In and Out of Fashion: Deceased Artiste Annie Girardot

I sing the virtues of character performers all the time on this blog, and sometimes “A-list” performers age into “character-hood,” and do so quite well. Such was the case with Annie Girardot, who was initially a sex kitten in French film (as so many French actresses in the Fifties and early Sixties were), and then developed into both a very talented actress and an éminence grise whose presence connoted that a film was definitely of a higher caliber.

It was noted in some of her obits that in a 1972 popularity poll of the French public Girardot scored higher than both Bardot and Moreau. Well, popularity polls don't really count for much, and the popularity earned can be too soon gone. What was important was that Madame Girardot kept on working throughout her career, appearing in several films a year. It was also noted in her obits, especially in the French press, that her family and show business friends (including La Bardot) said that it was a tragedy how Annie was “forgotten” by the French cinema, with special venom directed at the French New Wave filmmakers.

I would step to their defense to note that the New Wave was never an organized unit, so there was no “decision” by the filmmakers from that movement blackballing Girardot. She fell victim, unfortunately, to what happens to older actresses all the time in the film world: she was “in” and then she was “out.” To her credit, she kept on working, all through both phrases of her career.

In 1995 she publicly acknowledged that she loved working in French cinema when she won the Best Supporting Actress award at the Cesars for Claude Lelouch’s adaptation of Les Miserables (more below). Perhaps the most dramatic and sincerely brave thing she did occurred in 2006, when she publicly revealed she was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. Girardot became “the public face” of the condition in France, and participated in a very moving documentary called Ainsi Va La Vie that you can see scenes from below.

I will note that the Girardot clips in this post are for the most part in French with no English subs (unless I mention that there are subs). In the case of the films I’ve picked, though, the visuals and her fine acting shine through, whether you’re fluent in French, passable at best (as I am), or don’t know a word of the language.

There’s no better way to start off than this very beautiful montage, which the YT poster says he didn’t create but “found online.” Surely it was done for a celebration of Girardot’s work, possibly toward the end of her life. In any case, it is a beautiful summation of over four decades of an actress’s work:



A very cute clip from “Déclic et des claques” (1965):



A TV special hosted by Annie in 1959 feature none other than Edith Piaf as her special guest. I believe the song Piaf sang is here, but here is the host segment with the two women chatting:



The turning point for Girardot was her supporting performance in Rocco and his Brothers (1960). It was a watershed in terms of her professional life, since the film was a major success across Europe and an arthouse favorite in America. As for her personal life, she married the man who kills her in the film, actor Renato Salvatori. She remained married to him until his death in 1988, but they had been officially separated for the last years of the relationship. The entire Visconti classic can be found here. Here is a key scene featuring Girardot’s character:



Girardot worked alternately with French and Italian directors in the Sixties making films like Mario Monicelli’s Les Camarades (1963). My favorite moments from her career come at this point, when she worked three times for the inimitable Marco Ferreri. (Check out segments from my interview with Signore Ferreri). The first of the three contained what was without question Annie’s most daring move: staring as a hirsute woman exploited as a freak by Ugo Tognazzi in Ferreri’s sad/funny/weird The Ape Woman (1964). Here is one clip from the pic (which was released with two different endings):



A bit more of the brave, hairy Annie:



So, pretty much nothing Girardot would do in her career could be a surprise after she took that first chance with Marco to appear as an ape lady (and, remember, that when I interviewed Il Maestro Marco he did claim that his actors did nothing embarrassing in his pictures. The pictorial evidence sorta contradicts that….). She next appeared in a Marco movie as the sexy maid that Michel Piccoli cheats on his hot wife (Anita Pallenberg) with in the low-key-to-the-max supercrazy allegorical Dillinger is Dead (1969). Scenes between the two can be found here:



and here:



Annie’s appearance in another Marco mindfuck The Seed of Man is not online, but it is quite something, as again she plays the provocatrice for a seemingly post-nuke Adam and Eve (the very sexy snake in the garden, who meets a very nasty but not entirely un-Biblical end). The end of that pic can be found here. Annie’s coolest, most psychedelic-Sixties pic can be found in various places on YT, however. It is called Erotissimo, was made in 1969, and stars her as the wife of an executive who is trying to deal with the overflow of sexual material she sees in popular culture. Two cool-as-hell scenes that are worth your attention but do not feature Girardot are available here and here. This should give you an impression of how Sixties the pic is:



