Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz’s 1973 Messiah of Evil: Drive-In Fare with Artistic Flare

MESSIAH OF EVIL 

(Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz, USA, 1973, 90 minutes) 

"My father always said that you're about to wake up when you dream that you're dreaming."–Marianna Hill's Arletty 

Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz's freaky melodrama Messiah of Evil is of its place and yet placeless. The Los Angeles couple made the film in 1971, and set it along the Southern California coast--it was filmed in Malibu, Venice, and Echo Park--except it feels more like the Euro-cult films coming from France, Belgium, and Italy than other American horror films of the '70s.

Huyck and Katz, associates of George Lucas–with whom Huyck went to USC–even named leading lady Marianna Hill "Arletty," a reference to the French star of Marcel Carné’s epic wartime picture Children of Paradise. Plus, it's a name you never hear in the United States–or at least I never have. 

The film opens in grindhouse mode with a bleeding man (director Walter Hill!), scared out of his wits, running down a suburban street late at night. He collapses at a well-appointed home where he sees a preteen at the door who seems sympathetic to his plight. She watches as he falls to the ground and walks toward him. He looks at her expectantly as she leans down, presumably to help him back up on his feet. Instead, she slashes his throat. And the credits commence. We'll never see either character again. 

Huyck and Katz then shift to the hallway of a mental institute, an iconic shot with a blurry, shimmering figure in the distance, who becomes recognizable as an attractive woman as she moves down the hall and toward the light (I've seen versions of this eerie sequence in other horror films since). Her voice-over, which will continue throughout the film, begins at this juncture as she explains that "they did something" to her.

The directors then flash back to whatever the hell brought her to this place. She recounts the story, but it isn't clear who she's talking to, if anyone, and whether or not it really happened; the clues, however, indicate that it did. The man in the prologue, for instance, isn't part of her remembrance.

Arletty then describes the series of strange letters she had been receiving from her artist father, Joseph (Electra Glide in Blue's Royal Dano), who lives in Point Dune, where she grew up (I don't recall mention of a mother). With each letter, he grows more paranoid, so she hits the road to check in on him. Instead of having her read the letters, the directors hand this portion of the voiceover to Dano. It's one of the reasons the film feels like a mid-century melodrama–strip the horror elements away, and it's an extended conversation between a concerned daughter and an imperiled father.

Our heroine hasn't even entered Point Dune before things get weird. The gas station attendant (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid's Charles Dierkop), for instance, is more interested in playing with his rifle than assisting customers, but when Arletty arrives, followed by a Black albino in a red pickup (Bennie Robinson, who made one film and became immortal), the attendant helps her first and then him. When the man steps away, the attendant peeks under the tarp in the back to find three red-eyed, white-faced stiffs. After that, he tries to act normally while sending Arletty on her way, but the attendant and another ghoulish guest will soon have a tussle--like Arletty, the driver is also headed to Port Dune. 

Once she arrives at Joseph's house, she finds it locked, so Arletty breaks in, and makes herself at home. Her father is nowhere to be seen, but his floor-to-ceiling paintings cover every wall of the main room, a studio with a bed on a platform suspended from the ceiling. Jack Fisk, soon to become Terrence Malick's trusty production designer, did the honors, while Joan Mocine, Katz's UCLA roommate, provided the paintings, which depict empty malls and men in suits, both recalling and predicting Romero's Night and Dawn zombie films, except Huyck told Mike White of The Projection Booth that he was more inspired by Universal horror (this interview is included with the 2023 Radiance Blu-ray). He and Katz were also fans of Antonioni. 

Nonetheless, after they ran out of money and moved on to American Graffiti, for which they wrote the screenplay, a Chicago distributor would release it under the title Return of the Living Dead to capitalize on the similarities. Romero's production company took legal action, and the title went away. 

At her father’s beach house, a Malibu location that appeared in Michael Curtiz's mother-daughter melodrama Mildred Pierce, Arletty finds a diary with more insane ramblings, but no other clues, so she sets out to meet with a few people who might know where her father has gone. None of them do, but they're all quite entertaining–this is just that kind of film–including a shifty gallery worker (Morgan Fisher), a wild-eyed wino (Elisha Cook, Jr.), and Thom, a folklorist and dandy (cabaret performer Michael Greer from Fortune and Men's Eyes) and his lady loves, Laura, a stylish model (The Big Bird Cage's Anitra Ford) and Toni, a sporty teenager (Maidstone's Joy Bang in the final film of her five-year career). 

If Arletty was more pragmatic, she might meet with a cop, a detective, or even a private eye, except she doesn't, though they'll come calling when the body of a middle-aged man washes up on the shore. Before she even has the chance to make her next move, she wakes up one night to the sounds of an intruder. Instead of Joseph, she finds Thom, Laura and Toni. At first, it seems as if they might mean to do her harm, but they're just free-lovin' freeloaders looking for a place to crash. They're also looking for adventure. 

One night, Laura heads into town on her own. When the albino trucker offers her a ride, she looks at him and the men in the cargo bed, all staring up at the moon. She shrugs. "Sure," she says, and gets in. The albino proceeds to ask if she likes Wagner (pronounced with a strong "w" and a short "a"), shows her a "beach rat"--a small dark rodent–pops it in his mouth, crunches, and swallows. Just when you're expecting him to chomp on her next, she asks if she can get out. The rat-eater complies and drives away. 

Crisis averted, except it's pitch dark, and she's surrounded by empty houses. 

Laura then spots a man who appears to be beckoning her, so she follows him to a well-lit, all-night supermarket. It appears to be devoid of people, so she walks around, and catches a few quick glimpses of other customers. Finally, she finds a large group (played by former NASA employees) all gathered around the meat section, gobbling up the stuff–until they see her, and give chase. Are they vampires, zombies, or something else? Huyck and Katz don't say, though a flashback, featuring Cisco Pike director Bill Norton, attempts to explain their origins. The creatures have pasty skin and red-rimmed eyes, but it’s never clear what they are, other than very bad news for any human being who crosses their path. 

After Laura goes missing, Thom and Toni have their own encounters with the creatures. The other big set piece takes place in a Venice movie theater that Toni appears to have all to herself. The cashier (played by Katz) even turns off the marquee lights advertising 1950s noir Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye after Toni enters, indicating that she won't be selling any more tickets. 

Nonetheless, the pasty people enter the theater one by one, while Toni sits near the front obliviously munching popcorn–she retrieved it from the concession stand herself, since there was no cashier around. I won't say what happens next other than that Demons' Lamberto Bava and Interview with the Vampire's Neil Jordan--possibly even Anguish's Bigas Luna--would appear to have seen this masterful Hitchcockian sequence. 

Toward the end, Arletty does, in a manner of speaking, find out what happened to her father. After that, she does all she can to escape Port Dune, since her companions have been dropping like flies and the town's zombie population seems intent on making her their next meal. 

The film ends with Arletty in the mental institute. Either she made the whole story up, or the ordeal drove her mad. It's also suggested that she inherited her father's propensity for mental illness as much as his artistic nature. 

