Erwin C. Dietrich (October 4th, 1930 in Glarus[1] - March 15, 2018)

Erwin C. Dietrich passed away March 15, 2018, at the age of 87. He produced nearly 100 films and directed over 40 in a career spanning nearly 60 years. He was known for his numerous soft and sometimes hardcore features, and later for his action hits THE WILD GEESE and CODENAME: WILDGEESE. He also was a writer, actor, distributor (Avis Films) and opened the first multiplexes in Switzerland. The Zurich based producer also produced/co-produced/co-directed 17 Jess Franco films. From the ridiculous MONDO EROTICO (1976) to the sublime (MARQUISE DE SADE/DORIANA GRAY, DAS FRAUENHAUS (1977) and JACK THE RIPPER (1976), which stand as several of Franco's career best. He gave the prolific Franco better budgets, working conditions and, most importantly, the freedom to make the kind of films he wanted, at least within commercial formats and limitations. Both Dietrich and Franco were prolific makers of genre cinema, and appreciated film as an art form, a business and a way of life. 

Dietrich also provided funding for Franco's 1975 sex comedy (MIDNIGHT PARTY) and (BARBED WIRE DOLLS), the latter a highly successful Women In Prison epic which the producer balked at when Franco showed him the result. Both of those films starred Franco muse Lina Romay, as did Dietrich's own hardcore sex epic ROLLS ROYCE BABY (1975), in which Romay plays "Lisa Romay" a model-porn actress who hits on everyone around her until deciding on having her  chauffeur (Dietrich regular Eric Falk) drive her around the countryside in search of horny hitchhikers and wanderers to seduce. If the candidates are reluctant the chauffeur simply throws them on top of his beautiful employer and drives off. The drives become a ritual and her reason for living. This is a sex positive film, meaning sex is seen as a healthy, fun exercise, without hangups in a pre AIDS age. Sex is Eros here, rather than Thanatos, as it often is in Jess Franco erotica. Elegantly composed by Andreas Demmer and featuring a delightfully upbeat score by Walter Baumgartner, ROLLS ROYCE BABY may be Dietrich's masterpiece as a director, or at least a pleasant diversion. There's only one real hardcore scene in it, but Romay lounges around totally naked, legs spread, leaving nothing to the imagination throughout. There are worse ways to spend 85 or so minutes.

Dietrich's wildest piece of exploitation was the jet fueled, blood-soaked Nazi biker sleaze fest MAD FOXES (Paul Grau, 1981),featuring Jose Gras (the macho swat team leader in Bruno Mattei's zombie epic HELL OF THE LIVING DEAD) as a young, well to do driver of a Corvette Stingray who goes on a rampage of ultra violent revenge against the swastika wearing biker gang who raped his girlfriend (Andrea Albani) and murdered his family. It is a film that needs to be seen to be believed and defines the term European Trash Cinema, a Eurotrash verion of A CLOCKWORK ORANGE.

After producing the Franco films Dietrich went on to much larger productions, co-producing the 1978 action hit THE WILD GEESE, with Richard Burton and Roger Moore, an Antonio Margheriti follow-up CODENAME: WILDGEESE with Klaus Kinski and Ernest Borgnine, and more Philippine shot action epics, such as DER COMMANDER., with Lee Van Cleef (which can be presently found streaming on AMAZON PRIME)

My own personal favorites of his Jess Franco productions were the Warhol-esque DAS FRAUENHAUS (1977) and MARQUISE DE SADE/DAS BILDNIS DER DORIANA GRAY.

Dietrich gave Jess Franco carte blanche while making the ethereal, dreamlike vampire tale, MARQUISE DE SADE (1976), an abstract-erotic masterwork with a unique tone and a style which evokes the the esoteric world of Ingmar Bergman.

The very first of Dietrich's directorial efforts which I saw was a 1980 Women In Prison epic, retitled  ISLAND WOMEN for US VHS release. That was sometime in the early 1990s when I found it in the Adult section of a local Mom & Pop video store. I remember it as a very entertaining film, featuring a leather clad Karine Gambier and Brigitte Lahaie. In fact, I rented it hoping it was a retitled Jess Franco film. Ah, those were the days. Thank you Erwin C. Dietrich for all the memories....

