Private Parts

Gay cult actor/director/writer Paul Bartel (1938-2000) began his film-making career in 1968 with a 28-minute black comedy entitled 'The Secret Cinema', a movie about a woman who discovers that her life is being secretly filmed and shown in installments at a local art house cinema (an intriguing idea more elaborately developed in Peter Weir's 1998 film, 'The Truman Show'). For his first full-length feature, 'Private Parts', Bartel naturally gravitated toward a script by Philip Kearney and Les Rendelstein that took the themes broached in 'The Secret Cinema'—voyeurism, invasion of privacy, vicarious experience—and combined them with kinky eroticism and serial homicide to come up with a truly strange movie. Ayn Ruymen plays Cheryl Stratton, a naive but inquisitive 16-year-old runaway from Ohio who rooms with her best friend, Judy (Ann Gibbs)—until Judy angrily ejects her for spying during a lovemaking session. Cheryl subsequently moves into the King Edward, a skid row L.A. hotel run by her morbidly pious Aunt Martha (Lucille Benson). Despite Martha's pretensions toward respectability, the ominously seedy King Edward harbors all kinds of weirdos and sexual deviants, e.g., Reverend Moon (Laurie Main) a gay cleric with a fetish for bodybuilders; Mrs. Quigley (Dorothy Neumann), a dotty, deaf spinster constantly searching for a girl named Alice; Artie (Patrick Strong), a hardcore alcoholic who regularly passes out in his room; George (John Vantatonio), an effeminate photographer/voyeur who photographs couples making love in the park and sells the photos as pornography. After stealing a set of master keys, Cheryl launches a private, voyeuristic investigation into the rooms and lives of her fellow tenants, all the while being spied upon by lecherous George (cf. Norman Bates in Hitchcock's 'Psycho'), who acts out his crush on Cheryl with an inflatable sex doll. The plot thickens when Cheryl stumbles upon the remains of the aforementioned Alice, a teen fashion model recently gone missing. When Cheryl's friend, Judy, and her boyfriend Mike (Len Travis) come to the hotel looking for her, they also end up dead and dismembered before the (gender) identity of the killer is revealed in a surprise ending. A tension-inducing score by Hugo Friedhofer ('Ace in the Hole') adds a spurious gravitas to the proceedings. Subversive even by the more relaxed standards of the early Seventies, 'Private Parts' offended public sensibilities; some newspapers actually refused to print the title, "Private Parts," in ads for the movie, substituting "Private Arts" or "Private Party." Likewise, the movie embarrassed M-G-M, the studio famed for such estimable classics as 'The Wizard of Oz', 'Quo Vadis', and 'Dr. Zhivago'. Though it was hemorrhaging money at the time, M-G-M sheepishly relegated Bartel's unclassifiable opus to a dummy label (Premier Pictures) and made no effort to market it. Not surprisingly, 'Private Parts' fell flat. VHS (1991) and DVD (2005).

Both an unsettling horror film, and a very dark comedy, this is my favorite Paul Bartel film.

Avoiding the sometimes too overt self-congratulatory humor of "Eating Raoul", this story of a "nice" young girl who comes to stay at her aunt"s creepy hotel, only to be surrounded by all sorts of disturbingly depraved types frequently leaves you both laughing and cringing (in a good way) at the same time.

Only the less than stellar (in fact sometimes near porn film level) acting keeps this from being a classic of disquieting, semi-surreal cinema.

But there are scenes and images that stick with me, and Bartel creates a lot of atmosphere with his use of music, compositions, and light.

A teenaged girl out to discover womanhood early takes refuge from home and friends in her aunt's dilapidated, poverty row hotel. The hotel houses a bizarre assortment of characters including a photographer wearing nothing but black leather and never saying much, a drunk who leaves bottles out in the hallway, a reverend who has tons of homo-erotic art and photographs pasted on his walls, a handicapped woman constantly crying for her Alice to return, and, of course, Aunt Martha, the proprietor. Aunt Martha is a heavy-set woman who preaches about the way things used to be and how her hotel is a place for respectable people not tramps and the like. Lucille Benson plays Martha and does an incredible job with what is really a difficult role. Martha is a complex character of old-fashioned values being fused with strong sexual repression. She is in many ways a man trapped in a woman's body. Think about that when you finish the film. Benson has a grand presence on screen and such a distinctive voice. The rest of the acting is generally good as well. Stanley Livingston(Chip from My Three Sons) has a small role. Director Paul Bartel does a fine job capturing the perverse nature of the inhabitants of the hotel. Each seems to have some seedy perversion. The hotel sets the mood perfectly as it is grand in stature and just as filthy in reality. Bartel uses genuine horror and some really dark humour together. In one scene a boy's head is lopped off quickly. A rat is pushed down a garbage disposal. Bartel also uses some nifty lines like when an elderly woman cries for her Alice, someone says, "Alice doesn't live here anymore." A weird, quirky film whose atmosphere, direction, and a real creepy performance by Lucille Benson carry it beyond the ordinary and into the area of cult classic.

"Private Parts" tells the story of the runaway teen Cheryl Stratton (Ayn Ruymen) and her stay in her aunt's shady San Francisco hotel. Cheryl's story is not one of those pleasant coming of age films knee deep in moral values or road movies that enlightens the viewer about the importance of the journey. No, director Paul Bartel, in his first feature, has something completely different in mind, as he presents an extraordinarily bizarre tale of voyeurism, sexuality, and passionate murder. The voyeuristically loaded opening credits apply camera flashes and exposed body parts, which cue the audience in the direction of the story's sexual nature. The subsequent scene presents the sexual nature of the film in a much more tangible manner, as Cheryl sneaks a look at her friend and her boyfriend. However, Cheryl finds herself caught peeping. It places her in an awkward situation, which she avoids by leaving after she has stolen her friend's money. Here "Private Parts" pays homage to "Psycho (1960)" with similarities such as having a girl with stolen money seeking room and board at a hotel. Additional parallels to "Psycho" emerge as the film unfolds; for example, there is an intriguing bathroom scene.

This was a very odd movie, and I really enjoyed it. The story may not be all that unique, but it's told with flair, originality, and a dark, comic undertone that kept me interested throughout (the seediness and squalor of the characters quickly overshadows that of the hotel and its surroundings). The really interesting aspect for me was how, as the movie started, it just seemed a series of loosely connected events and strange details not really leading anywhere, but later on I began to realize this wasn't the case, as there was a sly subtly in the hinting of the material in terms of the various relationships and past occurrences with the hotel and its residents. Bartel made a number of films, some of them not so great, but when he's working with material that suits him, as is the case here, wonderfully tacky things ensue.

Overall rating: 7 out of 10.

A runaway bad-girl touches ground at an urban hellhole...a residence hotel owned and operated by her kindly, but captious and set-in-her-ways Aunt Martha. The tenants of the hotel are a curious bunch, among them a senile old bat, a gay transvestite priest, and a handsome, mysterious photographer with a secret that's darker than pitch. An unidentified psychotic killer is active among them, as well...before long, Aunt Martha's hotel has several unexpected vacancies.

A steady momentum of shocks and a vague, peculiar climax help to make PRIVATE PARTS something rather special. Splendidly perverse creative gusto which could only have escaped from the bizarre mind of the sorely missed Paul Bartel...this is a very unusual picture, infused with brooding atmosphere and deftly appointed in every aspect of its poverty-line production.

8/10