I've watched this 1975 film from Carlo Lizzani three times now and still can't quite get my head around it and whether it's offering serious social commentary on its subject, is exploiting it for sensationalist purposes, or – most likely on balance – a bit of both.
Certainly the first few moments pull no punches and make for decidedly uncomfortable viewing, as we get a grandmother pimping her purportedly 13-year-old granddaughter to passing motorists, with the girl exposing her breasts and pudenda before quickly moving to perform implied fellatio on the van driver who had thought he was only giving them a lift only a few moments earlier.
Their run-ins with a group of pimps who don't take kindly to incursions onto their turf forms a running thread through the remainder of the film, which presents a series of documentary-style reconstructions, each based on co-writer Marisa Rusconi's research.
The first of these case studies also works well, mainly because it seems more typical and credible. In it a naïve 16-year-old, Rosina, arrives in Milan from Sardinia. Her father died in an industrial accident, leaving Rosina to support the rest of the family. Being reluctant to marry a family friend several decades her senior, she has come to the city to take up work through her cousin. The job Rosina gets is, however, marginal at best, putting together bootleg tapes at piecework rates – if, that is, she even gets paid at all. At the weekend, another of the girls in the house-cum-workshop suggests that they go dancing. At the disco Rosina meets Salvatore, AKA Velvet. A pimp on the lookout for fresh meat, he turns on the charm and sweeps Rosina off her feet. By the time she realises his true nature, it is already too late...
The subsequent case studies have a tendency to be more sensationalistic and mondo-eseque. In one a girl from a good home, Gisella, is blackmailed into having relationships with men after she is photographed in a compromising situation. While one doesn't doubt that it could happen, it seems a somewhat inefficient and risky way of working compared to targeting others in Rosina's situation. In another a second respectable middle class girl prostitutes herself to express her contempt for her parents, before eventually confronting her father over his own liking for underage girls. Again, it seems too much like choosing the rarer specific case over the more routine and general one.
These later stories are also more explicit, with borderline hardcore footage of fellatio, pseudo-lesbian activity with a strap-on and penetration shots inserted into the narratives.
Insofar as this takes the film coming perilously close to itself exploitation what it is purporting to expose and condemn, it's difficult to know what director and co-writer Lizzani and his collaborators were thinking of here. Two possibilities do however spring to mind. One is that, like Salo as a whole or the final act of Di Leo's To Be Twenty, they are using a bait and switch approach, luring the spectator in with the promise of more routine exploitation pleasures before giving us rather more than we had bargained upon. Another is that it represents another part of Lizzani's political critique, that he wanted to universalise things more for the middle class audience than a succession of Rosina-type scenarios would have allowed for, with this allowing for a running theme of exploring and exposing the exploitative relationships inherent within capitalism society at all levels. (Or, to allude to another relevant but more straightfowardly generic title here, is it what have 'they' done to 'their' daughters, what 'you' have done to 'your' daughters or what 'we' are doing to 'our' daughters collectively?)
The young actresses look the age of their characters (“As far as make up goes, put on as little as possible – you always want to look younger than you are,” as Velvet instructs Rosina) making it the kind of film that it's hard to imagine someone contemplating making in today's climate and which, were it to somehow get backing, would in all likelihood still experience distribution and censorship problems; in this regard it is also worth noting that the Italian Raro Video release as Storie di vita e malavita omits the harder footage found in the Greek English-dubbed VHS as The Teenage Prostitution Racket.
Ennio Morricone provided the soundtrack and Franco Fraticelli was the editor.
Monday, 30 June 2008
Sunday, 29 June 2008
Messalina, Messalina / Caligula II: Messalina, Messalina
This is one of those films whose production history is perhaps more interesting than what is on screen.
Telling the story of the infamous, sexually insatiable Roman empress in the form of a comedy, replete with nudity, vulgar humour and much softcore romping, before culminating with a played for laughs bloodbath in which limbs and heads are lopped off, it's reminiscent of a Decamerotic made several years after that filone had peaked commercially – not the sort of thing you would expect of a canny professional like Bruno Corbucci.
The explanation lies in the title and an opening credit about the source of the impressive Roman sets. For the film was made in the hope of cashing in on the success of the Bob Guiccone bankrolled Caligula, only to be released in advance of its much-troubled model in a case of what critic Kim Newman calls “premature emulation”: second guessing the market in the hope of being there first amongst a successful productions sullo stesso filone imitators, only to back the wrong film.
In addition to borrowing Caligula's sets, female leads Anneke di Lorenzo and Lori Wagner also reprise their roles as Messalina and Agrippina. Given that both were Penthouse Pets, its fairly clear where their talents do and do not lie, but also that the nature of the piece means a paucity of thespian abilities doesn't matter too much.
Tomas Milian and Bombolo seem to have stepped out of one of their poliziotto for Corbucci, with Milian wearing the same Monnezza wig and delivering the same kind of exaggerated, gesture-driven performance as Baba, a low-life vox populi, thief and conman who has the (mise en scène)fortune to come to the attention of Messalina and her emperor husband, while Bombolo plays a dim-witted career soldier charged at one point with finding men who measure up to Messalina's exacting criteria. Giovanni Cianfriglia also has a small action / stunt role.
Telling the story of the infamous, sexually insatiable Roman empress in the form of a comedy, replete with nudity, vulgar humour and much softcore romping, before culminating with a played for laughs bloodbath in which limbs and heads are lopped off, it's reminiscent of a Decamerotic made several years after that filone had peaked commercially – not the sort of thing you would expect of a canny professional like Bruno Corbucci.
The explanation lies in the title and an opening credit about the source of the impressive Roman sets. For the film was made in the hope of cashing in on the success of the Bob Guiccone bankrolled Caligula, only to be released in advance of its much-troubled model in a case of what critic Kim Newman calls “premature emulation”: second guessing the market in the hope of being there first amongst a successful productions sullo stesso filone imitators, only to back the wrong film.
In addition to borrowing Caligula's sets, female leads Anneke di Lorenzo and Lori Wagner also reprise their roles as Messalina and Agrippina. Given that both were Penthouse Pets, its fairly clear where their talents do and do not lie, but also that the nature of the piece means a paucity of thespian abilities doesn't matter too much.
Tomas Milian and Bombolo seem to have stepped out of one of their poliziotto for Corbucci, with Milian wearing the same Monnezza wig and delivering the same kind of exaggerated, gesture-driven performance as Baba, a low-life vox populi, thief and conman who has the (mise en scène)fortune to come to the attention of Messalina and her emperor husband, while Bombolo plays a dim-witted career soldier charged at one point with finding men who measure up to Messalina's exacting criteria. Giovanni Cianfriglia also has a small action / stunt role.
Banditi a Milano / Bandits in Milan
For me, Carlo Lizzani is one of the largely unsung heroes of the Italian cinema. A politically committed figure who started out as the writer of a number of neo-realist films and as a documentarist, he increasingly moved into directing genre films in the 1960s and 1970s.
It sounds like a somewhat unlikely career trajectory until we bear in mind that the best known of his early works, Guiseppe De Santis's Bitter Rice, itself combine neo-realism and noir, political engagement and entertainment.
An expose of the exploitation of itinerant rice planters and harvesters in the Po Valley it was ironically criticised by Marxist commentators for its own exploitative elements, most famously the iconic image of Silvana Mangano wearing a tight sweater and short trousers working in the fields. These, the critics argued, had nothing to contribute to the class struggle.
What these critics forgot and what Lizzani has always remembered is that exploitation is a way to expose the mass audience to political content. It was all well and good for these same critics to prefer Luchino Visconti's La Terra trema on grounds of ideological and aesthetic purity but not so effective when we consider that it had to be subtitled in Italy itself for the characters' Sicilian dialect to be comprehensible and that its box-office failure put an end to the Visconti and the PCI's plans for two further similarly themed films.
Though some of the images are somewhat non-documentary realist, it's worth remembering that the interrogation and torture sequences in Rome, Open City are expressionist rather than realist.
Pre-dating the post-Dirty Harry and French Connection boom in Italian police films, Bandits in Milan has a different look and feel to the typical 70s poliziotto, with Lizzani taking an documentary like approach to his subject – a reconstruction of a real heist which turned the center of Millan into a racetrack and unfortunate bystanders into targets.
At the same time, however, Lizzani is careful not to let forget that we are watching a movie, whether the opening freeze frame that shows one of the bandits in flight and then presents his capture by an angry mob, or the later – but chronologically earlier – scene in which the robbers' lookout tries to convince a curious passer by that a commercial is being filmed inside the bank, that it's not being robbed for real.
The film has a curious structure, beginning with ten minutes of little vignettes that, besides introducing Tomas Milian's police chief, give a kaleidoscopic portrait of crime and the city.
Milian, facing the press.
Following an old timer's remarks that the new generation of career criminals have no restraints and no respect, we get the shaking down of a nightclub and a gambling den by a protection racket. Then, in what seems like a dress rehearsal for the later Storie di vita e malavita, we get the recruitment of a naïve young woman, played by Margaret Lee, into prostititution and her eventual murder at the hands of her pimp.
Robber, terrorist or ultra?
Finally, as one of the robbers is interrogated by Inspector Basevi, the main story begins to unfold via his confession.
Basevi learns that the Turin-based gang were behind the robbery of three Milan banks in the space of half an hour the previous year, hitting the first one and making sure that the alarm is triggered to draw police cars there as they move on to the second, repeat the trick there and then go on to the third.
Volonte looking for inspiration
The mastermind behind the gang, who have made some 17 bank robberies over the preceding few years is Cavallero, played by Gian Maria Volonte. A keen strategist who leaves nothing to chance and enjoys the thrill of robbery as much as the money it brings, he's charismatic, megalomaniac and has a liking for existentialist literature and military history.
Cavallero has also seen to it that the gang have set themselves up a legitimate business as a front, complete with a secretary, whom he amusing tells not to wear short skirts and, more practically, to never have her boyfriend around the office. He also keeps a balance sheet of the profits and losses from each robbery, all the way down to noting the amount of ammunition fired and the cost per bullet.
Gratuitous picture of Margaret Lee
With the other long-term members of the gang, played by reliable hands like Don Backy and Peter Martell, equally professional but less extraordinary, the other main focus of attention is newcomer Tuccio, played by a fresh-faced Ray Lovelock.
A promising footballer who works in Cavallero's father's garage, Tuccio happens upon a stash of hidden guns and, having proven to Cavallero that he can be trusted, is invited to train with the gang and join them for their next job. (When he's learning to shoot, Cavellero still keeps track of the ammunition used.)
Let's go to work...
Finally, the day of the heist comes, along with the introduction of the various unfortunates whose lives are about to fatally intersect with the bandits. The job itself comes off fine, with the gang having earlier timed the traffic lights and noted that they would also have a clean getaway, but the police pursuit proves unexpectedly dogged. This causes Cavallero to start deliberately shooting at passing traffic and people in the hope of forcing the police to give up the chase.
It doesn't work...
Bandits in Milan has so many strong points, including quality performances; powerful, hard-hitting action sequences; believable characters; naturalistic dialogue (in which a number of distinctively Turinese idioms are used for extra veracity) and a somewhat open ending, that it is hard to actually find much to criticise.
One potential weakness is that Milian plays his role straight and as such is perhaps less interesting and engaging than in the likes of Almost Human and Brothers Till We Die where he is more over-the-top. Likewise, Lee's role amounts to only two or minutes screentime.
If Milian and Lee's fans may be disappointed, those of Volonte will be delighted. Compare his character and performance here to those in, say, Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion or Io ho paura, and you cannot but be impressed with his ability to inhabit radically different roles – a self-satisfied, superior, fascistic police chief and an anxious, increasingly paranoid cop assigned as bodyguard to a judge investigating terrorism – and the sheer commitment he brought to them.
More mediation
Another thing I wasn't entirely sure about was the extra-diegetic music. It's fine in itself, but at times threatens to expose a split between the genre and documentary aspects of the film by providing additional commentary and emotional cues which I felt were somewhat superfluous given the power of the writing, performances and direction. This said, I must also having similar feelings towards a number of neo-realist films, so it may just be that I don't quite get this melodramatic aspect of wider Italian culture as it applies there and here. Or, rather, I 'get' it at an intellectual level, understanding how musical cues helped the Italian audience make sense of the film by providing emotional cues, but just cannot have this same response myself in the case of more realistic films.
Taken as a whole, however, Bandits in Milan deserves to be much better known and acknowledged as one of the great heist movies in the same breath as the likes of The Asphalt Jungle, Rififi, The Killing, Reservoir Dogs and Heat. It is that good.
It sounds like a somewhat unlikely career trajectory until we bear in mind that the best known of his early works, Guiseppe De Santis's Bitter Rice, itself combine neo-realism and noir, political engagement and entertainment.
An expose of the exploitation of itinerant rice planters and harvesters in the Po Valley it was ironically criticised by Marxist commentators for its own exploitative elements, most famously the iconic image of Silvana Mangano wearing a tight sweater and short trousers working in the fields. These, the critics argued, had nothing to contribute to the class struggle.
What these critics forgot and what Lizzani has always remembered is that exploitation is a way to expose the mass audience to political content. It was all well and good for these same critics to prefer Luchino Visconti's La Terra trema on grounds of ideological and aesthetic purity but not so effective when we consider that it had to be subtitled in Italy itself for the characters' Sicilian dialect to be comprehensible and that its box-office failure put an end to the Visconti and the PCI's plans for two further similarly themed films.
Though some of the images are somewhat non-documentary realist, it's worth remembering that the interrogation and torture sequences in Rome, Open City are expressionist rather than realist.
Pre-dating the post-Dirty Harry and French Connection boom in Italian police films, Bandits in Milan has a different look and feel to the typical 70s poliziotto, with Lizzani taking an documentary like approach to his subject – a reconstruction of a real heist which turned the center of Millan into a racetrack and unfortunate bystanders into targets.
At the same time, however, Lizzani is careful not to let forget that we are watching a movie, whether the opening freeze frame that shows one of the bandits in flight and then presents his capture by an angry mob, or the later – but chronologically earlier – scene in which the robbers' lookout tries to convince a curious passer by that a commercial is being filmed inside the bank, that it's not being robbed for real.
The film has a curious structure, beginning with ten minutes of little vignettes that, besides introducing Tomas Milian's police chief, give a kaleidoscopic portrait of crime and the city.
Milian, facing the press.
Following an old timer's remarks that the new generation of career criminals have no restraints and no respect, we get the shaking down of a nightclub and a gambling den by a protection racket. Then, in what seems like a dress rehearsal for the later Storie di vita e malavita, we get the recruitment of a naïve young woman, played by Margaret Lee, into prostititution and her eventual murder at the hands of her pimp.
Robber, terrorist or ultra?
Finally, as one of the robbers is interrogated by Inspector Basevi, the main story begins to unfold via his confession.
Basevi learns that the Turin-based gang were behind the robbery of three Milan banks in the space of half an hour the previous year, hitting the first one and making sure that the alarm is triggered to draw police cars there as they move on to the second, repeat the trick there and then go on to the third.
Volonte looking for inspiration
The mastermind behind the gang, who have made some 17 bank robberies over the preceding few years is Cavallero, played by Gian Maria Volonte. A keen strategist who leaves nothing to chance and enjoys the thrill of robbery as much as the money it brings, he's charismatic, megalomaniac and has a liking for existentialist literature and military history.
Cavallero has also seen to it that the gang have set themselves up a legitimate business as a front, complete with a secretary, whom he amusing tells not to wear short skirts and, more practically, to never have her boyfriend around the office. He also keeps a balance sheet of the profits and losses from each robbery, all the way down to noting the amount of ammunition fired and the cost per bullet.
Gratuitous picture of Margaret Lee
With the other long-term members of the gang, played by reliable hands like Don Backy and Peter Martell, equally professional but less extraordinary, the other main focus of attention is newcomer Tuccio, played by a fresh-faced Ray Lovelock.
A promising footballer who works in Cavallero's father's garage, Tuccio happens upon a stash of hidden guns and, having proven to Cavallero that he can be trusted, is invited to train with the gang and join them for their next job. (When he's learning to shoot, Cavellero still keeps track of the ammunition used.)
Let's go to work...
Finally, the day of the heist comes, along with the introduction of the various unfortunates whose lives are about to fatally intersect with the bandits. The job itself comes off fine, with the gang having earlier timed the traffic lights and noted that they would also have a clean getaway, but the police pursuit proves unexpectedly dogged. This causes Cavallero to start deliberately shooting at passing traffic and people in the hope of forcing the police to give up the chase.
It doesn't work...
Bandits in Milan has so many strong points, including quality performances; powerful, hard-hitting action sequences; believable characters; naturalistic dialogue (in which a number of distinctively Turinese idioms are used for extra veracity) and a somewhat open ending, that it is hard to actually find much to criticise.
One potential weakness is that Milian plays his role straight and as such is perhaps less interesting and engaging than in the likes of Almost Human and Brothers Till We Die where he is more over-the-top. Likewise, Lee's role amounts to only two or minutes screentime.
If Milian and Lee's fans may be disappointed, those of Volonte will be delighted. Compare his character and performance here to those in, say, Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion or Io ho paura, and you cannot but be impressed with his ability to inhabit radically different roles – a self-satisfied, superior, fascistic police chief and an anxious, increasingly paranoid cop assigned as bodyguard to a judge investigating terrorism – and the sheer commitment he brought to them.
More mediation
Another thing I wasn't entirely sure about was the extra-diegetic music. It's fine in itself, but at times threatens to expose a split between the genre and documentary aspects of the film by providing additional commentary and emotional cues which I felt were somewhat superfluous given the power of the writing, performances and direction. This said, I must also having similar feelings towards a number of neo-realist films, so it may just be that I don't quite get this melodramatic aspect of wider Italian culture as it applies there and here. Or, rather, I 'get' it at an intellectual level, understanding how musical cues helped the Italian audience make sense of the film by providing emotional cues, but just cannot have this same response myself in the case of more realistic films.
Taken as a whole, however, Bandits in Milan deserves to be much better known and acknowledged as one of the great heist movies in the same breath as the likes of The Asphalt Jungle, Rififi, The Killing, Reservoir Dogs and Heat. It is that good.
Friday, 27 June 2008
002 operazione Luna / 002 Operation Moon / Dos cosmonautas a la fuerza
In 1965 at least nine Franco and Ciccio films were released, each following the same formula: take some popular success of the time, whether A Fistful of Dollars, Thunderball or The Leopard, and place the two loveable rogues in its world to wreak havoc.
The target here, as indicated by the title, is also Bondian, loosely following on from the previous year's 002 agenti segretissimi, also directed by Lucio Fulci.
A Soviet space mission goes wrong, leaving the two Cosmonauts onboard Popov I lost in space and the party with a potential public relations disaster on their hands. Meanwhile Franco and Ciccio are arrested after a bungled robbery. A Soviet agent in Rome, whose cover is a beauty parlour and gym catering to the wives of Italy's ruling elite, sees Franco and Ciccio's picture in the newspaper and realises they are the spitting images of the Cosmonauts. Accordingly our two heroes are kidnapped, taken to Moscow and, after some tests, sent into space on Popov II. Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on how you see it, they then return to earth. The complication is that they've got to impersonate the Cosmonauts. For the military and media this isn't such a problem: they just have to sit there and keep their mouths shut. But when the two men's wives arrive and wonder why their husbands are speaking Italian rather than Russian it's a different matter. Then unexpectedly Popov I reappears and returns to earth, complete with the real Cosmonauts...
The cosmonauts
The real Franco and Ciccio, not lost in space but loose?
Who is who?
Nine films is a figure that gives some idea of Franco and Ciccio's popularity with a sector of the Italian public and of the qualities they required of their collaborators, most obviously a fast, efficient way of working. This also, however, helps to explain why Franco and Ciccio were a two-edged sword for the filmmaker, especially a more aspirational one like Fulci.
Working with / for them ensured that you would have plenty of work. But also imposed limitations on what you could do creatively and make it unlikely that intellectuals and taste makers would recognise your efforts in any case: To most of them it was probably just another Franco and Ciccio film, for which criticism and comment, except perhaps of the culture underlying their popularity, was essentially irrelevant.
Laika
Presumably not Vatican approved, though to link this with Fulci's personal biography would also be a step too far one thinks
As such, the filmmakers achievements here, modest though they may be, probably went unnoticed. Three things spring to mind.
First, a good proportion of the film's dialogue is in Russian, much of it subtitled into Italian. Given Italy's dubbing culture and the likelihood of the typical Franco and Ciccio fan not being that for the subtitled foreign art film, it comes across as a bold move that perhaps ran the risk of alienating the audience somewhat.
Second, that the documentary-style opening sequence, which sees the two cosmonauts who look exactly like Franco and Ciccio launched into space, convices, as do the two comedians straight performances: they may look like Franco and Ciccio, but are curiously serious, silent and stoic.
Third, a 360 degree pan around a lock-up full of electronics, that starts with (the 'real') Franco and Ciccio but then circles round to include them within the camera's independent vision, in a manner perhaps not too removed from the kind of camera consciousness Pasolini talked about in his discussions of The Cinema of Poetry, making us aware of its independent presence while also indicating something of the significance which televisions, refrigerators and radios had over the film's public at the time. (Later on, once they are in space, TV and radio form the basis for a number of Franco and Ciccio's gags as well.)
Not a great film by any means, but one that has its moments of interest.
The target here, as indicated by the title, is also Bondian, loosely following on from the previous year's 002 agenti segretissimi, also directed by Lucio Fulci.
A Soviet space mission goes wrong, leaving the two Cosmonauts onboard Popov I lost in space and the party with a potential public relations disaster on their hands. Meanwhile Franco and Ciccio are arrested after a bungled robbery. A Soviet agent in Rome, whose cover is a beauty parlour and gym catering to the wives of Italy's ruling elite, sees Franco and Ciccio's picture in the newspaper and realises they are the spitting images of the Cosmonauts. Accordingly our two heroes are kidnapped, taken to Moscow and, after some tests, sent into space on Popov II. Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on how you see it, they then return to earth. The complication is that they've got to impersonate the Cosmonauts. For the military and media this isn't such a problem: they just have to sit there and keep their mouths shut. But when the two men's wives arrive and wonder why their husbands are speaking Italian rather than Russian it's a different matter. Then unexpectedly Popov I reappears and returns to earth, complete with the real Cosmonauts...
The cosmonauts
The real Franco and Ciccio, not lost in space but loose?
Who is who?
Nine films is a figure that gives some idea of Franco and Ciccio's popularity with a sector of the Italian public and of the qualities they required of their collaborators, most obviously a fast, efficient way of working. This also, however, helps to explain why Franco and Ciccio were a two-edged sword for the filmmaker, especially a more aspirational one like Fulci.
Working with / for them ensured that you would have plenty of work. But also imposed limitations on what you could do creatively and make it unlikely that intellectuals and taste makers would recognise your efforts in any case: To most of them it was probably just another Franco and Ciccio film, for which criticism and comment, except perhaps of the culture underlying their popularity, was essentially irrelevant.
Laika
Presumably not Vatican approved, though to link this with Fulci's personal biography would also be a step too far one thinks
As such, the filmmakers achievements here, modest though they may be, probably went unnoticed. Three things spring to mind.
First, a good proportion of the film's dialogue is in Russian, much of it subtitled into Italian. Given Italy's dubbing culture and the likelihood of the typical Franco and Ciccio fan not being that for the subtitled foreign art film, it comes across as a bold move that perhaps ran the risk of alienating the audience somewhat.
Second, that the documentary-style opening sequence, which sees the two cosmonauts who look exactly like Franco and Ciccio launched into space, convices, as do the two comedians straight performances: they may look like Franco and Ciccio, but are curiously serious, silent and stoic.
Third, a 360 degree pan around a lock-up full of electronics, that starts with (the 'real') Franco and Ciccio but then circles round to include them within the camera's independent vision, in a manner perhaps not too removed from the kind of camera consciousness Pasolini talked about in his discussions of The Cinema of Poetry, making us aware of its independent presence while also indicating something of the significance which televisions, refrigerators and radios had over the film's public at the time. (Later on, once they are in space, TV and radio form the basis for a number of Franco and Ciccio's gags as well.)
Not a great film by any means, but one that has its moments of interest.
Thursday, 26 June 2008
Das Siebente Opfer / The Racetrack Murders
The world of horseracing was one which Edgar Wallace knew well, but not as well as he might like, given that part of the impetus for his extraordinary workrate stemmed from his chronic inability to back enough winners. He also however used his knowledge of the subject to good effect by using it as a backdrop to a number of his thrillers, including Never Back Losers and Thank Evans.
Wallace's son Bryan Edgar Wallace also used racing themes and settings on occasion, as with this krimi based on his novel Murder is Not Enough, produced by Artur Brauner's CCC and released in 1964; as a rule of thumb a CCC krimi will be a Wallace junior adaptation, featuring him in the opening credits and an 'authentic' Rialto krimis a Wallace senior adaptation, featuring his supposed voice, in English or German, over the credits.
Bryan Edgar Walace's customary appearance
The story opens on a country estate. Lord John Mant's horse, Satan, is the hot favourite for the Derby. It soon becomes clear, however, that someone does not want Satan to compete, with two shady characters planting a snake in the horse's path, causing his to throw the jockey, breaking his neck.
Satan
It seems like a terrible accident, but not enough for Lord Mant and his associates to really get bothered about, with their garden party going ahead as planned – “Why cancel it, just because some wretched jockey breaks his neck; it's outrageous,” as Lady Jenny remarks. Then one of the bandsmen, who had earlier indicated his need to talk to Lord John about an important matter, is shot dead.
Inspector Bradley is soon on the case, bringing all of the Many family and their servants, as the suspects in the case, into the drawing room, followed by the arrival of Peter Brooks, a painter who is a friend of Lord Mant's son.
As with his fathers' work, Bryan soon gives us a number of intersecting stories and conspiracies to work through: in addition to a successions of murders we have a missing will; a coveted painting of the Madonna worth £20,000; further attempts at taking the racehorse out of commission via doping; a noble scion with a mass of IOU's needing paid off to the shady figure who has acquired them, and an unidentified man wearing black gloves and puffing on cigars who is pulling the strings on at least some of these crimes.
The horse's name provides a running gag throughout the film, as the various genteel English country types, including the parish vicar, keep discussing Satan, his wellbeing and prospects, all the way to the final race – by which time several more characters have dropped out of the running in rather giallo-like subjective camera murder set pieces – where assorted punters amusingly chant “Satan, Satan” like members of some black metal band or their fans.
Franz Josef Gottlieb's direction is impressive even in the less than pristine version under review, with elegant camera movements and arresting expressionistic compositions, placing the camera at low and canted angles, with every shot beautifully lit and lensed by cinematographer Richard Angst.
Expressionist atmospheres and distortions
Whether on account of being of more contemporary vintage or the progressive tendencies of producer Artur Brauner, who had himself made one of the first West German films to deal with the Nazis and the Jewish Holocaust and who was also financing the so-called “risky wave” of non-genre films around this time from the proceeds of these krimis, The Racetrack Murders feels more class-conscious than many krimis.
In addition to the boozy Lady Jane's comments – she continues by remarking of the dead bandsman that “this is going too far: generally speaking things of this kind only happen among the working classes” – we also get Lord Mant accidentally-cum-deliberately mistakenly referring to Inspector Bradley as a sergeant until corrected, and thereafter expressing a clear annoyance at the Inspector's lack of deference and respect:
“In view of the circumstances I suspect every one of your guests”
“You're overreaching your professional duties Inspector”
“That, My Lord, is a purely personal point of view”
Indeed, just about all the characters are reduced to the same base level, more reminiscent of later gialli: regardless of their social origins and current positions they are out for what they can get, including the minister of religion, with this being a point which giallo fans may also wish to pay closer attention to.
There are also some untrustworthy foreigners, like the Italian jockey Giuseppe Ranova and an Oriental coded moll type, though in common with some of the other working-class characters they tend to minor rather than major villains.
Wallace's son Bryan Edgar Wallace also used racing themes and settings on occasion, as with this krimi based on his novel Murder is Not Enough, produced by Artur Brauner's CCC and released in 1964; as a rule of thumb a CCC krimi will be a Wallace junior adaptation, featuring him in the opening credits and an 'authentic' Rialto krimis a Wallace senior adaptation, featuring his supposed voice, in English or German, over the credits.
Bryan Edgar Walace's customary appearance
The story opens on a country estate. Lord John Mant's horse, Satan, is the hot favourite for the Derby. It soon becomes clear, however, that someone does not want Satan to compete, with two shady characters planting a snake in the horse's path, causing his to throw the jockey, breaking his neck.
Satan
It seems like a terrible accident, but not enough for Lord Mant and his associates to really get bothered about, with their garden party going ahead as planned – “Why cancel it, just because some wretched jockey breaks his neck; it's outrageous,” as Lady Jenny remarks. Then one of the bandsmen, who had earlier indicated his need to talk to Lord John about an important matter, is shot dead.
Inspector Bradley is soon on the case, bringing all of the Many family and their servants, as the suspects in the case, into the drawing room, followed by the arrival of Peter Brooks, a painter who is a friend of Lord Mant's son.
As with his fathers' work, Bryan soon gives us a number of intersecting stories and conspiracies to work through: in addition to a successions of murders we have a missing will; a coveted painting of the Madonna worth £20,000; further attempts at taking the racehorse out of commission via doping; a noble scion with a mass of IOU's needing paid off to the shady figure who has acquired them, and an unidentified man wearing black gloves and puffing on cigars who is pulling the strings on at least some of these crimes.
The horse's name provides a running gag throughout the film, as the various genteel English country types, including the parish vicar, keep discussing Satan, his wellbeing and prospects, all the way to the final race – by which time several more characters have dropped out of the running in rather giallo-like subjective camera murder set pieces – where assorted punters amusingly chant “Satan, Satan” like members of some black metal band or their fans.
Franz Josef Gottlieb's direction is impressive even in the less than pristine version under review, with elegant camera movements and arresting expressionistic compositions, placing the camera at low and canted angles, with every shot beautifully lit and lensed by cinematographer Richard Angst.
Expressionist atmospheres and distortions
Whether on account of being of more contemporary vintage or the progressive tendencies of producer Artur Brauner, who had himself made one of the first West German films to deal with the Nazis and the Jewish Holocaust and who was also financing the so-called “risky wave” of non-genre films around this time from the proceeds of these krimis, The Racetrack Murders feels more class-conscious than many krimis.
In addition to the boozy Lady Jane's comments – she continues by remarking of the dead bandsman that “this is going too far: generally speaking things of this kind only happen among the working classes” – we also get Lord Mant accidentally-cum-deliberately mistakenly referring to Inspector Bradley as a sergeant until corrected, and thereafter expressing a clear annoyance at the Inspector's lack of deference and respect:
“In view of the circumstances I suspect every one of your guests”
“You're overreaching your professional duties Inspector”
“That, My Lord, is a purely personal point of view”
Indeed, just about all the characters are reduced to the same base level, more reminiscent of later gialli: regardless of their social origins and current positions they are out for what they can get, including the minister of religion, with this being a point which giallo fans may also wish to pay closer attention to.
There are also some untrustworthy foreigners, like the Italian jockey Giuseppe Ranova and an Oriental coded moll type, though in common with some of the other working-class characters they tend to minor rather than major villains.
