Tecnica di un omicidio / Professional Killer / Hired Killer / No Tears for a Killer / Technique d'un meurtre

This is another film by the non-mondo Franco Prosperi, a man whom I've managed to confuse with his better known counterpart on at least one previous occasion. The date of the film, 1966, makes it easier to distinguish between the two men, however, since the other Prosperi would have been busy with Africa Addio around the same time.

The story is nothing special. Clint Harris, an ageing hitman, is hired by the shadowy organisation to do one last job before retirement: locate and terminate Frank Secchy, an independent who is suspected of making a deal with the authorities.

After Harris's brother is murdered, he agrees to take the job although the high fee he requests and receives – $200,000 compared to the initially offered $50,000 – leaves it open whether the matter is more business or personal.

Admittedly there are complications that would justify the fourfold increase in price. The first is that no-one knows what Secchy looks like, as he has undergone face changing surgery of variety seemingly much more common as a movie McGuffin than in real life. The second is that Harris, who normally works strictly alone, is required to take an up and coming youngster, Tony Lo Bello, along on the job and show him some of his hard-won professonal wisdom.

It's a collection of clichés, yes, but certainly provides a solid framework for the requisite action scenes that demonstrate Harris's no-nonsense professionalism and further allow for the development of his and Lo Bello's personalities and relationships with one another. Even if they don't quite emerge as fully rounded, believable individuals, they are nevertheless something more than instantly forgettable types. Nor is this the fault of the actors or the writers, instead simply being the archetypal effect that the filmmakers were going for.

One point of comparison that comes to mind is Point Blank: if Boorman's film is more complex in its narrative structure in disrupting chronology and making it hard to tell what is real and what being imagined by the protagonist, Lee Marvin's Walker is nevertheless is a similarly memorable instance of an impossibly single minded man on a mission, a human Terminator. (As another similarity both films also feature a drug-addicted supporting female character.)

Crucially, however, it is not that Robert Webber, who plays Harris, represents a poor man's Marvin, nor that Tecnici di un omocidio is merely a more straightforwardly structured version of Point Blank for the Italian vernacular audience and its international counterparts. Boorman's film, after all, wasn't released until after it.










Prosperi's mise en scene, use of location and the urban landscape impress

Rather, it's that both Prosperi and Boorman were drawing inspiration from the same hard boiled, film noir world and seeking to adapt its premises to an ever more technocratic, bureaucratic world in which romantic, independent figures were concomitantly more and more of an anachronism. (The lone avenger of Fuller's Underworld USA, with his one man vendetta against the faceless organisation that was responsible for the only business death of his father, would be another case in point.)

This is also reflected by Tecnici di un umodicio's visual style. Prosperi makes extensive use of the zoom, moving in and out on his characters from a distance. It is however excessive in a meaningful rather than overused sense, neatly establishing a shared paranoiac atmosphere. Harris is never sure if he is under surveillance by the organisation, his younger counterpart or the mysterious Secchy and the spectator of which of these points of view – if any – he or she might be momentarily sharing / occupying. Adding to this effect is the director's neat use of unusual angles to isolate and dwarf the characters against their environs, a probing use of hand-held camera and a persistent self-referentiality through repeatedly bringing techologies of vision and surveillance to the fore.










Paul Virilio or the panopticon?

The main attraction for many Eurocult fans will, of course, be the presence of a young Franco Nero in the role of Lo Bello. Clean shaven and wearing thick framed glasses and a sports jacket, he's almost unrecognisable compared to Django, with the part allowing him an early opportunity to demonstrate his range and avoid the typecasting that Corbucci's film and other spaghetti westerns could so easily have led to. (With regard to the spaghetti western, it's also worth noting that the relationship between the older and younger hitmen has some similarities with the Van Cleef / Eastwood pairing in For a Few Dollars More and the various films in the Day of Anger mould in which Van Cleef played a mentor figure; Unforgiven also fits this pattern somewhat, albeit with a more complex take on the relationship between the old timers and the newcomer out to make a name for himself.)

