Author: Jim McLennan

Dir: Francis Coppola
Star: Teri Garr, Frederic Forrest, Raul Julia, Nastassja Kinski

“One from the Heart has no characters, no performances, no story, no comedy and no romance, only what Hollywood calls ‘production values’… [It] appears to have been originally conceived as a series of sets, then as a story to go with the sets.”
— Vincent Canby, New York Times

Kinski’s first Hollywood film was a complete box-office disaster: it cost $26 million, but grossed less than $640,000 at the US box-office, a percentage which still ranks as among the worst ever. A string of poor decisions, both production and financial, bankrupted Coppola, and resulted in him, a decade later, filing for bankruptcy and owing partner and co-producer Fred Roos a total of $71 million by the time interest was included. Perhaps worse still, attempts to pay off the debt forced Coppola into a lengthy period of artistic servitude, working on things like Captain EO for Disney, or even Jack, the Robin Williams “comedy” (and quotes have rarely been used more deliberately). No-one should have to go through that…

Much though Coppola deserved some punishment, since it’s hard to disagree: Heart does suck. It’s a massively ill-conceived entity, which contains about fifteen minutes of cinematic magic, sandwiched in the middle of a pair of unlikeable characters, who feel like they spend the entirety of the remaining ninety minutes, yelling at each other.  They are scrap-yard worker Hank (Forrest) and travel agent Frannie (Garr), who are celebrating their fifth anniversary in Vegas. But it’s not long before their bickering turns into her storming out, and both of them hook up for one-night stands with their ideal lovers: she with Ray (Julia), a waiter and wannabe musician; he with Leila (Kinski), a circus artist. However, will this bring them the happiness they seek, or do they belong together?

It’s doomed to fail from the get-go, because there is absolutely no reason provided for the audience to root for the couple. We’re not shown them loving each other, or even given anything that might make us like them, and care about their fate. They’re not together two minutes before they arguing about whether to stay in or go out, and that sets the tone for almost all their exchanges until the utterly implausible ending. Really, if this is any kind of accurate snapshot of their relationship, it’s a miracle the previous five years have not led to involuntary homicide by one or the other. Even separated, they’re no more engaging, each whining to their friends about what a bastard/bitch the other is. [Hank’s colleague is played by Harry Dean Stanton, somewhat foreshadowing his later work with Kinski on Paris, Texas].

You can certainly admire the epic look and feel, with the entire thing filmed on sets at the Zoetrope Studios lot. That involved rebuilding the Las Vegas strip at a cost of $6 million, with 125,000 light bulbs and ten miles of neon. However, it doesn’t have any real sense of era: at times, it feels like the forties, but at others it could be the sixties or even the seventies. It’s as if Coppola was so obsessed with the details, he forgot the bigger picture. Still, this all pays off for at least one glorious segment in the middle, starting from when Ray seduces Frannie through dance, and proceeding through Kinski’s rendition of Little Boy Blue, and on to her hanging out with Hank at the scrapyard, which she regards as a “Taj Majal”-like wonderland. There, you can see for what Coppola was aiming. It’s a shame the rest of the film falls so far short of the same standards.

The supporting cast, Julia, Kinski and Stanton, are actually all solid in their roles. I have far greater problems with both Garr and Forrest, who are perhaps intended to stand in for the everyman and everywoman, but are badly miscast, and Coppola only succeeds in making them boring and irritating. This, combined with the idiocy of the plot. leave the film with a gurgling vortex at its core, down which everything else eventually vanishes, after varying degrees of struggle. I must confess that the setting of Las Vegas is appropriate, and has a certain emotional resonance to me, as that’s where I met my wife for the first time. The soundtrack, by Tom Waits, and performed by him and Crystal Gayle, works nicely as a chorus of comment. It’s really a musical, where almost none of the characters sing – Kinski’s number represents a rare exception.

Overall, however, this is one of those cases, where the process by which the movie was made (Coppola largely directing it from the interior of an Airstream trailer), and its after-effects, are a great deal more interesting than the actual product itself. I largely agree with Canby’s summation at the top of the page, or even Pauline Kael’s snarky assessment that “This movie isn’t from heart, or from the head either; it’s from the lab.” In Jon Lewis’s book, Whom God Wishes to Destroy…: Francis Coppola and the New Hollywood, the author suggests Coppola’s problems were the result of the studios trying to freeze out some of his advanced ideas about the way technology would revolutionize the industry.

“In order to protect their position – in order to maintain control over the distribution and exhibition of motion pictures in the United States – and in order to send a message about the shape of things to come in the industry, it was necessary for the studio to make sure that Coppola would not be able to fund his research… The production problems that plagued the film – all of which, more or less, had to do with capital secured through the major studio-big bank apparatus – seem at the very least to indicate an unstated industrywide decision to make the movie as difficult to produce as possible.”

That Coppola’s foresight was somewhat accurate (in general direction, more than specific ideas) matters not. It’s undeniable he didn’t so much shoot himself in the foot, as unload an entire magazine there. For instance, he filmed an entire additional, un-financed opening sequence without having secured the necessary cash: when he went to Paramount to ask for the extra $4 million, they turned him down, annoyed at not having been consulted beforehand. He ended up having to fund it from Chase Manhattan, with the studio and his Napa Valley winery as collateral for the loan. That ended well.

