TOO BEAUTIFUL TO BE PLAUSIBLE: THE TALE OF POLLY 21 (Lucy Fedoro, 2006)

'If her body of work offers service as a miscellany of possibility, then her body works as a miscellany of possible services' Norman Mailer

'The theory of Six Degrees of Separation slims down to three or four degrees with Polly Ventuno. If you don't know her, you know no-one. If you know her, you know everybody.' Gore Vidal

'How do I describe her? Two parts Sophia Loren. One part Gilles Deleuze. One part Russ Meyer Supervixen. One part Steve Reeves. One part Lucille Ball. One part Arthur Scargill. And perhaps another part Sophia Loren, just so her gorgeousness doesn't get diluted.' Germaine Greer

Polly Ventuno, better known as Polly Twenty-One, has amassed a startling array of film credits over the course of a long and langorous career. She has been an exotic starlet, a camp fetish object, an intellectual, an avant-guardian, an activist, and famously, 'too beautiful to be a plausible'. That is the name of the documentary which attempts to cram into ninety-four minutes many lifetimes. It lingers on the scuffles (when she slapped Lee Majors on live television; when she called Ali McGraw a 'fembot of self-loathing'), but fails to do justice to the mind-boggling list of credits on her film CV. Impossible as it is to cover it all, I feel this should be rectified somewhat, and have chosen to pick out some of the highlights from a career that spans nearly seventy years. The total number of pictures are innumerable: 'one stops counting at five-hundred, my dear. And you should too. It's only polite,' says Polly herself in the documentary.

In many ways, Polly has had the perfect career; for her happiness, anyway. 'I have been in so many terrible movies that I am unsinkable' she claims, and while this is a touch severe, there are enough blemishes, such as Josh Kosloff's risible Tip-Toe (1983, in which Rutger Hauer enters the Stealth World Championships), and Don Invigilator's dreary Space Hub (1954, space opera, plot long forgotten) to offer question marks. That she has endured unscathed may suggest something quite simple: that she has been castable, versatile and well just plain good enough times to stay lovable. Considering her genesis as 'ze most bootiful womans in ze hull whirld' (as Orson Welles famously jibed, gently mocking Polly's swirling vowels), and the precariousness of such a position, this is worth celebrating.

It was Welles who gave her a start, in his myth-assaulting Bellerophon (1943), and if her role in this, Sam Fuller's bone-hard war flick The Bejesus! (1951) and Welles' own Non Quixote (1952) revolved around little more than her ample charms, she was wonderful in all. A lead role in Roger Corman's Oskar Minimal (1957), as the lonely wife of a shrinking scientist showed that she really had the chops, and a part in Douglas Sirk's Cashmere Perfection was to follow, Polly's shadowboxing scene with Tab Hunter the most memorable moment in the box office smash of summer 1960.

She brilliantly avoided megastardom at this point, taking roles in campy dreck and small independent projects, apparently at whim. Straddling both was Return To Zembla from 1968. Boob-house legend Russ Meyer made this as a sequel to Vladimir Nabokov's novel Pale Fire. In the novel, our narrator, Charles Kinbote, who claims to be an exiled king from the country of Zembla, provides radically mistaken commentary on a poem by poet John Shade, claiming the poem to be about himself, and his journey from Zembla. We slowly become aware not only of Kinbote's delusions, but of his contribution to Shade's death. Return To Zembla sees Kinbote (Kurt Just) struggling back through the wilderness of a post-hippy America, running into busty flower children everywhere. Polly plays a visionary femme whose dreams of Zembla fit Kinbote's descriptions, and who helps the hero on his journey home. He doesn't get there; they rut endlessly.

The iconic roles continued: In Bob Fosse's electric Manhattan-set Alice in Wunderland (1977), Polly played the Queen of Hearts in a disco-fuelled re-imagining of Lewis Carroll's yarn. Memorable choreography and turns from an eccentric cast, including Fosse himself (The Mad Hatter), James Caan (the Cheshire Cat), Richard Pryor (the Black Rabbit, running to a meeting with his dealer), Donna Summer (The Duchess) and Pat Benatar (the Dormouse) mean this is an endlessly watchable slice of nonsense.

And on and on; whenever she seemed certain to fade into poor television and straight-to-video purgatory, up she would pop in something bold and deviant, like Abel Ferrera's kinetic Segue (1990, alongside William Burroughs as a shotgun-toting bus driver) or Claude Chabrol's deft suppression-of-story undrama Subtext (1995). These proved she still had legs and wit. The argument that she might have been a 'great' actress with different choices is moot, especially when you consider how good she is in so many things. Even when she was nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Oscar in 1982 for her role in Harold Ramis' A Confederacy of Dunces, she refused to take herself seriously. 'One felt all along, that we were playing a game that Polly wanted no part in. That was charming and quite something.' said Leslie Ann Warren, a fellow nominee that year. Or as critic Giles Hunter puts it: 'Polly is among the most gifted and prolific actresses of any generation, but her name is nowhere to be found on any awards list; not, I would venture, because she fails to live up to the ceremonies' implicit criterion of importance, but because she steadfastly refuses to try.'

Too Beautiful To Be Plausible: The Tale of Polly 21 Directed by Lucy Fedoro, Produced by Lucy Fedoro, Jeff Lynch Starring Polly Ventuno, Norman Mailer, Lee Majors, Germaine Greer, Joan Rivers, Gore Vidal Ultimo/Gossard Productions 94 mins Release Date UK/US: Nov 2006 Tagline: 'You Know Her. You Don't. You Love Her. You Should.'

