In early 1970s, there was a
surplus of straight-haired slap-free studiedly nonchalant actresses in
Hollywood – Katherine Ross, Jennifer O’ Neill, Candice Bergen, Ali McGraw - all
supposedly embodying the fruits of freedom as borne by the stinking sixties. In
truth though, the New Hollywood was Testosterone Town, and Ross’s appearance in
The Stepford Wives in 1975 would seem to be the logical conclusion of the
half-decade.
This was also the late Karen Black’s
time, but she’d be forever an outsider in said sorority. Her ripe-lipped
rapaciousness and blazing sapphire eyes marked her out as too bizarre for
romantic leads and too sexy for character roles. She looked - always - as
though she’d dine on leading men, so it was a constant source of amazement to
me that Tarantino never snapped her up from the cult straight-to-home-viewing treadmill
she was on for the last 25 years of her career, in order to play a
no-restraint-brooking leather-clad motorcycle mama, or something.
The former Karen Blanche
Zeigler was born in Illinois in 1939 and paid her dues on the Great White Way
before her pal Jack Nicholson cast her as an acid-tripping whore in 1969’s Easy Rider. The following year she
turned in an Oscar-nominated performance as Nicholson’s trashily endearing
girlfriend Rayette, in Bob Rafelson’s Five Easy Pieces. Probably her most revered role, it’s a mercy in some ways that
her character’s persona wasn’t an indication of things to come. For Rayette is
needy, clammy and passive. It hardly seems accidental that she’s got ‘Stand by
Your Man’ blaring from her Dansette when we first see her. But she’s also warm,
loyal, romantic and real.
As Rayette in Five Easy Pieces (1970)
As a wannabe country singer and an unselfconscious,
coral-haired diner waitress (America’s equivalent of the warm-hearted barmaid),
Rayette was the start of something in the sense that she’s the first in a line
of Black’s carnal prole gals who cannot escape the gravitational pull of their backgrounds.
Nicholson’s class-tourist treats her like the shit on his shoes for the bulk of
this film, until he perceives his Patrician family are judging her and does a
volte-face, a rare display of gallantry on his character’s part which seems to make
Rayette’s heart burst.
With Kris Kristofferson in Cisco Pike (1972)
From here, Black switched
between cult credibility (opposite Kris Kristofferson and several bricks of
hash in Cisco Pike, as a smack-addicted
hooker in The Pyx) and blockbuster
corn (the stewardess called upon to fly a cast of ageing legends to safety in Airport 75).
In Nashville (1975)
But it was in Hollywood’s partially
faithful versions of the cream of American literature that she truly shone,
playing two working-class girls who meet premature ends before their respective
bitterness curdles their beauty, which may be the only power they have. (In
some ways, she was continuing a tradition previously served so well by Gloria
Grahame.)
Jazz Age Jezebel: As Myrtle in The Great Gatsby (1974)
Her Myrtle in The Great Gatsby
was a million miles away, physically, from the fleshy slattern that F. Scott
Fitzgerald described, but, moving languidly across the screen, her hair the colour
of dried blood, Black’s Myrtle is bursting with sensuality and frustration, bringing
a desperate pathos to the shimmering soft focus of what’s ultimately an
interesting failure.
In John
Schlesinger’s The Day of the Locust, adapted
from Nathaniel West’s savage, nihilistic novel about Hollywood’s Depression-era
desperados, she was wannabe starlet Faye Greener, cruel and sexy in a
solarised, platinumed bob, lashing out like a burned cat at the kind acts of Donald’s
Sutherland’s tragic simpleton. Her portrayal of that vile, talentless,
narcissistic, spite-ridden girl was a study in soft-focus sadness; in short, she
was the rotten heart of a movie dealing with (in West's partisan view) a rotten town.
Hollywood Gothic: Day of the Locust (1974)
She took the lead in all three
sections of Trilogy of Terror, almost
upstaged in the exoticism stakes by a Zuni doll, which chases her around her
apartment with hilarious, murderous intent, and even stood out amid the
constellation of stars in Robert Altman’s Nashville,
where she’s disturbingly convincing as a dumb, arrogant broad. The following
year, 1976, she was bewigged, ruthless and cool as a julep in Hitchcock’s
pitiful swansong, Family Plot.
It's got TEETH! Trilogy of Terror (1975)
Only in Hollywood could a
woman of prodigious intelligence (Black entered higher education at 15) and
singular looks be thought unlucky. But starting at the top, she seems to have
managed to exploit said qualities handsomely: her filmography suggests a work
ethic of Leviathan proportions and a total lack of cultural snobbery (e.g. House of 1000 Corpses and Stuck! Steve Balderson’s 2009 homage to
‘70s babes-in-the-slammer flicks in which Black co-starred with Mink Stole,
would struggle to claim even cult status.)
Giving Jennifer Coolidge sleepless nights in House of 1000 Corpses (2003)
Black sang too – and even did so once with L7, of all people. She also sang in Nashvilleand Gypsy 83
(2001), in which she was touching as a sad-eyed, never-was lounge-pop crooner,
chuffing on cigarillos and flicking her marabou stole. But her standing in the
musical world is arguably stronger in terms of her name than her (good) voice,
all thanks to schlock-horror performance-art metallers and underground legends,
The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black. They’ve never been known to make their
audiences comfortable, much like their strangely beautiful and beautifully
strange namesake.
Five Easy Pieces (1970)
Being all '70s, like
the 1970s version of the 1930s at its zenith, in Day of the Locust (1974)
Smokin'
"Hey Honey - don't call ME Mac!" Five Easy Pieces (1970)
Fay takes a break from spite. Day of the Locust (1974)
In Killer Fish (1979)
With Dennis Hopper in Easy Rider (1969)
Eternal Summertime Sadness: With William Atherton in Day of the Locust (1974)
My introduction to the
Mo-dettes came in the form of a badge I found in a vintage clothes shop in
Greenwich, south London, in 1999. It featured a drawing of a reclining,
lantern-jawed, be-suited man - an ebony-haired hero straight out of an
illustrated Jackie romance. His smirk
suggested thoughts of a carnal nature, as well it might, since the thought
bubble coming from his slick head read ‘Mmm… Mo-dettes!’ I was intrigued by the name.
Was it a misprint? Surely they were called the Modettes? Or maybe the hyphen had run amok and it was supposed to
be Mod-ettes? My confusion was further compounded a few months later when browsing
through the paper mountains at VinMag in Soho, I came across a copy of The Face from September 1980 emblazoned
with the tagline ‘Modettes a la Mode’ and featuring as the cover star Jane, the
bassist, looking mischievously elfin. Surely such a clanging misprint wouldn’t
have made it on to the cover - they must’ve
been a mod revival band. And they must have been well fucked off about the
badge…
But then I heard ‘White
Mice’. All became clear, and a fan was born.
I later discovered the group
had been fond of the word ‘mode’ and
added the latter half as an homage to the girl groups of the
pre-swinging sixties (The Marvelettes, et al). Yet the three-decade-old
misconception of them as a mod group hasn’t died out (they frequently appear on
mod compilations) and in the 21st century, the Mo-dettes remain a
cult.
Thoughts of an impure nature
They say too much is made of
punk and the way it democratised creativity, that those who run today’s media
were so in thrall to in their youth that its cultural value is overstated.
Nonsense - not enough is made of it. For one thing, it’s easily forgotten today
how minimal the presence of female musicians was prior to punk. Before Patti Smith made her Shamanic assault on rock ‘n’ roll in 1975
(concurrent with The Runaways – who were a different beast altogether), many a
young gal had fronted a band on the strength of her tits ‘n’ teeth appeal
alone, but known female musicians that you couldn’t take home to your mother
could until then be counted on one hand: Sparkle Moore had herself a slide
guitar and a hot line in rockabilly hip-slinging but gave it up to be a
housewife; the Velvets had Mo Tucker pounding the drums; Joan and Joni had
their acoustics and Suzi had her electric. (And Janis? Janis pretty much preferred to be seen as one of the
boys.) Jane Crockford, the Mo-dettes’ gifted bassist, complained to Kris Needs
in 1979, “When I was a little girl I used to look at bands like The Beatles and
go, ‘It’s not fair! They’re all boys! Girls can’t grow up and be in a pop
group!’ I was really pissed off about it. It turned out alright though.”
