First things first: I must confess to being a fan of Christian Petzold’s work, such that the semi-annual appearance of his latest film usually represents one of the highlights of the EIFF for me.
For the uninitiated, the German director specialises in well-crafted, slow-burn thrillers. They demand a higher degree of viewer involvement than most comparable Hollywood product, but are not as hermetic as those of, say, Michael Haneke.
Petzold’s clinical, restrained mise-en-scene, all the better to accentuate the moments of sudden violence, does recall Michael Haneke somewhat. But there also is no question that Petzold is his own film-maker. This is particularly signalled by that issues around German identity that Fateh Akin would foreground here being a bit more subtextual.
The title refers to the location in North-Eastern Germany, near Rostock on the Baltic Sea coast, where the action, centring round a triangle of characters, takes place.
The first, Thomas, is an ex-soldier. He’s someone we can infer grew up in the DDR and to whom life has not been particularly kind. He was dishonourably discharged from the army after serving in Afghanistan – a stain on his character that’s deliberately left underexplored. After failing to keep his savings from a creditor now has no money with which to do up the family home, now his after the death of his mother.
The second, Ali, is a Turkish-German businessman. He came to the BDR when he was two years old and has established a chain of 45 fast food places in the area. Perhaps through the pressures of his job – his employees, many of them fellow migrants, cannot be trusted – he has a tendency to drink too much.
A chance encounter when Ali, drunk again, drives his Range Rover into a ditch, leads to Thomas being hired by Ali as his driver and, after the ex-soldier demonstrates that knows how to handle himself and when to keep quiet, general trusted right-hand.
It would be a perfect relationship but for the third point in the triangle, Ali’s wife Laura. Theirs is a curious relationship. She’s younger and considerably more attractive than Ali, yet she works hard for his business rather than taking things easy in the trophy wife manner that might be expected. She’s also, of course, a ‘true’ German like Thomas.
One day the three of them head to the coast for a picnic, during which the drunken Ali encourages Thomas and Laura to dance together. Ali then goes up a cliff, which collapses beneath him. After a highly significant moment of hesitation and exchange of reaction shots between Thomas and Laura, Thomas rushes to Ali’s aid and hauls him back to safety.
As Thomas and Laura embark on an affair under the always suspicious Ali’s nose, they begin to hatch a murderous scheme…
At this point it becomes clear, if the viewer had not realised it earlier, that Jerichow is a interpretation of James M. Cain’s oft-filmed novel The Postman Always Rings Twice. Crucially, however, Petzold again makes some interventions of his own, as we begin to wonder whether it is not so much that the postman always rings twice as that sometimes he doesn’t ring at all or perhaps only once – and even then, maybe not in the manner anticipated…
Another of Petzold’s strengths is his ability to draw the best from his actors. Jerichow proves no exception, with Benno Fürmann, Nina Hoss and Hilmi Sözer delivering nuanced, credible performances and playing off one another well.
Technically the film is accomplished, with good cinematography and sound design in particular.
In sum, strongly recommended.
Showing posts with label thriller. Show all posts
Showing posts with label thriller. Show all posts
Thursday, 18 June 2009
Saturday, 6 September 2008
Extrasensorial / Blood Link / The Link / Blutspur
You never know quite what you're going to get with an Alberto De Martino film. Responsible for some of the worst examples of filone cinema, such as Puma Man and Miami Golem, he's also made directed some seriously underrated films like 7 Hyden Park, A Special Magnum for Tony Saitta and this 1982 horror-thriller.
Indeed, had Blood Link / Extrasensorial been directed by someone better known like Brian De Palma or David Cronenberg – as two contemporary reference points, for reasons that will become clear – I have little doubt that the film would be acknowledged as a classic of its type.
Dealing with the romantic theme of the doppelganger in a contemporary guise that incorporates extra sensory powers – hence the alternative title – the film opens with a waltz scene that turns into a murder scene to recall the opening moments of Shadow of a Doubt.
Given that Hitchcock's film was also intimately concerned with doubles we may assume this to be a deliberate quotation on De Martino's part, especially given that the killer, like his counterpart in Hitchcock film targets lost soul type older women.
Beyond this the film riffs on a number of more general Hitchcockian themes, such as the transference of guilt and the double pursuit narrative whereby the “wrong man” must catch the guilty one to prove his own innocence to the typically unimaginative and ineffectual authorities.
Just a dream?
Martino also subtly misdirects us in this opening sequence as, breaking it down logically, the killer would have to have murdered his victim in plain sight of all least some of the others in the ballroom.
As the narrative continues, Dr Craig Mannings wakes up from his seeming nightmare – “I guess it was just a nightmare” – to the sound of the telephone ringing. It is his colleague and girlfriend Dr Julie Warren, reminding him that they have an important meeting at the university where they have to demonstrate that their research warrants further funding.
The meeting does not go well. Mannings insults the board and refusing to tell them what they want to know, with its head in any case being somewhat biased against their research, which involves the use of acupuncture and electric shocks with Mannings himself as the chief test subject, as unscientific.
Waking dreams?
Worse for Mannings, however, are the visions that trouble him on his way to campus, in which he sees himself picking up and murdering another woman, along with various curious details like writing on a boat in German – a language he has little or no knowledge of.
Mannings starts to believe that his experiments have unleashed something within him connected to his past – a past which, even by the standards of the Italian giallo is unusually traumatic.
For starters he and his brother Keith were born conjoined. Then their parents died in an accident when they were seven years old, leaving them to be brought up by different foster parents. Then Keith himself apparently died in another accident when he was 17. “I've been searching for the answers since I was seven years old,” as Craig remarks.
Stalk and slasher imagery with a twist
Or, rather, didn't: Keith is alive and killing in Hamburg, Germany – thus explaining the boat – and, sharing a psychic connection with his brother, also knows that Craig is well on his way to realising this and endevouring to stop him...
With its wintry locations, psychosomatic weird science and conjoined twin motif Extrasensorial recalls elements of De Palma's Sisters and Cronenberg's The Brood and Scanners. Crucially, however, De Martino uses these building blocks to create something that is recognisably his own, as further testified to by the way in which Dead Ringers and Raising Cain seem to almost return the compliment at times by then further developing some of Extrasensorial's themes and ideas.
The old through a fish tank shot
And there are certainly a lot going on around such seemingly uncharacteristic Italian horror topics as memory and identity and – perhaps more familiar, if because commonly used as an analytic tool here – the workings of the unconscious. It's not difficult to interpret Craig and Keith as representing ego and id respectively or Keith as the repressed side of Craig who gives free rein to anti-social and murderous impulses his brother denies, or to see them as introvert and extravert incarnations of the same person.
Here we might also note Craig's more assertive / aggressive response to the review board and his remark to its head: “I trust you have no difficulty finding the right patients?” “No, actually I have a great deal of difficulty. In fact we're looking right now for a really tight-assed subject to see how we can loosen him up. Would you volunteer Dr Adams?”
The thing is that it's almost too easy to invoke the ideas of Freud, Jung and company here. A more cinema-specific alternative is to read the opening scene as establishing a kind of Deluzean “crystalline image” with a temporary circuit of the real and the virtual chasing one another; significantly Deleuze entitles a key chapter of his Cinema 2: The Time-Image “From recollection to dreams”. With that “irrational cut” from the ballroom to the antechamber we can't definitively say whether we're seeing a representation of Keith's actions, Craig's visions of them, or something in-between. (“I meet my siamese twin after all these years and he calls me a murderer!” “I saw you!”)
If generic requirements mean that De Martino ultimately has to provide a clearer resolution than the more thoroughgoing Deleuzean critic might like, as epitomised by the way in which the final shock is more a detachable fragment in the manner of Carrie than a challenge to narrative closure, the director nevertheless does repeatedly confuse things and states by continually using mirrors within his compositions along with some adroitly executed match cuts that take us from one brother and location to the other. (Unfortunately, as is so often the case with this kind of film, the unsatisfactory pan and scan presentation has a tendency to make a something of a mockery of the filmmakers work, undoubtedly further contributing to their ghettoisation.)
The curse of panning and scanning strikes again
The other cornerstones of the film are Michael Moriarty's performances as the brothers, who start out with their own particular mannerisms – Craig plays with his hair when he is nervous, for instance – but quickly pick up on each others quirks, albeit with an apparent difference insofar as Keith consciously imitates Craig whereas Craig seems unawares that he is picking things up from Keith.
