The existential crisis of a man, a go go dancer and a cage. This Kafkaesque tale exists in a realm somewhere between the Twilight Zone and Shindig, a netherworld where angst goes where the action is.
The dancer is the legendary go go superstar Lada St. Edmund Jr. who had a thriving career frugging in cages on TV (Hullabaloo) and in the movies during the 1960s. She’s still alive, living in New Jersey and teaching dance is a fitness instructor and boxer.
I’ve tried to track down more info on Girl In A Cage but have come up snake eyes. A short clip from it has been used in a fan made Youtube video for the Sonics song “Psycho.” Other than that, I haven’t found anything on the Internet. But given a choice between sharing the rarely seen Girl In A Cage in its entirety with little back story or keeping it to myself, I opted to share.
Watch as a man is driven to the brink of insanity by a frenzied go go dancer in a basement apartment somewhere in pop culture hell.
Donald Cammell with Anita Pallenberg on the set of “Performance.”
Though he only directed two films that are truly extraordinary, Donald Cammell will always hold a special place on my list of the all-time great cinematic mindfuckers.
Dangerous Minds readers will undoubtedly be familiar with the hugely influence Performance, but Cammell’s last film, the darkly witty and perverse Wild Side, deserves to find a wider audience. It was butchered by its original production company and released in a bastardized form that so depressed the already mentally fragile Cammell it sent him over the edge and he killed himself in 1996.
Wild Side was re-released in 2000 in a version that comes close to Cammell’s original cut. Cammell’s close friend editor Frank Mazzola managed to gather together the “lost” footage from Wild Side and reconstruct it in a form that approximates Cammell’s vision. It is available here as an import DVD. For some unfathomable reason the director’s cut has never been released in any form in the USA. I did manage to see it years ago at a Cammell film fest in NYC. It features one of Christopher Walkens’ best and most bizarre performances in a career of bizarre performances. Trust me when I tell you, you’ve never seen Walken at his weirdest until you’ve seen him in a kimono and a long black wig.
Wild Side is cut from the same dark cloth as David Lynch’s Blue Velvet. But I can’t stress enough the fact that the butchered version available on Amazon and elsewhere is worthless. Avoid it like a bad case of the clap.
Here’s a clip from Wild Side with Anne Heche, Steven Bauer and Walken to whet your appetite. “Off with the Calvins.”
Cammell got his professional start in the arts as a painter and photographer in the swinging London scene of the 1960s. He lived the life of a rock star, looked the part and was prone to the hedonistic excesses of the times as well. He worked with filmmaker Nic Roeg to create the greatest head movie of all time, Performance. Artistic recognition led to a series of disappointments in Hollywood and Cammell’s life quickly veered toward a sad end. His story is compelling and tragic and in this documentary his fascinating life unfolds like one of his movies.
By day he’s a father of two, by night he’s a super hero patrolling the seedier streets of Brisbane as “Captain Australia,” fighting crime armed only with a flashlight, cell phone and video camera:
``During one patrol, I stopped two sexual predators from taking advantage of a very drunk woman at a taxi rank,’’ he said.
``Unfortunately, I was unsure of my ability to conduct a citizen’s arrest and the two predators ran away before the police arrived. But I was able to prevent a near-certain sexual assault.’‘
Captain Australia won’t reveal his identity, but is adamant he is just a regular Queenslander fighting evil in his beloved Brisbane.
``Evil triumphs when good men do nothing,” he said. “I want to inspire a new generation to stop using apathy as a shield.
“People don’t know how to react to my costume it shocks and amuses them.’‘
It’s a little nutty, sure, but it’s also very sweet and I for one, salute his efforts. He’s making his world a better place, right?
Filmed in Chicago in 1962, Twist Craze features a triumvirate of bands that exist in no known universe outside of the sphere of the movie itself: The Parisian Twisters, The Manhattan Twisters and The Windy City Twisters. The proposed sequel, Twist, Crazed And Confused, was reputedly going to include performances by The Kenyan Twisters, The Tulsa Twisters and The Istanbul Twist Society but during pre-production the world’s attention shifted from The Twist to The Watusi and the project was scrapped.
Beginning tonight in Los Angeles, the might Cinefamily is presenting a three-day encore run of Chris Morris’s Four Lions, and a full retrospective of his classic British television shows:
The word “genius” is thrown around rather casually these days when describing talented folks who do a very good job of what they do—but Chris Morris is one of those rare people to whom the term genuinely applies, and we absolutely mean it when we say Chris Morris is a comedic genius. For twenty years, he’s been the foremost boundary-pushing satirist in British comedy, giving us savagely funny fare like the proto-Daily Show news parodies The Day Today and Brass Eye, the Lynch-meets-SNL absurdity of Jam, and the acidic hipster/Vice Magazine critique of Nathan Barley—and now, his riotous feature directorial debut, which skewers the modern-day jihadist movement! Chris’s unshakeable wit is often aimed at topics deemed controversial, but it always provides a social criticism underneath the sensationalism, lampooning hysteria and groupthink with heroic levity. We here at the Cinefamily have been Morris fans since before we can remember, and we’re thrilled to present not only an encore three-day run of Four Lions, but a full retrospective of Morris’s creations in British television!
