Reflections on ... Of Love and Desire (1963)

 

Recently watched: Of Love and Desire (1963). Tagline: “If you are an adult in every sense of the word, you will probably understand about Katherine and Paul – and why there were so many men in her life!” I’m using this period of enforced social isolation to explore the weirder corners of YouTube for long forgotten and obscure movies. (My boyfriend is accompanying me only semi-willingly).  

When smolderingly handsome American civil engineer Steve Corey (Steve Cochran) lands his private plane in Mexico City to work for the mine owned by wealthy industrialist Paul Beckman (Curd Jurgens) and his half-sister Katherine (Merle Oberon), Bill Maxton - the man Corey is replacing - is quick to tip him off about Katherine. "All you have to do is touch her! She goes off like fireworks!” he leers. “There were plenty of guys before me - and there'll be plenty after me." After encountering her at a chichi cocktail party (complete with a mariachi band and female guests all wearing bouffant Jacqueline Kennedy-style helmet hair), Corey is indeed sucked into Katherine’s voracious sexual web. Maybe it’s the dramatic way she descends the staircase, or how she inscrutably murmurs, “I may look like champagne – but deep down I’m scotch and soda.” Their first date, though, is cataclysmic. When it comes for the goodnight kiss, Katherine lunges at Corey’s mouth, pawing him while hungrily gasping, “Please! Please!” then takes offence at his startled response. “Did I give in too fast for you?” she demands. “Didn’t I play the game right? I didn’t set the stage right, did I? I should have turned off the lights! Put on soft music! I should have pretended longer, but just how much longer? One hour? Two?! Just what do you need to make you feel like I’m a conquest?!” 

Despite Katherine’s whiplash mood swings, transparent neediness and “scarlet” past, gallant Corey is no slut shamer and finds himself genuinely falling in love with this troubled temptress. “I like you,” he assures. “I think you deserve to be treated like a woman.” (Is Katherine glamorously neurotic? Neurotically glamorous? You be the judge!). The sun rises and church bells toll as they make love for the first time. But what’s the deal with Katherine and Paul’s oddball relationship? At the party, Paul had leaned-in and sniffed Katherine’s perfume, inquiring, “Black orchid?” in a most unbrotherly gesture. And why is he taking such an unhealthy interest in Corey and Katherine’s burgeoning romance? 

Today Merle Oberon is best remembered for portraying Cathy opposite Laurence Olivier’s Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights (1939) and for her secretive origins (during her lifetime the Bombay-born Anglo-Asian Oberon concealed her biracial identity, allegedly passing-off her sari-clad mother as her maid). In the thirties and forties Merle Oberon had been hailed as one of golden age Hollywood’s great beauties. By the early sixties, movie offers had sputtered to a halt (she hadn’t made a film since 1956) and she was residing in Mexico as a jet-setting socialite with her Italian millionaire husband.  Perhaps surprisingly, Oberon decided to resume her film career aged 53 and the result was this bizarre comeback vehicle / vanity project.  Of Love and Desire is a candy-hued, lushly appointed melodrama in a similar vein to the deluxe soap operas that producer Ross Hunter was then concocting for aging screen divas like Lana Turner and Susan Hayward. Sammy Davis Jr croons the bossa nova-tinged opening theme tune over the opening credits of lush tropical flowers. The travelogue-style footage of mid-century Mexico is gorgeous. All the key players are well into in their late forties or fifties. Oberon’s close-ups twinkle with flattering Vaseline and gauze, she sports a fabulous wardrobe (including – memorably – a bikini) and she may well be wearing her own jewelry collection. Many of the interior scenes were reportedly filmed in in Oberon’s own sumptuous Mexican hacienda. 

But what’s most unique about Of Love and Desire is its prurient focus on incestuous attraction and the agony of nymphomania. This was the era when popular culture was titillated by “oversexed women”, treating the topic as both a genuine psychological condition and an alarming social issue. In her romantic lead heyday Oberon’s roles were mainly decorative and ladylike. While her tremulous performance here isn’t “good” by most standards, there’s something undeniably gutsy about how Oberon commits to the messy, sexually insatiable Katherine. It helps that she’s partnered with rugged film noir tough guy Steve Cochran. Who couldn’t be “oversexed” near Cochran’s pheromones? A 46-year-old DILF here, Cochran is a soupçon beefier and fuller-faced than he was in the forties and fifties, but his allure is most definitely undimmed (and we get to see him in revealing swimming trunks). 

