The Fastest Guitar Alive

You know those really shitty late Elvis movies? Well, if you ever wondered what a worse one would be like, it might be The Fastest Guitar Alive, Roy Orbison's feeble attempt at movie stardom.

This movie was made in 1967. On American movie screens you could see The Graduate, Bonnie and Clyde, Belle de Jour or this cheap-ass musical/western starring Roy Orbison, a prime example of the kind of crap other films were reacting against. Hell, even Valley of the Dolls is more artful and profound...

Yeah. It's nothing like this poster would lead you to believe.
This movie is a complete product of The Man.

The Fastest Guitar Alive starts out promisingly enough, with the sound of Roy Orbison warbling a tune. We get our first inkling of disaster when we see Sam the Sham listed in the credits and it's not as a musical guest. But here's ol' Roy, pompadour slicked down and flying high, strumming away on his guitar while perched on a medicine show wagon... towing a wagon of maidens behind. By a line that's hanging out the washing, because basically all the women do in this movie is laundry, dancing and a combination move of pouting and stomping their pretty little feet..

Roy Orbison and his wagon and his wimmin are attacked by a bunch of Indians. I can't really say Native Americans, as the "tribe" is quite clearly a bunch of paunchy middle-aged white guys with Jewish vaudeville accents. They also make jokes about Neo-Impressionist warpaint (made even worse by the fact that what they're pointing to as an example is clearly Abstract Expressionism). They "attack," so Orbison presses a button and a rifle barrel emerges from his guitar, he takes a few shots, the Indians flee in terror. The action in The Fastest Guitar Alive will remain at a strictly Wile E. Coyote level.

Oy.

So, anyway, they take the medicine show to San Francisco, where the ladies do a tepid saloon-girl routine about "doing the snuggle-huggle with you" and the boys make a half-assed attempt at peddling snake oil. It turns out that the whole gang aren't whores and con men at all--good thing too, because they all seem to suck at whoring at conning--they're Confederate spies! And we're supposed to think that's a good thing! In the same year the Supreme Court finally struck down laws forbidding interracial marriage and riots happened in over 150 American cities! And you thought women doing laundry and "the snuggle huggle" in the era of Janis Joplin was some passe wack shit...

Anyway, apparently Roy and his crew are out to steal a shipment of Union gold, in some plan that involves Roy Orbison first giving some local general's daughter "guitar lessons" and then putting on a fake beard. This is as good a time as any, and perhaps I should have said it sooner, to point out that Roy Orbison can't act for shit. Put a guitar in his hands, he's a lord. Put a script in his hands, he's a schmuck. He is not helped by the bad story, the lousy writing, the cheap production values, the lame supporting actors...

At the exact same moment, just a few miles up the California coast,
Hunter S. Thompson was doing acid with the Hells Angels.

So, anyway, Roy Orbison and the nitwits manage to steal the gold, squeezing in a few musical numbers before they go--the one where Roy bets a big "war drum," while the girls wander aimlessly--sorry, dance--around in buckskin bikinis belongs in Las Vegas Hillbillys. Then they head for El Paso to turn over their gold to their commander or whatever, with a few rounds of shenanigans along the way. Some bad dudes from San Francisco follow them, trying to get their ornery mitts on the gold. They run across the Nebbish Americans again. Another bad dude shows up when the girls are showerin' and Roy has to run him off.

But they pull into town only to find folks drinking and cheering and carousing in the street. It seems that the war has ended. The men's response: "The war is over. There's nothing left." The women's response: "We're left." One would like to think this is the sensible response to the end of hostility: Women, with their natural practicality and respect for life, are relived that life will continue. However, given the stance of the rest of The Fastest Guitar Alive, it's more likely that they just mean that they can all get hitched now. Elsewhere in America, it was the height of the protests opposing the Vietnam War...

So, what about the gold blah blah? They boys debate whether to keep it, then they decide to turn it in. In the meantime, various folks try to get the gold, leading to more fourth-rate Wile E. Coyote nonsense along with a few more musical numbers. I'd say the one thing the screenwriters for The Fastest Guitar Alive did right was keep the damn thing to 87 minutes.

Anyway, The Fastest Guitar Alive is an attempt to make 50s entertainment in the 60s  and, well, simply not good. Hell, even Elvis himself was leaving Clambake behind for the 68 Comeback Special by now (lawdy). The only redeeming quality is you get to hear some Roy Orbison songs and, frankly, you could do that better with a stereo.