Though Messiah of Evil was made in 1971, it wouldn't open theatrically until 1974 due to a variety of production and distribution issues. Because Huyck and Katz ran out of money, they weren't even able to film the entire screenplay. Ironically, the duo had only made a horror film because they couldn't get funding for anything else, and they would never work in the genre again, though they would find their place in Hollywood as Oscar-nominated screenwriters and script doctors. Huyck's directorial career, alas, would end with his misbegotten 1986 take on Marvel's Howard the Duck--an accidental horror film of a kind--which I saw upon its original release. If I can imagine watching and enjoying Messiah of Evil a fourth time or more, one go-round with the weird and creepy Howard was more than enough. 

When critics finally got a look at Huyck and Katz's first film, they weren't all that thrilled either, with the exception of Robin Wood, who declared it one of the best of the decade. The qualities that made it unique were initially seen as flaws. 

As Huyck would later declare, "We made an art film," but since it was marketed as drive-in fare, it's unlikely viewers were expecting all the literary, art, and "pretentious film school references," as horror historian Kim Newman puts it in his rapid-fire commentary track with author and musician Stephen Thrower. The narrative ambiguity must have also proved frustrating, though that's among its strengths, and why it rewards multiple viewings along with the eye-popping set pieces and game performances.

Messiah of Evil would eventually find its audience, leading to last year's deluxe Blu-ray edition, which also features a video essay from editor and podcaster Kat Ellinger, a documentary featuring film critics Alexandra Heller-Nicholas and Maitland McDonagh, a printed essay on the film's fine art inspirations from Bill Ackerman of the Supporting Characters podcast, and the 2019 audio interview with Huyck (Katz passed away in 2018). 

Over the years, the film has been compared to John Hancock's Let's Scare Jessica to Death and Stephanie Rothman's The Velvet Vampire, both from 1971, but the differences are just as striking as the similarities. Rothman's film, for instance, now streaming on the Criterion Channel, takes place in the desert and features an acoustic score, whereas Messiah of Evil takes place by the beach and features an electronic score (Jack Fisk would also provide production design for Rothman's Terminal City). Both conjure up the beauty and terror of bad dreams that just don't want to end. Though some of the modish Messiah outfits are suggestive in the usual 1970s way, Huyck and Katz's film is devoid of nudity, whereas Rothman's film has plenty.

If today's critics see the film as a commentary on free love, consumerism, and/or the anomie of modern life, Huyck and Katz were mostly just trying to launch their career by working in a genre for which they didn't feel any special affinity, though they filled it with references to art they found meaningful--from Edgar Allen Poe and H.P. Lovecraft to Edward Hopper and Ed Ruscha--so I wouldn't call it impersonal, and nor am I suggesting that those readings are invalid; I'm just not convinced they were trying to make any sociopolitical statements, with the exception of one: cults are bad. The Manson murders, after all, had taken place two years before.  

That said, I've long had a preference for horror films made by non-horror directors, like industrial filmmaker Herk Harvey's haunting Carnival of Souls, to which Messiah of Evil has also been compared. They're not all good, of course, but the way these filmmakers tend to ignore, flout, or subvert the well-worn rules of horror goes to show how malleable, expansive, and adventurous the genre can be, so here's to Willard Huyk and Gloria Katz for giving their first film everything they had. It shows, it thrills--and it endures.

 "They're waiting for you! And they'll take you one by one and no one will hear you scream. No one will hear you SCREEEAAAM!!!"--Arletty

The 4K restoration of Messiah of Evil is out now on home video through Radiance Films. Images from Elements of Madness (Blu-ray cover art), DVD Beaver (Walter Hill), the IMDb (Charles Dierkop and Joy Bang), Vague Visages (Elisha Cook, Jr. and Anitra Ford), and Final Girl (Marianna Hill)

You Better Run, You Better Take Cover: Bad Trip Australian Psychodrama Wake in Fright

This is a revived version of a 2014 Slog post about Ted Kotcheff's unhinged portrait of masculinity run amok. The original post is still available at The Stranger, but all of the images have disappeared, so it coexists here now.

Film/TV Jul 2, 2014 at 11:55 am 

You Better Run, You Better Take Cover: Bad Trip Australian Psychodrama Wake in Fright 

Kathy Fennessy

After watching John Curran's upcoming docudrama Tracks, in which a woman (Stoker's Mia Wasikowska) travels across the Outback, and David Michôd's recent repossession drama The Rover, in which a man (Animal Kingdom's Guy Pearce) does much the same—though for entirely different reasons—I realized it was time to catch up with 1971's Wake in Fright (The Rover opened two weeks ago; Tracks opens on September 19, 2014).

In Canadian director Ted Kotcheff's grubby psychodrama, an adaptation of Australian author Kenneth Cook's 1961 novel, a man (Zulu's Gary Bond) tries to travel from the Outback into the city, but the Outback just won't let him go (Joseph Losey associate Evan Jones wrote the script).

Bond, a bleached-blond British singer and actor with a young Peter O'Toole thing going on, plays John Grant, a one-room schoolhouse teacher in the tiny town of Tiboonda. Once Christmas break arrives, he hops a train en route to Sydney, stopping off in Bundanyabba, aka "The Yabba," for the night, where a cop (Chips Rafferty in his final film role) buys him beer after beer after beer. This leads John to believe he can make enough money playing two-up to pay off his bond and quit teaching--he would rather work as a journalist. Instead, he wins a hangover and loses his money.

Left: Thompson enjoying the kangaroo hunt

The next day, the heavy drinking continues. John's attempt to get busy with Janette (Kotcheff's then-wife, Sylvia Kay), the daughter of his host, Tim (TV actor Al Thomas), falls apart when a bout of nausea overtakes him. From the oh-well expression on her stoic face, it's clear she's been down this road before. The day after, John wakes up to another hangover, a shirtless Donald Pleasence, and a plateful of ground kangaroo.

After a breakfast of warm beer, he goes hunting with Pleasence's Doc, a self-proclaimed alcoholic, and his roughneck miner pals, Joe (Peter Whittle) and Dick (the great Jack Thompson in his first film role). They drink more beer and proceed to take their aggression out on a court of kangaroos (the film crew tagged along on a real hunt). It's all very psychedelic in a brown acid kind of way—you can practically smell the beer, blood, and body odor wafting off the screen. I really know how to sell 'em, don't I? Well, it's also rather beautiful in its way, especially John Scott's flute-saturated score.

As with British director Nicholas Roeg's Walkabout, also from 1971, the story ends much as it began, except that John can never return to the person he once was. If the two films share visual similarities, the storyline has more in common with John Boorman's infamous 1972 James Dickey adaptation Deliverance, in which Appalachia tests the mettle of four city dwellers (and was also made by an outsider). About Kotcheff's film, which was initially rejected by its home country, Nick Cave has said it's "the best and most terrifying film about Australia in existence."

