28 is no age to die, regardless if your name is Susan Superstar or Edie Sedgwick. But it happened, right during the wrap-up of Ciao Manhattan. Edie was gone, just like that, snuffed like so many of the other #Warhol Superstars. What did remain was footage, so much abandoned footage shot in the 60s when those stars were shining at their brightest. That footage, set in glitzy black-and-white Manhattan, is where Edie and Paul America race around town on amphetamine. Or see a doctor to get shots of some sorts.

“Speed is the ultimate, all-time high. That first rush. Wow! Just that burning, searing, soaring sense of perfection.”

– Susan

And there's colour footage too. Susan, topless, semi-(un)consciously dragged around the floor of her empty pool-turned-Superstar-temple. She babbles, drinks, dances around in her panties. And she ODs. Like Edie would even before this movie had seen the light of day.

 

They snuff so fast, these bright Superstars.

– You know what's really awful?

– No, tell me.

– Getting hooked. It's the end. But, if you only take one shot every once in awhile. Its no different than an occasional drink or cigarette.

The boss' girlfriend falls for an ambulance driver, derailing her man's gang's carefully planned narcotics heist.

Everything America stood for – God, liberty and justice for all – fell apart in the 60s. A much-loved president and family man killed on live television. Teenagers shipped to a country many never heard of before, only to end up as cannon fodder. Peace loving middleclass white kids from well-to-do families gathering en masse in Haight-Ashbury, collectively fell to bum trips and bouts of gonorrhoea. What America needs is family. Someone who takes you in, understands you, sings you songs and feeds you. An older man with friendly eyes appears on the scene, doing just that.

“These children that come at you with knives, they are your children. You taught them. I didn't teach them. I just tried to help them stand up.”

– Charles Manson's testimony

What the press dubbed The Family was a microcosm of American society; a loose collective of lost kids. Taken in by charismatic peddling pimp #CharlieManson with a steady supply of #LSD and a place to be themselves, rootless kids like Lynette “#Squeaky” Fromme and Paul Watkins were finally part of a family again. The family grew too; besides more lost souls and the occasional Beach Boy visiting Spahn Ranch, babies were born at the Devil's Slide.

 

Hendrickson and Merrick's Manson offers a candid and by times surreal portrait of a few #MansonFamily members (Squeaky makes out with a riffle, purring about how killing is like having an orgasm while Atkins lays out her plans to murder Frank Sinatra) right in the middle of the spectacle [sic] court-case. It was even nominated for an Oscar – which went to that other charismatic 70s evangelist, Marjoe (1972), while Manson was banned after Fromme's botched assassination attempt on President Gerald Ford in '75 and was lost for decades.

 

Stylistically inspired by Woodstock (1970) and soundtracked by the Family themselves, Manson remains a fascinating curio in the undying output of #Mansonsploitation movies. However gruesome, the American family is forever cemented in that holy cornerstone of self-immolation.

Veronika Voss, once one of Ufa's greats and rumoured lover of Goebbels, has a chance meeting with #sports journalist Robert Krohn. Despite not recognising her at first glance, the faded star and her world turn out to be irresistible to him.

“What do you want from Voss? She's no good at soccer.”

– Grete

Die Sehnsucht der Veronika Voss [litt. The yearning of Veronika Voss] is #Fassbinder's tribute to both #BillyWilder's Sunset Blvd. (1950) and real-world actress Sybille Schmitz whose career, like Voss', suffered greatly due to her #morphine dependence after the Entnazifizierung.

A brawl over a woman. That's what breaks The Great Phroso. After recovery, a year later, he finds himself a #paraplegic and his stolen wife dead in a church with an infant next to her. To Africa he takes the child – it's the other man's, the ivory trader's – and carefully, vengefully raises her.

“How did God ever put a thing like you on this earth?”

– Maizie

Phroso, now known as Dead-Legs and White Voodoo to the tribe he resides over, uses his magician's skills to rule over his own little jungle empire. We see the gestation of Kurtz, oddly too an ivory trader in that other White Hell, Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad, 1899).

 

Despite attempts to tone it down on request of censors, West of Zanzibar is one of Tod Browning's meanest. Lon Chaney is fantastic, of course. His Phroso, torn by love and #revenge, one of the early and rare depictions of male frailty in western cinema.

A Gen X-er, I grew up in a completely different world where so many films and TV that kids watched – if watched with today's eyes — were not particularly kid-oriented at all. I fondly remember Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975) and reenacting the Black Knight scene in the school grounds. Yul Brynner as a faceless, rampaging cyber cowboy in Westworld (1973)? Sure, bring it on! Not that the official kid's movies were “clean”. Did you spot the chicken decapitation in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971)? Well, you will now.

“Once upon a time, or maybe twice, there was an unearthly paradise called Pepperland. 80,000 leagues beneath the sea it lay, or lie. I'm not too sure.”

– narrator

Alright, I'll keep it clean and suggest a dose of Yellow Submarine. A fantastic adventure starring The #Beatles (well, their likeness mostly) who are summoned to save utopian, music-loving #Pepperland from the music-hating Blue Meanies. Trippy fun, and lots to discover the older you get.

Dr. Tube (Séverin-Mars) invents a powder that distorts reality and promptly tests it out on some oblivious test subjects, who quickly can no longer recognise the world around them. The brilliance of La folie du Docteur Tube is its use of practical in-camera effects that makes us, the viewer, experience the hallucinogen.

 

This little folly by the great Abel Gance features Albert Dieudonné in a small part, who later would again work with Gance in his Napoleon (1927), as Napoléon Bonaparte.

 

This is one of the few (French) comedies from the time that I'm aware of with a Black character who is not a horrible racist stereotype or a white person in blackface. If you have any idea of who the professor's assistant is, please reach out on Mastodon.