World Book Day 2023!

“Liz Renay is a most unusual woman with a most unusual past. A prominent author recently said, “I looked into her eyes, and they held me, and they haunt me now for in them I saw two thousand years of living!” 

She began as a smalltown girl in Mesa, Arizona as a sibling in a family of religious zealots. Then World War II came and she became a “V-girl”, attracting servicemen with her beautiful face and large breasts.

Thus began the “two thousand years of living” that took her into the world of high fashion models and 52^nd Street strippers. The quaint pranks of fate led her into the underworld, and she became known as a Mafia moll, trusted and respected. 

To escape from the world of crime, she went to Hollywood, where she became known as “Mickey Cohen’s girl.” 

She had already won a Marilyn Monroe lookalike contest. Cecil B DeMille was enthralled with her. Opportunities were opening up everywhere. 

Meanwhile, her paintings were selling for as much as $5,000 each. Her poetry was recorded and broadcast. 

And then came 13 Grand Jury appearances and screaming front page headlines. (On one day, nothing but her face and a headline about her filled the front pages of two daily newspapers in New York City on the same day). 

True to the people who trusted and protected her, she refused to cooperate with the efforts to put a gangster behind bars. She was tried and found guilty of perjury. 

Three years in a woman’s prison. Six marriages. More narrow escapes than Hairbreath Harry. And more love relationships than any six swingers of our time can boast of combined. 

And this is only part of the Liz Renay story. Told in her own words and with a candor and honesty unusual in autobiography. (But this still glamorous beauty is an unusual person!). 

My Face for the World to See is her story in her words – without the benefit of ghostwriters and professionals. It is compelling to read and memorable to have read!” 

To commemorate World Book Day (2 March 2023): the blurb from Liz Renay’s 1971 memoirs My Face for the World to See, which I’m currently reading. Her writing style can best be summarized as “chatty.” It really does read like a tipsy, garrulous woman at a cocktail lounge decided to sit next to you and start regaling you with her life story!

Next Lobotomy Room Film Club: The Star (1952) on 16 March 2023

 

/ “Never has the Hollywood story been told so frankly … so boldly … so completely! Here is every woman who ever climbed the stairway to the stars – only to find herself at the bottom, looking up!” /

/ “She fought for the power to stay on top … and almost lost the privilege and glory of being a woman!” Bette Davis and Sterling Hayden in The Star (1952) /

To commemorate “Oscar season” (full disclosure: we don’t actually care or pay attention to the Academy Awards!), on 16 March the free monthly Lobotomy Room film club presents The Star (1952)! Featuring the perennially fierce Bette Davis as Maggie Elliot, a faded fifty-something actress on the skids struggling to reignite her stalled career. “One good picture is all I need!” she screeches to her manager. Later, she confronts a parasitic sponging relative with, “Can’t you get it through your thick head that I’m broke? Dead, flat, stony broke!” 

/ “The orchids … the furs … the diamonds that were the star’s were all gone now … and nothing remained …  but the woman!” /

/ “ONLY Bette Davis – the star of stars – could accept the challenge of such a role! Only the WOMAN within her could find the penetrating insight to play it! ONLY the two-time winner of the Academy Award could give it such greatness!” /

The Star is comprehensively overshadowed by two other films where Davis played troubled ageing actresses: All About Eve (1950) and What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1952). But it’s one of my favourite unsung Davis performances and the film has an appealingly harsh low-budget ambiance that lends it a gritty almost documentary feel.  Years later, Davis herself would argue “I have always felt The Star was very underrated by critics and the public.” 

/  Davis with Sterling Hayden / 

And just wait until you see the camp highlight: slurring “C’mon, Oscar! Let’s you and me get drunk!” and strapping it to the steering wheel, Maggie takes her Academy Award for a drunken joyride - and winds up in a prison cell! (In a “meta” touch, the statuette in question is one of Davis’ own).  Rounding out the cast: Natalie Wood as Maggie’s daughter and hunky Sterling Hayden as a younger actor (who just may be Maggie’s romantic saviour …). And speaking of Oscars: Davis did get nominated for Best Actress for The Star (her ninth nomination), but she lost to Shirley Booth for Come Back, Little Sheba. 

/ “The story of a woman who thought she was a star so high in the sky … that no man could touch her … until she was no longer … THE STAR!” /

Lobotomy Room Goes to the Movies is the FREE monthly film club devoted to cinematic perversity! Third Thursday night of every month downstairs at Fontaine’s bar in Dalston! Two drink minimum (inquire about the special offer £6 cocktail menu!). Numbers are limited, so reserving in advance via Fontaine’s website is essential. Alternatively, phone 07718000546 or email bookings@fontaines.bar to avoid disappointment! The film starts at 8:30 pm. Doors to the basement Bamboo Lounge open at 8:00 pm. To ensure everyone is seated and cocktails are ordered in time, please arrive by 8:15 pm at the latest.

