I am loathe to memorialize actors in print. Because they exist on
film, they will live forever as well as most of us ever knew them. The fact
that they are no longer making films means only that we, who love them,
must set about exploring the depths of what we have been given, rather that
the length of what is yet to come. But having just seen Soledad Miranda
in Franco's Eugénie De Sade (1970) for the first time, I am
reminded of what a singular and truly irreplaceable personality she was
and reminded, furthermore, that twenty years have now passed since her tragic
death in an automobile accident at the age of 27.
Born July 9, 1943 in Seville, Spain, she was christened Soledad Redon Bueno
(the name curiously translates as "good solitude") by Portuguese
parents. Soledad entered show business at the age of 8, performing song
and dance numbers in San Fernando talent contests. At 16, she made her film
debut as a ballerina in José Maria Elorrieta's La Bella Mimi
("The Beautiful Mimi", 1960). It has been widely reported that
Soledad also made an early film appearance in Mariquita, la Reina del
Tabarín (1961), an early Jesús Franco vehicle for singer/dancer
Mikaela Wood.
After La Bella Mimi, Soledad spent the next several yearsthe bulk
of her professional life-moving to the foreground in uninspired "pepla"
(Carlo Campogalliani's The Mighty Ursus, 1961), Spaghetti Westerns
(Franco Giraidi's Sugar Colt, 1966), horror programmers (The Sound
of Horror, 1966) and the occasional producción internacionál
(Cannons for Cordoba, 1967, and 100 Rifles, 1968). Only her
two films for American expatriate producer Sidney Pink-The Castilian
(1963; directed by Javier Seto), and Pyro (Fuego, also 1963;
directed by Julio Coll)-gave Soledad the opportunity to truly shine. In
The Castilian, she appears brief ly as one of a dozen young women
who strip and bathe in a public stream to distract invading troops from
the surprise military rebuttal of their men folk. Pyro, an underrated
Spanish horror film with a remarkably mature screenplay, featured her as
the daughter of a carnival worker, a waif-like innocent who adopts lost
dogs and runs after them in the rain; it's the kind of touching role Chaplin
used to write for women, and she's marvelous in it. Alas, good and steady
work did not pay off in stardom.
"She had a rather unfortunate and difficult life, which began with
flamenco dancing and lead to small roles in films," Jess Franco told
Alain Petit in 1974. "It is very difficult for actors in Spain to achieve
any kind of recognition. She eventually gave up and married a Portuguese
racing driver-a very nice fellow, by the way-and they had a child. She retired
for awhile into her own private life but, in the end, she couldn't resist
returning to the cinema."
U.S. video box art for El Conde Drácula
Soledad Miranda returned to films in Franco's Count Dracula (El
Conde Drácula, 1969), in the pivotal role of Mina. A troubled
production, the film did not live up to expectations but it provided a comeback
of dark luminosity for Soledad. Between takes of the scene in which Dracula
seduces Mina and bites her throat, Christopher Lee confessed to his director:
"I've played this scene many times, but this woman is giving me something
no other actress ever has."
A more impressive record of Soledad's performance-and the only filmic record
of the person she was off screen-exists in Pedro Portabella's Vampir
(Cuadecuc, 1970), an avant-garde documentary about the filming
of Count Dracula. In one of the film's most magical moments, Portabella
captures the filming of Mina's staking, including the precious preparatory
moments of Soledad applying her own stage makeup and Jack Taylor (who played
the role of Quincy Morris) gathering her up in his arms, like a gallant
bridegroom, and placing her inside her casket.