"Small fish and large chips please, mate" Brighton 1979
The Mo-dettes formed in April
1979, when punk had succumbed to headline hype and become the ultimate phoney
rebel stance. It had also regressed to a level of thuggery fuelled by Colt 45
and conventionality fuelled by careerism. Alas, this didn’t stop the
lemmings-on-the-lam march from all points north to Chelsea, and ramalama
three-chord thrash just kept on coming. But the music the Mo-dettes ultimately
produced – rough-edged urban pop-punk – suggests that unlike scores of their
contemporaries, they’d woken up and smelt the '80s. This is not to say their
music contained the baby cries of hair metal, synthpop or richly syllabled new romantic
horrors, but they clearly realised that punk’s first noxious wave had long
since crashed on the shore and ebbed away. This was something different. They
were not as angular and aggressive as the Slits, not as earthy and experimental
as The Raincoats, but all three bands were progeny of punk’s first wave, which allowed
anyone to throw off the shackles and discover the strange, delicious things
that came with such freedom.
Vixens amid Vitrolite
Their 1979-1982 lifespan
coincided with the post-punk era, and though the Mo-dettes were not ‘post-punk’
in the accepted definition of the term (i.e. complex, experimental, cerebral,
avant-garde) with their melding of harmony, speed, pop, punk attitude, humour,
sass, and “female chauvinism” they were at the very least, members of a halfway
sorority house between the first wave of punk and its progeny. The dubby
basslines and sixties girl-group sensibility was arguably an example of
post-punk’s black/white fusion creeping into their sound, but ultimately, they
bristled with too much energy and sarky-snarky humour to truly fit post-punk’s
dry, sometimes po-faced model.
Likewise, they seemed to have
little time for the often humourless, partisan feminist politics of the day.
They appeared in NME’s “Women in Rock” issue on 29 March 1980 under extreme
sufferance. Despite the journalist, Deanne Pearson, explaining to the girls
that she was writing about women in rock, not feminists in rock, the interview
went from bad to worse, with questioner and questioned almost coming to blows.
While Jane Crockford conceded that they anticipated potential trouble with
record labels who regarded all-girls bands as novelties, she insisted that
being girls had, on the whole, been a help, not a hindrance. She added
(possibly as a wind-up, given the fractious tone between the band and Pearson)
that exploiting their sexuality might bring them a wider audience still, which
was fine with her. Ultimately, Ramona, the singer, decided that she personally was a feminist if feminism meant equal
rights and abortion on demand, but when it came to the band, much as they
couldn’t deny their gender, they were in it for the music alone.
Poseurs
So the Mo-dettes were not
fond of the “women in rock” tag, but they weren’t an anti-feminist band as such:
they simply wanted to be judged up top, not down below, as it were. Later that
same year, guitarist Kate told Mike Laye in a Sounds interview that she believed such compartmentalising defeated
the progress of women in society by making them into “…a women’s army”,
separating them from the mass of humanity and further cementing the idea of
women as Other – surely the opposite of the ideology’s tenets. Simply, the
Mo-dettes didn’t believe they were automatically or anatomically entitled to
respect simply because of a combination of gender and the ability to play. As
Jane said, “We don’t demand respect, we’re going to earn it, mate… as musicians, as ourselves.”
The original line up was
Ramona Carlier (vox), Jane Crockford (bass), Kate Korris (guitar) and June
Miles-Kingston (drums). Jane was unhappily playing bass in a band called Bank
of Dresden. The lone female of the group, she craved her own set-up. She met
Ramona at a gig and impressed by her sixties kitchen-sink heroine appearance, asked
her if she could sing. Ramona shrugged and said yeah, sure. (“That’s what you
did”, Ramona later said of the era’s “Anyone can, man” ethos.)
Meanwhile, Kate and June met
on the set of The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll
Swindle while working as production assistants and subsequently tried to
make music with boys, an idea scrapped following not-wholly unexpected “You’re
not a bad drummer/guitarist for a girl” quips. They saw countless potential
bassists and singers, mainly male, all either “unreliable or afraid” according to
Kate. Fortuitously, she then met Jane in the grim environs of the Lisson Grove
dole queue. They ran their ideas by each other, and an outfit was born.
Ramona had been raised in
Geneva, Switzerland and had studied ballet. From bourgeois beginnings, she
gravitated toward the seedier side of life, producing a punk fanzine called Lolos De Lola, hanging out on the minuscule
local scene and occasionally singing backing vocals for bands (but never for Kleenex,
as is often said). But she saw little evidence of anger being turned into art,
and yearning for the Real Thing, aged 21, emptied her savings account and flew
to London. Looking like both a raven-haired Vogue-cover
beauty and a cartoonish Betty Boop-alike with eyes you could swim with dolphins
in, the alarmingly cheekboned Ramona sang with an accent as broad as the Champs
Elysees (“Ah zee zoze gels go by tressed in dare zum-air closs!”) which left
one critic with oeuf on his face
after sneering at her “O level French” in an early review. Onstage, she’d
favour synthetic-to-the-touch vintage A-line mod dresses, in spite of such
attire possibly compounding confusion over their name.
Hittin' them notes: Ramona in 1980
Jane’s background was worthy
of a Richard Allen novel. A native of west London, she was a restless adopted
child who became a runaway and street kid, immersed in the capital’s
subcultures and demimonde from the
tender age of 13. Years of squats, violence and drugs could have led who knows
where, but punk kicked the door wide for her, opportunity wise. Arming herself
with a vintage Hofner violin bass, she proved to be a mistress of rich, dubby basslines
that would make her the rock of the band. Her appearance took the biscuit: a Lahndan doll with a fetching and fierce vanilla-pale
peroxide flat-top offsetting her razor-sharp cheekbones, a nice line in
skinhead/rockabilly fusion style courtesy of Kensington Market and an
astonishing pair of replacement eyebrows (she’d shaved hers off) which looked
as though they’d been fashioned from hot tar and applied via cunning use of a
Gloy-stick.
June don't play musical statues. The Modes in 1980
Kate, the guitarist, had
moved from New York to London in 1974. She’d founded The Slits in the searing
summer of ’76, played at their debut at Harlesden Coliseum with the Clash in
March 1977 and for two subsequent gigs before taking her leave, claiming in
1979 that she felt “…the whole thing with The Slits was to get as famous as
possible as fast as you could [but] I enjoyed it in a way.” Strong-featured,
leggy and looking haughty as a heron, with a platinum skunk-stripe in her
barnet, her minimal, glass-shower guitar sound complimented Jane’s heavy bass
perfectly.
June was a drop-out art
student and, as it turned out, a girl for whom rhythm came as naturally as
breathing, having taught herself to drum on a ramshackle £40 kit she’d bought
off the Pistols’ Paul Cook. A native of Essex and a musical family (her loftily quiffed brother Robert twanged for Tenpole Tudor), making her
own sounds must have been a case of when, not if. She looked like a member of a
girl gang: a surly mix of biker leathers (she did indeed ride) and slightly
swollen-looking lips set in a mean pout. Looking as cool as a julep whether behind
the kit or no, she favoured Spartan onstage outfits of shorts and singlet and
kept her make-up in a toolbox. Her power-drumming was equal parts cataclysmic
and clipped; it cut, said one elegant scribe “like a goods train passing
through the room.”
Thus grouped, they set about
making their impact on the world. Jane’s friend and mentor, the artist Neal
Brown, was frontman of the Vincent Units and had a side project called The
Tesco Bombers, with a rolling line-up. Jane had the idea that one such
incarnation should be all-female, with Brown only participating if he’d drag
up: The Tesco Bomberettes! In the end, they played it as the Mo-dettes, at Ladbroke
Grove bootboy haunt, the Acklam Hall. A run of backroom gigs soon followed at
The Chippenham, an insalubrious gin palace in Maida Hill. Word got out, and a
combination of scene solidarity and credible connections soon led to support
slots with Madness at the Electric Ballroom, the Clash at Notre Dame Hall and
Siouxsie and the Banshees at Hammersmith Odeon.
