The Cinema of Jean Rollin: Les Trottoirs de Bangkok (The Sidewalks of Bangkok)

Exhausted after the troubled production of The Living Dead Girl, Jean Rollin was looking to return his freewheeling roots with his next picture, a nod to the serials of his childhood entitled Les Trottoirs de Bangkok (The Sidewalks of Bangkok). Delightfully daffy, deliberately disconnected and undeniably entertaining, The Sidewalks of Bangkok can be looked upon as the comic flipside to Rollin’s first feature The Rape of The Vampire from 15 years before. Shot on a shoestring budget and improvised, The Sidewalks of Bangkok is as far removed from Rollin’s fantastique works as possible and yet it is Rollin through and through.





Starring the stunning, mysterious and very talented Yoko, seen here in one of the only non-hardcore features of her sadly brief film career, and the brilliant Francoise Blanchard, fresh off her tour-de-force turn in The Living Dead Girl, The Sidewalks of Bangkok is 85 minutes of pure enjoyable nonsense. The whole film feels like Rollin deliberately taking a step back from the intense poetry of his last few works to delve into a colorful comic-book fantasy focusing on guns, girls and intrigue.




While The Sidewalks of Bangkok is admittedly a minor Rollin film it was never intended to be anything more. Rollin told Peter Blumenstock in the pages of Virgins and Vampire and Video Watchdog that, “the entire shoot was great fun”, and ‘fun’ is indeed the best way to describe The Sidewalks of Bangkok. It’s a mess, but a delightful one, and its devil may care attitude is a refreshing break after the deadly serious Living Dead Girl had taken such a toll on Rollin and his crew.






Working again with reliable cinematographer Claude Becognee with the ever present Lionel Wallman producing, Rollin recalled to Blumenstock that they, “filmed in secret in the Chinese Quarter around the Porte d’italie and on the docks where goods from Asia (were) unloaded.” Other stolen shots were found in an abandoned den near the Champs-Elyseees and on part of the French Railroad where Rollin remembered they managed to not, “get discovered by the security guards.” Along with the film's number of memorable locations, the catchy electronic score by composer Georges Lartigau also gives the film an extra push it otherwise wouldn't have had.







Feeling like he was, “20 years old again”, Rollin had a blast working on the set and greatly admired the fearless Yoko whom he recalled as being and actress who, “stopped at nothing and played her part instinctually, like a small hounded animal.” Yoko is indeed a real delight in the film and she keeps it more than watchable even when financial constraints make it feel even cheaper than most of the shoe-string budget pictures Rollin had shot previously. Rollin celebrated Yoko to Blumenstock and even went so far as to say he had, “never worked with an actor who was so open-minded and easy to direct.” Excited about the prospect of working with the beautiful young actress again he, “wrote a story for her and Brigitte Lahaie” but sadly this never became a film and Yoko had disappeared from the screens by the early nineties.





Nearly as memorable as Yoko in The Sidewalks of Bangkok is the mega-talented Francoise Blanchard who, sporting a new-wave inspired haircut, is seen clearly having a ball in Rollin’s tribute to film’s like 1932’s The Mask of Fu-Manchu. Most of the rest of the cast were either inexperienced or had more of a past in adult features, but Jean-Pierre Bouyxou and Brigitte Borghese will be immediately recognizable to fans of Rollin’s oeuvre. Rollin himself makes another brief but memorable cameo as well and keep an eye out for pretty Antonina Laurent who is an actress who has the distinction of being someone who only worked with Rollin and fellow maverick Jess Franco, as her only other big-screen credit is 1987’s Faceless.





With its wacky plot, focusing on a missing secret agent and a chemical weapon he has supposedly given to a mysterious nightclub dancer, The Sidewalks of Bangkok is a film of little substance but damn it’s an entertaining little puzzle that never outstays its welcome in its slim running time. Rollin loves the film and celebrated it as, “truly a B-movie”, which was, “as crazy as it was incoherent”, and, “part parody and part adventure film.” Most importantly he noted that, unlike the more naïve Rape of the Vampire, the humor found in the madcap The Sidewalks of Bangkok was very much intended. This might be a totally ridiculous film, but the people behind it are extremely smart.










Cathal Tohill and Pete Tombs have an excellent section on the making of The Sidewalks of Bangkok in their indispensable Immoral Tales where they noted that despite a set-up time of “fifteen days from scratch” the picture, “went on to be one of Rollin’s biggest successes”, more than a little ironic considering how Rollin is often labeled as just a maker of erotic vampire films.





The Sidewalks of Bangkok has sadly not been given the full-blown special edition treatment of some of Rollin’s other works. It is currently available from Redemption with the only extras being a photo gallery and trailer. I would love to see a full-blown deluxe edition eventually, preferably with the involvement of the unforgettable and currently missing in action Yoko.

The Cinema of Jean Rollin: La Morte Vivante (The Living Dead Girl) 1982

Thought of by some as the last truly great film of Jean Rollin's career, the 1982 feature La Morte Vivante (The Living Dead Girl) is a fascinating but flawed feature graced with two of the most unforgettable performances in all of Rollin's canon. A frustrating work brought to life by some of the most iconic imagery seen in a Rollin film, The Living Dead Girl is a simultaneously ferocious and poetic work deserving of its reputation as one of Rollin's most important films, although it is ultimately not one of his great pieces.






Justifiably frustrated by the muted receptions and limited distribution that had been granted to Fascination, The Night of the Hunted and The Escapees, Rollin looked to return to the more commercial and gory aspects of The Grapes of Death with The Living Dead Girl, a work he hoped would break commercially as well as artistically. Unfortunately, Rollin was once again plagued by a smaller budget than his material needed, and The Living Dead Girl finally feels at best like a 60 minute film padded with some nearly unwatchable filler to stretch it to a feature length running time.






Rollin charted the film's troubled production in Virgins and Vampires. "The producers wanted another zombie story", the iconic director noted and, "I got around it by turning the living dead into sort of a vampire woman." Working with the importance of memory found in so many of his films, especially Lips of Blood and The Iron Rose, and revisiting several key moments from The Grapes of Death, The Living Dead Girl feels a bit like a rushed composite of some of Rollin's richer works. The film could have been much more, but according to Rollin, "the problems started after the filming", when, "the co-producer jumped ship leaving me with unpaid lab bills". Once again Rollin had been abandoned financially and changes had to be made to The Living Dead Girl so the director could, "make a film that would earn a little money and get the lab back on track."




Indeed The Living Dead Girl was the most commercially successful production Rollin had directed since The Grapes of Death. Rollin went so far as to tell Peter Blumenstock in Virgins and Vampires and Video Watchdog that it was, "the most successful film", he had ever made and for the most part he was happy with it. Importantly though he told Blumenstock that he, "had to make certain commercial concessions" just to complete the film, and those concessions mar at nearly every turn what should have been one of Rollin's greatest works.






It is a tribute to the wonderfully effective turns that stars Francoise Blanchard and Marina Pierro give that the sequences in The Lving Dead Girl that don't work are so often overlooked. A good 30 minutes of the film is spent on the dreadfully boring adventures of two American tourists, and it is only when Blanchard or Pierro are on the screen that the film really works. Both lead actors in The Living Dead Girl are simply unforgettable, wonderfully combining a poetic realism with silent film theatrics.






According to Immoral Tales, Rollin got his first look at the stunning Italian beauty Mariana Pierro a year or so before he began shooting The Living Dead Girl at a festival where she was promoting Walerian Borowczyk's masterpiece Dr. Jekyll and his Women. Borowczyk's haunting muse turned out to the perfect choice for the living dead girl's companion in Rollin's film after his first choice, Caligula star Teresa Ann Savoy, refused to work with him. Despite some minor problems on the set between the beautiful Pierro and Rollin, the casting was inspired and the many close-ups of the Italian actress are some of the most amazing shots Rollin's camera ever captured.





While Pierro is terrific in the film, The Living Dead Girl really survives due to the savage and heartbreaking work of Blanchard, a clearly talented actress who gives one of the best performances in all of genre cinema. Barely uttering a word, Blanchard is remarkable in every moment of the film she appears in, and it is a shame that Rollin chose to pad the film out with the American tourists instead of just more shots of Blanchard's damaged and tortured gaze.







Tohill and Tombs wrote that The Living Dead Girl, "combines savage bloodletting and dreamy lyricism", but the film remains a broken dream of sorts as the viewer is never fully able to fall under its spell, unlike Lips of Blood or The Iron Rose. Too ambitious with its amateur make-up effects and not ambitious enough with its plotting, The Living Dead Girl is a fractured work deserving of as much criticism as praise.












Technically The Living Dead Girl is kind of all over the place. Rollin pointed out in the booklet that accompanied Encore's set that Benoit Lestang, a young man who “had just left high school and only dreamed about bloody make-ups and gore”, devised the crude makeup effects. The effects are functional but finally cheapen the film, unlike The Grapes of Death where the gore seemed more organic to the story.





Rollin and his crew suffered all kinds of problems throughout the filming of The Living Dead Girl including being underfed throughout to having a camera stolen on set, a real downfall as parts of the film had to be redubbed later. Struggling to finish the film, Rollin finally credited editor Janette Kronegger as being a bit of a savior and admitted that, "without her The Living Dead Girl would never have been finished."





Competently photographed by Max Monteillet and scored beautifully by Philippe d'Arme, The Living Dead Girl is a valuable work despite its faults. The final sequence alone, featuring a series of startling close-ups of Pierro and Blanchard before one of the most savage endings in all of horror cinema, stands as a great testament to the genius of Jean Rollin. One wishes the film as a whole could have sustained this type of poetic hysteria...















The Living Dead Girl has been available on several different home video versions with varying quality. Far and away the best version is Encore's 3 disc (2DVDs and 1CD) set, a terrific collection containing commentary (by Blanchard), interviews, deleted scenes, a slideshow, the soundtrack and booklet. Featuring a beautiful quality print, the one drawback to Encore's disc is a framing issue that causes the subtitles to go off the screen on some widescreen sets. Worth seeking out for collectors is the laserdisc from the late nineties which contains an otherwise unavailable Rollin commentary track, the first he ever gave for one of his films.