party where she is seduced by her host Joe di Loggia (Yul Sanders) and his wife Marilyn (Evelyne Scott), later awakening from the threesome to find both of her lov- ers stabbed to death on the bed. Radeck subsequently orders two servants (Ramón Ardíd and Monica Swinn) to administer a Chinese torture to Sylvia while he questions her about whether or not she knows a man named Spencer, and Ardíd and Swinn double-team her whenever he limps on his wooden leg out of the room. What we have here is essen- tially a damsel-in-distress serial, compressed into a frolicsome feature with lots of LITTLE ANNIE FANNIE-type nudity and orgiastic pile-ons, played with wall-break- ing winks and the sort of old-fash- ioned rinky-tink piano music associated with bordellos and vaudeville. As recklessly photo- graphed in anamorphic 2.35:1 as it looked when cropped to 1.33 on VHS, this is not one of Franco’s most successful com- edies, nor is it particularly erotic, but it is fondly remembered by his devotées for its anarchic spirit, its willingness to puncture the conventions of its chosen genre, and for the sheer abandon of
Romay’s comic performance, filmed when she was perhaps at the apex of her beauty. With Pierre Taylou as Sylvia’s spoiled stay-at-home husband; “Charlie Christian” (actually the early Franco-championing film critic Alain Petit) as guitar-slinging Marxist Red Nicholas, who is heard performing fast and slow versions of his original “La Vie est une Merde”; and Olivier Mathot as Sylvia’s private detec- tive lover Alphonse Gaultier— who appears in the French version as Franco’s recurring private eye hero Al Pereira. The English-dubbed version, quite funny and well-done (it throws in a character named “Mr. Scrotum” for good measure), credits the film’s direction to James Gardner—not one of Franco’s usual pseudonyms and reportedly a house pseudonym used by Eurociné hacks. (Un- fairly, the film gives top billing to Monica Swinn, then starring in other Eurociné releases like HELLTRAIN, though she plays only a minor character.) Franco’s English performance sounds like it was dubbed by Max Adrian (a veteran of many Ken Russell films, including SONG OF SUMMER
and THE DEVILS), while the di- rector dubbed his own French performance. His acting is cred- ited onscreen to “Jess Frank,” while the French video alternate credits list him as “David Khunne,” one of his old screenwriting aliases. Franco was credited as director on both the film’s French and sub- stantially shortened German ver- sions, while an extensively re-cut Spanish version with the mislead- ing title LADY PORNO was cred- ited to “Tawer Nero,” a beard for another Eurociné director, Julio Perez-Tabernero (CANNIBAL TERROR), who used his own name to “produce” the variant. MIDNIGHT PARTY is presented in its original 2.35:1 aspect ratio, credited on its packaging to CinemaScope but looking much more like Techniscope. Audio op- tions are provided in German, French and English, with optional German subtitles. If you select the German version, scenes removed from the shorter German theatri- cal release default to French with German subtitles. Though the ex- tras offered with MIDNIGHT PARTY do not extend to a second disc, they are even more extensive than those Edition Tonfilm provided with Célestine. To begin with is
Lina Romay plays a goodtime girl who literally awakens in the midst of a murder scene in MIDNIGHT PARTY.
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