Ferdinando Baldi

I was saddened to discover that Ferdinando Baldi, the director of a number of interesting spaghetti westerns such as Blindman and Il Pistolero dell'Ave Maria along with the Five Dolls for an August Moon-esque Agatha Christie inspired giallo Nove ospiti per un delitto died a couple of weeks ago.

It's not been a good year for Euro-cult people, but unfortunately things are only going to get worse given the average age of the surving personnel (Baldi was born in 1917) and the moribund nature of the popular film industry in most countries.

Video Mania: Guida alle VHS rare e collezione

This 2005 book from Nocturno and Kultvideo presents an overview of the early years of Italian language home video, showcasing a selection of the rarest and most interesting genre releases, with gialli, horror, westerns, erotics and poliziotto well-represented.

Curated by Mario Degiovanni and Davide Pulici, it's strongly reminiscent of an Italian version of the likes of FAB Press's Shock Horror, with the authors doing for Italian language product what Marc Morris and company have done for British pre-certs in providing an archeological overview and field guide for the collector.

Indeed, anyone familiar with the UK scene may find some surprises in the labels included, with Cinehollywood well represented within the 120 tapes profiled, while Fletcher Home Video, it turns out, operated in Italy as Techno.

Given the preponderance of Italian product in the British video nasty listings, it's also fascinating to see how things went the other way, with films like Anthony Balch's Horror Hospital and James Kenelm Clarke's Expose (as La Casa sulla collina di paglia) sitting alongside the work of Fulci, Bava and Franco – the difference being the absence of something like the Video Recordings Act to condemn some tapes to obscurity and elevate others to cult status.

There appear to be a few factual errors – Lemora, a Child's Tale of the Supernatural is credited as a British film from 1963 – but these pale into insignificance against the wealth of information and trivia included within, even if the chances of seeing many of the films profiled, such as Renato Polselli's Oscenita or Demofilo Fidani's porno Burning Lips, probably lie somewhere in the range of slim to none.

Vacanze per un massacro / Vacation for a Massacre

Convicted killer Gio Brezzi (Joe Dallesandro) escapes from prison and, having stolen a car and casually committed another murder, makes a beeline for the isolated farmhouse in the country where he cached the loot from a previous job. Asking a local, he learns that the place is used as a weekend home by some Romans – not what he wanted to hear considering it is late Friday afternoon. Climbing in through a window he discovers that the fireplace has been bricked over, necessitating a spot of digging to uncover the money. But with a car pulling up outside, there is hardly time to get a pickaxe, never mind excavate.


The sisters and vital supplies for the weekend, although the J&B box doesn't contain bottles of whiskey as it turns out

Inside the car are Sergio (Gianni Macchia), his wife Liliana (Patrizia Behn) and her younger sister Paola (Lorraine De Selle). Lurking outside and observing the trio, Gio learns that Sergio plans to go hunting the next morning, while Liliana will be going into town for supplies. Paola, meanwhile, is not happy that Sergio is going hunting, as she had only come along on the basis of having a chance to be with Sergio, with whom she is having an affair, while her sister was out of the away; as her sister and Sergio retire to their room and make love, Paola masturbates in frustration.

The next morning, with Sergio and Liliana having left, Gio sneaks up on the sunbathing Paola, knocks her out, takes her inside and starts digging up the fireplace.






Paola makes an unsuccessful bid for freedom

After awakening, Paola makes an attempt to escape, so Gio knocks her unconscious again. This time Gio wakes Paola and demands that she make him coffee. She does, and then proceeds flirts with him. If Paola's intention was to get Gio to lower his guard it doesn't seem to work, save to raise the tension and unease, insofar as his response is to tell her to start digging. She does and after a while stops, asserting that she is too tired to continue. She also confesses to being “all sweaty” and proceeds to flirt with him again.








Gio tries to make sense of Paola's signals

Decidedly uncomfortable no-means-yes sex ensues, with Paola telling Gio post-coitus that he's “a good lover” before making yet another escape attempt, again unsuccessful, which prompts Gio to tie up and gag her.










As does the audience

At this point Liliana returns and is promptly given the same treatment. Sergio arrives shortly afterwards and, also taken by surprise, fares little better, losing his shotgun to Gio in the process. Yet another unsuccessful escape attempt ensues, prompting Gio to let Liliana know that her husband and sister are having an affair...

It would be unfair to say anything more at this point except that Vacanze per un massacro / Vacation for a Massacre has a lot to recommend it.

Obviously the film is yet another of those sullo stesso filone Last House on the Left in which the boundaries between the ordinary bourgeois and the psychopath are progressively blurred.

Though it became increasingly difficult to put a new spin on such subject matter with the procession of Late Night Trains, La Settima Donna, Fight for Your Life, Hitch-Hike, House on the Edge of the Park and so forth, director and co-writer Fernando Di Leo, working from a story by spaghetti western specialist Mario Gariazzio / Roy Garrett, succeeds in stamping his own identity on the proceedings.

The first key to this is the way he uses Luis Enrique Bacalov and Osanna's music, the majority of which had previously seen service in Milan Calibre 9, to drive and comment upon the the action, most notably with an ironic lyrical quotation from Hamlet (“to sleep, to dream”) in the build up to the devastating final act.

The second is the sense of intelligence that pervades the film, as when the familiar device of having the radio broadcast be interrupted to announce the escaped killer in the vicinity is not done in the usual perfunctory and functional way, whereby someone switches on the radio and immediately hears the relevant information, instead being seamlessly and believably integrated: in the farmhouse Paola listens to the radio, an advert for Fernet Branca and then yet another pop song, before a visual cut to Liliana in the car heading into town establishes the temporal unity of the images, shortly after which the broadcast is interrupted.




Oh Bondage, Up Yours

The same thoughfulness is apparent in the handling of the always problematic seduction and sex scenes.

If it is difficult for Gio and the audience alike to unequivocally read the signals Paola is giving off in particular, this is surely the intention given her evident sexual frustrations, current predicament and the general way she has been established as someone who is paradoxically both unconscious of her body and supremely aware of its power, her nude displays thereby oscillating between documentary style anthropological factual display and exploitation film attraction.

Does Paola have sex with Gio because she wants to, because it affords the opportunity to escape, because she considers it a preferable alternative to an inevitable more forced rape, because of masochistic or nymphomaniac tendencies, as means of getting at Sergio, or some confused combination of all these?

Given the presence of De Selle, Di Leo's accomplishments fall into sharper relief when we contrast his film with Ruggero Deodato's House on the Edge of the Park, the comparison gaining further relevance from the way in which Deodato’s cannibal films exhibit that same kind of anthropological / exploitation combination.

Whereas character and situation in House on the Edge of the Park come across as heavily contrived, only making a vague retrospective sense in relation to the poorly integrated shock ending that unsatisfactorily explains why Annie Belle’s and De Selle’s characters have acted the way they did in going along with – or at least appearing to go along with – their attackers, here Paola and Liliana’s actions feel credible throughout.

The brave performances from De Selle and Patrizia Behn contribute immeasurably here, the former’s willingness to bare all in the name of art in marked contrast to the surprising reticence she displayed in Lenzi’s Cannibal Ferox and, as such, perhaps further indicating the difference in accomplishment between Di Leo here and many of his peers.


Another classic Dallesandro expression

Though Dallesandro’s flesh isn’t on display to anything like the same extent as De Selle’s – a possible double standard, one has to admit – his characteristic non-acting proves curiously effective in relation to the whole, precisely because it renders Gio and his understandings of the developing situation that bit more difficult to read, allowing for a greater degree of sympathy for a character who could easily have been a two-dimensional cartoon monster.

Or, to put it another way, he’s more Ricky or Junior than Alex or Krug if we’re making comparisons with Last House on the Left and House on the Edge of the Park respectively.

As such, it’s perhaps Sergio who is the real villain of the piece on account of his duplicity and selfishness; a positioning that perhaps corresponds with the milieu presented in Di Leo’s films as a whole if we think of his frequent emphasis on the small time criminal as anti-hero in positive opposition to the faceless crime-as-routine business model.

While the low budget nature of the film is apparent in its rough-and-ready aesthetic, the small cast and one location set up, Di Leo again turns these limitations to his advantage, the interior sequences having an improvisatory, fly on the wall you are there rawness and the over-exposed exteriors conveying a sense of oppressiveness.

“Come away with me. Please come with me. Come on” are the final lines spoken. The question is who is asking who and what prompts them.

The film is available on DVD from Raro

E Tanta Paura / Plot of Fear

Two murders, those of well-known sexual deviant Mattia Grandi and a middle-aged woman, Laura Falconieri, occur on the same night in Milan, a connection between them established through what is soon to become the killer's calling card: illustrations from Pierino Porcospino / Shock Headed Peter, a tale by E T A Hoffmann.


Mattia's apartment


Complete with a representation of lion, subtly introducing a plot point


The man with the worst anglicised pseudonym, Franco Fumigalli alias Frank Smokecocks

Lieutenant Lomenzo (Michele Placido), a progressive-minded Neapolitan cop transferred up to Milan and determined to do his best to disprove Northern Italian stereotypes of their Southern countrymen is assigned the case.


One of the killer's calling cards

His investigations soon reveal that both victims were members of a group known as the Wildlife Friends. Though their name sounds innocent, their activities were decidedly less so, involving orgies at the Villa Hoffmann. Then again, immorality and illegality are not the same thing – unless you happen to be of a more conservative mindset than Lomenzo who, when asked why he doesn't arrest a couple making love in public, replies that he's “on their side.” More importantly, the group split up years ago, however, following the death of its founder and the villa's owner, Hoffmann (John Steiner) himself.





An example of the film's pervasive wit

As the “cartoon killer” continues to murder, Lomenzo makes the acquaintance of Jeanne (Corrine Clery), an associate of his girlfriend Ruth, who provides some futher clues in the case.


The first encounter between Lomenzo and Jeanne, in the lift

She confesses to Lomenzo that she was present at the Villa Hoffman on the night a prostitute, Rosa Catena, died of a heart attack at one of the Wildlife Friends' orgies after the Friends acted as if they were going to feed the girl to a tiger.


Riccio expounds his philosophy

A number of things do not make sense, however. Isn't it somewhat out of character for Rosa's former pimp, Agostino, to be seeking revenge on the remaining members of the Wildlife Friends as Jeanne contends – especially after four years have passed since her death. Wouldn't a tiger have been sent from Asia and not Africa, to which it is not a native species? Why should a vagrant glimpsed on the grounds of the villa be wearing nearly new, obviously expensive shoes? What motivates the enigmatic private investigator Pietro Riccio (Eli Wallach), who seems to have just about everyone of importance in the city – including the killers' victims – under surveillance, in providing advice and assistance to Lomenzo? Is Jeanne implicated in more than she lets on – and, if so, will the clearly infauated Lomenzo be able to separate out his professonial and the personal involments with her?


The Biancaneve style sexy cartoon

E Tanta Paura / Plot of Fear's Writer-director Paulo Cavara only made two gialli, this and the earlier Black Belly of the Tarantula, but they are enough to mark him out as someone with a distinctive take on the form. While he foregrounds the official police investigator above the conventional amateur sleuth here, this cannot entirely be explained away as a consession to the poliziotto audience insofar as the earlier film, made at the height of the post-Bird with the Crystal Plumage, used the same device.

In both cases, moreover, the cop and the mystery he investigates retain a distance from the polziotto act first, think later approach. It is not that Michele Placido or Giancarlo Giannini are incapable of doing the action man thing when required, as envinced here by the lengthy chase and fight that leads to the apprehension of Agostini, more that Cavara seems to prefer more sensitive, introspective and downright quirky cop figures above one dimensional displays of crowd-pleasing macho bullheadedness.

Put another way, it's hard to imagine Maurizio Merli entertaining the thought of eating macrobiotic food in preference to spaghetti and sugo or referencing positivist criminologist Cesare Lombroso by way of criticising his partners' common-sense approach to policework as Placido does here.










Politics and mirrors

Although such moments lighten the mood they are never allowed to dominate, with the audience constantly being reminded of the deadly serious nature of the game: No sooner have we been introduced to Grandi in his garishly decorated apartment and Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club band reject outfit and his particular sexual peccadilloes (“Did you ever have him?” “No, I'm in the lesbian department. He hung out at the S&M fetish area in Porta Volta”) than he is strangled to death. The Amuck-like pornographic cartoon that plays in Jeanne's account of activities at the Villa Hoffmann likewise raises a smile, but were's soon dragged back down to reality as the luckless, soon to be dead, Rosa is called upon to service one of the guests with a blow-job under the table while the others attempt to guess who the lucky man is from the expression on his face. Then there's the moment when one of the rapidly dwindling number of Wildlife Friends, having decided to get out of Milan before it is too late, gives the finger to a hitchhiker on the autostrada only for his own car to break down and the driver of the passing lorry he tries to flag down give him the same treatment, after which he is then run down by the next vehicle...

The film was co-scripted by frequent Fellini collabotor and Deep Red co-writer Bernardino Zapponi, with a sense of connection to the Argento film through the haunted house, children's story and return of the past motifs. At the same time, however, one also wonders if Argento was thinking of Plot of Fear's use of Hoffman when he made Sleepless, with its nursery-rhyme killer also leaving distinctive calling cards with each victim.

Steiner is amusingly typecast, with his character at one point admitting to having a father in the SS. While obviously cast for her physical assets and willingness to display them, Clery again impresses by making something more enigmatic of her character, making you wonder whether she is expressing her genuine feelings or putting on a very good performance. Placido and Wallach are even better, the former trying too hard to live up to an impossible ideal and the latter by turns impish, deadly earnest and simply enigmatic, someone who may be a Mabuse but not necessarily an entirely malign one.

If the film has a weakness, it is that it raises more questions than it can hope to answer on the incommensurability of law and order and the fixedness versus changeability of human nature, with the ambiguous denoument being likely to disappoint more mainstream audiences wanting to see something more traditional and unequivocal by which the bad guy(s) are unmasked and punished and the good guy(s) triumphant. It does work out that way, but only in an approximate, so-so way at best...




More reflections

Cavara's direction is effective, drawing us in to the mystery and providing enough hints as to what might be going on without being so obvious as to overdo things. Thus, for example, while the climax foregrounds the role of mirrors, their deploymenpt through the course of the narrative is more subtle, seen in the likes of repeated shots of the Placido and company driving around, the streets above them frequently reflected on their windscreens, or in opening a shot with an image on a surface. Vision, or its obscuring, are pivotal.




Men are pigs?

When he goes for the jugular he can also provide effective shocks as well, as when a pan along a row of gutted pigs in a slaughterhouse ends with one of cartoon killer's victims on a meathook, or the burning alive of another, “Joan of Arc” style.

Daniele Patucchi's music is less satisfactory, though the fuzz guitar driven main theme is endearingly trashy and very catchy. The suspense cues could be better, however.

The film is available on R0 DVD from Raro.

Suor Omicidi / Killer Nun

Sister Gertrude (Anita Ekberg) was recently treated for a brain tumour. Though the operation was officially declared a success, her doubts remain – as does the iatrogenic morphine habit she acquired – now that she is back in the convent hospital. The experience has done nothing to alter Gertrude's approach, as she continues to treat the patients in a decidedly stern fashion, more martinet than matron, even going so far as to take one old woman's false teeth and angrily crush them underfoot after the woman's had had the incidental temerity to dare interrupt the less than life-affirming story of a martyr's suffering – “….they pulled her teeth out and filled the bleeding sockets with boiling oil….pierced her tongue with a red-hot needle….slit her cheeks with sharp blades….” – that accompanies the day's meal of the customary thin, gruel-like, perhaps diarrhoea-inducing soup.


The truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help me God?

The incident, coupled with an earlier moment of hestitation in changing another patient's drip that almost resulted in her death, leads to Sister Gertrude to being disciplined by the Mother Superior (Alida Valli) and Dr Poirret (Massimo Serato).


The hands of the killer


The hands of the killer?


The eyes of the killer?

It also leads the traumatised old woman to the hospital, where she later dies. At this point Sister Gertude steals the woman's ring and, having sold it at a jewellers in town, goes to a bar / restaurant to pick up a man in a sequence interesting for its foregrounding of active female desire – albeit in a way that, through Getrude's pathology probably wouldn't exactly please mainstream feminist commentators – and which is curiously reminiscent of Angie Dickinson's brief encounter in Dressed to Kill.




The obligatory prospect of lesbian titillation


But Sister Gertrude really wants a man

Unlike Dickinson's character, however, Ekberg's isn't killed for these transgressions. She is definitely punished however, beginning with her own inevitable pangs of guilt and a plunge into ever deeper despair.

The question is whether she has gone so far as to have actually also committed murder then arises as another of the patients, Jannot, is bludgeoned to death, his body being defenestrated into the courtyard by the unidentified assailant.

While Gertrude – who is first on the scene moments later – and the the official report prepared by the Mother Superior suggest suicide, someone voices their belief that they suspect otherwise during a game of truth, although it is not clear whether Peter, who asks the question, is speaking for himself, someone else, or a collective that has become increasingly dissatisfied with their treatment – especially given the over anti-clerical and left-wing sentiments voiced by some of their number.






Classic dark passage suspense

Sister Mathieu, who had earlier confessed her desire for Sister Gertrude, meanwhile confides that she found her veil, covered in Jannot's blood. Jannot's face was certainly swathed in something as his body was dragged to the window, but what happened to this after his fell is less than clear – as is, for that matter, exactly what is real and in Gertrude's mind by this juncture.


A person...


... a dummy


... and back to a person again

Worse still follows as another patient, confined to a wheelchair, is found dead after Gertrude had either seen or imagined him having sex with a local prostitute. Dr Roland (Joe Dallesandro), recently arrived as replacement for Dr Poirret (Massimo Serato) following Sister Gertrude's him-or-me ultimatum, also notices certain discrepancies in the drugs store and that his predecessor's diagnoses were entirely sound...

Is Sister Gertrude going insane and / or is someone persecuting her? Was the voice we heard in the confessional at the start of the film hers or that of another?


An image that, no matter how you read it, cannot be good

Inspired by a headline seen by producer Enzo Gallo whose involvement in the production, according to director Giulio Berruti, went about as far as registering the title Suor Omicidi. The case on which the film is based was that of a Belgian nun who murdered a number of elderly patients and stole their valuables, which she kept, although of necessity Berruti and fellow writer Alberto Tarallo added in other elements like lesbianism and drug abuse to spice things up.








One of the patients, clearly more interested in the flesh than the word...

According to Berruti, however, they didn't do this with exploitation entirely in mind, instead seeking to draw high-minded parallels between the need for drugs and the need for God. How well such messages actually made it to the screen is however debatable, with Berruti's remarks about the need for subterfuge when shooting the film in an actual working convent somewhat indicative of compromise - even even before the finished film was marketed in true exploitation style as coming “From the secret files of the Vatican,” at which point the director apparently all but abandoned it to its fate.


Pink gloves?

As a giallo Suor Omicici / Killer Nun is a decidedle borderline, the murder mystery element of the killer's identify, represented metonmyically through pink surgical gloves, being being something of a non-starter insofar as there is only really one other suspect besides Gertrude herself. Like The Stendhal Syndrome and a number of Almodovar's films, however, the film is really more one that happens to use the thriller format as a route into to explore character, situation and a number of other decidedly more weighty matters.

The issue, again, is how well the filmmakers manage to crossover the underlying prima / terza visione or art / trash divide, encapsulated here by whether the presences of Dallesandro, Ekberg and Castel invokes thoughts of the likes of Trash, La Dolce Vita and In the Name of the Father or of Last House on the Beach, The Screaming Mimi and Orgasmo – or, for that matter, whether the ease with which these performers could move between ostensibly different types of production serves to indicate the fundamental irrelevance of cinematic class distinctions if the resulting films work in their own terms.

Here, though he doesn't neglect to deliver the exploitation goods, with the set-pieces such as the grotesquely rendered sex scene in a storm and the murders themselves particularly well executed, Berutti's approach evinces more artistry than the casual viewer expecting nothing but nunsploitation trash might anticipate.

One notes, for instance, the beautiful construction of the opening sequence and the questions and ideas it introduces in relation to the film as a whole: an overhead God's eye view shot of the nuns filtering into the chapel dehumanises them and suggests ritual in its precise choreography, before a more individuated shot shows the faces of otherwise anonymous supporting character type nuns in the foreground whilst in the background, her face obscured by the omnipresent veil (a detail that also grants a certain strangeness to otherwise conventional two shots throughout the film), another makes an unrepentant confession that, as the father confessor warns, entails losing any state of grace she might have possessed. What we have, in other words, are two potential acousmetric figures, voices heard without their source being identified. One, that of God, remains all too silent and thus, for the doubter, absent throughout. The other, that of the killer, is all too real and present, the question that of whom they will ultimately be visualised – or unveiled – as being; if anyone doubts the relevance of this concept to an obscure Italian oddity, it's worth remembering that the two ultimate acousmetric figures for the concept's exponent, Michel Chion, are God the father and, anterior – or superior, one is tempted to say – before him, the mother.

Elsewhere serendipity plays more of a part. The swathing of Jannot's face proves vaguely reminiscent of one of De Chirico's mannequin figures, for example, such that the plummeting dummy that follows, cloth limbs flopping in all directions curiously ends up strengthening the effectiveness of the sequence by foregrounding the entire issue of what within it is real and, beyond it, what we even mean by reality.

In this he is aided by cinematographer Antonio Maccoppi, equally at home with functional and expressive lightings and mise-en-scene and thereby giving editor Mario Giaccio, whose contributions are likewise sterling, plenty to work with.

The normally reliable Alessandro Alessandroni's score is not one of his better efforts, however. The choral themes work well enough to convey the milieu, but the easy listening and suspense cues heard elsewhere have too much obvious mickey mousing to them at times, as when a wobble board and “out of tune” sitar type tonalities are used to convey Sister Gertrude's mental trauma atop the nightmare montages.


Dallesandro's expression says it all?

While the dubbing means that Dallesandro's doctor doesn't speak with his Noo Yawk accent, his performance again has that recognisable non-actorly quality to it, contrasting with the professionalism of Serato, Valli and the rest of the predominantly Italian cast. This doesn't matter too much, however, insofar the real focus of the film is Ekberg, who impressively channels 20-odd years of life experience, marked her own transition from la dolce vita to a middle age which, if not quite itself leading to a yearning for la dolce morte, must surely have been a been difficult one, into the role.

Neither the most artistic and thought-provoking giallo or nunsploitation film, nor the trashiest, in the end Killer Nun emerges as being of interest for fans of both filone precisely because of its crossover position not only between them but also in its own execution.

This former “video nasty” has recently been released by Shameless in the UK, but has been out on DVD since 2004 on the Blue Underground release, from which these screen captures come; it was formerly also on video from Redemption.

A nice review of the film can be found at http://twtd.bluemountains.net.au/Rick/liz_kn.htm

Some spaghetti westerns from Germany's Koch Media

Two that are out just now:


Sergio Martino's Arizona si scatenò... e li fece fuori tutti, co-scripted by Ernesto Gastaldi, with Anthony Steffen and Rosalba Neri

http://imdb.com/title/tt0065422/


Tinto Brass's Yankee, with Philippe Leroy; does anyone know if Brass's early giallo Col cuore in gola is available?

http://imdb.com/title/tt0059924/

And two coming in a month or so:




And more Anthony Steffen

A Cat o' Nine Tails question

How do people understand Braun's murder and the discovery of his body by Manuel and Giordani in Cat o' Nine Tails.

Did Manuel's ex- kill Braun and send Giordani there in the hope of implicating him in the crime, or was Braun killed by Casoni because he knew too much / was a threat?

I guess the vagueness here reflects the way in which throughout the film no-one really knows much about the others' motives, as with the not quite intersecting blackmail and industrial espionage conspiracies; well, that and the need to fit a German guest star into the film for the co-production partners and their krimi audience...

Once Upon a Time in the West

Jill's America and the crane shot and music that ensue reduce me to tears; how can what ensues be conveyed in words?!

Tenebre question

So, I am watching Tenebre again. A question arises regarding the second sequence of the film, in which Ania Pieroni's shoplifter is apprehended by Enio Girolami's store detective before she has left the supermercato: how does this reflect Italian law, circa 1982?

The reason I ask is because with what I'm familiar with in Scotland a store detective wouldn't apprehend a suspected shoplifter until they left the premises. How does it work in Italy, the USA, etc?

The good and the ugly - this week's viewing

Sorry for the lack of updates and reviews recently – I have been very busy with work.

I’ve seen two interesting Italian films over the past week or so as part of the Italian film festival that’s doing the rounds in the UK at the moment, Antonio Pietrangeli’s Io la conoscevo bene / I Knew Her Well and Alessandro Blasetti’s 1860. Neither is a giallo, but that shouldn’t put anyone off them as they’re both very good films and, moreover, can always be connected to the filone cinema.

I Knew Her Well is like a cross between Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria and La Dolce Vita, following the last months in the life of a young woman from the provinces as she tries to make it in the big city. Featuring a brilliant performance from Stefania Sandrelli and ending with her characters’ suicide as she finally realises the bitter truth and experiences one humiliation too many, the camera does something of Bird with the Crystal Plumage style plummet as she leaps out her apartment window. It’s perhaps not as arbitrary a connection as it sounds seeing as Enrico Mario Salerno has a prominent role as a famous movie star, while Mario Adorf plays a boxer; elsewhere Robert Hoffmann and Claudio Volonte also make appearances.

1860, meanwhile, provides another link in the chain to Le Cinque Giornate, albeit in somewhat more patriotic and less cynical tone as a film made during the fascist era as a celebration of a particular version of Italian nationhood, while the fact that Blasetti later made Il Corona di ferro among others indicates the non neo-realist side of his influence in relation to Freda and, from there, the Italian fantasy cinema, not to mention the proto mondo Europa di notte

Hostel II was, not surprisingly, less satisfactory. Though I enjoyed the cameos from Luc Merenda, Edwidge Fenench and Ruggero Deodato and the various allusions to the likes of Torso and Late Night Trains, the presence of Deodato was for me also something which highlighted the fundamental redundancy of the film: I suspect most “normal” viewers will simply find Hostel II to be little more than an unpleasant exercise in sadism, while those who actually know who Deodato is will see a film necessarily constrained by the demands of securing a R-rating. I think there’s a bit more to it than that, however, in that as I find films like Cannibal Holocaust, Salo, Angst, Seul Contre Tous, Audition and The New York Ripper far more intellectually challenging as well, insofar as they make me have to try to work out why I’m watching them, what their attraction is beyond sadism.



The mention of Torso leads nicely on to the packaging for the new Shameless DVD: while I can appreciate that part of the thing about exploitation films is how you sell them, the tagline “where whores meet saws” seems decidedly tasteless...

Two new acquisitions

The locandina version of this - in this size like this I just thought it was that bit too big


And this

Now all I have to do is get frames...

Castellari: Action Italian Style

This, the latest in Midnight Media’s ongoing series looking at Italian cult cinema presents a interview with Enzo Castellari and filmography, the 44-page glossy A5 booklet being illustrated with stills, DVD and video covers, poster art and so forth.

While there’s maybe not too much in the interview that dedicated Castellari fans won’t have heard elsewhere, with the volume in some ways serving as something of an update to the interviews in European Trash Cinema #9 and #10, for example, its an entertaining and informative read that also provides some interesting insights as to certain of his films.

One is intrigued, for instance, in reading how the desire to make Cold Eyes of Fear on a couple of sets was inspired by William Friedkin’s gay drama The Boys in the Band, not so much for learning how it allowed Castellari to shoot the film in sequence – normally a technique that is too costly for time-is-money productions – but more for the possible light it sheds on the relationship between the two home invaders played by Julian Mateos and Frank Wolff.

I just wish there was more of it, and more like it...

Il Bandito dagli occhi azzurri / The Blue Eyed Bandit

Downtrodden, diffident and slightly disabled, middle-aged accountant Renzo Dominici (Franco Nero) is always the last to leave the bank where he works at night. Everyone else thinks it is just foolish dedication, with no-one suspecting that he is in fact a considerably younger man who keeps in shape and is just waiting for the right moment to rob the place before making off for a new life in the sun.


Enrico Maria Salerno?


Or Franco Nero?

With an unusually large amount of money being kept over the holiday weekend, that time has come.

While the robbery itself goes largely as Renzo had planned, as does his attempt to manufacture the perfect alibi by way of being elsewhere as his unrecognisable blue eyed alter-ego holds up the place and deliberately flashes his distinctive blue eyes to mislead his co-workers, he also drops a cigarette lighter and forgets that his cufflinks are visible.


Time to go to work...


... cause a distraction...


... rob the place...


... leave them something to remember you by...


... but forget about something ...

These little details lead the office canteen’s borderline nymphomaniac pastry chef Stella (Dalila Di Lazarro) and a grasping security guard to suspect that something is not quite right about their colleague, while elsewhere gay hustler and petty thief Ricky develops certain suspicions that the blue eyed man who frequents the Turkish baths where he works might be the bandit...




Where have I seen those cufflinks before?

The Blue Eyed Bandit's writer-director Alfredo Giannetti was primarily known for his work in the latter capacity – he had earlier won an Oscar for his contribution to Pietro Germi's Divorce Italian Style - with a certain lack of visual style evident in his approach.

While good at building character and place through an attention to little details, the more attentive viewer may also feel slightly let down by the way in which he later returns to some of these selfsame details with that excessive obviousness that denies the value of paying attention.
Here we can note, for example, that the distinctive cufflink worn by Nero qua Renzo are casually introduced as a seemingly non-signifying detail within a cutaway as he checks his watch before the robbery to later be similarly indicentally visible during it and thus later to become the object of meaningful close-up and zoom-in as the security guard notices Renzo wearing them.

Such misgivings aside, however, Giannetti's approach works insofar as it gives Nero plenty of scope to develop his character(s) and generally showcase his acting abilities – watching the opening scenes prior to the revelation that it is Nero in the role you could be forgiving for thinking that Enrico Maria Salerno is making an uncredited appearance as Renzo – without succumbing to obvious grandstanding or schticks. When he takes out the insole that makes him limp and the brown-eyed contact lenses concealed behind Renzo's thick, heavy spectacles you can easily believe that he had been wearing these props for the past several hours to help him get into the part.

One does also wonder, however, if more might have been made of the homosexual subtext to the character and whether this might have strengthened the whole. There's the hint of something about the character's double life, the way he visits the sauna as himself, yet runs from Ricky's pick-up attempt without really articulating why when combined with his heartfelt voice-off to his senile mother, whom he regularly visits incognito at a nursing home – “Why don't you die so I can live my life the way I want to”– that feels a bit, well, queer, but also the sense of a reluctance on someone's part to really push this angle.




Could there be another reason why Renzo is uncomfortable with Stella's attentions?

This said, one could well imagine that to make the character overtly homosexual would have made him less sympathetic for mainstream audiences in 1980 were concerned, too much attention here easily leading to jokes about the Blue Eyed Arse Bandit to the detriment of everything else.

As it is all concerned have done all they can to make us root for Renzo, whether presenting everyone else as just as bad or worse, his avoidance of violence except as a last resort – this must be one of the few Italian crime films of the period where rapine doesn't degenerate into shooting – or just because we want to see the archetypal little man win one over the system.

Ennio Morricone's uncharacteristic soundtrack, with its jazz shuffle and waltz themes, sightly reminiscent of a big(ger) band version of Take Five, is quirky but reasonably effective – a description that might, on reflection, apply to The Blue Eyed Bandit as a whole...

I watched the film via the Dutch subtitled, English dubbed VHS; there was a torrent of the film in circulation a few months ago.

La Polizia accusa: il servizio segreto uccide / Silent Action / Chopper Squad

Three high-ranking military men, including General Stocchi, are found dead in suspicious circumstances within the space of a couple of months, prompting an inquiry by the army and considerable media and public interest.


Precise statements of time and place help to convey a sense of authenticity...


... of a story ripped directly from the headlines

The police, in the shape of Inspector Giorgio Solmi (Luc Merenda) and his men have other cases to investigate, however, such as the murder of electronics expert Carotti, found bludgeoned to death in his expensive villa.


The staging of a suicide; the black gloved figure is immediately given a face in a non-giallo move

The evidence points to his murderer being the call girl who visited him that night, with her attempted suicide and the tens of thousands of lira found in her apartment convincing public prosecutor Mannino (Mel Ferrer) of her guilt, “as good as a confession.”


A respectable noblewoman is soon revealed as the madam of a brothel, indicating both the deceptiveness of appearances and the pervasiveness of corruption

Solmi, however, is not convinced, refusing to “stop at first appearances” and strongly doubting that La Tunisiana had the strength to cave in Carotti's skull with three or four blows from a poker. Accordingly he assigns his men to stake out Carotti's place lest the killer – or someone else – return to the scene of the crime. This leads to the apprehension of Remo Ortolani and the discovery of a tape indicate that Carotti, who financed his lavish lifestyle through blackmail, had uncovered a conspiracy involving General Stocchi and another man, Renzi.

With the army again declining to share information and Ortolani revealing that he himself is working for one of the secret services whilst indicating that he knows nothing else, there is unfortunately no indication as to who Renzi might be.


Milian in pensive mood


The familiar sight of the tape reels

Ortolani's claim prompts Solmi to go see his superior, Captain Sperli (Tomas Milian) who denies that Ortolani – or whoever he might really be – is one of his men and casts doubt on his claims. Even more worryingly for Sperli the tape of the conversation proves to have been wiped, raising his suspicions that Mannino or someone else knows more than they are willing to let on. Still worse follows as Ortolani is assassinated by a gunman posing as a traffic cop, indicating that Solmi's investigation is a threat and that Renzi or whoever else it could expose are powerful and utterly ruthless....


Another cog in the machine; the fake policeman assassinates Alighieri

Happily, however, another lead in the case emerges around this time, as La Tunisiana confesses to Solmi that she saw Carotti's murderer. Unfortunately the same man then abducts her from the hospital, sub-machinegunning some guards in the process. While La Tunisiana manages to escape and to contact Solmi, to give a name to the face – Massu (Antonio Casale) – he soon catches and disposes of her...




Poison was the cure – two killers pose as medical orderlies but soon reveal their true colours

Solmi puts out an all-point bulletin on Massu and soon manages to apprehend him. An initial interrogation fails to provide much new information, while Massu is then himself murdered in a prison riot clearly engineered by Renzi or his co-conspirators, further establishing the pattern implied by the Italian title: the police accuse, the secret service kills...

This densely-plotted 1975 poliziotto from Sergio Martino fits very much into the same mould as its predecessor, Milano trema - la polizia vuole giustizia /The Violent Professionals, on account of the presence of Luc Merenda in the lead and the same exposure of a wide-reaching conspiracy in which identities, boundaries and issues of guilt and innocence become ever more muddled.


Another otherwise giallo moment rendered poliziotto style


Assassinate the assassin, the trope of the footage or shots of the crime and of the fall of man...


... and the forbidden photographs of a citizen above suspicion...


A car bomb takes out one of Solmi's underlings, but was clearly meant for him

If the filmmaker’s popular / vernacular approach and lack of an obvious left- or right-wing stance prevents them from offering much in the way of analysis, insight or thought-provoking conclusions in the manner of more political counterparts like Francesco Rosi’s Exquisite Cadavers and The Mattei Affair, the overriding state of confusion that reigns throughout the piece can also be argued for as a genuine reflection of the political situation in Italy at the time.

Similarly, if the full scale pitched battle between Solmi’s men and the private army that leads to the identification and apprehension of the mysterious Renzi strains credibility, the reality of CIA sponsored “stay behind” armies in Italy and elsewhere indicates that something similar certainly could have existed, albeit perhaps in a more clandestine, less spectacular fashion.




Despite appearances these are not images from a war movie

Unfortunately the battle sequence and the sundry chases and shoot outs in between plot points come across as competent rather than genuinely inspired when compared to, for example, Castellari’s work.

While Martino earlier proved himself more comfortable at the giallo than Castellari, comparable criticisms might also be levelled at the more investigative and suspense scenes, with a second-hand quality to the identification of Massu via a distinctive piece of jewellery (as previously seen in The Case of the Scorpion’s Tail) or the locked room suicide scenario (as found in The Strange Vice of Signorah Wardh).

The mise-en-scene likewise has that predictability to it, where Martino will endeavour to turn on the style from time to time, in going to the handling camera for instance, but otherwise seems content to just go through the motions; the issue then being that the selfsame obviousness of the dramatic moment is as much undercut as emphasised.

Much the same can be said of Luciano Michelini’s score, which has the right ingredients, but never seems to bring them together into something particularly memorable; in this regard it’s telling that of Michelini’s dozen credits as composer the majority have been for films either directed by Sergio Martino or produced by his brother Luciano.

On the plus side, lead actor Merenda and special guest star Milian are better balanced than they were in Destruction Force, with the latter’s restrained performance sitting better with the former’s typically relaxed, easy-going style.

The ending – complete with dramatic slow-motion to add gravitas – is also surprisingly bold, although one is nevertheless confident that more politically committed naysayers will nevertheless interpret it negatively, as encouraging an attitude of despair about the prospects for changing the system more than as confirmation that the paradigm of the individual hero able to resolve all society's contradictions is now outmoded.