Stars in B-Movies Blogathon 2025: Mary Woronov and Paul Bartel and Eating Raoul

"I knew what was art and what was shit. But sometimes the shit was more interesting." -- Mary Woronov

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The first film I ever saw in which Paul Bartel and Mary Woronov both appear was Rock 'n' Roll High School, but I didn't start to associate them as collaborators until I saw Bartel's Eating Raoul on HBO in 1984. I had seen Death Race 2000 by then, too, but it didn't register for me that it was their first film together because Bartel, who directed the film, does not appear in it. They ultimately made 17 films together, sometimes playing husband and wife, sometimes with Bartel nowhere to be seen in front of the camera. Their best known collaborations were in films written and/or directed by Bartel himself (most famously in Eating Raoul in 1983), but they were a ubiquitous part of the company of actors who worked at Roger Corman's New World Pictures in the 1970s. I always loved it whenever they showed up in films together, and even when they showed up in films without the other.

Both Paul and Mary came to cinema from the New York underground. Bartel came up directing experimental films before graduating to the genuinely weird Private Parts in 1971, while Mary was one of Andy Warhol's proteges/superstars. Bartel's short film, "Secret Cinema," was admired by the likes of Brian De Palma, Martin Scorsese, and Steven Spielberg, the latter of whom hired Bartel to remake it for his Amazing Stories TV show in the 1980s, complete with a role for Mary. Private Parts was produced by Roger Corman's brother, Gene, which put Bartel on Roger's radar. He hired Bartel for second unit work on Big Bad Mama, and the work Paul did on that film convinced Roger that Paul was a "car" guy. Bartel was not a car guy, but he took the job he was offered anyway. That film was Death Race 2000, which according to Bartel, was not what Roger Corman wanted in the movie. Corman wanted a violent exploitation movie, and while Death Race 2000 was a violent exploitation movie, it was also a weird satire. Corman hated it, but it gave Bartel the excuse to bring Mary to Hollywood, and in the fullness of time became a substantial cult hit. My own favorite of Bartel's early roles in front of the camera is in Allan Arkush's and Joe Dante's Hollywood Boulevard, in which Bartel plays Erich Von Leppe, a martinet director of a dreadful low budget horror movie. At one point, he gives motivation to the guy in the suit playing a giant radioactive monster ("to step on as many people as possible") and in another, he fatuously claims that his film is a call for nuclear controls in our time. Mary is along for the ride here and gets some zingers of her own, but the film was made on a bet between producer Jonathan Kaplan and Roger Corman that they could make the cheapest film ever made at New World Pictures. A substantial portion of the film is clips from other films. In one regard, Hollywood Boulevard sums up the appeal of Paul and Mary in so far as it's a film that's loaded with sleazy exploitation elements, but which still manages a certain goofy innocence. Paul and Mary were able to work that same kind of alchemy in Eating Raoul.

I first encountered Eating Raoul in Heavy Metal magazine as a comics adaptation by underground cartoonist Kim Deitch long before I ever saw the movie. The comic manages to capture Bartel's deadpan direction and sense of banal perversion with uncanny accuracy even though it is, perhaps, more graphically flamboyant. The plot of the film finds the 1970s winding down and the 1980s, with its new conservatism, ramping up. It follows Paul and Mary Bland, a nice conservative couple who dream of opening their own restaurant. Paul has a job as a wine seller whose snobbish tastes in wine get him fired, while Mary works as a hospital nutritionist. Their apartment building is inhabited by swingers, much to Paul and Mary's dismay. One such man wanders into Paul and Mary's apartment by mistake and attempts to rape Mary. Meanwhile, Paul is pulled into the swinger's party down the hall where he encounters Doris the Dominatrix. Extricating himself, he returns home where he finds Mary being assaulted. Paul bashes him on the head with a frying pan. As they go through his wallet, they discover that he has $600. Mary discovers that Doris has given Paul her business card. The next day, one of Mary's sleazy patients finds that card and decides that he wants a piece of "Doris," convinced that it's Mary's alias away from the hospital. Soon enough, Paul has to bash his head in with a pan, too, and they discover that HE has a wad of cash, too. After Mary is turned down for a loan to open their restaurant--a loan conditioned on Mary sleeping with the bang manager--the couple decides to go into business. They don't know anything about the culture they're entering into, so they approach the real Doris for pointers. In real life, she's a chatty single mother trying to wrangle her toddler while giving advice on the finer points of sex work to the Blands. They set themselves up for business and are soon murdering their way through the swinger community. Mary asks Paul if they can buy a new frying pan because she doesn't like the idea of cooking in the one they use to commit murders. They are caught in flagrante by locksmith/thief Raoul, who wants to enter into their business as a partner. Raoul's job is to get rid of the bodies, which he does by selling them to a cat food business. He's also taking the victims' car keys and selling the cars to a chop shop. Raoul also has his eye on Mary and begins to seduce her. Paul will have none of that, and begins to sabotage their relationship. The climax of their career as murderers is a big swinger's party thrown by the bank manager, where the Blands find a target rich environment. Things come to a head with Raoul, and Mary has a decision to make. Raoul is very much on the menu...

