Barbarella **** (1968, Jane Fonda, John Phillip Law, Anita Pallenberg, Milo O’Shea) – Classic Movie Review 2,475

The 1968 sci-fi film Barbarella stars Jane Fonda as the title space traveller sent to find Durand Durand (Milo O’Shea), who has created a weapon that could destroy humanity. ‘I want to make something beautiful out of eroticism,’ said director Roger Vadim. 

Director Roger Vadim’s 1968 science-fiction erotic fantasy comedy adventure film Barbarella stars Jane Fonda as the title space-traveller and representative of the United Earth government sent to find scientist Durand Durand (Milo O’Shea), who has created a weapon that could destroy humanity.

‘I want to make something beautiful out of eroticism,’ said director Roger Vadim, casting his then wife Jane Fonda in 1968 as 41st-century sex kitten Barbarella in this teasing and amusing French-Italian science fiction erotic film fantasy based on Jean-Claude Forest’s popular French comic strip. ‘It’s a very romantic story, really, he added. ‘Barbarella has no sense of guilt about her body.’

‘It is absolutely camp, sophisticated camp, the wildest of them all,’ said Fonda. ‘Vadim loves science fiction and he’s gotten me interested. In a way, cinema is the natural medium for it, but up to now the technical gimmicks have been treated as the raison d’etre of the science fiction film. As an actress, I’m more concerned about the story, and the character.’

Barbarella is locked in a cage of birds, who peck off all her clothes on the evil planet of Lytheon. She’s attacked by mechanical dolls, who tear off all her clothes. Then she makes love to Dildano, played by David Hemmings, by touching his fingertips, as a result of which she tears off all her clothes. Comic strip indeed! It’s a case of sheer exotic, or erotic, fantasy overkill.

This is after she performs one of cinema’s most celebrated stripteases over the opening credits in which she loses all her clothes. It all makes John Phillip Law look quite casual as the archangel Pygar in a feathery jockstrap.

Unfortunately, Fonda’s in-flight anti-gravity striptease is masked by the film’s opening titles, but, hey, nothing’s perfect. These scenes where Barbarella seems to float around her spaceship were filmed by having Fonda lie on a huge piece of plexiglas with a picture of the spaceship underneath her. It was then filmed from above, making it seem she is in zero gravity.

‘What interests me is the chance to escape totally from the morals of the 20th century and depict a new, futuristic morality,’ Vadim concluded. ‘I want to do this film as though I had arrived on a strange planet with my camera directly on my shoulder – as though I was a reporter doing a newsreel.’

Also in the cast are Milo O’Shea as Durand Durand (almost a good name for a pop group, perhaps), Anita Pallenberg (dubbed by Joan Greenwood) as The Great Tyrant, Black Queen of Sogo), Marcel Marceau in his first speaking role in a film as Professor Ping (dubbed by Robert Rietty), Ugo Tognazzi as Mark Hand and Claude Dauphin as President Dianthus of Earth.

Undoubtedly its visual style and Claude Renoir’s cinematography can now be seen as triumphs.

It was a hit in the UK, as the year’s second-highest-grossing film. Its popularity boosted by a 1977 re-release as Barbarella Queen of the Galaxy, despite being in an edited version that removed some nudity, Barbarella has since become a cult movie, as a campy, sexy, designy icon of its era.

Italian producer Dino De Laurentiis bought the rights to Jean-Claude Forest’s comic series and hired Vadim to direct the film after he had expressed an interest in comics and science fiction.

Roger Vadim and Jane Fonda in Rome in 1967 during the movie’s filming.

Vadim’s friend Terry Southern wrote the initial screenplay, which changed much during production and led to eight writers being credited, including Vadim as well as Forest who also worked on the production design. The film was shot just after completion of De Laurentiis’s comic adaptation Danger: Diabolik, sharing several cast and crew members, including John Phillip Law.

The screenplay is by Terry Southern, Roger Vadim, Claude Brulé, Vittorio Bonicelli, Clement Biddle Wood, Brian Degas, Tudor Gates and Jean-Claude Forest, based Barbarella by Jean-Claude Forest.

Anita Pallenberg died on 13 June 2017, aged 75, after complications from hepatitis C.

She is also remembered for Candy (1968) as Nurse Bullock, Dillinger Is Dead (1969) as Ginette, Performance (1970) as Pherber, Love Is the Devil: Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon (1998) as Casino, and Cheri (2009) as La Copine.

She was the partner of the Rolling Stones founder Brian Jones, and later from 1967 to 1980 the partner of Stones guitarist Keith Richards, with whom she had three children.

John Phillip Law died on 13 May 2008, aged 70. He is also remembered for Death Rides a Horse (1967), Hurry Sundown (1967), The Sergeant (1968), Danger: Diabolik (1968), Von Richthofen and Brown (1971), The Love Machine (1971), The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1973) and Space Mutiny (1988).

His career breakthrough was in The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming! (1966), after director Norman Jewison discovered him working in Europe, but Barbarella is his most famous movie. After The Russians Are Coming!, he had a co-star role in Otto Preminger’s Hurry Sundown (1967), a drama about race relations in the US South, which starred Jane Fonda. Faye Dunaway played his wife in her first film role. Fonda was set to star in Barbarella and recommended Law for the film. He also had a role in Preminger’s Skidoo (1968).

© Derek Winnert 2015 Classic Movie Review 2,475

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