Ya Gotta Believe...

For anyone who found yesterday a little too wholesome - and, while I love her to death, I know that Alice Faye can have that effect on people - how about a little something, umm, less so?  The anti-Alice - the one and only, late lamented, totally demented Divine - shows us how it's done.

Tough Cookie

In a better world, that sweet creature on the right there - assaying the role of Concetta in what to me may be Mr. Waters's finest work, Female Trouble, along with Divine's Dawn Davenport and Susan Walsh's Chicklette - would be 63.  Cookie Mueller left the party too soon, but we're fortunate that beside her several memorable celluloid moments (which also include her turn as the plot-advancing spy, also Cookie, in Pink Flamingos), she left behind a small but treasurable body of prose, a mix of fiction, autobiography, and essays (for not the oddest part of her odd life is that she ended up a columnist, for both Details and the old East Village Eye).

When I moved to New York in the late '80s, it was partly because I wanted to be part of the underground world I read about in magazines like those, or at least a slightly sanitized, bougie version of it.  I remember when Cookie died, in '89, because I had the feeling that that party was ending, and I suppose mostly it did.  In her writing, though, you can capture that moment.  Waters said it best:  "Cookie Mueller wrote like a lunatic Uncle Remus - spinning little stories from Hell that will make any reader laugh out loud. She was a writer, a mother, an outlaw, an actress, a fashion designer, a go-go dancer, a witch doctor, an art-hag, and above all, a goddess. Boy, do I miss that girl.”

There's a fair amount of Cookie-love still out there online, ranging from an almost surreally primitive Angelfire (did you know that even still existed?) fan site to an enthusiastic overview of her writing, here.  Of course, you can always pop into nice Mr. Amazon's little shop and pick up your own copy of her anthology, Ask Dr. Mueller (they go high, but it's worth it).  Doing so makes for a nice birthday tribute, no?

The Female of the Species

Well, we've looked at various Daughters, Girls, and Women, so it seems almost inevitable to go down this little memory-lane, perhaps the most sordid of them all...

For a long time, but never more than during the sublimely trashy era between the nudie-cuties and the rise of videotape, "female" was movie-shorthand for, in many and varied ways, "slut."

You'd think that the male leads in a picture with this title would be more or less irrelevant; still, John Holmes, whatever else one might think about him, was certainly not easy to ignore...

One wonders what competing film was guilty of shyly exploring the bizarre, twilight world of abnormal sexual behavior.

A West Side Story star, the son of a silent-film legend, and what clearly look like the production values of Russ Meyers come together for...well, from the look of it, not all that much. Frankly, it gives every sign of being a yawner that might as well be titled Faster, Cowgirl! Kill! Kill!

I'm not going to make any jokes drawn from the headlines, I'm not going to make any jokes drawn from the headlines...

But I will say this: beware of any film that says it's in color - when its one-sheet poster isn't.

Who knew that Gun Crazy had an alternate title? For that matter, who knew that Gun Crazy originally came from a Saturday Evening Post story? I'd love to see the Norman Rockwell illustration for that one.

Remember that warning about color movies up above? It goes double for Brigitte Bardot movies that use "Spoken in English" as a tagline.

I don't know about Kathleen Crowley, but I'd cross the street to avoid anything that made Jayne Mansfield scream like a siren in the night. On the other hand, if Lawrence Tierney were doing the screaming...

Here we have the ne plus ultra of sleazy fifties "Female" pictures, albeit one that tried, hard, to play it classy.

This is the one where Our Joan strides around snarling out lines like "I have a nasty imagination, and I'd like to be left alone with it." She makes certain you believe it. On the other hand, it also has a character called Queenie played by Natalie Schafer and Jeff Chandler in (men's) swimwear, so it's not a total waste.

This one is trying to be the ne plus ultra of contemporary "Female" pictures, but all I think it really does is provide a subject for future surprise: Tilda Swinton and Paulina Porizkova once made a movie together?

There may be seven basic female responses; only six, however, get an illustration. All, apparently, involve, in varying degrees, bad hair, but only one requires being a Kaye Ballard impersonator.

In the end, though, despite the best efforts of Joan, Natalie, Tilda, and Paulina - this is the ne plus ultra "Female" picture, now and forever. And remember: just 'cause we pretty, everybody's jealous.

Just Sayin'

Miss West

Mr. Milstead

Compare and contrast.

I Confess!

Ever since Mr. Muscato got his New Look, I've been troubled by a sneaking urge. You see, when he sleeps, Mr. M. is exceedingly cute - one of those lucky souls who sleeps the sleep of the innocent.

And there I am (in Mammy's words, from Gone With the Wind, just like a spider), thinking how tempting it would be to give him the Full Divine. Something about all that scalp leaving all the more room for eye makeup, I suppose.

And I have to say, impossible as it likely is, it would be Quite Something to watch him re-enact the trampoline scene from Female Trouble, with its incredible ending: "Who wants to be famous? Who wants to die for art?" Something about the Egyptian accent would make that just irresistible...