Wednesday, 25 June 2008
Critics, Pirates, Creators and Consumers
Or, some random thoughts inspired by a couple of film festival panels I have attended over the past couple of days....
Every year the Edinburgh International Film Festival does a number of these panel events. By their very nature they can be a bit hit and miss, depending strongly on the quality of the panelists, the moderator and the questions from the audience.
This year I attended three panels, two of which – film criticism in the age of the internet and the notion of postive piracy – I feel are worth writing about here; I won't mention the third by name, but merely indicate that it didn't add terribly much to my understanding of the debates around its subject, though this could be because I'm arrogant or knowledgeable enough (take your pick) to feel that I really didn't need anyone else to be talking about its particular subject at the level the panelists did.
Both criticism and piracy are issues that I am closely involved in anyway: as regular readers will know I write reviews of films that I would consider veer in the direction of criticism a lot of the time, and that these are often of rather obscure genre films that I download from file sharing sites or exchange with other fans because they are more often than not unavailable by other means.
As such, I can't claim to be a neutral party: I have an agenda. I want to see the overthrowing of the existing power structures within cinema, so that anyone can see any film they are interested in, no matter whether it is art or trash; where it comes from; how old it is; with prejudice as to its aesthetics and politics, and ideally be able to find intelligent commentary on that film that helps make sense of and appreciate what it is doing, with the emergence of a discursive community around it.
The thing that emerged from the internet criticism panel was how far we've come and how far we've still got to go on this. Newspaper critics, in the UK at least, still tend to come from the same narrow backgrounds, still tend to keep a distance from film theory – sometimes wisely, it must be said – and seem to a degree to be beholden to two pressures that work against their writing about the sort of film I'm interested in.
The first of these is the power of the majors, that if a blockbuster is the film of the week they must give it pride of place in a column whether or not it merits it or if much can actually be written about the film itself. The second is the enduring power of the art / popular cinema divide, by which certain films are automatically deemed worth writing about or not worth writing about and of praise or condemnation.
With this, I found myself thinking back to some old issues of the Monthly Film Bulletin from the 1960s and 1970s I was reading recently: The MFB had the policy of reviewing every single film given a theatrical release in the UK, such that the latest from Bergman or whoever would sit alongside a dubbed spaghetti western or Eurohorror. But the reviews were divided into two classes: those films deemed to be of interest to the magazine's readers, which got more throughgoing analysis, and those of everything else, which tended to amount to three or five lines of summary, often dismissive, commentary after the plot synopsis. Sight and Sound, which ran parallel to the MFB for a number of years and now continues its remit of reviewing everything, though not with the same overt split, still tends to feature reviews of varying length and implicit assumptions of value.
Now, of course some reviews are always going to be longer than others, with some films warranting more commentary than others. But the thing that really stuck me, thinking about it, is how the web frees us from word / space limits, and how different things can be if we approach even the least film with a view to finding something more to say about it beyond a summary dismissal: what happens if we actually have to try to work through, for each and every film, what it does specifically as a unique object?
I can't say I live up to this ideal myself, and in truth I don't think many of us could, but it seems something to aspire towards...
A more difficult balance emerged as that between breadth and depth. All of the critics commented on the value added by the professional critic with the ability and willingness to go deeper than the fan who simply says that he or she liked or disliked something. Yet the question of breadth and depth remained at the back of my mind: it's all very well to say this, but isn't the critic who knows about the 'right' sorts of film, those which are either commercially or culturally valued, still perpetuating the same system so long as he or she is not being exposed to? Likewise, if the critic only sees a relatively narrow range of cinema – and I am not suggesting that they all necessarily do, but the Time Out panelists' comments about having a panel of reviewers, with certain ones who would be assigned to go see and review particular types of film – then how can they really educate their audience? At what point do we need the outsider's view, as when the the critic confronts a cinema that they have little or no knowledge of? How far does familiarity or unfamiliarity breed contempt? The classic kung fu fan should see some contemporary Iranian cinema, and vice versa, but how people actually many do?
The positive piracy panel, meanwhile, was interesting for the very admission that its title – which itself is of course problematic, in that we should really be debating and defining exactly what piracy is, whether it is anything beyond armed robbery at sea – made. Piracy is not, as the somewhat on-the-spot spokesperson for the Federation Against Copyright Theft often found himself trying in vain to get around, a cut and dry situation. What is positive for one individual or group, namely the fan who wishes to gain exposure to a wider range of cinema, is bad for another, namely the big players who really do not want us to become aware of any alternatives beyond the narrow range they are offering. To their credit, however, the other three panelists, independent horror filmmaker Alex Orr, an internet journalist, and a writer and programmer for the ICA, who expressed the desire that more of the kind of films the ICA showed were available to a wider audience, each understood the positive side of new avenues for distribution. They understood that, while the blockbusters and multiplexes are still here, there is the emergence of new sensibilities and understandings amongst filmmakers and of new audiences and communities who are quite simply bypassing the increasingly outmoded powers that be. Why is it okay for manufacturers to exploit freedom of the marketplace to move manufacturing wherever costs are cheapest, often devastating communities in the process – externalitie they do not need to worry about – yet bad when consumers exploit the same freedoms the internet gives them?
The idea of punk rock and DIY came up repeatedly within the panel. The FACT representative and the chair seemed to be invoking it solely in terms of a route in, that sooner or later the artist would want to work with the major label / studio and to make the big money. Orr, however, seemed to grasp the fundamental issue here: there is art and there is commerce and, if not necessarily incompatible, they are not necessarily compatible either. Too many artists have been screwed over buy the industry to believe otherwise.
The way forward, one has to conclude, is punk, is DIY, is fans ripping films and doing their own subtitles and reconstructions, but inspired more by the likes of Roberto Rossellini (as a name who came up in the discussion, along with the aesthetics of neo-realism, and, though none of the panelists mentioned this, who was also an independent producer in his own right) and ideologically pure post-punks like Fugazi:
“What could a businessman ever want more / Than to see us sucking on his store / We owe you nothing” or, to quote their song Cassavetes, about the founding father of independent American cinema, “If it's not for sale you can't buy it”
But, we might add, you may well be able to download it, or trade it with another in your particular fan producer-consumer community...
Every year the Edinburgh International Film Festival does a number of these panel events. By their very nature they can be a bit hit and miss, depending strongly on the quality of the panelists, the moderator and the questions from the audience.
This year I attended three panels, two of which – film criticism in the age of the internet and the notion of postive piracy – I feel are worth writing about here; I won't mention the third by name, but merely indicate that it didn't add terribly much to my understanding of the debates around its subject, though this could be because I'm arrogant or knowledgeable enough (take your pick) to feel that I really didn't need anyone else to be talking about its particular subject at the level the panelists did.
Both criticism and piracy are issues that I am closely involved in anyway: as regular readers will know I write reviews of films that I would consider veer in the direction of criticism a lot of the time, and that these are often of rather obscure genre films that I download from file sharing sites or exchange with other fans because they are more often than not unavailable by other means.
As such, I can't claim to be a neutral party: I have an agenda. I want to see the overthrowing of the existing power structures within cinema, so that anyone can see any film they are interested in, no matter whether it is art or trash; where it comes from; how old it is; with prejudice as to its aesthetics and politics, and ideally be able to find intelligent commentary on that film that helps make sense of and appreciate what it is doing, with the emergence of a discursive community around it.
The thing that emerged from the internet criticism panel was how far we've come and how far we've still got to go on this. Newspaper critics, in the UK at least, still tend to come from the same narrow backgrounds, still tend to keep a distance from film theory – sometimes wisely, it must be said – and seem to a degree to be beholden to two pressures that work against their writing about the sort of film I'm interested in.
The first of these is the power of the majors, that if a blockbuster is the film of the week they must give it pride of place in a column whether or not it merits it or if much can actually be written about the film itself. The second is the enduring power of the art / popular cinema divide, by which certain films are automatically deemed worth writing about or not worth writing about and of praise or condemnation.
With this, I found myself thinking back to some old issues of the Monthly Film Bulletin from the 1960s and 1970s I was reading recently: The MFB had the policy of reviewing every single film given a theatrical release in the UK, such that the latest from Bergman or whoever would sit alongside a dubbed spaghetti western or Eurohorror. But the reviews were divided into two classes: those films deemed to be of interest to the magazine's readers, which got more throughgoing analysis, and those of everything else, which tended to amount to three or five lines of summary, often dismissive, commentary after the plot synopsis. Sight and Sound, which ran parallel to the MFB for a number of years and now continues its remit of reviewing everything, though not with the same overt split, still tends to feature reviews of varying length and implicit assumptions of value.
Now, of course some reviews are always going to be longer than others, with some films warranting more commentary than others. But the thing that really stuck me, thinking about it, is how the web frees us from word / space limits, and how different things can be if we approach even the least film with a view to finding something more to say about it beyond a summary dismissal: what happens if we actually have to try to work through, for each and every film, what it does specifically as a unique object?
I can't say I live up to this ideal myself, and in truth I don't think many of us could, but it seems something to aspire towards...
A more difficult balance emerged as that between breadth and depth. All of the critics commented on the value added by the professional critic with the ability and willingness to go deeper than the fan who simply says that he or she liked or disliked something. Yet the question of breadth and depth remained at the back of my mind: it's all very well to say this, but isn't the critic who knows about the 'right' sorts of film, those which are either commercially or culturally valued, still perpetuating the same system so long as he or she is not being exposed to? Likewise, if the critic only sees a relatively narrow range of cinema – and I am not suggesting that they all necessarily do, but the Time Out panelists' comments about having a panel of reviewers, with certain ones who would be assigned to go see and review particular types of film – then how can they really educate their audience? At what point do we need the outsider's view, as when the the critic confronts a cinema that they have little or no knowledge of? How far does familiarity or unfamiliarity breed contempt? The classic kung fu fan should see some contemporary Iranian cinema, and vice versa, but how people actually many do?
The positive piracy panel, meanwhile, was interesting for the very admission that its title – which itself is of course problematic, in that we should really be debating and defining exactly what piracy is, whether it is anything beyond armed robbery at sea – made. Piracy is not, as the somewhat on-the-spot spokesperson for the Federation Against Copyright Theft often found himself trying in vain to get around, a cut and dry situation. What is positive for one individual or group, namely the fan who wishes to gain exposure to a wider range of cinema, is bad for another, namely the big players who really do not want us to become aware of any alternatives beyond the narrow range they are offering. To their credit, however, the other three panelists, independent horror filmmaker Alex Orr, an internet journalist, and a writer and programmer for the ICA, who expressed the desire that more of the kind of films the ICA showed were available to a wider audience, each understood the positive side of new avenues for distribution. They understood that, while the blockbusters and multiplexes are still here, there is the emergence of new sensibilities and understandings amongst filmmakers and of new audiences and communities who are quite simply bypassing the increasingly outmoded powers that be. Why is it okay for manufacturers to exploit freedom of the marketplace to move manufacturing wherever costs are cheapest, often devastating communities in the process – externalitie they do not need to worry about – yet bad when consumers exploit the same freedoms the internet gives them?
The idea of punk rock and DIY came up repeatedly within the panel. The FACT representative and the chair seemed to be invoking it solely in terms of a route in, that sooner or later the artist would want to work with the major label / studio and to make the big money. Orr, however, seemed to grasp the fundamental issue here: there is art and there is commerce and, if not necessarily incompatible, they are not necessarily compatible either. Too many artists have been screwed over buy the industry to believe otherwise.
The way forward, one has to conclude, is punk, is DIY, is fans ripping films and doing their own subtitles and reconstructions, but inspired more by the likes of Roberto Rossellini (as a name who came up in the discussion, along with the aesthetics of neo-realism, and, though none of the panelists mentioned this, who was also an independent producer in his own right) and ideologically pure post-punks like Fugazi:
“What could a businessman ever want more / Than to see us sucking on his store / We owe you nothing” or, to quote their song Cassavetes, about the founding father of independent American cinema, “If it's not for sale you can't buy it”
But, we might add, you may well be able to download it, or trade it with another in your particular fan producer-consumer community...
Tuesday, 24 June 2008
I gialli di edgar wallace 3
Just a poster I found on Ebay, dated as 1960 and suggesting that the British Edgar Wallace hour-long TV films made at Merton Park circulated on Italian screens as double-bills under an Edgar Wallace / giallo label.
The directors of this particular pairing include Clive Donner, the casts Harry H. Corbett and Hazel Court.
The directors of this particular pairing include Clive Donner, the casts Harry H. Corbett and Hazel Court.
Cattivi pensieri / Evil Thoughts / Who Mislaid My Wife?
Returning home one night after his flight to New York is postponed due to fog, lawyer Mario Marani (Ugo Tognazzi) finds his wife Francesca (Edwige Fenech) asleep and someone – a man – hiding in a closet.
This spurs Mario to imagine his wife having all manner of affairs with their friends and associates – if, that is, they are all in fact Mario's imaginings. For while some of the scenarios have a clear fantasy element, as when Jean-Luc Retrosi (Luc Merenda) goes outside into the snow on a skiing trip to kill the bear that had been watching their lovemaking from outside the cabin and returns moments later with its pelt, some of the others are more realistic / plausible in their content and / or form, eschewing more obvious fantasy sequence techniques of soft focus, dreamlike slow motion and so on, and featuring abrupt cuts from one state / scene to another.
Note the surrealist figures in the painting
Note the dark / light contrasts and boundary between Mario and Francesca
Double images of duplicity?
It's these, along with some of Cattivi pensieri's other intertextual reference points that are most interesting from a non-vernacular perspective.
Three films spring to mind: The Rules of the Game, La Bete and Belle de jour. In one scene, the Marani's and their circle gather for some hunting on a country estate, leading to the blasting away of all manner of wildlife and a gag in which one of the beaters thinks they are going to shoot him and collapses in faint as the shotguns ring out, recalling the accidental shooting in Renoir's film.
The Rules of the Game
In the aforementioned snow / bear sequence, Fenech's character puts her hands to her face like Sirpa Lane's character in Borowcyzk's film on seeing the titular beast. Initially it appears a coincidence, a case of reading too much in, but then later she and a different male acquaintance are pictured watching two horses mate, recalling the opening of Borowczyk's film, which leads them into a roll in the hay of their own.
La Bete
It is the aura of Belle de jour that permeates the dream sequences that is perhaps the most significant, however. In his book Cinema 2, Gilles Deleuze proposes the notion of the “crystal image,” a circuit of real and the virtual images constantly chasing after one another until it becomes impossible for the audience to distinguish between two incompossible alternatives. Thus, at the end of Belle de jour – in which a skiing trip is also featured – Severin's husband is either wheelchair bound or not, but there is nothing obvious in the presentation of the images that enables us to identify one state as true and the other as false.
I would argue that something similar, albeit less consistent and coherent, can be said about some of Cattivi pensieri's sequences, at least if we bracket the implications of the title and the neat – if beautifully ironic and revealing – ending.
Cattivi pensieri
Then again, it could also be countered that “if men define situations as real” a – i.e that Francesca is sleeping around – “then they are real in their consequences” – i.e. Franco's suspicion and cruelty.
Distinctive architecture in a popular film, once more.
Again the distinction between modernist art cinema and popular cinema emerges as one of degree rather than absolute divisions. (Another popular Italian film that might be worth considering in terms of its mixture of Deleuzean movement- and time-image concepts if anyone is interested in pursuing the topic further is Castellari's Keoma, particularly those fascinating scenes in which the adult Keoma gazes upon himself as a child.)
The same perhaps applies to some of the worse aspects of the “evil thoughts” regarding his wife: if they are Mario's fantasies, then they reveal just how warped his imagination can be and, by extension, implicate the male viewer who ltakes pleasure in them – not that this is a difficult thing when they feature Fenech, and plenty of her, at the pinnacle of her beauty.
Fenech dominating the male gaze?
And this, of course, is the main attraction for those who care nothing for attempting to apply theory to the Italian sex comedy or raise occasional examples of it like this out of the generic mass, and who would argue that any such attempts are misguided...
This spurs Mario to imagine his wife having all manner of affairs with their friends and associates – if, that is, they are all in fact Mario's imaginings. For while some of the scenarios have a clear fantasy element, as when Jean-Luc Retrosi (Luc Merenda) goes outside into the snow on a skiing trip to kill the bear that had been watching their lovemaking from outside the cabin and returns moments later with its pelt, some of the others are more realistic / plausible in their content and / or form, eschewing more obvious fantasy sequence techniques of soft focus, dreamlike slow motion and so on, and featuring abrupt cuts from one state / scene to another.
Note the surrealist figures in the painting
Note the dark / light contrasts and boundary between Mario and Francesca
Double images of duplicity?
It's these, along with some of Cattivi pensieri's other intertextual reference points that are most interesting from a non-vernacular perspective.
Three films spring to mind: The Rules of the Game, La Bete and Belle de jour. In one scene, the Marani's and their circle gather for some hunting on a country estate, leading to the blasting away of all manner of wildlife and a gag in which one of the beaters thinks they are going to shoot him and collapses in faint as the shotguns ring out, recalling the accidental shooting in Renoir's film.
The Rules of the Game
In the aforementioned snow / bear sequence, Fenech's character puts her hands to her face like Sirpa Lane's character in Borowcyzk's film on seeing the titular beast. Initially it appears a coincidence, a case of reading too much in, but then later she and a different male acquaintance are pictured watching two horses mate, recalling the opening of Borowczyk's film, which leads them into a roll in the hay of their own.
La Bete
It is the aura of Belle de jour that permeates the dream sequences that is perhaps the most significant, however. In his book Cinema 2, Gilles Deleuze proposes the notion of the “crystal image,” a circuit of real and the virtual images constantly chasing after one another until it becomes impossible for the audience to distinguish between two incompossible alternatives. Thus, at the end of Belle de jour – in which a skiing trip is also featured – Severin's husband is either wheelchair bound or not, but there is nothing obvious in the presentation of the images that enables us to identify one state as true and the other as false.
I would argue that something similar, albeit less consistent and coherent, can be said about some of Cattivi pensieri's sequences, at least if we bracket the implications of the title and the neat – if beautifully ironic and revealing – ending.
Cattivi pensieri
Then again, it could also be countered that “if men define situations as real” a – i.e that Francesca is sleeping around – “then they are real in their consequences” – i.e. Franco's suspicion and cruelty.
Distinctive architecture in a popular film, once more.
Again the distinction between modernist art cinema and popular cinema emerges as one of degree rather than absolute divisions. (Another popular Italian film that might be worth considering in terms of its mixture of Deleuzean movement- and time-image concepts if anyone is interested in pursuing the topic further is Castellari's Keoma, particularly those fascinating scenes in which the adult Keoma gazes upon himself as a child.)
The same perhaps applies to some of the worse aspects of the “evil thoughts” regarding his wife: if they are Mario's fantasies, then they reveal just how warped his imagination can be and, by extension, implicate the male viewer who ltakes pleasure in them – not that this is a difficult thing when they feature Fenech, and plenty of her, at the pinnacle of her beauty.
Fenech dominating the male gaze?
And this, of course, is the main attraction for those who care nothing for attempting to apply theory to the Italian sex comedy or raise occasional examples of it like this out of the generic mass, and who would argue that any such attempts are misguided...
Monday, 23 June 2008
Making connections
In the opening chapter – or scene, if you prefer – of Harry Grey's pseudonymous memoirs The Hoods, the five friends, Noodles, Maxie, Cockeye, Patsy and Donny are in school. Cockeye is reading a pulp western about the exploits of the James Gang, and fantasises about going out west, becoming a cowboy and joining them. He does not realise that the gang are dead and the wild west is no more until Noodles tells him.
It's an opening that I think helps explain why Leone became obsessed with bringing Grey's story to the screen, even if his own Once Upon a Time in America does not feature this scene.
It is all about the end of the “real” west and the printing of the Fordian “legend;” the shift from a rural to an urban environment; the gangster supplanting the cowboy as the idealised popular cultural figure of the man with a gun living and dying by a code; the replacement of the horse with the motor car; the emergence of the movies as a way in which American mythologies circulated. Thus, as Grey's memoirs continue, we get the blending of fact and fiction, as his memories of the gangster life become intermingled with the idioms of pulp crime writing and Hollywood gangster films.
In the period it took Leone to bring the novel to the screen he reluctantly directed the Mexican-revolution set Duck You Sucker. Juan's obsession with robbing the bank at Mesa Verde there mirrors Maxie's obsession with robbing the Federal Reserve in The Hoods.
The theme of betrayal also runs through both works, with Sean/John's memories of being betrayed by his colleague in the IRA and his eventual questioning of what he has done to Juan in using him for the revolution, along with Noodles' betrayal of his friends by informing the police on them. Grey novel, however, obviously does not feature the double-betrayal structure of Leone's film, where Maxie is presented as the brains behind the operation and Noodles, who has thought himself to be the betrayer for some 30 odd years, discovers himself to be the betrayed.
This double-betrayal aspect meanwhile also perhaps helps make somewhat akin to Leone's version of the Borges story The Theme of the Traitor and the Hero, itself with an Irish setting, which also formed the basis for Bertolucci's more personalised take on it in The Spider's Stratagem, in which the young hero discovers the truth behind his father's reputation as an anti-fascist hero.
It's an opening that I think helps explain why Leone became obsessed with bringing Grey's story to the screen, even if his own Once Upon a Time in America does not feature this scene.
It is all about the end of the “real” west and the printing of the Fordian “legend;” the shift from a rural to an urban environment; the gangster supplanting the cowboy as the idealised popular cultural figure of the man with a gun living and dying by a code; the replacement of the horse with the motor car; the emergence of the movies as a way in which American mythologies circulated. Thus, as Grey's memoirs continue, we get the blending of fact and fiction, as his memories of the gangster life become intermingled with the idioms of pulp crime writing and Hollywood gangster films.
In the period it took Leone to bring the novel to the screen he reluctantly directed the Mexican-revolution set Duck You Sucker. Juan's obsession with robbing the bank at Mesa Verde there mirrors Maxie's obsession with robbing the Federal Reserve in The Hoods.
The theme of betrayal also runs through both works, with Sean/John's memories of being betrayed by his colleague in the IRA and his eventual questioning of what he has done to Juan in using him for the revolution, along with Noodles' betrayal of his friends by informing the police on them. Grey novel, however, obviously does not feature the double-betrayal structure of Leone's film, where Maxie is presented as the brains behind the operation and Noodles, who has thought himself to be the betrayer for some 30 odd years, discovers himself to be the betrayed.
This double-betrayal aspect meanwhile also perhaps helps make somewhat akin to Leone's version of the Borges story The Theme of the Traitor and the Hero, itself with an Irish setting, which also formed the basis for Bertolucci's more personalised take on it in The Spider's Stratagem, in which the young hero discovers the truth behind his father's reputation as an anti-fascist hero.
Saturday, 21 June 2008
Alibi perfetto / Circle of Fear
Given that this 1992 thriller is directed by the talented Aldo Lado yet struggles to achieve anything like the success of his previous work within the same broad territory, it could be taken as an exemplar of the problems facing Italian filmmakers at the time. Quite simply, audience interest had went elsewhere and the filmmakers were unsure how to respond.
Though Lado had certainly drawn from The Last House on the Left when making Late Night Trains some 15 or so years earlier, he had also succeeded in crafting something which was distinctively situated within its own national and historical contexts.
This is one of the things which is most lacking here, with there being no sense of the events occuring within any definable – or well defined – framework. Rather, it feels more like Lado and his collaborators, including regular Argento writing partner Franco Ferrini, simply cobbled together elements from traditional Italian giallo and poliziotto entries and adding in some Hong Kong “heroic bloodshed” style action and imagery along with The Silence of the Lambs Hollywood serial killer-isms, without much rhyme or reason or, more importantly, effect.
The credits begin with a giallo image
Before we enter into Deadly China Dolls / Heroic Bloodshed territory
Though the killer is soon back to business
The story starts off as confusingly as it means to continue, with the arrival of various parties at a Chinese restaurant. Before long an uncomfortably directed shoot out occurs, by way of which we learn that cops Tony and Lisa are intent on busting gangster Mancini with the consignment of heroin he was picking up. Though the cops sieze the heroin and money, Mancini escapes.
Lisa and her boss
Back at the station, their boss berates them for acting without orders, pointing out that it was only supposed to be a surveillance and evidence gathering exercise: “I want my best agents to behave like cops, not Rambo rip-offs.”
Later that evening, Tony and Lisa comiserate with some lovemaking: they are partners off the job as well as on it, with this also serving to amusingly highlight the unspoken subtext of many a male-male buddy cop film of similar vintage.
Around about this point we also get some curious scenes of a dangerous madwoman, the Countess, in an asylum and of another looking around the outside of and photographing a house.
The first connection is made when Tony and the latter woman, his soon to be ex- in more ways than one Elvi, visit the courthouse to finalise their divorce proceedings. In the parking lot they are shot by two gunmen, killing Elvi and leaving Tony in a coma, from which he soon recovers. (There is a short black and white flashback here, which led me to briefly hope that the film might be about to enter into Short Night of Glass Dolls territory.)
Tony's immediate feeling is that Mancini was behind the hit, but this does not square with the unprofessionalism of the assassins in targeting Elvi first and leaving him alive. The plot thus thickens further as he receives the photographs Elvi took of the house, revealing a shadowy figure at a window when blown up, and then investigates the house, which used to belong to the countess, finding a Deep Red-style mummified body, with its head in the oven.
Is this the face of the killer at the window?
Initially it is believed to be the Countess's son, Marco, but the forensic examination reveals that the victim is female and died a violent death. Meanwhile, the murder of a prostitute indicates that a serial killer, long thought dead or inactive, has returned...
The dialogue is pretty awful, encompassing just about every cop movie cliché one could imagine and again lacking the subtleties of earlier films, as with the foreshadowing throwaway references to vampires in Short Night of the Glass Dolls: “Police: Get Your Hands Up. Don't even think about it!”
Giallo technology, circa 1990
The leads are also distinctly C-level, although the actress playing Lisa is certainly easy on the eyes. As such, the old familiar faces among the supporting players – Philippe Leroy as the chief, Bobby Rhodes as the pathologist – are welcome as ever, while Romano Mussolini's jazzy score provides a pleasant aural backdrop though at times also veers into more routine 80s sax and synth territory.
Tony and the Countess
Lado doesn't give the impression of being a 'natural' action director. He tries, but the shoot outs are devoid of excitement, with the panning and scanning making it more difficult to work out the spatial relationships between the characters. He does, however, manage a few moments that recall past glories, such as the mirrored reflections when the Countess is interrogated Hannibal Lektor style, suggestive of the way in which the characters are haunted by one another's presences and pasts.
Though Lado had certainly drawn from The Last House on the Left when making Late Night Trains some 15 or so years earlier, he had also succeeded in crafting something which was distinctively situated within its own national and historical contexts.
This is one of the things which is most lacking here, with there being no sense of the events occuring within any definable – or well defined – framework. Rather, it feels more like Lado and his collaborators, including regular Argento writing partner Franco Ferrini, simply cobbled together elements from traditional Italian giallo and poliziotto entries and adding in some Hong Kong “heroic bloodshed” style action and imagery along with The Silence of the Lambs Hollywood serial killer-isms, without much rhyme or reason or, more importantly, effect.
The credits begin with a giallo image
Before we enter into Deadly China Dolls / Heroic Bloodshed territory
Though the killer is soon back to business
The story starts off as confusingly as it means to continue, with the arrival of various parties at a Chinese restaurant. Before long an uncomfortably directed shoot out occurs, by way of which we learn that cops Tony and Lisa are intent on busting gangster Mancini with the consignment of heroin he was picking up. Though the cops sieze the heroin and money, Mancini escapes.
Lisa and her boss
Back at the station, their boss berates them for acting without orders, pointing out that it was only supposed to be a surveillance and evidence gathering exercise: “I want my best agents to behave like cops, not Rambo rip-offs.”
Later that evening, Tony and Lisa comiserate with some lovemaking: they are partners off the job as well as on it, with this also serving to amusingly highlight the unspoken subtext of many a male-male buddy cop film of similar vintage.
Around about this point we also get some curious scenes of a dangerous madwoman, the Countess, in an asylum and of another looking around the outside of and photographing a house.
The first connection is made when Tony and the latter woman, his soon to be ex- in more ways than one Elvi, visit the courthouse to finalise their divorce proceedings. In the parking lot they are shot by two gunmen, killing Elvi and leaving Tony in a coma, from which he soon recovers. (There is a short black and white flashback here, which led me to briefly hope that the film might be about to enter into Short Night of Glass Dolls territory.)
Tony's immediate feeling is that Mancini was behind the hit, but this does not square with the unprofessionalism of the assassins in targeting Elvi first and leaving him alive. The plot thus thickens further as he receives the photographs Elvi took of the house, revealing a shadowy figure at a window when blown up, and then investigates the house, which used to belong to the countess, finding a Deep Red-style mummified body, with its head in the oven.
Is this the face of the killer at the window?
Initially it is believed to be the Countess's son, Marco, but the forensic examination reveals that the victim is female and died a violent death. Meanwhile, the murder of a prostitute indicates that a serial killer, long thought dead or inactive, has returned...
The dialogue is pretty awful, encompassing just about every cop movie cliché one could imagine and again lacking the subtleties of earlier films, as with the foreshadowing throwaway references to vampires in Short Night of the Glass Dolls: “Police: Get Your Hands Up. Don't even think about it!”
Giallo technology, circa 1990
The leads are also distinctly C-level, although the actress playing Lisa is certainly easy on the eyes. As such, the old familiar faces among the supporting players – Philippe Leroy as the chief, Bobby Rhodes as the pathologist – are welcome as ever, while Romano Mussolini's jazzy score provides a pleasant aural backdrop though at times also veers into more routine 80s sax and synth territory.
Tony and the Countess
Lado doesn't give the impression of being a 'natural' action director. He tries, but the shoot outs are devoid of excitement, with the panning and scanning making it more difficult to work out the spatial relationships between the characters. He does, however, manage a few moments that recall past glories, such as the mirrored reflections when the Countess is interrogated Hannibal Lektor style, suggestive of the way in which the characters are haunted by one another's presences and pasts.
Wednesday, 18 June 2008
Il Sesso della strega / The Sex of the Witch / The Evil Eye
This 1973 giallo starts of as one of those Agatha Christia all'italiana types in presenting a family of suspects gathering for their patriarch's death, swiftly followed by the funeral and the reading of the will and a murder any one of them had motive and opportunity to commit.
What immediately sets the film apart from its English counterpart, besides the too sunny Italian locales doubling for a Worcestershire estate, are the sleaze quotient and contemporary setting – linked inasmuch as the youngsters are more likely to engage in a drugged out happening or orgy than the genteel cocktail parties of their parents or grandparents generations – and the distinct possibility that there may be a supernatural element to the crime(s).
The filmmakers successfully draw us in to their demi-monde at the outset, juxtaposing Sir Thomas Hilton's death-bed thoughts, that his family must end before its name is shamed any further, with two of his servants making love in the family crypt.
Fellini would be jealous...
The funeral
And the reading of the will
A nightclub sequence sees the director break out the weird lenses and colour filters
To achieve his end, Sir Thomas has crafted his will so as to set the family members against one another. Apart from the disinherited Evelyn, each will inherit an equal share of the fortune on turning 30, along with his personal secretary and lover Simon. But if any should die before then their portion is to be divided up amongst the survivors...
