Her Private Hell

Caught Snapping

Her Private Hell
UK 1968
Directed by Norman J. Warren
BFI Flipside
Blu Ray Zone B/
DVD Region 2 Dual Edition

I recently become properly acquainted with the work of director Norman J. Warren by way of the wonderful Blu Ray boxed edition from the Powerhouse/Indicator label, Bloody Terror: The Shocking Cinema of Norman J Warren. The contents of this box will be coming in over various reviews in the weeks and, possibly, months to come but, before I put those up, I wanted to take a look at Warren’s debut feature release My Private Hell, which I picked up on Blu Ray a couple of years ago from my local Computer Exchange shop for around a fiver. And, I have to say, the film is amazing.

It’s black and white photography and begins with a couple making love under the credits, with really beautiful photography which utilises the textures and abstract forms that can be achieved using this kind of filming. It immediately feels both European and somehow grittily English as the story, such as it is, unfolds.

Starting off with the arrival in England of Italian protagonist Marisa, played by Lucia Modugno, who appeared in such films as The Girl Who Knew Too Much, Danger Diabolik and Isabella, Duchessa Dei Diavoli (aka Ms. Stiletto, reviewed here), we follow her in her new career in ‘Swinging London’ as she is given board and lodging and a luxury lifestyle living in sin with the head photographer, all laid on by a modelling studio. So we have the photographer Bernie (played by Terence Skelton), his assistant Matt (played by Daniel Ollier), their direct bosses Margaret (played by Pearl Catlin) and ultimately Neville (played by Robert Crewdson)... plus a couple of Bernie’s ex-girlfriend models. The basic through line of the picture is the issue of nude pictures of a reluctant Marisa being sold on the sly and the tensions this causes within their small community as she swings between Bernie and Matt and ultimately gets confused and troubled by her situation (which really isn’t as hellish as the title makes it sound, to be honest).

However, what the film really is, is a time piece which nicely captures the 1960s London lifestyle (to a certain extent)... perhaps not as I remember it personally because I was just a toddler but, certainly the spirit as it’s often portrayed on film, at least. Mind you, I was born five days after this movie came out and in much less than two years I was a professional child model myself, working for a modelling agency called Tiny Tots (are they still around?)... and from what little I can remember of the atmosphere in the photo studios at the time... a lot of this rang true, to be honest.  

And, honestly, what promise this director had back then. It’s like Antonioni meets London all over again as Norman J. Warren matches the subject matter of the movie, the pursuit of the perfect pictures, with an astounding visual flair and jagged, ‘of its time’ editing style which really got me going ooh and ahh as I watched it (mentally oohing and aahing, for the record). There’s a real beauty to the way he manages to throw people together perfectly into the 1.33:1 aspect ratio of the shoot. I loved, for instance, the way he places people around objects and furniture, giving the shot a certain depth through a strong sense of perspective and then having people walking into the front of a shot and blocking out part of the view to present new compositional possibilities within the same frame.

Even on the rare sequences where he goes on location, he manages to treat the various environments such as the airport where Marisa pitches up at the start of the movie, as something which is interacting with the body shapes of the actors in some perfect set ups. For instance, during a forest montage sequence, bang slap in the middle of the movie, where Marisa goes out with Bernie to take some ‘fun pictures’, Warren manages to use the vertical tree trunks and angular, jutting branches to create little pockets of space to frame the actors in. It’s really nice stuff and it's this kind of harkening to the art form that kept me engaged with it all the way through. Not to mention that the actors are all pretty good and Marisa and Matt are quite sympathetic. He even manages to get a couple of overhead shots (whether using a crane... or just standing on the roof of a building is my guess) and it all pitches in with the monochromatic photography to dazzle the eyes.

There’s also a nice punchline to the film with, literally, the very last line of the movie. I won’t spoil that for you here but I wonder if the line was somehow shocking in it’s day or just, of it’s time. It’s fairly tame now but it’s also a nice bit of insight which possibly transforms some viewers' perceptions of the attitudes inherent in the film they’ve just been watching a little and, well... I appreciated the moment.