(C) Robert Monell

SINFONIA EROTICA (Severin Blu-ray)

PREVIOUS release on DVD:
Sinfonia Erotica Aka The Marquis De Sade's Sinfonia Erotica/Erotic Symphony. Directed  Jess Franco, With Lina Romay. Region 2 Import Spanish Audio No English Manga DVD

Thanks to an Internet contact I finally got a chance to see the MANGA DVD presentation years ago when I purchased a PAL capability player. The DVD is highly recommended, even though it's full-screen. There also aren't any subtitles or English language options. The image is %100 superior to the VSOM dub I had of the Italian tape, which also includes [incorrect] English subtitles and omits the original Spanish title sequence for a video generated main title card: MARQUIS DE SADE'S SINFONIA EROTICA. 

The Spanish version [it was a Spanish/Portuguese co production with Joaquin Dominguez as the primary investor]  of this 1979 film is the way to experience it. It still runs notably short of its listed 91m runtime in OBSESSION, but that may be incorrect. As Francesco Cesari notes in his essential and detailed liners there is no Liszt 4th Piano Sonata, upon which Franco supposedly based his score. In fact this film is a good example of Franco being, as he has said, a musician/composer who makes films. The score generates the mood, images, plot and characters. It's not a Ken Russell type extravaganza, though. I would place it in the top tier of Franco's Sade adaptations [it's mostly from the Bressac episode in JUSTINE, a remake of PLASIR A TROIS, but Franco's remakes are never just cut and dried remakes, they always expand in new directions].

It's an orgy of rack-focus and ambitious camera moves, like the circular track around the dinner as the participants plan against each other. Fassbinder-like pans and titled angles proliferate throughout. In terms of stylistic irony it may be Franco's closest to Fassbinder's period films. As Francesco points out the music is often used contrapuntally, to comment on and expand the imagery. It's a daring strategy which works more often than not this time out.  It's also one of Franco's best edited film, cutting from the characters to statuary, the exterior environment, and there is a fascinating internal montage in close ups which are also long shots and vice-versa. Franco atomizes objects and characters to an extreme degree as the screenshots provided by Alex illustrate.

As much of an improvement over gray market releases as that DVD was, the Severin Blu-ray now makes it obsolete and is as much a jump in quality as that was at time. 

SEVERIN BLU-RAY: A Triton, P.C./Estudio 8 [Lisbon,Portugal] Production with Candace Coster [Lina Romay] (Martine, the Marquise de Bressac), Mel Rodrigo (Flor), Armando Sallent (the Marquis de  Bresssac), Aida Gouviea, George Santos and Albino Graziani as Doctor Louys. DP: Juan Soler. Producer: Joaquin Dominguez. Based on the writings [Justine] of the Marquis De Sade; Written and Directed by Jess Franco. 84 mins. 1979. 1080p Full HD Resolution/Spanish Mono with English subtitles. 

Below: Alice Arno and Robert Woods in PLAISIR A TROIS (1973): A previous Jess Franco directed version of the Sade story.



Below: Cover for the new Blu-ray edition of SINFONIA EROTICA from Severin Films.

This 1979 Spanish-Portuguese co-production, a gorgeously lensed Sadean melodrama, is finally available in HD from Severin Films.

This is an elegant tone poem based on the same Sade story, from Justine -Justine, or The Misfortunes of Virtue (French: Justine, ou Les Malheurs de la Vertu), completed in1791. Franco actually shows Sade, played by Klaus Kinski writing the novel in 1787, or at least beginning it when is imprisoned in the Bastille, at the opening of the 1968 Harry Alan Towers scripted JUSTINE. Actually it's a story within the massive novel which Franco filmed as 1973's PLAISIR A TROIS and as GEMIDOS DE PLACER. The 1973 version featured Alice Arno in the role Lina Romay plays in SINFONIA.... Alice Arno quite effective and it's an interesting film, at least visually, but not in the same league as SINFONIA.... and the 1982 GEMIDOS DE PLACER, which was shot in just a few dozen plan sequences and is even more experimental.  

