Daring Cycles: the Towers–Franco Collaboration, 1968–70

This paper focuses on the prolific partnership between British independent producer Harry Alan Towers and Spanish filmmaker Jesús Franco, which yielded a total of nine films between 1968 and 1970. The Towers–Franco collaboration worked across genres, cinematic and literary traditions, and nations. Their partnership serves here as a case study to examine serial production and related forms of exploitation cinema such as sexploitation, in particular their specific modes of production and their actual modes of circulation and reception. Through an analysis of The Blood of Fu Manchu/Kiss and Kill (1968), The Castle of Fu Manchu/Assignment Istanbul (1969), 99 Women (1969), Paroxismus/Venus in Furs (1969), and Eugenie … The Story of Her Journey into Perversion (1970), the paper examines the complex and convoluted histories of international co-production, distribution, exhibition, and reception in the late 1960s.