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To whet your appetite ... the outrageous trailer! 

Reflections on ... The Legend of Lylah Clare (1968)

Recently re-visited: The Legend of Lylah Clare (1968). Tagline: “Overnight she became a star. Over many nights she became a legend.” 

Klaxon!! A pristine version of this widely reviled misbegotten camp oddity is currently viewable on YouTube – and it’s compulsory viewing for devotees of “bad movies we love”. I hadn’t seen this one since I was a teenager - and in fact even then I’m not sure I made it to the end. 

Sultry Kim Novak stars as decadent German screen diva Lylah Clare (think Marlene Dietrich or Greta Garbo), who died in her prime in murky circumstances – and urban myth has it she was initially discovered working in a “brothel that catered to some pretty peculiar fantasies.” Now, twenty years after her death agent Bart Langner (Milton Selzer) has terminal cancer and his final wish is to produce a tell-all Lylah Clare biopic. But when Langner pitches the idea to Lylah’s temperamental husband and director Lewis Zarkan (Peter Finch), he’s dismissive anyone could do Lylah justice (“Dreary little pussycats come mincing in here like bitches in heat doing their dirty little business!” Zarkan fumes). But then Langner introduces his discovery and proposed leading lady - a mousey unknown wannabe actress called Elsa Brinkmann (Novak again wearing glasses and a brown wig). “Shoulders. Hips. Cheekbones. Just like Lylah. It’s uncanny!” he raves. 

When she arrives at the mansion Zarkan shared with Lylah, the meek Elsa seems oddly mesmerized by a huge oil portrait of Lylah – and the sweeping dramatic staircase where she plunged to her death. (To be fair, it is a total death trap!). And when the tyrannical Zarkan manhandles her, the angered Elsa suddenly exclaims, “Keep your feeelthy hands off me!” in Lylah’s guttural Germanic voice - and in fact, seems to be possessed by her! (Note that Lylah’s “baritone babe” voice is dubbed by the great German actress and singer Hildegard Knef). Uh oh! From here, things just get weirder and messier … 

Director Robert Aldrich sure loved recycling the show biz-is-hell theme: The Big Knife (1955). Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962). The Killing of Sister George (1968). For good measure, Aldrich also throws in references to other peoples’ movies like Sunset Boulevard (1950), Vertigo (1958) and Valley of the Dolls (1967). (More recently, Lylah Clare belongs in the same lineage as David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001) and Inland Empire (2006) and the ultra-divisive Blonde (2022)). 

Downsides: characters endlessly pontificating at length about the dog-eat-dog cruelty of Hollywood. The furiously hammy spittle-flecked performances of Finch and Ernest Borgnine are insufferable. There’s zero attempt to capture period verisimilitude in the flashbacks to the 1930s (or is it the 1940s? It’s impossible to tell!). Coral Browne plays a malicious dragon lady gossip columnist loosely based on Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons. The cruel humour poked at the fact she’s disabled and wears a leg brace has aged like an avocado. 

But Novak is always compelling to watch. This is her equivalent of Boom! or Secret Ceremony, the freaky “failed art movies” her peer Elizabeth Taylor made in the same period. Interestingly, Aldrich’s first choice for Lylah was French actress Jeanne Moreau (her presence would have made it feel more cerebral and European art cinema) – which feels inconceivable today considering Lylah Clare (with its themes of shifting female identities and men obsessively making-over women) seemingly makes deliberate allusions to Novak’s earlier film Vertigo.  (Novak had been absent from the screen for three years and Lylah Clare would be her final major starring role). 

Critics were mostly hostile, but some were prophetic. "Not merely awful; it is grandly, toweringly, amazingly so,” Richard Schickel wrote in Life magazine. “I laughed myself silly at Lylah Clare, and if you're in just the right mood, you may too”, while Roger Ebert concluded, “Like the Burton-Taylor Boom, it provides its own grisly satisfaction: You can have fun watching it be so bad.”

Judge for yourself!

Reflections on ... All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (2022)

/ Pictured: Self Portrait 1st Time on Oxy, Berlin, 2014 by Nan Goldin /

In Laura Poitras’ lacerating Oscar-nominated new documentary All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (2022), fierce 69-year-old photographer Nan Goldin - think of her as the Marianne Faithfull of modern art (or as Variety puts it, “the post-punk Diane Arbus”) - emerges as a captivatingly blunt tough cookie. The film deftly weaves together her art, activism and history of personal trauma and Poitras wisely mainly lets Goldin narrate it herself in her broken chain-smoker rasp. 

