Post on 22-Jan-2023
RESEARCH ARTICLEDaring cycles: the Towers-Franco collaboration, 1968-1970
Antonio Lázaro-Reboll*School of European Culture and Languages, University of
Kent, UK
This article focuses on the prolific partnership between British independent producer Harry Alan Towers and Spanish filmmaker Jesús Franco, which yielded a total of nine films between 1968 and 1970. The Towers-Franco collaboration worked across genres, cinematic and literary traditions, and nations. Their partnership serves here as a case-study to examine serial production and related forms of exploitation cinema such as sexploitation, in particular their specific modes of production and their actual modes of circulation and reception. Through an analysis of The Blood of Fu Manchu / Kissand Kill (1968), The Castle of Fu Manchu / Assignment Istanbul (1969), 99 Women (1969), Paroxismus / Venus in Furs (1969) andEugenie … The Story of her Journey into Perversion (1970), the article plunges into the messy histories of international co-production, distribution, exhibition, and consumption in the late 1960s.
Keywords: Harry Alan Towers; Jesús Franco; serial production; distribution; advertising; pulp; sexploitation
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Daring cycles: the Towers-Franco collaboration, 1968-1970
Between 1968 and 1970, British independent producer Harry
Alan Towers (1920-2009) and Spanish director Jesús Franco
(1930-) collaborated on nine low-genre film productions
that encompassed both pulp and sexploitation cinema.i
Towers’ pulp film cycle Fu Manchu was already well
established when Franco came on board for the direction
of its fourth instalment, The Blood of Fu Manchu (1968); even
before filming had begun on the fifth and final part of
the Fu Manchu series, The Castle of Fu Manchu (1969), they had
diversified into another pulp cycle with a female Fu
Manchu, Sumuru, in The Girl from Rio (1969), and were also
responding to the exigencies of the European sex-film
boom and the emerging US sexploitation market with the
release of such titles as 99 Women (1969) and Venus in Furs
(1969). Their brief yet prolific partnership offers an
instructive case-study into serial production and related
forms of exploitation cinema, such as sexploitation, in
particular their specific modes of production and their
actual modes of circulation and reception. While Towers’
2
and Franco’s pulp film fictions were the product of an
industrial and cultural hybridization moulded by the
economic and artistic principles of serial production and
influenced by European and American pulp cultural
histories, their sexploitation movies belong to a set of
co-production, distribution and exhibition practices
intimately bound up with histories of American
(s)exploitation cinema. An examination of the Towers-
Franco collaborations will shed light on the industrial
mechanics of serial production and its economies, among
them the role of specific producers, the assemblage
practices at work to maximize the production and
subsequent circulation of film commodities, the
international distribution networks placing these
commodities in different markets, and the cultures of
consumption for which they were destined.
The alliance of Towers and Franco opens up complex
questions about the history and the geography of low-
genre productions in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The
film and cultural historian is confronted, on the one
hand, with the often messy history of their output as
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individual films and cycles overlap, and patterns of
distribution respond to the particular requirements of
the industry; on the other hand, the commercial and
cultural specificities of the films and related cycles go
beyond histories of British, Spanish, European or
American cinema – as mass culture products, the Fu Manchu
collaborations were distributed globally and reached
international audiences. When Fu Manchu addresses his
band of female assassins in the opening moments of The
Blood of Fu Manchu, the film signals self-reflexively the
cosmopolitan reach of this particular film and the cycle
as a whole: “Each of you has had a destination: Rome,
Berlin, New York, Tokyo, to the ends of the Earth”.
Industrial and generic patterns
The Towers-Franco collaborations must be understood
in relation to their material contexts of production,
distribution and exhibition, and the predominant generic
trends of the time. Their products are characteristic of
the industrial milieu in which European popular genre
films were being made during the 1960s, but also adapted
to the shifts taking place in the international media
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market in the late 1960s, among them, more daring
combinations of sex and horror, the expectation of sexual
titillation and more general changes in consumer taste.
Throughout the 1960s Towers had been developing
production and distribution networks in West Germany, in
particular with distribution company Constantin, which
specialised in popular genres – exotic adventure films,
spy thrillers and crime films – for the West German
market. With two contributions to the highly popular
Edgar Wallace series, Death Drums Along the River (Laurence
Huntington 1963) and Coast of Skeletons (Robert Lynn 1965),
and three other lowbrow genre products,ii Towers entered
the industry of serial film production and embraced
international co-productions as his regular modus operandi.
i The nine films were: The Blood of Fu Manchu / Kiss and Kill
(1968), 99 Women (1969), The Girl from Rio / The Seven Secrets of
Samuru (1969), Marquis de Sade: Justine / Deadly Sanctuary / Justine
and Juliet (1969), The Castle of Fu Manchu / Assignment Istanbul
(1969), Venus in Furs / Paroxismus (1969), The Bloody Judge /
Night of the Blood Monster (1970), Eugenie … The Story of her Journey
into Perversion (1970), and Count Dracula (1970).
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Although these films benefited from some British
government subsidies and private financing obtained
through his companies Hallam Productions and Towers of
London, they were ‘specifically designed to appeal to
West German audiences and were substantially motivated by
West German distributors’ demands for crime thrillers
based on Edgar Wallace’s pulp detective fiction’
(Bergfelder 2005, 216). The first three Fu Manchu films –
The Face of Fu Manchu, The Brides of Fu Manchu and The Vengeance of Fu
Manchu – emerged as part of this Anglo-German industrial
network in which Towers was operating and related to
general industrial and cultural trends which were taking
place in the West German media market in the 1960s, more
particularly the ‘recycling of older traditions of mass
culture […] from the 1910s and 1920s’ (Bergfelder 2005,
84). Pulp publishers in West Germany commercialised the
works of European pulp authors Karl May (1842-1912),
Edgar Wallace (1875-1931) and Sax Rohmer (1883-1959),
bringing them to the attention of contemporary readers.
Soon after, film companies such as Constantin and Rialto
adapted them for the screen. These pulp fictions provided
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producers and distributors with mass culture forms which
could be cheaply adapted to film and would be easily
recognised by popular audiences. Towers’ Fu Manchu cycle
was therefore firmly located in serial production
territory.
When Towers hired Franco as the director of the last
two instalments in the series, he encountered a pulp
kindred spirit. As he had done with the two Wallace
films, Towers adopted the nom de plum Peter Welbeck for
his adaptation of the Fu Manchu films. Franco too had
assumed a pulp fiction alter ego, David Khune,iii for the
production of his Dr. Orloff cycle in the early sixties
(Gritos en la noche (1961), El secreto del Dr. Orloff (1964) and Miss
Muerte (1965)). Both therefore acknowledged in a very
conscious manner the reciprocal influence of pulp novels
and pulp movies in their filmmaking practices and
fostered the sub-cultural literary respectability this
lent to their productions. The retention by Towers of the
ii These films were two crime thrillers, Victim Five (1964)
and 24 Hours to Kill (1965), and a white-slavery film,
Mozambique (1964).
