"You have my word as an inveterate cheat" - WHAT'S NEW PUSSYCAT? (1965)

With the way Woody Allen's sexual neurosis has gone into a deep WASP-y freeze these past decades, it's easy to forget his 60's pro-libido worldview and that old carefree magic that used to show us the winking horny trickster behind his neurotic fussing: TAKE THE MONEY AND RUN, SLEEPER, BANANAS, LOVE AND DEATH and PLAY IT AGAIN SAM, in fact everything he wrote before his break-out, STAR WARS-beating-for-the-Oscar success, ANNIE HALL, has a bawdy good humor that hasn't been very 'good' since his whole 'outing' as a sexual predator. It's important we remember that his Humbert-nebbish self-conscious paralysis and priapic overeager clowning was part of the sexual revolution, long before they were 'art.' In the 70s, a nebbishy persona and thick glasses didn't specifically exclude him from the in-crowd, as a result, he's not as threatened by the tall-goy-and handsome competition in ways he would be later. Maybe that's why WHAT'S NEW PUSSYCAT holds up so well today. He's not competing against a beautiful tall god like Peter O'Toole --he's writing for him. And he even gives the leg-humping lion share of comedy to a second Brit, Peter Sellers, with Allen pulling in the sloppy thirds as a nebbishy strip club prop man. Add a bevy of hot, talented comediennes and the film rises like a balloon way past the clumsy boudoir farce of types like Blake Edwards, who always seemed too easily hypnotized by a pretty shape with less of an idea how to film it, preferring to hang out in raincoat drag clubs with Oktoberfest grotesques and under beds and down late night hotel hallways like a guilty sinner while Mancini slinks along beside him in barefoot haste.

By contrast, British directors like Clive Donner and Robert Talmadge seem to know enough to just get out of the way when Allen is writing and comedic heavies are acting, like you would for the Marx Brothers. In a great extended scene, Fritz and O'Toole get drunk together in a Paris cafe, half-fighting, then apologizing, then taking off their coats to slug it out, then forgetting why they took their coats off and putting them back on before staggering over to Capucine's baroque apartment tower, arm-in- arm, to lob rocks and slurred declarations of love up to her balcony: "Tell her, her face is like ze pale autumn moon!" beseeches Sellers like a terrible Cyrano from the bushes. "I'm not going to say that," Toole slurs. "It's ghastly!" Drunken recitations from Hamlet are tossed up instead to indicate the Immoral Bard is with them, and O'Toole playing a drunk trying to do Hamlet is about the best Hamlet ever. Meanwhile Sellers' ridiculous black wig finally makes sense when he pops up as Richard III in a dream sequence (he apparently loved the wig so much he wore it all through the shoot). I love O'Toole more than in MY FAVORITE YEAR, and in some ways if you factor in that Allen worked in the Borscht Belt gag room of Your Show of Shows then you realize PUSSY might even be a prequel to YEAR, a relic from a smoother, bawdier epoch, before sex was relegated to the foul-mouths of 20 year-old virgins.

 MY FAVORITE YEAR doesn't hold up as well, today - at least for me. It has terribly unimaginative lighting and scoring, and its reliance on a barrage of ethnic humor, nebbishy voice-overs, and hack zaniness (Stealing a police horse and riding around Central Park at dawn? It's right up there with PETULIA's tuba). But Allen actually wrote for Sid Ceasar in TV's early 'years' but in 1965 is not yet all hung up on ethnic RADIO DAYS-style nostalgia. Instead of those G-rated tropes, PUSSYCAT has an air of real madness. There is need here for horse theft or other generic bits of naughtiness, and O'Toole has the energetic languor of a man in the prime of beauty and charm, who's been laughing a lot in between takes and makes the most of every clever line and every pretty girls thrown within his woo-pitching radius. He pours on a kind of dissolute actorly resonance most dramatic stars playing comedy wouldn't bother with. When, for example, he brings a cricket ball and bat to his insane group therapy meeting it feels like he's sharing something meaningful to him, O'Toole, with these new friends that have been making his sides hurt from laughing all through the shoot. It's beautiful. It's what that lame tuba, or that lame police horse, was probably fumbling after.

