Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 224: Mondo Oscenità (1966)

Ed Wood's footage wound up in the strangest places, but few were stranger than this.

In 1962, Italy dropped the bomb. Its name was Mondo Cane aka A Dog's Life, and it had the effect of a nuclear blast on the world of exploitation cinema. 

The first "mondo" film.

This modestly-budgeted travelogue, which purported to depict strange practices and rituals from around the world, became a huge hit with Western audiences thanks mostly to its heady mix of sex and violence. Even the film's catchy theme song, "More," became a pop and jazz standard. ("More than the greatest love the world has known...") Did it matter that numerous sequences in Mondo Cane were staged or manipulated by the film's three directors? Apparently, not much. Thrill-hungry audiences of the '60s flocked to see such scenes as a human woman breastfeeding a piglet. Wouldn't you? Remember, the internet wouldn't be invented for decades.

It's not often that you can say a single film inspired an entire subgenre of cult cinema, but that's exactly what happened in this case. Naturally, the makers of Mondo Cane produced a series of official sequels, ultimately leading to their beyond-insane Addio Zio Tom (1971), but schlockmeisters everywhere were eager to copy the profitable Cane formula and make lurid shockumentaries of their own. Many of these films had the word "mondo" right in the title so that audiences would know exactly what they were getting for their money. We were given Mondo Freudo (1966), Mondo Balordo (1964), Mondo Hollywood (1967), and even Russ Meyer's Mondo Topless (1966).

One of the lesser-known examples of the phenomenon is a film called Mondo Oscenità (1966) aka World of Obscenity. Right off the bat, the film's Italian title is bogus, since it's an American production. This demonstrates the across-the-board popularity of Mondo Cane: for a brief period in movie history, American filmmakers were pretending to be Italian! Director Joseph P. Mawra—best known for his work on the kinky, bondage-heavy Olga movies, such as Olga's House of Shame (1964) and Mme. Olga's Massage Parlor (1965)—actually called himself "Carlo Scappine" for this one. A likely-nonexistent producer called "Gino Poluzzo" (with no other credits) is also listed in the main title sequence.

Mondo Oscenità pretends to be a documentary about the history of obscenity in motion pictures. I say "pretends to be" because Joseph P. Mawra is clearly using this film as an excuse to show as much salacious (for the time) material as he can possibly assemble. And to get this thing to feature length, he just throws in whatever scraps of celluloid he had lying around the editing room, including some silent comedy footage that has nothing to do with anything. Fortunately, deep-voiced narrator Joel Holt (billed as "Lou Hopkins") is there to tie it all together with ponderous pronouncements like this:

In the next 75 minutes, we will take you into the world of motion pictures, into a world unfamiliar to most. A world made up of thought, sight, and imagination. A special kind of medium that can transport you into the future and take you back to the past. It is a state of unrealities, where sight, sound, feelings are all too real, where stimulations are aroused, where feelings are raised and lowered according to the thoughts of the director. We will show you what was considered too strong for the public in the early days of the motion picture and what is being viewed today. We will show you scenes from motion pictures that were judged as obscene only a short time ago, scenes that led to the outcry that obscenity in motion pictures was taking over the industry, that this is becoming a world of obscenity.

I'm guessing Mawra was more than a little influenced by Rod Serling. This is essentially The Twilight Zone: After Dark. The above monologue is even accompanied by footage of the stars in space.

What makes Mondo Oscenità of interest to us today is that it includes some otherwise-unused footage from Ed Wood's abandoned film Hellborn (1956). While he was an avid follower of trends in the entertainment industry, Eddie never even attempted to make a "mondo" movie of his own. Some of his nonfiction books and articles, like Drag Trade (1967) and Bloodiest Sex Crimes of History (1967), are written in the same basic spirit as those films, however. In fact, every time Wood writes about the odd sexual practices of Japan, as he does in Drag Trade and several of his magazine articles, he's channeling the spirit of Mondo Cane.

It was reader Brendon Sibley who hipped me to Mondo Oscenità, and I'm grateful he did because this is quite a find. I'd recently compared two different versions of the Hellborn footage, one from a 1993 documentary and one from a 2017 Blu-ray, and found that they contained the exact same footage, only projected at different speeds. In brief, the film alternates between two different groups of juvenile delinquents, one male and the other female, as they commit various crimes and get into fights. In the end, the boys and girls come together for a sort of picnic at Griffith Park. The footage ends with a black-clad hoodlum, played by Conrad Brooks, wandering off into the woods with his date, a curly-haired brunette in an angora sweater. This was the Hellborn I knew, and I thought it was all there was to know. I was dead wrong.