Unfortunately, the film was cut for time in the US version and also cut due to censorship of certain of the sexualised moments in the UK (see Dr. Adrian Smith’s informative essay detailing these as part of the accompanying booklet with the discs for more details). Rather than present the film as a composite, extended cut, the extra US moments are presented as three minutes of deleted scenes (along with several other nice extras which I haven’t had time to explore as yet). I would have preferred them to have been recut back into the feature presentation, for sure, because one of those deletions explains what I thought was a continuity jump in an earlier part of the film but... yeah, censorship causes problems folks, just don’t do it.

And that’s me done on this one. I think this may be my favourite film yet by the director and, given its successful reception back in 1968, I have to wonder why Norman J. Warren’s career took the path it did and why he plumped for a career in, more or less, B movie horror films (some of which are absolutely brilliant and others of which are... yeah, I don’t like to think of Bloody New Year too much). It’s clear just how talented he was and it’s a shame we’ve just lost him... he died in March 2021. I know his films will definitely live on for many though and, I’d certainly recommend Her Private Hell if you like the kind of cinema that was coming out of the London scene in the late 1960s, for sure.

The Notorious Betty Page

The Yeager Sanction

The Notorious Bettie Page
Directed by Mary Harron
USA 2005 Picturehouse Films
Blu Ray Zone B

I remember wanting to catch this movie at cinemas when it came out but, if memory serves, a combination of being ill and it not playing at my local meant I missed my opportunity. Luckily, I managed to pick up a DVD of this in Fopp records in one of those “if you spend over £X you get the opportunity to buy this for £Y” kinds of deals a year or two ago. And now, here I am finally getting around to watching the thing.

Bettie Page, of course, was the famous and certainly iconic model who, in the 1940s and 1950s was shooting saucy poses, nudes and also lots of fetish and bondage stuff (including short movies of similar material) for famous photographers such as Irving Klaw, his sister Paula Klaw and Bunny Yeager. She also appeared in a small number of feature length burlesque movies as a performer, along with the likes of Tempest Storm, Lili St. Cyr and Cherry Knight, in such movies as Striporama, Varietease and Teaserama. Curiously, those movies aren’t actually mentioned in this film, although the dance on the end credits could well be lifted from one of them... or it’s performed by Gretchen Mole, the actress playing The Notorious Bettie Page, copying one of them as, frankly, there are a few times in this movie when it’s very hard to tell them apart. Mole does that good a job with the role.

Now, it has to be said that the film, like most biopics, paints a slightly different version of events in some areas than real life. For instance, Jared Harris plays the creator of the famous Adventures Of Gwendoline bondage comic strip but, in real life, I believe the two never met. Now, Bettie Page was still alive and ‘rediscovered’ when this film came out (she died at the age of 85 back in 2008) and, contrary to reports at the time, she didn’t think the film necessarily portrayed things as they were precisely and didn’t quite click with it, although it’s noted she liked Gretchen Mole in the part. My understanding is the story of Bettie Page in real life, if you can filter out any tall tales, contains even more interesting and sometimes alarming material than is portrayed in this movie and so, it seems, I’ll need to try and pick up the equivalent of a decent biography at some point.

Now, I have to say that this must have been an intimidating part for Mole to play. I’m certainly not joking when I say Bettie Page is an iconic figure. I have a little bookmark with a painting of her at work which is ‘blu tacked’ to the inside of my doorframe and it’s clear that, even people who don’t know her, somehow recognise her and her famous haircut (the origin of which we see in this movie). I remember seeing the movie version of the comic book The Rocketeer back in 1991 and thinking how the character Jenny, played by Jennifer Connelly, seemed a fairly obvious, especially from the dialogue, homage to Bettie Page. When you look at the original comic book, which is very different due to the film not licensing half of the characters who are in the original (I think the most important absence in the movie, for me, is Doc Savage, who invented the rocket pack in the comic book... not Howard Hughes as the movie shows) the character is called Bettie and has a modelling career where she shoots risque material and is drawn to look exactly like Bettie Page so... yeah... an influential figure who, I suspect, was never fully or adequately paid for the cultural impact of her modelling work.