Keith
Craig
Keith and Craig
Cameron Mitchell plays an over the hill ex-boxer turned wrestler who has relocated from the US to Germany with his daughter, an old acquaintance of Craig's who has the misfortune to come across Keith first. His performance is also endearingly (sym)pathetic, making for a satisfying contrast with the smug, self-satisfied Max Morlacchi of Blood and Black Lace nearly 20 years earlier. (The use of German locations is explained by the co-production partners on the film being Italian, American and German.)
Who am I? Where amI?
The two female leads, Sarah Langenfeld as Mitchell's rightfully concerned daughter, and Penelope Milford, as Dr Warren, likewise deliver more than satisfactory performances, helped by the fact that their roles having more depth to them than many comparable films. Both are active rather than passive characters, going some way towards offsetting the more straightforwardly exploitative 'tits and a scream' aspects of the roles, although their divergent fortunes could be read as telling.
No less than Ennio Morricone delivers a simple but effective score that is by turns romantic and suspenseful while Inferno and Phenomena cinematographer Romano Albani meets all the demands of De Martino's sophisticated mise en scene, producing several layered foreground / background compositions and distorting effects.
Indeed, had Blood Link / Extrasensorial been directed by someone better known like Brian De Palma or David Cronenberg – as two contemporary reference points, for reasons that will become clear – I have little doubt that the film would be acknowledged as a classic of its type.
Dealing with the romantic theme of the doppelganger in a contemporary guise that incorporates extra sensory powers – hence the alternative title – the film opens with a waltz scene that turns into a murder scene to recall the opening moments of Shadow of a Doubt.
Given that Hitchcock's film was also intimately concerned with doubles we may assume this to be a deliberate quotation on De Martino's part, especially given that the killer, like his counterpart in Hitchcock film targets lost soul type older women.
Beyond this the film riffs on a number of more general Hitchcockian themes, such as the transference of guilt and the double pursuit narrative whereby the “wrong man” must catch the guilty one to prove his own innocence to the typically unimaginative and ineffectual authorities.
Just a dream?
Martino also subtly misdirects us in this opening sequence as, breaking it down logically, the killer would have to have murdered his victim in plain sight of all least some of the others in the ballroom.
As the narrative continues, Dr Craig Mannings wakes up from his seeming nightmare – “I guess it was just a nightmare” – to the sound of the telephone ringing. It is his colleague and girlfriend Dr Julie Warren, reminding him that they have an important meeting at the university where they have to demonstrate that their research warrants further funding.
The meeting does not go well. Mannings insults the board and refusing to tell them what they want to know, with its head in any case being somewhat biased against their research, which involves the use of acupuncture and electric shocks with Mannings himself as the chief test subject, as unscientific.
Waking dreams?
Worse for Mannings, however, are the visions that trouble him on his way to campus, in which he sees himself picking up and murdering another woman, along with various curious details like writing on a boat in German – a language he has little or no knowledge of.
Mannings starts to believe that his experiments have unleashed something within him connected to his past – a past which, even by the standards of the Italian giallo is unusually traumatic.
For starters he and his brother Keith were born conjoined. Then their parents died in an accident when they were seven years old, leaving them to be brought up by different foster parents. Then Keith himself apparently died in another accident when he was 17. “I've been searching for the answers since I was seven years old,” as Craig remarks.
Stalk and slasher imagery with a twist
Or, rather, didn't: Keith is alive and killing in Hamburg, Germany – thus explaining the boat – and, sharing a psychic connection with his brother, also knows that Craig is well on his way to realising this and endevouring to stop him...
With its wintry locations, psychosomatic weird science and conjoined twin motif Extrasensorial recalls elements of De Palma's Sisters and Cronenberg's The Brood and Scanners. Crucially, however, De Martino uses these building blocks to create something that is recognisably his own, as further testified to by the way in which Dead Ringers and Raising Cain seem to almost return the compliment at times by then further developing some of Extrasensorial's themes and ideas.
The old through a fish tank shot
And there are certainly a lot going on around such seemingly uncharacteristic Italian horror topics as memory and identity and – perhaps more familiar, if because commonly used as an analytic tool here – the workings of the unconscious. It's not difficult to interpret Craig and Keith as representing ego and id respectively or Keith as the repressed side of Craig who gives free rein to anti-social and murderous impulses his brother denies, or to see them as introvert and extravert incarnations of the same person.
Here we might also note Craig's more assertive / aggressive response to the review board and his remark to its head: “I trust you have no difficulty finding the right patients?” “No, actually I have a great deal of difficulty. In fact we're looking right now for a really tight-assed subject to see how we can loosen him up. Would you volunteer Dr Adams?”
The thing is that it's almost too easy to invoke the ideas of Freud, Jung and company here. A more cinema-specific alternative is to read the opening scene as establishing a kind of Deluzean “crystalline image” with a temporary circuit of the real and the virtual chasing one another; significantly Deleuze entitles a key chapter of his Cinema 2: The Time-Image “From recollection to dreams”. With that “irrational cut” from the ballroom to the antechamber we can't definitively say whether we're seeing a representation of Keith's actions, Craig's visions of them, or something in-between. (“I meet my siamese twin after all these years and he calls me a murderer!” “I saw you!”)
If generic requirements mean that De Martino ultimately has to provide a clearer resolution than the more thoroughgoing Deleuzean critic might like, as epitomised by the way in which the final shock is more a detachable fragment in the manner of Carrie than a challenge to narrative closure, the director nevertheless does repeatedly confuse things and states by continually using mirrors within his compositions along with some adroitly executed match cuts that take us from one brother and location to the other. (Unfortunately, as is so often the case with this kind of film, the unsatisfactory pan and scan presentation has a tendency to make a something of a mockery of the filmmakers work, undoubtedly further contributing to their ghettoisation.)
The curse of panning and scanning strikes again
The other cornerstones of the film are Michael Moriarty's performances as the brothers, who start out with their own particular mannerisms – Craig plays with his hair when he is nervous, for instance – but quickly pick up on each others quirks, albeit with an apparent difference insofar as Keith consciously imitates Craig whereas Craig seems unawares that he is picking things up from Keith.
Keith
Craig
Keith and Craig
Cameron Mitchell plays an over the hill ex-boxer turned wrestler who has relocated from the US to Germany with his daughter, an old acquaintance of Craig's who has the misfortune to come across Keith first. His performance is also endearingly (sym)pathetic, making for a satisfying contrast with the smug, self-satisfied Max Morlacchi of Blood and Black Lace nearly 20 years earlier. (The use of German locations is explained by the co-production partners on the film being Italian, American and German.)
Who am I? Where amI?
The two female leads, Sarah Langenfeld as Mitchell's rightfully concerned daughter, and Penelope Milford, as Dr Warren, likewise deliver more than satisfactory performances, helped by the fact that their roles having more depth to them than many comparable films. Both are active rather than passive characters, going some way towards offsetting the more straightforwardly exploitative 'tits and a scream' aspects of the roles, although their divergent fortunes could be read as telling.
No less than Ennio Morricone delivers a simple but effective score that is by turns romantic and suspenseful while Inferno and Phenomena cinematographer Romano Albani meets all the demands of De Martino's sophisticated mise en scene, producing several layered foreground / background compositions and distorting effects.
Sunday, 31 August 2008
Qualcosa striscia nel buio / Something is Creeping in the Dark / Something is Crawling in the Dark
We open on a dark, stormy night on an isolated road that is seeing an unusually high amount of traffic.
Feuding couple Sylvia and Donald Forrest (Lucia Bose and Giacomo Rossi-Stuart) are en route to a party at her friend Helen's, prompting Donald to naturally assume that the two cars which race past them must be other guests.
Director Colucci constantly reverses the angles here, framing Sylvia and Donald in the eerie blue light that dominates much of the film
In fact they are occupied by Inspector Wright (Dino Fazio) and Detective Sam and their quarry, the psychopathic Spike (Farley Granger).
Farley Granger as a rather old juvenile delinquent
Spike reaches the bridge and discovers it has been washed away in the storm and is thus apprehended by Wright. He then starts to turn back towards town with his quarry, advising Sylvia and Donald to do likewise.
They encountering another car heading in the opposite direction, occupied by Dr Williams and his assistant Susan who, despite being on the way to perform a vital operation, nevertheless had time to stop and pick up Professor Lawrence after his car broke down.
With the road back flooded and the water level rising all around, attention turns to a mansion house on the hill nearby.
