The Jess Franco Starting Ten

Nobody knows how many films Jesús Franco directed. The count sits somewhere between 160 and 200 depending on how you handle the pseudonyms — Clifford Brown, Jess Frank, Frank Hollman, David Khunne, and dozens more — the alternate cuts sold as separate features, and the productions where he shot for a fortnight, walked away, and let someone else finish. He worked from 1959 to 2013 and died at eighty-two, still making them. He is the most prolific director in the history of European cinema and one of its worst, and both of those sentences are load-bearing.

Here is the honest position, which any Franco enthusiast will confirm: most of his films are bad, and a meaningful share are unwatchable — out of focus, zoomed into oblivion, padded with fifteen-minute nightclub sequences, assembled from other films. The received advice is to dive in anywhere and let the delirium wash over you. That advice has recruited almost nobody, because the first film you pull at random is statistically going to be a 1983 Spanish women-in-prison picture shot in someone’s basement.

So: ten doors. Each one is a real film. The career, its economics and its madness get the long read in Jess Franco, the prolific king of Eurotrash.

The Spanish beginning

The Awful Dr. Orlof (1962). The film that made him and the one nobody expected. A surgeon abducts women to restore his daughter’s ruined face, assisted by a blind revenant with a pronounced overbite. If that sounds familiar, it is: Franju’s Eyes Without a Face had opened two years earlier and Franco had clearly seen it. What he does with the theft is instructive — he swaps the clinical calm for fog, cobbles, gaslight and a nineteenth-century setting, and produces a genuine gothic where his source produced a genuine nightmare. It is his most competently directed film, which is a backhanded compliment he would have enjoyed. Franju’s original is argued in Eyes Without a Face, the most beautiful horror film ever made.

The Diabolical Dr. Z (1966). The peak of his black-and-white period and, for my money, his best-directed film. A woman avenges her father using a hypnotised assassin with poisoned fingernails, and the whole thing is shot with a mobility that Franco later abandoned in favour of the zoom. Estella Blain’s nightclub act — performed on a giant spider’s web in a bodystocking painted with a skeleton — is the moment the Franco aesthetic arrives fully assembled. Everything he made for the next fifty years is trying to get back to that shot.

The Harry Alan Towers years

For three years the British producer Harry Alan Towers gave Franco real money, real stars and international distribution. It is the only period where the resources matched the ambition.

Succubus (1968). A nightclub performer whose act involves the ritualised murder of mannequins begins to lose the distinction between the act and the world. Janine Reynaud drifts through Lisbon and Berlin; the film abandons plot entirely by the second reel. Fritz Lang, of all people, publicly praised it. It is the film where Franco decided that coherence was optional and that a shot could exist because it was beautiful, and everything disreputable in his later work follows from that decision.

Venus in Furs (1969). A jazz trumpeter finds a woman’s body on a beach in Istanbul, then sees her alive at a party in Rio. Franco, a jazz musician himself, structures the film as improvisation — themes returning in different keys, time folding back. James Darren is out of his depth. Klaus Kinski is in it for four minutes and is the most frightening thing in it. Manfred Mann’s Chapter Three supply the score. It is the closest Franco came to making the film he thought he was always making.

Count Dracula (1970). The curiosity, and the one to show a sceptic. Christopher Lee had spent a decade playing Dracula for Hammer and complaining that the scripts ignored Stoker, so Franco promised him fidelity and delivered a startling amount of it — the white-haired count who grows younger on blood, the crawl down the castle wall, the coach chase. Kinski plays Renfield mostly by eating insects and refusing to speak. The money runs out visibly around the sixty-minute mark. Lee named it among his favourite performances of the role, which tells you the intention was real even where the execution collapsed. Hammer’s rather different approach is in Hammer horror and the colourising of the gothic.

The Soledad Miranda year

In 1970 and 1971 Franco made a run of films with the Spanish actress Soledad Miranda that constitute the strongest stretch of his career. She died in a car crash in Portugal in August 1970, aged twenty-seven, before the films were released.

Vampyros Lesbos (1971). The famous one, and it has earned it. Miranda plays Countess Nadine Carody, who performs an erotic act in an Istanbul nightclub for an audience that may be imaginary and summons a young lawyer to a Turkish island. The plot is a shrug. The film is a mood, held for ninety minutes: red kites, a scorpion, an empty pool, blood-coloured sunlight, and the Manfred Hübler and Siegfried Schwab score that a 1995 reissue turned into a lounge-revival phenomenon and that is now more famous than the film. Long case in Vampyros Lesbos, Jess Franco’s hypnotic Eurotrash landmark.

