WINTER OF DISCONTENT: Ilsa, Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheikhs

During the exegesis of diplomacy, patriotism and sensitive international relations that typified the Bush administration, it still amazes me that Dubya fumbled the ball so embarrassingly in terms of media awareness vis-à-vis his incursion into Iraq. The portrayal of this god-given mission to safeguard oil supplies democracy as an illegal war could easily have been avoided if only he’d been savvy enough to sponsor a roadshow re-release of ‘Ilsa, Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheikhs’. Ninety minutes of Don Edmonds’s razor-sharp indictment of Middle Eastern barbarianism and even the staunchest liberal would have been baying for towel-head blood.

It’s the mid-1970s and Ilsa (Dyanne Thorne) hasn’t let such minor quibbles as being shot at the end of the first film detract from a success career change. Nor has the passage of 30 years dared to even suggest she might fall prey to the ageing process. No, siree, Ilsa is as blonde and buxom and brutal as ever. She’s now in the pay of Sheikh El-Sherif (Jerry Deloney) and all those skills she learned as a high ranking officer of the SS have set her in good stead. Ilsa is assisted by her lithe and dangerous henchwomen Satin (Tanya Boyd) and Velvet (Marilyn Joi), who are basically a version of Bambi and Thumper from ‘Diamonds Are Forever’ only topless and vibing strong Sapphic undertones.

The film opens with the delivery to El-Sherif’s palace of three coffins containing drugged and kidnapped women. Our luckless and soon-to-suffer trio are retail heiress Nora Edward (Colleen Brennan), European starlet Inga Lindstrom (Uschi Digard), and famous equestrian Alina Cordova (Haji). Ilsa begins to train these new arrivals for life in El-Sherif’s harem. Her training technique consists of plentiful lashes of her wagstick, several unspeakable threats should anyone refuse to co-operate, and occasional on-the-job words of advice re: the art of sexual pleasure (sample quotes: “lick, bitch”; “use the tongue – I will not tell you again”).

While Ilsa is busy in this respect – as well as preparing out-of-favour harem girls for public auction – El-Sherif readies himself for a visit from Kaiser (Richard Kennedy), an American diplomat with vested interests in El-Sherif’s oil reserves, while considering the potential threat to himself presented by a sheikh from a neighbouring kingdom. El-Sherif is obsessed with power, as evidenced by the fact that he keeps his prepubescent cousin, the only living claimant to his throne, locked in a dungeon and fed on scraps.

Kaiser flies out from America, in the company of Adam (Max Thayer), a US naval commander with ties to the CIA. During the flight, Adam tells Kaiser that he has a spy in El-Sherif’s camp. Their conversation on the plane is intercut with scenes of Ilsa training Nora, Inga and Alina, Ilsa preparing the slaves to be sold, and the auction itself, the timeline suggestion that in the ’70s it took several days to fly from the US to the Middle East.

The political intrigue that follows is complicated by Ilsa’s instant attraction to Adam. After some initial pussyfooting around, they soon get down to business. Adam demonstrates a seduction technique to make Valentino jealous: he hacks her dress open with a flick knife and softly murmurs “Spread your legs, Ilsa.” Smooth, Adam; reeeeal smooth.

Meanwhile, Adam’s belly-dancing spy is discovered and persuaded to talk. El-Sherif evinces an oozingly insincere hospitality towards the Americans, all the while planning how best to rid himself of them. Kaiser returns to America, while Adam elects to remain. El-Sherif voices displeasure at Ilsa’s dalliance with him and orders her to kill him. When she prevaricates, El-Sherif exacts a humiliating punishment. Adam, meanwhile, is hauled off the dungeon where he’s locked into a device that suggests Jigaw might have been doing some freelance work in the Arab nations.

But our plucky square-jawed hero is swiftly rescued by Ilsa (her political affiliations now clarified thanks to a bit of the old in-out-in-out from a good ol’ right-winger) and they ably overthrow El-Sherif’s highly-trained guards with a makeshift army of eunuchs and slave-girls. Apparently, thongs and belly-dancing costumes are appropriate combat gear for the latter. The sheer amount of topless women who get involved in the firefight probably account for why El-Sherif’s men suddenly lose the capacity to aim their guns effectively.

‘Ilsa, Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheikhs’ contains less gore and torture than its predecessor, but its quota of violence against women remains consistent. The most cynical example is the exploding pessary which Ilsa designs, detonation occurring during intercourse. Elsewhere, the loathsome El-Sherif (a pantomime villain of the old school) gets his filthy non-Aryan paws on a succession of white women, while Ilsa is complicit in acts of torture, trafficking and sexual subjugation. Still, good triumphs in the final reel: our former she-wolf gets her come-uppance, El-Sherif gets his, and the Americans get the oil. So that’s all right, then.

