The Spaghetti Western: A Thematic Analysis

As an academic study adapted from Bert Fridlund's doctoral thesis, this is not a book for those seeking a viewer-friendly introduction to the Italian western. Rather, it forms a very useful counterpart and corrective to what probably still remains the dominant study of the cycle in English, Christoper Frayling's Spaghetti Westerns: Cowboys and Europeans from Karl May to Sergio Leone.

Whereas Frayling takes a more auteur focussed approach in concentrating upon a core selection of perhaps 50 spaghettis, Fridlund points to the frequent inconsistencies in such canon constructions - films like Django Kill and The Great Silence receive greater attention than box-office would warrant while the Trinity series are correspondingly downplayed as emblematic of little more than the descent into parody, for instance - and accordingly casts his net wider to discuss some 200 titles.

Fridlund's methodology likewise differs. Whereas Frayling emphasised the aesthetic dimensions of his films and was somewhat critical of Will Wright's structuralist analysis of the American western, albeit whilst offering his own alternative formulations of characteristic Italian western narratives, such as the "The Servant of Two Masters" plot he identified in A Fistful of Dollars and Django, Fridlund effectively reverses these terms, downplaying aesthetics in favour of thematics.

Indeed, in discussing Fistful of Dollars and A Pistol for Ringo, Fridlund is quick to offer an alternative formulation to Fraylings, that of "The Infiltrator," whilst subsequently identifying Django as an exemplar of another plot constellation, that of "the deprived hero".

Some of the strengths and weaknesses of these approaches are nicely summarised by the Fistful / Pistol pairing. Whilst I have not watched Ringo and his Golden Pistol for a while - and reading Fridlund makes me want to do so again, which always a good sign - from what I recall its aesthetics were far removed from those of Fistful, more neo-classical in seeking to directly emulate American models, less baroque, askew and 'Italian' - in other words, precisely the kind of thing that Frayling analyses excel at. But on account of this and the fact that aesthetics aren't Fridlund's topic, this is not a problem per se.

What some readers may find less convincing, however, is the way Fridlund's analyses develop over the course of the book as he explores other plot constellations, including "the unstable partnerships of bounty killers," as seen in For a Few Dollars More for example, and "the social bandit" of political or politicised spaghettis like A Professional Gun and Companeros. Or, more precisely the way in which they don't.

The key thing, after all, about Will Wright's Sixguns and Society is that second term in its title, the way in which he sought to bring Levi-Strauss and Propp inspired structuralism and formalism together with Marxism to show that the shifting configurations of the heroes, villains and their relationships with society in the American western over the decades, corresponded to social changes. Thus, for example, the emergence of the "professional" plot in the 1950s and 1960s, wherein the heroes remained outside of and separate from a weak society, corresponded with the emergence of technocratic elite rule.

Fridlund doesn't attempt anything comparable here. Whether this is down to too great a barrier of cultural difference - an American investigating his own country's myths obviously has it easier here than a Swede looking for the ways in which Italian film-makers used an imaginary America as a means of addressing specifically Italian concerns - that between an enduring American genre and a short-lived Italian filone cycle, a simple lack of enthusiasm - the success rate in bringing together the theoretical paradigms of Marxism and Structuralism has arguably been rather low despite the contributions of some of the best intellectual minds - or a combination of them, is open to debate.

On the plus side, however, the very fact that the emphasis is upon description also means that there is more here for the reader who is interested in the films in themselves, with less of those over-analytic, over-reaching and credibility-straining interpretations that often mar academic books as far as the fan reader is concerned.

For those with a more theoretical bent, meanwhile, it also opens up possibilities for further investigations, whether in filling in the gaps between theory and practice - a topic, often of great significance in the political spaghetti westerns to both characters and film-makers if not necessarily their viewing audience - or indeed in demonstrating their very irreconcilability as the reason for such a gap here.

Defining remarks

I've just been re-reading a useful little introduction to the giallo by John Martin, one of my favourite writers on the subject and Italian exploitation cinemas in general.

While he goes on in the piece – published in The Dark Side, of all places – to suggest his own quasi-definition, that "The essence of the giallo resides in two factors: style and savagery,” it's the introductory remarks by a number of other luminaries that I find really thought-provoking.

“That's a tricky one. I guess the first thing that springs into my mind is people with big black gloves, with zippers up the sides, and big knives, to stick into people... but its more complex than that...”
– Richard Stanley, offering a definition based around visual iconography and immediately acknowledging its shortcomings.

“It defines a genre of mysteries in which the discovery of the criminal's identity is less important than discovering how the crime was done.”
– Maitland McDonagh, emphasising narrative and thematic elements but raising questions over whose discovery of how the crime was done that matters.

“You mean Argento? Bava? Those films are blood operas...”
– John McNaughton, picking out defining auteur figures and a national cultural tradition.

Chi l'ha vista morire? / Who Saw Her Die?

1968, the French Pyrenees: A young red-haired girl, Nicole, is abducted and murdered, her body left buried in the snow. The case is never solved.

Four years later, Venice: Roberta (Nicoletta Elmi) arrives to visit her sculptor father Francesco (George Lazenby) from London where she and her mother, Francesco's estranged wife, Elizabeth (Anita Strindberg) live.




Atypical and typical ways to open a giallo: the snowy wilderness and the plane landing in the Italian city, in this case the oft-used Venice

Then Roberta disappears. Frantic with worry, Francesco searches everywhere he can think of. Her body turns up floating in one of the canals. Yet, strangely, she has not been molested…


Who could kill a child - Nicoletta Elmi in yet another giallo


Black gloves, but not as we are accustomed to seeing them

Frustrated by the failures of the police, realising that his daughter's murder was by no means the first perpetrated by the killer, whoever he or she may be, and haunted by his own feelings of guilt – at the exact moment Roberta was snatched, Francesco was making love with his girlfriend Gabriella (Rosemarie Lindt) – Francesco embarks on his own investigation, soon uncovering a web of corruption, blackmail and perversion amongst the city's elite, including a number of his own contacts and associates from the fine art world...

Aldo Lado's second giallo makes for a more conventional filone outing than its predecessor through its psychologically motivated black-gloved killer; considerable use of the subjective camera; comparatively explicit murder scenes – excepting, of course, the taboo subject of child murder, where the focus is necessarily on the aftermath rather than the act – though still characterised by a more restrained approach than seen in many contemporaries, and more mundane world devoid of occult references.






A wordless sequence that speaks volumes: Francesco and Elizabeth re-united in their shared grief

As with Short Night of Glass Dolls, however, Lado again demonstrates a level of artistry and intelligence not always seen in the filone, along with a consistent interest in playing with the then-emergent conventions.

Like most gialli the killer is represented metonymically by fragments that identify them qua killer, but not as a specific individual. Unusually, however, Lado presents them as wearing a veil rather than a mask and fedora, knitted rather than black leather gloves and old-style women's boots, painting the picture of a harmless nonna dressed against the winter cold instead of a stylish, dressed to kill mostro.

This said, viewers familiar with the filone are likely to have little difficulty in identifying the killer from the suspects presented and will also probably experience something of a sense of deja vu as to the manner of their demise; to say much more would run the risk of spoiling things.

What is worth noting, however, is that on the featurette included on Anchor Bay's DVD, Lado mentions providing a get out clause by which the killer is not what they seemed to be purely as a way of appeasing the authorities – as with Short Night, there is the sense of a filmmaker who is subversive in more than one sense.

Who Saw Her Die? also has a distinctive rhythm to it, and one which is again perhaps more reminscent of the art cinema than the popular / vernacular, as characterised by a distracted audience impatiently awaiting the next set-piece; tellingly from reading a number of comments on the IMDB and elsewhere a criticism often levelled against the film is that it lacks pace.

Rather than entering the scene at the dramatically significant moment and cutting from one shot to the next on the point of action, Lado instead often present a pre-existing world and holds a shot for an extra beat or two, giving the film a certain documentary quality, as when Roberta's body drifts silently and disruptively into the midst of a busy market or we observe the father of one of the killer's previous victims at work in a glass factory or are left in Franco's studio, empty but haunted by his dead daughter.


Francesco's studio; note the sign on the wall

Similar directorial attention to detail is apparent in Serpieri's first visit to a suspected paedophile lawyer in some way involved with the murders. As the lawyer fingers a pendant similar to one Roberta had been given shortly before her abduction and murder, Serpieri neither seems to notice nor Lado's direction to draw attention to the gesture as one with definite significance: rather than pointing it out with a close-up or zoom in in the manner of an “obvious cinema”, he leaves it up to the spectator to notice, or not, and make a connection, or not.




Images can be deceptive

Ennio Morricone's score ranks as one of the most haunting he composed for the genre. Whereas some of his gialli scores feature three types of cue – the character leitmotif; the improvised, aleatory or otherwise technically experimental suspense cue, and the easy listening party cue – and others the first two of these, here he strips things down by providing only the first, providing a number of subtle variations on the same theme dominated by a children's choir and invariably signalling the killer's presence within or – more usually – at the periphery of the scene.

Here we can note, for instance, how the black rubber glove wearing cleaner who runs the bath – a sequence which would be the prelude to a successful or attempted drowning in most other gialli – is clearly signalled as a Hitchcockian joke by departing from the killer's fetish attire of knitted gloves, as the otherwise eerie ambient soundscape of the running water becomes less eerie precisely because of the absence of the musical leitmotif.

Simultaneously the cross-cutting in of the cue as Serpieri stalks the lawyer through the streets as the camera cuts back and forth between Serpieri's point-of-view and that of an unidentified presence following him, indicates where the real killer is at that moment.

If the monothematic nature of the score perhaps makes it a touch repetitive – a criticism that, reading some other reviews, often seems to emerge – this same repetition can also perhaps be justified as an insight into the killer's monomaniacal personality, that he or she has to kill and Serpieri's subsequent obsession, even as the latter raises the idea of an alternate score featuring an obvious Serpieri leitmotif and a kind of musical duel. (The music that plays over the wrapping up scene at the end, the killer having been unmasked and brought to justice, actually lacks the children's choir, only for it to re-emerge as the end credits roll.)


Curiously off-centre framings suggest a world out of sorts

Another nice touch is the murder of another character in a cinema, recalling the krimi Curse of the Hidden but with the difference of having the killer use a silent method – strangulation – rather than a noisy one – shooting, relying on the noise issuing from the screen to mask the fatal shot – and the screening of a mondo sexy film rather than a thriller murder mystery, to nicely tap into the situation of the viewer themself, momentarily breaching the barrier between screen and spectator and likely giving an extra frisson to the theatrical experience of the film regrettably absent on home viewing.








Alone in the dark – the assassin strikes...


Francesco arrives and realises what has happened, just as the killer exits

Whilst we can safely “play at cops and robbers” – the remarks of the representative of official authority, whose characteristic lack of effectiveness and engagement ironically signals why the protagonist's amateur, private investigation is so necessary – in a way that Serpieri cannot, we are not equally safe from those others watching the film in the dark with us or awaiting on the way back home from the cinema; the double edge of the cover provided by darkness...

The post-industrial giallo

One locale that seems to crop up with a disproprtionate frequency in 1970s gialli is the abandoned factory or warehouse, replete with treacherous pitfalls. It appears in The Fifth Cord, Crimes of the Black Cat (which also features the model agency, for a double whammy) and Who Saw Her Die and others I can't recall offhand. Is the death factory just a cool location for a stalk and slash showdown, or is there some deeper significance that can be attached to it?

Subtitles or dubbing?

Assuming you're not Italian, how do you prefer to watch Italian films. Dubbed into your native language or in Italian with subtitles? In the original mono or stereo mix or a new, multi-channel one that better shows off your home cinema set up? Or does it vary depending on the individual film and viewing context?

Occhi di cristallo / Eyes of Crystal

This 2004 Italian-Spanish co-production starts off in bold style with a frenetic chase through winding alleys and back-streets as cops Giacomo Amaldi (Luigi Lo Cascio) and Frese (José Ángel Egido) pursue and catch an attempted rapist.