Marquise Martine de Bressac (Lina Romay) the wife of wealthy Marquis Armando, returns from a stay at a mental asylum after suffering a breakdown. She finds the Marquis involved with his male lover  Flor (Mel Rodrigo) and a runaway nun. Complications arise. Franco and his expert DP Juan Cozar flood the images with light and the camera often wanders away from the twisted characters to the distances between them, a favored Franco theme according to the man himself. The images of the statues, architecture, lakes and foliage of the estate are photographed in the style of the Alain Robbe-Grillet-Alain Resnais LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD (1962). It's a lush period piece which illustrates Liszt's piano music, which Franco adapted himself into a score part Romantic-part Gothic horror.

But this is not a horror film per se. It plays more like a period melodrama in the style of Douglas Sirk, pre his final Universal period. And as I wrote in my initial review of the DVD, the style also evokes Sirk acolyte R. W. Fassbinder (THE MARRIAGE OF MARIA  BRAUN, LOLA) in its lavish camera style, period evocation and use of color, which sometimes recalls Impressionist paintings of the late 19th and Early 20th Century. The floral environment, rich with all kinds of trees and flowers, seems as much interest to Franco as do the characters. There are many shots of budding tree branches (the opening credits), colorful sprouts and a glittering nearby lake surface, which the camera takes time to explore in detail. A sprawling castle atop an adjacent mountain also frequently captures the camera's lingering attention, even photographed through windows from interiors. This is the way Franco's  hapless EL CONDE DRACULA (1970) should have looked. 

Shot with a heavy dependence on star filters, diffusion and with a seeming desire to distort all natural light, the result is a highly stylized look which is far from any kind of realism. The period details, a villa in Sintra, Portugal, the dresses and men's wear, are all there, but everything is framed from a skewed angle or the focus is pulled, readjusted and pulled again. Instead of the zoom lens, a favorite Franco tool in the 1970s, the camera seems to constantly be on the prowl, slowly panning across bodies, rooms and landscapes, tracking toward, around and away from the action. The film seems both claustrophobic in its interiors and expansive in its sun-dappled exteriors. Gaslight and candlelight illuminate the manage a trois which often becomes a menage a quatre. 

The sex here is all devious, meant to manipulate and betray. Nothing or no one is what they seem on the surface. The Marquis is a bullying sadist who at the end, like most bullies, is shown to be a coward as he begs to die rather than be tortured. Martine, as expertly played by Romay, is both a victim and an evolving character who is playing a role within a role. Lina Romay has relatively few nude scenes and the erotic enounters are filmed in an almost abstract, rather than explicit/ hardcore, fashion. This is a film about emotional surges and variations rather than Grindhouse style sexploitation. 

Space is flattened and then expanded by Franco's elaborate camera styling and, importantly, time is expanded in these spaces. The pacing is set by Franco's own score, based on Liszt's music (concerto #2, rather than #4) but in the end is pure Jess Franco playing the synthesized result of what were no doubt improvisations on Liszt's themes. It seems as if we are witnessing the music being visualized and lulled into the 19th Century fantasia where our present concept of time is irrelevant. This film really rewards the viewer's patience and invites and further rewards multiple viewings. 

The new Severn Blu-ray, transferred in 4k from an uncut 35mm theatrical print, restores intended definition and sharpness to images meant to be that way as it illustrates the complex back and forth between focus and light flares, period lighting via the candelabra and gaslight as well as filtered sunlight pouring down on the bucolic locations.  Some of the painterly images are breathtaking and would be at home in Kubrick's design for BARRY LYNDON (1975). Of course, Franco is the polar opposite with his career long dependence on getting it in the can in one take but here he appears to have thought out and executed each and every image with extreme care and deliberation.  The film, finally, looks gorgeous and, at the same time, experimental.. Both Sade and the aspirations of Jess Franco are served well by this welcome and highly recommended HD release.

