The most common archetypes adapted from Hollywood have always been the handsome, hard and padrone men. From the late seventies, we can find Padre Padrone (1977), the Godfather trilogy (1972) and Die Hard (1988). It isn’t very easy to find the same character model in a woman. If you try, you won’t find more than a dozen.
On the opposite side, in the real world, we have feminists, strikes for the rights of women, women in the army, female Prime Ministers etc. The reality was an absolutely mismatch for Hollywood. Actually, the first “hit” may have come from an outsider. This was the Greek movie Stella (1955), outlining a woman’s refusal to get married – as was expected of the common woman — and sacrifice her freedom at the altar of incumbent desires. But the worst kicking of this standard of Hollywood male characters came from Venus in Fur ( also known as “Paroxismus”) by Jesus Franco.
T
he story of this movie is based on a novella by Austrian author Leopold von Sacher Masoch. It tells the story of musician Jimmy Logan (James Darren), who finds the murdered body of a woman — the beautiful Wanda Reed (Maria Rohm). He remembers her from a party where he’d seen her leave mysteriously with a few men…
This film has been categorized as a horror/thriller, but is better described as an allegoric film, especially if the viewer is aware of the humanistic and socialist ideas of Masoch. The woman as a thing (for sex, and for beauty), as “something” on the side of man — as the dead body at the beginning of the movie. And then came a time when women started to win the respect of society, taking revenge for everything that they had simply accepted. Notice that the change in roles isn’t only the change to an equal situation between Woman and 
Man, but a complete change, taking place across the entire continent. The film opens in the heart (at Constantinople, a city that was the capital of two powerful empires – under both the Byzantine and Ottoman emperors — of the old world, only to reverse to the capital, not of a country, but of a new world. A city best known for its exotic and sexually driven carnival. Man is a live person but woman — in the form of Wanda — is a living dead person. An eternal symbol of repression among women. She has taken the man from a pathetic singer and led him into the slavery of her charms and her dominion…
From another view, some people have said that this movie is something of a crypto-erotic film, with semi-nudity and sadomasochistic scenes, included in a very beautifully illustrated direction with fanciful ideas which echo Dolce Vita and Vertigo and an endless confusion created for the dirty dreams of the citizens of the suburban. The persistence in bondage and torture scenes, plenty of them panoramic, supports this classification.
Read also
Venus in Fur at IMDb
Venus in Fur (film) at Wikipedia
Venus in Fur (novel) at Wikipedia
Venus in Fur at Rotten Tomatoes
