Franco's 80s actors: JOSÉ LLAMAS

In 1979, Antonio Mayans, who had previously acted with Jess Franco on an occasional basis six years before, was part of a theatre company that was putting on a play at the Alfil theatre in Madrid. When, two months later, the production got into money problems, Mayans quit the company on a Saturday. On Sunday he got a call from Alicante to appear in Franco’s first version of Poe’s The Gold Bug (unreleased as yet). The rest, as they say, is history.



Among those Mayans left behind in the acting company was a dark, slender, boyish actor named José Llamas. It seems to have been through Mayans that Llamas, three years after that failed stage production, was to become one of Franco’s regular 1980s players. According to Mayans, Llamas “was very good friends with my wife and daughters, so after a while we had him join the group. He was a very nice man, and almost like an older brother to my daughters. He was also a very good actor, he could dance and sing…” (1).



As part of “the group”, Llamas was assigned anything from minor roles to leads, sometimes on the heroic side, as in Viaje a Bangkok, ataúd incluido (1985) and several antagonists, such as his “Macho Jim” in Los blues de la calle Pop (1983). Strangest of all was Franco’s decision that he fill in the shoes of Bruce Lee in some of the pseudo-martial arts features the director was occasionally and inexplicably turning out in the eighties despite an absolute lack of demand in Spain for homegrown product of this kind, not to mention Llamas’s lack of an appropriate background. The actor certainly looked athletic, had black hair and, as Mayans has said, could dance, but in the words of David Domingo “he’s hopelessly clueless about martial arts” (2). These words are in reference to La sombra del judoka contra el doctor Wong (1982-85), with Llamas credited as “Bruce Lyn” and the real Bruce Lee featuring on the film’s poster!



Since Llamas flourished in Franco’s cinema in 1982, and given his youth and looks, it’s not altogether surprising, perhaps, that he should “graduate” (if that’s the word) to appearing in several of the hardcore features that engaged the filmmaker throughout much of the 80s. In this respect, the actor’s roles include that of the Russian seen dancing to In the Steppes of Central Asia in the 1982 screwfest Una rajita para dos (“What’s the matter?” he tells the girls. “Don’t you like Borodin?”). In the credits of these flicks, Llamas’s name was usually replaced by the facetious porn moniker “Pepito Tiésez”, which might be translated as “Joey Hardon”.



It was these, of all of Llamas’s Franco films, that led to roles for other directors, more specifically in porn movies made by Ismael González and Manuel Mateos, and occasionally in the company of Mabel Escaño and Verónica Arechavaleta, both of whom had acted for Franco.



1987 is the year in which Llamas’s filmography seemingly comes to a halt, unless we count the 1984 El abuelo, la condesa y Escarlata la traviesa, not released until 1992. Both Franco and Mayans are on record as stating that Llamas died in London, and the former adds that he had been suffering from an AIDS-related illness at the time (3). His date of death is, as yet, unknown, but it might have been towards the end of the eighties. He appeared in at least 26 films within a film career spanning half a decade.

José Llamas's imdb entry at:

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0515635/

(1) Interview with Antonio Mayans conducted by Ferrán Herranz and Francesco Cesari in book Il caso Jesús Franco (2010). Ed. Francesco Cesari. Granviale Editori.

(2) Review of La sombra del judoka contra el doctor Wong by David Domingo (5 June 2008) in blog La abadía de Berzano at: http://cerebrin.wordpress.com/2008/06/05/las-artes-marciales-en-el-cine-espanol-iii-la-sombra-del-judoka-contra-el-doctor-wong/

(3) Interview with Jess Franco conducted by "Chus" and "Al Pereira" (3 March 2002)for Francomanía website at http://members.fortunecity.es/francomania2/

Text by Nzoog Wahrlfhehen

Franco's 80s actors: RICARDO PALACIOS

The Cantabrian-born, Madrid-based actor Ricardo López-Nuño Díez, better known as Ricardo Palacios, may be familiar to many from numerous Spaghetti Westerns, as well as much of Franco’s output from the early eighties. Born in 1940, he was a personal favourite of Antonio Margheriti, who used him in several films, even when there was no Spanish co-production involved, but it was Jess Franco, however, that gave him his first key role, as the bandit chief in The Blood of Fu Manchu (1968). This was the last time Franco and Palacios were to work together in a long time.

