FILM CLIPS:

Continuing our theme of "films not available on DVD," we start with Night Games, a film from the king of the French B-movies, Roger Vadim, who would occasionally churn out a film when he wasn't occupied having sex with Jane Fonda, Brigitte Bardot, Catherine DeNeuve, or Marie-Christine Barrault.  Vadim was essentially the French John Derek. Both men's films are filled with nudity, and Vadim was Derek's match in studliness. His harem is a solid match for Derek's group of Ursula Andress, Linda Evans, and Bo Derek. The only failure of the comparison lies in the fact that the Frenchman's films are mediocre, which means far better than Derek's.

Ultimately it doesn't really matter whether Vadim's movies are any good because one does not watch them for the quality. I don't much like 'em but I have to admit that if somebody issued a special DVD edition of "The Complete Roger Vadim Collection," I'd acquire it for the nudity alone.

Night Games features Cindy Pickett and Joanna Cassidy in various degrees of undress. Here is a zipped .mpg made from a VHS tape (large images, no sound). And here are two .wmv clips zipped together (small images, with sound).

The following are some sample captures. Ms. "Blade Runner" Cassidy had quite the butt on 'er.

Joanna Cassidy

 

For reference, here's a rare capture of Joanna's first screen nudity, in The Cursed Medallion (1975)

Joanna Cassidy

I have never found flat-chested, gap-toothed Jane Birkin to be an especially attractive woman, so I have a little trouble buying into a plot where she plays a top prostitute. Frankly, if Jane and I had sex and there was money exchanged, it would have to be flowing in the other direction! And it would have to be a sizeable amount! On the other hand, I thought she looked quite pretty in some scenes in Catherine & Co. Here is a zipped .avi made from a VHS tape. The following are some sample captures.

Jane Birkin

Who's Harry Crumb? (1989)

Who indeed? Harry is the world's worst private detective, although his father and grandfather were sleuths on a level with Holmes himself. With the elder Crumbs having passed on, the giant Crumb Detective Agency is being run by professionals, and poor old Harry has been exiled to the Tulsa office, obviously guaranteed a position in the company by his family inheritance, but assigned where he can do the least harm. His only unique gift as a human being is the complete inability to solve any crime of any type. Amazingly, the home office suddenly requires just such a talent. You see, the president of the detective agency has committed a kidnapping, and a wealthy client has hired the Crumb agency to handle the matter. It is therefore imperative as a matter of survival for the kidnapper/president to assign the case to a detective who will have absolutely no chance of figuring out what is going on. Enter Harry Crumb.

Harry is constantly posturing about how much he knows, even though the only things he gets right are meaningless bits of trivia. He is a limitless reservoir of accurate but useless information about obscure matters like vintage automobiles and fishing lures, but he is completely clueless when it comes to piecing together a criminal investigation. That doesn't stop him from declaring his genius with his words while his simultaneous actions betray his cluelessness. In other words, he's basically a fat, Canadian version of Inspector Clouseau. As per the requirements of a Pink Panther film, Crumb takes a know-it-all attitude, dresses up in ridiculous disguises, makes all the wrong assumptions,  gets everyone to assume he's an idiot, then somehow bungles his way to the correct solution.

Who's Harry Crumb isn't really such a good comedy. It's mostly slapstick, and the essence of its approach to humor is to exaggerate John Candy's ridiculous physical appearance. The big fella must have been at his peak weight at this time, and he was placed in the most embarrassing situations conceivable, whereupon the costumers were encouraged to dress him up in the most outrageous outfits they could conceive, so that the slapstick situations would look even sillier. He's flamboyant. He's a jockey. He's a woman. You get the idea. Of course, there was some juvenile humor to be milked out of that strategy, and I caught myself chuckling a bit, but it was also a waste of the kind of prodigious talent Candy had for creating a lovable wastrel character, as he did in Splash. Furthermore, Candy was basically asked to carry the entire movie with what is basically a colorful secondary character, and ... well ... we all know that a little bit of candy is a sweet treat, but we can get sick of it if we get too much.

