One of my most anticipated films of the year! While I may have spent quite a bit of time recently exploring hardcore cinema my deepest love remains the softcore erotic thrillers and dramas of the 1980s and 1990s. Craven capitalist exercises that existed because of the combination of the rise of the video rental market, the decreasing cost of premium cable and the increasing stigma around hardcore as America lurched rightward in the 1980s.
Despite the overarching reasons for the genre’s success being driven by market conditions it did give rise to some incredible artists that worked in that space. For a truly fantastic deep dive on the erotic thriller I recommend Anthony Penta’s We Kill For Love.
Think of Stella Stevens: The Last Starlet as essential side story or companion piece after having viewed We Kill For Love and having dipped into the directorial efforts of Andrew Stevens. Night Eyes 3 is probably my favorite erotic thriller of all time and is one that doesn’t feature Stella Stevens but she looms large over the script. There’s a child of divorce in the movie with the other parent back in Tennessee, a statuesque blonde actress who confesses to her new lover that her name is an affectation and she’s just a woman from Yazoo City and a tinge of melancholy and bitterness. It’s kind of the perfect Christmas movie.
Andrew Stevens DTV erotica is littered with Freudian recreations of his mother in abstraction. I’d read as much as I could find about the custody battle for Andrew, Stella Stevens divorce and how her career ambitions shaped Andrew’s life as I could find but resources were limited. News that Andrew Stevens was making a biopic of his mother was great news! He’d have access to people and personal writings of hers that no one else would and for confirmed Stevens fans like myself there’s the reality that a Stella Stevens biopic directed by Andrew is functionally a psychosexual autobiography for him. Even if he doesn’t outright say “here’s how my mom fucked me up” we’ll be able to see how his mom fucked him up.
Early on in the film Andrew Stevens said as he went through his mother’s effects he discovered that a lot of what people hadn’t seen was his mother’s journaling or correspondence and that he wanted to “bring that life” in the documentary.
If you guessed director who made multiple films in the 1990s where he functionally cast someone as his mother has upgraded to actress literally cast as his mother so she can read from his mother’s journals you win. When actress Lindsie Kongsore is introduced doing her best Stella Stevens, friends, I popped. Holy shit. Director who makes Freudian choices makes the most Freudian choice.
The film is full of interviews with friends, admirers and collaborators of varying worth. Some of them made little sense until I did snooping. Why is Vivica Fox so heavily involved? She and Andrew Stevens produce a lot of movies together. Quentin Tarantino is the most dubious. He seems incapable of calculating Stevens life in any metric except his amusement at her work. He says it’s “no big deal” that she didn’t book The Getaway because she booked Slaughter. Tarantino are you stupid?
The documentary does what I wanted which is to color in the contradictions in how Andrew perceived his mother. On one hand she wounded him deeply and lots of her early decisions about where he should live were misguided. On the other hand his mother was a saint who did no wrong.
Something I didn’t expect was the film does devote some mileage to Stevens decline from Alzheimer’s Disease and Andrew’s complex feelings about not living in Los Angeles when her health began to rapidly decline. This film is not just about forgiving the director’s mother but also the director