WINTER OF DISCONTENT: Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS

Silly me, there I was expecting ‘Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS’ to be a crude piece of T&A Nazisploitation. And it turned out to be so much more. More than I could possibly have anticipated.

‘Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS’ is no less than an historically accurate and profoundly important sociological document. It’s true. It says so right at the start:

Just in case the resolution’s a bit shoddy, I’ll present those words with the gravity and integrity so obviously intended by the film’s producer, Herman Traeger:

The film you are about to see is based on documented fact. The atrocities shown were conducted as “medical experiments” in special concentration camps throughout Hitler’s Third Reich. Although these crimes against humanity are historically accurate, the characters depicted are composites of notorious Nazi personalities; and the events portrayed, have been condensed into one locality for dramatic purposes. Because of its shocking subject matter, this film is restricted to adult audiences only. We dedicate this film with the hope that these heinous crimes will never occur again.*

Thus it was that I was forced to re-evaluate my perceptions/expectations. Accordingly, I overlooked the bad grammar and that superfluous comma floating around in the third sentence and settled down to watch Don Edmonds’s searing exposé of the Third Reich’s inhumane programme of incarceration and medical research with an open mind. And thus is was I learned what they never taught me in school. What I’ve never encountered in, say, Alan Bullock’s ‘Hitler: A Study in Tyranny’ or Laurence Rees’s ‘Auschwitz: the Nazis and the Final Solution’.

Not just an important sociological document, this movie. It was downright freakin’ educational.

I learned that it was possible for a woman to be commandant of a concentration camp. I learned that standard issue SS uniforms were specially tailored for female officers …

… as were prison camp uniforms:

I learned that punishment by flogging necessitated the female guards tasked with carrying out the sentence going topless. A more perceptive interconnection between violence and eroticism I have yet to encounter in the filmic arts.

I learned that medical experimentation in the camps was driven by the thesis that “a carefully trained woman can withstand pain better than any man”. This put a fascinating spin on the repetitive scenes of big-breasted woman in SS uniforms torturing big-breasted women in prison uniforms. These weren’t simply exemplars of pre-torture-porn torture porn with a quasi-Sapphic overtone. No, siree. These scenes were freakin’ feminist.

I was fascinated by the “notorious Nazi personality” that was Ilsa (Dyanne Thorne), and her predilection – obviously a “documented fact” – for pressganging the male prisoners into providing sexual services. I felt there was perhaps a correlation between Ilsa’s obsession with proving her scientific thesis and the fact that so few men were able to satisfy her rampant libido. I found a probing psychological insight in the scenes where Ilsa punishes her lovers for their shortcomings by castrating them. This was obviously a highly sensitive distillation of a complex web of interrelationships perhaps most fully underpinned, in the final analysis, by the conflict between personal satisfaction and duty to the Reich.

I was amazed that in a true story, Ilsa’s lover/nemesis Wolf (Gregory Knoph) should be a German-born American, the conflicting nature of whose cultural heritage so explicitly mirrors Ilsa’s dichotomous personality. And the revelation as to Wolf’s remarkable ability, a trait that allows him gradually to reverse the master/slave relationship between them … whew, powerful stuff! And kudos to the writer for the subtlety of Wolf’s expository dialogue, which allows the full implications to diffuse slowly into the viewer’s subconscious rather than banging the audience over the head with them:

“When I reached puberty, I discovered something about myself that set me apart from the rest of the guys. Something that made me unique, I guess. One of a kind … I discovered that I can hold back as long as I want. I still can. All night if necessary. I guess that makes me a freak of nature. A sort of human machine. A machine that can set its controls to ‘fast’, ‘slow’ or ‘never’. And you know something? That ‘never’ control just about drove her up the wall.”

The rhythm and cadences of that monologue! The sparsity and brutal effectiveness of that man/machine metaphor! This could have been an early work by Mamet.

Yes, folks, there’s no doubt about it: ‘Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS’ is a classic of the wartime genre, worthy of comparison with ‘All Quiet on Breast Fun Front’, ‘We Muff-Dive at Dawn’, ‘A Minge Too Far’ and ‘Shagging Private Ryan’.




*I have been unable to substantiate a rumour that the first draft of this testament, prior to being edited by the publicity department, read as thus: “The film you are about to see is a complete load of bollocks. The atrocities shown were filmed on the cheap in the hope of making a quick buck. Although these crimes against humanity are the product of the filmmakers’ twisted imaginations, we’d like to fob you off with the suggestion that there’s some kind of historical basis to this slice of baloney. Because of its aesthetic of wall-to-wall tits and gratuitous scenes of torture, this film is restricted to adult audiences only. We dedicate this film with the hope that it makes fuckloads of money.”