Bristling moustaches, fulsome racks and dollops of old sauce... Verhoeven’s debut sex-farce Business Is Business (1971) makes the pulp-provocateur look like the greatest director the porn industry never had. Still, two years later he made the “Best Dutch Film Of The Century” (says the Netherlands Film Festival). Anarchic drama Turkish Delight launched Verhoeven, star alter-ego Rutger Hauer and DoP Jan de Bont, with Hauer superb as a brutal, self-destructive loverboy. Sex and death collide again in arthouse brothel-drama Katie Tippel, but the mix of corrosive desire, throbbing violence and lurid subversion really start cooking in epic WW2 drama Soldier Of Orange and psycho-thriller The Fourth Man. As prototypes for Black Book and Basic Instinct, they’re pacy, complex, florid and incredibly watchable.
DVD Extras:
Youth pic Spetters and extra features are missing: film notes don’t cut it.