The film itself starts off in New York in 1955 where a porn store is raided and we go on to see David Strathairn playing  Estes Kefauver, a prosecutor in a public prosecution case against ‘The Klaws’ in a real ‘McArthy witch hunt looking' trial against pornographic material, which put me in mind of the same kinds of footage one sees of the hearings against the comic book industry in the 1950s. The film uses this point of time, with Bettie waiting in the lobby to be called to answer questions... and from there we dart backwards in time to different places to look at her back story and how she got from a girl growing up in 1936 and 1942, before going on to her modelling career.

And the film is pretty accomplished. In the 1942 sequence, director Harron takes us... and Betty... from early courtship to marriage, domestic abuse and divorce all in the space of a few minutes which doesn’t even feel like a regular montage sequence. That being said, the director really knows how to do that kind of sequence and there’s one beautiful section of film where we are taken through various covers which feature Gretchen as Bettie, moving and doing the photoshoot live in giant mock ups of the covers (or it’s possibly CGI’d). These moments actually reminded me of the scenes where Gene Kelly is talking about Leslie Caron and we see vignettes of her dancing in different moods in On The Town and, to be honest, of similar scenes in the late 1940s/1950s MGM musicals in particular, it has to be said. So, yeah, some really nice stuff here from this director. That being said, the film is mostly shot in a very crisp black and white but various sequences such as this wonderful cover montage or the photoshoots by Bunny Yeager in Miami, suddenly burst into colour (reminiscent of the colour films of the era) and bring a lovely sense of contrast and richness to the film as a whole.

When Bettie moves out of her abusive marriage she is picked up on the street one night on the promise of an evening of dancing and driven to a remote spot to be gang raped. I never realised she had this kind of trauma in her life but the early bleakness of the story is offset by some really happy times when we get to her modelling career. This incident compels her to leave for New York in 1949 where she gets into the modelling scene almost by accident. There are also some spots of actual footage, I suspect (or just incredibly well done, visually aged stock thrown in to confuse), from a similar period such as a the bus ride to New York which looks quite authentic at times... so I’m just assuming it is actually lifted from library stock.

And it’s a brilliant film which takes a look at the central character with, perhaps, just a little too much religious overtone if my reading of the reaction of the real Bettie Page is something I’m interpreting correctly.

Gretchen Mole is perfect in this, capturing the facial expressions, mannerisms and cute, exaggerated poses of the subject absolutely pitch perfectly. Now, it has to be said that I thought her nipples were just slightly different to the real life Bettie’s and I was somewhat torn for a few minutes in terms of the authenticity of the character but... I figured you can’t get everything right and, frankly, CGI nipples would not have been a good choice, methinks. Mole is joined by a whole load of brilliant actors to help highlight her central performance. I’ve already mentioned Strathairn and Harris but we also have on hand Lili Taylor as Paula Claw, Sarah Paulson (who played an important role recently in the M. Night Shyamalan film Glass, reviewed here) in an almost but not quite scene stealing turn as Bunny Yeager and a brilliant and nicely comical performance by Chris Bauer as Irving Klaw.

So, add up all these beautiful performances, some lovely black and white cinematography, a nice soundtrack including some good needle drop song choices by the likes of Julie London and an energy and pacing which makes for never a dull moment... and you have this fine film, The Notorious Bettie Page, which I would wholeheartedly recommend to any cinephiles I know of and especially those interested in a slice of American history which isn’t often touched upon that often in the movies (although the absolute masterpiece from a couple of years ago, Professor Marston and the Wonder Women, which I reviewed here, did a pretty good job of certain aspects of it too). This is definitely due another watch at some point and now I wish I’d have grabbed a Blu Ray copy of it instead of this DVD version. A truly gorgeous piece of movie making and I’m going to have to watch out for this director in the future, I believe.

I Love Liz La Point - 5 Years Of Art & Love

Love And Depth

I Love Liz La Point - 5 Years Of Art And Love
(expanded edition)
by Terry Osterhout
Limited Private Pressing

David Bailey once took some photos of me.

I also worked with Richard Harris, apparently... maybe even sat on his knee. Not many people would know this about me, nor would they want to I’m guessing, but I used to be a child model between the ages of “too few to mention months” up until the age of nine when a truly bizarre car accident short circuited my career (but that’s a whole other story).

