For today's Hippie Hotties, we are going to talk about a forgotten classic. It's the surrealist, the late-60s, European masterpiece Dillinger Is Dead from director Marco Ferreri. Famous Warhol groupies, existential dilemmas, and trippy filmmaking make this a Hippie Hotties movie.
Dillinger Is Dead is probably best remembered for its blonde bombshell of a star. The one and only Anita Pallenberg. Who exactly was Anita Pallenberg? She was an Italian-born model and actress of German heritage who made her way to New York City in the swingin' sixties where she became known as one of Andy Warhol's Factory Girls.
She hung around The Factory and also managed to meet and hang around The Rolling Stones, dating one of them and sleeping around with another. She was definitely a rock groupie in the traditional sense of the word who slept with Brian Jones and had a baby with Keith Richards. She also had sex with Mick Jagger in the X-rated film Performance which we talked about previously.
Anita wasn't just a pretty face who wanted to sleep with rockstars. She had her own dreams and desires as well! She tried her hand at acting in a number of very sexy films including the cult classic Barbarella alongside Jane Fonda.
We love her best in Dillinger is Dead in 1969 in which Anita proved that she actually can act. She played an ingenue, a wife whose headache becomes the catalyst for all of the events in the film.
The plot of Dillinger is Dead starts off nicely enough. Our leading man's wife is sick in bed with a headache. She left him dinner in the fridge, but he is not keen on that, so he decides to make himself an elaborate meal. While he's noodling around in the kitchen for supplies, he finds a revolver wrapped in an old newspaper with the headline "Dillinger is Dead". Who's revolver is this and why is it here?!
It turns out that the gun belongs to Dillinger himself! The film takes us through a day in the life of the man who discovered the gun. The man appears to be toying with his own mortality throughout the movie, staging is own suicide several times. He is bored with his lonely, bourgeois life, but it's hard to understand that because his life includes gorgeous women.
Anita plays his wife and Annie Girardot plays Sabrina, the maid. He tries to seduce the maid and at the end of the film, at dawn, he does something really shocking. The ending of the film is often debated, but I agree with writer Mira Liehm that the ending was about escaping the trappings of his life. This main character really has nothing to complain about throughout the film, but he is clearly experiencing malaise.
The gun is the only exciting thing to happen to this guy in a while! The introduction of the gun opens up a number of possibilities and gives him newfound confidence which we see when he seduces the main. The gun also symbolizes a way out, but he uses it to harm someone else and then run away from all of his problems rather than of himself which was what he seemed to want to do all along.
It's like the murderous spirit of the gun took over him! Instead of face those consequences, he acts like murder freed him and he charters a boat to Tahiti. And that's the end of the film! No more watching a snake puppet dance on Anita's ass.
I think this is meant to suggest that while he did indeed escape the life that he appeared to be so bored of, this was not done cleanly. There was no right way out. It was a very modern dilemma in 1969: how can one follow their every, hedonistic desire without hurting someone you care about?
So why is this a hippie movie? It's all in the style! The film is shot and edited together in a very avant-garde fashion with a cool, atmospheric soundtrack that will make you feel like you're smoking pot in a bohemian den. The movie has very little dialogue and this film, featured in the Criterion Collection, is a bit of an art-house classic.
The film was screened at the 1969 Cannes Film Festival. At the time, the movie was considered controversial because it seemed to glorify violence. As a result, it was issued a censorship warning and was rarely screened.
Interestingly, there is more to the allure of this film. It actually was never released in America until 2007 where it was screened for the first time in America at Telluride. Critics and movie lovers were finally able to see it. It's ironic that in a movie centering around discovery, American audiences got to feel like they discovered it decades later. That's why we are talking about it today!