June (left) and Jane on stage in Dallas, 1980
Their debut single ‘White
Mice’ (B-side ‘Masochistic Opposite’) was released in late 1979 on their own
Mode label and distributed by Rough Trade. A thing of jangly joy and beauty
forever, John Peel succinctly described this perfectly crafted, catchy, post-punk
pop-punk gem as sounding “… like the musical equivalent of the Battersea Power Station
made out of eggboxes.” It was that charming and that unique – but far less
fragile. Opening with a sharp reggae-like snare roll from June, the melody
spirals away perfectly as Ramona’s Fronsh
vocals lay waste to the egos of several Roxy Romeos with a bunch of
come-hither-fuck-off lyrics (“Your arse is tight your moves are right, your
eyes are big and blue, and if I was a homely girl I’d like to marry you. But
I’m too naughty, bold and haughty, forward with it too, so come and visit, then
I’d kiss it like other lovers do… don’t be stupid, don’t be limp. No girl likes
to love a wimp.”) Clearly aware that all the best pop songs feature handclaps
and “ooh-woahs”, they meld them with Kate’s ultra-minimal, choppy, abrasive
melodies, June’s military-style fills and Jane’s yo-yo-staccato basslines. The
single spent six weeks at number one in the then-new indie chart and it was
often at the top of my stash whenever I used to flex my shonky DJ’ing prowess in
exchange for a few light ales (typically, I found my original copy lurking
between a Purple Hearts’ and a Specials’ single in the Two-Tone & Mod
Revival section of the otherwise excellent Brighton emporium, Wax Factor, which
for some reason I always want to call ‘Vinyl Sassoon’).
NYC 1981
In 1980 they were signed to
Deram, an imprint of failing sixties’ stalwarts Decca. In June that year they
released their second single, a cover of the Stones’ 1966 hit ‘Paint it Black’.
Their take was stark, minimal and spiky, with just enough heft and sparseness
to the rhythms to suggest a hint of dub (giving it, as Nicholas Rombes says in
his Cultural Dictionary of Punk “its
blackness”). It made Single of the Week in Sounds,
the write-up revealing they were then John Lydon’s current favourites, rare
praise from a man never known to have doffed his cap lightly. However, the
single didn’t do what they expected commercially and nor did the subsequent
release, ‘Dark Park Creeping’, a jagged and murky song that pumps along at a
4/4 beat while Ramona’s vocals soar and echo as she wails about drunken,
inadequate men staggering around pitch-black parks after closing time looking
for someone to right-hook with their sovereign. (The brassy bounce of the B-side,
‘Two Can Play’ seems to be about the constant struggle for autonomy in
relationships.)
Loony Toons
Their album The Story So Far was recorded in
Coventry in summer 1980 and released in autumn that year, with the girls’
likenesses rendered in candy-coloured Manga-style ‘toons on the cover. It
received poor reviews largely centred on the production, described in one
quarter as “weak and uninspired”. The band themselves conceded, with June, in
bluff-stickswoman mode, describing it in the sleeve notes of the 2008 reissue
as “shit” and Kate puzzling over what went wrong between the studio and the
pressing plant. But this blight is easy to ignore simply because of the album’s
sheer, ballooning fun. It featured ten originals plus a joyous and bouncy cover
of Piaf’s ‘Milord’ and the aforementioned Stones cover. ‘Satisfy’ is a sunny,
smutty slice of power-pop – a Girl’s Own ‘Orgasm Addict’ – which revels in
harmony and owes some debt to Blondie. The cheery whirl of ‘Foolish Girl’
explains their aversion to the rigid and joyless feminist ideals of the day
(“She was once a feminist, sharp and deadly was her kiss…”) with a spiralling
outro bass line that suggests the Mo-dettes were well attuned to ‘old-fart’
notions of making people want to dance.
While humour seemed to be their forte, it’s counterbalanced by the chilly dawn
fade-in of ‘Bedtime Stories’ and the melancholy précis of Piaf’s life in
‘Sparrow’.
It may well be an imperfect
album (the sped-up, charmless version of ‘White Mice’ (‘White Mouse Disco’)
that they were forced to include didn’t help matters), but for those of us who
were still unable to read our own names in 1980, it’s one of the few artefacts
of their sound we have. They did record three Peel Sessions, one of which can be heard here and includes ‘Norman
(He’s No Rebel)’, ‘Dark Park Creeping’, ‘Kray Twins’ and ‘Bitter Truth’. This
session undoubtedly produced more cocksure recordings (and is truly
representative of their sound, according to Jane and June) and there’s a
clarity in the production that’s lacking on the album, but then, the producers
and engineers at BBC Maida Vale were probably more used to dealing with bands
not solely comprising hirsute men, unlike Roger Lomas at the Coventry studio
who, according to June, seemed to think female musicians were mythical
creatures and treated them accordingly.
There’s also a live 7’ of ‘Kray Twins’
recorded at The Marquee in 1981. As it fades in, we hear Jane telling the
restless audience in her broadest west-Londonese, “That one’s about amateur
violence [‘Dark Park Creeping’] – now let’s have some professional violence”. The song, a downbeat blues narrative, is a
snapshot of the rise and fall of the East End ne’er-do-wells and was written by
Jane in early 1979 when she was still in Bank of Dresden. She said, “I was the
only female in the band and they actually asked me not to write any songs,
despite my enthusiasm. They only wanted a dumb blonde bass player.” Their loss: the smart blonde added a loafing
bass line and raspy half-spoken, half-scatted vocals, and with Ramona’s eerie
backing wails, produced a song transcending both its era and any popular genre
then or now.
June in 1980
No longer existing on snouts,
wits and grubby pound notes, the Mo-dettes toured Europe and America twice.
According to Ramona in Hot Love: Swiss
Punk & New Wave 1976-1980, highlights of their travels included being
run out of Orange County by local rednecks, wowing lesbian fans in the deep
southern states, guzzling LSD-laced blue punch by the turquoise waters of the
Tropicana’s pool in LA and endless nights at squat parties in Amsterdam. A
contemporary American fanzine said that live, the Mo-dettes looked like they
were “fighting with their instruments – and determined to win!”
Kate in 1980
While in New
York, they found time to sing backing vocals on John Cale’s ‘Fighter Pilot’
single from his album Honi Soit. But
the fun couldn’t last forever and in mid-1981, their record company decided
their coffers needed replenishing and put a gag order on the band’s individual
sound, demanding a bit of sugar-coated candy pop to sweeten an increasingly
bitter deal. Their next (and as it turned out, final) single was ‘Tonight’
released in July 1981. Much loathed by the band, the high-pitched girly harmonising
and forgettable safe melody of the song is the antithesis of their earlier
work: the difference between it and the mature froideur of ‘Sparrow’ and the angular nastiness of ‘Dark Park Creeping’
is the difference between chiffon velvet and the Rocky Mountains. The same
might be said of the band’s appearance on the single’s cover – a far cry from
the cool-as-fuck satin ‘n’ tat-clad dandettes of old, they lounge on a mountain
of plush, got up in velour, puffballs, spangled woollens and half a ton of blusher
each. Even Jane, as stylish as the decade was young, appears to have been
forcibly permed. According to June, they considered the single and accompanying
shoot nothing more than a joke.
Kate clearly worn out by the glamour of it all . . .
Two months later, in August
1981, Melissa Ritter joined on rhythm guitar, Decca having demanded the
Mo-dettes add more flesh to their agile sound. The group’s dynamic was now askew, and the first cracks appeared. In a Sounds
cover story back on 28 June 1980, Ramona and Kate had both expressed
reservations about their signing to a major, a situation June and Jane,
conversely, couldn’t have seemed happier about. Ramona had said she didn’t like
knowing exactly how the following two years of her life were going to pan out.