The old dark house, plus ca change
Once inside, Wright and Williams go to make their urgent telephone calls, only to discover that lines are also down.
Sylvia and Donald continue to argue, with Sylvia also proposing that the group all make the most of the night via an anonymous orgy.
Spike then proves himself to be more than your average psychopapthic killer by improvising an etude on the piano. This has a powerful effect on Sylvia as we segue into a slow-motion fantasy sequence situated in an as yet unidentified room; later on it will prove to be the guest bedroom Sylvia and Donald are allocated.
In the fantasy Spike strikes Sylvia, who then stabs him repeatedly as he grins, undoubtedly plenty of material for anyone wanting to interpret the characters' repressed desires through the lenses of psychoanalytic and / or feminist theories: is this what men are really like? what women are really like? what men really think about women? what women really think about men? what men think women are like?
Intriguingly, however, the ensuing exchange of dialogue again hints at something beyond all this, insofar as both Spike and Sylvia seem to have somehow shared this fantasy and, through it, something of their respective inner secrets and desires:
Sylvia: “Tell me, how does it feel to kill?”
Spike: “Do you think you could really understand? Tied to a thousand fears, a thousand prejudices, a thousand superstitions? No, you live a life full of vanity and compromise. You could be able to understand what it really means to free yourself from all the hypocrisy and stupidity of this decadent world. You couldn't understand that.”
“And why not?”
“Because you're swimming in it.”
As the night continues the irrational and magical side is further foregrounded as discussion next turns to the house's former owner, whose initially covered portrait dominates the room. Apparently Lady Sheila Marlowe died in mysterious circumstances a year ago, not long after being acquitted for the murder of her husband. The information that she was also an occultist and held regular séances prompts Sylvia to suggest trying to contact Lady Marlowe.
The only true mystery is that our lives are governed by dead people?
Needless to say this soon proves to have been a less than good idea given the circumstances...
This 1971 supernatural horror / thriller was one of only two films directed by Mario Colucci and the only one which he both wrote and directed; his other directorial credit is on the 1968 spaghetti western Vendetta per Vendetta, while his list of writing credits is surprisingly, encompassing a total of seven films in nine years.
With Something is Creeping in the Dark also being Colucci's final film credit, one wonders whether he died shortly afterwards; had invested most of his own money in the film in the hope of launching his career, or simply responded to the indifference that met its release by turning his attentions elsewhere.
Yet while the film may not be particularly outstanding or memorable is it not the exactly the worst example of its kind on any count.
Colucci uses all manner of techniques – including slow motion, freeze-frame, superimpositions, rapid-fire edits and subjective camera alongside the more usual zooms and extreme close-ups – and demonstrates a firm grasp of how to generate atmosphere and effect and of ways in which to tell a story visually.
At one point Colucci even turns the camera upside down
Technically the film is likewise accomplished, with production design and lighting dominated by cool blues and brilliant reds, while the presence of Lucia Bose, Giacomo Rossi-Stuart and Farley Granger in the cast imparts a degree of quality and name recognition there as well.
Angelo Francesco Lavagnino – who also makes his only on-screen appearance in the film, minus the Angelo, as the Professor – contributes a simple but effective series of cues, ranging from the percussive polyrhythmic mix of bongos and hi-hat overlaid by shock stabs that heighten the excitement of the opening car chase; through Spike's suitably lush and swooning piano piece, to the piano chords that accompany the séance and sound like they could well be emanating from the pits of hell itself.
The satisfactoriness of the script is more dependent on how generous one is willing to be. For example, we're told that Professor Lawrence was picked up by Dr Williams after his car broke down. Given that Williams were supposed to be racing to an emergency it seems unlikely that he should have stopped – unless this selfsame contrivance is read as another indicator that no-one present here as quite the control over their actions they think, albeit in terms of the supernatural rather than the unconscious.
What this in turn clues us into is that, to the extent it is an example of the European fantastique, the film should theoretically be working via a cinematic rather than a narrative logic. The question here is whether this is successfully and consistently conveyed. While the aforementioned dream sequence certainly works in fantastique / cinematic terms, the mundane nature of the conflict between the police and Spike doesn't, with the filmmakers also failing to make the most of the rational detective type figures encountering a supernatural mystery angle or the Terror Express / Assault on Precinct 13 one of the two coming together against a mutual foe.
Beyond this, it's perhaps also that, for all the technique, the film also feels curiously old fashioned compared to Bava's Five Dolls for an August Moon, as another group of unpleasant characters stranded in an isolated location thriller, and Freda's Tragic Ceremony, as another occult themed horror-thriller. Colucci's direction lacks the sense of irony and self-parody we get in Bava's film, while his set of characters and séance are that bit less hip and happening than their counterparts in Freda's.
The one other area where the film is modern, namely its avoidance of an obvious protagonist with whom we can identify – Sylvia or Donald?, Spike or Inspector Wright? – also hurts it, because we're not given sufficient information to approach them the other way, that they aren't supposed to be rounded flesh and blood characters with whom we might identify as much as the pieces in some cosmic game.
One final point of note is that Something is Creeping in the Dark contains one of the more memorable credits within the Italian horror and thriller cinema, that of Lorenda Nusciak. Appearing as Lady Sheila Marlowe, the actress has a role recalling Gene Tierney's debut in Laura, in that she too only appears on screen in a still photograph. Nice work if you can get it?
Feuding couple Sylvia and Donald Forrest (Lucia Bose and Giacomo Rossi-Stuart) are en route to a party at her friend Helen's, prompting Donald to naturally assume that the two cars which race past them must be other guests.
Director Colucci constantly reverses the angles here, framing Sylvia and Donald in the eerie blue light that dominates much of the film
In fact they are occupied by Inspector Wright (Dino Fazio) and Detective Sam and their quarry, the psychopathic Spike (Farley Granger).
Farley Granger as a rather old juvenile delinquent
Spike reaches the bridge and discovers it has been washed away in the storm and is thus apprehended by Wright. He then starts to turn back towards town with his quarry, advising Sylvia and Donald to do likewise.
They encountering another car heading in the opposite direction, occupied by Dr Williams and his assistant Susan who, despite being on the way to perform a vital operation, nevertheless had time to stop and pick up Professor Lawrence after his car broke down.
With the road back flooded and the water level rising all around, attention turns to a mansion house on the hill nearby.
The old dark house, plus ca change
Once inside, Wright and Williams go to make their urgent telephone calls, only to discover that lines are also down.
Sylvia and Donald continue to argue, with Sylvia also proposing that the group all make the most of the night via an anonymous orgy.
Spike then proves himself to be more than your average psychopapthic killer by improvising an etude on the piano. This has a powerful effect on Sylvia as we segue into a slow-motion fantasy sequence situated in an as yet unidentified room; later on it will prove to be the guest bedroom Sylvia and Donald are allocated.
In the fantasy Spike strikes Sylvia, who then stabs him repeatedly as he grins, undoubtedly plenty of material for anyone wanting to interpret the characters' repressed desires through the lenses of psychoanalytic and / or feminist theories: is this what men are really like? what women are really like? what men really think about women? what women really think about men? what men think women are like?
Intriguingly, however, the ensuing exchange of dialogue again hints at something beyond all this, insofar as both Spike and Sylvia seem to have somehow shared this fantasy and, through it, something of their respective inner secrets and desires:
Sylvia: “Tell me, how does it feel to kill?”
Spike: “Do you think you could really understand? Tied to a thousand fears, a thousand prejudices, a thousand superstitions? No, you live a life full of vanity and compromise. You could be able to understand what it really means to free yourself from all the hypocrisy and stupidity of this decadent world. You couldn't understand that.”
“And why not?”
“Because you're swimming in it.”
As the night continues the irrational and magical side is further foregrounded as discussion next turns to the house's former owner, whose initially covered portrait dominates the room. Apparently Lady Sheila Marlowe died in mysterious circumstances a year ago, not long after being acquitted for the murder of her husband. The information that she was also an occultist and held regular séances prompts Sylvia to suggest trying to contact Lady Marlowe.
The only true mystery is that our lives are governed by dead people?
Needless to say this soon proves to have been a less than good idea given the circumstances...
This 1971 supernatural horror / thriller was one of only two films directed by Mario Colucci and the only one which he both wrote and directed; his other directorial credit is on the 1968 spaghetti western Vendetta per Vendetta, while his list of writing credits is surprisingly, encompassing a total of seven films in nine years.
