Marquis de Sade's Justine aka Deadly Sanctuary (Jess Franco, 1969)

Despite my love of drive-in/exploitation/b-movie/underground/cult film, I've never quite warmed up to Spanish filmmaker Jesús "Jess" Franco, one of the horniest and most prolific of b-movie directors, who released the first of his 100+ features, Tenemos 18 años, in 1959 and the last, Revenge of the Alligator Ladies, in 2013, the year of his death at the age of 82. To be fair, I've seen only a fraction of his output, including two movies I wrote about on this site, Barbed Wire Dolls, a standard-issue women-in-prison movie with an absurd number of crotch shots and one hilarious slow-motion scene that, instead of changing the frame rate of the film, has the actors (unconvincingly) move slowly, kids-on-a-playground style, and Oasis of the Zombies aka Bloodsucking Nazi Zombies, a standard-issue zombie movie in which the zombies that are supposedly reanimated Nazi soldiers sport early '80s shaggy rock'n'roll hairstyles like they're in Quiet Riot or Def Leppard.

This is usually the kind of thing I can get behind, but the lackadaisical sloppiness and narrative inertia of these two films and Franco's artless use of the zoom and casual disregard for whether his images are in focus (picture '80s camcorder footage of a children's birthday party, but shot on film) didn't win me over. I was expecting more of the same but on a grander scale with Justine, a Marquis de Sade adaptation with name actors and a much bigger budget than Franco usually had at his disposal that is frequently referred to by the Franco-heads as one of his dullest and most disappointing films. I think I'm in opposite land when it comes to Franco, because I really enjoyed this one, occasional artless zoom notwithstanding. It's nutty, ridiculous, horny, and bewildering, and it also has an energy and passion missing from the other Francos I've seen. He even manages to capture some exciting and beautiful images in between the scenes that look like he handed the equipment to a child or a drunk dad.

The worst part of Justine is the framing device, despite featuring Klaus Kinski as de Sade. This wordless performance sees Kinski behind bars, writing Justine in the Bastille between bouts of meaningful glowering and pacing and the occasional vision of Justine and lightly tortured nude women who otherwise don't seem to be a part of the narrative. Franco zooms his camera in and out on Kinski's aggrieved mug and the bars of the cell for what feels like an interminable stretch of time. This must have been a quick paycheck for Kinski for what I'm assuming was less than a day's work. He surprisingly appeared in several Franco films, and Franco is possibly one of the only directors Kinski never threatened to murder. (I recently saw the Brian Eno documentary with a friend of mine at the Austin Film Society. Afterwards, noticing Fitzcarraldo on the schedule, my friend made the comment that Kinski would have been unsuitable for any job on earth other than actor. After some pondering on this, we decided he would have been the proprietor of an extra-legal high-end exotic pet smuggling ring in Europe. "Hans, my Russians can get you three black bears by Thursday.")

Fortunately, the rest of Justine is much more entertaining. A loose adaptation of the de Sade novel, the film tells the story of the virtuous but naive Justine (Romina Power, daughter of Tyrone Power), and her unfortunate travels through France. Justine and her sister Juliette (Maria Rohm) are teenage girls living in a convent. The nuns inform the girls that their mother has died and their father has been forced to flee the country due to some kind of legal entanglement and can no longer pay for their room and board. The nuns boot the sisters out of the convent, which is devastating for Justine but fine and dandy with hedonistic bad girl Juliette. (The film flips the script on the usual stereotypes by making the blonde the bad girl and the brunette the goodie-two-shoes.) Justine is heartbroken by her mother's death, but Juliette is more concerned with any inheritance they may have received.

Given 400 crowns by their parents' estate and dumped on the street by the convent, the sisters make their way to Paris, where Juliette claims to know a place where they can stay. Of course it's a brothel, and the shocked Justine decides to take her chances on the streets rather than take up sex work. Juliette stays and wastes little time entering into a steamy relationship with fellow hedonist libertine Claudine (Rosemary Dexter). 

In short order, Justine gets her crowns stolen by a man in Catholic vestments, who says he'll look after the money for her at the church and sends to her a house where she can stay. When she arrives at the rooming house, the weirdo landlord Harpin (Orson Welles regular Akim Tamiroff) has no idea what she's talking about. Realizing she's been scammed, Justine begs for a job, and Harpin makes her the house maid, but her habit of wearing short nightgowns sans underwear while cleaning draws the attention of house resident Desroches (Gustavo Re). She rejects his aggressive advances while also rejecting Harpin's plan of using her to rob Desroches of his stash of gold jewelry.

Eventually, Justine is framed for stealing Desroches' gold brooch and sentenced to death, which is just the beginning of her scantily clad but virtuous journey across the French countryside, where she repeatedly meets and naively trusts unscrupulous people, gets cruelly taken advantage of, and miraculously escapes, only to get in another jam. Meanwhile, Juliette and Claudine also hit the countryside in an orgy of violence, theft, and nude river bathing. In contrast to her virtuous sister, the more wickedness Juliette indulges in, the more her fortunes grow.

Along the way, Justine encounters the evil head of a criminal gang, Madame Dusbois (Mercedes McCambridge, who appears to be having a fantastic time playing a baddie); sensitive painter Raymond (Harald Leipnitz), a seemingly decent guy with a spectacularly architecturally strange house; the marquis of Bressac (Horst Frank), a sadistic weasel who tries to get Justine to poison his much wealthier wife, the marquise (Sylva Koscina), so he can inherit her family fortune and freely have sex with his boy toy; and Antonin (Jack Palance), the head of a freaky, pleasure-seeking, S&M monastery with women slaves. Palance also pulls double duty as the film's narrator. 

I haven't seen every single Jack Palance performance, but I'm confident that what I'm about to type is one hundred percent accurate. Palance's performance as Antonin is the weirdest performance of his entire career and could conceivably be the weirdest performance an actor has ever delivered in anything. There's a wild moment where Franco fades down Palance's voice and superimposes a different scene over his face, mid-monologue. It's as if Franco is telling us that Palance's maniacally eccentric approach to the character is even too much for Franco.

Aside from the dull Kinski scenes (which only eat up maybe 10 minutes of the running time, tops), Justine is grade-A late '60s Eurotrash. I was thoroughly entertained, and, since I'd never read the de Sade novel (though some of it has been dramatically changed here), I never knew what to expect. This movie takes some wild turns. Even the crazy Franco zooms (which frequently go out of focus) don't bother me here because it feels like the director's id has completely taken over the proceedings and can't be bothered with technical details, and that's an exciting feeling. The actors mostly give campy (but not too campy), energetic, personality-filled performances, and Romina Power makes a good straight woman enveloped by nuttiness. She has the right face and delivery for the material. She's believable as the virginal, naive, pure of heart girl, but she also has just a hint of a sly, knowing look that subtly lets the audience know she's in on the joke. That may be the only time I ever use the word "subtly" in a Jess Franco review. Maybe I was too hasty in my initial Franco judgment, maybe this is an outlier, maybe I'm a contradictory man, but I like this one.