Scorenotes is a superb web site that will be of great interest to movie music lovers. The site describes itself thusly:

ScoreNotes.com: Your home for Composer Interviews in Audio, Online Suites, Soundtrack Reviews and more!

In fact, the site boasts a great archive of interviews with music critics and composers as well as the ability to play tracks from both vintage and new soundtrack albums. Check out the site by clicking here

By Dean Brierly

The 1970s were defined by a mind-boggling array of cultural and political phenomena. Some were serious—the energy crisis, no-fault divorce, Margaret Thatcher. Others were silly—crop circles, Charlie’s Angels, disco. And some were simply sublime—the American Basketball Association, SCTV, the proliferation of oral contraceptives. Among the most popular, yet controversial, of the decade’s attention-grabbers was a series of German films that explored the sex life of schoolgirls. (Those easily offended by such movies should perhaps stop reading now.) Based upon a best-selling book by German psychologist Günther Hunold, the films were presented as cautionary tales filmed in a quasi-documentary style in hopes of giving them a veneer of social responsibility. The public service aspect took the form of on-camera interviews with teenage girls answering blunt questions about their sex lives. The series purported to inform the public (i.e., parents) about what their supposedly innocent daughters were getting up to behind closed doors, in public parks, in automobiles, in swimming pools…

What they were, when one came right down to it, were soft-core sex films featuring an ever-changing cast of nubile young German actresses (most of whom ironically appeared to be at least college-aged, if not older). While the films were undeniably erotic, they were written and directed with a light touch and imbued with an earthy, farcical humor (think Benny Hill at his sleaziest). Most of the actresses exhibited an unabashed attitude toward sex that somehow made all the shagging seem like the wonderfully natural act it is rather than something shameful and prurient. The formula evidently worked. The Schoolgirl Report series was an immediate and smash success in Germany, and proved equally popular as a filmic export. The 13 films made over a 10-year period were seen by millions worldwide, including here in the God-fearing yet pre-Moral Majority U.S.A.

Each film presented up to eight vignettes in which German schoolgirls encountered a variety of sexual situations, including first-time sex, interracial sex, promiscuous sex, voyeurism, masturbation, rape, incest, and that old standby, pupil-teacher encounters. The boffing and boinking was by turns erotic, humorous, disturbing and poignant. Each story had at least a modicum of subtext, variously centered on the girls’ search for self-affirmation, the freedom to act as they pleased, and a determination to be treated as adults. Seen in a larger context, the series can be read as a swinging sexual statement of revolt on the part of its youthful protagonists against their parents’ authoritarian, dare one say dictatorial, World War II-era generation. Achtung, baby!
As in the previous films, the fourth installment in the series, What Drives Parents to Despair (1972), begins with an unintentionally hilarious on-camera prologue, presumably delivered by Hunold himself. “Well, ladies and gentlemen, here we are again. You’ll remember us if you’re among the 30 million people who saw our first three Schoolgirl Reports in 28 countries and turned them into a global blockbuster,” he intones, assuming an air of seriousness that fails to completely camouflage his inner perve. “Still, no film has ever been attacked as ours. But almost everything you saw came from authentic sources. Life writes the most interesting scripts. Of course, we will not claim that all schoolgirls behave the way they are portrayed in our films. But it would also be foolish to close your eyes to the facts.” Or to the hot teen action about to unfold, he might have added.