Why I mention all this is because I know that modelling for a photographer can be hard work sometimes and it’s something that certainly requires a lot of patience. So I always have a lot of empathy for them when I see models striking various poses, in addition to the look the artist is trying to capture, because I know it’s not always an easy job. One such model is Liz La Point.

I first became aware of Liz through Twitter, presumably following her off of someone retweeting some shots of her. She has a certain charm and appeal above and beyond her obvious fantastic body. As with most models, and I never realise why people take this for granted so much, it’s almost always the face that draws you into a work first... and Liz has this kinda pixie look about her which really made me take notice. After a while I discovered that the photography was taken by her husband, Terry Osterhout and so I looked into that too.

Fairly recently, Terry produced a beautiful hardback collection of photo sessions of his wife called I Love Liz La Point - 5 Years Of Art & Love in two editions, one regular and the one I’m reviewing here, the expanded edition. I was thrilled when Terry ran a competition to win one of these books and, though I rarely enter competitions these days (maybe once a decade), I was pleasantly surprised to find I’d actually won. Didn’t see that one coming. And it’s such a brilliant collection, that kept me up for hours looking through it when I should have been asleep, that I wanted to share a review of this work here.

Which is where I have my problem because... well... this is the first time I’ve tried to review any photography. I’m not quite sure how to do it, what to look out for or what to say. But, hopefully, I’ve muddled through that here without making myself look too much of an idiot and I think it’s a book that people interested in such things should certainly contemplate owning and enjoying for themselves... which is why I’m writing this now.

The tome is split into various themed sections... well chapters, I guess... and right from the outset we are presented with shots which define the cheeky and playful nature of Terry and Liz' approach to eroticism and female beauty in the first batch called Vintage Vixen. Here the hippy-like but revealing clothing and seductive poses the model is presenting are nicely undercut by the knee high socks she is wearing as she frolics on a bed. This immediately brought a smile to my face and made me ponder just how many couples have gone through the whole "socks in bed" debate.

Now, I hate to go on about capturing textural contrast because it’s something that somebody looking at photographs is probably supposed to bang on about… which is a good reason not to do it… but Osterhout does find some interesting moments capturing the juxtaposition of different surfaces throughout the book. For instance, a shot from the Vintage Vixen shoot is a close up of Liz' pubic hair with her thumb just brushing the lips that mark the entrance of her sex. The hair is in direct contrast with the smooth skin of part of her leg and the creased orange top coming down to her waste... the three different textures colliding with each other and highlighting the others all in one hit.

Next up is the first of two mostly black & white series' in homage to the famous Valentina comic strip character created by Guido Crepax (see my review of Valentina movie Baba Yaga here). There is an almost thrown together quality about this series but it's a deceptive attribute when you start to really look at what's involved here. Some of these show experimentation with the depth of field, with large parts of a composition blurry while Liz's head or hand is in sharp focus to grab the attention… which makes for an interesting shot. Osterhout does a similar thing in a photo from a lovely little session entitled The Writer, where a studious looking Liz is lounging naked, other than her glasses, writing in an exercise book. In one of these shots he again uses a smaller depth of field to bring her feet to the attention of the onlooker while everything else in the shot is softened down. An overhead shot of Liz looking up into camera while sucking on her pen, her head in such a way that it looks almost artificially attached to the beautiful trunk of her body, is equally captivating.

One of the things which caught my attention is the range of styles that the artist manages to capture with his camera eye throughout the book. The Wet series, for example, reminded me of the kinds of beach scenes that would adorn various calendar's in the late 1970s/early 1980s and took me straight back to my teenage years. Another series entitled Wild In The Forest gave me a similar 1980s hit as almost a tribute, and I have no idea if this was deliberate or not, to the movie version of Sheena, Queen Of The Jungle... except you never saw Sheena as seductively displayed as Liz is here. Especially the “almost about to get feral” feel of the last shot in that series, with the model looking straight into the camera as if to say... “things are about to get real”. Other shoots in the book have distinct atmospheres which capture different periods, genres and moods, such as the aforementioned Valentina shots which pitch things back to a late sixties/early seventies feel. The photographer here is nothing, if not diverse, in his approach to his subject.

