Hey. Hey you, Mondo film. Yes you. I'll be covering a maddening amount of your often inconsequential time capsules over the course of writing here, so we better get well acquainted. I'll slip into something more comfortable. Oh what's that? Acceptable xenophobia whilst feigning interest in other cultures to see tits jiggle and animals violently slaughtered?
That looks fantastic on me. Oh you know just what to say!The Mondo "craze" began with the popularity of Mondo Cane in 1962. Mondo is Italian for "world", so we are subjected to a plotless melange of globe-spanning footage; a sampler of often-staged cultural traditions that will SHOCK AND AWE western audiences. The conceit can be boiled down to"Look honey, wacky foreigners! And their doing primitive shit!" Somehow this caught on, leading to an exciting game of cinematic one-upmanship culminating in films featuring on-screen human death and suicide, something we all know is more fun with a paying audience.
This specimen, however, is that rarest of birds: a mondo film with a frame story! Jayne Mansfield "stars" as herself in the film equivalent of the car crash that decapitated her. JUST KIDDING! Her skull remained attached to her body when it was crushed in that car.
Jayne Mansfield as "Jayne Mansfield" is dropped off at a swanky hotel teaming with poorly-dubbed Italian patrons and bellhops. For a while she struts, semi-strips, and sunbathes and to what end? Well, audience titillation and extending the runtime past the 1-hour mark. This is trash cinema, after all. After five minutes one can only shed a tear for the Jayne mansfield of yesteryear. This lazy-eyed somnambulist scarcely resembles the perky beauty queen of Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter. I fear that while Tashlin's satiric masterpiece had Jayne playing doppleganger glamour hound Rita Marlowe, Primitive Love's Jayne Mansfield is yet another autobiographical performance, only reflecting her current state: desperate and detached.
Just why is Jayne wasting her time at this lodging aside from a narcissistic need for constant ogling by clientele? She is meeting The Professor of course! His credentials are left in sweet ambiguity (film is art, maaaan), he and Jayne relax and discuss a most pressing matter: human sexuality. Fortunately Jayne Mansfield, Hollywood starlet, has been galavanting across the world's jungles and villages shooting a film on this very topic entitled Love Among the Primitives. Her thesis is that male sexuality has remained base and uncontrollable while the illustrious professor vehemently disagrees, proposing that modern men have cultivated self control so as not to violently hump any female/moistened cavern in sight. Thus the battle of the intellects begins.
Lets inspect some of the evidence Jayne provides to back up her claims:
- Africans, once called "savages" have been mercifully upgraded to "primitives"
- Lots of stock footage of villages and straw huts
- South American tribes dancing around a fire
- Villagers planting for the harvest
- Cockfighting in the Philippines
- Old African women bringing female children into the woods to explain the intricacies of sexual intercourse SO THERE ARE NO QUESTIONS LATER
- A boar stabbed in the neck
- Sharks stabbed in the ocean
- A live chicken skinned and eaten
- A snake slowly gutted for use as an aphrodisiac
- A chinese man catching his wife in an extramarital tryst proceeds to whip eggs at her face, a shame so extreme she will forever be labelled the village tramp.
- Mickey Hargitay (Jayne's real life hubby) dressed as a Hawaiian chieftain for some reason.
- A poorly dubbed African man asks his wife to step out of a hammock and lay next to him. That's it.
- Occasional bouncing breasts of an exotic kind (read: non-white)
Jayne Mansfield's Baraka culminates in her discovering purity in Brazil because where else, huh? A young woman with ample mammalian protuberances runs topless through the jungle, pursued by a man symbolized by a POV camera that often forgets it's a POV camera mid-shot. Eventually we are shown a waterfall and told she fell to jagged, rocky death. The template for my new board game Rape-Escape is complete.
