Jack Smith Movies
Playwright, underground filmmaker, and performance artist Jack Smith frequently appeared in avant-garde films by such New York artists as Andy Warhol and Scott and Beth B. He made short films in the early '60s, most notably his notorious Flaming Creatures, which featured an all-transvestite cast. An offbeat, informal, and campy homage to B-movie actress Maria Montez, Smith made the film on a 300-dollar budget using old black-and-white film stock. Considered obscene at the time of its release, the film was confiscated by the New York police and was not publicly released until the '70s by the film's most ardent admirer, Jonas Mekas. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide- 2006
When Ken Jacobs, Bob Fleischner and Jack Smith were studying camera techniques at CUNY night school in the mid-1950s, Jacobs met Smith through the pair's mutual friend Fleishner. Though Fleischner and Smith would eventually part ways, Jacobs was stunned to learn that in October of 1989 the pair died within a week of one another. In this feature length film, Jacobs responds to his loss by adapting the 1990 Nervous System performance piece "Luminous Threnody." ~ Jason Buchanan, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Jack Smith
- 1991
Taking an avant-garde approach, experimental Russian painter turned director Ari Roussimoff creates an offbeat addition to the horror genre. Troubled, doomed Paul returns to his home in an oppressive and stylized Manhattan (filmed in black and white) after spending time with a traveling carnival. As he wanders the gloomy streets in search of love and acceptance, he muses about the correlation between the grim fates of his family and his own destiny. Both his brother and his mother killed themselves, and now Paul sees the Spirit of Death beckoning him to do the same. He does not realize that Death is really only offering him more of the same. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide
- 1983
Jack Smith combined footage from various phases of his career for Respectable Creatures. There's additional material from "The Yellow Sequence" phase of Normal Love, featuring Tiny Tim and David Sachs, shot around 1963-1964. (Glimpses of Francis Francine swinging in a hammock evoke Ron Rice's Chumlum [1964].) Later in the '60s, Smith filmed some of Carnival when he was in Rio de Janeiro. He uses that footage here to frame Buzzards Over Bagdad, a movie he'd made in the 1950s -- a Maria Montez-style yarn in which the girl who is promised to the Caliph tries to keep a lover. ~ Nicole Gagne, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Tiny Tim, David Sachs, (more)
- 1980
This experimental drama comes from the avant-garde team Scott B. and Beth B. and is their last film made on Super-8 film. It is the story of a jobless man's attempt to find stability in his life. His life is a nightmare of darkness and oppression and during his journey, the man encounters an assortment of strange, intensely self-absorbed characters. The tale culminates with the hapless man being knocked in the head during a mugging. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide
- 1979
Filmmaker Jack Smith returns as his desiccated alter-ego, the ever-in-red Rose Courtyard. This time Rose gets lucky and is called upon by a mousy suitor, over whom she towers. The two repair to the couch and Rose repeatedly signals her oral interests by nibbling on flowers and fixing her lipstick. When the guy starts getting frisky, however, she hits him. Each of his gropes are met with punches, until he rips apart the front of her dress and exposes Smith's flat hairy chest. Sickened with horror, he throws up all over Rose. When she hits him again, she's answered with another vomitous heave, and she continues hitting him despite getting the same response to her every blow. ~ Nicole Gagne, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Jack Smith
- 1976
In this film, outspokenly homosexual filmmaker Rosa von Praunheim has documented his encounters with friends in the New York "underground" arts movement, the better-known of whom are William Burroughs (who says nothing for the camera), Andy Warhol (seen in the distance) and Fernando Arrabal (who is interviewed in Spanish). The emigrants named in the title are notable Germans who left the country before World War II, such as Greta Keller and Grete Mosheim. Reviewers at the time of the film's release considered it to have been a sort of paid vacation for the filmmaker rather than a serious effort. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- William S. Burroughs
