TIFF Lightbox is doing a retrospective on the Iconic Dutchman starting from his early homegrown masterpieces Turkish Delight, Soldier of Orange, Spetters and The Fourth Man to his Hollywood blockbusters that are as savagely satirical as they are porno-violent Robocop, Starship Troopers, Total Recall and Showgirls. Click on the gallery images above to go through all that is on offer from January 24 - April 4. Or if you are in Toronto, head on over to tiff.net and spend some money.
BUSINESS IS BUSINESS
After cutting his teeth making propaganda action reels for the Dutch Navy and making Rutger Hauer a TV star in the 1960s Paul Verhoeven jumped into feature filmmaking in 1971 with this 'cheerfully smutty, episodic sex comedy' about a pair of prostitutes who entertain their clients' bizarre sexual fantasies in a canal house/cathouse in Amsterdam. He brought Hauer along for the ride, and would collaborate with the actor again and again throughout the 1970s.
TURKISH DELIGHT
The highest-grossing Dutch feature ever made, Verhoeven's brutal, erotic, hilarious, disgusting, and desperately moving tale of the rocky love affair between a lusty bohemian sculptor (Rutger Hauer) and his wild-child bride (Monique van de Ven) remains an anarchic milestone of seventies international cinema.
KATIE TIPPEL
In some ways, the proto-type for the basic story and eventual excesses of the city of sin in Showgirls, this very expensive - for its day - Dutch production, features a beautiful young country girl (Monique van de Ven, again) who gets an education in the school of hard knocks when she arrives in 1880s Amsterdam. In his now auteur-ishly blunt fashion, Verhoeven postulates that "money turns people into bastards."
SOLDIER OF ORANGE
As Katie Tippel was to Showgirls, Solidier of Orange is to Black Book. Two upper-class university friends (Rutger Hauer, again, and great character actor Jeroen Krabbé) join the Dutch resistance when their homeland is overrun by the Nazis, in Verhoeven's tremendously exciting and morally complex WWII epic.
SPETTERS
The tale of three small-town friends who dream of escaping their drab surroundings by finding fame on the national motocross circuit sparked controversy with its portrait of conservative religion, thuggish police and predatory homosexuals. On screen homosexual sex sent late 1970s dutch audience, politicos and other powers that be into a thither at the time, and the film has not lost any of its power today.
THE FOURTH MAN
Want to know why Verhoeven moved his Hollywood career from violent late 1980s sci-fi actioners to smoky erotic thrillers in the mid 1990s? Well, he was just doing what he did best in the Netherlands with big Hollywood dollars. This is never more in evidence than here with this baroque Hitchcockian thriller about an alcoholic, bisexual novelist (Jeroen Krabbé, again) who becomes entangled in the murderous web of a sizzling femme fatale. You can practically overlap Sharon Stone's ice-pick wielding Catherine Tramell with Renée Soutendijk's scissor handling Christine Halsslag.
FLESH + BLOOD
This X-rated medieval action film marked Verhoeven's transition from The Netherlands to Hollywood, while bringing his regular star, Rutger Hauer, back to the time period of his Floris TV series (albeit this time with a much, much bigger budget) and adding some Americans to the mix (Jennifer Jason Leigh, Bruno Kirby and prolific character actor Brion James). It was released in some countries as The Sword and The Rose.
Featuring the tagline, "A timeless adventure, a passion for wealth and power. Only the strongest will survive," it tells the story a band of medieval mercenaries that take revenge on a noble lord who decides not to pay them by kidnapping the betrothed of the noble's son. All of this with the black plague ravaging 16th century Italy as a backdrop.
ROBOCOP
If you can find me a more prescient film on the 21st century decay and infrastructure troubles of Detroit than Robocop, then I'd like to hear it. A massive superhero flick made in the 1980s with a decidedly satirical screenplay that would skewer the industrial military complex, ugly corporate shenanigans with the same glee as union labour, vapid media, and cartoon criminals.
