Craig J. Clark
When Paul Verhoeven started making films, his home country of the Netherlands had no film industry to speak of. This explains why a full decade passed between the completion of his first short in 1960 and production on his debut feature. Fifteen years later, he made the move to Hollywood to continue his career in the movie capital of the world, but in between, he directed some of the most popular (and/or notorious) films in the history of Dutch cinema. Just don’t go looking for them on any streaming services.
With the exception of 1971’s Wat zien ik (also known as Business Is Business, Diary of a Hooker, or – going by the poster art on Letterboxd – The Happy Hookers from Amsterdam), which is on a service called Cultpix, Verhoeven’s early Dutch films aren’t streaming, not even for rental or purchase. And save for 1980’s Spetters, all are long out of print on physical media in the US. (The other five were released on DVD by Anchor Bay in 2001 and then in a limited edition boxed set in 2003, but they’ll set you back some now.) It’s a sad state of affairs for the distinctive director, who turns 85 today and is still active and capable of raising eyebrows, as 2021’s Benedetta ably demonstrated.
Half a century earlier, Verhoeven and screenwriting partner Gerard Soeteman aimed to follow the bawdy sex comedy Business Is Business, made for producer Rob Houwen, with something more substantial. They proposed an adaptation of Jan Wolkers’s semi-autobiographical novel Turks Fruit, a bestseller with a built-in audience. The resulting film, known as Turkish Delight in English, fulfilled that promise and then some, breaking attendance records in Holland that still stand 50 years later. Its enormous success made instant stars of Monique van de Ven (an acting student making her screen debut) and Rutger Hauer (the hero of Verhoeven and Soeteman’s television adventure series Floris), and earned a nomination for Best Foreign Film at the Academy Awards.
Dutch moviegoers and Academy voters alike responded to the story of passionate sculptor Eric Vonk and his roller-coaster romance with the immature Olga, whose mother conspires to keep them apart. With its copious nudity (male and female), broad comedy, graphic violence, and matter-of-fact depictions of bodily functions, Turkish Delight is as in-your-face as they come, running the gamut from bawdy to lyrical, farcical to tragic. It’s also loaded with symbolism and foreshadowing, sturdy narrative devices Verhoeven and Soeteman returned to in their subsequent collaborations.
With the Best Dutch Film of the Century under his belt (as voted at the Nederlands Film Festival in 1999), Verhoeven was given the wherewithal to make Keetje Tippel, a period piece set in late-19th-century Amsterdam that again paired Monique van de Ven (as the title character) with Rutger Hauer. In tandem with Soeteman and cinematographer Jan de Bont (who also shot Business Is Business and Turkish Delight), Verhoeven brought as much verisimilitude to the project as he could muster, painting an unsentimental portrait of poverty and the things a young woman had to be prepared to do to claw her way out of it.
When Keetje Tippel failed to reach the same heights as its predecessor, Verhoeven and Soeteman regrouped and emerged with their most ambitious film yet, the World War II tale Soldaat van Oranje/Soldier of Orange. Tackling themes and situations they would revisit three decades later when Verhoeven returned to Holland to make 2006’s Black Book, Soldier of Orange covers seven years in the lives of six university students, concentrating on the period between Nazi Germany’s invasion of Holland in May 1940 and the country’s liberation five years later. During the war, each takes his own path, some joining the resistance, others siding with the occupiers, but Verhoeven and Soeteman decline to judge any of them. At the same time, they specify when each meets their maker – whether by firing squad, assassination, bomb, or guillotine – until just two are left standing when the credits roll.
On his commentary for Anchor Bay, Verhoeven expressed his disappointment with the “neutral” reaction to Soldier of Orange, but that didn’t prevent its expansion into a four-part miniseries for Dutch television in 1979. That same year, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association voted it Best Foreign Film, setting the stage for its nomination in the same category at the Golden Globes and marking the beginning of Verhoeven’s concerted efforts to find a project that would take him to America. By that time, Verhoeven had parted ways with producer Rob Houwer and formed a partnership with Joop van den Ende, which resulted in an hour-long TV movie and Spetters (released on Blu-ray by KL Studio Classics, but still not streaming). In contrast with the upper-class backgrounds of the protagonists of Soldier of Orange, the three “good-looking young men” of Spetters (that’s what the title is slang for) are decidedly blue collar, and their objective is using motocross to get a leg up in the world. In this, their idol is dentist-turned-motocross champion Rutger Hauer, a hometown hero in league with a TV presenter played by his Soldier of Orange co-star Jeroen Krabbé.
Hauer and Krabbé aside, the cast of Spetters is mostly unknowns, with the highest profile going to Renée Soutendijk as an ambitious outsider who believes one of the boys will be her ticket out of the cramped trailer/food truck she shares with her brother. Her character’s mercenary attitude carried over to Verhoeven’s next film, 1983’s De vierde man/The Fourth Man, based on a novella by gay writer Gerard Reve, who wove his devout Catholicism into the text. Verhoeven and Soeteman followed suit, ramping up the religious imagery as Gerard (Krabbé, playing a character based on the author) becomes ensnared in the web of thrice-widowed hair salon owner Christine (Soutendijk), believing he’s using her to get to her current beau, a hunky plumber whose trade aligns him with the male leads from Spetters.
Full of dreams, fantasies, visions, and premonitions – many of them had by Gerard, who admits he “lie[s] the truth” to the literary society that pays his way to their provincial town for a speaking engagement – The Fourth Man was Verhoeven and Soeteman’s joke on the critics who pilloried Spetters, yet praised them for their sophisticated use of symbolism. In fact, The Fourth Man earned their best reviews since Turkish Delight, picking up the International Critics’ Award at the Toronto International Film Festival and Verhoeven’s second LACFA Award for Best Foreign Film along the way. With this momentum behind him, Verhoeven took his first half-step away from the Netherlands with the international co-production Flesh + Blood, for which Orion Pictures footed part of the bill.
The gritty medieval epic’s production, undertaken in Spain and shot in English, was far from smooth sailing, though, and ultimately brought an end to Verhoeven’s professional relationship with Rutger Hauer, his cinematic alter ego. It also marked his last collaboration with Gerard Soeteman for two decades. Verhoeven was undeterred, however, and moved to the United States in 1985 to take the reins of another Orion project that would be his first – but not his last – foray into the realm of science fiction. As bumpy as the journey from Holland to Hollywood had been, once he had RoboCop in the can, Verhoeven was off and running.
Unlike most of his early Dutch work, all of Paul Verhoeven’s films from “Flesh + Blood” on are available to stream or rent.
