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.

Il Delitto del diavolo / Queens of Evil

A lonely road at night, somewhere by the sea. David (Ray Lovelock), an idealistic young hippie biker type, stops to assist an older man whose Rolls Royce has broken down. David might have wondered why he bothered when the man not only berates him for his unconventional lifestyle, lack of religion and respect for tradition, but also surreptitiously spikes one of his tyres.


The knight of the road on his quest for freedom; note the Laszlo Kovacs style lens flare


The man

Having repaired the flat, David goes off in pursuit of the man, his peace and love philosophy again evident insofar as he wants to know what motivated the older man. His quarry speeds up rather than slowing down, however, precipitating a crash.

Faced with this scene, David attempts to flag down a passing truck. The driver and co-driver only see another dirty hippy and decline to stop. Deciding that there is nothing he can do, David departs. Taking a back road, he finds a cabin in the woods and settles down for the night.

The next morning David is awoken by a beautiful young woman, Liv (Haydee Politoff). She wonders what he is doing there and indicates that he had best leave as soon as possible before anyone else notices his presence. Evidently having past experience of similar situations, David thinks that Liv means her parents, and is accordingly surprised when he is confronted with two slightly older, but equally beautiful women, Samantha (Silvia Monti) and Fabiana (Evelyn Stewart / Ida Galli) – who present themselves as Liv’s elder sisters.


Liv


Samantha and Fabiana

They invite him in for breakfast. Both hungry and intrigued, David takes up the offer, finding his curiosity even more piqued by the half-fairytale half-Habitat and Biba décor of the sister's house and their just happening to have baked four large cakes as if expecting a guest.


The sisters' house, dominated by their pictures. Are they to be looked at or looking?







Having gorged his fill – gluttony is evidently not one of the deadly sins on this occasion – the young man moves to leave but has a change of heart; significantly we view this scene with the sisters, who plainly expected to see him return.






“Yes, David”

An idyllic morning on the lake ensues culminating in an almost miraculous catch of fish. Is it just the spot where they always congregate at noon, as the sisters explain, or something more? Whatever the case, another extravagant repast follows along with another even more half-hearted attempt to leave.




The female gaze

As the days go on, David finds himself increasingly bewitched by the sisters's glamour, his former certainties and resolution dissolving, powerless to avoid the fate that awaits him even as Liv hesitantly once more tries to encourage him to leave before it is too late…

As the back cover review on this DVD indicates, Tonino Cervi's Queens of Evil is best viewed as an allegory, David less an Easy Rider or Wild One situated against a concrete historical and geographical background than a questing knight in a modern yet mythic landscape that could be anywhere in the west. His holy grail is freedom, the three sisters the belle dames sans merci put there to tempt him off his righteous path.




A coach approaches the castle as we move deeper into fairy-tale territory

Following from this allegorical nature, the usual rules of engagement with film do not apply. Rather, as with such other reference points as Riccardo Freda's Tragic Ceremony, Dario Argento's Inferno, Jean Brismee's The Devil's Nightmare, Aldo Lado's Short Night of the Glass Dolls and Giorgio Ferroni's Night of the Devils it is the kind of film where atmosphere and symbolism are more important than narrative logic and the creation of characters and situations we could believe exist in the real world.

Taken in its own terms, the film succeeds admirably.

Though Cervi's direction is sometimes obvious, this obviousness is as much part and parcel of the film's effectiveness as the obvious weight attached to each and every line of dialogue. We know that David knows his resolve is crumbling in the face of the three sisters, and more importantly that he increasingly does not care to resist.

Elsewhere the director's approach is more subtle, with some clever compositions and use of focus to highlight the shifting contours of the relationships between the four characters.

The film's subtexts are also fascinating, whether the play upon the biblical idea of being fishers of men when the sisters take David onto the lake, with the ironic equivalence between his position and that of his erswhile catch, or the entire way in which the film's regimes of looking and being looked at fail to accord with regulation issue male / female active / passive structures and strictures.

No doubt if we wanted to then read the film as ultimately a misogynistic, male paranoid work where active female sexuality is presented as the greatest threat to the ideals of counter-cultural revolution – and here we perhaps have to note the specific historical context of the film's production, coming at a point where gender politics were coming on the agenda more than they had been only a few years earlier – we could do so. The three women, are after all, ultimately obeying the law of their father. His real identity should be obvious even without a consideration of the Italian title, Il Delitto del diavolo: favola thrilling, with this in turn being a title that implies a different degree of agency to the sisters than the English language alternative, where they are The Queens of Evil.

The real point, however, is that things are never quite as simple as either / or theories would have it.

