Of all his wild and varied cinematic work, I’ve often thought that Jess Franco seemed to be having the most fun when engaged in lightweight comic book romps, be they Lucky the Inscrutable or the Red Lips pairing of Sadisterotica and Kiss Me Monster, and this deliriously mad romp definitely fits in with those movies. Inspired by the likes of Danger: Diabolik and Barbarella, the 1968 production The Girl from Rio – ostensibly based on a story by Fu Manchu author Sax Rohmer, though I doubt he would’ve recognised much of it – is a ridiculous, sexy and trashy slice of loungetastic silliness that is hard to resist.
The plot is pretty incoherent and plays second fiddle to the ludicrous costumes and general air of cartoonish excess, but it involves playboy and fraudster Jeff (Richard Wyler), who turns up in Rio with a suitcase containing $10 million (or does he?) and finds himself catching the attention of both crime boss Sir Masius (George Sanders) and Sumanda (or Sumitra, depending on whether you believe the dialogue or the credits), leader of Femina, the City of Women. This was a second stab at the Sumuru role for Shirley Eaton after the 1967 film The Million Eyes of Sumuru, the film to which The Girl from Rio is ostensibly a sequel though it works just as well as a stand-alone story. As the story wanders from point to point, throwing in supporting characters who appear and disappear at random, the whole thing becomes rather hard to follow, as if big chunks of the screenplay by ‘Peter Welbeck’ – in reality, the infamous producer Harry Allan Towers – have either been dumped during editing or possibly never made their way from Towers’ mind to the written page to begin with. This would be a problem for most films. But here, it somehow adds to the weird charm, allowing you to sit back and enjoy the garish spectacle without having to worry about following the plot.
Like a lot of Sixties Euro spy heroes, our ostensible hero Wyler is astonishingly charmless and smug – his ‘seduction’ of a manicurist early on has to be seen to be believed – and he wanders through the film in a daze, as if he has no idea what is going on. That may well have been the case and it adds a certain verisimilitude to the character, but he seems less baffled and more dopey. The idea that women would be throwing themselves at him is laughable even by the standards of 1960s movie hunks. Sanders, close to the end of his career (the final triumph of Psychomania being only a couple of years away) looks perpetually befuddled and vaguely embarrassed, especially when being fondled by sexy Elisa Montés. He brings a certain flippant humour to the film as the greedy villain Sir Masius, but he must have wondered just how it had all come to this.
The women in the film are rather better. The aforementioned Montés, playing Sir Masius’ accountant is impressively flirtatious and ambiguous – the film seems to suggest that she might not be who she seems to be, though this is another idea that goes nowhere. Still, she is fun in her variety of outrageous bikinis (to give an idea of the film’s disregard for common sense, in one scene Sanders asks her “Where are your clothes?”, to which she casually replies “I lost them” – no further explanation required, it seems). Critics are often dismissive of Maria Rohm, the wife of producer Towers and a regular in his films – clearly, she was cast in lead roles because she was sleeping with the producer but the truth is that she is usually up to the task and here – barely recognisable under a black wig – she more than holds her own.
The film’s stumbling block seems to be with the Girl from Rio herself. Shirley Eaton, her hair switching randomly from blonde to black and back again with no explanation, is attractive but somehow out of place. While she has a good cynical smile, she still isn’t convincing as the ruthless leader of a city of women, bent on world domination. You can’t believe in her as this cruel, sexually confident character, and you can’t help but wonder how much more effective one of Franco’s muses like Soledad Miranda or Lina Romay might have been in the role. What’s more, Eaton is all too obviously replaced by a bewigged stand-in for a lightweight sapphic scene that appears to have been crowbarred in, and as with Sanders, you have to wonder if she knew exactly what she was supposed to be reacting to a lot of the time.
But none of that matters in the end, as this cheerfully mad film trundles along, throwing in a great bossa nova soundtrack (and cracking theme tune that channels The Girl from Ipanema) from Daniel White, ludicrously impractical and sexy outfits (which range from the ultra-cool to the rather home-made) for the Femina residents, some ridiculously lightweight torture scenes, moments of gratuitous (if mild) nudity and unconvincing action scenes. It’s not sophisticated entertainment and it doesn’t have the erotic delirium of Franco’s other works from this era, but makes up for that with a gleeful level of eccentricity. Those who complain that Franco’s films lack incident will have to think again after this film, which is pretty much all go from start to finish. There are some fine visual flourishes and cool cinematic moments (like when Wyler and Rohm encounter a bunch of masked would-be assassins in a moment that is fantastically weird and twisted), while the end of the film makes the most of the Rio carnival, cunningly mixing the main characters in with revellers who presumably had no idea that they were about to end up in a Jess Franco film.
It’s not all great – Franco’s tendencies to rush result in a few clumsy moments, such as the scene when Wyler is supposedly gassed even though we can see the tube from the mask dangling loosely, or the fact that the secret Femina city is clearly within sight of industrial buildings. This and a few camera wobbles give away the haphazard nature of the production but if that is the sort of thing that you focus on, this isn’t the film for you (the obviousness of these moments also speaks to the downside of UHD – while the Blue Underground 4K release of The Girl from Rio looks gorgeous for the most part, it also allows you to see the artifice more clearly).
Like a lot of 1960s Euro spy/superhero/comic book films, The Girl from Rio is not a good movie in the conventional sense. It’s messy, ridiculous and nonsensical much of the time. It’s certainly not the sort of film that we would associate with Jess Franco. But he seems to be having fun with the project and that is rather infectious. Lower your expectations and I imagine you’ll find this hugely entertaining, gloriously camp and massively silly. There’s always room for that sort of thing in my life. Yours too, I hope.
DAVID FLINT
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