After the 29 years and 11 months old Johnny gets bludgeoned to death following some particularly heavy debauchery, the Inspector is called in to see if anyone can tell him anything about the night in question. Good luck to him in solving the case, as he'll very definitely need it...
Recalling the likes of The Night Evelyn Came out of the Grave, The Red Queen Kills Seven Times – sharing a key character called Evelyn with both – and The Weekend Murders at times, this is an enjoyable slice of sleaze trash that doesn't take itself too seriously, with writer-director Angelo Panaccio – also coincidentally responsible for Holocaust 2, along with the likes of Naked Exorcism and Porno Exotic Western – targetting the low-hanging fruit by way of the requisite party sequence, lesbian and heterosexual softcore numbers and stalk-and-slash set pieces. In a moment of inspiration there are, however, significantly no black gloves to be seen.
A random breast self-examination
Medieval weaponry is surprisingly common in the giallo
A nice little found composition
The lesbians
And some yellow curtains
The cast is populated by familiar B-movie names of the period, including Donal O'Brien as the inspector and Gianni Dei, Frank Garofalo and Camille Keaton as secretary, servant and nipote respectively. Daniele Patucchi provides a reasonable effective, insistent harpsichord based score, with one repeated doleful progressions coincidentally slightly remiscent of Morricone's work on The Stendhal Syndrome. The cinematography, production design and costumes are bright and colourful in that 70s way, further adding to the lurid comic-book feel.
Cinema Nocturna Review:
http://www.cinema-nocturna.com/index.php?ind=reviews&op=entry_view&iden=118
What immediately sets the film apart from its English counterpart, besides the too sunny Italian locales doubling for a Worcestershire estate, are the sleaze quotient and contemporary setting – linked inasmuch as the youngsters are more likely to engage in a drugged out happening or orgy than the genteel cocktail parties of their parents or grandparents generations – and the distinct possibility that there may be a supernatural element to the crime(s).
The filmmakers successfully draw us in to their demi-monde at the outset, juxtaposing Sir Thomas Hilton's death-bed thoughts, that his family must end before its name is shamed any further, with two of his servants making love in the family crypt.
Fellini would be jealous...
The funeral
And the reading of the will
A nightclub sequence sees the director break out the weird lenses and colour filters
To achieve his end, Sir Thomas has crafted his will so as to set the family members against one another. Apart from the disinherited Evelyn, each will inherit an equal share of the fortune on turning 30, along with his personal secretary and lover Simon. But if any should die before then their portion is to be divided up amongst the survivors...
After the 29 years and 11 months old Johnny gets bludgeoned to death following some particularly heavy debauchery, the Inspector is called in to see if anyone can tell him anything about the night in question. Good luck to him in solving the case, as he'll very definitely need it...
Recalling the likes of The Night Evelyn Came out of the Grave, The Red Queen Kills Seven Times – sharing a key character called Evelyn with both – and The Weekend Murders at times, this is an enjoyable slice of sleaze trash that doesn't take itself too seriously, with writer-director Angelo Panaccio – also coincidentally responsible for Holocaust 2, along with the likes of Naked Exorcism and Porno Exotic Western – targetting the low-hanging fruit by way of the requisite party sequence, lesbian and heterosexual softcore numbers and stalk-and-slash set pieces. In a moment of inspiration there are, however, significantly no black gloves to be seen.
A random breast self-examination
Medieval weaponry is surprisingly common in the giallo
A nice little found composition
The lesbians
And some yellow curtains
The cast is populated by familiar B-movie names of the period, including Donal O'Brien as the inspector and Gianni Dei, Frank Garofalo and Camille Keaton as secretary, servant and nipote respectively. Daniele Patucchi provides a reasonable effective, insistent harpsichord based score, with one repeated doleful progressions coincidentally slightly remiscent of Morricone's work on The Stendhal Syndrome. The cinematography, production design and costumes are bright and colourful in that 70s way, further adding to the lurid comic-book feel.
Cinema Nocturna Review:
http://www.cinema-nocturna.com/index.php?ind=reviews&op=entry_view&iden=118
Tuesday, 17 June 2008
Der Fluch der gelben Schlange / The Curse of the Yellow Snake
This CCC krimi from 1963 feels very much like a cross between Edgar Wallace and Sax Rohmer, with a Fu Manchu like mastermind plotting world domination, beginning with the expulsion of the British from Hong Kong.
In other words it's the kind of film that's highly problematic in these more politically correct times in that its stereotypes go beyond the usual ones of an imaginary / idealised England, which we insiders can always laugh off as camp or kitsch, to also encompass those of an Other culture, where it can be difficult to find an acceptable position to take.
But rather than refusing to engage with such films – and here I would include the Harry Alan Towers Fu Manchu films along with the likes of Hammer's Terror of the Tongs and Stranglers of Bombay – I would argue that it is the cult film fan's responsibility to see them and attempt to contextualise them so that they can be understood as the products of their time, place and circumstances.
Here, of course, what we have is a 1960s German adaptation of a 1920s British novel. One defence could be to argue that the orientalist aspects of the piece are more ignorant and innocent and thus excusable than those of the contemporaneous Dr No, while Caucasian actor Pinkus Braun's Eurasian villain is likewise not in the same league of grossly insensitive caricatures as Mickey Rooney's Mr. Yunioshi in Breakfast at Tiffanys.
In other words, there's always some way of making excuses for the things we like, so why should cult fans be any different?
Some nice expressionistic compositions, albeit compromised by panning and scanning from the original 1.66:1 to 1.33:1
The story begins in a studio-set Hong Kong as two agents of the Fighting Hand society steal the Yellow Snake, a legendary talisman that guarantees victory in war to whomsoever possesses it and begins the battle on the Day of the Dragon, November 17.
Our hero, Clifford Lynn (Joachim Fuchsberger), immediately raises the prospect of an inside job to his adoptive father, Joe Bray (Fritz Tillmann), that the murdered guardian of the hidden snake might have been “more loyal to his colour than you think,” and that his half-brother, Graham / Fing Su (Braun), could well be the one behind the crime.
He's right, of course, but until everything turns to type midway through, we've got an interesting subtext of filial piety as Cliff is send to London to undergo an arranged marriage to one of Bray's business partners which neither he nor either of the prospective brides to be are particularly happy about, all to be overseen by Fing Su...
And, even when Fing Su and Cliff show their true colours – i.e. yellow and red, white and blue respectively – as the true villain and hero of the piece, there's still an element of this remaining, in that Fing Su's loyalty, as his choice of name serves to indicate, is to his late mother's side of the family and her motherland...
The two brothers can hardly bear to look at one another
Thus, though I wouldn't say Fing Su is quite presented as more sinned against than sinning, things are definitely more complicated than they initially appear – much, indeed, like Rohmer's novels with their self-deconstructing presentation of Petrie's desires for the 'exotic' Kâramanèh.
And in the end that is perhaps why I so enjoy popular works like these: they are not trying to be art, but only to entertain their audience and, in so doing, unselfconsciously express the unconscious desires, fears and beliefs of this audience. (More awkwardly, of course, they also helped shape them at the time they were originally circulated; but again I'd say that something like the Indiana Jones films are far more pernicious here today precisely because they'll be approached by more people unthinkingly. In most circles you don't have to defend your liking for them, whereas if you watch Eurotrash or whatever you have to work through to your position.)
An obligatory this is England shot
Other pleasures to be had from the film include Fuchsberger's charming yet somewhat grey knight performance; Werner Peters' characteristically shifty mercenary businessman; a woman and child as property subtext if we want to look for it, and some nice expressionistic angles and lighting from director Franz Josef Gottlieb and cinematographer Siegfried Hold.
As with Eddi Arent's comic relief, the score is however likely to divide audiences. Rather than attempting to convey orienticity the composers take a decidedly modernist experimental approach, with strange electronic noises perhaps reminiscent of the Darmstadt School or the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. While they work in the context of the film, especially as many are emphathetic to its visual images, I don't think they'd be the best cues to have on a krimi compilation CD.
A useful article on Fu Manchu derivatives: http://www.njedge.net/~knapp/clones.htm
In other words it's the kind of film that's highly problematic in these more politically correct times in that its stereotypes go beyond the usual ones of an imaginary / idealised England, which we insiders can always laugh off as camp or kitsch, to also encompass those of an Other culture, where it can be difficult to find an acceptable position to take.
But rather than refusing to engage with such films – and here I would include the Harry Alan Towers Fu Manchu films along with the likes of Hammer's Terror of the Tongs and Stranglers of Bombay – I would argue that it is the cult film fan's responsibility to see them and attempt to contextualise them so that they can be understood as the products of their time, place and circumstances.
Here, of course, what we have is a 1960s German adaptation of a 1920s British novel. One defence could be to argue that the orientalist aspects of the piece are more ignorant and innocent and thus excusable than those of the contemporaneous Dr No, while Caucasian actor Pinkus Braun's Eurasian villain is likewise not in the same league of grossly insensitive caricatures as Mickey Rooney's Mr. Yunioshi in Breakfast at Tiffanys.
In other words, there's always some way of making excuses for the things we like, so why should cult fans be any different?
Some nice expressionistic compositions, albeit compromised by panning and scanning from the original 1.66:1 to 1.33:1
The story begins in a studio-set Hong Kong as two agents of the Fighting Hand society steal the Yellow Snake, a legendary talisman that guarantees victory in war to whomsoever possesses it and begins the battle on the Day of the Dragon, November 17.
Our hero, Clifford Lynn (Joachim Fuchsberger), immediately raises the prospect of an inside job to his adoptive father, Joe Bray (Fritz Tillmann), that the murdered guardian of the hidden snake might have been “more loyal to his colour than you think,” and that his half-brother, Graham / Fing Su (Braun), could well be the one behind the crime.
He's right, of course, but until everything turns to type midway through, we've got an interesting subtext of filial piety as Cliff is send to London to undergo an arranged marriage to one of Bray's business partners which neither he nor either of the prospective brides to be are particularly happy about, all to be overseen by Fing Su...
And, even when Fing Su and Cliff show their true colours – i.e. yellow and red, white and blue respectively – as the true villain and hero of the piece, there's still an element of this remaining, in that Fing Su's loyalty, as his choice of name serves to indicate, is to his late mother's side of the family and her motherland...
The two brothers can hardly bear to look at one another
Thus, though I wouldn't say Fing Su is quite presented as more sinned against than sinning, things are definitely more complicated than they initially appear – much, indeed, like Rohmer's novels with their self-deconstructing presentation of Petrie's desires for the 'exotic' Kâramanèh.
And in the end that is perhaps why I so enjoy popular works like these: they are not trying to be art, but only to entertain their audience and, in so doing, unselfconsciously express the unconscious desires, fears and beliefs of this audience. (More awkwardly, of course, they also helped shape them at the time they were originally circulated; but again I'd say that something like the Indiana Jones films are far more pernicious here today precisely because they'll be approached by more people unthinkingly. In most circles you don't have to defend your liking for them, whereas if you watch Eurotrash or whatever you have to work through to your position.)
An obligatory this is England shot
Other pleasures to be had from the film include Fuchsberger's charming yet somewhat grey knight performance; Werner Peters' characteristically shifty mercenary businessman; a woman and child as property subtext if we want to look for it, and some nice expressionistic angles and lighting from director Franz Josef Gottlieb and cinematographer Siegfried Hold.
As with Eddi Arent's comic relief, the score is however likely to divide audiences. Rather than attempting to convey orienticity the composers take a decidedly modernist experimental approach, with strange electronic noises perhaps reminiscent of the Darmstadt School or the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. While they work in the context of the film, especially as many are emphathetic to its visual images, I don't think they'd be the best cues to have on a krimi compilation CD.
A useful article on Fu Manchu derivatives: http://www.njedge.net/~knapp/clones.htm
Delitto al Blue Gay / Ein Superesel auf dem Ku'Damm / Cop in Drag
Delitto al Blue Gay opens with six minutes of non-stop action, albeit at least in part culled from previous poliziotto films, accompanied by a voice-off introducing Tomas Milian's Nico Giraldi character to those unfamiliar with him; I have the strong suspicion that the opening clip actually sees Milian pursuing himself, in the guise of one of his Lenzi characters.
Next we get a lip synched song and dance number, “man or woman, makes no difference on stage” delivered by a bunch of men in drag, at the Blue Gay club. Following some backstage bitching between leading diva Columba Lamar and her understudy and rival, Nadia, the introduction of visiting German film director Kurt Linder, and another stage routine, Nadia is found in her dressing room, murdered.
Columba and Nadia, moments before the latter is murdered
A bunny girl with a difference
No prizes for guessing who is assigned the job of going undercover at the Blue Gay or who he ropes in to help him...
The many faces of Nico Giraldi
Directed and co-written by Bruno Corbucci, this 1984 film is the 11th and last entry in the Giraldi series inaugurated by Cop in Blue Jeans eight years before. The formula remains much the same as its predecessors, with a mixture of action and crude comedy episodes centred around the endearingly scruffy Nico, his bumbling petty criminal sidekick Venticello and common-law wife Angela, who has just had another baby.
Unfortunately with all this there's also the sense of not really trying to go beyond a somewhat tired formula, that we've seen it all before and done better before, with two exceptions. The first, the inclusion of the song and dance numbers, most notably an interminable breakdancing and body popping zombie music video a la Thriller, soon become tiresome. The second, a chase in which Nico, dressed as a roman centurion, pursues a car in a chariot, is a nice idea, but fails to convince – how slow is the car going for the chariot to keep up – and also means there is no real possibility for more crazy stunts.
A familiar sight
Breakdancing zombies
The English title, Cop in Drag, is also something of a cheat in that Nico himself never actually dresses up as a woman, and keeps the beard and moustache throughout, with it being Venticello who is assigned the task of impersonating a woman on their visits to the Blue Gay.
This said, despite the stereotypical gay characters and frequent references to “fags” and “faggots” in the dialogue, the filmmakers prove surprisingly progressive and sympathetic in their portrayals of the Blue Gay's habitues, with Nico soon largely overcoming his masculine heterosexual anxieties and even incorporating Columba into his extended family by the end.
Next we get a lip synched song and dance number, “man or woman, makes no difference on stage” delivered by a bunch of men in drag, at the Blue Gay club. Following some backstage bitching between leading diva Columba Lamar and her understudy and rival, Nadia, the introduction of visiting German film director Kurt Linder, and another stage routine, Nadia is found in her dressing room, murdered.
Columba and Nadia, moments before the latter is murdered
A bunny girl with a difference
No prizes for guessing who is assigned the job of going undercover at the Blue Gay or who he ropes in to help him...
The many faces of Nico Giraldi
Directed and co-written by Bruno Corbucci, this 1984 film is the 11th and last entry in the Giraldi series inaugurated by Cop in Blue Jeans eight years before. The formula remains much the same as its predecessors, with a mixture of action and crude comedy episodes centred around the endearingly scruffy Nico, his bumbling petty criminal sidekick Venticello and common-law wife Angela, who has just had another baby.
Unfortunately with all this there's also the sense of not really trying to go beyond a somewhat tired formula, that we've seen it all before and done better before, with two exceptions. The first, the inclusion of the song and dance numbers, most notably an interminable breakdancing and body popping zombie music video a la Thriller, soon become tiresome. The second, a chase in which Nico, dressed as a roman centurion, pursues a car in a chariot, is a nice idea, but fails to convince – how slow is the car going for the chariot to keep up – and also means there is no real possibility for more crazy stunts.
A familiar sight
Breakdancing zombies
The English title, Cop in Drag, is also something of a cheat in that Nico himself never actually dresses up as a woman, and keeps the beard and moustache throughout, with it being Venticello who is assigned the task of impersonating a woman on their visits to the Blue Gay.
This said, despite the stereotypical gay characters and frequent references to “fags” and “faggots” in the dialogue, the filmmakers prove surprisingly progressive and sympathetic in their portrayals of the Blue Gay's habitues, with Nico soon largely overcoming his masculine heterosexual anxieties and even incorporating Columba into his extended family by the end.
Monday, 16 June 2008
Femina Ridens
Co-written and directed by Piero Schivazappa, this film goes by a number of different titles, each placing its own distinctive slant on the proceedings – The Laughing Woman, The Frightened Woman and Games of Love, Games of Death.
Philippe Leroy plays Dr Sayer, a misogynist obsessed with male virility and the threat of a female-dominated future. He's also a sadist who enjoys regular weekend sessions with a high class hooker. When she cancels at the last minute, Sayer decides to take advantage of feminist journalist Maria, played by Dagmar Lassander, inviting her to come over to his apartment later to collect some papers she needs to be able to write up her article over the weekend. There, Sayer slips Maria a drugged J&B and takes her to his country home, with the intention of re-educating her as to the 'proper' places of men and women...
Images haunting sayer's dreams / nightmares
There's not much more than can be said without spoiling things for the first time viewer, except that, like Deep Red or Kidnapped / Rabid Dogs, it's worth paying close attention to the opening sequence. And, in common with these other masterworks of Italian popular cinema, The Laughing Woman is also sufficiently rich in its images and ideas to reward repeat viewings once the surprise is over.
A shot that would not be out of place in The Conformist
The duplicitious woman, framed in the mirrors
The buttoned-up, straight-laced Maria
Some of Sayer's abstract paintings, based on viruses under the microscope
As the synopsis indicates, we're very much in battle of the sexes territory, with all the usual structural oppositions in place: male / female, master / slave, active / passive, bearer of the gaze / object of the gaze, sadist / masochist, victimiser / victim etc. Yet The Laughing Woman also goes a considerable way towards challenging these binaries, treating them in a distinctly ironic manner and encouraging the viewer to take another look.
Sayer and Marie in a cage
Sayer and “the usual phallic cutlery”
Sayer's ideal man, himself
The voiceless woman
Again, it's difficult to say much without spoiling things. Despite all his attempts to master and discipline his own flesh and that of Maria and her predecessors, Sayer's position is ultimately one of fear and weakness. He has a revulsion for intimacy with the female, believing that she will kill him once she has mated in a manner akin to a scorpion he saw in his boyhood, while his dreams are dominated by the image of a giant vagina dentata, an abyss into which men enter never to return.
Obvious sexual symbolism
Sayer photographs his trophy
But to play the great white hunter, he must place himself in the frame and the camera's eye, surrendering a degree of power
Maria usurping the gaze
The thing that really sets the film apart is how beautifully stylised it all is. Moreover, it is not just about style for its own sake. Rather, form and content are intertwined, body and mind becoming a single flesh. It's not just the way in which the gigantic sculpture of vagina dentata and curvaceous, contoured abstract female form around it so brilliantly incarnates Sayer's fears, but also the suggestiveness of the relentlessly rigid and linear compositions around him, with their parallel connotations of a need for control, order, domination and systematisation.
Though there are a few more characters at the start and end, the bulk of the film is essentially a two hander between Leroy and Lassander. As such, it's crucial for the success of the piece that both deliver strong performances, with Leroy especially successful in conveying his character's preening narcissism and Lassander winning the viewer as well as Sayer over.
Lassander has long been something of an enigma to me. To put it crudely and admittedly cruelly, what happened to her between this film, So Young, So Lovely, So Vicious, where she plays the new stepmother and rival to Gloria Guida's teenage temptress, and The House by the Cemetery, where her Mrs Gittelson is very much middle aged and non-sexual, with only that fiery hair as a reminder of past glories. Was it simply time and nature taking a harsher toll than on any of the other starlets of similar age, or of Lassander's enjoying that bit too much of la dolce vita in the intervening years?
Whatever the case, she's in her absolute prime here, with her own particular dance of the one long veil to Stelvio Cipriani's “sophisticated shake” with its breathy female vocals surely counting as one of the most wonderfully erotic and sensuous moments to come out of the entire Italian cinema of this time. Its also a crucial moment of spectacle within the film gestalt, again foregrounding a somewhat more complex dynamics of looking and being looked at inasmuch as Maria is here putting on a performance that shifts the balance of power between her and Sayer for the first time.
Lassander's dance; note the teeth motif on the wall and the obligatory J&B bottle
Another stunning composition
Both characters again in a cage
It's telling in this regard that the film was picked up for international distribution by Radley Metzger's Audubon Films, given the still subversive nature of Metzger's own erotic and pornographic films of the same period such as Score, The Lickerish Quartet and The Punishment of Anne, with their aims of stimulating the viewer both physically and mentally; in Metzger's masterpiece The Opening of Misty Beethoven, for example, passengers boarding a routine jet flight are asked which meal option they would like and whether or not they want oral sex administered in a manner reminiscent of a scene in Bunuel's The Phantom of Liberty in which eating is done in private and is a taboo subject, whereas everyone gathers around the table to do the toilet. The point, there as here, is reminding us that the 'natural' and 'normal' are at least partly conventional.
If it would be going too far to say that The Laughing Woman is a Nieztschean film, despite the philosopher's notorious and revelant proclamation that “when you go to a woman, you should take a whip with you,” it does have that quality of making you think about such things. (Intriguingly, however, Bertrand Russell also opined that “Nine out of ten women would get the whip away from him [Nietzsche], and he knew it, so he kept away from women, and soothed his wounded vanity with unkind remarks,” with this being a remark well worth thinking about on a repeat viewing.)
The Laughing Woman also features a stunning score from Stelvio Cipriani, which has itself recently been re-issued on CD by Digitmovies. Besides the aforementioned Sophisticated Shake, other standout tracks include a spaghetti western style deguello theme, which plays over the final showdown between Maria and Sayer, replete with alernating close-ups of their eyes, and the closing “A Man like You,” sung by Olimpia in her deliciously accented phonetically pronounced English.
The weakest aspect of the film is perhaps its dialogue, with some awkwardly arch lines that today's audience may find dated and hard to take seriously. Even here, however, it's evident that the filmmakers took considerable care over what they were doing, with some subtle little hints here and there of what is to come. The self-consciously 'meaningful' nature of many of the exchanges also helps in the creation of an enclosed world with its own particular rules and logics, in keeping with the production design, direction and overarching themes of the piece.
Take, for example, one of the initial exchanges between Maria and Sayer, after he has learned that she prefers to work at weekends: “You have a very odd way of spending your weekends.” “I seem to work better on those two days. I like to shut myself off from people and not be distracted.” The point is that Sayer's own weekend activities are not particularly normal, while in abducting Maria and subjecting her to various bondage scenarios, he is himself helping shut her off from (other) people and anything that might distract (or detract) from her experiencing her full quotients of suffering and he of pleasure.
In sum, a stunning one-off that still holds up well nearly 40 years after its original release while also providing a fascinating time capsule of the beginnings of second wave feminism and its social and cultural reverberations.
Philippe Leroy plays Dr Sayer, a misogynist obsessed with male virility and the threat of a female-dominated future. He's also a sadist who enjoys regular weekend sessions with a high class hooker. When she cancels at the last minute, Sayer decides to take advantage of feminist journalist Maria, played by Dagmar Lassander, inviting her to come over to his apartment later to collect some papers she needs to be able to write up her article over the weekend. There, Sayer slips Maria a drugged J&B and takes her to his country home, with the intention of re-educating her as to the 'proper' places of men and women...
Images haunting sayer's dreams / nightmares
There's not much more than can be said without spoiling things for the first time viewer, except that, like Deep Red or Kidnapped / Rabid Dogs, it's worth paying close attention to the opening sequence. And, in common with these other masterworks of Italian popular cinema, The Laughing Woman is also sufficiently rich in its images and ideas to reward repeat viewings once the surprise is over.
A shot that would not be out of place in The Conformist
The duplicitious woman, framed in the mirrors
The buttoned-up, straight-laced Maria
Some of Sayer's abstract paintings, based on viruses under the microscope
As the synopsis indicates, we're very much in battle of the sexes territory, with all the usual structural oppositions in place: male / female, master / slave, active / passive, bearer of the gaze / object of the gaze, sadist / masochist, victimiser / victim etc. Yet The Laughing Woman also goes a considerable way towards challenging these binaries, treating them in a distinctly ironic manner and encouraging the viewer to take another look.
Sayer and Marie in a cage
Sayer and “the usual phallic cutlery”
Sayer's ideal man, himself
The voiceless woman
Again, it's difficult to say much without spoiling things. Despite all his attempts to master and discipline his own flesh and that of Maria and her predecessors, Sayer's position is ultimately one of fear and weakness. He has a revulsion for intimacy with the female, believing that she will kill him once she has mated in a manner akin to a scorpion he saw in his boyhood, while his dreams are dominated by the image of a giant vagina dentata, an abyss into which men enter never to return.
Obvious sexual symbolism
Sayer photographs his trophy
But to play the great white hunter, he must place himself in the frame and the camera's eye, surrendering a degree of power
Maria usurping the gaze
The thing that really sets the film apart is how beautifully stylised it all is. Moreover, it is not just about style for its own sake. Rather, form and content are intertwined, body and mind becoming a single flesh. It's not just the way in which the gigantic sculpture of vagina dentata and curvaceous, contoured abstract female form around it so brilliantly incarnates Sayer's fears, but also the suggestiveness of the relentlessly rigid and linear compositions around him, with their parallel connotations of a need for control, order, domination and systematisation.
Though there are a few more characters at the start and end, the bulk of the film is essentially a two hander between Leroy and Lassander. As such, it's crucial for the success of the piece that both deliver strong performances, with Leroy especially successful in conveying his character's preening narcissism and Lassander winning the viewer as well as Sayer over.
Lassander has long been something of an enigma to me. To put it crudely and admittedly cruelly, what happened to her between this film, So Young, So Lovely, So Vicious, where she plays the new stepmother and rival to Gloria Guida's teenage temptress, and The House by the Cemetery, where her Mrs Gittelson is very much middle aged and non-sexual, with only that fiery hair as a reminder of past glories. Was it simply time and nature taking a harsher toll than on any of the other starlets of similar age, or of Lassander's enjoying that bit too much of la dolce vita in the intervening years?
Whatever the case, she's in her absolute prime here, with her own particular dance of the one long veil to Stelvio Cipriani's “sophisticated shake” with its breathy female vocals surely counting as one of the most wonderfully erotic and sensuous moments to come out of the entire Italian cinema of this time. Its also a crucial moment of spectacle within the film gestalt, again foregrounding a somewhat more complex dynamics of looking and being looked at inasmuch as Maria is here putting on a performance that shifts the balance of power between her and Sayer for the first time.
Lassander's dance; note the teeth motif on the wall and the obligatory J&B bottle
Another stunning composition
Both characters again in a cage
It's telling in this regard that the film was picked up for international distribution by Radley Metzger's Audubon Films, given the still subversive nature of Metzger's own erotic and pornographic films of the same period such as Score, The Lickerish Quartet and The Punishment of Anne, with their aims of stimulating the viewer both physically and mentally; in Metzger's masterpiece The Opening of Misty Beethoven, for example, passengers boarding a routine jet flight are asked which meal option they would like and whether or not they want oral sex administered in a manner reminiscent of a scene in Bunuel's The Phantom of Liberty in which eating is done in private and is a taboo subject, whereas everyone gathers around the table to do the toilet. The point, there as here, is reminding us that the 'natural' and 'normal' are at least partly conventional.
If it would be going too far to say that The Laughing Woman is a Nieztschean film, despite the philosopher's notorious and revelant proclamation that “when you go to a woman, you should take a whip with you,” it does have that quality of making you think about such things. (Intriguingly, however, Bertrand Russell also opined that “Nine out of ten women would get the whip away from him [Nietzsche], and he knew it, so he kept away from women, and soothed his wounded vanity with unkind remarks,” with this being a remark well worth thinking about on a repeat viewing.)
The Laughing Woman also features a stunning score from Stelvio Cipriani, which has itself recently been re-issued on CD by Digitmovies. Besides the aforementioned Sophisticated Shake, other standout tracks include a spaghetti western style deguello theme, which plays over the final showdown between Maria and Sayer, replete with alernating close-ups of their eyes, and the closing “A Man like You,” sung by Olimpia in her deliciously accented phonetically pronounced English.
The weakest aspect of the film is perhaps its dialogue, with some awkwardly arch lines that today's audience may find dated and hard to take seriously. Even here, however, it's evident that the filmmakers took considerable care over what they were doing, with some subtle little hints here and there of what is to come. The self-consciously 'meaningful' nature of many of the exchanges also helps in the creation of an enclosed world with its own particular rules and logics, in keeping with the production design, direction and overarching themes of the piece.
Take, for example, one of the initial exchanges between Maria and Sayer, after he has learned that she prefers to work at weekends: “You have a very odd way of spending your weekends.” “I seem to work better on those two days. I like to shut myself off from people and not be distracted.” The point is that Sayer's own weekend activities are not particularly normal, while in abducting Maria and subjecting her to various bondage scenarios, he is himself helping shut her off from (other) people and anything that might distract (or detract) from her experiencing her full quotients of suffering and he of pleasure.
In sum, a stunning one-off that still holds up well nearly 40 years after its original release while also providing a fascinating time capsule of the beginnings of second wave feminism and its social and cultural reverberations.
Sunday, 15 June 2008
Un Par de zapatos del '32 / Qualcuno l'ha visto uccidere (Unica traccia: un paio di scarpe n.32 / The Student Connection / Witness to Murder
The opening gambit of this Spanish-Italian co-production recalls The Case of the Scorpion's Tail as a heavily disguised man – indeed, some might almost say too heavily disguised, with a neck-brace and a curiously Asian name for a European that one suspects would draw unwanted attention to him today as fitting the terrorist profile – plants a bomb on board a passenger plane, killing his target and another 139 people.
The assassin's reasoning makes sense, in its own perverted, psychopathic way: it's safer than taking a more director, personal approach to his target and, with this number of casualities, its highly probable that the a political motivation will be presented or imputed for the terrorist-seeming act.
Unlike his counterpart in Sergio Martino's film, however, his co-conspirator, doctor and headteacher Roger Mell (Ray Milland) isn't too pleased to learn that he's now indirectly responsible for a mass murder and proceeds to react by killing the assassin, whom he then buries in the greenhouse of his boarding school.
At this point the thriller rather than political aspects of the scenario come to the fore as the conspirators' personal motives emerge, in that Mell and his mistress Sonia (Sylva Koscina) only wanted to be rid of her husband, while the authorities begin to investigate the case in a throughly routine manner rather than take advantage of it by attributing it to some convient political enemy – a spider's stratagem that would seem to have been all too common in Italy's years of lead, but which would have never passed by the Spanish censors under Franco; it is also perhaps telling that the location of the film is southern France rather than north western Italy or northern Spain. (Not that any other country is necessarily any better: who knows what secret histories will emerge in 30, 50 or 100 years around our present, or what has already vanished from the official record, or was never put on any record to begin with.)
The trajectory of the piece is completed by the fact that one of the school's pupils, saw Mell kill the assassin. While Mell isn't sure which one, Sonia is sure of what they must do once they identify the child who saw too much: silence him...
All they initially have to go on is the size of the child's shoes, from which the Spanish and Italian versions of the film take their titles.
Much like the way Martino's film unexpectedly disposed of its apparent female protagonist one third of the way through a la Psycho, The Student Connection's inversion of the more usual giallo framework helps keep it fresh and engaging throughout.
Knowing whodunit, the emphasis is more on whosawit and whether the reluctant killer, already wracked with guilt over his initial crimes, will actually be able to coldly kill an innocent himself when the moment comes.