So it was perhaps no surprise that she was the first to decamp, in the winter
of 1982, citing Deram’s wilful neglect of them as her reason and leaving June
to sing from behind her toms until one Sue Slack took over vocal duties. Kate
was next to go, her initial worries about being manipulated by the strings of a
major (also aired in the aforementioned interview) seemingly confirmed. With
only half the original line-up now at the helm, the good ship Mode ran aground
in late '82.
A grass-roots revolution of
the like we surely won’t see again had offered these girls (and many more)
previously undreamt of opportunities – for making a living out of gut
creativity, travelling the world and treating others to the fruits of said
ideas. The Mo-dettes were, by their own account, out for a lark and would give it
up when the fun ceased – but to live the lark required a certain amount of
capital and their signing with a major seemed less a career move than a chance
to extend the fun. They cared about the music though, and wanted to be heard:
they didn’t, as Kate said to ZigZag
magazine in 1979, want to be a cult, and so they set about moving into the
slipstream of the mainstream. Despite this, their lack of careerism was
ultimately borne out by the fact that they stuck to their agreement to chuck it
all in when it stopped being a hoot.
Sun und fun
Perhaps that’s one of the
reasons behind their obscurity. It was the right time and they had a real cool
one - but their ardour for hedonism burned brighter than their ambition, unlike
many of their contemporaries, such as the Slits. Another reason for the
Mo-dettes’ continuing obscurity may be the ongoing erroneous belief in their
relation to modernists. For unlike Two-Tone’s still much-loved exuberant brand
of ska, new mod’s practitioners (Merton Parkas, Lambrettas), with their reputation
for po-faced fastidiousness, have not been looked upon with any such favour
(Paul Weller excepted) and are rarely played by all but their sharply-clad
devotees. Of course, being remembered may well be enough for the
former Mo-dettes. After all, by 1983, they’d already done what they’d set out
to do, have proof of the accomplishment and may feel no need to revisit the
graffiti-covered, booze-filled, fag-fugged rooms of their past.
The group’s ultimate
contribution to the world is a singular sound: they simply don’t sound like
anyone else. Dark and abrasive edges somehow sit happily alongside their bold
and rough ‘n’ cheery punky melodies. That they’re only ever compared (lazily)
to their stateside contemporaries The Go-Gos, whose twisted take on Californian
surf-pop had as many dark and abrasive edges as a multi-coloured beachball, is
basic proof for my money that they were a rare bunch. And the intervening decades have
been kind: their songs could be placed in almost any year since the ones they
were recorded. And while it’s less important, the same is true of their
appearance: their young selves could take to a stage in the gentrified badlands
of Dalston tonight and no one would peg them as time travellers from the early
years of Thatcher’s reign of terror. They never looked ‘seventies’ or indeed,
‘eighties’ in any way (save for the slapstick shoot for ‘Tonight’).
Faggin' around in London tahn: 1979
Though their legacy can
undoubtedly be heard in the pure indie fuzz-pop of C86 groups like The Shop Assistants and The Darling Buds, it’s difficult – not least because of their
obscurity - to make a case for the Mo-dettes as influential. If they were,
there’d be far more good bands on the underground circuit today than there are.
But if their legacy seems to have reached an impasse in the mid-to-late eighties, it may be all the better for
preserving their uniqueness.
Of her band’s place quiet but
sure place in the pop-cult pantheon, Jane : “Along with The Slits, to have been a genuine part of London culture – of British culture – whether it’s high or
low, is mind-blowing.”
"Tits have played a big part in history" - Leee Black Childers
In 2012, Leee Black Childers came to London to launch his book Drag Queens, Rent Boys, Pick Pockets, Junkies, Rock Stars and Punks (ah - My People!) He came armed with anecdotes and proved to be a fountain of Old Southern Charm. Below was a piece I wrote at the time for the London Festival Fringe. It was an honour to meet him.
Leee Black Childers 1972
When Leee Black Childers
first arrived in New York in the late 1960s, fresh from the simmering
backwaters of Kentucky, a cocky request for a cigarette found him looking
skywards: towering above him was a stack-heeled Amazonian disporting false eyelashes
like tarantula legs, hair an aureole of static-charged frizz. She was primed
with panstick and sleek with speed: his first NYC drag queen.
Jackie Curtis 1971
Leee’s entry into the
demimonde of the rotting core of the Big Apple led to his becoming the in-house
snapper at Andy Warhol’s Factory, and later vice president of David Bowie’s
Mainman company and manager of Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers (who he
brought to the UK to join the Sex Pistols on the 1977 Anarchy Tour). But in the
end, he was always spiritually solid with the anonymous outlaws scratching a
living in the anomalous, urban dead zones of London and New York.
In that respect, the tile of
the exhibition & book is somewhat misleading. While Childers has taken the
titular misfits as his subjects for over 40 years, the photos on display here
are largely comprised of the Warhol superstars, the key proto-punks (Iggy and
the Stooges, Patti Smith, the New York Dolls) plus Bowie, Debbie Harry and the
London scene of ’77.
Iggy 1973
Modest to the point of
reticence about his many achievements, Leee’s photos betray a stunning use of murky
light, composition and, of course, styling – none of which was born of anything
as quotidian as by-rote training: these were collaborations born of sulpahte,
sass and whatever satin and tat was to hand.The photos of the Factory drag queens stand out – particularly a 1970
shot of Jackie Curtis, a plush hussy half lit by a seedy neon dancehall sign,
cigarette in hand, hair the colour of dried blood, eyelids weighted with
glitter, her gossamer-thin mini-dress dress clinging to her padded contours.
Jayne County 1974
The proud and pugnacious Jayne County snarls at the camera, mimicking the heads
of two tiger rugs that flank her – she looks like their human equivalent, equally
fierce but with more Max Factor than fur. Patti Smith looks equal parts frail
and hard, her obsidian eyes ablaze in that solemn pale cameo of a face, and
Cherry Vanilla is depicted simultaneously enjoying cock and crack in an
eye-watering fashion.
Debbie Harry 1977
Bowie appears here on his
1974 Russian tour in all his haughty, androgyne glory. Childers had also been tour
manager for Iggy and the Stooges in 1972 and the images of the 23-year-old Iggy
perfectly stress his diamond-hard, glistening body aglow with sweat and sexual energy,
while the Stooges look like the most terrifying gang on earth. They had competition
in Bowery boys The Heartbreakers though, and the pictures of them in London display
a menacing vision of sexuality – Johnny Thunders couldn’t have looked as though
he gave a damn even if he’d tried. The other London pictures depict some
curiously cosy scenes: NME journalist Caroline Coon had half the punks in town
round for Christmas dinner in 1977, and it’s charmingly jarring to see Slits
guitarist Viv Albertine and Sid Vicious (with an acoustic!) lounging amid the throws and spider
plants of Coon’s living room like a pair of urchins who’ve broken into some bourgeois hippy's home and are taking a moment before going in search of the jewellery
and silver. A platinumed Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren overlook the brood.
Cherry Vanilla pipes up, 1976
There’s a grand portrait of chalk-faced Siouxsie, too hardened with
hauteur and high dudgeon to care that someone’s waving a lens in her direction and her polar opposite,
Debbie Harry, displaying the smiling, cocky, come-hither charm of the savviest
starlet in town.
Jackie Curtis 1970
Bowie on the Trans-Siberian Express 1973
Diabolical Angel: Johnny Thunders in London 1977
Hard Day's Night: sleepy rent boys, late 1970s
These kind of outlaws are harder to find in London or NYC today as the cancerous bloom of gentrification slowly seeps into every street and neighbourhood. But they’ll always be with us, skirting the Quicksand of the Everyday, outsmarting the Life More Ordinary – and Leee Black Childers’ subjects built much of that rocky road on which they wilfully walk.
Leee Black Childers. Born: Louisville, Kentucky 1945. Died: Los Angeles, California 2014.