Atomic Blonde

... Played with a reserve as icy as the cubes she tosses into her many glasses of vodka (seriously, people drink and smoke in this movie like it’s Barfly), Lorraine herself comes in with only a few shreds of backstory and remains enigmatic throughout the film, which some might find off-putting but, hell, isn’t that how James Bond has operated for 26 movies?

Read the rest of the review at Vegas Seven...

Modesty Blaise

Fabulous cast, highly regarded director, beloved source material, eye-popping design: What could go wrong?

In the case of Modesty Blaise, apparently a lot, though it's hard to put your finger on exactly what--probably for all of those reasons listed above.

So, we have the sensational Monica Vitti as super-spy Modesty, done up in a succession of stunning mod 60s outfits and wigs. When they put her in the catsuit and dark beehive, she does truly look like the heroine from the comics. Terence Stamp is most appealing as her sidekick; Dirk Bogarde does a fine, queeny turn as the arch-villain--and his pop-art Mediterranean villa is to die for.

If there's anyone I might look askance at in this matter, it's the director: Joseph Losey--better-known for dark psychological dramas such as The Servant and Eva. Modesty Blaise opens with our heroine in her all-white rotating penthouse, on her round bed, getting mercenary assignments and horoscopes (she's a Scorpio) from a houseboy in white tie and tails.... promising enough, but them the theme song kicks in: It sounds like Up With People in tone, if not content, and it presages a movie full of almost and not quite...

Anyway, a Sheik has a bunch of diamonds stolen, Modesty is hired to get them back by a committee of stuffy British tropes. Thus begins the rather silly and pointless plot. Dirk Bogarde chills around his lair with his organist and his lackeys and his dominatrix buddy who tortures mimes, occasionally sending a henchman or two off in an attempt to stop Modesty, who does not seem to be trying all that hard to do anything but look gorgeous and bemused.

There's only one big explosion--right at the opening--and very little in the way of the elaborate schemes and getaways or fancy lethal gadgets usually found in spy movies. We do get some lovely international locales--London, Paris, that fabulous Mediterranean villa--but that and the sensational outfits are about all we have from the high-gloss world of international espionage we all know so well from the movies. But apparently Losey admitted he had seen virtually nothing of the genre he was supposed to be parodying. That is not a good sign.

The movie ends with a romantic duet amidst gunfire and Arabs on jet-skis. It's meant to be exciting and amusing: It winds up being more dull and dumb. Frankly, Monica Vitti kicks more ass as the suicidal perfume heiress in The Scarlet Lady.

There were plenty of spy film spoofs during the 60s--Danger: Diabolik, Casino Royale, Dean Martin's Matt Helm films. None were entirely successful, but they all had their finer points. Mostly, when Modesty Blaise tries to be silly, it simply winds up being stupid. Still, this movie is a nice piece of eye candy and if you put it on in the background with Serge Gainsbourg or Stereo Total on the sound system, it should work quite nicely.

Cleopatra Jones

Back in the 60's and 70's, several attempts were made at a "female James Bond." Honey West and The Girl from U.N.C.L.E. went heavy on gadgetry. There was the Ginger pictures (in which our heroine was most Bondlike in her skill at fucking her enemies into submission) and the Brits tried a lady spy series called Go Girl! (Bondlike for accents and ripoff credits).

But as far as embodying the deadly glamour and "I own this room" charisma of Bond, the closest you'll come is Cleopatra Jones. As portrayed by the 6'2" Tamara Dobson, Cleo is a couture-wearing, karate-kicking high-level CIA agent whose movies combined fashion and feminism, blaxploitation and martial arts, spy movie thrills and social consciousness.

 Cleopatra Jones opens with one of the best badass hero introductions in the movies: Landing by helicopter in the middle  of the desert, with dignitaries of all nations lined up to meet you. Then you give the signal for the RAF to wipe out "$30 million on the street" worth of poppies -- not a hand wave, but a Avedon/Verushka for Vogue-style flourish of your fox-trimmed cloak.

Dobson's wardrobe throughout is by Giorgio di Sant'Angelo. The designer went nuts on furs, hat, turbans, boots, capes and statement jewelry. If this sounds slightly impractical, dig her maxidresses with breakaway skirts for fight scenes. Probably 99% of humanity would look ridiculous in at least one, if not all of these outfits, but Tamara Dobson carries every one them off like the supermodel she was.

 

 

Immediately after the explosions, we meet Mommy aka Shelley Winters. She's a drug lord (drug lady?) and that was her poppy field Cleo wiped out. She's hanging around one of those big paneled & draped offices every top villain in the 70's had. We will only see Shelley Winters on this set -- until the very last scene, and i imagine that they needed a pair of muscleboys in hot pants carrying a plate of spaghetti and a couple of pints to lead her there.

