"What you said, that's pretty racy, even for a Swede."
Sweden gets a Hollywood mid-60s sex comedy makeover in
I'll Take Sweden, the film that dares to ask: How far into the
sexy Scandinavian darkness would Bob Holcomb--a California
bourgeois widower played by Bob Hope--go to avoid acquiring
a penniless
pisher like Frankie Avalon as a son-in-law?
See
I'll Take Sweden (1965) to find out!
Who can resist a film with such an unusual title--as if Hope was playing
Risk with Hitler? What about the poster
of Hope hailing us from his Volkswagen perch, bikini-clad Swedes a-flanking? Am I crazy, though, or do his outstretched arms
conjure Ahab beckoning from the deep, calling us North by Northeast to the land of blondes and honey, or perhaps to throw
him a lifevest so he can get back to the inhibited land of censor-approved L.A.?
The always dependable American actress Tuesday Weld plays Bob's daughter, Jo-Jo as a virginal but busting out all over all-American
sprite, and Holcomb is well aware of what he'd losing to gain a 'son' of Avalon's suspicious age and energy. So while Frankie
sings and bounces around trying to turn the film into a
Beach Blanket movie, a chance to transfer to Stockholm opens
up at Bob's oil company, where presumably there will be no 'young' goombah singers trying to infest his family tree. Bob grabs
Jo-Jo and away they go.
By 1965, even in PG-rated California, they'd heard of sexual liberation and they knew Sweden was setting the bar high via
their exported films like
I, a Woman (released the same year). Sex
isn't spot-welded inextricably to marriage and procreation in Sweden, presumably, but associated with a regimen of physicality
and health that includes girls in bikinis doing calisthenics against a backdrop of firs, prompting Hope to exclaim, "What
a lot of time I've been wasting playing golf." There is also skiing, sunbathing, and dancing; and Lovemaking is as natural
as any of those activities. This kind of de-mystification is something someone who leers as vocally as Hope would presumably
be keen to embrace. In fact, immediately upon arriving he finds a willing, practical bed partner in Karin (Dina Merrill) his
firm's hired decorator. Jo-Jo also gets her own Nordic consort in the form of handsome, disciplined Erik (Jeremy Slate), who
is tall, blonde and corporate --everything Avalon is not. Erik even wears a tie and greets them at the airport. "I love to
hear Swedish spoken as it should be," Hope notes. "It's like a foreign movie!"
So Erik takes Jo-Jo to swanky tea and cake spots; ostentatious concerts; the opera, but when Erik gets tired of necking and
art then it's time to get get her away on his two week summer vacation... unchaperoned. According to Erik, the couples in
love in Sweden go on a pre-honeymoon before they are married. "It's more sensible," he says. "That is why there is so little
div
orce in Sweden. We do not m
arry strangers."
Jo-Jo's, feeling unprotected by the safety bars of Hollywood censorship, is horrified. But Erik keeps at it: "In Sweden, we
are very
tolerant of
nature." His previously engaged friends Greta (Alice Frost) and Axel found out they are
not compatible, after all. "Wasn't it fortunate they spent those two weeks to
gether at the youth festival?"
Dealing with the dad is of course an issue since he is effectively Erik's boss: "Times have changed, Mr. Holcomb," Erik informs
him. "Chaperones are primitive." Holcomb is wise to the rap: "'The low divorce rate in Sweden?' You Scandinavian Svengali,
don't give me that old-fashioned jazz!" But when Jo-Jo catches her dad and Karin (a divorcee) at the same Goombatten hotel
of de youth festival, she decides to shack up with Erik just to punish her dad's hypocrisy
Realizing she's there too, Hope freaks: "As Jo-Jo's future mother you can talk her out of this." Karin is turned off by Hope's
Puritan ideals and his presumption that if they her and Hope are to have sex, marriage is a given,
beforehand! Such
things may exist as censor requirements for films in the US, but in Stockholm seems merely like pre-sex jitters. When Jo-Jo
admonishes him: "You are trying to treat me like a child!" Bob snaps back, "I'm trying to stop you from having one," but he's
really just stalling his own immanent moment of possible fatherhood - he might fail to deliver the stork.
Meanwhile Frankie's back in California, singing ballads to some gathered youths. Bob wires him airplane fare when it looks
like his daughter's going to be seduced by Erik. "She didn't forget you," he says to Frankie over the phone. "She's talks
all the time to Erik about you!"
The big difference in the film between Swedes and Americans are that the former have accepted sex as a given, no big deal,
any more than horseback riding or water polo. Americans carry the repression of prudes, which means they are also sex maniacs.