And this supplies us with Annie in aviatrix gear singing a tune called “La Femme Faux Cils,” with women’s magazine ads intercut, for the full psych effect:



And just in case you weren’t sure if the film was a bona fide piece of crazed Sixties creativity, here is Annie meeting a guest star we love very much in the Funhouse (with English subtitles!):



Girardot’s films are not out in great profusion on DVD, but Les Novices (1970) is. Any film that starts with cute nuns stripping down to bras and panties, and then follows a novice (Bardot) and a hooker (Girardot) as they try to raise dough in various ways on the streets of Paris, of course deserves our attention, but it’s a cute entertainment, not a major comedy by any means. The biggest surprise on the film’s credits is that it was written by Paul Gégauff, whom I wrote about in my Deceased Artiste tribute to Claude Chabrol. IMDB also lists Chabrol as having done uncredited direction on the film. I would think if he really contributed to it, it would’ve been just a slight bit sleazier and sexier…. Here is the trailer:



One of my favorite underrated French filmmakers is the darkly comic master Bertrand Blier. Girardot had a support role in his very strange “road movie” Merci La Vie (1991):



Annie and the great Chabrol/Eustache star Bernardette Lafont in a scene from the women’s prison drama (warning: not much sexploitation here!) Les Prisonniéres (1988 ):



Girardot’s career was brought “back to life” with her supporting role in Lelouch’s adaptation of Les Miserables (1995) starring Belmondo. I will confess I have not seen the film, but this is a scene that appears to have been Annie’s “bravura moment”:



As with most aging performers, Girardot’s final great roles were as mothers of younger stars — she was Adjani’s mom in La Gifle (1974), and played Huppert’s mother twice, first in Doctor Francoise Gailland (1976), and then in Michael Haneke’s disturbing La Pianist (2001):



The final triumph of Madame Girardot was not a fiction film, it was a TV documentary called Annie Girardot: Ainsi Va La Vie, which aired on French TV in 2008. As noted above, she bravely announced she had Alzheimer’s in 2006, and was thereafter known to the French public as a sufferer of the condition. This documentary found her reviewing her career and also interacting with her family. This segment begins with the important moment at the Cesars in 1995 where she won the Best Supporting Actress honor and there wasn’t a dry eye in the house, with several of her women colleagues deeply moved by her speech:



This segment from Ainsi is exceptionally sad but heroic, as Annie talks about her condition. Like many great French stars, her voice changed over the years due to constant smoking, but here the habit enhances her “mysterious” quality. Even in decline, she had a radiant and intriguing screen presence:

Bye Bye, Baby: Deceased Artiste Jane Russell

Hollywood during WWII was extremely repressed, but there were always the pin-up girls, Betty and Rita and Lana and the amply bosomed Jane Russell, who died last week at 89. Russell for me has always belonged to that category of actresses who looked seethingly sexy in photos, but was never as red-hot on screen. Perhaps it was her reserve on camera, plus the fact that underneath it all we were aware that Russell the sexbomb was also Russell the Very Christian Girl. She was an imposingly sexy babe on screen, but she wasn’t the best actress (although she did study with Maria Ouspenskaya, so maybe that explains why she played gypsy babes so well) and was not reserved in the even more appealing way that Kim Novak was (a sex queen who had you coming to her rather than doing the Marilyn thing of coming straight at you).

In any case, Ms. Russsell was quite identified throughout the years with her chest (38D), from her headline-fetching “censored” debut in Howard Hughes’ dirty-for-its-time The Outlaw (1943) to the very tame films she made that showcased her chest in musical numbers or in the very titles of the pics themselves (including Double Dynamite, which found her getting star billing over Groucho Marx and Frank Sinatra, thanks to Hughes) to her ubiquitous ads for the Playtex Cross Your Heart bra in her later years.

As I went through the clips on YT to discover the best possible tributes to Jane, it became evident that she had three fan bases: men who really dig the sexbombs of the Forties; classic movie fans who liked her somewhat dominating presence in adventure pictures and musicals; and gay fans, who love old movie divas and especially those like Russell whose big-screen identity was openly classified as being of “gay interest” by no less a filmmaking master than Howard Hawks (see below), who in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes actually achieved the impressive feat of making Busby Berkeley seem subtle.

