Girl on a Motorcycle
If you find movie reviews on this website, it's because of Moviedrome. If there's one reason this website is called Kurtodrome, that reason is Moviedrome. This BBC2 programme introduced me and millions of other people to cult cinema (which is much more than just a bunch of tacky lesbian vampire flicks). Elsewhere on this site, you can read which movies were played on Moviedrome.
As a tribute to the show, we now present you a double bill previously shown on the BBC and as introduced by Alex Cox.
Tonight on Moviedrome, Naked Under Leather (or rather Girl on a motorcycle, as Jack Cardiff's film became more chastily known). It forms the first half of our mad motorcycling double bill, the second feature of which will be Psychomania.
Girl on a Motorcycle is an Anglo-French co-production made in 1968. It stars Marianne Faithfull and, as you might expect, goes in for lashings of the old solarized images of weird colour and bizarre super-impositions, faithfully recreating the hallucinogenic experience in order to prolong the travellogues and render the bonk-ups more artistic. It's a nutty but highly entertaining film.
Jack Cardiff was a noted cameraman: he shot Black Narcissus, The Red Shoes, The African Queen and Rambo II, along with many other pictures. His directorial work includes Sons and Lovers and Death on the Nile. He certainly provides some exhilarating motorcycle sequences as the heroine - or her stunt-double - rides an enormous Harley Davidson across the Franco-German border to see her intellectual biker boyfriend, played by Alain Delon.
Girl on a Motorcycle is so mad, so over the top, that it's hard to rationally describe or criticize. There are moments of sublime madness, as where Cardiff cuts from an exciting biking exterior to an overhead shot of a bowl of bubbling fondue. It's so insane there has to be a real intelligence behind it.
Not so excellent is the incessant voiceover, with the unfortunate Miss Faithfull forced to spout hippie rhetorics such as "Why don't the dead rebel?". All dialogue is a bit ill and so Delon is forced to intone, drenched in a French accent, "A motorcycle is closer to you than any human being".
You can appreciate her predicament: what would you do if you were in love with Alain Delon and he'd given you a motorbike and you were married to a guy called Roger Mutton?
Marianne's obsession provides some splendid wacky visuals as even the roadside billboards start to display Delon's visage as she speeds past.
One quivel though: although it's unlikely to spoil the enjoyment of the general viewer, but why doesn't Marianne's bike lean over when she goes around the corners? It does on the wide shots (where presumably she's being doubled), but on all the close and medium shots of her riding, she and the bike remain upright at all times, the way Sid Vicious did on his Triumph in The Great Rock'n'Roll Swindle. Almost as if they weren't riding the motorcycle at all, but merely sitting on it on a platform or holding a pair of handlebars in the back of a pick-up truck.
Surely not!
[Note: The film clips are here, courtesy of British Horror Films. We've been asked to download rather than to stream the files so their server won't get blocked.]
And now another deranged biker movie, this one made in England in 1971. There seems to be a French connection here as well: the script is by one Arnaud d'Usseau [also writer of Horror Express, Kurtodrome].
The film stars Beryl Reid and George Sanders, who both appear far too infrequently in my opinion. The bulk of the screentime is devoted not to George and Beryl, but to a biker gang, appropriately named The Living Dead. Appropriately since they are led by a deceased biker who has been buried aside his cycle:
All of which leads to some fine out-of-the-grave stuff, non of it quite in the league of the fantastic nightmare sequences of Hammer's Plague of the Zombies.
Psychomania - it is not clear why the film is named this - was directed by one Don Sharp, an Australian director, who also made Witchcraft and The Face of Fu Manchu for Hammer. The Face of Fu Manchu, with Christopher Lee as the demonic doctor, is in my opinion a far better, more inspired, film. One can only hope that the tide of political correctness has not prevented Lee's and Karloff's portrayals of the fiendish Fu Manchu being washed ashore occasionally on our late night screens.
But, let there be no mistake, though it is nowhere near as good as Girl on a Motorcycle, Psychomania is a worthwhile film with some fine characterisations and some outstanding lines of dialogue.
It's a good mix of late 60s and early 70s Hammer and Amicus horror film and the American biker flicks of the same time.
True fans of this movie will want to order a copy of the soundtrack with its theme song, Riding Free, sung by Harvey Andrews.
Everyone else will not.
The movie introductions were transcribed from the Moviedrome programme.
Both Girl on a Motorcycle and Psychomania have now been released on Region 1 DVDs.
The Kurtodrome Vault is part of the Kurtodrome.