The Thesis: Every Eurocrime-Franchise that Jess Franco touched, had to be buried afterwards. Basically his movies are the sleazy epitaphs of once-well-regarded serials and characters: the last chance to squeeze some money out of an already dead topic.
Residing in quiet Zurich, Romay and Franco seem to finally get their lifes together. Switzerland is known for discreet but bottomless sex experiences for sale. No wonder the OPEC and the IOC reside there. With Erwin C. Dietrich, Franco finally has found a producer who can handle him and the result are 15 movies in 2 years. And most of them pretty good.
Dietrich, freed from the burdon of directing himself (except for the very special "Rolls Royce Baby" Lina Romay feature), puts his energy into distribution and acquires the rights to distribute two movies about the inner workings of prisoner camps in unwieldy surroundings for the german-speaking market.
These sincere psychological studies, made by the renowned company of CINEPIX, of female behaviour when put in a situation of power (and powerlessness) obviously tingled something deep inside of Herr Dietrich (= he smelled money, big time)....
The Franchise: Ilsa, Greta, Wanda
Ok, this is a far stretch. Ilsa, is of course not a european franchise but a canadian one, but then it is based on Ilse Koch, who was German anyway, so I just have the liberty to include the series here. Forgive me. Furthermore, this is a european film as only Thorne is from overseas. Adding to this is the statement by Dietrich himself who always considered the german-language versions as the original ones. And as we will see at the end, it was Dietrich himself, who started this whole SHE-Thing of the SS in the first place....
The first one "Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS" is distributed OUTSIDE of Germany by Dietrich as "Ilsa, die Hündin von Liebeslager 7" (Ilsa, the bitch of Love-Camp 7) and becomes a huge hit. In tiny Switzerland with 3 million german-speaking inhabitants 180.000 curious alpine moviegoers wanted to be informed what exactly had gone on with their neighbours 30 years ago. (if you scale that, that would be 12.000.000 tickets at the US-Box-office in 1975 - which would have secured a Top 5 spot on the US-charts!!!!).
Ilsa is said to be "based" on the the real-live KZ-witchbitch Ilse Koch, but even the american perception of her was deeply distorted and the camp version is even more. I would love to see a good movie be made about her interesting life. Giving Thorne's character red hair in Greta brings her historically closer to the real Ilse Koch.
I have absolutely no idea (joke!), why Dietrich missed the opportunity to distribute this valuable documentary in Germany itself. But let's be real: he obviously did not need another police intervention.
There is this myth about the movie being banned in Germany, which is not true. Of course it would have been, if it had been released there, but as it never crossed the Swiss border, no action could have been taken. Still, today, the movie is available with its german-language dubtrack in Switzerland, easily to be imported to Germany without any customs etc.
Ok. If you check my NIGHTS AT THE GRINDHOUSE, you will know that, at 18 years of age I witnessed a complete night consisting of 12 EC Dietrich-distributed films back in 1985. Man was I excited... I had heard rumours about Ilsa and when I finally saw impressive Dyanne Thorne with the oilsheiks I was underwhelmed. Aside from her, everything else felt cheap and bland. When I got lucky later to get a VHS copy of "She-Wolf" in a Belgium seaside-resort movie-shop (german with flemish subs) I could see the appeal of the eery fake-authenticity of "Hogan's Heroes" sets for US-viewers, but "Harem Keeper" was kind ofa bomb. Worse, though, much worse was "Tigress of Siberia". Now that is an absolute loser of a movie and a waste of everything, including my time (I actually watched it three times because the verions I saw HAD to be cut.... well they are not - the movie is simply worthless).
But hey, we're still with Dietrich and "Harem Keeper". His nose following the gold-trace and hearing that his canadian partner André Link (co-founder of CINEPIX and another one of the many east european exilees to be found in post-war cinema) was not too happy with Thorne he quickly made an offer: Thorne in a WIP-Ilsa-style movie directed by the inventor of sleazy WIP soft-erotica himself: Jess Franco. Congratulations, Erwin. Well done.
And it is so easy: Show the two previous films to Jess and tell him that all he has to do is to incorporate this into his next WIP he is preproducing anyway. And that he can shoot in Portugal.
The only problem was that André Link did not want Dietrich to use the name of ILSA.
Ok, let's get to the bottom of it by logical deduction. It is known that Link "lends out" Thorne to Elite/Dietrich - this could only been done if she would have been under exclusive contract with Cinepix. That contract could only been sealed after "She Wolf" as the success was not known beforehand. So they do "Oil-Sheik" with Thorne as part of a multi-picture exclusive.
After Oil-Sheik, Link lends out Thorne to Elite but does not allow Elite to use the name of Ilsa, although they are going to distribute the movie in the US. This is odd. Only if Link would not have been able to give Dietrich the rights to the ILSA-character this would make sense somehow. But maybe Thorne had something to say in ILSA too...
So maybe they were already selling/transferring the rights to Corman/Reitman for "Siberia". Or there were two seperate deals - one on Thorne and one for the rights and Dietrich simply did not want to pay for the latter - which would not astonish me a bit.
You can say about Jess Franco what you want, but this guy had been around. Instead of fantasyzing about Ilse Koch in cheap hollywoood sets done by ex-hippies on drugs, he had seen things. Living in fascist Gerneralissimo Franco-Spain was no joke and as strange as it may sound: The strength of Franco's WIP movies were an expression of the conditions in a) Spain b) Portugal c) South America at that time. Paired with his love for the female body, his WIP-films are something different. They just hit harder than the italian processed productions and american irreality.
