1976, Italy. Starring Helmut Berger, Ingrid Thulin, Teresa Ann Savoy, Bekim Fehmiu, John Steiner, John Ireland, Tina Aumont. Directed by Tinto Brass. Buy it from Amazon.

Although it's not very B-movie friendly of me, I have to say that I really, really hate Nazi sexploitation films. I know, I know. I said I didn't like sleazy cheerleader movies from the 1970s, then went and changed my mind. But in the case of Nazi sexploitation, I'm more informed of my own opinion as I've seen a lot more of these than I had seen cheerleader movies. And after a small parade of the films, I safely say that I hate Nazi sexploitation and don't see myself flip-flopping on that decision any time soon, so take that, George W. Bush!

I don't hate the movies because I have good taste. The aforementioned sleazy cheerleader films can attest to that. I don't hate them because I find them morally reprehensible, though they most assuredly are. But I'm well past the point of being morally outraged by a movie. There's more important things in real life about which one can be morally outraged. It seems pointless to expend so much energy on being offended by a movie. No, I hate Nazi sexploitation films for the same reason I hate any of the films I hate, for the one transgression I consider unforgivable in any type of film: they are godawful, gut-wrenchingly, mind-numbingly boring.

Well, to me, anyway. I know there are people who are fascinated by these movies, and obviously it's not because they find them boring. Hey man, like Funkadelic says, everybody has got their thing (or something to that effect). I have friends who can't understand why I love Jean Rollin vampire movies, which they insufferably ponderous, dull, and shoddy. It's because, as I've said before, there is no such thing as a good movie or a bad movie; there are only movies we perceive to be entertaining, and those we do not, and that is a purely subjective judgment. So it is my subjective opinion that watching Nazi sexploitation films is even less interesting than watching the NASA Channel when they do things like focus on a lug nut for eleven hours just to fill air space.

But I am a fair man, and part of the reason I'm undertaking this Marco Polo-esque journey through the Netflix Silk Road is to evaluate, reevaluate, plug holes in my education, and generally attempt to paint for myself and you a more complete image of the cinematic landscape, but not to the point of being all "Leonard Maltin's Guide" and everything. I decided, then, that in the name of assembling a more inclusive survey of cult, obscure, and forgotten films that I should probably bite the bullet and let there be a representative of the accursed Nazi sexploitation genre that became so bewilderingly popular during the 1970s thanks to the success of Diane Thorne and Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS. I always thought that movie was dreadfully boring and always felt like watching Diane Thorne was akin to peeping on your aunt - albeit an aunt with a tendency to dress up in Nazi S&M gear and poke things in people's butts. Ilsa was not a movie through which I wanted to suffer again just for the sake of writing a review, nor were any of the other half a dozen or so titles that could have fit the bill, all of which seem to feature a saucy female commandant who tortures naked women and men (but mostly women) for eighty minutes before some cheap stuff blows up in the final five when either Allies invade or more upstanding members of the Third Reich find out about all the sordid details of whatever's been going on in SS Experiment Camp #324 or wherever.

I figured if I was going to delve once again into the brackish waters of SS sexploitation, I should go for the more critically acclaimed "artistic" end of the spectrum, which means watching Night Porter and Tinto Brass' Salon Kitty. Night Porter is still to come, and that'll be the last of my words on the subject, because if Salon Kitty is any representation of "serious" Third Reich randiness, then this end of the spectrum is really no more bearable than the end of the field occupied by such titles as SS Love Camp, though it has a lot less to do with those films and is more akin to films like Salo: 100 Says of Sodom, another self-important "exploitation as art" film that bored me to tears for much the same reasons as Salon Kitty.

Tinto Brass may not be that recognizable a name to American moviegoers who don't pay attention to Italian cult directors with ass fetishes, but one need only utter the title Caligula to realize that, name recognition aside, Brass is responsible for the one of the most controversial movies in American history. He has a long resume apart from that notorious Penthouse-funded skin flick, and though many of his other titles may be both artistically and erotically better, none of them tricked Peter O'Toole into being in a hardcore porn film. For Salon Kitty, the only celebrity puzzler is how they roped acclaimed art director Ken Adam, who did all the best set design for the James Bond films, into working on what amounts to typical sleaze in an arthouse disguise. In fact, Salon Kitty's primary claim to critical fame is that Ken Adam did stunning work, as always. Everything else about the film, however, is an utter mess, and a boring one at that. On the other hand, it's an accomplishment that a film that I find to be so boring can still spark so much debate and such a long review, so I suppose it's good for something even if I don't particularly like it.