The Professor appears unconvinced despite the myriad evidence presented by the blonde bombshell about harvest tactics and hammock relaxation. We do know that many were fooled into thinking this would be a mondo nudie when in fact it contains little more than dull stock shots and wonderfully racist stagings of presumably invented traditions claimed to be straight verite footage. Standard mondo fare.
I have thus far failed to mention two key aspects of our globe-trotting sex-farce. The two horrific warts that no surgery will remove nor chemical cocktail sear off.
FRANCO
CICCIO
I have thus far failed to mention two key aspects of our globe-trotting sex-farce. The two horrific warts that no surgery will remove nor chemical cocktail sear off.
FRANCO
CICCIO
Franco Franchi and Ciccio Ingrassia, Italy's 21st chromosomes, prat-fall and forehead-dance through scene after excruciating scene in which they devise plans that climax with forcible entry into Ms. Mansfield ("All my years in love and I've never added a pearl like that to my string"). Well, they may not aim for rape per say, but just look at them. Any sex they initiate is rape. Their physical comedy is so dull that it makes Kevin James segway stunts appear Keaton-esque in their grace. While Franco's repertoire involves Cheshire Cat grins and little else, Ciccio brings nothing to the table. His facial expressions barely change, reinforcing my assumption that his Ron Perlman mask was built by the artisans on the original Planet of the Apes. This duo set the groundwork for all Happy Madison comedy to follow; comedy that is somehow stronger with more purpose. They infect every scene with a feisty strand of3qerbwr nb aw3rr33333rrrrrrrrrr
Sorry... I blacked out for a second. Fury can do that. I dreamt the same dream of theirs though, in which they impersonate Hawaiian islanders while Jayne jiggles her dignity away:
[EDIT: There used to be a youtube video here of the aforementioned dance but the gods above saw fit to strike it from Earth, their creation]
Unfortunately we must return to the battle of wits encompassing whatever "themes" this film believes it's exploring. The Professor's resolve remains steadfast, but Jayne's got a plan! She hides him in the closet ala Blue Velvet and chooses to allow Franco and Ciccio Frank Booth her all they want. Of course, being the idiot man children they are Jayne's seduction/striptease sends them into lust overload (overlust?), ending with them passed out on the bed an orgasmless heap of failure (certainly a perpetual occurrence in their lives). See, these representations of all men just want to screw a woman who offers herself to them while performing a low-rent burlesque. POINT PROVEN JAYNE! We never actually see her bare breasts but the professor does, transforming him into the lascivious Mr. Hyde lurking in each of us, cartoonish cro-magnon makeup and all. He chases her out of the room and into our hearts. The end. Thank you Jayne for filming a brilliant metaphor for your career trajectory. And then dying in an attempt to make me feel bad for writing that. Didn't work.
You know you want it.
Sorry... I blacked out for a second. Fury can do that. I dreamt the same dream of theirs though, in which they impersonate Hawaiian islanders while Jayne jiggles her dignity away:
[EDIT: There used to be a youtube video here of the aforementioned dance but the gods above saw fit to strike it from Earth, their creation]
Unfortunately we must return to the battle of wits encompassing whatever "themes" this film believes it's exploring. The Professor's resolve remains steadfast, but Jayne's got a plan! She hides him in the closet ala Blue Velvet and chooses to allow Franco and Ciccio Frank Booth her all they want. Of course, being the idiot man children they are Jayne's seduction/striptease sends them into lust overload (overlust?), ending with them passed out on the bed an orgasmless heap of failure (certainly a perpetual occurrence in their lives). See, these representations of all men just want to screw a woman who offers herself to them while performing a low-rent burlesque. POINT PROVEN JAYNE! We never actually see her bare breasts but the professor does, transforming him into the lascivious Mr. Hyde lurking in each of us, cartoonish cro-magnon makeup and all. He chases her out of the room and into our hearts. The end. Thank you Jayne for filming a brilliant metaphor for your career trajectory. And then dying in an attempt to make me feel bad for writing that. Didn't work.
You know you want it.