Oddo

Behind the over-the-top hyperbole of the liner booklet included in its 2010 DVD reissue, ODDO turns out to be a pretentious, desultory effort by porn director Nick Millard. There's little here besides the sex tease.

Martin Donley (the booklet misspells his name, perpetuating a typo lifted from IMDb, which I've since submitted to be fixed) stars as war vet Alan, back from a two-year hitch in Vietnam. Physically he looks 4-F, more like Al Franken than a he-man, with big glasses on. This being an MOS shoot, we have to take the droning narrator's word for it about his mental condition, but he's more or less a basket case.

Nick's clumsy structure has him supposedly visiting his old girl friend Melanie after dealing with n'hood youngsters who are mean to him based on his uniform. However, all we get is a Jean Harlow poster on a door as he's shooed away upon arrival, a kind of "scene deleted" moment. Instead there's a jump-cut to him arriving home, where a James Dean poster awaits, and endless voice-over substitutes for action & exposition. Nick's idiotically pretentious & portentous narration is read matter-of-factly by Allen Sterling - I don't fault the messenger, but the auteur should be spanked for this sorry writing (oops, he'd probably like that!).

At home we see somebody under the bedclothes with an empty bottle nearby; narrator tells about Alan's drunk dad, lame filmmaking indeed. Suddenly a 13-minute lesbo scene erupts in the next room when Alan's step mom Jan returns home with a gal pal. Even now that's way overlong (I think Cinemax times the sex to run 4 minutes on average), so especially in 1967 it's obvious that this is porn with dollops of "story" added.

The girly sex turns out to be tame, basically de rigeur black underwear, stripping to topless and lots of fondling of shoes or boots, all the better to appease our fetishistic auteur. As an indie filmmaker Nick never catered to the fans or the exhibitors, but instead presented the sex he likes -take it or leave it. I lived in Cleveland when he was active in the '60s and '70s churning out porn, and never saw a single one of his films -I doubt if they got any bookings thereabouts.

-MANY SPOILERS AHEAD-

Alan wakes up and hears the nearby action, bursts in and (apparently) stabs Jan & pal to death with a penknife. I guess he learned something in the Army. I say apparently because Nick doesn't show anything, just a couple of closeups of skin smeared with what might as well be a dab of nail polish. This has to be one of the most tasteful and thereby useless "shock" scenes of violence in cinema, probably for fear of crossing some line of mixing sex & violence, though it never stopped H.G. Lewis or the Findlays.

Wandering around, and taking his mind off the predicament by playing on a park's swing set, Alan gets a shoeshine from a topless girl on the street (viva San Francisco), walks past marquees for local clubs like Coke's and Big Al's and heads for a dingy hotel to be serviced by prostitute Marie.

Not to be outdone, Nick stages an uneventful 12-minute scene of poor Marie undulating on the bed next to catatonic Alan, getting no response whatsoever. Even the narrator is embarrassed by this unbelievable display - I thought prostitutes (at least movie ones) had a shorter fuse, like the cliché "hey give me some money, I don't have all night", but Marie persists until, you guessed it, belatedly out comes the pocket knife and she's history (another murder depicted strictly off-screen). Well at least she was wearing black underwear including mesh panties and stockings. And also, despite the usual quaint contorting of limbs common to early/mid-'60s porn, she accidentally flashes a full beaver shot a couple of times - which Nick thankfully left in the print. That would be pretty rare for 1967.

Alan picks up a handgun at a pawnshop and paints a mustache on his face. A San Francisco Globe headline blares "Murderer Still at Large" sort of contradicting the time-frame of events, but so be it. Alan rolls a guy on the street for his wallet, which has a girl's photo in it and visits her -named Sylvia (presumably her address was in the wallet, but Nick isn't being too careful).

He breaks into Sylvia's apartment and has sex with her, including her fondling his leg with her (black stockinged) foot. Their French kissing is carefully calibrated by Nick as sort of a delayed sexual payoff for the fans, after the previous 50 minutes of cool aloofness, but no matter - a jump-cut to a night scape of the city is accompanied by a voice-over: "Sylvia had been dead for two hours, stabbed". Back in his room we see a symbolic pot of water boiling (it's a potboiler!), and Alan raises the gun to his temple. "They scraped what remained of his head off the kitchen wall" intones the narrator solemnly. As has been stressed over & over before, the final message is: "he was a madman".

If this sounds like claptrap, that's because it is. No amount of deconstructing or apologizing can raise the film ODDO from the dead. It's a thoroughly amateurish effort from an out-of-his-depth would-be filmmaker who would eventually hit his stride, cranking out hour-long loops featuring sexy actresses as lesbians with foot & leather fetishes, for voyeurs and fetishists to enjoy. As a writer of purple prose, he flunked out.

Oddo indeed! But I liked this, rambling b/w 'sex' movie from Nick Millard. Ostensibly revolving around a disillusioned Vietnam vet returning to San Francisco and including stock shots of the war in negative exposure. This is in reality a series of encounters with or sometimes just close by scantily clad ladies who play with their underwear and themselves. The thing is the girls don't quite move and writhe in the 'normal' way and Millard seems as interested in bits of underwear or bits of bodies and certainly feet and shoes as he is in the traditional sex fare. This all means that set to a jazz score we are treated to a most unusual and oddly erotic series of images. The misogynist, cod philosophical narration is irritating but so appealing are the strangely shot bits and bobs, I for one did not care. The much hyped violence is mostly off screen and seemingly irrelevant. Mr Millard may have had something to say about a 'mad man' but as usual with the more off beat film makers, it is not so much their serious and supposed intellectual thoughts that interest but their inner passions, possibly, unwittingly revealed.