Pornhound Goes to the Movies

The Forbidden Ballad of Hollywood's Greatest Stunt Cock
The Legend of Jimmy Laine

This article is a riff on the ballad of Jimmy Laine and what could have been. 

Laine is a name that any true grind-house loving pornhound will prick up his ears upon hearing. 

Laine made an obscure porn movie in the mid-1970s, 9 Lives of a Wet Pussy.  For a little spare cash, Laine took to performing as a stunt cock in his own film, fucking his female co-stars in his directorial debut.  Laine was a pornographer at heart, a man who knew what snatch-hunters everywhere were looking for, wanted and needed and strove to give it to them on the big screen in a world where the ultimate ambition was to get high and fuck.  But Jimmy Laine was just a pseudonym. 

The man behind the pornographer was a former Catholic who with his high-school friend and screenwriter Nicholas St. John wanted to make feature films. 

After 9 Lives of a Wet Pussy, he dropped the pseudonym and went straight to the grindhouse for The Driller Killer, a film so unrelentingly violent as to be banned in Britain.  Since then, he embarked on a series of depraved, violent sexually charged films that peaked in the film Bad Lieutenant, the critical reception to which had him acclaimed alongside Quentin Tarantino as a duo the press at the Cannes Film festival would call “the sons of Scorsese.”  His name: Abel Ferrara.

Ferrara refuses to talk about Jimmy Laine or 9 Lives of a Wet Pussy in interviews.  He has set aside his origins as a pornographer and stunt cock to assume the critical status of international “auteur”, the sole American director whose films bring the sensibility of the grindhouse to the art-house.  But the pornographer in Ferrara still surfaces now and then.  In Ms .45, Ferrara stages the rape from behind of a mute woman (Zoe Tamerlis) by a man in a mask.  Ferrara himself plays the rapist: in the masked man is there a hint of Jimmy Laine?  Zoe Tamerlis was a drug addict and actress with a lithe, feline sensuality that made her stand-out in the world of grunge and cult cinema, eventually starring in a nude sex scene for director Larry Cohen in Special Effects.  Tamerlis changed her working name to Zoe Lund and remained one of the close inner circle of collaborators that Ferrara trusted to see his films made the best they could be. 

After Ferrara transformed another Nicholas St. John script into the gangster masterpiece of King of the City (with Christopher Walken at his most decadent prior to his turn as the elegant Venetian sex-killer in Paul Schrader’s The Comfort of Strangers), he set about Bad Lieutenant.  What Ferrara sought to do, however, was further than screenwriter St. John was prepared to go and he refused to write the film: with St. John out, Ferrara turned to Lund.  Bad Lieutenant was thus the collaboration between a repentant pornographer and a dope addict.

Pornhounds and dope fiends reading this review should thus immediately take note: films don’t get much better than Bad Lieutenant.  It is essential viewing. 

As a dope smoker and porn junkie, I had to review this DVD in the right frame of mind.  Expanded!  The weed went down smoothly and the high made my synapses tingle.  Fingers at the keyboard I watched the world of Abel Ferrara unfold, wondering what direction the lapsed Catholic stunt-cock turned art house genius would lead me.  Hopefully into Zoe Lund’s pussy!

In a performance ironically recalling his work for Martin Scorsese in Mean Streets, Harvey Keitel is the man to watch.  He’s a father, swearing at his kids as he takes them to school.  As soon as they get out of the car, he snorts a line of coke.  He’s betting on a baseball game in the World Series: if he loses, he’s in debt and the Mob will kill him for it.  The World Series extends to match after match as he follows its progress on the radio, stopping only to get high and hallucinate in a guilt-driven religious psychosis which makes him focus on a new case: the rape of a nun by youth gang members.  After he visits the hospital and sees the nun naked and being cleaned following her horrific violation, he corners two teenagers in a car.  He shows his badge.  They are scared, but he is the law.  The scene that follows is a piece of sheer transgressive artistry.  And then: in a wave of demented epiphany, this irredeemable, profane man thinks he can redeem himself by finding the rapists just as the nun has forgiven them.  He has found a purpose.  All he needs is another fix… and Zoe Lund is there to give him one, lovingly preparing the pipe for him.