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pulp villain name Fu Manchu linked Towers’ cycle to pulp
pleasures harking back to the 1910s through to the 1940s,
as well as to the many other mass media iterations of
Rohmer’s creation – radio serials, magazines and comics.
Towers and Franco would activate similar strategies in
subsequent collaborations. They did it for their Marquis de
Sade: Justine (1968), Venus in Furs and Eugenie (1970), this time
mining literary sources associated with deviant pleasures
and perversities (Marquis de Sade (1740-1814) and von
Sacher-Masoch (1836-1895)) rather than pulp pleasures or
more conventional horror thrills. And they did it again
for their Count Dracula (1970).iv
The adaptation of pulp fictions to the screen, as
well as the international co-production of lowbrow fare,
made little demand in terms of the means of production:
use was made of material already in the public domain;
formulaic narratives and stock characters and locations
were constantly repeated and modified with few
variations; shooting schedules were limited to a maximum
of three to four weeks; and technical personnel moved
from one production to the next. Specific production
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strategies also maximized the industrial and cultural
exploitation of individual films and cycles: the
repetition of similar titles assured the consumption of a
regular novelty; generic conventions, motifs and tropes
appealed to different audiences and encouraged cross-
iii According to Franco, these films were adaptations for
the screen from novels allegedly penned by Franco. See
Lázaro-Reboll (2012) for a discussion of Franco’s pulp
alter ego. Concurrent to these films, Franco had also
directed a number of genre films such as the spy spoofs
La muerte silba un blues / 077 – Operation Jamaique (1962), Residencia
para espías (1965) and Cartas boca arriba / Attack of the Robots
(1966).
iv As the pressbook and opening credits proclaimed, Count
Dracula was the first faithful ‘adaptation of Bram
Stoker’s original Count Dracula’. Towers’ and Franco’s
claims to staying true to the original were embodied and
confirmed in the figure of Lee, who lent the film
authenticity and horror pedigree (his powerfully erotic
and predatory rendition of the Count having been polished
in the Hammer Dracula series) and, above all, guaranteed
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generic links; and the casting of local and international
actors appealed to various territories. Co-production
arrangements maximized even further the economics of
serial production since costs were shared and spread
across two or more countries, and distribution and
exhibition reached international markets and audiences.
The Blood of Fu Manchu and The Castle of Fu Manchu certainly belong
to this international model of production and
distribution; in fact, given their negligible budgets and
sharper schedule constraints, they exemplify an even more
intense and exploitative mode of production.
While the first three instalments were
straightforward Anglo-German co-productions, the Towers-
Franco Fu Manchu collaborations involved multiple sources
of finance, which Towers sought intercontinentally to cut
back on production costs. The Blood of Fu Manchu was co-
financed by Ada Films (Spain), Terra Filmkunst (West
Germany), Towers of London (United Kingdom) and Udastex
Films Ltd. (UK); The Castle of Fu Manchu was co-produced by
Towers of London, Terra Filmkunst, Estudios Balcázar
international sales.
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(Spain) and Italia International (Italy). All these
production companies provided expertise in popular genre
production as well as low-cost production facilities –
Spain and Italy had become especially low-cost locations
by the late 1960s. Estudios Balcázar, for example, had
specialised in spaghetti westerns during the mid-1960s
and forayed into horror genre productions towards the end
of the decade. Continuity in the cycle was provided at
the levels of production, distribution and exhibition.
Titles identified the Towers-Franco collaborations as
belonging to a larger recognizable series, while, at the
same time, they crudely characterized the individual
episode. Further continuity was provided across the five
films with the casting of Christopher Lee as Dr. Fu
Manchu, Tsai Chin as his sadistic daughter Lin Tang, and
Howard Marion-Crawford as Dr. Petrie, assistant to
Scotland Yard’s inspector Nayland Smith. As the main
point of reference for the series and the main selling
point to a variety of markets and audiences, Lee’s screen
persona and cinematic reputation as a Hammer horror star
lent the cycle an air of generic gravitas. Other casting
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practices promoted connections and correspondences
between the Fu Manchu series and other contemporary
series such as the Karl May or the Edgar Wallace films.
In the case of The Blood of Fu Manchu, the character of
secret agent Carl Jansen was performed by German actor
Götz George, recognizable to European audiences through
his work in Karl May western productions, whilst the
inclusion of European B-movie starlets like Rosalba Neri
and Maria Perschy in The Castle of Fu Manchu established a link
to Italian and Spanish genre products. The last two
entries to the Fu Manchu series also slotted into and
circulated within the economically proven circuits of
distribution and exhibition trodden by Towers, which
meant that the films premièred in West Germany’s inner-
city cinema houses and so-called bahnhofskinos (shabby
cinemas located near train stations) and were then
released to other European countries such as Italy
(seconda visione / second showing and terza visione / third
showings circuits) and Spain (cines de barrio / neighbourhood
cinemas) and beyond (the US genre and exploitation
markets).
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The Fu Manchu and Sumuru films were contemporary
with a number of lowbrow cycles being produced in West
Germany, among them the Dr. Mabuse films (1960-1964) and
the secret agent Jerry Cotton series (1965-1969) to name
just a few. They were also coetaneous with other more
globally successful Anglo-American series like the James
Bond films, pitched at a multi-national audience, and the
huge number of Bond spin-offs and imitations produced
across the world. Many other popular genre products,
which were internationally distributable, were coming out
from different national contexts. Exotic adventure yarns,
crime thrillers, secret agent films (à la James Bond),
westerns and horror movies were among the most
predominant generic trends in European popular cinema
during the 1960s. The Italian exploitation film industry
described them as filone (a term that encompasses
traditions, formulas and cycles of films) and most local
critics dismissed them as sottoprodotto (products of low
industrial and aesthetic quality); the Spanish industry
and the critical establishment referred to this bulk of
cinema production as cine de subgénero, which implied both a
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cheap mode of production and an inferior type of cinema
in terms of cinematic quality.
Marketing was crucial to differentiate one lowbrow
genre product from another in such a fecund and
competitive market. While a generic product required
continuous reconfiguration and modification, it had to be
sold in relation to similar individual products, sets of
films and cycles. The advertising and publicity materials
designed by the producers and the distributors of many of
these international genre products shared a number of
marketing strategies. Pressbooks, posters and trailers
promised audiences the same gratifications, highlighted
the sensationalist features of the product, evoked a
range of different generic markers that would appeal to
different audiences, and promoted generic affiliations
with other films and cycles. Terms such as ‘suspense’,
‘thrills’, ‘fear’, ‘terror’, ‘mystery’, ‘adventure’ and
‘action’ were recurrent general descriptors in
promotional materials. All the trailers for the Fu Manchu
films guaranteed the delivery of old-fashioned
gratifications thus: ‘Dangerous Action, Thrilling
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Suspense and Exciting Adventures’. As the decade
progressed and censorship laws relaxed in most Western
European countries and the US, however, the promise of
more daring subject matter and titillation grabbed the
attention of (male) audiences, who expected different
pleasures and thrills, namely the display of female
bodies in new dramas and erotic adventures.
The publicity material for The Girl from Rio provides a
clear example of the ways in which a particular film not
only encouraged connections between and within the cycles
already set in motion by Towers but also fostered links
across a number of contemporaneous cycles with an
international reach. Based on a character created by Sax
Rohmer and adapted to the screen for the first time by
Peter Welbeck in The Million Eyes of Sumuru (Lindsay Shonteff
1967), the film affirmed its pulp lineage.v The Girl from Rio
displayed generic allegiances to many a cycle, from its
explicit modelling on the Franco-Italian Bond spin-off
title L’Homme de Rio / That Man from Rio (Philippe de Broca
1964) to its obvious bond with the genuine OO7 series via
the casting of British actress Shirley Eaton, who had
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achieved world-wide publicity appearing as the “golden
girl” in Goldfinger, and also to its linkage with the
secret agent Coplan series through the casting of
American actor Richard Wyler. But the Bond brand and its
European imitations were not the only generic frames of
reference; exotic adventure stories set in the jungle and
pseudo-spy films set in futuristic scenarios were also
alluded to in the textual and visual materials. Other
references spilled over to the world of comics, namely
the Italian fumetti Diabolik and its film adaptation Danger:
Diabolik! (Mario Bava 1967), and to wider references to
contemporary pop art aesthetics through the costumes and
fashion-like arrangements of female characters.
Distribution in different countries also reveals how the
The Girl from Rio established a dialogue with local traditions
and cultures of consumption. The West German distributor
Constantin released the film under the title Die Sieben
Männer der Sumuru in order to locate it in a recognizable
pulp genealogy and in the pressbook emphasized its pulp
merits (‘Ein Aktion-film’; ‘Sumuru Ziel: die
Weltherrschaft’ / ‘Sumuru’s aim is to take the world
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over) and sensasionalist qualities (‘Brutalität und
Erotik’ / ‘Brutality and Eroticism’). The Italian poster
for Sumuru: Regina di femme also conveyed the female
villain’s pursuit of domination in the title, her pulp
attributes sexed-up through a graphic artwork reminiscent
of fumetti comics.
The Towers-Franco collaborations not only responded
to the demands and developments of European co-production
markets but also to the commercial needs and changes of
the US film market. Throughout the 1960s US film
companies such as American International Pictures (AIP),
Commonwealth United Entertainment (CUE) and Harold
Goldman Associates sought co-production and distribution
arrangements in Europe. These companies were major
players in the exploitation and genre markets catering
for double-bill programming cinemas, the drive-in and the
grindhouse circuits. Business deals with European
partners in Great Britain, Italy and Germany fulfilled a
dual purpose: meeting the demands of theatrical
distribution and responding to the exigencies of
television distribution, at a time when television
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syndication was becoming a highly profitable sellers’
market for the distribution of feature films. Many of
these films were retitled, dubbed, rescored and recut in
order to fill double-bill screenings and fit the generic
tastes of American audiences. Goldman, for example,
placed some of Towers’ low-budget action-adventure films
in the US genre market; ‘Goldman & Towers plot three
films’, reported Variety in May 1967: ‘A Foreign Legion v See Knapp’s website ‘The Page of FU MANCHU’ for an
account of Sax Rohmer’s creation: ‘Sumuru was originally
created for an eight part radio serial on the B.B.C [in
1945-46]. Rohmer rewrote the serial as a novel titled The
Sins of Sumuru. The American paperback publisher, Fawcett,
which was looking for material for first edition
paperbacks saw great possibilities for the character and
published it as Nude in Mink in May, 1950. It sold so well
they had a second printing the same month and they wanted
more. Another series was born. There are nine titles, but
only five novels. The Fawcett Gold Medal paperbacks are
the true first editions’ (2005). This was followed by The
Slaves of Sumuru (1951), The Fire Goddess (1952), Return of Sumuru
(1954) and Sinister Madonna (1956) (2005).
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saga’ and two other pix [which] will be announced later.
All three will be distributed here by Feature Film Corp.
of America, Goldman’s theatrical distribution arm and
marketed to television by TV Enterprises Corp., after a
two-year theatrical clearance’ (16).vi The titles of the
films, as these snippets reveal, were unimportant;
generic categorization and commercial distribution was
what mattered.
Similarly, CUE and AIP provided Towers’ productions
with access to the genre market as well as to more
specialist circuits such as exploitation and
sexploitation. These same American co-producers and
distributors also shaped the commercial and critical
trajectory of the Towers-Franco collaborations. The
retitling of The Blood of Fu Manchu as the more suggestive Kiss
and Kill by CUE meant that the Fu Manchu cycle was broken –
no longer marketable and readable as a cycle – and that
the film had been repackaged and released for wider
exploitation circuits, a commercial move aided by the
film’s generic fluidity. As a sequel to The Million Eyes of
Sumuru, The Girl from Rio can be seen as Towers’s bid to
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branch out and orchestrate yet another cycle peddling on
the success of his own Fu Manchu series as well as other
popular contemporary generic trends; the commercial
possibilities of the Sumuru cycle, however, were short-
lived since AIP did not release the film theatrically and
it ended up as a direct to TV release with the more sci-
fi title Future Women.vii Products like The Blood of Fu Manchu
and The Girl from Rio therefore highlight the complex history
of the Towers-Franco films’ international distribution,
exhibition and consumption.
Derring-do Fu Manchu
The two Towers-Franco takes on Fu Manchu, The Blood of Fu
Manchu and The Castle of Fu Manchu, peddled on the relative
success of the producer’s first instalment, The Face of Fu
Manchu, and the less financially and critically
successful sequels, The Brides of Fu Manchu and The Vengeance of
Fu Manchu. By the time Towers hired Franco to helm The Blood
of Fu Manchu the budgets were much lower – from the initial
$10 million dollars of the first film down to the $3
vi Of the three films plotted, only the jungle adventure
film The Face of Eve (Jeremy Summers 1968) came to fruition.
