Not to be confused with the following year's anthology film The Witches, Damiano Damiani's The Witch AKA The Witch in Love (1966) is a film which, like much of his output, seems to fall awkwardly between the vernacular and arthouse camps.
In relation to the former, it comes across as his version - albeit via Panamanian author Carlos Fuentes's novel Aura - of the strand of Italian Gothic characterised by Bava, Margheriti and company with their characteristic theme of the dualistic female monster, often as not incarnated by Barbara Steele.
In relation to the latter, it's a slower-paced and more self-conscious about being art as well as entertainment, with a contemporary rather than period setting - albeit with almost all the action taking place in an enclosed, palazzo whose glory years are clearly behind it.
While the Ur-text of the Italian Gothic, I Vampiri, also mixed modern and classical Gothic, the two films quickly establish different approaches to their respective monsters and her relationship to their male protagonists.
Freda's film presents a Countess Bathory type figure who is never seen at the same time and place as her niece, because they are one and the same, and who is fixated on the son of her former love.
Here, in contrast, we have two women, Consuela and her daughter Aura, who are almost immediately presented together - albeit with certain uncanny traits, like a shared tendency to appear and disappear almost as if by magic and to make the same characteristic movements and gestures - whose target, whilst carefully chosen, has no evident prior connection to them to speak of.
Sergio (Richard Johnson) purchases a newspaper and finds within it a job advertisement that seems to have been written with him specifically in mind. Arriving at the address he encounters an old woman, Consuela (Sarah Ferrati), whom he suspects is the one who has kept on crossing his path in the last month. The job, she explains, is cataloguing her late husband's books - a task which, whether intentionally or not, recalls Hammer's Dracula and Jonathan Harker's subterfuge there, just as Consuela's appearances prefigure those of the heavy in Four Flies on Grey Velvet.
Somewhat disturbed by these coincidences and the old woman's eagerness to have him take the job, despite his not being a librarian, Sergio attempts to leave.
Two things stop him. First, Consuela, seems to suffer a seizure, possibly drug-induced. Second, her beautiful young daughter Aura (Rosanna Schiffiano) appears.
Remaining in the house, Sergio learns some of its other secrets, including that Consuela's husband's remains are there in a glass case, and the unwelcome presence of the previous incumbent of the librarian's post, Fabrizio (Gian Maria Volonte)...
Well performed by the four leads, on screen in one or other combination for the entirety of the one hour fifty minutes running time, reasonably well directed by Damiani and nicely shot and designed, with some good use being made of the interiors and the compositional opportunities they present, the biggest issue that many are likely to have with The Witch in Love is its aforementioned in-between nature.
By virtue of being dubbed into English for the international market and not bearing the names of any more respected auteurs, as with The Witches and Spirits of the Dead, the film would seem to have been condemned to be seen primarily by a genre audience.
As one commentator notes on the IMDB, there's also a strange affinity between the film and Joseph Losey's The Servant, perhaps suggesting that the film could even have worked without overt supernatural overtones or resolution, with this in turn perhaps indicating why Fuentes was unhappy with Damiani's adaptation and felt Bunuel would have done a better job of it, when we think of the likes of The Exterminating Angel, Belle de jour or That Obscure Object of Desire and their surrealistic confusion of dreams and reality to the point of indiscernibility.
Yet, on account of its slow pace, preference for atmosphere over shocks and the absence of any popular author's name or a star presence that Barbara Steele would have brought to the role of Aura - especially considering her appearances in The Long Hair of Death, Nightmare Castle and The She-Beast around the same time, images from of which are reprised here - it perhaps didn't have particularly obvious attractions for them either.
While Johnson had appeared in Robert Wise's The Haunting in a somewhat similar role, that was Hollywood style cautiously 'respectable' horror. Likewise, while Volonte had appeared in A Fistful of Dollars and For a Few Dollars More by this time and would soon appear in Damiani's own A Bullet for the General and Sergio Sollima's Face to Face, it's probably true to say that he was more enthusiastic about and recognised for his work in more serious political roles than in the latter two 'political' spaghetti westerns, never mind their 'apolitical' Leone counterparts.