The vignettes revolve around an 18-year-old who seduces her math teacher in order to ace her final, then blows him off with a curt auf Wiedersehen; a 16-year-old who talks her boyfriend into posing as a doctor and making a “house call” so they can get it on upstairs while her naive parents watch television downstairs; a group of high school girls and boys who set up a profitable prostitution ring to better partake of Germany’s economic miracle; and a quartet of oversexed young lovelies who get more than they bargain for when they prick-tease an Italian immigrant into proving his virility. In a much harder-hitting tale, an African girl adopted by a German couple is the target of crude racial insults from her Aryan schoolmates—in the locker room shower, naturally. Later, the Deutschland dollies arrange for her sexual violation by their equally racist boyfriends. There’s nothing titillating about this sequence, which comes across as a strong anti-rape statement.
Another edgy story depicts a sexually curious teen virgin who harbors incestuous fantasies about her older brother. After spying on him making love to an older woman at a party, she begs him to deflower her, with predictable results. (No surprise considering the girl is played by Swedish exploitation film star Christina Lindberg.) In keeping with the series’ non-judgmental tone, the coupling is presented as a one-time-only adolescent experiment. The filmmakers don’t condemn the siblings as much as the socio-economic conditions that can give rise to such misdirected sexual development. And in the final story, as if to somehow reassure parents that not all schoolgirls are completely depraved, an 18-year-old waits until she is certain that her boyfriend loves her before giving up her V card.

The actual sex scenes truthfully aren’t all that exciting, at least, not by today’s XXX-on-demand standards, yet for their time they obviously fulfilled the needs of audiences from Berlin to Baden-Baden and beyond. And the sincerity of these at times awkward couplings takes viewers back to their own fumbling first attempts at sexual expression. That alone makes these films worth revisiting. Additionally, viewing the Schoolgirl Report films today is like opening a time portal onto a genuinely stylish era, one filled with beautiful young people following their natural instincts against a cultural background of casual drug use, space-age pads, trippy cars and the Hammond-driven sounds of Gert Wilden’s stunning jazz-rock music. For those who aren’t afraid to confront their own secret desires, this is trash cinema at its most diverting.

(Impulse  Pictures has released the first three films in the series with letterbox transfers, original German language dialogue and English subtitles. For more info go to official web site)

In 1971, 20th Century-Fox scored a huge commercial and critical hit with The French Connection, a hard-boiled thriller about the largest heroin bust in New York City’s history. Directed by William Friedkin and starring Gene Hackman as Det. Eddie “Popeye” Doyle, the picture presented a gritty, but idealized portrait of the police at work. In 1972, wanting to capitalize on the picture’s success, Fox decided to produce a sequel, a continuation of Doyle’s pursuit of Alain Charnier (Fernando Rey), the French drug lord who eludes capture at the end of Friedkin’s film. The studio decided to have the picture shot in Marseilles, a port city in the south of France where heroin production thrived in the early Seventies. Friedkin, however, was uninterested in working on a sequel and so the chiefs at Fox approached John Frankenheimer, who had lived in France and spoke the language fluently. Although Frankenheimer had enjoyed a great deal of success in the Sixties with pictures like The Manchurian Candidate, Seven Days in May and Grand Prix, nearly a decade had passed since he’d scored a box office hit. The opportunity to work on a high-budget picture of this sort aroused his interest and he accepted the offer.

The original script for French Connection II was prepared by Robert Dillon, whose previous credits included, most notably, Roger Corman’s X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes.  Once production commenced in the summer of 1974, however, Frankenheimer decided that he needed to have his script re-worked. For the job, he recruited the novelist Pete Hamill, who’d actually known Eddie Egan, the New York City police detective upon whom Hackman’s character Popeye Doyle was based. In 2006, Hamill recalled his involvement in the project:

[When Frankenheimer] called me from Marseilles, asking me to help, I said I would try to get there within two days. "Why not one?" he said, and laughed nervously. I never asked why he called me. Someone hand-delivered a script to my place in New York and I read it on the plane.

       John, at that time, had a major problem. He had already shot nine days of the existing script. He had developed a reputation for going over budget, so had no flexibility. He couldn't re-shoot what was already in the can.

       That gave me a problem too, since I had to write around the existing pieces, which, as always, had been shot out of order. It was like working on a jigsaw puzzle. The basic problem was that Hackman, a great movie actor, had nothing to act. And the reason for that was that Roy Scheider was not in the sequel, and Hackman had nobody to bounce his lines off. He would never talk to a French cop the way he talked to Scheider in the Billy Friedkin original.