GLITTERED SHOULDERS (Douglas Sirk, 1961)

'To know inauthenticity is not the same as to be authentic' Paul de Man

'To appreciate a film like Glittered Shoulders probably takes more sophistication than to understand one of Ingmar Bergman's masterpieces, because Bergman's themes are visible and underlined, while with Sirk the style conceals the message.' Roger Ebert

Pierre Imperius, firebrand beat critic for the short-lived Insouciance '55 said of Douglas Sirk's Glittered Shoulders that 'if insoluble dubious intent is the barometer of febrile justice (and judging by the nixed reactions to the Testament of Offshore Leaking, and Korea, and The State of the United States, actually, it may well not be) then tensions must surely mount upon the fluid release from this hellish discharger; for Sirk may purport to mock vanities, but he is decadence disempowered, stripped to fervent longing and lack of belonging and unfurling and and and and... the self-indulgence on display is surely worthy of crucifixion, with no chance of resurrection.'1

A counter-argument comes from an unlikely source. In his erudite examination of road movies Gas, Food and Longing (1986) shabby philosopher Milo Holodex takes in a pitstop (sunny vista, near a large villa, walled gardens) and lingers on Sirk briefly, suggesting that, in his repeated examination of lovers and haters in situ (A house, a stage, a house as a stage) Sirk 'tackles American displacement from within; his characters are eating the heart out, whereas the Easy Riders and Kowalskis are just eating out, heartlessly'.2

But time and time again, purported avant-garde or experimental film-makers are cut a huge amount of slack, whereas huge studio names like Sirk are drafted into the drippy camp, tarred as counter-revolutionary or dimly praised as 'stylists.' But surely with Glittered Shoulders Sirk nails what any number of angry Shampoos or Blow-Ups or Beyond the Valley of the Dolls stuck it to (in their varied ways) later and with less complexity. It drapes a plot over the arm of a Hollywood setting, and implodes a cold and hucksterish scene from inside-out (which perhaps is scientifically an impossible metaphor, but such is the sleight of hand that Sirk pulls: The satire is so vast as to be invisible. This Hollywood stage is bedevilled with such ornate decadence that it would a miracle for the keen starlets, oaken actors and trophy-laden old money to notice the elephant in the room (with its irony tusks). Elephantitis, or similar visible and/or tropical disease, would be sniffed like freshly-cut gossip from next week and banished or paraded accordingly.)

Anita Ekberg is the bombshell with an LSD addiction, paying regular visits to a German doctor; Richard Widmark the producer from the storied family who seeks to live up to his name with on-screen success and off-screen destruction; Groucho Marx has a flinty cameo as a cynical party host with an impenetrable hold on the tastemakers; Lana Turner, in curious series of wigs and eyelashes is Baroness Barba Gabrielle Gastoni (or 'Lady Baba Gaga for short, and boy is she short with everyone,' as Marx tells all), the lost lead around who the film spins. She enters, she leaves, she sighs, and endless orchestral variations of Henry Mancini's 'Theme From Glittered Shoulders'3 follow and follow and follow, until it feels like this elegiac drift is not so much an announcement of her beauty and presence as a haunting reminder of her spindly existence.

All of the characters speak knowingly and with apparent wisdom (of goings on, of what to do, of who does who, and how they do), and yet each screams sadness with every smirk. Marx is particularly effective in this regard; his familiar smart-aleck persona rendered, with a slight shifting of mirrors, unlikeable and desperate. The difference is minor (Groucho Marx is, after-all, always Groucho Marx), and many critics see here only a paler imitation of his best performances. But this is Sirk's masterstroke, withholding the genius when necessary, frustrating the audience and the performer. He performs a dramatic castration, an orchestrated self-savagery epic and lushly toned, in which satire is buried so deep as to be be as cool and cruel as the ice princess at its centre, Turner.

I return to Paul de Man: 'Irony divides the flow of temporal experience into a past that is pure mystification and a future that remains harassed forever by a relapse within the inauthentic. It can only restate and repeat it on an increasingly conscious level.' Sirk's genius is that he manages to unite these two separate time zones in a place so rarely visited that it took viewers and critics years to discover the breadcrumb trail led somewhere.

Glittered Shoulders Directed by Douglas Sirk Produced by Ross Hunter Written by Allan Scott Starring Lana Turner, Richard Widmark, Anita Ekberg, Groucho Marx, Music by Henry Mancini, Universal Pictures 123 min Release Date US: June 1961 UK: November 1961 Tagline:'Come rub shoulders with the stars.'

1. Insouciance'55, vol3 No12, Summer 1961. Imperius said lots of things for their coin, and took a long time saying them: He wrote 100,000 words over a two year period.
2. Holodex makes another claim worth repeating:'
'the sixties represent the beginning of the end not because of drugs or sexual deviancy or civil rights or Vietnam, but because it was the first time that a huge minority of Americans became aware of the mass illusion that there is a joke that they have to be in on; this is what is loosely known as cool; it poisons the waters of the most benign offerings, and does so endlessly, so much so that instead of admiring great achievements, we spend longer avoiding great embarrassments'.
I think it is worth thinking about Sirk with these words in our ears, because not only did his career end as 'the sixties' formed, but because no modern concept of cool includes elements that are especially Sirkian; The man himself had no concern for it. He said: 'the great artists... have always thought with the heart'. He also said, (regarding the film's relative box-office failure) 'I could suggest a thousand reasons why nobody wanted this. But they would all be incorrect. Motives are always confused, always, if they are honest. And by honest I do not know what I mean.' These two statements need not be seen as contradictory.
3. The main theme song was composed by Henry Mancini, crooned by Ricky Nelson, and had notable lyrics by Mack Discant:
'When you rub shoulders with the stars, you get glittered limbs
you compose wild hymns
In your pseudonym, she swims
And other synonyms'