Playing a charmer who is as irresistible to women as they are to him, we feel in O'Toole's depth that his life has been one long series of one-night stands, and when he says he needs more out of life. O'Toole is more than good, he's convincing. So when one of his more insistent conquests, played by Romy Schneider, demands he marry her, he goes to see a psychiatrist. Enter: Fritz (Sellers), to help him with what we'd now call sex addiction (and we'd now be compelled to say "there's nothing funny about it!" in case anyone is listening). Meanwhile, Woody shows up through the stage woodwork and somehow winds up taking a disillusioned Romy home to his little pad --her act of reprisal against O'Toole's waffling, the way Miriam Hopkins was always going off with Edward Everett Horton.

PUSSYCAT began as a Warren Beatty vehicle but had it turned out that way it would have been a completely different film and nowhere near as fun. Men like myself distrust Beatty-- his ability to bed all these girls and still look tan and nonplussed does not move us. We love O'Toole on the other hand, because his pallor is that of a man taking too much Cialis. And scoring loads of babes seems so critical to Beatty's self-esteem that it's not joyous just compulsive. O'Toole just genuinely seems too enraptured by the beauty and sparkle in ways Beatty's too narcissistic to match. Each new lover takes just a bit of O'Toole's bodily fluids, and each takes him farther from being able to look his fiancee in the eye, but he's so enamored by each new girl, and so appreciative of their attention, that each time he cheats is like the first. As he struggles valiantly against his inner nature, women are literally dropping out of the skies into his motorcar. What's a nobly drunk insouciant to do?

That's the joy of it all: we'd do just what he's doing, except maybe not try so hard to keep Schneider... though her parents turn out to be pretty fun at a party. Another genius rarity! You know those affairs where you stick it out an extra year because you like drinking with her parents!? You don't? O monsieur! And another thing that hasn't happened in 1965 (aside from AIDS, of course), that grisly story of what too much sex did to Three Dog Night's Danny Hutton. As far as we knew, there could never be too much sex. Oh man, to have Cialis for daily use, but as yet no AIDS? Can you imagine?

Naturally Allen's script is going to lean at some point towards his beloved Fellini, here via an image of O'Toole with whip and slouch hat as women fight over him in a dream, but I always got the impression Fellini was too guilty a Catholic to really go for broke. That he'd run home at the last minute hyperventilating like Marcello's provincial papa in LA DOLCE VITA, as many of us probably would. O'Toole's women on the other hand are all believable conquests and his befuddled sense of crushing over-stimulation conveys what it feels like when every girl in the room is fighting over you and then they make peace and decide you're a sleaze for wanting them all, and suddenly no one wants you and then you're just tossed away in the street for twenty years, alone and wondering what you did wrong, like the Jeff Beck guitar neck in BLOW-Up or Donna Summer's cake in the rain.

Girls of O'Toole, from top: Ursula Andress, Romy Schneider, Capucine, Paula Prentiss

Then there's the women: Ursula Andress ("She's a personal friend of James Bond!" Fritz shouts) has seldom been more alluring as the mark-missing skydiver who lands in O'Toole's roadster en route to le Chateau Chantal, where the cast is assembling for the final, inevitable closet-hopping merry-go-round; Paula Prentiss is aces as a manic stripper-poetess ("Who killed Charlie Parker? You did!") working on her fifth nervous breakdown / pill OD (the detox ward presents her with a commemorative plaque); Capucine is a sexy bundle of nymphonic repression and I love her to death, so why pick Romy Schneider's pussycat over all those meaningless... gorgeous.... succulent... crazy other pussycats? She's cute and can be vivacious but ends up with the one-note monogamy-hawker part; she even thinks she's being cute when she steals his car keys and won't give them back. And you know how she ended up? All but wrapped in collector's non-acidic mylar by Jacques Dutronc in The Important thing is to Love. (1975).
 

