Still Looking for that Italian Dream: Gloria Guida in Mario Imperoli's Blue Jeans (1975)

Even though she was one of the most distinctive and charismatic film stars that came out of seventies Italian Cinema, Gloria Guida has never quite gained the following in the United States that she has deserved. A big part of this is due to the fact that her film work has never had the type of exposure to English-language audiences as the work of say an Edwige Fenech or Laura Antonelli. The majority of the films Guida shot throughout the seventies have simply never found a home video release on disc in America or Britain.

A key work in Gloria Guida's elusive filmography is her fourth feature, Blue Jeans, released in Europe in 1975 just about a year after Guida had been crowned Miss Teen Italy. Guida was just 18 when she shot the admittedly uneven, but mildly entertaining, Blue Jeans with director Mario Imperoli, the filmmaker who had introduced her to film audiences with the very popular Monika in 1974. Italian audiences had responded immediately to Imperoli's sexy blonde discovery and by the time she reunited with the director again for Blue Jeans, Guida already had another two hits on her resume (Silvio Amadio's La minorenne and Giuliano Biagetti's La novizia).

Absolutely perfect for the sexy comedies that Italians were flocking to throughout the seventies, Gloria Guida was one of the most charming actors that came to fame in the commedia erotica all'italiana genre. Standing in clear contrast to her darkly sensual Italian peers, Guida was all sex and sunshine and she had the absolute perfect face, figure and openness for the Sex Comedies that she became famous for. Guida was also very funny and had a wonderfully sweet quality about her that gave even her more explicit films an oddly innocent feel, and a director who absolutely recognized this special quality was Mario Imperoli.





Born in Rome in 1931, Imperoli broke into the Italian film industry in the early seventies as a producer and writer and his discovery of Gloria Guida, and the subsequent films he shot with her, would turn out to be his most noteworthy cinematic achievement. With only 8 films to his credit as a director, Imperoli would sadly pass away in 1977, Monika and Blue Jeans gained the most notoriety, mostly due to the stunning young leading lady he had introduced to the film world.





Scripted by Imperoli, along with the incredibly prolific Piero Regnoli, Blue Jeans tells the story of young Daniela 'Blue Jeans' Anselmi, a free-spirited drifter who makes her way in life by selling sexual favors and practicing petty-crime. After Daniela is arrested, and discovered to still be a minor, the man who might be her long-lost father is called into her life to look after her.




Blue Jeans is a slight film that is only fitfully funny but it is never less than compulsively watchable thanks to Guida, who appears in nearly every scene of the film (that she easily steals from all of her more experienced costars including Paolo Carlini as her bumbling father). Featuring a delightfully breezy score by the legendary Nico Fidenco and some truly gorgeous color photography by future Dario Argento cinematographer Romano Albani, Blue Jeans is finally mostly just a showcase for Guida and her considerable physical charms (Imperoli all but abandons his already thin narrative throughout the film with fetish-like closeups of Guida's long muscular legs and shapely behind). If the film is perhaps more memorable than it should be it is probably due to the peverse and violent final act that seems taken from another work entirely.




When his camera isn't ogling Gloria Guida's astonishing physique, Imperoli's direction is workmanlike and not especially stylish. Compared to say the incredible satiric comedies that the great Salvatore Samperi was making with Laura Antonelli, such as the masterful Malicious (1973), Blue Jeans feels fairly weak indeed. Perhaps the big tragedy of Gloria Guida's career is that most of the films she did make throughout the seventies survived mostly due to her presence alone, with a few notable exceptions like Fernando Di Leo's haunting To Be Twenty (1978).




Like most of her films, Blue Jeans has never been released on home video in the United States and my copy comes from a fan-subbed European import. A special cult-figure in need of a larger audience, Gloria Guida could find a major new following if some enterprising company would invest in her elusive filmography. Until then, fansubbed versions of some of her films, like Blue Jeans, can be found on the web while a few have been granted Region 1 release (with special mention going to To be Twenty and Monika). For those with all-region players, with no need for English subs or dubs, a number more are available on European disc.