Anyway, for enthusiasts of camp Of Love and Desire teems with moments to treasure. Prepare for overwrought dialogue like, “Oh, darling! I wish I were as young as you make me feel!” Corey had commented of Katherine’s long opulent upswept beehive coiffure (clearly a wiglet): “I can’t run my fingers through it …” In response, Katherine spontaneously instructs a barber to lop it off into a perkily youthful shorter ‘do (a makeover sequence shamelessly swiped from the Audrey Hepburn film Roman Holiday). “Now you can run your fingers through my hair any time you want!” she simpers. Watch for a bathtub sequence in which Oberon daringly reveals a surprising amount of tanned naked flesh. Best of all, in a climactic moment, Katherine is overcome by self-loathing and has a psychological freak-out while in public. Running through the street and then a hotel lobby, she is horrified that everywhere she looks there are MEN ogling and approaching her (and they’re saying things like “Hey, lady!” “Is something wrong?” and “Que pasa?”). Hilariously, it culminates with Katherine becoming trapped in a revolving door. In closing: extramarital sex and female desire lead to nothing but heartache, but don’t judge nymphomaniacs – they have their reasons.

Watch Of Love and Desire here.

Further reading:

Stunningly ageist and misogynistic contemporary review of Of Love and Desire in the New York Times.

Amusing analysis (with some great pics) in the reliably great Poiseidon's Underworld blog. 

Reflections on ... Carnival Story (1954)

Recently watched: Carnival Story (1954). Tagline: “The story of a woman’s shame!” I’m using this period of enforced social isolation to explore the weirder corners of YouTube for long forgotten and obscure movies. (My boyfriend is accompanying me only semi-willingly). 

A traveling American carnival is touring through post-war Germany. In Munich, the carnival barker Joe Hammond (Steve Cochran) encounters desperate local woman-on-the-skids Willi (Anne Baxter) when she pickpockets him. (Baxter instills Willi with an almost Joan Crawford-level lip-twisting intensity, but her German accent falters). Perversely, when Joe catches her, the attraction between them is immediate. Willi’s criminal act charms Joe (“You feel sorry for everything that wears skirts!” another character spits) - probably because Joe is an amoral conman, and he assumes Willi is a soulmate. He impulsively hires the guttersnipe to scrub dishes in the cook tent. Within no time, the circus’ new female arrival catches the eye of dashing high-diving artist Frank Collini (Lyle Bettger), who recruits Willi as his assistant, training her in the death-defying art of high-diving. Soon, Willi has swapped toiling in the cook tent to performing under the big top in a glamorous sequined leotard with the carnival’s headline act. The besotted Frank asks Willi to marry him. He’s thoroughly decent as well as handsome (Lyle Bettger’s butt and thighs look sensational in his one-piece costume), but Willi is conflicted: the suavely duplicitous Joe still exerts a powerful sexual hold over her. And it’s tinged with sadomasochism: Joe alternates between slapping Willi around and hungrily kissing her – which to be fair, seems to excite her. “Until I met you, I never knew how rotten I was!” Willi pants. “We belong together,” Joe growls back. “We’re two of a kind!” Willi is horrified, though, when Joe assures her, “We’re not going to let a little thing like you being married come between us!” With hideous inevitability, things soon spiral into jealousy, violence and tragedy … 

Filmed on location in Germany and set in the tattered milieu of itinerant carnie folk, Carnival Story is an overwrought, amusingly sordid melodrama via RKO Radio Pictures. (We see titillating glimpses of the sideshow acts, including Siamese twins, a bearded woman, a snake handler and a sword swallower – very Diane Arbus. Note Groppo the hulking mute strongman, who observes everything silently and gradually emerges as a significant figure. As Groppo, Ady Berber presages Ed Wood stalwart Tor Johnson from Plan 9 from Outer Space). Kurt Neumann’s direction is creakily old-fashioned (rapturous music crashes and swells on the soundtrack when characters embrace or erupt into fistfights). But with the depravity, homoeroticism and emotional cruelty cranked-up a few more notches, it’s weirdly easy to imagine R W Fassbinder remaking Carnival Story. (The early scenes of Fassbinder’s Fox and His Friends (1975) unfold in a low-rent German carnival). And you’ve got to love a film with dialogue this pungent: "If you were starving to death, howling for food, I wouldn't throw you a rotten bone!" “You love to wallow in the mud!” “If you touch me again – I’ll kill you!” “We’re both bad, baby … that’s why we’re good for each other!” 

