Jess Franco composites: UNE CAGE DOREE/RAZZIA SUR LE PLAISIR ; DE SADE'S JULIETTE/JUSTINE

Uli There is very little general agreement on both the quality and quantity of the massive filmography of the late Spanish filmmaker Jess Franco. Did he direct 199 feature films, or was it 161, or maybe 180? His film career started in the mid 1950s with work in short films, screenwriter, composer, assistant director. His feature film career ran from 1959 to 2013. He died in the midst of making one final film, REVENGE OF THE ALLIGATOR LADIES. A unapologetic workaholic Franco also left behind a portfolio of incomplete films and unrealized projects. We'll be considering two composite films in which several of his films were composited by another director, JUSTINE (1979) without his involvement, UNE CAGE DOREE, a 1975 sexploitation film in which he directed several scenes but had no involvement with the post-production or overall planning. JUSTINE is perhaps the more egregious. Italian producer-directed Joe D'Amato simply took three of his 1970s film and cut them together with a new narration and music track. This 1979 composite, as supervised by Italian porn king D'Amato [rn: Aristide Massaccesi], is a pretty delirious hot mess. D'Amato cut Jess Franco's DE SADE"S JULIETTE/JULIETTA 69 (1975), a hardcore starring Alain Petit and Lina Romay, into shreds and then inserted scenes from two other 1975 Franco productions, MIDNIGHT PARTY and SHINING SEX, the former a comedy, the latter a sci-fi tinged erotic fantasy. He then rescored the newly christened Frankenstein monster of a film with cues written by frequent musical collaborator, Nico Fidenco. This doesn't make it any more of a "Joe D'Amato" film and robs it of much of it's identity as a Jess Franco film. The most familiar Fidenco cue is one of the themes for the EMANUELLE IN AMERICA music track.

JUSTINE opens crediting Alice Arno as the lead actress. The fact that she's not in the film and she's not in any of the three composited Franco film illustrates just how off D'Amato and co. were from what they were dealing with. A rock band fronted by "Chris" (Alain Petit) is playing in a crowded club, totally out of sync with the Fidenco replacement score. This was actually a scene from Franco's MIDNIGHT PARTY (1975), in which Petit plays a long-haired musician who is also an enthusiastic Communist at odds with the shady character played by Olivier Mathot, who is also a lover of Petit's character's girlfriend. The song they perform in MIDNIGHT PARTY is a composition by Petit titled "Life is Shit".