My fellow Los Angelenos, don’t miss this rare chance to see Four Lions in a cinema setting, but gosh, which TV series to catch? The Day Today? Brass Eye? Jam? Nathan Barley? That’s hard because I’m such a big Chris Morris fan. I’ve shoved DVDs of all these shows into the paws of many a friend for about a decade now, but I still think I’d give Nathan Barley the (slight) edge when it comes to picking which of his series to watch in a room full of people. A communal experience of Jam would be great, too, but Nathan Barley’s vicious hipster satire would go down quite well with the Cinefamily audience, I think. No matter how you slice it, it’s an embarrassment of riches. The man can do no wrong in my eyes.
Below, my December 2010 interview with Chris Morris:
DM contributor Paul Gallagher wrote about All Dolled Up last month and provided a link to the film on Youtube that was unfortunately not viewable in the USA. Well, much to our delight, our pals at See Of Sound have made the film available for the Internet audience on this side of the pond and everywhere else.
Paul had this to say about All Dolled Up:
Here’s something lush. The New York Dolls hit the road in this documentary film made by rock photographer Bob Gruen and his wife Nadya Beck. Filmed over three years, All Dolled Up captures The Dolls at their height in the early seventies, following them backstage and on tour, visiting such legendary venues as the Whiskey-A-Go-Go, the E-Club, Kenny’s Castaways and Max’s Kansas City. And there are also rousing versions of “Personality Crisis”, “Who Are the Mystery Girls”, “Vietnamese Baby”, amongst others. So, kick back your high heels and enjoy.”
New York City rock and roll history, All Dolled Up:
Anthony Stern’s San Francisco is a seminal work of British experimental and avant-garde cinema and one of the few art films to actually capture a little bit of the vibe of the hippie era. Stern describes the inspiration behind the film:
San Francisco was a response to hearing “Interstellar Overdrive” by Pink Floyd. It was my desire to make permanent the Pink Floyd lightshows created at the UFO club by Peter Wynne Wilson. The LSD-triggered psychedelic experience found its ultimate expression in this fusion of sight and sound, which achieved a visceral effect on the audience. San Francisco is ‘painting with light’ as well as a saturated archive of day to day life in the 1960’s. New rhythms were created in the language of film, in using single-frame exposures and freeze-frame techniques.”
Stern developed a friendship with Syd Barret while both were living in Cambridge, England. It was a relationship that would prove artistically productive, later evolving into a collaboration with Peter Whitehead on sixties pop culture documentary Tonite, Let’s All Make Love In London.
Here for your viewing and listening pleasure is Anthony Stern’s mindbending San Francisco:
Over the past couple of years, the hyper-ascension of everyone’s favorite street artist has led to all kinds of phenomena, including the mainstreaming of the artform and, yes, its commodification.
In the case of Banksy, the adventure of anonymously creating public pieces is being matched by the similar adventure of swiping and selling them. LA Weekly photographer Ted Soqui’s report on the theft of Banksy’s Caution (after it got tagged) in East L.A. (pictured in sequence L-R above) put me in the mind of Jamaican edge-culture worker Peter Dean Rickards’s 2008 jacking of a larger piece that ol’ Mr. Anonymous tossed onto the outside wall of a Kingston pub. Rickards—who does business as Afflicted Yard—shot the video below, which also documents the amazing dynamics that can happen when a dozen Jamaican men work on the same project.
Directed by Robert Downey (senior) in 1966, Chafed Elbows was one the first underground films to actually be seen outside of lofts or basements in Greenwich Village. I saw it when I was 15 at the Key Theater in Washington D.C. I wasn’t sure what the hell was going on but I liked it.
Using still photos, some moving images and comically surreal voiceovers, Downey’s subversive slice of New York bohemian humor would later be amplified in his cult classic Putney Swope.
In his 1967 column for the New York Times, film critic, and square, Bosley Crowther did his best to come to terms with Chafed Elbows to humorous effect:
Everybody in this wacky movie about a busy day in the life of a hyperthyroid moron is an unregenerate mess—from the fellow himself, whose mad adventures include a mistaken hysterectomy, which results in the removal from his innards of 189 $10 bills, to his snaggletoothed, scratchy-voiced mother with whom he is having an incestuous affair, to his bald-headed, viper-tongued psychiatrist who rattles off his words like Groucho Marx.
They’re all hideous, obscene, repulsive people on the order of some of the slobs in comic strips, only these are much more irreverent and filthy-mouthed than any comic-strip characters would dare to be. And I would hastily overlook them and drop this film with much of the trash in the underground, if it weren’t that there is in “Chafed Elbows” a promising modicum of lively, acid wit.
Peter Bergman and Firesign Theatre producer and archivist, Taylor Jessen, discuss the newly released box set of Firesign Theatre radio shows (1970-72), Duke of Madness Motors, featuring over 80 hours of MP3 audio on a DVD-ROM and a 108 page full-color book! Order your copy of Duke of Madness Motors today, because there are only 200 copies left and it’s unlikely to ever be reprinted.
