Building the Ultimate Superhero

Richard Harrison plays a banker who gets transformed into a superhero against his will in the 1968 fantasy adventure FANTABULOUS INC.

Richard Harrison is not a name most moviegoers in the U.S. are probably familiar with but film buffs around the world know him as one of the American actors who relocated to Italy in the early sixties and enjoyed a long and prolific career there in B-movie fare and low-budget genre films. In a career of more than 100 feature films, there may not be a bona fide classic among them but there are several cult gems and entertaining oddities to enjoy and one of my favorites is La Donna, il Sesso e il Superuomo (English title: Fantabulous Inc., 1968), directed by Sergio Spina. Although it is usually classified as a Eurospy flick released in the wake of the James Bond craze, it is actually a fantasy/adventure/satire that sends up the whole concept of the superhero in comic books and films. It also works as a subversive cautionary tale about the dangers of fascism delivered in the form of a comic cartoon.

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Fashion in the Nuclear Age

Models wearing metal sculptures as clothes are featured in a bizarre fashion show in the opening to William Klein’s WHO ARE YOU, POLLY MAGGOO? (1966).

The fashion industry has always been fair game as a target for satirists but the majority of movies about the fashion world have mostly been glamorizations of it (Funny Face, The Devil Wore Prada) or serious validations of the business like the 1995 documentary Unzipped featuring designer Isaac Mizrahi or The September Issue (2007), which focuses on Anna Wintour, editor-in-chief of Vogue. It is much harder to come up with memorable satires on the subject although the supremely silly Zoolander (2001) is fun and Robert Altman’s Ready to Wear aka Pret-a-Porter (1994) is an amusing minor trifle. One of the few exceptions is Qui Etes-Vous, Polly Maggoo? (English title: Who Are You, Polly Maggoo?, 1966), the feature film debut of renowned photographer William Klein, which brilliantly skewers the profession while dazzling you with its visual inventiveness and giddy high spirits.

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