Sextette (1978): When Mae West bagged James Bond

Sextette (1978)
dir: Ken Hughes

Today, Last Vegas is released to theaters around the country. I support seeing Last Vegas over Ender's Game, but why not try out this...er...classic!

Last Vegas is a movie about a 69 year old man going on one last bender with his other old male friends before he marries some young 20-something girl. Sextette is about the attempted honeymoon of an 83-year-old woman just after she marries a 32-year-old future James Bond. Last Vegas is about four old men who are recapturing their youth by completely objectifying women and viewing them exclusively as sex objects. Sextette is about one old woman who seems to think she never lost her youth and views men as sex objects. Last Vegas deals in cliches that had been worn out 20+ years before it had been made. Sextette deals in cliches that had been worn out 30+ years before it had been made. Last Vegas is a star-studded event. So is Sextette.

The parallels are astounding.

Sextette is a one-last-fling vehicle for Mae West, who really wanted to recapture the innocently risque style that defined her career. Supposedly inspired by Mae West's 1926 play Sex, for which she had been arrested, Sextette has nothing in common with that earlier piece of then-provocative work. Sextette casts Mae West as the Hollywood sex symbol Marlo Manners, whose theme claims her to be the "female answer to Apollo!" Marlo just got married to British Lord Barrington (Timothy Dalton, 2 years before Flash Gordon, and 9 years before James Bond) and is trying to have a peaceful sexy honeymoon in a busy hotel that is hosting top international diplomats and a generic American athletic team.

Of course, Marlo hasn't retired yet. Dom Deluise is her semi-agent who whores her out to politicians and arranges things with the "Studios." She has to go through wardrobe and do screen tests, and hook up with an ex-husband while also trying to save a cassette tape of her memoirs. Oh, and fawn over the athletic team.

The thing is, Sextette is a Broadway musical with trampy jokes that play to the cheap seats. And, it is also a zany screwball movie with very little energy for screwball. Think Oscar, but slowed down by a factor of 20. The opening theme is just a theme, but then it launches into a big grand happy-as-hell number of Hooray for Hollywood, where Mae West is not singing or dancing, but merely answering questions like "How do you like it in London?" "I like it any place I can get it."

Several of Mae West's ex husbands are also in the hotel. Her 3rd ex husband Sexy Alexei is some Russian consulate played by Tony Curtis. Her fourth ex-husband is also the director of her new film, who is present for her screen test...and is played by Ringo Starr. Her 5th (and last husband before James Bond) is presumed dead, but ends up played by George Hamilton.

Keith Moon plays the gay dress designer on speed. Alice Cooper plays a feel good piano-playing bellhop. Regis Philbin cameos as himself. Yeah, I can't make any of this up.  The casting is as mind-bogglingly strange as you can imagine.

But, what makes this movie so adorably bizarre is that everybody is throwing themselves at Mae West, much like everybody throws themselves at the old dudes in Last Vegas. And, I mean, everybody. The American Athletes are fawning over themselves to pose with Marlo Manners. All of the politicians have had sex with Marlo. Her ex-husbands are still obsessed with Marlo. She has an outrageous duet with James Bond singing Love Will Keep Us Together. She's the woman every man wants for their own.

Unfortunately that is somewhat of a disconnect because poor Mae West has had gallons of makeup plastered to her that gives her face an unnatural ghostly pale look that even is contrasted to the rosiness of her neck and bosom. Mae West is constantly deathly pale and shot in focus soft the sets frequently looks blobby.

Is Sextette good?  Not in the traditional sense. It's something that must be seen to be believed. Mae West has done much better work in her youth, and even her turn in Maya Breckinridge is much more inspired than this swan song vehicle. But, at least Mae West has agency to sleep with anybody she wants...unlike Last Vegas, where women only exist to be fucked.

