FEMALE CONVICT "SCORPION" - JAILHOUSE 41 (59)

Directed by: Shunya Ito (1972)

Starring: Meiko Kaji, Kayoko Shiraisi, Hiroko Isayama, Fumio Watanabe

The Pitch: A group of female convicts - led by the enigmatic, near-silent "Scorpion" - break out of jail and seek refuge amid a desolate rural landscape, pursued by the vengeful warden.

Theo Sez: Fair to say I'm not the biggest fan of prison movies - I like them fine, but only A MAN ESCAPED (which is hardly typical) counts among my favourites - which may be why I spent much of this flamboyant exploitation-piece being slightly bored by the badass posturing and spaghetti Western-scored showdowns between cold-eyed, tight-lipped prison authorities and even more laconic heroines, pausing only at regular intervals to pick my jaw up off the floor at the panoply of wildly imaginative effects Ito uses to spice up the proceedings. Favourite devices include the tilted camera (notably in a low-angle shot while heroine lies on the floor, so that she and her tormentors shoot upwards in astonishing V-shaped composition) and the sound cut off at the height of especially intense action scenes, followed by a series of anguished freeze-frames - not to mention the Kabuki-style musical numbers coming out of nowhere, garish fantasy scenes, eyes in ECU, sudden shifts from hard light to pastoral interludes scored to saccharine pop music, and the less flamboyant artistry like diopter effects necessary for the deep-focus shots - one girl in CU, another in the background - with this kind of anamorphic lens (a DP friend informs me that, given the lenses being used and the ASA of film in the 70s, Ito would've positively had to flood the sets with light to get the shadowy look of the interiors). Also of course something of a feminist fable, though not as radical as it might appear : the villainness is a woman who killed her unborn child - offending against traditional notions of womanhood - and "Scorpion" has no problem betraying her own sex, if she feels she's been wronged ; better seen as a simple cry of rage against a System dominated by the male gaze (note the warden with his eye torn out), as inchoate and basically apolitical as the revenge in AUDITION. Generic material livened by style, loopy non sequiturs (the little kids who turn up just long enough to say "We're sightseeing!") and a number of demented set-pieces - notably, of course, the pandemonium in the bus, heroines singing tunelessly and ripping off their clothes while rapist-killer hostages are stripped and beaten. Given this plot and these (non-)characters, probably as good as it gets.