First, the photos. Here is a montage of pics accompanied by Russell singing a song called “Boin-n-n-ng.” Yeah, the Forties were a demure decade all right….



A song I like a lot being given the “steamy” treatment by Russell. She wasn’t Julie London, but she could actually warble pretty well:



She only made 22 films in all, 18 during the Forties and Fifties. This one started it all, and this YT poster has pared The Outlaw down to only the most “provocative” scenes:



A few years later Russell was fit for mainstream Hollywood and appeared in such family-friendly fare as Son of Paleface (1952), opposite Bob Hope and Roy Rogers. Here the trio sings the film’s best-remembered tune:



The aforementioned Groucho-Sinatra pic where Jane received top billing, Double Dynamite (1951). It’s a very slight movie, but fascinating for the fact that someone did actually think Grouch and Frank would make a good comedy team:



Macao (1952), a classic adventure picture, with touches of stylization provided by the initial director (Josef von Sternberg) and embellished by the director who took over (Nicholas Ray). The script isn’t much, but the cast is perfect and, yes, Russell actually does have two physical tussles with Big Bob Mitchum and was a great match for him physically:



Howard Hawks was indeed a Master, and he knew back in 1953 that there was, let us say, an “alternative” audience for the major sex symbols of the era. He openly acknowledged the gay male viewer in the camp staging of “Ain’t There Anyone Here for Love?” in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. The film is available in its entirety here, and the musical number is here:



Here is Jane in a very “provocative” outfit (for the time) in The French Line (1953). UPDATE: I had initially linked to this version of the following musical number, but the brilliant RC has noted to me that The French Line was censored at the time it came out, to the extent that there were two different versions of this number. The one I initially linked to was the censored version, which used an alternate take of the scene that showed Russell in a very long shot. The uncensored version of the number included not only a clearer view of her provocative one-piece outfit, but also a bit of spoken-word patter in the middle that RC rightly notes finds "Jane channeling two MMs: Marilyn Monroe and Moms Mabley." The proper, "dirtier" version is below, and here is a quick link to an interview clip where Russell talks about the censorship of her films (and mentions how The French Line was condemned by those perpetual tight asses over at the Catholic Legion of Decency). The fact that The French Line was a 3D picture must've pleased teenage boys quite a lot at the time:



As with Sophia in Italy and Raquel in the Sixties (and Bisset in the Seventies), directors figured that the best way to showcase an actress’s “assets” was to keep her in the water:



The sequel to Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, called Gentlemen Marry Brunettes (1955), has never been available on VHS or DVD, and has really not been shown much (if at all) on the classic movie nets. This wildly crazy, racist musical number might explain why. UPDATE: I've been informed by Paul G. that the film is available (streaming only) on Netflix. If anyone wants to deliver a report of how bad (or good) it is, please pass it on:



One of the most colorful, eye-filling movies Russell made was the earnestly sincere but still pretty odd saga of gypsy life made by Nicholas Ray, Hot Blood (1956). No intrepid soul has put up the energetic catfight Jane has in one scene in the film, but here is a small sample of the film:



Jane in full Xtian-lady mode on TV as part of “the Hollywood Christian Group,” a singing quartet composed of Connie Haines, Beryl Davis, Rhonda Fleming, and Russell. This is some super-wholesome stuff, so wholesome it has been spoofed by drag queens on YT:



Jane guests on Italian TV with a bilingual host named Heather. The two talk about Jane’s latter-day pursuits, sing together, and James Coburn comes out to say goodnight (!):



Russell essentially retired from show business after the Sixties, but made an occasional TV appearance and also did some live performances (what is there left to do after playing a rape victim in the first Billy Jack film?). Although there are indeed some very nice home-video moments (like this one, at the Hollywood Heritage Museum), the most impressive is this performance at the Castro Theater in San Francisco. Many of her obits quoted her description of herself: "These days I am a teetotal, mean-spirited, right-wing, narrow-minded, conservative Christian bigot, but not a racist.” Clearly, she was okay with gay audiences, though, and she does seem a little butch here as she sings a theme song she says was written for her by Peggy Lee, “Big Bad Jane,” and the Blondes song “Bye Bye, Baby”:

Why is the Oscarcast so horrible, no matter what changes are made?