She Killed in Ecstasy (1971). Shot back to back with the above, in the same locations, with the same crew and the same star, and it is the better film. Miranda plays a widow avenging her husband, a researcher destroyed by a medical board, and she works her way through the panel one by one. It runs seventy-nine minutes, has an actual structure, and gives Miranda more to do than any other film she made. Franco puts himself in it as one of the victims, which is either an apology or a joke.

Eugenie (1970). Sade adapted with a straight face. A girl is taken to an island by a couple who intend to educate her; Christopher Lee, who has always maintained he was not told what kind of film he was in, appears as the sect’s leader reading aloud in a library. It is Franco’s most controlled composition work and his most unpleasant premise, and the tension between those two facts is the whole experience.

The Lina Romay era, and the exit

A Virgin Among the Living Dead (1973). A young woman arrives at a family château for the reading of a will and finds the relatives are dead and have not stopped hosting. It is the closest Franco ever came to Rollin — a genuine dream film, all silence and drifting. The distributor later hired Jean Rollin himself to shoot inserts of zombies staggering out of a lake and cut them in, which is the most Eurotrash sentence in this piece. Watch a version without them. Full read in A Virgin Among the Living Dead, Franco’s dream-state Eurotrash.

Faceless (1988). The last good one. Twenty-six years after Orlof, Franco returns to the same premise — a surgeon harvesting faces — with an actual budget, Helmut Berger, Brigitte Lahaie, Telly Savalas and a Paris fashion-house setting. It is glossy, mean, and technically the most accomplished film he ever completed. Watching it after the Miranda run is a strange experience: the ideas are the ones he had in 1962, executed with the equipment he wanted in 1970, arriving eighteen years too late to matter to anyone.

The films you will be told to watch, and should not

A starting ten is only useful if it also tells you where the floor is, and with Franco the floor is a long way down. The women-in-prison run — 99 Women (1969), Barbed Wire Dolls (1976), Sadomania (1981) and a dozen more — gets defended by enthusiasts as genre pioneering, and 99 Women did genuinely establish the template that American exploitation spent the next decade copying. The films themselves are grim, repetitive and shot with no interest in anything except duration. Nothing in them repays the argument made on their behalf.

Then there are the Video Nasty entries. Bloody Moon (1981) is a German-financed slasher with a genuinely notorious stone-saw sequence and about eighty minutes of nothing around it; it reached the DPP list, which gave it a reputation it never earned on screen. That whole British episode is in the video nasty list forty years on. And the eighties Spanish run made for Golden Films Internacional, shot on video-grade stock with a cast of four in the same apartment, is where most people who “tried Franco once” ended up. They are the residue of a man who could not stop, and obscurity is doing them a kindness.

The pseudonyms make this worse, because the same film circulates under three titles in different cuts of wildly different lengths, and the difference between a Franco worth ninety minutes and a Franco worth none is frequently which distributor’s scissors reached it. Check the running time and the label before you press play. Severin, Mondo Macabro and Blue Underground have done the archaeology; almost everything outside their catalogues is a coin flip.

The zoom, explained

The single most mocked thing about Franco is the zoom, and the mockery is half right. He used it constantly, crudely, in and out of focus, on faces and crotches and lamps, and in the seventies it becomes an involuntary tic. But the reason he reached for it is worth understanding: Franco worked without a dolly, without a crew large enough to lay track, and often without a second day in the location. The zoom is the only camera move available to a man alone with a lens and forty minutes of light. He was a jazz player who wanted the camera to improvise, and the zoom is the only instrument the budget bought him.

That is the whole Franco proposition, and you either accept it or you do not. He was a genuine cinephile, a working jazz musician, a man who could compose a striking frame, and he chose to make two hundred films badly rather than twenty films well, because the making was the appetite. Nobody has to admire the result. Anyone who watches the Miranda films back to back will understand what the appetite occasionally purchased.

Start with The Diabolical Dr. Z, then She Killed in Ecstasy, then Vampyros Lesbos. Severin and Blue Underground have restored more of this filmography than it strictly deserved. His nearest neighbour in temperament and economics is catalogued in the Jean Rollin canon, and the wider disreputable continent is in the Eurohorror canon.