I’ll bet most fans of Jack Hill’s Switchblade Sisters didn’t discover it until Quentin Tarantino’s revival distribution company Rolling Thunder chose it as one of their first releases in 1996. I only caught up with it on VHS but liked it immediately — it was like nothing I’d seen before. A genuine grindhouse exploitation classic made in the waning days when such films still drew big audiences in urban theaters looking for R-rated triple bill fare, Switchblade apparently did not do did well on its first release, despite having a high reputation.
I think the reason for that was that it was too good for its own market. Jack Hill had just finished a completely trashy formula ‘cheerleaders’ movie that delivered what the grindhouse audience wanted — sexy women, nudity and violence. Switchblade Sisters is pretty strong stuff for content, language and dangerous ideas, but its real graces are things that exploitation audiences don’t need: a great screenplay, excellent acting and taut direction. The raincoat crowd would prefer more T&A, while the mainstream audience would avoid the title like the plague — it sounds like something Travis Bickle would foolishly take Cybill Shepherd to on 42nd Street.
Arrow Video not only gives us Jack Hill’s (best?) movie in an excellent-quality scan, disc producer Neil Snowdon has arranged a handsome set of extras that help us fully ingest this grindhouse opus. It’s a good show to explain exactly what in ’70s trash filmmaking so strongly appeals to Quentin Tarantino.
Excited to do a movie about gangs, Jack Hill first insisted on making it about a girl gang, and then had the idea of hanging the central conflict on a flip-flop reading of Othello. It works far, far better than one would expect.
Pint-sized hellion Lace (Robbie Lee) runs the vicious girl gang The Dagger Debs. Egged on by the one-eyed Patch (Monica Gayle), Lace roughs up her own members, and likes to pick on the insecure Donut (Kitty Bruce). Lace at first clashes with but then recruits Maggie (Joanne Nail), a newcomer who soon proves to be tougher than any of them, especially when fighting back against the lesbian prison wardmistress, Mom Smackley (Kate Muragh). The problem is that The Dagger Debs are an auxillary of The Silver Daggers, a pack of loutish ingrates that use and discard them and abuse their loyalty. Lace is strongly attached to Dominic (Asher Brauner), the Silver Dagger leader. He rapes Maggie, who stays quiet about the attack; the malicious Patch promotes the notion that Maggie is trying to steal Dominic to goad Lace down a destructive path of revenge.
There’s a weird sisterly solidarity among this group of sociopaths, and when Lace betrays the Daggers to their main rivals The Crabs, an ambush at a roller skating rink finishes with the wrong person being blasted with a shotgun. The rivalry between Dominic and his opposite number Crabs (Chase Newhart) ends up being secondary concern. Patch continues to manipulate Lace to ignite a showdown, but events go in a different direction. With the remaining male gangbangers sulking like cowards, Maggie rallies the girl gang and re-names them The Jezebels to reflect their emancipation from The Silver Daggers. She aligns with another girl gang, the black Marxists led by Muff (Marlene Clark), to wipe out the Crabs in open warfare on the streets.
What hardly sounds like a high-powered filmmaking concept IS, thanks to the leadership of Jack Hill and his inspirational direction of a startlingly effective cast. Most of his actors had theatrical experience but hadn’t been asked to carry a full film performance. They’re superb, especially considering the movie’s high camp value — we go in expecting no story and lame dialogue and are instead captivated. Yes, the drama is aimed at an unreal high-genre level of exaggeration, but it works because the performances reach the same giddy pitch of earnest absurdity. The all-male writing team come up with a remarkably pro-female script — the femmes are more effective gangsters than their male counterparts, who are mostly selfish, sexist and outright disgusting.
Leading the charge are the three top-billed female characters. Robbie Lee’s Lace looks truly underaged. She speaks in a baby voice that toughens into a shocking snarl. She sounds like a young Tuesday Weld, or Melanie Griffith’s teenager Delly in Arthur Penn’s Night Moves, if Delly were a cold-blooded killer. Lace dresses like a biker chick, with a leather choker and gloves with metal knuckles. When she has a mid-film breakdown, suddenly distraught at her bleak prospects for a romantic, mainstream-domestic future, Ms. Lee has us firmly in Lace’s corner… we sympathize completely with the little psycho. When pulp fantasy is working, real emotions can emerge from a completely artificial construct. How else could I sit through all those Science Fiction groaners?
Joanne Nail’s Maggie is the most physical of the three; when she decides to seduce Crab she makes herself up to look alluring, yet wears the smile of a hungry shark. Maggie has definite authority — she’s the Jezebel with the take-charge attitude, who rebels against the men. She also fights the best. She’s commonly dressed in leather hot pants, high boots and a belt that terminates in six symbolically unsubtle metal balls that hang in front.
Monica Gayle’s sleek, cool Patch handles her ‘Iago’ role with aplomb, pushing Lace this way and that and exulting when her manipulations are effective. We’re not sure of Patch’s exact motivation — does she possibly want Lace for herself, or does she want Lace out of the way? Patch’s treachery is bad news all around, mostly for the leading male characters. Her costume almost seems modeled on that of Anita Pallenberg in Vadim’s Barbarella — the slim actress looks terrific in black, with an eyepatch decorated with a colorful butterfly.
Actresses in movies made at this level often barely know what the story is about, except that they need to be ready to strip down or kick-box at any given moment. Hill gives them real characters to play and guides and modulates their performances, which is why the acting dramatics of Switchblade Sisters is so arresting. There’s also a lot of subtle expression going on between the hyped tough-girl dramatics. We may think some of the situations are silly but the characters never are. Jack Hill aptly calls his approach ‘operatic.’
Jack Hill paces his picture well, delivering some really disturbing content. The trashy ‘girl’s prison’ episode leaps to life when the Dagger Debs rush to defend Maggie, just because they admire her grit. But the two rape scenes are really rough, with very un-P.C. aftermaths. The good-looking but thoroughly loathsome Dominic follows Maggie home the first time he meets her, and forces himself on her even though her mother is in another bedroom. The gang definition of toughness sloughs off this kind of abuse. Maggie is none the less attracted to Dominic afterward — the fact that she hates him makes no difference.
The story’s tough context gives us some regulation black militants that carry Mao’s Little Red Book, spout slogans and have converted a ‘fifties sedan into a tank; despite the welcome presence of Marlene Clark there isn’t much imagination at work there. But Hill also has Maggie’s mother routinely pay the rent by having sex with the building super, an ugly setup that helps define the Jezebels’ ugly world view. The rival gang leader Crabs has a racket going in which he takes urban renewal ‘bootstrap’ money under false pretenses, and uses it to finance his drug dealing.
The impressive production makes good use of scattered locations, including a fully functioning roller rink. The location for the Crabs’ phony social services office looks fine, although we’re told that this was one of the final films shot there — it’s a corner of a city street set on the MGM back lot, one that Gene Kelly might have rollerskated on way back in It’s Always Fair Weather. Hill uses it well.
The film’s relative lack of sex and nudity were likely not enough to satisfy the raincoat crowd, and the good fight action is in service of the drama, instead of additional martial arts gore & cruelty. The bottom line is that, like several of Jack Hill’s films, Switchblade Sisters is too sophisticated and good to fit neatly into its intended commercial exploitation slot. As such it pretty much killed off Jack Hill’s independent career, just as the Steven Spielberg era began. But now, taken in as a retro grindhouse spectacle, it comes off as quite an inspired piece of work.