        ….My first work was on the following day's pages, trying to make the character sound like Popeye Doyle….Within a day-and-a-half  (with naps in between) I had written enough for them to keep shooting for six or seven days….Hackman was ecstatic. He had something to act!

French Connection II begins shortly after the first film ends, with Doyle arriving in France on April Fool’s Day. As the only person who can identify Charnier, Doyle has been sent by his supervisors to assist the Marseilles police as they search for the elusive kingpin. Vulgar and loud, Doyle alienates himself quickly from his counterparts in Marseilles, a group of “narcs” led by the level-headed Henri Barthelmy (Bernard Fresson). Annoyed by Barthelmy’s cautious approach to law enforcement, Doyle soon sets out on his own. In his porkpie hat and Hawaiian shirts, he cuts a clownish figure on the foreign city’s streets and he is quickly spotted and subsequently abducted by Charnier’s men. Imprisoning him in a slum hotel for three weeks, Charnier injects Doyle with heroin, with the hope that this will loosen his lips. The tactic breaks the detective, transforming him into a helpless addict. But it doesn’t yield any helpful information and Charnier returns the captive to the police. As he explains to Doyle, just before he frees him: “We take you back, Doyle, to your friends. They are looking for you everywhere and making it difficult for me to operate.” 

Renewal invariably follows demoralization in many of Frankenheimer’s pictures and the same happens here. Forced by Barthelmy to quit his addiction “cold turkey,” Doyle suffers horribly, bursting into tears at one point. But he makes it through and sets out on his own to locate the hotel where he was kept prisoner. Once he finds it, he sets the building on fire and snags one of Charnier’s men. The goon provides information which eventually leads Doyle and his French counterparts to the lab where Charnier’s people process heroin. Charnier rushes off, though, as the police close in, just as he did in the first movie. But Doyle, weak and limping, runs after him and a chase commences through the congested city, ending when the detective spots his adversary sailing out of the harbor on a yacht. Drawing his gun from the holster he wears on his ankle, Doyle fires two shots into Charnier’s chest, presumably killing him. But Frankenheimer closes the movie at this point, denying his viewers a denouement of any sort, leaving open the possibility that the pursuit may continue in the future.

 French Connection II is an often harrowing examination of the dangers that result when people flout the law for personal gain. Charnier, of course, may be the most offensive example of this criminal self-centeredness. A bon vivant, he uses the money he earns from his drugs business to make his life exceedingly comfortable, spending it on fine clothes, hunting trips and beautiful women. His success, however, rests upon a willingness to exploit human weakness, a great sin in itself. Yet, as Frankenheimer shows us, it also has a terrible, imitative effect, breeding a culture of addicts and thieves who, like Charnier, seize upon the weak. Such is the case with an old woman in the hotel, who steals Doyle’s watch. The problem not only transcends gender, age and nationality, but occupation, too. A sleazy U.S. Army general (Ed Lauter) is one of Charnier’s collaborators.

Though Doyle has no apparent interest in financial gain, he is similarly guilty of flouting the law for private reasons, sidestepping civil liberties and human rights when they interfere with his pursuit. To some degree, this brutal approach is effective, leading him and Barthelmy to Charnier’s heroin. But it is also ugly. Early in the film, for instance, Doyle amuses himself as he explains to a suspect:

I’m going to work on your arms. I’ll set ’em over a curb. And I’m going to use them for a trampoline. I’m going to jump up and down on them. Right? Then your kneecaps. One. Two. Kneecaps. Oatmeal. I’m going to make oatmeal out of your…kneecaps. And when I get done with you, you are going to put me right in Charnier’s lap.

