Ilsa the Wicked Warden (1977)

Troy Howarth (0:03)

Hello, and welcome to the audio commentary for Ilsa the Wicked Warden, also known as Greta the Mad Butcher, and a whole slew of other titles we're going to get into. It was actually conceived under the title, No Man's Land, according to the director, Jess Franco. You can see here proudly displayed as a Jess Franco film. There's no mistaking that. This was the ninth of Franco's run of films for the Swiss producer, Erwin C. Dietrich, based in Zurich, though he sometimes co-produced with other countries. And indeed, that's the case here. This is technically a Swiss Canadian co-production with the latter side allowing them access to Diane Thorne. It was a major name in sexploitation cinema of the period. But before I get too far ahead of myself, I'd rather introduce myself, I suppose, rather quickly. This is Troy Howarth. I'm a writer who specializes in so-called European cult cinema. I've written a number of books on the subject. And I'm a big time devotee of the director, Jess Franco. Jess Franco, of course, is going to be the focus of this track, but also I'm going to be getting into the careers of other people involved, including Diane Thorne, Irwin C. Dietrich, Lena Romay, and various other people as they come into play within this particular narrative. This was a film that was conceived as a return to the woman in prison genre, which is something that Jess Franco was an old hand at. As we're going to discuss, Franco did not create this genre, but he did help to popularize it in the late 1960s. And indeed, when he started his rather not long, but certainly fruitful association with Irwin C. Dietrich, with a film called Barbed Wire Dolls, that was indeed a woman in prison film, albeit a much rougher around the edges film than the movie we're looking at here. If you think this movie seems rough, well, you ain't seen nothing yet. Although content wise, it definitely does push the envelope. We have the usual, you know, sexploitation type images in this film, the traditional trope of the women being forced to shower together, very much a, you know, an expected sequence in a film such as this. But rather playfully, Franco is intercutting these sequences with shots of Diane Thorne as Greta or Ilsa, depending on which title you want to go with. Bathing luxuriously in solitude in her bathtub, bubble bath. So she's having a very nice time of it, really able to enjoy it, and kind of playing up the sexual aspect of the character. Who we're gonna see is very much a coded to be sort of nymphomaniacal character, albeit in a very sort of cartoonish and pulpy sort of way. There are a lot of kind of serious themes bubbling, if you'll pardon the expression in this context, underneath the surface of this particular film. But in traditional Franco style, he handles it with a real sort of flair for genre and for entertainment values. So it's very tongue-in-cheek, it's very over-the-top. It's the type of film that the average film critic is not going to take very seriously for that reason. That's why I'm here today. I do think that there are definitely some very interesting kind of anti-fascist and very sort of left-leaning principles and ideas guiding this particular film. Yes, we're looking at a film that really trades on the sexualized and arguably objectified image of beautiful naked women. It is a inherently, I suppose we could say, quote unquote problematic genre in that sense. But within that framework, Franco, who was very intelligent, I think it's safe to say an intellectual, he's able to work in certain aspects that give the film a little bit more substance. Now, of course, now we're dealing with the escape of the character Rosa, who is identified as prisoner number 52 That's an idea that's really hammered home in the film. This idea of sort of the dehumanization of the prisoners, which again is a serious kind of concept that is baked into the cake with this film. Names have no value here, so everybody is identified as a number. She is prisoner number 52 This is an actress by the name of Angela Richard, who didn't really do much. Unfortunately, she didn't have a particularly active career in films. She did, however, go on to appear in a small role in another Jess Franco-directed Irwin C. Dietrich production called Lurita. So the collaboration between Jess Franco and Irwin C. Dietrich, as I mentioned, wasn't a particularly lengthy one. It was, however, extremely fruitful, and it yielded a total of 16 films. It was long thought to be 15, but actually turned out there was another one tucked in there, which was long assumed to be the work of Dietrich himself, but it was, in point of fact, directed by Jess Franco. I can radical off the titles here real quick. We've got Barbed Wire Dolls, Downtown, The Slave Girls, Dorianna Grey, The Girls in the Night Traffic, White Hands on Black Skin, or if you prefer, White Skin and Black Thighs, Around the World in 80 Beds. That's the one that people thought for a long time was actually directed by Dietrich. Jack the Ripper, Ilsa the Wicked Warden, Love Letters of a Portuguese Nun, Blue Rita, Sexy Sisters, also known as Satanic Sisters, Love Camp, Voodoo Passion, Wicked Women, and Women in Cell Block Nine. Now you might hear an array of titles like that, and such a high volume of titles, 16 altogether, and assume that, wow, that must have been shot over at least five years, if not more. No, these all were shot between the summer of 1975 and the fall of 1977 So, Just Franco was nothing if not speedy and efficient. Sometimes arguably too much for his own good, but it was something that enabled him to make a lot of films and leave behind a very diverse, eclectic, and well, admittedly, I think rather maddeningly uneven filmography, but a filmography I'm very drawn to and fascinated by and hopefully some of you who've tuned in are already Franco fans. And if you're not, well, maybe some of what I've got to say might help to pique your curiosity somewhat. This particular film was shot largely on location. It's certainly the exteriors were shot in Cintra in Portugal with the interior work being done in Zurich. So it was shot from the 17th of August until September of 1976 Relatively brief shoot. There's the man of the hour himself, just Franco with his trademark trusty cigarettes. He was seldom without one in films or indeed in real life. The topic of, you know, are you ever going to give up smoking was broached to him on more than one occasion. And I remember him saying in one interview, oh, I'm so used to smoking that if I were to quit, all the cells in my body would rebel and it would kill me. Well, who knows? But regardless, he did live to a nice old age. So there's something to be said for that. But yes, this movie followed very quickly on the heels of Jack the Ripper, which had wrapped in Zurich on the 25th of June, 1976 And then after this, Franco shot Love Letters of a Portuguese Nun, also in Portugal, starting early in November, 1976 So you're looking at about a month's worth of breathing room in between each of these projects, at least in this cluster of films.