Right: As this image attests: Pleasence is very good value

Kotcheff would go on to direct many other movies, including The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, North Dallas Forty, and First Blood, before becoming a producer on Law & Order: SVU (let us not speak of Weekend at Bernie's). In the intervening years, Australia has come to embrace Wake in Fright, which helped to kick-start the New Wave that launched Peter Weir (Picnic at Hanging Rock), Bruce Beresford (Breaker Morant), and Fred Schepisi (The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith).

So, it's a good film and an important one, but it's no walk in the park despite a fair number of funny lines, all perfectly delivered. Though other actors, like Dirk Bogarde and Michael York, circled the part, the lesser known Bond, primarily a theater actor, turned out to be the perfect man to play the antihero (even if Cook wrote the character as Australian). Bond's ability to take his schoolteacher from condescension to degradation to uneasy acceptance helps this strong medicine go down easier than it would have otherwise—plus, I'm not sure that York or Bogarde would've been as willing to go full frontal in a sequence cut from the original American prints.

 

Wake in Fright is available for streaming through Netflix and Drafthouse Films. In 2017, some fool attempted to remake it. Images (Gary Bond, Jack Thompson, and Donald Pleasence) from United Artists via the IMDb.

Trans R&B Singer Jackie Shane Shines Again in Painterly Doc Portrait Any Other Way

JACKIE SHANE: ANY OTHER WAY 

(Michael Mabbott and Lucah Rosenberg-Lee, Canada, 2024, 99 minutes) 

"I was born, but never lived."

--Jackie Shane (1940-2019)

A conventional documentary wouldn't have suited R&B performer Jackie Shane. 

A coproduction of Telefilm Canada and the Canadian Film Board, Any Other Way isn't the first film about a musician of whom little performance footage exists, but unlike most, it doesn't rely strictly on still images, but on painterly recreations of her life at home and on the stage. In other words, it's a cross between a traditional documentary and an animated biopic. 

Though Jackie was making music associated with the Deep South in the 1960s, from the likes of Georgia-born Little Richard and Alabama-born Wilson Pickett, she was a visible trans performer at a time when that was anything but the norm in either Canada or the United States.  

When historians look back at the Toronto music scene of that era, it's all about Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, and Gordon Lightfoot, all of whom deserve the attention, but Jackie was right there in the mix, and yet completely set apart from the rock scene. While all three of these artists continued to ply their trade in the 1970s and beyond, Jackie completely disappeared. 

Co-directors Michael Mabbott and Lucah Rosenberg-Lee, alongside animators Luca Tarantini and Jared Raab, fill in the blanks, while further contextualizing the Numero Group's 2017 collection of her work. I'm pretty sure that's how I first heard about her, and it was love at first listen. 

As it turns out, Jackie had a whole life in the US, since it's where she was born, where she spent most of her life, and where she died. 

Tennessee natives Vonnie Crawford-Moore and Andrenee Majors-Douglas, a niece and a cousin, didn't find out--until she bequeathed them her modest estate--that she had lived in the same area for 40 years. All of a sudden, the two women found themselves in possession of a museum's-worth of stage apparel, costume jewelry, faded photographs, reel-to-reel tapes, and other remnants of a life about which they hadn't known a thing. Because they didn't even know she existed. Significantly, they also found a hand-written autobiography with the perfectly pulpy title Let "God" Be My Judge.

In the film, trans performers Sandra Caldwell and Makayla Walker read passages from the unpublished manuscript, sometimes as themselves, sometimes as rotoscoped versions of Jackie in her various elements. Had she not written down her story, the directorial duo would have to recreate it by sifting through the clues, but she made sure she would get to reconstruct it herself--the late Anita Pallenberg did much the same, since Catching Fire, Alexis Bloom and Svetlana Zill's 2024 documentary about the model and actress, also relies on a manuscript left behind after her passing. 

The Any Other Way filmmakers, who knew about Jackie before Vonnie and Andrenee, also recorded their conversations with their subject during her final year, but always over the phone, and never in person. She had become a recluse. A combination of voices, including Jackie and her admiring heirs, describes her background. She inherited a love of singing from the grandmother who raised her, and pursued it from youth as a member of the church choir. From early on, she was also drawn to all things feminine. 

In young adulthood, her music career took off just as she was becoming more feminine in her affect. 

She revealed an affinity for the drums, purchased a kit, and plunged into the blues and soul scene, backing up stars, like Joe Tex, when they came through town. She was earning her keep, having fun, and relishing her independence. She even befriended Little Richard with whom she would hang out while he was living in Nashville. 

It was Tex who encouraged Jackie to leave the Jim Crow South for greener climes, so she literally joined the circus in the form of a carnival, which traveled to Canada, and with which she fell in love, starting with Cornwall where she decamped, and then Montreal, where she set down roots as a singer, still not yet fully trans, but more feminine-looking than ever before. 

Abundant photos track every stage of Jackie's transition, from lipstick and penciled eyebrows to more elaborate makeup combined with men's suits. I mean no disrespect, but her brows were pretty crazy, though I wouldn't say it was a specifically trans thing. Sophia Loren and Giulietta Masina also had swooping eyebrows at the time--at least she was in excellent company. 

By the time Jackie made her way to Toronto, she looked more like a woman with a preference for suits, like Marlene Dietrich in Morocco, than a man who liked to wear makeup, like Little Richard or Liberace. Nonetheless, she preferred to use male pronouns, though she refused to take off her makeup or to play for segregated audiences, even if it meant missing out on star-making opportunities, like The Ed Sullivan Show and American Bandstand. She was making the rules up as she went along, which may not play well with some viewers, but nowadays there are more resources for young trans people.

If Jackie was packing Toronto's Saphire club and even drawing fans from across the border, the city's big pop station, CHUM, ignored her music, including signature 1963 single "Any Other Way." They just weren't interested in Black artists, but Jackie's fans forced their hand, and they eventually relented, sending the song to #2 on the local singles chart.

With the release of the Red Hot Organization's 46-track compilation Transa on November 22 of this year, it's possible the song will hit the airwaves again--or for the very first time, depending on your station of choice. 

As Jim Farber noted in a New York Times preview from earlier this month, "Another historic reference point comes from a cover of the song 'Any Other Way,' which became an improbable Canadian hit in the '60s for the soul singer and early trans performer Jackie Shane. The Americana singer and banjo player Allison Russell recorded Shane's song for the project several months ago at Mexican Summer studios in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, in a stripped-down version, joined by the harpist Ahya Simone.” (The Canadian-born Russell, who identifies as queer, is cisgender, while the Detroit-based Simone is trans.) 

In 1971, Jackie returned to the States with her common-law husband Dan--a strikingly handsome man--changed her name, and settled in Pasadena where she lived fully as a woman. No more suits, no more male pronouns. She traded a public career for a private life, but it wasn't built to last. 

At this point, I was reminded of Lili Elbe, the real-life trans artist who inspired The Danish Girl, a fundamentally dishonest 2015 film that warps the circumstances that led to her death. Suffice to say her life was more fulfilling than the dismal one Tom Hooper depicts, except it wasn't enough. Just as Jackie longed to be a suburban housewife, Lili longed to have a baby. Neither woman got her wish--but at least Jackie's dream didn't kill her.