This piece was originally published by London Festival Fringe in December 2012
With his broad-shoulders half lit by seedy neon and his facial
crags fleetingly illuminated by a shuddering Zippo flame, The Male Loner is
over-represented in film. Male collectivity was relatively rare in cinema until
all those bromance and buddy flicks came along to bore us the collective shit out of us. There always were exceptions of course – the films of Peckinpah, John Cassavetes’ 1970
film Husbands, queer cinema like Boys in the Band and certain war films and
westerns. But even the latter two tended to focus on a renegade soldier,
general or nameless vigilante rather than battalion banter or saloon
solidarity: the great rebel male goes it alone.
But with female characters, collectivity has been huge, whether in solidarity (Busby Berkley musicals, How to Marry a
Millionaire, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, The Group, Nine to Five, Thelma and Louise,
Steel Magnolias, Bridesmaids etc) or bitchery (The Women, Stage Door, Mean
Girls). The message has mainly been that men are self-reliant and women
co-dependent. But for every male outsider, whether it’s Mitchum, Garfield,
Brando, Dean, McQueen, Newman, DeNiro or Gosling, there’s always been a
straight-talking sister, rebel girl, lone lady, morose misfit and no-bull
broad. Some are cultural icons, some cult curios – and none of them need you or
anyone else.
Jessica Lange as Frances
Farmer in Frances (1982)
Ready for combat: Lange as Farmer
Of course, we’re dealing with the real life of an actual
flesh-and-blood outsider heroine here, as interpreted by Lange in an intuitive,
violent and sensitive performance. But this film, for all its flaws, liberties
and inaccuracies is how most people came to ‘know’ the tragic story of the ‘Bad
Girl of Seattle’ (this, or a later acquaintance with Nirvana’s In Utero and this song). But was Frances Farmer (1913-1970) bad? Or
mad? Clearly neither, but rather a gobby anomaly; a punk on remand at
Paramount, a leftist adrift in La-La Land, a foul-mouthed feminist who neither
knew nor needed that title. Few outsider heroines lived the nightmare like Farmer,
a misfit in every sphere: a socialist, atheist, intellectual teenage girl in
the 1930s, a Hollywood star who couldn’t stick gossamer glamour, publicity or
film-making, an off-Broadway actress used by producers to get backing for their
plays, an alcoholic on the run from the law and ultimately, a none-more-sane inmate
of a Dickensian asylum, locked for a half-decade in a primitive ward for the
incurably insane.
Frances Farmer in 1940
Lange takes Farmer from
stubborn schoolgirl to reluctant goddess to liquored-up firebrand to a hollow-eyed,
fragile matron clad in black as if in mourning for her ruined life. But she
also demonstrates that at every age, Farmer was a woman who clung with
white-knuckled fervour to her sense of self. When she fights with her vile
gorgon of a mother, with the police, paparazzi, psychiatrists or orderlies, I
think of the real-life 1943 newspaper reports from when Farmer was arrested in
downtown Los Angeles for violating her parole: “By all accounts, Miss Farmer
did not surrender peacefully.”
Farmer after her arrest in 1943
She survived her horrific years of unjust incarceration, but
returned to the bottle, which aided the creep of cancer which did for her at
the shockingly premature age of 56. Even if she did end up burned out on the
bonfire of idealism, Farmer had stuck to her guns even when they were turned to her temples (as Roger Ebert said of Frances: “It shows it’s possible for
everything to go wrong [in a life]”) – and she’s still cited today as a heroine
to thousands who’ve stuck to theirs in extreme adversity.
“Miss Farmer did not surrender peacefully . . .”
Solitary: Lange as Farmer
Sigourney Weaver as
Lt Ellen Ripley in the Alien Trilogy (1979, 1986 and 1992)
'nuff said
One of the greatest female characters in 120 years of
cinema, in any discussion about Ripley the Renegade it’s inevitable that some
purse-lipped sad-sack will point out that the role was originally written as a
man. So? And William of Orange was Dutch and spaghetti comes from China. The
fact is, the former Susan Weaver is
Ripley.
It would belabour a point to say too much about Ripley - reams
have been written on her unblinking militaristic gumption, seal-sleek skin aglow
with combat toil and the flames reflected in her incredulous eyes. Ripley’s not
fearless – but she is astonishingly brave. She’s as human as her nemesis is, um,
alien.
Nowhere is this better demonstrated that at the climax of the first film
of the trilogy, when tremulous with terror and her nerves ripped raw, she
steadies herself by humming the dulcet notes of a nursery rhyme while
clambering into her space suit in order to not alert the stowaway alien, who is
snoozing ’neath the pipes and no doubt dribbling acid.
She’s seen as the benevolent force in this haunted-mansion-in-outer-space
trilogy and is undoubtedly the one we root for. Yet in her own fashion, she’s
as much a lone killer and harbringer of destruction, carnage and death as is the
Alien Queen. And she battles alone:
her allies are always dispensable and it’s always just her and the descendants
of her original enemy, ultimately.
Thirty-five years on, and there have never been any serious
contenders for her crown (though in Aliens, Jeanette Goldstein’s ripped marine,
Vazquez, briefly made Ripley look like a Big Girl’s Blouse): no one else is fit
to wear her cracked-yet-impenetrable armour.
Jane Fonda as Gloria
Beatty in They Shoot Horses Don’t They? (1969)
Never no Glory
Sic transit Gloria
mundi. Fonda’s palpably bitter and sneering nihilist is the black heart of
this adaptation of Horace McCoy’s 1935 existential pulp novel about the
futility and grasping desperation of life. Gloria is one of many Depression-era
desperadoes seeking hope in eternally sun-dappled California. But circumstance,
the indifference of Hollywood and a belly rumbling like a boxcar force her to join
a dance marathon at the Santa Monica Pier ballroom in 1932.
Gloria is what Pollyanna the Glad Girl might have turned out
like had she been slung into reform school aged 11. She’s so bruised by life
and crackling with misanthropy that she cannot and will not trust another human
being. She’s an avowed loner. She’s not without mordant wit (“Maybe the whole
damn world’s just like Central Casting. They got it all rigged ‘fore you ever
show up.”) and almost smiles once, while relating to her dance partner a story
about a sick dog she once cared for. But then misery steals across her taut
features again as she recalls the hound’s painful fate. “Doesn’t matter,” she
snaps. “Forget it.”
Danse Macabre
By the last quarter of the film, Gloria is pantingly fierce:
her once smart, tight Marcel Wave - a symbol of putting her best foot forward -
has exploded into loose, crazed curls; her sleep-deprived eyes are angry and as
red as a sunset; her limbs look painfully lean; she looks like she smells of stale
sweat and Lucky Strikes, has rank breath and teeth fizzing with sugary corrosion.
She’s close to breaking but still takes no shit from anyone, least of all men.
She does give up - but arranges her own fate. And it’s equal parts cowardly and
brave, like most humans when faced with their mortality. Gloria’s not too
sensitive for this world – she’s too wise for it. She’s seen it writhing
bloodily with its skin ripped off and, in disgust, decides to leave it to the
foolish hopers.
Barbara Stanwyck as Lily
Powers in Baby Face (1933)
Hard-knock life for Lil'
A girl’s gotta live somehow. This Pre-Code Depression-era gritfest is a Stanwyck classic. Lily is a barmaid in her snake of a father’s
speakeasy in the soot-sodden steel mill hell of Pittsburgh: a city where the
streetlamps are lit at noon and hope is drowned in hooch. OK, so she shapes up
as a gold-digger, but the only other life she’s fit for is the horrid one she’s
trying to escape.
*Almost* a reason to put up with Pittsburgh
Her end goal isn’t really glittering mink and an Art Deco
Park Avenue duplex (though she gets these): it’s security, independence, autonomy.
With her background, the best she can hope for if she follows the path of
decency is one where she’ll be wasting her looks and wits in the boss’s outer
office, chained to the stenograph. Girls like Lily, then as now, will grab at
the first chance to be delivered from a lifetime of drudgery. Can you say you
wouldn’t do the same?
Lily’s dad offers his daughter to a corrupt local politician
in return for protection. She pours scalding coffee in his lap and says with
emasculating sarcasm: “Oh I’m sorry.