Finally, I was viewing the film in 4:3, as available on Netflix, and was wondering how that affected things, even though the cinematography certainly isn’t a problem here. However, turns out Coppola deliberately shot in that ratio, to mimic the visual style of the forties musicals he wanted. It still felt weird,  because I’m so used to watching letterboxed films these days. It was certainly a contrast to go from the widescreen glories of Tess to something which both looks like an extremely expensive TV movie, and plays like a bad soap-opera.

Dir: Roman Polanski
Star: Nastassja Kinski, Peter Firth, Leigh Lawson

You can hold your own for beauty against any woman, Queen or commoner. I tell you that as a practical man who wishes you well. If you’re wise, you’ll let the world get a clearer sight of that beauty – before it fades…
— Alec Stokes-d’Urberville

This was the first Kinski film I saw which required a significant amount of full-on acting, and it was a revelation. While it was Kinski’s presence that initially drew me in, I was blown away by just about every aspect, from the cinematography to the score, and I still regard as an all-time classic, 25 years after first seeing it. Thomas Hardy’s book – which I subsequently read – is one of the greatest tragic stories in English literature, and Polanski’s version does it complete justice.

Its origins are in the violent mayhem which struck Hollywood in August 1969, when Polanski’s wife, actress Sharon Tate,  then 8½ months pregnant, was among the victims of Charles Manson’s “family.” The last time Polanski saw Tate, she supposedly gave him a copy of Hardy’s novel, telling him it would make a great film. Tate had herself been given the book by Julie Christie, inscribed “For my Hardy heroine” – Christie had been one of those herself, starring in John Schlesinger’s 1967 adaptation of Far from the Madding Crowd. The resonance of Tate with Tess, both losing a child and their life in terrible circumstances, doesn’t need to be spelled out.

“The thing that attracted me most to this novel is the theme of fate: the heroine has everything she needs to make her happy. However, the social context in which she lives and the unrelenting pressures weighing down on her lock her into a chain of events that lead to her tragic end.”
— Roman Polanski

Polanski and Kinski had known each other well before the movie. Their relationship began when she was just 15 – by some reports, the first significant relationship since Tate’s death – and it’s a spooky coincidence that both Kinski and Tate were born on January 24th, eighteen years apart. There’s some doubt as to whether they were still together during filming. One reports says, “Their own affair wrapped about simultaneously with Tess,” but according to Polanski, “From the time I started the film with her, we were like brother and sister.” Kinski concurred: “It was just a romance. I fell out of love with Roman after a while because something bigger grew—a real understanding. He’s like from my family.”

It was a production fraught with issues. Because Polanski had fled legal proceedings for statutory rape in the United States, the film could not be shot in England, where Hardy’s story took place, for fear of extradition. Instead, Locronan. in French Brittany, stood in for Wessex, but the need to capture all the seasons led to a nine-month shooting schedule and resulted in the film becoming the most expensive produced to that point in France. Weeks were lost to a strike by French crew members, and original cinematographer Geoffrey Unsworth died in the middle of the shoot. Apocryphally, when producer Claude Berri’s wife was asked how her husband was sleeping, given all these problems, she replied: “Like a baby – he wakes up crying every hour.”

Also raising eyebrows was the decision to cast a teenage German girl in the central role. Kinski was sent to London for five months of dialect study and Polanski also sent Nastassja to Lee Strasberg’s studio. She says, “He took a lot of time, two years, preparing me for that film.” Quite a number of reviewers were unimpressed by the effort – one described her accent as “bewildering,” another said it “deeply marred” her performance – but it seems pretty damn close to me, certainly good enough and never took me out of the moment. The same can be said for the length: I tend not be a fan of movies that go beyond 2 1/2 hours in length, since they always seem overstuffed and superfluous. That’s not the case here: every scene is necessary, and I never even glanced at the time.

Backing up Kinski’s performance are those of Lawson and Firth, portraying the two men in her life. First, there’s Lawson as Alec, who sets his sights on conquering her, from the first time he sees her. Yes, he’s a total cad, but Alec is at least consistent, and doesn’t make much of an effort to conceal his true nature. While there obviously can be no excuse or defense for his assault on her, he shows himself willing to do the right thing, and take care of both the child spawned from his loins, and Tess herself in the long term. You could argue that it’s the heroine”s pride and defiance, which makes that task far more difficult than it should be.

Angel (Lawson) is arguably a worse villain, because his facade of propriety is shown to be nothing more than hypocritical sham, when Tess finally gets the courage to detail her past. That’s not for want of trying either: possibly the most awful moment in the film is when she discovers the note she left for him, slipped under the carpet unseen. As she descends to ground, crumpling the note, the sun flares up behind her into the lens in a brilliant moment of cinematography (whether fortunate or planned), incinerating everything., including our heroine’s happiness. It’s little wonder Tess looks like a deer caught in headlights at her wedding, terrified for the future.

She’s absolutely right to be concerned, because Angel’s reaction to her confession is to turn into Mr. Bastard, telling Tess, “You are not the woman I loved…[but] another woman in her shape.” He becomes even more scathing from there: “I cannot help associating your lack of firmness with the decline of your family. Decrepit families imply deficient willpower and decadent conduct. I thought you were a child of nature. But you were the last in a line of degenerate aristocrats.” The double-standard here is clear, having just confessed about a premarital relationship of his own – and one which was, unlike Tess’s, apparently entirely consensual.

