1968
DIRECTOR: ROGER VADIM PRODUCER: DINO DE LAURENTIIS SCREENPLAY: TERRY SOUTHERN, ROGER VADIM, VITTORIO BONICELLI, CLEMENT BIDDLE WOOD, BRIAN DEGAS, CLAUDE BRULÉ, AND TUDOR GATES, BASED ON THE COMIC STRIP BY JEAN-CLAUDE FOREST STARRING: JANE FONDA (BARBARELLA), JOHN PHILLIP LAW (PYGAR), ANITA PALLENBERG (THE BLACK QUEEN AKA THE GREAT TYRANT), MILO O’SHEA (DURAND-DURAND/THE CONCIERGE), DAVID HEMMINGS (DILDANO), MARCEL MARCEAU (PROFESSOR PING), UGO TOGNAZZI (MARK HAND), CLAUDE DAUPHIN (PRESIDENT OF EARTH)
Barbarella
DINO DE LAURENTIIS CINEMATOGRAFICA/PARAMOUNT • COLOR, 98 MINUTES
In the year 40,000, Earth sends a sexy female agent to a sinister planet in search of a missing astronaut.
“It makes science fiction… something else.” So proclaimed the advertising campaign for Barbarella, a pop-art space fantasy starring Jane Fonda as Earth’s most alluring “astronavigatrix” of the year 40,000. At twenty-nine, Fonda had carved out a promising career as a dramatic and comedic talent in films such as Edward Dmytryk’s Walk on the Wild Side (1962) and the Oscar-winning Cat Ballou (1965) when she put on a spacesuit—and promptly took it off—in the first sci-fi to bring sex into outer space. Barbarella’s famous zero-gravity striptease that kicks off the movie captures an illustrious performer at her most wildly uninhibited.
When Italian producer Dino De Laurentiis offered Fonda Barbarella, an adaptation of the racy 1964 French comic strip by Jean-Claude Forest, the actress threw his letter in the trash. The role was originally intended for France’s leading sex symbol, Brigitte Bardot—who happened to be the ex-wife of Fonda’s then-husband, director Roger Vadim. Bardot and Sophia Loren had both turned it down, but Vadim convinced his wife to play Barbarella and to let him direct the spoof. “I explained to Jane,” Vadim later wrote, “that the time was approaching when science fiction and galactic-style comedies like Barbarella would be important.” Jane consented, rejecting lead roles in Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and Rosemary’s Baby (1968) to bring a comic-book vixen to the screen.
Dr. Strangelove (1964) co-screenwriter Terry Southern helped shape the comic into the “something totally original” Vadim hoped to create. The wafer-thin plot concerns Barbarella’s mission to the planet Lythion in her mod pink spaceship to locate astronaut Durand-Durand, played with maniacal glee by Milo O’Shea. En route, Barbarella crashes her ship (twice), is attacked by cannibalistic dolls, nearly pecked to death by lovebirds, and is subjected to the rigors of a machine that kills by pleasure. With each scrape, she loses more of her outré mini-costumes designed by Jacques Fonteray and Paco Rabanne, prompting critic Charles Champlin to observe, “She is both comical and stripped most of the time, which is about all you can ask of a comic strip.”
Roger Vadim directs Jane Fonda and John Phillip Law
Milo O’Shea and Jane Fonda
Anita Pallenberg as the Great Tyrant
Among Barbarella’s rescuers, lovers, and tormentors are John Phillip Law as the winged, angelic Pygar; Anita Pallenberg as the sultry Black Queen, tyrant of the sinful city of SoGo; and David Hemmings in a lively comic turn as a revolutionary leader fixated on the word “secret.” But it is Jane Fonda’s tousle-haired, false-eyelash-batting performance that makes the movie. Fonda later admitted suffering from bulimia and feeling plagued by insecurities during shooting. “Every morning,” she wrote in her autobiography, “I was sure that Vadim would wake up and realize he had made a terrible mistake—‘Oh my god! She’s not Bardot!’” Remarkably, none of her self-doubt appears on the screen. She is equal parts silly, sexy, and sincere.
The film’s poster touts Barbarella’s “sex-ploits” as “the most bizarre ever seen,” yet her escapades are actually quite tame. There are no sex scenes; Barbarella never even shares a kiss with her conquests. All sensuality is implied with a wink and a double entendre. Though, as New York Times critic Renata Adler pointed out, the jokes are “mainly at the expense of Barbarella, and of women,” our heroine gets the last laugh by triumphing over her aggressors. In the end, the liquid subterranean monster known as the Matmos spits out Barbarella, its evil defeated by her innocence. This movie heroine is allowed to be a paragon of purity without being virginal, and that’s a small triumph in itself.
Barbarella managed to shrug off its lackluster reviews to become a bona fide cult classic. Jane Fonda, who later divorced Vadim and rebelled against her sex-kitten image, eventually came to appreciate the film’s kitschy appeal, saying, “I think the jerry-built quality of the effects and the offbeat, camp humor give it a unique charm.” The actress has even volunteered to step back into her spaceship. “I have a dream: to do a sequel to Barbarella,” Fonda told the Los Angeles Times in 2011. “I think it could be funny—and feminist.”
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