My hand shakes so when I’m near you!” Poppa’s still later explodes in his face
and after his funeral, Lily visits her crusty old mentor, who’s mad about
Nietzsche but also full of Puritan Homilies as dictated by Will Hays. He
declares she must go forth into the world and USE MEN – but with purity! With decency! Lily
lights her cigarette, looks up at him half in disbelief half in pity, and says:
“I got four bucks, where am I supposed to go, Paris?”
Chico and Lily: sisters under the skin
That city comes later. Now though, she and her fellow
barmaid Chico hitch a boxcar to NYC where Lily works and sleeps her way to the top
of a Wall Street bank. Soon, she’s incredibly gowned in Lucien Lelong, dripping
cabochon diamonds, her once soft, wholesome ash-blonde hair now undulating in
sculpted, metallic waves. She’s not hard-but-gooey-inside, like an over-chilled
soft centre - she’s hard, hard, hard all the way through, like school. You look
for flashes of conscience in vain for most of the film (not unusual in
pre-code). She moves from the boss to the boss’s son. She packs away half a
million dollars in jewels alone. One man loses his job, wife and family over her,
but she moves on with nary a backward glance.
Getting what you want . . .
One night he turns up at her
apartment begging for her love. She slams the door on him and tells her current
beau it was a telegram boy. But we root for Lily still. She’s a woman alone thinking
of her future – a thing she once didn’t have. She’s fiercely loyal to Chico (when
one lover says “Can’t you get rid of that fantastic black maid?” Lily snaps
“Chico stays!”) and later describes herself as having lost her kindness through
bitter circumstance and a need to survive, and if you didn’t already understand
her motives, you do then: dealt a bad hand, she reshuffled the deck.
Lily and Chico - make mine mink!
Sissy Spacek as Carrie
White in Carrie (1976)
The teenage years: a veil of blood and tears
I first saw Carrie when I was 12 and I was upset and scared in
equal measure. Upset because I too was as popular as the pox and had to admit
to myself that I identified with her (it’d be a few more years before I’d be able
to take the wind from my detractors’ sails by discovering I was actually proud to be the things they ribbed me
for) and scared because it suggested that perhaps, there were no happy endings
for misfits. I didn’t help that I read the Stephen King novel shortly after;
Carrie’s backstory broke my heart. King described the abuse and suffering heaped
on this innocent soul - from her grisly birth to her miserable demise - with an
extraordinary compassion (it’s a book that can make you a better person,
undoubtedly).
Spacek, who occasionally blots her copy book with luvvyish bull
about her profession, hit the nail on the head when she created a creature of
enormous sympathy in this freckled, folorn,
doormat-in-a-world-of-platform-heels. Unaccountably and very sadly, Carrie’s
actually a sweet girl, when you’d imagine her to be bitter as all get-out. Furthermore,
though Carrie is friendless, hurt, alone and regularly beaten by her religious
nut mother, she’s not quite beat. She
still tries, still hopes. She even tells her mother (played by defused former 1950s sex bomb Piper Laurie in a performance that seems designed for drag queen imitations) that she wants to “try and become a whole person before it’s too
late.” For this touching hope she gets a cup of coffee chucked in her face. But
she’s quietly rebellious – she tries to be that person.
" 'You're beautiful' said Tommy. She was."
And when she finally
gets what seems like her chance and is crowned Prom Queen, her vile classmates
drench her soft amber tresses and ivory satin gown in thick, unctuous, pig
plasma, skin and entrails. (In my alternate version, Carrie then licks her
lips, goes “Mmmm!”, then performs a full striptease, throwing her clot-covered
clobber at her enemies, piece by piece, before the carnage commences). She claws
at the air, looking like a horrific fire-and-brimstone drawing from an
illustrated version of the Old Testament. Then the hurt turns to rage. All
those years of never giving as good as she got have backed up and their force
when released is a veritable banquet of revenge. I smile when I see her
teachers and peers die screaming in flames, frying like meat or being mangled
in car crashes. Not that I’d wish this on anyone in real life, but Carrie
stands as a warning to all you bullies out there. We stride out into the world
with a little bit of hope, then you try and kick, beat and wrangle it out of us
for having had the audacity to be born different. It might look like you’re
succeeding, too. But one day, one day . . .
Carrie: wet nightmares
I had my own Carrie moment not long after I first saw it. A
porcine-faced school bully with a curiously wheezy, high-pitched voice (which
made him sound like Phil Mitchell being shagged with an outsize strap-on) poured
a can of Coke over my head at the bus stop in middle of town. Some kids
laughed, some adults tutted, but no one reproached him (guess he were just
dousing me in sugary slurp, not dumping a sow’s innards on me). After giving
him a hurt sideways glance as beads of brown liquid dripped from my eyelashes,
I opted for what I thought were a cool, slightly swaggering Outsider’s Retreat
(I’d also recently discovered the films of Steve McQueen & Paul Newman),
though I could almost feel my soul shrivelling with humiliation. The bully,
I’ve since heard, made a memorable appearance on a cable TV show called I’m So
Fat I Can’t Find My Penis.
Gena Rowlands as Gloria
Swenson in Gloria (1980)
Oh yeeeeeeah.
G.L.O.R.I.A! Anyone who knows me well knows that if this
list had order, Gloria would take Gold. As directed by husband John Cassavates,
Rowlands’s fast-talking, tough-walking, Virginia-Slim chuffing ex-moll, former jailboid
and unwitting mater dolorosa has
heart, soul and sass. She flexes her Joisey roots in her gravelly tones and
big, honeyed hairdo. She looks like a Gentile Lauren Bacall, or what Anne
Sothern might have ended up like had she not gotten into the movies.
Gloria: twice as fierce
Gloria’s neighbour keeps books for the mob, but has been
embezzling funds. They’re onto him, and he knows it’s curtains for him and his
family. So he sends Phil (John Adames) his youngest, round to Gloria’s apartment
down the hall. The gunshots ring out and Gloria and her solemn little soldier
are soon on the run.
Reluctant as hell, she hastily packs her kimono and pistol
and ushers herself and the kid down the back stairs through an atmosphere of
fear thick as smoke. You know she’s never again going see all the things that
have made her new life worth living – “My apoartment, my clothes, my shoes, my
friends . . . some”. But she does the right thing and the two of them blaze a
taut, fraught and deadly trail across Brooklyn, the Bronx and New Jersey
pursued by the Gloria’s old mob cronies through bars, flop houses, stations,
subways and crack dens.
Lioness of the Bronx
Gloria’s not maternal (“I was always a broad – never
could stand the smell of milk”) but what else is she doing but defending Phil’s
life to the death? It’s a tedious trope for tough-as-titanium female characters
to be revealed at some point as ‘vulnerable’, but Gloria never is (and who’d
believe it anyway?) What she is though, is compassionate.
Mobster’s Mistress turned Mother Courage.
Gloria’s not totally phlegmatic, and she clearly often feels
the total danger of her situation. But when she does, she stares it
dead.in.the.face. (The first time I saw this film on the big screen a few years
ago, the scene in which Gloria overturns an entire car full of macho hoods with
just a couple of shots from her gun had people punching the air and going
“WOOO-HOOO!”) She shimmies up and down crumbling stairwells and fire escapes, the
heartbreakingly sweet and wise orphaned Phil hiding in the folds of her skirt;
she holds up an entire apartment full of molls, whores and a well-armed
greaseball; she escapes from the enemy (again) on a crowded subway car, giving
her the best line in the film as she backs away from the train across the
platform, her teeth gritted, her eyes furious, gun held aloft: “Sissies! So you
let a woman beat ya, ha? Yer PUNKS!”
She does all of this in high-heels and with no help from a
soul. Even her natural allies – bartenders, hookers and waitresses, all fail
her. Time and again, she proves the fallacy of her own weary maxim that you
can’t beat the system. (When Phil asks her what ‘the system is’, she’s tells
him she’s no idea. “How d’ya know you can’t beat it then?” he says.)
