The film opens with Dick Dale and His Del-Tones playing surf music at a college fraternity party. Before they've finished, pledge Johnny Kowalski (William Wellman Jr.) has slipped out, driven to a boxing arena, knocked out his opponent as "Kid Gallant" in the first round, and returned to the party in time to hear Dale croon the title tune as though nothing happened. It is an efficient and genuinely enjoyable pre-credits sequence – a rock and roll secret identity movie…

Austria-born Freddy Quinn was one of the most successful German-language entertainers of the 1950s and 1960s, selling tens of millions of records and earning the kind of celebrity that gets your first name into nearly half your film titles. Freddy und das Lied der Prärie – released variously as In the Wild West, The Song of the Prairie, and The Sheriff Was a Lady – was produced by Artur Brauner at CCC-Film as a "Western Musical," an attempt to combine…

Imagine Wild Guitar meets The Beverly Hillbillies as directed by Doris Wishman, and you might get some idea of how off-the-wall this one-day wonder is. Produced by Lou Campa (responsible for Cool It Baby, Mini-Skirt Love, and Venus in Furs) and directed by Larry Crane (who also gave the world All Women are Bad and The Love Captive), Private Relations is a film so cheap that a nightclub set consists of an old sheet tacked to a lounge-room wall. When…

Alex de Renzy was one of a handful of Golden Age directors who understood that the difference between pornography and cinema was mostly a matter of attention - attention to atmosphere, to cutting, to the relationship between sound and image. Femmes de Sade is the film that demonstrates what that attention looks like when applied to genuinely transgressive material. It is, by any reasonable measure, deeply unpleasant. It is also, by the same measure, unmistakably the work of a filmmaker.…