Lucky the Inscrutable 1967 / She Killed In Ecstasy 1971

Watched 2 more Franco movies and its amazing the growth of this director within a few years.

"Lucky" is a very polished, commercial spy spoof with heavy NeoRealism influences. It builds to a shocking ending that totally changes the context of everything you've watched. Even as a young populist Spanish director, Jess was transgressive and never afraid to lampoon Western ideas, especially the sexist, racist and morally corrupt greed of the US & UK. But he makes sure to deliver a stunning and well-executed product for his producers. Here he works on a Spanish-Italian coproduction so he ups the slapstick, eye candy actors, lavish color and obligatory Romantic elements. The films most understood by Franco's own fans are ones like "Lucky" where he flirts with selling out only to finally transgress or TRANSCEND the restrictive, repressive nature of the subject matter to make a statement of protest. There's a scene where the hero makes love to the Communist female villain (played fabulously by the legendary Rosalba Neri). Franco's following love scene is a bizarre montage of comic book and porno mag images with the faces of Karl Marx and Mao floating through. His anti-hero makes love literally to the idea of Communism within a film thats supposed to sell Nationalism, fascism, white supremacy. There are plenty of 60s James Bond spoofs but how many are well informed Anti-Bond films?

Flash forward a few years and Franco is within a dark, lonely yet liberating transition. His films are becoming much smaller, depressed, sensual and outspoken. "Ecstasy" has the same revenge plot of so many Franco films like Venus in Furs, Other Side of the Mirror and Jack the Ripper (which follow an arc). But Ecstasy's inspiration is a shattered romance, cultural and generational revolution, economic disenfranchisement, scientific liberalism and many other themes that can be tied to his producer's strict "plot" necessities. Its been said that Franco hated plot. Wrong. He simply saw it as tool for artistic expression and, when forced to work within the conservative genres of low budget filmmaking in Europe, he used the Nationalist or Capitalist issued "plot rules" to simply deconstruct themselves and call attention to the futility, materialism and unreality of mass media propaganda.

So again he returns to films about corrupt authorities, spies, detectives, prisons, Nazis, predatory lesbians, criminals, psychopaths and abusers of power to cut them down and exorcise the psyche of the viewer and himself to create films that are closer to reality at least in psychology. He uses the absurd dreamlike phenomenology of fantasy films to unlock the truths that the timid and conservative call frightening or unpleasant. Jess Franco used commercial cinema like a sugarpill to deliver the medicine of existentialist, nihilist and ultimately socialist thoughts of democratic revolution and utopian change. His films are political protest films but they hide their academic meanings in lurid masks that appeal to the sadomasochistic voyeur in a bourgeois culture of slaves labor and exploitation. His films were for the people who don't need entertainment. They needed art, the one thing the powerful don't want them to have.