He storms off and heads for Brazil, but as he leaves, has a chance encounter with Izz, one of his wife’s colleagues from the dairy, who always held a candle for Angel. He asks if she’d come with him, but the resulting conversation is another dagger, this time to Angel’s heart, and one too late to repair:

“Do you love me so much?”
“I’ve… I’ve always loved you.”
“More than Tess?”
“No. Not more than her. Nobody could have loved you more than Tess. She’d have given her life for you. I could do no more.”

That’s just one of a number of heart-wrenching scenes that are just intense to watch – the most traumatic of which is perhaps Tess pleading with the local vicar to allow her baby, baptized only by its mother, to be buried in the local churchyard. [I probably shouldn’t say this, but I suspect the child probably died of starvation: let’s just say, the scene of Nastassja breast-feeding, suggests not enough nutrition for a field-mouse…] The entire film is an emotional roller-coaster like that – except there’s a lot more down than up. In fact, it’s more like an emotional Tower of Terror.

All the pieces mesh perfectly, even the cinematography where, as mentioned above, Geoffrey Unsworth died during filming, and was replaced by Ghislain Cloquet (who also passed away, a few months after completing hs work) . You can probably tell the differences in style, and figure out who shot what, if you know the hallmarks to look for, but you’d never know it otherwise, with their styles complementing each other. Right from the off, Phillipe Sarde’s score is right there alongside the viewer, propelling and crafting emotions in almost every scene – I’m not able to hear the lullaby, Bye, baby Bunting, without thinking of the film, due to Sarde’s variations on the theme.

The film was a critical hit, snaring six Oscar nominations and winning three – Unsworth and Cloquest shared for Cinematography, and it also won for Art Direction and Costume Design. Inexplicably, it lost out for Best Score to Fame, and for Best Picture to Ordinary People, whose director Robert Redford also beat out Polanski. Commercially, it was less successful, at least in North America where Polanski’s reputation probably hurt it more, with a take there of fractionally over $20 million, compared to its budget of $35 million. However, it did well in most of Europe, for example taking in about $7 million in the UK. Certainly, it performed a lot better than Polanski’s next film, Pirates, so I trust Berri was able to sleep eventually!

As for Kinski, it made her an international star, though her acclaim was less. She was nominated for a César, and won the Golden Globe for New Actress [though to put the latter into context, in the next two years, the same award went to Pia Zadora and Sandahl Bergman, before the plug was pulled on the category entirely!] But she did pay a price for the fame the movie brought her. Two years later, she was still “taking a daily rubdown for back problems caused by the tight corsets she wore” during the filming. That’s suffering for your art.

Dir: Alberto Lattuada
Star: Marcello Mastroianni, Nastassja Kinski, Ania Pieroni, Mónica Randall
a.k.a. Stay as you Are, Stay the Way you Are

On the one hand, this is a ludicrous, middle-aged fantasy of a movie, based upon the wobbly premise that someone like the teenage Kinski would be even slightly interested in leaping, at first sight, into an affair with Mastroianni, more than three times her age at the time of filming (he was 53; she was 17). This would only be less credible if she turned up on his doorstep to fix the plumbing or deliver a pizza: it’s that dubious of a concept.  However, both the leads do a pretty good job at selling this. There’s a reason Mastroianni was nominated three times in his career for the Best Actor Oscar, and if Kinski isn’t exactly stretched by a role as a wild-child teenager with Daddy issues, she brings a youthful exuberance and boundless energy to proceedings, that’s actually tiring to watch.

He plays architect Giulio Marengo, resident in Rome, but working on a project in Florence. He encounters Francesca (Kinski), and there immediately appears to be a connection, as he gives her a lift back to town – only for her to vanish mid-journey, courtesy of a passing motorcyclist. But she left her phone-number behind, and it’s the start of a passionate affair. A large, incestuous spanner is thrown in the works, however, when a friend of Giulio tells him that Francesca is the daughter of Fosca, a woman whith who Giulio was in a relationship, not too far from the appropriate time-frame of Francesca’s birth. However, Fosca is now dead, and there are other possible candidates for the role beside Giulio.

This is where I part company with his character entirely. In the extremely unlikely event of a teenage hottie developing a crush on me, if I discovered there was even the slightest possibility she was my daughter, it would immediately reduce her to the status of platonic friend, until there was incontrovertible proof to the contrary. Not so Giulio, who continues to operate on the basis of “Well, maybe she isn’t,” and even after explaining the situation to Francesca, doesn’t take the obvious step of any kind of paternity test – they did have those in the 70’s. Instead, it’s a weird, unresolved aspect of their relationship: maybe Italians are simply less concerned about such things?

This does play somewhat like Tatort, with Kinski once again hooking up with an older, married man, though at least here, the reaction of Mrs. Marengo (Randall, looking oddly like Diana Rigg from On Her Majesty’s Secret Service) seems plausible enough. There’s a brilliant scene where Francesca is supposed to meet Giulio in town, but when he doesn’t show up, she goes to his house, where his wife answers the door, and susses the situation in about two-tenths of a second. The temperature in the room drops about thirty degrees as a result. The film does pose the tricky question: is it better to maintain a sham of a marriage for the sake of your children, even if it largely makes everyone involved unhappy?

The film’s major advantage is Mastroianni, who comes over as genuine and likeable, which is quite impressive, given at the heart of the movie, you have to get past the whole “she’s one-third his age!” thing. Admittedly, there’s absolutely no sense of this being other than a relationship between two intelligent, fully consenting adults – they just happen to be separated by several decades in chronology. Portraying that as being neither particularly shocking, nor intrinsically unnatural, is actually quite groundbreaking and refreshing. You can understand what they see in each other, even if it isn’t much more than old/young stereotypes i.e. wisdom and calm, versus energy and enthusiasm.