"When she began working in my films, it was like watching her undergo
a transformation," Franco recalled. "She told me it was the first
time in her life she felt so fulfilled." The actress also underwent
an almost physical transformation; Sidney Pink's autobiography So You
Want To Make Movies (Pineapple Press, 1990) includes a photograph of
his 16 year-old "discovery," standing next to Cesar Romero during
the time of filming The Castilian; the healthy, dimpled, blonde starlet
in no way resembles the pale, haunted, brunette icon of Franco's work. Even
the Soledad of Count Dracula, a petite but otherwise healthy-looking
girl, is not the Soledad of the films made the following year. After Count
Dracula, Franco made a deal to film three erotic thrillers in Liechtenstein
and offered Soledad star-billing in each. She had not worked in erotic films
before, but trusted Franco implicitly. Concerned about maintaining her family's
privacy, Soledad agreed to appear in these films under the condition that
she could use a nom d'écran, and that her known professional
name would appear only on heavily censored Spanish prints. Franco agreed,
concocting a new identity for his superstar by combining two ostentatious
names from the annals of epic film-making and best-selling fiction. Thanks
to the producer of The Thief of Bagdad and the author of such popular
sleaze as Valley of the Dolls and The Love Machine, "Susann
Korda" was born. The pseudonym was never "Susan", as is given
in most filmographies.
Miranda and Christopher Lee from El Conde Drácula
It is impossible to chronologize the three Liechtenstein productions-Les
Cauchemars Naissent la Nuit, Sex Charade and Eugénie
De Sade-but there is also little need; Franco worked in his accustomed
way, shooting footage for all three movies simultaneously. While Les
Cauchemars and Sex Charade remain unavailable, Eugénie
De Sade had finally surfaced (in somewhat splicy shape) on French video;
this deliciously disturbing item takes the actress, so convincing as Stoker's
classical victim, and transforms her into a truly modern Sadist. It may
be her definitive work.
Soledad plays Eugénie, the young daughter of Albert de Franval (Paul
Muller), an acclaimed psychologist who, under the name "Radeck,"
is engaged in researching into sexual perversion. Eugénie is a remote,
bookish girl - her favourite book is the story of Saint Theresa, which details
a young novice's devotion to God that is not far removed from erotic delirium,
indicating that she may herself be approaching a hormonal boil; her chance
discovery of Albert's journal unleashes a powerful incestuous attraction.
Albert succumbs to temptation slowly, but readily accepts his daughter into
the darkest avenues of his research. In a powerful sequence, Eugénie
provokes Albert by strangling to death a nude model (Alice Arno in her first
Franco film) they have hired for some amateur S&M photography; the taboo
of incest is instantaneously overreached, made trivial by an act of murder.
When father and daughter pick up an attractive hippie hitchhiker, they drink
together and enter into a parlor game of "Play Dead"-one of them
lies stationary, daring the others to do anything to break their deathlike
trance. When Eugénie loses her turn, she rewards father and guest
with a tantalizing striptease, in which she forces the viewer's attentions
almost entirely on her hands (Soledad's childhood flamenco lessons paid
off in a formidable talent for stripping). When the hitchhiker plays dead,
Eugénie stimulates her by sucking her bare nipples-clearly representing
to her watchful father, the mother missing from their sexual matrix-and
the two set about "burking" their guest, gleefully destroying
the mother symbol, whose elimination makes a first-time sexual encounter
between Albert and his daughter possible. (A similar scene appears in Franco's
experimental. "real time" film of 1982, Gemidos de Placer.)
Their incestuous relationship is threatened again when Eugénie find
herself attracted to a nightclub musician ("André Montcall"/Andrés
Morales), whose "correctness" in conveyed by his sloppy apartment
("I'm an artist," he explains), where the centerpiece is a poster
of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. Albert walks into the love nest after Eugénie's
departure and slashes the throat of her lover as he basks in afterglow.
He returns home, where he slashes Eugénie severely with a pair of
scissors, leaving her for dead, then takes his own life in a formalized
act of ceremonial seppuku.
Eugénie De Sade subjects Soledad to a few seeming indignities,
not the least of which is a bewilderingly brash, red ensemble of go-go boots,
cape and floppy hat, worn as a disguise with a pair of oversized white-frame,
blue-lensed sunglasses. While this outrageous get-up would make any workaday
welfare hooker cringe, Soledad manages to wear it like Edith Scob wore her
mask in George Franju's Les Yeux Sans Visage (1959). She dominates
and enriches the entire cheap film much as she dominates her thrift shop
wardrobe; it is impossible to look away when she is on screen.