In the late-1970s, she returned to Nashville to take care of her ailing mother and stepfather. She also reclaimed the name Jackie Shane. After her parents passed, she went into seclusion. She maintained contact with a few friends, but it was mostly just her and her little black cat, and since cats only live so long—I lost my 19-year-old Lola in January—there are times she may have been completely alone. 

The filmmakers make space for Sandra Caldwell and Makayla Walker to share their thoughts about Jackie's journey, and also about their own lives. Caldwell, who is especially forthcoming, found a way to reconcile her personal and professional selves, but Jackie chose one over the other. Sad as it may seem now, it's possible she made the best choice, because she may not have been able to hold on to her career if she had fully transitioned in the public eye, but we lost all the music she might have made. 

Fortunately, we didn't lose the music she did make. Just as Light in the Attic brought the work of Betty Davis, another trailblazer-turned-recluse, to a new audience, the Numero Group did the same when they tracked Jackie down and arranged to package her life's work in a box set filled with singles, live tracks, and an 80-page biography. After the set received a Grammy nomination for Best Historical Album, she started to make plans that fate did not allow her to bring to fruition, but she was thrilled to speak with the press about her music and to receive messages of praise from fans old and new.

So, it's a sort of happy ending. Some artists, like Nick Drake and Arthur Russell, don't get their flowers until long after they're gone, but Jackie lived long enough to get hers. Other than the fact that I was never certain how she made a living once her music career had come to an end--a problem with too many documentaries about long-forgotten or newly-rediscovered artists--Michael Mabbott and Lucah Rosenberg-Lee did right by their subject. 

Beyond the participants mentioned above, they also spoke with music historian Michael Gray, gender studies professor Marisa Richmond, singer and dancer James Baley, choreographer Rodney Diverlus, writer Elaine Gaber-Katz, and biographer Rob Bowman. Further, they tapped some notable Canadian talent as producers: Oscar-nominated actor Elliot Page and Sam Dunn and Scot McFadyen, the directors behind several fine hard rock documentaries.

In her life, Jackie didn't get everything she wanted, but she lived her truth, and Any Other Way honors a woman of color who refused to let racism, homophobia, and transphobia define or destroy her, even as that same toxic brew led her to leave the wider world behind for an intimate space filled with glittering mementos of that brief, shining moment she was a sexy, sassy, singing star. A Sylvester before Sylvester, a Prince before Prince. A groundbreaker and a path-maker for more new and exciting performers.

Jackie Shane: Any Other Way, which has received theatrical play in Canada, is currently making the festival rounds in the US. I'll update this post once it becomes possible to see in Seattle, whether in-person or online. Images from Image Amplified (Jackie on the bed), Spotify ("Any Other Way" single), Hot Docs (Jackie and Little Richard), Vintage Everyday (Jackie with swooping brows), Ahya Simone Live, and Vogue (Jackie in the suburbs).

Don’t Mess Around with the Cemetery Man

CEMETERY MAN / Delamorte Dellamore 

(Michele Soavi, Italy, 1987, 103 minutes) 

Cemetery Man, Italian filmmaker Michele Soavi's fourth feature film, has it all. 

To be sure, it's a horror film, zombie division. There are zombies, "returners" in the film's parlance, lurching all over this thing, but it's also a comedy and a love story--two love stories, no less. Other zom-coms, like 2013's Warm Bodies and 2014's Life After Beth, have combined the same genres, but Soavi got there decades before, and Cemetery Man, Delamorte Dellamore in its native country, is a model of the horror/comedy/romance form. 

But wait! There's more, because it's also a star vehicle. No disrespect to the film's continental cast, who offer excellent value, but the film, in the best of ways, could be considered The Rupert Everett Show. Forget, or put aside, all of those period pieces, like Mike Newell's 1985 Dance With a Stranger, Everett has to carry this entire film on his back, and he makes it look easy. 

Cemetery Man begins with Everett's Francesco Delamorte in his home at night. He's shirtless, cigarette dangling from the side of his downturned mouth, and looking for all the world like a goddamn movie star. He hears a sound at the door, opens it, comes face to face with an ashen-faced zombie with a fly buzzing around his ear, and shoots him in the noggin. The insouciant way he goes about the task indicates that this happens all the time. It's as funny as it is unexpected–an opening sequence for the ages. 

And it does, indeed, happen all the time. 

Ever since an epidemic ravaged Francesco's mountain village, many newly dead humans come back to life after seven days. Someone has to keep the zombie population under control, and he ended up with the gig. Instead of gratitude, however, the townspeople treat him like a pariah. The way they see it, he's no different than a garbage collector. Fortunately, he doesn't really care. Francisco is perfectly content to fill a role to which he appears to be well suited. 

Nor is he alone, since he he has a trusty assistant, Gnaghi (actor-musician François Hadji-Lazaro of The City of Lost Children and French band Les Garçons Bouchers), who lives in the basement, digs the graves, gobbles food like an overgrown toddler, and spends his free time parked in front of the boob tube. Throughout the film, he makes non-verbal noises, but refrains from any recognizable words, with the possible exception of "gna." 

Not insignificantly, Gnaghi serves as Francesco's negative image, a squat, shaven-headed cross between Moe of the Three Stooges and Buster Bloodvessel of British ska-punk outfit Bad Manners. He may not look like anyone's idea of a romantic hero, but just like his boss, Gnaghi will fall in love with a lovely young local, who will return his ardor in ways you can't possibly imagine--unless you've read the novel. Soavi pulls out all the stops to depict their hilariously grotesque and strangely touching romance.

Writer Gianni Romoli, meanwhile, adapted the screenplay from Tiziano Sclavi's 1991 novel Delamorte Dellamore. 

Though the film has taken hits over the years for the switch to Cemetery Man for English-speaking territories, it's an apt title that doubled as a savvy commercial move. Further, by 1994, Everett had starred in an Oscar-winning short, 1982's A Shocking Accident, and scored a BAFTA nomination for 1984's Another Country, in which he played a role he had originated on stage in 1981. Though Soavi had a track record in Italy for his work in the horror genre, both on his own and with Dario Argento, Everett was seen as an international star who would make the film a hit, except it wasn't. And nor was it the fault of either gentleman, though I do have a few theories… 

First of all, one of the film's biggest strengths, the way it mixes and mingles genres, may have confused critics, audiences, and exhibitors. 

Second, the high-born Everett was a name, but he was best known for literary adaptations drawn from the works of Ian McEwan, Alan Bennett, and numerous others. There's nothing wrong with that–on the contrary–but it may have created a disconnect, with horror fans staying away, because he seemed too refined for the genre, and with Everett fans staying away because the material seemed beneath him. It's neither of those things, and the actor proved he could get his well-manicured hands as dirty as necessary, but I can understand the confusion his casting may have caused.

Then there's the more delicate matter of his sexual orientation. 

