“Beautiful! Voluptuous! Deadly! Vicious!” As a movie star, Tura Satana was hardly prolific, but as a cult cinema icon the former go-go girl was already a legend long before her death in 2011 at the age of 72. Directed by Cody Jarrett, narrated by Margaret Cho, and perfectly timed for the 60th anniversary of her standout movie Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! — in which she plays stunning black-leather-clad bad-ass Varla — this playful but reverent and often quite unexpectedly moving documentary offers a fascinating portrait that reveals some of the late star’s secrets while generating a few new mysteries of its own. The prime audience is grindhouse movie buffs, for sure, but Jarrett’s film has more to talk about than such kitsch as the making of 1968’s The Astro Zombies, raising serious questions about the alarming state of race and gender in postwar America.
Boldly, the film gets off to a heavy start, revealing that the Satana — born Tura Luna Pascual Yamaguchi to a Japanese father and American mother — was raped by five local men in her Chicago stomping ground, just a few days away from her 10th birthday in 1948. The crime is recounted, in her own words, in chilling detail, but, as Jarrett goes on to show, Satana did not let the event define her. Rather, she saw it as a warning to toughen up and get ready to fight back; after all, internment was very much a recent memory, animosity for Pearl Harbor still hung in the air, and the young Satana knew that signs saying “This is a white man’s neighborhood” were not intended solely for African Americans.
The assault was so serious, Satana was lucky to survive (enough to get her own back later, in ways the film alludes to only in the most oblique terms), but, in accordance with the times, the men were absolved, and the girl got the blame — surprisingly, even at home. Though she had a good relationship with her father, Satana’s mother was distant, doing everything she could to erase her daughter’s racial identity, from joining the Jehovah’s Witnesses to — most shocking of all — taping her eyes open to give her a more western look. Inevitably, Satana was not a grade-A student, and after a stint in reform school Satana became a fairly well-paid burlesque dancer in her mid-teens. Amazingly, her parents approved. “They wanted that money, but they still didn’t want me,” she notes, adding that they’d married her off at 13, to a 17-year-old boy named John Satana.
As it did in her life, cinema mostly occupies the middle third of the movie, starting with her introduction to Billy Wilder before making her (uncredited) debut in his 1963 film Irma La Douce almost by accident. “I just wanted to screw him,” she claims, adding Wilder to a long list of rumored suitors that include Tony Curtis, Tony Bennett and a young Elvis Presley, who she claimed proposed marriage. Bizarrely, Satana would end up settling for much, much less in her actual love life, belying her ass-kicking image by shacking up with controlling and coercive men who tried, unsuccessfully, to make her turn her back on showbusiness.
The most moving scenes in the movie come courtesy of Satana’s daughters Jade and Lani, who don’t even try to sugarcoat their mother’s shortcomings (“She wasn’t a ‘Hey, let’s bake cookies’ kind of mom,” they say, to no one’s surprise). Though by no means a bad mother, they suggest that her mind was elsewhere, and after a series of twists that would have finished off any lesser mortal — a brutal car crash and a bizarre shooting incident — Satana finally got her groove back with the arrival of VHS and the re-release of her modest back catalogue. More importantly, Faster Pussycat! — a flop on its original release — found a whole new audience in the wake of punk rock and the early days of the gay rights movement, who embraced Varla as a countercultural heroine.
Given that Satana passed nearly 15 years ago, Jarrett was clearly aboard the Satana train well before that, which translates into fine original interview material and impressive archival footage, including Super-8 home movies. Interviewees are good too, from Faster Pussycat! superfan John Waters to Dita Von Teese, Peaches Christ and former stripper Angel Walker, whose signature act was to light her tassels aflame “then extinguish the flames by means of strenuous mammary rotation”. Star of the show, though, is Satana herself, living up to Russ Meyer’s famous saying: the sweetest kittens do have the sharpest claws.
Title: Tura!
Director/screenwriter: Cody Jarrett
Distributor: Quiver Distribution
Running time: 1 hr 46 mins