The film's theology is also interesting on this count: Whereas in Rosemary's Baby the Devil's greatest power stems from the fact that few besides his followers really believe in him anymore in the “Age of Aquarius,” here he requires us to have faith, even if only so that this same faith – in David's case in that hope of an alternative way of being – can in turn be broken.

In both films, however, the real absence is perhaps the same one: God's. And yet, again Cervi's film complicates matters. Is a priest who David later encounters at a gathering, and who urges him that the time has come to make a decision – a decision that the rest of the film has been building up to – but who pointedly remains apart from the others there in fact God, his representative or another of the Devil's agents? And, in line with the décor of the elegantly appointed castle at which this gathering takes place, with many of the portraits adorning the walls apparently of cardinals, is there any significant difference? Is, in the end, this a religious or anti-religious allegory? Are the laws of “God the father” and “your father, the Devil” one and the same in terms of subjecting oneself to the other's and society's will?

Whether any of this makes sense in traditional theological terms is, of course, debatable. But whatever the case Queens of Evil is a heady fantastique brew whose only hangover, pleasant rather than nasty, is the stimulus it provides to thought.

The difficulty, as ever, is that the kind of audiences who went go to see Eric Rohmer's “Moral Tale” La Collectioneuse and who might have noticed the presence of Haydee Politioff here and been pleasantly surprised by what they, would likely have pre-judged Cervi's the film as Euro-trash, beneath them, at least in the English-speaking world.

Though not really an actors' film, the four leads are perfectly adequate in their roles. Politoff has perhaps the most challenging role alongside Lovelock, having to play something of the innocent in contrast to the more mature Monti and Stewart whose primary role – which they understandably perform beautifully – is to to be seductive and alluring, although importantly in distinctive ways that suit their respective images, Monti more obviously passionate and Stewart more aloof and icy.

Lovelock displays an easy going naïve charm, and also intriguingly contributes a couple of non-diegetic songs to the soundtrack. They're somewhat sub-Dylan, but come across as genuine and thus add rather than detract from the whole. Francesco Lavagnino provides the rest of the music, an effective selection of empathetic pieces which enhance the mood of any given scene, be it playful or more sinister.

Though one of the supporting characters indicates that “Audio visual means are no longer effective,” the cumulative effect of this beguiling piece of fantastique is to prove otherwise.

This DVD has been put together by Johnny from Lovelock and Load and Marc from Mondo Erotico. It's a by-fans for-fans kind of release rather than a commercial product. You won't find it for sale in your local or online retailer of choice as it isn't for commercial sale. So, of course, how do you get a copy? Visit Johnny's website and find out...

The care and consideration that have gone into the package put many commercial releases of comparable product to shame. The picture is a considerable improvement on the old VHS dupes out there, while the choice of English and Italian audio is always welcome. The inclusion of the two Lovelock songs among the extras is a nice touch, as is the cover art modelled on the film's art deco styled poster.

Un Posto ideale per uccidere / Dirty Pictures

Two young hippie tourists, Dick (Ray Lovelock) and Ingrid (Ornella Muti), hit upon a clever way of financing their trip to Italy: stopping off in Copenhagen, they visit a sex shop to stock up on pornographic material, which they then sell on at a considerable mark-up to Italians deprived of such product and eager to taste the fruits of “Sexual Freedom in Denmark”

Having exhausted their supply and the money it has brought in almost as quickly, Dick then decides they can make their own pictures just as easily with Ingrid as their main subject.

Things continue to go swimmingly until they are apprehended by the police and given 24 hours to get out of Italy, followed by a run-in with some similarly anti-establishment bikers who then proceed to take off in the middle of the night with the last of their money in a no honour among thieves kind of way.

Their car having run out of petrol, Dick and Ingrid are forced to stop at a large, isolated villa. Believing no-one to be at home, they go to explore and discover the garage door to be unlocked and a car with petrol therein.

But before fortune can help those who help themselves, the lady of the house, Barbara (Irene Papas) unexpectedly shows up. Even more surprising is her reaction: rather than responding like the typical representative of middle-age, middle-class society that the couple have encountered until now, she invites them in.

Or, given some of the customers for their dirty pictures, perhaps she is more typical than they realise, this being a notion characteristic of this film's ambiguities and ambivalences.

For what Dick and Ingrid do not realise is that Barbara is less interested in hearing their counter-culture arguments or the chance to indulge in a ménage a trois than in their potential value in relation to her own criminal conspiracy – one that involves rather more than the victimless crimes the young couple have engaged in thus far...

One of the little games you can play for yourself when watching golden age gialli is that of trying to guess the generation and politics of the film-makers concerned – are they left or right, counter- or traditional culture, and post- or pre-1960s in their general intellectual and cultural formations?