The failings of this film notwithstanding, I really miss John Candy. Has he really been dead a dozen years? I can't think of anyone else who has come along to replace him. He was cast as a slacker, an incompetent, a shifty drunk, a coward, a pervert, a clueless dolt, a pompous ass ... and in every single case, the audience adores him. He's the ultimate lovable goof-off on screen, and his SCTV colleagues verify that John was simply playing John. When the members of the SCTV team sequestered themselves in remote hotels to concentrate on writing several episodes of SCTV for those early seasons, the others could never count on John to come back with the skits he said he would work on, but they could count on three things: (1) John would be in the hotel bar making a friend of every single human in sight; (2) John would have some funny ideas which could be developed by the cast members with better work ethics; (3) when the time came for filming, John would bring the same irresistible charm to his roles in the skits that he brought to the hotel bar.

And some of that charm can be seen here as well. The film needed more verbal humor and fewer pratfalls, but it does have John, and some other minor charms. Annie Potts is fun as a dotty nympho, and Shawnee Smith is adorable as the young girl who becomes Candy's ad-hoc partner. Above all Candy is Candy, so it can't be totally awful, can it?

 

Annie Potts

 

The Second Coming of Suzanne (1974)

Some movies are self-reviewing.

Here is the blurb from the DVD box:

"Meet Suzanne ... pure, sweet and so very innocent.

Three men are unavoidably drawn to her:

• There's the tormented artist, driven to capture her angelic beauty on canvas.
• And a right-wing columnist who is captivated by her "flower child" radical life-style.
• Plus an offbeat filmmaker who is convinced that the pristine Suzanne is the Messiah. In his bizarre film-within-a-film, the crucifixion becomes a frighteningly real crucifixation. The film crew's accountant tries to keep the movie's final scenes from being shot. Can he succeed ... or will it be too late?"

I didn't make up that "crucifixation" part. It really says that. Let me add that the entire film was based on a song, Leonard Cohen's "Suzanne," a famous hippie anthem which drones on and on throughout the film.

You'll notice that I omitted the film's date from the top of the page. You get to guess the era:

a. 1946-1959

b. 1960-1966

b. 1967-1974

c. 1982-1993

d. 1994-1999

e. 2000-2006

Pretty obvious, isn't it? Two IMDb commenters said it better than I could have:

(1) One of those post-psychedelic burnout non-movies that came out of the avant-garde independent cinema fringe in the early 70s. Sondra Locke portrays a female Christ figure for a bunch of young filmmakers ... and really that's about it. Chock full of drawn-out senseless images and pseudo-spiritual kakadoodie, the most troubling thing about this terrible movie is its smug air of self-importance ... the film is as hollow as a hat and struts through its duration with the pride of a peacock.

(2) Hard to sit through and almost impossible to follow, "The Second Coming of Suzanne" puts you through the same kind of torture that Suzanne is put through by Logan and the makers of the film-within-a-film. The movie tries to be arty but that's just an excuse to cover up its brainless and non-existent storyline and the terrible and amateurish acting by everyone in it.

It has all the usual requirements for hippie-era filmmaking: a nearly complete lack of dialogue, youth gangs wearing mime make-up, Seventh Seal rip-offs, sitar music, psychedelic "trips," dream sequences, paintings coming to life, and of course a crucifixion. 

The film was produced by a well-known TV actor named Gene Barry, the only film he ever produced, presumably to give his son Michael Barry a chance to write and direct a movie. It would be the last time anyone in showbiz would ever hear of Barry the Younger.  On the other hand, Barry the Elder, who also played the right-wing columnist in this film, would go on and on like the Energizer Bunny. As I write this, 32 years after Suzanne was made, and nearly 50 years after Bat Masterson debuted, Gene is still working. And he was already 42 when Bat Masterson went off the air! According to IMDb, he had a small part last year, at the age of 86, in Spielberg's War of the Worlds. (It was a bit of symmetry. He was also in the 1953 version of the film.)

In all those years, The Second Coming of Suzanne is the worst film (per IMDb rating) in which he is credited as an actor!

You can see some captures from the film at The Movie House, but this loopy film clip of the sex scene (zipped .wmv) is probably a better review than anything I have said or captured.  As I said, some movies are self-reviewing.

Sondra Locke

 

 

OTHER CRAP:

Movie Reviews:

Yellow asterisk: funny (maybe). White asterisk: expanded format. Blue asterisk: not mine. No asterisk: it probably sucks.

No theme, except all the gals are beautiful and a few of them are nekkid. 
 

Anne Hathaway	Courtney Peldon	Davina McCall	Gemma Atkinson
Jamie Lee Curtis	Jennifer Rubin	Pamela Anderson	Gina Gershon
Natalie Portman	Natalie Portman	Paris Hilton	Roselyn Sanchez
Uma Thurman			Vanessa Minnillo