3 The Right Way

While I find it hard to give a damn about an organization that year after year ignores some of the most influential and greatest artists and bands in popular music history, last night The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame got it right when they inducted Adam Horowitz, Adam Yauch and Michael Diamond. For more than thirty years now, Beastie Boys have been one of the most consistently brilliant, trailblazing and influential bands in the world and I am thrilled to see them honored as the truly great act they are. Are there bands that should have been put in first? Absolutely but there are few that are more deserving than Beastie Boys and I wanted to wish them a sincere congratulations. I also wanted to send my best to my favorite BEATsie Boy MCA, Adam Yauch, who was unable to attend last night's ceremony. I wish the best health and happiness to Adam and I hope for at least three more decades of truly inspiring and thrilling music from his amazing group.

Lost in the Snow: Lamont Johnson's You'll Like My Mother (1972)

An extremely chilling, and sadly mostly-forgotten, thriller from director Lamont Johnson, You'll Like My Mother(1972) is one of the most overlooked horror films of the early seventies. A claustrophobic and eerie production highlighted by a terrific performance from Patty Duke, You'll Like My Mother has never been granted a release on DVD or Blu-ray and it is a fine work ripe for rediscovery.

You'll Like My Mother began life as a novel from the pen of Naomi A. Hintze. Published originally in 1969 by G. P. Putnam's Sons, Hintze's gripping tale of a pregnant woman's terrifying ordeal in the childhood home of her recently deceased husband garnered some praise upon its release and was compared to Ira Levin's astonishing Rosemary's Baby. You'll Like My Mother was custom-made for a big-screen adaptation and Universal's Bing Crosby Productions division bought the rights in early 1970.

Actor, director and writer Lamont Johnson was already a seasoned veteran of the film industry when Universal picked him to direct You'll Like My Mother as pre-production began in 1971. The fifty-year old Johnson was best known for his work in television, so he might have seemed like an odd choice for a big-screen work of horror, but he was trusted by Crosby Productions as a capable and dependable filmmaker and the pick turned out to be a fairly inspired one, as his direction of You'll Like My Mother is intense, taut and extremely memorable.





While Lamont Johnson's reliability behind the camera was certainly the main reason for his placement as the director of You'll Like My Mother, Universal was also aware that he had already guided the film's chosen star, Patty Duke, to one of her greatest performances in the moving My Sweet Charlie just a few years earlier. With their director and star in place, Universal sent the cast and crew of You'll Like My Mother to Duluth, Minnesota in March of 1972 to make the film along the North Shore and at the Glensheen Historic Estate, a location that would eventually become known as the infamous Elisabeth Congdon murder-mansion.

The You'll Like My Mother team were greeted with an enthusiastic reception upon their arrival in Duluth (all the extras in the film would be played by locals) as well as a brutal late season blizzard that made shooting a major chore. The heavy snow would end up serving the production well though, as it added a chilled layer of dread and isolation to the proceedings that no Hollywood technician could replicate. You'll Like My Mother stands as one of the great snowbound thrillers ever released and you can still feel the freezing cold coming off the screen in every scene.




While the shoot would turn out to be quite a frozen logistical nightmare on certain days, Patty Duke's warmth helped everyone from the crew to the extras get through. The Oscar-winning icon proved very popular among everyone on the set and her performance in You'll Like My Mother stands among her very best. She is incredibly powerful in the film and watching it today serves as a reminder, to those that need it, of her power as an actor.




