56: Blonde Cobra

            There is a telling moment in Ken Jacobs’ Blonde Cobra (1963) in which the film’s star, Jack Smith, declares as he pauses mid-rant, “I don’t know if this makes sense to you.”  Let me assure you that if you have not seen Blonde Cobra, or any of Smith’s own films such as Flaming Creatures (also 1963), that he makes no sense at all.  I was tempted to begin this review by writing that “it’s difficult to describe Ken Jacob’s Blonde Cobra,” but it is not.  In fact, several adjectives spring quickly to mind, among them: disturbing, offensive, and pointless.

            The film is comprised of three primary vignettes, in which Smith and friend Bob Fleischner play dress-up and prance for the camera in front of a mirror while Smith describes acts of perversion in voiceover.  In the first sequence Smith cross-dresses as a Gypsy fortune teller with an oral fixation on raw poultry as his narration describes necrophilia and childhood sexual molestation.  As a visual separation between scenes, extended rolls of blank leader fill the screen, and Smith tells a story of an elderly nun who is lashed with a rosary for confessing desires of lesbianism to her Mother Superior.  This all gives way to another tale of women using religious statues as objects of masturbation, and then meeting the same punishment as the nun.  Smith’s commentary on his narrative is equally off-putting, as he laughingly remarks, “God’s not dead…He’s just marvelously sick.”

            As the visual changes back to the game of dress-up, Smith and Fleischner emerge as Warner Bros-esque gangsters, burning holes in one another’s ties with their cigarettes and dancing to Fred Astaire and Ginger Rodgers’ chorus of “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off.”  Were it not for this sequence, edited together by Jacobs after Smith and Fleischner shot the footage, I believe the film would be utterly forgettable with regard to influence. However, it is notable that Blonde Cobra precedes the somewhat similar use of music for staging in Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising (1964), by a year.

            Another curtain of blank leader gives way to a third sequence of the two performers, now dressed as jungle explorers, while they continue to perversely abuse the various objects within the crowded apartment set.  One particular shot, of a golf club wedged in the crease of one of the men’s backsides, is accompanied by Smith’s repeated voiceover declaration that “sex is a pain in the ass.”  The moment epitomizes the bad taste on display throughout the film.

            Smith and his pictures are gay icons of the 1960s New York underground film movement, but it’s doubtful that they were even intended for audiences outside of this scene.  As such, it is difficult for me to place them culturally; despite the fact that I acknowledge that in this right they are important documents of that time and place.  However, from an entertainment and mainstream artistic standpoint I feel confident in my assessment that they’re crap.

 Language: English

Runtime: 33 Minutes

Available @youtube.com

Grade: .5 Hats Off