The Nones of Exploitation: Marihuana

Marihuana
1936 / 0:50
Tagline: “See the Truth about the Smoke from Hell!”
[internet archive]

It is a curious thing - one might say a melancholy one - that in the detritus of antique amusement, amidst the refuse heaps of what passes for cinema, there should glimmer, now and again, a spark of something nearly noble. I speak here not of a work wrought with care or conscience, but of a base and tawdry spectacle - an exploitation film, vulgar in its intentions, slipshod in its execution, and yet, by some accident of human truth, not wholly devoid of merit.

Observe, if you will, the young woman - her foot turning idly, joyously, upon the running board of a battered motorcar, her face alight with the unselfconscious radiance of youth and affection. It is a gesture so slight, so unstudied, and yet it speaks with the eloquence of a Turner sky: of vitality, of freedom, of the fleeting grace of being alive and beloved. Such a moment, though framed by the crude machinery of commerce, is not unworthy of art.

Elsewhere, the drama descends - nay, collapses - into the grotesque. A quarrel between mother and daughter, rendered with the subtlety of a cudgel, culminates in the girl’s flight from home. But even here, amid the shrillness, there is a gesture of pathos: she pauses, embraces her lapdog with a tenderness that betrays the ache of her decision. It is the last act of a soul not yet hardened by the world’s indifference.

Later still, as she descends into what the moderns call “degradation” - a word too often used without understanding - she casts a glance, guilt-ridden and persuasive, upon her sister. It is not the look of a villainess, but of a soul in torment, aware of its fall and yet unable to arrest it. That such a moment should arise in a film otherwise so bereft of moral imagination is, I declare, astonishing.

But alas, these are but fragments - pearls cast into a mire of incoherence. The film, taken as a whole, is a shambles. Its narrative is as a house built upon sand; its characters, mere shadows of intention; its climax, a thing so mishandled that it leaves the viewer neither stirred nor satisfied. The acting is passable, the direction perfunctory, and the moral vision - if such a term may be applied - entirely absent.

And yet, even in this mire, there is revelation. For it is only by witnessing the debasement of form that we come to appreciate its true expression. Just as the sight of a polluted stream makes us long for the mountain spring, so too does this film, in its failure, remind us of what cinema might be when guided by truth, beauty, and reverence for the human soul.

As for the final descent - four young women, stripped of both clothing and dignity, frolicking in the Pacific surf - it is not merely a violation of the Hays Code, but of decency itself. That such imagery should be offered as entertainment is a sign, not of liberation, but of cultural exhaustion.

Let us then take from this experience not pleasure, but instruction. Let us remember that art, even when sullied, may still reflect the divine spark - and that the worst of pictures may yet contain a moment worth saving.