Robby Poiventin's score, all big-band brassy crime jazz, is another major asset, beginning with an opening theme that really draws one into the film's world and never really letting up thereafter.

Well worth a look.

Un Uomo dalla pelle dura / The Boxer / Counter Punch / Murder in the Ring / Ripped Off / Tough Guy

Un Uomo dalle pelle dura / The Boxer is a film that cannot but play differently in hindsight through the casting of the notoriously troubled Robert Blake in the titular role of the tough-skinned pugilist. For Teddy 'Cherokee' Wilcox is a man with some severe anger management issues, seemingly tailor-made for the perfectionistic, method-to-madness actor.

Within two minutes Teddy has walked out on his manager after discovering, in time honoured fashion, that boxing is a dirty game where his chances of a shot at the big time are not as much in his own hands as he would like.

Hitting the road Teddy meets a hippy stranger who asks him for a lift; that he's played by Tomas Milian suggests less a casual encounter than one which will prove important. Teddy declines, less because he fears the stranger is a Manson type – remembering the counter-counter cultural reaction against the hippy around the time of the film's release – as that he's not one to help his fellow man out: “I got my own troubles pal,” as he explains.

Arriving at a diner, Teddy then shows how much of a jerk he can be when, given admittedly slow service, he makes a mess of the counter and almost punches out the guy behind him before realising he is in fact an old friend, Mike.

As the two catch up on each other's lives we learn that Teddy is a college graduate, a decorated Vietnam veteran – he caught a bullet in the leg four months into his tour of duty and was invalided out, but killed 13 Vietcong on one occasion before this – and an ex-con; if an odd combination, it's one that is telling in terms of his personality.

As it so happens Mike also knows an old-time trainer, Nick, who worked with some of the greats, lives nearby and is always looking for young prospects. Under Nick's tutelage Teddy soon back in the ring and climbing the ranks. “We'll make boxing what it used to, what today's kids don't know.”

At this point Nick is approached by the syndicate who make threats on his life – we might wonder why they don't threaten his daughter were it not that she is the obvious love interest figure in the otherwise male-dominated tale – and tell him that Teddy must lose his next fight.

With Teddy not one to take dive, the trainer impairs his vision part of the way through the fight but the boxer somehow manages to prevail.

Realising that he has been betrayed by Nick, Teddy goes to sort things out. Arriving, he is is taken by surprise and knocked unconscious. He comes to to find Nick dead, beaten to death. in what Captain Perkins, assigned to investigate the case, surmises to be the manner of a professional...

If The Boxer unfolds like a piece of cheap pulp fiction that plays every cliché of the boxing / crime film it at least acknowledges this fact, as when Perkins proclaiming that Teddy's file “reads like a cheap novel”.

Indeed, given that Tarantino referenced Blake's TV character Baretta in Reservoir Dogs and has a long-standing interest in Italian trash cinema, one wonders if the film had in some way influenced Pulp Fiction's boxer story alongside the more obvious likes of The Set Up.

Where The Boxer departs from Hollywood formula is in the inclusion of a certain giallo touches, including fetishistic close-ups of the real killer donning black gloves before he goes to work, along with the wider investigative scenario that develops as Teddy tries to prove his innocence to the sceptical Perkins.

This in turn leads to a number of scenes of the investigators scrutinising still photographs, tapes and film clips for that vital clue, including a a neat variation on the classic giallo “testimone oculare” formulation as a lip-reader makes out some enigmatic remarks – “There may be some broken gears in the cash register. The firm sent me to fix the machinery.” – in a cinesthetic modulation from the aural to the visual back to the aural.

More generally the film benefits from mondo specialist Franco Prosperi's distinct ability to modulate between documentary and fiction styles, that knack for making his documentary material more visually exciting through more obvious interventions and the fiction material more realistic through use of documentary-style techniques.

Thought some moments like an apparent breach of the 180 degree rule don't quite come off, the montages depicting Teddy's ascendancy in the ring, accompanied by Carlos Pes's signature theme, are effective. The frequency of awkward pans in the panned and scanned version under review also suggests an effective use of the widescreen space.