They argue against sex before marriage but when they realize they're gonna 'get some' they're like eager little children expecting
candy. In fact, candy would make a good analogy: In Sweden they want candy, they have one piece and move on, while the Americans
don't allow themselves any --they're on a diet, anyway, they shouldn't--well, wait, no-- their Swede friends have already
moved on from the candy tray. The American hems and haws and finally in a guilty rush, devours the entire bowl of candy, then
feels horrifically guilty, and nauseous. In this lies the clue to America's tenedency to then go running back to the oppressive
moral laws of our forefathers like a cold shower. Hope's anguish over his daughter's virginity masks his anxiety of going
to bed with a very liberated Swede, and Karin seems smart enough to know it. "If I can't trust me, how can I trust her?" he
says, as rationale but Karin's tolerant smile indicates she's wise to the fact that there's no need for 'trust' at all, in
either case. A roll in the hay doesn't always have to be accompanied by legal documents and parental approval for it to be
'okay' - in Sweden especially. Like the archetypal American tourist, Hope brings his own moral straitjacket prison with him
wherever he goes, he drools over the idea of free love, but still insists on a receipt.
Kudos to Hope that his character's terror of sex is allowed to be so obvious and unflattering. Ordering steak , rare, at the
hotel restaurant, in order to get the blood up, he seems as frightened of what's happening in Goombatten as his daughter.
Again it becomes a matter of what Zizek calls the dual nature of social reality - the fantasmatic undercurrent: "I was seeing
pink Jo-Jos again!" he exclaims, spotting his daughter in the hotel (he thinks she's back in Stockholm, studying). Thus the
parameters of the Hollywood sex comedy hold Bob and Jo-Jo in a glacial fog, allowing them to burlesque their sexual desire
while doing all in their power to avoid the deed, as it will effectively sever their connection to the big other and mire
them in the fantasmatic plastic flytrap, the carnal desire of the other that suddenly manifests itself once one is within
striking distance of its sticky tongue
And so a queasy compromise with virginity is made - American couples are allowed to depart from convention as long as they
suffer in guilt over what their fathers will think, and vice versa. Swedes must then respect our gentle decency as their casual
sex lifestyle devolves into debauched ennui (Erik turns out to be a date-rapist). In other words, Hope will
take "Sweden"
but can't allow his daughter to do the same even though one look at Erik and you know he'd be awesome breeding stock for Jo-Jo.
Hope's choosing mutt Frankie to come in and save the day is typical of America's preference for socially instilled mores vs.
natural selection. He finally respects Frankie because Frankie, too, is terrified of sex - and would never dream of mating
with Jo-Jo unless there were rings and certificates and demands from in-laws for grandchildren involved. In short, Frankie
is American as defined by Hollywood in the half-Nelson of the production code. It was the style of the time, the early 1960s,
marriage enforced under the states' stern censors; hotel detectives looking under beds for evidence of 'mixed parties' and
women's dorm room 'matrons. So people back then would marry each other after only a few dates, go racing for their new room
in married couples housing like their pants were on fire. Only later do they find out they are not so compatible... wasn't
it unfortunate they never had those Swedish two weeks at the youth festival in Go
ombatten.
A final bow to the Big Other comes at the last minute realization that the priest who conducted their double wedding didn't
yet have his license, so technically neither couple is married. And they're on a cruise back home to the USA... where such
things matter! Karin can only gape in horror as Bob frantically calls the ship's captain for a quick boatside ceremony before
any 'damage' is done, though any damage done was and is strictly done by his own insecure deal-seal-stalling. Karin's horror
is the realization that Hope's delaying tactics will never end, for they are decades away from the invention of Viagra,
and he has all the time in the world, just to quip and evade, and complain of headaches.
The climax of the film comes before then, with Hope's mad dash through the hotel where Jo-Jo and Erik are staying under a
false name. Hope goes barging in on lovers up and down the halls in order to prevent his daughter's premarital deflowering.
Meanwhile we learn from Marti (Rosemarie Frankland, above), the girl Frankie's been dating while Jo-Jo holds out, that Erik
slept with her the week before, and is a bit of a wolf. Her admissions of the subterfuge carried on for Erik's behalf come
with a sense of world weary despair. She feels the ugly side effect of sexual freedom, i.e. she's a reminder than women still
feel used regardless of the socially acceptable practice of loose sexuality, but she swallows her feelings and plays along
with the subterfuge, becoming wingman to the dude she banged the week before, whether she really wants to or not.
On that note, we move to
Thriller: A Cruel Picture (1974), aka
They Call Her One Eye, a labor of insane ambition
from first-time feature director Bo Arne Vibenius. It tells the story of Madeline (Christina Lindberg), a milkmaid--mute
since being raped as a child-- who winds up a drug-addicted white slave in the big empty house of a clammy swinger named Tony
(Heinz Hopf). He's rather robotic as he slips Madeline a roofie at dinner, gets her hooked on heroin while she's passed out
for a week, then lays out the means by which she will earn future shots thereof, though in this alternate universe heroin
seems to do little else than make you sleep and stare vacantly through the endless Swedish dusk. Since Madeline seems a rather
dull and zombie-like character to begin with, it's hard to tell what she feels about it all beyond her immediate desire to
bolt out the door, but Tony makes a mistake in giving her a cyt of the profits, as she usess the money to hire trainers in
martial arts, marksmanship, and high-speed driving on her day off...
