Friday, 22 August 2008
Thursday, 21 August 2008
Jack el destripador de Londres / Sette cadaveri per Scotland Yard / Seven Murders for Scotland Yard
Present-day London is in the grip of a serial killer whose modus operandi recalls that of Jack the Ripper nearly a century before, suggesting someone with surgical training – or at least the skills of a butcher.
The lost world of British sexploitation advertising
This evidence suggests that the crimes may be the work of Pedro Dorian (Paul Naschy). A Spaniard who attended medical school for a couple of years in his home country, he also happens to have a limp, sustained as the result of a circus accident, and thus fits a young eye-witnesses' description of the man the police are looking for.
Classic giallo imagery
But while academic amateur investigator Windsor Derby Christian (Andrés Resino) is convinced Dorian must be the man responsible for the crimes, his professional counterpart and friend Commissioner Henry Campbell (Renzo Marigano) continues to have his doubts – at least until the bodies and the evidence against Dorian begin to mount, most notably when an anonymous tip off leads to his being found with his date from the previous night, dead, mere days after the murder of his own wife...
This 1971 Paul Naschy vehicle sees the Waldemar Daninsky star trying to board the giallo bandwagon, with mixed results.
For while featuring the obligatory black gloved, knife-wielding killer, his identity concealed by various point-of-view shots, along with a decent body count, the film never really goes all out on the sleaze front, with little nudity to speak of, a tendency for the victims to die somewhat neatly after one or at most two stabs and a preference for telling us rather than showing us the more extreme of the ripper's depradations.
Nor does the whodunnit aspect amount to much. Working on the premise that Naschy cannot be the murderer, both for the extra-diegetic fact that it's not his style to draw his audience in and pull the rug from under us, that the typically tragical nature of his monster figures depends on our knowing their true nature, and the diegetic sense that someone is trying too hard to make him the most – i.e. too – obvious culprit, we're left with only really two other candidates in a population of seven million: Windsor and Henry.
Given that the filmmakers approach to the Scotland Yard authority figures seems rather more krimi than Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion – and here also remembering that the Spanish half of co-production team were still subject to the strictures of Francoist censorship – the genre-literate viewer may soon quickly reduce this short list to one.
If all this starts to read like a spoiler, bear in mind that the typical viewer for the film is likely to have seen a fair number of better gialli and Naschy entries; certainly when I watched the film with a friend who had never seen Seven Murders for Scotland Yard but who possesses this wider awareness he had no difficulty whatsoever in correctly picking out the guilty party almost as soon as he had appeared on screen.
If similar points could be made about many other gialli, they are usually at a bit better at finding a number of other suspects.
One telling point of comparison here, given the nature of their killers and use of locations foreign to the filmmakers is The New York Ripper, with the coincidences further enhanced by the presence of another foreign suspect marked out as different, in the form of Mickey Scellenda with his missing finger, and of an suave and sophisticated, intellectual, chess-playing investigator / suspect, in Dr Davis, within Fulci's film.
What Fulci succeeds in doing, however, is really conveying a sense of New York-ness to his film and, more significantly, making this sense and integral part of the overall sensibility of his film through the way in which his other characters, those with no real counterparts in Seven Murders for Scotland Yard, are made part of the warp and weft of the film.
Though Naschy and company clearly did travel to London to pick up some location shots of his character wandering around Soho these paradoxically lessen the overall effectiveness of the piece precisely because they jar with the other, rather too obviously Mediterranean exteriors found elsewhere in the film. (Much like their more pervasive counterparts in The New York Ripper there's also a nice incidental documentary aspect to these images, showing the difference between the still relatively staid Soho of 1971 with posters for films and shows promising more than they likely ever delivered, and the hell-on-earth of 42nd Street just prior to the AIDS and crack epidemics; in characteristic displays of British reserve many of the bystanders also do their best to move out of the camera's gaze or to cover their faces.)
Seven Murders for Scotland Yard is also rather lacking in pace. In part this is quite literally the case, thanks to the Naschy character's disability and the longer than usual shots of his walking from one scene to another that result. But it's also down to the curious almost real-time pacing of the film, where scenes and shots have a tendency to be held beyond the moment when their dramatic point has been made in a manner that is oddly, if presumably unintentionally, reminiscent of Antonioni.
Consider the opening murder: For two minutes we have shots streets of Soho from the POV of the unidentified killer. He then silently picks up a prostitute. They enter the block where she has her room and ascend the stairs, watched by a girl, Margaret, whose eye-witness testimony will later prove important. Once in the room, the woman then proceeds to slowly strip off, the camera alternating between close-up and longer shots that probably no longer correspond with to the killer's POV insofar as he as busy taking out his knife; we're now at the four and a half minute mark.
The killer then advances on the woman, whose look turns from one of feigned pleasurable expectation to terror, and, after all this build up calmly stabs her twice. A few credits roll over the freeze-framed, red tinted image of the dead woman's body on the bed and the killer slowly makes his exit, taking us to almost the seven minutes in before the second sequence starts.
This sees Naschy's character in a nearby bar, nursing a wound to his hand. After finishing his drink, he gets up and walks home, arriving there about the 8 minutes 30 seconds mark.
As far as the performances go Naschy is, well, Naschy, complete with the regulation bare-chested and mano a mano fight scenes, no fewer than three of them.
Indeed, given that the aforementioned footage of him shuffling around Soho proves remarkably reminiscent of similar scenes in the later Waldemar Daninsky entry Dr Jekyll versus the Werewolf and that a final showdown in the madman's dungeon-cum-laboratory could easily have also come from just about any entry in the same series, you half expect him to transform at just about any moment.
Oops, I've done it again?
Still, whatever Naschy may lack as an actor he compensates for in the sheer commitment he always brings, coupled with a surprising willingness to take on somewhat unsympathetic and unheroic roles. Here Pedro does little more than drowning his sorrows with one whisky after another. If this leads to some obligatory giallo traumatic flashbacks, tinted blue to hint at an ambiguous association with the red tint over the opening murder, that his whisky of choice is Vat 69 rather than J&B again seems to foreground the Spanishness of the production.
The other performers are satisfactory in their one-note roles although the exaggerated dubbing accents used on the English-language version adds further unintentional humour to what is already often some rather doubtful dialogue:
“It's alarming how many crimes of a sexual nature are being committed at the moment.”
“Did you say anything dear?”
“No, nothing – I was merely thinking aloud”
“Jack – Jack the Ripper!”
“Yes, his signature's all over the bodies of those two women.”
“But surely Jack the Ripper's dead, isn't he?”
“Undoubtedly – or extremely old”
Piero Piccioni delivers some engaging jazzy themes which affords him plenty of opportunity to whizz around the keys of his Hammond. Unfortunately these themes never really integrate that well with the film as a whole, giving the impression of being library music or at least pieces originally composed for some other purpose.
The lost world of British sexploitation advertising
This evidence suggests that the crimes may be the work of Pedro Dorian (Paul Naschy). A Spaniard who attended medical school for a couple of years in his home country, he also happens to have a limp, sustained as the result of a circus accident, and thus fits a young eye-witnesses' description of the man the police are looking for.
Classic giallo imagery
But while academic amateur investigator Windsor Derby Christian (Andrés Resino) is convinced Dorian must be the man responsible for the crimes, his professional counterpart and friend Commissioner Henry Campbell (Renzo Marigano) continues to have his doubts – at least until the bodies and the evidence against Dorian begin to mount, most notably when an anonymous tip off leads to his being found with his date from the previous night, dead, mere days after the murder of his own wife...
This 1971 Paul Naschy vehicle sees the Waldemar Daninsky star trying to board the giallo bandwagon, with mixed results.
For while featuring the obligatory black gloved, knife-wielding killer, his identity concealed by various point-of-view shots, along with a decent body count, the film never really goes all out on the sleaze front, with little nudity to speak of, a tendency for the victims to die somewhat neatly after one or at most two stabs and a preference for telling us rather than showing us the more extreme of the ripper's depradations.
Nor does the whodunnit aspect amount to much. Working on the premise that Naschy cannot be the murderer, both for the extra-diegetic fact that it's not his style to draw his audience in and pull the rug from under us, that the typically tragical nature of his monster figures depends on our knowing their true nature, and the diegetic sense that someone is trying too hard to make him the most – i.e. too – obvious culprit, we're left with only really two other candidates in a population of seven million: Windsor and Henry.
Given that the filmmakers approach to the Scotland Yard authority figures seems rather more krimi than Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion – and here also remembering that the Spanish half of co-production team were still subject to the strictures of Francoist censorship – the genre-literate viewer may soon quickly reduce this short list to one.
If all this starts to read like a spoiler, bear in mind that the typical viewer for the film is likely to have seen a fair number of better gialli and Naschy entries; certainly when I watched the film with a friend who had never seen Seven Murders for Scotland Yard but who possesses this wider awareness he had no difficulty whatsoever in correctly picking out the guilty party almost as soon as he had appeared on screen.
If similar points could be made about many other gialli, they are usually at a bit better at finding a number of other suspects.
One telling point of comparison here, given the nature of their killers and use of locations foreign to the filmmakers is The New York Ripper, with the coincidences further enhanced by the presence of another foreign suspect marked out as different, in the form of Mickey Scellenda with his missing finger, and of an suave and sophisticated, intellectual, chess-playing investigator / suspect, in Dr Davis, within Fulci's film.
What Fulci succeeds in doing, however, is really conveying a sense of New York-ness to his film and, more significantly, making this sense and integral part of the overall sensibility of his film through the way in which his other characters, those with no real counterparts in Seven Murders for Scotland Yard, are made part of the warp and weft of the film.
Though Naschy and company clearly did travel to London to pick up some location shots of his character wandering around Soho these paradoxically lessen the overall effectiveness of the piece precisely because they jar with the other, rather too obviously Mediterranean exteriors found elsewhere in the film. (Much like their more pervasive counterparts in The New York Ripper there's also a nice incidental documentary aspect to these images, showing the difference between the still relatively staid Soho of 1971 with posters for films and shows promising more than they likely ever delivered, and the hell-on-earth of 42nd Street just prior to the AIDS and crack epidemics; in characteristic displays of British reserve many of the bystanders also do their best to move out of the camera's gaze or to cover their faces.)
Seven Murders for Scotland Yard is also rather lacking in pace. In part this is quite literally the case, thanks to the Naschy character's disability and the longer than usual shots of his walking from one scene to another that result. But it's also down to the curious almost real-time pacing of the film, where scenes and shots have a tendency to be held beyond the moment when their dramatic point has been made in a manner that is oddly, if presumably unintentionally, reminiscent of Antonioni.
Consider the opening murder: For two minutes we have shots streets of Soho from the POV of the unidentified killer. He then silently picks up a prostitute. They enter the block where she has her room and ascend the stairs, watched by a girl, Margaret, whose eye-witness testimony will later prove important. Once in the room, the woman then proceeds to slowly strip off, the camera alternating between close-up and longer shots that probably no longer correspond with to the killer's POV insofar as he as busy taking out his knife; we're now at the four and a half minute mark.
The killer then advances on the woman, whose look turns from one of feigned pleasurable expectation to terror, and, after all this build up calmly stabs her twice. A few credits roll over the freeze-framed, red tinted image of the dead woman's body on the bed and the killer slowly makes his exit, taking us to almost the seven minutes in before the second sequence starts.
This sees Naschy's character in a nearby bar, nursing a wound to his hand. After finishing his drink, he gets up and walks home, arriving there about the 8 minutes 30 seconds mark.
As far as the performances go Naschy is, well, Naschy, complete with the regulation bare-chested and mano a mano fight scenes, no fewer than three of them.
Indeed, given that the aforementioned footage of him shuffling around Soho proves remarkably reminiscent of similar scenes in the later Waldemar Daninsky entry Dr Jekyll versus the Werewolf and that a final showdown in the madman's dungeon-cum-laboratory could easily have also come from just about any entry in the same series, you half expect him to transform at just about any moment.
Oops, I've done it again?
Still, whatever Naschy may lack as an actor he compensates for in the sheer commitment he always brings, coupled with a surprising willingness to take on somewhat unsympathetic and unheroic roles. Here Pedro does little more than drowning his sorrows with one whisky after another. If this leads to some obligatory giallo traumatic flashbacks, tinted blue to hint at an ambiguous association with the red tint over the opening murder, that his whisky of choice is Vat 69 rather than J&B again seems to foreground the Spanishness of the production.
The other performers are satisfactory in their one-note roles although the exaggerated dubbing accents used on the English-language version adds further unintentional humour to what is already often some rather doubtful dialogue:
“It's alarming how many crimes of a sexual nature are being committed at the moment.”
“Did you say anything dear?”
“No, nothing – I was merely thinking aloud”
“Jack – Jack the Ripper!”
“Yes, his signature's all over the bodies of those two women.”
“But surely Jack the Ripper's dead, isn't he?”
“Undoubtedly – or extremely old”
Piero Piccioni delivers some engaging jazzy themes which affords him plenty of opportunity to whizz around the keys of his Hammond. Unfortunately these themes never really integrate that well with the film as a whole, giving the impression of being library music or at least pieces originally composed for some other purpose.
Belve feroci / Wild Beasts
Whether by accident or design there's a certain affinity between Savage Beasts' setup and that of Jorge Grau's excellent Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue, the main difference that Franco Prosperi's technology gone awry scenario is that bit more plausibly grounded.
For rather than seeing an experimental pest control machine bring the recently dead back to life, what we have here is the contamination of the water supply of a city with PCP causing the animals that drink it to become aggressive and run amok.
Man and the City
The ensuing gory highlights include a couple being devoured by rats; a blind man being savaged by his seeing eye dog; a cheetah pursuing an open-topped VW beetle and an elephant crushing a man's head underfoot.
Dottoressa de Selle
In the midst of the chaos a team of scientists, led by the always welcome Lorraine De Selle, try to work out what has happened and how to stop the madness before it spreads further...
A film with a message?
If its difficult to take Savage Beasts' quasi-ecological message all that seriously given writer-director Prosperi's background in mondo, this selfsame background also shows through in his willingness to take on a challenging assignment of the “never work with children and animals” type with largely successful results.
The main difficulty many will have with the film is the element of unpleasantness that pervades it, most notably with the burning alive of several dozen rats, some butchery footage and the unleashing of a tiger on some penned-in cattle.
Gore, but perhaps not of the sort the fan wants
Though perhaps inherently distasteful at a visceral level these images also reminded me somewhat of Georges Franju's brilliant documentary about a Paris abattoir, Blood of the Beasts, in that they're showing us things going on all the time but which we generally prefer to bracket out of our existence.
After all, in any sizeable city there will be pest controllers whose job it is to exterminate vermin, and slaughterhouse workers and butchers responsible for turning animals into abstracts, those cattle into beef or those pigs into pork, bacon and so on.
A mondo-style juxtaposition of the butchery footage, by which the tiger is fed in an unnatural manner, and its own bringing down of one of the cows, by which it follows its natural instincts, is also interesting from a philosophical perspective if we think about the German philosopher Heidegger's notions of authentic and inauthentic being. (The film's setting in a northern European city, identifiable as Frankfurt, is a happy coincidence in this regard.)
For, from a Heideggerian perspective a caged tiger in a zoo is not an authentic tiger, being unable to roam around and hunt for food as it would in the wild.
Contrary to appearance, this is not a real tiger
Following from this, as in so many other aspects of life, modern, 'fallen' man has been conditioned to accept an inauthentic ersatz substitute for the real experience, or a pacified un-nature in place of authentic nature, often red in tooth and claw.
If such ideas seem far removed from the Italian exploitation cinema, it can also be argued that they are at the heart of Prosperi's own filmmaking practice, given that the mondo is a form of cinema which trades on notions of documentary realism for much of its effect but which has always attracted criticism for its dubious claims to authenticity in fabricating scenes.
Moreover, if we think about it these scenes are often about the contrasts between modern and primitive and civilised and savage forms of life, with the division frequently also breaking down along lines of the fallen and the authentic.
While Savage Beasts is a fiction film, as foregrounded by the obvious reference point of Suspiria for the seeing eye dog attack, similar questions can still be asked of other aspects of it. Note, for example, the way in which Prosperi establishes the situation with his opening montages of the urban jungle: were those discarded needles that the camera picks out on a U-bahn escalator found or planted? If found, were they a lucky find or near ubiquitous? If near ubiquitous, what does this say about 'our' way of life, when so many need to find escape in drugs...
For rather than seeing an experimental pest control machine bring the recently dead back to life, what we have here is the contamination of the water supply of a city with PCP causing the animals that drink it to become aggressive and run amok.
Man and the City
The ensuing gory highlights include a couple being devoured by rats; a blind man being savaged by his seeing eye dog; a cheetah pursuing an open-topped VW beetle and an elephant crushing a man's head underfoot.
Dottoressa de Selle
In the midst of the chaos a team of scientists, led by the always welcome Lorraine De Selle, try to work out what has happened and how to stop the madness before it spreads further...
A film with a message?
If its difficult to take Savage Beasts' quasi-ecological message all that seriously given writer-director Prosperi's background in mondo, this selfsame background also shows through in his willingness to take on a challenging assignment of the “never work with children and animals” type with largely successful results.
The main difficulty many will have with the film is the element of unpleasantness that pervades it, most notably with the burning alive of several dozen rats, some butchery footage and the unleashing of a tiger on some penned-in cattle.
Gore, but perhaps not of the sort the fan wants
Though perhaps inherently distasteful at a visceral level these images also reminded me somewhat of Georges Franju's brilliant documentary about a Paris abattoir, Blood of the Beasts, in that they're showing us things going on all the time but which we generally prefer to bracket out of our existence.
After all, in any sizeable city there will be pest controllers whose job it is to exterminate vermin, and slaughterhouse workers and butchers responsible for turning animals into abstracts, those cattle into beef or those pigs into pork, bacon and so on.
A mondo-style juxtaposition of the butchery footage, by which the tiger is fed in an unnatural manner, and its own bringing down of one of the cows, by which it follows its natural instincts, is also interesting from a philosophical perspective if we think about the German philosopher Heidegger's notions of authentic and inauthentic being. (The film's setting in a northern European city, identifiable as Frankfurt, is a happy coincidence in this regard.)
For, from a Heideggerian perspective a caged tiger in a zoo is not an authentic tiger, being unable to roam around and hunt for food as it would in the wild.
Contrary to appearance, this is not a real tiger
Following from this, as in so many other aspects of life, modern, 'fallen' man has been conditioned to accept an inauthentic ersatz substitute for the real experience, or a pacified un-nature in place of authentic nature, often red in tooth and claw.
If such ideas seem far removed from the Italian exploitation cinema, it can also be argued that they are at the heart of Prosperi's own filmmaking practice, given that the mondo is a form of cinema which trades on notions of documentary realism for much of its effect but which has always attracted criticism for its dubious claims to authenticity in fabricating scenes.
Moreover, if we think about it these scenes are often about the contrasts between modern and primitive and civilised and savage forms of life, with the division frequently also breaking down along lines of the fallen and the authentic.
While Savage Beasts is a fiction film, as foregrounded by the obvious reference point of Suspiria for the seeing eye dog attack, similar questions can still be asked of other aspects of it. Note, for example, the way in which Prosperi establishes the situation with his opening montages of the urban jungle: were those discarded needles that the camera picks out on a U-bahn escalator found or planted? If found, were they a lucky find or near ubiquitous? If near ubiquitous, what does this say about 'our' way of life, when so many need to find escape in drugs...
Tuesday, 19 August 2008
Cyborg, il guerriero d'acciaio / Cy Warrior / Cy Warrior: Special Combat Unit
An accident causes the activation of the top-secret Cyber Warrior or 'Cyw' before his programming has been completed.
Number five is alive – or something
Concerned that the Cyw may fall into the hands of enemies, prove unable to control or simply receive unwanted attention from the public or foreign powers, the military dispatches a crack squad led by Colonel Hammer to bring back the Cyw one way or another: “If any of you see this piece of garbage and it gives you any kind of resistance blow it up as quickly as possible.”
Meanwhile, their target is befriended by young Brandon Scott and his sister Susan (no relation to Nieves Navarro, evidently), who had conveniently been orphaned by the death of their parents in a car crash a few years previously...
If this 1989 entry from make up and effects man Gianetto De Rossi is an obvious Terminator rip-off, down to copycat scenes of the Cyw performing surgical repairs on himself and POV shots in which he assesses the threat posed by possible enemies, it also has certain affinities with the later Universal Soldier which, along with in its high-speed reading Star Trek: The Next Generation's Data, demonstrates that apparent influences could go both directions or merely be coincidental.
“Hey CW1, we're friends. You can trust us. We don't want to do you any harm.”
Otherwise, there's not much to say about the film itself, with action, characterisation, dialogue and narrative alike being decidedly perfunctory. Nor is De Rossi's direction particularly inspired or imaginative, though also characterised by a surprising restraint, with little use of 'dramatic' close-ups, zooms and other techniques that we might traditionally associate with the inexperienced filmmaker striving for effect.
Henry Silva, great fun as always
Henry Silva is good value as the foul-mouthed Hammer, the kind of the boo-hiss villain who thinks nothing of having his men fire into crowds of innocent bystanders at a funfair in an ill-fated attempt to bring in the Cyw in the confidence that his superiors will cover up the incident as a turf war between local gangs, while the woodenness of Frank Zangarino as the Cyw is suitably in-keeping with his robotic nature, every move of his head being accompanied by the whirr of his motors on the soundtrack at a volume that makes you wonder how he didn't also turn the heads of people in the street.
The music by Lanfranco Perini is a plus, with simple yet effective percussive ostenati overlaid with synthesisers in a way that successfully connotes the Cyw's high-tech, robotic nature and, as the story progresses, emergent humanity.
Note how the Cyw's insides extend out further than his outside.
What was most interesting for me is how the film, like a number of filone entries of similar vintage such as Luigi Montifiore's Metamorphosis / DNA formula letale and producer Fabrizio De Angelis's Killer Crocodile – one of De Rossi's other directorial ventures was a sequel, Killer Crocodile II, shot back-to-back with its precedessor – seems to have sank without a trace, as indicated by the murky looking pan and scan Greek subtitled VHS source through which I had the opportunity to watch the film.
Twenty or even ten years earlier Cy Warrior would likely have found enough of an audience and and sufficient box office returns for De Rossi to carve out a longer running directorial career and maybe even have the opportunity to find a filone he was more suited for.
[The AVI is available from Cinemageddon]
Number five is alive – or something
Concerned that the Cyw may fall into the hands of enemies, prove unable to control or simply receive unwanted attention from the public or foreign powers, the military dispatches a crack squad led by Colonel Hammer to bring back the Cyw one way or another: “If any of you see this piece of garbage and it gives you any kind of resistance blow it up as quickly as possible.”
Meanwhile, their target is befriended by young Brandon Scott and his sister Susan (no relation to Nieves Navarro, evidently), who had conveniently been orphaned by the death of their parents in a car crash a few years previously...
If this 1989 entry from make up and effects man Gianetto De Rossi is an obvious Terminator rip-off, down to copycat scenes of the Cyw performing surgical repairs on himself and POV shots in which he assesses the threat posed by possible enemies, it also has certain affinities with the later Universal Soldier which, along with in its high-speed reading Star Trek: The Next Generation's Data, demonstrates that apparent influences could go both directions or merely be coincidental.
“Hey CW1, we're friends. You can trust us. We don't want to do you any harm.”
Otherwise, there's not much to say about the film itself, with action, characterisation, dialogue and narrative alike being decidedly perfunctory. Nor is De Rossi's direction particularly inspired or imaginative, though also characterised by a surprising restraint, with little use of 'dramatic' close-ups, zooms and other techniques that we might traditionally associate with the inexperienced filmmaker striving for effect.
Henry Silva, great fun as always
Henry Silva is good value as the foul-mouthed Hammer, the kind of the boo-hiss villain who thinks nothing of having his men fire into crowds of innocent bystanders at a funfair in an ill-fated attempt to bring in the Cyw in the confidence that his superiors will cover up the incident as a turf war between local gangs, while the woodenness of Frank Zangarino as the Cyw is suitably in-keeping with his robotic nature, every move of his head being accompanied by the whirr of his motors on the soundtrack at a volume that makes you wonder how he didn't also turn the heads of people in the street.
The music by Lanfranco Perini is a plus, with simple yet effective percussive ostenati overlaid with synthesisers in a way that successfully connotes the Cyw's high-tech, robotic nature and, as the story progresses, emergent humanity.
Note how the Cyw's insides extend out further than his outside.
What was most interesting for me is how the film, like a number of filone entries of similar vintage such as Luigi Montifiore's Metamorphosis / DNA formula letale and producer Fabrizio De Angelis's Killer Crocodile – one of De Rossi's other directorial ventures was a sequel, Killer Crocodile II, shot back-to-back with its precedessor – seems to have sank without a trace, as indicated by the murky looking pan and scan Greek subtitled VHS source through which I had the opportunity to watch the film.
Twenty or even ten years earlier Cy Warrior would likely have found enough of an audience and and sufficient box office returns for De Rossi to carve out a longer running directorial career and maybe even have the opportunity to find a filone he was more suited for.
[The AVI is available from Cinemageddon]
Sunday, 17 August 2008
Das Geheimnis der gelben Narzissen / The Devil's Daffodil / The Daffodil Killer
With newspaper hoardings announcing a second daffodil murder a young woman goes to make a call to Scotland Yard, but is herself murdered by a black clad masked figure before she can can be put through to them.
The daffodil killer strikes again in a scene full of giallo-style iconography but comparatively lacking in style
After leaving a daffodil on the body the killer then goes after Global Airlines investigator Jack Tarling, played by archetypal krimi detective hero Joachim Fuchsberger, finding him with a cargo of fake daffodils containing heroin intercepted by customs officials as part of a cargo from Hong Kong.
While successful in blowing up the customs officials the daffodil killer fails to kill Tarling, who then meets with his Hong Kong counterpart, Ling Chu, played by the unlikely seeming figure of Christopher Lee, as planned.
Fuchsberger and Lee
After announcing their presence to Scotland Yard the two men then investigate the convoluted mystery, beginning with the daffodils' importer, Lyons, before moving on the Soho nightclub where the first three murder victims all worked, the Cosmos...
Yet more daffodils and a characteristic mirror shot
With the subsequent proceedings continuing very much in the conventional krimi vein – Klaus Kinski is also on hand in characteristically twitchy mood, though Eddi Arent's comic relief is absent – the most interesting aspect of The Mystery of the Yellow Daffodil is arguably its production context, as one of the few collaborations between German and British filmmakers on an Edgar Wallace adaptation.
From the point of view of the krimi productions, the chief benefit of the co-production emerges as its affording more location shooting and less stock footage than usual. Even here, however, while Picadilly Circus is effectively used as the backdrop for one assassination – the victim ironically falling into a flower-seller's basket after being shot – Scotland Yard is still represented by a plaque on some random building elsewhere over which, inevitably, Big Ben chimes.
On location in exotic Soho
Insofar as the German audience would happily accept this attempt at conveying London-ness, what really hurts the film is the blandness of the Shepperton Studio interiors, which generally have a somewhat flatter and anonymous look to their lighting and lack the kind of production details that are so much a part of the charm of their German counterparts.
In fairness Terence Fisher's Sherlock Holmes and the Deadly Necklace suffered from a similar aesthetic discomfort when moving geographically in the other direction, suggesting that both British and German filmmakers of this type were perhaps somewhat set in their own comfortable ways of working at home.
Certainly if the later example of Cave of the Vampires is taken into account director Akos Rathony gives the impression of being a competent veteran but one who never found his particular niche, the first signalling his similarity with Fisher and the second his difference.
Ultimately one thus feels that it is the film's very title that indicates what it most lacks: an expressive use of colour.
If it is Blood and Black Lace rather than Hammer that would prove the catalyst here, The Mystery of the Yellow Daffodils' intersection of a drug smuggling plot with a masked killer working his way through a number of glamorous women, all from a particular place, and the prominence given elegant yet sleazy sounding bongo rhythm heavy music combine to suggest that some influences may conceivably have gone in the other direction.
It's as if, having seen what the British could bring to the krimi the Germans then sought to see whether the Italians could do any better, with the colour flooding into the antique shop from the adjacent dance hall and the more surreal look given the masked killer in Bava's film indicating that they most certainly could. (Not that this prevented future German-British krimi collaborations, as Circus of Fear demonstrates, but the results were decidedly uninspired.)
With Fuchsberger's investigator operating in the same respectable, s(t)olid manner as his more usual Scotland Yard men, it is Lee's character who is given responsibility for the more ruthless aspects of the investigation, including a spot of torture where he drowns out the victim's screams by turning up the radio.
Much like the notion of having a white actor playing a non-white this is a piece of stereotyping whose implications – these sadistic Orientals with their history of fiendish tortures as per Fu Manchu etc. – are decidedly awkward today.
This is however partly offset by Lee's always respectful performance, alongside the simple fact that at the time the ability to perform the role would have likely appeared a positive sign of his versatility as an actor rather than as negative display of potential cultural insensitivity; here it must be remembered that Lee also appeared in all manner of European productions with no-one ever really seeming to complain that his portrayal of, say, a WWII veteran German officer in The Virgin of Nuremberg was offensive or taking away work from indigenous actors.
More important than this, however, is that within the context of The Mystery of the Yellow Daffodils itself the filmmakers actually make an oblique comment on the performative rather than essentialised nature of identity by having Ling Chu have a habit for quoting Confucian proverbs and epigrams in a Charlie Chan manner only to eventually reveal that he has been making them up as he went along.
Finally, it should be noted that the film was shot in both German and English language versions, with some differences in the casting of the smaller roles. That the German version is the only one available, complete with a commentary track but no English subtitle option, presents a clear indication of the differing popularity of Wallace in the two territories today.
Another review of the film: http://dantenet.com/er/ERchives/reviews/d_reviews/daffodil.html
The daffodil killer strikes again in a scene full of giallo-style iconography but comparatively lacking in style
After leaving a daffodil on the body the killer then goes after Global Airlines investigator Jack Tarling, played by archetypal krimi detective hero Joachim Fuchsberger, finding him with a cargo of fake daffodils containing heroin intercepted by customs officials as part of a cargo from Hong Kong.
While successful in blowing up the customs officials the daffodil killer fails to kill Tarling, who then meets with his Hong Kong counterpart, Ling Chu, played by the unlikely seeming figure of Christopher Lee, as planned.
Fuchsberger and Lee
After announcing their presence to Scotland Yard the two men then investigate the convoluted mystery, beginning with the daffodils' importer, Lyons, before moving on the Soho nightclub where the first three murder victims all worked, the Cosmos...
Yet more daffodils and a characteristic mirror shot
With the subsequent proceedings continuing very much in the conventional krimi vein – Klaus Kinski is also on hand in characteristically twitchy mood, though Eddi Arent's comic relief is absent – the most interesting aspect of The Mystery of the Yellow Daffodil is arguably its production context, as one of the few collaborations between German and British filmmakers on an Edgar Wallace adaptation.
From the point of view of the krimi productions, the chief benefit of the co-production emerges as its affording more location shooting and less stock footage than usual. Even here, however, while Picadilly Circus is effectively used as the backdrop for one assassination – the victim ironically falling into a flower-seller's basket after being shot – Scotland Yard is still represented by a plaque on some random building elsewhere over which, inevitably, Big Ben chimes.
On location in exotic Soho
Insofar as the German audience would happily accept this attempt at conveying London-ness, what really hurts the film is the blandness of the Shepperton Studio interiors, which generally have a somewhat flatter and anonymous look to their lighting and lack the kind of production details that are so much a part of the charm of their German counterparts.
In fairness Terence Fisher's Sherlock Holmes and the Deadly Necklace suffered from a similar aesthetic discomfort when moving geographically in the other direction, suggesting that both British and German filmmakers of this type were perhaps somewhat set in their own comfortable ways of working at home.
Certainly if the later example of Cave of the Vampires is taken into account director Akos Rathony gives the impression of being a competent veteran but one who never found his particular niche, the first signalling his similarity with Fisher and the second his difference.
Ultimately one thus feels that it is the film's very title that indicates what it most lacks: an expressive use of colour.
If it is Blood and Black Lace rather than Hammer that would prove the catalyst here, The Mystery of the Yellow Daffodils' intersection of a drug smuggling plot with a masked killer working his way through a number of glamorous women, all from a particular place, and the prominence given elegant yet sleazy sounding bongo rhythm heavy music combine to suggest that some influences may conceivably have gone in the other direction.
It's as if, having seen what the British could bring to the krimi the Germans then sought to see whether the Italians could do any better, with the colour flooding into the antique shop from the adjacent dance hall and the more surreal look given the masked killer in Bava's film indicating that they most certainly could. (Not that this prevented future German-British krimi collaborations, as Circus of Fear demonstrates, but the results were decidedly uninspired.)
With Fuchsberger's investigator operating in the same respectable, s(t)olid manner as his more usual Scotland Yard men, it is Lee's character who is given responsibility for the more ruthless aspects of the investigation, including a spot of torture where he drowns out the victim's screams by turning up the radio.
Much like the notion of having a white actor playing a non-white this is a piece of stereotyping whose implications – these sadistic Orientals with their history of fiendish tortures as per Fu Manchu etc. – are decidedly awkward today.
This is however partly offset by Lee's always respectful performance, alongside the simple fact that at the time the ability to perform the role would have likely appeared a positive sign of his versatility as an actor rather than as negative display of potential cultural insensitivity; here it must be remembered that Lee also appeared in all manner of European productions with no-one ever really seeming to complain that his portrayal of, say, a WWII veteran German officer in The Virgin of Nuremberg was offensive or taking away work from indigenous actors.
More important than this, however, is that within the context of The Mystery of the Yellow Daffodils itself the filmmakers actually make an oblique comment on the performative rather than essentialised nature of identity by having Ling Chu have a habit for quoting Confucian proverbs and epigrams in a Charlie Chan manner only to eventually reveal that he has been making them up as he went along.
Finally, it should be noted that the film was shot in both German and English language versions, with some differences in the casting of the smaller roles. That the German version is the only one available, complete with a commentary track but no English subtitle option, presents a clear indication of the differing popularity of Wallace in the two territories today.
Another review of the film: http://dantenet.com/er/ERchives/reviews/d_reviews/daffodil.html
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