This film, written and directed by Paul Morrissey, is very strange. It tells the story of a young East German who swims ashore on a US beach. Stripping down to his swimming costume, he uses a switchblade to mutilate his thigh, for no apparent reason. Wandering the streets, he falls in with a streetwalker and her gay pimp who is obsessed with doorknobs. The streetwalker’s father is a fat transvestite who spends most of the time talking about junk food and the rest of the time tormenting his adolescent son. Our hero moves into an abandoned building full of strange characters. It turns out that the East German is in America to recruit Jane Fonda (who not surprisingly is not in the film) to aid the Communist revolution. Meanwhile, Madame Wang runs the only punk Chinese restaurant in town.
Paul Morrissey came from the Andy Warhol stable. Originally hired as an assistant, he graduated to directing Warhol’s underground films when Warhol was seriously wounded by a disciple. Eventually he branched out on his own, directing a dismal version of The Hound of the Baskervilles with Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. Madame Wang’s was his first film in three years. While the cover of this DVD says “Andy Warhol Presents”, Warhol had nothing to do with this film, as he and Morrissey had parted company in 1975. Morrissey has taken a bunch of interesting ideas and put them all together in a stew that does not add up to the sum of its ingredients. It seems as if he was trying for shock value in order to create a cult film with a gay subtext. All he has succeeded in doing is making a dull and lifeless film with some obnoxious characters and no real interest. John Waters has done this sort of thing a lot better. An odd thing about Morrissey is that while a lot of his films centre around alternative and underground culture, he is apparently very conservative and a devout Catholic. If he is is trying to criticise the culture he portrays, it is not evident from the film. The acting in this film is very poor. The two leads are wooden to say the least, and the rest tend to overact. The direction is serviceable at best, and the script is somewhat pretentious and incoherent. Madame Wang is played by Virginia Bruce. According to every on-line film reference this is the same Virginia Bruce who was a Hollywood star during the 1930s. I am not so sure. This actress looks to be too tall, and there is little resemblance to the original Virginia Bruce, who died the year after this film was released, and had retired in the early 1960s.

Madame Wang's[1981]Paul Morrissey.avi

General
Container:	AVI
Runtime:	1h 35mn
Size:	1.10 GiB
Video
Codec:	XviD
Resolution:	688x544
Aspect ratio:	5:4
Frame rate:	25.000 fps
Bit rate:	1 500 Kbps
Audio
2.0ch MP3 @ 128 Kbps

https://nitro.download/view/98F2362FD9A1155/Madame_Wang’s_1981_Paul_Morrissey.avi

Language(s):English
Subtitles:None

The post Paul Morrissey – Madame Wang’s (1981) first appeared on Cinema of the World.