About a decade and a half later, Palacios’s close friend Antonio Mayans wheedled him into acting for Franco at the time when Mayans had become the filmmaker’s main assistant. During this period, Franco roles played by Palacios include that of the big mobster in Juego sucio en Casablanca (1985), the militarist prison warder in Furia en el trópico (1985), and Dr. Orgaz (a Hispanised Orloff) in Sola ante el terror (1986), a remake of Los ojos siniestros del Dr. Orloff (1983). Prior to this, his growling voice had appeared, minus his bulky presence, dubbing the butler in El hundimiento de la casa Usher and narrating Los blues de la calle Pop (both 1983).

Palacios had graduated in both acting and directing at the Escuela Oficial de Cinematografía (EOC) but it was not until precisely his spell as a Franco regular that he also realized his dream of taking up directing. His directorial debut, Mi conejo es el mejor (1982), was an S/M softcore film, in which Franco had no participation, although the leads were Lina Romay and Emilio Linder (taking over from the originally intended Mayans) and the supporting cast included Carmen Carrión. His next, more ambitious project was the Civil War comedy ¡Biba la banda! (1987), which was produced by Franco (who also did second-unit work) and featured Juan Soler Cózar among the actors, along with Mayans (also the film’s production manager) in a bit role. Palacios himself drifts in and out of the film, in the unresolved character of a Valencian landowner, one of several details suggesting that the film’s troubled history affected the final result. Palacios is on record as blaming Franco and Mayans for the production problems it encountered, although actors Alfredo Landa and José Sancho are agreed in finding Palacios himself somewhat disorganized.

Whatever the truth, Franco was fired from his own production and Palacios ceased to be on speaking terms with Franco or Mayans. The head of the Arcofón sound studios took over as producer and the film, despite all the trouble, opened to a good response. A sequel was intended but failed to take off, as did another film project of Palacios’s dealing with the Civil War. Palacios, however, found himself much in demand as a writer and/or director on Spanish TV. Ten years after the making of ¡Biba la banda!, the film served as the basis for La banda de Pérez (1997), a comedy TV series written entirely by Palacios and directed between himself and Josetxo San Mateo. At this point, Ricardo Palacios had largely abandoned his career as a screen actor, mostly concentrating on his work as a dubber and, especially, as a TV writer and director. This activity was enough to earn him enough money to gradually withdraw from show business in the wake of health problems he encountered in the late nineties, to the extent of necessitating surgery. There appears to be no information on film or TV work of his after the year 2002. He appears to be retired and still living in Madrid.


On the whole, he has acted in dozens of feature films and TV shows, performing under the direction of people as disparate as Roberto Rossellini, León Klimovsky, Ignacio F. Iquino, Paul Naschy, Juan Antonio Bardem, José María Zabalza, Juan Logar, José María Forqué, Richard Lester, José Luis Merino, Eugenio Martín, Sergio Leone, Rafael Gil, Juan Bosch, José Antonio Nieves Conde, Jaime Chávarri, Pedro Lazaga and Vicente Aranda. As for his work as a dubber, he can be heard as the voice of a sailor in Amando de Ossorio’s Serpiente de mar (1984) and that of Michael Berryman in the Spanish-language version of Sylvio Tabet’s Beastmaster 2: Through the Portal of Time (1991).

Most of the above information is taken from Carlos Aguilar’s valuable book Ricardo Palacios. Actor, director, observador (2003), a lengthy interview in which the actor talks about his life and career. The son of a prison governor, he spent much of his childhood in expensive boarding schools (which he hated), and later, in his adulthood, following a spell with the right-wing Carlists, he subsequently joined the Spanish Communist Party. Roberto Rossellini, Eddie Constantine, Fernando Sancho, Juan Logar and Ignacio F. Iquino do not come off too well in the account he gives of his encounters with several notable people; Rafael Gil, Nieves Conde, Bardem, Lazaga, Frank Braña, Klimovsky, Margheriti, Leone and Merino are viewed more favourably. He also talks about his film interests: his favourite director is John Ford.