Look! Look at the lips of that Prentiss poet. 

But what's important is that Woody doesn't really believe either notion - monogamy or nymphomania - is the answer. Writing a character like O'Toole's sex addict seems to help this young version of Allen's pen write large: the sex is easy and breezy, not the cranky old bourgeois intellectual somehow scoring the love of a teenager or a prostitute in his future films. O'Toole's tall lanky Britishness gives Allen permission to keep things at a literally Wagnerian pitch. His pen's libido seems charged with that exhilaration that only comes when a non-Catholic writes farce in France, to the point that even when O'Toole starts tenderly yammering about how his true love was right in front of him all the while, a big author's message sign flashes on... and on. Man, that author's message sign could be flashing nonstop in the last dozen films Woody's made!

That's fine because, marriage-minded women or no, there's some of that giddy thrill of when you're 'on a roll' and women start fighting over you, or you just get lucky and for once aren't saying idiotic things and blowing your chances, and actually getting a bottle, a bed, and a girl together all at the same time and life is a jazzy gas. Even if poor Allen's character spazzes and Sellers is basically trying to date rape Capucine all through the film, why not forgive it? And if you have laughter, it doesn't even matter if you end up with nothing else. Just look at those crazy actors in this picture below. They're all having a blast, and why not?

So instead of getting upset, just think about the way young woman all claim they're helpless nymphomaniacs to a man one minute and then refuse his advances a second later, and all the other things that have disappeared from films due to PC ethos. There was once upon a time a book called "The Joy of Sex" that was on every adult's bookshelf --even in suburbia. Nowadays there wouldn't be a book like that, now it would be The "Joy of Responsibility, Control and Prior Consent" - where even porn stars are required to use aesthetically depressing condoms and there are enough lectures about the importance of family values and settling down in every rom-com to turn off even a moralistic old studio like the post-code MGM.

But this is 1965, we don't have to worry about that yet. Here no woman runs away who doesn't secretly want to be chased, the cross fades are psychedelic, and the perfume of giddy madness eliminates any staleness in the boudoir-farcical air. Whoa whoa whoa Whoa! Whoa.

PS - And just when you think it can't get any better? Francois Hardy. All she'd have to do is sing "La Chazz l'infantile" and we'd be at it again.

PPS - Rereading this in light of the Harvey Weinstein /Louie CK stuff kind of shocks me - my only excuse was a kind naïveté. Since that piece by Ronan Farrow and the one by his sister that came out in the wake of Blue Jasmine, I've been on an Allen embargo, and now the bawdy 'all women want to be chased' attitude in the film and in my piece unnerve me. I was protesting more the mawkish sentiment of rom-coms and this pro-family dynamic then in vougue. But I think this rousting of the predators from Hollywood is very very important, and good for male-female relations as a whole, as the sooner they're all identified and eliminated, the quicker we can go back to 'fun' in sex and male-female banter with a clearer understanding and less silence about real intentions and motives.  Meanwhile, of course Allen is still at it, with something called Wonder Wheel. Ugh -- Kate.... Kate, what are you thinking? (12-19-17)

The Sorrows of Softcore are the Joys of Art: L'IMPORTANT C'EST D'AMIER (1975, Andrzej ZulawskI)

The French love their neuromantic triangles. What's up with that? Well, I dated a Swiss-French lady and I can tell you; they love what they call a cinq à sept (like Cleo, it means from 5-7): a pre-set tryst with one's lover on the way between work and home for dinner. Participating in this convenient and marvelous alternative to a conventional relationship can ruin you for all other kinds, specifically the "I can't understand why you don't like my friends" American variety. The 5-7 is very, very French and variations can be seen in everything from Jean Renoir's La regle du jeu (1939) to Le Mepris (1968) up through to Last Tango in Paris (1970). Andrzej Zulawksi's third feature, the 1975 romantic tragedy, L'important c'est d'aimer ("The Important thing is to Love")  carries this torch of Gallic perversity with knowing references to all three of those aforementioned films, right up to having Georges Delerue do a kind of sequel to his unforgettable orchestral Le Mepris score. That's to say nothing of the film's intertextually ill-fated production of Richard III that centers the action, and off-the-cuff references to Miriam Hopkins (see: 'la reine de Menage a Trois').

