This latest offering in the Headmaster series confirms that Lupus Films intend that under the new management the strict standards set by Rigid East for the education of young women at St Thomas's Academy are to be fully maintained. We can look forward to at least a dozen more episodes explicitly demonstrating the beneficial effects of the lash on the female bottom.
Eulalie, a shy studious girl, enters the Headmaster's room as he is about to rush off to an appointment with Dr Schertal, mumbles her innocent request for the loan of a globe, which is misheard, and is punished for poor diction by being made to kneel on the scrubbing board balancing books on her outstretched arms. When the headmaster rushes back to collect his hat he discovers that she is trying to ease her uncomfortable task, thus earning 15 strokes of the cane. This is a fairly light event by Rigid East standards and the young lady has no difficulty in adhering to the story line that she should bear her punishment like a stoic and not cry out.
However by a twist in the plot which is not too clear to those unblessed with Slavic ethnicity, she is soon seized by the ear and bound over the whipping bench for a second dose, this time with a three-tailed tawse which friends of the Headmaster have kindly sent from Scotland. The fifty stroke thrashing which follows turns her cheeks a rich burgundy, and the well-lit, clean shaven lips (prominent, but barely able to contain a tumescent clitoris) which the cheeks would normally enclose, were they not spread athwart the bench, provide a treat for the connoisseur. Having viewed this movie first as an artistic whole (which one should always do, of course) it is intructive to resort to the jog dial to observe, one frame at a time, those three tails sweep across Eulalie's bottom, momentarily opening every orifice as they pass, and, on at least one occasion, penetrating the cleft between to give those lips a well-deserved nip. The female lead is played by Zdena Rehorkova who, in hair style and facial expression, presents Eulalie as a very prim, controlled young woman of old maidish appearance but under the whip her true character is betrayed: those hot vertical lips pouting between her thighs tell their own tale.
The Headmaster is, however, disappointed by the tawse, as, despite the overwhelming evidence of efficacy at the rear end, the girl persists in not crying out. The viewer, on the other hand, being treated to alternate shots of the rear and the front, can observe the tears, or sweat, dripping off her nose the clenching of her hands, and the pitch of her voice rising a little as she counts off the strokes. Although the headmaster removes his jacket after twenty five, and draws blood in the course of the next instalment, he is non-plussed by his inability to provoke a vocal reaction and the film ends with (yet another first for Rigid East in the cp genre?) the tawse being consigned to the stove for burning. From now on, says the Headmaster, he will rely on the "Austrian cane", surely a misnomer: it was the English who, in the course of their Empire building, discovered the corrective possibilities of the rattan, and who, having imported it for the improvement of the public schoolboys they were training to run said Empire, re-exported it with them to the rest of the world.
And one wonders if that tawse is genuinely Scottish. There is a rather tedious bit of business when the Headmaster, following the instructions, spends five minutes applying oil to the tails, yet it is very unlikely that any Scottish tawse ever left the saddlers not ready for immediate use the minute it was delivered. And the one in the film is a broad slappy affair: after the expenditure of considerable effort on the part of the Headmaster it does produce a lurid and exceedingly tender result, but no one stroke bites hard enough to produce that missing vocal response in the way the genuine article, or a cane, would.
Under Lupus Films this is the first Rigid East offering to fade out with a full list of credits, translated into English. From this we can see that there is some duplication of effort - Pavel Stastny writes the screenplay as well as playing the headmaster, and Thomas J Marco the one-time head of Rigid East contributes to the story line, directs, and shares post production with Pavel Stastny, while Irena Mala, among other duties, sees to the props and catering - but the list of contributors would still be long enough to grace, if not a Hollywood epic, at least a mainstream arthouse movie. We can thank Johan Bruner for the score which distinguishes all the Headmaster films (except during periods of chastisement when the music wisely falls silent rather than compete with the crack of the lash). It started off as a simple silent film style piano accompaniment, and has developed, with the addition now of some choral, into a sort of honky-tonk-con-brio well suited to the period and the august setting of the headmaster's study.
This film runs for around 45 minutes, and much of that, as usual in this series, contains some very original business, but the director would have been well advised to apply the stop watch to the final cut, so that the running time was reduced to the uniform 30 minutes which proved so apt in the first two episodes. By all means have the girl kneel on the scrubbing board, and oil the tawse too, if that is what the instructions require, (and continue to relieve the tedium by showing the cane strokes ripening on the girl's bottom as, tethered to the bench in the background, she awaits a taste of this new instrument of discipline) but it is sufficient merely to hint at these events.
Otherwise this movie is well up to standard, and I do not think we should be misled by the Headmaster's avowal to use nothing but the cane in future. Sometime, in one or other of the next dozen episodes, I am sure we will see, and some wayward girl's responsive bottom will feel, the American paddle, or the French martinet. Whether that will edify her as much it does us, the viewers, will of course be a matter of opinion.
UK REVIEWER