Mondo Oscenità—which was rereleased by (who else?) Something Weird Video in 1997—contains unique Hellborn footage that does not appear in the 1993 documentary or the 2017 Blu-ray at all. In fact, the footage essentially starts where those other iterations of Hellborn leave off! Here, Conrad and his date start passionately kissing on the lawn, but Connie quickly becomes violent and aggressively rips the girl's sweater off, exposing her bra underneath. She manages to fend him off and makes her way to a dirt road, but Connie starts chasing her. That's where the scene ends. Narrator Joel Holt takes a dim view of all of this:

Then there were other producers, not realizing the delineation between freedom and license, not heeding their responsibility to the public, who made films appealing to the baser emotions. We will discuss this type of producer and his product in the reels to follow. This approach in filmmaking was done for the sake of sensationalism in hopes of big returns at the box office. These were love scenes far too ardent to be considered within the bounds of good taste.

The scene is very similar to the opening sequence of Ed Wood's The Sinister Urge (1960), which also depicts a sex-crazed young man chasing a half-clad woman down a dirt road in Griffith Park. Director Joseph P. Mawra has added very dramatic music to the silent Hellborn footage, and the result is actually halfway exciting.

Conrad Brooks (right) takes things too far in Hellborn.

How did this rare, otherwise-unseen Hellborn material wind up in Mondo Oscenità? The connection is exploitation filmmaker George Weiss, who produced Ed Wood's Glen or Glenda (1953) and who also produced several of Joe Mawra's films, including Chained Girls (1965). The biopic Ed Wood (1994) even namechecks that movie specifically, when George (Mike Starr) tells Eddie (Johnny Depp): "I don't hire directors with burning desires to tell their stories. I make movies like Chained Girls." Hellborn was supposed to be the next Wood/Weiss collaboration, but it was never completed. Ed Wood makes it seem like Weiss hated Wood and never wanted to work with him again, but in truth, they did try to make further films together without success. It is my supposition that the aforementioned "Gino Paluzzo" was actually George Weiss.

The footage Ed Wood shot for Hellborn in the 1950s bounced around from owner to owner before finally being purchased by Conrad Brooks, ultimately leading to that obscure 1993 documentary. Apparently, in the mid-1960s, George Weiss forwarded the unused footage to Joseph P. Mawra, who decided that these scenes were just sexy and exciting enough to use in a movie. This was the era when just about any available footage was considered too valuable to throw away and so was put to some kind of use. If you've ever sat through Herschell Gordon Lewis' Monster a Go Go (1965), made from the scraps of an unfinished Bill Rebane movie, you know exactly what I mean.

More than anything, Mondo Oscenità feels like a jumble of random footage, loosely tied together by stern, judgmental narration. Mawra was obviously using any scrap of celluloid he could get his hands on, whether it were titillating or not. It makes sense that his own Olga bondage films are cannibalized thoroughly. (Joel Holt narrated those, too.) I particularly enjoyed a scene in which a young lady is given electric shocks until she wiggles right out of her bra. But the director seems determined to get this movie to feature length by any means possible. Footage of planes taking off? Scenes plundered from old Westerns? Reaction shots of crowds? They're all fair game. 

Honestly, this film is constructed along very similar lines as Ed Wood's own Glen or Glenda (1953). Both Mawra and Wood, for instance, use bland footage of highway traffic to illustrate some point the narrator is making about modern civilization. The narration in Mondo Oscenità discusses such hot-button issues as censorship, drug abuse, interracial relationships, and homosexuality, but it does not seem that the credited screenwriter, a one-and-doner named Ernest Franklin, has done any research on any of these topics. Meanwhile, in giving us a capsule history of sex in motion pictures, the film is strikingly similar in tone to such Ed Wood articles as "What Would We Have Done Without Them?" (1972) and "The Movies and Sex" (1971), plus Ed's book Censorship, Sex, and the Movies (1973). Wouldn't it be just too wild if Ernest Franklin were actually Ed Wood?

Interestingly, a cinematographer named Jay Levy is listed in the opening credits of Mondo Oscenità, but Mr. Levy has no other credits to his name. It is my guess that he is nonexistent. Unless I'm missing something, I don't see a single scrap of footage that was shot exclusively for this movie. It's all second-hand celluloid, much of it focusing on nudity and sadism. Even here, though, there are limits to what can be shown. There is no actual sex in the film, for instance, nor do we see any male or female genitals. It's just boobs and butts, thank you. If you freeze the frame at exactly the right moments, you might catch the merest hint of pubic hair now and again.

Of the movies I've reviewed for this series, the one that most closely resembles Mondo Oscenità is Joe Robertson's salacious Love Making U.S.A. (1971). That film, too, employs an ostensibly "serious" narrator and features an assortment of unrelated footage, some of it dating back to the silent era. But Robertson put a touch more effort into his film than Mawra did with this one. For one thing, Robertson actually shot some new scenes for Love Making U.S.A., which is more than Mawra bothered to do. 

The inclusion of the Hellborn footage makes this shockumentary a curio for Ed Wood completists, but I also appreciated it as a snapshot of Los Angeles in the 1960s, back when Dean Martin had his own restaurant on Sunset Blvd., complete with a neon likeness of himself out front. When the camera zoomed by this long-gone nitery, I wanted to drop in for a steak and a highball.