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million allocated to each of the last two films and much
shorter shooting schedules (from six to three weeks).viii
Towers maximized the serial production assemblage
practices fine-tuned in his previous adaptations of
Wallace and Rohmer, from the casting of actors to appeal
to various territories to the mobilising of genre markers
to the intensive use of locations. The serial template is
also replicated in the last two sequels: Fu Manchu
plotting world domination; Fu Manchu seeking the
annihilation of his arch-enemy, Inspector Nayland Smith
of Scotland Yard, who, in turn, is constantly on the
trail of the evil doctor; convoluted plotlines leading to
the formulaic open-ended finale whereby Fu Manchu claims
“The world shall hear from me again”; and the use of
stock characters, locations and scenarios, which perform
assigned formal and aesthetic functions in the series.
Plotlines for The Blood of Fu Manchu and The Castle of Fu
Manchu reiterated formal principles with a modicum of
variation to conform to the maxim of product
differentiation. Similar tropes and motifs shaped the
commonalities and differences between films in the cycle.
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Thus while Fu Manchu’s bid to conquer the world in The Face
of Fu Manchu is aided by a fatal poison distilled from the
seeds of a rare Tibetan poppy, in The Blood of Fu Manchu the
poison of choice has been distilled from a black cobra
native to an unspecified part of the South American
jungle. And whereas the latest evil invention in The Brides
of Fu Manchu is a deadly ray, the villain’s ruse to world
domination in The Castle of Fu Manchu takes the form of a
powerful machine which will freeze the world’s oceans.
Together with the twin tropes of wicked inventions and vii The film was re-edited for its TV release, which
included the deletion of the pre-credit sequence, as well
as the ‘removal of all nudity and numerous images of
erotically charged torture and sexually suggestive
dancing in the streets of Rio by scantily clad female
participants in the 1968 Rio Carnival’ (Monell 2006). AIP
also intended to commercialise the film with the title
Mothers of America. While AIP circulated The Million Eyes of Sumuru
as part of a double bill with another Towers Euro-
American co-production, the white-slavery film House of
1,000 Dolls (Jeremy Summers 1967), The Girl from Rio was retitled
Future Women and ended up as a television release.
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global domination, the films in the cycle feature a
string of kidnappings, abductions and escapes, the
criminal exploits of local bandits, drug barons and
international crime syndicates, and, of course, the
display of beautiful girls, either as the vulnerable
victims of or fiendish accomplices to the master villain.
Set in the depths of the Amazonian jungle, the pre-
credit sequence of The Blood of Fu Manchu follows a group of
enslaved young women and their captors to Fu Manchu’s
secret headquarters where, with the help of his daughter,
he is indoctrinating the new recruits: ‘Each of you has
had a pointed task with the ten men who are my greatest
enemies. You will take them the gift you bear upon your
lips: death’. The first assignment falls to Celeste,
whose mission will be to travel to London and kiss and
kill Scotland Yard commissioner Nayland Smith (Richard
Green). Blinded by the poison, Nayland Smith persuades
his friend and Home Office pathologist Dr Petrie (Howard
viii Shooting for The Castle of Fu Manchu started on 10
September 1968; three weeks later Franco was filming Venus
in Furs, from 1 October.
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Marion-Crawford) to take him to South America where,
following intelligence from his agent Carl Jansen (Götz
George), he believes Fu Manchu to be hiding. In the
meantime Fu Manchu’s plans to eliminate Nayland Smith and
Jansen require the recruitment of local bandit Sancho
López (Ricardo Palacios). Fu Manchu’s underground
headquarters are finally destroyed, but the voice of the
eponymous villain can be heard rising ominously from the
ruins: ‘The world shall hear from me again’. The reviewer
of the Monthly Film Bulletin rebuffed the promise of a sequel
in no uncertain terms: ‘One can only hope that Fu
Manchu’s promise to return will not be fulfilled if his
next appearance is anything like this abysmal mess of a
film’ (1969, 56). But the world does hear from the evil
mastermind again, in The Castle of Fu Manchu. The film opens
with a radio broadcast from the evil doctor: ‘This is Fu
Manchu. Once again, the world is at my mercy. I have
conquered not only the mysteries of the continent but now
of the oceans, too. In a few moments the proof of my
mystery will be completed’. Established tropes and motifs
from the cycle are economically and squarely re-
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presented. The radio broadcast knowingly reminds
audiences that this is Fu Machu’s preferred means of
communication, and also of the media formats through
which this serial narrative spread across the globe, from
its pulp literature origins to its adaptations for the
radio to the pulp film fiction the viewer is about to
experience. But, although the villain threatens to return
once again as his castle is being blown up in the closing
scenes, there would never be another sequel.
The release pattern for The Blood of Fu Manchu followed
a similar trajectory to the other films in the cycle:
like The Face of Fu Manchu and The Vengeance of Fu Manchu it
premiered in West Germany (23 August 1968), then reached
the British (30 August 1968) and Scandinavian markets
(Sweden on 25 November 1968 and Finland on 25 April 1969)
and, finally, crossed the Atlantic a year later (24
September 1969) where it was commercialized by
Commonwealth United Entertainment under its export title
Kiss and Kill. The release history of The Castle of Fu Manchu, on
the other hand, reflected the film’s box-office flop in
West Germany. The British release was in 1972, and the US
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release was held for several years, only to appear at the
lower half of a double bill under the more Euro-spy title
Assignment Istanbul, entirely removing the Fu Manchu brand
from the product. From sequel to sequel the cycle waned
commercially and critically.
