I come here to praise Roger Vadim, not to bury him. Perhaps the most notorious bad boy director of French cinema, Vadim has been the subject of a few reputation rehab attempts over the years on home video, but it never seems to stick. Instead he’s still remembered (if at all) as the lothario who romanced Catherine Deneuve, Jane Fonda, and Brigitte Bardot, with the latter two becoming his wives. Granted, that’s a reputation Vadim himself did more than a bit to encourage by writing autobiographies with titles like Memoirs of the Devil and Bardot, Deneuve & Fonda: My Life with the Three Most Beautiful Women in the World. On the other hand, if people can wake up and enshrine Russ Meyer in the auteur firmament, there’s no reason his closest French counterpart shouldn’t have the same chance. One of his most outrageous films (and first Hollywood effort), 1971’s Pretty Maids All in a Row, will be shimmying back onto TCM in the wee hours this Thursday, August 18th, but that’s just the opening salvo in a full-on Vadim assault on your senses in August. On Tuesday, August 23rd, you can also savor his contribution to the three-film Edgar Allan Poe anthology Spirits of the Dead (1968) and, as part of the day’s Summer under the Stars salute to Brigitte Bardot, see some of their collaborations with The Night Heaven Fell (1958), And God Created Woman (1956), and Love on a Pillow (1962). Be sure to check out the other Bardot films, too, as they ramp up to the final sublime entry, Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt (1963).
Now it seems as ripe a time as any to take a look at the black sheep of the French New Wave. A young aspiring filmmaker, Vadim catapulted teenage bride Bardot to stardom with the sensory Cinemascope soufflé of And God Created Woman (1957) as she tears up hearts around Saint-Tropez. She and Vadim cemented her sex kitten status and stretched abilities to do both drama and comedy with The Night Heaven Fell, Love on a Pillow and Please, Not Now! (1961), with a much more eccentric and taboo-pushing reunion long after their breakup with the delirious pop art fantasia, Don Juan (or If Don Juan Were a Woman) (1973). How could anyone possibly hate a film about a sexually liberated female Don Juan confessing her sins to a priest and chugging around in a mini submarine love pad?
After Bardot, Vadim embarked on a wild cinematic spree with Jane Fonda that began with the saucy Circle of Love (1964), a remake of La Ronde, followed by the mod Émile Zola adaptation The Game Is Over (1966). Of course, their most famous collaboration – and the one that briefly made Vadim a major name in America – is Barbarella (1968), the kinky, dreamy sci-fi comic book adaptation with Jane Fonda propelled through a string of misadventures involving a blind angel, a leather-clad female tyrant, a homicidal aviary, and malevolent dolls. Some of Vadim’s more low-key instincts were suppressed here when Paramount forced out his original score of choice by regular composer Michel Magne and imposed a wild pop soundtrack by Charles Fox and Bob Crewe, but no one who loves the film could argue that this was a bad choice.
What’s obvious if you look at Vadim’s work as a whole is that, his reputation to the contrary, all of his films deal with the strength of women who buck against and demolish (or at least partially subvert) the power structures around them. Barbarella is actually one of the meeker examples since she does this almost entirely by chance, but his other heroines are much more headstrong and fascinating. Bardot got some of the plum examples out of his filmography, but the work of Vadim as a whole is studded with multi-layered women going after what they want and disregarding the rules that govern them. Granted, it’s a little hard to see this thread when so many of his key works have either been unavailable in the United States for decades or never made it here at all, but the effort to seek them down pays off in dividends. (One startling exception: his 1963 World War II adaptation of the Marquis De Sade’s Justine and Juliette, Vice and Virtue, made its English-friendly home video bow last year from Kino Lorber and is well worth snapping up.)
A little digging will give you such rewards: Jeanne Moreau manipulating and backstabbing everyone in sight in an uber-cool modern version of Les Liaisons Dangereuses (1959) complete with a smoky Thelonious Monk soundtrack; an “easy” Gwen Welles offering respite from the horrors of Vietnam in the sadly underseen Hellé (1972); edgy Euro goddess Sirpa Lane pushing the taboo envelope to the breaking point in Vadim’s most extreme film, Charlotte (1974), which has yet to receive a decent video release anywhere in the world.
