This is one of the more beautiful French promo posters we’ve run across. It was created by Georges Allard and is the best work we’ve seen from him so far. He painted it for Propriété privée, which was actually a U.S. production originally released as Private Property. However we chose this masterpiece because it’s light years better than the U.S. promo.
Private Property premiered in the U.S. in April 1960, and reached France today the same year. It’s about two hustlers—Corey Allen and his dimwitted sidekick Warren Oates—who break into an empty Los Angeles house and spy on the fancy property next door, where Kate Manx and her husband live. Allen’s goal is to somehow charm, trick, or coerce Manx into a bed session with Oates, in repayment for a redhead who chose Allen over Oates sometime back. It’s just as creepy as it sounds, and Oates in particular is adept channeling the sense of inchoate menace needed for his role. Meanwhile Allen is whisperingly seductive, and Manx actually turns out to be susceptible to him because she’s neglected.
The movie was condemned by the National Catholic Legion of Decency for being highly suggestive. No shit. We wonder which bits steamed them up. Is it the part where Manx is understood to have skinny-dipped? Is it the constant undercurrent of infidelity? Is it the scene in which Manx wraps a belt around her own neck, symbolizing both masochism and masturbation? Oh yes, we bet that got them in an uproar. What about the wildly sexy reclining cowgirl pose she casually adopts at one point? How about that sweaty-faced moment in bed when she’s obviously thinking of Allen? Or that acrobatic maneuver when she’s laying down and sort of rolls onto her shoulders to pull her pants on over her bikini bottoms—with her ass aimed cameraward?
What do you mean indecent? Geez, you Catholic Legion people have dirty minds. Every woman tightens a belt around her own neck once in a while.
You know what gets you sweaty? Laying on a bed with a belt around your neck. Totally normal, though.
Ass shot? What do you mean? If your eyes are drawn between her legs that says everything about your eyes and nothing about the intent of the shot. Every woman puts on her pants that way.
She’s just reaching for something and reclining in a totally innocent and normal spread-legged way. Maybe it’s you so-called Decency people that are the problem.
It goes on and on. The movie is nouvelle vague influenced, but it isn’t in any way vague in the English sense of the word. Manx is ripe fruit ready to drop—on Allen’s dick. But remember—it’s not him but Oates she’s supposed to fall for. As Snoop Dogg once rhymed, “Ain’t no fun if the homies can’t have none.” Think there’s any chance that’ll actually happen though? Oates begins to suspect he’s being left out in the cold, while Allen has his own demons to wrestle. Either way hell hath no fury like a psycho scorned. It’s this nod toward male toxicity and its potential for violence that makes Private Property, for all its strange tone, worthy of viewing and discussion—though it’s too uneven to be truly good. But it’s a risk taking effort, and we always appreciate that.
And now we’ll turn it over to Pulp Intl.’s special consulting film critic, Angela the Sunbear.*
Hi, everyone. Angela here. As an animal that has a regular rutting cycle let me just tell you—that was some highly sexual shit.
