Red-Barracuda
Venus in Furs is arguably the best film prolific Spanish cult director Jess Franco ever made. It was one he released in his late 1960's period when he had noticeably more budget at his disposal and he was able to hire actors of the calibre of Klaus Kinski. The reason this film is so high up quality-wise in Franco's filmography though is that it combines this higher budget with many of the personal facets that would go on to make some of his later work so interesting. Essentially he became something of an auteur of erotica and in this flick he shows he knew how to do it well. Sexploitation was a genre that Franco would contribute dozens of films to but this is one of the ones where he took a lot more care.The story-line is about a jazz musician who finds the body of a beautiful dead woman washed up on the shore of a beach; she subsequently appears to him from beyond the grave and carries out a series of deadly revenges on the three individuals who killed her. To be honest though, the story-line isn't terribly important; it's more a means of taking us from A to B. What it serves to do is allow for Franco to indulge in arty cinematic devices such as colour filters, slow-motion, strange camera angles and of course copious zooms; while at the same time delivering the requisite erotic content. The latter is of a pretty classy calibre though, helped massively by the presence of the rather gorgeous Maria Rohm as the title character. Franco really photographs all scenes with her very well and her revenge scenes in particular are strikingly effective.Despite the title, this film only has a passing relevance to the famous 1870 Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch novel. The only connections seem to be that the title character is called Wanda and she is fond of wearing furs. The Italian director Massimo Dallamano made a direct adaption of the book – also called Venus in Furs and also released in 1969 - and it too is well worth seeking out. Franco's film was basically re-titled to surf the popularity that novel had at the time. Amusingly, the film blares out the vocal line 'Venus in Furs will be smiling' every time Wanda deals with another of her tormentors. The music in general is a jazz score composed by Manfred Mann which adds a significant amount of atmosphere and mood and compliments things ideally. I have read in more than one review here that the sound in general is completely unsynchronised and that it's basically all voice-over – strangely, even though I have seen this film twice, I didn't even notice this. I can only account for that by the film being so successfully trippy that it didn't even register with me. At the end of the day, like all Franco, this is not a film for all tastes although it's definitely one of his more plot-oriented and user-friendly. Whatever the case, for Euro-cult enthusiasts it ticks a lot of boxes.
James Hitchcock
No doubt in Spain the name Jesús Franco is a perfectly normal one, no stranger than, say, Harry Brown or Jack Robinson would be to us, but to English eyes the combination of the name of the Son of God with that of a notorious dictator seems rather disconcerting. Senor Franco may have realised this, because for English-speaking audiences he dropped the second vowel from his Christian name, becoming simply "Jess". His supernatural and erotic thrillers from the sixties and seventies have won him a reputation in some circles as a cult director, but to my mind he has always seemed a classic example of the talentless hack director who suffers from delusions of grandeur and imagines himself a great auteur. The original novel "Venus in Furs" was published in1870 by the Austrian writer Leopold von Sacher Masoch, the man who gave his name to masochism, but apart from the title, the name of the heroine (Wanda) and her love of wearing fur coats (and very little else) there is very little connection between the novel and the film. Sacher Masoch's name does not appear in the credits, which state that the script is "from a story by Jess Franco". The hero of the original book was named Severin, but here, more prosaically, he becomes Jimmy. The film opens with Jimmy, a young jazz musician, wandering along a beach near Istanbul, where he discovers the dead body of a young woman washed up on the beach, and realises with a shock that the corpse is that of his girlfriend Wanda. The body appears to have been mutilated, but no precise information is given as to how she died. In fact, the film does not really give us any precise information about anything. From Istanbul Jimmy travels to Rio de Janeiro where he finds Wanda alive and well, but the causes of her sudden return to life remain even more mysterious than the causes of her death. The one clue is given in the film's Italian title, "Puo una morta rivivere per amore?"- "Can a dead woman return to life through love?" (This is officially an Italian film, even though the dialogue is in English). Jimmy revives his relationship with Wanda, much to the discomfiture of his new girlfriend Rita. I mean, sharing your boyfriend with another woman is one thing, but sharing him with a reanimated corpse quite another. Trying to summarise the plot any further would be a vain enterprise, as this is the sort of film which generally avoids plot altogether. The rest of the film is generally taken up with various love scenes involving either Wanda or another mysterious fur-clad beauty named Olga. It ends with Jimmy returning to Istanbul, wandering along the same beach and discovering Wanda's corpse for the second time. The sex-scenes are fairly tame by modern standards, but in 1969 sex-scenes of any description were something of a novelty so they were probably well- received by audiences of the day. None of the cast made any impression, except for the wrong reasons. Maria Rohm as Wanda has something of the look of a porcelain doll, and about as much acting ability. She was so wooden that I wondered if Franco had instructed her to play the role in a deliberately emotionless way. James Darren as Jimmy is no better, although I was surprised to see Dennis Price among the cast-list. In the 1940s Price was one of the rising stars of the British cinema, especially after his starring role in Robert Hamer's great comedy "Kind Hearts and Coronets", but his career went into something of a decline in the sixties, largely due to problems in his personal life, and he ended up acting in some rather unsuitable films, especially low-budget horror. I never realised, however, that he declined quite as far as this. There is no real reason for the action to take place in Istanbul or Rio- none of the characters are Turkish or Brazilian- but Franco doubtless fancied a trip to somewhere exotic. Some of the shots of the two cities are quite attractive, but in general the photography is highly eccentric, Franco making the maximum use of such devices as shaky hand- held cameras, blurry soft-focus and colour filters. Some of these devices can, in other hands, be effective, but here they only give an overall impression of ineptitude and of a director desperately trying to show off his cleverness while betraying his lack of it. I came very close to awarding this film the ultimate insult of a 1/10 mark; I only refrained because I normally reserve that for films which fall into the "so bad it's funny" category. "Venus in Furs" never quite sinks that low- it's more a question of "so bad it's boring"- but it did nothing to change my impression that Franco was the man who tried to do to the European film industry what his infamous namesake did to Spanish democracy. 2/10
Michael_Elliott
Venus in Furs (1969) *** 1/2 (out of 4) Terrific, trippy and haunting love story/mystery about a jazz musician (James Darren) who finds a body washed up on the shore of his house. He recognizes the woman (Maria Rohm) from a party he attended a few nights before but she is now dead. Two years later she reappears to him but is she alive or just a part of his obsession with her? This is an incredibly well made film from Jess Franco. It just goes to show he certainly had the talent to come up with something great but he often wasted it on cheaper pictures. Rohm does an incredibly job and Franco's use of a wonderful jazz score really helps the dreamlike nature of the film. There are plenty of twists and turns throughout the film and a ending that comes out of nowhere. A wonderful mystery set behind a very good love story. Klaus Kinski and Dennis Price co-star.
elvisflushley
then I'll never watch another franco movie. I was excited to see this by the reputation and the American title (shades of Leopold von Sacher Masoch)and all I saw was fifteen minutes of good film (the first 15) and then a bunch of stock footage,nonsensical dialogue, and BS plot development. I needed more dungeon scenes or more masochism, and less stock-footage/VO mental masturbation. I was sorely disappointed. Some might say "You should see it stoned", well, I did, and that didn't improve things. Someone compared this to "Lost Highway", and to them I can only spit derisively. I'd rather watch a Dolph Lundgren movie. How that guy still has a career is more honestly surreal than this stuff.
