Psychotic Cinema

Genre: Nazi Wartime Propaganda / Anti-Fremasonary

This is an interesting 50 minute piece of Nazi propaganda from the Vichy era in occupied France during World War II and portrays a paranoid conspiracy concerning Freemasonry.

Pierre Avenel (Maurice Rémy) gives a passionate and rousing speech in the French parliament on how the poor and bourgeoisie are destroying the country. Two listeners discuss how Avenel should be invited to join their Masonic Lodge because he would be of benefit to it. Avenel is approached with the idea and he accepts, believing that it would benefit his political career.
Meanwhile his wife speaks to her friend about her concerns for Avenel and how Freemasons are “mediocre social climbers.”
We are then taken through the many rituals and customs which are performed by the new initiative as he becomes a Freemason. Avenel is warned by the Grand Master of the lodge that he must support his Freemason brothers no matter what, and is told:

“If you betray your oath, you will not escape the vengeance of the brothers spread out across the world and who have sworn to punish perjury”.

In next to no time the lodge members are bombarding Avenel with requests for privileges and help including helping them to escape their charges for petty crime. It’s not surprising that seeing this is Nazi propaganda that the first member to ask for help just happens to be Jewish. Following him is a mixture of shady characters and second-rate businessmen
Avenel starts to become uncomfortable about what he’s let himself into and soon realizes the power of the Freemason goes right to the top of government. The Freemasons are unconcerned for the welfare of France and their only concern is to better themselves.
Things come to a head when at a meeting the Freemasons suggest that France should attack Germany because:

“It will be easy to fight National Socialism whose ceaseless demands are becoming intolerable… and liberate our brother’s reduced to slavery.”
This is all too much for Avenel and he stands up and interrupts the speaker, telling the shocked lodge that what they are being told is untrue. Because of this outburst, plans are made to discredit Avenel, first by physically attacking him one night on his way home and then telling the newspapers of sexual misconduct and drug abuse resulting in him being labeled a psychopath.
While Avenel recovers in his hospital bed, he is told that France has attacked Germany with the help of a Jewish influence.
This film was commissioned in 1942 by the Propaganda Abteilung which was part of the German propaganda ministry in occupied France. When France was finally liberated, the film's writer Jean Marquès-Rivière, its producer Robert Muzard and its director Jean Mamy were purged for collaboration with the enemy. On 25 November 1945, Muzard was condemned to 3 years in prison and Robert Muzard, who had fled, was condemned to death in his absence. Mamy was also condemned to death and executed at the fortress of Montrouge on 29 March 1949.

Maurice Rémy, who played Pierre Avenel ended up settling in Argentina in 1949. I wonder if he had any new German neighbors while he was there.
This film is worth watching for those interested in Nazi wartime propaganda as well as those with an interest in the rituals and inner workings of the Freemasons. My guess is that the rituals and initiation ceremony are probably fairly accurate, giving the viewer the chance to see something which otherwise only takes place behind closed doors.
This film is worth checking out as a fascinating oddity, a piece of odious wartime propaganda and an insider’s look at Freemasonry. I’ll have to try and remember that Freemason’s handshake next time I meet someone important.

Forces Occultes (Occult Forces) (1943)

Genre: Biker Movie

After saving Pilot (Larry Bishop), the bike gang’s leader, during a brawl with a rival gang, fellow gang member, Angel (Don Stroud), announces his intentions to leave the gang and to head out on the road. Pilot tells him that he is indebted to Angel and if ever he needs a favour, to come back and ask.

Angel heads out across Arizona until he reaches a small town where he helps a hippie couple who are being harassed by the local rednecks. In gratitude, the couple take him back to their commune, which is a collection of small shacks out in the country.

Their life is very wholesome, with vegetarian food, farming and taking care of the babies.

Angels falls in love with Merrilee (future Cagney and Lacey star, Tyne Daly), but the commune's idyllic existence is soon ruined by the rednecks who arrive in dune buggies and proceed to harass them by driving over their crops.
Angel stabs one with a pitch fork and so the rednecks give the hippies an ultimatum of one week to go or else there will be trouble.