Sometimes it's relatively easy, as is the case with Argento and The Bird with the Crystal Plumage. (Hint: look out for the Black Power posters on the wall.) Sometimes it's a bit more difficult, as with the likes of Fulci and A Lizard in a Woman's Skin or Don't Torture a Duckling, although the complexities and contradictions that emerge thereby can also at least be argued to be in accord with the contradictions and complexities of the man himself. Sometimes, as in the case of Lenzi here, it is damned difficult to tell.

At issue is that key descriptor used by both Craig Ledbetter and Adrian Luther Smith in their write-ups: cynical. More specifically the question might be phrased thus: if the attitude of Lenzi's film is a cynical one, who is (t)his cynicism addressed to and what form does it take?

For while Ledbetter suggests that Un Posto ideale per uccidere / Dirty Pictures is characterised at its core by a cynicism towards the youth audience it was likely intended for, found myself wondering whether in their desire to merely live free Dick and Ingrid aren't in fact established as more tragic / romantic characters who, to quote the introduction to Nicholas Ray's They Live By Night, “were never properly introduced to the world we live in.”

Certainly they seem to approach the world with a (conventionally) childlike innocence, playfulness – note here, for instance, the way Dick treats the pistol he finds as if it were a toy – and general guilelessness, especially when compared with Barbara. (Or “Age and Guile Beat Youth, Innocence and a Bad Haircut,” as the title of a book by satirist P. J O'Rourke puts it.)

Part of the difficulty in knowing for sure is that Lenzi's direction throughout is characterised by the same directorial style, which we might term – in keeping with the theme of apparent contradiction – an energetic laziness. By this I mean that while his camera is constantly doing something, there rarely seemed much sense of any real logic underlying its peregrinations, with the potential shock effect of the zoom lens being particular diluted through overuse. Had Lenzi established greater contrast between acts, interior and exterior locations, subjective and objective perceptions, or simply dramatic scales – with these all being things he managed in his previous gialli, so they were certainly not beyond him – the effect would have been more telling, the indication of whose side he was on that little bit clearer.

Ignoring these questions – admittedly not necessarily of interest to everyone – the main pleasures be had thus come from the performances by the three leads, each ideally suited to their part and all the more convincing for it, with Papas in particular again delivering the kind of performance that is all too rare – and even less rarely critically recognised – within such cinema; and the incidentals, including cameo roles from such giallo regulars as Tom Felleghy and Umberto Raho; some pleasingly modish fashions – most notably Lovelock's Austin Powers style Union Flag jacket – and an inspired departure from convention by virtue of not having the radio broadcast a vital piece of information at exactly the right moment for it to be heard by the protagonists.

Play Motel

A man with the unlikely name of Mr Shamrock goes into a hotel, orders a J&B (by name) and looks around, noticing a woman with a distinctive pin. Before you can say “handkerchief code”, he's picked her up and they're off to his room for some satantic themed sex games, she wearing nothing but a nun's wimple and he a devil's outfit, complete with pitchfork – although it doesn't stay on for long, disappearing as if by magic as he goes down on her.


Who says nuns have no fun?


A horny devil

There are some jumps in the breezy, inane music at this point, indicating the film to exist in that borderline realm between (s)exploitation and hardcore, with inserts of a man's hand masturbating a woman's genitals – not necessarily those of the performers here – and of some in-and-out action – as the sound of a camera clicking is heard by us – if not, as it turns out, the performers.

For it was not someone shooting stills to accompany a porno shoot, but a blackmail gang who are use the hotel as their base of operations. Thus, when we next see the man, now revealed as Mr Cortesi, it's at his office receiving the compromising pictures and a request for a few million lire or else. Rather than paying up, however, he decides to seek the counsel of his lawyer, Lanzieri. The message on his answering machine says he's out, in court, but as we cut again we see he's in bed with Cortesi's wife, Luisa!

Lanzieri advises Cortesi to go to the police but, wary of his indiscretions being made public, Cortesi is in favour of paying up this time. Lanzieri telephones Luisa to let her know her husband's decision and, for reasons of her own, sneaks away with blackmail photos and letter and goes to the police.

Luisa tells Inspector De Sanctis (Antony Steffen) that she and her husband are both free to have whatever relationships they want and that they are in the process of divorcing anyway – so revenge is not a motive.

While Luisa puts the originals back before her husband can realise they have even gone the police go to work, quickly identifying Cortesi's partner as a model from a contact / porn magazine, published by Shamrock editions, whose offices De Sanctis thus stakes out whilst waiting for the woman, Loredana, to eventually show.