Reading the reviews published in the Monthly Film
Bulletin, the contemporary reader notices the demise of the
cycle. The Face of Fu Manchu, directed by Sharp, had set the
critical yardstick: a ‘first-class thriller […]
resourcefully directed and inventively scripted’ (1965,
163). The reviewer particularly praised the plausible
locations which ‘sensibly stick to the point and make no
attempt to rival the Bond films in opulent extravagance’
(163). Although ‘remarkably similar in plot and style’
(1967, 9), the sequel The Brides of Fu Manchu is ‘another
excellent thriller’ (9) which remained ‘particularly
inventive’ (9) in its display of atmospheric period sets
and the way the film ‘makes use of the pioneering days of
wireless communications’ (9), namely ‘Fu Manchu’s
sinister but not yet perfected electronic apparatus to
the detailed explanations of how the British Broadcasting
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Company (as it then was) has discovered a new method of
tuning in to alien wavelengths and jamming their signals’
(9). The Vengeance of Fu Manchu, however, showed ‘none of the
inventiveness’ (1968, 13) of its predecessor and director
Summers ended up delivering ‘a very tame affair after the
period splendours’ (13) of the first two films in the
series. Franco’s The Blood of Fu Manchu did little to revive
the series. The Monthly Film Bulletin reviewers insisted on the
same elements, that is, innovation and the ability to
recreate period settings: ‘there is no trace of either
the invention or the period charm of Don Sharp’s earlier
films in the series, and the Amazon jungle looks about as
menacing as Epping Forest’ (1969, 56). The Castle of Fu Manchu
was defined as ‘an inept production’ that looked ‘as if
it has been patched together from several tatty
television segments’ (Gillett 1972, 31).ix Clearly, the
production values of the last two sequels were closer to
a sub-product than to the B-film productions that Towers
had churned out in collaboration with West German
distributor Constantin. The Castle of Fu Manchu, for instance,
not only unashamedly repeats a sequence from The Brides of Fu
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Manchu but also uses stock footage from a film, the
Titanic drama A Night to Remember (Roy Ward Baker 1958), and
recycles an unknown documentary about dams. In the US,
the retitling and repackaging orchestrated by
distributors Commonwealth United Entertainment reoriented
The Blood of Fu Manchu towards a more audacious terrain where
the promise of sex and horror would pay more dividends
than the exhausted and expendable image of Fu Manchu.
The advertising ballyhooing for the Fu Manchu cycle
in the US presents another angle on the changing tactics
deployed to sell particular films and to (re)position
cycles in the market. Ahead of the release of The Face of Fu
Manchu, Seven Arts Productions plastered parts of New
York City with posters containing the header ‘FU MANCHU
RUNNING FOR MAYOR’ under the imposing and menacing iconic
portrait of Christopher Lee as Fu Manchu. The sequel The
Brides of Fu Manchu, a clear reference to the 1960 Hammer The
Brides of Dracula (Terence Fisher 1960), was sold by Seven
Arts Productions on a double visual appeal. It maintained
the recognizable iconic image of Christopher Lee as Fu
Manchu at the centre of the poster, carrying in his arms
28
the voluptuous body of a defenceless young woman, but the
large shadow of Fu Manchu teems with images of beautiful
women in lingerie in a photographic arrangement
reminiscent of the American ‘nudie-cutie’ subgenre. The
ratio between sexual imagery and horror iconography is
provocatively summarized in the tag-line ‘The Master of
Horror Takes a Harem of Women’ and the more humorous
phrase ‘Better Dead Than Wed!’
The shift towards the exploitation of sexual
excitement and sensation was even more evident in CUE’s
publicity material for Kiss and Kill. (The retitling as well
ix British trade journal Cinema TV Today reviewed the film
along similar lines: ‘a sorry hotchpotch of bits and
pieces of plot, odds and ends of film stock, and
characters who come and go with an almost total disregard
for any semblance of continuity’ (Bilbow 1972, 29). Yet
the critic predicted that the film would do well at the
box-office for ‘stars and the title will no doubt lure
the unwary in sufficient numbers to make this an
acceptable choice for popular cinemas catering for
uncritical audiences’ (29).
29
as the re-cutting and rescoring of European genre films
for the US market was a common practice among
distributors.) The textual material included in the
pressbook mainly emphasised the horror genre credentials
of the film (‘Christopher Lee Creates New Horror Role for
“Kiss and Kill”’, ‘Top Stars Create Horror for “Kiss and
Kill”’, or ‘“Kiss and Kill” Is Blood-Curdling Epic”’) and
devoted some advance announcements to persuading
exhibitors – and prospective viewers – that the pulp
villain could still attract local audiences. In this
respect, the news item ‘There Is An Audience for “Kiss
and Kill”’ noted that
The so-called “Geritol generation” grew up watching
the machinations of Fu Manchu, as played by Warner
Oland and Boris Karloff, and they watched Myrna Loy
win her acting spurs in the early Fu Manchu films
long before the “Thin Man” series. Now the so-called
“Pepsi generation” is going to see what all the
ruckus is about.
30
Part of the commotion was the performance of ‘skull-and-
terror’ star Christopher Lee, who followed ‘the footsteps
of Lon Chaney, Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi’. But the
real ruckus lay in the ads, posters and lobby materials
which emphasised the juxtaposition of sex and horror. The
graphic artwork for the poster pits the head of a young
woman in profile, lips pouting, against a skull. Between
them the film’s tag-line reads: ‘LUSCIOUS LIPS – lethal
in their biting sting of death’. The image is
complemented by the sketch of three women in a kneeling
position, their hands tied, suggesting a disciplining and
sadistic scenario which audiences could readily associate
with ‘roughie’ movies. The promoters ‘Positively
Recommended [“Kiss and Kill”] for the Pure and Strong in
Heart – Transplants are Hard to Come By!!!’ Such taunting
publicity material would become the norm in advertising
campaigns orchestrated by the US distributors of
subsequent Towers and Franco products which broke through
to the sexploitation market.
Tapping into Sexploitation Circuits
31
Commonwealth United Entertainment, American
International Pictures and Distinction – a subsidiary of
AIP which specialised in the distribution of X-rated
films – led Towers and Franco into the US sexploitation
market with slick advertising and promotional tactics.
With 99 Women, Marquis de Sade: Justine, Venus in Furs and Eugenie …
The Story of Her Journey into Perversion, the Towers-Franco
collaborations moved into more daring territory by
exploring cinema’s newfound erotic freedom across some
parts of Europe and the US. While Venus in Furs was based on
a loose adaptation of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s novel
published in 1869, Marquis de Sade: Justine and Eugenie were
based on the Marquis de Sade’s libertine novels Justine, or
the Misfortunes of Virtue (1791) and Philosophy in the Boudoir (1795),
respectively. Like the pulp fictions of Sax Rohmer,
Sade’s and von Sacher-Masoch’s oeuvres were also in the
public domain and could be exploited at no cost.
As well as sharing a literary origin – albeit one
drawing from erotic rather than pulp fiction – these
films also presented similar production and distribution
patterns to the Fu Manchu and Sumuru cycles, among them
32
Towers’ own presence as screenwriter, multinational
sources of finance, lucrative pre-sales deals with
distribution companies on both sides of the Atlantic, and
the casting of Hollywood veterans and European genre
actors to appeal to various territories and audiences.
Marquis de Sade: Justine is a case in point: an adaptation by
Peter Welbeck of de Sade’s novel; co-produced by the US
(AIP), West Germany (Corona Filmproduktion), Italy (Aica
Cinematografica S.R. L.) and Liechtenstein (Etablissment
Sargon); distributed by Constantin in West Germany and
AIP in the US; and the inclusion of Mercedes McCambridge,
Jack Palance, Klaus Kinski and Howard Vernon. But, above
all, this set of Towers-Franco films represent an
adaptation of their output to the changes in audience
expectations and tastes demanding material of a more
‘adult’ nature – sex and violence – and to the
requirements of distributors and exhibitors in specific
territories (France, Italy, Scandinavian countries and
West Germany) which catered for sex-films, soft-porn or
erotic cinema.
