Those Sexsational Sexploitationaries

FAROUK UNIVERSITY

Directed by

Thomas Alderman

The title’s a double-entendre for sure, as in “Farouk U” and King Farouk, last of the debauched Egyptian kings, pre-Nasser-wise. Extensions include Burroughsian Arab fantasies, syphillitic narcosis in the casbah and other trans-cultural necrophiliac turnons.

x Things start okay with a surprise cameo appearance by Lyndon Baines himself, doing the Eisenhower reversal move by becoming president of Farouk U. The school opened, Lyndon tells us, when Ali Baba Schwartz, inventor of Preparation Asp, was crushed to death between the humps of a camel in the annual Shriners parade... he left his considerable fortune to carry on the tradition.

Action takes place at Kappa Frig Kappa/Thi Beta Thi, a coed fraternity/ sorority house featuring housemother Tempest Lavern, a red-headed gamey Ann-Margaret caricature who “retired from show-biz a step ahead of the vice squad.”

“Somebody say something about me? I hope it was dirty,” says Tempest. You remember Tempest — one of her best known roles was Nude Nurse, in which she gave her body to an army of lepers in the climactic opening scene.

The two lead characters have a difficult time adjusting to life the coed bacchanal. Diane Patton plays Virgie Summers, daughter of a defrocked priest wbo left her $40 million with one stipulation: she had to be a virgin until age 21, and was inspected annually to verify her chastity.

Then there’s Graham Williams (credible performance by Bob Guthrie) as a divinity student. Graham’s really a charmer since he looks like a doublesized Dick Cavett. He’s shocked to find an orgy going on when he enters the house, and more shocked when he passes the bubble-gum machine that dispenses birth control pills: “Have a ball, not a baby.” He is almost immediately raped by Tempest, and he suffers much guilt. He goes to see the campus minister, a Rabbi, who reassures Graham that “it’s okay to eat anything as long as it’s not pork.”

Pretty neat parallel plot development. Virgie loses her cherry to Graham. And the fathers of the Church of the Holy Grabbers, Graham’s denomination, cut off his scholarship money to go to Mexico to mow poppy fields.

To raise the $8,000 Graham needs to stay in school, the brothers and sisters have an alumni day benefit featuring famous grads of Farouk U. The first, “a lady big in every dimension,” is none other than the widow of Ali Baba Schwartz, and the ugliest mass of swollen burpoid flesh you’ve ever seen. Half a dozen convention types, drunk and horny as they sat next to us, groaned “Oh Christ!” in unison at the sight of Mrs. Schwartz.

Then there’s Major Sanders, the fried chicken magnate who gets some implicit head from Tempest after her boob-wiggling striptease; Stoney Akers, Tempest’s co-star in “Two Men and A Horse” (remember the gang-bang scene?); and, of course, the remarkable Ace Holey, aviation expert who later meets his demise on a mountain top after attempting to fuel his plane with cheapo gin.

Let’s not forget Sod O. Mia, campus hero. He met his downfall in a relay race when his teammate grabbed the wrong baton! The guy who once took on and knocked up the entire girls’ basketball team in one outburst of passion now stands stooped and emaciated, like a tall Arnold Stang.

The toppef'of them all is none other than Dr. M. DeSade, famed gynecologist and Certified Public Accountant, as well as resident instructor in advance sex at F.U. The highlight of the benefit was the DeSade Dance Co.’s showstopping version of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” a collage of flags, breasts and buttocks, with DeSade leading the troupe in straw hat and dinner jacket. Dr. DeSade’s latest contribution to human sexuality is the ultimate birth control device: peanut butter.

Alas, our heroine’s getting uptight about losing the $40 million. Tempest, as understanding a house mother as a girl could ask for, enlists the aid of De. DeSade to perform the world’s first hymen transplant and thus fool the examiners.