And yet I ask myself, Why? Her black hair is lifeless, thin, limp and threaded
(already at 26) with gray; when she disrobes, her body is attractive but,
in all honesty, unspectacular-incapable of distracting us from the secrets
trembling at the back of her absolutely black eyes. The answer is that,
when Soledad Miranda is on screen, the mind is pommelled with questions,
provocations, enigmas. What crossed her mind to produce that strange, warm,
adoring look? Why does she sit in certain scenes hugging her legs, staring
over the crests of her knees? Why are her eyes glassy with tears in the
nightclub scene, as she watches her future lover playing his trumpet, when
the scene doesn't require it?
Eugénie De Sade is told in flashback by Eugénie as
she lies dying from her wounds in a hospital bed. Listening to her dying
words, holding her hand, is Franco himself-playing Atilla Tanner, a writer
whose intentions of composing a study about Franval's research are politely
rebuffed by Albert himself throughout the film. In the end, Tanner is finally
given the material he needs. It is an amusing Franco performance, this weasel
who always pops up at the least convenient moments (during Albert's escape
from a murder scene, for instance), but it is also poignant as the closest
portrait committed to film of the director's true relationship with his
darkest star.
Chronologically, Eugénie De Sade appears to have been the
last-filmed of the three French productions, because it features a staircase
in common with Franco's next three German co-productions (and also shares
one key locations skywalkwith his much earlier Succubus (Necronomicon,
1967). Franco reused the title "Eugénie" in 1980 for a
quite different erotic film starring Katja Bienert, whose teenage heroine
was appropriately renamed "Lolita" by the film's German distributors.
Vampyros Lesbos
After the Liechtenstein Trilogy, which shared virtually identical casts,
Franco wrote and directed three films for West Germany's CCC Filmkunst/Telecine-with
a different (but again identical) cast headlined by "Susann Korda."
Franco took advantage of the successful West German premiere of Count
Dracula to finance a rather free interpretation of Bram Stoker's short
story, Dracula's Guest. It seems that three versions of Vampyros
Lesbos, Franco's second CCC film, exist: the explicit German edition-subtitled
Erbin des Dracula ("Heritage of Dracula"; a presumably,
equally bold French version (Sexualité Spéciale, "Strange
Sexuality"); and a squeaky-clean Spanish expurgation (Las Vampiras,
"The Vampire Women"). The Spanish version credits Soledad Miranda
as its (always covered) star, and itwas not issued theatrically until two
years after her death.
The German version begins with an evocative quote from Heinrich Heine's
poem "Helena":
Press your mouth to my mouth;
The breath of life is Holy.
I will drink deep of your soul,
For the Dead are insatiable.
Though not her best film, Vampyros Lesbos remains the perfect Soledad
Miranda vehicle. She plays the Countess Nadina, awealthy recluse who strips
nightly in aclub in Istanbul to lure audience members to her island for
vampiric enslavement. Structurally, the film is nearly identical to Count
Dracula, with the focus shifted from the Supernatural to carnal anguish.
Despite the darkness of its themes, the film is dressed throughout in playful,
decorative inversion; Nadina's castle, for example, is a sun-drenched beach
house, overrun with weblike fishing nets (a symbolic moth is shown caught
in its intricate weaves) and scorpions. Kites flap about the skies instead
of bats.
Nadina's island is visited by an attractive admirer (Ewa Stroemberg)-named
"Linda Westinghaus" in the German version, and "Alice Korda"
in the Spanish!-who saw her in dreams before catching her act, dreams which
Nadina promptly realizes with some bedded bloodsucking Linda/Alice awakens
to find Nadina floating dead in her swimming pool and collapses, reviving
in the asylum of Dr. Seward (Dennis Price, looking somewhat healthier than
in later Franco films). Holly (Heidrun Kussin), one of Nadina's earliervictims,
is being held in one of Seward's padded cells, which the black-caped Countess-flanked
by her bodyguard Morpho (oneof Franco's stock monster characters, portrayed
here as a tall, handsome mute in Italian sunglasses by José Martinez
Blanco) -periodically visits in well-staged episodes of erotic delirium.