With Something is Creeping in the Dark also being Colucci's final film credit, one wonders whether he died shortly afterwards; had invested most of his own money in the film in the hope of launching his career, or simply responded to the indifference that met its release by turning his attentions elsewhere.
Yet while the film may not be particularly outstanding or memorable is it not the exactly the worst example of its kind on any count.
Colucci uses all manner of techniques – including slow motion, freeze-frame, superimpositions, rapid-fire edits and subjective camera alongside the more usual zooms and extreme close-ups – and demonstrates a firm grasp of how to generate atmosphere and effect and of ways in which to tell a story visually.
At one point Colucci even turns the camera upside down
Technically the film is likewise accomplished, with production design and lighting dominated by cool blues and brilliant reds, while the presence of Lucia Bose, Giacomo Rossi-Stuart and Farley Granger in the cast imparts a degree of quality and name recognition there as well.
Angelo Francesco Lavagnino – who also makes his only on-screen appearance in the film, minus the Angelo, as the Professor – contributes a simple but effective series of cues, ranging from the percussive polyrhythmic mix of bongos and hi-hat overlaid by shock stabs that heighten the excitement of the opening car chase; through Spike's suitably lush and swooning piano piece, to the piano chords that accompany the séance and sound like they could well be emanating from the pits of hell itself.
The satisfactoriness of the script is more dependent on how generous one is willing to be. For example, we're told that Professor Lawrence was picked up by Dr Williams after his car broke down. Given that Williams were supposed to be racing to an emergency it seems unlikely that he should have stopped – unless this selfsame contrivance is read as another indicator that no-one present here as quite the control over their actions they think, albeit in terms of the supernatural rather than the unconscious.
What this in turn clues us into is that, to the extent it is an example of the European fantastique, the film should theoretically be working via a cinematic rather than a narrative logic. The question here is whether this is successfully and consistently conveyed. While the aforementioned dream sequence certainly works in fantastique / cinematic terms, the mundane nature of the conflict between the police and Spike doesn't, with the filmmakers also failing to make the most of the rational detective type figures encountering a supernatural mystery angle or the Terror Express / Assault on Precinct 13 one of the two coming together against a mutual foe.
Beyond this, it's perhaps also that, for all the technique, the film also feels curiously old fashioned compared to Bava's Five Dolls for an August Moon, as another group of unpleasant characters stranded in an isolated location thriller, and Freda's Tragic Ceremony, as another occult themed horror-thriller. Colucci's direction lacks the sense of irony and self-parody we get in Bava's film, while his set of characters and séance are that bit less hip and happening than their counterparts in Freda's.
The one other area where the film is modern, namely its avoidance of an obvious protagonist with whom we can identify – Sylvia or Donald?, Spike or Inspector Wright? – also hurts it, because we're not given sufficient information to approach them the other way, that they aren't supposed to be rounded flesh and blood characters with whom we might identify as much as the pieces in some cosmic game.
One final point of note is that Something is Creeping in the Dark contains one of the more memorable credits within the Italian horror and thriller cinema, that of Lorenda Nusciak. Appearing as Lady Sheila Marlowe, the actress has a role recalling Gene Tierney's debut in Laura, in that she too only appears on screen in a still photograph. Nice work if you can get it?
Tuesday, 8 July 2008
Lo Strano ricatto di una ragazza per bene / Blackmail
A raid on a nightclub catches Babel Stone (Brigitte Skay) in possession of a substantial quantity of dope, leaving it up to her straight, respectability obsessed father (Umberto Raho) to bail her out of trouble yet again.
Babel, you see, resents her father for his lifestyle and remarriage, following her mother's death, to a younger woman, Stella (Rosalba Neri).
“What did it cost you for this fiasco, huh papa?”
At the beach with her cohorts Claudio (Benjamin Lev), Rick and Eva, Babel then hits upon an idea by which she can both gain revenge on her father and secure their group a much needed measure of financial independence: staging her kidnapping.
The curse of panning and scanning strikes again
Suggesting that they can hide out at his sister's house as she and her husband are on holiday, Claudio and the rest of the gang decide to go along with the ill-thought out scheme. They make a tape of Babel pleading to her father, indicating that he should not involve the police or his daughter will be killed and, in one of their few shows of intelligence, have Claudio go to make the call from a phone booth. Telingly, however, Claudio also leaves the tape, which had been recorded after / over some music, playing as he stops for petrol en route, leading to a frenzied move for the stop button as the message starts.
Mr Stone receives the call and indicates that he will pay the money while pleading that the kidnappers do not harm his daughter.
It looks as though everything is going to plan. But then Claudio's sister and her husband return and everything threatens to quickly come undone for Babel and company...
Like writer-director Paolo Solvay / Luigi Batzella's bizarro horror films The Devil's Wedding Night and Nude for Satan, Blackmail is one of those films which psychoanalytically inclined commentators would probably have a field day with, given the dynamics of the relationship between Babel – a symbolically suggestive name in its own right, implying the failure of communication – her father and stepmother, along with the eventual resolution to the drama.
“Fracaro won the derby”
The scene in which the police captain addresses Babel's father is also worth noting in more sociological. If the captain's suggestion that smoking dope is a gateway to heroin is dubious, it also reflects the older generation's beliefs and their failure to accord with the experiences of Babel and her friends. Further nuance is provided by the captain's suggestion that Babel's father might want to try to get to know his daughter a bit better, coupled with Mr Stone's own indication that he has given Babel everything she might want, understanding this strictly in material terms: he cannot see that times have changed and that his daughter and her generation might have different values and desires from his own.
Two films which thus come to mind as intertexts are Rabid Dogs / Kidnapped and The Killer Must Kill Again, insofar as both occupy similar generic territory, as crime thrillers that aren't conventional gialli or poliziotteschi, and which also emphasise the amateur / professional distinction in crime – the former with the youthful joyriders and with the assassin who's already been caught in flagrante delicto once, the latter with the younger robbers with their lack of composure and self-control – and through this the whole generation gap idea.
Skay, here doing a bit more than her 'tits and a scream' role in Five Dolls for an August Moon
If Batzella's film cannot stand up to comparison with Bava and Cozzi's films otherwise, not least in terms of its highly unsatisfactory conclusion, it nevertheless moves along at a fair pace, only being stalled by some sexy and musical interludes of the sort it's hard to dislike; features decent characterisation and performances, with Skay's self-deprecating performance as the none-too-bright Babel particularly enjoyable; and keeps us engaged by throwing in new plot twists at regular intervals.
Babel, you see, resents her father for his lifestyle and remarriage, following her mother's death, to a younger woman, Stella (Rosalba Neri).
“What did it cost you for this fiasco, huh papa?”
At the beach with her cohorts Claudio (Benjamin Lev), Rick and Eva, Babel then hits upon an idea by which she can both gain revenge on her father and secure their group a much needed measure of financial independence: staging her kidnapping.
The curse of panning and scanning strikes again
Suggesting that they can hide out at his sister's house as she and her husband are on holiday, Claudio and the rest of the gang decide to go along with the ill-thought out scheme. They make a tape of Babel pleading to her father, indicating that he should not involve the police or his daughter will be killed and, in one of their few shows of intelligence, have Claudio go to make the call from a phone booth. Telingly, however, Claudio also leaves the tape, which had been recorded after / over some music, playing as he stops for petrol en route, leading to a frenzied move for the stop button as the message starts.
Mr Stone receives the call and indicates that he will pay the money while pleading that the kidnappers do not harm his daughter.
It looks as though everything is going to plan. But then Claudio's sister and her husband return and everything threatens to quickly come undone for Babel and company...
Like writer-director Paolo Solvay / Luigi Batzella's bizarro horror films The Devil's Wedding Night and Nude for Satan, Blackmail is one of those films which psychoanalytically inclined commentators would probably have a field day with, given the dynamics of the relationship between Babel – a symbolically suggestive name in its own right, implying the failure of communication – her father and stepmother, along with the eventual resolution to the drama.
“Fracaro won the derby”
The scene in which the police captain addresses Babel's father is also worth noting in more sociological. If the captain's suggestion that smoking dope is a gateway to heroin is dubious, it also reflects the older generation's beliefs and their failure to accord with the experiences of Babel and her friends. Further nuance is provided by the captain's suggestion that Babel's father might want to try to get to know his daughter a bit better, coupled with Mr Stone's own indication that he has given Babel everything she might want, understanding this strictly in material terms: he cannot see that times have changed and that his daughter and her generation might have different values and desires from his own.
