Cast

Tiny Tim, David Sachs, Beverly Grant, Francis Francine

Film description

Jack Smith’s ‘live films’ incorporate footage going back to the mid 1950s. Thus, Respectable Creatures intercuts material from Smith’s first movie, Buzzards over Baghdad, with scenes shot over a decade later during carnival in Rio de Janeiro, and scenes from Normal Love, including an alternate version of The Yellow Sequence. The extant footage suggests a relatively straightforward gloss on the María Montez vehicle, a harem girl and her lover putting poison in the caliph’s wine. Jacobs regarded Smith’s intentions as devoid of irony – although that was certainly not the case a decade or more later when Smith reassembled the footage, discovered in a film can labeled.

J. Hoberman / Live Film! Jack Smith!