Many of these lines are snarled by mid-century cinema’s supremely sexy bad boy, Steve Cochran. Carnival Story succeeds best as a “star vehicle” for the alluring Cochran, who specialized in depicting amoral anti-heroes, heels and tough guys you-love-to-hate with surprising complexity, even delicacy. A swarthy charmer with pomaded hair and an impressively lustrous chest pelt, Cochran effortlessly radiates testosterone and animal magnetism. Just try to tear your eyes off him when he’s onscreen. If you keep your expectations low, Carnival Story is the tawdriest of circus-set thrillers until a sixty-something Joan Crawford donned hot pants and top hat to play a ringmistress in Berserk (1967). Note that Carnival Story was filmed in a process called “Agfacolour”. The faded public domain print circulating online looks like it’s been overlaid with a retro Instagram filter.

Watch Carnival Story here:

 

Further reading: this Poseidon's Underworld blog post features an appreciation of Lyle Bettger's "ass flank."

Reflections on ... Private Hell 36 (1953)

Private Hell 36 (1954). Tagline: “These are night faces... Living on the edge of evil and violence!” 

I’m using this period of enforced social isolation to explore the weirder corners of YouTube for long forgotten and obscure movies. (My boyfriend Pal is accompanying me only semi-willingly). No false promises or great claims: this fatalistic low-budget noir crime melodrama is unremarkable in the grand scheme of things and Don Siegal’s direction is efficient rather than inspired. But Private Hell 36 is sturdy and suspenseful, less than 90-minutes long and I’m a sucker for any old movie where hard-boiled types chain smoke and growl at each other in seedy locales like racetracks and cocktail lounges. And the cast is genuinely exceptional. Howard Duff and Steve Cochran are two LAPD cops who find themselves deeply compromised when they impulsively split thousands of dollars pilfered from a dead robber - and soon find their loyalty to each other unraveling.  

Jack Farnham (Duff) is the honest cop with a conscience. His partner Cal Bruner (swarthy, impossibly handsome charmer Cochran) is the crooked bad influence. Implicated in all this is hard-as-nails, bruised-by-life nightclub chanteuse Lily Marlowe (gravel-voiced Ida Lupino). Even in a relatively small thankless role, Dorothy Malone (two years before she won her Oscar as the nymphomaniac sister in Douglas Sirk’s Written on the Wind) brings her full eye-popping, lip-twisting intensity as Duff’s fretful wife. 

/ Above: Steve Cochran and Ida Lupino (and product placement for Pabst Blue Ribbon ) /

/ Above: Dorothy Malone /

Mainly, though, Private Hell 36 succeeds as a showcase for Cochran’s moody, amoral and flawed anti-hero. He excelled at playing noir tough guys, but Cochran invests them with unexpectedly complicated, nuanced and melancholic interior lives. Cochran (currently my favourite actor: Robert Mitchum has slipped to second place) never hits a false note and never ceases to surprise. The womanizing, hard-living Cochran’s bad boy persona wasn’t contrived for the screen: Siegel would later recall that “Cochran was a good actor, but not when he was loaded, and I had a hard time catching him even slightly sober”. He died aged 48 under sordid circumstances (Google the story for yourself!). The film’s greatest pleasures are in the tough-but-tender love scenes between Cochran and Lupino expertly depicting two been-around-the-block cynics with no illusions. As Imogene Sara Smith of The Chiseler notes better than I could: “Cochran and Lupino have serious chemistry (the scene where he unties the halter neck of her dress and massages her naked shoulders is a classic of Code-era steaminess), but Cal and Lily also connect on some deeper level, making us believe these two what’s-in-it-for-me types surprise themselves with genuine feeling.” Trust me: if you didn’t already, you will have a crush on Steve Cochran by the conclusion of Private Hell 36. 

/ Sadly, this eye-poppingly homoerotic image with a shirtless Cochran and Duff never actually happens in Private Hell 36. But it does stir the imagination! /

Reflections on ... The Damned Don't Cry (1950)

From the Facebook event page for 16 January 2020:

For the first Lobotomy Room film club of 2020, let’s bask in some old-school pagan diva worship! As is tradition, the first film club of the New Year stars eternal Lobotomy Room favourite - Golden Age Hollywood’s bitch goddess extraordinaire Joan Crawford! (In January 2018 we screened Strait-Jacket. In January 2019, Sudden Fear).