Regarding Franco and his 80s films, he says: “I went through outrageous situations during that period. For instance, I was left behind as a hostage in a hotel, along with the rest of the crew, because the money had run out and Franco and Mayans had gone to Madrid to look for more”. Regarding the man himself, his words are: “One thing I can say about Jess is that he’s got this wonderful capacity for ignoring what’s right and what’s wrong if it serves the purpose of making his film. Jess Franco is neither a good nor a bad person, he just wants things to be done his way and couldn’t care less about the rest of the universe”.



Text by Nzoog Wahrlfhehen

Franco's 80s actors: EDUARDO FAJARDO

On returning to Spain in the late 70s, Jess Franco came more and more to rely on either his stock players or assorted obscurities to people his casts, obviously in accordance with his ever-dwindling budgets. Now and then, however, some old-timer of Spanish cinema might turn up in a film of his. The reasons for them appearing in such down-market productions were presumably various. One assumes that Fernando Rey was available to fill in time between assignments when appearing in La bahía Esmeralda (1989), and that it was personal friendship with Franco that brought Manuel Alexandre into the cast of Las tribulaciones de un buda bizco (1989). As for the case of Lola Gaos and Barta Barri, their appearances in, respectively, La isla de las virgenes (1987) and the aforementioned Las tribulaciones obviously bore on the declining careers of these aging, once-prominent character actors.

Of all these actors, Eduardo Martínez Fajardo, with three Franco films to his credit, worked most prolifically in the director’s later output. The squarely-built, distinguished-looking Galician was born in either 1918 or 1924 (sources disagree on this point) and his collaboration with Franco coincided with a period of career decline in the early eighties, which paradoxically preceded what may have been his greatest popular success. Soon he was to appear in a major role in the TV series Tristeza de amor (1986), taking over from the recently deceased Alfredo Mayo, which brought Fajardo more familiarity than he had ever enjoyed before, although now, of course, he is chiefly remembered for his numerous villainous roles in Spaghetti Westerns.

Having started his acting career in 1942 as a dubber, providing the Spanish voice of Charles Boyer in Franz Borzage’s History Is Made at Night (1937), he was later to supply the voice of Orson Welles’s Othello. Concurrently, he was appearing onscreen as a contract player for the powerful CIFESA. Following a long fifties period working in Mexico, he settled in Spain once again and it is then that he embarked on his long series of international coproductions. During this period, most controversially, he was also active in the National Show Business Syndicate of the (Francisco) Franco regime. At the time he was making films for Jess Franco, he was appearing in much TV and had resumed his old trade as a dubber, his velvety bass voice being heard in anything from episodes of Starsky and Hutch to films such as Absence of Malice (1981).

As for his roles in Jess Franco films, he was given a very good starring role as the drunken fisherman in El lago de las virgenes (1981, released 1987). As he gives his teenaged grandson a crude but sound sex-education monologue, one cannot help remembering the very different, less welcome instructions he had earlier given as the onscreen lecturer in Manuel Esteba’s El despertar de los sentidos (1974), an outrageously repressive sex-instruction docudrama in the manner of Erich F. Bender’s Helga (1967).



Franco gave Fajardo another role in the replacement Spanish scenes of Oasis of the Zombies (1983) in which he and Lina Romay took over from the two French actors used in the initial Eurociné version. Finally, he appeared in the supporting role of a millionaire in the adventure film Bangkok, cita con la muerte (1985).



In the nineties, Fajardo went to live in Mojacar, Almería, where he has a street named after him, and since 2001 has been mainly involved in giving acting lessons to disabled people. He now lives in Huércal, Almería. He is also occasionally active on the stage, having performed a monologue written by himself in 2009. All in all, he has appeared in some 2,000 television programs, 180 films and 75 plays.