The commutation of what would otherwise be an array of adult suspects into potential child victims also works in the film's favour, in that every time Mell or Sonia are alone with one of the children the imbalance of knowledge between viewer and characters – except for in the case of the child who saw it all – creates considerable suspense, with one false move or misreading potentially signalling an innocent's death.
Though Milland likely took the role strictly because it was available and he wanted / needed to keep working, his performance, like that in The Pyjama Girl Case, belies such circumstances, beautifully expressing the complexities, anxieties and position of his character as a man hopelessly out of his depth.
Koscina doesn't quite transcend the femme fatale role, but then again isn't really required to so long as she brings the necessary glamour and danger to it. While none of the child actors are required to provide the same complexity of performance as Ana Torrent in the contemporaneous Spirit of the Beehive, which still represents the touchstone for all child performances as far as I am concerned, they are nevertheless always believable and avoid obnoxiousness of the sort that starts to see you almost rooting for the killer.
Essaying his first thriller after a series of westerns, Rafael Romero Marchent demonstrates a professional facility for adapting his style with some nice nighttime stalking sequences, echoed on the soundtrack by Stelvio Cipriani's tense, psychedelic rock giallo rather than spaghetti themed cues, with jazz squalls in lieu of mariachi deguellos.
One does, however, wonder what co-writer Luciano Ercoli might have made of the same material, and his wife Nieves Navarro of the Sonia role.
Yet, disregarding the what ifs, the what is still warrants an hour and a half of your time.
Another opinion: http://euro-fever.blogspot.com/2008/02/student-connectionun-par-de-zapatos-del.html
The assassin's reasoning makes sense, in its own perverted, psychopathic way: it's safer than taking a more director, personal approach to his target and, with this number of casualities, its highly probable that the a political motivation will be presented or imputed for the terrorist-seeming act.
Unlike his counterpart in Sergio Martino's film, however, his co-conspirator, doctor and headteacher Roger Mell (Ray Milland) isn't too pleased to learn that he's now indirectly responsible for a mass murder and proceeds to react by killing the assassin, whom he then buries in the greenhouse of his boarding school.
At this point the thriller rather than political aspects of the scenario come to the fore as the conspirators' personal motives emerge, in that Mell and his mistress Sonia (Sylva Koscina) only wanted to be rid of her husband, while the authorities begin to investigate the case in a throughly routine manner rather than take advantage of it by attributing it to some convient political enemy – a spider's stratagem that would seem to have been all too common in Italy's years of lead, but which would have never passed by the Spanish censors under Franco; it is also perhaps telling that the location of the film is southern France rather than north western Italy or northern Spain. (Not that any other country is necessarily any better: who knows what secret histories will emerge in 30, 50 or 100 years around our present, or what has already vanished from the official record, or was never put on any record to begin with.)
The trajectory of the piece is completed by the fact that one of the school's pupils, saw Mell kill the assassin. While Mell isn't sure which one, Sonia is sure of what they must do once they identify the child who saw too much: silence him...
All they initially have to go on is the size of the child's shoes, from which the Spanish and Italian versions of the film take their titles.
Much like the way Martino's film unexpectedly disposed of its apparent female protagonist one third of the way through a la Psycho, The Student Connection's inversion of the more usual giallo framework helps keep it fresh and engaging throughout.
Knowing whodunit, the emphasis is more on whosawit and whether the reluctant killer, already wracked with guilt over his initial crimes, will actually be able to coldly kill an innocent himself when the moment comes.
The commutation of what would otherwise be an array of adult suspects into potential child victims also works in the film's favour, in that every time Mell or Sonia are alone with one of the children the imbalance of knowledge between viewer and characters – except for in the case of the child who saw it all – creates considerable suspense, with one false move or misreading potentially signalling an innocent's death.
Though Milland likely took the role strictly because it was available and he wanted / needed to keep working, his performance, like that in The Pyjama Girl Case, belies such circumstances, beautifully expressing the complexities, anxieties and position of his character as a man hopelessly out of his depth.
Koscina doesn't quite transcend the femme fatale role, but then again isn't really required to so long as she brings the necessary glamour and danger to it. While none of the child actors are required to provide the same complexity of performance as Ana Torrent in the contemporaneous Spirit of the Beehive, which still represents the touchstone for all child performances as far as I am concerned, they are nevertheless always believable and avoid obnoxiousness of the sort that starts to see you almost rooting for the killer.
Essaying his first thriller after a series of westerns, Rafael Romero Marchent demonstrates a professional facility for adapting his style with some nice nighttime stalking sequences, echoed on the soundtrack by Stelvio Cipriani's tense, psychedelic rock giallo rather than spaghetti themed cues, with jazz squalls in lieu of mariachi deguellos.
One does, however, wonder what co-writer Luciano Ercoli might have made of the same material, and his wife Nieves Navarro of the Sonia role.
Yet, disregarding the what ifs, the what is still warrants an hour and a half of your time.
Another opinion: http://euro-fever.blogspot.com/2008/02/student-connectionun-par-de-zapatos-del.html
Bathman dal pianeta Eros
What could be better or worse – depending on taste – than an ultra low budget Italian Batman rip-off / spoof?
Holy lawsuits Batman!
How about an ultra low budget Italian hardcore porn Batman rip-off / spoof?
Some alien android, I think
If you're not sold on the film or scurrying for cover yet, consider also that it stars none other than Mark Shannon, he of Joe D'Amato's Dominican Republic sex and horror epics and the lumpy scrotum, in the title role.
The Penguin, Joker and Catwomen
That there's not terribly much more can be said about the near plotless series of sexual numbers that follow, except for that they also feature Bathman's female sidekick, a gender shift obviously intended to avoid any suggestion of the camp crusader's not being one hundred percent heterosexual, though we also get a gay Penguin, along with the Joker and a Catwoman or two, along with a Commissioner Gordon clone, who gets turned gay; holy subtexts batman!
The gay Penguin looks away in disgust at two of his minions' heterosexual antics
What one does wonder, however, is how the big studios and corporations and their porn industry counterparts negotiate films like Bathman, perhaps more particularly in the US context. Do sound-alike porn films simply fly under the radar of the big studios? Do they avoid acting because it might be self-defeating, drawing more attention to the porn product, in a Streisand Effect manner? Do the porn producers know how far they need to go to produce something that's a parody rather than plagiarism, or which no reasonable individual could ever mistake for the real thing?
Robina engages in some auto-erotic activity
Perhaps the most incredible thing of all, however, is that Bathman isn't even the nadir of the Batman porn films, with that honour going to the once seen never forgotten Batpussy, a film which can only be summarised by the final words of Heart of Darkness: the horror, the horror!
Does this really need an explanatory caption?
http://batmanfansite.blogspot.com/2008/05/klito-bell-ovvero-bathman-dal-pianeta.html
Holy lawsuits Batman!
How about an ultra low budget Italian hardcore porn Batman rip-off / spoof?
Some alien android, I think
If you're not sold on the film or scurrying for cover yet, consider also that it stars none other than Mark Shannon, he of Joe D'Amato's Dominican Republic sex and horror epics and the lumpy scrotum, in the title role.
The Penguin, Joker and Catwomen
That there's not terribly much more can be said about the near plotless series of sexual numbers that follow, except for that they also feature Bathman's female sidekick, a gender shift obviously intended to avoid any suggestion of the camp crusader's not being one hundred percent heterosexual, though we also get a gay Penguin, along with the Joker and a Catwoman or two, along with a Commissioner Gordon clone, who gets turned gay; holy subtexts batman!
The gay Penguin looks away in disgust at two of his minions' heterosexual antics
What one does wonder, however, is how the big studios and corporations and their porn industry counterparts negotiate films like Bathman, perhaps more particularly in the US context. Do sound-alike porn films simply fly under the radar of the big studios? Do they avoid acting because it might be self-defeating, drawing more attention to the porn product, in a Streisand Effect manner? Do the porn producers know how far they need to go to produce something that's a parody rather than plagiarism, or which no reasonable individual could ever mistake for the real thing?
Robina engages in some auto-erotic activity
Perhaps the most incredible thing of all, however, is that Bathman isn't even the nadir of the Batman porn films, with that honour going to the once seen never forgotten Batpussy, a film which can only be summarised by the final words of Heart of Darkness: the horror, the horror!
Does this really need an explanatory caption?
http://batmanfansite.blogspot.com/2008/05/klito-bell-ovvero-bathman-dal-pianeta.html
Saturday, 14 June 2008
Epic Films: Casts, Credits and Commentary on over 250 Historical Spectacle Movies
The cover of the 2004 second edition, with expanded coverage
This McFarland book, published in 1990, discusses the epic film, providing full reviews of 222 movies and shorter summaries of another 73. Richard Harrison, the star of a number of Italian peplum productions in the 1960s provides the introduction, followed by an overview of the history of the genre by author Gary A. Smith. It's important to note the boundaries of the epic Smith provides here as they define what gets included and what doesn't.
Budget is not directly an issue, though the presence of larger-than-life characters and monumental events, whether historical or mythological, are prerequisites. So too is that these events occur sometime between the beginning of the world and the thirteenth century – the latter proving a somewhat arbitrary cutoff point that leads to the exclusion of a film like Freda's Maciste in Hell which would otherwise presumably qualify.
Another limitation, perhaps more obvious today than at the time of the book's publication, is its strong emphasis on European history, religion and mythologies and corresponding film productions, with no mention of, say, Tarkan Meets the Vikings from Turkey or Tales of the Taira Clan from Japan.
Nevertheless, the range of films featured is still broad, ranging from silent Italian and Hollywood epics such as Cabiria and Intolerance, through much of Cecil B DeMille's output, onto the 1950s Hollywood epics, scores of peplums, sundry Hammer exotics, Caligula and Caligula the Untold Story (but no mention of Mattei's Caligula and Messalina) and even a few versions of Bible stories produced under the auspices of church groups and released theatrically.
All the longer reviews follow the same basic format, telling the potential viewer what he or she needs to know, with an overview of the story and an evaluation of the film's strengths and weaknesses, along with any particularly noteworthy facts about the production.
Though perhaps not as comprehensive as it could be I doubt that it would be possible for anyone to genuinely cover the epic across the entirety of world cinema and feel sure that Epic Films will remain a useful guide to pre-Gladiator, 300 and Passion of the Christ historical spectacles. Certainly, I came away from it with a better sense of where these films fit in relation to their wider sub-generic histories. And, at the simple level of knowing whether this or that Hercules or Maciste peplum is worth a look, it will undoubtedly help.
Tempi duri per i vampiri / Hard Times for Vampires / Uncle was a Vampire
It's well known that Christopher Lee refused to reprise the part of Dracula for a long time after playing the character in Hammer's 1958 film for fear of becoming typecast in the way that Bela Lugosi had been, leading Hammer to produce Brides of Dracula and Kiss of the Vampire as vampire films without Lee or Dracula.
Hotel Dracula?
What's not so well known, however, is that long before his return to the role in 1965's Dracula Prince of Darkness he had played a vampire and upon his association with the Dracula role in this 1959 Italian horror-comedy. Even odder is that, with the film being executive produced by Joseph E. Levine and dubbed into English – albeit with another actor providing Lee's heavily reverbed voice – it clearly had distribution outwith Italy, even if this was delayed by a few years.
Lee trading on his Dracula image
The film is surprisingly prescient, prefiguring elements of Blood for Dracula, Love at First Bite and – given Lucio Fulci's mentoring by director Steno – Dracula in the Provinces.
Beyond this it's also an engaging and entertaining film that's worth watching in its own right given the reliable and versatile Steno, a comedy specialist who could also turn out an excellent hard-hitting poliziotto conspiracy thriller when the occasion demanded, and the presence of the multi-talented Renato Rascel (also one of the co-writers and composers, along with Armando Trovajoli) and a young Sylva Koscina and Kai Fischer amongst the euro-starlets on display.
We begin with a Renfield-like servant transporting his master, Baron Roderico da Frankurten (Lee), to the train station in a crate, ready for shipping to Baron Osvaldo Lambertenghi (Rascel) in sunny Italy.
It doesn't seem the most obvious place for a vampire, but Frankurten is running out of options and hopes that his nephew's castle will provide a suitable replacement for his own, which has been destroyed; his servant's last request is to have permission to commit suicide, which the Baron graciously, wordlessly grants.
“And at last Baron, may I commit suicide?
Thanks; can one say this was really living sir”
Meanwhile Baron Lambertenghi is selling his castle to the Atlas Hotel Corporation in order to raise the money he needs to pay his back taxes, 80 million lire. Graciously, however, the Corporation agrees to allow the Baron to stay on at the castle in a position appropriate to his status and worth, that of the bellhop; they also convert the family crypt into a bar...
Learning the truth about his uncle, Lambertenghi resolves to destroy him, but finds his attempts repeatedly stymied by the interruptions of the other staff and guests. Worse follows as Baron Frankurten, weary of an unlife of moving from castle to castle and tomb to tomb, decides to transfer the family curse / inheritance / disease to his nephew. (As with the Hammer Dracula, from which the filmmakers draw a number of images, the direct image of one man biting another is evaded, though here we see Lee throwing his cloak around Rascel.)
The two barons meet; note the contrast in their outfits / uniforms
Gaze into the eyes that hypnotise – Lambertenghi addresses the spectator
Transformed from gamekeeper into poacher, Lambertenghi begins to work his way through the female staff and guests, beginning with Koscina's character's mother, before waking up in his uncle's coffin, wearing an opera cloak and remembering nothing about the previous night's antics. He then can't understand why no fewer than 42 women are infatuated with him, “ready to die for love” or asking for “one more bite”...
Lambertenghi has women trouble – too many of them
Though the film's version of vampirism is perhaps thus more akin to lycanthropy the filmmakers elsewhere engage nicely with other aspects of traditional vampire lore, having Lambertenghi attempt to fumigate his uncle with a garlic infused garden spray and one guest inadvertently paralyse the vampire with a cross-shaped clothes hanger, temporarily robbing the vampire of his powers.
An owl, recalling Terence Fisher's Dracula
They also make the most of the contrast between the tall, aristocratic Lee and the short Rascel, with the latter taking a somewhat more Lugosi like approach to the vampire role, exaggerating his gestures and expressions for greater comedic effect. He also delivers some monologues direct to the audience, again reminding us of the way in which long established popular theatrical conventions had their own proto-Brechtian elements, with some critics forgetting that in addition to alienating his audience from the work Brecht was also concerned with transforming their notions of popular entertainment.
More Hammer-style images
Apologies if this seems like an obsession in my writing of late; put it down to the coincidence of having seen multiple films using similar devices in a short space of time, along with the ease with which its possible to read social, sexual and political subtexts into a film like this. The more committed modernist can however take comfort from the fact that the film's resolution is more conventionally happy and reassuring than revolutionary.
Or, as the closing theme has it, with its blend of traditional and contemporary, “Dracula, cha, cha, cha”
Hotel Dracula?
What's not so well known, however, is that long before his return to the role in 1965's Dracula Prince of Darkness he had played a vampire and upon his association with the Dracula role in this 1959 Italian horror-comedy. Even odder is that, with the film being executive produced by Joseph E. Levine and dubbed into English – albeit with another actor providing Lee's heavily reverbed voice – it clearly had distribution outwith Italy, even if this was delayed by a few years.
Lee trading on his Dracula image
The film is surprisingly prescient, prefiguring elements of Blood for Dracula, Love at First Bite and – given Lucio Fulci's mentoring by director Steno – Dracula in the Provinces.
Beyond this it's also an engaging and entertaining film that's worth watching in its own right given the reliable and versatile Steno, a comedy specialist who could also turn out an excellent hard-hitting poliziotto conspiracy thriller when the occasion demanded, and the presence of the multi-talented Renato Rascel (also one of the co-writers and composers, along with Armando Trovajoli) and a young Sylva Koscina and Kai Fischer amongst the euro-starlets on display.
We begin with a Renfield-like servant transporting his master, Baron Roderico da Frankurten (Lee), to the train station in a crate, ready for shipping to Baron Osvaldo Lambertenghi (Rascel) in sunny Italy.
It doesn't seem the most obvious place for a vampire, but Frankurten is running out of options and hopes that his nephew's castle will provide a suitable replacement for his own, which has been destroyed; his servant's last request is to have permission to commit suicide, which the Baron graciously, wordlessly grants.
“And at last Baron, may I commit suicide?
Thanks; can one say this was really living sir”
Meanwhile Baron Lambertenghi is selling his castle to the Atlas Hotel Corporation in order to raise the money he needs to pay his back taxes, 80 million lire. Graciously, however, the Corporation agrees to allow the Baron to stay on at the castle in a position appropriate to his status and worth, that of the bellhop; they also convert the family crypt into a bar...
Learning the truth about his uncle, Lambertenghi resolves to destroy him, but finds his attempts repeatedly stymied by the interruptions of the other staff and guests. Worse follows as Baron Frankurten, weary of an unlife of moving from castle to castle and tomb to tomb, decides to transfer the family curse / inheritance / disease to his nephew. (As with the Hammer Dracula, from which the filmmakers draw a number of images, the direct image of one man biting another is evaded, though here we see Lee throwing his cloak around Rascel.)
The two barons meet; note the contrast in their outfits / uniforms
Gaze into the eyes that hypnotise – Lambertenghi addresses the spectator
Transformed from gamekeeper into poacher, Lambertenghi begins to work his way through the female staff and guests, beginning with Koscina's character's mother, before waking up in his uncle's coffin, wearing an opera cloak and remembering nothing about the previous night's antics. He then can't understand why no fewer than 42 women are infatuated with him, “ready to die for love” or asking for “one more bite”...
Lambertenghi has women trouble – too many of them
Though the film's version of vampirism is perhaps thus more akin to lycanthropy the filmmakers elsewhere engage nicely with other aspects of traditional vampire lore, having Lambertenghi attempt to fumigate his uncle with a garlic infused garden spray and one guest inadvertently paralyse the vampire with a cross-shaped clothes hanger, temporarily robbing the vampire of his powers.
An owl, recalling Terence Fisher's Dracula
They also make the most of the contrast between the tall, aristocratic Lee and the short Rascel, with the latter taking a somewhat more Lugosi like approach to the vampire role, exaggerating his gestures and expressions for greater comedic effect. He also delivers some monologues direct to the audience, again reminding us of the way in which long established popular theatrical conventions had their own proto-Brechtian elements, with some critics forgetting that in addition to alienating his audience from the work Brecht was also concerned with transforming their notions of popular entertainment.
More Hammer-style images
Apologies if this seems like an obsession in my writing of late; put it down to the coincidence of having seen multiple films using similar devices in a short space of time, along with the ease with which its possible to read social, sexual and political subtexts into a film like this. The more committed modernist can however take comfort from the fact that the film's resolution is more conventionally happy and reassuring than revolutionary.
Or, as the closing theme has it, with its blend of traditional and contemporary, “Dracula, cha, cha, cha”
Friday, 13 June 2008
Biancaneve & Co. / Snow White and the 7 Wise Men
This 1982 film is an adaptation of the adult fumetti of the same name by Leone Frollo, an erotic, comic version of the Biancaneve – i.e. Snow White – legend, albeit with seven wise men rather than the dwarfs that Anglophone audiences might be familiar with and a foregrounding of the sexual subtexts inherent in the original not-so-innocent tale.
C'era una volta...
After Biancaneve's mother, the Queen, dies giving birth to her the weak willed King (Aldo Sambrell) is tricked into remarrying. A number of years pass and Biancaneve (Michela Miti) blossoms into a beautiful young woman. The wicked Queen / stepmother (Damianne Saint-Clair) resents the threat she perceives Biancaneve represents and hires Jack il silenzatore to murder the girl. Jack, however, is smitten by Biancaneve's and cannot bring himself to kill her. Instead, after taking Biancaneve's virginity he takes a lock of her pubic hair and presents this to the queen as proof that Biancaneve is dead. Unable to return home, Biancaneve wanders the kingdom and has various adventures, invariably putting her in various states of undress...
The wicked stepmother and the king
Biancaneve
The mirror in the TV set
Biancaneve strips for her assassin, Jack the Silencer
Biancaneve meets the seven wise men
Miti is a winning heroine, who brings the right mixture of innocence, playfulness and sexiness to the role. It's a shame her emergence coincided with the decline of the Italian popular cinema as one could well imagine her having become a next generation Edwige Fenech otherwise – or, had the film been made ten years later during the heydey of the Decamerotics, the delightful possibility of seeing Fenech herself in the title role.
Everyone else enters into the spirit of things, with Sambrell effortlessly sleazy as ever and a nice cameo from Oreste Lionello as the sorceror the wicked Queen goes to for help on realising that Biancaneve is still alive.
The familiar magic mirror is replaced with a gold-framed television set, but otherwise performs the same mythic function of answering the wicked queen/stepmother's questions and indicating to her that she is no longer the fairest of all as Biancaneve's beauty blooms, with the magic mirror telephoning the director to check. (Lacanians will probably also have a field day here with the Queen's little secret.)
Another amusing anachronism, besides telephones, projectors and porn films, a prince in a tracksuit and welding gear, sees the queen looking for an assassin to take care of Biancaneve in the giallo – i.e. yellow – pages, where there are also entries for the likes of squartatore – i.e. rippers – before settling on Jack the silencer.
Despite the English lyrics on the catchy theme tune (“Snow White she's a beautiful girl / She's a venus with a pony tail / Put your head in her world / She will give you fun / She never fails”), the film itself is in Italian, without subtitles. It matters because, alongside the visual humour and attractions, there appears to be a lot of wordplay, most of it delivered at screwball comedy speed and much with exaggerated voices: one character is called Stronzolo – i.e. little(r) piece of shit, while one of the wise men's attempts at installing himself as a pimp sees his target say she doesn't need any help from murderers, rippers, thieves or politicians.
Hopefully subtitles will surface some day. Until then...
...e vissero felici e contenti
C'era una volta...
After Biancaneve's mother, the Queen, dies giving birth to her the weak willed King (Aldo Sambrell) is tricked into remarrying. A number of years pass and Biancaneve (Michela Miti) blossoms into a beautiful young woman. The wicked Queen / stepmother (Damianne Saint-Clair) resents the threat she perceives Biancaneve represents and hires Jack il silenzatore to murder the girl. Jack, however, is smitten by Biancaneve's and cannot bring himself to kill her. Instead, after taking Biancaneve's virginity he takes a lock of her pubic hair and presents this to the queen as proof that Biancaneve is dead. Unable to return home, Biancaneve wanders the kingdom and has various adventures, invariably putting her in various states of undress...
The wicked stepmother and the king
Biancaneve
The mirror in the TV set
Biancaneve strips for her assassin, Jack the Silencer
Biancaneve meets the seven wise men
Miti is a winning heroine, who brings the right mixture of innocence, playfulness and sexiness to the role. It's a shame her emergence coincided with the decline of the Italian popular cinema as one could well imagine her having become a next generation Edwige Fenech otherwise – or, had the film been made ten years later during the heydey of the Decamerotics, the delightful possibility of seeing Fenech herself in the title role.
Everyone else enters into the spirit of things, with Sambrell effortlessly sleazy as ever and a nice cameo from Oreste Lionello as the sorceror the wicked Queen goes to for help on realising that Biancaneve is still alive.
The familiar magic mirror is replaced with a gold-framed television set, but otherwise performs the same mythic function of answering the wicked queen/stepmother's questions and indicating to her that she is no longer the fairest of all as Biancaneve's beauty blooms, with the magic mirror telephoning the director to check. (Lacanians will probably also have a field day here with the Queen's little secret.)
Another amusing anachronism, besides telephones, projectors and porn films, a prince in a tracksuit and welding gear, sees the queen looking for an assassin to take care of Biancaneve in the giallo – i.e. yellow – pages, where there are also entries for the likes of squartatore – i.e. rippers – before settling on Jack the silencer.
Despite the English lyrics on the catchy theme tune (“Snow White she's a beautiful girl / She's a venus with a pony tail / Put your head in her world / She will give you fun / She never fails”), the film itself is in Italian, without subtitles. It matters because, alongside the visual humour and attractions, there appears to be a lot of wordplay, most of it delivered at screwball comedy speed and much with exaggerated voices: one character is called Stronzolo – i.e. little(r) piece of shit, while one of the wise men's attempts at installing himself as a pimp sees his target say she doesn't need any help from murderers, rippers, thieves or politicians.
Hopefully subtitles will surface some day. Until then...
...e vissero felici e contenti
Diario segreto da un carcere femminile / Love and Death in a Women's Prison / Women in Cell Block 7
This 1973 women in prison / poliziotto / whatever marked the writing and directorial debut of Rino De Silvestro of Naked Werewolf Woman infamy. Those who've seen that 1976 oddity will pretty much know what to expect: quality sleaze trash that can't quite seem to make up its mind about what sort of film its trying to be.
The two New York mafiosi
And their assassin
We open at full tilt, with a wealth of plot information thrown at us via voice-over in the space of a few minutes: Interpol agents had planned to intercept some American mafioso as they picked up a heroin shipment from their Rome counterparts. Unfortunately another gangster unexpectedly gunned down the mafioso and made off with the drugs. And, before he could be brought in and made to divulge who had informed him of Interpol's plans, he was involved in a fatal car accident. His moll / girlfriend Daniela Vinci (Jenny Tamburi) survived the crash and is jailed as an accomplice despite professing to know nothing about the now-vanished drugs. Seeking to clear up the mystery and her father's name, as the gangster's contact and the suspected mastermind behind the scheme, Hilda (Anita Strindberg) – who is herself an Interpol agent, unbeknownst to her father – goes undercover in the same women's prison. Meanwhile, the mob closes in on her father...
You want realistic sleaze? You've got it – Tamburi undergoes a cavity search
What ensues is an entertaining if not terribly coherent mish-mash of beatings, shoot outs, car chases and prison intrigues, including the obligatory lesbian, shower and catfight sequences and all the stock characters like the sadistic warden, the inmate running the show and not taking kindly to any newcomer challenging her position, and the crazy one.
The stunts are surprisingly decent
Tamburi and Strindberg are certainly game and do the best they can with the material given them, but the actorly pickings are definitely somewhat slim in comparison with their roles in Smile Before Death and Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key.
This said, the writing is difficult to judge anyway in that much of the dialogue sounds as if it has been substantially rewritten for the English dub by the film's US distributors, Terry Levene's Aquarius, with this also providing some presumably unintentional laughs through frequent dubiously macho references to the inmates balls' and ball-busting one another.
Classic WIP images
There are some moments of inspiration like a crane shot which takes us over one prison wall to reveal another, larger structure behind it; the mournful 99 Women / Caged Heat style blues vocal number that is unexpectedly positioned as diegetic as one prisoner tells another, admittedly positioned offscreen, to shut up, which can probably be attributed to Levene and company; or a shot of Hilda's father, mirrored upside down in a pool of water curiously reminiscent of David Hemmings at the end of Deep Red. The locales for the action sequences are also well chosen in the main, with the prison interiors and bit players also looking authentically lived in and world-weary.
Prisoners like these disappear whenever there's a shower scene
Cue Peter North jokes...
But in general there remains something of the feel of different films and tones battling against each other for dominance – now wanting to be serious and hard-hitting, now schlocky and sleazy. Without wanting to make any claims for De Silvestro as some kind of undiscovered auteur, its worth noting here that Naked Werewolf Woman and Red Light Girls had something of the same distinctive sensibility to them, with the latter offering a curious amalgam of giallo thrills and mondo-esque prostitution expose.
In keeping with the rest of the film, the music is also somewhat schizophrenic, mixing funky action themes with mood music, but even so works well to provide the emotional cues and glue required, particularly during a long dialogue-free sequence of girl-on-girl frottage.
The two New York mafiosi
And their assassin
We open at full tilt, with a wealth of plot information thrown at us via voice-over in the space of a few minutes: Interpol agents had planned to intercept some American mafioso as they picked up a heroin shipment from their Rome counterparts. Unfortunately another gangster unexpectedly gunned down the mafioso and made off with the drugs. And, before he could be brought in and made to divulge who had informed him of Interpol's plans, he was involved in a fatal car accident. His moll / girlfriend Daniela Vinci (Jenny Tamburi) survived the crash and is jailed as an accomplice despite professing to know nothing about the now-vanished drugs. Seeking to clear up the mystery and her father's name, as the gangster's contact and the suspected mastermind behind the scheme, Hilda (Anita Strindberg) – who is herself an Interpol agent, unbeknownst to her father – goes undercover in the same women's prison. Meanwhile, the mob closes in on her father...
You want realistic sleaze? You've got it – Tamburi undergoes a cavity search
What ensues is an entertaining if not terribly coherent mish-mash of beatings, shoot outs, car chases and prison intrigues, including the obligatory lesbian, shower and catfight sequences and all the stock characters like the sadistic warden, the inmate running the show and not taking kindly to any newcomer challenging her position, and the crazy one.
The stunts are surprisingly decent
Tamburi and Strindberg are certainly game and do the best they can with the material given them, but the actorly pickings are definitely somewhat slim in comparison with their roles in Smile Before Death and Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key.
This said, the writing is difficult to judge anyway in that much of the dialogue sounds as if it has been substantially rewritten for the English dub by the film's US distributors, Terry Levene's Aquarius, with this also providing some presumably unintentional laughs through frequent dubiously macho references to the inmates balls' and ball-busting one another.
Classic WIP images
There are some moments of inspiration like a crane shot which takes us over one prison wall to reveal another, larger structure behind it; the mournful 99 Women / Caged Heat style blues vocal number that is unexpectedly positioned as diegetic as one prisoner tells another, admittedly positioned offscreen, to shut up, which can probably be attributed to Levene and company; or a shot of Hilda's father, mirrored upside down in a pool of water curiously reminiscent of David Hemmings at the end of Deep Red. The locales for the action sequences are also well chosen in the main, with the prison interiors and bit players also looking authentically lived in and world-weary.
Prisoners like these disappear whenever there's a shower scene
Cue Peter North jokes...
But in general there remains something of the feel of different films and tones battling against each other for dominance – now wanting to be serious and hard-hitting, now schlocky and sleazy. Without wanting to make any claims for De Silvestro as some kind of undiscovered auteur, its worth noting here that Naked Werewolf Woman and Red Light Girls had something of the same distinctive sensibility to them, with the latter offering a curious amalgam of giallo thrills and mondo-esque prostitution expose.
In keeping with the rest of the film, the music is also somewhat schizophrenic, mixing funky action themes with mood music, but even so works well to provide the emotional cues and glue required, particularly during a long dialogue-free sequence of girl-on-girl frottage.
Thursday, 12 June 2008
A sublime image
I was watching Once Upon a Time in the West again last night and was really struck by this image, of Cheyenne looking out the window of the McBain homestead at the construction of Sweetwater by a mass of nameless, faceless labourers. With the narrower vista of the window frame within the screen frame, it just seemed to perfectly encapsulate the themes of the film – the end of the old west and the beginning of a new one, and the triumph of history, woman and “ultimate man” over myth and “superman”.
Un Angelo per Satana / An Angel for Satan
This was one of two gothics directed by the veteran Camillo Mastrocinque, following on from the Carmilla styled Terror in the Crypt. Adapted from a novella by Luigi Emmanuelle, whose other writing credits include the story for the spaghetti western This Man Can't Die, it's an atmospheric and effective piece with some exceptional images and strong performances that's well worth a look for any enthusiast of the form who values subtlety over shock.
