Les nuits brûlantes de Linda (1975) [filmed in 1973]

... aka: Brutal Nights of Linda
... aka: Burning Nights of Linda, The
... aka: But Who Raped Linda?
... aka: Come Close, Blond Emmanuelle
... aka: Erotic Dreams
... aka: Habitación Prohibida (Forbidden Room)
... aka: Hot Nights of Linda, The
... aka: La felicità nel peccato (Happiness in Sin)
... aka: Savage Girls

Directed by:
"J.P. Johnson" (Jesus Franco)

In Paris, Marie-France Bertrand (Alice Arno) is looking for work and goes to an employment agency where she learns of an opening which will put to use her nursing, teaching and secretarial skills. Taking a train ride to the country, she goes to the seaside villa of wealthy Paul Radeck (Paul Muller), a secretive man who wants her to help care for his two adult daughters; Linda (Verónica Llimera) and Olivia (Lina Romay). Linda is a depressed, paralyzed woman-child who clutches her baby doll and likes to sunbathe naked on the terrace. Olivia, who's actually an orphaned cousin Paul adopted and not his blood daughter. is lonely, virginal, sex-obsessed and lies in bed drinking champagne and throwing out sensuous glances to at anyone who walks through the door. Also living in the home is Abdul (Pierre Taylou), a servant who doesn't speak and only grunts like a caveman. Her first night there, Marie-France has immediate reason for concern as everyone acts either extremely suspicious or extremely screwed up. Olivia keeps her awake moaning loudly and likes to watch her new "teacher" shower. She also catches the voyeuristic Abdul peeping in her room and makes note that the short-tempered Paul refuses to discuss Linda's condition and refers to her only as "the fruit of sin."

Meanwhile, a female photojournalist (Catherine Lafferière) and a goofy private dick (Richard "Deconninck " / Bigotini) are spying on the villa from a nearby house with binoculars that somehow enable them to see right into all the bedrooms. Since the girls like to run around naked most of the time, she's hoping to get good photos for Playboy while he hopes to get evidence that Paul murdered his wife, which is the rumor around those parts. Olivia is troubled by nightmares / flashbacks of her uncle slashing his unfaithful wife Lorna's (Monica Swinn) lover's throat with a sword while the two were in bed. Paul is also haunted by visions of the tryst and takes it out on his daughters by beating and screaming at them all the time and caressing them while they sleep in the nude. When he catches one of his girls in bed with Abdul, he drags him off to a room, chains him to a wall and whips him while calling him a dog. There are numerous sexual tanglings all around that keep Abdul awfully busy and Olivia makes mention of wanting a key to a locked room her father always keeps guarded to see what's inside.

The pacing is extremely, almost insufferably slow most of the time and this has next to no narrative drive to propel the thin story forward. Sex, jealousy, madness, murder, child abuse, lesbianism, incest, suicide, ESP and voyeurism all rear their heads from time to time, but the story itself is rather aimless and uninvolving. As per the director's usual, the bulk of the time is spent on nude / sex scenes, but the film finally settles more in the horror-thriller territory in the last few minutes with one of the cast members going crazy and murdering numerous characters with a sword and battle axe. There's some minor comic relief in side scenes, constant zoom shots into eyeballs, a few nice visual touches, a good Daniel White score and a cheeky twist at the very end that's kind of humorous. Of course, the primary reason this was made was to undress all of the female cast members, and this at least does that much, though it takes Franco a whopping 18 minutes to get one of the ladies naked, which may be a record for him. Looks-wise, Romay is in her prime here, so that's good.

Like most other Franco films, this was released in different forms in different markets with differing footage, though the running times all hovered around 80 minutes. The first release, as originally shot by Franco and titled Les nuits brûlantes de Linda, contained just one graphic scene of banana play featuring Romay, though later French versions contained added hardcore insert shots spliced in that were filmed by Franco himself. This was the same version released on the bootleg circuit here in America under the titles Brutal Nights of Linda and The Burning Nights of Linda. Franco later trimmed out some of the more explicit material and filmed new comic scenes featuring the private detective and reporter characters specifically to pad out a softer release version, which played on European TV (dubbed into English) under the title Erotic Dreams. Another version released in Italy titled La felicità nel peccato ("Happiness in Sin") supposedly contains a soft sex scene featuring Swinn not seen in any other version.

The one I ended up watching was an 80 minute cut packaged as The Hot Nights of Linda but with a title screen that calls it But Who Raped Linda? which was also the version theatrically released by hack company Eurociné. The sex is soft, the nudity isn't all that explicit by Franco standards, it's in widescreen, is English-dubbed and opens by saying it's "a film by J.P. Johnson" and then goes on to list the director as Madeleine Quinquandon, who was actually one of the production managers. (The credited director on the Italian version is "Rick Deconinck," it's "Roy Darton" in Spain and so on). Under any name, this is a middling and rather forgettable effort for Franco that represents neither the best nor the worst of his work. Getting into even more details about the various versions (there are many) is something I'm not going to do here because, quite frankly, I didn't like this enough to want to sift through other versions looking for little differences. For a full and thorough run-down of the variations, consult the excellent write-up by Eric Contenas at DVD Drive-In RIGHT HERE.

In 2013, Severin released the ultimate collector's edition for this title. It includes multiple versions of the film, including a DVD and Blu-ray of the soft version as well as a poor-quality VHS transfer of the French-language, English-subtitled hardcore version, referred to as the “French Hard Banana Version.” Other extras include roughly 30 minutes of interview footage with Franco and Romay, another ten or so minutes spent with author and “Franco expert” Stephen Thrower, who discusses the director, the film in question and plugs an upcoming Franco book he's working on, a brief outtake reel, trailers and a few other goodies. It's really not worth the 30 dollars they're asking unless you're a Franco completist.

