I never met either Russell Means or Sylvia Kristel. And that’s probably a good thing. Russell Means might have scared me. In the presence of the ravishingly sexy Sylvia Kristel I would doubtless have felt intimidated. But when the two of them died recently, just four days apart, I found myself musing about some of the more unlikely films that came under the Roger Corman umbrella.
As an actor, Russell Means was best known for his first role, the title character (opposite Daniel Day-Lewis) in 1992’s The Last of the Mohicans. He next played a mysterious Navajo who comes to a bad end in Oliver Stone’s brutal Natural Born Killers, then showed a softer side as the voice of Chief Powhatan in the Disney version of Pocahontas. It made perfect sense to cast Russell Means as a Native American power-figure. Because that’s exactly what he was.
Long before he went Hollywood, Means was a national leader of the American Indian Movement. In 1973, he gained international prominence for his role in AIM’s 71-day armed occupation of Wounded Knee in South Dakota, and his fiery commitment to his cause never wavered. After he was indicted, along with AIM’s Dennis Banks, for his part in the Wounded Knee uprising, the Los Angeles Times called the pair “the two most famous Indians since Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse wiped out Custer nearly a century earlier.”
This quote reminds me of the days when Roger Corman, on the strength of the 1990 box-office triumph of Dances With Wolves, decided he wanted to bring to the screen the story of Crazy Horse. None of us knew anything much about Indians, and historical epics with a cast of thousands were not exactly Roger’s specialty. His concept was to film the re-enactment of the Battle of Little Big Horn that takes place annually in Montana, and then shoot the rest in Peru, where he had connections. (This led me to refer to our film as Dances With Llamas.) Fortunately, after we struggled with a lackluster script, the whole idea got scrapped. Russell Means may have breathed a sigh of relief.
Sylvia Kristel was a gorgeous Dutch actress who, beginning in 1974, starred in a series of French films as Emmanuelle, a sexually adventurous young wife living in exotic lands. IMDB reader James Hitchcock points out that one reason the Emmanuelle films seem so dated today is that they try to give intellectual underpinnings to what is essentially soft-corn porn. The result is what he memorably calls “existentialism-lite,” or “Sartre meets Hugh Hefner.” I never saw an Emmanuelle film, but the fifth in the series somehow became a Roger Corman co-production, complete with many new scenes shot by Steve Barnett of the Corman staff and lots of Corman stock footage added to flesh out (so to speak) the skimpy story. Barnett’s version was released in 1987, but two years earlier Steve had been asked by Roger to enhance another soft-core French film, The Click.
I’m open-minded about movies, but The Click fits my definition of pornography. It’s about an inventor whose small handheld device can make beautiful women writhe in the throes of passion. Eventually one of his victims falls genuinely in love with him. Yuck! The other thing I remember about The Click (not to be confused with Adam Sandler‘s 2006 comedy) is that we had an original French poster hanging in the Concorde offices. The huge poster featured an arty sketch of an undraped young woman in dreamy tropical surroundings. I always thought its caption should read, “I was a sex slave in Disneyland.”