But, if I didn't find The Witch in Love to be as effective or enjoyable as Kill Baby Kill or Castle of Blood, it also has to be said that these, particularly the former, do set the bar high and that the presentation of the film in the version I watched, panned and scanned with a somewhat greyish murkiness and with a muffled dub, was hardly the most conducive to proper evaluation.
Showing posts with label Gian-Maria Volonte. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Gian-Maria Volonte. Show all posts
Wednesday, 6 May 2009
Friday, 1 May 2009
Sacco and Vanzetti
The basic facts in the case of Sacco and Vanzetti are simple:
Two Italian-born anarchists who had emigrated to the US, were arrested and charged with having committed murder during a robbery, tried, convicted and sentenced to death on dubious evidence. Despite appeals and various high profile figures of the time pleading for clemency, the sentences were eventually carried out, to become a cause celebre for progressive elements in the US.
What Giuliano Montaldo’s film does is explore the background, in terms of the authorities’ paranoia about revolutionary elements and (the US as) a divided country where the elite were afraid of losing their power and would do anything to keep it, in ways that undoubtedly resonated for 1970s audiences.
Thus, he open with black and white scenes of a raid on an immigrant community, which filone fans may find curiously reminiscent of the sepia-toned opening to The Beyond; repeatedly cuts in the image of an anarchist falling to his death whilst in police custody, apparently referencing Dario Fo’s contemporaneous Accidental Death of an Anarchist; and contrasts the certitude of various eye witness testimonies – yes, those are the men I saw – with the far more ambiguous ‘reality’ revealed in the pseudo-documentary reconstructions.
While the investigation of the investigation reveals the fabrication and disappearance of evidence, along with the essentially show trial nature of events, where the verdict had essentially been decided in advance, this same dietrology (i.e. what lies beneath?) perhaps also exposes the implicit problems here.
Specifically, what we have is a film which is radical in content, but not in form – here we may note the constructed nature of the flashback reconstructions, against the unquestioned reality of their earlier counterparts and the found newsreel images – and which, as such, was necessarily complicit with the status quo, at least according to some theoreticians and practitioners.
Or, if we deny that there is truth, that everything is just a more or less self-interested discourse, then don’t we thereby accept that the reactionaries and racists who condemned Sacco and Vanzetti to death have just as (in)valid a perspective as they did, with their compassionate desire to emancipate the mass of humanity?
That the filmmakers did not support such self-defeating positions is evident.
While Gian Maria Volonte, who plays Vanzetti, may have appeared in the Dziga Vertov collective’s Wind from the East, with its radical form and content, he also appeared in more conventional politically committed films like Sollima’s western Face to Face and Petri’s giallo Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion both before and afterwards.
(Would anyone have gone to see Wind from the East had it not also had Godard’s name connected to it, albeit ‘under erasure’? I think not.)
Ennio Morricone and Joan Baez’s music, with the clear subject position we are to take in relation to the ballad of the two men in Baez's lyrics and the decidedly conventional approach in Morricone's music, in comparison to the experimental work he was undertaking with the new improvisation group or on soundtracks like Cold Eyes of Fear (genre) and The Working Class Goes to Heaven (art, with Volonte again), engages rather than alienates us.
Above all, however, it is the way everything – writing, direction, performances, design etc. – come together to really draw us in to the story to make us feel the injustice, rather than that all there is is just us...
Highly recommended, unless you’re one of them, whichever they this refers to...
Two Italian-born anarchists who had emigrated to the US, were arrested and charged with having committed murder during a robbery, tried, convicted and sentenced to death on dubious evidence. Despite appeals and various high profile figures of the time pleading for clemency, the sentences were eventually carried out, to become a cause celebre for progressive elements in the US.
What Giuliano Montaldo’s film does is explore the background, in terms of the authorities’ paranoia about revolutionary elements and (the US as) a divided country where the elite were afraid of losing their power and would do anything to keep it, in ways that undoubtedly resonated for 1970s audiences.