The aforementioned Spirits of the Dead might be the biggest obstacle to appreciating Vadim since his segment was chosen as the opener for a film also including stories by Louis Malle (who got Bardot instead, oddly enough) and Federico Fellini, who delivers one of his finest pieces of cinematic work with “Toby Dammit.” Almost every critic lambasted Vadim’s contribution, “Metzengerstein,” with Jane Fonda traipsing around as a sadistic Countess Frederique who becomes fixated on her cousin (played by her brother, Peter Fonda, a twisted bit of casting) and descends into a hallucinatory death spiral involving horses and fire. The funny thing is, Vadim’s segment is stunningly shot and feels truly perverse (despite the lack of any really explicit content) with an odd, fragmented structure that borders on experimental at time. Scenes feel like nightmarish shards instead of fully-formed dramatic pieces, leaving us stranded in a world where the amoral Fonda calls the shots all the way to the grave. This is a title that’s come up more than a couple of times in my conversations with Howard S. Berger, one of the revelatory forces behind the world’s greatest dummy death in film blog, Destructible Man. I asked him to sum up his thoughts for this piece I was putting together and thought it would be worth sharing what this fellow Vadimophile had to say:
The staple in the centerfold of Vadim’s career — an hallucinogenic biographical re-purposing of Poe that places his current wife and muse simultaneously on a pedestal and amidst the roaring fires of hell. Fonda/Frederique = the stunning vixen bored with the trappings of wealth, hungry to live life as she wishes; to the satisfaction of her impulses and whims (sadism and perversion for Frederique/political activism for Fonda). Judgement is cast by her masculine obsession, Baron Wilhelm/Vadim and both suffer the willful wrath of Frederique/Fonda against male dominance. The climax speaks miles about the Vadim/Fonda relationship as the liberated Frederique is haunted by the loss of Wilhelm to the point of total destruction by the vengeful Baron’s “ghost.” Vadim is supporting, with vivid metaphor, the idea that he created Fonda’s image and he can destroy it just as easily. Ironically, for Vadim, a self-fulfilling prophecy blown back at him full force — Fonda divorced Vadim a few years later and refused all roles that depicted her as sex-symbol. “Metzengerstein” is a succinct, poetic philosophical milestone separating his early biographical examinations of his own ego and his later satires of a world tilted off its axis by the sexual emancipation of women.
As Vadim’s marriage to Fonda disintegrated, his next film didn’t do much to win over the critics either. Fortunately it’s become a substantial cult classic in recent years, with Quentin Tarantino naming it one of his (many) personal favorites. A bizarre collision between two very different sensibilities, Pretty Maids All in a Row was scripted by none other than Star Trek‘s Gene Roddenberry, based on a much more graphic 1968 novel by Francis Pollini. (Scotty himself, James Doohan, even turns up in the colorful cast that also consists of Telly Savalas, Roddy McDowall, Keenan Wynn, and Roger Corman staple William Campbell. Oh, and the theme song’s performed by The Osmonds!
Ostensibly it’s a male-based story about serial killings on a high school campus serving as bookmarks in the awkward sexual development of student Ponce de Leon Harper (John David Carson) under the tutelage of adulterous football coach Tiger McDrew (Rock Hudson). However, it’s Angie Dickinson who swipes the film as a teacher whose sparkling, carnal presence is so powerful she overwhelms all of the other nympets and stunted man-boys in the cast. She’s so good, in fact, that my main issue with the film is that I’d rather go off and follow her story a while longer instead of going back to the murder investigations. The script might feel like an issue of Playboy transposed to the screen, but the end result is a film that becomes more fascinating and entertaining with each passing year. There’s truly nothing else remotely like it.
If I haven’t made enough of a case for Vadim as a filmmaker more worthy of attention, there’s one film that absolutely clinches it: the criminally underseen Blood and Roses (1960), one of the finest of all European horror films and an absolutely essential entry in vampire cinema (without a fang in sight). It’s Vadim’s only contribution to the horror genre, and oddly enough, he actually shot it twice: once in English, and once in French, with totally different line readings, camera movements, etc. Both are masterpieces, albeit very different; the English-language American version (most likely assembled by Paramount, and quite skillfully so) is a supernatural story through and through, while the French one is framed as a story told by a psychiatrist and can be read as a tragic story of a young woman driven over the brink by her dark ancestry.
In either case it’s a colorful, lyrical adaptation of J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s classic novella, Carmilla, about an ancient evil overtaking a household and consuming the young daughter who represents the bloodline’s hope for the future. However, unlike other versions (The Vampire Lovers being the most famous, and just as loose in its own way), the predatory outsider is an intangible spiritual force unleashed during a fireworks display that infects our heroine like a virus and ignites a thirst for blood. (Also of note, Carmilla/Millarca is played by another of his wives, the Danish actress Annette Vadim, later Annette Stroyberg). Haunting and beautiful, it shows Vadim at the peak of his powers in every way… and as with the rest of his work, there’s always more than first meets the eye as he explores the idea of womanhood from every perspective.