An extract of Fajardo’s voice in Tulio Demicheli’s Tequila (1973):

http://www.4shared.com/audio/bxeqXjYu/fajardo.html

An extract of Fajardo’s voice in the Spanish-language soundtrack of Norman Jewison’s And Justice for All (1979), dubbing a supporting character:

http://www.4shared.com/audio/1eDjksaB/fajardo5.html

An extract of Fajardo’s voice in El lago de las virgenes:

http://www.4shared.com/audio/qByJU-gK/fajardo2.html

Imdb entry:

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0265761/

Spanish Wikipedia entry:

http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eduardo_Fajardo

A list of some of his dubbing jobs:

http://www.eldoblaje.com/datos/FichaActorDoblaje.asp?id=18068



An early image of Fajardo, during his CIFESA period, in a brief role in Rafael Gil’s Don Quijote de la Mancha (1948)

Text by Nzoog Wahrlfhehen

Franco's 80s actors: TRINO TRIVES

Among Jess Franco’s actors, the background of Trino Martínez Germán, known as Trino Trives, is similar to that of Antonio de Cabo. Though not primarily an actor, he was nonetheless a man of the stage who additionally gave acting performances in films by Franco – indeed, exclusively in Franco films as he appears to have worked for no other filmmaker in his life. In the world of theatre, while he did occasionally act, he mainly busied himself with direction, set design and the translation into Spanish of plays, not to the exclusion of some poetry translating. In 1998, when his career had lapsed into obscurity, he was cited in the newspaper ABC as one of the most relevant theatrical figures in Spain, where he is essentially remembered as the man who, as a translator and stage director, introduced many Spaniards to the work of Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter and Eugène Ionesco during the sixties, notably with productions of such Beckett plays as Waiting for Godot, Endgame and Happy Days.

The Valencian-born Trives also served, for a while, as the director of the National Theatre in Spain, but he was mostly active either abroad or working in the fringe. It may be that an openly gay man like him had limited chances in the Spain of General Franco, or it might simply have borne on a personal penchant on his part. Whatever the case, he alternated his activity in Madrid with work in Paris, not to mention Portugal and Brazil, both of which were also frequented by his fellow theatre professional Antonio de Cabo, with whom he thus became acquainted; it could well be, in fact, that one of these two men recommended the other to Jess Franco. 

Trives’s first recorded collaboration with Jess Franco came with his work as production designer for Rififí en la ciudad (1963), where he is credited as Trino Martínez-Trives. This was during his period  of greatest prominence in the world of theatre. By the time he returned to Franco’s cinema, in the eighties, Trives’s career was drifting towards a marginal position, in which he was engaged in acting teaching and in fringe, non-profit theatrical productions, with much of his income coming from the royalties of his translations. Franco, for his part, saw possibilities in his appearance, bald and with a Van Dyke beard, and cast him in several roles, often villainous, as in Los blues de la calle Pop and Viaje a Bangkok, ataúd incluido.  

However obscurely, Trino Trives remained active as a stage director towards the end of the century, gaining a 1998 award in Japan for his production of Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano. Interviewed in 2002, Jess Franco said of Trives: “I’ve lost track of him but we’ve always been very, very good friends” (1). Trives, at the time, had been diagnosed with lung cancer and returned to his hometown, namely Orihuela, Alicante. In the summer of 2003, he refused to give an interview, saying: "Forget it. Those who've tried to rehabilitate my name by writing about me have merely screwed up. Anyway, with no sex and no work, death is a relief" (2). He died on 28 September 2003. His ashes lie buried in Montparnasse Cemetery, in Paris.  . 

 Los blues de la calle Pop (Aventuras de Felipe Marlboro, volumen 8) (1983)

                              En busca del dragón dorado (1983)

                                           Bahía blanca (1983)

                          Viaje a Bangkok, ataúd incluido (1985)

                           La chica de los labios rojos (1986)

Dark Mission: Flowers of Evil (1988)

Trino Trives's imdb entry:

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0873205/ 

(1) http://members.fortunecity.es/francomania2/entrevista.html

(2) http://www.orihueladigital.es/orihuela/puntos/puntos_2_131003.htm

Text by Nzoog Wahrlfhehen (Special thanks to Ricard Reguant)

Franco's occasional actors: LUIS CIGES

Not to worry guys, I’ve not given up on the 80s actors series. Just thought I could begin another one. The present series will deal with Spanish actors of at least some distinction who have appeared in a Jess Franco film on a very occasional basis.


Now, the first name in the series may surprise some. I mean, Luis Ciges? Wasn’t he a Paul Naschy man? Well, yes, he did more Naschy than Franco; he also did more Iquino than Franco; and he was basically associated with the cinema of Luis García Berlanga, BUT he did appear in one role for Jess Franco, that of one of the evil monks at Jack Palance’s monastery in Marquis de Sade: Justine (1969). To this one could add one his first acting roles, an uncredited part in Ramón Comas’s Historias de Madrid (1958), which Franco co-scored.