In a career-capping self-reflexive performance along the lines of Norma Desmond's in Sunset Boulevard (1950), or Sylvia Miles in Heat (1972), French actress Romy Schneider plays Nadine, a B-list French actress, hanging on by her nails in softcore (?) sex films. She can still look stunning in the right make-up and lighting, but Zulawski keeps her aging face ravaged by strange, pale, orange glows; we can see the lines of anguish in the corners of her eyes; gravity and the ravages of unfeeling exploitation film crews drag on her cheeks. Further, she's burdened by the knowledge that she'd still be neck-deep in a world of prostitution and smack addiction if not for the "Zorro-like" rescue of her otherwise ineffectual husband, Jacques, an autograph collecting cinephile played with intentionally irritating impishness-cum-starry-eyed self-loathing by sometimes-chanson singer Jacques Dutronc.

Joe Gillis en verso: Jacques rescued Nadine from the garage sale of aging female fallen idols, cleaned her up, and now stores her in amidst all his stacks of LPS, stills, and film books. The walls around his bright studio apartment are garish with Hollywood movie posters. It's the kind of pad that DVD collectors may recognize as approximate to their own, but in Zulawski's vision it carries a stale, empty, even claustrophobic ennui. It's the den of a consumer, not a creator. Reflected within the sad disconnect on Schneider's face and her husband's oblivious oppression, the posters become like prison walls; the gaze expanded into some approximate escapist aesthetic arrest is still male.

We see all this through the depth-focused eyes of handsome, ever-so-tortured photographer Servais (Fabio Testi), who falls for Nadine after he sneaks into her Eurosleaze film shoot on his way to shoot gay porn for his deceptively dapper smutmeister uncle, Mazelli (Claude Dauphin).

But Mazelli is the corrupt one, the purveyor, not the noble Servais, who's just paying off dad's gambling debts. Each a slave to desire on one side of the camera or the other, Servais and Nadine fall in love through the pain and emptiness they find in each others' eyes; they're bonded by their moral disgust and sense of self-degradation. They are two prudes inextricably immersed in the sleaze business, so they spend most of the film circling each other, bound by fidelity to their spouses -- a fidelity that is so un-French it needs special reasons to exist (Servias stole his current wife from another man who's since been drinking himself to death, etc.). Meanwhile Delerue throbs on the soundtrack like Contempt's kinkier younger brother, egging them on to the inevitable hook up.

Let us take a moment to remember that Paris (and Rome, as per The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone) has always been more cultured in the ways of non-marital, financially-rewarding love than America, and the figure of a houseboy/stud who depends on his looks and weak scruples for drug money needn't carry the same repellent currency it has in the States, where pretty rent boys are expected to suffer more operatically even than Liz Taylor in Butterfield 8. William Holden in Sunset Boulevard, Gene Kelly in An American in Paris, and George Peppard in Breakfast at Tiffany's, to name but three examples, all feel the need to censor their enjoyment of their special situation. They take the cash of their rich sponsors and no doubt provide certain services but the censors don't let us know what those services specifically are, and either way they aren't allowed to enjoy their positions and keep our sympathy. They have to squirm like every dollar hurts their pocket. Mon dieu! Les hypocrites!

Zulawski seems to be sending up this kind of self-loathing and torment with d'amier, albeit in a post-Sirkian way ala Almodovar or Fassbinder. There are also echoes of Midnight Cowboy's Joe Buck in Servais in that both are pretty, relatively unspoiled punks clinging to the delusion that they can call the shots without any cash to back said shots up. Adrift in a midnight world of sordid desire, in love with the sadness he catches in the newer porn performer's faces, Servais would like to forget that he borrowed big bucks from Mazelli to co-finance a a performance of Richard III just so that Nadine can play Lady Anne. Ever the noble, he insists the producers not let her know he put up the money. Yawn-ement! But luckily for us, that's where Klaus Kinski enters, and cuts through la merde del martyr like a knife through water.