While You'll Like my Mother would turn out to be dominated by Patty Duke's intense and touching performance, Johnson was blessed with several great actors for his film including a young Richard Thomas (who was in the midst of making a major name for himself as John-Boy on The Walton's), a terrifying Rosemary Murphy and pretty young Sian Barbara Allen (an actress who would soon be playing Thomas' love interest on The Waltons).
Behind the scenes, Johnson had a solid crew including cinematographer Jack A. Marta (fresh from his work on Spielberg's tremendous Duel), prolific composer Gil Melle (a talented jazz artist who had worked on My Sweet Charlie) and art-director William D. DeCines (who had previously worked on thrillers like Curtis Harrington's Games and Daniel Petrie's Silent Night, Deadly Night). Melle's eerie bass-driven score would especially give Johnson's film the push it needed to go from routine scare-film to a great thriller.



You'll Like My Mother opened up in the fall of 1972 to a fairly respectable box-office performance and some critical acclaim. Perhaps too subtle, Johnson's PG rated spine-tingler never really caught on with a mass audience though and by the mid-seventies it was only seen via late-night television showings (it is still often mistakenly called a TV-movie). The film would all but vanish (save for a few midnight showings in Duluth) until a pan and scan VHS release about a dozen years ago came out and soon slipped out of print. Until a disc is released (which will hopefully happen eventually) this special little film can be viewed here broken up into ten parts at YouTube.



***For more on the shooting of You'll Like My Mother, please visit this Duluth site that contains some vintage newspaper articles and photos detailing the production.***

My Conversation with Sheila O'Malley on Elvis Presley's Film Career

Hopefully all of my readers here are familiar with the amazing Sheila O'Malley, easily one of the best writers on film, music and popular culture on the planet. Sheila's work at her site, The Sheila Variations, is always brilliant and inspiring and recently I had the great pleasure of participating in a chat with her on one of our mutual favorite artists, Elvis Presley. Our talk, on Elvis' unfairly maligned movie career can now be read over at The Sheila Variations and I wanted to invite my readers to check it out. It was such a great pleasure participating in this and I was thrilled to be able to share my enthusiasm on Elvis' acting and filmography with another writer who shares my devotion. I hope the chat might inspire a few folks to perhaps check out films like King Creole, Wild in the Country and Live a Little, Love a Little who might not have before and, I know, Sheila and I both would appreciate any comments that might come our way. Thanks to Sheila for letting me appear on her terrific site and thanks to Elvis for always inspiring us both!

Operation Screenshot (Films of the Seventies): Derek Jarman's Jubilee (1978)

Femme au Miroir: Jean Rollin's Requiem for a Vampire (1973)

Eloquent, expressive and altogether haunting, Jean Rollin’s fourth feature film,
1971’s Vierges et Vampires (Requiem for a Vampire) shows him as an artist totally in control of his own art and totally separate from anyone else in cinema before or since.




Rollin admitted in his introduction to Requiem for a Vampire in Virgins and Vampires that by 1971 he was, “used to the critics insults, the public outcry” and that with the film he, “started shooting for (his own) personal pleasure exclusively since the others had rejected” his past works. It’s that striking spirit of independence that finds its way into every frame of Requiem for a Vampire, a totally secure and confident work that has our guy making one of the purest Jean Rollin films imaginable.




For fans of Jean Rollin’s oeuvre, the images in Requiem for a Vampire are legendary. The opening shots Marie-Pierre Castel and Mireille Dargent dressed as clowns in a never explained high speed shoot out to the many shots of the two of them walking alone and in silence through fields, an empty cemetery and a ruined castle will be chill inducing for admirers of Rollin. A friend once spoke of Requiem for a Vampire reverentially by stating that in the hands of anyone else it would have been an incredibly boring and poor piece of filmmaking, but Jean Rollin’s uncompromising and beautifully singular style makes it all seem so profound and moving.



Attempting to replay the minimal plot of Requiem for a Vampire is a bit senseless. Rollin stated in Virgins and Vampires that the work was “an attempt to simplify the structure of a film to an extreme” and it does so with remarkable veracity. One can imagine the film set to an unwritten opera by Philip Glass or Terry Riley as it contains so many of the repetitive and hypnotic methods inherent in much if the minimalist music that was beginning to come out of the period. Along with being a love letter to a particular style he had perfected, Rollin is clearly building his own mythology with Requiem for a Vampire and he would recount to Peter Blumenstock in Virgins and Vampires as well as Video Watchdog that he was more and more making, “references to (his) earlier films” and that he was looking to, “connects dreams and stories like a construction system and (that) the audience can make their own thing out of it.”