The commune’s leader Tremaine (Luke Askew; famous for being the stranger on the highway in Easy Rider (1969)) asks Angel if his old bike gang could come and help. Angel is reluctant to ask because the hippies wouldn’t be able to handle the lawlessness of the bike gang and tells them:

“If you bring a bike club here, you’re going to have a lot of trouble on you’re hands.”

After unsuccessfully trying to mediate with the rednecks, Angel eventually turns to his old bike gang for help.
Soon the bikers have moved into the commune and Tremaine and his fellow hippies struggle to stay patient with the antics of the bikers.
Soon it looks as though the bikers aren’t going to keep their promise of protection and instead want to leave, but first they want to take with them the resident old Indian’s ‘wammo’. This is a strong hallucinogenic drug of which he only knows the recipe.

As the bikers are about to leave, the hippie couple return. The man has been badly beaten by the rednecks and the girl has presumably been raped.

With the rednecks on their way, will the bikers change their minds and stay?

This is a good American International Pictures film. The story is an old one and has been tackled many times before in such films as The Seven Samurai (1954) and The Magnificent Seven (1960), but its fun to see it in this setting of bikers and rednecks.

The imposing Don Stroud is good as Angel. Tyne Daly is also good as Merrilee, although she doesn’t seem hippie enough to be living out in a commune. Luke Askew as the commune leader, Tremaine, is much more believable.
The bikers are all good – spitting out beer after every other swig and causing general mayhem. Bill McKinney is especially good as Shotgun. He argues with Angel over Merrilee as if she is a commodity to be bargained with. Larry Bishop, who plays the bike gang’s leader, would later write, direct and star in his own homage to biker movies, Hell Ride (2008).

This film was made with the help of bike gang, The Dirty Dozen of Arizona.

Angel Unchained has been released on DVD as a double-bill with another 1969 biker film, Cycle Savages.

Angel Unchained (1970)

Genre: Comedy/Drama

Bradley Morahan (James Mason) is a successful artist who wants to escape the hustle and bustle of New York to work on some new paintings. This takes him to the other side of the world and Australia.

He rents a shack on a small secluded island, hoping to be cut off from everyone except for the company of his pet dog. This all changes when he meets Cora (Helen Mirren), a pretty young girl who spends her days hunting or stealing food. She is desperately trying to save the $100 so she can escape her drunk domineering grandmother and become a hairdresser in Brisbane.

Bradley models Cora in the sand and she soon finds that she has an interest in being his artist model. When Bradley offers her money, she’s more than willing and isn’t afraid to shed her clothing.

Obstacles to this happy relationship appear and it soon looks as though Bradley will not get his pictures completed and Cora will not save her money. Their relationship has to be put on hold.

This is charming movie which was beautifully filmed on Dunk Island on the Great Barrier Reef by British movie director Michael Powell (ONE OF OUR AIRCAFT ARE MISSING, PEEPING TOM) and incidentally produced by himself and James Mason.

Twenty-four year old Helen Mirren is excellent as the teenage Cora – beautiful and buxom. In the beginning she is very tom-boyish as she hunts and frolics on the beaches. It isn’t until Cora sees the paintings that she begins to re-evaluate her body and feminine beauty and this gives her a new direction in life. The scenes are very liberating as she poses naked, playing in the water during the artist’s breaks between painting.

Helen Mirren would pose nude again a few years later for another artist in Ken Russell’s Savage Messiah (1972). This was a biography on the French sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska.

Irish actor, Jack MacGowran, is great as Bradley’s unwanted guest, Nad. He is one of the supporting characters who bring some humor to the film, as does Harold Hopkins as Ted. He is the young boat owner who is keen to win over the affections of Carla and seems to wear the smallest pair of shorts in the Southern Hemisphere.
The underlying theme of this movie is the body. When it’s not with Cora naked, then it is Nad when he is unexpectedly caught skinny dipping or when he goes to meet the neighbor, Isabel Marley, and being first greeted by her behind as she works in the garden, or Ted’s muscular body. All the while we are surrounded by Bradley’s nude sketches of Cora. It wouldn’t be of any surprise that this was adapted from a story by the artist Norman Lindsay, who painted similar nudes.