Tinto Brass is most competent when working on small-scale erotic indulgences. When he tries to ply his craft on a grander scale, the gaping cracks in his skill as a storyteller are revealed. Salon Kitty purports to tell the somewhat true story of a brother madame who is contracted by the Nazis to establish a whorehouse for their officers, stocked with only the finest Aryan ladies with unshakable faith in the Reich. The ulterior motive, however, is to spy on various Nazi officers, see which ones might be wavering in their commitment to der Fuehrer, and which ones will just be valuable to blackmail at some point in the future. In and of itself, it's an interesting plot, but Brass stretches it out to an ungodly 133 minutes, which is at least a full half hour longer than it needs to be - and this coming from someone who generally likes long movies. Characters drift in an out with only the weakest of development, and at no point is there anyone in this film with whom you can identify, or even remember, for that matter. But we'll come to that - the film's biggest crime is that it simply fails to be what it should, which is interesting.

As any long-time reader knows, I'm a big history buff. Military history doubly so. Like any good history buff, and anyone who has even the tiniest shred of self-respect as pertains to their own intelligence, I'm fascinated by World War II and understanding the mechanics of what happened and how such things came to be. As wretched and despicable as they may have been, few subjects in recent history are as intriguing, as grotesquely engrossing, as the Nazi party's more extreme explorations. I'm talking about their obsession with the occult, with occult and religious symbolism, and their eventual evolution into some crazy Europe-conquering version of the Hellfire Club or some other secret society of decadent aristocratic mystics. Exploitation movies have, predictably, chosen to focus more on the "Fall of the Roman Empire" style sex and debauchery. Certainly there was that aspect of the Reich, though the, shall we call it "creativity" of some of these torture devices and sex experiments remain purely the figments of exploitation filmmakers' twisted imaginations. Generally, the Gestapo's favored method of torture was simply to beat you until you cracked. It worked remarkably well and had also been the preferred method of torture employed by Genghis Khan's horde. Time tested, you know, unlike electrified spiked dildos powered by the sperm of slain Jews, or whatever the hell some of those movies dreamed up.

Whatever the case, it's ripe material for film, as proven by the sheer volume of movies dealing with the subject. In the hands of a competent director, someone who is unafraid to wallow in what others may see as simple filth and exploitation while at the same time being able to present it in a way that is as stylish, sophisticated, and provocative as it is twisted, disgusting, and perverse, the subject of Nazi decadence - or let's simply strip that away and call it the decadence of the powerful elite, any powerful elite (witness, for example, Rome in Brass' next film) - should make for a controversial, enraging, and stunning film. Salon Kitty takes all the pieces needed to be great but fails to assemble them properly, but since I'm the eternal optimist, I'll focus on the positive aspects of the film before jumping into its sundry negatives.

First and foremost, Salon Kitty achieves said sophistication and stylishness with the set design. It's beautiful, and it makes it impossible to properly assess Brass' directorial skills since a chimp could man a camera and come away with a beautiful shot when it's surrounded by Ken Adam's impeccable interpretation of Nazi iconography, Weimar Republic cabaret chic, and modernism. Filmed as it is with a hazy, dreamlike quality, it perfectly captures the atmosphere of a powerful elite who have lost touch with reality, who indulge in every vice and whim either out of obliviousness or denial of the fact that their empire is crumbling and the barbarians, so to speak, are at the gate. On visuals and they way in which they are presented, Salon Kitty is a remarkable success.

The set is decorated with copious, near constant in fact, male and female nudity presented with such frankness, such clinical disinterest, and in some cases, such distasteful indulgences, that it ceases entirely to be erotic. Though this much sex and nudity, not to mention the name of Tinto Brass, inevitably means that the film will be classified as erotic, it couldn't be any further from the mark. One could argue that there are no actual sexual acts in the film; merely acts and expressions of power. Brass helps keep all the sex and nudity a total turn-off by allowing himself to indulge is some unquestionably tasteless, gratuitous sleaze - most notably an infamous "deformed dwarf" sex scene and a scene of a woman having sex with a double-amputee. At no point does Brass' camera shy away from what's happening, so if you have ever wanted to see the penis of a humpbacked dwarf or watch a woman screw a legless man, here's your chance. Brass' inclusion of such scenes is questionable, at best, and they certainly undermine any attempts to have the film taken seriously as a work of art instead of near-pornographic sleaze, even if they remain thematically true to the notion of sex as a tool rather than a thing of pleasure, a fetish to be indulged rather than an experience to be enjoyed.