In reality, this was just one of many roles, scores of roles, the small, gaunt actor played in the cinema and on TV, starting on an occasional basis in the late fifties and steadily from the late sixties until his death from a heart attack at the age of 81, by which time he had long gained a place as one of the most beloved character actors in Spanish cinema.

He also had a rather varied life, in which he stumbled into acting by sheer accident. Luis Ciges Martínez (1921-2002) was born in Madrid, his father being the writer and Republican politician Manuel Ciges Aparicio, who had begun to act as the civil governor of Ávila when he was shot (1936) by Nationalist forces during the Civil War. At the time, the young Luis had already graduated in Accountancy at the age of 14.

After the Nationalist victory in the war, he and two of his brothers, despite the family’s left-wing credentials, joined the Blue Division, an element of Spanish volunteers created to aid the German war effort in Russia. On returning to Spain, he studied medicine for two years in Ávila, while working as an intern at a clinic for the tubercular. Due to his wife’s unwillingness to stay in Ávila, he moved to Madrid and studied at the Institute for Film Research and Experiences (IIEC), where he graduated in film directing (“I liked acting but was too ugly”). Following some experience on TV in Madrid, he settled in Barcelona. Amidst much directing of TV programmes and commercials, and numerous technical tasks, he had already started to appear as an actor in many films. His liberal politics had already got him into trouble, first on account of a documentary he had made on Spain’s urban poor and later, for his protests against the Burgos trials. This led to his being fired from TV in 1970 and his subsequent concentration on acting roles. He was seen in all manner of roles until the late seventies, when he came to specialise in the roles of spacey eccentrics with which he became well-known.


In 1995, he received the Goya to the best supporting actor for José Luis Cuerda’s Así en el cielo como en la tierra (1995). Three years later, in his late seventies, he played a rare lead role in Javier Fesser’s El milagro de P. Tinto(1998). Prior to that, he had played another lead long before, as the vagrant in Jaime Chávarri’s segment in the supernatural compendium Pastel de sangre(1971). In addition to all the above, he became much in demand in shorts, including one, Franco no puede morir en la cama (1998), in which he was cast as General Franco, no less!


Prior to dying, when he left his flat to go to an old people’s home, he donated his personal collection of 6,000 books and numerous videos to the town of Islantilla, Huelva, where he had been paid tribute in 2000. In return 2009, the Islantilla film festival posthumously created the Luis Ciges award.


Luis Ciges with Mabel Escaño, an 80s Franco regular, in Luis García Berlanga's Nacional III (1982)(In the background, Amparo Soler Leal and José Luis López Vázquez).


Text by Nzoog Wahrlfhehen

Franco's 80s actors: ANTONIO DE CABO

Although Antonio de Cabo started out with Franco in the early seventies, one tends to associate him with the director’s later output in Spain, which made better use of his easily recognizable appearance: tall and spindly, with a long, saurian face, bushy eyebrows and a heavy head of silver hair. His case is similar to that of Trino Trives – a man of the theatre who, although not fundamentally an actor, performed as such for Jess Franco and, would seem, few other directors (none at all in Trives’s case, at least from what information we have). The basic vocations of this well-educated man with a well-off family background were as a stage director, a set designer and a translator of plays. In the latter capacity, he was responsible for the translations used in the very first Spanish productions of Tennessee Williams, including Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, which opened in Madrid in 1959, with Aurora Bautista (of Eugenio Martín’s A Candle for the Devil) as Maggie. De Cabo also translated The Rose Tattoo and Sweet Bird of Youth.

Some of De Cabo’s work for Franco, in Drácula contra Frankenstein (1972) and Eugenie (Historia de una perversión)(1980), was in keeping with his background, as a location scout and art director, although he did appear briefly in the earlier film. His first acting role for Franco, in X312 – Flight to Hell (1971) is curious. At first, we think that the presumably gay Spanish aristocrat who is among the plane passengers will be part of the main cast – then, however, he departs from the story and is never seen again. It could be that Franco, at the very last minute, shoved him into the film as an afterthought. In future, the filmmaker was to make more prominent use of De Cabo’s distinctive appearance: Other Franco roles for De Cabo at the time include a barely recognizable appearance in the docudrama Virgin Report (1972) and the notary in Virgin among the Living Dead.