33
This final section, however, moves away from their
European contexts of reception and turns its focus to a
very specific temporal and spatial location, Times Square
in New York, by focusing on the role of American
distributors in circulating and selling these
commodities, which trafficked on sensation and sexuality,
and by plunging into the messy histories of their
exhibition and consumption, with particular attention to
the sleaze audiences frequenting the downtown grindhouses
of Times Square. The production, distribution,
exhibition, critical reception and consumption of these
films were industrially and aesthetically shaped by
sexploitation film practices and cultures of consumption.
The action-adventure-mystery genre blend which gave
momentum to the Fu Manchu cycle was being replaced by
film hybrids which fused erotic, horrific and sadistic
elements. By the late 1960s Towers’ and Franco’s pulp
sensibilities had successfully readjusted to developments
in the genre film industry, which gave free rein to more
deviant and disreputable forms of production.
34
The Towers-Franco products were therefore inserted
into an established tradition of exploitation cinema and
its latest industrial and cultural manifestation,
sexploitation, which developed throughout the 1960s.
Sexploitation movies ‘in combination with more daring
European product’, as Eric Schaefer has argued, ‘put the
final nail in the coffin of classical exploitation’
(1999, 337) with their focus ‘on nudity, sexual
situations, and simulated (i.e. nonexplicit) sex acts,
designed for titillation and entertainment’ (338).x The
proliferation of sexploitation movies throughout the
decade also ran parallel to the economic legitimacy of
male sexual desire and the ‘growing recognition of the
desire of women, younger people, and those deemed to be
35
in some way “deviant”’ (Schaeffer 1999, 339). Deviant
pleasures could be sated in Times Square’s grindhouses,
adult bookstores, live S&M shows, and other sex-related
businesses which formed part of a larger culture of
consumption. It is in this specific context that Towers’
and Franco’s foray into the women-in-prison subgenre and
their cinematic adaptations of the untapped works of de
Sade and von Sacher-Masoch must be understood.
Given that Towers’ production and distribution
practices were grounded in his proven pragmatic approach
to lowbrow genre filmmaking, it is no surprise that 99
Women was effectively a by-product of the economies of
serial production. When Franco and Towers completed the
x The marketing and consumption of these films must also
be considered in relation to developing film cultures in
the late 1950s and early 1960s, whereby exploitation,
sexploitation and art cinema ‘shared discourses and modes
of address’ (Betz 2003, 204); American exploitation
movies and European art-house films were regularly cross-
marketed and exhibited in art-house and grindhouse
circuits.
36
shooting of The Girl from Rio in Brazil ahead of schedule,
they contrived to pre-sell another project to their
American distributors. The locations and personnel
available in Rio de Janeiro provided the raw material for
this next film, which led, in turn, to the run of films
destined for the sexploitation market. Towers and Franco
filmed around thirty minutes of footage featuring
actresses Maria Rohm, Eliza Montes and Valentina Godoy,
who had all taken part in The Girl from Rio. This film
fragment, which only included three scantily clad “women
in peril” in a jungle, promised a variety of sellable
generic gratifications and sensations, namely exotic
adventure stories, white-slavery film scenarios and
sexploitation aesthetics. Around this footage, Towers
penned another screenplay as Peter Welbeck and once more
secured multi-national financing and distribution in
various territories,xi primarily through the assembling of
an international cast list. The result was a feature
film.xii The narrative template of choice this time was
the women-in-prison formula, a genre which had been
classified as ‘crime drama’ in the 1950s and which had
37
been appropriated by the sexploitation trade throughout
the 1960s. CUE’s pressbook simply described the film as
‘A new daring drama’, invoking, on the one hand, a 1950s
tradition through the use of the general-purpose label
‘drama’,xiii and, on the other hand, a sexploitation
tradition by qualifying the film as ‘daring’. As Schaefer
has pointed out in ‘Pandering to the “Goon Trade”.
Framing the Sexploitation Audience through Advertising’
(2007),
some words turn up over and over in the advertising
for sexploitation films. Not surprisingly, “adult”
is the most constant signifier, usually to indicate
the intended audience either with “adults only” or
“strictly adult.” Other words that recur repeatedly
include “sex,” “erotic,” “passion,” “intimate,”
“pleasure,” “love,” and variations on “lust.”
“Daring,” “shocking,” “raw,” “thrills,” “lurid,”
“orgy,” and “sin” also appear often. Finally,
descriptors such as “exotic,” “abnormal,” and
“bizarre” turn up with some frequency. (26)
38
Thus, Schaefer states, ‘regardless of who produced and
distributed the advertising material, as with
sexploitation films themselves, the ads for the movies
have a large degree of intertextual similarity’ (26). 99
Women was no different. Advertising and promotional xi Five countries were involved in the coproduction of 99
Women: Spain (Hesperia Films), German Federal Republic
(Corona-Filmproduktion), Italy (Cineproduzioni
Associate), Great Britain (Towers of London) and the US
(Commonwealth United Entertainment).
xii Again, recognizable headliners were at the forefront of
Towers’ casting practices in a bid to attract different
audiences and territories. Veteran Hollywood actress
Mercedes McCambridge, who played the sadistic prison
director Thelma Diaz, was paired with European film star
Maria Schell as the sympathetic superintendent Leonie,
and with European B-movie stalwart actor Herbert Lom in
the role of Governor Santos. Italian Luciana Paluzzi and
Rosalba Neri, who have made their names in the European
genre circuit, were cast for their proven sex-appeal.
xiii See Morton (1986: 151-20) for a brief history of
women-in-prison films.
39
tactics explicitly inscribed the film in the
sexploitation trade, from the so-called ‘eye-stopper’xiv
images in ads and posters to the use of generic markers
that encouraged the recognition of sexploitative traits
among prospective audiences. The main poster ran the
following tag-line: ‘One Girl’s Shock-Awakening from
Innocence … To the Raw Realism of Prison Life, Among
Women Without Men’. The trade press unquestionably
categorized and read 99 Women as sexploitation. Whereas
Today’s Cinema described it as a ‘sexploitation melodrama in
colour’ (1969, 8), Variety catalogued it both as a ‘prison
drama’ and ‘a sleazy prison melodrama’ (1969, 3).
