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The camera's eye is to be assaulted, cp. Un Chien Andalou, it takes a smacking from a shorn courtesan (Constance Towers) in the indelible opening. (She adjusts her wig as the lens becomes her mirror and boiling jazz yields to the lush score in her own mind, the first of many startling disjunctions.) Champagne is her front in new territory, "Angel Foam" stepping off the Greyhound and sampled by the police captain (Anthony Eisley), "enough to make a bulldog bust its chain." She's pointed to the brothel across the river but joins the hospital staff instead, a fresh start among crippled children. Romance with the model citizen (Michael Dante) clinches the conversion to respectability, the moneyed aesthete woos her with earfuls of Beethoven and verses by Byron and Venetian home movies—the gondola ride of her dreams suddenly dissipates with a recoil from his lips. "We call it a naked kiss... It's the sign of a pervert!" Pirate Jenny plus Florence Nightingale, "a woman of two worlds," the ultimate Samuel Fuller heroine for the ultimate Samuel Fuller genre derangement. Small-town U.S.A. far odder than Underworld U.S.A., nothing more hallucinatory than the smiles and songs of "normalcy." Parable of the white swan, confession to the seamstress' mannequin, "indescribable pleasure" for dirty money. "That's the fourth customer she's cold-cocked with a karate punch." The acid test is a burst of full frontal treacle by tykes on tiny crutches mysteriously transfigured into sheer discordant transcendence, an interplay of warbling close-ups that comes to encapsulate the harmony and beauty risen out of abnormal intensity described by Dostoevsky. Prince Charming's plastic veneer cloaks a quivering molester, the truth gets Mary Magdalene out of the slammer and onto a pedestal. "They sure put up statues overnight around here, don't they?" She leaves the specious mainstream behind like the maverick filmmaker, Lynch (Blue Velvet) and von Trier (Dogville) are among the students. Cinematography by Stanley Cortez. With Virginia Grey, Patsy Kelly, Marie Devereux, Betty Bronson, Karen Conrad, Neyle Morrow, and Edy Williams. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |