Irving Rosenthal Movies
- 1969
No President, Jack Smith's last 16 mm feature, combines found footage with his own production -- a crazed account of former Republican presidential candidate Wendell Willkie being abducted by pirates and auctioned off in a Baghdad slave market. A heavily made-up Irving Rosenthal plays Willkie in distress and Tally Brown gives a notable supporting performance as a feisty slave girl. Willkie himself appears in newsreel clips, posing with cows while visiting the Future Farmers of America (a wicked in joke from Jack Smith on behalf of all the gay men who were also members of their own FFA!). ~ Nicole Gagne, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Irving Rosenthal, Doris Desmond, (more)
- 1963
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, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Francis Francine, Sheila Bick, (more)