Two films which thus come to mind as intertexts are Rabid Dogs / Kidnapped and The Killer Must Kill Again, insofar as both occupy similar generic territory, as crime thrillers that aren't conventional gialli or poliziotteschi, and which also emphasise the amateur / professional distinction in crime – the former with the youthful joyriders and with the assassin who's already been caught in flagrante delicto once, the latter with the younger robbers with their lack of composure and self-control – and through this the whole generation gap idea.
Skay, here doing a bit more than her 'tits and a scream' role in Five Dolls for an August Moon
If Batzella's film cannot stand up to comparison with Bava and Cozzi's films otherwise, not least in terms of its highly unsatisfactory conclusion, it nevertheless moves along at a fair pace, only being stalled by some sexy and musical interludes of the sort it's hard to dislike; features decent characterisation and performances, with Skay's self-deprecating performance as the none-too-bright Babel particularly enjoyable; and keeps us engaged by throwing in new plot twists at regular intervals.
Saturday, 21 June 2008
Alibi perfetto / Circle of Fear
Given that this 1992 thriller is directed by the talented Aldo Lado yet struggles to achieve anything like the success of his previous work within the same broad territory, it could be taken as an exemplar of the problems facing Italian filmmakers at the time. Quite simply, audience interest had went elsewhere and the filmmakers were unsure how to respond.
Though Lado had certainly drawn from The Last House on the Left when making Late Night Trains some 15 or so years earlier, he had also succeeded in crafting something which was distinctively situated within its own national and historical contexts.
This is one of the things which is most lacking here, with there being no sense of the events occuring within any definable – or well defined – framework. Rather, it feels more like Lado and his collaborators, including regular Argento writing partner Franco Ferrini, simply cobbled together elements from traditional Italian giallo and poliziotto entries and adding in some Hong Kong “heroic bloodshed” style action and imagery along with The Silence of the Lambs Hollywood serial killer-isms, without much rhyme or reason or, more importantly, effect.
The credits begin with a giallo image
Before we enter into Deadly China Dolls / Heroic Bloodshed territory
Though the killer is soon back to business
The story starts off as confusingly as it means to continue, with the arrival of various parties at a Chinese restaurant. Before long an uncomfortably directed shoot out occurs, by way of which we learn that cops Tony and Lisa are intent on busting gangster Mancini with the consignment of heroin he was picking up. Though the cops sieze the heroin and money, Mancini escapes.
Lisa and her boss
Back at the station, their boss berates them for acting without orders, pointing out that it was only supposed to be a surveillance and evidence gathering exercise: “I want my best agents to behave like cops, not Rambo rip-offs.”
Later that evening, Tony and Lisa comiserate with some lovemaking: they are partners off the job as well as on it, with this also serving to amusingly highlight the unspoken subtext of many a male-male buddy cop film of similar vintage.
Around about this point we also get some curious scenes of a dangerous madwoman, the Countess, in an asylum and of another looking around the outside of and photographing a house.
The first connection is made when Tony and the latter woman, his soon to be ex- in more ways than one Elvi, visit the courthouse to finalise their divorce proceedings. In the parking lot they are shot by two gunmen, killing Elvi and leaving Tony in a coma, from which he soon recovers. (There is a short black and white flashback here, which led me to briefly hope that the film might be about to enter into Short Night of Glass Dolls territory.)
Tony's immediate feeling is that Mancini was behind the hit, but this does not square with the unprofessionalism of the assassins in targeting Elvi first and leaving him alive. The plot thus thickens further as he receives the photographs Elvi took of the house, revealing a shadowy figure at a window when blown up, and then investigates the house, which used to belong to the countess, finding a Deep Red-style mummified body, with its head in the oven.
Is this the face of the killer at the window?
Initially it is believed to be the Countess's son, Marco, but the forensic examination reveals that the victim is female and died a violent death. Meanwhile, the murder of a prostitute indicates that a serial killer, long thought dead or inactive, has returned...
The dialogue is pretty awful, encompassing just about every cop movie cliché one could imagine and again lacking the subtleties of earlier films, as with the foreshadowing throwaway references to vampires in Short Night of the Glass Dolls: “Police: Get Your Hands Up. Don't even think about it!”
Giallo technology, circa 1990
The leads are also distinctly C-level, although the actress playing Lisa is certainly easy on the eyes. As such, the old familiar faces among the supporting players – Philippe Leroy as the chief, Bobby Rhodes as the pathologist – are welcome as ever, while Romano Mussolini's jazzy score provides a pleasant aural backdrop though at times also veers into more routine 80s sax and synth territory.
Tony and the Countess
Lado doesn't give the impression of being a 'natural' action director. He tries, but the shoot outs are devoid of excitement, with the panning and scanning making it more difficult to work out the spatial relationships between the characters. He does, however, manage a few moments that recall past glories, such as the mirrored reflections when the Countess is interrogated Hannibal Lektor style, suggestive of the way in which the characters are haunted by one another's presences and pasts.
Though Lado had certainly drawn from The Last House on the Left when making Late Night Trains some 15 or so years earlier, he had also succeeded in crafting something which was distinctively situated within its own national and historical contexts.
This is one of the things which is most lacking here, with there being no sense of the events occuring within any definable – or well defined – framework. Rather, it feels more like Lado and his collaborators, including regular Argento writing partner Franco Ferrini, simply cobbled together elements from traditional Italian giallo and poliziotto entries and adding in some Hong Kong “heroic bloodshed” style action and imagery along with The Silence of the Lambs Hollywood serial killer-isms, without much rhyme or reason or, more importantly, effect.
The credits begin with a giallo image
Before we enter into Deadly China Dolls / Heroic Bloodshed territory
Though the killer is soon back to business
The story starts off as confusingly as it means to continue, with the arrival of various parties at a Chinese restaurant. Before long an uncomfortably directed shoot out occurs, by way of which we learn that cops Tony and Lisa are intent on busting gangster Mancini with the consignment of heroin he was picking up. Though the cops sieze the heroin and money, Mancini escapes.
Lisa and her boss
Back at the station, their boss berates them for acting without orders, pointing out that it was only supposed to be a surveillance and evidence gathering exercise: “I want my best agents to behave like cops, not Rambo rip-offs.”
Later that evening, Tony and Lisa comiserate with some lovemaking: they are partners off the job as well as on it, with this also serving to amusingly highlight the unspoken subtext of many a male-male buddy cop film of similar vintage.
Around about this point we also get some curious scenes of a dangerous madwoman, the Countess, in an asylum and of another looking around the outside of and photographing a house.
The first connection is made when Tony and the latter woman, his soon to be ex- in more ways than one Elvi, visit the courthouse to finalise their divorce proceedings. In the parking lot they are shot by two gunmen, killing Elvi and leaving Tony in a coma, from which he soon recovers. (There is a short black and white flashback here, which led me to briefly hope that the film might be about to enter into Short Night of Glass Dolls territory.)
Tony's immediate feeling is that Mancini was behind the hit, but this does not square with the unprofessionalism of the assassins in targeting Elvi first and leaving him alive. The plot thus thickens further as he receives the photographs Elvi took of the house, revealing a shadowy figure at a window when blown up, and then investigates the house, which used to belong to the countess, finding a Deep Red-style mummified body, with its head in the oven.
Is this the face of the killer at the window?
Initially it is believed to be the Countess's son, Marco, but the forensic examination reveals that the victim is female and died a violent death. Meanwhile, the murder of a prostitute indicates that a serial killer, long thought dead or inactive, has returned...
The dialogue is pretty awful, encompassing just about every cop movie cliché one could imagine and again lacking the subtleties of earlier films, as with the foreshadowing throwaway references to vampires in Short Night of the Glass Dolls: “Police: Get Your Hands Up. Don't even think about it!”
Giallo technology, circa 1990
The leads are also distinctly C-level, although the actress playing Lisa is certainly easy on the eyes. As such, the old familiar faces among the supporting players – Philippe Leroy as the chief, Bobby Rhodes as the pathologist – are welcome as ever, while Romano Mussolini's jazzy score provides a pleasant aural backdrop though at times also veers into more routine 80s sax and synth territory.