The solid performances from Kinski and Mastroianni help paper over some moments best described as strange. There’s an entire chunk devoted to a trip to Madrid for the pair, to see Giulio’s daughter, which appears to be in Spain for no other reason than it’s a Spanish-Italian co-production. Look! Landmarks! Having got that contractual obligation out of the way, the leads camp out for the rest of the time in a hotel room. There. Francesca urges her lover to bite her ass hard, and then serves him a glass of her fresh urine. No, really: that’s taken almost verbatim from my notes, and there’s just not any way to describe the scene, where it doesn’t seem truly bizarre.

Things head to a conclusion which is almost inevitable, once you hear the story of how Giulio and Fosca broke up. I’m still not sure whether it counts as satisfying or not. If it “makes sense,” in the light of what has gone before, it doesn’t present the viewer with any real resolution, and I didn’t get the feeling that many of the characters had been changed significantly by their experiences. The overall concept is of two ships – who may or may not be intimately connected – passing in the night, then heading on their separate ways. While the production values and her co-star certainly count as a step up for Kinski (I should also mention Ennio Morricone’s score, which definitely enhances proceedings), it’s not a film that will likely stay with you particularly long, and feels more like a cinematic trifle than a classic.

Dir: Andre Farwagi
Star: Nastassja Kinski, Gerry Sundquist, Marion Kracht, Véronique Delbourg

“St Clare’s School a brothel? This is the greatest offer I’ve ever heard, boys.”

In its dubbed incarnation as Passion Flower Hotel, this was the first Kinski film I saw, when it was screened overnight on ITV, I’m guessing probably in the late eighties, and at the time, I thought it (and Kinski in particular) was the greatest thing since sliced bread. It was the beginning of a lengthy fascination with Nastassja, that lasted a decade, was derailed when a psychotically jealous girlfriend decided to cleanse my life of her (I should have taken the hint when video sleeves started turning up with their eyes gouged out!) , and declined into irrelevance, as I became the happily-married man I am now. But my fondness for trash cinema and writing about it remains intact (on Monday, I did 500 words on Sharknado, which irreparably timestamps this post at July 2013!), and this film was one of the formative influences.

Of course, things have changed since: mostly me. It’s one thing to watch a film which depicts teenage girls as sex objects when you’re the same age yourself. At that point, it was hard to conceive of a finer prospect than the 17-year-old Kinski. Now, I’m married, with a daughter who is older than that, and it just seems…wrong, and I feel wrong for watching it. [Though as we’ll see, its creator seemed to feel no such qualms] Of course, it’s the cheerily transgressive nature of the movie which was part of its original appeal. Even in the decade between its release and my discovery, AIDS had turned sex into a death sentence, and the concept of a lighthearted romp involving underage girls selling their virginities, was already insanely inappropriate, albeit in ways not perhaps foreseeable when the book that inspired it came out, in 1962.

“It would have been shocking anywhere, but that it should happen at Bryant House, an expensive and exclusive girls’ boarding school, was incredible – at least, to the authorities. Sarah Callender was receiving excellent instruction in cookery, home-nursing, needlework, languages and games, but she was deeply disturbed by an obvious omission from the curriculum. So during her Christmas holidays she did some unusual research and discovered that boys in boarding schools were being neglected in the same subject. There was no alternative: they must educate themselves.”

The book, The Passion Flower Hotel, was written by “Rosalind Erskine”. Quotes used advisedly: rather than the supposed teenage girl author this was one of many pseudonyms adopted by Roger Longrigg. A prolific author, then in his mid-thirties. he also wrote, under another pen-name, Mother Love, adapted into a successful BBC TV series starring Diana Rigg. Predating the movie, the book became a musical play, with a score by John Barry, composer of the Bond theme. That ran in Manchester and London’s West End over the summer of 1965, with the cast including Barry’s future wife Jane Birkin and Pauline Collins, later to become Shirley Valentine, and also Francesca Annis.  [Warner Bros apparently had optioned the play’s movie rights, but nothing came of it]. In the mid-eighties, however, the novel also became a BBC radio dramatization, for which I’ve just located a source, and it’s something I am quite curious to hear.

There were actually three books, the sequels being Passion Flowers in Italy and Passion Flowers in Business, but it’s only the first which has any culture resonance, and still seems to be remembered quite fondly – its Goodreads.com rating is a healthy 3.9 out of five stars. There’s a Books Monthly feature article that is quite effusive in its praise, calling central character Sarah Callender, “the culmination of all those fantastic school story heroines.” But it makes the credible point that the book came out just after Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which marked a ‘great leap forward’ in permissiveness for literature, one authors were keen to exploit. However, it also remains resolutely homophobic, as witnessed by the following exchange between Sarah and one of her prospective clients at the neighbouring school:

‘Don’t you have romantic feelings for smaller boys?’
‘When did you ever hear that?’
‘I suppose I read it.’
‘Only perverted swine go in for that sort of thing.’

Ironic how society’s attitudes have gone the opposite way in this, compared to the core concept here. There’s one odd scene – odd, mostly because it’s a musical number! – where the boys get lessons in kissing, which ends with some brief male on male action. But it’s not an idea more than vaguely broached by the film version on which we’re focused, despite the obvious possibilities inherent in schoolgirl lesbian lust. Yep, spam those Google search terms!

