LOS BLUES DE LA CALLE POP (AVENTURAS DE FELIPE MALBORO, VOLUMEN 8)
1983 80 MINUTES* Galan Video (Spain) European Trash Cinema (U.S. import) Written and Directed by Jess Franco; Cast: ROBERT FOSTER (Antonio Mayans), ANALIA IVARS, JESS FRANCO (Sam Chesterfield), CANDY COSTER (Lina Romay), TRINO
TRIVES, MARY SAD (Maria de la Mar Sanchez),
JOSE LLAMAS (Macho Jim), Augustin Garcia, Juana de la Morena.
*90 minutes according to OBSESSION, THE FILMS OF JESS FRANCO. The VHS dupe I've seen only emphasizes how this film screams for a HD remastering.
Felipe Marlboro, gamely incarnated by Franco mainstay Antonio Mayans
("Robert Foster"), is a seedy private investigator who takes up a
missing
person case in punk infested Shit City. Hired by Maria Lucky (Maria de la Mar Sanchez) to locate the punk informer Macho Jim (Jose Llamas), he runs into big trouble almost immediately. All the men seem to hang out in a loud, teeming,
smoky bar decorated with posters of Bogart (from CASABLANCA) and Mae West, waiting for
trouble to
erupt.
The residents of this corrupt town all look like they base their
fashion sense and hairstyles on 1980s MTV videos. The men look like either Sid Vicious or a member
of A Flock of
Seagulls, and the women sport the slutty attire and pouting sexuality of
Robert Palmer's female back-up vocalists in the music video of "Addicted to
Love." Likewise, the visual style of the film is a whacked-out array
of bright, primary colors, punk comic book tableaux, and weird camera angles.
The plot has Marlboro enlisting the aid of piano player Sam
Chesterfield (played by Jess Franco himself) in an all-out effort to find his man and
bust the town's drug
and dirty money kingpin, Saul Winston (Trino Trives). Obviously, Jess Franco is based on Hoagy Carmichael's piano man in the 1943 Hollywood classic CASABLANCA, and Marlboro, a 1980s Bogart style PI, is telling him to "Play it Again, Sam" by pumping him for information. The fact that the main characters are all named after American cigarette brands say a lot about Jess Franco's love of smoking and American culture.
Forget SIN CITY and PULP FICTION, the visual style, costume design and tone of both are anticipated by this 1983 production, this unfolds in Shit City and is the original Pulp Fiction, a Jess Franco wonderment which manages to precede all of Tarantino, Rodriguez and co. by decades.A witty, obsessively self reflexive, visually striking neo-noir, a live action comic book which is one of Franco's
personal favorites, and it's easy to see why. Almost every shot in the
film is a
loving homage to 1940s private eye cinema (such as THE MALTESE FALCON
and THE BIG SLEEP) filtered through a 1980s MTV-style lens and striving for a comics stylization of image, performance and atmosphere.
Franco has stated that he attempted to create a sustained comic-book
look, and he has totally succeeded in that while creating his most
entertaining film
since his amusing 1967 spy spoof LUCKY THE INSCRUTABLE. Unfortunately, you may have a difficult time seeing it in the way it deserves to be presented.
Antonio Mayans
is the perfect fall guy in Franco's off balance world of pimps, whores,
killers, and
thugs. Felipe Marlboro seems like a close cousin of the director's perennially challenged P.I., Al Pereira. In her first role in a Jess Franco film, Analia Ivars, who has great legs and 1980s big hair, makes for a perfect lean, mean femme fatale. Franco stages all the standard private eye cliches in his usual
off-kilter fashion. For instance, when Marlboro gets a beating for
asking too many
questions, the thug (Augustin Garcia) who kicks the living daylights out of him is a flashy
flamenco dancer who performs his dance steps in between each punch and
kick. Most
amusing of all is the twisted ending, which finds Marlboro seduced by
the woman who has set him up for extinction.
Franco adorns this personal favorite with a fast-paced editing style, glimmering shots of the Benidorm locations (which have a tacky glamor), often shooting through diffusion lenses, and a rousing
New Orleans
style jazz score by Fernando G. Morcillo. LA BLUES DE LA CALLE POP... is a
continual delight to see and hear, and one can sense its maker's joy in creating a noir comic book on film.
Franco's experimental deployment of colored filters and lighting is especially
interesting (as in the visually similar ESCLAVA DEL CRIMEN-1986) and makes me wonder
why he
didn't continue in this style. Instead, his later 1980s films, such as
DARK MISSION (1987), ESMERALDA BAY (1989) and DOWNTOWN HEAT (1990), were made using much more
conventional cinematography, musical and narrative
techniques. Not bad films, just not the kind of prime, personal Jess Franco which LOS BLUES CALLE POP exemplifies so beautifully. You haven't seen the real Jess Franco until you've experienced it.
**It should also be noted that the film is narrated, in a mastered tone somewhere between mock authoritative and old fashioned cynical, by Ricardo Palacios, who first appeared in Jess Franco's world as the pugnacious tourist in CARTAS SUR TABLE (ATTACK OF THE ROBOTS-1966). He also played the bandit chief in the 1968 Harry Alan Towers production THE BLOOD OF FU MANCHU, memorable noir villains in JUEGO SUCIO EN CASABLANCA (1984) and CAMINO SOLITARIO (1993), among other Franco titles. A memorable character actor in films by Franco, Margheriti (CAR CRASH), Rossellini (SOCRATES) who appeared as various characters in Euro-westerns (THE BOUNTY KILLER-1966). He was also the director of the1987 Spanish Civil War comedy, BIBI LA BANDA, produced by Jess Franco, and Mi Cojeno es el Mejor, a 1982 erotic comedy featuring Lina Romay. It was reported that Palacios passed away on February 11, 2015, in Spain. Thanks to Nzoog. Ricardo Palacios (1940-2015)
(C) Robert Monell, 2018
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