The actors are uniformly good, though I think the script gives them tragically little character with which to work. There's nothing surprising about this though. Brass is, after all, an Italian director at a time when Italian directors were abandoning the notion of a film needed developed characters or a coherent script in favor of experimenting with imagery and mood - kind of like American films are doing today, which frankly, is scary since I like a lot of the more outlandish Italian films but despise most modern American films. Maybe I'm a hypocrite. Time will tell if, in another thirty years, people write about Underworld or The Chronicles of Riddick in the same way I write about Dario Argento or Mario Bava films. Whatever my perceived short-comings of the script and the characterizations it forces upon the actors, the performances are good. Italian cult film fans may even recognize a face or two.

The script toys with interesting notions even as it fails to construct a coherent story or engrossing characters. By default, it's a political script, as any script about "the corruption of absolute power" can't help but be. The set-up is well thought out, with our Madame Kitty () representing the old swinging ways of the post-WWI Weimar Republic, better known as the greatest era for cabaret performers. She must ultimately submit to the power of the Nazis not because she believes in them, but because they are stronger. She's constantly looking for a way to wrest control of her brother back from the Reich, just as many German citizens in general were wondering how they let their country fall into the hands of a bunch of thugs. The main difference is that the average German wasn't doing this while wearing sparkling gold eyelashes and fishnet stockings (that wouldn't start until later). Kitty's salon is a microcosm of Germany.

From our viewpoint here in 2004, one can also see a reflection of the Germany to come in Salon Kitty. The world over, Germans are known for being the weirdest, kinkiest, and most accepting people on the planet, with perhaps only the Japanese coming close to them. Hey - it's not a criticism as far as I'm concerned. What it has done, however, is make so many extreme things so accepted, so almost mundane, that it takes a gargantuan kink to shock the Germans. In such a setting, sex and sexual perversion becomes less about just getting your kicks and more about having to push things further and further in order to avoid being bored. Obviously, putting such a viewpoint into Salon Kitty is injecting modern events into a film that is thirty years old, though I'm sure the Germans were busy building their reputation even in the 1970s. In fact, Salon Kitty, if nothing else, is a perfect example of the 1970s' tendency to want to challenge and befuddle people with the "is it art or is it porn?" question. Even if the answer was "it's porn," it still confused people and shook things up. Nowadays, I guess the closest thing we have is Vincent Gallo, though in his case the question of "is it art or is it porn" is eschewed in favor of the more telling declaration of, "Man, is that guy ever as asshole!"

I already touched on Brass' tendency to indulge in perversions of a purely exploitive nature, but it's not like that's ever turned off the guy who gave a good review to Revenge of the Cheerleaders. Anyway, it seems like he did that mostly as a lark, a shock tactic to amuse himself and outrage those who are outrageable (?).

So let's skip ahead to the homosexuality in this film. It's overly common to day to ascribe a high degree of homosexuality and homosexual tendencies to the Nazi party (and to most former world-conquering regimes). What makes the subject tricky is that sometimes it's done to correct an historical inaccuracy, sometimes it's done purely to exploit, and sometimes it's done out of homophobia. First of all, I don't think Tinto Brass made Salon Kitty as some sort of manifesto against the evils of homosexuality or as a comment to the effect of, "Hey, ever notice when societies become decadent and depraved they also go gay?" Likely he was simply following the trend of the time, which was toward Nazi fetishism and carrying the Aryan Man myth to its extreme. This is only partially based on historical fact. When the Brown Shirts, Hitler's famed gang of young thugs, was formed, it is indeed true that a lot of homosexual worked their way into the ranks in order to be close to so many young boys. But homosexuality was not exactly cherished by the Third Reich the same way it had been by, say, the ancient Greeks.

In 1934, there was a famously bloody purging of homosexuals from the ranks of the Brown Shirts, and Nazi Germany went on to exterminate hundreds of thousands of homosexuals in a campaign that gets far less attention than the similar campaign against Jews. Salon Kitty takes place in 1939, and while I'm sure some homosexual characters had snuck back into the fold, it's highly unlikely that we'd see this much, pale-faced, makeup-wearing mincing about. There are very few overt acts of homosexuality in the film, but the general appearance of some of the main Nazi characters is obviously heavily influenced by stereotypical images of homosexuality, more as another fetish than as an actual sexual preference. The Nazi officers here look less like men who could perpetrate the deaths of millions and beat the crap out of people and more like refugees from the pages of Propaganda magazine. They're not just white, they're ghostly white. The pale, frail Aryan flower stuck in the imagination of many, and we see it here in abundance, as if the Night of Long Knives never happened.