It may not have been a factor, but I couldn't say for sure. Though Everett had played a gay character in both versions of Another Country, he didn't come out, in real life, until 1989. Afterward, he says, the job offers went away. 

If anything, Soavi may have gotten a better deal for his services in 1994 than he would have in 1986 when Sclavi modeled the paranormal investigator at the center of his comic series Dylan Dog on Everett's handsomely-tousled appearance in Another Country. Further, Everett may have been drawn to the project more because he needed the money than because he was passionate about the material, though knowing he had inspired a previous Sclavi character may have proved irresistibly appealing.

Not surprisingly, they've been conflated, but Dylan Dog and Francesco Dellamorte are different characters, though they do share similar, baddie-fighting characteristics. Amazingly, the series has continued for nearly 40 years, though Sclavi has been increasingly less involved with the writing. 

In Cemetery Man, Everett plays things unambiguously straight–so straight that it becomes a liability. 

Francesco's commitment to the bit will be put to the test toward the end, in ways both physical and spiritual. If anything, the discontents of hyper-heterosexuality is kind of the point of the film. 

Francesco can slay zombies with the best of them, but he's so emotionally stunted that he can't form anything other than a purely sexual relationship with a woman. Some moviegoers may not have been ready to see this particular actor play that particular part, and yet Everett's ability to project both movie star charisma and an underdeveloped, adolescent sensibility is precisely what makes his performance sing. 

Francesco is so unworldly and poorly educated, in fact, that he has only "read" two books, one he never finished and the phone book in which he crosses out the name of each corpse that ends up in the graveyard.

Everything changes--and not necessarily for the better--when he spots Anna Falchi's very young, very sexy widow in a funeral procession at his place of business, mourning the loss of her much older, very dead husband.

In Romoli's screenplay, she's simply named She. 

Normally, it would irritate me that the men have proper names while the primary female character doesn't, except she represents Francesco's ideal, and he doesn't really see her as a person. Furthermore, Falchi will end up playing two more women in quick succession. Soavi never establishes whether they all really look alike, or whether Francesco simply imagines that they do, because his obsession with this unattainable creature has so thoroughly clouded his vision. 

Since Cemetery Man is filled with surprises, I would rather avoid too many plot specifics, other than to say that Soavi, in his excellent commentary track, demurs that it's pretty episodic. He's not completely wrong, but that's hardly a liability, since it plays like a series of intricately-rendered comic book panels come to life--not least when a zombified motorcyclist bursts through the soil to ride again, an absolutely stunning in-camera effect that would not have made the same impact if created digitally. I went into the film cold, and I love the way it consistently keeps predictability at bay. 

And that includes Falchi. There's no doubt that the model-turned-actress was hired for her looks, but she holds her own with Everett, despite the fact that it was her first leading role. It's quite a remarkable achievement. 

Prior to Cemetery Man, Falchi was best known for a perfume ad shot by Federico Fellini. 

Not a bad calling card for a 22-year-old aspiring actress, but no guarantee that she could credibly play three characters, one of whom will turn into a moldering zombie, and that isn't exactly a spoiler, since it happens surprisingly early on in the proceedings. 

In the interview included with the new release, Falchi says the makeup sessions took as long as seven to eight hours. The release also comes with a making-of documentary, which includes footage of the painstaking process. 

Though the film is filled with plenty of fun zombie jump scares, few things gave me more of a start than Falchi's first appearance on screen wearing sheer, designer-style widow's weeds, because she didn't seem quite real.

Just as the two teenage boys in John Hughes' 1985 horror-comedy Weird Science managed to miraculously create the seemingly perfect woman in the form of Kelly LeBrock–in a decidedly '80s twist on Frankenstein–Falchi's widow looks exactly like the kind of living centerfold a teenage boy or sex-obsessed comic book illustrator would dream up, and that isn't a knock. 

Much as Australian transplant Margot Robbie had to conform to an all-American image of female perfection to play the living doll in Barbie, the Finnish-Italian actress wouldn't have passed muster if she looked too ordinary. With her full lips, almond eyes, ample bosom, and wasp waist, she's like something engineered in a lab, i.e. what most every member of the Kardashian clan wishes they looked like, except it's all apparently real. In the new interview, Falchi admits that she had extensions to make her long, honey-blonde hair look extra-luxurious, but that doesn't count as fakery in my book, just a touch of movie magic.    

Aging comes for anyone who lives long enough, but many va-va-voom female performers don't wear it well. Falchi, who has aged more gracefully than your average blonde bombshell, is a major exception to the rule.

Everett, on the other hand, showed up for his on-camera interview wearing a very unflattering, extra-tall, red knit cap. I have no idea why, especially since it doesn't even look comfortable–it looks itchy. A fully-grown adult has the right to wear whatever he wants, of course, but it's a bizarre choice.  

He also speaks about the film in flattering terms, though Soavi admits that they locked horns. By 1994, Everett had made films in both Italy and Spain, so I don't know if language or cultural differences left him feeling isolated, if the role of an antihero who makes a heel turn was getting to him, or if he expected more coddling on the set, but he appears to have had a fairly miserable time. Then, when the film proved something other than a hit, he claimed that Soavi was the worst director he had ever worked with. Though he doesn't mention it in his interview, Soavi definitely mentions it in his. 

It wouldn't take long, however, for Cemetery Man to become a deserving cult classic. If Everett has warmed to it over the years, it may simply be because time has healed his wounds, or because it's no longer the redheaded stepchild of his CV. If anything, it's one of the glittering jewels in his crown. Unlike Soavi, who appears to have stopped working as a feature-film director in 2018, or Falchi, who appears to have stopped working as a leading lady in 2013, Everett is still plugging away. 

Leading roles may be a thing of the past, but the 65-year-old continues to show up in studio productions, like Ridley Scott's 2023 Napoleon, in which he plays the Duke of Wellington, or Starz's The Serpent Queen, on which he plays Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. Everett has also kept busy as a memoirist and novelist, and Simon and Schuster will release his next book, a collection of short stories called The American No, on October 3, 2024.

After Cemetery Man, Everett would avoid horror, notwithstanding a role as a demon in 2019's Muse and a guru in 2022's She Will. It wasn't really his thing, though he's perfect as Francesco Dellamorte. On the other hand, if the film had been a hit, we might have gotten a series of increasingly less heartfelt, less handcrafted sequels--better one great film that stands alone.

Cemetery Man, fully restored from the Cinecittà negative, is available on Blu-ray and 4K HD from Severin Films. Images from StudioCanal and IGN (Rupert Everett), Talk Film Society (Everett and François Hadji-Lazaro), IntoMore.com (Everett and Cary Elwes in Another Country), Hey Kids Comics! (Dylan Dog No. 1 cover by Claudio Villa), the IMDb (Everett admiring Anna Falchi), American Cinematheque (Falchi after zombification), Pinterest (Kelly LeBrock in Weird Science), and X (actor-director Michel Soavi on the set of 1991's The Sect with actor-director Dario Argento).  