Unexpectedly Giacomo then shoots the man in the leg, explaining to his shocked partner that it's for “when he gets out of prison.”




Reflections in a golden eye: extreme ocular close-ups are in abundance as we might expect in a film entitled Eyes of Crystal

While useful for establishing character – Giacomo's “issues,” we later learn, stem from the tramautic legacy of his first love herself being raped and murdered – it also proves a touch inconsequential, a breach of procedure that leads to no complaint or inquiry and has no further bearing on the various stories about to emerge...

The first involves a killer who, after indulging in a spot of taxidermy (from Psycho through Jeffrey Dahmer, have taxidermists ever had a positive representation?) unceremoniously guns down a young couple in a waste-ground with a hunting rifle, along with the peeping tom who was spying on their lovemaking. We also learn that the man has a missing pinkie.

Amaldi and Frese are assigned the case.

The second sees their older colleague Ajaccio (Simón Andreu) go into hospital for tests that prove him to be suffering from a brain tumour, already at the inoperable and soon to be at the causing hallucinations and changes in personality stage...

The third finds attractive female student Giulietta (Lucía Jiménez) being stalked and coming to Amaldi and Frese for help, with younger man soon taking a personal interest in the case.

The fourth sees an antique dealer sell a 19th century doll to a mystery buyer – i.e. our killer; obviously a man of means – who murders her and removes her arms.








The blue eyes of the broken sex doll?

Suspiciously some surgical tools have disappeared from the hospital. Meanwhile, Ajaccio awakens to find someone having written his name on his torso in a wax pencil of the sort used for marking where surgical incisions are to be made...

As Amaldi and Frese continue their investigations and the killer continues on his mad quest, all the Pieces – to cite a rather more trashy old school production that has more relevance than Eyes of Crystal's makers would probably care to admit – start to come together...






The sign of the cross

The mystery element of this neo-giallo (although it should be noted that director Eros Pugliessi seems to want to avoid the use of the G word) never quite comes off, it being all too easy for the seasoned genre veteran to work out who the killer is from the suspects and red herrings set up – the sinister doctor, the other student who always seem to be wherever Giuditta is etc. – and, perhaps more importantly, not framed as such.




Some suspect characters

Likewise, while the reason behind the killer's missing finger is ultimately explained us, in all its phallic symbolic glory, it lacks significance as far as the policemen are concerned and, as such, perhaps functions more as a kind of reverse McGuffin, more important to us than them.

The convergence of the different story threads necessarily meanwhile imparts a degree of contrivance which, whilst certainly no worse that those seen in countless classic gialli, is more problematic on account of the film-makers' aspirations. Although blame can probably be apportioned here to author Luca Di Fulvio on whose novel L'impagliatore the film is based, I would have preferred to see at least one of the sub-plots remain more isolated.

This would, I think, have helped better illustrate the theme of contingency versus destiny running through the work and concomitantly the danger of reading too much significance in to what could be a random detail, as highlighted by Amaldi and Frese's discussion of what the killer's cryptic writings, as found at the scene with another victim lacking body parts, might mean.







Amaldi and Frese debate the meaning of a potential clue in a characteristically functionally shot police station sequence; Puglielli's direction itself leaves little to chance

For, as Amaldi remarks, it's often that the meaning we impute that is the more important, as a kind of personality test. And as far as Eyes of Crystal goes, I think what is revealed therbey is a somewhat schizoid personality, that of a film which tries to have it both ways in appealing to both genre and art cinema or horror and psychological thriller type audiences and does not always successfully reconcile the contradictions that emerge thereby.

What I mean here is the kind of authenticity that an Angst, Henry Portrait of a Serial Killer or Seul Contre Tous evinces against a Silence of the Lambs or Se7en, of being willing to present extreme, all-too-real violence – in all its forms – in an unflinchingly, hopefully repellent way, and to avoid the cliché of the brilliant serial killer playing games with the authorities.

It should however, also, be noted that while Eyes of Crystal has such a killer, at least the buddy cop pairing departs from the Se7en model somewhat in making the younger Amaldi the educated, cultured type and displacing the retiree role from the older Frese onto the third party Ajaccio.

Likewise, the film-makers could undoubtedly point to the name recognition of the latter against the former group of films and argue that the plague on both your (grind and art) houses approach of Angst and company is one with a more limited appeal, just as my own preference for those works that take this approach is also an expression of a particular strategy of distinction in that “look at me, I'm harder-core and culter than thou” way.

In more genre based terms it also, perhaps, something of the authenticity that a The Bird with the Crystal Plumage exhibits against a Sleepless, that difference between the film-maker compelled to get what he wants to say out there, without really knowing if there was the audience waiting to be constructed, and the one making a calculated pitch towards a more or less known, pre-existing audience. (Sleepless is neither a bad film nor a bad Argento film specifically, more just another one on both counts.)

Again, however, this is not surprising from the point of view of a young director mindful of developing a long-term career, just a way beset by compromises and arguably less likely to lead to future masterpieces.

It's at this point that, despite all the above reservations and criticisms, I should emphasise that I thoroughly enjoyed Eyes of Crystal, found it an accomplished work and firmly believe that Puglielli is a talent who absolutely deserves the opportunity to make more films of whatever type he – and hopefully not so much the marketplace – desires.

His direction is confident. Indeed, if anything its perhaps even over-confident, insofar as there are times – the use of a Jacob's Ladder style shaky head effect in the flashbacks, for instance – where a technique seemed to be there more because it was available than for what it contributed to the meaning of the scene, with that sense of form determining or over-riding content.

Elsewhere, however – note the way the cross-shape of the wire frame for one of the killer's stuffed animals near subliminally introduces a visual motif that links him in with Ajaccio's enigmatic flashbacks, for instance, or the ironic juxtaposition of Giacomo and Guidetta's first and abortive date with a supporting character's fatal encounter with the killer – he nails it.

The technical credits are good, with attractive compositions and cinematography and a surprisingly bold score centred around a madrigal type piece, whilst the performances – filone fans will note the presence of Simon Andreu, a frequent face in Luciano Ercoli's contributions to the genre in the 1970s – are of a higher standard than many would expect from a giallo.


The Frightened Woman...




... and with good reason

One factor that would appear to contribute here is the use of Italian rather than English dubbing. I wondered if the film had originally been slated to be dubbed, insofar as all of the books Giacomo reads whilst researching the occult and the textual inserts are (somewhat incongruously it has to be said) in English. It would certainly be interesting to have seen the film dubbed to ascertain if and how that affects the experience; one assumes for the worse.

A final thought, meanwhile, is that whilst the use of Sofia as a backdrop does not particularly hamper the film, I could not help wondering what a more concretely defined location might have brought to the film; Turin springs to mind as an ideal location on account of the occult theme. Or perhaps that would have been to invite the Argento comparisons (“When I write a film now I always visualise Turin”) Puglielli otherwise seems to want to maintain some distance from – at least for now.

Italian Horror Film Directors

“The Italian horror film has had its heyday. It has passed… [T]he purpose of this book is to recount the origins of the genre, celebrate ten specific auteurs who have contributed enormously, mention the many who have made noteworthy films in this genre, and also discuss the seminal influential genres associated with the Italian horror film. Hopefully you will enjoy reading about the obscure films, as well as reading about those that you may already be familiar with.”

Thus states Louis Paul in the second paragraph of the introductory essay that opens Italian Horror Film Directors by way of providing criteria for evaluating the work; criteria by which, unfortunately, the book only emerges as a qualified success at best.

The essay itself, which follows lively forewords by Jess Franco – once again confirming his lifelong passion for the B-cinema – and Lucio Fulci's daughter Antonella, is one of the better sections.

Beginning his survey in the silent era with the influential Theatre du Grand Guignol and its Italian offshoot, Paul charts the development of Italian horror through the seminal films of Freda, Bava, Argento and company with the appropriate name-checking of I Vampiri, Black Sunday, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage and so on, whilst also identifying less-well known and downright obscure films awaiting rediscovery.

Although Paul's knowledge of the form thus comes through, some of his remarks also raise questions as to his broader awareness of the Italian cinema and ability to more fully contextualise these films and film-makers.

He suggests that I Vampiri is marred by "an infatuation with the concerns of the cinema of neo-realism," an evaluation that would surely surprise Riccardo Freda with his explicit opposition to that movement and remarks that "I am not in the least interested in banal humanity, everyday humanity" (cited in Pierre Lephoron's The Italian Cinema, p. 179).

Discussing the apparent anachronism of Freda's Maciste All'Inferno with its 17th century setting (p. 17), Paul meanwhile seems unaware of the existence of Guido Brigone's 1925 film film of the same name and the precedent it established in placing the mythical strongman in 19th Century Italy.

Turning to the the directors profiled in detail we find a list largely comprising of the usual suspects – Dario Argento, Lamberto and Mario Bava, Ruggero Deodato, Lucio Fulci, Umberto Lenzi, Antonio Margheriti, Aristide Massaccesi and Michele Soavi – with the notable exception of the absence of Riccardo Freda and the surprise inclusion of Bruno Mattei. (Freda is later controversially evaluated as “a problematic figure in the history of Italian horror films [...] his earliest works in the field [...] considered by many Italian horror cinemaphiles as prime examples of the finest directorial achievements in the genre, are, in fact, pedestian and rigid exercises in filmmaking.”)

Things get off to a bad start as, on the first page of the Argento profile Paul states that his daughters Fiore and Asia Argento were the products of their father's marriage “ a woman named Marisa," which must come as something of a surprise to Dario, Asia and her mother Daria Nicolodi!

While I did not spot any errors quite as glaring as this elsewhere, with Argento admittedly being the film-maker whose life and work I am most familiar with, it is the kind of thing that hardly inspires confidence, making you wonder what to make of the rest of the facts presented – are they facts or factoids? – especially in relation to those film-makers who are less familiar.

Paul's evaluations of the film-makers respective oeuvres follow a fairly conservative line for the most part: The Beyond is "as close as Fulci has come to a masterpiece of horror" whilst The New York Ripper is "a disappointing and gruesome work [that] reveals little imagination," for example.

Predictably the two directors who come off worst are Deodato and Lenzi on account of their association with the cannibal film.

Paul does offer a surprise in Lenzi's case through a positive evaluation of Nightmare City – “a highlight of Lenzi's horror filmography” – but then goes on to relegate the director's crime films, outwith his purview despite the marketing of Almost Human in the US as a horror film, to a single four line paragraph. This results in the overall verdict of someone who “never consistently excelled at any one genre” rather than – as I would argue – a solid action and gialli film-maker who has unfortunately become typed as the guy who made Cannibal Ferox.

The last two sections of the book, profiles of 39 other directors and a filmography of significant films by other filmmakers not otherwise mentioned, are an improvement.

While some of the filmmakers under discussion, such as Sergio Martino and Aldo Lado will be be well known to genre aficionados, fewer are likely to have heard about the likes of Gianfranco Giagni or Mario Colucci.

The same can be said of the genre filmography through the inclusion of not only Frankenstein's Daughter but also No Thanks, The Coffee Makes Me Nervous. Again, however, there are some curious choices – if Django is included on account of its grotesque and horrific elements where is Django the Bastard?

Overall, there is about enough in Italian Horror Directors for it to be a worthwhile volume to have on one's cult film bookshelf. But therein lies the rub: it is not an indispensable volume that the reader will keep close to hand and, given the price of the volume and the growing competition in the marketplace, that is likely insufficient.

Door into Darkness subtitles

A while back I got the Greek release of Argento's Door into Darkness TV series, which is without English subtitles. I remember vaguely seeing a torrent of the series, or at least the Argento-directed episodes and programme introductions with a subtitle file, but couldn't figure out how to download just the subtitled. So, does anyone have any English subtitle files for the series I could get a copy of or else know where one can be found online?

Thanks

The dubbed voice

In Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen the French composer and film theorist Michel Chion's discusses some of the differences between French and Italian dubbing cultures. He suggests that Italian dubbing is not of a low standard, as is often assumed, but rather operates according to a different standard or set of principles from the French. It is “looser,” being more concerned with synchronising the voice with the entire performance gesture, to the body as much as the mouth, presumably in line with the commedia dell'arte and opera traditions.

It's a useful insight and makes me wonder how far the criticism of the dubbing in Italian filone product within the UK in particular is down to the greater importance / awareness of French than Italian language film theory and practice within British film culture, that the voices which have been raised here are more likely to be speaking French or at least with a metaphorical French accent.

It also raises questions, I think, of what is happening to Italian horror and gialli now with subtitled DVD releases, in that we then have the combination of a “low” cultural form – i.e. things which are read as horror films – in a “high” culture package – i.e. in a foreign language, with subtitles. How far does the growing respectability of these films, such as it is, with official / institutional film culture parallel this? Which films and film-makers with the filone “win” and “lose” through such processes? How are our appreciations and understandings of them altered? Is there such a thing as an authentic, original language text in the case of a multi-lingual co-production also made with foreign sales in mind anyway? Too many questions, too few answers?

Lovecraft and Italian horror

Re-reading the interviews in Loris Curci's Shock Masters of the Cinema, something John Carpenter says regarding his then-current In the Mouth of Madness got me thinking:

“I've been wanting to do a Lovecraft story for many years – but you can't do them, they don't work... Lovecraft is just to be read, that's where he's beautiful, that's his language; you can't show the “indescribable horror that drives you crazy” because it won't, it will never drive you crazy.”

Or, Lovecraft – like Poe – is about the generation of particular sensations through the use of words and as such they cannot really be adapted for the cinema but only transposed and translated? Why Bava and Argento were right to never make straight adaptations of Lovecraft but instead draw inspiration from and allude to him? The difference between Lovecraft's “cosmic horror” and the attempted codification and systematisation into “the Cthulhu Mythos” by August Derleth as something that “makes sense,” idiosyncratic use of elementalism (e.g. Cthulhu despite being a water power is trapped beneath the ocean) notwithstanding? The equivalent mythos of the Three Mothers (their alchemy) and their intertexts of Fulci and Cozzi?

Solamente nero / The Bloodstained Shadow

Young mathematician Stefano D'Archangelo (Lino Capolicchio) returns to the Venetian island of Murano to recuperate from a nervous illness. After chatting with young artist/designer Sandra Sellani (Stefani Casini – Suspiria) on the train, he is met off the ferry by his older brother Paolo (Craig Hill), now the island's priest.


Who saw her die and who caused her demise - the girl in the flashbacks


Stefano


Paolo; perhaps the shot / reverse shot construction of the sequence in the restaurant retrospectively conveys the distance between the brothers?

The brothers go for a meal and to catch up on what has been happening, with Paolo voicing his frustration at his inability to do anything about Murano's degenerates and deviants – an atheistic gay aristocrat with paedophile tendencies; a doctor whom he suspects to have murdered his wife and who refuses to use his wealth and influence to help the poor and disadvantaged; and a midwife rumoured to have a crazy son and to performs illegal abortions – all of whom also participate in seances conducted by a medium.








Solamente Nero is a term that also applies to many of the film's visuals

During the night Paolo is awoken by a noise. Going to the window, he sees two figures struggling in the street. Stefano arrives and the brothers go to investigate, but find nothing amidst the darkness and torrential rain.

Paolo finds a note warning him of the consequences of delving further into the matter: “If one speaks of murder, yours will be talked about.” He and Stefano debate what to do, only for their discussion to be rendered irrelevant when the medium's body is found strangled elsewhere on the island, the mode of her death recalling a still-unsolved child murder from their youth and triggering one of Stefano's nervous attacks.

When Paolo narrowly avoids being crushed by a falling stone crucifix – the symbolism of the scene is obvious, if effectively staged – it becomes clear the killer intends to make good on his threat. Yet, in that he is also targetting the same corrupting influences Paolo had earlier railed against, continuing with the Count, the killer also confusingly appears have some common ground with the priest himself.

Had not Paolo earlier remarked that the count was “a most despicable individual... without morals,” and that “it might be better if he disappeared from the face of the earth.”?

Meanwhile, courting Sandra and visiting her mother's house in Venice, Stefano happens upon a painting that triggers another one of his attacks...




Two brothers who cannot face one another nor the truth?

This 1978 giallo from Antonio Bido starts off promisingly with two impressively mounted murder set pieces – an impressionistic slow-motion flashback whose meaning is gradually determined as the investigation develops and a classic expressionistic dark and stormy night – but thereafter seems to lose its way somewhat.

The chief culprit here is the romantic subplot between Stefano and Sandra, which seems somewhat shoehorned in at times, never more than in an awkwardly handled love scene which neither performers Lino Capolocchio and Stefania Casini – both of whom are otherwise pretty good in their respective roles – nor Bido seem very comfortable with. (Admittedly the same could be said, for instance, of the comparable scene in The Cat o' Nine Tails, but there one gets the impression that a sense of unease – even disgust – is more deliberate than accidental thematically.)

In a similar vein whilst the evocation of life in a small town provides for a change of pace and the Venetian locations impart their usual picturesque qualities – mist shrouded canals, winding passageways etc. – those with a liking for more kitschy and trashy fare may feel a bit short-changed since while Bido's visuals style is certainly dynamic, his use of handheld-camera, zooms, canted angles, extreme close-ups and jarring cuts – i.e. all the standard tropes of the giallo – is judicious rather than grandstanding for the most part, and his colour palette, lighting and design largely subdued.






Sandra is stalked through the alleys of Venice before Stefano makes his appearance, looking like he's wearing Dracula's cape here

Two set-pieces perhaps best encapsulate Solamente Nero / The Bloodstained Shadow's qualities.

The first is the aforementioned debate between the brothers. Bido frames their exchange in a mirror, such that they appear to be facing opposite directions. In many gialli – The Case of the Bloody Iris is a particularly good counterpoint here – this would likely be a throwaway piece of visual trickery for its own sake. Here, however, it becomes invested with meaning, suggesting the distance between the brothers and their paths through life – a classic set of binary oppositions, between science and religion, reason and faith, staying and leaving Murano, sexual relationships and celibacy etc. – along with the fact that we do not have a full picture of either man.


The art of darkness


The child in the primal scene

The problem, speaking here from the perspective of the more mainstream giallo, is that this then weakens our point of identification. We do not have one character we know to be innocent of the crimes to function our surrogate as detective committed to unveiling the truth. If we comparing Stefano to The Bird with the Crystal Plumage's Sam Dalmas and Deep Red's Marc Daly, the key difference is that when he recalls his moment of trauma he does not know his place within the scene, whether he was an innocent witness or the perpetrator. (It's perhaps not too much of a spoiler to indicate those aware of the rules of the game as far as red herrings and suspects go will be able to work out the identity of the killer without too much difficulty.)






The awkward love scene

It is also such differences that help Bido's film find its own identity rather than simply coming across as ersatz Argento – and a comparison with Tenebrae might be interesting here – as also seen in the way that the medium is here presented as a Trauma-style fake than the genuine article as with Deep Red, or in Stefano's Stendhal Syndrome-esque interludes when confronted by the enigmatic painting.

The second is a long wordless passage where the handheld I-camera stalks Sandra through the sidestreets and canals of Venice. The sequence goes on for what seems like an eternity and is undoubtedly effective in terms of suspense and shock dynamics, with a textbook Lewtonian “bus” moment as Sandra is startled by a drunken accordion player who jumps out at her for no particular reason, but seems ultimately a touch gratuitous when the figure who finally emerges is Stefano.




Broken dolls...


... ocular close ups...


... black gloved hands removing a vital visual fragment

Again, however, given the aforementioned questions as to his role – further enhanced here by the way Bido has the character dressed and framed – or the possibility that our perspective has imperceptibly shifted from one stalker to another, with Stefano's presence possibly scaring an actual would-be attacker away, other interpretations are certainly possible.

As with The Cat with the Eyes of Jade / Watch Me When I Kill, Bido employs a very Goblin-esque score along with the occasional diegetically located classical interlude. Here however, the music was actually performed by the group, although for contractual reasons it is Stelvio Cipriani's name that appears on the credits.

Indeed, it's perhaps Goblin's score that encapsulates the ambiguous position of The Bloodstained Shadow in relation to the art and filone cinemas, insufficiently respectable and concerned with exhibiting the approved taste for the former – or, possibly, perhaps trying too hard for crossover appeal to it, in the manner of the prog-rock concept album – yet a touch too idiosyncratic and non-formulaic for the latter.

Once again “their” respective losses prove “our” gains in terms of the pleasures of interpreting – that is both reading and re-writing – the giallo text, above all in trying to tease out all those contradictions and our own responses to them, in my case as (self-)conscious (self-)marginal(ising) would-be intellectual...

Thoughts inspired by Roma Violenta

I watched the poliziotto Roma Violenta last night. I thoroughly enjoyed it for the most part, for its no-nonsense, take-no-prisoners approach and the perhaps dubious enthusiasm which Maurizio Merli always seems to bring to the Inspector Betti role. I did feel it flagged a bit towards the end compared to, say, Napoli Violenta, perhaps because there was no strongly personified antagonist for Betti's crusade against crime in general. Admittedly this is maybe a good thing ideologically – i.e. the traditionally Hollywood good guys / bad guys, let's clean up this town notions are problematised – and it certainly helps in conveying the sense of a society falling apart.

What the film also made me wonder about, in combination with the various other poliziotto I've seen over the past few years is whether Mikel Koven's vernacular cinema thesis, that there are certain films which have no aspirations towards art and should be read for their social value for their target audience, might be better applied to the poliziotto than the giallo.

What I mean is that I've seen plenty of gialli that I feel run counter to Koven's thesis in consciously aspiring to art to a greater or lesser degree, but all the Italian cop films I've seen have been straightforward entertainments with a functional – and generally effective – mise-en-scene, relatively simple narratives and characterisations and plenty of “attractions” and emotional pay-offs. The one exception would be Ricky Tognazzi's La Scorta, which is a later film, with a different social / political context, and one I'm not sure even fits into the genre / filone.

So, for those who know more about the Italian cop film than I do, were there any more obviously aspirational, less vernacular films? Those of Fernando Di Leo, perhaps? Is / was there a distinction in the labels and descriptions used, so that a filmmaker like Umberto Lenzi made poliziotto whilst his art-house counterparts made contemporary set political dramas that just happened to feature police protagonists? And what would be some examples of the art-house / crossover cop film if such exist?

Random thoughts on Sleepless

I watched Sleepless again earlier this evening. It's a film I can appreciate but have not been able to quite embrace whole-heartedly. I think I'm starting to understand why: I just find it to be too calculated, too concerned with giving the audience what it wants. I realise that this was what Argento needed at that point in time, coming off the disappointing critical and commercial responses to Trauma, The Stendhal Syndrome and Phantom of the Opera – the first two being films I think are much maligned, perhaps on account of being more authentic and personal works, and which I find continue to get better with each additional viewing and passing year.

What also struck me this time is how the film seems very much like the inverse of Phenomena, as a similar exercise in revisiting past themes; that way in which with both films you can almost go through them scene by scene, picking out the intertextual reference points and allusions.

One difference is that with Phenomena, I get the sense Argento was making a film for himself and trusting that his core audience would have faith and come along for the ride. With Sleepless, 15 years later, I gets the sense that he was no longer confident of this audience – if indeed it even still existed, or had not changed composition dramatically – and accordingly sought to make a film for them, for better or worse. (Trauma would, I suppose, be midway between these two positions, for its simultaneous adoption of elements of the slasher film and its subversion of the same with the giallo and an overriding seriousness.)

Another difference is that with Phenomena I still get that sense of a film-maker going forward or at least underscoring a phase in his career. With Sleepless, however, it at times seems more like a scoring out of the previous decade's work, of saying that it represented (perhaps necessary) dead ends and digressions.

There is one significant exception: with the character of Ulysses Moretti I think we see Argento – no longer of course, a young man, even if my (our?) mental image of him remains as such – addressing issues of ageing and mortality in a new, genuinely mature, way. Perhaps its the Bergman influence exerting itself through the presence of Max Von Sydow in the role, perhaps the expressionist influence on both filmmakers, but for some reason I'm reminded of Wild Strawberries...