Set in the late 19th century in a remote Italian community, the the story begins with the arrival of young artist Roberto Merigi (Anthony Steffen) by boat. He's been commissioned by Count Montebruno (Claudio Gora) to restore a statue that's recently been recovered from the lake.
Legend has it that the statue bears a curse and, indeed, no sooner has Roberto arrived than the boat that brought him in sinks on the lake with the loss of all aboard.
An almost neo-realist image
As a modern man, however, Roberto puts this down to coincidence. His attitude contrasts sharply with that of the superstitious villagers working the Montebruno estates. The most notable of these is the fearsome Carlo Lionesi (Mario Brega) who does not take kindly to Roberto's sketching and accuses him of having the evil eye, leading to a brawl that comes uncomfortably close to western territory – especially when we consider the two combatants' associations with the spaghetti genre.
An almost spaghetti western image – Brega confronts Steffen
Fortunately things are soon back on the Gothic track as, with the arrival of the Count's adoptive ward, Harriet (Barbara Steele), from her school in England the story really kicks into gear.
The statue
And Steele
The resemblance is striking
For Harriet is not only the spitting image of the statue but may be its reincarnation or possessed by its spirit, as she starts to manifest a split personality, alternating between her own demure and frightened self and the cruel, sadistic Belinda to unpredictably turn to and on Roberto, the Count, Carlo and the other men around her...
Another beautiful transition, from an eerie painting to the statue
It's impossible to imagine An Angel for Satan working quite so well with any other actress in the Harriet / Belinda roles. Steele was quite simply born to play these dualistic parts that made the most of her unique features, that strikingly expressive mask which provided her with an unsurpassed capacity for switching from victim to monster, masochist to sadist, object of the gaze to its bearer, with a little curl of the lips or movement of the eyes.
The many faces of Steele - vamp, sadist and innocent victim
The real surprise among the performers is thus Steffen who, clean cut and frock coated rather than unshaven and scruffy, presents an almost entirely different persona to his other period appearances, more talkative than taciturn, yet still full of the same self-assuredness – that spaghetti brawl, though it at least resolves differently and slightly more realistically than in one of his Django type roles – at least to begin with.
Indeed, the film as a whole is marked by this distinctive combination of the gothic and the realist, where a storm at an (in)opportune moment may be natural or supernatural, a chess game knight move followed by a checkmate potentially symbolic, all the way through to an ambiguous ending that is the very definition of the fantastique.
Making connections, and another Steele double image
Mastrocinque plays up these coincidences or connections in his compositions and editing, frequently cutting or dissolving between matched images – the statue and Harriet / Belinda, Harriet / Belinda and the Count both looking at themselves in the mirror, a painting and the statue etc.
The icing on the cake is provided by Francesco De Masi's lush romantic score, full of drama and emotion and providing yet another illustration – if any were needed – of just how versatile Italian film composers of the period were in adapting their idiom to suit the film at hand.
Set in the late 19th century in a remote Italian community, the the story begins with the arrival of young artist Roberto Merigi (Anthony Steffen) by boat. He's been commissioned by Count Montebruno (Claudio Gora) to restore a statue that's recently been recovered from the lake.
Legend has it that the statue bears a curse and, indeed, no sooner has Roberto arrived than the boat that brought him in sinks on the lake with the loss of all aboard.
An almost neo-realist image
As a modern man, however, Roberto puts this down to coincidence. His attitude contrasts sharply with that of the superstitious villagers working the Montebruno estates. The most notable of these is the fearsome Carlo Lionesi (Mario Brega) who does not take kindly to Roberto's sketching and accuses him of having the evil eye, leading to a brawl that comes uncomfortably close to western territory – especially when we consider the two combatants' associations with the spaghetti genre.
An almost spaghetti western image – Brega confronts Steffen
Fortunately things are soon back on the Gothic track as, with the arrival of the Count's adoptive ward, Harriet (Barbara Steele), from her school in England the story really kicks into gear.
The statue
And Steele
The resemblance is striking
For Harriet is not only the spitting image of the statue but may be its reincarnation or possessed by its spirit, as she starts to manifest a split personality, alternating between her own demure and frightened self and the cruel, sadistic Belinda to unpredictably turn to and on Roberto, the Count, Carlo and the other men around her...
Another beautiful transition, from an eerie painting to the statue
It's impossible to imagine An Angel for Satan working quite so well with any other actress in the Harriet / Belinda roles. Steele was quite simply born to play these dualistic parts that made the most of her unique features, that strikingly expressive mask which provided her with an unsurpassed capacity for switching from victim to monster, masochist to sadist, object of the gaze to its bearer, with a little curl of the lips or movement of the eyes.
The many faces of Steele - vamp, sadist and innocent victim
The real surprise among the performers is thus Steffen who, clean cut and frock coated rather than unshaven and scruffy, presents an almost entirely different persona to his other period appearances, more talkative than taciturn, yet still full of the same self-assuredness – that spaghetti brawl, though it at least resolves differently and slightly more realistically than in one of his Django type roles – at least to begin with.
Indeed, the film as a whole is marked by this distinctive combination of the gothic and the realist, where a storm at an (in)opportune moment may be natural or supernatural, a chess game knight move followed by a checkmate potentially symbolic, all the way through to an ambiguous ending that is the very definition of the fantastique.
Making connections, and another Steele double image
Mastrocinque plays up these coincidences or connections in his compositions and editing, frequently cutting or dissolving between matched images – the statue and Harriet / Belinda, Harriet / Belinda and the Count both looking at themselves in the mirror, a painting and the statue etc.
The icing on the cake is provided by Francesco De Masi's lush romantic score, full of drama and emotion and providing yet another illustration – if any were needed – of just how versatile Italian film composers of the period were in adapting their idiom to suit the film at hand.
Tuesday, 10 June 2008
Der Fälscher von London / The Forger of London
Released in 1961, this was the seventh Edgar Wallace krimi overall and the third of five to be directed by Harald Reinl, here working with his then-wife Karin Dor for the second time in the series.
Based upon Wallace's 1927 novel The Forger, it's an unusual piece in that it begins with a marriage – that of Dor's heroine Jane Leith to Peter Clifton – and then proceeds to suggest that Peter may well hereditarily insane with schizophrenia and amnesia, and the titular Forger of London to boot, before moving onto more familiar territory as Inspector Burke of the Yard proceeds to conduct his investigations along the lines that the mounting evidence against his friend – including the facts that he was known to have passed one of the forged notes, is an expert lithographer and is discovered by Jane in a secret room late one night working a printing press – is just that little bit too cut and dried...
We open at the Derby, with Edwardian class distinctions in full effect
Director Harald Reinl's Fritz Lang obsession is again apparent both in the wonderfully expressionistic mise en scène and the Mabuse-like plot machinations that ensue, ultimately revolving around a heard but not seen “acousmetric” figure behind the crimes who issues orders and counsel to his many minions from a room behind a one-way mirror, Blomberg.
Burke also fits into a Langian framework somewhat, being something of an ambiguous Scotland Yard man whose tactics, like those of like his counterparts in Lang's Dr Mabuse der Spieler and Spione, do not seem particularly different from those of his quarry at times, while another departure from the krimi norm circa 1961 raises the spectre of corruption within the ranks of the Yard itself.
Three views from Blomberg's lair
Indeed, with a bit more Door with the Seven Locks-style mad science on display one could almost imagine the film working as a Dr Mabuse entry, a point perhaps not lost on production company Rialto's rivals CCC who would release Scotland Yard jagt Dr. Mabuse, directed by Paul May and featuring several krimi film regulars including Klaus Kinski and Werner Peters, two years later. (As a throwaway speculation, we might also wonder whether May adopted his surname in reference to Joe May, one of the founding fathers of German popular cinema and the man who gave Lang an important early break.)
The obligatory Home Counties ancestral pile
Another thing worth noting is the way The Forger of London deals with psychological themes, especially when at one point modern art is deployed in an ambiguous 1940s Hollywood meets Nazi entartete kunst manner, hinting at a character's badness. (Within Lang's Scarlet Street, Edward G. Robinson's character Chris Cross, encouraged to embark on a life of crime by the woman he obsesses over, paints in a distinctly modern, non representational style, though there is a distinct irony if we consider Lang and Robinson's Jewish heritages – Robinson's given surname, which he reduced to his middle initial in the often racist Hollywood of the time, was Goldenberger – and the actor's own interest in abstract art and progressive politics.)
When the woman looks
Beyond the Langian references, the film is pretty much business as usual, with an effective Martin Bottcher score; reasonably well integrated if still obvious library footage; atmospheric use of location and studio sets; stock players like Eddi Arent performing their stock characters with customary aplomb, and that general sense of a group of filmmakers who knew where to fine tune their formula to keep things fresh and interesting and where to leave well alone.
A blade in the dark
The Joyless Street, 35 years and one war later
If there's an element of “what's in a name” emerging throughout this piece – Blomberg or Mabuse, the world of Wallace or Lang – it's perhaps best to conclude by indicating that, regardless of where else you might place it, The Forger of London belongs in the 'worth seeing' group of krimis.
Based upon Wallace's 1927 novel The Forger, it's an unusual piece in that it begins with a marriage – that of Dor's heroine Jane Leith to Peter Clifton – and then proceeds to suggest that Peter may well hereditarily insane with schizophrenia and amnesia, and the titular Forger of London to boot, before moving onto more familiar territory as Inspector Burke of the Yard proceeds to conduct his investigations along the lines that the mounting evidence against his friend – including the facts that he was known to have passed one of the forged notes, is an expert lithographer and is discovered by Jane in a secret room late one night working a printing press – is just that little bit too cut and dried...
We open at the Derby, with Edwardian class distinctions in full effect
Director Harald Reinl's Fritz Lang obsession is again apparent both in the wonderfully expressionistic mise en scène and the Mabuse-like plot machinations that ensue, ultimately revolving around a heard but not seen “acousmetric” figure behind the crimes who issues orders and counsel to his many minions from a room behind a one-way mirror, Blomberg.
Burke also fits into a Langian framework somewhat, being something of an ambiguous Scotland Yard man whose tactics, like those of like his counterparts in Lang's Dr Mabuse der Spieler and Spione, do not seem particularly different from those of his quarry at times, while another departure from the krimi norm circa 1961 raises the spectre of corruption within the ranks of the Yard itself.
Three views from Blomberg's lair
Indeed, with a bit more Door with the Seven Locks-style mad science on display one could almost imagine the film working as a Dr Mabuse entry, a point perhaps not lost on production company Rialto's rivals CCC who would release Scotland Yard jagt Dr. Mabuse, directed by Paul May and featuring several krimi film regulars including Klaus Kinski and Werner Peters, two years later. (As a throwaway speculation, we might also wonder whether May adopted his surname in reference to Joe May, one of the founding fathers of German popular cinema and the man who gave Lang an important early break.)
The obligatory Home Counties ancestral pile
Another thing worth noting is the way The Forger of London deals with psychological themes, especially when at one point modern art is deployed in an ambiguous 1940s Hollywood meets Nazi entartete kunst manner, hinting at a character's badness. (Within Lang's Scarlet Street, Edward G. Robinson's character Chris Cross, encouraged to embark on a life of crime by the woman he obsesses over, paints in a distinctly modern, non representational style, though there is a distinct irony if we consider Lang and Robinson's Jewish heritages – Robinson's given surname, which he reduced to his middle initial in the often racist Hollywood of the time, was Goldenberger – and the actor's own interest in abstract art and progressive politics.)
When the woman looks
Beyond the Langian references, the film is pretty much business as usual, with an effective Martin Bottcher score; reasonably well integrated if still obvious library footage; atmospheric use of location and studio sets; stock players like Eddi Arent performing their stock characters with customary aplomb, and that general sense of a group of filmmakers who knew where to fine tune their formula to keep things fresh and interesting and where to leave well alone.
A blade in the dark
The Joyless Street, 35 years and one war later
If there's an element of “what's in a name” emerging throughout this piece – Blomberg or Mabuse, the world of Wallace or Lang – it's perhaps best to conclude by indicating that, regardless of where else you might place it, The Forger of London belongs in the 'worth seeing' group of krimis.
Der Grüne Bogenschütze / The Green Archer
The country estate of American emigre Abel Bellamy (Gerd Fröbe, in fine intimidating form) is haunted by the ghost of the Green Archer, a 14th century Robin Hood type figure who terrorised the former lords of the manor.
Now, with the gangster coming home on vaguely defined business and his niece Valerie (Karin Dor) arriving with her adoptive father to take up residence in the adjacent mansion, much to Bellamy's annoyance, the archer has returned.
Who is he and what does he want?
The cloth-capped, working class thief, whose death starts the story
This 1961 krimi from Rialto and Preben Philipsen, directed by Jürgen Roland, presents the third film adaptation of Edgar Wallace's 1923 novel of the same name, following two US serial versions in 1925 and 1940.
Though coming early in the krimi cycle and thereby remaining relatively faithful to the spirit of Wallace and free of intentional (if not unintentional) camp, there was just something about Der Grüne Bogenschütze which just failed to work for me, at least in the the way I had expected.
Town and country – the twin poles of krimi space
The usual ingredients are certainly there: an incomprehensible plot whose machinations the viewer-detective has absolutely no chance to figure out for him- or herself; a dastardly villain; a mysterious avenger with a gimmick; a beautiful damsel to be placed in situations of distress; country houses replete with secrete passages and dungeons; an array of quirky supporting characters cum victims cum suspects; a trip into the heart of darkest Soho; stock shots of the Houses of Parliament and Picadilly Circus to add a veneer of authenticity to the German imaginary London and, of course, the stalwart men of Scotland Yard there to unmask the guilty and save the day.
I think that the two biggest difficulties I had with taking the film in the usual way revolved around the first and last entries in this laundry list. There are almost too many characters, subplots and incidents to keep track of at times, in part because the Scotland Yard man who usually represents our route into and through the story is working undercover and not introduced as such until over half-way through.
What the film does have going for it is a somewhat more self-conscious approach to the whole business of the krimi.
A giallo-esque black glove moment
A giallo-esque black glove / telephone moment, with a more krimi costumed villain
While we can ascribe the absence of “hallo hier spricht Edgar Wallace” to watching the English language edit of the film, the opening sequence is noteworthy for foregrounding the sort of distantiating strategies that – at least according to theory – popular films don't engage in as two characters, a journalist and a tour guide, breach the fourth wall and directly address the spectator:
“There's nothing to make a decent film of here friends. A murder with a bow and arrow. Come on, they can't be serious! That terrible green archer – an absurd idea!”
“All who visit here are deceived, so of course they all come here. No one here believes in ghosts. Oh but they pay to come in here – they want to know why they don't believe in them.”
A few moments later, after the tour guide has done his spiel about the 10 shilling book detailing the “lurid history” of the castle and the archer in greater depth, he and the reporter discuss the authenticity of the archers' green-painted bow:
“Well, you know how it is. They want a little atmosphere. But how about doing a little story on it, eh?”
“Shoot some shots for the newsreel?”
“Uh-huh”
“I am a reporter, not a press agent!”
“Yes, well, we all have to live”
Then one of the tour party is found dead with a green arrow in his back, allowing the story proper to begin:
“Is he dead?”
“Yes; I guess we have a story for the film after all”
If events proceed along more conventional lines hereafter, the journalist (the ubiquitous Eddi Arent) again turns to us intermittently throughout the narrative, signalling pantomine-like that we must be quiet as he sneaks up on some of the bad guys and so forth, to remind us that it's not for real.
Breaching the fourth wall
It's not the epitome of cinematic modernism, but does server as a useful reminder that the avant-garde perhaps wasn't always as avant as it thought and never held a monopoly on such practices / praxis. (After all, couldn't Wallace's patented plot wheel be read in quasi-structuralist terms, as revealing similar kinds of paradigmatic and syntygmatic combinations as, say, Proppian analyses of narrative?)
Expressionism redux
Another point of interest in relation to the Wallace universe is the way the film treats its foreign and working class characters. Though some subalterns certainly follow the conventional villain pattern, others unusually get away with their schemes, perhaps because of their Robin Hood-esque “rob from the rich” quality.
Now, with the gangster coming home on vaguely defined business and his niece Valerie (Karin Dor) arriving with her adoptive father to take up residence in the adjacent mansion, much to Bellamy's annoyance, the archer has returned.
Who is he and what does he want?
The cloth-capped, working class thief, whose death starts the story
This 1961 krimi from Rialto and Preben Philipsen, directed by Jürgen Roland, presents the third film adaptation of Edgar Wallace's 1923 novel of the same name, following two US serial versions in 1925 and 1940.
Though coming early in the krimi cycle and thereby remaining relatively faithful to the spirit of Wallace and free of intentional (if not unintentional) camp, there was just something about Der Grüne Bogenschütze which just failed to work for me, at least in the the way I had expected.
Town and country – the twin poles of krimi space
The usual ingredients are certainly there: an incomprehensible plot whose machinations the viewer-detective has absolutely no chance to figure out for him- or herself; a dastardly villain; a mysterious avenger with a gimmick; a beautiful damsel to be placed in situations of distress; country houses replete with secrete passages and dungeons; an array of quirky supporting characters cum victims cum suspects; a trip into the heart of darkest Soho; stock shots of the Houses of Parliament and Picadilly Circus to add a veneer of authenticity to the German imaginary London and, of course, the stalwart men of Scotland Yard there to unmask the guilty and save the day.
I think that the two biggest difficulties I had with taking the film in the usual way revolved around the first and last entries in this laundry list. There are almost too many characters, subplots and incidents to keep track of at times, in part because the Scotland Yard man who usually represents our route into and through the story is working undercover and not introduced as such until over half-way through.
What the film does have going for it is a somewhat more self-conscious approach to the whole business of the krimi.
A giallo-esque black glove moment
A giallo-esque black glove / telephone moment, with a more krimi costumed villain
While we can ascribe the absence of “hallo hier spricht Edgar Wallace” to watching the English language edit of the film, the opening sequence is noteworthy for foregrounding the sort of distantiating strategies that – at least according to theory – popular films don't engage in as two characters, a journalist and a tour guide, breach the fourth wall and directly address the spectator:
“There's nothing to make a decent film of here friends. A murder with a bow and arrow. Come on, they can't be serious! That terrible green archer – an absurd idea!”
“All who visit here are deceived, so of course they all come here. No one here believes in ghosts. Oh but they pay to come in here – they want to know why they don't believe in them.”
A few moments later, after the tour guide has done his spiel about the 10 shilling book detailing the “lurid history” of the castle and the archer in greater depth, he and the reporter discuss the authenticity of the archers' green-painted bow:
“Well, you know how it is. They want a little atmosphere. But how about doing a little story on it, eh?”
“Shoot some shots for the newsreel?”
“Uh-huh”
“I am a reporter, not a press agent!”
“Yes, well, we all have to live”
Then one of the tour party is found dead with a green arrow in his back, allowing the story proper to begin:
“Is he dead?”
“Yes; I guess we have a story for the film after all”
If events proceed along more conventional lines hereafter, the journalist (the ubiquitous Eddi Arent) again turns to us intermittently throughout the narrative, signalling pantomine-like that we must be quiet as he sneaks up on some of the bad guys and so forth, to remind us that it's not for real.
Breaching the fourth wall
It's not the epitome of cinematic modernism, but does server as a useful reminder that the avant-garde perhaps wasn't always as avant as it thought and never held a monopoly on such practices / praxis. (After all, couldn't Wallace's patented plot wheel be read in quasi-structuralist terms, as revealing similar kinds of paradigmatic and syntygmatic combinations as, say, Proppian analyses of narrative?)
Expressionism redux
Another point of interest in relation to the Wallace universe is the way the film treats its foreign and working class characters. Though some subalterns certainly follow the conventional villain pattern, others unusually get away with their schemes, perhaps because of their Robin Hood-esque “rob from the rich” quality.
Monday, 9 June 2008
Holocaust parte seconda: i ricordi, i deliri, la vendetta
The opening titles, consisting of slow drums and white noise playing over real photographs of Nazi rallies and the death camps and their victims, lead you to expect something grim and harrowing.
The film is not a sequel, though there was an Italian TV movie called Holocaust that it was likely retitled to cash in on
The reality
The reconstruction; note the absence of yellow stars
What ensues, however, is a frankly boring piece of Nazisploitation that it is not only difficult to take seriously but which also fails to provide the usual concentration of camp, sleaze and bad taste.
Given the subject matter, that of a group of Nazi hunters tracking down their quarry in 1970s Italy, it might at a pinch be construed as an attempt to convey Hannah Arendt's “banality of evil”. Certainly at one point a Nazi does indicate that he was “only obeying orders.” Even so it hardly makes for entertaining or engaging viewing on the level of, say, SS Experiment Camp or The Beast in Heat – here bracketing any consideration of how distasteful most would undoubtedly find it for anyone to admit to enjoying these films – and completely fails to stimulate deeper thought, other than of the sort one must engage in here in an attempt to make sense of the film for a review.
Part of the trouble is that nothing within the film can really match up to the horror of those initial images – images not seen in most of the other, less self-consciously serious entries – while the flashback sequences fail to convince even by the standards of low-budget war movie reconstructions.
The greater issue, however, is that the way in which the Nazi hunters are presented makes them perilously close to being as bad as their quarry, as they strive to make each revenge attack different from the last and thereby difficult for the authorities to connect together, while also taking a rather broad view of who counts as a legitimate target.
Thus, the son of one Nazi is deemed an acceptable substitute because his father is in hiding, while the wife or daughter of William Berger's ex-officer is stripped naked, has ropes tied around her limbs and is spreadeagled before having her neck broken. (Berger fans should note that, while top billed, he is only on screen for a couple of minutes right at the start.)
An acceptable revenge image
Getting somewhat dubious
One of the curiosities of the film, albeit one which it has in common with a number of other Italian Nazi / Holocaustsploitation entries is that, despite the Holocaust 2 title, it skirts around actually identifying the non-Nazi characters as Jewish. Instead, they are presented as undefined enemies of the regime, although when some of the flashbacks show children rather than adults it is difficult to square this with these selfsame enemies being anything other than ethnically / religiously defined.
Not recommended, except for the completist.
The film is not a sequel, though there was an Italian TV movie called Holocaust that it was likely retitled to cash in on
The reality
The reconstruction; note the absence of yellow stars
What ensues, however, is a frankly boring piece of Nazisploitation that it is not only difficult to take seriously but which also fails to provide the usual concentration of camp, sleaze and bad taste.
Given the subject matter, that of a group of Nazi hunters tracking down their quarry in 1970s Italy, it might at a pinch be construed as an attempt to convey Hannah Arendt's “banality of evil”. Certainly at one point a Nazi does indicate that he was “only obeying orders.” Even so it hardly makes for entertaining or engaging viewing on the level of, say, SS Experiment Camp or The Beast in Heat – here bracketing any consideration of how distasteful most would undoubtedly find it for anyone to admit to enjoying these films – and completely fails to stimulate deeper thought, other than of the sort one must engage in here in an attempt to make sense of the film for a review.
Part of the trouble is that nothing within the film can really match up to the horror of those initial images – images not seen in most of the other, less self-consciously serious entries – while the flashback sequences fail to convince even by the standards of low-budget war movie reconstructions.
The greater issue, however, is that the way in which the Nazi hunters are presented makes them perilously close to being as bad as their quarry, as they strive to make each revenge attack different from the last and thereby difficult for the authorities to connect together, while also taking a rather broad view of who counts as a legitimate target.
Thus, the son of one Nazi is deemed an acceptable substitute because his father is in hiding, while the wife or daughter of William Berger's ex-officer is stripped naked, has ropes tied around her limbs and is spreadeagled before having her neck broken. (Berger fans should note that, while top billed, he is only on screen for a couple of minutes right at the start.)
An acceptable revenge image
Getting somewhat dubious
One of the curiosities of the film, albeit one which it has in common with a number of other Italian Nazi / Holocaustsploitation entries is that, despite the Holocaust 2 title, it skirts around actually identifying the non-Nazi characters as Jewish. Instead, they are presented as undefined enemies of the regime, although when some of the flashbacks show children rather than adults it is difficult to square this with these selfsame enemies being anything other than ethnically / religiously defined.
Not recommended, except for the completist.
La Morte scende leggera
Giorgio Darika (Stelio Candelli) is in big trouble. Returning to see his estranged wife Irina following a trip to Milan on criminal business he finds her dead. Without an alibi, his lawyers (Fernando Cerulli and Tom Felleghy) – and, we soon learn, criminal associates – suggest Giorgio lie low for a while and make arrangements for him and his girlfriend Liz (Patrizia Viotti) to hide out at what should be a deserted hotel. Giorgio soon discovers that the place is not empty, however, as he encounters the caretaker – along with the body of the caretaker’s wife, her throat slit with a straight razor…
The face of a murderer?
Sleaze with a splash of giallo
This 1972 giallo from Leopoldo Savona is at times reminiscent of a sleazier hybrid of Four Flies on Grey Velvet and Spasmo, as a paranoiac psychodrama where motives are obscure and nobody, least of all Giorgio’s lawyers, with their penchant for mysterious telephone calls to film directors (whose latest project, La Matassa disfatta, is identified as a giallo) and certain members of the police, can be trusted.
Where the film differs from Four Flies on Grey Velvet is that we never know if Giorgio is in fact innocent of his wife’s murder until the end. The film opens with a subjective stalker cam shot entering her apartment, followed by a nervous-looking Giorgio exiting out the front door, donning his dark glasses and driving off, but there is no indication of the amount of time that has passed between the two images.
Sharing an isolated central location replete full of people acting strangely with Spasmo, La Morte scende leggera differs its more 'political' subtext, as we gradually learn fragments of the criminal conspiracy and how high up it goes. Crucially, however, this never causes the film to shift its focus, which always remains on Giorgio rather than the investigation slowly closing in on him.
Savona does a reasonable job of building atmosphere, countering the relative difficulty in empathising with Giorgio and most of the other characters on account of their general unpleasantness. One telling moment here is when Giorgio, Liz and Felleghy’s lawyer are driving to the hotel. As they come across an accident, with bodies strewn across the road, Giorgio’s instinctive response is to stop the car and going to help but the cooler-headed lawyer prevails: someone else will surely be along in a minute, and it’s best not to get involved in any case.
There’s some nice use of yellow within a number of the compositions, though the nightmare and flashback sequences are somewhat crudely rendered with colour filters and shock zooms predominating.
The obligatory women in mirrors shots
Tips for a murder suspect #1: Don't pick up the straight razor unless you intend to use it!
Most obviously, however, the filmmakers’ focus is on sleaze, with some gratuitous shower scenes featuring Viotti – not that one is complaining – and a love scene between she and Candelli that Savona amusingly intercuts with the porno loop playing on the 8mm projector that Giorgio had for whatever reason had the wherewithal to bring along.
Couples porn?
Then again, he and his associates are marked out as the loop’s producers, with Giorgio also commenting that Italy is one of the world’s leading producers of said material. (The famed porn director Lasse Braun, despite his Scandinavian sounding name, is in fact Italian and was born Alberto Ferro.)
Another splash of giallo, as an official inquires what's in the box
Mention must finally be made of the scoring, which comes courtesy of Lalo Gori and rock group the Mak Sigis Porter Ensemble. Though the Ensemble are credited only with the acid freak out title theme, which is enjoyable in its own right until the singing starts and then becomes enjoyable in a what-the-hell-does-that-mean sort of way, many of Gori’s cues present gentler variations on it, with others having a slightly incongruous spaghetti western flavour.
The face of a murderer?
Sleaze with a splash of giallo
This 1972 giallo from Leopoldo Savona is at times reminiscent of a sleazier hybrid of Four Flies on Grey Velvet and Spasmo, as a paranoiac psychodrama where motives are obscure and nobody, least of all Giorgio’s lawyers, with their penchant for mysterious telephone calls to film directors (whose latest project, La Matassa disfatta, is identified as a giallo) and certain members of the police, can be trusted.
Where the film differs from Four Flies on Grey Velvet is that we never know if Giorgio is in fact innocent of his wife’s murder until the end. The film opens with a subjective stalker cam shot entering her apartment, followed by a nervous-looking Giorgio exiting out the front door, donning his dark glasses and driving off, but there is no indication of the amount of time that has passed between the two images.
Sharing an isolated central location replete full of people acting strangely with Spasmo, La Morte scende leggera differs its more 'political' subtext, as we gradually learn fragments of the criminal conspiracy and how high up it goes. Crucially, however, this never causes the film to shift its focus, which always remains on Giorgio rather than the investigation slowly closing in on him.
Savona does a reasonable job of building atmosphere, countering the relative difficulty in empathising with Giorgio and most of the other characters on account of their general unpleasantness. One telling moment here is when Giorgio, Liz and Felleghy’s lawyer are driving to the hotel. As they come across an accident, with bodies strewn across the road, Giorgio’s instinctive response is to stop the car and going to help but the cooler-headed lawyer prevails: someone else will surely be along in a minute, and it’s best not to get involved in any case.
There’s some nice use of yellow within a number of the compositions, though the nightmare and flashback sequences are somewhat crudely rendered with colour filters and shock zooms predominating.
The obligatory women in mirrors shots
Tips for a murder suspect #1: Don't pick up the straight razor unless you intend to use it!
Most obviously, however, the filmmakers’ focus is on sleaze, with some gratuitous shower scenes featuring Viotti – not that one is complaining – and a love scene between she and Candelli that Savona amusingly intercuts with the porno loop playing on the 8mm projector that Giorgio had for whatever reason had the wherewithal to bring along.
Couples porn?
Then again, he and his associates are marked out as the loop’s producers, with Giorgio also commenting that Italy is one of the world’s leading producers of said material. (The famed porn director Lasse Braun, despite his Scandinavian sounding name, is in fact Italian and was born Alberto Ferro.)
Another splash of giallo, as an official inquires what's in the box
Mention must finally be made of the scoring, which comes courtesy of Lalo Gori and rock group the Mak Sigis Porter Ensemble. Though the Ensemble are credited only with the acid freak out title theme, which is enjoyable in its own right until the singing starts and then becomes enjoyable in a what-the-hell-does-that-mean sort of way, many of Gori’s cues present gentler variations on it, with others having a slightly incongruous spaghetti western flavour.
Sunday, 8 June 2008
Giallo: die farbe des todes
For those whose German is better than mine and weren't aware of this book:
Die italienische Filmindustrie war eine der umtriebigsten im Europa der 60er und 70er Jahre. Man folgte vielen Trends, entwickelte aber auch ureigene Themen wie den Italo-Western oder den Sandalenfilm. Und natürlich auch den Giallo.
Dabei fällt es schwer, den Giallo als Genre abzugrenzen und ihm ein Gesicht zu verleihen. Am leichtesten ist es natürlich, wenn man ihn auf den Killerfilm reduziert, wie er durch Mario Bavas BLUTIGE SEIDE und den frühen Filmen von Dario Argento wie DAS GEHEIMNIS DER SCHWARZEN HANDSCHUHE populär wurde. Doch der Giallo kann und muss mehr sein als nur ein gängiges Muster, das wieder und wieder genutzt wird.Und tatsächlich ist er das auch, denn der Giallo, der seine Hochzeit von Anfang bis Mitte der 70er Jahre erlebte, ist eine Filmgattung, bei der viel zusammen kam: Sex und Gewalt. Doch nicht nur das. Es sind auch die aus heutiger Sicht schrillen Kostüme und Frisuren, die zum Kultfaktor beitragen. Und nicht zu vergessen natürlich die oftmals herausragende Musik, die den Zuschauer direkt ins Geschehen hineinzieht.
