2019 - Dopo la caduta di New York / 2019: After the Fall of New York

In the early 80s films about dystopian near futures like Mad Max 2 and Escape from New York were big box-office. It was no surprise, then, when Italian film-makers quickly moved to rip them off to the best of their abilities and budgets. 2019: After the Fall of New York is Sergio Martino’s contribution to this cycle, in conjunction with his producer brother Luciano and frequent screenwriter Ernesto Gastaldi. (Sergio Martino uses his Martin Dolman alias, Gastaldi his Julian Berry one.)


Planet of the Apes? Escape from New York?

The film’s influences are evident from the first two scenes. Scene one gives the back-story, that a nuclear war between the Eurac Alliance (of Europe and Asia) and Pan American Confederation has left the earth devastated and women infertile, with no children having been born for 15 years. The ruins of New York are under Eurac control, with soldiers and mercenaries hunting down survivors who refuse to submit for “voluntary” medical experiments. Scene two introduces our hero, Parsifal – a name with appropriately mythic connotations – as he engages in some Mad Max style car wars in order to win some prize or other.


The Eurac leader's Picasso pastiche; only thing is he identifies with the bombers rather than the bombees

Following this, the story proper gets started as Parsifal is taken to the Alaskan base of the Confederation. A fertile woman, upon whom the fate of the human race depends, is somewhere in New York. It is up to Parsifal to find her and bring her out of the city. He is to be assisted by Bronx and Ratchet. Bronx knows New York like the back of his hand – presumably not the one that has been replaced with metal pincers – whilst Ratchet, who sports the eye-patch that is about the only aspect of Snake Plissken’s look not in evidence on Parsifal himself, is immensely strong and deadly with his bolas.


Snake, er Parsifal, and one of those early 80s blue laser beams

Good comic-book / pulp fun, 2019’s main strengths are a fast pace once the story is underway and a superabundance of action, combined with the fact that everyone involved seems on the same wavelength as far as the ridiculous and cliché are concerned: At one point a Eurac commander actually remarks to a prisoner that “We have ways of making you talk,” while George Eastman is memorably typecast as a simian mutant called “Big Ape”.

Its main weaknesses are some obvious model work and the state of many of the locations used, not so much post-apocalyptic, as with the models and mattes, as post-industrial. Arguably, however, this could also be read as in accord with the general design of the film, as with the Eurac soldiers being equipped with Wookie-type bow-laser combinations and riding white horses that contrast with their own black vaguely kendo or samurai type armour. That blue laser beam effect gets a look in, as do some blinkenlights devices and general purpose oscilloscopes; here one wonders how you test a woman’s fertility with an oscilloscope?


The Eurac troops are about as effective as Stormtroopers

Oliver Onions provide a moody Goblin-esque score, with their title theme also giving Martino the opportunity for a nice sight gag, as a mournful trumpet plays over the image of a ruined Manhattan skyline, before the trumpeter is revealed to be just off to our side. Elsewhere we also get some gratuitous gore, with a Eurac leader being enucleated and the odd gut-spilling in the fight scenes and, more awkwardly, some rats apparently being impaled for real.

While perhaps one of Martino’s less substantial efforts, 2019: After the Fall of New York is fast, funny and passably stylish.

[The film is screening this Friday as part of the Edinburgh Film Guild's Apocalypse and Beyond screening - more information here: http://edinburghfilmguild.org.uk/film.php?id=44]

L' Assassino è ancora tra noi / The Murderer is Still with Us

The opening images of L' Assassino è ancora tra noi / The Murderer Is Still with Us, trees silhouetted against a violet sky as darkness descends, recall Sergio Martino's occult-themed All the Colours of the Dark. The impression is enhanced when the writing credits indicate that scenarist Ernesto Gastaldi performed a similar role here, in conjunction with director Camillo Teti.




Darkness descends

Another Martino / Gastaldi giallo, Torso, is then brought to mind as a couple, parked in a lover's lane, fail to notice the stalker outside until it is too late. His modus operandi, however, throws us for a loop, as he unceremoniously guns them down in a manner more reminiscent of The Son of Sam than your typical giallo killer.

