Love Saves The Day: Sex and Romance in "Salon Kitty"

A notorious film by a notorious filmmaker, Tinto Brass's 1976 film set in a brothel marked a key transition in the director's career.
Elizabeth Horkley

Tinto Brass's Deadly Attractions and Sinful Desires is showing September - October, 2020 on MUBI.

Above: Salon Kitty

Known today as a maestro of erotic cinema, Italian director Tinto Brass’s legendary status is hard-won and attributable to his dogged dedication to filming sex. There’s a whiff of aimless opportunism in his genre-hopping early career, which included flirtations with neorealism, psychedelic experimentalism, and even a spaghetti western. But in Salon Kitty (1976), his first English-language film, Brass began to consolidate and wield influences. Salon Kitty brandishes its references in plain acknowledgement of the director’s derivative tendencies, meanwhile offering glimpses of Brass-original motifs that he would later (rather ingeniously) repurpose in erotic contexts. In Salon Kitty, we can perceive the director’s artistic resolve stiffening, amounting to a film that’s greater than the sum of its cherry-picked parts. 

Based on the stranger-than-fiction, true story of a Berlin brothel of co-opted by Nazis to spy on foreign allies and fellow officers, Salon Kitty is front-loaded with aping references to the “Nazi-chic” films of the 1970s. This is evident from the opening number, in which Ingrid Thulin as Madame Kitty performs a musical number in androgynous drag, one half of her body painted and costumed as a man and the other as a woman. It’s a clear hat tip to the Marlene Dietrich routine performed at the outset of Luchino Visconti’s The Damned, a gesture made all the more emphatic by the fact that Thulin’s Salon Kitty co-star, Helmut Berger, played the showgirl in the former film. While Kitty performs, the camera fans the room to show a cast of characters who double as visual shorthand for Weimer-era decadence: a tactic that mimics Cabaret’s (1972) frequent glances to its nightclub clientele. Likewise in Cabaret, the musical numbers in Salon Kitty are incidental to the plot, confined to the dais of the brothel. 

Berger plays Wallenberg, a villainous, rising-in-the-ranks SS officer who’s equal parts Berger’s sniveling, narcissistic Martin in The Damned and Wallenberg’s real-life historical counterpart, Walter Schellenberg. To carry out his mission of transforming Salon Kitty into a bugged den for espionage, he recruits politically involved Aryan women to replace Kitty’s staff. In a bizarre ritual of initiation, Wallenberg commands the dozen-plus women to strip naked and “practice” intercourse with a matching number of pale-skinned soldiers. The imagery of lined up, nude flesh commanded to unsexily cavort forms a queasy connection with the visuals and central narrative of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975), while the staging of the sex acts themselves cheekily borrows from Leni Rifenstahl’s Olympia (1938). 

In a chapter of the book Nazisploitation!: The Nazi Image in Low-Brow Cinema and Culture, author Robert von Dassanowsky acknowledges the influence of The Damned, Salò, and Cabaret (among other titles of this ilk) on Salon Kitty but also makes a unifying connection in comparing it to Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds (2009), citing its “...nervous collision between the fictionalization of the historical and the overt theatricality of the prurient.” Dassanowsky’s comparison is intriguing in its focus on artifice, which can be extended to both Brass and Tarantino’s fixation on exploitation fare. Tarantino is an unlikely but apt predecessor, known for his deeply referential, nearly curatorial approach to movie-making, which famously includes his own output. More subtly, Brass also recycles from his personal oeuvre. In the Olympia scene and others, he draws from his past as a director of surrealist, countercultural fantasies. Examining these films offers a compelling look at his circuitous trajectory. 

Despite his modern reputation, Brass seemed to view sex with ambivalence in early films. L’urlo (The Howl), a 1970 feature loosely based on Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, begins with the brutal rape of its female protagonist, played by Tina Aumont (also seen in Salon Kitty as Wallenberg’s abused, servile wife). With the help of a shape-shifting philosopher-cum-country bumpkin, she escapes a square marriage and embarks on an adventure through the strange environs of a wonderland-esque countryside. At one point, the couple set fire to a bus while acid-rock plays on the soundtrack. In a voiceover, a narrator drolly preaches: 

"Naturally, if this film were a romanticized history, or an historical romance, at this point there would be a love scene. However, since it is just a simple documentary, pure testimony, the actors are spared the trouble of performing para-hypo-peri-sexual exercises and gyrations. The calisthenics of those mucous membranes are therefore left, for the time being, to the more or less filthy imaginations of the audience."

When considered in the context of some of Brass’ subsequent, swooning “historical romances,” this aside sounds more tongue-in-cheek than cynical; less a condemnation of the audience and more a winking acknowledgement of Brass’ own “filthy imagination.” 