Requiem for a Vampire is a bit of a hard film to nail down. Cohill and Tombs would state the film works as a, “straight horror film and an exploration of personal mythology.” in Immoral Tales but it strays as far from the idea of a ‘straight horror’ film as possible at times. Surprisingly comic (an early sequence involving Castel and an outdoors street vendor is one of the silliest and most infectiously fun moments in Rollin’s canon), undeniably erotic and strikingly mournful, Rollin’s fourth film is a work that defies categorization. Perhaps Rollin himself placed it in the best context when he wrote in Virgins and Vampires that, “excluding the timid erotic scenes”, the work, “could be a film for children made by children”, and that finally it is very much, “a fairy tale.”




Shot quickly in and around the ruins of a dungeon owned by the Duchess of Roche-Guyon, Rollin recalled in Encore’s booklet for the film’s special edition DVD release that it had all come from a spidery script, “written naively without thought, almost in automatic writing, without prior idea and above all without reflection. It’s nothing else but a simple stream of ideas out of an unconstrained imagination.” While the film is controlled by the lovely team of Castel and Dargent (whom Rollin recalls on Encore’s commentary track as two girls he loved that hated each other) other familiar faces pop up throughout its less than ninety minute running time including the hypnotically strange Dominique and musician turned actress Louise Dhour (featured in a terrific interview on Encore’s set), who would be so memorable in Rollin’s 1974 production, Demoniacs.




Inspired by the paintings by Paul Delvaux, and working with a young but stylish cinematographer named Renon Polles, Jean Rollin injects every frame of Requiem for a Vampire with a striking and languid authority. Not in a hurry and delighting in capturing moments that other filmmakers would scoff at, Jean Rollin has by this point totally perfected the deliberately slow and mesmerizing pace that so many of his fans have come to worship and revere over the years. The director himself would state in Encore’s booklet about his most “childish and personal” film that he “was beginning to obtain a certain authority” in his command of the medium, and it's not a stretch to say that every film he has made since owes at least something to the evocative images of Marie-Pierre Castel and Mireille Dargent running from something unseen throughout this, one of his most iconic and necessary works.




The near silent (dialogue wise) Requiem for a Vampire would have a fairly successful run in France and throughout parts of Europe but not surprisingly it was butchered for its US release, and retitled with the wincingly exploitative Caged Virgins moniker. Widely considered one of the best Rollin films, the film is available on a bare bones Region 1 DVD from Redemption (featuring a solid visual presentation) as well as several varying DVDs throughout England and Europe.
Collectors and lovers of Rollin’s work should seek out Encore’s impressive three disc box set which features a beautiful print (I have read some complaints stating that the picture is slightly squeezed but honestly on my player and computer it looks just beautiful) and a terrific set of extras (many of which I have already highlighted in previous posts). Hardcore collectors are advised to seek out the old Something Weird VHS under the title of Caged Virgins, which features some needless additional footage that all but destroys Rollin’s deliberately maintained and incredibly effective pacing.




Called, “a definitive work of French fantastic cinema, post 1970.” By Tim Lucas in the pages of Video Watchdog 31, Requiem for a Vampire is one of the most ideal introductions to Jean Rollin’s filmography to newcomers. It is also one of the most representative and it wouldn’t be a stretch to say that a person who isn’t won of by the delightfully different and distinctive images in Requiem for a Vampire will sadly always probably fall outside of the circle of Jean Rollin fans.

***The soundtrack for Requiem for a Vampire has just been released by Finders Keepers and it will make its Blu-ray debut in May, courtesy of Kino and Redemption.***