Haji spent a decade at the elbow of louder women in Russ Meyer's pictures, sulking, hovering and speaking in an accent from nowhere. She was rarely the point of the film, and she is often the thing we remember.
Fi1m perspective
In Faster, Pussycat (1965) Tura Satana's Varla does not talk so much as issue statements, and Rosie, played by Haji, answers in an accent from nowhere. She stands a little behind Varla and a little too close, sulking, waiting. Haji had no acting training; she was a dancer Meyer found in a California strip club, and she moves like someone who always knows where the audience is sitting. At the ranch, with the three women waiting to see who moves first, we found we were watching Rosie rather than Varla, because Satana tells you what she is about to do and Haji only looks as though she might. She and Lori Williams are better than the film needs.
Meyer gave her the lead first, as Ruby Bonner in Motorpsycho (1965), and then made her a regular. She played a sorceress in Good Morning and... Goodbye (1967), bringing her own witchcraft and costumes to a film that had asked for neither, and Cat Woman in Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970). By Supervixens (1975) she was doing the makeup as well as appearing in it. She wrote much of her own dialogue in his films, which accounts for a good deal, the accent included. Five pictures with Meyer is the career, and she seems to have known it.
The one director of standing to use her was John Cassavetes, and he cast her as what she was: a dancer in the club Ben Gazzara's Cosmo would die to keep open in The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976). The part is small and the film has its eyes on Gazzara. There was Ilsa: Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks the same year, and then very little, until a last appearance in Killer Drag Queens on Dope (2003).
What she could do was be present. She hit her marks in fights, wore the leather without looking as though she had been told to, and held a look longer than the script required. What she could not do, or was never asked to do, was carry a scene of talk; nobody in a Meyer film was. Her own account of the job was plain: "As an actress I just do as I'm directed." It is the least actorly thing an actor can say, and it is why she is convincing as a woman who follows Varla anywhere.
Meyer's camera looked at these women the way it always looked at women, and Faster, Pussycat has since been claimed as a feminist film, which it is not. Haji is not troubled by any of that. She is a dancer in a desert who will not be hurried, and the only reason to see her other films is if you have already seen that one and want more of the same. There is not much more, and it is not the same.
Biography
Haji, born Barbarella Catton, was a Canadian actress. She appeared in several films directed by Russ Meyer, including Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965) as Rosie and Motorpsycho! (1965) as Ruby Bonner. She also played the role of Haji in John Cassavetes's The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976).
Born in Quebec City in 1946, she began working as an exotic dancer at the age of 14. Her other credits include Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970) and Supervixens (1975). Her final screen role was in Killer Drag Queens on Dope (2003). She died in 2013.