Though all the cast, which also includes Ernest Borgnine as Perkins and Gabriele Ferzetti as Nick, are good the other stand-out beside Blake is Catherine Spaak as Nick's daughter. Whilst obviously there as eye-candy roles, that she otherwise portrays a character whose appearance, personality and mannerisms are very different from her role in Cat o' Nine Tails – indeed, the viewer who has seen both films may need a double take – serves to indicate her underrated abilities as an actress and that casting for one set of considerations need not preclude another.

[The film is available for download from Cinemageddon]

Belve feroci / Wild Beasts

Whether by accident or design there's a certain affinity between Savage Beasts' setup and that of Jorge Grau's excellent Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue, the main difference that Franco Prosperi's technology gone awry scenario is that bit more plausibly grounded.

For rather than seeing an experimental pest control machine bring the recently dead back to life, what we have here is the contamination of the water supply of a city with PCP causing the animals that drink it to become aggressive and run amok.




Man and the City

The ensuing gory highlights include a couple being devoured by rats; a blind man being savaged by his seeing eye dog; a cheetah pursuing an open-topped VW beetle and an elephant crushing a man's head underfoot.


Dottoressa de Selle

In the midst of the chaos a team of scientists, led by the always welcome Lorraine De Selle, try to work out what has happened and how to stop the madness before it spreads further...


A film with a message?

If its difficult to take Savage Beasts' quasi-ecological message all that seriously given writer-director Prosperi's background in mondo, this selfsame background also shows through in his willingness to take on a challenging assignment of the “never work with children and animals” type with largely successful results.

The main difficulty many will have with the film is the element of unpleasantness that pervades it, most notably with the burning alive of several dozen rats, some butchery footage and the unleashing of a tiger on some penned-in cattle.


Gore, but perhaps not of the sort the fan wants

Though perhaps inherently distasteful at a visceral level these images also reminded me somewhat of Georges Franju's brilliant documentary about a Paris abattoir, Blood of the Beasts, in that they're showing us things going on all the time but which we generally prefer to bracket out of our existence.

After all, in any sizeable city there will be pest controllers whose job it is to exterminate vermin, and slaughterhouse workers and butchers responsible for turning animals into abstracts, those cattle into beef or those pigs into pork, bacon and so on.

A mondo-style juxtaposition of the butchery footage, by which the tiger is fed in an unnatural manner, and its own bringing down of one of the cows, by which it follows its natural instincts, is also interesting from a philosophical perspective if we think about the German philosopher Heidegger's notions of authentic and inauthentic being. (The film's setting in a northern European city, identifiable as Frankfurt, is a happy coincidence in this regard.)

For, from a Heideggerian perspective a caged tiger in a zoo is not an authentic tiger, being unable to roam around and hunt for food as it would in the wild.


Contrary to appearance, this is not a real tiger

Following from this, as in so many other aspects of life, modern, 'fallen' man has been conditioned to accept an inauthentic ersatz substitute for the real experience, or a pacified un-nature in place of authentic nature, often red in tooth and claw.

If such ideas seem far removed from the Italian exploitation cinema, it can also be argued that they are at the heart of Prosperi's own filmmaking practice, given that the mondo is a form of cinema which trades on notions of documentary realism for much of its effect but which has always attracted criticism for its dubious claims to authenticity in fabricating scenes.

Moreover, if we think about it these scenes are often about the contrasts between modern and primitive and civilised and savage forms of life, with the division frequently also breaking down along lines of the fallen and the authentic.

While Savage Beasts is a fiction film, as foregrounded by the obvious reference point of Suspiria for the seeing eye dog attack, similar questions can still be asked of other aspects of it. Note, for example, the way in which Prosperi establishes the situation with his opening montages of the urban jungle: were those discarded needles that the camera picks out on a U-bahn escalator found or planted? If found, were they a lucky find or near ubiquitous? If near ubiquitous, what does this say about 'our' way of life, when so many need to find escape in drugs...