Fantom Kiler

Over on Groovy Age of Horror there's an interesting thread with some early 1990s erotic grotesque fumetti – well, they're erotic horror, but the Japanese phrase seems very apposite. I found one of them, in which a man builds a masturbation machine, using the severed hands of a succession of female victims, so marvellously perverse.

It also got me to thinking about a notorious underground giallo type film from a few years back, Fantom Kiler, which I ended up watching again to see if my initial very negative reactions would be any different this time round...

The short answer is no – the film is the kind of thing which can only give the giallo and the fans of Eurocult cinema an even worse name among the mainstream media, were it to ever creep onto their radar. The longer one... well, read on...

Episode 1:

Two station attendants watch a beautiful, unattainable woman. One or both of them imagine her naked, reminiscent of Meyer's The Immoral Mr Teas. Coming over to ask them what they find so fascinating, the woman, now seen clothed, slips, exposing her breasts and that she is wearing no panties. Declining the men's dubious offers of help. she leaves, not noticing that she has dropped her keys, which the men pick up. One suggests that he will be seeing her, as a close-up of his eye segues us into the next sequence.






Classic giallo iconography put to dubious use; note the Bisongrass Vodka bottle in lieu of J&B in the purportedly Polish production.

Walking through the woods, the woman becomes lost and progressively loses her clothes through a series of contrivances, including a randomly barbed wire fence in her way – shades of Suspiria's room filled with razor wire, if we want to desperately search for a reference point / justification for sitting through the film perhaps?

Finally - the extended stalking sequence being marked by the absence of obvious POV shots from the killer's position, insofar as most of the camera set-ups conveniently position us with a full frontal view even if a supernatural element might then serve as justification – she meets the Fantom Kiler, dressed a la Blood and Black Lace and wielding a large knife for maximum phallic symbolism.

He then proceeds to menace and verbally taunt her. While this is useful for the film-makers as way of expressing his – and more worryingly perhaps also their – twisted philosophy, such as it is, it also serves to undercut the iconic potential of the figure when we remember that his more realistically grounded predecessors invariably declined to speak. (Think, for instance, of the aforementioned Blood and Black Lace, with the mute figure writing his question, “where is the diary” on a notepad.)


At least the banal presentation of the perfunctory investigation scenes is true to the prevailing norms of the giallo form; the detective's remarks seem like a convenient get-out for the film-makers and their target audience, however .


Two of the under-achievers, with the safe, convenient distance of Benny Hill-esque parody.

Then, inevitably, he slashes her repeatedly, before finishing with several thrusts of his blade to her groin. Due to the lack of special effects and poor technique the scene is nowhere near as nasty or shocking as it sounds, especially when compared with similar moments in the likes of The New York Ripper, Crimes of the Black Cat or The Bird with the Crystal Plumage.

The exception is in terms of its sheer lack of taste, by way of the gloating, she-asked-for-it attitude. It's not that filmmakers should ever be self-censoring and refuse to admit of or explore the dark side of human desire, more that there one gets the sense here that all they wanted to do was shock.

This might seem a curious thing for me to say, given that in the case of The New York Ripper I recently argued that Fulci and his collaborators did not have any particular misogynistic or psychosexual axe to grind and were instead just seeking to be as hard hitting as possible, but there at least there were also narrative, characterisation and subtext to keep one engaged and, most importantly, a denouement that is ultimately as if not more terrifying in its absolute bleakness than anything in the preceding 90-odd minutes.

Come morning the police find the body, leading to a flashback from another similar case a year ago, in which a naked woman is menaced with a power drill; similar moments punctuate the main episodes and have a tendency to show the limitations of the digital video equipment being used, as with an otherwise potentially interesting set up where one victim loses her glasses to allow scope for some split-focus type effects.

Episode 2:

Meanwhile at the station one of the attendants has been taken ill, leading to the arrival of his replacement, a woman who proceeds to engage in assorted scantily clad floor and window cleaning. She then demonstrates the strength of her buttock muscles by inviting the other attendant to attempt to pull out a wooden spoon she clenches between them, inevitably winning the contest, the wager of one weeks' wages and – you sense – the imminent wrath of the Fantom Kiler.

Before this, however, the other attendant is called into the police station for a chat about the case, it so happening that the officer heading the investigation is also his brother. The attendants recollections of what he was doing on the day in question leads to another Mr Teas type sequence, as the two layabouts ogle the invariably scantily clad women, including one whose rebuff signals the Fantom's next appearance.


Note the obvious cut out blade

At this point, however, these recollections spill over into the next extended stalk, strip and kill sequence as the woman unwittingly gets into a taxi driven by the Fantom. There's a brief moment of wit here, as the woman asks him why he wears the mask, getting the response that he was in an accident and is quite badly scarred; an answer that's accepted at face value and wouldn't perhaps be out of place in many proper gialli.

The car then breaks down in the middle of the woods. There's a series of three cuts in on the red headlight of the car, getting closer each time, that indicates the Argento influence and a more general hint of Suspiria to the lighting, even if again the paucity of resources proves a limitation. But, all too soon we are again back into more mundane territory as the Kiler discovers he needs something to tie the fan belt back into the engine, giving the woman a reason to take the bottom half of her clothes off and, before long, her top as well - her hot pants fall under the taxi and so she takes off her boob tube to be able to better stretch under it.

The Killer then takes a hammer and a chisel and is about to strike the blade into the unwitting woman's anus, the attempts at suspense backfiring on account of some unconvincing impossible camera angles from what would have to be the brown-eye-view, before another woman unexpectedly shows up and asks if she can help.

The killer then strips her naked and glides his chisel across her body before stabbing her in the groin with it. Again what could be unbearable comes across as laughable, especially when he then drags her bloodless, seemingly unharmed form away. Taxi woman remains oblivious to all this, as she is still busy retrieving her hot pants from under the vehicle, then discovers the killer's accoutrements in the boot of the vehicle – too late...





A potentially worthwhile composition ruined by technical inability?

Episode 3:

Back in the station and the female attendant's girlfriend shows up, revealing that she only took on the post for bet. The two women return home and prepare for some lovemaking, at which point the Fantom shows up. He slits the girlfriend's throat - there are lashings of gore here, but the effect is negated by a blade that is more fake than the breast implants of the female performers - then deals with the attendant, who seems quite into their S&M games until she's handcuffed and helpless and he pulls her girlfriend's severed head out of his bag...

There's perhaps five minutes of decent spoof / parody material here, but as for the rest it's so calculated and as a result ineffectual in its attempts to shock. Perhaps it's desensitisation after years of watching what are by most people's standards pretty extreme films. I would prefer to think of it as a re-sensitisation, as to what a good giallo specifically or sex / horror hybrid generally can actually accomplish, however.


Pseudonyms galore; like Snuff, none of those who appeared in this film were ever heard from again...

Though purportedly of Polish origin – bottles of Bisongrass Vodka perform a function analogous to the beloved J&B bottle – the film would appear to in fact have been clandestinely produced in the UK with its director hiding behind a pseudonym. While probably a wise move legally – exactly what is the BBFC's policy on the insertion of wooden spoon and broom handles into the rectum, even if only implied? – and in terms of helping establish a certain mystique around the film, one really cannot emphasise enough that this is one of those films that would be better left to hopefully disappear. Sadly, however, with two sequels and an out-and-out hardcore porn offshoot, it would seem that too many of us were curious and / or believed the hype...

Midi Minuit Fantastique

Things have been quiet at http://bxzzines.blogspot.com for a while, but there's been a flurry of activity recently with some excellent scans from old magazines, like a Midi Minuit Fantastique piece on Riccardo Freda. Enjoy...

La Ragazza dal pigiama giallo / The Pyjama Girl Case

The body of a young woman is found on the beach, her face burned beyond recognition. The post-mortem reveals that she had been shot and bludgeoned. In addition to the official investigation, retired old-timer Inspector Timpson (Ray Milland) takes an interest in the case, which soon becomes an obsession.


The true face of horror

Deciding that before they can find the killer they must first identify the victim, the police have the body embalmed and put on public display. This seems to give them the break they need, leading to the arrest of a low-life by the name of Quint.

Timpson, however, is not convinced and goes to a rendezvous with the man he believes to be the real killer. The correctness of his deduction is confirmed by his own murder, compelling his ex-colleagues to re-open the case...






The macabre, Damien Hirst-like exhibition of the pyjama girl to the Sydney public


Luis Barboo in a cameo appearance as one of the audience; note the yellow of the perspex of the girls's glass cage

Though La Ragazza dal pigiama giallo / The Pyjama Girl Case / The Girl in the Yellow Pyjamas is the film certainly belongs within the form, as signalled by its self-referential title, hardly your typical giallo.

Drawing its inspiration from a notorious real-life murder case that shocked 1930s Australia (and which is examined in detail on the featurette on Blue Underground's excellent DVD) the film avoids the conventional trappings of black gloved killers, subjective stalk and slash camera and so on, favouring a low-key approach that's almost documentary like at times, most notably in its warts-and-all exploration of the demi-monde of Sydney's immigrant communities. (“Don't tell me you're jealous – Oh yes, you're Italian...”)


Michele Placido plays to the Italian stereotype


Stylised, but not too stylised?

It also throws the viewer expecting a conventional giallo for a loop through the device – only understood retrospectively – of introducing the pyjama girl to us in a parallel narrative, without revealing that it takes place in the past.

Indeed, thanks to the inclusion of a conventionally connoted vaseline-on-the-lens type dreamy “I remember” flashback in which she and her friend go to bed together, we could easily think that the latter is the victim and that what's about to develop is your standard psychosexual killer seeking to punish deviant women type affair.

What emerges is far more disturbing precisely on account of its banality, as we see how the “pyjama girl” (Dalila Di Lazarro) is deserted by her lover (Mel Ferrer), marries another (Michele Placido) on the rebound, embarks on an affair with a third (Howard Ross / Renato Rossini) and falls pregnant, en route to a denouement that's less premeditated murder than the inevitable accidental outcome of circumstances.

It's the kind of everyday tragedy that we find in neo-realism – the peasant girl mistaken for the GI's killer in Paisa and then shot as a Nazi collaborator, say – or in Pabst's Pandora's Box – the pyjama girl as a 1970s Lulu – of all-too-human characters rather than would-be supermen.

Equally, however, these two unlikely seeming reference points also point to one of the film's few weaknesses, perhaps stemming from director and co-writer Flavio Mogherini's background as a production designer.

It's that tension between simply showing the world out there and making more obvious interventions, of whether its enough in itself to show a factory floor to make a socio-political point or make it a more overtly expressionistic / symbolic unnatural landscape, or what the use of slow-motion and yellow lighting say as the pyjama girl ascends the stairs with the men to whom she has agreed to prostitute herself.








The giallo as exploitation and commentary on exploitation

Sometimes, as in both these instances, the ostensible gulf between objective and subjective is intersubjectively resolved in that poetic manner Mikel Koven distinguishes, although I would contend that there is also a greater degree of conscious artistry here than his thesis would seem to admit of. Elsewhere, however, as with the red and green lights that Mogherini likes to have play across the pyjama girl's face, it feels too self-conscious and contrived.




A case of Bava or Argento-itis

In a similar vein, if it seems impossible for directors to film in Sydney without including a scene or two in front of the opera house there are again potential subtexts: what does it represent, but a vision of the Australian dream; a dream only available to the disadvantaged and disenfranchised as an exterior to be taken in but not actually entered into.

As Troy Howarth pointed out, there are certain parallels between the film and Dario Argento's Sleepless, where Ulysses Moretti is also a retired ex-detective whose unofficial investigation is regarded with suspicion and / or derision by his younger counterparts, but ultimately leads to the solving of the case – albeit at the cost of his life as he gets too close to the truth. (“Times have changed. The modern delinquent's a different breed... don't take this to heart but age isn't on your side and God knows what you might run into in a case of this kind.”)

Yet beyond this Sleepless is the more traditional and conventional giallo through its cunning psychopath playing games with the police and extensive use of the subjective camera killers' eye-view set pieces, precisely because it represented an attempt by its director to “get back to basics” and give his core audience what they wanted / expected after the debacle of Phantom of the Opera.

Where Argento does seem to succeed, however, is in painting a more convincing picture of modern versus traditional police methods, insofar as here modern methods come down to old-fashioned brutality as a confession is forcibly extracted from Quint. Unless, of course, that's the point the film-makers were making here, of a sense of frustration creeping in as new technological and criminological approaches fail to deliver what they promise:

“I've got a theory. In my opinion the girl was raped before she was killed, obviously by some psychopath. Probably a man with a castration complex.”

Again, one comes down to that interpretive richness that makes the film so fascinating to review...






The alien geography of Sydney

Minor criticisms notwithstanding, The Pyjama Girl Case emerges as an impeccably mounted example of the filone as non-filone, the kind of giallo where the writing, direction, performances – Di Lazarro and Michele Placido are particularly outstanding as the ill-fated couple – and overall seriousness of tone, where the sleazy and salacious details always have that double edge to them, perhaps most eloquently expressed in the gallery sequence where the girl's body is exhibited like some perverse artwork before crowds of ambiguously motivated public spirited and / or ghoulish types, could appeal to wider audiences for whom the term “European cult cinema” is otherwise anathema.


A Bava-esque pieta?

The Black Abbot

We begin with the obligatory pre-credits shock, as treasure hunter Mr Smooth (!) meets the titular abbot, with predictably fatal consequences. “Edgar Wallace” then introduces himself, followed by the assorted suspects, red herrings and plots that it is up to us and Scotland Yard, in the form of redoubtable Detective Puddler and his bumbling assistant Horatio W. Smith (Eddi Arent), to sift through.

First of all we have Lord Harry Chelford and his cousin Dick (Joachim Fuchsberger), representing the last of their line. Dick doesn't want Harry to marry, with all that implies in terms of an heir, and so tries to encourage Leslie Gine to break off her engagement to him.

Lawyer Gilder (Werner Peters) is also in love with Leslie, whose brother Arthur, an inveterate gambler, has forged Lord Chelford's signature on several documents that have come into Gilder's possession...

Chelford's butler, Fortuna (Klaus Kinski) is in Gilder's pay and keeps him abreast of developments at the abbey.

Mary Venner is the wild-card, seeking the treasure and / or a man to keep in her the style to which she would like to become more accustomed.

Finally there is the mysterious Dr Loxon, the Chelford family physician, and the small matter of the missing, presumed dead Lady Chelford, Harry's mother...

I revisited this 1963 krimi on the basis of having picked up the 1926 novel of the same name and wanting to see how faithful or otherwise an adaptation it was. The first main difference is the introduction of new characters, namely Mr Smooth, Dr Loxon and Horatio W. Smith, and some changes to those it includes. In the novel Dick is Harry's younger brother, while Mary has a more substantial role and displays more nous when, unwittingly given a contract signed in invisible ink she learns how to make it reappear. A second is the film's faster pace. In the novel the Abbot does not make an appearance until about a quarter of the way through and no-one is killed until midway through, so that the existence or otherwise of the Abbot and the treasure are initially in doubt. Likewise Puttler first appears as an essentially private investigator: while still from Scotland Yard, he's there in as a form of vacation. A third – and the one that really shows the film-makers' craft – is the way they have discarded the slightly more rarefied aspects of the mystery, where the location of the treasure is revealed to the reader through etymological clues (what is chesil?!) in favour of a more visually stylish, cinematic approach in which less talk and more action is the order of the day.

As with most krimi films The Black Abbot has that strange sense of temporal and cultural displacement stemming from being a 1960s German evocation of a 1920s England that was probably already half-mythical at the time of its creation. Yet it's these kitsch and camp aspects that are a large part of the appeal of the krimi to me, so it was pleasing to also find them in Wallace's novel. One cannot imagine something quite working in the same innocent way these days, however:

“You can come and sleep with me,” said Leslie. “I've got a big bed.” And this offer was most gratefully accepted.

“Have a look under your bed first,” said Miss Venner nervously, and not until this ritual had been observed did she commence very slowly to undress.”

Or how about the way Dick describes Harry:

“I am wholly responsible. I have always known my brother was queer, and about a year ago I was certain that the horrible taint of madness which his poor mother transmitted to him was developing in a way which could only have one end. I begged him to see a medical man, but he hated doctors. I brought down the best alienists from London in various guises...”

But for that Wallace almost certainly wasn't consciously thinking about it perhaps we could imagine a story entitled The Case of the Missing Gay Subtext...

Another blog

Another Italian genre cinema blog for your enjoyment:

http://filmwalrus.blogspot.com/search/label/Italian%20Horror

“See them tear each other apart. Then see what they do with the pieces”

I was revisiting Death Laid an Egg last night, with an eye to possibly writing a longer than usual piece on it. Then the questions started: is the Japanese DVD cut? Is it in the correct aspect ratio? The difficulty in attempting to answering both questions is that the film-makers technique is deliberately disorienting, full with montage editing and off-centre compositions in line with its distinctive post-Blow Up but pre-Bird with the Crystal Plumage take on the nature of giallo perception, from the inaugural murder-that-isn't on.

While the issue of cuts does not concern me too much, probably because the film has so much going for it that it does not depend on more explicit scenes of sex and / or violence for its power and [ae]ffect, whether the 1.85 framings on the DVD are true to the original film seems crucial to any interpretation: is this composition so “off” because the film-makers intended it that way or has it been pushed to the limits through the anonymous contribution of whoever was operating the Telecine at the time? If information is being lopped off from a 2.35:1 scope image, is it equally from both sides of the image or skewed one way or the other? Here are some screengrabs that hopefully illustrate the point.

A sign on the autostrada, advising tried motorists that they should take a break; retrospectively we learn that the family of Ewa Aulin's character died in an auto accident:


1.85:1


Possible 2.35:1

Jean-Louis Tritignant in conference with the Association:


1.85:1


Possible 2.35:1 A


Possible 2.35 B


1.85:1


Possible 2.35:1 A


Possible 2.35:1 B

It also makes me think about all that “Death of the Author” stuff. Is this like reading a literary text where out of every hundred words they had inscribed – i.e. 2.35 as our starting base of data – only 79 – i.e. 1.85 divided by 2.35 – were visible, not on account of the hand of the editor or censor, but rather because the page was smaller? I suppose you could get a similar effect by blowing up an existing text so that the left and rightmost words / letters were cut off. Perhaps it only adds to the out-thereness of the experience, but Death Laid an Egg is hardly a film that needs help here...

Thoughts anyone?

La Corta notte delle bambole di vetro / Short Night of Glass Dolls

[Warning: this discussion contains potential spoilers]

Communist-era Prague: A foreign journalist, Gregory Moore (Jean Sorel) awakens in a catatonic state. Unable to move or speak, he desperately tries to recall what happened before he undergoes an autopsy...








“I'm dead?! I'm not dead” – Gregory comes to in the morgue

Fragments return: his Czech girlfriend Mira Svoboda (Barbara Bach) whom he planned to help leave the country... his colleagues at the press bureau, including boozy Irishman Jack MacPherson (Mario Adorf) and concerned ex-lover Jessica (Ingrid Thulin) ... their attending a social function graced by prominent party members and other nomenklatura... Mira's mysterious disappearance immediately thereafter...




A setting more appropriate for the gothic than the giallo?


Mira and Gregory in happier times; note the butterflies on the wall

Was it the authorities themselves who were responsible? Certainly the police were less than helpful, conducting only a perfunctory investigation and trying to dissuade Gregory and his friends from undertaking their own, which led to the discovery of a young woman's body in the river. But it wasn't Mira...

Perhaps all is not lost...




A couple the enigmatic visual fragments - shards of crystal? - that flash through Gregory's mind's eye, out of place and time

Doctor Karting pays a visit to the morgue and notices something is amiss: his old friend's body continues to show no signs of rigor mortis nor is it cooling down...

Spurred on by this, Gregory recalls uncovers a chain of mysterious disappearances, then the murder of an informant before his eyes... On the dead man's body a potential clue, a membership card for the prestigious Klub 99 ... Simply an association of music lovers or something more sinister, seeing as all the missing young women gave recitals there...

Can Gregory remember the truth that will set him free?

Although narratives told by a dead or dying protagonist are a familiar device in noir – Double Indemnity, DOA, Sunset Boulevard, Point Blank etc. – and indeed crop up in the occasional giallo such as The Double, there seems something characteristically Italian – excessive – about crossing it with a satanic conspiracy out of Rosemary's Baby for added exploitation potential.




More butterflies, in their glass cages...

Yet as a giallo in terms of the narrow post-Bird with the Crystal Plumage definition, Aldo Lado's debut feature stands out precisely on account of eschewing most of the themes and motifs audiences had come to expect from the filone by way of black-gloved killers stalking beautiful, scantily dressed women and impelled by quasi-Freudian repetition compulsions.

While this obviously lessens the scope for set-pieces, with the most overt concessions to the filone audience in the murders of Gregory's informant and subsequently one of his friends being positively restrained – the use of the train station as backdrop in the former case also recalling The Cat o' Nine Tails to again demonstrate that less is sometimes actually more (shocking) – there is little doubt that Lado has an assured grasp of technique, his material and – most important of all – their ultimate indivisibility and the need for each to inform and be co-present in the other.

Juxtaposing fragmentary montages of random signifiers with longer dramatic scenes in which their meanings unfold like a wings of the butterfly, a recurring motif in the film, the writer-director draws the viewer deeper and deeper into a nightmare reminiscent of Kafka or Poe in which hitherto casual remarks – Gregory's “I'd better rescue Mira from the body snatchers” – and details – Mira's name apparently translates as “Peace Freedom,” and as such speaks of an outlook at odds with the established, entrenched order – retrospectively attain key significance.

Much the same can be said of the throwaway experiment in which a scientist colleague of Karting's demonstrates that tomatoes feel pain, a meter rising whenever he penetrates their flesh with a needle: it may seem like just more egregious science of the Four Flies on Grey Velvet sort, but then allows Lado to draw comparisons with Gregory's equally inert form ironically showing no signs of life, while the way in which the technocrat crushes said tomato as he reproaches his colleague for sentimentality retrospectively alludes to his role in the conspiracy.


Lado arguably draws attention to his art a bit too much on occasion

At the same time, however, it is also the surfeit of instances such as this that arguably conspire to take the film down a notch precisely by overburdening it with significance at times. Here one also notes a crucial difference from Rosemary's Baby: whereas Polanski leaves it up to the (hyper)attentive viewer to notice that a cabbie can also be seen during a satanic orgy, Lado cuts in a flashback insert of a prominent cultists at work and play.




The habituees of the Klub 99 remind one of the vampires in Polanski's Dance of the Vampires – you're going to meet death now, the living dead...

Minor errors of judgement aside – and as a first film it has to be said that this displays a level of assurance and control that's up there with Argento's debut – Short Night of Glass Dolls is nevertheless an enjoyably different take on the Italian thriller deserving of the acclaim it has belatedly received.

Thinking about it in relation to Argento's one also wonders if the influence went both ways, insofar as the mission statement of Lado's cultists – “We will hold the reins of power in the world… Our bitterest enemies are persons who love freedom… We need the young to keep us alive. They must become as us. They must think as we do. And those who rebel must be sacrificed” – doesn't sound that far removed from that of their immortal witches of the Three Mothers films who “don't want anything to change”. (“There is politics,” as Argento has said in interviews; just not an easily identifiable and quantifiable politics.)

Likewise – with this being a device that broadens the scope of the film out to make it less a direct reference to Communist repression in Czechoslovakia in the immediate aftermath of the Prague Spring than a general comment on the mentality of all too many ruling elites regardless of time and place, to thereby perhaps explain just how Lado was able to make the film under the auspices of the hard-line regime – we can also note the reference to branches of the secret society all over the world. It also curiously calls to mind Elio Petri's eerie, typically idiosyncratic take in the political-occult-gialli – generic taxonomy clearly creaking here – in Todo Modo.


Jessica reaches the “screaming point”

Performances and technical credits are as good as one would expect from the likes of Bergman regular Thulin – an actress equally at home in The Damned and Salon Kitty – and the Morricone / Nicolai composer / conductor one-two, contributing an appealing combination of the restrained, elegant yet sinister (Mephisto?) waltz and minimalist cues based around heartbeat and breath rhythms, neatly suspended between the diegetic and non-diegetic and underscoring the more suspenseful moments.

Lado's comments on the film on the Anchor Bay DVD are interesting. He explains that the inspiration for the film came from the case of an outspoken Italian judge who was effectively “buried alive” by an appointment in Sicily. It was originally known as Malastrana, referring to the distinctive district in Prague that forms the backdrop to the action, before this was deemed too esoteric for the likely audience. Accordingly the more generic animal title Short Night of the Butterflies was decided upon and promotional materials prepared, only for the too-similar sounding The Bloodstained Butterfly to beat it to cinema screens. It's a shame because the butterfly – delicate, fragile, emphemeral – is used throughout the film and is more meaningful than the Glass Dolls title. But, by any other name this is a giallo that warrants your attention...

Death Laid an Egg

Just a brief notice that Giulio Questi's brilliant Death Laid an Egg is on some torrents at the moment:

http://tracker.zaerc.com/torrents-details.php?id=10809

English and Italian audio, but no subtitle options for those who prefer the 'authentic' / 'original' language experience. Looks like the rip is from the Japanese King Records release.

Perché quelle strane gocce di sangue sul corpo di Jennifer? / The Case of the Bloody Iris

En route to a meeting. presumably with a client, a high-class hooker is slashed to death in the elevator of a high-rise apartment block. Shortly thereafter one of the three people who found her body, an exotic dancer named Mizar Harrington (Carla Brait) is in turn murdered, being drowned in her bath by a masked assassin.










Did Brian De Palma see this film prior to making Dressed to Kill?

As the characteristically incompetent police investigate, a couple of models, Jennifer (Edwige Fenech) and Marilyn (Paola Quattrini), move into the Mizar's apartment at the suggestion of playboy architect Andrea Barto (George Hilton), the building's designer and also, as it happens, one of the last people to see Mizar on the night of her murder, having gone to see the “black, but not too black” (!) model at the recommendation of his campy, gay-coded photographer friend and business associate Arthur.


Professor Isaacs, Mizar Harrington and Mrs Moss discover the woman's body


Mizar is drowned in the bath; isn't it suspicious that Andrea has a claimed aversion to the sight of blood?

Andrea isn't the only suspect, however, seeing as Jennifer also find herself being stalked by by her possessive ex-husband Adam (Ben Carra), who wants her to rejoin him and his sex-cult. (“You belong to us now. You pledged yourself to us and you swore to me above all. You're my wife, remember that.”)


The titular iris, the symbol of Adam's love-cult


Obligatory psychedelic orgy sequence with kaleiodoscopic lens effect


Frightened Fenech #1

Furthermore the apartment black is also home to all manner of suspicious and suspect neighbours, any one of whom could be the killer, like old lady Moss, with her curious interest in horror comics like Killerman (“To really like horror tales you have to be nuts. She only buys horror tales – if you ask me, she's got something loose up here”) and a reluctance to be, well, neighbourly, or predatory lesbian Sheila Hendricks (Annabella Incontrera), clearly pleased to have two potential new girlfriends in the apartment and possibly not adverse to terrorizing them into her waiting arms...


Frightened Fenech #2


The iconic killer


Mirror, mirror...


...and again...

Known by a plethora of different titles – the more literal translation of Perché quelle strane gocce di sangue sul corpo di Jennifer as What are those Strange Drops of Blood Doing on Jennifer's Body, the more suggestive Erotic Blue – besides the more mystery-like Case of the Bloody Iris is perhaps the quintessential giallo, the one with everything that aficionados love about the form (well, almost – while the killer's chooses to wear brown surgical gloves he or she makes up for this fashion faux pas by eventually exit by the de rigeur fall from a great height) and which condemns it in the eyes of detractors as stupid, even offensive, trash.




Frightened Fenech #3

It's sleazy, cheesy and, I find at least, a sheer pleasure from start to end in its willingness to shamelessly contrive cliché and stereotype after cliché and stereotype; the production line, known – and knowing - quality of the piece perhaps best summarised by the way the closing scene neatly and needlessly echoes its opening counterpart as another woman goes into a phone booth, makes a call and is invited to “come on up”. Edgar Wallace may have developed the idea of the plot wheel, but on this showing at least it was the Italians who were the most enthusiastic about spinning it again and again...




Lesbian seduction interrupted?

The credits are a who's who of golden age exploitation all'italiana: Luciano Martino produced; Ernesto Gastaldi provided the script and Bruno Nicolai the score, whilst future directors Michele Massimo Tarantini and Stelvio Massi were assistant and cinematographer respectively.

The cast is likewise full of familiar faces, ranging from top-billed Edwige Fenech and George Hilton, playing very much to type as the frightened woman and the suave, shifty suspect / red herring – what trauma lies behind his aversion to blood, or is it just a convenient alibi? – down to reliable support from the likes of Oreste Lionello, as Andreas's campy, bitchy photographer friend; George Rigaud, as Sheila's perpetually violin-scraping father, a dottore in his dotage; or Alan Collins / Luciano Pigozzi, as the sweaty, shifty majordomo of the nightclub where Mizar worked.








Gratuitous shots of Fenech #1 to #4

Perhaps the only thing that the film does not have going for it is the sense of directorial sureness that Sergio Martino would likely have brought to it – I mention him by name precisely because this is a case where we can single the director's contribution out, as a comparison with The Strange Vice of Signora Wardh or All the Colours of the Dark will demonstrate. (Whether this makes Martino an auteur or merely a higher-ranking metteur en scene is another matter, as is whether such critical distinctions really matter in a case like this.)

It's not that spaghetti western specialist Anthony Ascott / Giuliano Carnimeo has an empty bag of tricks, more that what he does at the helm too often comes across as self-conspiously trickery and frippery, deployed without that sense of thought as to what it is actually contributing in terms of visual storytelling. Note, for example, the way in which a complex mirrored composition showing Marilyn and Jennifer say nothing about the duality or duplicity of either character – the former is just too much of the dumb blonde for subtext, the latter a straightforward damsel-in-distress who simply wants to put her past behind her rather than having half-submerged sadomasochistic yearnings like her counterpart in Strange Vice...

Still, precisely because the film doesn't aspire to be art, gives its target audience what they expect and cheerfully owns up to its own raison d'etre (“Andy, what really sells beer, when you come right down to it?” “How should I know? How about alcoholic content?” “No! What sells beer is a bare-assed broad holding a barrel, or a bottle, or a beaker, right here, between the tits... You've got to have a nude in there somewhere!”) it can in the end be said that this really doesn't matter.

Two books

Over the weekend I read two new cult cinema related books, neither admittedly about the giallo. One is a must buy and the other the kind of thing that I feel like warning others against spending their hard-earned on. The must buy, is Stephen Thrower's Nightmare USA, a hefty (500+ page) examination of the American “exploitation independents” of the period 1970-1985. The should avoid, is Sinclair McKay's ostensibly self-explanatory A Thing of Unspeakable Horror: The History of Hammer Films.

Taking the bad first, the issue with McKay's book is its sheer pointlessness. While it's still possible to find something new to say about Hammer – Wayne Kinsey's books are a perfect illustration, through their year-by-year approach and engagement with each and every production regardless of where it fits generically – what we have here is a retread of the same old material with a predictable focus on the more famous productions to the exclusion of a Never Take Sweets from a Stranger or Demons of the Mind. Indeed, about the only thing I got out of it was a new word for describing Hammer's leading ladies – embonpoint, “the bodily property of being well rounded.”

Nightmare USA is an altogether different proposition. After a scene-setting introduction to the world in which the exploitation independents operated – the slow replacement of the drive ins and grindhouses by home video; the shift from softcore to hardcore; the difficulties in recognition that stem from an auteurist approach whose search for recurring signatures in a sustained body of work ill-fits the one-off and anonymous nature of much independent exploitation production – the bulk of the book comprises a series of chapters discussing a range of individual films and film-makers, rounded off with 100 or so pages of shorter reviews.

Let's throw in some names: James Bryan, Fredrick Friedel, The Deadly Spawn, Don Jones, Screams of a Winter Night, David Durston, Messiah of Evil, Fight for Your Life, Death Bed: The Bed that Eats – the point is that these are names which even most cult film fans may well never have heard of.

More importantly, Thrower also has the knack of making you want to see the films he discusses for yourself. His approach is a simple but brilliantly effective one, of approaching each film and film-maker in their own terms, acknowledging that there are fundamental differences between – say – the ultra low-budget film intended as a Hollywood calling-card by young first-time film-makers; the grind-'em-out and put bread on the table product from the middle-aged professional trying to adapt to the changing cultural landscape; and the obsessive individual committed to his art, however defined.

Thower knows that you may not want to ever actually see a film like Zebedy Colt's Sex Wish, for instance, but also establishes a framework in which you could at least begin to approach it through a confrontational stance that frequently asks what is the point of a horror film if it doesn't, in some way, actually horrify you?

Thrower also has the breadth of knowledge to make you understand where the individual work fits. Here – and by way of bringing in something more on-topic for this blog – his deep familiarity with Italian exploitation pays dividends, with a number of comparisons to Bava, Argento, Fulci and so on. Crucially, however, these never feel like gratuitous name dropping – you know that he has sought out, watched and thought about each and every one of these films, what they do and how they do it.

The comments from the film-makers themselves, many speaking for the first time are equally valuable and should be required reading for anyone interested in the film business. The story they tell, again and again, is that it's not a question of whether the independent exploitation film-maker was going to get fucked over by the distributor, but how badly. (Sometimes, as with Death Bed, whose revival largely came about through the existence of a bootleged tape its creator was unawares for a quarter-century, this can have positive consequences.) Likewise, their comments help address one of the criticisms made (by Tim Lucas in his Video Watchdog review) of Thrower's earlier study of Fulci, Beyond Terror, by contextualising his sometimes theoretically-inclined thoughts with the nuts-and-bolts of the film-making process, sometimes to indicate that, yes, a cigar is just a cigar and there is little or no subtext, but sometimes indicating that a deeper meaning might well have been there (e.g. the phallic and vagina dentata symbolism of The Deadly Spawn monsters).

In the end, the key difference between the two books is that whereas McKay's comes across as an opportunistic exploitation of “cult” – i.e. the Hammer name sells, at least for certain narrow definitions of “Hammer” – Thrower's is a genuine labour of love, the kind of thing that can only come from someone who has an authentic commitment to spreading the word about obscure films to whoever will listen. Please do...

New Italian cinema blog

Niels Kulper has started a good-looking blog dedicated to Italian genre cinema, called The Devil's Honey after the Fulci film and beginning with a review of Enzo Castellari's “twilight” spaghetti western classic Keoma.

Joe-Bob says “Check it out":

http://thedevilshoney.blogspot.com/

La Casa con la scala nel buio / A Blade in the Dark

Hired to score a low budget horror movie, Bruno (Andrea Occhipinti / Andrew Painter) rents an isolated luxury villa for the month. The ambience of the place soon gets to him as, going to investigate a noise from the basement, he is finds a young woman, Katya, who literally leaps out the closet at him, frightened – she says – by a spider. Acting strangely, Katya asks if Bruno is a friend of the previous tenant, Linda, then makes her exit as Bruno answers a phone call from landlord Tony (Michele Soavi). Curiosity piqued, Bruno searches around and finds Katya's diary in the closet, containing cyptic references to Linda and her “fascinating” secret.


Giovanni Frezza in the film-within-the-film


The house, reminiscent of Tenebrae


The New York Ripper meets Lucio Fontana, as the killer slashes up an image of sexualised femininity

Returning to his work, Bruno remains oblivious to the mayhem outside as an unseen figure attacks Katya with a craft knife, finally cornering and dispatching her in the basement. Playing back his tape, Bruno then notices a voice, which he isolates as that of the mysterious Linda. Another noise draws him outside, only for another telephone call to draws him back inside again – this just as he looked about to literally bump into Katya's corpse. Picking up the phone, there is no answer from the other end...






Echoes of Deep Red as Bruno tries to work

Noticing bloodstains on his trousers, Bruno goes outside yet again and discovers others in the undergrowth. By this time Katya's body has been removed, however, and so his search of the grounds reveals nothing other than the absence of the caretaker from his quarters – we have a suspect; all the more so when he is later found furtively moving a heavy bag of rubbish from the basement and to have an enthusiasm for collecting newspaper crime clippings – and some more telltale marks in the basement, before the sound of his music playing draws Bruno back to his studio, where he finds his tapes mangled.




Effective compositions in a film full of them


As with his father's Blood and Black Lace, a diary holds the secret

Bruno's girlfriend, Giulia, then shows up unexpectedly. She had tried to phone, she explains, but the line went dead. She also asks whether Bruno has noticed the strange smell emanating from the pool. He hadn't but when he recounts his own strange encounter with Katya, Giulia takes it as a confession of infidelity and angrily departs almost as soon as she had arrived...

Conducting a more thorough search of the house, Bruno finds a locked door in the basement at which point Tony shows up. He explains that the room contains some of Linda's belongings but that he can have it opened up if Bruno wants her things moved. Before Bruno can ask any other questions they are interrupted by yet another phone call. While Tony makes his exit – “I'd better go; I have to change”– Bruno answers. On the other end is a woman, who threatens him. It is only Sandra, making a prank call...




Classic giallo imagery; note Katya's yellow skirt


The killer's weapon, held first-person shooter style like the axe in a similar scene in Tenebrae


Those stairs look familiar...

Sometime later Angela, a friend of Katya's shows up, asking if she can use the pool. The previous occupant, Linda, always let her do so, she explains. Her behaviour is again somewhat strange though Bruno, keen to get on with his work, thinks little of it or the revelation that Katya had apparently come to the villa to retrieve her diary.

As she swims Angela notices a knife at the bottom of the pool. It is a discovery that leads to her death as an unidentified figure selects a knife from the kitchen – “the usual phallic cutlery” indeed – and dispatches Angela in the bathroom. Oblivious to all this, Bruno later notices the misplaced knife and, more worryingly, a blood-encrusted gash in the bathroom that fits its blade perfectly, thus prompting yet another exploration of the house and the recording of a message in which Bruno summarises the facts of the case and his fears that he may be cracking up and / or the next victim...

Sandra arrives and suggests that the killer likely would not have had the time to remove the bodies, such that they are still probaby hidden somewhere in the grounds. Given that Bruno has already conducted a number of searches that have exhausted almost all the possibilities, attention turns to the locked room containing Linda's things. On hearing the name, Sandra mentions once knowing a Linda herself, although it would surely be too much of a coincidence were she the same person – the kind of thing that could only happen in “a bad movie”...


Under the soles of your shoes...




Tony's yellow tie and Angela's yellow bag

Going to investigate, they find the room unlocked. It contains various boxes and a suitcase. The boxes contain books, not body parts. The chest contains tennis balls – a sight which bemuses Bruno and horrifies Sandra, as she realises that this Linda and the one she once knew, the one who inspired her film – a film “A childhood trauma turning a normal person into a monster” – are likely one and the same...

Upstairs there is a noise...

A somewhat long precis admittedly but also one that, I would argue, gives some indication as to A Blade in the Dark's particular strengths and weaknesses. Foremost among the former are a engaging and economical mystery – virtually all the action takes place in one location, while the filmmakers play mostly fair with us as far as suspects and red herrings go – with well-handled suspense and shocks, whose nastiness belies the film's television origins. This also unfortunately, also accounts for many of the the latter in terms of a somewhat over-extended narrative – even reading the above, how many times does Bruno explore the house or go answer the phone at an (in)opportune moment? – and a slighty too episodic structure in which a murders at the end of parts one, two and three are followed by recapitulations of “the story so far” at the start of parts two, three and four.


Knife in the water; cinematographer Gianlorenzo Battaglia was a specialist in underwater photography having also worked on the ballroom sequence in Inferno among others.




Angela's murder and the killer's non-black gloved hand cleaning up afterwards

What it does not convey, however, is the general assurance of Lamberto Bava's direction, with lots of elegant camera movements as he explores the environments of the house, all surfaces, textures and minute details a la Argento, albeit without quite that same extravangance and sense of defamiliarisation, with budgetary constraints obviously precluding Louma crane experimentation.

The De Angelis brothers' effective synthesiser-led score is another asset. While derivative of Goblin it also gains a certain justification in these selfsame terms as being exactly what an early 1980s Italian horror film should sound like.

Indeed, one of the major pleasures of the film for the genre-aware viewer – i.e. most of us – is what a theoretically inclined commentator might term its palimpsestic qualities, those traces of other films – Tenebrae, The House by the Cemetery, Deep Red etc. – that repeatedly show through.

Again something similar could be said about Argento's films, Tenebrae in particular. But there is also, I think a vital difference. Whereas Tenebrae's self-consciousness is of a deadly serious sort, in that Argento seems to have intended it as the ultimate giallo, the final word on 20 years of filone production, A Blade in the Dark simply aspires to be an entertaining diversion, its game-playing more akin to that found within the film that started it all, The Girl Who Knew too Much; in this respect, at least, Lamberto Bava is more like his father...

Poe - Argento

“But first let me tell of the rooms in which it was held. There were seven [...] the windows were of stained glass whose colour varied in accordance with the prevailing hue of the decorations of the chamber into which it opened. That at the eastern extremity was hung, for example, in blue – and vividly blue were its windows. The second chamber was purple in its ornaments and tapestries, and here the panes were purple. The third was green throughout, and so were the casements. The fourth was furnished and lighted with orange – the fifth with white – the sixth with violet. The seventh apartment was closely shrouded in black velvet tapestries that hung all over the ceiling and down the walls, falling in heavy folds upon a carpet of the same material and hue. But in this chamber only, the colour of the windows failed to correspond with the decorations. The panes here were scarlet – a deep blood colour.”
- Edgar Allan Poe, The Masque of the Red Death

A source of inspiration for the rooms of Suspiria?

A Violent Professional: The Films of Luciano Rossi

Kier La-Janisse's new book arrived this morning, immediately prompting a change of plans and a cover-to-cover reading.

The third in FAB Press's Cinema Classics Collection series of monographs on individual cult films, genres, actors and directors, the handsomely produced and well-illustrated 128 page volume – designer Rob Jones has went stratospherically above and beyond the call of duty – follows a brief biography of the sadly now-deceased cult character actor (happily countering the story propagated by Joe D'Amato in the Totally Uncut documentary that Rossi had been in the asylum and was living as a bum; though Rossi's fate in the last quarter-century of his life makes for depressing reading things never got quite that bad) with a survey of his 70-plus film appearances from 1967 to 1987, describing his appearance in each, ranging from the blink-and-you'll-miss-him to his more habitual single scene-stealers to occasional more substantial supporting roles, and evaluating them on the basis of how much screen time he gets and “how cute he is” in his own special way.

Clearly a labour of love, it's a book that every Eurocult fan should buy, even if they aren't necessarily fans of Rossi or the western and crime genres in which he was most prominent – though as Janisse points out, the overlap of talent between cycles means that blinkered horror fans perhaps don't know what they are missing – to demonstrate that there is an audience / market for future volumes of what one hopes will be an ever-expanding series; random thoughts as to subjects would be Marina Malfatti, Jorge Rigaud and Frank Wolff...

Le Foto di Gioia / Delirium Photos of Joy

A maniac is murdering the models for Pussycat magazine and sending snapshots of his/her handiwork to its editor / proprietor Gloria (Serena Grandi); the character is named Gioia – i.e. Joy – in the Italian, thus giving a double meaning to the title Le Foto di Gioia, depending on whether one reads Gioia with or without an initial capital.


Serena Grandi as Serena Grandi or Gioia?

Who could it be? The procession of usual suspects facing Inspector Corsi (Lino Salemme; you'll know his face if not his name as he's cast against type and ironically remarks on how he is often mistaken for a thug on account of his distinctive physiognomy) is a long one.

There's Mark (Karl Zinny), the wheelchair-bound peeping tom who lives opposite Gioia, watches her every move from his rear window; makes obscene phonecalls and suffers from a paralysis that is, according to his doctor, entirely psychosomatic.










The film is replete with phallic imagery, if one wants to look for that sort of thing; note also Mark's yellow room

There's rival publisher Flora (Capucine), who would seemingly stop at nothing to be top dog – or is that bitch – once more and happily tries to turn the situation to her advantage.

There's Roberto (David Brandon), the gay photographer who has conveniently managed to misplace some compromising photos from Gloria's modelling days, and Eveline (Daria Nicolodi), the devoted personal assistant who always seems to be on hand to receive the maniac's latest package.

And then there's the Gloria's own dubious past, before her husband died in a speedboat accident to leave her the magazine...


One of the killer's still lifes




The obligatory black gloves and mannequins


Gioia wakes up to find a crowd standing over her, much like Nora Davis in Mario Bava's The Girl Who Knew too Much, but without the same visual flair

Lamberto Bava seems forever doomed to be compared to his father Mario and mentor Dario Argento and found wanting. While his work sometimes warrants more recognition in its own right, with A Blade in the Dark serving as a textbook example of how to make a low-budget giallo, Delirium: Photos of Gioia is not such a work, instead operating at the trashier end of the spectrum.

Admittedly some aspects of the piece cannot be helped. Whereas the styles and technology of a 60s or 70s gialli now have that retro aspect to them, the 80s – big hair, shoulder pads, pastels and patterns etc – still emerges as too close in time for such a re-evaluation to take place, while Serena Grandi compares unfavourably to the likes of Edwige Fenech in the woman-in-peril stakes and, on this showing at least, as an actress.

Elsewhere, however, Bava and his collaborators do themselves few favours in borrowing liberally from the Argento playbook in choreographing murder-as-spectacle to a propulsive rock soundtrack – Simon Boswell in Goblin / Simonetti mode – but rarely manages to quite push things into the same delirious, absolute territory.

When Bava does introduce some ideas of his own, most notably the horror masks worn by the victims during the stalk and slash sequences and intended, along with the use of Suspiria-like colour filters, to convey the killer's warped perspective, the results are as much laughable as anything else.








Some of the killer's subjective visions

A macabre bathroom death by bee-stings recalls Phenomena and some of the more inventive murder methods seen in the likes of Crimes of the Black Cat and The Black Belly of the Tarantula. “Murder considered as one of the fine arts,” indeed.

1970s Italian Sexy Horror

Discussing previous Glittering Images books on Italian cult cinema a little while back I commented that what was needed was a third volume that continued the story begun by La Dolce Paura and continued by Esotika, Erotika, Psicotika. At the time I didn't know that this third volume, 1970s Italian Sexy Horror: Weirdly Erotic Terror Movies from Cineromanzi Starring Rosalba Neri and Other Lucious Beauties of Cinema Bis, was already on the way.

Co-authored by Stefano Piselli and Antonio Bruschini and opening with a dedication to the memories of Renato Polselli and Mickey Hargitay, the profusely illustrated volume is in the now-established dual language English / Italian format for the authors' commentaries, unlike the earlier entries in the publisher's Bizarre Sinema series which also included French text. The fotoromanzi excerpts that make up the bulk of the volume are in Italian only though it is not exactly difficult to work out what is going on from the pictures themselves even if one does not know the language given that the preceding piece on each film describes the sequence and that their subject matter is largely self-explanatory.