When Nadina threatens to obsess Linda/Alice's lover ("Michael Berlin"/Andres
Morales) to even more dangerous extremes, Linda returns to the beach house,
where she finds the Countess expiring from lack of blood (an attempt to
visit Holly has been thwarted). Begging for Linda/Alice's blood, the tables
are turned as she bites Nadina's throat, stabbing her for good measure through
the eye! The final scene-in which Linda/Alice's psychiatrist, Dr. Steiner
(Paul Muller, again), finds her alone in the beach house-is tantalizingly
obscure. The bodies of Nadina and Morpho (who grieved her loss to the point
of suicide; an act missing, incidentally, from Spanish prints) are suddenly
nowhere to be seen. Has Linda/Alice imagined the entire episode, or has
the spirit of the Countess Nadina taken possession of her body?
Publicity still from Vampyros Lesbos
As the undead Countess-whom the film suggest may be one of Count Dracula's
brides (is Nadina perhaps Mina?)-Soledad gives a performance that is both
animal and ethereal, lacking the porcelain fragility that marks almost all
of her earlier work. (Her character is not only paid homage, but virtually
reembodied by Lina Romay in Franco's The Loves of lrina (La Comtesse
aux Seins Nus, "The Bare Breasted Countess," 1973), in which
the similarly-named Countess Irina behaves far more explicitly in much the
same garb.)
Vampyros Lesbos' most dazzling footage is missing, naturally, from
the Spanish Las Vampiras : two extended stripteases which Soledad
performs amid the fetish trappings of a candelabra, a full-length mirror,
and a blonde mannequin (actually a live woman, standing very still). To
the tune of an organ-heavy Manfred Hübler/Siegfried Schwab composition
with electronically garbled, almost submarine vocals, she artfully peels
away her lingerie item by item, lovingly transferring these pieces to the
nude mannequin. Indeed, the notion of re-dressing a voluptuous blonde (not
unlike Ewa Stroemberg) in her own black accoutrements prefigures the possession
interpretation of the film's final scene. Considering the major differences
between Vampyros Lesbos and Las Vampiras which includes a
snippet of dance footage not found in the German film, showing Soledad twirling
a chain, smiling and chewing gum, as she teases her guitarist!-the possibility
that alternate footage exists in the French Sexualité Spéciale
is enticing, to say the least.
The third production for CCC was Der Teufel Kamaus Akasava ("The
Devil Came from Akasava"), a recklessly filmed potboiler based on the
kriminovel by Bryan Edgar Wallace. In a plot that borrows heavily
from Robert Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly (1955, based on the novel by
Mickey Spillane), Teufel follows the investigations of a Scotland
Yard detective (Fred Williams) into the theft of a lethal "philosopher's
stone", a glowing mineral capable of turning common metals into gold,
and burning live men to cinders. In her most unlikely role, Soledad plays
Jane Morgan-a Captain in the British Secret Service who, while posing as
a prostitute in London, is recruited to pose as an exotic dancer in Akasava
to "get close" to a few prime suspects in the theft. Soledad's
nightclub act amounts to nothing more than lying on the stage or draping
an arm over the back of a red velvet chair, tracing and cupping her pink
contours through the openings in a gown of raven-colouredtinsel, hopelesslyout-oftime
with her post-sync musical accompaniment. Her performance is not embarrassing,
but it is embarrassingly unsupported by the composer, the cinematographer,
and the director. Although Soledad's character is at the center of attention
for most of the film's length, she is nowhere to be found in the final scenes,
her fate unresolved, her purpose forgotten.
Der Teufel Kam aus Akasava-silly Euro spy trash that it is may be
miserable, but it isn't a complete waste; it is one of only three films
in which Soledad shares the screen with the great Howard Vernon (the others
are the seemingly lost Sex Charade and Sie Tötete in Ekstase),
and Franco himself appears in a sizeable supporting role. With this careless
quickie out of the way, Franco and Soledad embarked on the culmination of
their collaborative years.
