PSYCHOPATHIA SEXUALIS (1966)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *naturalistic*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *psychological*

I don't have any reason to disbelieve that this Albert Zugsmith effort, which he wrote and directed six years after his horrendous SEX KITTENS GO TO COLLEGE, came out under the title ON HER BED OF ROSES, as the poster above indicates. I tend to doubt, as IMDB claims, that the movie appeared with the title PSYCHEDELIC SEXUALIS. The title on the Youtube version I screened merely projects a mock-up cover of a book bearing the title of Richard Kraft-Ebing's famed 19th-century study of sexuality. There doesn't seem to be any advantage for the film to advertise psychedelia, since there are no drugs and only one very short weird dream.

In any case, this is a much more coherent film than the idiotic SEX KITTENS, though it's not without various plot holes. Like most of the softcore features that appeared in the grindhouse venues, the actors are largely unknowns outside of the exploitation cosmos. SEXUALIS does boast much better cinematography than most grindhouse movies, courtesy of Robert Caramico, who started off with low-budget films like this and the Ed Wood-scripted ORGY OF THE DEAD, but ended his career with mainstream works like JUST SHOOT ME. But the biggest "celebrity" associated with the project was forties songwriter Joe Greene. Greene's score is far better than Zugsmith's script, which looks like an amalgam of Freudian tropes (with maybe a little borrowing from PSYCHO) and probably no indebtedness at all to Kraft-Ebing (aside from Zugsmith bestowing that name on his psychiatrist character).

SEXUALIS does start off with a bang, depicting Stephan Long (Ronald Warren), a man in a rose garden undergoing a mental breakdown. He plucks a rose and holds it firmly in one hand despite the way the thorns make him bleed profusely. Then for the next fifteen minutes he collects a carrying-case, drives from the suburbs to an open highway, removes a rifle from the case and randomly fires at passing cars. Before the police can overtake the killer, the disturbed fellow puts his gun in his mouth and kills himself.

From this opening, one might expect that the movie's going to be about how Stephan went round the bend. Instead, Stephan turns out to be a supporting player in the tale of the true main character, a young woman named Melissa (Sandra Lynn). She's first seen in a frame-story taking place one year in the future from Stephan's death, and in this frame Melissa is only seen visiting her psychiatrist. What she's been talking about with him for a full year, who knows. Yet because it's now the anniversary of Stephan's death, Melissa has a breakthrough, and she relates the unabridged story of her association with Stephan.

Since Melissa and all of the other characters are barely more than flat representations of Zugsmith's pop-Freudianism, I'll keep the revelations as brief as possible. Though Melissa's a mature twenty-something, she suffers from what we now call an Electra complex (actually a term suggested by Jung, and one Freud didn't accept). Unbeknownst to her father, Melissa yearns to push aside her mother Joanna and become her father's sole love. However, both females get the shaft when the father become besotted with one of Melissa's same-age young friends, so that he divorces Joanna and moves out of both females' lives. Melissa begins sleeping around with older men who remind her of her father. But because she's still obsessed with overshadowing her mother, she keeps bringing them to meet her-- and Joanna, being a more experienced seductress, keeps stealing her daughter's beaus, as if in revenge for Melissa's conniving.

 

However, Melissa notices Stephan, who's moved in next door to live with his clingy mother. Melissa comes on to the naive young man, who's obsessed with the roses in his mother's garden, even though the garden is also (at least once) used by the mother for an assignation with a younger man. Melissa may be still be yearning to replace someone's mother, but she does seem to care for Stephan, enough to take his virginity in his mother's precious roses. However, she isn't receptive when the young man suggests they run away and get married. She refuses for unclear reasons, but that proves fortunate since Stephan has broken away from mother's apron strings by killing her and burying her in her own garden. After that, he goes on his fatal rampage.

I'm not going to dwell on the aforementioned plot holes or the underwhelming performances of the actors, since SEXUALIS is poised as escapist sexploitation fare. I will note, however, that the "raincoat crowd" who would've been the main customers might not have liked the fact that most of the titillation is psychological and not physical. The script does include one long scene, a make-out party in which a handful of characters get naked and simulate sex, while one guest gets up and does a long belly-dance number for everyone's amusement. But there's so little overt sexual activity that one might suspect that Zugsmith harbored the notion of that he was creating was valid psychological drama.

The above poster mentions a "rose fetish," which I feel fairly sure Zugsmith just made up. Flowers in general often symbolize female sexuality thanks to their morphology, but despite the popularity of roses as courting-gifts, that particular bloom has a huge number of associations. Yet in SEXUALIS, roses are always emblematic of female sexual desire, since Zugsmith works in references to them aside from the rose-bed at Stephan's house. The most amusing reference appears when Melissa tries to flirt with her shrink by quoting Robert Herrick's line "Gather ye rosebuds while ye may." The guy playing the analyst then replies, "I didn't know you read Henley," which may be his mistake or Zugsmith's, though it's funny either way.

There's even a sense that Zugsmith's roses may connote rapaciousness in females. At the movie's end, a police detective, who's listened to a sizable section of Melissa's disclosures, stops at a flower-shop to get a gift for his wife. When the salesgirl suggests roses, the cop makes a face, and instead selects chrysanthemums, best known for benign associations like friendship and luck.