The late 1960s and early 70s was a fecund time for US cinema, but not every revolutionary film from that period has achieved the hallowed status of a Mean Streets or a Badlands. One, at least, has been lost for almost half a century. Emerging out of San Francisco’s countercultural Haight-Ashbury scene, Luminous Procuress is an enigmatic, transgressive and gleefully queer journey to the divine state of enlightenment lurking just beyond the carnal. And you can’t say that about The Godfather.
Steven Arnold’s first and only feature brought him to the attention of Andy Warhol and Salvador Dalí, and seemed sure to set him on the path to cinematic greatness. It begins with two handsome young naifs, one in a groovy mushroom-coloured catsuit, being welcomed at the lavish modernist home of the Procuress. Played by Arnold’s friend Pandora in tarantula lashes and a horizontal pink wig shaped like a milkmaid’s yoke, she is their tour guide in a labyrinth of outre attractions. In one room, they find the exhausted aftermath of an orgy; in another, San Francisco’s hirsute drag troupe, the Cockettes, shuffle on stage in painted faces, posing pouches and pineapple breasts while a clown cranks the handle on a music box. Those same performers then dress as nuns and bishops for some naughty cavorting before a good, old-fashioned food fight. Old-fashioned, that is, had they not taken LSD shortly before the cameras rolled.