Thus, he open with black and white scenes of a raid on an immigrant community, which filone fans may find curiously reminiscent of the sepia-toned opening to The Beyond; repeatedly cuts in the image of an anarchist falling to his death whilst in police custody, apparently referencing Dario Fo’s contemporaneous Accidental Death of an Anarchist; and contrasts the certitude of various eye witness testimonies – yes, those are the men I saw – with the far more ambiguous ‘reality’ revealed in the pseudo-documentary reconstructions.
While the investigation of the investigation reveals the fabrication and disappearance of evidence, along with the essentially show trial nature of events, where the verdict had essentially been decided in advance, this same dietrology (i.e. what lies beneath?) perhaps also exposes the implicit problems here.
Specifically, what we have is a film which is radical in content, but not in form – here we may note the constructed nature of the flashback reconstructions, against the unquestioned reality of their earlier counterparts and the found newsreel images – and which, as such, was necessarily complicit with the status quo, at least according to some theoreticians and practitioners.
Or, if we deny that there is truth, that everything is just a more or less self-interested discourse, then don’t we thereby accept that the reactionaries and racists who condemned Sacco and Vanzetti to death have just as (in)valid a perspective as they did, with their compassionate desire to emancipate the mass of humanity?
That the filmmakers did not support such self-defeating positions is evident.
While Gian Maria Volonte, who plays Vanzetti, may have appeared in the Dziga Vertov collective’s Wind from the East, with its radical form and content, he also appeared in more conventional politically committed films like Sollima’s western Face to Face and Petri’s giallo Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion both before and afterwards.
(Would anyone have gone to see Wind from the East had it not also had Godard’s name connected to it, albeit ‘under erasure’? I think not.)
Ennio Morricone and Joan Baez’s music, with the clear subject position we are to take in relation to the ballad of the two men in Baez's lyrics and the decidedly conventional approach in Morricone's music, in comparison to the experimental work he was undertaking with the new improvisation group or on soundtracks like Cold Eyes of Fear (genre) and The Working Class Goes to Heaven (art, with Volonte again), engages rather than alienates us.
Above all, however, it is the way everything – writing, direction, performances, design etc. – come together to really draw us in to the story to make us feel the injustice, rather than that all there is is just us...
Highly recommended, unless you’re one of them, whichever they this refers to...
Sunday, 8 February 2009
Svegliati e Uccidi / Wake Up and Die
During the 1960s and 1970s Carlo Lizzani made a number of interesting genre films marked by a combination of solid entertainment, social comment and commitment, a logical extension of earlier neo-realist styled works such as Achtung Banditi and Cronaca di poveri amanti into the prime years of the filone cinema.
While preceded by Il Gobbo, about Rome resistance fighter and latterly bandit Alvaro Concenza, Svegliati e Uccidi - closer to Wake Up and Kill, rather than Wake Up and Die in English translation- marks an important step in the evolution of Lizzani's crime cinema, in engaging with contemporary Italian gangsterism rather than looking back to the 1940s.
The equivalent to Concenza here is petty criminal turned public enemy number one Luciano Lutring (Robert Hoffmann), another real-life bandit, Milanese rather than Roman, who became a respected writer and painter after his release from prison.
Lutring - whose name was also sufficiently well-known to be an alternative homonymous title for the film in Italy - is a complex character with obvious personal issues. First seeking to impress night-club singer Yvonne (Lisa Gastoni), whom he soon marries, he anaesthetises himself with drink and counters his feelings of inadequacy by carrying a machine gun he hardly knows how to use.
As an impulsive amateur rather than a professional, he emerges as something of the polar opposite of his counterpart in Bandits in Milan, Pierro Cavallero, who treats crime as a rational business like any other.
While Robert Hoffman is entirely satisfactory as Lutring the best performance in the film is probably that of Gian Maria Volonte, as his nemesis cum protector Inspector Moroni.
It's a testament to Volonte's abilities that while Moroni is very different from Cavallero in the later film, both characters are utterly convincing.
Moroni is also where the film gets even more interesting in political terms. In the Italian set portions of the film we see how he allows the media to focus on Lutring at the expense of other, actually more troublesome criminals whom he wishes to divert attention from and / or lull into a false sense of security, with a pragmatic emphasis on the either / or.