I have in person witnessed half of the audience leaving, sickened at a secret theatrical screening of "Woman of Cell Block 9" although it was obviously all "fake".
So here we have him with very good human ressources (Lina&EC-Dietrich crew&Thorne), well-funded sets and obviously a carte blanche by Dietrich to go all in.
Case opened: Greta, Haus ohne Männer (Greta, House without Men)
The Plot: Murder, needle torture, flogging, mass rape of lobotomized women, licking a diarrhea-ridden butt, a cat fight, vagina torture, suffocation with a plastic bag, torture by electric shocks, disfigurement, cannibalism. Great fun for the whole family, which, as Dietrich noted with delight, was just as successful in the cinemas as "The Omen", which had been released just three months earlier. He truly was a real gold-digger.
Ilsa/Greta here has the red hair of Ilse Koch and things move different. We have a very hairy undercover agent who tries to solve the mystery of lost girls and goes in as inmate into a forensic asylum. We have Thorne, giving her rare evil comedy performance and a strong one by Romay. Even Franco himself is not that bad as witness.
The movie looks good. Not a single distorted take, no cringe moments, even the zooms are kept to a minimum. Franco could take his time here concentrating on untamed bodyhair and cold showers, sadistic set-pieces and sex.
There are stylistic differences between the first two Ilsa-movies and this one, but in all regards, (except for the strinking image of Thorne in a SS-Uniform), the canadian movies are inferior.
I am pretty close to calling this movie Franco's best, because this is a carefully constructed piece in a field where the director felt comfortable. Nothing distracts, nothing is loose and if you can stomach the positively spoken cartoonish effects the only thing regrettable is the little screentime Thorne has.
I have always wondered about the title "Greta, Haus ohne Männer" (still accepting that this is the original title of this movie - as told by Dietrich). This seems such an odd choice. The wallonic-french one "Greta, the torturer" comes much closer. The german title translates as the harmless "Greta - House without Men" which at the end is not even true.
And then there is Dietrich's own venture into Nazi sadism "She Devils of the SS/Frauleins in Uniform", made in 1973 and OBVIOUSLY an inspiration to "Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS". Based on the two books "Gretchen in Uniform" and "Gretchen out of Uniform", this is the first real deal of Nazi Sexploitation and distributed in Canada by.... CINEPIX. This now comes full circle as "She-Devils" was made under the original name of "Eine Armee Gretchen" "An Army of Gretchens" playing with the idea that the nazis "created" sexually willful female slaves to pleasure the soldiers. That name refers to the girl "Gretchen" in the play of "Faust" by Johann Goethe that - out of idealism - becomes a "fallen girl".
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| Gretchen, here, Greta there... |
"Gretchen" is the diminuitive form of Margarete and the short/but not diminuitive form of Margarete is "Greta". Nice.
But the "House without Men" I still don't get.
This movie has so many titles, from Greta, to Wanda and then finally to Ilsa when Cinepix themselves gave it up and put the movie correctly into their franchise. Best title of all, however, must be the bulgarian: "Ilsa, the whistleblower-theorem" obvioulsy depicts the most scandalous of all the plot elements: Franco as a whistleblower!!!
So did Jess Franco kill Ilsa/Greta ?
No, that was done by cinepix themselves. They did not know what to do with their asset. Or maybe they had trouble with Thorne. Somebody should research the strange license-situation around Ilsa in 1976-77 and why nobody (except for "Werewolf-women of the SS") has revived it yet. The death stroke to Ilsa was not Greta - in fact she was the best thing in this series- but the ill-concepted "Tigress of Siberia" vehicle which is a bad joke.
Acquittal
So here I come to the end of my small journey. Starting from a question: "How come, Jess Franco was involved in the last movies of all of my favourite series" I ventured into the shady realm of eurolicenses and personal business networks, shake-hand-agreements and quid-pro-quo deals. I made so many notes for future things to explore and have met a lot of very, very nice people personally and online on the way. I really, really enjoyed that.
And no. Jess Franco did not kill the licenses off. He was not even cynical about it (maybe Dr. M - but I do not count that as Mabuse anyway).He was just put into the position of a pallbearer by the producers, not eager to revive, but to exploit the already dead corpses of their franchises.
I have to admit that I was not a huge (like HUGE) fan of Franco before this series started. But now I can fully understand the appreciation and admiration he gets.
If you have not read the other chapters of my journey-journal about how Jess Franco killed off Eurocrime... here they are:
1. Jess Franco vs. Lemmy Caution
2. Jess Franco vs. Dr. Fu Manchu
4. Jess Franco vs. Edgar Wallace
5. Jess Franco vs. Bryan Edgar Wallace
7. Jess Franco vs. Jack the Ripper
All of this will be extended with future (and extended - as I always cut these posts down to a readable size) knowledge in further installments of KRIMI!... See ya.
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| another case of shameless self- promotion.... |
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| French: Prison Ward of the perverted Women. |
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| Flemish: The Sadistic Greta Wallonic: Greta the torturer |
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| Strange they are, those bulgarians. "Ilsa, the whistleblower-theorem" obvioulsy depicts the most scandalous of all the plot elements: Jess Franco as a whistleblower!!! |
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