Artistry and perversity then combine as the figure drags the woman's body away, removes her remaining clothes, and indulges in some strange shadowplay as the silhouette of his hand caresses her corpse before, using a knife, he makes a few exploratory incisions, as if testing the tensile strength of her flesh, before apparently violates her with a tree branch.


The hand of doom, aesthetically interesting to look at but somewhat problematic from the perspective of a film based on a true case

A telephone rings and we segue from what could have been the feet of the female victim to those of our protagonist, criminology student Cristina Marelli, as she is informed that the killer has struck again.

Deciding to use the case for her thesis, Cristina begins her own investigation, and soon threatened herself. Worse, she comes to suspect that her pathologist boyfriend Alex may be the killer, through a combination of circumstantial evidence like bloody gloves and fetishistically wrapped scalpels and his conspicous absence whenever the killer strikes...


The assassin's tools, or just a coincidence; giallo film or real life fetishistic (re)presentation?

Featuring some truly nasty violence reminiscent of the likes Giallo a Venezia and The New York Ripper type, this 1986 giallo arguably even outdoes such models in sheer tastelessness by taking its inspiration from a still-unsolved real case, that of the so-called “Monster of Florence”. (Koven's argument that the idea of the serial killer is alien to Italian culture is supported by the numerous references to il mostro, the monster.)


Despite such reports, the idiot plot prevails as a succession of victims position themselves to be killed in a manner more akin to slasher film ciphers than convincingly drawn characters

The result is a highly curious blend of fact and fiction in which the foregrounding of the amateur-type investigator figure against a seeming backdrop of official and public concern – a succession of victims feeling the blade of the ripper, albeit posthumously – feels inappropriate. (It is worth noting here that both Giallo a Venezia and The New York Ripper emphasised the poliziotto professional instead.)

The style of The Murderer Is Still with Us also vacillates awkwardly between documentary and giallo conventions, as when the lights go out out in Cristina's apartment to allow for some highly stylised expressionistic lighting effects.






Neo-realism it ain't

In the end Cristina even attends a seance in the hope it might help illuminate the case, at which point the film-makers cut between the participants and the monster's latest atrocity, although his mutilations of a young woman's body is shown in unflinching, no cutaway close ups.

Such touches work in Deep Red and Opera which don't purport to be about the quotidian world – “it all depends on what you mean by reality,” of course - but again leaves a unpleasant after-taste here.


The nightmare becomes reality?

This itself isn't necessarily a problem – a film with this subject matter should position us outwith our comfort zone, I would argue – but we are not given further spur to thought except to question the motives of Teti and his collaborators, especially when an open ended (non-)resolution takes us into self-reflexive, mise-en-abyme territory as Cristina settles down with Alex to watch a giallo entitled L' Assassino è ancora tra noi...

Libido

Although in these posts I sometimes question the validity of taking a psychoanalytic approach to each and every giallo, there is no doubt that it has their place. This 1967 entry is a case in point. Opening with a quotation from Freud and a classic “primal scene” if ever there was one – the young Christian hears a noise emanating from his father's chamber and walks in to discover the man murdering his mistress – it then proceeds to play out the enduring consequences of this trauma and his father's suicide (though significantly no body was ever found) on Christian some 20 years later.

During this intervening years Christian (Giancarlo Giannini) has been kept away from the cliff-top mansion that is one part of his inheritance by his guardian and mentor Paul (Luciano Pigozzi) who has dutifully kept the place in good repair and also endeavoured to have the young man's case assessed and treated by the very best experts in mental health and illness.




The creepy doll and the creepy kid


The moment of trauma

But now, as Christian and his fiancee Eileen (Dominique Boschero) and Paul and his partner Brigitte (Mara Maryl) – significantly and suspiciously something of a dead ringer for Christian's father's mistress – converge on the house for what may be the last time prior to the young man's belated age of majority, doubts start to surface on all sides as Christian comes to believe that his father is not dead and continues to haunt the grounds...