However, Blümchen doesn’t attempt to be contemporary, nor even sets its story during the sixties, alongside the novel, but moves things back to the summer of 1956, when rock and roll was causing waves on the far side of the Atlantic; there are several Bill Haley and the Comets songs used. Hence, the arrival of Deborah Collins (Kinski) at St. Clara’s School [the dub says St. Clare’s, but the signs disagree] is a social and cultural timebomb. On the train there, she bumped into Frederick Irving Benjamin Sinclair (Sundquist), known as Fibs from his initials. Conveniently, he is going to St. George’s: that’s the boys’ school standing opposite the bridge leading to St. Clara’s, on its island in a lake. While very scenic, this makes it tough to carry on any kind of relationship, as Deborah soon finds out.

The headmistress thinks Deborah will lick her dubious dorm-mates into shape; they, however, are eager to greet their American cousin, whom they believe will be a trove of worldly wisdom. Deborah is happy to sustain the illusion, and assist them in losing those pesky cherries: “What we all need is a situation where we don’t need to take the initiative,” as one of the girls puts it. The solution: Club Love Unlimited, which will cater to the boys of St. George’s, offering them the chances to enjoy the fruits of St. Clara’s and induct them into the ways of womanhood. Needless to say, the boys are delighted by the prospect. Of course, there’s many a slip ‘twixt cup and lips, and the encounters don’t go as planned. At the end of term, CLU decides to go out of business with a bang, holding a party and striptease contest in the school attic. Bang successfully accomplished, shall we say.

It’s basically a sex comedy, playing like a distaff version of Porky’s, which came out four years later, with teenage boys, desperate to lose their virginities, by any means necessary. Despite the sensational subject matter, the tone is generally kept light, with the encounters usually being foiled with slapstick results.  This also has much in common with the “sex report” films that were hugely successful in Germany during the seventies, most obviously the long-running Schulmädchen-Report series, which supposedly exposed the sex lives of teenage girls. Blümchen hits the ground running in this regard, starting off with a close-up of a teenage breast, holding the shot for so long that the shock evaporates, and it then goes beyond erotic, into surreal post-modern territory.

But, man, there’s a lot of lingerie and giggling: I was prepared to swear a pillow-fight was going to break out, at any second.  Which would have been fine, as a guilty pleasure, except Jane (Kracht) looks about 12. I kept expecting the police to break down my door simply for having this, even though Kracht was actually born the year after Kinski. It’s an interestingly cosmopolitan selection too, with the five girls from America, Germany and France, and sporting accents to match, at least in the dubbed version. In contrast, all the boys except the Italian nicknamed ‘Plum Pudding’, sport English accents, even “Carlos Rodriguez”. Mind you, the distinction between boys and girls is even clearer in the method of selecting representative. The girls draw cards, for the queen of hearts; the boys eat stuff, either dumplings or live insects. Snips and snails…

Still, it’s a frothy concoction which manages almost entirely to avoid being sleazy, partly because of its upbeat tone, and partly because both sides are the same age, unlike many of Kinski’s early movies, where she was the subject of attention from much older men. There are some genuinely funny moments – the deadpan safety demonstration before a romantic boat-ride always made me laugh – and the moral of this immoral tale is that there’s someone for everyone, and that true love will find a way. From most accounts, the book has much the same “naively depraved” tone, and what you get here is absolutely a product of its time, shot in focus that’s less soft than fluffy (cinematographer Richard Suzuki also did Emmanuelle), and accompanied by a bouncy score from Oscar-winning composer Francis Lai which you’ll probably find yourself whistling subsequently.

It’s perhaps worth spending a paragraph doing a “where are they now?” on the actors and actresses. Of the boys, Sundquist struggled with depression, and committed suicide in 1993, jumping under a train at a London station. But Sean Chapman, who plays Rodney, had a part in Alan Clarke’s Scum, and is best known (at least, in our household) as ‘Uncle Frank’ in the first two Hellraiser films. Kracht has had a long career in German television, and Gina (Fabiana Udenio) has also kept busy, playing Alotta Fagina in Austin Powers. But perhaps the biggest surprise is Gabrielle Blum, who was head-girl Cordelia, a no-nonsense “jolly hockey sticks” type, who is easily the butchest girl in the entire film. Two years later, she’d win Miss World as Gabriella Brum, albeit resigning after a mere 18 hours wearing the crown.

As for Kinski, she has made no secret of her utter disdain for the movie, saying in an interview, “I’d like to find every copy of that film and burn them.” That’s a bit of an over-reaction. No-one is going to make the mistake of considering this as great art, but there are a lot worse transgressions and embarrassments in the early careers of other actresses. I’m thinking of Jennifer Aniston in Leprechaun bad. Helen Mirren in Caligula bad. This is not even in the same league, and is a film for which I suspect I’ll always have a spot in my film festival of great trash cinema.

Dir: Wolfgang Petersen
Star: Nastassja Kinski, Christian Quadflieg, Judy Winter, Klaus Schwarzkopf

Tatort – it means “crime scene” – is a national institution in Germany, where it has run since 1970. It’s a police procedural, with a varying cast of characters: the regional channels which form ARD, contribute feature-length entries to each series, depicting their own investigators and cases.  This was one of six episodes directed by Petersen, who’d find fame with Das Boot, and move to Hollywood, where he directed Air Force One, The Perfect Storm and Troy, among others. But given its longevity, almost everyone in German film short of Werner Herzog has worked on the show at some point. Others involved include Oliver Hirschbiegel (Downfall), Michael Haneke (Funny Games), Robert Schwentke (RED), Christoph Waltz (Inglourious Bastards) and even Sam Fuller (Shock Corridor).

