Reeling Backward: "Barbarella" (1968)

So it turns out the most lasting cultural impact of "Barbarella" is boobs.

The movie came out in late 1968 at almost the exact same time the new MPAA rating system went into effect, becoming one of the first mainstream films to feature a copious amount of nudity and sex. The opening credit sequence where star Jane Fonda strips down from her space suit to her birthday suit, her lithe body somewhat obscured by some cheekishly flickering titles, remains an iconic moment in cinema.

Admittedly, the sexual encounters are largely implied or spoofed. But there's nakedness aplenty apart from Fonda's occasional dropping frock, and at one point her character is placed inside a machine that's supposed to kill her with sexual pleasure, only the power of Barbarella's orgasms overwhelm the gizmo.

Not too bad for a PG rating. (F'reals.)

A little boob and butt may not seem like such a big deal a half-century hence. But the fact that American movies were again willing -- after a fleeting acceptance of nudity in silent films -- to show the human body in its entirety finally put cinema on an equal footing with other visual arts like sculpture, photography and painting.

Since then Hollywood has gone back and forth on how much flesh it is willing to show, including our current atmosphere where it seems like it's more common to see a penis than a vagina. (Don't squawk, fellas: we held an overwhelming advantage in that regard for well past a century.)

"Barbarella" helped usher in a new era of moviemaking that wasn't strictly aimed at families with kiddies, and we're all better for it.

The fact remains, however, that even the most generous contemporary reading of the film and its legacy comes to the conclusion that "Barbarella" is am embarrassingly awful POS.

It has achieved "cult" status almost from the moment it came out, because the movie is so ridiculously silly that it's hard to take the humor at face value. We never quite feel like the film is in on its own joke. Camp can go quickly from self-ridicule to pathetic pandering. Maybe people laughed with "Barbarella" in 1968, but in 2017 we can't help but laugh at it.

Producer/master of schlock Dino De Laurentiis put the project together based on the French comic book about a space traveler/sex adventuress. Screenwriter Terry Southern punched out a cheeky script, only to see director Roger Vadim and six Italians receive billing alongside him.

According to legend Southern didn't know about the story changes until he saw the other men's credits onscreen. And there were at least a half-dozen more writers who contributed without credit, dashing off revisions even as the cameras rolled. Fonda herself has claimed that they shut down production several times, ostensibly due to her own illness, but really so the next scenes could be written.

After her nude appearance in the opening, Barbarella gets naked again after her spaceship crashes on a planet near the city of Sogo, and she hooks up with a hirsute "Catchman" (Ugo Tognazzi). She offers him any reward for saving her life and he requests sex the old-fashioned way, not the 41st century method of taking a pill and having a vibrating commune through the touching of hands. Barbarella finds the experience... invigorating.

From there, Barbarella's displays come mostly through costume changes, including outfits where one or two breasts are seen through transparent cups, or partial destruction of her clothes. Background characters take up the slack, however, with a multitude of bare-chested/bottomed residents of Sogo or the surrounding labyrinth of exiles. It's enough to make a voyeur's fingers work overtime over the pause/rewind buttons.

It's difficult for me to conceive that in the 1960s Jane Fonda was largely regarded as an inconsequential sex kitten. We're so used to modern conceptions of her as a serious actress, Hanoi Jane, exercise matriarch and now aged icon. But Henry's little girl was still evolving back then.

Vadim was married to Fonda at the time, and he reportedly pursued several other screen vixens, including Bridget Bardot and Sophia Loren, before settling on the missus. She attacks the part with a mix of confident verve and shrinking neuroticism. Her Barbarella is erotic but reactive, a feminist icon who lets the men (and one potential female mate) make all the first moves.

Barbarella has been sent to Sogo by the Earth president to find the wayward scientist Durand Durand, who has developed the first weapon in centuries. (This did give the idea for a name to the '80s pop band, ironically by dropping a pair of double D's.) She eventually finds him, played by Milo O'Shea, having taken on the role of the concierge to the city's Great Tyrant, the Black Queen (Anita Pallenberg, her voice dubbed by Joan Greenwood).

Durand has been ravaged by age while experimenting with the Mathmos, an ocean of volatile liquid energy underneath Sogo that is fed by negative emotions and thoughts. His goal is to overthrow the queen and then take over Earth, except that she is always protected by the robot-like sentinels, the Black Guard.