As with the other Zulawski films that have recently appeared in beautiful editions from Mondo Vision, L'important c'est d'aimer's style is form-fitted to the subtexts: voyeurism, cinema, the insanity that true art both requires and instills, and the spiritual purity of over-acting to the point of surrealism. The camera moves in an around actors, leering over their shoulders like a pesky reporter. Often, the actors seem to be trying to get away from Zulawski's camera, just to breathe. They don't really acknowledge the camera directly, but they feel it watching, like a starlet on set might ignore a leering gaffer. Who knows if this is what's happening? Is Zulawski deliberately annoying his actors to the point they're always about to storm out of the room? He'd still chase them.

Escape is futile.

In Zulawski-ville you can have you cake, eat it too, store it in the fridge, throw it away in a fit of pride and self-will, fish it out later and freeze it for future generations, all at once, but it's still not going to satisfy your cake craving. Rabid foaming mouth hungry ghost insanity is yours no matter how much you eat. And that is why, for Zulawski, the image is always stronger than the reality it services, like neo-realism reversed, and reversed back and forth atop, until it becomes raw blood, guts and modernism. As consumers of these images, we're forced to reckon with the inescapable idea that baser arts such as smut make the higher arts possible and even 'high' by definition. Was not even Shakespeare once considered a 'low' art? It's only the dumbing down of already dumbed-down dumbness and the changes in linguistic structure that has made Shakespeare a "higher" art, just as flowers can't blossom without the gritty, ugly, muddy soil and the leering gaffers who pat it down. It is what it is because of what it isn't (on this rocklessness, structuralism doth build its church). Thus artists are always courting the bourgeoisie for grants in order to make art that criticizes artists for taking grants from the bourgeoisie. No wonder Kinski has to kick so much ass just to get an orgy going!

The importance of Kinski has still yet to be fully gauged, there is yet no meter with which to measure it. So when he hears that the RICHARD III will get the last part of the funding if they cast Nadine as Lady Anne, he suddenly remembers her from her last film, Nymphocula! (a Jess Franco film title if ever there was one!) which he remembers as "the one with two dykes in a castle with a dwarf. "She was fantastic," he cries, "amazing!" That sounds like Franco, all right. Kinski's own appearances in Eurosleaze titles are not only too numerous to measure (he was in Nymphocula too, whether it exists or not) but intrinsic to the genre. He's the crucified, screaming scarecrow at the crossroads between genius and insanity, art and exploitation, raving anger, and complete detachment. Both creepy and sexy, he's never a full hero or villain: half debonair intellectual aesthete, half wild orangutan, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde swirled together like soft serve. Somehow, when he does these low-rent high art 'man on a wire' flicks, his insanity keeps him grounded and he emerges unscathed from the carnage.

The sane, however, to judge by Zulawski's moping protagonists at any rate, remain permanently traumatized. They wanted to do Shakespeare and wound up in Eurosleaze; they're despondent about their failure but Kinski knows better: he brings the Shakespeare to the porn and the porn to the Shakespeare.

The key Richard III meta-scene is in act 1, scene 2, wherein Richard woos Lady Anne as she mourns by Edward's coffin. Romy's not putting it over too well, so the director asks her husband (Dutronc) to lie in the coffin, hoping Nadine will perhaps get some extra emotional punch from seeing him in there. Tellingly, Jacques comments during the five-minute break: "I thought I did pretty well, no?" And of course, he will do even better--and help Nadine even more--very soon, for real this time, as his cheerful disregard for the druggy emotional nakedness of real theater heralds his own 'real' death. His flippancy here is a punch-in-the-gut reminder to us viewers that we are standing on the sideline, watching other people act or sing and quietly judging them. We like to think we're secret kings who could do this all super well if we bothered to try. We hate to be reminded that we're just watchers in this world, already dead, looking up from our coffins at the faces weeping down on us. Cue Delerue!