And, of course, Nastassja. She plays Sina Wolf, a teenager who is having an affair with Helmut Fichte (Quadflied), one of her teachers at the school. Another pupil, Michael, with whom she used to be in a relationship, finds out about the affair, and blackmails Sina into going to the woods with him, looking for some hanky-panky. But Sina smacks his skull in with a rock, blaming the attack on an individual she read about in the newspaper, who is being sought by the police for attacks on women. The cops, led by Inspector Finke (Schwarzkopf) are unconvinced, and the more they pick at the story, the more they find its flaws. Meanwhile, turns out Michael shared Sina’s secret with a classmate, who is now blackmailing Fichte for better grades, and things start to unravel from that end too, as his wife (Winter) finds out what’s going on.

It’s one of the few episodes of the show ever to receive any distribution outside of German-speaking territories, and it’s the only episode I’ve ever seen, so I can’t really say how typical it is.  It does appear the show created quite an impact on its original screening in Germany, not least for the nudity: Kinski is topless in a couple of scenes, though is playing a couple of years older than her real age. But it is “often voted the favorite episode in Tatort’s history,” according to one source, which praises the “well-written, haunting script” and the performances, stating that Kinski “became famous overnight” as a result of the show. I can’t argue with that: it’s an intelligent story, where people behave rationally, and most of the performances are sympathetic.

Indeed, what’s particularly striking is how non-judgmental the film is – though it’s hard to tell how much of this is down to current morality. The movie does come from an earlier era, less (hysterically?) sensitive to underage sex. and certainly from a European sensibility – the age of consent in West Germany at the time this was filmed, was 14. though the student-teacher relationship here may have been covered by other laws. I am not an expert on German legislation, nor do I play one on TV. But that aside, it would have been easy for the creators to make Fichte some kind of sleazy predator, but he isn’t. Instead, he’s depicted almost as much a victim as Sina – who is smart and knows her own mind. She has the future all planned out.

“At 25 I will become a mother. I’ll correct English tests and when the little girl brings me the button off a coat, I won’t take it. You have to accept this. I won’t sew on buttons, nor will I iron shirts. It’d be best if you wear sweaters. In the summer, the little girl will stand in the garden and pick daisies, with a red ribbon in her hair. You will come home from school annoyed about Prof. Pfeiffer. The reason? He doesn’t like your modern educational methods. You see the child and half your anger vanishes. You see me at the door and all of it is gone.”

Teases her lover, “And if I suddenly fall in love with another school girl?” The expression on Sina’s face is marvelously deep, a million emotions flickering across her face as she pauses, before replying, firmly: “That is not a good idea.” No, what we have here hardly appears to be a seduction of the innocent. Even more remarkable – in fact, requiring more suspension of disbelief than I could manage – is the calm, rational approach taken by Frau Fichte to the news her husband is having an affair with one of his charges. She does little more than roll her eyes and request a transfer to a boys’ school. I checked in with my wife whether she would be as measured, in similar circumstances. Her stated reaction involved my testicles and a rusty nail-file, which seems more understandable. Maybe such a phlegmatic approach is a German thing.

Indeed, there isn’t what you’d call a conventional “villain” in the entire movie. It’s more a tragedy for all, set in motion by a combination of small actions, none of them particularly malevolent in themselves or especially motivated by evil. Even Michael, whose attempt to blackmail Sina, is what kicks things off, is shown with some sympathy – witness the shot of him pedaling furiously away after seeing her and Helmut have sex. He’s clearly deeply hurt and angry, and his subsequent actions reflect that. Likely the most unpleasant character is Sina’s classmate, who both seeks to use the situation to her own advantage, while simultaneously denigrating Sina for her actions. Nice to know high-school bitches aren’t just an American thing.

Certainly, it’s a good deal more accessible than Falsche Bewegung, and considering it was a TV movie, has to be considered well above-average for the genre. Solidly produced and with decent performances from all the leads, it’s easy to see why it made such an impression on viewers, both in general, and in its introduction of Nastassja to a wider audience.

Sina (Kinski) is interrogated by Inspector Finke (Schwarzkopf)

Dir: Peter Sykes
Star: Richard Widmark, Nastassja Kinski, Christopher Lee, Anthony Valentine.

“98% of so-called ‘Satanists’ are nothing but pathetic freaks, who get their kicks out of dancing naked in freezing churchyards. They use the Devil as an excuse for getting some sex. But then, there’s that other 2%…”
— John Verney

The last Hammer horror film ever made, Daughter saw the studio return to the well of Dennis Wheatley, which had previously been drawn from by the company in 1968, with a successful adaptation of The Devil Rides Out. The genre landscape had changed significantly since, most notably with a more explicit style, as seen in The Exorcist and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Hammer had been slow to adapt. The early 70’s saw them attempt to inject more sex into their mix, but they also tried their hand at movies based on TV shows, and even co-produced films with the Shaw Brothers in Hong Kong. Describing the success of these efforts as “mixed” would be kind, and Daughter is generally seen these days as the final flicker of a dying candle, though was fairly successful commercially at the time.

