All Women Are Bad. Larry Crane, 1969.
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Edition screened: Something Weird DVD-R, released 2006. English language. Runtime approximately 67 minutes.
Summary: No animals or references to animals in the film.
I know there is a competition to use the word sexploitation as much as possible, but that glib adjective doesn’t help my perception of this meditative, disconcerting film. More like Kurtzploitation.
We meet our narrator, a weary door-to-door salesman working a northern New Jersey neighborhood, needing a little rest in the middle of his day. We have spent a few minutes with him, walking up and down identical cement steps without making a sale, and share his fatigue. He wanders into a wooded area and lies down for a rest - in his suit - at the edge of what appears to be a large drainage ditch. His potential nap is interrupted by an enticing noise that sends him on a lengthy rock climbing adventure to find the source. The narration, both plodding and exuberant, lets us share his unarticulated expectation to discover something life-altering, something like Sirens. Finding the unexpected source of the sound triggers his psychological descent into another reality. He returns home to discover his wife’s infidelity, motivating the parallel physical crossing into a darker world. He complies, and determines to explore seedy sexuality in The Big Apple.
The aesthetic climax of the film is an interminable docking of the Hudson River ferry as we arrive in Manhattan. We spend about eight minutes watching the ferry creep the final fifteen feet to the dock and wiggle into place while our salesman calmly confirms that the ritual is taking forever, everyone on board is anxious, it’s a precision maneuver. It is easy to superimpose two women dressed in black sitting on the dock, knitting, waiting for disembarkation.
This string of long contemplative scenes, each hypnotizing in a taxing way, probably constitute half of All Women Are Bad’s short runtime. The subsequent sexual encounters he discovers, always as voyeur rather than participant, historically were marketed as the point and purpose of the film. They alternate between mundane and unknowingly comedic, occasionally mildly upsetting. They serve primarily to demonstrate that our man has lost his mind by showing distressing transformations that exist only in his damaged imagination. I was left unconvinced that All Women Are Bad but reasonably sure that All Men Have Been Driven Insane by the disconnection they battle between the natural world and the artificial world, a struggle amplified rather than calmed by the colonialization of sexuality.