If you enjoy watching the reliably intense Crawford suffering in mink, irresistibly tawdry noir melodrama The Damned Don’t Cry (1950) is the movie for you! Thursday 16 January! Hear her snarl hard-boiled dialogue like “Don’t talk to me about self-respect! That’s something you tell yourself you’ve got when you’ve got nothing else!” No spoilers, but it begins with Crawford as downtrodden housewife from the wrong side of the tracks Edith Whitehead, who climbs to the top of high society … one man at a time! (Edith’s mantra: “I want something more than what I’ve had out of life. And I’m going to get it!”). Unfortunately – she soon finds herself embroiled in the murky realm of organized crime (and sexy gangster Steve Cochran!).

Lobotomy Room Goes to the Movies is the FREE monthly film club downstairs at Fontaine’s bar (Dalston’s most unique nite spot!) devoted to Bad Movies We Love (our motto: Bad Movies for Bad People), specializing in the kitsch, the cult and the camp! Third Thursday night of the month. Doors to the basement Bamboo Lounge open at 8 pm. Film starts at 8:30 pm prompt! We can accommodate 30 people maximum on film nights. Remember: the film is FREE so you can buy more cocktails! (One drink minimum).

/ "She’s as tempting as a cupcake - and as tough as a 75-cent steak!” / 

It was never intentional, but in recent years it’s become a Lobotomy Room film club ritual to screen a Joan Crawford film to usher in the new year. Maybe it’s a subconscious act of pagan goddess worship? Anyway, we showed Strait-Jacket in January 2018, Sudden Fear in January 2019 and now The Damned Don’t Cry in January 2020. When I introduced Damned onstage, I quoted Crawford’s line of dialogue from the film, “I want something more than what I’ve had out of life - and I’m going to get it!” and urged the audience to embrace this mission statement as their new year’s resolution for 2020.

/ “Call me CHEAP?” Nothing’s cheap when you pay the price she's paying! /

After Crawford’s Oscar-winning, career-reviving comeback victory with Mildred Pierce (1945), her studio Warner Bros clearly decided: don’t mess with the formula. Subsequent films like Flamingo Road (1949), The Damned Don’t Cry (1950) and This Woman is Dangerous (1952) are all increasingly threadbare and repetitive variations of the Mildred Pierce template, cleaving to the same essential noir crime melodrama style and theme. As The Chiseler concisely summarizes, the narratives of these Crawford pictures all “follow a woman as she claws her way out of dreary poverty, attains a pinnacle of penthouse luxury, and plunges from there into the abyss”. So yes, it’s a formula - but hell, it’s a juicy, lurid and insanely enjoyable formula, and these films are understandably embraced today as both exemplars of mid-century “women’s pictures” and camp classics.  Think of it this way: imagine there was an all-night Joan Crawford film marathon on TV. If you started watching The Damned Don’t Cry, fell asleep mid-way through, woke up in middle of This Woman is Dangerous and continued watching, you probably wouldn’t notice any discrepancy. (It helps that Crawford co-stars with silver fox David Brian Flamingo Road, Damned and This Woman is Dangerous!).

/ Joan Crawford with David Brian in The Damned Don't Cry /

As a Joan Crawford star vehicle par excellence, Damned certainly delivers on showcasing the diva’s considerable mid-period strengths. It ticks all the boxes: Crawford gets beautifully lit and flattering close-ups, copious costume changes (charting her trajectory from drab housewife to upper-crust socialite), gets to have big emotional confrontations, snarl hard-boiled dialogue and slap men’s faces. (Just to shake things up, in Damned, Crawford herself also gets slapped around and roughed-up a lot). Characteristically of this period, Crawford’s leading men are mostly secondary considerations, with minimal threat of challenging her dominance. (The exception: smoldering noir tough guy Steve Cochran. More of him later).