You can hear the resonances of various other films present in this. Rosemary’s Baby, released the same year as Rides Out, tells a similar tale of modern Satanism, using an innocent to give birth to the embodiment of Satan. Of course, that was directed by Roman Polanski, who would go on to cast Kinski in Tess. I’m also obviously reminded of The Wicker Man, which also had Christopher Lee as the head of a pagan sect possessing different moral standards. And while this came out a couple of months prior to The Omen, it has a similar manichean struggle between the forces of light and darkness. That’s made most clear in the end caption, by Wheatley: “In light all things thrive and bear fruit… In darkness they decay and die. That is why we must follow the teachings of the lords of light.”

The film starts with the excommunication of Father Michael Rayner (Lee) for his heretical beliefs. 20 years later, Catherine Beddowes (Kinski) is about to leave the German convent where she has lived her whole life, for the annual trip to see her father, just before 18th birthday. But this time, a lot more is being planned than cake and ice-cream, for her parents gave her to Rayner’s Satanic cult, and they’re now looking to cash the IOU, using her as a vessel to return their lord, Astaroth, to the world. However, her father seeks to renege on the deal, enlisting the help of American occult expert John Verney (Widmark). He intercepts Catherine at the airport on her arrival, and there begins a cat-and-mouse game, with Rayner using black magic to recover Catherine, and Verney using his knowledge to fight back.

It’s the performances that make this work, when it does: it’s almost a parade of great British actors, with the most recognizable faces in the supporting cast including Honor Blackman, Frances de la Tour and Brian Wilde. But it’s Lee who dominates the film, with strong performance as a confident and intelligent villains, fully committed to his cause. This is most apparent during a glorious moment, just after the forced birth which is the film’s most squirm-inducing scene (the mother having her ankles and knees tied together, leaving the baby to claw its way out of her stomach). The camera pans across the faces of those in attendance. You see revulsion. Horror. Then Father Rayner, grinning in gleeful abandon. It’s awesome.

In contrast, Widmark comes off as a little flat, and you sense he was included in a sop to the American market, much as the German location and Kinski were to Hammer’s co-producers, Terra Filmkunst GMBH Berlin. One wonders how the latter felt about the portrayal of the Satanists, which on occasion borders on the neo-Nazi. That may be a vestige of Wheatley’s military past – he was gassed at Passchendaele in World War I, and part of a secret planning group called the London Controlling Section in World War II – and the book certainly contains its share of political commentary, mostly anti-Socialist. However, lines like the following could easily be imagined coming from the lips of a Hitler Youth member, as much as a devout nun!

“The youth of the world has lost its way – it’s in a vacuum. They need something to believe in, to follow – something new and powerful. We will provide it, very soon… I simply believe and obey.”
— Catherine Beddowes

In her first English-speaking role, Kinski acquits herself credibly, managing to capture nicely the dual nature of someone who is both completely innocent, as well as being groomed as the embodiment of pure evil and chaos, and fully committed to that end. She has to play both sides of the spectrum, and does so effectively, even though she is delivering her lines in a second language. I’m not sure whether she was dubbed, as Hammer did with a number of their overseas leading ladies, such as Ingrid Pitt in Countess Dracula. It doesn’t sound too different to me from her voice in, say, Reifezeugnis, but I’m not exactly an audio expert, and others have sworn blind her voice was replaced.

What clearly wasn’t replaced was her body, most notoriously when she slides off the sacrificial altar at the end, shedding her robe as Rayner offers her to Verney as a sample of what he could have after Astaroth is re-incarnated. If the topless scenes already in her career were surprising, the full-frontal nudity is even more shocking, considering Kinski was likely 14 at the time of filming. [I recall reading her claim this was a body-double, which hardly seems likely] Equally as creepy is her part in the reverse birth sequence, one of a number of disturbing nightmare sequences, and she has a good dramatic range, going from quiet piety to thrashing around on a bed like a cat in heat. Yes, I accept that I am using a fairly-loose definition of “dramatic range.”

The film’s real problem is the ending, which appears to demonstrate that the way to defeat ultimate evil is to chuck a rock at it, and takes about two minutes. If it appears to have been made up on the spot, that’s largely because it was. Director Sykes found the original screenplay he was given unusable, leading to an emergency uncredited rewrite by Gerald Vaughan-Hughes, who’d go on to script Ridley Scott’s feature debut, The Duellists. This was still being worked on when shooting started, and it’s really more to the movie’s credit that the results largely work. The climax originally was to have had Rayner struck by lighting, but that was deemed too close to Lee’s fate in Scars of Dracula, leading to an emergency rewrite of the emergency rewrite. Just be grateful it wasn’t all a dream.

The other problem, particularly for a modern viewer, is the film’s attempt to depict the spawn of Satan, something that has not stood the test of time well – though I suspect it probably didn’t look too good in 1976 either. This isn’t a film that needs a physical monster, because Lee does a perfectly good job of embodying evil, in a way that’s more horrific, psychologically, than any puppet creation could be [though, that said, it was only six years later that Rob Bottin’s work on The Thing would prove there are times when showing stuff will beat the pants off letting your imagination do the work]

Random factoids. I used the film as a basis for a D&D adventure while at college. It worked rather well, if I recall. And the film is namechecked in the Simple Minds’ song, Oh Jungleland: they also mentioned Nastassja in their earlier Up on the Catwalk, among the “one thousand names that spring up in my mind.” Neither of these are meaningful in any way.