Each Man Kills the Thing He Loves in Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Final Film, Querelle

QUERELLE 
(Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Germany, 1982, 108 minutes) 

Even by Rainer Werner Fassbinder's standards, Querelle is one odd film. 

Adapted from the 1947 novel, Querelle of Brest, by the brilliant Jean Genet--and featuring then-scandalous illustrations by the equally brilliant Jean Cocteau--it's a hothouse melodrama about queer desire and criminality. 

In Edmund White's monumental 1993 biography, Genet, he proclaims Querelle the French writer's "strongest book," explaining that, "Its themes are doubling, repressed homosexual desire, and violence." These themes in and of themselves were not unusual for either author or director, except Fassbinder renders every detail in an intentionally artificial manner. 

After 1978 psychological thriller Despair with Dirk Bogarde, an adaptation of Nabokov's 1934 novel, it was Fassbinder's second feature film in English (though 1981's Lili Marleen was shot in English, it was dubbed in German). 

Since he filmed in Europe with a European cast and crew, I wouldn't say he had gone Hollywood, but both films feature an English-speaking lead. In this case, American actor Brad Davis, best known for Alan Parker's Midnight Express, plays the title character, a French sailor, drug dealer--and murderer. Though Davis did not identify as gay, there's nothing shy or timid about his performance. The guy absolutely went for it. 

I'm certain that the filmmaker found Genet's novel meaningful, not least since his filmography is populated by sexually-repressed criminal types, but he uses every trick in the book to keep us at arm's length from these characters. From Querelle on down, none of them are asking audience members to love them, but it's a feature, not a bug.

As Fassbinder said of Sirk's 1956 Southern Gothic melodrama Written on the Wind, "The good, the 'normal,' the 'beautiful,' are always utterly revolting; the evil, the weak, the dissolute arouse one's compassion." 

In addition to the quotes that serve as chapter headings, most from Genet's novel, an uncredited American actor shares the narration with Franco Nero's Lieutenant Seblon. The Italian actor had costarred with Fassbinder in Wolf Gremm's cyberpunk thriller Kamikaze '89, they hit it off, and that's how the spaghetti western icon ended up in the film. Seblon is in love with Querelle, and spends most of it spying on him. He also keeps a tape recorder hidden in his coat to record their conversations, so he can play back the sound of his lust object's voice in the privacy of his own quarters. 

All of the action takes place in a set-bound recreation of the port town of Brest. 

A matte painting--or series of paintings--provides the backdrop, everything is bathed in a sulfurous golden glow, and instead of gargoyles, the brick wall separating land from sea features phallic buttresses, in addition to colorful graffiti.

It's as stylized, and as delightful, as Barbara Baum's costume design, from the jaunty red pom-poms topping the sailors' caps to the crystals adorning Jeanne Moreau's ears, neck, wrists, and hands as shot by frequent Fassbinder DP Xaver Schwarzenberger in the vein of Eduard van der Enden's work for Harry Kümel's Daughters of Darkness. In that 1971 erotic horror film, every candle and every sequin on Delphine Seyrig's show-stopping silver gown generates star-shaped sparkles (in a manner of speaking, Querelle qualifies as erotic horror, too). It's an in-camera effect you rarely see nowadays, and adds to the bleary, smeary, hyper-real atmosphere.    

Nouvelle vague icon Moreau (Elevator to the Gallows, Jules et Jim) plays Lysiane, madam and owner of the Hotel Feria bar with her husband Nono, played by Günther Kaufmann, a Black German actor—and sometime Fassbinder lover—who appeared in 14 of his films. 

Querelle has barely arrived when he reconnects with his brother Robert (Hanno Pöschl), a Feria regular, and offers to sell opium to Nono, who also tends bar. In the course of the transaction, he stabs his accomplice Vic (Dieter Schidor), a fellow sailor, to death--and licks the blood from the wound, thus confirming his nature as a sort of living vampire. Though he claims he's looking for "broads," he ends up having aggressive, sweaty sex with Nono, who uses it more as a means of control than pleasure. Though his every action suggests otherwise, Querelle insists, "I'm no fairy." 

Throughout the film, Lysiane sings a song that rests on one line, extracted from an 1898 poem by Oscar Wilde--who was almost as familiar with penitentiary life as Jean Genet--and set to music by composer Peer Raben: "Each man kills the thing he loves." It isn't great, but it's far from terrible. Nonetheless, the party poopers behind the Golden Raspberries nominated it for worst song. To add insult to injury, they nominated Raben for worst score, though the woozy chorus of male voices fits the theme perfectly. (The film lost in both categories to Pia Zadora bomb The Lonely Lady.)

Though Querelle literally gets away with murder, his friend Gil (Pöschl again), who stabs another sailor to death, does not. The fact that the same actor plays both brother and potential lover adds an element of incestuousness, which may or may not have been Fassbinder's invention. After his arrest, Querelle offers to help Gil escape by setting him up with a change of clothes and a ticket to Bordeaux.

Before Gil's departure, the two share a kiss, and Querelle confesses, "I never loved a boy before, and you're the first one." It's the only truly tender moment in the entire film, but as the omniscient narrator adds, "He didn't know how to fuck a guy. The gesture would have embarrassed him."

Up until that point, Querelle had never initiated queer sexual activity; his encounter with Nono was his first time with a man. As the film ends, he's still among the living and still free, but I wouldn't say it's a happy ending.

In the novel, Genet sums up Querelle as follows: "He had appeared among them with the suddenness and elegance of the Joker in a pack. He scrambled the pattern, yet gave it meaning." 

He could almost be describing the director. As Robert Horton wrote in 1983, "Fassbinder seemed to want nothing so much as to disturb us; in his films, when people start feeling comfortable, they start to fade away. Querelle may make you feel many things, but comfortable isn't one of them."

Just two months before Querelle's premiere, and after making 40 films in 15 years, the hard-living director would pass away at the age of 37. Only nine years later, Brad Davis would pass away at 41, seven months before the premiere of Robert Altman's The Player. It would mark his final film role. 

Querelle is an odd film to be sure, but it's a beautiful one, too, filled with unforgettable imagery. Compared to more recent queer films, like  João Pedro Rodrigues' O Fantasma or Alain Guiraudie's 2014 Stranger by the Lake, it isn't especially explicit, but in every other way, it's among the most deliriously homoerotic films ever made--and I didn't even mention Marco (co-writer Burkhard Driest), the corrupt cop dressed as a Tom of Finland-style leather daddy with a cap spelling out the word P-O-L-I-C-E--a possible nod to the B-O-Y caps that were all the rage in the 1980s and 1990s. 

Rainer Werner Fassbinder may have died before his time, but there's no doubt he was having F-U-N right up until the very end.