But maybe that's historical nitpicking. It's not as if Salon Kitty aspires to historical accuracy, after all. I'm pretty suregay or not, there weren't many Nazis who dressed up in skintight shiny silver "Uberman" outfits adorned with lightning bolts and a cape. It's an extrapolation, an exaggeration of reality, even at its most lucid moments. Still, one can't help but wish for a few less puckered-lip dandies with extreme hair parts and a few more fat, burly Gestapo thugs who look they could really knock the crap out of you. Have you ever seen a picture of those guys? I don't think Hermann Goering was anyone's fetish. But then, if we base things on him, then the Master Race looks to have really hit the bratwurst stand hard during the last Oktoberfest.

What really makes Salon Kitty fail for me is the bloated running time. There's just not enough movie for 133 minutes. The main plotlines - Kitty's deal with the devil and subsequent attempts to regain control of her little cabaret world seems to sputter, and the love affair between one of the prostitutes and a Luftwaffe pilot remains utterly unengaging because both characters are so dull. Brass pads the film out with endless "indulging in wicked fetishes" scenes, but really, one can only sit through so many of these. At least Salon Kitty doesn't go for the more lurid "sex torture" nonsense of cheaper films. The few points the script has to make were obvious, even in 1976, but that doesn't stop it from hammering us over the head with its observations. I get it! Nazis were decadent! I get it! Absolute power results in a detachment from reality! People pretend to believe in something simply to advance their own greed and lust for power. I knew all this already, and it's not like people coming out of the 1960s, Vietnam, and the Nixon era needed to be told. Given the dearth of valid or intelligent political discourse today, it's easy to over glorify the political content of Salon Kitty, but placed in the context of 1976, the film is actually something of a late-comer when it comes to taking shots at political corruption, cronyism, and elitism.

There is a tendency to over-praise a film like Salon Kitty just as there is a tendency to over-criticize it. There is plenty going on here, but none of it is profound or even particularly daring when placed in the context of other films of the time. What keeps Salon Kitty on people's radar is how it pushed the boundaries for sexual perversions in a big budget film, and if nothing else, it really pushed those. But the story, the message, these things are not groundbreaking. Like the constant nudity, the ham-fisted clumsiness of the script and the sheer repetition of ideas that were obvious from the get-go serves simply to grind down the viewer, especially when it's stretched out over 133 minutes.

So where does that leave us? I think it leaves us with a film that, if you have the stomach for such fare (and despite the constant nudity and dwarf-humping, Salon Kitty is actually a lot less sleazy and offensive than most other films in the genre, though it's still not a good "first date" film), you should see even if, like me, you're going to end up not liking it. It never spans the gulf between its ambitions and the reality of what it can accomplish, but the experience is anchored by some masterful direction made possible by Ken Adam and his stunning art design. That's enough to carry even a bored viewer through much of the film, though ultimately it wasn't enough for me. As a dream sequence, Salon Kitty is quite powerful and well-crafted. At the same time, have you ever tried to sit through someone detailing one of their dreams to you? The feeble political currents in the script are admirable today since so few films aspire to be anything more than "loud, dumb, and cool to look at," but let's not over-estimate the political daring of Salon Kitty since it came from a period when shocking social and political commentary in a film was more the rule than the exception.

I appreciate that it gives us a lot about which to talk. In that sense, there are many levels to Salon Kitty and it certainly doesn't deserve to be dismissed as pure exploitation, though it also doesn't deserve to be accepted as pure art. It exists somewhere in that uncomfortable middle that confuses so many people, which actually might be the best thing about it. It covers much of the same thematic ground as Brass' godawful Caligula, though it's faint praise indeed to say Salon Kitty is better than that rotten heap of rubbish, just as it doesn't say much to remark that, "It's certainly better than those Ilsa movies." I'd place it in the company of Passolini's Salo, another movie that indulges in endless perversion to make a screamingly obvious point. Both are films that I appreciate for taking risks, for pushing buttons, and for their willingness to tread where film was not meant to tread. I also appreciate that Salon Kitty stays away from the fetid realm of sexual torture that befouls so many Nazisploitation films and just over-indulges in fetishes. But respect isn't the same as like, and no matter what respect I may have for Brass' bawdy foray into Nazi fetishism, it doesn't change the fact that once the credits rolled, I was not shocked, dismayed, outraged, or enthralled. I didn't hate it, love it, or even like it. I was just glad to have the thing finally over.

Labels: Netflix Diary, Sexploitation, Year: 1976