Dieses Buch zeichnet den Werdegang den Aufstieg und Fall des Giallo in chronologischer Reihenfolge mit mehr als 200 Filmen und unzähligen Abbildungen nach.
Byleth – il demone dell'incesto
Having been away from the family estate and his beloved sister Barbara for a year, handsome young nobleman Lionello (Mark Damon) returns to a shock: Barbara (Claudia Gravy) has married the older Giordano (Aldo Bufi Landi) in his absence.
The issue is more than one of brotherly concern; in any case Giordano is a suitable husband in every respect, cultured, considerate and embodying all the virtues of his class. Rather, it is that Lionello, whose nerves have always been somewhat fragile in any case, has incestuous longings towards his sister.
It may be merely a coincidence, but Lionello's return also coincides with a series of murders, beginning with a prostitute, Dolores, in town and continuing with one of the family's own servants, the maid Gisella. In both cases the killer's modus operandi is the same, the victim having been killed by a precise strike to the neck from a distinctive three bladed weapon.
Coupled with a number of other signs – the sight of a white horse, a tremor – it leads the local priest to suspect that a demon, Byleth, may be abroad on the earth and in their midst.
Lionello the voyeur #1
Meanwhile, Barbara and Giordano have invited the beautiful Floriana (Silvana Pomilli) to come stay with them, in the hope that a romance with Lionello might blossom or, if not, that her presence will at least keep him from brooding on things...
Lionello the voyeur #2
Written and directed by the enigmatic Leopoldo Savona, Byleth – il demone dell'incesto is one of the more ususual possession-themed films to come out of Italy in the 1970s on account of its historical rather than contemporary setting and the nature of its victim. Both these distinctions can presumably be put down not only to the film's pre-Exorcist origins but also its somewhat more aspirational nature, whereby the sex side of the sex and horror material is often framed in the context of Lionello's sickness and voyeurism in a way that makes us aware of our own 'sinfulness'.
Lionello the voyeur #3
The evocation of period detail is effective, with some nice details like the investigator's suspicion that the prostitute's murderer may be one of the Carbonari or Barbara's discussion of the thrill of travelling on a fast-moving train and of visiting Venice and Rome.
Thought at times reminiscent of Bava's Kill Baby Kill, with Savona also using zooms and close-ups to underscore key moments, the film lacks the same kind of clash between modern and traditional beliefs, with the idea of demonic possession being accepted more matter of factly after it is raised – a distinction that can be attributed to the film's being set 70 or 80 years earlier, at a point in history where the connections between madness and religion were that bit stronger, even among the educated elite.
Although Byleth also lacks Kill Baby Kill's more obviously expressive use of colour, its own colour palette seems somewhat worked-through, with natural shades predominanting to cloak many scenes in a sepia tone equally suggestive of hazy nostalgia of Barbara and Lionello's childhood games and the suffocating weight of the same past in the present where they are now forbidden, taboo.
From innocent play to something more serious in two minutes – Lionello and Barbara
Another obvious point of comparison is Joe D'Amato's undeniably muddled but haunting Death Smiles on a Murderer, with which the film shares its incest theme and that general air of decadence and malaise.
Giallo or gothic imagery?
Though perhaps inconsistently directed overall – a set-piece friendly duel turned competitive between Lionello and Giordano is full of dynamic camera movements and cutting, whereas expository scenes tend to remain bland and by the numbers – and lacking in a strong detective subplot or central character to engage the less committed viewer, Byleth works nicely when taken as a mood piece in which atmosphere is prioritised over shock and suspense.
The issue is more than one of brotherly concern; in any case Giordano is a suitable husband in every respect, cultured, considerate and embodying all the virtues of his class. Rather, it is that Lionello, whose nerves have always been somewhat fragile in any case, has incestuous longings towards his sister.
It may be merely a coincidence, but Lionello's return also coincides with a series of murders, beginning with a prostitute, Dolores, in town and continuing with one of the family's own servants, the maid Gisella. In both cases the killer's modus operandi is the same, the victim having been killed by a precise strike to the neck from a distinctive three bladed weapon.
Coupled with a number of other signs – the sight of a white horse, a tremor – it leads the local priest to suspect that a demon, Byleth, may be abroad on the earth and in their midst.
Lionello the voyeur #1
Meanwhile, Barbara and Giordano have invited the beautiful Floriana (Silvana Pomilli) to come stay with them, in the hope that a romance with Lionello might blossom or, if not, that her presence will at least keep him from brooding on things...
Lionello the voyeur #2
Written and directed by the enigmatic Leopoldo Savona, Byleth – il demone dell'incesto is one of the more ususual possession-themed films to come out of Italy in the 1970s on account of its historical rather than contemporary setting and the nature of its victim. Both these distinctions can presumably be put down not only to the film's pre-Exorcist origins but also its somewhat more aspirational nature, whereby the sex side of the sex and horror material is often framed in the context of Lionello's sickness and voyeurism in a way that makes us aware of our own 'sinfulness'.
Lionello the voyeur #3
The evocation of period detail is effective, with some nice details like the investigator's suspicion that the prostitute's murderer may be one of the Carbonari or Barbara's discussion of the thrill of travelling on a fast-moving train and of visiting Venice and Rome.
Thought at times reminiscent of Bava's Kill Baby Kill, with Savona also using zooms and close-ups to underscore key moments, the film lacks the same kind of clash between modern and traditional beliefs, with the idea of demonic possession being accepted more matter of factly after it is raised – a distinction that can be attributed to the film's being set 70 or 80 years earlier, at a point in history where the connections between madness and religion were that bit stronger, even among the educated elite.
Although Byleth also lacks Kill Baby Kill's more obviously expressive use of colour, its own colour palette seems somewhat worked-through, with natural shades predominanting to cloak many scenes in a sepia tone equally suggestive of hazy nostalgia of Barbara and Lionello's childhood games and the suffocating weight of the same past in the present where they are now forbidden, taboo.
From innocent play to something more serious in two minutes – Lionello and Barbara
Another obvious point of comparison is Joe D'Amato's undeniably muddled but haunting Death Smiles on a Murderer, with which the film shares its incest theme and that general air of decadence and malaise.
Giallo or gothic imagery?
Though perhaps inconsistently directed overall – a set-piece friendly duel turned competitive between Lionello and Giordano is full of dynamic camera movements and cutting, whereas expository scenes tend to remain bland and by the numbers – and lacking in a strong detective subplot or central character to engage the less committed viewer, Byleth works nicely when taken as a mood piece in which atmosphere is prioritised over shock and suspense.
Circuito chiuso
We open with the titles unfolding over a somewhat indistinct image of a gun, aggressively pointing at us. The gun proves to be that of Guiliano Gemma on a poster for the western Day of Anger and its location that of a provincial cinema about to open for the day.
The audience gradually filters in, a variegated assortment of everyday types, and the film begins; genre buffs may care to note, however, that the clips we see are from A Sky Full of Stars.
Just prior to the climactic showdown a middle-aged man comes in and sits down near the front, next to a couple and obscuring the view of the man behind him who, after trying to adjust his position, moves to another seat.
A shot rings out and the middle-aged man falls dead...
The doors are locked and the police called in to investigate. They have suspects and opportunity amongst the audience, but no weapon nor motive. A reconstruction of the scene thus seems the way forward, with one of the cinema staff sitting in for the dead man. Incredibly, he too is shot dead.
Yet this is not as incredible as the resolution to the mystery which will ultimately transpire as a sociologist, in attendance to study the audience rather than the film, begins to make the leaps of logic required to solve the mystery...
[Spoiler allusions follow]
Posters for Profondo rosso, Four Flies on Grey Velvet, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage and The Perfume of the Lady in Black are nice, telling, touches
Before Demons and The Purple Rose of Cairo (both 1985) there was Circuito chiuso.
But before Circuito chiuso there were L' Arrivée d'un train à La Ciotat (1896) and The Great Train Robbery (1902).
In the Lumiere brothers' actualite a train arrived at a station. Not being aware of the difference between real and reel life, members of the film's audience apparently panicked as the train advanced upon them.
By the time of Edwin S Porter's proto-western, meanwhile, it was possible for the filmmaker to include an image of one of the robbers pointing his gun directly at the audience, an act of aggression that, like the rest of the narrative, assumed an element of cine-literacy on the part of the spectator. He or she had to read the film image as such, and neither recoil nor – in the case of any actual cowboys in the audience – return fire. (Goodfellas' closing image, of Tommy's return from the dead, is a nod to Porter's film.)
Giuliano Gemma in the film within the film
We tend, that is, to forget that film images and our ability to read them are cultural rather than natural phenomena. This is the point made by political critics of mainstream cinema, though too often they denied it as having any transformative or consciousness-raising potential.
Yet this is what Circuito chiuso does. It is, in its own way, an extremely subversive film for a Italian thriller made from 1978, in presenting cinema and the fantasies it encourages as dangerous.
We have to remember that the 1970s saw the large scale domestication of Italian social life, with television replacing cinema as the predominant visual medium. While this process echoed that which had already occurred in the US and UK in previous decades (a large part of the reason behind the spaghetti western boom of the 1960s was, after all the decline in western film production as Hollywood turned its attentions to the small screen) it was also encouraged by the endemic terrorism and street crime of the anni di piombi. Put simply, going out to the cinema came to be perceived as an inherently risky activity.
Returning the gaze; who is the character actor on the far left of the first picture?
Maybe you felt safer once in the reassuring darkness of the auditorium and / or when watching a poliziotto that affirmed, however ambiguously, that justice could still be done and that one man could still triumph, even if only mythically and symbolically, over the system.
But what if the auditorium becomes a site for murder? (This is a theme also seen, in a even more threatening realist guise in the excellent giallo-politico / poliziotto Io ho paura, where a porno theatre is chosen as a site for assassination, all the better to impugn the reputation of the intended victim.) What if the film ceases to offer comfort but instead threatens by exposing the dangers inherent in our emotional and libidinal investments in the image?
Nor, moreover, is it simply a question of opposing cinema to other media here: as the authorities bring in televisions for this captive audience to watch as they are kept in the theatre overnight, the TV news only fanning the flames by showing student demonstrators clashing with the police.
A Baudrillardian horror film?
It's the ubique media daemon, where there is no escape from the circuit of cameras and images, recording, representing and reflexively constructing an arguably increasingly virtual unreality.
And, ultimately, it's the nightmare that all our ontologies and epistemologies are no defence against the absurdity and chaos of the universe...
The audience gradually filters in, a variegated assortment of everyday types, and the film begins; genre buffs may care to note, however, that the clips we see are from A Sky Full of Stars.
Just prior to the climactic showdown a middle-aged man comes in and sits down near the front, next to a couple and obscuring the view of the man behind him who, after trying to adjust his position, moves to another seat.
A shot rings out and the middle-aged man falls dead...
The doors are locked and the police called in to investigate. They have suspects and opportunity amongst the audience, but no weapon nor motive. A reconstruction of the scene thus seems the way forward, with one of the cinema staff sitting in for the dead man. Incredibly, he too is shot dead.
Yet this is not as incredible as the resolution to the mystery which will ultimately transpire as a sociologist, in attendance to study the audience rather than the film, begins to make the leaps of logic required to solve the mystery...
[Spoiler allusions follow]
Posters for Profondo rosso, Four Flies on Grey Velvet, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage and The Perfume of the Lady in Black are nice, telling, touches
Before Demons and The Purple Rose of Cairo (both 1985) there was Circuito chiuso.
But before Circuito chiuso there were L' Arrivée d'un train à La Ciotat (1896) and The Great Train Robbery (1902).
In the Lumiere brothers' actualite a train arrived at a station. Not being aware of the difference between real and reel life, members of the film's audience apparently panicked as the train advanced upon them.
By the time of Edwin S Porter's proto-western, meanwhile, it was possible for the filmmaker to include an image of one of the robbers pointing his gun directly at the audience, an act of aggression that, like the rest of the narrative, assumed an element of cine-literacy on the part of the spectator. He or she had to read the film image as such, and neither recoil nor – in the case of any actual cowboys in the audience – return fire. (Goodfellas' closing image, of Tommy's return from the dead, is a nod to Porter's film.)
Giuliano Gemma in the film within the film
We tend, that is, to forget that film images and our ability to read them are cultural rather than natural phenomena. This is the point made by political critics of mainstream cinema, though too often they denied it as having any transformative or consciousness-raising potential.
Yet this is what Circuito chiuso does. It is, in its own way, an extremely subversive film for a Italian thriller made from 1978, in presenting cinema and the fantasies it encourages as dangerous.
We have to remember that the 1970s saw the large scale domestication of Italian social life, with television replacing cinema as the predominant visual medium. While this process echoed that which had already occurred in the US and UK in previous decades (a large part of the reason behind the spaghetti western boom of the 1960s was, after all the decline in western film production as Hollywood turned its attentions to the small screen) it was also encouraged by the endemic terrorism and street crime of the anni di piombi. Put simply, going out to the cinema came to be perceived as an inherently risky activity.
Returning the gaze; who is the character actor on the far left of the first picture?
Maybe you felt safer once in the reassuring darkness of the auditorium and / or when watching a poliziotto that affirmed, however ambiguously, that justice could still be done and that one man could still triumph, even if only mythically and symbolically, over the system.
But what if the auditorium becomes a site for murder? (This is a theme also seen, in a even more threatening realist guise in the excellent giallo-politico / poliziotto Io ho paura, where a porno theatre is chosen as a site for assassination, all the better to impugn the reputation of the intended victim.) What if the film ceases to offer comfort but instead threatens by exposing the dangers inherent in our emotional and libidinal investments in the image?
Nor, moreover, is it simply a question of opposing cinema to other media here: as the authorities bring in televisions for this captive audience to watch as they are kept in the theatre overnight, the TV news only fanning the flames by showing student demonstrators clashing with the police.
A Baudrillardian horror film?
It's the ubique media daemon, where there is no escape from the circuit of cameras and images, recording, representing and reflexively constructing an arguably increasingly virtual unreality.
And, ultimately, it's the nightmare that all our ontologies and epistemologies are no defence against the absurdity and chaos of the universe...
Saturday, 7 June 2008
Delitto d'autore
A group of the great and the good gather at the Countess's estate for the awarding of an art prize. No sooner have they assembled than there is a telephone call, indicating that death will result should the prize be awarded. The group ignores this warning, believing it to be a hoax.
The killer is on the phone, as per usual
The first indication that it is something more comes during a spot of clay pigeon shooting, when one of the participants levels his or her shotgun at the Countess but is thankfully prevented from pulling the trigger by the intercession of another body before the intended target. (There is a nice rapid fire montage of the characters/suspects here.)
Later, after a spot of disco dancing, the countess's niece Melina senses someone enter her room, with a pair of black gloves left at the scene appearing to confirm that someone is indeed after her.
Sometime later, Melina is kidnapped. Then, before the group can decide on a course of action the countess herself is murdered and a valuable old painting stolen...
The police arrive and begin to investigate the case; before the case is closed we will have another couple of characters being blown up by a bomb planted in their car and a third falling to their death in the time-honoured manner...
It wouldn't be a 70s film without some bad wallpaper
Written and directed by Mario Sabatini, this 1974 giallo is the kind of utterly routine production that could probably have just about been made on auto-pilot, with the other checked boxes including some subjective killer-cam; drugs and blackmail subplots slightly reminiscent of Blood and Black Lace or Crazy Desires of a Murderer (a useful reference point, although Delitto d'autore lacks its distinctive languid / morbid atmosphere); a party-cum-orgy; a priest whose spare set of vestments are found in an incriminating place, and some lesbianic sunscreen application by the pool.
It's a harmless way to spend 70 odd minutes – a runtime suggestive either of aspirations towards being little more than programme filler anyway or extensive cuts to the more graphic and exploitative material – but little beyond this, although the cast, with Pier Paolo Capponi, Krista Nell, Sylva Koscina and Luigi Pistilli in prominent roles, is of surprisingly high quality.
The obligatory stairwell shot and dummy plunge
The one moment of inspiration is telling, when we see one of the characters donning a balaclava prior to attempting to steal the painting and being interrupted by the Countess: he at least cannot be the murderer, unless the filmmakers are playing a triple-bluff.
I won't spoil it for you by saying whether this is the case or not, but let's just say that anyone expecting a lost giallo classic is likely to be disappointed.
Once again, thanks to the fine people at Cinemageddon and especially the fansubbers for the opportunity to see another rarity.
The killer is on the phone, as per usual
The first indication that it is something more comes during a spot of clay pigeon shooting, when one of the participants levels his or her shotgun at the Countess but is thankfully prevented from pulling the trigger by the intercession of another body before the intended target. (There is a nice rapid fire montage of the characters/suspects here.)
Later, after a spot of disco dancing, the countess's niece Melina senses someone enter her room, with a pair of black gloves left at the scene appearing to confirm that someone is indeed after her.
Sometime later, Melina is kidnapped. Then, before the group can decide on a course of action the countess herself is murdered and a valuable old painting stolen...
The police arrive and begin to investigate the case; before the case is closed we will have another couple of characters being blown up by a bomb planted in their car and a third falling to their death in the time-honoured manner...
It wouldn't be a 70s film without some bad wallpaper
Written and directed by Mario Sabatini, this 1974 giallo is the kind of utterly routine production that could probably have just about been made on auto-pilot, with the other checked boxes including some subjective killer-cam; drugs and blackmail subplots slightly reminiscent of Blood and Black Lace or Crazy Desires of a Murderer (a useful reference point, although Delitto d'autore lacks its distinctive languid / morbid atmosphere); a party-cum-orgy; a priest whose spare set of vestments are found in an incriminating place, and some lesbianic sunscreen application by the pool.
It's a harmless way to spend 70 odd minutes – a runtime suggestive either of aspirations towards being little more than programme filler anyway or extensive cuts to the more graphic and exploitative material – but little beyond this, although the cast, with Pier Paolo Capponi, Krista Nell, Sylva Koscina and Luigi Pistilli in prominent roles, is of surprisingly high quality.
The obligatory stairwell shot and dummy plunge
The one moment of inspiration is telling, when we see one of the characters donning a balaclava prior to attempting to steal the painting and being interrupted by the Countess: he at least cannot be the murderer, unless the filmmakers are playing a triple-bluff.
I won't spoil it for you by saying whether this is the case or not, but let's just say that anyone expecting a lost giallo classic is likely to be disappointed.
Once again, thanks to the fine people at Cinemageddon and especially the fansubbers for the opportunity to see another rarity.
Nella stretta morsa del ragno / The Web of the Spider
Along with the likes of Hitchcock's The Man who Knew too Much and Haneke's Funny Games, this is one of those rare instances of a director remaking their own film. The director in question is Antonio Margheriti / Anthony Dawson and the original is Castle of Blood.
The story, by Bruno Corbucci, is simplicity itself: Sceptical journalist Alan Foster (Anthony Franciosa), follows Edgar Allan Poe (Klaus Kinski) to the UK in search of an interview, refuses to believe that Poe's tales of mystery and imagination are in fact reportage of actual occurrences, wagers with Lord Blackwood to spend a night in his haunted castle to prove that there are no such things as ghosts, and comes to regret this decision somewhat by the time the night is over.
The sceptical enquirer
The tortured artist who knows it is all real
Like its predecessor, Web of the Spider is somewhat slow moving but undeniably atmospheric, with plenty of cobweb-filled rooms, billowing curtains, creepy portraits and single candles illuminating it all as if they were spotlights. It also has that distinctive blend of the physical and metaphysical, with vampires who only materialise one night of the year; a Beyond-like place out of the laws of space and time; and, more regrettably, the killing of a snake as a means of demonstrating a point about the nature of life and death, acknowledged even within the diegesis as somewhat spurious.
A clock stopping in a haunted house is never a good sign...
Nor are women identical to those in old portraits...
Nor balls in previously empty rooms...
The chief difference is that the film is in colour rather than monochrome. While a commercial necessity by 1971, it is debatable whether it adds terribly much. Indeed, in that Margheriti seems to here avoid more stylised colour effects, with almost everything in the same drab shades, it's possible that it actually detracts by giving the film a more realistic veneer throughout. Though this may be intentional, as a means of conveying that Blackwood Castle and its inhabitants seem normal to the reporter until it is too late, one can't think it would have been aesthetically preferable to establish greater contrast between real and fantastical through a more expressive use of contrasting colour regimes.
Having said this, it's also equally possible that this general drabness is a consequence of the poor quality of the version of the film under review here, particularly given that the near contemporaneous Seven Deaths in the Cat's Eye features a number of beautiful colour effects.
The panning and scanning, most evident within what would otherwise be two or three shots as an awkward telecine whip pan moves from one character to another, is particularly bad here, making it even more difficult to fairly judge the film.
One does, nevertheless, hesitantly get the impression that Web of the Spider comes across as somewhat out of time and place itself, as a comparatively tame and suggestive 1960s gothic made in the more explicit 1970s. This said, the pervasive sense of deja-vu one gets from having seen its predecessor also adds to the experience by re-enforcing the selfsame theme of fatalism that already runs through the film.
The changes in casting between original and remake are both for the better and worse. Klaus Kinski of course makes for an excellent haunted Poe, though his contributions is confined to the framing narrative(s). Franciosa is an agreeable protagonist, effectively conveying the journalist's smug self-confidence in the initial scenes followed by its progressive undermining and ultimate collapse. The female beauties, including Michele Mercier and Karin Field, are suitably fatally attractive, though inevitably comparatively lacking in those unique sado-masochistic, victimiser-victim and pain-pleasure hacceities that Barbara Steele brought, consciously or otherwise, to her role in the original.
A cleaned up DVD release would certainly be very welcome.
The story, by Bruno Corbucci, is simplicity itself: Sceptical journalist Alan Foster (Anthony Franciosa), follows Edgar Allan Poe (Klaus Kinski) to the UK in search of an interview, refuses to believe that Poe's tales of mystery and imagination are in fact reportage of actual occurrences, wagers with Lord Blackwood to spend a night in his haunted castle to prove that there are no such things as ghosts, and comes to regret this decision somewhat by the time the night is over.
The sceptical enquirer
The tortured artist who knows it is all real
Like its predecessor, Web of the Spider is somewhat slow moving but undeniably atmospheric, with plenty of cobweb-filled rooms, billowing curtains, creepy portraits and single candles illuminating it all as if they were spotlights. It also has that distinctive blend of the physical and metaphysical, with vampires who only materialise one night of the year; a Beyond-like place out of the laws of space and time; and, more regrettably, the killing of a snake as a means of demonstrating a point about the nature of life and death, acknowledged even within the diegesis as somewhat spurious.
A clock stopping in a haunted house is never a good sign...
Nor are women identical to those in old portraits...
Nor balls in previously empty rooms...
The chief difference is that the film is in colour rather than monochrome. While a commercial necessity by 1971, it is debatable whether it adds terribly much. Indeed, in that Margheriti seems to here avoid more stylised colour effects, with almost everything in the same drab shades, it's possible that it actually detracts by giving the film a more realistic veneer throughout. Though this may be intentional, as a means of conveying that Blackwood Castle and its inhabitants seem normal to the reporter until it is too late, one can't think it would have been aesthetically preferable to establish greater contrast between real and fantastical through a more expressive use of contrasting colour regimes.
Having said this, it's also equally possible that this general drabness is a consequence of the poor quality of the version of the film under review here, particularly given that the near contemporaneous Seven Deaths in the Cat's Eye features a number of beautiful colour effects.
The panning and scanning, most evident within what would otherwise be two or three shots as an awkward telecine whip pan moves from one character to another, is particularly bad here, making it even more difficult to fairly judge the film.
One does, nevertheless, hesitantly get the impression that Web of the Spider comes across as somewhat out of time and place itself, as a comparatively tame and suggestive 1960s gothic made in the more explicit 1970s. This said, the pervasive sense of deja-vu one gets from having seen its predecessor also adds to the experience by re-enforcing the selfsame theme of fatalism that already runs through the film.
The changes in casting between original and remake are both for the better and worse. Klaus Kinski of course makes for an excellent haunted Poe, though his contributions is confined to the framing narrative(s). Franciosa is an agreeable protagonist, effectively conveying the journalist's smug self-confidence in the initial scenes followed by its progressive undermining and ultimate collapse. The female beauties, including Michele Mercier and Karin Field, are suitably fatally attractive, though inevitably comparatively lacking in those unique sado-masochistic, victimiser-victim and pain-pleasure hacceities that Barbara Steele brought, consciously or otherwise, to her role in the original.
A cleaned up DVD release would certainly be very welcome.
Friday, 6 June 2008
Vivi o, preferibilmente, morti / Alive or Preferably Dead / Sundance Cassidy and Butch the Kid
This Duccio Tessari western reunites the director with his Ringo star Giuliano Gemma to intermittently amusing if ultimately decidedly less noteworthy than these and their other collaborations together.
Gemma plays city slicker Monty Mulligan (his forename presumably a reference to Gemma's frequent Anglophone billing as Montgomery Wood) whose financial worries may be over if he can find his brother Ted, played by Nino Benvenuti, out west and get him to agree to their spending six months together in order to fulfil the criteria of their uncle's will and collect $300,000.
The first obstacle is that there's no love lost between the two brothers with their very different lifestyles and attitudes. The second through umpteenth come via a series of episodic adventures with outlaw Jim and his gang and some bumbling attempts at criminality by the brothers themselves, most notably when they kidnap banker's daughter Scarlett only to discover that he's quite glad to be rid of her and is in no hurry to pay the ransom. (Cue invitable “I don't give a damn” punchline.)
Thought distributed in the US under the title Sundance Cassidy and Butch the Kid and the more defensive please don't sue us tagline of “Don't confuse them with the other two,” one suspects that the more immediate model for the film and reference point for “the other two” were Terence Hill and Bud Spencer, with the brothers relationship and their slapstick antics more remiscent of the Italian than Hollywood caper western.
This is most apparent in the resolution of the bankers daughter subplot: whereas in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid the broadly comparable Katherine Ross character is there to attempt to refute the homosexual or homosocial hints that the two men might be something other than conventional red-blooded heterosexuals (how successfully it does so being another matter, in that the selfsame need to make a point of demonstrating their heterosexuality and masculinity also inevitably raises these other spectres) here we get a more juvenile, non-sexual, fraternal resolution to the whole scenario that seems to suggest that boys will be boys but little more. (Unless, of course, one wants to read the film as some sort of paean to homosexual incest.)
The film's main asset beyond Gemma's irrepressible charm, and the sense that no-one – including Tessari or such reliable supporting players as George Rigaud, who plays the wily old banker; Cris Huerta, as comic book sadist bandit; and Sydne Rome, as Scarlett – is taking things all that seriously anyway, is the operatic (well, horse opera) chorus provided by Italian country and western duo John and Wayne, whose yee-ha ballads provide an amusing commentary on the action throughout and a nice counterpoint to Gianni Ferrio's more conventional themes. (John and Wayne are also featured in the Frank Wolff narrated documentary / promo on the Italian western that was included as one of the extras in the old Blue Underground Spaghetti Western Box Set; they were a real duo of Italian country and western fans, not just an invention of this film.)
Gemma plays city slicker Monty Mulligan (his forename presumably a reference to Gemma's frequent Anglophone billing as Montgomery Wood) whose financial worries may be over if he can find his brother Ted, played by Nino Benvenuti, out west and get him to agree to their spending six months together in order to fulfil the criteria of their uncle's will and collect $300,000.
The first obstacle is that there's no love lost between the two brothers with their very different lifestyles and attitudes. The second through umpteenth come via a series of episodic adventures with outlaw Jim and his gang and some bumbling attempts at criminality by the brothers themselves, most notably when they kidnap banker's daughter Scarlett only to discover that he's quite glad to be rid of her and is in no hurry to pay the ransom. (Cue invitable “I don't give a damn” punchline.)
Thought distributed in the US under the title Sundance Cassidy and Butch the Kid and the more defensive please don't sue us tagline of “Don't confuse them with the other two,” one suspects that the more immediate model for the film and reference point for “the other two” were Terence Hill and Bud Spencer, with the brothers relationship and their slapstick antics more remiscent of the Italian than Hollywood caper western.
This is most apparent in the resolution of the bankers daughter subplot: whereas in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid the broadly comparable Katherine Ross character is there to attempt to refute the homosexual or homosocial hints that the two men might be something other than conventional red-blooded heterosexuals (how successfully it does so being another matter, in that the selfsame need to make a point of demonstrating their heterosexuality and masculinity also inevitably raises these other spectres) here we get a more juvenile, non-sexual, fraternal resolution to the whole scenario that seems to suggest that boys will be boys but little more. (Unless, of course, one wants to read the film as some sort of paean to homosexual incest.)
The film's main asset beyond Gemma's irrepressible charm, and the sense that no-one – including Tessari or such reliable supporting players as George Rigaud, who plays the wily old banker; Cris Huerta, as comic book sadist bandit; and Sydne Rome, as Scarlett – is taking things all that seriously anyway, is the operatic (well, horse opera) chorus provided by Italian country and western duo John and Wayne, whose yee-ha ballads provide an amusing commentary on the action throughout and a nice counterpoint to Gianni Ferrio's more conventional themes. (John and Wayne are also featured in the Frank Wolff narrated documentary / promo on the Italian western that was included as one of the extras in the old Blue Underground Spaghetti Western Box Set; they were a real duo of Italian country and western fans, not just an invention of this film.)
Confessione di un commissario di polizia al procuratore della repubblica / Confessions of a Police Captain
Commissioner Bonavia has hygiene-obsessed mafioso Lipuma release from the insane asylum where he has been incarcerated for the past six years knowing fullwell that Lipuma's first action once released will be to make an attempt on his former rival Dubrosio's life.
Indeed this is what Bonavia, who is pursuing his own personal vendetta against Dubrosio is counting on; he knows that there is no point in pursuing legal channels when just about the entirety of the Palmero administration and judiciary is in league with Dubrosio.
The introductory image – an unidentified hand groping around in the dark
Unfortunately for Bonavia, someone tips Dubrosio off, so that the only victims of the ensuing shoot-out are Lipuma and three of Dubrosio's hired guns – all conveniently from out of town.
Public prosecutor Traini is assigned to investigate alongside Bonavia, and soon comes to realise that his erstwhile colleague knows more than he is letting on.
But beyond this motives and allegiances remain obscure. Bonavia suspects that the idealistic young prosecutor may already be in someone's pocket or, if not, will soon be offered the chance to further his personal position at the expense of the people and the law he professes to represent without prejudice or preference, while Traini cannot be sure that Bonavia is not pursuing Dubrosio on behalf of one of his rivals. And even if they can overcome their mutual suspicions and differences, it is still uncertain whether there is anyone else they can trust.
Images of the figures behind bars recur throughout, creating a sense of the characters' entrapment and inability to escape their world
Confessions of a Police Captain is, quite simply, an excellent film that accomplishes everything it sets out to do: to wit to entertain, to inform – specifically about the collusion of civil and criminal societies in 1960s and 1970s Sicily around construction and development projects – and to convey a complex reality in an accessible way.
The film's three pillars are Damiano Damiani's writing and direction and the impressive central performances of Martin Balsam and Franco Nero in the roles of Bonavia and Traini.
The writing is of the quality where merely recording the actors reciting it would have been sufficient in itself for a less conscientious filmmaker. An illustrative sample exchange, taken from a point late on where Bonavia and Traini have each begun to covertly investigate one another:
“You never experienced that, right? You never thought that you were a kind of executor, looking after the interests of whoever happens to be in power?”
“A cop who's an anarchist. You're a living contradiction Bonavia.”
“Haven't you ever had any doubts about enforcing unjust laws?”
“It's not for us to judge the law...”
“... But to enforce it. Yes I knew you would say that. But let's say tomorrow the law stated that we had to use torture.”
“Don't be absurd.”
“Why? It used to be the law, it could be the law again. It's only a matter of principle. Then you would use torture if the law said so.”
“You're using an extreme example!”
“All right then, what's your limit? How much injustice would you stand for to satisfy the people we work for?”
“If you go on, I'll arrest you!”
“I was only referring to Rizzo's ideas...”
Bonavia puts up his hands to indicate his innocence of sedition, that he is only referring to Rizzo's ideas, in an ironic mirroring of a gesture earlier made by Dubrosio when one of his gunmen shot the selfsame union organiser.
If Damiano avoids more visible stylistic flourishes, he nevertheless expertly conveys a pervasive sense of confusion and distrust with his mise en scène with deep shadows and recurring use of bars as a motif, along with preferring to gradually fill in details rather than lay it all out for us in an obvious manner.
Thus, for example, we open with a shot of hands feeling along a wall in the dark, introducing the characters in the asylum without quite knowing what it is, who they are, what they are doing there or why. Likewise, the small, easy ignored or missed detail of another of the patients / inmates (for it is not clear that Lipuma is actually certifiably insane) requesting that Bonavia talk to him later assumes a deeper significance later as, when repeated on Bonavia's subsequent visit to the place with Triani it suggests that he has been there before. Triani thus gets the wrong clue for the right solution.
There is also an appealing lack of resolution to the whole thing that neatly provides an agreeable balance between the needs of the vernacular audience to see the bad guys receive some sort of punishment and of Damiano, as a politically committed filmmaker, to convey the ongoing struggle against organised, systematically endemic corruption and criminality. The individual hero prepared to take a stand for the good of the collective is similarly granted a degree of ambiguity: necessary, but also dangerous in what he implies.
As with The Most Beautiful Wife Damiani brilliantly captures the complexities and contradictions of Sicilian life and the difficulties faced by the Marxist filmmaker – as “organic intellectual,” in the Gramsian sense – in attempting to represent and reach a population brought up to understand that the well-being and honour of the family were far more important than any wider notions of class solidarity.
It is, we might say, Marxism's version of the free rider and prisoner's dilemma problems: If the benefits of political action will accrue to me because of my position as a member of a certain class why should I as a rational individual take the risks involved in this selfsame action that will bring them about, when they are considerable for me and mine? Alternatively, if these benefits only accrue to the loyal members of the party and its vanguard, isn't there then the risk of becoming another small, narrowly self-interested group like the others? (Francesco Rosi's Hands Over the City is also recommended viewing in this regard.)
The scenes where the is most clearly conveyed are the flashback ones involving Rizzo, the Communist Party Union organiser from the same village as Bonavia, whose valiant attempts to encourage his people to stand together against the mafia meet with predictable indifference and consequences.
The face of challenge and defiance – Rizzo
Rizzo also understands the rules of this world better than almost anyone else in the film. Having been shot by an unseen, unidentified gunman after publically challenging Dubrosio, the police do nothing. He thus lies bleeding, declining to be taken away until the mafioso and his men have departed, causing Dubrosio to lose face and transforming an apparent defeat into a kind of victory. (“That episode made Rizzo a hero, only being a hero isn't always an asset.”)
The PCI HQ, with its heroes and martyrs
The greatest shame of all meanwhile to the critics who rejected the film and others like it for being conventionally well-made, under the mistaken belief that radical form necessarily equated to radical content, while largely ignoring the question of whether such films ever possessed any wider appeal beyond their own circle.
Damiani, who started his directorial career in the neo-realist period with a documentary, La Banda d'Affori, and frequently blended left wing politics with popular genres in his subsequent genre films, including the seminal Zapata western A Bullet for the General, surely knew his audience better than these elitist fellow-travellers abroad.
A world of shadowy figures and relationships
The other key political issue related to all this, strange though it may seem, is dubbing versus subtitling. To explain: for a film to be accessible to the vernacular audience, it has to be in the vernacular, i.e. the language of the people. As such, it was better that Confessions of a Police Captain be dubbed than subtitled for international release, so that it might reach the widest possible audience beyond the art cinema ghetto.
It's also curious that critics didn't seem to be in favour of dubbing as a device for popular films even when it could have helped to show up the arbitrariness of the sound-image relationship in cinema and presumably thereby encourage a more distanciatiated approach to the text, or somesuch. Instead, reading reviews from the time, all we typically get are references to “bad dubbing”.
Why, one wonders, were the same criteria not applied to subtitled Italian films which featured post-synchronised sound even in the Italian? Why did no-one complain that in a Fellini film the voices weren't 'fixed' in the manner that these evaluative criteria imply that they ought to have done? Presumably Fellini's intentions were recognised, but then why was intentionality recognised and accepted when the talk elsewhere was of the death of the author and the ideologically regressive implications of auteurism?
The two leads make for a fascinating contrast: the domestic star and the US character actor. While it's a combination found in countless Italian films of the period, there's something more about the way it works here, that the two men are present for what they could bring to the project as actors rather than as just marquee names for the domestic and international audiences. That Balsam was a character actor (once remarking that “the supporting role is always potentially the most interesting in a film”) rather than an immediately recognisable and typed star name – even if a B-list one – means that you approach his performance and character without much in the way of presuppositions, while he clearly seems to have relished the opportunity to get his teeth into a more substantive role than usual. Nero again excels at taking what could otherwise have been a routine figure and going the extra mile in giving him a more complex characterisation (see also his compromised hot-headed alcoholic journalist investigator in The Fifth Cord, or his post-Death Wish vigilante with doubts in Street Law.)
Those familiar with Luciano Catenacci from his appearances in Lenzi poliziotti may be surprised to see him here in the role of Dubrosio. Though required primarily to be the sneering villain – with this also perhaps the area where the films and Damiano's limits are more evident, insofar as there's perhaps too much of a personal mano a mano element to his conflict with Balsam, leading to a corresponding de-emphasis on the political and business aspects – he again impresses as someone capable of holding his own against more widely acknowledged performers, even when saddled with an awkward looking hairpiece in the flashback scenes.
A number of other familiar faces – Calisto Calisti, Arturo Dominici, Marlilu' Tolo – round out the cast effectively, while Riz Ortolani's powerful, melancholy score is another asset.
Highly recommended.
Indeed this is what Bonavia, who is pursuing his own personal vendetta against Dubrosio is counting on; he knows that there is no point in pursuing legal channels when just about the entirety of the Palmero administration and judiciary is in league with Dubrosio.
The introductory image – an unidentified hand groping around in the dark
Unfortunately for Bonavia, someone tips Dubrosio off, so that the only victims of the ensuing shoot-out are Lipuma and three of Dubrosio's hired guns – all conveniently from out of town.
Public prosecutor Traini is assigned to investigate alongside Bonavia, and soon comes to realise that his erstwhile colleague knows more than he is letting on.
But beyond this motives and allegiances remain obscure. Bonavia suspects that the idealistic young prosecutor may already be in someone's pocket or, if not, will soon be offered the chance to further his personal position at the expense of the people and the law he professes to represent without prejudice or preference, while Traini cannot be sure that Bonavia is not pursuing Dubrosio on behalf of one of his rivals. And even if they can overcome their mutual suspicions and differences, it is still uncertain whether there is anyone else they can trust.
Images of the figures behind bars recur throughout, creating a sense of the characters' entrapment and inability to escape their world
Confessions of a Police Captain is, quite simply, an excellent film that accomplishes everything it sets out to do: to wit to entertain, to inform – specifically about the collusion of civil and criminal societies in 1960s and 1970s Sicily around construction and development projects – and to convey a complex reality in an accessible way.
The film's three pillars are Damiano Damiani's writing and direction and the impressive central performances of Martin Balsam and Franco Nero in the roles of Bonavia and Traini.
The writing is of the quality where merely recording the actors reciting it would have been sufficient in itself for a less conscientious filmmaker. An illustrative sample exchange, taken from a point late on where Bonavia and Traini have each begun to covertly investigate one another:
“You never experienced that, right? You never thought that you were a kind of executor, looking after the interests of whoever happens to be in power?”
“A cop who's an anarchist. You're a living contradiction Bonavia.”
“Haven't you ever had any doubts about enforcing unjust laws?”
“It's not for us to judge the law...”
“... But to enforce it. Yes I knew you would say that. But let's say tomorrow the law stated that we had to use torture.”
“Don't be absurd.”
“Why? It used to be the law, it could be the law again. It's only a matter of principle. Then you would use torture if the law said so.”
“You're using an extreme example!”
“All right then, what's your limit? How much injustice would you stand for to satisfy the people we work for?”
“If you go on, I'll arrest you!”
“I was only referring to Rizzo's ideas...”
Bonavia puts up his hands to indicate his innocence of sedition, that he is only referring to Rizzo's ideas, in an ironic mirroring of a gesture earlier made by Dubrosio when one of his gunmen shot the selfsame union organiser.
If Damiano avoids more visible stylistic flourishes, he nevertheless expertly conveys a pervasive sense of confusion and distrust with his mise en scène with deep shadows and recurring use of bars as a motif, along with preferring to gradually fill in details rather than lay it all out for us in an obvious manner.
Thus, for example, we open with a shot of hands feeling along a wall in the dark, introducing the characters in the asylum without quite knowing what it is, who they are, what they are doing there or why. Likewise, the small, easy ignored or missed detail of another of the patients / inmates (for it is not clear that Lipuma is actually certifiably insane) requesting that Bonavia talk to him later assumes a deeper significance later as, when repeated on Bonavia's subsequent visit to the place with Triani it suggests that he has been there before. Triani thus gets the wrong clue for the right solution.
There is also an appealing lack of resolution to the whole thing that neatly provides an agreeable balance between the needs of the vernacular audience to see the bad guys receive some sort of punishment and of Damiano, as a politically committed filmmaker, to convey the ongoing struggle against organised, systematically endemic corruption and criminality. The individual hero prepared to take a stand for the good of the collective is similarly granted a degree of ambiguity: necessary, but also dangerous in what he implies.
As with The Most Beautiful Wife Damiani brilliantly captures the complexities and contradictions of Sicilian life and the difficulties faced by the Marxist filmmaker – as “organic intellectual,” in the Gramsian sense – in attempting to represent and reach a population brought up to understand that the well-being and honour of the family were far more important than any wider notions of class solidarity.
It is, we might say, Marxism's version of the free rider and prisoner's dilemma problems: If the benefits of political action will accrue to me because of my position as a member of a certain class why should I as a rational individual take the risks involved in this selfsame action that will bring them about, when they are considerable for me and mine? Alternatively, if these benefits only accrue to the loyal members of the party and its vanguard, isn't there then the risk of becoming another small, narrowly self-interested group like the others? (Francesco Rosi's Hands Over the City is also recommended viewing in this regard.)
The scenes where the is most clearly conveyed are the flashback ones involving Rizzo, the Communist Party Union organiser from the same village as Bonavia, whose valiant attempts to encourage his people to stand together against the mafia meet with predictable indifference and consequences.
The face of challenge and defiance – Rizzo
Rizzo also understands the rules of this world better than almost anyone else in the film. Having been shot by an unseen, unidentified gunman after publically challenging Dubrosio, the police do nothing. He thus lies bleeding, declining to be taken away until the mafioso and his men have departed, causing Dubrosio to lose face and transforming an apparent defeat into a kind of victory. (“That episode made Rizzo a hero, only being a hero isn't always an asset.”)
The PCI HQ, with its heroes and martyrs
The greatest shame of all meanwhile to the critics who rejected the film and others like it for being conventionally well-made, under the mistaken belief that radical form necessarily equated to radical content, while largely ignoring the question of whether such films ever possessed any wider appeal beyond their own circle.
Damiani, who started his directorial career in the neo-realist period with a documentary, La Banda d'Affori, and frequently blended left wing politics with popular genres in his subsequent genre films, including the seminal Zapata western A Bullet for the General, surely knew his audience better than these elitist fellow-travellers abroad.
A world of shadowy figures and relationships
The other key political issue related to all this, strange though it may seem, is dubbing versus subtitling. To explain: for a film to be accessible to the vernacular audience, it has to be in the vernacular, i.e. the language of the people. As such, it was better that Confessions of a Police Captain be dubbed than subtitled for international release, so that it might reach the widest possible audience beyond the art cinema ghetto.
It's also curious that critics didn't seem to be in favour of dubbing as a device for popular films even when it could have helped to show up the arbitrariness of the sound-image relationship in cinema and presumably thereby encourage a more distanciatiated approach to the text, or somesuch. Instead, reading reviews from the time, all we typically get are references to “bad dubbing”.
Why, one wonders, were the same criteria not applied to subtitled Italian films which featured post-synchronised sound even in the Italian? Why did no-one complain that in a Fellini film the voices weren't 'fixed' in the manner that these evaluative criteria imply that they ought to have done? Presumably Fellini's intentions were recognised, but then why was intentionality recognised and accepted when the talk elsewhere was of the death of the author and the ideologically regressive implications of auteurism?
The two leads make for a fascinating contrast: the domestic star and the US character actor. While it's a combination found in countless Italian films of the period, there's something more about the way it works here, that the two men are present for what they could bring to the project as actors rather than as just marquee names for the domestic and international audiences. That Balsam was a character actor (once remarking that “the supporting role is always potentially the most interesting in a film”) rather than an immediately recognisable and typed star name – even if a B-list one – means that you approach his performance and character without much in the way of presuppositions, while he clearly seems to have relished the opportunity to get his teeth into a more substantive role than usual. Nero again excels at taking what could otherwise have been a routine figure and going the extra mile in giving him a more complex characterisation (see also his compromised hot-headed alcoholic journalist investigator in The Fifth Cord, or his post-Death Wish vigilante with doubts in Street Law.)
Those familiar with Luciano Catenacci from his appearances in Lenzi poliziotti may be surprised to see him here in the role of Dubrosio. Though required primarily to be the sneering villain – with this also perhaps the area where the films and Damiano's limits are more evident, insofar as there's perhaps too much of a personal mano a mano element to his conflict with Balsam, leading to a corresponding de-emphasis on the political and business aspects – he again impresses as someone capable of holding his own against more widely acknowledged performers, even when saddled with an awkward looking hairpiece in the flashback scenes.
A number of other familiar faces – Calisto Calisti, Arturo Dominici, Marlilu' Tolo – round out the cast effectively, while Riz Ortolani's powerful, melancholy score is another asset.
Highly recommended.
Wednesday, 4 June 2008
Angeli bianchi... angeli neri / White Angel... Black Angel / The Satanists / Witchcraft 70
This is one of a number of mondo films made by Luigi Scattini, along with Sexy magico, L' Amore primitivo, Sweden: Heaven or Hell and Questo sporco mondo meraviglioso.
Presenting the usual combination of documentary footage and reconstructions of dubious provenance and authenticity accompanied by a supercilious voice-over commentary (courtesy of Edmund Purdom, who performed similar chores on Sweden: Heaven or Hell) there's not much to be said about the film except it is impossible to take seriously yet sometimes places barriers to enjoyment at the camp level through the obligatory animal killing footage, including that of a hen and a goat in the context of a Brazilian magic ceremony where the initiate has her freshly shaven head doused in their blood and daubed with feathers.
With most of the participants in the black magic scenes either the kind that you wouldn't particularly want to see naked anyway or those that you wouldn't mind but who seem to always keep themselves strategically covered, the film's saving grace is Piero Umiliani's soundtrack.
Umiliani worked with Scattini regularly and produced some of his best and best known work, if we consider that The Muppet Show's mahna mahna theme originated in Sweden: Heaven and Hell for him, with Witchcraft 70 offering a pleasing mix of easy listening, bossa, samba and psychedelia-tinged cues that also showcase the talents of Edda Dell Orso, Nora Orlandi, I Cantori moderni and Lydia MacDonald amongst others.
Fans of Anton Lavey may also be interested to know that the brilliantly self-publicising ex-carny man and his The Church of Satan are included in one of the segments, though little insight into his philosophy is provided.
Presenting the usual combination of documentary footage and reconstructions of dubious provenance and authenticity accompanied by a supercilious voice-over commentary (courtesy of Edmund Purdom, who performed similar chores on Sweden: Heaven or Hell) there's not much to be said about the film except it is impossible to take seriously yet sometimes places barriers to enjoyment at the camp level through the obligatory animal killing footage, including that of a hen and a goat in the context of a Brazilian magic ceremony where the initiate has her freshly shaven head doused in their blood and daubed with feathers.
With most of the participants in the black magic scenes either the kind that you wouldn't particularly want to see naked anyway or those that you wouldn't mind but who seem to always keep themselves strategically covered, the film's saving grace is Piero Umiliani's soundtrack.
Umiliani worked with Scattini regularly and produced some of his best and best known work, if we consider that The Muppet Show's mahna mahna theme originated in Sweden: Heaven and Hell for him, with Witchcraft 70 offering a pleasing mix of easy listening, bossa, samba and psychedelia-tinged cues that also showcase the talents of Edda Dell Orso, Nora Orlandi, I Cantori moderni and Lydia MacDonald amongst others.
Fans of Anton Lavey may also be interested to know that the brilliantly self-publicising ex-carny man and his The Church of Satan are included in one of the segments, though little insight into his philosophy is provided.
Gli Uomini dal passo pesante / The Tramplers
The casual viewer can be forgiven for confusing this 1965 spaghetti western from hypenate writer-producer-director Albert Band with Sergio Corbucci's 1966 entry The Hellbenders, also produced and co-authored by Band.
Both films see Joseph Cotten playing much the same character, the southern patriarch who refuses to accept that the war is over and that things are changing, spurring a familial and generational conflict that pits father against son and brother against brother.
The chief differences are that here Cotten's character is less interested in making the south rise again as in re-establishing his iron rule over his own little community and that the lines of conflict are quicker to be drawn.
The story starts with the men of the Cordeen clan returning to the Texas town, El Crossing, that Temple Cordeen (Cotten) had built up, along with his cattle business, from nothing.
Their first act is to take advantage of a legal technicality to lynch Fred Wickett for having spread abolitionist messages at a time when it was illegal to do so, thereby sending a strong message to northerners, ex-slaves and other 'undesirables' that their presence is not welcome here. “Cordeen's waiting for them all and he's not running out of rope,” as the sheriff, powerless to do anything, later explains.
One of the family, Lon Cordeen (Gordon Scott), is late to the necktie party and proves to take a dim view of the rest of his clan's activities, even attempting to express his regrets to Wickett's daughter Edith, who has resolved to have Temple brought to justice for his actions: “I'll build me a scaffold with the help of the law. The real law.” But when Edith learns of Lon's parentage she rebuffs him. (“That's my family, not me,” you can almost imagine Lon saying.)
The battle lines are confirmed when Temple then sends Lon and another of his sons, Hoby (James Mitchum), to convince Charlie Garvey (Franco Nero, billed as Frank Nero) that he should not marry their sister, Bess, and ought to leave the territory and his new ranch for the good of his health.
Temple's plan that this will effect Lon's return to the fold backfires however when he sides with the good-natured Garvey and convinces Hoby to go along with him.Worse, Garvey also brings his new brothers-in-law in on a lucrative cattle driving scheme that puts them in competition with Temple for control of the town and its future...
Unfolding almost like an Elizabethan or Greek Tragedy at times, The Tramplers is a curious example of its type that blends the traditional generic material of fist fights, gun fights and so forth with a rare degree of dramatic weight and rounded characterisations that give the players plenty to work with.
Though Cotten probably takes the acting honours, he is pushed every inch of the way by the other leads, most notably James Mitchum's Hoby, who returns from his mission to track down an elusive drover minus an arm and with a whole load of new psychological hang-ups. Nero's role is a small, straightforward one.
While the pan and scan presentation doesn't help, Band's direction is unfortunately more routine, with the budgetary limitations show through in the presentation of the cattle drive via stock footage accredited to Bovril Argentina (!)
Angelo Francisco Lavagnino's score is effective, though again somewhat more generic than it might be.
Both films see Joseph Cotten playing much the same character, the southern patriarch who refuses to accept that the war is over and that things are changing, spurring a familial and generational conflict that pits father against son and brother against brother.
The chief differences are that here Cotten's character is less interested in making the south rise again as in re-establishing his iron rule over his own little community and that the lines of conflict are quicker to be drawn.
The story starts with the men of the Cordeen clan returning to the Texas town, El Crossing, that Temple Cordeen (Cotten) had built up, along with his cattle business, from nothing.
Their first act is to take advantage of a legal technicality to lynch Fred Wickett for having spread abolitionist messages at a time when it was illegal to do so, thereby sending a strong message to northerners, ex-slaves and other 'undesirables' that their presence is not welcome here. “Cordeen's waiting for them all and he's not running out of rope,” as the sheriff, powerless to do anything, later explains.
One of the family, Lon Cordeen (Gordon Scott), is late to the necktie party and proves to take a dim view of the rest of his clan's activities, even attempting to express his regrets to Wickett's daughter Edith, who has resolved to have Temple brought to justice for his actions: “I'll build me a scaffold with the help of the law. The real law.” But when Edith learns of Lon's parentage she rebuffs him. (“That's my family, not me,” you can almost imagine Lon saying.)
The battle lines are confirmed when Temple then sends Lon and another of his sons, Hoby (James Mitchum), to convince Charlie Garvey (Franco Nero, billed as Frank Nero) that he should not marry their sister, Bess, and ought to leave the territory and his new ranch for the good of his health.
Temple's plan that this will effect Lon's return to the fold backfires however when he sides with the good-natured Garvey and convinces Hoby to go along with him.Worse, Garvey also brings his new brothers-in-law in on a lucrative cattle driving scheme that puts them in competition with Temple for control of the town and its future...
Unfolding almost like an Elizabethan or Greek Tragedy at times, The Tramplers is a curious example of its type that blends the traditional generic material of fist fights, gun fights and so forth with a rare degree of dramatic weight and rounded characterisations that give the players plenty to work with.
Though Cotten probably takes the acting honours, he is pushed every inch of the way by the other leads, most notably James Mitchum's Hoby, who returns from his mission to track down an elusive drover minus an arm and with a whole load of new psychological hang-ups. Nero's role is a small, straightforward one.
While the pan and scan presentation doesn't help, Band's direction is unfortunately more routine, with the budgetary limitations show through in the presentation of the cattle drive via stock footage accredited to Bovril Argentina (!)
Angelo Francisco Lavagnino's score is effective, though again somewhat more generic than it might be.
L'Ultimo squalo / The Last Shark
This is, of course, the Italian entry sullo stesso filone Jaws that was felt to be too close to its model and thereby barred from being distributed in the US following court action by Universal Studios. It's also, as with all Enzo Castellari's work, a technically well made, unpretentious piece of low-budget B-cinema that accomplishes everything it sets out to do – except perhaps bring in the money thanks to Universal's pack of legal sharks...
A big shark, eating people. What more can you really say?
The deja vu, cut-and-paste plot is as follows:
The resort community of Port Harbour is about to celebrate its centennial with a regatta and windsurfing competition. The favourite is out practicing his moves when he suddenly disappears from view.
The search party, led by chief of police Peter Benton (James Franciscus) and grizzled old fisherman Ron Hamer (Vic Morrow), later discovers part of the surfer's board with bite marks suggestive of a massive great white shark.
Unfortunately Mayor Wells (Joshua Sinclair) refuses to accept this possibility for fear it will disrupt the celebrations and thus his own election campaign, giving the shark opportunity to wreak further havoc, including going after a boat crewed by his son and Benton's daughter...
As Luigi Cozzi once remarked, the Italian popular cinema strongly privileged imitation over innovation: “In Italy [...] when you bring a script to a producer, the first question he asks is not 'what is your film like?' but 'what film is your film like?'. That's the way it is, we can only make Zombie 2, never Zombie 1.”
Cast in these terms, the success or failure of certain filone as a whole might be explained in terms of a combination of budgetary requirements and cultural background.
For an Italian filmmaker to make a science fiction film to cash in on Star Wars was relatively difficult, not just because of the cost of high-tech effects (as distinct from traditional Bava or Margheriti style smoke, mirrors and model-work) but also because science fiction had never quite imprinted itself on the public consciousness.
Indeed Cozzi is a case in point here. An avowed science fiction enthusiast who had made his debut in the genre, with the non-commercial, festival screened The Tunnel Under the World, he soon found that while he could easily smuggle science fiction elements into gialli it was near impossible to actually get a straight science fiction project off the ground in the early and mid 1970s.
For an Italian filmmaker to make a horror film to cash in on Halloween was relatively easy not only because slasher films required little in the way of resources, but also as the American slasher film had itself borrowed heavily from the Italian giallo – a fact which reminds us, along with the obvious influence of the spaghetti western on the post-spaghetti US western, that it was never just about Italians 'ripping off' Hollywood anyway.
Someone fails to get out the shark repellent bat spray in time
We can thus perhaps begin to get an insight into how and why The Last Shark works and the problems it faced on account of this.
The simple fact is that there is probably not very much you can really do here except follow the Jaws template, all the more so when Spielberg's film is itself little more than a big budget B-movie that rigorously adheres to an old, well-established narrative trajectory:
1) There is an monstrous threat to the community.
2) The hero realises the nature of this threat.
3) Those in a position of power refuse to acknowledge the threat until it is almost too late.
4) The hero defeats the threat.
Seen in this light, the only other real difference between Jaws and Invaders from Mars, The Blob or Invasion of the Saucer Men is that it also threws in a touch of Moby Dick, presumably in a Corman-esque appeal to the more cultured segment of its audience.
The problem with The Last Shark, I suspect, is that it is thus not just too close an imitation of its model – Benton = Brody; Hamer = Quint; Wells = Vaughan; the failure to make the syntygmatic substitution of a giant alligator or killer whale for the shark etc. – but also that bit too well made and thus threatening to Hollywood's own sequels and cash-ins, not least the tawdry and tardy Jaws 3D.
With Castellari at the helm, it really was a case of Italians doing it better, accomplishing more with less – yes, the shark here is unconvincing, but those in Jaws aren't significantly better despite the hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on them – and generally knowing how to get round their limitations by acknowledging them, most notably when a ratings-seeking TV crew discusses the possibility of incorporating in some stock footage to spice things up on the grounds that their viewers wouldn't be able to tell anyway.
It's all about affecting the audience...
A big shark, eating people. What more can you really say?
The deja vu, cut-and-paste plot is as follows:
The resort community of Port Harbour is about to celebrate its centennial with a regatta and windsurfing competition. The favourite is out practicing his moves when he suddenly disappears from view.
The search party, led by chief of police Peter Benton (James Franciscus) and grizzled old fisherman Ron Hamer (Vic Morrow), later discovers part of the surfer's board with bite marks suggestive of a massive great white shark.
Unfortunately Mayor Wells (Joshua Sinclair) refuses to accept this possibility for fear it will disrupt the celebrations and thus his own election campaign, giving the shark opportunity to wreak further havoc, including going after a boat crewed by his son and Benton's daughter...
As Luigi Cozzi once remarked, the Italian popular cinema strongly privileged imitation over innovation: “In Italy [...] when you bring a script to a producer, the first question he asks is not 'what is your film like?' but 'what film is your film like?'. That's the way it is, we can only make Zombie 2, never Zombie 1.”
Cast in these terms, the success or failure of certain filone as a whole might be explained in terms of a combination of budgetary requirements and cultural background.
For an Italian filmmaker to make a science fiction film to cash in on Star Wars was relatively difficult, not just because of the cost of high-tech effects (as distinct from traditional Bava or Margheriti style smoke, mirrors and model-work) but also because science fiction had never quite imprinted itself on the public consciousness.
Indeed Cozzi is a case in point here. An avowed science fiction enthusiast who had made his debut in the genre, with the non-commercial, festival screened The Tunnel Under the World, he soon found that while he could easily smuggle science fiction elements into gialli it was near impossible to actually get a straight science fiction project off the ground in the early and mid 1970s.
For an Italian filmmaker to make a horror film to cash in on Halloween was relatively easy not only because slasher films required little in the way of resources, but also as the American slasher film had itself borrowed heavily from the Italian giallo – a fact which reminds us, along with the obvious influence of the spaghetti western on the post-spaghetti US western, that it was never just about Italians 'ripping off' Hollywood anyway.
Someone fails to get out the shark repellent bat spray in time
We can thus perhaps begin to get an insight into how and why The Last Shark works and the problems it faced on account of this.
The simple fact is that there is probably not very much you can really do here except follow the Jaws template, all the more so when Spielberg's film is itself little more than a big budget B-movie that rigorously adheres to an old, well-established narrative trajectory:
1) There is an monstrous threat to the community.
2) The hero realises the nature of this threat.
3) Those in a position of power refuse to acknowledge the threat until it is almost too late.
4) The hero defeats the threat.
Seen in this light, the only other real difference between Jaws and Invaders from Mars, The Blob or Invasion of the Saucer Men is that it also threws in a touch of Moby Dick, presumably in a Corman-esque appeal to the more cultured segment of its audience.
The problem with The Last Shark, I suspect, is that it is thus not just too close an imitation of its model – Benton = Brody; Hamer = Quint; Wells = Vaughan; the failure to make the syntygmatic substitution of a giant alligator or killer whale for the shark etc. – but also that bit too well made and thus threatening to Hollywood's own sequels and cash-ins, not least the tawdry and tardy Jaws 3D.
With Castellari at the helm, it really was a case of Italians doing it better, accomplishing more with less – yes, the shark here is unconvincing, but those in Jaws aren't significantly better despite the hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on them – and generally knowing how to get round their limitations by acknowledging them, most notably when a ratings-seeking TV crew discusses the possibility of incorporating in some stock footage to spice things up on the grounds that their viewers wouldn't be able to tell anyway.
It's all about affecting the audience...
Mother of Tears in Denver
Thanks to Alexis at Trashwire.com for alerting me to screenings of Mother of Tears in Denver, June 27 - July 3.
Details are here: http://www.denverfilm.org/filmcenter/detail.aspx?id=21787
Details are here: http://www.denverfilm.org/filmcenter/detail.aspx?id=21787
Articles on or interviews with Bruno Mattei?
One of my film studies colleagues is looking for information on Bruno Mattei.
Can anyone suggest any magazines or fanzines, that have career profiles or interviews with him, especially in English?
I have some myself somewhere in ETC or suchlike, which I'm going to look out, but am sure there are others that I'm not aware of.
Thanks in advance...
Can anyone suggest any magazines or fanzines, that have career profiles or interviews with him, especially in English?
I have some myself somewhere in ETC or suchlike, which I'm going to look out, but am sure there are others that I'm not aware of.
Thanks in advance...
Tuesday, 3 June 2008
Deep Red versions straw poll
A quick question:
If you've seen different cuts of Deep Red / Profondo Rosso, which do you prefer overall, if you have a preference, and why do you prefer it?
* The English-language version(s), which omits much of the romantic comedy subplot and interplay between Marc Daly and Gianna Brezzi.
* The Italian-language version, which includes all of this material.
* The Japanese Suspiria 2 version which, although I have never seen it myself, is apparently in between the English and Italian versions in length.
* Another version I'm maybe not aware of, e.g. in French or German; if so, can you also say a little bit about what it best compares to in content and length.
There is a somewhat obscure logic behind this question, which I will explain if anyone wants to know it before answering and once the results are in in any case.
If you've seen different cuts of Deep Red / Profondo Rosso, which do you prefer overall, if you have a preference, and why do you prefer it?
* The English-language version(s), which omits much of the romantic comedy subplot and interplay between Marc Daly and Gianna Brezzi.
* The Italian-language version, which includes all of this material.
* The Japanese Suspiria 2 version which, although I have never seen it myself, is apparently in between the English and Italian versions in length.
* Another version I'm maybe not aware of, e.g. in French or German; if so, can you also say a little bit about what it best compares to in content and length.
There is a somewhat obscure logic behind this question, which I will explain if anyone wants to know it before answering and once the results are in in any case.
Tano Cimarosa
I was watching Damiano Damiani's The Most Beautiful Wife last night and got confused at one point because there's a character in the film called Tano Cimarosa whom I was sure was being played by the actor Tano Cimarosa. I checked on the IMDB and, in addition to confirming that actor and character name were indeed identical, was saddened to learn that he had died only last week.
Tano Cimarosa, 1922-2008
For what it matters, Cimarosa's very good in the film, which is as much a drama as a crime film and was based on a true story. He plays the peasant farmer father of the girl whom a rising local mafioso decides to take for his bride. Despite all his daughter suffers, Cimarosa's character is unwilling / unable to take a stand or defend her. It's a powerful performance in which he beautifully conveys the frustration and helplessness of the character with his body language and gestures.
Tano Cimarosa, 1922-2008
For what it matters, Cimarosa's very good in the film, which is as much a drama as a crime film and was based on a true story. He plays the peasant farmer father of the girl whom a rising local mafioso decides to take for his bride. Despite all his daughter suffers, Cimarosa's character is unwilling / unable to take a stand or defend her. It's a powerful performance in which he beautifully conveys the frustration and helplessness of the character with his body language and gestures.
Monday, 2 June 2008
Ator il guerriero di ferro / Ator the Iron Warrior
After Joe D'Amato temporarily abandoned the Ator franchise after his second film failed to achieve the same heights of success as its predecessor, Al Brescia stepped into the breach to present this reinterpretation of the character.
We begin with a prologue in which Ator's brother, Trogar, is kidnapped by the power hungry sorceress Phaedra. The other members of her sorority, led by Deeva, take of dim view of this, but merely banish Phaedra as punishment.
Ator poses in front of a mirror, but where did it come from?
18 years pass and Phaedra has returned, along a the fearsome skull-masked, heavy-breathing warrior (think Skeletor meets Darth Vader, I guess) and their assorted minions to launch an attack on the King's castle on the very day of his daughter Jenna's own 18th nameday ceremony.
Though escaping the castle massacre, Jenna is captured by cloaked dwarf creatures.
Jenna, in wet t-shirt mode
Sure enough, Ator, now played by Miles O'Keeffe, comes to the rescue, while also having the first of what will be many evenly-matched fights with Trogar.
Trogar
So it continues for another hour or so in ABC-quest fashion until the forces of good and evil face off for one final battle in which rightful order is restored, or something...
Right from the opening credits, proudly announcing The Iron Warrior to be an Al Bradley film to the strains of Carlo Mario Cordio's derivative-if-heroic theme music, its obvious that this is going to be a nonpareil cheesefest.
The best things the film has going for it are the picturesque Crete locations, which do good service as the Kingdom of Dragmor, and Jenna's tissue-thin gowns.
Ator delivers a witty one-liner
The worst is that in seeking to add a soupcon more style to the proceedings, Bradley / Brescia overcompensates with the slow-motion to the point you start to imagine that the film could have been refitted for a hour-long TV spot by dint of playing everything at regular speed.
Really, however, it's the kind of film that offers predictable pleasures and which doesn't take itself too seriously anyway and, as such, is arguably immune to this kind of criticism.
We begin with a prologue in which Ator's brother, Trogar, is kidnapped by the power hungry sorceress Phaedra. The other members of her sorority, led by Deeva, take of dim view of this, but merely banish Phaedra as punishment.
Ator poses in front of a mirror, but where did it come from?
18 years pass and Phaedra has returned, along a the fearsome skull-masked, heavy-breathing warrior (think Skeletor meets Darth Vader, I guess) and their assorted minions to launch an attack on the King's castle on the very day of his daughter Jenna's own 18th nameday ceremony.
Though escaping the castle massacre, Jenna is captured by cloaked dwarf creatures.
Jenna, in wet t-shirt mode
Sure enough, Ator, now played by Miles O'Keeffe, comes to the rescue, while also having the first of what will be many evenly-matched fights with Trogar.
Trogar
So it continues for another hour or so in ABC-quest fashion until the forces of good and evil face off for one final battle in which rightful order is restored, or something...
Right from the opening credits, proudly announcing The Iron Warrior to be an Al Bradley film to the strains of Carlo Mario Cordio's derivative-if-heroic theme music, its obvious that this is going to be a nonpareil cheesefest.
The best things the film has going for it are the picturesque Crete locations, which do good service as the Kingdom of Dragmor, and Jenna's tissue-thin gowns.
Ator delivers a witty one-liner
The worst is that in seeking to add a soupcon more style to the proceedings, Bradley / Brescia overcompensates with the slow-motion to the point you start to imagine that the film could have been refitted for a hour-long TV spot by dint of playing everything at regular speed.
Really, however, it's the kind of film that offers predictable pleasures and which doesn't take itself too seriously anyway and, as such, is arguably immune to this kind of criticism.
Il 13º è sempre Giuda / The Last Traitor / The 13th is Always a Judas
Following the Civil War, retired gunman Ned (Donal O'Brien) invites twelve of his closest friends to a ranch on the Mexican border to outline his plans for their future. He is going to marry Marybelle and thus inherit an old silver mine once belonging to her father, Old Man Owens, which they will the work together, putting their pasts and differences, including fighting for different sides, behind them:
“Bellman: he has a nasty little habit of letting his hands get into the collection boxes. I don't want to know about it.”
“The Ross brothers: they have $2,000 price tags on their heads. I can't recall, I got a lousy memory.”
And so on.
The plan soon goes awry when the stagecoach arrives with all on board, including Marybelle, dead.
Worse, the other passengers are soon revealed as undercover government agents, whose deaths are sure to soon bring further unwanted attention.
Ned professes not to care about this, however, only wanting revenge against Marybelle's killer or killers, whom he suspects to be amongst the assembled party.
The most likely suspect is cardsharp Tim (Maurice Poli) who arrived late and makes a hasty exit, along with Joe the Mexican, soon thereafter.
But is everything as straightforward as it seems? What if, for example, Tim is a Judas goat?
Directed by Guiseppe Vari under his Joseph Warren pseudonym, The 13th is a Judas is an intriguing spaghetti western with a pronounced mystery element to it. Though relatively short on action, it benefits from strong central performances from O'Brien and Poli that keep you guessing as to their motives; a rousing yet tense score from Carlo Savina; a well-crafted story from writer Adriano Bolzoni, and some reasonaby clever incorporation of Christian religious references into the material, like the arrangement of the 13 men at the wedding table a la the last supper or Ned's reminding his bickering friends that the Reverend Bellman has prepared a sermon for a wedding, not a funeral.
Trivia buffs may care to note that Ted Rusoff has a credit for additional dialogue, while it sounds like Carolyn De Fonseca provides the voice for one of the Mexican women.
“Bellman: he has a nasty little habit of letting his hands get into the collection boxes. I don't want to know about it.”
“The Ross brothers: they have $2,000 price tags on their heads. I can't recall, I got a lousy memory.”
And so on.
The plan soon goes awry when the stagecoach arrives with all on board, including Marybelle, dead.
Worse, the other passengers are soon revealed as undercover government agents, whose deaths are sure to soon bring further unwanted attention.
Ned professes not to care about this, however, only wanting revenge against Marybelle's killer or killers, whom he suspects to be amongst the assembled party.
The most likely suspect is cardsharp Tim (Maurice Poli) who arrived late and makes a hasty exit, along with Joe the Mexican, soon thereafter.
But is everything as straightforward as it seems? What if, for example, Tim is a Judas goat?
Directed by Guiseppe Vari under his Joseph Warren pseudonym, The 13th is a Judas is an intriguing spaghetti western with a pronounced mystery element to it. Though relatively short on action, it benefits from strong central performances from O'Brien and Poli that keep you guessing as to their motives; a rousing yet tense score from Carlo Savina; a well-crafted story from writer Adriano Bolzoni, and some reasonaby clever incorporation of Christian religious references into the material, like the arrangement of the 13 men at the wedding table a la the last supper or Ned's reminding his bickering friends that the Reverend Bellman has prepared a sermon for a wedding, not a funeral.
Trivia buffs may care to note that Ted Rusoff has a credit for additional dialogue, while it sounds like Carolyn De Fonseca provides the voice for one of the Mexican women.
Sunday, 1 June 2008
Una Magnum Special per Tony Saitta / A Special Magnum for Tony Saitta / Blazing Magnums / A Strange Shadow in an Empty Room
This 1976 Italian-Canadian-Panamanian (!) co-production, made in Montreal with a North American cast is, not surprisingly, a somewhat difficult film to place. At times it feels like a poliziotto, with plenty of sustained hard-hitting action scenes and an alternately cool jazz and driving funky soundtrack courtesy of Armando Trovajoli, at others like a giallo, with a labyrinthine murder-mystery plot and long list of individuals to be eliminated from the inquiries by the investigators – if, that is, the killer doesn't get to them first...
The basic giallo vs poliziotto structure, broadly corresponding to an alternation between plot, character and narrative focused material alternating with dialogue free action sequences, is neatly established from the outset.
On the university campus student Louise Saitta argues with her teacher and presumed lover Dr George Tracer (Martin Landau) while some other students play frisbee and catch football nearby, including Louise's ex-boyfriend, Fred (Jean LeClerc).
Clearly distressed at something, Louise tries to telephone her brother, indicating that it's imperative that she speak to him.
Like a number of gialli, we begin with a telephone call
Tony Saitta (Stuart Whitman) is an inspector in the Ottawa police who is currently occupied with intercepting some armed robbers, armed with machine guns and acting very much like their Roman or Milanese counterparts despite the unfamiliar location.
Rome or Ottawa – it's all the same?
But with some local colour as well...
After a chase, Saita forces their car off the road – through a shop window – then calmly shoots three of the four with his magnum before forcing the other to surrender.
This guy is tough, so tough that the the bad guy doesn't even think about chancing whether he'd fired six shots or only five...
Unfortunately he's also perhaps not the best suited to the case about to ensue, having a distinctly poliziotto tendency to act first and worry about asking questions later, in addition to also being more like an amateur than a professional investgator in the way his personal involvement in the case about to ensue repeatedly clouds his judgements.
Yet another photo of a lady above suspicion?
Later that night Louise and Fred play a practical joke on Dr Tracer at a party also attended by all the other suspects, red herrings and victims to be, with Louise pretending to have some sort of seizure.
Then, after Dr Tracer has attended to her and the joke has been revealed, Louise does have a seizure and drops dead, despite the doctor's desperate ministrations.
Tony arrives in Montreal for the funeral, where he meets the Tracer and Cohn families along with the other suspects, red herrings and victims to be; the only one whose role is clear being the blind Julie (Tisa Farrow).
A line (up) of some of the suspects
Learning of Louise's desperate and frightened state from Julie, Tony has his contact in the local police, Sergeant Matthews (John Saxon) arrange for an autopsy to be performed, which reveals traces of poison...
In the meantime, Tony follows up leads, learning that Louise was seeing Dr Tracer. Seeing motive in the respectable doctor's need to avoid a scandal and an opportunity, Tony puts things together and, after Margie Cohn refuses to corroborate that she could be certain what Tracer administered Louise, has him arrested on suspicion of murdering his sister. (To add to the suspicion and sleaze Tony finds Margie (Gayle Hunnicutt), whose name is apposite insofar 'she spreads easily' for just about everyone except her husband, in bed with Tracer's son, Robert.)
The question that eventually emerges is whether Tony has added two and two to come up with three or five.
A bottle of nail varnish found on the mangled remains of a transvestite found in a rock crushing machine leads Tony, via a sex shop (?!), to a transvestite club, one of those cross-dressing fight scenes that cropped up with surprising regularity in Italian films of this time, and the revelation that Margie's brother, Terry, was mixed up in the case and knew too much, specifically about a necklace Louise was wearing in one of the last photographs taken of her. Either Dr Tracer is innocent or has a co-conspirator...
The key to the mystery?
The quest leads Tony to a locker and a quest to track down three fences.
The first, whom he chases through the underground station and proceeds to interrogate via water torture in the men's room, proves to know nothing...
The second, whose car he pursues recklessly through the streets of downtown Montreal in one of those ridiculously over-the-top chases, choreographed by none other than Remy Julienne, at least knows something, thus dragging us back into the giallo plot for the third act after this second dominated by a succession of poliziotto action sequences...
Stunt cars!
Imagine a cross between The Bloodstained Butterfly and Violent Naples if you can and you have a fair idea of what you're in for here. A Special Magnum for Tony Saitta perhaps won't work as well as either of these films for the purist, having too many plot convolutions for the poliziotto fan and insufficient opportunity to engage with the mystery for oneself for their giallo counterpart, but which never lets up and delivers 100 per cent entertainment for those willing to ascribe to the simpler taxonomy of dividing films into the two camps of the good and the bad.
A giallo style blade in the dark, but not from a black-gloved hand
A poliziotto cop with his big, loud weapon
This said, while the film's greater emphasis on action inhibits the extent to which Alberto De Martino can engage in directorial sleights of hand, there are nevertheless enough subtleties to his direction to reward a second viewing.
The same can also be said of Gianfranco Clerici and Vincenzo Mannino's writing providing one is willing to overlook the question of exactly how Saitta, outwith his jurisdiction and pursuing what increasingly comes across as a personal vendetta, is allowed to get away with it all, with a number of telling exchanges and seemingly throwaway lines that gain renewed significance with the benefit of hindsight:
“I've just left Tracer's colleagues.”
“And?”
“As far as they're concerned he's a good doctor, a straight shooter and a family man. Can you believe that? He's a guy that's been living a double life and all this time he's been getting away with it.”
Stuart Whitman's no-nonsense, take-no-prisoners approach to the role is appropriate, conveying his confidence and certitude that he is in the right, regardless, while Martin Landau's more nuanced portrayal of Dr Tracer works nicely as a counterpoint, conveying an apparent ambiguity and uncertainty that his erstwhile nemesis lacks.
John Saxon's role is a largely thankless one in that he doesn't really get involved with the action scenes and remains a largely peripheral figure in the investigations. Still, even walking onto the scene from time to time, his is always a welcome presence.
The overall message of the film might perhaps be summed up as there being “none so blind as those who would not see”. Even if its cross-filone compromises mean it perhaps fails to convey this as convincingly or consistently as the likes of The Bird with the Crystal Plumage or Deep Red, A Special Magnum for Tony Saitta remains, like De Martino's work as a whole, well worth a look from any Italian popular cinema enthusiast willing to go beyond the more familiar names.
The basic giallo vs poliziotto structure, broadly corresponding to an alternation between plot, character and narrative focused material alternating with dialogue free action sequences, is neatly established from the outset.
On the university campus student Louise Saitta argues with her teacher and presumed lover Dr George Tracer (Martin Landau) while some other students play frisbee and catch football nearby, including Louise's ex-boyfriend, Fred (Jean LeClerc).
Clearly distressed at something, Louise tries to telephone her brother, indicating that it's imperative that she speak to him.
Like a number of gialli, we begin with a telephone call
Tony Saitta (Stuart Whitman) is an inspector in the Ottawa police who is currently occupied with intercepting some armed robbers, armed with machine guns and acting very much like their Roman or Milanese counterparts despite the unfamiliar location.
Rome or Ottawa – it's all the same?
But with some local colour as well...
After a chase, Saita forces their car off the road – through a shop window – then calmly shoots three of the four with his magnum before forcing the other to surrender.
This guy is tough, so tough that the the bad guy doesn't even think about chancing whether he'd fired six shots or only five...
Unfortunately he's also perhaps not the best suited to the case about to ensue, having a distinctly poliziotto tendency to act first and worry about asking questions later, in addition to also being more like an amateur than a professional investgator in the way his personal involvement in the case about to ensue repeatedly clouds his judgements.
Yet another photo of a lady above suspicion?
Later that night Louise and Fred play a practical joke on Dr Tracer at a party also attended by all the other suspects, red herrings and victims to be, with Louise pretending to have some sort of seizure.
Then, after Dr Tracer has attended to her and the joke has been revealed, Louise does have a seizure and drops dead, despite the doctor's desperate ministrations.
Tony arrives in Montreal for the funeral, where he meets the Tracer and Cohn families along with the other suspects, red herrings and victims to be; the only one whose role is clear being the blind Julie (Tisa Farrow).
A line (up) of some of the suspects
Learning of Louise's desperate and frightened state from Julie, Tony has his contact in the local police, Sergeant Matthews (John Saxon) arrange for an autopsy to be performed, which reveals traces of poison...
In the meantime, Tony follows up leads, learning that Louise was seeing Dr Tracer. Seeing motive in the respectable doctor's need to avoid a scandal and an opportunity, Tony puts things together and, after Margie Cohn refuses to corroborate that she could be certain what Tracer administered Louise, has him arrested on suspicion of murdering his sister. (To add to the suspicion and sleaze Tony finds Margie (Gayle Hunnicutt), whose name is apposite insofar 'she spreads easily' for just about everyone except her husband, in bed with Tracer's son, Robert.)
The question that eventually emerges is whether Tony has added two and two to come up with three or five.
A bottle of nail varnish found on the mangled remains of a transvestite found in a rock crushing machine leads Tony, via a sex shop (?!), to a transvestite club, one of those cross-dressing fight scenes that cropped up with surprising regularity in Italian films of this time, and the revelation that Margie's brother, Terry, was mixed up in the case and knew too much, specifically about a necklace Louise was wearing in one of the last photographs taken of her. Either Dr Tracer is innocent or has a co-conspirator...
The key to the mystery?
The quest leads Tony to a locker and a quest to track down three fences.
The first, whom he chases through the underground station and proceeds to interrogate via water torture in the men's room, proves to know nothing...
The second, whose car he pursues recklessly through the streets of downtown Montreal in one of those ridiculously over-the-top chases, choreographed by none other than Remy Julienne, at least knows something, thus dragging us back into the giallo plot for the third act after this second dominated by a succession of poliziotto action sequences...
Stunt cars!
Imagine a cross between The Bloodstained Butterfly and Violent Naples if you can and you have a fair idea of what you're in for here. A Special Magnum for Tony Saitta perhaps won't work as well as either of these films for the purist, having too many plot convolutions for the poliziotto fan and insufficient opportunity to engage with the mystery for oneself for their giallo counterpart, but which never lets up and delivers 100 per cent entertainment for those willing to ascribe to the simpler taxonomy of dividing films into the two camps of the good and the bad.
A giallo style blade in the dark, but not from a black-gloved hand
A poliziotto cop with his big, loud weapon
This said, while the film's greater emphasis on action inhibits the extent to which Alberto De Martino can engage in directorial sleights of hand, there are nevertheless enough subtleties to his direction to reward a second viewing.
The same can also be said of Gianfranco Clerici and Vincenzo Mannino's writing providing one is willing to overlook the question of exactly how Saitta, outwith his jurisdiction and pursuing what increasingly comes across as a personal vendetta, is allowed to get away with it all, with a number of telling exchanges and seemingly throwaway lines that gain renewed significance with the benefit of hindsight:
“I've just left Tracer's colleagues.”
“And?”
“As far as they're concerned he's a good doctor, a straight shooter and a family man. Can you believe that? He's a guy that's been living a double life and all this time he's been getting away with it.”
Stuart Whitman's no-nonsense, take-no-prisoners approach to the role is appropriate, conveying his confidence and certitude that he is in the right, regardless, while Martin Landau's more nuanced portrayal of Dr Tracer works nicely as a counterpoint, conveying an apparent ambiguity and uncertainty that his erstwhile nemesis lacks.
John Saxon's role is a largely thankless one in that he doesn't really get involved with the action scenes and remains a largely peripheral figure in the investigations. Still, even walking onto the scene from time to time, his is always a welcome presence.
The overall message of the film might perhaps be summed up as there being “none so blind as those who would not see”. Even if its cross-filone compromises mean it perhaps fails to convey this as convincingly or consistently as the likes of The Bird with the Crystal Plumage or Deep Red, A Special Magnum for Tony Saitta remains, like De Martino's work as a whole, well worth a look from any Italian popular cinema enthusiast willing to go beyond the more familiar names.
L'Isola degli uomini pesce / Island of the Fishmen
1891: en route to an island prison, the French transport the Cayenne is sunk, leaving one member of the crew, ship's doctor Claude de Ross (Claudio Casinelli), with six of the convicts on a lifeboat.
After seven days and nights drifting in the ocean a current catches the liferaft and smashes it to pieces just off an island. In the chaos one of the prisoners is killed by a mysterious creature, assumed by the others to be an giant octopus.
Of those who make it ashore one dies as a result of drinking from a poisoned pool, a third after going off alone and being attacked by another one of the creatures, now seen to be some sort of fish-men, while a fourth falls into a spike-filled pit that almost also does for de Ross.
Continuing on their way de Ross and the two surviving convicts – the superstitious, frightened José and the bullying, antagonistic Peter – find a cemetery with empty graves and signs of voodoo rituals:
“There are zombies here”
“Stop it José, you're talking nonsense. Zombies don't exist. They have never existed.”
The living dead don't appear, which is probably just as well given the range of dangers the island has already presents and those soon to emerge as the real story gets underway after de Ross is saved from a poisonous snake by the timely intervention of the beautiful Amanda Marvin (Barbara Bach).
Contrary to appearance, not a zombie hand
Keeping her distance, she advises the men leave the island immediately. It is the property of one Edmund Rackham (Richard Johnson), who does not take kindly to intruders.
This is easier said than done, however, with the men having little choice but to continue on their way regardless, eventually happening upon Rackham's plantation style house. He proves surprisingly welcome given Amanda's warnings, inviting De Ross to join him at their table while accommodating the two convicts in an outbuilding.
After Amanda leaves, Peter follows after her with rape on his mind, only to be himself attacked and slain by one of creatures.
One of the fishmen
The next morning José decides he has had enough and flees. Rackham says to let him go, but de Ross goes off in pursuit. He doesn't find José but is knocked unconscious by one of the creatures and only saved from certain death due to Amanda's intervention. Awakening back at Rackham's estate, he finds her denying all knowledge and saying he must have been suffering from hallucinations – an interpretation Rackham also seems keen to foster, but which doesn't accord with de Ross's physical wounds.
Just what is going on? Let's just say it doesn't really get much clearer, though with a mad scientist and his experiments (think The Island of Dr Moreau in reverse); the lost continent of Atlantis; a fortune in treasure; a volcanic eruption, and all manner of pulp villainy and derring do still to come, there's is plenty more to keep you entertained.
Johnson's Rackham is a great villain, sadistic, superior, sneering and seemingly relishing every moment of it. Maybe not appearing on stage for Royal Shakespeare Company as Iago or Richard III but somehow comparable in its own little way...
Cassinelli again impresses as a thinking man's action hero, equally adept at using brain as brawn. The one noteworthy exception is when he destroys the mad scientist's greatest / most questionable achievement, where instinctual revulsion takes over and ironically makes him into just about as much of a criminal as those he was once transporting. (“In one moment you've destroyed the results of a lifetime's work. That was the only specimen with full human intelligence!”)
Bach is primarily there as eye candy and love interest and proves adequate to both tasks. At the level of prurient interest the absence of nude scenes, as distinct from wet, diaphanous dress ones, may however disappoint the male members of the audience – especially compared to Mountain of the Cannibal God, where Ursula Andress again displayed her charms.
Note the way in which Martino and Geleng co-ordinate the primary colours of the test tubes to provide a nice little visual touch; it's the kind of thing which shows they care and which helps elevate the film that little bit
Sergio Martino's direction is assured, helping, along with Eugenio Alabaso's crisp editing and Massimo Antonello Geleng's designs (including the fishmen, made with Rocchetti Carboni make-up) to overcome most of the obvious budgetary limitations. There are also some nice underwater sequences, along with a bit of model work and some stock volcano footage.
The dynamics of Rackham's black servants (including Beryl Cunningham as a Haitian voodoo priestess, Shakira) and the fishmen strongly resemble those of the cannibals and zombies in Zombie Holocaust, with 'primitive' practices in both cases having been encouraged by the white colonial master intent on exploitation. (Rackham's boat is ironically titled The Enterprise.)
Zombie, of course, presents a neat through line connecting them thanks to the presence of Johnson there and its sets in Zombie Holocaust. The key words, in line with the origins of the fishmen themselves, are perhaps mutation and hybridity, the thinking presumably that of refusing to stay confined and defined by one filone when three provide a wider palette of ideas and images to draw from.
The film also features some curiously forward thinking / anachronistic remarks for 1891 about the neo-malthusian threat of population outstripping food supply, a theme also seen in the contemporaraneous Hell of the Living Dead with decidedly more apocalytic consequences.
The future of mankind?
The soundtrack further suggests zombie or cannibal connections, with plenty of percussive jungle / voodoo drum type cues reminiscent at times of Nico Fidenco's work.
Mention must finally be made of the film's complicated distribution history in the US: Initially receiving a limited released in a dubbed version, the film was later bought by United Pictures Organisation who, together with Roger Corman's New World, recut it and added in new scenes featuring Mel Ferrer and Cameron Mitchell. This version, released as Something Waits in the Dark, wasn't a success, however, prompting the Screamers retitling and a more exploitative advertising campaign promising that viewers would actually “see a man turned inside out”.
Though they didn't, in truth there was already more than enough for it not to matter. If exploitation cinema is about selling the sizzle and not the steak, as David Friedman puts it, Island of the Fishmen was already a steak, with side dish of onions.
After seven days and nights drifting in the ocean a current catches the liferaft and smashes it to pieces just off an island. In the chaos one of the prisoners is killed by a mysterious creature, assumed by the others to be an giant octopus.
Of those who make it ashore one dies as a result of drinking from a poisoned pool, a third after going off alone and being attacked by another one of the creatures, now seen to be some sort of fish-men, while a fourth falls into a spike-filled pit that almost also does for de Ross.
Continuing on their way de Ross and the two surviving convicts – the superstitious, frightened José and the bullying, antagonistic Peter – find a cemetery with empty graves and signs of voodoo rituals:
“There are zombies here”
“Stop it José, you're talking nonsense. Zombies don't exist. They have never existed.”
The living dead don't appear, which is probably just as well given the range of dangers the island has already presents and those soon to emerge as the real story gets underway after de Ross is saved from a poisonous snake by the timely intervention of the beautiful Amanda Marvin (Barbara Bach).
Contrary to appearance, not a zombie hand
Keeping her distance, she advises the men leave the island immediately. It is the property of one Edmund Rackham (Richard Johnson), who does not take kindly to intruders.
This is easier said than done, however, with the men having little choice but to continue on their way regardless, eventually happening upon Rackham's plantation style house. He proves surprisingly welcome given Amanda's warnings, inviting De Ross to join him at their table while accommodating the two convicts in an outbuilding.
After Amanda leaves, Peter follows after her with rape on his mind, only to be himself attacked and slain by one of creatures.
One of the fishmen
The next morning José decides he has had enough and flees. Rackham says to let him go, but de Ross goes off in pursuit. He doesn't find José but is knocked unconscious by one of the creatures and only saved from certain death due to Amanda's intervention. Awakening back at Rackham's estate, he finds her denying all knowledge and saying he must have been suffering from hallucinations – an interpretation Rackham also seems keen to foster, but which doesn't accord with de Ross's physical wounds.
Just what is going on? Let's just say it doesn't really get much clearer, though with a mad scientist and his experiments (think The Island of Dr Moreau in reverse); the lost continent of Atlantis; a fortune in treasure; a volcanic eruption, and all manner of pulp villainy and derring do still to come, there's is plenty more to keep you entertained.
Johnson's Rackham is a great villain, sadistic, superior, sneering and seemingly relishing every moment of it. Maybe not appearing on stage for Royal Shakespeare Company as Iago or Richard III but somehow comparable in its own little way...
Cassinelli again impresses as a thinking man's action hero, equally adept at using brain as brawn. The one noteworthy exception is when he destroys the mad scientist's greatest / most questionable achievement, where instinctual revulsion takes over and ironically makes him into just about as much of a criminal as those he was once transporting. (“In one moment you've destroyed the results of a lifetime's work. That was the only specimen with full human intelligence!”)
Bach is primarily there as eye candy and love interest and proves adequate to both tasks. At the level of prurient interest the absence of nude scenes, as distinct from wet, diaphanous dress ones, may however disappoint the male members of the audience – especially compared to Mountain of the Cannibal God, where Ursula Andress again displayed her charms.
Note the way in which Martino and Geleng co-ordinate the primary colours of the test tubes to provide a nice little visual touch; it's the kind of thing which shows they care and which helps elevate the film that little bit
Sergio Martino's direction is assured, helping, along with Eugenio Alabaso's crisp editing and Massimo Antonello Geleng's designs (including the fishmen, made with Rocchetti Carboni make-up) to overcome most of the obvious budgetary limitations. There are also some nice underwater sequences, along with a bit of model work and some stock volcano footage.
The dynamics of Rackham's black servants (including Beryl Cunningham as a Haitian voodoo priestess, Shakira) and the fishmen strongly resemble those of the cannibals and zombies in Zombie Holocaust, with 'primitive' practices in both cases having been encouraged by the white colonial master intent on exploitation. (Rackham's boat is ironically titled The Enterprise.)
Zombie, of course, presents a neat through line connecting them thanks to the presence of Johnson there and its sets in Zombie Holocaust. The key words, in line with the origins of the fishmen themselves, are perhaps mutation and hybridity, the thinking presumably that of refusing to stay confined and defined by one filone when three provide a wider palette of ideas and images to draw from.
The film also features some curiously forward thinking / anachronistic remarks for 1891 about the neo-malthusian threat of population outstripping food supply, a theme also seen in the contemporaraneous Hell of the Living Dead with decidedly more apocalytic consequences.
The future of mankind?
The soundtrack further suggests zombie or cannibal connections, with plenty of percussive jungle / voodoo drum type cues reminiscent at times of Nico Fidenco's work.
Mention must finally be made of the film's complicated distribution history in the US: Initially receiving a limited released in a dubbed version, the film was later bought by United Pictures Organisation who, together with Roger Corman's New World, recut it and added in new scenes featuring Mel Ferrer and Cameron Mitchell. This version, released as Something Waits in the Dark, wasn't a success, however, prompting the Screamers retitling and a more exploitative advertising campaign promising that viewers would actually “see a man turned inside out”.
Though they didn't, in truth there was already more than enough for it not to matter. If exploitation cinema is about selling the sizzle and not the steak, as David Friedman puts it, Island of the Fishmen was already a steak, with side dish of onions.
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