The Radley Metzger Collection – Volume Two (The Dirty Girls (1964)/Little Mother (1971)/Score (1972)/First Run DVD Set)

 

Picture: C+ (Dirty: C)     Sound: C+ (Dirty: C)     Extras: C+      Films: C+ (Dirty: C)

 

 

PLEASE NOTE: Score has been issued on Blu-ray in a longer, better version and you can read more about it at this link:

 

http://www.fulvuedrive-in.com/review/10463/Radley+Metzger%E2%80%99s+Score

 

 

 

A legacy of cheesy filmmaking continues in the career of Radley Metzger, though he tries to at least mix the cheese with drama as he goes to color film, as demonstrated by two of the three films in The Radley Metzger Collection – Volume Two, the latest in a long series of Metzger films finally arriving on DVD from First Run.  It takes an early cheese film and adds two of the more interesting Metzger films he made.

 

The Dirty Girls offers a tale of Garance in France, and Monique in Munich, both “bad girls” who are good at “something” so different, yet so ...  the same.  The film is silly, but takes itself seriously and has a few moments to chuckle at.  Otherwise, the shots of the respective cities are as interesting as any of the quasi-sex in the film.  This English version has a silly “voice of god” narrator who over-explains everything, while the dubbing is sort of a hoot itself.  This one is strictly for fans.

 

Little Mother is essentially a take-off of the Evita Peron story.  Quicker that you can say Madonna, Alan Parker and Patti LuPone, this “Blood Queen” (the alternate title of the film) is on the loose getting what she wants when her husband takes power.  Christiane Kruger is the title tyrant, quite good in her performance, which saves the film from being an exploitation disaster.  Ironically, future Steven Spielberg producer Branko Lustig is a production manager here.  One other highlight is the amusing way she shows her deep faith, yet The Church is shown to be corrupt and complicit in the madness that follows.  If the film was not sidetracked by Metzger’s pretension and stopping short of being a study of corrupt power, this could have been his best film.  This print has an R-rating at the end and you’ll love when she gets obscene.

 

Score is actually based on a play about free and open sex, group sex, and gender crossing, though by the end of the film, this one was more like gender confused.  This includes an actual gay male porno star in his “acting” debut at a time when sex and art became confused.  It does just about everything wrong Mike Nichols recently did right with his film adaptation of another sexually charged play, Closer.  That 2004 film is more serious, more verbally graphic and far more advanced, but you can see why Score [based on the shorter cut only here] has been timed for release as Nichols’ film gets critical acclaim.  It is worth a look, but expect to laugh.

 

Overall, I think this is a better set than First Run’s previous box, but this is a cycle for fans only for the most part.  Metzger was more interesting in his later full color films for the most part, unless he had a star to be.  In color, he was forced to be more creative and happy accidents get a new meaning.  Give or take completists, people buy a set like this as a gag, like they might buy a Rambo set.  Taken that way, you will get the most out of these films.

 

The letterboxed 2.35 X 1 Franscope image on Dirty Girls is a dated analog transfer that has awful gray scale and bad definition, as have some of the other monochrome entries in the series.  Except in cases where the censored footage survived only on video, the Audubon catalog has needed updated and this film needs some serious work.  Roger Duculot and Hans Jura both shot the film and it has a good look, though no match for what Godard did with the format in Contempt a year prior, color stock notwithstanding.  See more on Godard’s film in the Criterion DVD reviewed elsewhere on this site.

 

The 1.85 X 1 image on Little Mother seems to be missing image on each side and may be a tunnel-vision version of a scope film to some extent.  I like the Movielab-processed EastmanColor as shot by Hans Jura, though it deserves better treatment, as this analog transfer turns all the Video White blueish.  Anton Diffring also stars, though I had to laugh when the opening credits tried to tell us that “any similarity to persons living or dead” was “purely coincidental” when it is beyond obvious what is being portrayed here.  The 1.85 X 1 image on Score fares a bit better but shows its age, though the color is again more like the time of release.  This time, Franjo Vodopivec is the cinematographer and is as good as Jura.

 

The Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono on all three films show age, especially on Dirty Girls, which suffers the additional problem of bad English dubbing.  Music is sparse on all the films, and corniest in the sex scenes.  Extras on Dirty Girls includes nude clips for the film that were never included in its first release, but could have been reintroduced on this DVD, promo stills of the film and its print ad campaign and three text pages on the film.  The same applies to Little Mother and Score, save the extra nude shots.  At the point of the color films, Metzger could get away with more nudity.  All the discs have the same Metzger filmo/biography text and their original trailers.  Nathaniel Thompson authored all the notes.  Though not for everyone, The Radley Metzger Collection – Volume Two is certainly worth a look.

 

 

-   Nicholas Sheffo