REMAIN CORDIAL TO THE STICK INCEST (Orson Welles, 1962)

'I'm turning everything full cycle. I want to explode cinema to such an extent that future generations will believe the medium to be a myth; Billy Wilder will seem like Bigfoot, and the Gish sisters a pair of gorgeous Loch Ness monsters, imagined only.' Orson Welles, 1946.

.. and so, finally, we get to Welles, The Great Orsini, the man whose personality and presence almost rubs itself out. Citizen Kane sits near the summit of every list, but Welles' subsequent work hides in its shadow. Much of his real-life substance has the shimmer of the fake about it: When critics dubbed his adaptation of Don Quixote a failure that would never make it to the screen, he responded by borrowing their cheeky name for it: Non Quixote (1947) was a chewed-up, spat out version of the myth, with Welles as both the titular hero and a modern filmmaker making a film about him. And thus a bipolar career opened up. For every impeccable Shakespeare adaptation there was to be shadowed web of cheaply made chunterers: His problems with studios, critics and his own ego led him to conceive a series of films under the title The Foul Papers that would be a spewing of interlinked ideas, filmed quickly so as to not suffer the overburdening of money and expectation, and rarely widely released. They were begun, like so many great things (including the Fictional Film Club itself), with the playful liberation of a joke, but grew into something more steadfast. And funnier.

The rabble of flicks in this broad series seem to fight among themselves, elbowing their way to the door. Heir Removal (1952), a tough runt, holds attention through the sheer volume of its dizzy anti-Roylist satire. Cruel Aprils (1949) is a doomed drunk, an elliptical inversion of Eliot's The Waste Land. Bellerophon (1944) was, Welles suggested, created when he went back in time to plant seeds that would grow into his great epic. Indeed, unknown actor Pearl Stringer was cast in that movie as Bellerophon's unlover Anteia, and she went on to star in many Welles films. Weirdly, no-one remembered her being in the earlier movie until she starred in the latter, her history growing before the world's eyes. Arch-genius invents time-travel, no-one notices. Just as Welles 'started at the top and worked his way down' as he had it, he somehow managed to work backwards from the future. Bellerophon skulks in the corner of the house, undiscovered.

(The Foul Papers series is not to be confused with Welles' other eternally unfinished run of overlapping stories, titled NOTES, that he claimed 'pull together every arc of myth, philosophy and truth into a rainbow of religious noise'.1)

Remain Cordial To The Stick Incest (1962) is a crescendo, of sorts. It is as if the filmmaker took everything that was left and threw it in the pot. Welles took kernels from all of his previous efforts, and wrapped them up in a construct half-inched from Flann O'Brien's modernist nonsense novel At Swim Two Birds. Various characters from Welles' films litter the scenes, confused and desperate to escape; they plot to kill their creator, the author Shag Lipton (Welles himself). Lipton, for his part, discovers a way in which he can in literature and literally, give birth to fully-formed adults. He explains, '...the benefits are obvious. No turgid backstory is required, no slow-moving exposition of tedious childhoods. Instead, we have sons who can be breadwinners from the womb, or daughters who are sprung out as attractive marriage propositions, or further, we can lay pensioners onto the operating table who are old and crippled enough to claim compensations from the state: parenthood is both a joy and an immediate economic advantage'.

Lipton's wife Sara (Jean Simmons) gives birth to Flashey (William Holden), a forty year-old gambler, shagger and boozer who immediately causes problems in the household with his advances towards his own mother. Lipton insists on a bed in a separate room rather than a crib in the main room, causing distress in proud mother Sara. Society begins to shun the Liptons at parties. Their son, older than they, is a public disaster, smashing glass and hearts unevenly all over the community of ex-pat American and British wives in Madrid.

Lipton assaults them from his window, describing them as '... bona-fide Marthas, lipsticked frigidaires and dried-out harpies of spastic alacrity, tense victims of a benign sisterhood, owned by thick vikings of the market, who climb over one another's gowns, splitting seams to reach an imaginary head table.'

... and meanwhile, the walking carcasses of Lipton/Welles' past creations fill the house, vengeful and waiting for the moment the creator averts his eye. He does. They put an ice-pick through his skull and escape to another film entirely, Decadent Midwife (1965) where they spawn and split up, leaving the ludic environs of philosophical parlour amusements for a life, one assumes, off- celluloid.

Harry Lime, Charles Foster Kane, Hank Quinlan and Macbeth bubble in a pool of blood, pasts both celebrated and shed. Welles implodes. 'There are no more waters in these Welles' cries Hollywood Reporter, but the big man turns his back.