Director and actor met again on a more regular basis during the crossover from the seventies to the eighties, when Franco started casting De Cabo in either co-starring or distinctive supporting parts, initially as Lina Romay’s randy father in Las chicas de Copacabana (1978); later, as the confessor in the footage of El sádico de Notre Dame (1979) that is not taken from the 1974 Exorcism; and memorably as the “drunken, decadent marquis” in Aberraciones sexuales de una mujer casada (1980).

Except for Franco’s movies, Antonio de Cabo’s filmography is minimal: he acted in two non-Franco films from, respectively, Brazil and Portugal, both of these being countries where De Cabo travelled as part of his theatre career - directing Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap in Brazil and Godspell in Portugal, where he resided for long. Both of them, in fact, are also countries where he was captured by Franco’s camera.And Portugal, in fact, is also the country where Antonio de Cabo died in the mid-1980s.


X312 – Flight to Hell

Virgin Report

Drácula contra Frankenstein (next to Eduarda Pimenta)

Virgin among the Living Dead

Las chicas de Copacabana

Devil Hunter (1979)

El sádico de Notre Dame

Aberraciones sexuales de una mujer casada

El lago de las vírgenes (1981)

A link to Antonio de Cabo’s imdb entry:
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0127656/

Text by Nzoog Wahrlfhehen (Special thanks to Ricard Reguant)

Franco's 80s actors: DANIEL KATZ

It was through Carmen Carrión, his partner at the time, that this Argentinean actor gained access to Franco’s cinema. If not much of an actor, at least he looked good, what with his gaunt face, long jaw, high forehead and green eyes – occasionally and perhaps significantly seen in tight close-up.



Katz’s placement in Franco’s casts was changeable, ranging from minor roles to prominent supporting ones, especially villains, for whom his appearance seemed particularly suited. On the odd occasion, as in Mil sexos tiene la noche (1984), he would be entrusted with the male lead, apparently on account of Antonio Mayans’s inability at the moment to leave Madrid and accompany Franco to the director’s favoured Andalusian or Canarian locations. It makes sense, in this respect, that he should sometimes be dubbed by Mayans.

Katz remained with Franco for long, sometimes performing other duties than that of performer. In the 1989 La bahía esmeralda, he is billed as actor (in which capacity I have not been able to recognise him there) and also credited with the wardrobe; some time later, in 1994, he acted in Downtown Heat (1994), as well as being placed in charge of the art direction.

Sangre en mis zapatos (1983)

La tumba de los muertos vivientes (1983)

El tesoro de la diosa blanca (1983)

Historia sexual de O (1984)

Mil sexos tiene la noche (1984)

Dark Mission: Flowers of Evil (1988)

Downtown Heat (1994)

On only one occasion, Katz took leave of his association with Franco. He can be seen as the sinister gardener in José Ramón Larraz’s Rest in Pieces (1987)

Daniel Katz in Larraz’s Rest in Pieces

Text by Nzoog Wahrlfhehen

Franco's 80s actors: JOAQUÍN NAVARRO

The juvenile lead of La isla de las virgenes aka El lago de las virgenes did no further work for Jess Franco and, indeed, very little film acting for others. His filmography comprised the years 1981-83 and his only leads were in Franco’s film and Carlos Aured’s quasi-bloodless slasher flick Atrapados en el miedo (1983, released 1985).






Other than that, he is listed as part of the respective casts of Mariano Ozores’s ¡Qúe gozada de divorcio! (1981), a comedy vehicle for Andrés Pajares; and Bésame tonta (1982), a now-forgotten vehicle for the Orquesta Mondragón music group. To these one should add José María Zabalza’s ultra-weird softcore film Bragas calientes(1983), with Navarro was the youthful owner of the mysterious house around which much of the action revolves. Franco’s movie appears last in his filmography due to its having been released in 1987, although it’s really a 1981 production, signifying that it was among the first of the actor’s films, or maybe even the very first.

Text by Nzoog Wahrlfhehen