As perverse as it is, Eating Raoul is about liberation. The Blands are as uptight as they come, and when they begin to transgress, it provides them with an exit from the straightjacket of their basic decency. That basic decency turns out to have been a sham. The ease with which they slide into deviance and atrocity is startling, especially given the stark banality of how they are initially depicted. Eating Raoul is an economic horror movie in as much as it is a horror movie at all. I say that it is a horror movie of a kind, something along the line of The Honeymoon Killers or (perhaps intentionally) The Corpse Grinders. It has the deadpan of 1970s exploitation a la directors like Andy Sidaris or Al Adamson down pat, but where those filmmakers struggle with the limitations of their talents to get this effect, Bartel finds comic possibility in the blank facade of exploitation. Certainly, the image of Mary done up in her various costumes are droll commentaries on the vapid sexual imaginations of not-very-creative people. Mary played dominatrix-y roles in other films--certainly Principal Togar in Rock 'n' Roll High School is of a piece--so it's not a surprise when Doris pronounces her "a natural" when she play-acts a domme voice in their first meeting. What IS a surprise is the way the film undercuts this by putting her into a Minnie Mouse outfit to satisfy the kinks of one particular victim. Mary, more than Paul, is trying on sexual personae in spite of herself as she dresses up for these men, and when she finally takes notice of Raoul, it's a tipping point for her. The viewer can't imagine her actually having sex with Paul. Indeed, they sleep in separate twin beds. This is one of the film's best meta commentaries on its stars given that Paul Bartel himself was gay. But we can definitely imagine her in the arms of a hot latin lover. The film rightly separates this into categories of love (with Paul) and lust (with Raoul). Under Raoul's influence, her natural sexiness comes to the forefront even though it was never really submerged much below her nurse's uniform in the early part of the film. Raoul is as liberating as kink for her. The persona that arrives at the swinger's party at the end is not even an act at that point. It's probably not a coincidence that the uptight dominance of Principal Togar is associated with fascism while the Blands embrace of social transgression is their way to freedom.

Bartel for his part is playing a variant on the unhip music teacher from Rock 'n' Roll High School. Paul Bland is an effete snob who demands to stock Le Fitte Rothschild champagne in a neighborhood liquor store that we first see being robbed. He tends to whine when he doesn't get his way. And he's petty. When he suspects Raoul is having an affair with Mary, he suggests a supplement of saltpeter to keep him impotent. Bartel himself was very much not like Paul Bland and occasionally referred to some of his early work as pornography. The banality of Paul and Mary almost undersells the film's most outrageous jokes, the creme de la creme of which is the hot tub gag where Paul, impatient to be done with these people, throws a space heater to electrocute them all en masse. The film has occasionally been criticized for its restraint, which is an odd thing to say about a comedy this perverse. The tone does a lot to insinuate its themes rather than beat an audience over the head.

The Blands appeared in one further movie, as minor characters in Jim Wynorski's Chopping Mall, and were set to appear in a sequel to Eating Raoul later in the decade before the plug was pulled by its backers. Mary Woronov would co-star once more with Robert Beltran (Raoul himself) in Night of the Comet, which, along with Rock 'n' Roll High School, are bigger cult hits than Eating Raoul. I always perk up when Mary or Paul appear in other films (my favorite of Mary's later performances is in Hellhole as the lesbian mad psychiatrist in charge of a women's asylum for the criminally insane). But Eating Raoul itself endures. It wound up in the Criterion Collection, which gives it a stamp of approval for film snobs. Better still, it still plays marvelously. The comedy still works. It's a testament to both Bartel's gift for offbeat stories and to the perfect fusion of actors and comedic sensibility. Bartel's later films as a director--Lust in the Dust, say, or Scenes From the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills--don't have nearly the same bite, perhaps because Bartel himself does not appear in them. Which is to say that Bartel made films better whenever he was on screen.

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This post is part of this year's Favorite Stars in B-Movies Blogathon, once again hosted by Brian over at Films From Beyond the Time Barrier. Check out the other writing and say hi for me.

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