Yet Doyle, despite these repellant qualities, is difficult to reject completely. Far from his New York City stomping grounds, the detective, like the fish on the tables that appear at the beginning of the film, is out of his element, completely separated from people who think, act and speak like him. Certainly, he behaves in a ludicrous manner frequently, translating the word “mayonnaise” into French and ordering “el scotcho” at a bar. But the character’s basic problem, the alienation felt by the émigré, is hardly unique or strange; and because of this, in spite of his many defects, he is recognizable, understandable and sympathetic.  

Like the first French Connection, Frankenheimer’s picture is a “police procedural,” a film that traces the efforts of law enforcement officials as they conduct an investigation. In the middle of this movie, however, the director breaks from the genre’s most important convention by halting the detective hero’s pursuit, confining him first to the cell-like room of the hotel and then the basement jail of the Marseille police station. Some critics have maligned this turn in the narrative. Roger Ebert, in his 1975 review, complained that it brings “the movie to a standstill. The plot, the pursuit, the quarry, are all forgotten during Hackman’s one-man show, and it’s a flaw the movie doesn’t overcome.” These sequences do slow the story’s pace a bit, but they nevertheless serve an important thematic function. In many of Frankenheimer’s films, extreme suffering gives rise to important changes in his protagonists’ personalities. For Doyle, the dialectal torture of addiction and withdrawal restores the drive and commitment that characterized his pursuit of Charnier in the first film. During the first third of French Connection II, that is, Doyle is distracted and ineffectual, spending much of his time drinking, carousing and picking fights with the people who can help him. But following the experience with heroin, he returns to the dirty Marseilles streets single-minded, not only avoiding drink and women, but working closely with Barthelmy. He may or may not capture Charnier—we aren’t allowed to know—but he certainly scores his revenge, besting him with the two bullets he fires into his chest. 

Though French Connection II is one of the bleakest pictures Frankenheimer made, it is also one of the most thrilling, thanks to spectacular sequences like the burning of the slum hotel and the final chase, when Doyle runs after Charnier along the Marseilles harbor. The director realized that the exaggerated quality of these scenes could arouse disbelief and thus he tried to make them seem as authentic as possible. He explains on the commentary he recorded for the film’s DVD release:

The key to doing a movie like this is to make every incident, every moment of the movie as real and believable as you can. Once you, the audience, feel betrayed by me, once you feel out of the movie, once you feel,  ‘Oh these are only actors and this is fake and this doesn’t look right,’ then the movie’s over for you, then everything that happens after that doesn’t work. But if I can keep you involved and keep you believing this looks rights this looks real, then I’m doing my job. And that goes for the costumes, that goes for the sets, that goes for the extra that’s way in the back of the room. One little thing that’s not right can turn you off the whole movie.

To achieve the verisimilitude he needed to make these scenes work, the director used several tactics. He and his cameraman Claude Renoir employed shooting techniques borrowed from cinéma-vérité, filming Marseilles’ buildings, its streets and its citizens with handheld cameras and hidden cameras. He and production designer Jacques Saulnier built sets which they modeled after real places, like the city’s police station, a jail and the bottom-rung hotel. And Charnier’s lab, incredibly, was built under the guidance of a group of Corsican heroin dealers who had taken an interest in the film. The director also hired non-actors whenever he could. The doctors who treat Popeye after his abduction, for instance, were real doctors.

When French Connection II opened in the spring of 1975, the reviews it received were generally favorable and its performance at the box office was strong. The New York Times’ Vincent Canby, for instance, wrote:

"The concerns of “French Connection II” are not much different from those of old Saturday-afternoon movie serials that used to place their supermen  in jeopardy and then figure ways of getting them out. The difference is in   the quality of the supermen and in their predicaments. Popeye is a colorful and interesting — though hardly noble — character, and when the Marseilles drug people kidnap him, forcibly create a heroin habit in him, and then release him, you have a very special kind of jeopardy that the film and Mr. Hackman exploit most effectively. The perverse intensity and the anguish in these sequences recall some of Mr. Frankenheimer's best work in “The Manchurian Candidate”.