Tony and the Countess
Lado doesn't give the impression of being a 'natural' action director. He tries, but the shoot outs are devoid of excitement, with the panning and scanning making it more difficult to work out the spatial relationships between the characters. He does, however, manage a few moments that recall past glories, such as the mirrored reflections when the Countess is interrogated Hannibal Lektor style, suggestive of the way in which the characters are haunted by one another's presences and pasts.
Saturday, 31 May 2008
Cover Girl Killer
This 1959 British thriller is the kind of film which had it been made fifteen years later in Italy would probably have been a fine trash / sleaze giallo with a black gloved killer and plentiful J&B, pulchritude and stalker-cam. Think Strip Nude for Your Killer without the stripping...
The obvious suspect / red herring
Running just under an hour, the film sees a moralistic serial killer murdering his way through the cover girls of Wow! magazine, luring them with promises of work and leaving them posed in macabre tableaux morte based on the photoshoots.
The police and Wow!'s new proprietor, an archeologist incongruously left the maagzine and the Kasbah nightclub by his uncle, find their investigations hampered by the fact that the killer wears a disguise, his ill-fitting wig and coke-bottle glasses ensuring that everyone who sees him remembers but also has no idea of who he really is.
“She's the showgirl with the most on show,” which by the standards of Britain, 1959 wasn't very much...
The sole exception – and the thing which distinguishes the film from the giallo while helping generate suspense even as it removes the red herring element – is that the viewer knows the killer's identity from the outset. He's played by Harry H. Corbett, best known to the British audience from the long-running TV series Steptoe and Son.
A vital piece of photographic evidence
Unfortunately Corbett is about the only thing the film has going for it, with flat direction, generally poor performances and – as might be expected – little real sleaze content except that inherently attaching to its grimy, low-rent milieux. (“I've got a divorce coming up. If she's dead I've saved myself a lot of money,” remarks one husband whose star-struck wife walked out on him.)
The next victim, again declining to strip nude for her killer...
An amusing self-reflexive element sees the killer pose as a film producer seeking to make a cheap cash-in production based on the selfsame killings, just the sort of thing you can imagine the producers Butchers themselves doing.
Writer-director Terry Bishop (a hypenate combination surely more about economy than auteur aspirations) also made the similar-sounding Model for Murder the same year.
The obvious suspect / red herring
Running just under an hour, the film sees a moralistic serial killer murdering his way through the cover girls of Wow! magazine, luring them with promises of work and leaving them posed in macabre tableaux morte based on the photoshoots.
The police and Wow!'s new proprietor, an archeologist incongruously left the maagzine and the Kasbah nightclub by his uncle, find their investigations hampered by the fact that the killer wears a disguise, his ill-fitting wig and coke-bottle glasses ensuring that everyone who sees him remembers but also has no idea of who he really is.
“She's the showgirl with the most on show,” which by the standards of Britain, 1959 wasn't very much...
The sole exception – and the thing which distinguishes the film from the giallo while helping generate suspense even as it removes the red herring element – is that the viewer knows the killer's identity from the outset. He's played by Harry H. Corbett, best known to the British audience from the long-running TV series Steptoe and Son.
A vital piece of photographic evidence
Unfortunately Corbett is about the only thing the film has going for it, with flat direction, generally poor performances and – as might be expected – little real sleaze content except that inherently attaching to its grimy, low-rent milieux. (“I've got a divorce coming up. If she's dead I've saved myself a lot of money,” remarks one husband whose star-struck wife walked out on him.)
The next victim, again declining to strip nude for her killer...
An amusing self-reflexive element sees the killer pose as a film producer seeking to make a cheap cash-in production based on the selfsame killings, just the sort of thing you can imagine the producers Butchers themselves doing.
Writer-director Terry Bishop (a hypenate combination surely more about economy than auteur aspirations) also made the similar-sounding Model for Murder the same year.
Tuesday, 12 February 2008
L' Ultima chance / Last Chance / Last Chance for a Born Loser / Motel of Fear / Stateline Motel
Having just been released from a Canadian prison after serving a six-month sentence for stealing a car, career criminal Floyd (Fabio Testi) takes advantage of the fact that he has to return to his native USA within 48 hours by teaming up with his old colleague Joe (Eli Wallach) to pull a jewelery store heist. The plan is that Floyd will smuggle the loot across the border and meet up with Joe back stateside the following day, where they will divide it up. As we all know, however, plans have a habit of going awry – especially in the heist movie.
The two men manage to pull off the robbery, albeit with Joe being forced to shoot a man who tries to raise the alarm, Floyd having failed to take control of the situation. The younger man does, however, prove his mettle in the car chase that ensues, as they successfully evade the police and make it out of the city.
Driving along a snow-covered backroad, Floyd unwisely starts veering from side to side and winds up going off the road. Though he is unhurt, the car needs repairs. And these repairs as mechanic Jack (Howard Ross) explains require a part – a part which will have to be brought in from out of town, meaning that Floyd isn't going to get across the border as planned.
Floyd goes to the motel next to the garage, and phones Joe to try to explain, but fails to his colleage's suspicious that he is trying to pull a fast one.
His frantic need to get out of town, railing at the gas station attendant who cannot – he believes will not – rent him a car, soon arouses suspicion, all the more so when the news broadcasts footage taken by a hidden camera inside the jewelers and notes that it is likely the American robbers may well be heading for the border.
While Floyd and Joe men were wearing masks, the descriptions of them are accurate, noting in particular that the younger man unusually wore his watch on the right rather than left wrist.
Floyd manages to remove the offending item before it can incriminate him, but by now the motel owner's wife, Michelle Norton (Ursula Andress) is convinced that something about the stranger is not as it seems. She's unstable and, keen to get out of her stultifying relationship with her older husband (Massimo Girotti), has already been carrying on with Jack, who also quickly puts two and two together...
Worse, the other inhabitant of the Last Chance Motel, the chambermaid Emily (Barbara Bach) just happens to be the girlfriend of one of the town policemen (Carlo De Mejo)...
Based on a novel of the same name by Franco Enna (whose work also provided the source for Omicidio per appuntamento a few years earlier), Maurizio Lucidi's L'Ultima chance is unusual among Italian crime thrillers of the early 1970s for its setting, which is also made a relatively important part of the whole.
While I didn't really get whether the story was supposed to be taking place in Francophone or Anglophone Canada – the advertisement hoardings are all in English, but the Montreal Star seems to be the newspaper of choice – the story probably wouldn't work in most European border locales with, say, two robbers trying to cross from Austria into Italy or from Belgium into France. It needs the scale and anonymity which the US-Canada border can provide, along with a harsher winter.
Though first in the credits, Wallach's role is largely limited to the opening and closing moments – albeit with his work there having that intensity which just about warrants his prominence in terms other than box-office recognition.
The rest of the film is pretty much the Testi and Andress show. Both do what they need to, with Andress taking the honours as far as the more complex performance goes, leaving us unsure as to her true feelings until the last – although it is also harder to fairly judge Testi's performance insofar as unlike Andress he does not do his own English dubbing – and are capably supported by Ross, Bach and Girotti.
The plotting and direction don't immediately come across as equally successful, however.
Part of this could be down to the English version apparently being cut compared to the Italian, but the rhythm and tone do seem a bit off at times. In particular, the opening robbery and chase set you up for a different kind of film than what the rest delivers, while the challenge of conveying a state of stasis without also boring the viewer is not quite met.
There are also some possible inconsistencies of character, such as Joe's trusting Floyd with the loot and Floyd's behind the wheel antics (as the sort of thing likely to attract the attention of the police or lead to some sort of (un)foreseen mishap) though more charitably it could be said that these reflects the basic inadequacies of the two men as (un)professional criminals.
Much the same might be said of place the loot ends up being hidden. Anyone who has seen Night of the Hunter or Wait Until Dark will probably be ahead of Floyd here, but perhaps thereby also forget to pay as much attention as might otherwise be the case to certain other curious details that emerge along the way to the final resolution...
While it may be a consequence of poor video mastering or similar, the visuals are a bit murky at times, with some scenes being so dark that it is difficult to anything out or else featuring the kind of contrast where there is black, white and little else.
The two men manage to pull off the robbery, albeit with Joe being forced to shoot a man who tries to raise the alarm, Floyd having failed to take control of the situation. The younger man does, however, prove his mettle in the car chase that ensues, as they successfully evade the police and make it out of the city.
Driving along a snow-covered backroad, Floyd unwisely starts veering from side to side and winds up going off the road. Though he is unhurt, the car needs repairs. And these repairs as mechanic Jack (Howard Ross) explains require a part – a part which will have to be brought in from out of town, meaning that Floyd isn't going to get across the border as planned.
