1971@50 PRETTY MAIDS ALL IN A ROW

Year 12 student Ponce (yes, really) rides through a credit sequence on a scooter eyeing all the beautiful girls that the early '70s can offer but his gaze is deflected by every one. Mortally embarrassed by the hardon that his sexy substitute teacher has inadvertently given him he begs excuse and goes off to the boys' to soften down and discovers a dead girl draped over the pedestal, a note taped to one of her buttocks. Ponce sounds the alarm and brings the rest of the school and local cops to rubberneck as he tries to insist everyone (including the rozzers) to keep to the point who is still lying in the cubicle. They stop talking about football long enough for Telly Sevalas to come in as a proto Kojak and take over. Uberhunk Rock Hudson, school counsellor canoodling with a student, stirs at the sight of the cops outside, emerges from his publicly funded man cave to handle the kids and takes young Ponce aside for a debriefing (no, not that kind). Ponce can't stop getting erections but no girl will come near him. Counsellor Tiger (yes, really) sees an opportunity to make Ponce a man and knows how when the substitute teacher (a young 'n' hawt Angie Dickenson) happens by to express her concern. Tiger returns to his den whereupon his secretary's clothes fall off and she gives him that look. And that's the point you really go UH?

See, the credit sequence (set to the tune of a faux folk ballad by Lalo Schifrin and sung byThe Osmonds - yes, really) promised a cute and warming coming of age as young Ponce (I laugh every time I type that) clearly needs a shot of Man-Up so he can vault over the heartbreak and learn love. The scene in the gents' plays like the kind of black comedy that Robert Altman or Elaine May were making their own. The bizarre love-generation romping between staff and students (it's not just Tiger) are a tiny flick away from cringe sex-comedies from the mid sixties. The murder trail of female students gets longer and is not played for laughs. One of the first names you see in the credits is Gene Roddenberry. The creator of Star Trek who took American TV to where no TV had gone before with fables on the evils of warfare, arms races, colonisation and the first American onscreen interracial kiss, also wrote this. The last name you see in the credits is director Roger Vadim.

Now, Vadim is no slouch as a filmmaker but if you make one Nutty Naughty Chateau that's how you get pegged. If you keep making them it won't matter how many earnest pieces you can boast it will be the T&A that will get you hired. So it was that Roddenberry's dark social satire grew leggy and raunchy under the watch of the same guy who made sci-fi sniggeringly naughty in Barbarella (a film I sometimes love and sometimes cringe at). It's 1971 and New Hollywood is soon to rise and tear itself from l'ancien regime irrevocably but, as we'll see in this blog series, until that happened we had a mainstream that was growing increasingly curious and playful. 

Vadim's importation for the director role and his clear hand is smearing his prints over every scene. The thing is that none of it plays well as comedy. The timing is all off and the performances aren't allowing it (they're good just not comic). Rock Hudson's Tiger (also the school's football coach) is straight out of a vintage "What kind of man reads Playboy?" marketing ad. Not even the dependable Hudsonian charm can lift him out of looking like hippy never happened. Vadim's self conscious sex-first zeitgeist is like May '68 never happened. That scared the likes of Godard away from narrative altogether as he dived into the underground (kind of). But Rog? Hey, maybe I can bring a better class of sex to America. And I don't need to change my M.O. Hell they're paying me for it. (You know, even Benny Hill toned it down for his brief comeback in the '80s.)

If, however, you are patient there is a reward to all this and it feels like the writer's intention was too strong to dismiss. The final sequence is an inversion of the opening and carries a suggestion, cold and mechanical, of how the social order is maintained. It is expertly judged and chilling. I guess there were a lot of pretty maids before we got to the row.