/ Nan Goldin in Boston, 1970 / 

The focus encompasses early family tragedy (the story of her doomed older sister Barbara is wrenching), Goldin’s artistic epiphany photographing her LGBTQ friends and her early years hustling in grungy 1980s New York (she go-go danced in New Jersey “titty bars”, bartended and did sex work at a brothel to buy rolls of film). Goldin eventually achieves international acclaim but also weathers the AIDS crisis, violent relationships and drug addiction. 

/ Trixie on the Cot, New York City 1979 by Nan Goldin /

While Goldin has openly battled substance abuse over the decades (she frequently depicts herself in rehab in her self-portraits), nothing prepared her for the hell of OxyContin, which she was prescribed following an injury. Once Goldin recovered, she was enraged to learn the very galleries that display her work benefited from the support of the Sacklers – the mega-rich family behind Purdue Pharma whose wealth is tainted by the OxyContin-fueled opioid crisis and who position themselves as art world philanthropists as a means of image-laundering. Forming the activist group PAIN (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now) in 2018, Goldin undertook powerful demonstrations to shame the world’s cultural institutions into cutting ties with the Sackler family. (Goldin witnessed Act Up protests in the 80s and clearly took notes). 

/ Portrait of Cookie Mueller by Nan Goldin / 

Bittersweet as All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is (and the Sacklers retreat into their wealth rather than face any real consequences), it’s gratifying to see galleries finally start refusing the family’s money. There are vivid glimpses of totemic avant-garde downtown NYC denizens like Cookie Mueller, David Wojnarowicz, Greer Lankton and Vivienne Dick. And as you would anticipate, the soundtrack is impeccably hip (Klaus Nomi. Bush Tetras. The Velvet Underground. Suicide). 

Next Lobotomy Room Film Club: Macao (1952) on 16 February 2023

  

There is no place like it on earth. Macao in the China Seas across the bay from British Hong Kong. Where gambling is the heavy industry and smuggling and dope peddling come as naturally as eating. To this island of commercial sin comes Nick, a young grifter wanted back in the States – and Nora, a girl who never got the breaks. Both hard as nails, cynical, strangers. And on the same boat, posing as a salesman, comes a hard-boiled New York cop, sent out to capture a fugitive-racketeer is now the Frankie Costello of Macao …

Into this hotbed of espionage, intrigue and murder, three people take refuge! 

Robert Mitchum - living on velvet … loving the same way! 

Jane Russell - whose song belies … the fear in her heart! 

William Bendix - whose stock in trade … is danger! 

Yes, this is Macao – port of peril. Where boy meets girl too late! The risks they run …  the chances they take … fighting to remain together in a dangerous paradise!

On 16 February the Lobotomy Room film club (motto: Bad Movies for Bad People) whisks you away to the steamy Portuguese colony of Macao for this sordid noir thriller! Sure, the Times’ critic reportedly dismissed Macao as “melodramatic junk”, but I side with deviant queer film scholar Boyd McDonald, who concluded “Macao is, arguably, perfect.” 

Macao’s major selling point is the sullen dream duo of Robert Mitchum and Jane Russell, who effortlessly match other for tough wry humour and torpid impudence. As McDonald notes in his volume of essays Cruising the Movies (2015), “out of habit rather than anything in the script, the stars of Macao – and under their spell, the supporting players and extras – loiter about leering and sneering at each other, giving attitude. The attitude is one of contempt mixed with lust – an insolent craving, a concupiscent scorn … the players look as though they can’t stand the sight of each other, yet want to suck each other off … Russell, gifted with articulate nostrils and some slight imperfection in the nerves or muscles about her lips, is especially good at competitive sneering.” Seriously – how can you resist? 

Adding to the intrigue: temperamental veteran filmmaker Josef von Sternberg (the visionary behind all those great 1930s Marlene Dietrich films) was exhumed from semi-retirement to direct Macao but when preview audiences grumbled the film was too art-y and weird, an uncredited Nicholas Ray (of Johnny Guitar (1954) and Rebel without a Cause (1955) fame) was assigned to shoot additional scenes! Watch as well for delectable bad girl Gloria Grahame in a supporting role! 

Lobotomy Room Goes to the Movies is the FREE monthly film club devoted to cinematic perversity! Third Thursday night of every month downstairs at Fontaine’s bar in Dalston! Two drink minimum (inquire about the special offer £6 cocktail menu!). Numbers are limited, so reserving in advance via Fontaine’s website is essential. Alternatively, phone 07718000546 or email bookings@fontaines.bar to avoid disappointment! The film starts at 8:30 pm. Doors to the basement Bamboo Lounge open at 8:00 pm. To ensure everyone is seated and cocktails are ordered in time, please arrive by 8:15 pm at the latest.

