The satan women of Tittfield

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Movie
German title The satan women of Tittfield
Original title Faster, pussycat! Kill! Kill!
Country of production United States
original language English
Publishing year 1965
length 83 minutes
Age rating FSK 16
Rod
Director Russ Meyer
script Jack Moran , based on an idea by Russ Meyer
production Russ Meyer,
Eve Meyer
music Igo Cantor
camera Walter Schenk
cut Russ Meyer
occupation

Satan Wives of Tittfield (Original title: ! Faster, Pussycat Kill Kill ) is a in black and white twisted American feature film by Russ Meyer from 1965. This low-budget production can the genre of exploitation film be attributed. Although there are no nudes in the film, Meyer indulges his preference for busty women with the selection of his actresses . The film has gained a certain cult status since the 1980s due to its focus on female dominance .

action

At the beginning of the film, a black screen can be seen with the optical soundtracks of a speaker from the off , who gives a prologue to the film on the subject of "Women and Violence" in a sonorous voice .

Then you see the three main actresses, the strippers Varla, Rosie and Billie, table dancing in a nightclub in front of a cheering audience. Then Varla, Rosie and Billie drive through the desert in their sports cars. A quarrel between the three women characterizes their roles: Varla is the group leader with gallows humor, Rosie is her easily irritable friend who is apparently in a lesbian relationship with her, while Billie is the blonde, nymphomaniac party girl.

At a lonely car racing track in the desert they meet the young couple Linda and Tommy. Tommy is challenged to a race against the three strippers. When Tommy allegedly cuts Varla's car during the race, she gets angry. Varla and Tommy fight and Varla kills Tommy by breaking his neck. The three girls continue their ride with the hysterical Linda who has been drugged by Varla. At a gas station they see an old man with walking difficulties who is being carried by his son. They learn that the man has been disabled since an accident in which he wanted to save a girl from an approaching train and with his sons, the retarded "Cauliflower" (in the original version: "The Vegetable") and the introverted bookworm Kirk, lives on a lonely farm in the desert. Large amounts of money from insurance compensation payments are said to be there. Varla and the other girls sneak into the farm under a pretext to get the money.

When old Linda tries to kill her because she reminds him of the girl he tried in vain to save, and Billie tries to seduce "cauliflower", the violent events culminate: Since Billie no longer agrees with the deeds of her friends, she is stabbed with a knife by Varla. Shortly afterwards, Varla and Rosie run over the old man who has hidden the money in a wheelchair with their sports car. "Cauliflower" pulls the knife from Billie's back and kills Rosie with it. Varla tries to crush “cauliflower” on a wall with her Porsche, which he can still prevent with superhuman strength. Varla grabs the farmers' pickup truck to follow Kirk and Linda, who are trying to escape on foot, and confronts them. There is a fight between Kirk and Varla. When Kirk is almost defeated, Linda gets behind the wheel of the pickup and runs over Varla. In the final scene, Kirk says to Linda, standing next to the dead Varla: "She had nothing human."

History of origin

After Meyer had finished his film Motorpsycho , he decided to make a new film with the opposite starting point: Instead of three motorcycle rockers, there should be three wild women who put their surroundings in fear and terror. Meyer hired former child star Jack Moran to write a script for his story. Moran, an alcoholic with a penchant for sharp-tongued dialogue, locked himself in a hotel room and, within four days, created the script he wanted called The Leather Girls .

Meyer found his leading actresses in the stripper Haji , who had already shot with him, for the role of Rosie and for the role of Billie in Lori Williams , an 18-year-old actress who had already appeared in several Elvis films. Meyer found the actress of Varla through an advertisement in Variety : The stripper Tura Satana , according to her statements half Japanese , half cherokee Indian origin, had experience in martial arts and, for Meyer, was the ideal cast for the dark leader thanks to her appearance.

Filming began on a budget of $ 46,000. After the nightclub sequence was filmed at the Pussycat Club in Van Nuys , the crew moved on to the Mojave Desert , where the near-ghost towns of Randsburg and Johannesburg served as locations near Lake Isabella . The old man's farm was Meyer's friend's ranch, which was later also used for shooting Meyer's next film, Mondo - Mockumentary Mondo Topless .

The shooting turned out to be quite simple, so that Meyer, who otherwise always wanted to keep full control of his film, even allowed his actors to improvise. Only the 16-year-old actress of the Linda, Susan Bernard , who comes from a Hollywood actor family and came to the location with her mother, could not cope with the arrogant manner of the two older leading actresses. Meyer also had problems with Satana, who got into an argument with him about the design of a scene and almost broke her hand when she angrily hit a wall. Meyer said of his leading actress: “She was great. She worked hard, did her own stunts, and she was strong, she helped us lug our gear. But she also had a mind of her own, was used to things going the way she imagined. "

The story is spread by everyone involved that Satana refused to stay on location for three weeks if she was not allowed to have sex. The camera assistant was ultimately chosen to serve Satana every night to satisfy her needs, and Meyer reluctantly abandoned his “no sex while filming” maxim.