I won’t spoil the ending of this film. (Though you may have
already seen it in Luc Besson’s Leon which had Jean Reno effectively in the
Gloria role and Natalie Portman in Phil’s.) Gloria itself was remade in 1999 with
Sharon Stone in the title role. Though Stone need not be in any way ashamed of
her performance, the film, like 99 per cent of remakes, was in no way necessary.
After Rowlands’ Gloria, any imitation could only ever be as pale as a Xerox of
a Xerox.
Gloria: smoke and mirrors
Thora Birch as Enid
in Ghost World (2000)
"Enid the Iconoclast!"
Enid the Iconoclast sounds like a superheroine by way of a
no-nonsense Northern dinner lady (and they’re
an imperious breed, let me tell you) but that’s what she is – or wants to be
(an iconoclast that is). The gap between what we are and what we hope to become
seems as narrow when you’re a teen as it does when you’re gallon drunk at a
much more advanced age. But you wouldn’t know it with Enid. She isn’t the first
bored, truculent and directionless teen who, finding her turn-of-the-century world
and peers lacking, seeks solace and identity in the sounds and looks of ’77.
In
her unlovely and lonely corner of an outer LA suburb, choked with neon and smog,
multiplexes and parking lots, her inability to relate to anyone of her
generation leads her to hook up with Steve Buscemi’s sad-eyed blues-loving fellow
loner, thereby inadvertently wrecking her own hopes of escape and his career in
the process.
Failed by her crypto-Republican
best mate Rebecca (a pre-peroxide Scarlett Johansson), confused by her feelings
for Seymour and believing she’s going to lose her kind, gentle father (Bob
Balaban) to his second wife, she finds solace in the memories of childhood as
prompted by a twee little 7-inch record. She’s only 18 and already looking back
rather than forward. But after getting caught up in a philistine scandal that
costs her the one chance of escape she had, she takes her destiny in hand and bravely
honours her dreams of leaving – alone.
When I first saw Ghost World I
thought they were trying to show us how punk Enid was by dint of her red-flag-to-the-mean-girls
name alone – I mean: Enid! But in America, Enid (and Thora) aren’t old ladies’
names as they are here on Airstrip One where “Enid, played by Thora . . .” reads
like a credit from Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads. On the other hand “Rebecca,
played by Scarlett . . .” puts us firmly in Red Shoe Dairies territory.
Hmmm.
Enid's World
Marlene Dietrich as Lola-Lola in Der Blaue Engel (1930)
File under 'legend'
The silk-stocking-and-suspender
clad thighs of the heartless Lola-Lola are ultimate emblems of the Weimar
Republic’s twilight years. Dietrich’s final film as a mere mortal (as opposed
to living legend) and her first film with Josef von Sternberg cast the Teutonic
goddess as a gleeful, natural saucestrel and anti-heroine. Her merciless destruction
of the middle-class, hypocritical, lascivious and ultimately pathetic Professor
Rath (Emil Jannings) is steady yet casual, malicious yet uncalculated. She’s
not after wealth or position. She marries Rath as an act of mockery; he has
little money and she knows that. The subsequent events suggest she’s avenging
her sex and class with her treatment of Rath.
Professor Beware
Strutting around on the
splintery stage of a smoky cabaret club in high-heels, frilly knickers and a
top hat, Lola has probably earned more free beer than cash in her working life.
Having no privileges, she’s created her own. She’s languid as a cat, and a
symbol of what the bourgeoisie fears the most: a sexual, sensual destructoress who
does not give a damn for you and your notions of what is Right and Proper and
does not crave your approval or way of life.
You just know she’s made for lust
more than love, and when she claims the opposite in that famous song, reclining
on that beer keg and flashing more close-to-the-border-flesh than Hollywood
would ever allow, those who aren’t spellbound are as dead as Prof Rath.
Pam Grier as Jackie Brown
in Jackie Brown (1997)
Brown: in the Driver's Seat
Tarantino’s tale of a lone, middle-aged air hostess on the
bottom rung of her profession was something of a departure for him. So much so
that some audiences baulked and walked due to the lack of choreographed
ultra-violence. But he seemed to realise that while sticking with a
tried-and-tested formula might bring simpler, straightforward success, it would
also lead to a far less interesting body of work. This is my personal Tarantino
favourite. It proved he could deliver trenchant, rounded characters just as
well as he could bruised fists, smoking guns and gushing blood – and that he was,
in fact, a great director of women.
Brown’s sensational and casually-worn sexiness seems to have
got her little materially, but it’s fed her self-assurance (or vice versa) and
given her the confidence to carry off her illicit yet unglamorous sideline -
until now.
Still, it’s a lonely life she leads and the pathos of her plight is
highlighted when we see her return to her touchingly modest apartment, grim in
its sparse neatness. It’s there that she and Robert Forster’s craggy-faced
ageing fox talk about the passing of their respective years, dreams and hopes, of
disappointments and arse-saggery. Brown doesn’t know what her future is going
to hold but she knows what she wants and likes – we can see that in the swooning
pleasure she takes in the sweetest soul music and her sensual enjoyment of a
slowly smoked cigarette. She’s the brains behind the film’s central scam and
fearless about executing it. She could lose her job, freedom or life in the
process, but she’s willing to take that tightrope over the quicksand of the
everyday. She’s cool as a julep whether being interrogated, held at gunpoint, stewing
in the pen or grabbing her rightful share of a fortune in a nail-biting heist.
Jackie on the lam
Even the one time she loses her cool she reverts to Coffy, doing the
motherfucking-finger-wagging-shoulder-shake and taking no prisoners. In the
end, she heads off into the sunset after stirring feelings in Max he clearly
thought he’d forgotten. She doesn’t beg him to join her – that’s not her style.
The kiss she gives him says enough. Her expression in the unbroken and lengthy final
shot as she drives away, silently mouthing the words to Across 110th
Street as it plays on her radio, is inscrutable.
Madonna as Susan in
Desperately Seeking Susan (1985)
Susan’s a drifter, a rock ‘n’ roll hobo, a Greenwich Village
gunslinger. She’s a playful, insouciant punk who smiles more than she sneers. Knows
exactly what she wants and takes it. In other words, Madonna playing a version
of herself at the time (hopefully, there’s no sequel in the offing – a yoga-mad
Susan looking like a walnut-filled condom would ruin the illusion beyond
repair). Susan has effortlessly turned her life into a vision of free-spirited
paradise as coveted by Rosanna Arquette’s Roberta who has ended up married
alive in the bourgeois graveyard of New Jersey’s moneyed suburbs.
Desert Island Shot
Susan blazes a casually chaotic trail across NYC, relying on
few and pursued by many – some with murderous intent. Like a man, she takes her
pleasures and vices more seriously than any of her emotions and is so funny and
sexy and she’d probably snub Madonna as too humourless and ambitious to be
interesting. Memorably yet stupidly described in one review as a
‘self-sufficient slut’ (which I think was intended to be a compliment), Susan
actually seems to reserve her heart (but not her body) for only one man -
Robert Joy’s runtish Jimmy.
'tude to spare - any takers?
Big-haired, bountiful of breast and never-knowingly
overdressed, every time she appears on screen, klieg lights seem to come on and
the poverty of the Soft Life roars at you. We’re all Roberta when we watch DSS
– misfits craving the slapstick sin of lawless Big City Life as made so damn
desirable by Susan. Only when you follow in her footsteps to a city of
warehouse apartments, dive bars and pulsing netherworld clubs where everyone’s
dressed like Someone Your Mother Warned You About will you feel this free.
Karen Black as Rayette
DiPesto in Five Easy Pieces (1970)
Trying to make a case for Rayette as any kind of feminist
heroine would be like trying to Instagram an avalanche. However, Black’s trashily
endearing turn here is justly revered – and it’s she who is the film’s ultimate
outsider, not Jack Nicholson’s class-tourist, Bobby.
As Bobby’s girl, sweet Rayette has ambitions
to move up in the world – something Bobby either can’t or can’t be bothered to
understand, having left behind his family of classical music geniuses for a
life as a drifting roustabout.