Neatly maintaining the balance between alternative explanations and rationales until the final act and benefitting from a quartet of fine performances and some nice touches – the aforementioned Wellesian hall of mirrors and the Jiminy Cricket musical doll that provides for a diegetic leitmotif of the sort later picked up upon by Argento in Deep Red to name but two – this is a giallo that is ripe for rediscovery.


Twenty years later in Opera it would be Like / Not Like My Mother!

Although it has traditionally been the performance by Giancarlo Giannini that has attracted the most attention, on account of his more art-house friendly work for Lina Wertmuller in particular and the fact that the film represents his debut, genre fans may be more likely to enjoy the opportuntity to see Alan Collins / Luciano Pigozzi in a more substantial role than usual.

Strangely, however,the most important contribution to the film's success is perhaps that that made by Mara Maryl, precisely because she both plays to and with / against the dumb blonde sexpot stereotype in a way that keeps you guessing.

It thus comes as no surprise on reading an old Video Watchdog interview with Maryl's writer husband Ernesto Gastaldi – also co-director here, although he indicates in the same interview that the co-credited Vittorio Salerno did not really contribute much to the finished film after his brother Enrico Maria Salerno was replaced by Pigozzi – that she provided him with the initial idea for the film and was keen to establish herself as an actress at the time.

This notwithstanding, there is also however an unmistakable Gastaldi touch to the proceedings. Indeed, if one reads Libido in relation to some of of Gastaldi's other works, it emerges across as something of a transitional work, poised between the gothic/broken mirrors and modern/broken minds milieux of The Whip and the Body and The Strange Vice of Signora Wardh respectively, albeit with an uncharacteristic focus on the neurotic (or psychotic – again, is it real or in his mind?) male.

In this regard is it also worth noting how the film features a virtual reprise of the Kurt Menliffe at the window and mysterious muddy footprints scenario of Bava's film and that the surname Corot, later applied to George Hilton's character in Martino's, makes a prior appearance here.

I Corpi presentano tracce di violenza forte: some notes on representations of violence in Torso and the Italian giallo

[Note that this post contains spoilers]

A “psychosexual maniac” is stalking the students of a Rome University class. First, Florence and her boyfriend are murdered by a peeping tom in a lover's lane. Next, Carol (Conchita Airoldi) leaves a party in a marijuana haze after giving a couple of her fellow students the brush off. Though pursuing, they prove all mouth and little action as one crashes his motorcycle and lands unceremoniously in the dirt. It is too late for their quarry, though, as she flees ever deeper into the woods and there encounters the killer. This time, however, at least there is a clue: the distinctive red and black patterned scarf used by the killer to strange Carol.

Another student, Daniela (Tina Aumont) receives a threatening telephone call, warning that to tell the police about the red scarf – which flashbacks reveal she saw around the neck of a fellow student, Stefano, whom the audience has already seen assaulting a prostitute he picked up – would be a bad idea.

The police, meanwhile, go to question the stallholder (Ernesto Colli) who sells the scarves. No friend of the police, he professes to know nothing but then attempts to blackmail the killer, with predictably fatal consequences.

Seeking to get away from the unpleasantness, Daniela and her friends Ursula, Katia (Carla Brait) and Jane (Suzy Kendall) decide to spend some time at Daniela's uncle's hilltop villa in the country. Unfortunately the killer is on their trail...

Taking his later Suspicious Death of a Minor to be more of a poliziotto, Torso / I Corpi presentano tracce di violenza carne was the last classic giallo to be directed by Sergio Martino. Released in Italy at the tail end of 1972, the film nevertheless also seems to indicate a growing dissatisfaction with the filone formula as then extant.

Torso features a different cast from Martino's usual, with the likes of Edwige Fenech, George Hilton, Ivan Rassimov and Anita Strindberg conspicuous in their absence, while the musical duties are assigned to the De Angelis Brothers rather than Bruno Nicolai. Perhaps the most interesting change, however, lies in the dynamics of the film. Though starting off very much as a traditional giallo, the second half of the film has been argued as moving more into slasher film territory by downplaying the traditional whodunnit and conspiracy aspect of the giallo and producing, in the figure of Jane, a prototypical “final girl”.

