Mil Pecados... Nenhuma Virtude

When watching various interviews with Sergio Martino over the years,I've been curious over the mentions about him having started in the "Mondo" genre. Taking a look at a DVD sellers recent listings,I was thrilled to spot Martino's first film, leading to me collecting some sinful wages.

View on the film:

Getting into directing after spending the previous few years working as a assistant director and scriptwriter, director Sergio Martino teams up with future The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh (1971-also reviewed) cinematographer Florian Trenker for the first time, and tantalisingly points to the psychedelic Gialli they would later make,with a groovy opening dance number.

Bouncing along to Peppino De Luca's plush Jazz score, Sergio teams up with his brother Luciano,for a screenplay where the Martino's mock the self-righteous, by layering Edmund Purdom's sardonic narration over Mondo/documentary footage of free-love Europe, with a highlight being making the claim that Germany has turned trains into outdoor bordellos in order to increase transport use.

Later making a number of Gialli which would focus on personal vice and gleefully offer a eyeful of skin, the screenplay by the Martino's has a strange, ill-fitting mix of being sarcastic one moment with the sleaze, and then being a total prune at going tut tut over footage of people in their most liberating moments, as they weigh the wages of sin.

Mondo Sex began life as Mille Peccati..... Nessuna Virtu, in English it became The Wages of Sin, but widely released as Mondo Sex. After its initial run the film disappeared, resurfacing in the early Eighties on Dutch video under its Mondo Sex moniker and made out to be a torrid piece of work, rather than the relatively tame late Sixties archive piece it really is. If Mondo Sex is remembered at all, its as the debut of Italian director Sergio Martino who in the Seventies would become a one man film industry responsible for adventure, gory horror, futuristic and thriller movies. A pseudo scientific documentary Mondo Sex has dated badly than most of its contemporaries, both in attitude and execution. Setting the standard of licentious images with a somewhat paradoxical puritanical stance, Mondo Sex opens to `if sin still means anything at all to anyone under thirty it certainly has allot to do with sex' accompanied by protracted scenes of psychedelic go-go dancing. Elsewhere hostesses for a German business meeting are measured in their underwear in the hope of becoming the `Lady Macbeth of big industry'. Another scene shot in horror movie fashion shows a woman being terrorised by Witchcraft era English Satanists, obviously really hammy Italian actors in crude Viking helmets and little else. More lively than most late Sixties mondo, scenes at strip clubs around the world, nude body painting and a Paris cult who worship the navel provide the film with its bared flesh. Drug taking comes a close second and is dealt with via Scandinavian students gobbling an LSD dosed underground newspapers and graphic close ups of people injecting morphine shots. `Lend me your eyes' barks a professional hypnotist who teaches would be Lotharios how to hypnotise women into stripping for them, which seems to only work on the hypnotists assistant. Funny to read about, Mondo Sex is often unbearable to sit through, simply because the film is so mean spirited towards its subject matters. Mondo features by their nature tend to be cruel, and late Sixties ones adopt a high moral stance thats little to do with their makers views than to appease the censors. But Mondo Sex is far more ugly and repellant than could ever be justifiable. Fat people, gays, Arabs, anti- war protesters, bikers, transvestites, single mothers and women in general are poked fun in a gross and unappealing fashion. Various countries are treated to further character assassinations. The Swedish are wet types who can't beat their children or stop from exposing them to material that will turn them into `paraclysms (!) of promiscuity, frigidity or perversion'. The French are filthy tramps or sell souvenirs of the 68 student revolution as cheap tourist attractions, the English are either `lunatics' who offer children joints or repressed John Steed types who harbour sadistic fantasies which are catered to by adverts in dubious London shops. Unsurprisingly the Italians are seen as healthy people with an innocent passion for illegal gambling. Mondo Sex is just wrong and hideous objectionable moments stick out like a sore thumb. A man and a woman are wired up to a machine, watched over by mad scientists, all masterminded by `an electronic brain'. In this horror movie scenario the purpose is to match a perfect couple, the only way to halt permissiveness a process disturbingly referred to as the `final solution'. The narration was by exploitation movie legend Edmund Purdom, who lent his voice to the likes of Sweden Heaven and Hell, Naked England and Witchcraft 70. It is obvious why Purdom worked well in this respect, he has a BBC English accent that carries with it the authenticity of a professor. For such a serious actor Purdom's narration here generates into the incredibly goofy. His impersonations of ranting Germans, Oh La La French, toff English and effeminate women come across like Purdom was auditioning for The Bonzo Dog Band. At one point Purdom becomes an honorary Cockney geezer `its cos' he luvs yu, yu silly bi**ch'. Mondo Sex is not totally without merit, it has a camp kitsch feel to it, the sound-track is a lounge lizards delight, there are many funny moments as well, such as when the film accuses the German government of trying to restore public travel by turning trains into outdoor bordellos. But the film isn't laughable in a riotous reactionary Reefer Madness fashion its attacks are just too personal, too vindictive, too hateful for that or to form an enjoyable movie. Ultimately Mondo Sex offers little for modern viewers other than a shocking example of late Sixties intolerance.