Although here Shelley is a big ol' lesbian with a wardrobe of ghastly wigs that have model names like "The Buffalo Chicken" and "Pubic Hair." She's also got a taste for young stuff: As she says to whatever stretch-panted blonde, brunette or redhead is wandering around her office, "You're the only one around here who gives a shit about Mommy." I just hope she's hooking Miss Teen Poughkeepsie up with smack for services rendered. Or, better yet, before they are rendered: I can't imagine it is a muff that one is eager to dive into...

Mommy decides the thing to do is send the cops she's bought off to bust Cleo's pet charity, a narco/alco recovery house run by her dashingly turtlenecked and Afro-ed boyfriend. So there's a bust, with plenty of stereotypical nasty cracker pig cops wrecking the house and roughing people up and planting drugs on a sobbing ex-junkie.

So Ms. Cleopatra Jones packs up what i can only imagine is six Louis Vuitton trunks of her finest outfits and goes back to Cali with more chutzpah than LL Cool J and Biggie put together. A pair of thugs meet her at the airport, but lose her -- only for her to reappear sliding down the baggage chute. She uses her mad kung fu skills, but the bad guys eventually draw guns...

As the police run toward Cleo, guns drawn, she smirks and flips out her CIA I.D. One cannot help but enjoy the turning-of-the-tables as the cops now show her deference, in comparison to their behavior in the previous scene.

Works even better than a "Stand Your Ground" law, officers.
Now, I need you to do two things. One, step out of my way. Two, suck it. I'll let you pick the order.

Cleo meets with the police chief, played by that guy who was also Kojak's Chief of Police, who is nothing if not apologetic (he did not approve the bust, apparently). She's pissed about the raid on her boyfriend's halfway house and she's pissed about all the dope in her old neighborhood and she's pissed about the cops being assholes. CoP says he'll handle it, but nothing doing. As Cleo says, "My jurisdiction extends from Ankara, Turkey to Watts Tower, baby!" Why would one think it's a good idea to have this woman on your doorstep and mad as hell?

She brokers a 72-hour truce between the cops and the brothers to get to the bottom of who ordered the raid and who sent those assholes to the airport. When the bad guys put a bullet in Cleo's man, she throws down, revealing an in-car arsenal that would put Puff Daddy's to shame.

Boyfriend is now out of commission. This shoot-the-boyfriend move gets pulled a number of times in these female-centric blaxploitation movies (i.e, Sugar Hill, Foxy Brown). It leaves our heroine to TCB alone, while making sure we get her man's not a coward and rubbing off a bit of her potentially virago edges -- if he was able to save the day, he would and/or she might let him. But he's not, so....

 Hey! It's Huggy Bear! Yes, Antonio Fargas himself shows up as a flashy drug dealer who questions the intelligence of Shelley Winters' plan to poke a stick into the giant hornet's nest of fierceness and fury that is Cleopatra Jones. Legit question! In the meantime, Cleo has enlisted the Johnson Brothers, who are part cavalry, part comic relief. (And if Melvin ain't high on weed, i don't know who is.)

 Another recurring motif in Cleopatra Jones is men appreciating the awesomeness of Cleopatra Jones, either as she arrives, as she leaves or both -- seriously, it probably adds about 10 minutes to the flick. Cleo has no interest in going incognito: Her flamboyant presence is the dead opposite of the usual agent cover, but it seems to work just as well. She's not going to blend in anyway, so why not rock a turban and a T-top Corvette and let the males of the world marvel at the majesty?

The Corvette comes in handy during a ten-minute Bullit-esque car chase. This movie certainly believes in giving the people what they want: Fast cars, kung fu, one-liners, crazy fresh outfits. Did i mention the part where she wins the dirtbike race?

I'm going to assume that you can guess the outcome of the final showdown between the twentysomething 6'2" kung fu Amazon and the pudgy, sixtyish lady who drinks and screams a lot....

Cleopatra Jones has been an inspiration and an icon ever since this flick came out. It was followed up by Cleopatra Jones and the Casino of Gold, another bust-the-narcos mission with the Johnson brothers and another lady-loving Ms. Big. It also had the added thrill of being a Shaw Bros. co-production, with New! Improved! martial arts action. I wouldn't say that Cleopatra Jones could replace James Bond, but i do wish she'd had more than two movies...

Sex and Fury

This movie is a fucking masterpiece. I am not exaggerating. Sex and Fury is one of my all-time favorite films. I have never watched it with anyone whose mind was not utterly and completely blown.