Ironically their number include one gang whom the naive Lutring brings a daring plan for a daylight robbery but who then decide to carry it out by themselves shortly before the arranged time in the hope that their erstwhile colleague will arrive just as the police do and serve as the fall guy.
The social commentary continues as Lutring flees to France, as different groups within the French police compete to be the ones who bring him to book, with predictable results.
Given all this, Lutring's position ultimately emerges as something of a riff on Peter Lorre's character in M, as a helpless figure whom everyone else, rather than wanting out of the picture, wishes to take advantage of.
Lizzani achieves a nice balance between modes in his direction, with enough style to avoid simply being a documentary and enough documentary to effectively convey the reality of the characters and their world as part of our own. This is perhaps best realised in the nightclub scenes, which are simultaneously realistic and expressive to convey a sleazy glamour, and the set-piece robberies, as a how (not) to do it guide.
Ennio Morricone's score is beautiful in its simplicity, building tension through the use of quasi-minimalist 'cells' of piano and percussion in the suspense and action sequences and expanding out for lush vocal numbers in the nightclub scenes.
Volonte's younger brother Claudio Camaso - if anything an even more intense performer - also appears in the film.
While preceded by Il Gobbo, about Rome resistance fighter and latterly bandit Alvaro Concenza, Svegliati e Uccidi - closer to Wake Up and Kill, rather than Wake Up and Die in English translation- marks an important step in the evolution of Lizzani's crime cinema, in engaging with contemporary Italian gangsterism rather than looking back to the 1940s.
The equivalent to Concenza here is petty criminal turned public enemy number one Luciano Lutring (Robert Hoffmann), another real-life bandit, Milanese rather than Roman, who became a respected writer and painter after his release from prison.
Lutring - whose name was also sufficiently well-known to be an alternative homonymous title for the film in Italy - is a complex character with obvious personal issues. First seeking to impress night-club singer Yvonne (Lisa Gastoni), whom he soon marries, he anaesthetises himself with drink and counters his feelings of inadequacy by carrying a machine gun he hardly knows how to use.
As an impulsive amateur rather than a professional, he emerges as something of the polar opposite of his counterpart in Bandits in Milan, Pierro Cavallero, who treats crime as a rational business like any other.
While Robert Hoffman is entirely satisfactory as Lutring the best performance in the film is probably that of Gian Maria Volonte, as his nemesis cum protector Inspector Moroni.
It's a testament to Volonte's abilities that while Moroni is very different from Cavallero in the later film, both characters are utterly convincing.
Moroni is also where the film gets even more interesting in political terms. In the Italian set portions of the film we see how he allows the media to focus on Lutring at the expense of other, actually more troublesome criminals whom he wishes to divert attention from and / or lull into a false sense of security, with a pragmatic emphasis on the either / or.
Ironically their number include one gang whom the naive Lutring brings a daring plan for a daylight robbery but who then decide to carry it out by themselves shortly before the arranged time in the hope that their erstwhile colleague will arrive just as the police do and serve as the fall guy.
The social commentary continues as Lutring flees to France, as different groups within the French police compete to be the ones who bring him to book, with predictable results.
Given all this, Lutring's position ultimately emerges as something of a riff on Peter Lorre's character in M, as a helpless figure whom everyone else, rather than wanting out of the picture, wishes to take advantage of.
Lizzani achieves a nice balance between modes in his direction, with enough style to avoid simply being a documentary and enough documentary to effectively convey the reality of the characters and their world as part of our own. This is perhaps best realised in the nightclub scenes, which are simultaneously realistic and expressive to convey a sleazy glamour, and the set-piece robberies, as a how (not) to do it guide.
Ennio Morricone's score is beautiful in its simplicity, building tension through the use of quasi-minimalist 'cells' of piano and percussion in the suspense and action sequences and expanding out for lush vocal numbers in the nightclub scenes.
Volonte's younger brother Claudio Camaso - if anything an even more intense performer - also appears in the film.
Sunday, 29 June 2008
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.
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