There is a sad communion amongst the desolate.  Lund knows it and the despairing humanity she brings to her script and performance underlie the film’s sense of tired desperation. 

Ferrara has his camera linger on Keitel’s face as the high consumes him, making us share in the moment, inviting us too to join Keitel and just get drug-fucked.  Here it is no longer Ferrara, but the ghost of Jimmy Laine and the high pornhound is treated to the violent rape of a nun, on an altar, beneath a statue of Jesus that in a hallucinatory explosion is alive: Christ, who forgave all for their sins, wretches as the sinful he forgave rape and sodomize a helpless young nun.  When Ferrara shows Keitel looking at the body of the naked nun, he knows just how Keitel feels, how the male viewer feels: that recognition of the lust of the men Keitel now seeks to forgive, to save himself for wishing for a brief moment to do what they did.  Ferrara’s vision is borne of guilt, forbidden lusts and self-destructive abandon in the new holy water of the grindhouse – drugs and sex. 

There is a reason why all of Abel Ferrara’s films to the point of Bad Lieutenant had been rated NC17 in America or banned outright.  Although he avoids any acknowledgement of 9 Lives of a Wet Pussy, Ferrara cannot suppress Jimmy Laine.  And in one astonishing, forbidden high light of the movie the viewer is treated to an indication of just how radical Jimmy Laine the ponographer might have been had he not reverted to Abel Ferrara the artiste.  Ferrara has granted Keitel and us, high along with him, the sight of the forbidden – the naked nun.  He knows it has gotten Keitel, and the male viewer with him, erect. 

Creating the erection, his direction now turns towards its manipulation. 

Keitel pulls over a car.  In it are two teenage girls afraid he’ll tell their father they took the family sedan without permission.  They are his to manipulate and he wants to get off.  So does the spirit of Jimmy Laine and Ferrara lets the side of him he denies in public take over.  Keitel tells one girl to bear her ass for him as he stares from outside the car through the driver’s window.  He asks the other girl to show him what she looks like as she sucks cock.  She doesn’t want to.  He commands her, masturbating as he watches her simulate a blow job.  And Laine’s camera is there, penis level on the girl’s face open mouthed, her tongue twirling.  CUT.  Laine lingers on Keitel bringing himself to orgasm as he stares down at the girl’s face, the camera showing both his pleasure and her humiliating submission.  But ultimately this is Ferrara, not Laine, and there is no cum-shot to make the scene complete: either way, this is grindhouse pornography at its best.

Jimmy Laine never died! 

His spirit was held back by Nicholas St. John’s scripts, but as mentioned, Bad Lieutenant was too much for St. John to bear.  And in his seductive treatment of dope fiend Lund’s script, Ferrara let the spirit of Jimmy Laine through just to see what would have happened.  Just for the Hell of it.  That’s the thrill of Bad Lieutenant for the dope fiend and porn hound: one of America’s finest directors, who turned his back on a potential career in pornography and the grindhouse, indulged his suppressed pornographer alter-ego for one film.  Nothing in contemporary Hollywood could offer this: the pornographer was free to create art, with the help of the dope fiend.  In the history of drug-fuck movies from Reefer Madness through Easy Rider, Cheech & Chong and The Doors, Bad Lieutenant alone takes the stoned or tripping viewer through self-destructive, drug-induced moral abandon, and of course, the fallen man’s search for redemption.  It’s the theme of redemption that appealed to the mainstream critics reviewing the film, director Martin Scorsese going so far as to say of Bad Lieutenant that: “it’s the kind of film that I wanted The Last Temptation of Christ to be…it’s amongst the greatest pictures ever made about a man’s descent in search of redemption.”  But it’s the forbidden thrill of Jimmy Laine’s potential career and the pornography of sexual guilt that makes Bad Lieutenant the masterpiece that it is.