Review: LES GRANDES EMMERDEUSES (Clifford Brown, 1974)

Review: LES GRANDES EMMERDEUSES (1974)

After a few glimpses of the Paço dos Duques de Bragança, Franco zooms up to a window. Inside a lavish bedroom chamber Lina Romay and Pamela Stanford romp in the nude giving the director a chance to employ his infamous vaginal zoom. The remainder of the film is set in what look like budget Portuguese hotel rooms and a few images of attractions on the Atlantic beach resorts. It's difficult to believe there was an actual full screenplay for this Eurospy comedy-adventure, financed by the ever cost conscious Robert (Grandpa) De Nesle. This is a delightfully sleazy Jess Franco romp, and I use the word "romp" with no irony intended. Jess directed under his "Clifford Brown" beard. White watching it one gets the sense that he probably forgot about it the day after shooting was completed. It all looks like it was shot in two and a half days in some hotel where the film crew were probably hiding out from the cops. Lina Romay and Pamela Stanford (Lorna, the Exorcist herself!) jiggle their merry ways through this sleek put-on concerning two almost always naked diamond smugglers (guess where they hide the diamonds) who travel to Istanbul where they hope to fence the jewels. Hot on the trail are a pair of bumbling Interpol agents (Franco regulars Bigotini and Ramon Ardid), who are introduced being bawled out by an Interpol official played by Jess Franco himself, a cameo that was probably dictated by lack of a casting budget. The female hot operators at the center of the action aren't the Red Lips detective team from Franco's second feature, LABIOS ROJOS (1960), or such follow ups as SADISTEROTICA and KISS ME MONSTER (1968). They're definitely on the wrong side of the law. Girls out to have fun. It's more like let's go to Cascais and make a sexy comedy, screenplay not included.

The women manage to elude their pursuers but run into the massive Radeck (amusingly incarnated by the spherical Victor Mendes) a sort of gangster-mad scientist who has developed a hairy montrosity to whom our heroines will be fed if they don't deliver. It's all wild and crazy fun filmed with little or no budget, with plenty of those trademark zooms and without even the bare basics of a camera tripod or lights. The exteriors are mostly shot from a moving car and one can imagine the director hanging out the window with his hand held camera, zooming in and out of every object which caught his attention- a tree here, a bridge there, and so forth. All this will probably drive those insisting on the "well made film" up the proverbial wall, but I loved every minute of it.

Lina and Pamela seem a lot more comfortable nude than most actresses do fully clothed, having a ball running around like jerks, playing sexy tricks on the villains and donning bizarre disguises (Stanford has an outrageous wrap-around cat mask which she puts on before going into action). Franco provides a circular, interactive structure by beginning and ending with the ladies assuming sexy poses, teasing the viewer by looking directly into the camera and telling us of how their latest adventure went down. I was particularly amused by a scene of the elephantine Radeck attempting a melancholy tune at the paino in his castle. This is a typically obscure in-joke which only those thoroughly immersed in Franco's alternate universe will catch on to. Others will stare in wordless amazement that this bleary trifle has even survived. We'll overlook the "Durenstein" monster, who is played by a remarkably ugly shirtless actor. Immediately interactive and stubbornly lacking any obvious serious subtext, it's easy to overlook that it's Franco challenging viewers to believe how little he can do and still make a deliverable film. No sets, no costumes (except for the cat mask), no plot, and totally dependant on the talents of Lina Romay and Pamela Stanford. Even the earlier Red Lips film such as KISS ME MONSTER and SADISTEROTICA look lavish compared to this. It's just women having fun at the expense of male characters, and actresses having fun making a film. A trip to sunny Portugal. In a sense it's similar to Polanski's erotic cartoon comedy, WHAT?, made the previous year, which presented an always nude sex object eluding sexual assault, including gang rape, from obnoxiously horny European men. In that case the horny guys were embodied by Marcello Mastrioanni and Polanski himself. By the way, Polanski rang up Franco and inquired about getting Britt Nichols for the lead.

Outside of my current and previous thoughts on this all nude, fun-in-the-sun spy farce, I could continue to talk about this as yet another example of female empowerment through having more fun and intellectual control than any women in most Eurospy films, including the James Bond series. But that would spoil the fun. It's not a coincidence that Franco's very last completed film AL PEREIRA VS THE ALLIGATOR LADIES, also features two frequently nude muses having a ball at ridiculing the self involved maleness of Fanco's favorite law enforcement representative. A few bullet points: Having written about this in 1999, for MHVF, and later for my blog, my thoughts have evolved. But looking beneath that seemingly lightweight comedy surface this is inevitably another example of what I term Franco's "Cinema, Degree Zero". Quickly, recklessly filmed it nonetheless has its unique artistic rigor embedded in it's frenetic mise en scene. One can hope for a 2 or 4K HD release to reveal more about that obsessive mise en scene in even the most dire of circumstances. That release is unlikely to occur anytime soon. Seeing this nearly a decade later made me appreciate Franco's sheer creativity in the face of dire poverty all the more. It looks like this was shot in Super 8mm, or maybe just regular old 8mm! But it was a 35mm shoot. My most recent viewing a further decade on notes Jess Franco looks really spaced out or hyped up on something in his appearance, pacing around yet another sleazy hotel room. Did he ever sleep during this workaholic period? Willy Braque (Guy Peraud), a familiar face from a number of Jean Rollin films (DEMONIACS; LIPS OF BLOOD), is even stranger looking than Jess Franco! This guy looks like he hasn't had a decent meal in his life. In other words, he's perfectly credible as the "connection" Kashfi. My final bullet point is a question: Who will dare do a restored HD release of a film whose title roughly translates The Big Pains in the Ass? Thanks to Monica Swinn. (C) Robert Monell 2023