It is a truism that the Oscarcast can’t help but suck horribly. No matter what tweaks are put into effect, no matter what technological innovations are displayed, the show is a stiff for several reasons, including:

—the fact that moviemakers only make movies well, they can’t put on a live show properly (haven’t ever been able to);
—it’s grating to watch a community pat itself on the back for over three hours of TV time;
—the attempts to snare young viewers are hopeless and pathetic (young viewers have better things to do than watch the Oscars)
—and the lip service given to the “respect” the Academy has for its legacy and elders is of course disproved by the disrespectful treatment those same elders receive during the program (which is related to the previous point).

So, let’s run through the statistics, shall we? What I’ve always found interesting, and thoroughly obnoxious, about the Oscars is the constant back-patting about what a great industry they’re a part of. If you check the MPAA’s website it is noted that 560 films were theatrically distributed in America last year — if you remove nearly half of those in the expectation that many are independent features (one hopes) and/or foreign releases (these days, quite few), you still have a good 300 films made and released by Hollywood annually.

So the fact that a small handful of movies get saluted at the Oscars each year has always been a don’t-watch-that-watch-this bit of misdirection. The fact that the “sweep” factor finds less than 10 films nabbing most of the nominations contributes to this, as does the sporadic instances, as with this year’s King’s Speech, where a film made in the U.K. receives many nominations and most of the top prizes. So Hollywood is indeed proud of the fact that about 10 out of every 300 films that are produced here are very good — and that better movies are often made elsewhere.

And then we come to the dead folk. As regular readers of this blog know, I am devoted to saluting the Deceased Artistes whose work I loved, so of course one of the reasons I have to watch the Oscarcast is to see what they do with their annual necrology segment. For years it was an odd popularity contest in which they led up to the biggest names, and the audience was encouraged to applaud wildly at whomever they recognized. That iniquity was taken away a few years ago, when they started doing severely solemn necrologies that gave less than 10-15 seconds to every person saluted.

This year each person was given approximately three and a half seconds of screen time, no matter if they were an agent, an executive, a producer, or a Hollywood stalwart performer like Tony Curtis or Dennis Hopper. Four seconds, and yer out! So much for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ respect towards its elders.

Of course, there is also the shameful move instituted last year, where the Lifetime Achievement awards were shunted off the program and thrown into a separate event held months before the Oscar telecast. This year our Funhouse deity Uncle Jean (aka Jean-Luc Godard) didn’t make the trip from Switzerland to Hollywood to receive his five-decades-delayed Oscar for Breathless, but the three other honorees were in attendance, and all four gentlemen were given 20-25 SECONDS each to be saluted on the puffed-up Oscar show.

Some of the tech awards remain, the shorts remain, the wretchedly bad comedy bits remain, the tributes that come out of the blue and go back into the blue and make no sense remain — Billy Crystal talking to Bob Hope? (That guy’s immense ego hasn’t deflated since he made himself a partner to Laurel and Hardy some years ago) — and yet the Lifetime honorees get 25 seconds each.

It was only natural that one of those honorees, the brilliant film historian Kevin Brownlow, displayed the MOST respect for Hollywood’s legacy of filmmaking by simply saying in his acceptance speech, "I really do regret the loss of black and white...."

An exploitation pioneer passes: Deceased Artiste David F. Friedman

Dave Friedman was a very amiable gent whom I had the distinct pleasure of interviewing twice. He will go down in history as the last of the old-fashioned, road-tested exploitation producers. He learned at the hands of a master (Kroger Babb), created with Herschell Gordon Lewis the gore movie, made some very dippy nudie-cutie pics with HGL, wrote a great memoir (A Youth in Babylon), and gave us some of the best-ever trailers for softcore pics in the Sixties. He of course also made features to go with these trailers, but they very often (with one or two exceptions) were much less entertaining than the trailers were.

Here is a classic Friedman trailer for his “roughie,” The Defilers:


The Defilers (1965)


Another great one that reflects beautifully Friedman's attitude toward softcore. A free i.d./password for Daily Motion might be required to view this one, but you should have one of those anyway (Daily Motion is a YouTube with no squeamishness about the unclad body):


The Lustful Turk


I thought I had put up the “carnival pitch” clip from my first interview with Mr. Friedman (who did insist on being called “Dave,” as noted in his New York Times obit), but I evidently never did. I will rectify that in the near future. In the meantime, I offer this great bit from my second interview where Dave just laid it on the line about his profession.

The man was a delight to talk to. His trailers may have indeed been better than his films, but I can vouch for the fact that talking to the guy was FAR more entertaining than watching either. He was an extremely friendly legend.

