Des diamants pour l'enfer (1975)

User Rating:

4.4/10   

Director:

Jesus Franco

Writer:

Marius Lesoeur (writer)

Release Date:

1975 (France)

Genre:

Crime | Drama | Thriller

Plot:

A small-time hood brings the attention of the law with an insurance scam and diamond theft, but things...

Plot Keywords:

Murder | Diamond | Diamond Theft | Electric Shock | Corruption

Cast

Lina Romay	...	Shirley Fields
Martine Stedil	...	Martine (as Martine Steed)
Nathalie Chape
Roger Darton	...	Milton Warren
Ronald Weiss	...	Carlo de Bries
Denis Torre	...	Jailer
Frieda Altstadt
Raymond Hardy	...	Gangster Boss
Jesus Franco	...	Bill (as Clifford Brown)
Joëlle Le Quément	...	Cora (as Joëlle Le Quement)

Also Known As:

Women Behind Bars (UK) (video title) (USA)
Visa pour mourir (France) (video title)

Runtime:

75 min

Country:

France | Belgium

Language:

French

Color:

Color

Aspect Ratio:

2.35 : 1

Sound Mix:

Mono

Certification:

France:X | Australia:R

Filming Locations:

Antibes, Alpes-Maritimes, France

Company:

Brux International Pictures

Trivia:

The film was one of 74 titles banned in the UK as a video nasty by the DPP.

Banned in Britain! (ho-hum)

This is one of only two Jess Franco movies to have been banned in Britain during the "video nasties" scandal of the early 1980's, which only goes to show you that the BBFC (the British Board of Film Censors) needed to see A LOT more Jess Franco movies. This movie is pretty sick, but it is nowhere near as sick as earlier Franco WIP movies like "Barb-Wire Dolls" or "Greta, the Wicked Warden" (another Franco WIP movie "Women in Cellblock 9" was much more recently censored by the modern-day BBFC for underage nudity, and is currently unavailable in America at all).

This movie actually has a surprisingly intricate, if pretty off-the-wall, plot that kind of gets in the way of the depravity. After some diamonds are heisted from a Chinese junk, the only surviving thief is shot dead by his girlfriend "Shirley" (Lina Romay). The girlfriend is sentenced to a brutal prison, but many suspect she knows more than she's telling about the missing diamonds including the prison warden, who forces his prison snitch mistress to befriend "Shirley", and a crooked insurance investigator, who it turns out was in on what was to have been a fake heist before he and his partners were double-crossed by "Shirley" and her boyfriend.

The movie has the typical Francoesque longeurs of lesbian frolicking while the director performs the cinematic equivalent of a full body cavity search on the actresses with his beloved zoom lens. The two scenes that probably most incensed the BBFC though were the scenes of a naked woman being brutally whipped (old hat by the mid 1970's) and the scene of a naked Lina Romay receiving electroshocks in a very uncomfortable place (and I don't just mean the dank, barren cell). While this may seem the kind of incendiary mixture of violence and sex that tends to raise British censorial hackles, the violence is impossible to take seriously due to the incompetent film-making. The whip, for instance, leaves no mark on the girl in long shots but only in obviously fake close-ups, while the warden on the English-language soundtrack keeps demanding the prisoner "kneel down and beg forgiveness", despite the fact she's clearly chained to the ceiling. In the electroshock scene, Romay has her hands hand-cuffed in front of her and she could easily pull off the wire that is supposedly causing her searing pain (and as in "Barb Wire Dolls", her miming of electric convulsions is also pretty unconvincing). On the other hand, if there's anything at all "sexy" about these scenes it's simply that these women are nude at the time and have very nice bodies (especially Romay)--it has nothing to do with the ridiculous "torture" they're supposedly undergoing.

This movie didn't deserve the censorship it received, but conversely, it also doesn't deserve the fame/notoriety/whatever it has received for having been censored. It might be one of Franco's better WIP movies, but it's certainly not one of his best movies, and definitely not a great movie by any standard.