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VENUS IN FURS
(Paroxysmus)
Rating: 
West Germany/Italy/UK. 1970.
Director – Jesus Franco, Screenplay – Milo G. Cuccia, Carlo Fadda, Jesus Franco, Bruno Leder & Malvin Wald, Producer – Harry Alan Towers, Photography – Angelo Lotti, Music – Mike Hugg & Manfred Mann, Special Effects – Howard Anderson Co. Production Company – Towers of London Productions/Cineproduzioni Associati/Terra Filmkunst.
Cast:
James Darren (Jimmy), Maria Rohm (Wanda Reed), Barbara McNair (Rita), Klaus Kinski (Ahmed), Margaret Lee (Olga), Dennis Price (Kapp)
Plot: In Istanbul the jazz horn player Jimmy discovers the body of a girl on the beach. He realizes that she is Wanda Reed, a beautiful woman that he saw being dragged into the sadistic sex games of three people at a party he was playing at several weeks ago. Some time later Jimmy is playing in Rio and sees Wanda very much alive. Ignoring her warnings not to, he becomes sexually obsessed with her. However she has returned from the dead to exact revenge on the three that killed her.
Jesus Franco is a director that inspires people between either total hatred of his work or a fanatical cult devotion. Franco is quite possibly the most prolific director of all time. (It is impossible to obtain an accurate listing of all Franco’s titles, which often hide behind a mind-boggling array of multiple international titles and alternative versions – the Internet Movie Database credits Franco with some 160 films as director). Franco’s work ranges from mostly horror films to spy films, pornography, sf and adventure films. Franco is also credited with the creation of the Women in Prison exploitation subgenre and is responsible for some of its most extreme and sadistic examples. As a director, Franco’s work is crude, lacks little more than rudimentary style and never works on anything beyond the most pedestrian level. The sole appeals of the Franco cult are the same ones behind the Herschell Gordon Lewis cult – a prurient fascination with sleaze exploitation at its most undiluted and extreme. There’s certainly nothing of any redeeming artistic value in Franco’s work.
Venus in Furs is called Franco’s masterpiece. Again one must realize that this is Franco we are talking about and this is relatively speaking. In respect to other films it is a competently made exploitation film. It could almost be a version of La Dolce Vita (1960) as directed by Mario Bava or Riccardo Freda. It is filled with lots of tame softcore sex scenes that bear Franco’s unmistakable exploitation imprint. But it does have an atmosphere that, albeit rather crude, is hard to shake. The initial assault on Maria Rohm takes place at a party where everybody else stands frozen in position like mannequins while the provocative Rohm struts through the room. There’s a weird scene with Dennis Price being killed by Rohm sitting in a series of provocatively teasing positions and apparently killing him with her reflection. And Klaus Kinski gets his in a scene that turns into strange kind of Arabian Nights fable. Dialogue is filled with dated howlers and there is a The Sixth Sense (1999)-styled twist ending that doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense. Maria Rohm has an aloofly sophisticated beauty – in some of his better images Franco places her in quite provocative poses and there is one undeniably erotic image of her simply caressing a statue. The beautifully wide-eyed Margaret Lee rivals Rohm for onscreen allure. And there’s a surprisingly good score co-written by no less than Manfred Mann. You can understand why this is such a culty psychotronic hit among Franco afficionados.
This is one of three films made all around the same time that bear the name Venus in Furs. Originally titled Paroxysmus, this was retitled Venus in Furs for US release, a title taken from an 1870 erotic novel by Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch. The late 1960s/early 70s saw a spate of De Sade adaptations – many of these made by Franco and Venus producer Harry Alan Towers. The thinking here was clearly to trend jump from the writer that gave his name to the term ‘sadism’ to adapt a work by the writer that gave his name to masochism – Sacher-Masoch. The irony of this rather exploitative retitling is that the Franco Venus in Furs has become the most well-known of the films under that name – and the one most associated with the title – even though the film actually has nothing at all to do with the book.
Copyright Richard Scheib 2000
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