Sex and Fury is a period piece, set in Tokyo circa 1905, the conflicted Meiji period. (Also the setting of Jet Li's Once Upon a Time in China movies.) Like many martial arts movies, it begins with a "they killed my family/master/dog and now i will spend the next decade-plus training for my eventual vengeance" bit. In this case, our heroine's police detective father is suddenly murdered (with horrible Burroughs-esque ripping sounds), leaving behind several playing cards elaborately decorated with a boar, a deer and a butterfly.

After some psychedelic opening credits -- our now-grown, tattooed and katana-wielding heroine Ocho, posing amidst the graphics, vaguely like James Bond and Bond Girl rolled into one. Then the movie proper begins, with a pallsy meeting between the new Yakuza President (as in he is a Yakuza and the President), local politicians and a few roundeye devils. Suddenly, a guy in a Dracula cape and emo-manga bangs tries to stab Yakuza President (y'know, that would be a good band name) and flees into a maze of streets. He is hidden by Ocho, who pickpockets a locket from him ("Force of habit.") with a sepia-toned photo of a fetching brunette lass inside.

On to the gambling house. A man is caught cheating at cards, followed by brawling and stabbing. The cheater confesses to Ocho (through a mouthful of blood) that he did it to buy his sister's freedom from a whorehouse. He entrusts Ocho with the money to free her but, hell, our girl could probably handle this shit without cash.

Next follows one of the film's great set pieces: The swordfight in the snow. Ocho is bathing when she is attacked by dozens of thugs; without missing a beat or putting on any clothes, she grabs a sword and dispatches them, the bloody battle crashing through the house out into the snow. It is one of the most stunning action sequences ever. Let me reiterate: It is snowing, she is naked and slicing Yakuza in half like blood is worth money and she intends to outfit herself in Prada from panties to earmuffs.

But, back to the plot! To win the girl's freedom, Ocho must play against a "western female gambler" at a mansion called the Guinness. The gambling lady is the one whose picture had been in Manga Bangs' locket and none other than Christina Lindberg, whom the truly erudite amongst you may recognize as the heroine of  Eurosleaze sex n' violence revenge flick They Call Her One Eye aka Thriller, A Cruel Picture. She plays a dancer/gambler/spy who dresses as Cinderella -- her first entrance is descending a staircase in hoopskirts, ringlets and tiara. Although she spends most of the film naked, when she is wearing clothes, it's straight-up Disney Princess.

The ladies play their game but are interrupted by Manga Bangs who's trying to stab someone again and Christina wants to shoot him, but is bewildered by flashbacks of the Cinemax After Dark flick the two of them apparently made together -- by the time she regains her senses, a bunch of Ninjas and Gilbert & Sullivan policemen are fighting in the ballroom, so they go back to their cards. Did i mention that it's 1905 and they have multicolored plastic poker chips?

So Ocho wins the game, but the guy decides to rape little sister before turning her over. Ocho finds the girl sobbing and talks her out of suicide but, man she is pissed. She is even more pissed when the girl adds that the man had a deer tattoo on his back -- just like one of the guys who killed Ocho's dad. Oh, a motherfucker is going to pay!

Sex and Fury is a stylish, action-packed picture, but it does have a few more plot twists than it can use. Suffice to say that once Ocho finds one of the bastards she needs to kill, the others are not far away. But it won't be easy. Not with the platoon of switchblade-wielding nuns in her way.  Or the bizarro psychedelic-blasphemous torture sequence. Not to mention the enmeshed political intrigue of several nations that somehow involves far-right President Yakuza, some Jack the Ripper-mustached guy who is Christina Lindberg's boss and wronged lefty Manga Bangs. And an Opium War. It's complicated. We also do tend to stop dead for more softcore sexytime. And some rather heavy-handed comedy bits. And a Romeo and Juliet-meets-Anna Karenina death scene (among many other death scenes). But did i mention the magic lantern light show? The fringed buckskin bikini? The poisoned lube?

Reiko Ike is remarkable as Ocho, a warrior of singular purpose and implacable wrath. She hacks through dozens of opponents -- swinging her blade through crowds that disintegrate into dismembered limbs and puddles of tempera-paint stage blood. By the end, entire gangs flee, knowing that all you can do is try to run because there is simply no stopping her.

If you see just one female martial arts exploitation vengeance flick -- and there are many, thank our lucky stars -- make it Sex and Fury. Even if you're not a fan of the Pinky Violence genre, it does not disappoint.