We actually see the queen a little earlier, dressed up with an eye patch and an outfit with a transparent crotch, doing the emperor's old act of pretending to be a commoner -- in her case, to cavort with the idle and willing. She comes onto Barbarella, calling her "Pretty Pretty," but things don't culminate that way.

David Hemmings turns up as Dildano, the leader of a bumpkin rebel movement that seems to consist entirely of his unkempt bachelor pad of a headquarters, also located underneath Sogo. (Why not awash in Mathmos goo, we know not.) He makes a deal with Barbarella to get her into the queen's Chamber of Dreams, and they share a hair-raising sexcapade using the contemporary Earth method.

Master of mime Marcel Marceau has a small part as Professor Ping, one of the outcasts in the labyrinth.

The other notable character is Pygar, an angel (or "ornithanthrope," as he calls himself) who has been blinded and left unable to fly. He's fixed up after a romp with Barbarella, and becomes her ally and main mode of transport after that.

Tall, tan, muscular and blond, I thought at first that Pygar must be played by a young Terence Stamp after some peroxide and time at the beach. But it's actually John Phillip Law, who had a brief heyday as a sex symbol in the late 1960s and early '70s. This was a throwback to a time when Hollywood freely accepted fair-haired fellows as virile examples of masculinity, unlike today.

The look of "Barbarella" was considered quite astonishing for its time, what with the lasers and robots and spaceships. And this was not a low-budget film (somewhere between $4 million and $9 million, depending on who you ask.) But when you consider that this movie came out the same year as "2001: A Space Odyssey," it looks like positively primordial science fiction.

Part of this was intentional, as "Barbarella" is meant as fun, not cerebral rumination. The floating or flying scenes are quite obviously accomplished with wires or tilted cameras, giving the movie a funhouse aspect. The whole thing feels grubby and cheap, but not without titillation.

Today it operates mostly as an exercise in voyeurism. The inheritors of "Barbarella" came not in the sci-fi realm but in soft-core movies like the Emmanuel series, with our heroine a somewhat naive lass wandering through an alien landscape of bacchanalia and carnal revelry, in which she is invited to partake.

Part sex tourism, part futurist plaything and whole lot inept craftsmanship, "Barbarella" is one of those films that became important without ever actually being any good.

Reeling Backward: "The Verdict"

If there's a greater actor in a better role than Paul Newman in "The Verdict," I haven't met it.

This 1982 legal drama directed by Sidney Lumet is one of my cinematic touchstones, a film that grabbed me at an early age and profoundly affected the way I approached movies. It still retains a strong hold on me and I think about it often, even though I doubt I've seen it more than a total of three times.

Watching it as a precocious preteen bedazzled by Jedis and replicants, "The Verdict" opened me up to a universe of serious films where the characters didn't do much more than talk. It's an incredibly spare film, lacking big showy moments, and with barely any music to push or pull the audience into easy emotional catharsis.

Even Frank Galvin's courtroom speeches are rambling and unfocused -- he comes across less as an attorney presenting a compelling legal argument than a stumblebum hanging out on the corner lamenting the woes of the world to no one in particular. It's hardly the fiery "you're out of order!" brimstone you usually see.

To call Frank down on his luck would be to presume that he ever had any.

When we first meet him, Lumet and screenwriter David Mamet (on just his second screenplay) go out of their way to depict him as a lowlife ambulance-chaser. He plays pinball with grim concentration, taking a breakfast of a beer with a raw egg cracked into it before heading out on his daily rounds. This mostly consists of following the funeral notices in the paper for potential cases. He bribes the morticians to introduce him to the bereaved family as an old friend, so he can slip them his card and drum up a wrongful death lawsuit.

We learn he's only handled four cases over the last three years, all of them out-of-court settlements. And that Frank had a brush with the law, nearly losing his law license for jury tampering a decade ago. Since then he's been riding the downward spiral, with retired lawyer friend Mickey Morrissey (Jack Warden) throwing him a case from time to time, and peeling him off his office floor when Frank's been on one of his benders.

The latest is a good one, a real "money-maker," Mickey promises. But Frank can't even remember the case when Mickey brings it up, 10 days before trial. He pulls himself together enough to meet with the clients, the sister and brother-in-law (Roxanne Hart and James Handy) of a woman who fell into a coma after going to the hospital to give birth and being given the wrong anesthetic. (Interestingly, the film never mentions what happened to the baby.)