Another scene is L’urlo is nearly recreated in Salon Kitty, in a gruesome sequence showing another phase of “auditions” for Salon Kitty’s sex workers. In the later film’s depiction, Wallenberg makes his way up an asylum hallway, peering through portholes in cell doors to observe women’s reactions to sex with partners that test their stamina, i.e. people with severe physical conditions and concentration camp inmates. The same segmentation of interior spaces into warrens of sexual degradation occurs in L’urlo, wherein the two leads make their way through a hotel hosting a commune of sexual experimentalists. They navigate the cavernous space through doors similarly equipped with portholes, exploring chambers displaying bestiality, necrophilia, and high-concept role play. A male-female hybrid who bears an unmistakable resemblance to Thulin in Salon Kitty is also present. 

This brand of sexual misadventure, which places love-making and cruelty in close proximity, proved to be a slippery slope for Brass. Producer and Penthouse founder Bob Guccione hastily hired Brass for Caligula —an ambitious attempt to make a star-studded, mainstream pornographic film with a standalone plot—based on viewing a few reels of Salon Kitty. He came to regret it. "No matter what instructions I gave him, Brass would go out of his way to do the opposite,” Guccione told the Guardian in 1999. “He mishandled and brutalised the film's sexuality." As recompense, Guccione filmed several hardcore scenes after production had wrapped and spliced them into the film without Brass’ permission. 

Brass disowned the film, yet Caligula, as both a film and, as reported, filmmaking experience, composes a critical chapter in Brass’ career. Guccione’s quote to the Guardian is telling, and may offer some insight into Brass’ headspace during filming. Observing the course of his career post-Caligula and its chaotic release, it could be concluded that Brass was frustrated by the second component of the lucrative sex-violence pairing. This shift is portended in the second half of Salon Kitty, which shifts focus to Margherita (Teresa Ann Savoy), a Nazi brothel maiden who falls in doomed love with a client and teams up with Kitty to destroy Wallenberg. 

Despite their explicit content, the films Brass made after Caligula are comparatively wholesome, positioning sex as catalyst for both fulfilling relationships and self-actualization. Brass’ first formal outing after Caligula—1983’s The Key—portrays the sexual reawakening of a repressed housewife that leads to reconciliation with her husband. Paprika (1991) follows a young woman’s auspicious journey from sex work to countessdom. 

Though the tone of these exuberant, sex-positive films drastically differs from Brass’ early and mid-career work, he doesn’t shed formative techniques. Instead, he resurfaces them in sensual realms. For example, his predilection for utilizing mirrors for trippy effect in psychedelic fare transitions into a means to multiply naked bodies, or provide better perspectives to shoot sexual scenarios. Low angles meant to intensify the echoing, marbled meeting spaces of SS officers in Salon Kitty are later reinvented as an effective way to shoot high-heeled, stockinged legs, and magnify the size of derrières. These two calling cards meet in a scene in Paprika, in which the piquantly named young woman, shot from below, proudly stands nude atop a mirror. Paprika, in particular, is an illuminating companion to Salon Kitty. Set in a series of brothels, it tells the sotry of earned independence through sex work and sheds the pretensions of its predecessor. In Paprika, the brothel-setting is embraced as a story device to show a progression of sexual acts. 

There’s a sense of restraint in Salon Kitty that manifests in reflexive gestures to the cinema. Brass seems to distance himself from the cruelty of the narrative by directing attention to the dry machinations of filmmaking.  Apparatuses emerge from behind Brass’ camera and become a focus of it, as in the Olympia-esque initiation, wherein an SS officer films the stylized sexual proceedings. In another scene, a circular desk lamp stares directly at the camera, shining harsh light directly into the face of viewers and in a sense, breaking the fourth wall. In instances like these, Brass’ desire to engage with the audience is hinted at. After Salon Kitty and its bastardized heir, Caligula, it seems that Brass embraced the possibilities of pornography to establish a level of intimacy with audiences that, through its explicit intentions to induce a physiological response, is mostly unavailable with other genres. 

Thus, a parallel can be made between Salon Kitty’s story and Brass’ career. After Margherita discovers the joy of sex and falls in love (in that order), she rejects the politics of her upbringing and allows herself to be swept into a mission guided by love. “Pleasure was liberating me,” Teresa, the protagonist of The Key, states plainly as she caresses a young paramour. Brass, too, seemed to find new life as an auteur in depictions of sex in its plainest definition, as an expression of love. 

Don't miss our latest features and interviews.

Sign up for the Notebook Weekly Edit newsletter.

Tags

Tinto BrassNow Showing
0
Please sign up to add a new comment.

PREVIOUS FEATURES

@mubinotebook
Notebook is a daily, international film publication. Our mission is to guide film lovers searching, lost or adrift in an overwhelming sea of content. We offer text, images, sounds and video as critical maps, passways and illuminations to the worlds of contemporary and classic film. Notebook is a MUBI publication.

Contact

If you're interested in contributing to Notebook, please see our pitching guidelines. For all other inquiries, contact the editorial team.