Mario Montez Movies

The underground art of renegade performance artist, photographer, and filmmaker Jack Smith is explored through the images he created and the words of those who knew him best in filmmaker Mary Jordan's tribute to the man believed to have inspired some of Andy Warhol's most iconic works. A virulent utopian and anti-capitalist whose works spanned from the 1960s to the late-1980s, Smith gained notoriety early on in his career when he went battled the Supreme Court over the banning of his controversial work "Flaming Creatures." An enigmatic artist whose work remains on the fringes of the mainstream despite the praise of curators from the Whitney to the Louvre, the effects of Smith's powerful influence are explored in interviews with those who both loved and hated Smith. ~ Jason Buchanan, Rovi

Underground filmmaker Jonas Mekas presents a collection of home movies, outtakes and unfinished projects. A picnic in Central Park with friends is shown, as are Allen Ginsberg and Norman Mailer in an anti-war protest march. John Lennon and Yoko Ono are shown in their celebrated honeymoon where they answer questions from the media in a Toronto hotel room to promote peace. Timothy Leary, Andy Warhol and Nico also appear. Color process is not credited. ~ Dan Pavlides, Rovi

Unscreened until 1998, almost a decade after Jack Smith's death, I Was a Male Yvonne De Carlo contains footage he'd shot in the 1960s and '70s. The introduction is an unsettling montage of steamy manhole covers (which Smith had sometimes shown as a short called Marshgas of Flatulandia). A pair of transvestites are seen living in a hovel with a shrine to Mario Montez. For Smith, Universal's promotion of Yvonne De Carlo as a replacement for Mario Montez typified how profiteers substitute the ersatz for the genuine, and so he spends most of this film as the titular male version of Yvonne De Carlo: an adored celebrity, bearded and wearing a leopard-print jacket, who endlessly signs his autograph and poses for photographs. The ending consists of film Smith shot of an old New York movie house being demolished, which literalizes the film's themes of cultural vandalism and irreparable loss. ~ Nicole Gagne, Rovi

One of the first "underground" films of the 1960's to achieve a degree of mainstream acceptance (it was an actual hit in New York City, was well-received in Los Angeles and San Francisco, and was banned in Chicago and Boston), Andy Warhol's The Chelsea Girls offered a long, unblinking look into the lives of Warhol's retinue of "superstars" as they showed off for the camera in their various rooms in the notorious Chelsea Hotel, long a favored New York hangout for writers, artists and bohemians. Along with such notables of the moment as Eric Emerson, Brigid Polk, Ondine, and Mario Montez, one of the "girls" was Mary Woronov, years before she gained a cult following for her work in Rock 'n' Roll High School and Eating Raoul. The three-and-a-half hour film consisted of two series of images shown simultaneously, though only one soundtrack was audible; in 1995, Warhol associate Paul Morrissey prepared a video edition for broadcast on British television, though the film has yet to be broadcast in the United States and there is no authorized video release as yet in North America. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi

By 1965, Jack Smith was exhibiting versions of Normal Love, mixing his soundtracks live and often re-editing the film as it was being shown. After Smith's death, Jerry Tartaglia prepared this restored 105-minute version, which premiered in 1997. Although shot on backdated color-film stock and paced more languidly than Flaming Creatures, Normal Love again features women and cross-dressed men in an idyll of sexual anarchy. Smith filmed almost entirely outdoors, emphasizing pinks and greens in the scenery, costumes, and props, and combining textural passages with allusions to film icons such as the Mummy and the Werewolf, Maria Montez, and Busby Berkeley. The inspired finale is set atop a massive pink cake (where the dancing Cake Cuties include Andy Warhol). The Yellow Sequence, an additional 20 minutes of footage -- in which gold tones predominate and the players include Tiny Tim -- was also restored by Tartaglia as an addendum to Normal Love, and the two films are inevitably shown together under the single title. ~ Nicole Gagne, Rovi

One of the most celebrated of all underground films, Flaming Creatures excited national censorship controversies in its day and was even denounced (and screened!) in the halls of the U.S. Senate. Jack Smith had hit a nerve with his delirious tribute to the 1940s screen star Maria Montez. (The soundtrack even includes a chunk of her 1943 release Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves.) A hilarious and startling version of Arabian exotica, Flaming Creatures was shot on backdated black-and-white film stock, creating an overexposed and archaic quality to its images -- a world of uncontrollable sexual energy where women and transvestites primp, pose, dance, romance, and sometimes assault each other. ~ Nicole Gagne, Rovi