That the relationship between Varla and Rosie was laid out with clearly lesbian undertones, Meyer had concealed from his actresses until the shoot, because he feared that they would jump off the project.

The English original title was finally based on the film What's new, Pussycat? elected.

Reception and aftermath

When the film hit theaters it was a complete failure. The plot was too extreme even for the targeted male audience, and the lesbian undertones bothers them. In addition, black and white films were out of fashion.

Insofar as the critics took notice of the film at all, they praised Meyer’s limited funds. Louis Black wrote: “One of the most relentless films by the most relentless filmmaker. A dusty, violent film, (...) a really mean Meyer. ” Variety judged:“ It is obvious that Meyer has a talent for filmmaking that actually deserves bigger and stronger films. His sense of the visual is outstanding, as is his scenic structure (...). Meyer's editing is pleasurable and polished to a high gloss, which helps the film to achieve impeccable speed and emphasis, without being obvious gimmicks of post-production. All he needs is a better script and more experienced actors. "

The film service criticized the “hairy story”, which was embellished with dialogues, “whose rude jargon would do an Italian western any credit”. Meyer only let his actresses "wiggle their hips and assume lascivious poses". The film is "primitively wound down, a bad mixture of sex showmanship and strength."

Even the evangelical film observer doesn’t let the strip down: “The brutalizing effect of the scenes described in this disgusting film can foster a development that is once again creating brutal concentration camp thugs. The film must be strictly rejected simply because of its anti-human stance. "

In 1995, Roger Ebert recognized the qualities of The Satans Wives of Tittfield as a female version of the action film : “What attracts the audience is not the sex and not even the violence, but the image of strong women as a pop art fantasy, on a high Energy levels captured on film and exaggerated in a way that seems bizarre and unnatural, until you realize that Arnold Schwarzenegger , Sylvester Stallone , Jean-Claude Van Damme and Steven Seagal also play such characters in principle. Without the bras, of course. "

In her book X - Porno für Frauen , Erika Lust describes the film as "one of Russ Meyer's most legendary films" and as an "orgy of chases". After looking at it, there is no recognizable meaning in the bad plot, but she writes: “Russ Meyers Kino wants us to enjoy the action and the women who delight in the suffering of others and are as bad as it was in In the films, only the men were. ”These“ tough girls with breathtaking necklines ”can, in their opinion, be described as“ the first representatives of a feminist revolution in the cinema ”.

Chris Hicks, on the other hand, also spoke out against overrating the film in 1995: “The story is so ridiculous and the acting so bad that one shouldn't make the mistake of mistaking the film for something other than what it is: a turkey ! "The Heyne Film Lexicon ruled in 1996:" Comic-strip-like horror comedy that caricatures and serves sexual fantasies at the same time, and makes macho male behavior really ridiculous in excessive exaggeration. "

The film found its way into the in the 1980s arthouse cinemas . The portrayal of dominant, independent women also excited the female audience more and more. In 1995 the film was re-released for American cinemas, and in 2002 the three leading actresses toured Europe to promote the film as a retrospective .

Cult director Quentin Tarantino was inspired by the film for his work " Death Proof ".

Film analysis

A microcosm of violence

Meyer always affirmed that he made his films for commercial reasons and not to express himself artistically. In Die Satansweiber von Tittfield , however, Meyer manages to create his own cinematic world by restricting the plot to sexual connotations and acts of violence, in which the characters do not find the motivation for their actions according to moral standards, but only their right to survive and enforce on instinct satisfaction. The figures are so overdrawn that, according to Myron Meisel, they have "no personality, (...) only attributes". David K. Fraisier adds: “You never get the impression that there is another world outside of this emotionally highly charged microcosm. The operatic (...) passions of Meyer's characters are as great as the physical makeup of women; so big that they overshadow the lesser emotions of reality. "

In the motives for their actions, Varla symbolically stands for “all or nothing”. She says to Kirk when he asks her what she wants: "Everything - or at least as much as I can get."

Moran's script, which, apart from the slippery one-liners, takes the plot to the ultimate conclusion in a bitterly serious tone and free of irony, namely that in the end five of the eight main characters are dead, plays an essential role in this existential limitation of the film.

Pop culture and society icons

Meyer exposes the conventions of film melodrama of the 1950s by turning them upside down: the values ​​of the family no longer exist and the traditional gender roles have been switched: it is the men who live in the familiar surroundings of the home stop, the women, on the other hand, are the active actors who hang around in the wild. Not even in the only scene in which the actresses play a traditional female role, when dancing in the nightclub, do they correspond to the image of the passive female, but already appear aggressive and uncontrollable, emphasized by editing, music and lighting.