Whatever the relative merits and / or demerits of these changes, they would seem to have worked with the audience as far I Corpi presentano tracce di violenza carnale's box office is concerned, with the film doing approximately the same business as its two 1972 predecessors, All the Colours of the Dark and Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key, combined.




Yet more broken doll imagery - "dolls, just stupid dolls" and some soft-focus lovemaking reminiscent of the opening of Your Vice...


From Torso to Black Christmas and When a Stranger Calls, with the killer on the phone?


The masked, gloved, knife-wielding killer

The thing that I find most interesting about the film, however, is the way it might help illuminate certain aspects of cinematic violence as they might pertain in the giallo.

In a 1993 Film Quarterly article, Devin McKinney attempted to distinguish between two sorts of screen violence. In its “weak” form, characteristic of most mainstream cinema, violence is more likely to be spectacular, throwaway and even pleasurable. In its “strong” form, typically associated with art cinema, violence is more likely to be depicted in a complex and consequential way.

While McKinney's own position would likely disincline him to give a film like Torso the benefit of the doubt – especially when its first half operates broadly in weak violence terms – events at the villa have a stronger edge via the way we are denied the on-screen spectacle of Daniela, Katia and Ursula's deaths in favour of an emphasis on the – thoroughly unpleasant – aftermath and Jane's suitably horrified / terrified reactions.

More generally, one also wonders what the emphasis on trauma within the giallo might mean for McKinney's thesis, in that innumerable genre entries explore the longer-term consequences of a violent act in the past.

While trauma admittedly often serves as little more than pretext for violence as spectacle in some of the better, more thoughtful, aspirational and consequential examples of the giallo – The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, Four Flies on Grey Velvet, Don't Torture a Duckling, The Cat with the Eyes of Jade or The Stendhal Syndrome for example – the balance swings the other way.

A particularly good example here is another hybrid, the much maligned Trauma itself. A large part of the reason for the film's poor reception, I would suggest, was its giallo disavowal of the usual inconsequential pleasures of the more mainstream slasher film. Thus, for instance, when David catches sight of the vulnerable Aura undressing his gaze – and ours – is an explicitly guilty one.

This is not to say that Trauma is an unqualified success; some of the murder set pieces do seem to be intended to be spectacular but fail. This kind of analysis does seem, however, to offer some potential here and more generally in distinguishing between the less aspirational “vernacular” giallo and the more aspirational “auteur” or “art / popular” variants.

Returning to Torso itself, one question that arises is which kind of giallo it is. As a "vernacular" film there is, I would suggest, the matter of which vernacular audience – that in the Italian terza visione cinemas (as I Corpi...) or in the American grindhouses and drive-ins (as Torso), as evinced by the difference between the two versions, the Italian one including an opening monologue on art (overlaid atop a sex scene in an almost Godardian juxtaposition that reminded me of Le Mepris) and some low comedic moments absent from its international counterpart.


Art or commerce?


The consequences of violence

As an auteur film, meanwhile, the issue seems that of exactly who this author might be, of distinguishing between the contributions of Martino and Gastaldi. While not discounting the latter's work, I would suggest that the most successful elements of the film, most notably the extremely suspenseful, largely silent scenes at the villa, belong primarily to the director. Other elements, like the broken dolls and fall-of-man themes, seem more generic / attributable to the writer. The same can be said of the less successful mystery element, with the usual rule of black-gloved thumb applying: if somebody is an obvious suspect, like Stefano, then they are likely just a red herring.

As far as the Psycho-esque element of unexpectedly killing off apparent protagonist Daniela goes, meanwhile, it is worth remembering that Gastaldi and Martino has used the same device themselves in The Case of the Scorpion's Tail with Evelyn Stewart's character.

As ever, the issue is one of the more mainstream critics applying only certain frames of reference and deeming the giallo to be beneath them.

Whatever one thinks of it, Torso thus emerges yet another giallo that manages to be both entertaining and – if one is willing to go beyond “mere entertainment”– thought-provoking.