The secrets of a small New England town are violently exposed on Christmas Eve in this proto-slasher shocker. The owner of the long-abandoned Butler estate is desperate to sell, and dispatches his lawyer from New York to negotiate its purchase by the town council. Meanwhile, an inmate from a nearby insane asylum breaks loose and makes his way to the old mansion to take bloody revenge for a crime kept hidden for 35 years. The maniac makes mysterious phone calls to various prominent citizens, telling them that "Marianne" has returned, and lures each to the Butler house to meet their doom. The mayor's daughter, Diane, receives a visit from a man who claims to be Jeremy Butler, the mansion's owner, in town to investigate his lawyer's disappearance. Together they attempt to unravel the sinister mystery of the Butler house, which turns out to be a harrowing tale of incest, insanity and mass murder. Cult favorites Mary Woronov and John Carradine are featured in the cast of this eerie thriller, which also includes cameos from Warhol Factory legends Candy Darling and Ondine. ~ Fred Beldin, All Movie Guide
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, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Dr. Timothy Leary
- 1969
Filmmaker Jack Smith also stars in this funny short film, playing the cadaverous matron Rose Courtyard (inspired by Rose Kennedy). Dressed completely in red (gown, gloves, glasses, and wig), the wheelchair-bound Rose sits ceremoniously under an American flag, the floor littered with corpses, while Kate Smith sings "God Bless America" on the soundtrack. Rose is laden down with all sorts of odd paraphernalia (hot-water bottle, box of candy, ears of Indian corn, toilet brush, Valentine's Day card, football, etc.), which she keeps dropping. Besides tippling on a bottle of booze and spraying the air with Lysol, she also peruses a scrapbook of old theatrical clippings. Song for Rent ends with Rose shedding a tear. ~ Nicole Gagne, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Jack Smith
- 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)
- 1968
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, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Jack Smith, Ondine, (more)
- 1968
This Big Apple underground art film is based on the classic Greek play Prometheus Bound and presents assorted characters, symbolizing Greek gods and their daily actions that signify the relationship between homosexuality and urban living. Andy Warhol and his Factory members populate the piece. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide
- 1967
With Reefers of Technicolor Island, Jack Smith takes an affectionate look (in color) at marijuana and drag, two essential fuels for his previous films, Flaming Creatures (1963) and Normal Love (1965). The first sequence features footage of thriving marijuana plants awaiting harvest; the second includes Smith's starlet Mario Montez on display as a South Seas siren adorned in feathers and pearls. For all the obvious humor attached to its subjects, Reefers of Technicolor Island is largely about texture, with Smith utilizing numerous superimpositions and close shots to transform what he was filming and bring out some of its mystery. (Smith also flopped certain superimposed images, as he did with repeated footage in Normal Love.) ~ Nicole Gagne, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Mario Montez
- 1965
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, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Mario Montez, Diana Baccus, (more)
- 1964
Ron Rice's only color film, Chumlum depicts Jack Smith and some of his cast during the making of Normal Love, which includes Beverly Grant, Mario Montez, Francis Francine, and Tiny Tim. Rice offers glimpses of them in between set-ups at Normal Love's locations, as well as shots of the players lying in hammocks and rocking lazily after they were back in Rice's New York City loft. Throughout Chumlum, he utilizes superimpositions to turn his subjects into fields of texture, rhythm, and color. The title is derived from the score by composer/musician Angus MacLise, which he played on cembalo. ~ Nicole Gagne, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Jack Smith, Beverly Grant, (more)
- 1963
In the late '50s, Jack Smith was acting in a film for director Bob Fleischner, but the project ended when the two had a falling out. A fire subsequently destroyed most of what had been filmed, but in 1960, Fleischner gave the remaining footage to director Ken Jacobs, who edited it into this short, which features a manic Smith putting on makeup, playing with dolls, smoking marijuana, and wearing dresses. By 1962, Jacobs' own falling out with Smith had cooled sufficiently to enable him to record a soundtrack, for which Jacobs mixed 78 rpm records and strummed inside a piano while Smith improvised a hilarious confessional rant of poverty and desperation: "Why shave when I can't think of a reason for living?" ~ Nicole Gagne, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Jack Smith
- 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)