It's that sense of sacrifice and death that makes up a woman's picture in the classic pre-code Hollywood version of the term: fantasias of women running up and down the pole of financial success via a series of men they've manipulated and ruined. Or they slavishly throw it all away on some handsome bounder with no bread. Or they fall from grace and sleep with everyone in sight, except the man they truly love -- he, this one man, alone, must stay a perfect memory, untouched by her corrosive caresses. On his side, however, that's crap. Why should he stay a virgin because she hates herself?

Thus, the ideal lover for such a weepy self-righteous martyr is dead and so can't cheat or steal or grow tired of said martyr's incessant sobbing. The dead lover is a lover whom no amount of licentious rubbing can denature. You can pine for him and think he was "the one" and hopefully, for your sake, he's not going to come groveling back from Hollywood in two years with gray hairs and gambling debts, wanting a "mommy" to make it right. And you, dolefully glancing at your one true love in the shadows, would probably take him back, because of your wedding vow.

Any less than three people in a marriage is a mockery of the Trinity.

Where Zulawski takes a self-reflexive step back from all this is with Jacques' possessive insecurity taking on a horrifically babyish form: he's being forced to admit he never learned to fight back or to "care" enough about the living, the people he knows (photos and film memorabilia are a different story). Take it from me, it's very difficult to know what to do, how to be graceful, when one is being cuckolded, or cuckolding, or breaking up a home. I've played all the parts once or twice over my romantic lifetime, and that's what Jacques doesn't quite realize --it's an act. I played the parts - the jealous old lover, the tactful new one, and the two-timer trying to oil the hinge between them - but they are interchangeable in the end. Nothing is real. Resorting to violence is pointless for any sensible or educated man, no matter how badly cuckolded, so all he can do is make snarky comments, bitter veiled threats, and--as I used to do -- spill wine on the other guy's stupid hippie sandals "accidentally."

Another thing you can do is just dig that it's about post-modern Baudrillard simulacrum deconstruction -- i.e. romance inside a mirror --but that doesn't make it any less painful.

In the end, Jacques offers a quietly unflattering portrait of a fan who hides behind images and record albums as if a mother's skirt, afraid to look life in the eye. Servais, on the other hand, is a photographer and Nadine a model; they actually create the images that Jacques worships. They feel validated by the act of leaving their mark for better or worse on eternity, superior to the consumers of the images they make, even if their destiny hangs by such abstract threads as an early morning edition theater review in the local paper. The critics! baisez tous les critiques stupides!

Meta-riches are to be found in this film's DVD packaging, which invites you to luxuriate in fine design and cultivate your inner collecteur as you watch a film that savages the collecteur instinct. Consider the image above, wherein Jacques waxes ecstatic over an old glossy of Miriam Hopkins while his ex-movie star wife languishes stoically next to him, leaving her left flank exposed to the sympathetic gaze of Servais on the right. Her hair pulled back to resemble Hopkins' in the photo, Nadine is radiating a docile calm which Jacques entirely misses, instead talking aloud as if to a rapt audience, announcing of the photo: "This one is going in the safe," indicating his preferred treatment (isolation) for all his pretty prizes. Poor Jacques!

But not poor Erich! I still have my memories and now, thanks to Mondo, a very cool DVD for the top row of my bookshelf--right next to Godard, Antonioni, Bertolucci, Romero, Argento y Fulci? N'cest pas? Do you feel my self-loathing? Ach, wohin ist Klaus Kinski!!! Klaus, kommen Sie hier, bitte! Wir verrotten in der Hölle ohne Ihre Verrücktheit!  

PS. 3/13/16-- Romy's name just turned up in a WWII documentary I was watching. As a kid she played with the high ranking Nazi's children as her mother was a big German star under the Goebbels-managed German cinema! I went back over this to figure out how to slide that bit in like I knew it all the time, but non. It's too perfect as is... though knowing this makes her defeated calm extra resonant