Thoughts on Jess Franco

Short Film Commentaries
by Timothy Liebe

Jess Franco

(originally published 2013)

Jesus "Jess" Franco is an—interesting filmmaker. Sometimes brilliant, sometimes boring, sometimes you're just shaking your head and going, "What the heck did I just see…?" He'd done everything from Eurohorror to cheap spy thrillers to exploitation to (especially later in life) erotic thrillers and spoofs.

He was Second Unit Director for Orson Welles on 1965's Falstaff (aka Chimes at Midnight) and Welles' unfinished adaptation of Treasure Island.  In 1992, Franco tried assembling the extant Treasure Island footage—the results were not well-received.

I found myself "getting" what Tim Lucas meant about Jess Franco when Netflix had a bunch of his movies available on DVD. No, his Seventies films aren't "sexually arousing", but they are undeniably erotic in the manner of a sexual fever dream. If you're in the proper frame of mind for them, you feel yourself floating on a sea of perverse desire and a kind of bizarre "logic" that only starts to make sense once you surrender to it. It's like, as I think Lucas has said, Franco's filmmaking was closer to an endless improvisational jazz riff than commercial moviemaking with a coherent beginning, middle and end.

I tend to like his softcore erotic horror/thrillers because they have this kinky, trippy quality, and they're always beautifully photographed. His spy and straight horror thrillers tend to show off their low budgets more, and are more of a mixed bag, IMO….

I think you do a disservice to both Franco and Roger Corman when you just call them "hacks". While both were unashamedly commercial filmmakers, Corman also had the desire to be an art filmmaker (as you can see from films like MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH and TOMB OF LIGEA) as well as a social critic (THE INTRUDER, THE TRIP, GAS-S-S-S). Franco, though, may have had the personal obsessions that made him a more genuine "art filmmaker" than Corman, who at his most artistic paid homage to Bergman rather than strike out with his own particular obsessions. 

I get it that you don't like Jess Franco—nor should you, given that by any normal metric he's right down there with Andy Milligan or Jack Smight as The Worst Director Ever. But, I think that there's also a strong jazz element to his filmmaking, as well as a twisted sense of sensuality and beauty, that is why some of us see more to him than we do to other, similar narratively-challenged filmmakers.

As I've already said, I consider Franco's best work to be considered his most disreputable—his softcore thrillers and horror movies have a mad eroticism and romanticism that transcends "porn" into something resembling a gloriously personal vision of deviant sexuality. That's something Corman never touched—very few directors besides Rollin and (more intermittently) Dario Argento or Mario Bava got there like Franco did.

I'm in a weird position defending Jess Franco's almost-mainstream work, because he was always at his worst trying to tell a conventional movie story. His Fu Manchu films felt like work-for-hire jobs that he largely took to pick up a quick paycheck, and the chance to get his hands on a film crew and Christopher Lee for a couple weeks that he could squeeze a few extra days out of for his own future projects. 

MST3K showed some of Franco's most conventional (and weakest) work—like his Fu Manchu movies and his no-budget Sixties spy and detective thrillers. Those were never going to translate well into English, given he couldn't afford to compete with the A-List films of the time.

Vale, Jess Franco.