Coleman Francis

Many directors started out as actors who were fed up starring in other people’s claptrap and sought to share their unique visions from the directors’ chair. Not always, but sometimes, these people with such independent visions make films not easily digested by the mainstream. This anomaly includes such people as Stroheim, Welles, Cassavetes, and… Coleman Francis. Wait. Did I just reference Coleman Francis in the same sentence as Erich von Stroheim and Orson Welles? Well, yes, like any work by those men, there is a distinct authorship in Francis’s films as a director.

In his lifetime, Coleman Francis was better known as a bit player, who starred in such B films as T-Bird Gang and The Jailbreakers. Like Cassavetes or Stroheim, he is better known posthumously as a director of a handful of films that in the grand tradition of Erich von, snub their nose at Hollywood conventions, and commit their peculiar visions to celluloid either within or without the system- mainstream acceptance be damned. Whereas Stroheim, Welles and Cassavetes advanced the film language, Francis set it back about forty years.

Between 1961 and 1965, Francis wrote and directed a trio of grimy, washed-out Grade Z genre pictures, with Anthony Cardoza as producer: The Beast of Yucca Flats, The Skydivers and Night Train to Mundo Fine (now better known as Red Zone Cuba). Beast has been lauded as an all-time bad movie for quite some time, but the latter two films have gained a new audience thanks to their inclusion in the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 sweepstakes.

Visionaries do not act alone. They have inseparable companions to aid them in realizing that vision. In the films of Coleman Francis, Anthony Cardoza is an important ingredient. Not only did he produce all three of Francis’ pieces, he also acted in prominent roles in the last two. He saw it fit to literally immerse himself in his director’s unique morality plays. In Skydivers, he is Harry, whose infidelity meets a stern retribution. In Red Zone, he and Francis play two of the ex-cons on an impressionistic journey of plunder. Did Cardoza cast himself in order to save money? Perhaps the two filmmakers were so close to the project that they decided to play two of these horrible human beings as the absolute filth they envisioned them to be.

In the twilight of Coleman Francis’ life, his efforts as a filmmaker were forgotten. Once again, he was making a meager living in small roles in films B to Z. He was a fixture in films of Russ Meyer and Ray Dennis Steckler. In Motorpsycho, Meyer gave him a prominent role as Haji’s husband (yeah right!), who could be a lecherous cousin of Bert Remsen’s character in Nashville. It is a well-known story in the annals of Grade Z-dom that Steckler had just wrapped Body Fever, but when he saw Francis in the gutter, he suddenly created a scene which showcased the hungry actor, and his off-the-cuff scenes actually would add weight to the plot! In an interview, Steckler had lamented that Hollywood had given Francis the cold shoulder because of his alcohol problem. It is sadly ironic that one of his last (and tiny) roles was in Meyer’s Beyond the Valley of the Dolls… as a drunk.

Thanks to the MST3K crowd, Francis is better known today as a director. And despite the foreground heckling of the animated silhouettes, it is also because of this treatment that Francis’ films are arguably better known today than ever before. Finally, after decades of neglect, even after Francis lies buried, his uncompromising trio of films is back in the public eye. They are a durable portrait of a justifiably bitter man- one that was ignored by the system and then retaliated by creating work which challenged our conditioned responses to cinema, and which gave us stark, bleak portraits of humanity.