Jane Fonda and a cast of out-of-this-world eye dazzlers bring the uninhibited French Comic Strip to the screen
In 1962, Jean-Claude Forest, a young French illustrator, created a comic-strip heroine who would develop into a futuristic combination of Wonder Woman and our own Little Annie Fanny. The result: Barbarella (right), a science-fiction evocation of eroticism whose distaste for criminals and clothing is matched only by her penchant for passion. Barbarella's early popularity was predicated on her ability to take misfortune lying down; but soon her thinly veiled jabs at contemporary morality established her as France's leading underground pop scene stealer. When Evergreen Review translated Barbarella's adventures into English two and a half years ago, enough interest arose to entice Grove Press into publishing an anthology of her most sensual space sorties. And now, Barbarella--with Jane Fonda in the title role--comes to the screen in a $3,500,000 Paramount film produced by Dino de Laurentiis and directed by Miss Fonda's husband, Roger Vadim. Barbarella's supporting cast is as lustrous as its leading lady. More than 30 of Europe's most exciting young beauties appear in the movie, while the male contingent is represented by such hot properties as David (Blow-Up) Hemmings, Milo (Ulysses) O'Shea, Italian comedian Ugo Tognazzi and French pantomimist Marcel Marceau. Barbarella, whose amorous encounters are abundant enough to bring blushes to the cheeks of Sexual Freedom League charter members, has an outspoken admirer in director Vadim. "She is neither immoral nor amoral," he says. "Immorality applies to someone who has lost her morality. Amorality applies to those who haven't any. Barbarella has a moral code--her own. Her attitudes about sex are as natural and matter of fact as the psychologists say the young generation's are becoming." The film, to be released late this summer, takes place in the year 40,000, when the kinkily attired astronette-adventuress is asked by the President of Earth to locate a missing scientist. Barbarella's journey -- plotted by Vadim and Terry (Candy) Southern--hardly gets off the ground before she crash-lands on Lythion, the most perversely populated planet in the universe. The scientist she seeks is somewhere in Lythion's capital city of Sogo; and by the time Barbarella catches up to him, she has endured tribulations and triumphs more than worthy of the supersexed heroine she is.
