Barbarella is among the illustrious company of Modesty Blaise and Fritz the Cat in being a movie based on a comic strip. It was directed by Roger Vadim, a Frenchman, and it stars a young ingenue from America, his then wife Jane Fonda.
Vadim is one of theose directors who 'loves women'. In 1956, he made a film called And God Created Woman starring Brigitte Bardot, and he liked it so much that, in 1987, he made it again, this time starring Rebecca de Mornay. He's not really a good director; he's sort of like Polanski but without the pain and the brain. But Barbarella is not a bad film. It's entertaining, has good sets, very good costumes (Miss Fonda's were designed by Paco Rabanne). It also has a lot of good actors in it, including Milo O'Shea, David Hemmings in the role of Dildano, Marcel Marceau and Anita Pallenberg, who you might recall was one of Mick Jagger's room-mates in Performance. The screenwriter - well, eight of them are listed in the credits, but the person listed first is Terry Southern, the American who wrote the novels Candy and the Magic Christian and the screenplays for the film version of the latter and for Lolita and Dr Strangelove.
Apparently Jane Fonda still likes Barbarella and stands by it. I wonder why?