- 1963
Jack Smith shot this six-minute black-and-white film in his New York City apartment probably sometime in 1959. Overstimulated is a study in light and movement, in which two men in long dresses jump around in front of a flickering television as the camera darts about. The performers are Jerry Sims, who also appears in Smith's Scotch Tape (1962) and acts with Smith in Ken Jacobs' Star Spangled to Death (1957), and Bob Fleischner, who directed the footage of Smith which Jacobs would use in his classic Blonde Cobra (1963). ~ Nicole Gagne, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Jerry Sims, Bob Fleischner, (more)
- 1962
Director Ken Jacobs shot this footage of Jack Smith and Jerry Sims in 1958, around the same time that he filmed both men for his epic Star Spangled to Death. In 1962, funds became available to print the film and add music. The only editing was Jacobs' insertion of whimsical title cards, such as "They stopped to think" and "It began to drizzle." Smith carries on gleefully in lurid makeup and impromptu costumes, gnawing on baby dolls, smoking pot, and carousing on the roof dressed like a clown. ~ Nicole Gagne, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Jack Smith, Jerry Sims, (more)
- 1962
Shot in 1959, Scotch Tape is Jack Smith's first film -- a joyous, three-minute romp, in color, using Peter Duchin's rhumba "Carinhoso" for its soundtrack. Three young men merrily bop through the wreckage of razed buildings at the site of what would become Lincoln Center. Apparently, Scotch Tape was never edited and, instead, was cut in the camera by Smith, combining long shots and close-ups while filming mostly from overhead. The title comes from a small strip of scotch tape that was accidentally stuck on the camera and so is visible in the lower-right corner of the frame throughout the film. Note that one of the shimmying trio is Ken Jacobs, who'd begun directing Smith in 1957 with Saturday Afternoon Blood Sacrifice and Little Cobra Dance. On his own, Jacobs made such major works as Tom, Tom, the Piper's Son (1969) and his multi-projector "Nervous System" series. ~ Nicole Gagne, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Jerry Sims, Reese Haire, (more)
- 1961
A violent argument between actor Jack Smith and director Ken Jacobs terminated the shooting of this film not long after it began, and The Death of P'Town became the last time Smith performed for Jacobs' camera. Jacobs edited together what footage he had into this silent short, in which a title card explains that Smith "would've starred as the Fairy Vampire." Smith lives up to that description and is seen madly cavorting in a Provincetown graveyard, dressed in a dirty old nightgown. ~ Nicole Gagne, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Jack Smith
- 1957
This charming, short black-and-white comedy features Jack Smith as the mysterious leader of an even-more-mysterious cult, garbed in pseudo-papal regalia and adorned with jewelry and makeup. His followers do his bidding by abducting and cross-dressing an unsuspecting mailman. The triumphant Smith launches a processional and is soon joined by real neighborhood children in the streets of Lower Manhattan. Eventually, the police came along and the shooting ended, but not before director Ken Jacobs got a wonderful overhead shot of Smith trying to explain himself to the cops in their patrol car. ~ Nicole Gagne, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Jack Smith
- 1957
Director Ken Jacobs showcases the humor and vitality of performer Jack Smith in this silent black-and-white short. Draped in bedsheets and assorted scarves, Smith prances ecstatically all over the back courtyard and fire stairs of a Manhattan apartment building, performing a wild dance that's clearly inspired by his enthusiasm for the 1940s screen siren Maria Montez. ~ Nicole Gagne, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Jack Smith
- 1957
Aired in numerous formats for over four decades, New York underground filmmaker Ken Jacobs' assemblage of 16 mm fictional footage, public service announcements, and snippets of Hollywood films didn't achieve mainstream critical acknowledgement until 2003, when the New York and London Film Festivals premiered its definitive, six-hour version. Star Spangled to Death is an abstract, political-philosophical treatise on the contradictions of life in America in the latter half of the 20th century, using excerpts from other films and news footage to touch upon issues of race, religion, and warfare. In the filmed material that punctuates the "found" footage, two characters referred to only as The Spirit Not of Life but of Living (Jack Smith) and Suffering (Jerry Sims) share conflicting views on day-to-day existence. ~ Michael Hastings, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Jack Smith, Jerry Sims, (more)