Floyd goes to the motel next to the garage, and phones Joe to try to explain, but fails to his colleage's suspicious that he is trying to pull a fast one.
His frantic need to get out of town, railing at the gas station attendant who cannot – he believes will not – rent him a car, soon arouses suspicion, all the more so when the news broadcasts footage taken by a hidden camera inside the jewelers and notes that it is likely the American robbers may well be heading for the border.
While Floyd and Joe men were wearing masks, the descriptions of them are accurate, noting in particular that the younger man unusually wore his watch on the right rather than left wrist.
Floyd manages to remove the offending item before it can incriminate him, but by now the motel owner's wife, Michelle Norton (Ursula Andress) is convinced that something about the stranger is not as it seems. She's unstable and, keen to get out of her stultifying relationship with her older husband (Massimo Girotti), has already been carrying on with Jack, who also quickly puts two and two together...
Worse, the other inhabitant of the Last Chance Motel, the chambermaid Emily (Barbara Bach) just happens to be the girlfriend of one of the town policemen (Carlo De Mejo)...
Based on a novel of the same name by Franco Enna (whose work also provided the source for Omicidio per appuntamento a few years earlier), Maurizio Lucidi's L'Ultima chance is unusual among Italian crime thrillers of the early 1970s for its setting, which is also made a relatively important part of the whole.
While I didn't really get whether the story was supposed to be taking place in Francophone or Anglophone Canada – the advertisement hoardings are all in English, but the Montreal Star seems to be the newspaper of choice – the story probably wouldn't work in most European border locales with, say, two robbers trying to cross from Austria into Italy or from Belgium into France. It needs the scale and anonymity which the US-Canada border can provide, along with a harsher winter.
Though first in the credits, Wallach's role is largely limited to the opening and closing moments – albeit with his work there having that intensity which just about warrants his prominence in terms other than box-office recognition.
The rest of the film is pretty much the Testi and Andress show. Both do what they need to, with Andress taking the honours as far as the more complex performance goes, leaving us unsure as to her true feelings until the last – although it is also harder to fairly judge Testi's performance insofar as unlike Andress he does not do his own English dubbing – and are capably supported by Ross, Bach and Girotti.
The plotting and direction don't immediately come across as equally successful, however.
Part of this could be down to the English version apparently being cut compared to the Italian, but the rhythm and tone do seem a bit off at times. In particular, the opening robbery and chase set you up for a different kind of film than what the rest delivers, while the challenge of conveying a state of stasis without also boring the viewer is not quite met.
There are also some possible inconsistencies of character, such as Joe's trusting Floyd with the loot and Floyd's behind the wheel antics (as the sort of thing likely to attract the attention of the police or lead to some sort of (un)foreseen mishap) though more charitably it could be said that these reflects the basic inadequacies of the two men as (un)professional criminals.
Much the same might be said of place the loot ends up being hidden. Anyone who has seen Night of the Hunter or Wait Until Dark will probably be ahead of Floyd here, but perhaps thereby also forget to pay as much attention as might otherwise be the case to certain other curious details that emerge along the way to the final resolution...
While it may be a consequence of poor video mastering or similar, the visuals are a bit murky at times, with some scenes being so dark that it is difficult to anything out or else featuring the kind of contrast where there is black, white and little else.
Wednesday, 25 April 2007
Wait Until Dark
This is yet another non-giallo, non-Argento film whose relevance to this blog has to be demonstrated. We could simply invoke the old chestnut of there only being two sorts of anything, the good and the bad, and that Wait Until Dark fits into the former category.
But we can do better, in terms of how different the history of the giallo could have been. For the film was a big success in Italy, where it went by the title Gli Occhi della notte - literally The Eyes of the Night - and put director Terence Young in the running to direct The Bird with the Crystal Plumage. He didn't of course, and the rest is history, Argento taking the genre to new artistic and commercial heights and inspiring a raft of imitators.
More interesting than this oft-told story, however, is the way in which Wait Until Dark also reverberates into later giallo productions, notably Argento's subsequent essay in the thriller form, The Cat o' Nine Tails, which shares with it the notion of a blind protagonist, and Duccio Tessari's Puzzle, with the same MacGuffin of hidden drugs that the protagonists – one suffering from amnesia and other from a broken leg to give them not too similar states of disability – are initially unawares of.
The doll
The plane
Aparted from a play by Frederick Knott, almost all of the action within Wait Until Dark takes place in the one location, in near real time. The way the filmmakers initially open out the action is interesting from a giallo perspective though, insofar as it entails the familiar tropes of air travel and the doll. Drugs mule Lisa takes the doll, which is stuffed with heroin and also happens to play a distinctive music-box style tune, from Montreal to New York, passing it on to photographer Sam Hendrix on the pretext that it is for a little girl who is sick and that she does not want to be seen with it on her when she meets her own daughter as the child will not understand that the doll is not for her. (Try that nowadays and I wonder how far you would get.)
At the airport Lisa is intercepted by her old partner Harry Roat (Alan Arkin) who murders her offscreen - though there are moments of shock, this is more of a suspense film characterised by restraint and menace rather than gratuitous violence - and puts her body, contained within a transparent plastic clothes bag, in the cupboard of the Hendrix's apartment. (Not a million miles away from Five Dolls for an August Moon's meat locker, then.)
The psycho; one of the best incarnations of the type out there besides Luciano Rossi
The body, wrapped in plastic
Things get a little confusing here - another reminder that it's not just gialli that can be accused of suffering from less than water-tight naratives - as another couple of men, Mike Talman and an ex-cop by the name of Carlino, turn up at the apartment looking for Lisa. They also leave their prints all over the place, placing them right where Roat, who shows up shortly after, wants them. (In keeping with the theme of blindness, non-visual details attain a greater importance than usual here, though with an element of inconsistency at times, one feels.)
Around about this point Susy Hendrix (Audrey Hepburn) returns home. Recently blinded in an accident, she does not notice the men's presence, taking the little details that are out of place, like the chair she nearly trips over, as stemming from the child upstairs, Gloria, visiting when she was out. Roat and company sneak the body out, dumping it where it is later found. Believing that Susy knows the whereabouts of the doll, Roat and his reluctant co-conspirators concoct a story that implicates Sam in Lisa's murder and the doll as the thing that can prove his innocence.
Unfortunately there are also those little details, like the fact that two different men being played by Roat both seem to be wearing the exact same pair of creaky new leather shoes, that begin to arouse Susy's suspicions and place her in increasing danger...
But we can do better, in terms of how different the history of the giallo could have been. For the film was a big success in Italy, where it went by the title Gli Occhi della notte - literally The Eyes of the Night - and put director Terence Young in the running to direct The Bird with the Crystal Plumage. He didn't of course, and the rest is history, Argento taking the genre to new artistic and commercial heights and inspiring a raft of imitators.
More interesting than this oft-told story, however, is the way in which Wait Until Dark also reverberates into later giallo productions, notably Argento's subsequent essay in the thriller form, The Cat o' Nine Tails, which shares with it the notion of a blind protagonist, and Duccio Tessari's Puzzle, with the same MacGuffin of hidden drugs that the protagonists – one suffering from amnesia and other from a broken leg to give them not too similar states of disability – are initially unawares of.
The doll
The plane
Aparted from a play by Frederick Knott, almost all of the action within Wait Until Dark takes place in the one location, in near real time. The way the filmmakers initially open out the action is interesting from a giallo perspective though, insofar as it entails the familiar tropes of air travel and the doll. Drugs mule Lisa takes the doll, which is stuffed with heroin and also happens to play a distinctive music-box style tune, from Montreal to New York, passing it on to photographer Sam Hendrix on the pretext that it is for a little girl who is sick and that she does not want to be seen with it on her when she meets her own daughter as the child will not understand that the doll is not for her. (Try that nowadays and I wonder how far you would get.)
At the airport Lisa is intercepted by her old partner Harry Roat (Alan Arkin) who murders her offscreen - though there are moments of shock, this is more of a suspense film characterised by restraint and menace rather than gratuitous violence - and puts her body, contained within a transparent plastic clothes bag, in the cupboard of the Hendrix's apartment. (Not a million miles away from Five Dolls for an August Moon's meat locker, then.)