/ Suffering in mink: Joan Crawford in The Damned Don't Cry /

/ Check out those gams! Yes! Scary diva Joan Crawford at full voltage in torrid melodrama The Damned Don’t Cry (1950) /

Vincent Sherman directs Damned with verve and economy, ensuring the story unfolds in broad strokes and dramatic flourishes. Boiling with ambition and hunger, Crawford swaps identities with remarkable ease, swiftly re-inventing herself from frumpy small town hausfrau Edith Whitehead to elegant heiress Lorna Hansen Forbes (“the darling of café society”) under the tutelage of her new friend, shifty posh-voiced grifter Patricia Longworth (exquisitely performed with the perfect amount of patrician anxiety by scene-stealing Selena Royle). Sherman neatly contrasts the visual signifiers of Crawford’s new realm (cocktails (vermouth and cassis!), gold cigarette cases, mink coats, orchids, swimming pools) and her discarded working-class origins (derricks pumping in the Texas oil fields belching sooty plumes of pollution, blue collar men in hardhats and overalls, a wardrobe of cloth coats and aprons, no make-up, scraped-back hair).

Initially Damned positions Crawford in a conventional romantic triangle. Edith / Lorna must choose between impoverished, honest (and dull) accountant Marty Blackford (Kent Smith) or sociopathic but rich and suave organized crime kingpin George Castleman (David Brian). But then mid-way through the film Castleman’s dangerously volatile mobster associate Nick Prenta (Steve Cochran) arrives and explodes the movie apart. If you’re unfamiliar with hirsute and broodingly handsome Cochran (1917 - 1965), he’ll be a revelation. Probably best-remembered for the film White Heat (1949), Cochran is worthy of comparison to peer Robert Mitchum: both invested unexpected complexity and humanity to their portrayals of sexy noir thugs. 

/ “A woman who crossed the paths of many men … and double-crossed every one of them!” Steve Cochran and Joan Crawford in The Damned Don't Cry /

Great as Crawford is – she is never less than majestic and mesmerizing to watch here – she is also sticking with what she already knows in Damned. (By 1950 Crawford could play a role like Edith / Lorna with her eyes closed). I’d argue Damned really belongs to Cochran, whose performance feels modern, nuanced and surprising. For a macho gangster, Nick (as Cochran plays him) reveals intriguing fissures of sensitivity and insecurity seething below the surface. At times, Cochran almost suggests Nick is a little boy playing at being a mobster. For example, even while Nick strives to maintain his taciturn demeanor, it’s also clear he’s astounded a classy high falutin' dame like Lorna could be romantically interested in him (watch the way Nick proudly escorts her through his swanky Palm Springs nightclub, hoping to impress her), and he’s quick to bristle with offense when he suspects she’s belittling him. Cochran does nothing to solicit the audience’s sympathy – and yet Nick is easily Damned’s most compelling character. He’s also sex on legs: watch for the poolside scenes of Cochran in clingy swimming trunks or a terry cloth robe, with his impressive chest pelt on full display. The cruel and sensual face, lush dark brows and mane of oiled, combed-back black hair also anticipates Elvis Presley. Read more about essential noir icon Cochran in this lyrical, perceptive essay.

Speaking of male pulchritude, Cochran is rivaled here by Richard Egan (1921 – 1987) as Roy Whitehead, the laborer husband who Edith abandons. Egan's appearance is fleeting but – phew! – memorable. With his brawny physique, stubbled face, leather jacket, pomaded hair and visible chest hair, Egan suggests a hunky escapee from a Bob Mizer / Athletic Model Guild beefcake photo shoot. Interestingly, there is reason to believe that various points, the cougar-ish Crawford was romantically involved with virtually every man involved in The Damned Don’t Cry. She’s been "linked" to director Vincent Sherman and leading men David Brian, Steve Cochran and Egan.

/ Above: Egan with Crawford in The Damned Don't Cry (1950) and below in a candid social shot from what appears to be the early sixties /

 / Above: as a bonus for reading this far, some beefcake pin-ups of the wondrous Richard Egan. You're welcome! Read more about him here /

/ Two things: apparently at some point Crawford had off-screen "intimate knowledge" of each of her leading men in this shot (and director Sherman). And I love how this smiling publicity photo wildly misrepresents The Damned Don't Cry as a romantic comedy / 

/ Portrait of a bitch goddess extraordinaire: Joan Crawford in The Damned Don't Cry /

To the surprise of no one, now that London is on lock-down with the dreaded Coronavirus, the monthly film club is on indefinite hiatus. (We were meant to screen Desert Fury in March). But as god as my witness, Lobotomy Room (and Fontaine's bar) will be back! Watch this space.

Further Reading

Read my analysis of the Joan Crawford films Sudden Fear (1952) and Autumn Leaves (1956).