By Chris Hyde

February 11, 2004

Samba, go-go boots and bikini clad femme fatales thirsting for world domination: it’s Jess Franco in Rio!

While 1968 is oft remembered for political events that shook the foundations of the world, it was also a great heyday of mod design and the swinging lifestyle. Evincing the zeitgeist of the times, beautiful people all over crisscrossed the globe in sleek airplanes to the tune of twangy guitar, shaking their thing while Marshall McLuhan and Che Guevara echoed in the background. During this heady time, Spanish born director Jess Franco and producer Harry Alan Towers lit out for the Third World in search of a cheap labor environment in which to shoot a crazy comic book of a movie. Their ultimate stopping point was to be the sunny beaches and teeming streets of Brazil; the film that they created was The Girl From Rio, now available on DVD through the auspices of cult fan favorite Blue Underground.

As is generally the case with the films of Mr. Franco, the plot of this picture is ludicrously fantastic. Taking characters from the work of pulp novelist Sax Rohmer (most famous for creating the villainous Dr Fu Manchu) as its starting point, the movie begins with a colorfully lit scene of what appears to be some sort of James Bond clone being dispatched by a topless woman in leather boots. After this brief and psychedelic intro, the Astrud Gilberto ripoff music gets cued up and we are subsequently introduced to the main players of this lurid tale: Jeff Sutton (Richard Wyler), a not entirely convincing secret agent type with a penchant for plaid; Sir Masius (the great George Sanders, in a fittingly caddish role—though the actor is certainly on the down slope of his career here, not long before his suicide), a dapper, martini drinking fop with an endless crew of black suited henchmen and a babealicious accountant; and Sumuru (Shirley Eaton, most renowned for her part in Goldfinger), the vicious queen of a modernistic city of jet-set Amazons.

During the course of the film, this trio engages in the standard machinations of kidnap, karate chop, swindle and theft that usually result when superspys, penthouse peacocks and power mad sirens butt heads over piles of loot. And to be perfectly honest, there’s really not much here of substance to latch onto, as the story more or less has the feel of something tossed together on the fly by someone interested in bringing the penny dreadful into the Space Age. The action even lags a little at times as the players stylishly go through the motions, and though the implication is that the film is peppered with lesbianism and torture, for a Franco film this one is actually pretty mild. There’s really nothing here that would seem out of place at, say, a Super Bowl halftime show.

But anyway, does anyone really watch a film by this prolific director in order to revel in the finer points of a tautly plotted tale? While this one is certainly lesser Jess, its garish eye candy attractions remain many and varied. Just seeing the in-thing futuristic sprawl that is supposedly the metropolis of Femina is worth the price of admission, as the International Style backdrop makes a perfect setting for the filmmaker’s preposterously pop antics. Also entertaining are the outlandish costumes, with knee-high boots, tawdry two pieces and neo-Nehru the order of the day. Toss in an alluring 6/8 soundtrack plus some very cool street scenes shot at Rio’s famous carnival, and perhaps you’ll even be able to overlook the film’s utterly implausible and ridiculous climax. We won’t spoil it here by detailing the ending, but let’ s just say that you likely will not mistake the conclusion’s epic gun battles for scenes of gritty battlefield realism.

In any case, though this film may not reach the more sublime heights of the filmmaker’s best work, we still salute the folks at Blue Underground for uncovering and restoring yet another valuable period piece. The film as it appears here looks to be in pretty decent shape, and though the presentation has some flaws I’d sure assume that this caring outfit did the best that they could with the elements they had to work with. Also included in the package is a nice 14-minute documentary that combines interviews with the film’s producer and director as well as female star Shirley Eaton, who still looks great today. Accompanying this in the extras is the usual spectacular collection of posters and ad materials, a well-written bio of Franco himself and a segment on the work of writer Sax Rohmer that is coupled with cover scans of his lowbrow novels.

A swirling picture of a with it world that has long since passed into oblivion, The Girl From Rio succeeds best when depicting the really now joie de vivre of the latin version of the Summer of Love. This is a universe where way out babes answer Ericofons in swimming pools and natty aristocrats have people beat up while reading Popeye, and there’s simply no sense in attempting to analyze the outing on any but the most basic of levels. Though the year in which this movie was shot held some of the defining events of the latter half of the twentieth century, you certainly won’t catch a whiff of subtext in this throwaway yarn. For as the filmmaker makes explicit in the short documentary segment on the disk, as a director he has very little interest in attempting to depict “reality” in his work; instead, the idea is to frolic in the multihued glow of the entertainment of surprise. So while the '60s as an epoch may now have gone the way of the frazzled synapse, this new DVD release at the very least shows that it is not yet too late to tune in and turn on.