"A riot is an ugly thing!": Deceased Artiste Kenneth Mars

Show biz folks die all the time, but it does seem like a lot of people whose work I really loved are dying these days. I was introduced to the brilliance of stalwart comic actor Kenneth Mars by my dad, who would tell me of the wonders of The Producers before I finally got to see it and memorize it (the recent-vintage musical remake is an abomination I won’t even comment on).

Mars did play normal characters quite often (he was the dad in a Molly Ringwald comedy, fer chrissakes), including a lead part in a Frank Gilroy picture I’ve yet to catch up to, Desperate Characters with Shirley MacLaine (1971). But it’s for his absolutely brilliant comic turns he’ll be remembered, most especially the two for Mel Brooks (see below).

In reading Mars’ obits, I became aware of how much work he did as a voice talent for cartoons. It makes perfect sense — in his best comic performances, he was most definitely cartoonlike but played the characters with a sincerity that was gorgeous (and made the characters even funnier). Besides his prolific work on sitcoms, I want to point to two of his performances that absolutely blew me away.

The first is in the overambitious and sadly underwhelming Woody Allen film Shadows and Fog (1991). The film, Woody’s last for Orion Pictures, is his homage to German Expressionist silents and also the work of Franz Kafka. It is a confused picture that has way, way, way too many celebrities in supporting roles and cameos (it could be seen as the Expressionist Mad, Mad, Mad World) — John Malkovich, Madonna (who received prime placement in the Spanish poster, as you can see on the right, although she’s barely in the picture), Jodie Foster, Kathy Bates, Donald Pleasence, John Cusack, David Ogden Stiers, Philip Bosco, Fred Gwynne, Kate Nelligan, Wallace Shawn, William H. Macy, and of course Woody’s main squeeze at the time, who now threatens to sue if her clips are shown in documentaries about him.

The film doesn’t wind up working well as an Expressionist update or as a Kafka-esque comedy. Kenneth Mars shows up at the film’s end as a magician in a circus that Woody has run to, in order to escape a killer. Mars proceeds, with a beautifully understated performance that seems intended to evoke Bergman actor Erland Josephson, to steal the entire movie. I was already a firm fan of Mars’ when I saw the film upon its initial release, but I was very impressed that a really talented character actor could just steal an entire film away from its unnecessarily star-studded cast. Someone has posted the entire film on YT, here is the very end:



The other Mars performance that is indelible for me is his semi-regular work as William W.D. “Bud” Prize on the terrific Fernwood 2-Night and its follow-up program America 2-Night. In that character, Mars achieved something quite unique: he actually made hardcore deadpan comic actors Martin Mull and Fred Willard break up. Unfortunately, the scene in question isn’t on YouTube, but it occurred when “Bud” Prize began to lecture “Barth Gimble” (Mull) and “Jerry Hubbard” (Willard) about why parents shouldn’t let their children transform themselves into pirates. The show was written by brilliant comedy writers, but one could see that Mull and Willard were always “sweetening” their bits with toss-off lines. Mars was the only guest I can remember whose riffing got Mull and Willard to smile broadly on camera (and Mull to hide his face behind a prop, so as not to be seen laughing).

As for clips of Mars, I offer a late Sixties Prell ad he appeared in:



And, from around the same time, the charming low-key sitcom He and She with Richard Benjamin and Paula Prentiss. Mars played their Greek fireman neighbor:



Kenny’s introductory sequence in The Producers ranks among the funniest scenes ever. Ever!



An outtake from Young Frankenstein that introduces his Inspector character:



And the classic “a riot is an ugly thing!” bit:



The best for last: Mars as “ambassador-at-large for the Fernwood Chamber of Commerce” William W.D. “Bud” Prize on Fernwood 2-Night. Here he talks to Barth and Jerry about his environmental preservation (which he calls “conservatage”) and his terminal underbite:



Bud Prize debates “Sylvia Miller” (Fannie Flagg) on whether or not she’s having sex with aliens. He also discusses his mentor and “chin-odontist,” the great Cletus Emmett Wheelwelker (Fernwood 2-Night was so goddamned good for several reasons, among them the fact that even the smallest characters had a demented back story):



Bud Prize came back on America 2-Night as Barth’s “interview coordinator.” Here he presents in the flesh the great aviatrix Amelia Earhart… kinda: