Cloris Leachman was an American actress with a long an fruitful career.
I give you a fragment from The Last Picture Show (1971) in which she is a wife angry at her husband.
And one set of fragments from the Young Frankenstein (1974), where she famously is Frau Blücher, and everytime her name is pronounced the horses start to whinny, neigh and rear.
Irm Hermann was a German actress best known for her films with Rainer Werner Fassbinder.
In Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974), she is the girlfriend of racist Eugen (Fassbinder).
Things come to a crisis when her mother (Brigitte Mira) falls in love with a Moroccan Gastarbeiter (migrant worker).
Researching this death, I came across an interview with a very lovable Brigitte Mira and her relationship to director Fassbinder.
This happened in 2018 but I only found out today.
Janine Reynaud was a French actress and model best known for her work in B-movies of the erotic variety.
She is perhaps best-known for her part in Succubus (1968) by Jess Franco.
Monique Mercure was a Canadian actress.
In the scene above she is Fadela, the housekeeper in Naked Lunch (1991) who chases away the penis-buttocks-cartilage centipede.
The scene is known as the mujahideen’s scene, because that is the name of the typewriter.
In this particular scene actress Judy Davis sits on the lap of Peter Weller. They represent Burroughs and his wife. They take a drug named majoun. Judy Davis is typing on a typewriter. On the paper Arabic words appear. Peter Weller tells her to write dirtier prose, meaning more erotic, more pornographic. As the words become filthier the typewriter starts to enjoy the prose more. It starts undulating under her fingers, giving way, until it finally opens up and shows its fleshy vaginal innards. Judy Davis introduces her hands. She licks Peter Weller’s fingers. A penis emerges from the innards of the typewriter. They start kissing and making out.
Next scene. Judy and Peter are in bed together. Clothed A penis-like centipede with buttocks and cartilage jumps from what appears to be a cupboard with them in bed. We Just before it jumps there is a shot of ‘it’ showing other vagina-like orifices. It flaps around them in bed in a bizarre threesome, making squishy sounds.
A woman comes in with a whip. This is Fadela played by Monique Mercure. She chides the centipede, chasing it outside. It jumps from the balcony and when it hits the ground, it transforms into the typewriter.
Shirley Knight was an American actress known for her performances in 1960s American cinema.
Here she is in a scene from the film Dutchman (1967), an adaptation of the Amir Baraka play of the same name.
Honor Blackman was an English actress, known for her sex symbol-ish parts in popular pulp of the sixties (The Avengers, Goldfinger and Jason and the Argonauts).
Radley Metzger cast her as Susan Sills (“the big game hunter, one of the world’s most efficient killers”) in The Cat and the Canary (1978).
She recorded the surprise hit “Kinky Boots” (1964) and the album Everything I’ve Got (1964) which featured an interpretation of Serge Gainsbourg’s “La Javanaise”.
Neda Arnerić was a Serbian actress.
In Shaft in Africa (1973) she is Jazar (above):
Jazar : How long is your phallus, Mr. Shaft?
Shaft : My what?
Jazar : Your cock?
Shaft : Baby, by now it shrunk down to 20 inches.
Arnerić was considered a sex symbol of Yugoslav cinema.
Anna Karina was a Danish actress best-known for her work with the French New Wave and Jean-Luc Godard.
She appeared four times in the film On the Passage of a Few Persons Through a Rather Brief Unity of Time (1959) by Marxist/situationist Guy Debord, a much more interesting figure than Godard.
These four appearances were from television commercials. Three fragments are from a Monsavon commercial, a fourth I have been unable to identify.
In the first clip (13:53) Anna stands in front of a mirror in the same bathroom as in which she takes a bath in the third clip.
The voice-over: “What was directly lived reappears frozen in the distance, engraved in the tastes and illustions of an era and carried off with it.”
In the second clip (14:41) she is in the bath and rubs herself with soap.
The voice-over: “There is no more should-be; being has been consumed to the point of ceasing to exist. The details are already lost in the dust of time. “Who was afraid of life, afraid of the night, afraid of being taken, afraid of being kept?”
In the third clip (17:30) she is seen at the wheel of a convertible car, a bird’s eye view, three young people get out of the car.
The voice-over: “In the final analysis, stars are not created by their talent or lack of talent, or even by the film industry or advertising. They are created by the need we have for them.”
The fourth clip (18:09) begins where the first clip left off.
The voice-over: “The advertisements during intermissions are the truest reflection of an intermission from life.”
Translations are from [1].
Actress Sylvia Miles died. She was 94. I discovered her via the book Cult Movie Stars (1991) which I bought the year it came out. It describes Miles as a “quirky, funny, busty blonde New York character actress.”
The 1990s was the time of video rental stores and I after I had read Cult Movie Stars from cover to cover I scoured Antwerp looking for old films. So I saw a handful of Miles’ films including Heat (1972) [above], as well as many other Warhol films. Heat opens with the wonderful John Cale song, “Days of Steam” from the album The Academy in Peril (1972).
Sylvia Miles is mainly known for her part in Midnight Cowboy (1969) but she also starred in Denise Calls Up (1996), one of my canonical films.