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Reflections on ... Dolly Parton's Southern Style Banana Cake Mix

 

In 2022 the sugary high cholesterol collab of our dreams dropped when the Duncan Hines corporation and beloved Country & Western diva and bouffant wig enthusiast Dolly Parton joined forces for a limited-edition “Southern Style” range of cake mixes and frostings. And the kitschy retro pastel Barbie-like packaging was pure pop art! 

So, imagine how crushed I was when I couldn’t find any of these cake mixes at my local grocery stores in London. And I quickly discovered they were also seemingly impossible to order online outside of America. I sent a message to Duncan Hines via their Twitter account querying this, and a representative explained the licensing agreement exclusively covers the US, meaning no one outside of the country can buy Parton’s cake mixes. It was seemingly never meant to be … 

... until my sassy Ohio-residing British ex-pat friend Louise (“Weezie) came to the rescue! She sent me two packages of Parton’s banana-flavoured cake mixes and two tubs of her buttercream frosting as a Christmas gift. (I don’t even want to think how much the postage must have cost her). I was going to hang onto them for special occasions (plus I’m trying to shift some post-Christmas – hell, post-Covid lockdown – blubber). And then there were the legal concerns. Am I breaking the law? It felt illicit! This cake mix is not licensed for use in the UK! But I cracked and - donning my frilly pinafore - whipped-up one of the mixes yesterday. 

My verdict? Even though the box screamed “DO NOT EAT RAW BATTER” in bold and upper case, I sampled some of the batter and it gave instant promising hits of banana milkshake. My layers came out a bit asymmetrical and wonky, but the finished cake is sublime. It’s ultra-sweet and packed with that synthetic banana flavour which is Proustian for those of us who came of age in the seventies before people worried about E-numbers in food. Goddess Dolly never steers you wrong! In conclusion, to paraphrase Homer Simpson: “Mmmm – fattening!” Now I’m determined to get my hands on the coconut-flavoured version!

Next Lobotomy Room Film Club: This Woman is Dangerous (1952) on 19 January 2023

 

“Every inch a lady – until you look at the record! Part of her was Ritz – part of her was “racket” – all of her was exciting! Beth Austin – stylish dame with a stylish name who lived by jungle law in a big city and clawed her way to where the money was …”  

From the trailer:

 

“It’s that Austin woman!” 

“She’s front-page dynamite!” 

“How does she get away with it?” 

“Yes, they talked about this woman whose name was in the social register – and the police blotter. This lady who graced a millionaire’s mansion one night and a mobster’s hideout the next. Living dangerously, loving dangerously, she used each new romance to claw her way from the rackets to the Ritz. Into the careers of many men – into the hearts of two. One who saved life. One who took life. And she made them both pay the price of her reckless ambition.”

“A rancid melodrama” is how Joan Crawford’s biographer Bob Thomas disparages this low-rent 1952 noir crime thriller. "I must have been awfully hungry,” La Crawford herself bemoaned. “The kids were in school, the house had a mortgage. And so, I did this awful picture that had a shoddy story, a cliché script and no direction to speak of. The thing just blundered along. I suppose I could have made it better, but it was one of those times when I was so disgusted with everything that I just shrugged and went along with it. It was the worst picture I ever made." And remember - she’s including Trog (1970) in that assessment! 

In Woman, Crawford is Beth Austin, ersatz high society matron and mastermind of a criminal hold-up gang. (I love the idea of Crawford as a decorous “lady mobster” wearing little gloves and fur stoles, whose brooch matches her earrings). Oh, and did I mention Beth is wracked by headaches, at risk of going blind and urgently requires vision-saving experimental surgery? Seriously, she has a LOT on her plate! 

Is This Woman is Dangerous the worst film Crawford ever made? And what if you (like me) like “rancid melodramas?” Judge for yourself when the Lobotomy Room film club (our motto: Bad Movies for Bad People) presents This Woman is Dangerous on Thursday 19 January in the glittering Art Deco environs of Fontaine’s cocktail lounge in Dalston! 

Lobotomy Room Goes to the Movies is the FREE monthly film club devoted to cinematic perversity! Third Thursday night of every month downstairs at Fontaine’s bar in Dalston! Two drink minimum (inquire about the special offer £5 cocktail menu!). Numbers are limited, so reserving in advance via Fontaine’s website is essential. Alternatively, phone 07718000546 or email bookings@fontaines.bar to avoid disappointment! The film starts at 8:30 pm. Doors to the basement Bamboo Lounge open at 8:00 pm. To ensure everyone is seated and cocktails are ordered in time, please arrive by 8:15 pm at the latest.

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