Barbarella (1968)

Long ago, in the days before VCR's, I had this friend whose mother was going to college. They seemed impoverished but they stayed on the cutting edge in certain ways. They had a video disk player. It would play movies on large, LP-sized disks. They weren't available for rent anywhere, so they could only watched the movies that came with the player when they bought it. One was The Godfather and  another was Barbarella. I don't know why his mother chose an R-rated sex movie. It had Jane Fonda and looked like science fiction, so they may have gotten the wrong impression. My friend would sing along with the theme song.

Directed by Roger Vadim. His first wife was Brigitte Bardot. Fonda was wife #3. 

Mark Rappaport, in his documentary about Jean Seberg, commented on the tendency of male directors to cast their wives in roles like this. Elderly Republican pervert Clint Eastwood gave Sandra Locke a rape scene in every movie of his she was in. 

I tried to watch Barbarella back then and never made it very far. I have it on at this very moment on The Criterion Channel. It's well-made anyway, better than other science fiction movies capitalist countries produced at the time. I never really liked Jane Fonda. Mike Kuchar noted that they stole some stuff from his underground film Sins of the Fleshapoids.

On a 1978 episode of Saturday Nigh Live, Bill Murray played a dim witted movie critic who reviews Coming Home and laments that Jane Fonda's anti-war activism kept her from getting more good roles like Barbarella. Murray then courageously speaks out against the Vietnam War three years after it ended, which was the problem with Coming Home. It should have been made ten years earlier.

Come to think of it, I haven't seen Coming Home anywhere in years. Maybe Barbarella WAS of greater lasting merit.