by Patrick Boniface

Created on: September 22, 2008

The kids of the 1960's knew how to have a good time even if their parents did not understand the pop culture of the period. It was the generation that put flowers in their hair, danced naked in San Francisco and listened to Hendrix at Woodstock, smoked joints on street corners and wanted to ban the bomb and get out of Vietnam. They looked at multiple images of baked bean cans and Marilyn Monroe and witnessed the killing of a President and his brother. Oh how I wish I could have been there. Having been born in March 1969 it was never going to happen, but the hippy generation has given us a legacy, a portfolio of wildly strange, camp, silly, over the top and sometimes outrageous movie classics.

I only have, however, the one suggestion to top my 60's fantasy list: 1968's Barbarella Queen of the Galaxy. It is pure comic book, a pleasurable mixing of eroticism, horror, torture, despair and fine line humor. The 1960's was a generation of 'free love', another reason I was born too late! In Barbarella, love is most definitely free, also casual, carnal and perhaps even expected and prescriptive. Sex is mechanized, controlled and unlimited. It is clean, it is inexpensive but it is soul less and devoid of feeling. It is literally sex in a pill. Pop one on your tongue and away you go. Love is the theme that keeps the movie together, Barbarella's need for sex and love and those characters she meets who crave the emotional connection it brings in a world where machines do the hard work of love making.

Jane Fonda's husband at the time was director Roger Vadim who took the French comic heroine and made his wife a sex kitten of the 1960's. She was also cute in Barefoot in the Park and Cat Ballou. She later ruined that reputation by visiting Hanoi during the Vietnam war and becoming Hanoi Jane as a result.

From its opening credits, a zero gravity disrobing of Jane Fonda, you know that this is a popcorn fantasy science fiction classic and yet it keeps getting better. Every scene sees another costume change for Fonda as she travels from one improbable situation to another each more outrageous and extravagant than the last.

Set in the year 40,000 on the planet Lythion Barbarella battles wrong doers and monsters when her spacecraft crash lands. She wrestles Black Guards, the evil Queen and Duran Duran (yes that is where the band got their name). There is something strangely Gothic about scenes in the movie, especially the 'love machine' as Duran Duran plays the keyboard Barbarella's sex drive destroys it such is her desire and sex drive. Only when she discovers Dildano played by the late David Hemmings does she discover real sex something that she later recreates when she falls for the blind angel Pygar.

Whether Jane Fonda, now in her 70's, is proud of her role as Barbarella is anyone's guess the lady herself seems to keep fairly quiet on the subject of her skin tight spacesuit and exploits in outer space.

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