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Quacks can’t express how much I love LORD LOVE A DUCK (1966)

Posted by Daniel Metz

Dir. George Axelrod
Alamo Drafthouse Ritz, 1/20/10, 11:59pm

Weird Wednesday is probably the greatest thing Austin, Texas has going for it. It is a unique film experience and it highlights a cinema that most have never heard of and almost no one gets to see regularly. As a matter of fact, I actually moved to Austin on a Wednesday just so that I could go to Weird Wednesday on my first evening in town (7/2/08: Jamaa Fanaka’s Emma Mae with Fanaka in person!). I am just trying to establish my investment in this series so that you understand what happened this past week.

As great as the series is, it may well be one of the most difficult things in Austin, Texas. Often after the show, as my friends complain to me about dragging them to see a deadly slow and wretched movie like The Female Bunch, I explain to them that it is to me like a religious flagellation. You’ve got to constantly watch bad cinema in order to truly understand good cinema.

More importantly, it is within the horrible cinema that the most beautiful flowers can bloom. In the case of the The Female Bunch, for instance, that flower is a drunken Lon Chaney Jr., who stumbles through the Russ Meyer rip-off in a way that only a fallen angel can. Still, this concept, while theoretically nice, is challenging in practice, and I have lost a lot of film-partners along the way.

Every once in a while something about Weird Wednesday will click; maybe its the weather, maybe the make-up of the audience, the new-release schedule of the time or some mystical coming together of fates, I don’t know, but sometimes the experience is truly beautiful. I am not talking about when Lars sneaks in a really good movie like Rolling Thunder or Point Blank. I mean when an exploitation film is so electric that everyone in the crowd is changed forever.

From my experience, I will say that these films fit that classification:

8/13/08: The Apple
9/10/08: Kidnapped Coed
10/1/08: All the Sins of Sodom
11/12/08: Tarzana, the Wild Girl
12/17/08: The Witch Who Came From the Sea
1/21/09: The Day Time Ended
3/4/09: The Sinful Dwarf
4/8/09: ‘Gator Bait
8/26/09: White Line Fever
9/2/09: Teen Lust
9/23/09: Eugenie
10/7/09: Unholy Rollers
10/14/09: The Wild Pussycat
11/13/09: Convention Girls

For every one of these films, though, that makes us re-evaluate what taste, class, and art are, there are two or three films like Supervan, the film about the “freak out” van competition. These films make you want to poke your eyes our and fall asleep, but that is what why Weird Wednesday is so great. You never know what you are going to get.

And now, after all that, I can finally get to Lord Love a Duck, which I am now placing firmly in the Weird Wednesday presentation pantheon. This satire on American life and teen pics is hysterically funny, full of beautiful gags, and, above all else, absolutely mad. The print was gorgeous, too, preserved excellently and with the subtle grainyness of mid-1960s lower-budget black and white movies but nearly without any scratches or deterioration.

The film stars Roddy McDowall, whose role as Mollymauk is one of the great romantic leads in the cinema. His syrupy voice, as in his role as Cornelius in the great ape caper, melts into your heart as his face exudes confusion and superiority. His character is an enigma, charmed and brilliant but tortured and twisted; he is, after all, a murderer, but he is a murderer for love. The fact that he is clearly 37 years-old is a little strange for a high-school senior, but that only adds to his indescribable charm.

Thankfully, the object of his affection, frustration, and hypnotism is the beautifully named and even more beautiful looking Tuesday Weld. Weld is legitimately a great actress that has no business in exploitation except maybe she didn’t realize what she was doing. Her beauty and her command of the screen are overwhelming. She plays a young ingénue who is searching for fame; in one of the film’s more touching scenes, she confesses with great clarity and little self-awareness that all she wants is to be loved by everyone at school.

There are moments of narrative messiness in the film. As part of its ranging satire, the film changes from a high school comedy to a beach film, briefly to a young romance yarn and finally to a murder farce. This mucks up the pacing a bit, but each segment is strong in its own right.

I am not getting across how sidesplittingly funny this film is. Maybe that’s for the best. Stephen will hopefully capture some of the hi jinx in his review.

Nevertheless, I cannot possibly leave out a brief discussion of the sweater scene. Weld tricks her father into shopping for cashmere sweaters for her. She tries on a series of thirteen sweaters, all named with near-explicit colors like “Periwinkle Pussy.” The father-daughter relationship is strained here, as they both get to orgasmic climax through the whole experience. And that is not a joke or an overstatement. They moan, scream, make “O faces,” the whole nine yards. It was a moment that had the whole theatre laughing loudly and for minutes without end. Truly the greatest laugh that I have witnessed in an audience in Austin.

Oh, that reminds me of so much more. There is a great scene in which Weld seduces her principle in a crass and hilarious way in order to get him to improve her grade in “plant skills.” There is a scene where, upset, Weld tries to play the game “undress in front of mommy’s place.” I am not even mentioning the alternate titles for Bikini Widow. Oh, I’m too excited. Do whatever you can to watch this movie. This is the year of the duck.