In a hospital scene that comes off like a joint spoof of Love Story by Mad and Screw, Virgie, about to die from complications, urges Graham to take her to the window for a final look “at our lovely valley” — actually, the middle of a smog filled industrial park. She breaks into song, as she often does in emotional moments, doing a ’50’s doo-wop style death-rock move reminiscent of a demented Chantels. She falls out the window of Connie Lingus Memorial Hospital. Graham rushes to her, she finishes her song, and dies. -

The finale is a somber funeral scene, with the Topless Tabernacle Choir singing and Graham giving the oration. “He who is without sin, Let him cast the first stone,” says Graham. He’s hit by a rock in a really well-timed slapstick variation that’s funny indeed. Major Sanders, who has donated 1000 sets of braces to hunchback prostitutes in Karachi, agrees to build the school a new wing. And Virgie rises to heaven from her coffin, again a great visualization of the standard death-rock final chorus.

Of course it’s a dumb movie, but not without is saving graces. Actually, Farouk University is part of the growing genre of half-assed skin-flicks, like Monique, Camille 2,000, Cry Uncle, or the R-rated Big Doll House, careless low-budget jobs with lots of breasts, silly sight gags, and sillier dialogue, riddled with double-entendres, puns and outright crudeness. The camera work stinks, the photography is erratic and certainly without depth or technique, but you weren’t expecting Fellini when you bought your ticket, right?

Nevertheless, certain spoofings here are clever, such as the many less-thansubtle Love Story riffs. The acting is generally better than most films of this type, even if most of the roles are little more than cardboard.

Death in Venice it ain’t. It’s also probably not as boring. Don’t spend your last two bucks on Farouk U, but there’s not much more to lose. One warning — there aren’t any genitals swinging loose at all, and not even any really explicit sex scenes — it’s all waistups, around the buttocks, and your imagination. That being so, this film may not be suitable for true deviates of any stripe. Raincoat and umbrella not required.

Wayne Robins

TITS

by Larry Rivers

Larry Rivers of the fleecywhite cutout clouds and the sense of humor cutouts and -ins, school of. Tangential Popart, of trombones and swings and women high, high in the loft. . . well, he’s made a movie, too. Nof the ordinary poohbear variety, dedicated to story hour morals and the usual heavyhanded schlock which people are always trying to tell us our dreams are made of (whew). . . no. Here is a delightful travelogue/documontage report in the first personal-eye on Tits. This is, as the best art always is, both more and less than the ordinary: a woman who has trained her jungle-plumage parrots to gently nibble grapes off her bare nippies as she lies on a divan, explaining to the camera that she does not find this a sexual turn-on; a woman in a silver mask and bared bosom showing off her breast inserts, shaking the now-perfect twin heaps of golden wheat for the final proof of firmness and contour; a small entr’acte, a young man showing off his bare tits and getting involved with a bunny rabbit . . . and various other home movie humoresques, some in color and some in black-and-white.

Th6 merit in the ‘new’ subjective journalism depends on the ability of the journalist; we are fortunate that the subject of Tits has had Mr. Rivers as one of the scoop reporters.

To see the movie in your home town: demand the movie as a prize in the plaid stamps gift catalogue; as the prize at your local gas station’s beweekly ripoff lottery; as a replacement of the local TV network’s ‘serious cultural affairs’; maybe as a substitute for the Pristine ad.

Lita Eliscu

PRAISE MARX AND PASS THE AMMUNITION

Directed by Maurice Hatton

There are films that aren’t really good films, or even influential films, but which are necessary films. If you believe, as I do, that the general course of world cinema during the Seventies will be a search towards a socialist — or at least a political — cinema, than it follows that there will be certain experiments that must be tried, even if they fail. The mock epic, to give only one example, is such an experiment, and if, to me, both Catch-22 and Little Big Man fail, I still consider them necessary failures, necessary films. If you make movies or write about them or just think about them and where they’re headed, the Nichols and Penn films stand as reference points. Some people, of course, think one or both succeed; some think they fail because of particular mistakes made by their directors; some think they prove the mock epic unviable in anybody’s hands — but no matter what you think, Catch-22 and Little Big Man are at least there. Seen. Existing. Available. Reference points. Necessary ones.

Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about a British film I saw two years ago at the New York Film Festival called Praise Marx and Pass the Ammunition, a first feature by Maurice Hatton, because it is, to me, a necessary film although pretty much a failure. It’s a large reference point in my head but not as large a point as I’d like it to be in conversation because only about five people I know showed up for its matinee showing during the festival’s worst timeslot. And I feel funny writing about it because it’s not available in America and is unlikely ever to be; the independent distributors I’ve spoken to say “it stinks” or “it’s awful” when I bring it up — and I don’t blame them because they’re at least half right. People, most people anyway, want to go and see a good movie, and there are very few crackpots like me willing to spend an evening with a necessary failure.

But then there are very few people in. general who want to see any revolutionary cinema, and it is the recognition of this situation which l^ads to why Praise Marx is such an interesting film. I mean it’s easy to see that Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Marie Straub and other revolutionary directors are performing mind-blowing cinematic experiments, but how many outside the intelligensia see their films? Certainly they’re not reaching the “masses” with which their movies are so incessantly concerned. And it’s a bit of a cop-out to say that that’s because we’ve all been brainfucked by 50 years of “bourgeois” form: Are we going to wait another 50 until the mass audience is ready for Godard? We want a revolution now, right?

So here was/is the paradox of Praise Marx and Pass the Ammunition. It was/is the first English-language commercial feature ever made which is clearly “Marxist” — not vaguely radical like (for example) Lindsay Anderson’s If. . . — but Marxist, Marxist-Leninist. And yet it is probably the most conventional first feature made by a British director in a decade — almost a relief from all of the obscenely “visual” pyrotechnics from England’s new filmmakers. It is, indeed, little more than an illustrated script; take away its verbal audacity and you might as well be watching a television dramatic show.

When it came out one of my favorite critics, Robin Wood, dismissed it as an Ealing comedy, Ealing being the studio that made Alec Guinness vehicles like The Lavendar Hill Mob and The Man in the White Suit. For once, Robin missed the point. Hatton really wanted to reach the people by presenting revolutionary content in the most palatable form possible, and he was well aware of the internal contradictions inherent in this approach — as proven on two occasions in the film when he begins scenes with direct cuts to (1) Cuban newsreel footage, and (2) Eisenstein’s Potemkin. No, Hatton is saying, Praise MarX isn’t either of those; it’s a conventional film in format. Unfortunately, therein lay its defeat; it wasn’t even a commercial success because it was too conventional. “Ahead” of its audience politically, it was “behind” it visually. Perhaps Andrew Sarris is right: Only those who risk the ridiculous ever achieve the sublime.

The film traces the progress of a young Marxist-Leninist in London of 1968. Before the events of May in France, he and his revolutionary cell concentrate on “Third World” action; after May, he — but not his colleagues — becomes convinced that revolution is possible in his own, highly industrialized, country. Accused of developing a personality cult, he is being “tried” before the party’s kangaroo court when he is saved by the wits of a very sharp female comrade.

Praise Marx has numerous small triumphs, particularly in casting. John Thaw, as the protagonist Dom, has that brand of narcissism at once very “masculine” yet completely non-physical which is found in many young revolutionaries. The other cell members, blacks and orientals all, display a certain absurd seriousness common to those who have to over-corn pensate for society’s neglect. The film’s wry, betimes satiric look at its own characters is a measure of its honesty: there can be little doubt that Hatton’s sympathies lie with his people.

“Honest,” “measure,” “feeling” — I’m afraid that these are the words that come to mind, for in a larger sense the film bores, especially in comparison to a film with a similar story-line, Godard’s La Chinoise. Thus: the verbal diarrhea which characterizes some revolutionaries is presented, but without the poetic, almost incantory charge achieved by Godard. A scene in which Thaw must sacrifice humanistic impulses in favor of the larger revolutionary program — he has to torture a man and get information — seems child’s play compared to Anne Wiazemsky’s killing of the wrong guy in Chinoise.

And so Hatton over-calculated in favor of safety and convention, and failed. In the end, Praise Marx and Pass the Ammunition turns out a film of irony rather than poignancy, atmosphere rather than ambience. But I wish it were around, because I think it would give a lot of filmmakers and film critics ideas, if only in reaction against it. It’s a necessary film, a reference point. But I’ve said that already.

Stuart Byron