Another way Osterhout expresses his diversity, whether consciously or not, is by the way he lights certain scenes in either a soft or hard light, and uses this, and a range of colours, to reflect a certain mood. For instance, after a load of really amazing shots, we get to a section entitled Random Favourites and the first six shots in this section are absolutely stunning in their sense of intimacy with the subject. You can almost feel Osterhout and La Point’s love for each other coming through the lens of the camera and capturing something almost as elusive as lightning in a bottle. If the reader (viewer?) went into this book blind, without knowing that the photographer and artist are married, then surely they would 'get it' by this point that the two are lovers. It really comes through here and I can see why these shots in particular were selected for their 'favourites' section.

Also, the way Liz is made up helps contribute considerably to the mood of the artist’s creation, it seems to me. The heavy eye shadow on a series called The Gamer (playfully reminding me of all those mis-spent evenings shouting angry insults at Lara Croft as she met her untimely death over and over again) gives us a much sterner looking version of La Point which, given my own sexual preferences, was a bit of a turn on, it has to be said. The metaphor of the console joystick Liz grasps in her hands in this sequence was certainly not lost on me, for sure. There’s one shot in this sequence which is probably my favourite in the book and it makes up a double page spread. It’s not so much the skill of the photographer, or the pose as Liz is naked and resting bent over a chair, with her behind prominent, which makes this shot stand out for me. It’s the expression on her face, looking back over her left shoulder and directly in to the camera, which is truly startling. It’s one of those looks that makes you project yourself into the photograph, making you wonder what the hell the “character”... as opposed to the actress that is the model... is thinking and just how that expression came into being.

A playful series of Liz reclining against a collection of sprawled out comic books is striking in many ways, not least of all because Osterhout obviously has the same run of 1970s John Carter Warlord Of Mars comics which I have stowed away in a box somewhere. The clarity and humour of the shots in this are lovely, with a wonderfully attention grabbing set of Superman symbol panties which are absolutely brilliant when showing the contours of the model’s sex lips against the colourful design. This series of shots, entitled Comic Book Geek, makes a mini sequence... almost a seduction... with the model stripping down slowly until we are left with just the sense of her sex through the panties before finishing with a close up of her lower legs and the super-heroic knickers dangling around them. A brilliant tease where the pay off in this one is the denial of the reveal.

There are a few other sections in here, too, which are telling a sequence of events in a narrative order. One long sequence called The Haunting Of Red Riding Hood has Liz starting off in the traditional Riding Hood costume and then running through the forest, shedding clothes as she goes, trying to escape the unseen creature that is presumably giving chase. It actually has a similar vibe about it to the Walerian Borowczyk movie The Beast, also featured as a section in the original extended cut of that director’s Immoral Tales (and reviewed here). Like that movie, the subject of the camera gaze starts off in fear and ends up in consensuality. This and a few other sections in the book certainly gel with the artists description of himself as a storyteller rather than a photographer and, although he (like us all, I guess) hates being labelled by other people, I have to say he’s a really great photographer too... someone who really knows what he’s doing and who seems to embrace the spontaneity of the creative process, as evidenced by some of the great work throughout this particular volume.

So, yeah, that’s about all I’ve got to say on this one. If you’re into sexy shots (far more revealing than the ones I’m allowed to show on this blog under Google’s guidelines) with a large degree of technical skill combined with the soul of an artist then I Love Liz La Point - 5 Years Of Art & Love is certainly worth picking up for your personal library. A truly gorgeous gal, a gifted photographer and the fruits of their passion published and bound for your perusal and, hopefully, fascination. Also, the last section, where Osterhout and Liz declare the full fire of their love, should melt even the sternest of hearts and have you saying “Awww” to yourself. This is a really great book and I’m proud to own one of the copies... for which I very much thank both the artist and his muse with equal appreciation.

You can visit Terry’s site and buy a copy of this wonderful volume here http://terryosterhout.com/

To find out more about Liz La Point at her website here http://www.lizlapoint.com/ and check out her YouTube channel The Naked Advice here https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNaW2ftS_rC_vdKFqiRo6mA 

Liz’s blog column for The Naked Advice is here https://thenakedadvice.wordpress.com/

You can follow Terry on Twitter here https://twitter.com/terry2070 and Liz here https://twitter.com/liz_lapoint