A tired-looking Steffen, a long way away not only from his westerns of a decade before but also the likes of The Night Evelyn Came out of the Grave from earlier in the 1970s


Do you think it's the same woman?


Could this be a clue?


Undoubtedly

Inside we are “treated” to some scenes of a photoshoot and yet more distinctly unappealing porno action. (Whether it's supposed to be erotic, a la Joe D'Amato, or anti-erotic, a la much of Jess Franco, is debateable. I don't know which and more to the point don't know if the filmmakers knew either.)

Loredana rebuffs the advances of Willy – talk about obvious names – telling him to come back when he has more money and leaves. Cutaways to an extreme close up of an eye tell us that she is not long for this world and, sure enough, everything goes white as someone then strikes her from behind. It makes a change from black, I suppose, and also allows for a nice dissolve between scenes as we then see De Sanctis and his men finding her car and body at the bottom of a white stone quarry. (Or, at least, it all seems to be white in the Luminous Film and Video Wurks sourced version I watched, whose visual qualities add an extra layer of illicit scuzziness to the whole experience.)

With this avenue of investigation now closed, Luisa decides to go undercover at the Play Motel. Following a likely-looking couple to their room, she enters the office oddly located adjacent to it and, sure enough, finds it has a one-way mirror through which she can observe their games – he dressed as a gladiator type with whip and she playing at being a wild beast, although they soon also get down to business. Meanwhile, a black-clad figure advances along the corridor whilst the intrusion of the camera clicking atop the porno-funk scoring indicates seems to suggest either that Luisa is one of the blackmailers, that the opposite adjacent room is also occupied by them, or that no-one was really paying much attention to such details, presumably figuring that their audience wouldn't either. I suspect it was probably the third case, although since Luisa is then dispatched by the black-clad figure – who dons black leather gloves before garotting her – the second is perhaps a possibility.

While the killer takes Luisa's body to his car park another couple of guests arrive at the desk. While the man (Ray Lovelock) is settling accounts the woman decides to wait for him in their car, prompting the hotel clerk – whom we already knew to be in on things – to surreptitiously signal to his collegue via a buzzer.

As they couple drive away, oblivious to the body dumped in their boot, they argue.

Roberto wants to know why they had to go to play motel to make love – is he being set up as the next victim? – and says the time they spend there could have cost him an acting job. “Big deal, considering the great role the director assigned you” is Patrizia's reply. It's somewhat ironic given that one wonders what Lovelock and Steffen are doing here, along with director Roy Garret / Mario Gariazzo himself.




Familiar eye / camera lens motifs

Sure enough their car then gets a flat tyre, prompting the discovery of Luisa's body and the couple, to belatedly get involved with the case as classic giallo amateur sleuths when, observing those in attendance at Luisa's funeral, De Sanctis notices the incongruous presence of an old enemy, Liguori, from his days in the vice squad and needs someone the pimp won't recognise to go undercover at the Play Motel...

They find Liguori and company setting up a tycoon's wife, but for some reason – read, the film-makers need more sleazy contrivances – this isn't enough evidence yet to act, so Patrizia goes to the photography studio pretending to be an aspiring actress / model / whatever and from feeling awkward and modest in front of the camera to seasoned professional in a couple of minutes – either a great actress or to the manner born – whilst the scene goes on far beyond any narrative purpose it had.


“Take 'em off” or “Keep em on”?


The mirror has two faces


Cardinal Sin and Catholic guilt?


The black gloves

The difference between a good and a bad giallo that emerges is, however, not so much to do with the balance between narrative and non-narrative scenes, but whether the latter have their own raison d'etre as exercises in style over substance or even style as substance. Needless to say those in Play Motel fail on both counts through their lowest common denominator raincoater audience apirations – or, more precisely, the lack thereof.


A familiar giallo sentiment, though this is no Bird with the Crystal Plumage or Cat o' Nine Tails


Steffen in “go ahead punk, make my day” mode

As the non-diegetic music and attempts at style kick in, it is again hard to tell what the filmmakers' editorial perspective is in all this, other than a having their cake and eating it hypocritical one – albeit with a similar attitude perhaps manifest in one's own viewing the film with those “guilty pleasure” and “so bad its good” aesthetics perhaps too often covering for a multitude of sins.

One thing Play Motel does have going for it is a modicum of insight into those who would undoubteldy want films of its ilk banned were they ever to appear on the wider cultural radar – note the identify of the figure finally revealed to be behind the whole operaration, or the the family-values respectable bourgeois type who celebrates news of his upcoming dinner with the cardinal by a visit to the motel.

Overall, however, this is a sad and dispiriting example of the giallo in decline.