As a wannabe country singer and an
unselfconscious, coral-haired diner waitress (America’s equivalent of the
warm-hearted barmaid), Rayette was the start of something in the sense that
she’s the first in a line of Black’s carnal prole gals who cannot escape the
gravitational pull of their backgrounds, though they try with all their hearts.
Bobby treats her like the shit on his shoes for the bulk of this film, until he
perceives his Patrician family are judging her and does a volte-face, a rare
display of gallantry on his character’s part which seems to make Rayette’s
already swollen heart burst.
Bobby & Ray in one of those moments that Make Up For It All
She’s warm,
real, romantic, fun and loyal. She can be shit-sharp as a gangster, too: when
Helena Kallianiotes's verbally aggressive hippy responds to Rayette’s openness
and working-class charm by snapping “Hey – don’t call me honey, mac.” Rayette’s
eyes flame and she spits: “Don’t call ME mac - HONEY!” Nor is she above a bout
of red-blooded bitchery, sweetly saying to her classy yet cold love
rival Catherine (Susan Anspach) “That’s a lovely head of hair you’ve got -*beat*- natural?” She is a vulnerable soul, it's true, but outsiders are not amorphous in every trait –
they can be tender or tough.
Mia Farrow as Rosemary
Woodhouse in Rosemary’s Baby (1968)
Would he be really better off with his mother's eyes?
In this the Rolls Royce of horror films, Rosemary is manifestly not a
hard-drinking, tough-talking dame. She’s not scraping by on her wits and wiles.
Society at large approves of her; to all outward appearances, she and Guy (John
Cassavetes) are part of the Establishment. She’s so bourgeois she even gets in
a butler and bartender when she throws a party. But was there ever a woman more
alone in her singular terror?
After Old Nick has gotten into her knickers and her
strangulating foetus drains her of colour and comfort, each and every potential
ally is despatched, disabled or safely out in the Midwest. She is alone. She becomes paranoid. But that
doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get her. When the coven decide it’s safe for
her to venture out into the burning concrete jungle of high summertime New York and put a halt her suffering, Farrow’s beleaguered
gamin gets wise. Her stuttering, palpable jitters in that phone booth scene as she frantically tries to reach her doctor
are visceral – you can almost feel the pure fear oozing from her pores and
seeping all over her body like icy water (“Witches, witches all of them witches
. . .” she giggles to herself maniacally).
And like in every smudgy coloured
nightmare you’ve ever had, every situation she now finds herself in seems to
have four brick walls and no door. But ‘poor’ Rosemary? Never! As the net
closes in on her and the hour of birth draws near, she goes down fighting,
screaming, distracting, running, door-locking and tranquiliser-dodging. She is dogged, now beyond fear.
"You look like a piece of chalk, Ro"
At the end, as
she enters a room full of gleeful sherry-sipping Satanists, carving-knife in
hand, to stake her rightful claim on her newborn son, she’s throwing down the
gauntlet. Maternal feelings overcome ones of revulsion because Rosemary knows
however bad his dad might be, he’s also as good as her at her best, too, isn’t
he? (Isn't he?)
Carol White as Joy in
Poor Cow (1967)
"A lady? Perhaps, I may be . . ."
White embodied the lot of the proletarian princesses of
Swinging London. Predictably, she was thus saddled with epithets like “The
Battersea Bardot” - hijacked by Oi band Cock Sparrer for their tribute to White
- and “The Working-Class Julie Christie”, as if she was worthy only through
comparison (imagine anyone calling Julie Christie “The Middle-Class Carol
White”). For while the well-heeled SW3 sorority - Christie, Judy Geeson, Suzy
Kendall, all so sunny and insouciant where White was forlorn and resigned -
were free to indulge in Pilled-up sex as their Baby Boomer birthright and
suffer little or no consequence or judgement, White’s girls only had to take
the most tentative walk on the wild side before finding themselves up the duff,
up the aisle or up shit creek PDQ. Joy will never cross the river to Chelsea
– she’ll always be too busy putting her little cherub to sleep with the aid of
milk and alcohol or washing the Battersea soot from her yellow hair with Lux
flakes.
Joy & Son: room and bored
Joy is simple, straightforward and lonely, a bit of a
drifter. Her husband is doing 12 years in Wandsworth and alone with her baby
son, she hooks up with Terence Stamp’s ebony-haired, tender-but-bad boy. He’s
in the same business as her jailbird spouse, and it’s a lifestyle she casually accepts
– the stolen jewels he brings to a bleary-eyed Joy after a night-time robbery
delight her in the most casual manner. Such are the material blessings that
light up her existence. No matter how many shifts she spends getting varicose
veins behind the local bar or how many shivery hours she spends ‘modelling’ in
front of a sweaty lecher’s film-free camera, she’d only ever have the shillings
for paste imitations.
A smashing bird under sooty skies
Now and then, she’s radiant with hope. Yet the forlorn look
in her eyes – even when she’s smiling – always hints at some inevitably bleak
and hopeless destiny. She always seems soft, whereas girls like Joy are often
bruised early by experience, and it shows in their flinty faces. But Joy’s a
romantic soul, too suffused with dreams of something better so that she floats
above the rocks. She delights in sexual pleasure and is frank about it, telling
her equally hard-up, more practical mate Beryl that “I couldn’t go professional
– I enjoy it too much.”
Battersea Bardot
Her beauty is a casually worn one, forever on the verge
of being slatternly: chignon always falling apart, badly-bleached hair in need
of a root-job, mascara collecting sootily in the corners of her eyes. These
looks are Joy’s only passport to a better life, and you just know they’re going
to expire. It’s a fleeting, early-blooming beauty, one that will run to
colourless, fat cheeks on a steady diet of white bread, too-sweet tea, gin
& orange squash and John Player’s Specials. When Joy says to herself
“Whoever heard of girls like me making it?” the pathos in her voice is
heartrending – for this is barely an act; the thought has probably passed
through her mind daily since she first realised she’d be looking out over
weed-choked bombsites all her young life.
Jane Fonda as Bree
Daniel in Klute (1971)
Fonda as Bree: a vision of urban alienation in shiny boots of leather
Klute is a favourite film of mine, the unjustly and
bafflingly least known of Alan J. Pakula’s early 1970s ‘Paranoia Trilogy’. I
love Klute as much for the stomach-tensing murk and menace of the setting and
mood as for Fonda’s portrayal of this none-more-conflicted and unflashy prostitute
being stalked by a psychotic ex-john.
A loner in the head-down urban jungle of
noirish early seventies NYC, Bree is one of its many working girls – but none
can match her for oddness. She’s not eccentric, just strange - and anomalous in
every sphere of her life. You can tell by her accent, the books she reads, her
methods of relaxation (a joint, a kaftan and a gospel standard) that she’s of
middle-class extraction, probably a college graduate and that her family, if
she has any, know nothing of her current life or the peril she’s in.
She’s more
solitary than social: we only seeing her letting loose when she goes on a
three-day drug binge to forget the horror of her situation, dancing to high-octane psych-soul with Candy Darling. Even her threads set her apart from
her fellow hookers (“Yeah. She used to dress the way you do” smirks Shirely
Stoler’s madam as she looks over Bree’s East Village roll-neck and mod mop).
Humiliated
at model castings (“She’s got funny hands”) and acting auditions (“Interesting
accent – we’ll let you know”), the uncomfortable irony is that’s she only in
control when she’s turning tricks: “For an hour, I’m the best fuck in the
world”. No wonder she’s so neurotic and throws away half her earnings on shrink
sessions.
"I guess this will amuse you . . . I'm - I'm afraid of the dark."
When she meets Donald Sutherland’s gauche, lonely private investigator, John Klute, she first snubs him as a “Goddamn hypocrite square”, then takes his virginity.
In return, he gradually gives her love and understanding. And against her will she finds herself responding. They are both outcasts on opposite sides of the
law, but equally, neither have a place in ‘respectable’ society. Still, there’s
no danger of Klute threatening Bree’s independence; her succinct take on the normal
life that marriage represents are an outsider classic: “Setting up home? Darning
socks? I’d go mad.”