Tura Satana says: "We were the first to set women free. (...) Basically, our film showed people: (...) You can be different and still be feminine." John Waters , an ardent admirer of the film, tells of his fascination when he saw it for the first time: “I was completely blown away. A drama about a lesbian redneck killer and, because it was in black and white, kind of artistic. They were grueling, sex-obsessed lesbians, and that was exactly the size of my collar. They were feminists, but kind of the Las Vegas way. "

The Porsche 356 C, similar to the coupé that Tura drove in the film, came from Meyer's private collection

Tura Satana in particular became a symbol of attractive female domination. Her completely black outfit with a black, low-cut top, skin-tight jeans, leather boots, leather belts and leather gloves, smoking cigarillos and driving a black Porsche , became the model for many artists from Madonna to the Spice Girls , in order to achieve a similar image create.

There are many references to the film in popular culture: In 1983 the rock band The Cramps recorded the title song in a Psychobilly version, which brought the film additional popularity. Also in the 1980s, the rock band Faster Pussycat named themselves after the film, and in the 1990s the band Tura Satana after the leading actress.

In the 1990s, the lesbian movement discovered the film as a symbol of a strong lesbian self-confidence. The American film scholar B. Ruby Rich interpreted the murder of Tommy as an aggressive expression of lesbian identity: as a couple, Tommy and Linda are the symbol of normative heterosexuality , two philistines, of which at least the man must fall victim to lesbian dominance. Consequently, the only explicitly heterosexual portrayal of the strippers, Billie, is inferior to the other two: She is the unreliable of the three, besides her lust for men, has a penchant for alcohol and other drugs and is also the first of the women to die.

Cinematic means

Light, camera and editing

Tittfield's Satans Wives was Meyer's last black and white film. Meyer later said: "We should have shot the film in color, but back then we saved where we could." The black and white photography, however, benefited the mood of the film: Meyer used the moon-like landscape of the Mojave Desert and natural sunlight and its reflexes to rotate high contrast images. His preferred shooting times were early in the morning or in the late afternoon due to the necessary low sunshine.

In order to be able to create attractive pictures despite the small budget, Meyer relied on unusual camera positions, often from a very deep perspective, in order to make the actresses appear even larger, voluminous and threatening.

Meyer, to whom post-processing of sound and image was alien until the Satansweibern , discovered a technical means during the filming to drastically increase his cutting frequency: By using a 2-track sound machine , he had the opportunity to record dialogues from one in to let the next shot overlap and thus to realize rapid editing sequences that give the film a high speed.

Sound and music

The sound, originally recorded on location due to the technical limitations, has only been expanded to include a few small but effective details, such as the cracking of a walnut when Varla breaks Tommy's neck.

The music was produced in a typical Meyer style: Meyer rented a recording studio for the composers and musicians (including Bert Shefter ) for a few hours, where the largely improvised soundtrack, which was typical for the 1960s, was recorded. The title song Run Pussycat Run played and sang the imaginary beat group "The Bostweeds", which consisted of the studio musicians and the singer Rick Jarrard - who later produced Jefferson Airplane  , among others .

literature

  • Rolf Thissen : Russ Meyer - The King of Sex Films. Heyne Verlag, Munich 1985, ISBN 3-453-09407-7 .
  • Jimmy McDonough: Big Bosoms and Square Jaws - The Biography of Russ Meyer, King of the Sex Film. Crown Publishing Group, New York 2005, ISBN 1-4000-5044-8 .
  • Carla Despineux, Verena Mund (eds.): Girls, Gangs, Guns - Between exploitation cinema and underground. Schüren Verlag, Marburg 2000, ISBN 3-89472-323-8 .
  • Bev Zalcock: Renegade Sisters - Girl Gangs on Film. Creation Books, 2001, ISBN 1-84068-071-7 .
  • Julian Stringer: Exposing Intimacy in Russ Meyer's Motorpsycho! and Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! In: Steven Cohan, Ina Rae Hark (Eds.): The Road Movie Book. New York 1997, pp. 165-178.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f Thissen , pp. 126-132
  2. ↑ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q McDonough, pp. 157–179
  3. ↑ criticism. ( Memento from June 2, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) In: Variety
  4. ^ Film-dienst , issue 29/1967
  5. ↑ Evangelischer Presseverband München, Review No. 317/1967, p. 409
  6. ↑ Roger Ebert : Critique
  7. ↑ a b c Erika Lust : X - Porn for women. Wilhelm Heyne Verlag, Munich 2009, p. 174, ISBN 978-3-453-67572-8
  8. ↑ Chris Hicks: Review. ( Memento of February 13, 2002 in the Internet Archive ) Whereby Turkey means a cheaply produced, commercial B-movie.
  9. ↑ a b Zalcock, pp. 66-72
  10. ↑ a b B. Ruby Rich: Lethal Lesbians . In: Despineux / Mund, pp. 127-131
This version was added to the list of articles worth reading on January 6, 2007 .