The cover artwork, derived from the poster for Mel Welles' film Lady Frankenstein

The films / fotoromanzi covered are Lady Frankenstein; The Night of the Damned; L'amante del demonio; Frankenstein '80; The Devil's Wedding Night and The Reincarnation of Isabelle – i.e. pop surreal, sadean concoctions of sex and violence whose own aesthetic clearly shows the influence of earlier generations of fotoromanzi and fumetti in pushing things that bit further than their filmic predecessors of the previous decade. (Others prime candidates for the fotoromanzi treatment, like Nude for Satan were inexplicably never translated into the format.)

The key filmmaker emerges as Renato Polselli, a favourite of the authors but also someone whose enduring engagement with the form from The Vampire and the Ballerina onwards marks him as a subject worthy of further research.

Besides all the pictures of Rosalba Neri, Rita Calderoni and company in various states of undress and distress the main aesthetic interest in the excerpts lies in seeing how the fotoromanzi authors have chosen to adapt and translate their filmic source material for the printed page and what is altered thereby with the absence of sound, colour and movement and the new ability to fetishistically pick out details for the reader to linger upon and return to. Away from the obvious, one notes the likes of the the jumbo cords and platform boots worn by Lady Frankenstein's monster (p. 25) and the framing of Raoul as a cut-price reincarnation not of Isabel but of Gorka from Bava's Black Sabbath (p. 87).

Now if only one could get the original fotoromanzi – although having said this a quick search on Ebay indicates that they are out there, while Kult Video also has a fair few...




Originals are out there if you look for them

Sherry Buchanan

One Eurocult performer of the 70s and 80s who intrigues me is Sherry Buchanan, seen in the likes of Zombie Holocaust, Last House on the Beach and The Heroin Busters. Specifically, was she Anglo or Italian?

Her name sound more like a British or North American one, but her first screen appearance was in What Have They Done to Your Daughters where she's playing a schoolgirl and looks about the right age, suggesting her to Italian, along with the lack of US productions in her filmography. So was she like Ray Lovelock, Italian but with an Anglo parent and name to confuse the unwary? Or is Sherry Buchanan / Cheryl Buchanan / Cheryl Lee Buchanan just a stage name and it's that her real name has never come out into the open?

Gatti rossi in un labirinto di vetro / Eyeball

Whilst holidaymaking in Spain a coach party of Americans are unfortunate to find the body of a local girl. None attaches particularly much importance to the unpleasant incident – in addition to the fatal stab wounds, one of the girl's eyes has been plucked out – until one of their own group is subsequently killed and mutilated in the same manner, forcing them to consider the possibility that the killer is among or following them.




The first murder - red gloves and ocular trauma


The coach party / suspects / victims; note John Bartha's yankee tourist in the loud shirt and Jorge Rigaud in the dog-collar at the back

There is certainly no shortage of suspects.

Is it Mark Burton, arrived on the scene at the exact right / wrong moment?

The Reverend Bronson, with his suspicious photos?

Jose, the practical joke playing tour guide?

Mark's estranged, mentally unstable wife Alma, whom we have earlier seen change her flight plans?

The cigar chomping Mr Hamilton, with his straight razor and conservative mindset? (“Safety blades – I was out of them.”)

The lesbian photographer or her girlfriend / model? (“Niaba, is it you? I want to see you in the bedroom. It's the only place to make up.”)

Someone else, whom no-one – except the giallo literate viewer, that is – would expect?


The rain capes, the lesbian couple and the second victim to be






Murder on the ghost train

Whoever and whatever the case and despite the uncomfortable similarities between the killer's modus operandi and that of a murderer in the group's home town of Burlington a year ago, no-one considers abandoning the trip until it is too late and, following some further reductions in their numbers, the group are forced to surrender their passports...

Sometimes one feels sorry for Umberto Lenzi and the way his contributions to the giallo and poliziotto filone have been overshadowed by his cannibal films.

This Italian-Spanish co-production is not, however, one of them.

Lazily directed, with almost every scene breaking down into a procession of zooms and (dis)graced by a bland and unappealing score from Bruno Nicolai that must rank as his work work within the filone, Gatti rossi in un labirinto di vetro / Eyeball throws just about every cliché imaginable into the mix to a singular lack of effect.

Just check them off:

The traumatic incident that drove the killer insane and motivates the method in their madness.

The reluctant amateur sleuth themselves a suspect and struggling to put their finger on some vital detail about the case. (“I can't put it together, it just doesn't make sense.”)

The mismatched policemen, the one an old timer who operates on the basis of hard-worn experience and is due for retirement and the other a proponent of modern, scientific methods. (“Now you're talking symbolism...”)

The vital clue hidden in an otherwise innocuous photograph.




As is often the case in the giallo the police procedural scenes show a lack of visual imagination - Tom Felleghy's coroner and Inspector Tudelo discussing the autopsy findings in shot-reverse shot style.


Yet another bull in a (Ramblas) china shop moment of zoom abuse

All of this would perhaps be tolerable had the film-makers attempts at innovating by making the killer wear a red rain cape (“like a cat, a big crimson cat”) in lieu of the traditional macintosh and slouch hat not fallen so flat, more likely to induce laughter than terror, and there not been so much co-production padding in the form of flamenco dance interludes and visits to the Ramblas or Sitges.

Play Motel

A man with the unlikely name of Mr Shamrock goes into a hotel, orders a J&B (by name) and looks around, noticing a woman with a distinctive pin. Before you can say “handkerchief code”, he's picked her up and they're off to his room for some satantic themed sex games, she wearing nothing but a nun's wimple and he a devil's outfit, complete with pitchfork – although it doesn't stay on for long, disappearing as if by magic as he goes down on her.


Who says nuns have no fun?


A horny devil

There are some jumps in the breezy, inane music at this point, indicating the film to exist in that borderline realm between (s)exploitation and hardcore, with inserts of a man's hand masturbating a woman's genitals – not necessarily those of the performers here – and of some in-and-out action – as the sound of a camera clicking is heard by us – if not, as it turns out, the performers.

For it was not someone shooting stills to accompany a porno shoot, but a blackmail gang who are use the hotel as their base of operations. Thus, when we next see the man, now revealed as Mr Cortesi, it's at his office receiving the compromising pictures and a request for a few million lire or else. Rather than paying up, however, he decides to seek the counsel of his lawyer, Lanzieri. The message on his answering machine says he's out, in court, but as we cut again we see he's in bed with Cortesi's wife, Luisa!

Lanzieri advises Cortesi to go to the police but, wary of his indiscretions being made public, Cortesi is in favour of paying up this time. Lanzieri telephones Luisa to let her know her husband's decision and, for reasons of her own, sneaks away with blackmail photos and letter and goes to the police.

Luisa tells Inspector De Sanctis (Antony Steffen) that she and her husband are both free to have whatever relationships they want and that they are in the process of divorcing anyway – so revenge is not a motive.

While Luisa puts the originals back before her husband can realise they have even gone the police go to work, quickly identifying Cortesi's partner as a model from a contact / porn magazine, published by Shamrock editions, whose offices De Sanctis thus stakes out whilst waiting for the woman, Loredana, to eventually show.


A tired-looking Steffen, a long way away not only from his westerns of a decade before but also the likes of The Night Evelyn Came out of the Grave from earlier in the 1970s


Do you think it's the same woman?


Could this be a clue?


Undoubtedly

Inside we are “treated” to some scenes of a photoshoot and yet more distinctly unappealing porno action. (Whether it's supposed to be erotic, a la Joe D'Amato, or anti-erotic, a la much of Jess Franco, is debateable. I don't know which and more to the point don't know if the filmmakers knew either.)

Loredana rebuffs the advances of Willy – talk about obvious names – telling him to come back when he has more money and leaves. Cutaways to an extreme close up of an eye tell us that she is not long for this world and, sure enough, everything goes white as someone then strikes her from behind. It makes a change from black, I suppose, and also allows for a nice dissolve between scenes as we then see De Sanctis and his men finding her car and body at the bottom of a white stone quarry. (Or, at least, it all seems to be white in the Luminous Film and Video Wurks sourced version I watched, whose visual qualities add an extra layer of illicit scuzziness to the whole experience.)

With this avenue of investigation now closed, Luisa decides to go undercover at the Play Motel. Following a likely-looking couple to their room, she enters the office oddly located adjacent to it and, sure enough, finds it has a one-way mirror through which she can observe their games – he dressed as a gladiator type with whip and she playing at being a wild beast, although they soon also get down to business. Meanwhile, a black-clad figure advances along the corridor whilst the intrusion of the camera clicking atop the porno-funk scoring indicates seems to suggest either that Luisa is one of the blackmailers, that the opposite adjacent room is also occupied by them, or that no-one was really paying much attention to such details, presumably figuring that their audience wouldn't either. I suspect it was probably the third case, although since Luisa is then dispatched by the black-clad figure – who dons black leather gloves before garotting her – the second is perhaps a possibility.

While the killer takes Luisa's body to his car park another couple of guests arrive at the desk. While the man (Ray Lovelock) is settling accounts the woman decides to wait for him in their car, prompting the hotel clerk – whom we already knew to be in on things – to surreptitiously signal to his collegue via a buzzer.

As they couple drive away, oblivious to the body dumped in their boot, they argue.

Roberto wants to know why they had to go to play motel to make love – is he being set up as the next victim? – and says the time they spend there could have cost him an acting job. “Big deal, considering the great role the director assigned you” is Patrizia's reply. It's somewhat ironic given that one wonders what Lovelock and Steffen are doing here, along with director Roy Garret / Mario Gariazzo himself.




Familiar eye / camera lens motifs

Sure enough their car then gets a flat tyre, prompting the discovery of Luisa's body and the couple, to belatedly get involved with the case as classic giallo amateur sleuths when, observing those in attendance at Luisa's funeral, De Sanctis notices the incongruous presence of an old enemy, Liguori, from his days in the vice squad and needs someone the pimp won't recognise to go undercover at the Play Motel...

They find Liguori and company setting up a tycoon's wife, but for some reason – read, the film-makers need more sleazy contrivances – this isn't enough evidence yet to act, so Patrizia goes to the photography studio pretending to be an aspiring actress / model / whatever and from feeling awkward and modest in front of the camera to seasoned professional in a couple of minutes – either a great actress or to the manner born – whilst the scene goes on far beyond any narrative purpose it had.


“Take 'em off” or “Keep em on”?


The mirror has two faces


Cardinal Sin and Catholic guilt?


The black gloves

The difference between a good and a bad giallo that emerges is, however, not so much to do with the balance between narrative and non-narrative scenes, but whether the latter have their own raison d'etre as exercises in style over substance or even style as substance. Needless to say those in Play Motel fail on both counts through their lowest common denominator raincoater audience apirations – or, more precisely, the lack thereof.


A familiar giallo sentiment, though this is no Bird with the Crystal Plumage or Cat o' Nine Tails


Steffen in “go ahead punk, make my day” mode

As the non-diegetic music and attempts at style kick in, it is again hard to tell what the filmmakers' editorial perspective is in all this, other than a having their cake and eating it hypocritical one – albeit with a similar attitude perhaps manifest in one's own viewing the film with those “guilty pleasure” and “so bad its good” aesthetics perhaps too often covering for a multitude of sins.

One thing Play Motel does have going for it is a modicum of insight into those who would undoubteldy want films of its ilk banned were they ever to appear on the wider cultural radar – note the identify of the figure finally revealed to be behind the whole operaration, or the the family-values respectable bourgeois type who celebrates news of his upcoming dinner with the cardinal by a visit to the motel.

Overall, however, this is a sad and dispiriting example of the giallo in decline.

Romero's Spasmo footage

I've been reading up on George A. Romero over the past few days. In Paul Gagne's book The Zombies that Ate Pittsburgh he quotes Romero about working on Umberto Lenzi's giallo Spasmo, adding some new footage to spice up the American version:

"It was really nicely shot, and very rich looking. In the Italian version, you never saw the killer actually doing the killings, so we added about ten minutes showing the kills." (p. 68)

Has anyone out there seen this version and how well or badly does Romero's footage integrate with the film as a whole? Is this version available anywhere?