gray was perhaps conceived as a means of addressing Oscar Wilde's themes in a manner relevant to the changing times. An opportunity to reflect upon what distinctions exist, if any, between being liberated and being a libertine. Alas, from the film's first Giallo-influenced frames (Giallo being a stylized genre of Italian thriller), it's clear that this Dorian Gray is less interested in exploring the complex themes of aestheticism vs. morality so much as exploring how far the newly relaxed standards of cinema censorship can be pressed into the service of chronicling Dorian's heretofore only-hinted-at depravities and sins of the flesh.
Desire Under the Elms
PERFORMANCES
Italian cinema's long history of dubbing and post-synching dialog frequently makes it tough to access actors' performances. Dorian Gray's multi-national cast speaks its dialogue in English, but the entire film is dubbed by other actors (save for Herbert Lom, who provides his own voice). This might spare audiences the sometimes ear-gnarling clash of dueling accents you get with many international productions, but it also tends to rob performances of a great deal of their vitality. This is especially true of the dynamic and charismatic Helmut Berger, who possesses a sexy, melodic voice and whose charming Teutonic lisp (he's Austrian, actually) I greatly miss.
Action films and mostly-silent spaghetti westerns fare better under this practice, but a dialogue-heavy film like this — with its attempts at Wilde-ishly witty banter — makes for a particularly clumsy aural experience. The effect of all these somewhat flat, disembodied voices is that already dodgy performances are rendered thoroughly ineffectual (I'm sorry, but lovely Marie Liljedahl seems like a pretty awful actress in any language), and potentially good performances (Berger, Isa Miranda, Renato Romano) are de-fanged and neutered. In its place is a form of acting I tend to associate with those Hammer horror films from the '60s: underlined and over-indicated to the point of pantomime.
"Do you want to sell it, Mr. Gray?"
In a minute, randy millionairess Patricia Ruxton (Isa Miranda) 
will make it obscenely clear she isn't talking about real estate

Happily, Dorian Gray, having been fashioned as an erotic exploitation film from the get-go, isn't really a film fueled by its performances. Like a trash novel by Sidney Sheldon or Jacqueline Susann (fans of Valley of the Dolls would love this), Dorian Gray is a movie devoted to surface gloss. And on that score - from its photogenic cast, sumptuous color photography, lavish locations, outrageous mod costuming, and climate of glamorized sleaze - Dorian Gray more than delivers.
Tearoom for Two
Dorian Gray, Sexual Outlaw
THE STUFF OF FANTASY
A hurdle for any screen adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray is the casting of a Dorian whose looks correspond to enough people's wildly subjective notions of male beauty so as not to render the narrative absurd, or at the very least, puzzling. For my money, director Dallamano hits pay dirt with the casting of Helmut Berger. A man so staggeringly beautiful that he makes personal fave Joe Dallesandro (certainly one of the most gorgeous men to have ever walked the planet) look like Ernest Borgnine.
Something not possible in earlier adaptations, contemporary Dorian Gray becomes a porn star!
Protégé and life partner of director Lucino Visconti, Berger appeared prominently for the director in The Damned, Ludwig, and Conversation Piece. Dubbed by the press at the time as the most beautiful man in the world, Helmut, smooth, slim, and marvelously devoid of tattoos, was like the Richard Gere/Ewan McGregor of his day: he couldn't keep his clothes on.
In the '70s, female stars were jumping out of their clothing in record numbers, but one had to rely almost exclusively on Andy Warhol-produced Paul Morrissey films to catch male nudity of any consequence. Lucky for us connoisseurs of male pulchritude, Helmut Berger obligingly doffed his trousers in film after film. A fact that certainly leaves me wondering to what degree my affinity for this film is tied to the filmmakers taking every opportunity to feature our leading man in various states of undress. I'll have to think about that.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS
Someone once said, "Everyone has trash, but what distinguishes us is the quality of our trash," (it sounds like something John Waters would say). I apply this philosophy to my taste in movies. I'm well aware that a great many of the films I get the biggest kick out of are films many would perceive as pure cinema trash, but there's not a soul in the world who could convince me that my particular brand of trash isn't some of the most superior trash you're likely to come across. It's often the very best that the worst has to offer.
The striking actress Beryl Cunningham portrays Adrienne, Dorian's amoral partner-in-blackmail
In Dorian Gray, you have the typical youth-directed sexploitation stuff American International released with assembly-line regularity in the '60s and '70s (Three in the Attic, Angel, Angel, Down We Go), only this time cloaked in the veil of literary significance. In most aspects superficial (those centering on the libidinous exploits of Dorian), the film does right by its conceit in updating the tale to modern times. But it fails to go much below the surface in examining even a fraction of the ideas and concepts its premise suggests.
Curiously, it's the passing of time which has granted Dorian Gray the subtextual gravity it lacked in 1970. Albeit perhaps, uncomfortably.

Actor Helmut Berger has gone on record about his disdain for Los Angeles and Hollywood, and has thus, outside of a small part in The Godfather: Part III and a year's penance on TV's Dynasty in 1983, mostly worked in Europe. High living (literally...drug and alcohol abuse) eventually got the better of him, and like Marlon Brando, that other physical specimen who ceased to care for maintaining a youthful appearance for the comfort of his fans, Helmut did the unspeakable...he allowed himself to age naturally.
Renato Romano portrays Dorian's boyhood friend, Alan Campbell, a chemist
Certainly his current condition is to some degree a result of youthful excesses, but at almost 70 years of age, part is merely due to a thing that has become increasingly rare among public figures: actual aging. A phenomenon practically unheard of in Hollywood, our culture reveres beauty so completely that an individual who allows his looks to "go" is considered more a figure of pity than one who pathetically clings to eternal youth.
Personally, I find Helmut Berger's current relaxed-into-himself countenance very refreshing, and it speaks of a self-image perhaps a good deal healthier than the plastic-surgery nightmares that proliferate in Hollywood today. I've read many online comments about how sad it is that Berger has failed to maintain his looks as he ages, but little speculation along the lines of how he might be happier and more at peace with himself now than in his cocaine-thin days.
Helmut Berger in his 60s  /  Berger at 25 
The questions about inner vs. outer beauty that Oscar Wilde dramatized so artfully years ago (and if you've never read The Portrait of Dorian Gray, I heartily recommend it) are still with us... maybe now more than ever. In our looks-obsessed culture in which beauty is so often seen as a virtue, is youth really a thing worth trying to hold onto forever, prizing it above all? And what value does beauty have to the possessor (we on the outside benefit from gazing upon it) if there's not also peace of mind? It's a pity that Dorian Gray, an exploitation film distracted by its own sensationalism, failed to delve deeper into the many questions raised by its enduringly appealing premise.

But take a look at the film now, through the prism of 43 years having passed. Like a real-life Dorian Gray, Helmut Berger in this movie provides a record of himself in a state of near-perfect youth. A moving portrait frozen, unchanging, and captured on film for all time. Knowing now what we couldn't have known in 1970 (what ultimately becomes of Helmut's celebrated beauty, his battles with drugs and alcoholism, and the toll they take on his face, body, and mind) raises the very issues Oscar Wilde's novel proposed all those years ago, and makes us question our own attitudes about beauty, aging, and the value we place upon such things.
"The world belongs to the young and beautiful," Wotton tells Dorian. Perhaps that's true. But it's ownership with a very short lease. Beauty is indeed something, but it's sobering to ponder, when considering Helmut Berger's troubled life and how little peace his good looks brought him, how obviously beauty isn't everything.

Copyright © Ken Anderson     2009 - 2013