 

Querelle opens at Northwest Film Forum on Aug 30. Fri and Sat screenings introduced by Navid Sinaki, author of queer Iranian noir romance Medusa of the Roses. Click here for tickets. Querelle is also available from Criterion Collection. The new release includes a behind-the-scenes documentary from Wolf Gremm and a video essay from Michael Koresky. (The film looks fantastic, though it could really use a commentary track.) Images from Janus Film (Brad Davis), Amazon (Genet: A Biography, Vintage, 1994), the IMDb (Franco Nero and Jeanne Moreau), and Cinema Delirium (Davis with Burkhard Driest and Günther Kaufmann and Davis with Hanno Pöschl). 

We Got That Attitude: Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains with a Fiery Diane Lane

Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains went from a non-hit to a cult classic to a riot grrrl handbook, but is it all that? It is. And it isn't. Here's an extended version of a post I wrote for The Stranger's Line Out blog in 2011 before it disappeared from the internet.

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, THE FABULOUS STAINS
(Lou Adler, USA, 1982, 87 minutes) 

Girls can't be rock and rollers. It's the facts of life.
--Billy (Ray Winstone)

Cursed with too much attitude, a young soap star acts up and loses her job. Abandoned by her father and orphaned by her mother, Pennsylvania teenager Corinne "Third Degree" Burns (a fine and feisty Diane Lane), who lives with her exasperated Aunt Linda (an unrecognizable Christine Lahti), starts a punk band with her sister, Tracy (Marin Kanter, who had appeared in Kathryn Bigelow's directorial debut, The Loveless, the year before), and her cousin, Jessica "Dizzy Heights" McNeil (Laura Dern, also very good). 

Unlike many youth films of the 1970s and '80s, all three young women were real-deal teenagers, which added a verisimilitude that helps to compensate for other problems. Though Kanter, who would retire by the end of the decade, was 19 during filming in 1980, Lane and Dern were 15 and 13 respectively, and they hold their own with the seasoned actors in the cast.  

In Charlestown, people consider her a has-been, but Corinne's attitude proves a blessing to her music career. After she catches a gig by the Losers--a baby-faced Ray Winstone with members of the Clash and the Sex Pistols (Paul Cook, Steve Jones, and Paul Simonon)--she finds a way to join their US tour. And with that, Ladies and Gentleman, the Fabulous Stains is off to the races. 

A cult hit in the 1980s, the film has since become a how-to guide for female rockers, like the riot grrrls who have cited it as an inspiration, most recently Kathleen Hanna (Bikini Kill, Le Tigre) in her rollicking memoir, Rebel Girl.

Tobi's dad, Eldon, was into laser discs at the time, and Tobi [Wilcox] lobbied hard for him to rent a disc about an all-girl punk band called Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains, but it wasn't available. Luckily, her uncle taped it off TV and we watched it on a Betamax tape. The three of us lay on our stomachs with our chins in our palms, transfixed as Diane Lane, playing the lead singer of the band, yelled, "I'm perfect! But nobody in this shithole gets me because I don't put out.--Kathleen Hanna (HarperCollins, 2024)

While non-musician Winstone as Billy rocks out convincingly, Tubes front man Fee Waybill, who had appeared in Robert Greenwald's rock musical Xanadu two years before, leads the Metal Corpses, "old farts" in platform heels and face makeup coasting on an old--and not very good--glam-rock hit. The three mismatched bands end up on the same tour bus.

It doesn't seem completely plausible that an untested and unsigned band--only three rehearsals to their name--would land a national tour so quickly, but stranger things have happened, and it sets the scenario in motion. 

Suffice to say: the men do not welcome the women, and in a matter of speaking that was happening behind the scenes, as well, since the woman who wrote the script, Slapshot and Coming Home writer Nancy Dowd, was so unhappy with the finale that she gave herself the credit Rob Morton.

Then again, the Losers and the Corpses don't get along all that well either, and the girls only piss off the crowd at their first show, but Corinne's attitude does attract attention, along with her new bi-color hairstyle and skimpy outfit--she rejects the black pleather catsuit provided by Rasta promoter Lawnboy (Barry Ford) in favor of a pinup girl look with black panties and a see-through top that plays like Frederick's of Hollywood gone punk--though no one could have pulled that off quite like Lane, who would do much the same when she played a rock singer in Walter Hill's 1984 Streets of Fire.  

On the way to California, one of the Corpses becomes an actual corpse, but the tour pushes on without them. In a framing device, entertainment journalist Alicia Meeker (St. Elsewhere's Cynthia Sikes), who's been covering Corinne since her acting days, reports on the tour. Soon, Tracy and Jessica have dyed their hair blonde and black, and now the trio looks less like the Runaways and more like a weird Rocky Horror hybrid, which may not be completely coincidental, since Adler, a music and movie producer, was behind the 1975 screen version of Richard O'Brien's cult-classic musical.

To the surprise of the Losers, audiences prefer the Stains. Their female fans, who call themselves Skunks, even start to dress like them. 

All of this might seem feminist, except The Fabulous Stains sends a decidedly mixed message. For one thing, cinematographer Bruce Surtees, a frequent Clint Eastwood collaborator for nearly 15 years, ogles the band and their fans, traveling up fishnet-covered legs and focusing in on the ladies' nether regions. The intention may have been empowering, except his upskirt-style camera work feels invasive and objectifying, not least because two band members were underage, though his celebration of the color red is hard to deny. I've seen worse, and you probably have, too, but I expected better.

Furthermore, there's a fine line between standing up for yourself and being a bitch. As was often the case with her juvenile performances, like Cherry Valance, the beautiful "Soc" she played in Francis Ford Coppola's adaptation of S.E. Hinton's The Outsiders, Lane sells the material like the pro she was, but the film has trouble distinguishing between the two, possibly because Adler saw punk more as a look or an attitude than an ethos; a rejection of the corporate mentality that characterized the music industry of the 1970s.  

The comments at The Stranger in response to my original post were mostly in praise of the film--readers were just happy I had called attention to it.

Few seemed to notice that I had given it something other than a rave. It's better than stirring them up, which wasn't my intention, but I was disappointed that no one had the same qualms. It's a fun film in a lot of ways, and I can easily recommend it, but it's troubling, too, and I'm not even certain what it was trying to say in the end. According to David Chiu in a fine piece for The Quietus, "Dowd's original ending for the script saw the Stains conquer America and tour the world as their fanbase grows." Adding insult to injury, a crew member even groped the Oscar-wining screenwriter.

By the epilogue, the band has morphed into something else--something popular, yes, but with all their original rough edges sanded away. Punk wasn't meant to last forever, and it didn't, but they come across as sellouts. 

Though Lou Adler, in the tacked-on ending, presents the new incarnation of the Stains as something good, it's a pyrrhic victory. Then again, maybe the ladies were never truly punk in the first place--they were just Rust Belt kids playing at something they didn't really understand. They tried, they failed, and what they were at the end is what they were always meant to be.

 

For more: Melissa Anderson ably captures the film's complexities.

As of 2022, Ladies and Gentleman, the Fabulous Stains was available on region-free Blu-ray from Imprint. Unfortunately, it's now sold out, but can be streamed from the usual pay operators. Special features include commentary tracks from Lou Adler, Diane Lane and Laura Dern, and the late cult-film critic Lee Gambin and Bratmobile singer Allison Wolfe. Images from Scopophilia (Lane), The Quietus (Lane, Kanter, and Dern), The Grindhouse Cinema Database (Skunks), and Imagine! Belfast (Kanter, Lane, and Dern).