99 Women told the familiar story of a repressive
women’s prison located in a remote island, populated with
stock characters: the attractive and probably wrongly-
imprisoned inmate, the sadistic, menacing warden, and the
no less threatening and aggressive inmates. The graphic
artwork on posters resorted to the representational codes
of the women-in-prison film subgenre and, more generally,
to sexploitation tactics, among them the recurring hints
at lesbianism and sadomasochistic imagery. The customary
40
tropes of sexploitation advertising completed the
manufacture of 99 Women: headlines which associated the
film with controversial and shocking adult material
(‘Provocative treatment of a daring theme’), tag-lines
which suggested deviant sexual practices (‘99 Women …
Behind Bars, Without Men!’ or ‘Women who are forced to
live without the companionship and love of men’), and
marketing strategies which enticed the prospective
sexploitation male patron to be part of an exclusive
audience (‘Whisper to your friend that you have seen
it’). The opening of the trailer strategically aligned
the film with the sophistication and ‘respectability’
associated with foreign productions based on literary
adaptations – ‘First The Fox …, then Therese and Isabelle … and
now 99 Women … without men’,xv and at the same time xiv Here I borrow Schaefer’s description of this
advertising technique in relation to Vance Packard’s
‘classic 1957 exposé of the advertising industry, The
Hidden Persuaders (1957)’ (2007, 21). “Eye stoppers” are
‘those sexy images that can arrest the eye’ and in
sexploitation advertising they ‘relied first and foremost
on eye stoppers – images of scantily clad women’ (21).
41
fostered connections between similar groups of films.
Sexploitation audiences would consider these films in
relation to each other and in relation to other
contemporary products. The role of CUE in up-scaling the
erotic appeal of 99 Women from advertising to post-
production, the film’s avid promotion by consumers as
well as its X rating all paid dividends, since the film
became the top-grossing film in Variety for several weeks
after its release in March 1969. The film went on to play
double and triple bills with other so-called Euro-sleaze
movies in Times Square grindhouses such as the Liberty
and the drive-in circuit throughout the early 1970s.xvi
With Venus in Furs, AIP and CUE joined forces and
adopted a straightforward sexploitation release strategy.
The ad campaign was premised on tag-lines which
emphasised sensationalist (‘Venus in Furs: A Masterpiece
of Supernatural Sex’) and coarse sexuality (‘The coat
that covered paradise, uncovered hell!’). The poster,
which featured a woman loosely draped in fur and baring
flesh, also drew visual continuities between different
media formats: men’s pulp magazines, pulp paperbacks and
42
imagery from sexploitation movies. (Sax Rohmer’s novel The
Sins of Sumuru had been published in the US ‘with the more
titillating title: Nude in Mink. It was published in May
of 1950 with a Marilyn Monroe-like nude in a mink coat’
(Knapp 2005)). The trailer pandered to the curiosity and
desires of the sexploitation consumer: ‘Who is this
elusive Venus? Is she the sex-symbol of a wild fantasy?’
And the commercial and critical category assigned to the
film by trade journals and the press was that of ‘an
international sexploiter loosely based on the Leopold von
Sacher-Masoch porno classic’ (Variety 1970, 24). Tellingly,
Venus in Furs overlapped with other ‘Venus in Furs’ movies
which gave commercial impetus to the Towers-Franco
version, among them Joe Marzano’s 1967 Venus in Furs and
Massimo Dallamano’s Venus in Furs / Devil in the Flesh (1969). The
promotional material of these films trafficked on similar
imagery and played off each other with deliberate
references to, echoes of and departures from each other.
Contemporary reviews in trade journals and the
mainstream press give a sense of the programmes and
venues for which 99 Women, Venus in Furs and Eugenie were
43
destined and of the patrons who consumed them. Some are
straightforward predictions. 99 Women would do ‘good in
the sexploitation market’ (Bilbow 1969, 8), according to
Today’s Cinema. Eugenie was presented as a ‘minor entry
strictly for specialised sex-perversion markets’ by Film
Bulletin (1970, 20) and panned as an imitation of a previous
sexploitation cycle by The New York Times’ reviewer: ‘“Inga”
is at it again, as Eugenie’ (Thompson 1970, 207), here
referring to Swedish actress Marie Liljedahl, who had xv In fact, Mark Rydell’s The Fox (1967) and Radley
Metzger’s Therese and Isabelle (1968) were adaptations of
novellas written by D.H. Lawrence and Violette Lecuc,
respectively.
xvi See “The Liberty and the Cinerama: Showcases for
Eurosleaze” in Sleazoid Express (2002) for a discussion of
the context in which 99 Women was exhibited in the
downtown grindhouses of Times Square in New York. As
Landis and Clifford note, ‘The king of the Deuce Eurosex
movie was and is Jess Franco’ (2002, 177). Franco’s 99
mujeres, as well as his Necronomicón (aka Succubus (1969)),
were shown alongside ‘violent thrillers known as giallos,
cannibal vomitoring and zombie rip-offs’ (2002, 177).
44
been the lead protagonist in the successful nudie film
Inga (1968) by sexploitation filmmaker Joseph W. Sarno.
But other reviews are interesting documents which reveal
the ways in which these films were classified. Variety’s
review on 99 Women was mostly devoted to these aspects:
Simply because it includes beaucoup footage of
female nudity, most of it in connection with lesbian
love making, 99 Women is by far the most
commercially promising feature yet released under
corporate moniker of Commonwealth United
Entertainment. Without all that stuff, pic would
rank as little more than a sleazy prison melodrama
suitable only for the bottom half of action bills
(1969, 3).
The journalist then concedes that the film had ‘a chance
for the first run “sex-art” market and deserved
consideration as a top-of-the bill “showcase” entry’ (3),
arguing that ‘leaving aside the sexploiteer subtrade, sex
elements have historically entered regular “commercial”
fare via “class” product , then later filtered down to
45
routine releases’ (3). Although this critic does not
explain what exactly constitutes the “sex-art market’, it
can be argued that the term refers to the intersections
between art-house and sexploitation cinema at the levels
of marketing, exhibition and reception. The critic also
viewed the film from an industrial and formal standpoint
as a conventional B picture: ‘pic on hand has all of the
cast, story and production attributes of a second feature
– except for that liberal dose of frank sex’ (3). From
the plural predictions of this one review, the
contemporary film historian can see how 99 Women short-
circuits marketing labels, exhibition routes and film-
going experiences.