Remain Cordial To The Stick Incest Directed by Orson Welles Produced by Orson Welles Written by Orson Welles, the cast Starring Orson Welles, Jean Simmons, William Holden, Rosebud Productions/United Artists Release Date US: Oct 1962 Tagline 'Gotta Get Outta This Movie!'

1. I mentioned NOTES in a previous entry regarding Walter Friend's Dijonnaise in FFC, January 2009.

THE ECSTACYSMS (Roger Corman, 1952)

'lest such arcane chicanery enslave our chicklets, we should find the breast milk of righteousness for their pouting mouths and remove the teat of poisonous cinemas from our towns.' Pastor Sid McBaleful, on seeing The Ecstacysms.

When this B-movie arrived, America was expanding and retracting to the first playings of the suburban teenage1 drama (in which under-21s first traced the now-perennial contours of liberation and frustration), and as such, it hit a spot. How a movie hits a spot is hard to say; but timeliness is all with regards to this kind of phenomenon, and this marriage of technicolor schlock and heightened sensitivities to the subject matter found a bullseye, and the exploitation picture was truly born.

In the pre-rock'n'roll fifties, 'ecstacysms' were hard to describe. Frantic tabloid suggestions multiplied with a collective libidinous urge to create delirious images in the public mind: Pre-teens were being eaten by beatniks, adolescents were cyborging their brains, illegal inter-racial homosex was a contagious epidemic, passed from sibling to sibling. Movie theaters were rumoured to contain poisonous pheromones, given off by a potent cocktail of youths multiplied by horniness, and as such, films aimed at young people were on dangerous ground. The state of Alabama banned popcorn after a scientist there claimed that it contributed to the sinful mixture, causing electric brain washes, and local pastor Sid McBaleful began a national campaign to ban cinemas. His polemic was even captured in a documentary that was, somewhat ironically, shown at drive-ins. Sid Says (Doug Long, 1954) was played before main features in an attempt to persuade young people to ignore movies and embrace a wholesome life. Theaters were happy to show the piece, as not only did McBaleful pay a princely sum for the slots, but movie-goers showed up in droves and bought extra popcorn to throw at the screen while it played, cheering every direct hit to the famous McBaleful bald pate.

Roger Corman's creation, then, one of twenty he made that year, managed to combine two concerns of the fearful right. Not only was it a cheap and lewd movie, but his subject matter was the gathering of young people into ritualistic groups, the like of which the adult world had heard about from newspapers, but did not understand. Shot in a documentary style, The Ecstacysms follows a group of curious youngsters as they deconstruct the shibboleths necessary to gain admittance into a group of peers that gather in remote locations to undergo what one teen calls 'a period of adsolute frenzy'. This frenzy is not drink or drug fuelled, but sponsored by young agony: at the conclusion of the film, we discover that the teens merely stand in circles and emit low moans in tandem. It is their sadness that horrifies the town, far more than any bad behaviour. Corman's entry into the fiery debate is ultimately quietly moral.

Lillian Gish appeared in the film as Annie, a widowed mother who achieves orgasmic delirium during the ecstacysms, and becomes obsessed with pushing further. Drawing the old-Hollywood Gish into the film might have threatened the lo-fi veracity of the experience, but to some, seeing a familiar face only seemed to enhance the film's plausibility: Gish received many letters from many viewers 'concerned' by her experience in the film. One even hitch-hiked from her home in New Jersey to visit the town of Youth, California, the setting for the film, to check on the occupants. Needless to say, she didn't find it. Youth, CA, is a fictional town.2

The Ecstacysms Directed by Roger Corman Produced by Roger Corman Written by Roger Corman Starring Rex Wigler Lillian Gish Sandy Doon Leslie Haslow Woolner Brothers Pictures Inc Release Date US: March 1952 Tagline: 'Where Do Our Kids Go At Night?'

1. The word 'teenager' can be attributed to the French film Tenage (Louis Louis, 1944) in which the titular protagonist, Marc Tenage, found himself in a constant state of delirious stubbornness.
2. A post-script: that woman, Betsy Louise Sherman, was so distraught at her inability to find Youth that she wandered the state in distress. Authorities asked Corman to rebuild the smalltown set that represented Youth in the movie in a bid to draw Ms Sherman back from a trance-like existence. Upon seeing Youth with its small corner store, iconic fountain and smiling extras, she whispered 'Oh, that's okay then,' before collapsing. She made a full recovery in hospital from Fictional Coma Syndrome, a condition now popularly known as 'Betsy's Trance'. John Carpenter made a film about Betsy Sherman in 1985, starring Veronica Cartwright, entitled Betsy's Dream (In Europe, this film was released as Oh That's Okay Then).