I have a Jess Franco habit, no secret, and I also have a Franco podcast habit. There was a strong double header from the Important Cinema Club a few years back and more recently an epic Oscarbate series that covers every single Franco film currently available and a few that aren’t.
Aside from the volume of his filmography, anywhere between 170 - 200 features, not to mention the uncannily true Tim Lucas dictum that “you can't see one until you've seen them all,” the challenge with Franco is capturing the mood. Languid, oneiric, perverse, sloppy—that’s the easy part. Defining the full breadth of the personality that infuses Franco’s best work is considerably more taxing.
Beyond the aestheticism and erudition, usually boiled down his passion for jazz, de Sade, and a personal canon of great filmmakers, there’s the question I suppose of Franco’s politics. He exiled himself from Spain under Generalissimo Franco in part to escape the regime’s censorship laws. That he was “anti-Fascist” is, well, duh.
Personally I suspect that Jess Franco was apolitical if not completely hostile to all ideology, being that his work conjures the spectre of a horny anarchist with a contrarian streak. Right and Left are regularly lampooned onscreen. Jess Franco was very much for freedom—personal and artistic—but try telling that to a generation that gets its bad politics in a knot over the very word, or, as they like to call it, free-dumb.
Which brings us to Tender Subject, a Franco podcast that appeared in early 2026. It’s hosted by a woman and a dude transitioning into a “woman”, so a dude, who manages to make the show largely about himself. It’s all so tiresome and predictable but even John and Will over at Oscarbate can’t avoid the maddening Millennial habit of hyper-focusing attention on gender ideology. They’re both smart and irreverent and then the entire show judders to a halt, like a prayer break.
“Progressives” now fall over themselves in their obsequience to trans rights. The accusation of “transphobia” terrifies them. It means instant social death and so they are consumed by this phantom thing, now a contagion that grips an entire generation (mine too, at least around the edges). Everyone now has a gay friend to protect who is transing. I wish we were as sensitive to the tragedy of young gay teenagers I know, personally, in my little community, who are being encouraged to destroy their bodies with pharmaceuticals and surgery. This will all end very, very badly.
Anyway, there are transsexual characters in Jess Franco’s filmography (reminder to anyone born before 1980: it’s not new.) Macumba Sexual and Sadomania both starred Ajita Wilson who had undergone sex change surgery. And what of it? Franco would prefigure The Crying Game by some 30 years with Les ébranlées, and not in a way that signifies any kind of sympathy for its transsexual character—it’s a plot device—although Las chicas del tanga does the opposite, allowing a strongly heterosexual character to love and accept a gorgeous creature with a surprise cock.
Again, however: what of it? It’s more likely that Las chicas del tanga is super-attenuating Joe E. Brown’s punchline to Some Like it Hot. Which is to say: Franco was a film buff and (in Stephen Thrower’s words) a pussyhound who enjoyed stuffing the frame with libertines, exhibitionists, sexual adventurers, and freaks. You can call that political, I suppose, but I don’t think he would. At the very least, listening to a couple idiots convince themselves that Jess Franco was their proto-“trans ally” is amazing.