I mention her in relation to Karin and Jo-Jo of
I'll Take Sweden as a contrast in daughter characters, each threatened
by a violent, adult Swede. Both are thrust into sexuality before they are quite ready (Erik turns into a
deus ex machina
rapist, making Hope's embarassingly provicial intervention heroic at the last possible second). Considering they were made
a mere nine years apart,
Thriller could be said to be
I'll Take Sweden's post-apocalyptic wasteland sequel -
after Hope's oil company has bought out the expanses of Stockholm, save a few derelicts and farmers, and permissive sexual
freedom has destroyed any sense of human value.
It's also not hard to compare the
One-Eye 'twist' of her parents killing themselves, heartbroken, thanks to nasty forged
letters Tony wrote them, with Hope nearly killing himself in his effort to keep Jo-Jo a virgin, racing around the hotel barging
in on people like a maniac. His over-protection is clearly making her woefully unprepared for the youth festival. Similarly,
the neglect Madeline suffers at home in the early scenes of
Thriller, with elderly parents who seem incapable of protecting
her from local scuzzes until too late, says a lot about the importance of preparedness, and the teaching of self-reliance,
especially when your daughter can't or won't yell for help.
We learn in interviews with Lindberg that she refused certain sex scenes for the movie and the director tried repeatedly to
trick her into them, and then promised no X-rated inserts would be added, then went and shot inserts, and added them for some
markets. All of which is a meta mirror to the film's tale of an innocent girl and her manipulative pimp. Add to that the feeling
that the film itself seems 'missing' as if created as a skeleton framework for an elaborate piece of X-rated nastiness (I'm
deliberately discussing the non-X insert version as I've seen no other) and filling in the dead space are weird musics and
bizarre super slow motion effects, weird windy outdoors action, spartan set decorations and the mood of existential despair
that can only come from a place where it's dark most of the year. There's a 'nihilistic awakening' going on, with the feeling
that no one is around for miles except the cast who are all slowly succumbing to a zombie swinger plague.
The scenes of Tony at his desk ordering various hit men around after Madeline after she goes ballistic are priceless, barren,
reminding me of stuff we'd shoot in my little gang of kids in the 1980s on super 8mm. And Lindberg is hilariously 'out' of
step with most action stars -- she walks like she's a 14 year-old in her first tight skit --her hat and coat and guns looking
all the world (intentionally?) like a junior high school freshman trick or treating as Female Convict Scorpion. (Thriller
made Lindberg a huge hit in Japan and she shot several pictures there).
Madeline's muteness is perhaps a way to duplicate the language barrier which is allegedly instrumental in white slavery rackets.
(Matsu in the
Female Convict Scorpion series can talk, but never does). This is also a way to get around problems with
translations, subtitles, dubbing, and so forth. But if done right, it's also eloquence itself. In not speaking, Madeline speaks
the language of nature, becoming a blank slate through which others encounter the frustrating spectral ugliness of their own
enjoyment. The film around her is similarly quiet. Its skeletal structure made to fit seemingly nearly any type of re-edit
like a big empty haunted house awaiting furniture. Most scenes are set in Tony's foyer and the dark empty room assigned to
Madeline (the bed is on the floor and covered in black sheets, making it practically invisible against the dark wood), there's
never moments where anyone feels connected to anyone else - or indeed that there
is anyone else.
In one memorable sequence, Madeline thrashes a couple of cops and steals their squad car. Racing down the highway with sirens
flashing she runs every vehicle she passes off the road. Most of them explode. There's no attempt to separate the innocent
drivers from the bad and the scene is never explained. One of the shoot-outs takes place at a restaurant connected to a huge
empty raceway/stadium. We follow Madeline as she drives into the vast, empty parking lot - the sky gray and lifeless - and
it feels like she's fighting through a special Swedish gravity as she putters in with her guns cocked and out. In trying to
kill the only few people left alive she's like a pint-sized black-garbed eraser, trying to undo the whole first half of the
film, via slow motion bloodletting until no one is alive but herself and a single horse. Forget about milking cows; now she
will work the plow and answer to no one but herself.
In the Sates, relaxed censorship would eventually lead to inflammatory rape-revenge films like
Last House on the Left
and
Death Wish 2, while Swedish exports like
Let the Right One In have been overshadowed by the runaway success
of
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, which brings the rapes up close and personal, lavishing brutal detail until you
can't imagine your ancestral homeland any other way than as a prison of flesh, where the Youth Festival's gaudy lights, and
robust health are just a few midnight sun-drenched months a year followed by an eternity of endless, cold, dark, bleak, violent,
desolate, drug-addicted, sexual drudgery. With nights that last months and a landscape more desolate than the moon, two packets
a day and a place to sleep it off in seems a modern carny geek ecstasy.
But lo! Here comes One-Eye's spiritual sibling, Bob Hope, scrambling through the windblown ruins of what was once Goombatten's
nicest and only summer lodge... to the rescue! Armed only with a preacher, a snappy bit of semi-blue patter, and a instilled
moral code so unshakable as to cut any Scandinavian Svengali to the quick. Roll the credits and let's move silently back to
the coded land of control and morality, before the shooting starts again and the camera shudders to a bloody slow motion crawl
into the age of 1980s slasher movies... Amen.
To: The Social More Probing Finger of Essy Persson
STOCKHOLMSNATT and the Battle of the Swedish Telephone Booths