Special features include Jess Franco On First Wife NIcole Guettard, in which he uncomfortably recalls her extended, painful demise from a tumor and Alzheimer's Disease. 

In Stephen Thrower:On Sinfonia Erotica, the author of Muderous Passions: The Delirious Cinema of Jess Franco places the film within Franco's filmography and discusses its style.

Thanks to Francesco Cesari and Wearethedead for additional informatioln. 


(C) Robert Monell, 2018

Sex, Death and Delirium under the African Sun (Macumba Sexual, 1980)

She is introduced in long shot, clad in blinding white, sillhouetted against the desert Sun, the rays of which are blotted out by her imposing figure. The zoom lens gradually draws her closer to us, as if compelled by an occult force rather than a camera operator, in this case the great Juan Soler Cozar. She raises her hands above her head as if in communion with a elements. From the opening moments of this film She is in control....

The Canary Islands: Tara Obongo (the late, legendary Ajita Wilson), the living dead Black witch, is capable of possessing her victims through a form of sexual voodoo, hence the title. Her most recent victims are American tourists Alice Brooks (Lina Romay) and her boyfriend (Antonio Mayans). Alice is in the Canary Islands representling a US real estate firm. But that isn't important in this context. Tara seduces and sexually enslaves them both, but each time they believe they have escaped her spell another level of the nightmare begins.

Ever have a nightmare from which you couldn't awaken? You know it's only a dream but each time you try wake up another chapter of the dream starts. MACUMBA SEXUAL opens in the midst of a nightmare and ends with another one just starting. Alice dreams of Tara atop a sand dune under the blazing tropical sun. A terrifying fetish (looking like a shrivelled Donald Duck!) keeps appearing as a kind of warning. There is no escape from her psycho-sexual curse. A local hotel manager (Jess Franco) tells them that Tara has been long dead. But every time they sleep she becomes their controlling reality. Tara represents both Sex and Death, she seduces everyone who comes into contact with her and has two collared male slaves whom she walks like dogs. Her haunting voice calls to Alice while she sleeps in a similar way the vampire princess of VAMPYROS LESBOS called to another female protagonist. Tara lives to project sensual hypnotism and awaits her own death. There is no middle range of emotion or consciousness. The sexually ambiguous Ajita Wilson perfectly emodies her. But his is not a Pop Art blow out like VAMPYROS LESBOS.  The Istanbul of VAMPYROS LESBOS is replaced with the desolation of the Canary Islands locations, which seem like an endless desert. Those who know about her, like Franco's babbling innkeeper, can't fully articulate what she is about. But her presence permeates every moment of the film and overwhelms all of the characters. The audio-visual impact of the film is tremendous. It doesn't matter that Franco has told this story before. It's how he tells it this time which is important. One feels immersed in some primeval African ritual, one is which coherence and a "white" reading can't account for. 

It ends as Alice again awakens, this time in the comforting arms of her lover. then she sees the Voodoo fetish in the corner of the room. Or is it just an hallucination? The film closes on her seemingly endless, high pitched screams. Screams of pure terror. The unknowable, the negative force, the Other has once again gotten the upper hand. Jess Franco can only move on to the next film. Fin...

One of Franco's most delirious films: teeming with Jungian symbolism, almost dialogue free (words are pointless in this context), nearly hard-core (the Spanish tape appears to be cut), and driven by the moaning (by an uncredited relative of Jess Franco?), eerie voodoo rhythms of  Pablo Villa (the late , great Daniel J White improvising with the director and a vocalist). Lina wears a blonde wig, runs around in a skimpy bikini and is credited as "Candy Coster." It's too morbid to be erotic and creates a kind of disembodied horror which lingers after Tara dissolves into the omnipresent Voodoo fetish. The slow zoom shots which move in and out of the action seem controlled by Tara's presence, representations of her uncanny magnetism. The viewer is pulled into the toxic miasma, like it or not. It's like drinking an entire bottle of Rum all at once instead of just having a few tropical cocktails. One gets intoxicated and reality becomes irrelevant. Some may wish there were a HD release of this fever dream. Thanks to Francesco Cesari. 

Essential Franco. Robert Monell