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MARY WORONOV
One of the revelations of the recent flood of restored early Warhol films is Mary Woronov's Screen Test (1964), the first title in her official filmography. Warhol reportedly shot as many as 800 of these four-minute close-ups, instructing his subjects not to talk or blink. Some like Susan Sontag look stoic and sad under the camera's relentless gaze; others like Edie Sedgwick appear frightened as their mask of perfection starts to crack. But Woronov reacts quite differently to Warhol's casual sadism — leering, smirking, tossing her head with lusty abandon, in a sense forcing the camera to blink. Her sheer intensity in a confined space, her refusal to be intimidated even for four minutes by Andy Warhol, set the pattern for her cinema career. With her geometric face, husky voice, and droll-dominatrix look, Woronov mesmerizes in small roles in major films and big roles in marginal ones.
Born in Florida in 1943 (or 1946; sources differ), Woronov had ambitions to be a painter, but after meeting Warhol and getting involved with the Theatre of the Ridiculous in the early 1960s, she abandoned painting for the more visceral pleasures of avant-garde cinema and theatre. (She would later return to painting.) Roger Corman's films occupy a cultural space not far from Warhol's factory, and for Woronov it wasn't a stretch to go from the treacherous Hanoi Hannah in The Chelsea Girls (1966) to the murderous Calamity Jane in Death Race 2000 (1975) or the gorgeous, evil principal Miss Evelyn Togar in Allan Arkush's Rock and Roll High School (1979). "It was just like Warhol," she said of working in Corman's New World. "Very cheap, brilliant people working for nothing, bizarre material, the tackiness of the sets." In the incestuous manner associated with Corman and his army of proteges, she teamed up with Death Race 2000 director Paul Bartel for a feature Corman refused to finance, Eating Raoul (1982), a cult classic that showcased Woronov's irresistible mix of the ironic and the iconic.
ROCK AND ROLL
Allan Arkush's anthemic Rock and Roll High School (1978) is a direct descendant of, and made for much the same reasons as, Corman's early forays into the genre, Rock All Night (1956) and Carnival Rock (1957). According to Corman, he asked Arkush to make a film called Disco High to cash in on the disco craze, but yielded to Arkush's better judgment when told that "disco" was taboo in punkier circles as a degraded, effete version of rock.
Rock and Roll High School
Rock All Night has the desperately hurried — make that immediate — feel typical of Corman's early work, and no wonder: screenwriter Charles Griffith rewrote most of it in two days when told that the film's centerpiece, the doo-wop group the Platters, would not be available for more than a couple of songs. The film features fine versions of those songs, along with sizzling rockabilly numbers by a now forgotten band, the Blockbusters. Outstanding performances by Dick Miller and Mel Welles (as a Lord Buckley clone) distinguish the film, but the drama is foregrounded to the music, and the atmosphere is black-and-white cramped, as if the characters are aware of their brief existence in a low-budget film. Carnival Rock also subsumes the music to the melodrama. This impoverished remake of The Blue Angel is awash in Method acting but has its own downbeat charm largely due to the always underrated Susan Cabot, who brings her unique air of pervasive sadness to the proceedings.
Rock and Roll High School differs seriously from the Corman antecedents. The film has a cheery buoyancy and a safe anarchic feel that reflect the optimism of both its then-novice filmmakers and the time in which it was made. The existential anxiety and black humor of Corman's ‘50s films is missing; New World's typical antiauthoritarianism is here in diluted form, the blatant references to such pesky problems as third world revolutions (The Hot Box) and a racist, sexist justice system (every women-in-prison movie) replaced with good times and the Ramones' gritty brand of rock 'n roll. The conflicts are played strictly for laughs, with the blowing up of the school a comic diversion and even the sadistic Miss Togar (Mary Woronov) barely able to suppress a grin as she's dispensing her evil.