Venus in Furs also caused a sense of confusion among
some critics and audiences; the film displayed a
‘bewildering ambiguity that should mystify general run
audiences’, yet it seemed ‘a good programmer in multiple
release’ (Variety 1970, 24). For this Variety reviewer Venus in
Furs was a ‘slickly-produced, soft-core vehicle of sex,
sadism and lesser aberrations and fetishes’ which is
nothing more than ‘a tired paperback original […] despite
46
its vague tie-in with Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s porno
classic’ (24). The film ended up as part of a double
bill, as The New York Times informed prospective viewers:
‘Swappers shares bills with Venus in Furs at neighbourhood
theatres in New York City, Long Island, New Jersey, and
Westchester’ (Greenspun 1971, 210). The New York Times
critic gives us an insight into the profile of the
sexploitation consumer: ‘considering the bland nature of
the sexual infusion of these movies [Swappers and Venus in
Furs], it seems to me that there is less harm in what sin
may do to the suburbs than in what the suburbs are doing
for sin’ (1970, 210), an unequivocal reference to the
notorious 1964 film Sin in the Suburbs by Joseph W. Sarno and
its subsequent spin-offs. Another reviewer in the same
newspaper commented on the generic and sleazy qualities
of 99 Women and the presumed perversities of its
audiences:
A prison drama, imported from England, opened a
window at local theatres yesterday through which
indiscriminate voyeurs can gape without much
satisfaction. Despite the appearance of such
47
professionals as Mercedes McCambridge, Maria Schell
and Herbert Lom and hints of sexuality, a
discriminate moviegoer suffers more than any of the
harried inmates in “99 Women” (Weiler 1969, 41).
For Cinema TV Today, Justine and Juliet was nonsense
entertainment for easy consumption and titillation, a
‘colourful codswallop for undemanding audiences and
timorous voyeurs. A collector’s piece for connoisseurs of
the magnificently daft’ (Bilbow 1972a, 36). Industrially,
however, Justine and Juliet deserved praise: ‘the mind boggles
at the cunning with which Harry Alan Towers has collected
together a cast of stars each of whom is a big office
draw in at least one European country; in addition to
those who are internationally known. Say what you like
and think what you like, it’s an object lesson for
producers’ (1972a, 36). More often than not deviant
filmic pleasures and sensibilities were linked to other
cultural forms and activities; the reception of Eugenie,
according to the Film Bulletin, ‘is restricted to what is
commonly considered the “underground” trade – a market
that usually contents itself with picture books of sado-
48
masochistic content and certain 8mm perversity-oriented
film cellars’ (Combs 1970, 20).
Four decades later, contemporary ‘connoisseurs of
the magnificently daft’ Towers-Franco collaborations have
carried these films and cycles into contemporary film
culture. Obsessive archivists and completists of Franco’s
work such as Tim Lucas of specialist magazine Video
Watchdog return time and again to the films discussed
here, drawing further connections and commonalities
between them. Lucas has returned repeatedly to Franco’s
partnership with Towers: his first comprehensive approach
to the study of Franco films in the premiere Video Watchdog
issue (1990) referred to the “The Harry Alan Towers
Period”; this phase of Franco’s production was also
addressed in the co-edited volume Obsession: the Films of Jess
Franco (1993); for more than a decade he has supplied
detailed liner notes for DVD releases of many Franco
films; and, more recently, he has revisited Franco’s work
with Towers as a subcategory of what he has categorized
as “The Adult Fantasy Years (1967-1973)” (2010: 18). Late
TV screenings, videotapes and DVDs have enabled the
49
recovery and repeated viewings of the nine films
resulting from their collaboration. Changing technologies
and fan / cinephile discourses have contributed, and
continue to contribute, to the re-evaluation of the
Franco and Towers partnership. Other 1980s, 1990s and
2000s specialist genre magazines, paracinema publications
and blogs such as Fangoria, Sleazoid Expressxvii or ‘I’m in a
Jess Franco State of Mind’ by Robert Monnell, to name but
a few, have generated countless writings on Franco’s
films, and, by extension, specific references to his
partnership with Towers and other producers. Furthermore,
over 150 videocassettes, DVD and Blue-ray discs are now
available on Franco’s work, not including the
‘multilingual variants and alternative titles, re-
packagings of his films, or the copies with hardcore
inserts’ (O’Brien 1993, 187). The Franco-Towers
collaboration is certainly well represented; all the
films mentioned here have been commercialised and made
available for new generations of fans across the globe.
xvii See Koetting (1996a, 1996b) and Landis Clifford
(2002).
50
The Fu Manchu cycle, for example, has been recycled and
reconfigured in a variety of ways in the 2000s: as the
‘Dr. Fu Manchu Collection’ by German DVD distributor
Kinowelt, as “The Christopher Lee Collection’ by US Blue
Underground, and as a double bill DVD release by British
Optimum Releasing. Kinowelt and Blue Underground have
brought to light original trailers and pressbooks for the
German and American markets, respectively, as well as
interviews with the ever accessible Franco. Redemption
(United Kingdom), Anchor Bay (US) and Blue Underground
(US) have released their sexploitation products trading
on the same sensations and tropes mobilised by
sexploitation distributors back in the 1960s, repackaging
these sexploitation movies for DVD consumption using
similar marketing labels and generic categories such as
Euro-sleaze, and aligning them with specific cultural
sensibilities emerging in contemporary critical
discourses (cult, psychotronic or trash, to name just a
few critical categories).
Conclusion
51
The Towers-Franco collaborations worked across
genres (pulp adventures and mysteries, secret agent
spoofs, women-in-prison films and erotic fantasies) and
nations. Whether as serial productions or sexploitation
movies, their films traded in low-brow pleasures: pulp
and pop, crime and horror, sex and sleaze. Distributors
and exhibitors capitalized on their pulp and deviant
sensibilities and commercialised them as part of film
making practices and film cultures which went beyond the
work of individual producers and directors. Their
disreputable mass-cultural creations responded not only
to the economics of product differentiation but also to
the increasingly hybrid and international industrial and
cultural landscape of late 1960s and wider shifts in
consumer taste cultures. Tagging their movies to
successful films, cycles and generic trends, Towers and
Franco forged alliances with American and European
economies of serial and exploitation production,
instigated liaisons and connections across the filmic
medium, and mobilised intermedial relationships between
and across popular cultures of consumption.
52
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Tim Lucas. eds. 1993 Obsession: The Films of Jess Franco, Berlin:
Graf Haufen & Frank Trebbin.
Bergfelder, Tom. 2005. International Adventures: German Popular
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Books.
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Politics of Oppositional Taste. Manchester: Manchester University
Press: 203-222.
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53
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(457): 31.
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One. in Fangoria. April: 12-17, 80.
1996b. Making Book for Fear. Part Two. in Fangoria.
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54
Lucas, Tim. 1990. How To Read a Franco Film. Video
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2010. Jess Franco’s Declaration of Principles. How
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16-49.
Monell, Robert. 2006. The Films of Sumuru.
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55
Schaefer, Eric. 1999. “Bold! Daring! Shocking! True! A History of
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University Press: 19-46.
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