In Praise of German Series Babylon Berlin's First Three Dazzling, Labyrinthian Seasons

Extended versions of my 2021 reviews for Video Librarian. Though this site exists primarily for film-related purposes, Babylon Berlin is as cinematic as TV can get. 

BABYLON BERLIN: SEASONS 1 & 2 [***1/2]

Take a seat, Berlin Alexanderplatz and Heimat: A Chronicle of Germany, the most expensive series in German history justifies its budget with intricate plotting, dazzling sets, and expertly choreographed crowd sequences.

Director and co-creator Tom Tykwer (Run Lola Run) and collaborators pull out all the stops to recreate novelist Volker Kutscher's eight-volume take on Weimar-era Berlin. Hitler merits mention as a minor figure, but the politics in play are already fascistic in nature, much like Prohibition-era America in which law-breaking ran as rampant among the cops as the criminals. 

Two central figures anchor the sprawling cast and labyrinthian storyline, starting with Cologne-born Gereon Rath (Generation War's Volker Bruch), a morphine-addicted member of the vice squad, driven largely by the desire to destroy the negatives of an incriminating film involving a powerful relative. 

His female counterpart, Charlotte Ritter (The Wave's Liv Lisa Fries), who shares a crowded flat with her extended family, comes from humbler origins. By day, she reports to the same police headquarters as Rath, serving as a steno-typist in the homicide unit. By night, she lives the life of a jazz-age flapper, wearing borrowed finery, dancing at the Moka Efti cabaret, and supplying sexual favors on the side to supplement her overstretched income. 

Shared interests bring her in contact with Rath, who becomes a friend, though his shady partner, Bruno (A Heavy Heart's Peter Kurth), becomes an enemy when he blackmails her in a bid to limit Rath's investigative powers. Other characters include Russian violinist Kardakov (Ivan Shvedoff), an anti-Stalinist, and his partner, Svetlana (Severija Janusauskaite), a gold-obsessed drag performer whose greed will mark her associates for death. 

As these two seasons play out, most everyone crosses paths. When Rath rents Kardakov's old room, he starts to put the pieces together, roping Lotte in to solve the mystery of the musician's disappearance. It's valuable experience for Lotte, who would also like to work as a detective. 

Another case will come her way when she runs into Greta (The Teachers' Lounge's Leonie Benesch), who has fallen on hard times. 

Through Lotte, Greta will find employment with a powerful Jewish figure only to fall prey to unscrupulous opportunists. All the while, the city's left-wing faction increasingly finds themselves at odds with a police force that will stop at nothing to quell uprisings and eliminate key figures. 

If the show proves hard to follow at first, the elements snap into place quickly enough. For all the beauty of the period outfits--those stunning hats!--and snazzy, Art Deco interiors, the brutality can be equally baroque, making for a challenging watch at times. Hence, the occasional dance sequence provides a breather whenever things get too intense. 

There are no weak links among the cast, Bruch and Fries above all, who meet every challenge writers Tykwer, Achim von Borries, and Henk Handloegten throw at them. Through Netflix, Babylon Berlin has captivated international audiences, inspiring Sky Atlantic to renew it for two more seasons. This set comes complete with a detailed look at the production, including the disclosure that face powder is verboten, contributing to the look of a populace on edge at every level. Highly recommended.

BABYLON BERLIN: SEASON 3 [***1/2]

During Babylon Berlin's first two seasons, the Weimar-era drama played like a musical whenever characters gathered at the Moka Efti to dance. Set prior to the stock market crash of 1929, the third season ditches cabaret to embrace socio-political intrigue. 

Chilly Armenian gangster Kasabian (Exile's Mišel Matičević), husband of once-famous actress Esther (Munich's Meret Becker), abandons the club to focus on film production, but his plans run aground when the star of his latest film turns up dead. Though the film-within-a-film sequences involve Busby Berkeley-like choreography, movement takes precedence over music. 

Police inspector Gereon Rath (Volker Bruch, a slight man with wary eyes) joins forces with police clerk Lotte (Liv Lisa Freis) to catch the murderer, a mysterious figure in a black cloak. The production continues with another actress, but when she also turns up dead, the mystery deepens, especially when they find another cloaked figure haunting the Babelsberg set. 

Suspects include proto-Goth actor Tristan Rot (The Whistlers' Sabin Tambrea), Kasabian's partner Weintraub (Ronald Zehrfeld), who has eyes for his wife, and Esther, who believes she's the best actress for the part. 

Fortunately, Rath's head is clear. While a different show might have detailed his efforts to kick the morphine habit that held him in its grip in previous seasons, that process takes place off-camera here. It may have something to do with his rekindled romance with Helga (Hannah Herzsprung), who relocated from Cologne to be with him, except their plans quickly crumble. 

Alone and secretly pregnant, she enters into an arrangement with erratic industrialist Alfred (Irma Vep's Lars Eidinger), while her son, Moritz (Ivo Pietzcker), stays with his uncle. If the two enjoy a genial rapport, Rath worries about his nephew's involvement with the Hitler Youth. 

It becomes an even greater concern when Rath and his former landlady and part-time lover, Elisabeth (Fritzi Haberlandt), shield Jewish reporter Katelbach (Karl Markovics) from enemies, like ruthless police counselor Wendt (Benno Fürmann), who will do anything to become chief of police. 

Lotte, meanwhile, moves into a flat with her younger sister, Toni (The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes's Irene Böhm). When their hard-luck older sister needs an operation, she considers a return to the sex work of her past. Little does she know that Toni has been following in her footsteps. 

Babylon Berlin is nothing if not eventful, and other characters make their mark, including crime scene photographer Gräf (Christian Friedel), whose homosexuality is an open secret among his associates, police analyst Ullrich (Luc Felt), whose delusions of grandeur put the two inspectors at risk, and Greta (Leonie Benesch) a death row inmate seeking a last-chance appeal. 

Building the central mystery around a series of film-set murders allows the writers to explore the links between surrealism, hypnotism, the occult and other shadowy subcultures thriving in Berlin at a transitional time. 

The third season also witnesses Rath and Lotte becoming closer. Even as other characters come and go, they continue to anchor this compulsively watchable show, which can reach crazy heights, with the grounded strength of their performances. As highly recommended as the first two seasons.  

Babylon Berlin - Seasons 1 & 2 and 3 are available on DVD and Blu-ray from Kino Lorber. Click here for more information. Season 4 is currently streaming on MHz Choice; Kino will release home video editions on Sept 24. Images from Prime Video (Volker Bruch), Glamour Daze (Liv Lisa Fries), TV Tropes (Bruch and Peter Kurth), The Guardian (Photograph: Frédéric Batier/X Filme), and Babylon Berlin GIFs (Bruch and Fritzi Haberlandt).