Age of Consent has been released on DVD as a double-bill with Powell and Pressburger's earlier 1946 fantasy Stairway to Heaven aka: A Matter of Life and Death.

If you get the chance, watch Age of Consent, it's a great film about relationships and freedom.

Age of Consent (1969)

Genre: 60’s Crime Drama

Now this is an odd West German film and not particularly good, but it will definitely be of interest to some people.

First of all it stars the gorgeous Anita Pallenberg in her first screen role. Her next starring role would be opposite Jane Fonda as the The Great Tyrant in Roger Vadim’s sexy science fiction Barbarella (1968) and later with Mick Jagger in Nicolas Roeg’s Performance (1970)

As most of you probably already know, Anita Pallenberge is famous for being romantically involved with three members of the Rolling Stones. First it was with Brian Jones, who was her boyfriend during the making of this film, but then she famously dumped him for Keith Richards resulting in the both of them driving off to Morocco in Brian’s Rolls. Supposedly she also had a fling with Mick Jagger during the making of Performance.

In this movie, Pallenberge plays Maria, who in the midsts of having a fight with her boyfriend in her apartment, accidentally shoots him. His matter-of-fact response to being fatally shot is:

“Now look what you’ve gone and done”

... and then proceeds to die on the carpet.

With the body lying in the apartment, Maria has to somehow remove it before her flat mate returns, so she goes to the local railways station to look for help. Wandering around, she asks strangers if they would like to earn 500 DM by removing the body.

Unsuccessful, she ends up in a small bar in a working-class district where she meets Günter (Hans Peter Hallwachs). He agrees to help her and is soon in her apartment and bed while they both wait for it to get dark outside.

They need a car to transport the body, so they borrow an old one from the garage where Günter works.

After going back to bed with Maria, Günter tells her that the body is too heavy and that he needs to ask his friend Fritz (Manfred Fischbeck) to help.

With the help of Fritz, they move the body, which is wrapped in a carpet, into the car and drive out to the countryside where they bury it on a construction site.

Maria now also becomes romantically involved in Fritz, but he has some concerns that the body hasn’t been hidden well enough. The others aren’t keen to return, so they continue their journey home and depart company.

Except for the occasional flashback and one lapse into heavy drinking, Maria seems fairly unemotional about the fact that she had killed her boyfriend. She only finally breaks down uncontrollably once home when she sees his photo beside her bed.

On the whole, Maria seems to have a death fixation. In one scene in the car she instigates a game of 'dare or lose' which nearly results in all three being killed. She also points the gun around at Günter with total disregard for his safety, especially considering what had already happened. Actually, all the characters seem very blasé. If it’s not losing the 500 DM in cash by the side of the road, it’s the discussion about who had used or not used  protection during their love-making, to not being too overly concerned about the dead body. Without giving too much away, even the very last shot in the film is completely odd as if those involved are also slightly detached from reality.

Because of this, it’s quite hard to feel any sympathy for the characters which is what lets this film down.

Directed by Volker Schlöndorff (THE TIN DRUM) with a minimal budget and being rather pretentious at times, this film falls short of his later work.

As mentioned earlier, Anita Pallenberge was dating Brian Jones when this film was in production and he actually appears very briefly in one scene. I must have blinked because I missed it or it was missing from my copy which had 10 minutes of footage missing from the original 87 minutes running time.

This leads on to the second reason why this film will be of interest to some. Not only does Brian Jones have an extremely brief part in this film, but he also composed, arranged and produced all the music.

This was his only solo work away from the Stones and hearing it you can really appreciate the talent he had. With the help of session musicians Jimmy Page (guitar), Nicky Hopkins (piano), Kenny Jones (drums) and Peter Gosling (background vocals), Brian played all the other instruments, including sitar, organ, recorder, banjo, harpsichord, autoharp, dulcimer, clarinet, and harmonica. The result is a great piece of 60’s psychedelia, which sadly has never been issued on LP or CD and possibly never will be. Volker Schlöndorff says he still has the original master tape given to him by Brian, but is unable to release it due to publishing rights.

A Degree of Murder (1967)