THE PHILIPPINES
Cinematically speaking, America's relationship with the Philippines stretches back almost to the beginnings of film; according to Pete Tombs in Mondo Macabro, "two American-financed films about nationalist hero Dr. Jose Rizal appeared in the same week in 1912" at Manila theatres, while by the 1920s, ghost stories and fairy tales were a staple of Philippine cinema. If early entrepreneurs were attracted by the country's heroic tradition and its rich folklore, later arrivals like Roger Corman and his New World Pictures proteges could not resist the low wages, "exotic" backgrounds, and the ability to stage elaborate and sometimes dangerous scenes without the pesky presence of a union rep.
Corman's entree to the Philippines came through exploitation actor-turned producer John Ashley, whom he visited on the set of Beast of the Yellow Night (1970), an Eddie Romero film that New World would pick up for distribution. New World's third release, Jack Hill's The Big Doll House (1970), was the first of Corman's productions to be shot in the Philippines and, grossing $3 million on an investment of $125,000, one of its most successful.
 The Hot Box  |
Some of the success of this and subsequent films like Hill's The Big Bird Cage (1972) and Joe Viola's The Hot Box (1972) was due to their look. Grindhouse patrons were used to dark lighting in their exploitation, which could handily disguise a threadbare set or suggest more action than was really occurring. But New World's Philippino films were positively expansive by contrast, with gorgeous tropical backgrounds, native actors, realistic settings, and supremely, the brilliant light of the Philippines. Even the "darkest," most fetishistic scenes — and the films had plenty, including s&m torture and an early female mud-wrestling sequence — had a brightness and luster not often seen in the genre. And stunts were never a problem. As Hill said in Fangoria magazine, "If they want to have a man on fire, they just set a guy on fire who'll try and jump into the water as quick as he can."
Inevitably, production costs rose and Philippinos got tired of being set on fire, and by 1975 Corman had retreated entirely to the United States, where he began the second phase of New World working with talents like Joe Dante, John Sayles, and Allan Arkush.
TITS-AND-ASS FEMINISM
"Exploitation of male sexual fantasy, a comedic subplot, action and violence, and a slightly left-of-center subplot … and then frontal nudity from the waist up, total nudity from behind, no pubic hair, and get the title in the film somewhere and go to work." That was Corman in 1972 explaining to director Jonathan Kaplan the formula for the "nurse" film that he would be directing (Night Call Nurses). Is Corman's precise formula, which is worked out almost mathematically in many of the pictures his proteges made for New World Pictures, incompatible with the view of the company as proto-feminist?
 The Arena |
Corman's own oeuvre provides some pointers in this area. While the period in which he worked allowed little of even the kind of playful nudity of '70s New World films like The Student Teachers, The Arena, or Death Race 2000, a fetish — we must call it that — for female sexuality and especially dominant women runs throughout his career, appearing in the violent, sexy babes of Teenage Doll; the frenzied anima figures from the Poe films (cf. especially the murderous Madeline in House of Usher); and the beautiful, tormented Susan Cabot in a number of roles. New World's nurses, teachers, female convicts and bikers, and stewardesses fighting "the establishment" and dispatching errant boyfriends, doctors, policemen and other patriarchal symbols are simply a variant and update of the powerful, rapacious women of Corman's own films.
If we accept the idea that showing women expropriating male roles and making their own choices is inherently feminist, New World certainly qualifies, with the company's antiauthoritarian strain bolstering the argument. But the films' political leanings go largely unnoticed by its young male target audience, who are mesmerized by the sea of tits and ass that flows through the company's roster. The fetishized feminism of New World primarily feeds the male spectator's fantasies, but the clever Corman ultimately has it both ways. In his peculiar egalitarianism, he presents the fetish in all its glory and then undermines it for those who care to notice.
January 2000 | Issue 27
Copyright © 2000 by Gary Morris
ALSO: A 1974 interview with Roger Corman and Dancing with Werewolves: John Sayles in Roger Corman's Hollywood
PLUS: More exploitation cinema
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