PHENOMENALITY: (1) uncanny, (2) *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *psychological, sociological*
I remember enjoying writer-director
Frederick Dobbs’s GODMONSTER OF INDIAN FLATS, but though I’d
screened his ROSELAND before around the same time, I couldn’t
recall anything about it. Having watched it now, I can see why
nothing stuck with me. Though there’s a certain amount of nudity
and softcore sex in the flick, I can’t imagine anyone seeking out
ROSELAND for erotic satisfaction. However, it may be one of the few
films of the period that overtly commented on the audience for
sex-films.
Adam Wainwright (great name!) is a man
of many parts. He became obsessed with sexuality after an early
exposure to the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch. This led, in some
fashion, to his being condemned for performing a dirty song on the Ed
Sullivan Show, after which he becomes “the Black Bandit,”
devoting himself to stealing smutty films from theaters. But his
thievery has nothing to do with the plot, such as it is. Rather, Adam
seeks help from a psychiatrist, who tells him that everything in his
fantasies is a reflection of Freudian hang-ups—which the viewer
can’t judge, not seeing anything of Adam’s early life. The
therapist gives Adam LSD, which provides the film’s only
metaphenomenal content, as the schnook starts having wild fantasies.
These include cavorting with unclad followers before a giant penis
and talking to the Dutch painter Hieronymous Bosch, who just happens
to be black (as well as the best actor in the movie). I might
theorize that Dobbs was trying to emulate the avant-garde theater of
this period, particularly with respect to using a black actor for a
non-black role, as JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR had done for the character
Judas.
Despite some esoteric references to
Freud and Gnostic Christianity, clearly Dobbs had no real plan here,
so ROSELAND is nothing but pretentious twaddle. Yet it’s still a
little more entertaining than my other seventies selection, NINE
LIVES OF FRITZ THE CAT. This adult-rated animated feature was a
sequel to Ralph Bakshi’s FRITZ THE CAT, freely adapting Robert
Crumb’s comic-book character. But whereas the Bakshi film was
lively enough to earn good box office as a midnight movie, NINE feels
like the animators just threw together a bunch of aimless fantasies,
possibly thinking that their viewers were all stoners who wouldn’t
remember a narrative anyway.
NINE’s basic idea is that henpecked
Fritz, nagged by his heavy-bodied cat-wife, leaves home and starts
telling strangers about the glamorous “other lives” he’s lived
as a cat. The only scenario that had a half-decent concept dealt with
a future in which a black separatist state in the U.S. (run by crows,
of course) threatens to make war on the government. The state’s
actual intention is to surrender, in order to force the country to
render military aid, but this backfires, and Frtiz is right in the
middle of it. The film’s perhaps interesting as a time capsule, but
director/co-writer Robert Taylor never manages to ccme up with
anything remotely funny.
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