★★

Justine de Sade (1972)

... aka: Justine
... aka: Justine - Lustschreie hinter Klostermauern
... aka: Violation of Justine, The

Directed by:
Claude Pierson

After being tossed out of a convent, 15-year-old Juliet (France Verdier) is forced to look for a way to support herself. Thankfully, a local brothel is hiring. After passing her virginity test, Juliet is promised retirement after just ten years as a working girl. In that time, she makes all the right connections and manages to carve out a cushy life for herself as the wife of a wealthy count. The same cannot be said for Juliet's sister, Justine (Alice Arno). Instead of prostituting herself, Justine decided to try to live a more virtuous life. And if you're familiar with the de Sade novel in which this is based, you'll realize that trying to take the more 'respectable' road has its own misfortunes. This begins with Justine, who now goes by the name Thérèse, being brought into a tavern by two armed guards on their way to Paris. Justine has been accused of theft, arson and murder, and may face death if convicted. Juliet happens to be in the same tavern and, married to a Count, gets a chance to talk to Justine. Since the two women were separated as children, and Justine has only revealed her alias, they don't even realize they're sisters.

Justine's story is a sordid one full of cruelty, abuse and misery. As a poor orphan girl, Justine got her first taste of what men are really like when a potential employer forced her to jerk him off and then ejaculated on her face. Humiliated by that ordeal, Justine moves on to the home of eccentric Mr. Du Harpin, who encourages her to steal a gold box from an upstairs neighbor in exchange for a raise. After Justine refuses, Du Harpin frames her and she's thrown in prison. There, she meets a notorious gypsy named Madame Dusbois, who usually runs with a pack of thieves. Dusbois starts a fire which kills 21 people so she can escape, and takes Justine along with her. Justine refuses to give up her virginity to Dusbois's bandit friends, so they make her do other sexual things instead. Right when one tries to enter into "the altar where I will burn my incense" (her ass), Justine is saved by the arrival of Saint-Florent (Franco Fantasia). The bandits rob him but spare his life when Justine agrees to do any sexual favors the men want. Instead, she unties Saint-Florent and the two manage to sneak out the next morning before any deflowering of incense burning can commence.

Saint-Florent rewards Justine for saving his life by knocking her out with a stick and then violating her while she's knocked out. Afterward, she encounters a young man "immolating his master with a colossal spear" (i.e. fucking another guy) in the woods. When they realize she's spying on them, they "flush the slut out," strip her naked, scare her and then take her back to an aunt's home to work as a chambermaid. When she refuses to take part in poisoning the aunt, she's taken outside, where De Bressac lets a couple of dogs chew up her ass. Justine goes to a seemingly charitable surgeon, who tends to her wounds and lets her convalesce for a month. Nice guy? Nope. He turns out to be a sadist who likes being whipped and is a pedophile who uses his daughter Rosalee as a sex slave and then plans on killing her. When Justine tries to help Rosalee escape, she's branded a criminal and tossed out of the boarding school.

Off to a monastery Justine goes, where she hopes to find sanctuary with some holy men. Nope. These monks are actually sadistic creeps just like the rest of the men in this movie. The men have their own female sex slaves, who have been beaten into complete submission during their stay there. They'd like to add Justine to their little harem. She's gang raped multiple times, has her ass beaten bloody with a piece of wood, is whipped, forced to take part in orgies, is douched with boiling hot water, has a communion wafer shoved up her ass (!) and has to have sex with another woman. She escapes from there after six months and is immediately kidnapped and brought to the home of a bisexual painter with a major ass fetish who lives with his sickly wife (played by Arno's real-life sister Chantal Broquet) and two boy toys and likes to slice them all up with a scalpel. Her last little adventure involves a wealthy, well-endowed nobleman (with a cock "the size of half an arm") who's into torturing and killing women and oxygen deprivation.

This makes quite the interesting companion piece to Jess Franco's MARQUIS DE SADE'S "JUSTINE" (1968), an adaptation of the same controversial tale. Both movies had a major central casting flaw. Franco's movie featured 17-year-old Romina Power (forced upon him by producers) in the titular role. While Power certainly looked the part of an inexperienced, naive young virgin, she lacked the talent and experience necessary to make the character anything more than a wooden plank to bounce the action off of. Pierson's choice of Alice Arno (then in her mid-20s) also doesn't really ring true. Though a better actress than Power, she's still pretty wooden herself and doesn't look anywhere near as fresh and innocent. To solidify the connection between the two films, Arno was a frequent player in Franco's films both before and after this one. She was a victim to incestuous father-and-daughter killers in EUGENIE DE SADE (1970), played the titular cannibal in THE PERVERSE COUNTESS (1973), was a sadistic lesbian in FEMALE VAMPIRE (1973) and had numerous other roles for the Spanish director.

Franco's film was the bigger-budgeted, better-looking, more visually stylish of these two movies and had the star power of actors like Jack Palance, Klaus Kinski and Mercedes McCambridge to fall back on. Despite having a cast not well-known outside of France, Pierson's film is actually the better acted of the two movies and is also adequately produced itself, with fine sets, period costumes and production values. Pretty much in the pocket of his producers, Franco had to tone down the material considerably to ensure a wider release. Pierson, however, did not. He covers more of the novel in much less time and is able to stay more faithful. His film features lots of kinky sex and full-frontal nudity and even retains de Sade's downbeat ending (which Franco had changed). It's almost as if one took the best elements from both of these movies we'd have a very good adaptation instead of two watchable though highly-flawed ones.

If possible, try to view this one in French with subtitles. The English dubbing makes the whole thing rather laughable. Many versions are censored; including the original U.S. theatrical and VHS releases (there's now an uncut DVD from Blue Underground). The most complete version runs 115 minutes.

★★1/2