Dir: Wim Wenders
Star: Rüdiger Vogler, Hanna Schygulla, Hans Christian Blech, Nastassja Kinski (as Nastassja Nakszynski).

The opening scene has the hero, Wilhelm (Vogler) observing people in the city square below his bedroom window. Suddenly, without explanation, he puts his fist through the glass. His mother comes to see what has happened – she opens the bedroom door, stares at Wilhelm, who stares back, without either of them saying a single word – such as (and I’m just improvising here), “What the heck happened to the window, and why is your hand bleeding?” Instead, after exchanging gazes, she closes the door, and your humble reviewer literally bursts out laughing, at the pretentious angst-laden weight of it all.

This is the kind of seventies artwank for which I have little time and even less love, with Wilhelm being emo in all the worst ways, about a decade before the term was even invented. That means: self-obsessed, introverted and in love with the sound of his own inner monologue, even though he doesn’t have much of interest to say.  But then, the same could be said for just about everyone else in the movie. Even the conductor on the train, as Wilhelm heads to Bonn to seek his fortune as a writer, doesn’t just sell tickets, he also expresses his angst: “Something terrible happened to me today. I leave the house, and when I’m outside I notice I’ve forgotten my umbrella. I opened it up. I had odd-colored socks on too. It was indescribable.”

Ah, the ennui is overpowering, to quote Marvin the Paranoid Android (not the last Hitch-hiker’s Guide reference in this paragraph, either). On his journey, Wilhelm turns out to be a bit of a Pied Piper of Angst, attracting a palette of other characters around him, who act in a similar fashion, as if their banal pronouncements shed some light on the meaning of life. For instance, there’s actress Therese (Schygulla), street performer, and likely unreconstructed Nazi, Laertes (Blech) his pubescent assistant Mignon (Kinski), and wannabe poet Bernard, whose output is so execrably bad, it’d give Vogon poetry a run for its money. Let’s just enjoy a sample, shall we?

A child trod on me, like on snail-festooned jellied, rotting fungus.
I yearned to spurt myself into the gutter.
I felt like trembling, transparent veal jelly.
I fell though a trap-door into a last dream and hung like well-hung meat on a hook.
And a hanged man with a sign: “I AM A TRAITOR” twitched as MYSELF from a plum tree.
From my terror-stricken stiff member there shot sperm and dripped upon a white sheet.
Since then I’ve lived under a glass bell and let my rotting consciousness vapour the glass.
Why must there be so vast a space between me and the world?

Bernard fits right in, needless to say. Reaching Bonn, they wander through the backstreets of the capital, observing the sickness of the human condition: a couple fighting here, a man howling from a window there. The only time any enthusiasm is detected in the group, is when they see what appears to be a fire and rush off to see it. Maybe someone is burning to death in there. They end up at a castle supposedly belonging to Bernard’s uncle, but it’s the wrong house, and they interrupt the owner, just as he is about to commit suicide, following his wife, who did so three months previously. After listening to his monologue, beginning, “I’d like to talk about loneliness. I don’t believe it exists. It’s more of an artificial feeling engendered from outside,” I can see why she opted for suicide. And after one night with the group, the house-holder too, opts to return to his original plan, and kills himself.

That night Wilhelm ends up – accidentally or not – in Mignon’s room, where she is sprawled, topless, awaiting his attention. This is “a bit troubling,” shall we say, since Kinski was probably only 13 at the time of filming, given the film’s premiere was March 1975, seven weeks after her birthday.  So don’t expect a screenshot of it here. Fortunately for the film’s legal status, he slaps her and leaves. The next day the group exchange dreams and go for a walk, on which Bernard and Wilhelm have a conversation. It’s notable, because it’s one of the few times characters talk to each other, rather than pontificating at each other, without the slightest apparent interest in listening to anyone else.

It’s probably this which makes the film so irritating. Peter Handke’s screenplay (inspired by Goethe’s novel, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship) seems more interested in using the characters as a mouthpiece for his own views, than bringing them to life of their own. The group slowly disintegrates., Wilhelm observing the banality of the everyday life which surrounds him, and never getting round to doing much in the way of writing. His cold disinterest eventually drives even Therese away, reducing her to empty gestures, flailing ineffectually at Wilhelm with paper snatched from his typewriter.

Really, Kinski’s character comes over as perhaps the most sympathetic in the entire film – because she is completely mute, and so doesn’t have to spout the turgid, pseudo-philosophical nonsense which comes out of the mouths of everyone else. It’s probably wise, given her complete lack of acting ability or training, and instead, she just observes what’s going on – her silence (never explained or even addressed) makes her seem a lot smarter than most of the adults. The luminous gaze that would bring her to international stardom down the line, is already completely recognizable, and its understandable why Wenders discovered her in a Munich disco, apparently oblivious to her parentage.

I get the fact that this is all intended to be an allegory for the state of Germany in the mid-70’s, with Mignon representing the nation’s youth, and Laertes its dubious recent past, for instance. But any relevance is severely diluted by the passage of close to forty years, as well as several thousand miles of geographical distance. Now, what you have is instead a parade of unlikeable, selfish characters wandering around an emotional wasteland, while preening in their intellectual mirrors. It ends – and I trust I’m not spoiling this for anyone – with Wilhelm as alone as he was when the movie started, apparently unchanged and unmoved by his experiences. As character arcs go, it’s nothing to write home about.