The hospital is owned by the Archdiocese of Boston, and the calculating-but-not-uncaring Bishop (Edward Binns) offers Frank a $210,000 settlement. For his standard one-third fee, that would garner him a neat $70,000 (about $170k in today's dollars) -- enough to keep Frank flush in cheap cigarettes and breath spray for years. But he refuses, and insists on taking the case to trial.

Why? Part of the film's greatness is never definitively answering this question. Clearly Frank is deeply impacted when he visits the woman in the hospital, curled up in a permanent fetal position, and takes Polaroid photos of her. Lumet cleverly doesn't allow his camera to show her from the same angles as Frank's pictures, which bring her sad plight into focus -- for us and for him.

His clients don't want to go to trial. They make clear they're looking to recover $50,000, which is the amount a local facility wants as an endowment to take over perpetual care of the woman. The sister and brother-and-law want to move out west and wash their hands of the burden. So why does Frank turn down the settlement -- nearly coming to blows with the sister's husband when he finds out?

From a legal standpoint, his case is a mess. He only has the testimony of one over-the-hill country doctor (Joe Seneca), who turns out to be black to top things off. It's funny and sad to think about how just three decades ago, having an African-American doctor as your star witness was seen as undermining the case.

Of course, Frank stumbles into luck with a last-minute witness, an admitting nurse who was bullied into changing the medical form to cover up the doctor's mistake (played by Lindsay Crouse employing a full-on Boston blarney accent). He does so in part by breaking into a post office box to get an uncooperative woman's phone records.

Frank sees this as his last shot for ... well, not greatness, but at least legitimacy. After he wins this case, the final scene of him reposing in his office, refusing to answer a phone call he knows he oughtn't to, suggests that Frank will resume practicing the law with something like resolve. He'll probably keep boozing, and probably handle lowlife cases, but he'll be an attorney again.

About that phone call. Charlotte Rampling plays Laura, a divorced woman who takes Frank up like a lost child off the street and becomes his lover/confessor, bucking him up when things look bad. Certainly it's not because a burned-out 55-year-old drunk has any business nabbing her interest. Even his initial come-on lacks embellishment: "My God, you are some beautiful woman."

Secretly she's being paid off by Frank's opposing counsel, Ed Concannon (James Mason, in pure aristocratic arrogance mode), to feed him information. When Frank finds out, he belts her ... hard.

I'd like to talk about that punch. It was the thing I most remembered from seeing the movie, when Mr. Movie Star Paul Newman punches out a willowy-looking woman. There's a long, silent pause before he does so, as they look at each other. Wordlessly, the look of betrayal on his face is reflected in her own, as she realizes the gravity of what she's done.

The look on Newman's face is just classic. It's the expression of a beat-down dog who's just had his last bone taken away from him, and he's finally riled up and mad. He's ready to fight. Frank has lost everything -- his status, his wife, his friends -- and here is this woman gnawing away the last tatters of his dignity.

Violence against women is repugnant, but in the film's context it feels totally justified.

Aside from Newman, the performances are roundly solid. Rampling has a certain reserved, damaged quality -- we later learn she used to be a lawyer herself and is looking to get back in the game. Concannon is the real twisted soul, taking a case he could easily win and putting a couple of fingers on the scales of justice. I wonder if it ever occurred to Concannon that he is engaging in the sort of activity that nearly cost Frank his law license?

Warden is his usual blowsy, hard-talking presence. Seneca has a quiet dignity as a man who earns most of his livelihood testifying against other doctors in court. He acknowledges his vocation but fervently affirms the validity of it. Wesley Addy also has a small, subtle role as the accused doctor.

Milo O'Shea, who recently passed, is just terrific as Judge Hoyle, who handles Frank like a wayward student hawking spitballs in the back of his classroom. In his heart of hearts, he'd rather just see Frank thrown out in the the wilderness, but he does his duty anyway. Not without prejudice, however -- it's quite clear that the judge favors the defendant, and works to undermine Frank's case.

Yet, when the surprise witness has just undermined Concannon's case, he and the judge have this great exchange of stares where O'Shea peers out from beneath those marvelous caterpillar eyebrows with a look that says, "You're on your own, me bucko."

That's one of the things that dazzled me when I recently watched "The Verdict" again -- how it makes every big moment bigger by going smaller. In its lean, small, often wordless and soundless way, "The Verdict" is a piece of true greatness.