I Spit On Your Grave (1978): Woman as Victim and Victor

I Spit On Your Grave (1978)
dir: Mier Zarchi

In 1978, a movie was self-distributed titled Day of the Woman.  Later, it was picked up for slightly wider distribution, and re-released as I Spit On Your Grave. The impact of this film was both solid and null, thanks in large part to its graphic nature. Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel rallied against this movie, calling it depraved, and immoral.  They considered the violence to be purely exploitative, and just as damaging to women due to their perception of the exploitative nature of the rape.  They were wrong. Maybe.

I Spit On Your Grave is one of the most disturbing and harrowing movie experiences one could find.  I remember the first time I encountered the movie.  In my film class, we had just finished watching Last House on the Left, the old Wes Craven rape-revenge movie that Americanized and politicized Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring.  I had commented that Last House wasn't as shocking or brutal as I had been expecting, and was softened by the comic relief of the police, the hick music, and that the torture was way more psychological than I had been expecting; the result of the politicization of the subject matter.  My professor handed me a semi-bootleg of I Spit On Your Grave, and this had been the movie I had been expecting.

I Spit On Your Grave is a raw, amateur rape-revenge movie that does not flinch from nor does it glorify the act of rape.  It is a 100-minute movie, but it has no plot development beyond big city female author comes to backwoods, gets gang raped, and exacts bloody revenge.  But, the tonality of the film sets it apart from other files of its ilk, like Last House on the Left, The Accused, and Ms. 45.  

I Spit On Your Grave features a grueling and excruciating 24 minute sequence of Jennifer, the main woman, being repeatedly trapped, raped, and freed by a group of four men.  There is no soundtrack.  There is no joy in this sequence.  There are amplified volumes of the woman screaming.  There is no silly thwaping sound that would reduce the horror, or hint at any eroticism, on screen.  There are distorted close-ups of the faces of the male rapists, not distorted enough to be cartoonish, but enough to be frightening.  It is a harrowing experience from the victim's point of view.

Then, we get a bit of downtime before we get a 30 minute sequence of Jennifer ensnaring the men and then brutally murdering them.  Unlike the rape scenes, this is filled with semi-heroic imagery and are primarily from the perpetrator's point of view: that of the woman.  These are much more filled with victory and resolution than the rape, which is filled with horror and dread.

As such, I Spit On Your Grave is intended to be almost a feminist fantasy tract where it shows how brutal men are to women, and it also shows that a woman is perfectly capable of extracting her own revenge.

It's problematic in its text, but it isn't nearly as problematic as Lucky McKee's The Woman.  In The Woman, McKee is attempting to take a point of view of a judgmental third party, but mainly focuses on the "civilized" family.  We have a lot of point of view shots from both victim and aggressor.  It becomes seriously problematic in terms of how to process the crimes we are seeing on screen.  Are we supposed to be encouraging the misogynist?  Are we supposed to be empathizing with one party over another?  Only by going over the top has Lucky McKee achieved any level of distance between the viewer and the aggressor.

In I Spit On Your Grave, Zarchi never gives us the point of view of the rapist.  We never lust over Jennifer's body.  There aren't long lingering shots that romanticize the woman's body during any of the rape sequences.  These are raw and brutal acts that pierce your soul, if you're watching it right.  On the other hand, due to the nature of film, it is often a third-party camera.  There is a way, if you're sick enough, to enjoy this rape sequence for the act of rape itself.  I'm sure there are people who watch it and say "yeah, that's how it should be done" even though it is another person suffering.

Therein lies a rub.  Should an act be depicted if somebody else can get vicarious pleasure from it?  Should the depictions be more like Natural Born Killers, where we can take the viewpoint of the killers, even as Oliver Stone is trying to condemn our consumption of the act? As in Irreversible, should these brutal acts be depicted in an distant way?  Should it be more like Fight Club's final edit of Angel's face breaking, where the act happens mainly off-screen, denying the viewer any vicarious thrill from it, and leaving it to the imagination?

These are actual questions that will always be up for debate, and have answers that probably differ between people, and between acts, and between movies and intent.  But, in the case of I Spit On Your Grave, Zarchi didn't make this movie for the pleasure of showing rape.  He made it to depict a revenge fantasy.  He wanted a strong woman in it to exact her own revenge.  And, once the revenge is done, the credits roll.