Robocop was glossy and violent, so very, very violent that some critic had to come up with a new phrase: "Porno violent." And yet it riffs so delightful with the earnest heroic narrative and the basic human desire to do good, it really did re-define how to do a visceral Hollywood Blockbuster extravaganza and has aged exceptionally well.
TOTAL RECALL
Two Weeks. Twowow Weeeeeks. Twwoooooooo Weeeeeeeeeeks. Arnold Schwarzenegger enters the fray with Paul Verhoeven and turns out a movie that is even more violent than Robocop, and yet delights in making the action star look like a fool as much as an unstoppable wreck force. It distills down a lot of Philip K. Dick's themes on identity, memory and belief into a romp of an adventure with great villains, icky bodily fluids and the now very famous three-breasted hoooker.
BASIC INSTINCT
A bad-apple homicide cop (Michael Douglas) risks getting an icepick up his strap when he embarks on a torrid affair with a brazenly bisexual murder suspect (Sharon Stone) in Verhoeven's slickly seedy eroto-thriller that literally showed the world Ms. Stone's lady parts in a scene that is as sizzling as it is over-the-top.
If you watched the pilot for HBO's True Detective, you will see one scene involving smoking in a police station that cribs from the same interrogation scene (which is much more than just the iconic beaver shot), proving the myriad of strange ways Verhoeven's contributions to American cinema continue to this day.
SHOWGIRLS
A bomb of epic proportions began the end of Hollywoods love-affair with Paul Verhoeven (albeit he managed two more sci-fi action pictures before departing LalaLand), this film was immediately embraced by a cult of camp-hungry hipsters and has received significant critical re-evaluation over the past nineteen years. To this day I cannot un-see that Kyle MacLachlin sex and it lingers like a canker sore on my brain while slyly tickling my funny bone. Ditto Gina Gershon pushing strippers down steep stairwells, ditto ...oh... it's all good if you like this sort of hyper-ironic sleaze.
STARSHIP TROOPERS
If you will indulge me a bit of bragadoccio, I feel I completely got the joke of Starship Troopers the first time around and was dismayed that the film bombed so spectacularly at the box office. I'm a fan of the Heinlein novel, and was nevertheless delighted that the Dutch director inverted the entire thesis of the novel by only exaggerating things a smidgen and casting out of the pages of Beverly Hills 90210's vapid good looking Aryan types.
Another collaboration with Robocop screenwriter Ed Neumeier, it moves the 80s Anchorman media tropes into the internet 1990s while evoking the propaganda war films of the 1940s and beings as prescient as any film to the USA's reaction to 9/11. My lord, this film is good at what it does, and features a brilliantly hammy performance from Michael "See you at the Party, Richter!" Ironside as a gruff highschool teacher turned gruff field-sergeant. War makes fascists of us all, I'm sure John Milius couldn't stop grinning while watching Starship Troopers.
HOLLOW MAN
A brilliant, arrogant military scientist (Kevin Bacon) turns murderously megalomaniacal when he ingests an invisibility serum, in Verhoeven's last Hollywood film to date. I've never seen this film, and I should probably fix that.
BLACK BOOK
After the box-office spanking in his last few Hollywood Blockbusters, Paul Verhoeven made a triumphant return to his homeland to revisit a World War II setting. Putting him back in the dark moral territory of his earlier hit Soldier of Orange with its story of a Jewish singer who joins the Dutch resistance and quickly discovers that, in wartime, the lines between good and evil are very blurry indeed.
Fans of the fire-witch in Game of Thrones played by Carice van Houten might relish the opportunity here to watch the fearless and chameleon actress dye her pubic hair blonde. Just sayin'.
TRICKED
A lively combination of corporate intrigue and sex comedy, Verhoeven's latest film was made via a "user-generated" narrative which incorporated story suggestions submitted by the public.
I am of course leery of this approach of making movies, and by all accounts this ultra-short 55 minute feature is a piece of shit worthy of simply ignoring. But then I might be falling into the fallacy of the release of so many of Verhoeven's films, so best perhaps to see for myself.