Contrary to German production yearbooks and CCC sources, which declare Der
Teufel Kam aus Akasava as the last of Soledad Miranda's films to be
released, Franco has identified Mrs. Hyde (Sie Tötete in
Ekstase, "She Killed in Ecstacy") in interviews as their final
collaboration. A more explicit remake of his earlier success, The Diabolical
Dr. Z (Miss Muerte, 1966), the film stars Soledad as the vengeful
widow of a scientist driven to suicide by official resistance to his revolutionary
ideas. After the stimulating heartiness of Vampyros Lesbos, Mrs.
Hyde seems a rather pallid and unnecessary retread. It is saved from
redundancy by Franco's exhibitionist performance as one of six doctors doomed
to die in ecstacy, and by one of Soledad's most feeling performances. Sinking
her long red fingernails into Dr. Franco's bare chest, her coal-black eyes
tremble for a moment in close-up, expressing at once a frozen void of grief
and an incendiary anger. Both projections chill the heart as they burn holesinthescreen.
In a climax of appalling prophecy, Soledad's final character perishes in
a fiery automobile accident.
With 31 films already behind her (more if you count the various alternative
versions of Franco's films), Soledad Miranda sped along a highway in Lisbon
to her death, sometime in late 1971. A couple of weeks before the accident,
Vampyros Lesbos had opened in West Berlin to great success.
"The day before she died, she received the greatest news of her life,"
Franco recounted. "I visited her apartment in Lisbon with a German
producer, who came to offer her a two-year contract with CCC, which would
assure her of at least two starring roles per year in big-budget films.
She was going to become a major star in Germany. The next day, as her contract
was being drafted, she had the accident. When the hospital called me to
break the news... I nearly passed out."
In the wake of Soledad's death, Jess Franco rushed headlong into a workaholic
lifestyle that continues to this day. At his height of productivity, the
death-obsessed Franco managed to script, direct, and act in more than a
dozen films in one year.
Whereas many of Franco's subsequent female leads have tended toward tawdry
obviousness, weird eccentricity, or both, Soledad Miranda was alone in exuding
an alluring, enigmatic quality that allowed her to remain provocative and
unknowable in scenes that would have stripped any other actress of all mystery.
In a phrase, she was to the Spanish horror cinema what Barbara Steele was
to the Italian horror cinema of the 1960s : a uniquely compelling personality
in whose face the shadings of fear and desire are equally discernible and
tantalizing.
"She left behind an incredible legacy," Franco summarized. "All
of the women who acted in my films after her were deeply affected by her
legend. Lina Romay, for example, has had moments in which she was completely
possessed by Soledad. She became Soledad Miranda! My actors, my crew, and
myself as well-we all had tremendous feelings for her. She still exists
for us."
"Jes uis morte" Soledad says at one point in Eugénie
De Sade, playing dead on a sofa while Paul Muller and another co-star
strip her and try tickling her body "back to life." They set to
work and, in time, her nose begins to twitch. Her eyes flinch, her mouth
purses with rigid determination, then widens into an open, honest, un-acted
smile... Soledad Miranda laughs.
Under the circumstances ("Death is insatiable..."), it was difficult
to share in her laughter, rare though was to see onscreen. So I write
this testimonial instead, to celebrate her memory on this sad anniversay
and the happy fact that, during her short time here, cameras were rolling.
Copyright 1993 Tim Lucas. All rights
reserved.
This article originally appeared in the magazine "European Trash Cinema,"
and the book OBSESSION: THE FILMS OF JESS FRANCO. The Black Stare of
Soledad Miranda was reprinted with the author's kind permission.
Brought to you by Kronos Productions
Special thanks: Tim and Donna Lucas
FAX: USA 216-775-1260
Real Word Address: MPO Box 67, Oberlin, OH 44074-0067 USA