The psycho; one of the best incarnations of the type out there besides Luciano Rossi
The body, wrapped in plastic
Things get a little confusing here - another reminder that it's not just gialli that can be accused of suffering from less than water-tight naratives - as another couple of men, Mike Talman and an ex-cop by the name of Carlino, turn up at the apartment looking for Lisa. They also leave their prints all over the place, placing them right where Roat, who shows up shortly after, wants them. (In keeping with the theme of blindness, non-visual details attain a greater importance than usual here, though with an element of inconsistency at times, one feels.)
Around about this point Susy Hendrix (Audrey Hepburn) returns home. Recently blinded in an accident, she does not notice the men's presence, taking the little details that are out of place, like the chair she nearly trips over, as stemming from the child upstairs, Gloria, visiting when she was out. Roat and company sneak the body out, dumping it where it is later found. Believing that Susy knows the whereabouts of the doll, Roat and his reluctant co-conspirators concoct a story that implicates Sam in Lisa's murder and the doll as the thing that can prove his innocence.
Unfortunately there are also those little details, like the fact that two different men being played by Roat both seem to be wearing the exact same pair of creaky new leather shoes, that begin to arouse Susy's suspicions and place her in increasing danger...
Sunday, 22 April 2007
Assault
Taking a short cut through the woods that abut her school, Tessa Hurst (Lesley-Anne Down) is sexually assaulted. The trauma of the attack leaves her mute and oblivious to the world, despite the efforts of young doctor Greg Lomax, giving Detective Chief Superintendent Velyan (Frank Finlay) and his men little to go on in their investigation of the case.
A couple of months later another girl, Susan Miller, unwisely takes the same shortcut. When art teacher Julie West (Suzy Kendall) learns this from the other pupils she is ferrying home in her car - a precautionary measure lest the maniac, who clearly has local knowledge, strike again - they go into the woods to search. The car gets stuck in the mud and in the half-light Julie sees a diabolical figure standing over the girl, who proves to have been raped and murdered.
Through a Glass Darkly - Julie sees the killer standing over the body
Unsurprisingly Julie's testimony that she saw a figure who looks like the Devil does not go down well, although its sensationalist aspect – the place is known as Devil's End, though this remains a somewhat underdeveloped notion despite the film's AKA titles In the Devil's Garden and Satan's Playthings – appeals to sleazy newshound Denning (Freddie Jones), who then proceeds to harass her in a way that would not go down well with the press complaints commission.
The Art of Darkness - Julie painting the devil
This prompts Julie to come up with a scheme of the it's-so-crazy-it-might-just-work variety: get Denning's newspaper to run a story showing a couple of her paintings of a devilish figure with the announcement that the next issue will reveal the real killer's identity, thus forcing him to show his hand.
Black-gloved antics
Whoever it might be, there are no shortage of suspects, like the husband of schoolmistress Mrs Sanford, with his collection or pornography and dubious interest in the pupils, or Lomax himself, with his remarkable ability to always show up at the crime scene and “a pill for every occasion”; no talking cures for this man.
In an Italian film the recurring use of yellow might mean something; here it's harder to tell how conscious the filmmakers were of the colour's associations, not that their main audience would have been likely to have gotten them.
Featuring an unidentified often black-gloved stalker, a traumatic primal scene and an artistic amateur sleuth protagonist who cannot quite remember that vital detail, Assault makes for a fascinating if not entirely successful attempt at transposing the Italian giallo to a small-town British setting, where Fiats and Lancias may morph into Morris Minors and Jaguars but the often dubious sexual politics remain the same.
In common with many Hammer-style films – Edinburgh-born director Sidney Hayers was earlier responsible for Circus of Horrors and Night of the Eagle – the film is hampered by bad day-for-night work and continuity, with darkness quite literally falling in the pivotal what-did-she-really-see sequence. Likewise, while this sequence is effectively rendered, in contrast to the generally undistinguished and by-the-numbers mise-en-scene, it is telling that we do not get any flashbacks to it in the manner of The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, perhaps indicative of a fundamental lack of imagination or aspiration on the filmmakers' part. The film also suffers from an overused and unattractive main theme that leaves one longing for the elegance and intricacies of a Morricone or Nicolai score.
Trivia fans may also note that the schoolgirl whom Mr Sanford paws is played by Janet Lynn from Pete Walker's sexploitation entry Cool It Carol!; Walker would later also direct the giallo-esque Schizo from a script by David McGillivray, whose critical beat for the Monthly Film Bulletin saw him cover a number of gialli around this time.
A neat equation, (no sex please we're) British style: nudie pictures equals pervert equals rapist and murderer?
On the plus side, the mystery remains engaging to the end whilst Kendall again makes for an attractive woman in peril. One is also struck, however, at just how wholesome she appears, more wide-eyed dolly bird than potential raptor, affording a more limited range of possibilities than contemporaries like Susan Scott, Edwige Fenech and Barbara Bouchet,but also confirming the appropriateness of her Spasmo casting as uncomfortably moral conspirator.
Some links:
Sidney Hayers appreciation
A review of the film that makes the giallo connection
A couple of months later another girl, Susan Miller, unwisely takes the same shortcut. When art teacher Julie West (Suzy Kendall) learns this from the other pupils she is ferrying home in her car - a precautionary measure lest the maniac, who clearly has local knowledge, strike again - they go into the woods to search. The car gets stuck in the mud and in the half-light Julie sees a diabolical figure standing over the girl, who proves to have been raped and murdered.
Through a Glass Darkly - Julie sees the killer standing over the body
Unsurprisingly Julie's testimony that she saw a figure who looks like the Devil does not go down well, although its sensationalist aspect – the place is known as Devil's End, though this remains a somewhat underdeveloped notion despite the film's AKA titles In the Devil's Garden and Satan's Playthings – appeals to sleazy newshound Denning (Freddie Jones), who then proceeds to harass her in a way that would not go down well with the press complaints commission.
The Art of Darkness - Julie painting the devil
This prompts Julie to come up with a scheme of the it's-so-crazy-it-might-just-work variety: get Denning's newspaper to run a story showing a couple of her paintings of a devilish figure with the announcement that the next issue will reveal the real killer's identity, thus forcing him to show his hand.
Black-gloved antics
Whoever it might be, there are no shortage of suspects, like the husband of schoolmistress Mrs Sanford, with his collection or pornography and dubious interest in the pupils, or Lomax himself, with his remarkable ability to always show up at the crime scene and “a pill for every occasion”; no talking cures for this man.
In an Italian film the recurring use of yellow might mean something; here it's harder to tell how conscious the filmmakers were of the colour's associations, not that their main audience would have been likely to have gotten them.
Featuring an unidentified often black-gloved stalker, a traumatic primal scene and an artistic amateur sleuth protagonist who cannot quite remember that vital detail, Assault makes for a fascinating if not entirely successful attempt at transposing the Italian giallo to a small-town British setting, where Fiats and Lancias may morph into Morris Minors and Jaguars but the often dubious sexual politics remain the same.
In common with many Hammer-style films – Edinburgh-born director Sidney Hayers was earlier responsible for Circus of Horrors and Night of the Eagle – the film is hampered by bad day-for-night work and continuity, with darkness quite literally falling in the pivotal what-did-she-really-see sequence. Likewise, while this sequence is effectively rendered, in contrast to the generally undistinguished and by-the-numbers mise-en-scene, it is telling that we do not get any flashbacks to it in the manner of The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, perhaps indicative of a fundamental lack of imagination or aspiration on the filmmakers' part. The film also suffers from an overused and unattractive main theme that leaves one longing for the elegance and intricacies of a Morricone or Nicolai score.
Trivia fans may also note that the schoolgirl whom Mr Sanford paws is played by Janet Lynn from Pete Walker's sexploitation entry Cool It Carol!; Walker would later also direct the giallo-esque Schizo from a script by David McGillivray, whose critical beat for the Monthly Film Bulletin saw him cover a number of gialli around this time.
A neat equation, (no sex please we're) British style: nudie pictures equals pervert equals rapist and murderer?
On the plus side, the mystery remains engaging to the end whilst Kendall again makes for an attractive woman in peril. One is also struck, however, at just how wholesome she appears, more wide-eyed dolly bird than potential raptor, affording a more limited range of possibilities than contemporaries like Susan Scott, Edwige Fenech and Barbara Bouchet,but also confirming the appropriateness of her Spasmo casting as uncomfortably moral conspirator.
Some links:
Sidney Hayers appreciation
A review of the film that makes the giallo connection
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