Tough to Kill

Written by Paul Cooke and David Zuzelo of Tough to Kill and Tomb it May Concern and available through Lulu.com, this 120 page PDF/print-on-demand book/ebook examines The European Action Cinema Explosion of the 1980s or, more specifically, the contribution made by Italian productions and co-productions to it.

The bulk of the volume is comprised of 80+ reviews of films like Alien From the Deep, Ark of the Sun God, The Atlantis Interceptors, The Barbarians, The Black Cobra (and II and III), punctuated by cheesy video sleeve artwork, almost invariably of grimacing steriod-amped types wielding large phallic weapons.

The write-ups tell you what you want and need to know about a particular film – who made it, who's in it, what it's ripping off (if the title alone doesn't give this away), how much action there is and how far things get bogged down by niceties such as characterisation and plot etc. – and finish up with an “exploding huts” rating of one to five to help the new viewer work their way through the minefield of the good, the bad, the ugly and the frankly inept.

They are also pretty damn entertaining in their own right:

“Ettore Spagnuolo and Alfonse Brescia, the gruesome twosome of European trash cinema, try to add together zero budget and zero market desire to equal a good feature film. It doesn’t compute. However, Miami Cops is the most entertaining movie with Miami in the title that NEVER goes near Miami. And it has chainsaw slashed bad guys going for it.”

“A film that defies description without begging for hyperbole, Strike Commando is action-sploitation that pounds outrageous and entertaining mischief in every minute. Really. The brain trust (read: they trust that you will not use your brain!) of Bruno Mattei and Claudio Fragasso fired on all genre conventions, burping out this incredible entry.”

Reading as someone more familiar with gialli and horror from the 1960s and 70s, it's interesting to see how the pantheon of filmmakers changes somewhat with the shift in time and place. While Castellari and Margheriti are prominent names of the ever-reliable type, the likes of Larry Ludman (i.e. Fabrizio De Angelis) and the above-mentioned Mattei emerge as solid second rank figures at their best delivering brain-dead action fun.

Indeed, one half wonders in this regard if the decline in Fulci's fortunes wasn't correlated with De Angelis's emergence as a director in his own right, as if the canny producer worked out that by directing his films himself he could save money on hiring the likes of Fulci.

It was also useful to begin to piece together the flow of the action-adventure cycle over the course of the decade, with a prevalence of entries sullo stesso filone Raiders of the Lost Ark, Mad Max, Conan the Barbarian or Rambo etc. depending on the exact point in the 80s.

In this regard, however, I also wondered whether it might have been preferable had one of the concluding essays, “Pastapocalypse 80: After they Baked the Big Apple,” which gives something of an overview of key films and stages in the the cycle, come at the start to facilitate access for the newcomer.

Then again, it could be said that part of the joy of this kind of cinema is discovering things for yourself and that providing a short cut to finding out about the delirious like of The Last Match – which I won't describe here so as not to spoil things for you – not only takes some of the fun out of things but also makes it that bit easier for those who don't understand to misappropriate and mock.

The other concluding pieces comprise a tribute to Bruno Mattei and to some of the most notable performers within the cycle – Brent Huff, Lewis Collins (whom many UK viewers may find it hard to disassociate from The Professionals, as I did), Reb Brown and Mark Gregory – and an interview with Edoardo Margheriti, discussing his own work and that of his father, Antonio.

Or, to put it another way, the kind of things which will please the fan and leave the other 99 per cent nonplussed.

The point, of course, is that the internet and the ability to self-publish means that this majority reaction really doesn't matter any more: it's now so much easier for the other one per cent of us to make contact, support one another's endeavours and spread that Eurocult love...

Il Cav. Costante Nicosia demoniaco, ovvero: Dracula in Brianza / Dracula in the Provinces

Il Cavaliere Costante Nicosia (Lando Buzzanca) just about has it all: a beautiful wife, Mariu (Sylva Koscina) and mistress, Liu (Christa Linder) and a profitable business, Italy's largest toothpaste manufactory. Mariu and the business came together – by marrying Mariu Costante inherited the factory from her father; clearly nobody thought that Mariu might venture into the world of business in her own right nor ever assume anything other than decorative and familial roles. Perhaps the risk of contamination was too great; as proof, we can look at the example of Wanda Torsello (Francesca Romana Coluzzi), the militant communist union organiser.

Costante's good fortune in turn highlights the other dominant aspect of his make up: all manner of superstitious quasi religious, pre-capitalist beliefs, ranging from having a hunchback on the company payroll so that he can rub the man's hump for luck to getting the homely looking – and thus, by the logic of the genre, assuredly still virginal – live-in maid to urinate on the pieces of broken mirror as a means of counteracting the seven years bad luck it would otherwise bring.


“Dinner in Transylvania's always in the nude,” explains Dragalescu...


The Brides of Dragalescu close in


Costante falls asleep with one of the women...

The aforementioned contamination, meanwhile, could be considered a dominant theme of the film, emerging at just the point when Costante's luck runs out as, following a business trip to Romania and a half-remembered evening with Count Dragalescu (John Steiner) that begian with the count's three vampire brides but ended with the two men waking up in bed together, Costante comes to suspect that he has be infected with homosexuality.


Then awakens besides


Dragalescu!






Back in Brianza and finding himself gazing longingly at the buttocks of the company basketball team as they shower, Costante goes to see Dr Paluzzi (Rossano Brazzi) for advice:

“As I was saying about my cousin [...] he found himself in bed with the man who was his host.”

“Naturally”

“No doctor, it isn't natural at all. This person isn't that kind of person. Well, anyway, he drank something. As a matter of fact I don't know what, but a whole bottle. He fell asleep smashed out of his skull. He didn't know what he was doing. That's the real truth of it doctor, that is the catch! He didn't know if he...”

“If he was penetrated or not.”

“I didn't want to put it that way exactly. Anyway, from that moment he gets these funny sensations any time he sees a naked man. He's afraid of becoming, he's afraid of turning into a...”

“Queer?”

“No”

“What do you mean no, well then exactly what is he afraid he's turning into?”

“A queer”

“Naturally”

“How can you say naturally! He isn't that kind of person, you understand! The man is happily married, a very influential person, financially secure. He has a mistress.”

Etc:

“After your return from Romania, have you been to bed with a woman?”

“Me? Why do you want to know? I thought we were talking about my cousin. No I don't think he's been to bed with anyone because he's feeling miserable. He's probably afraid to go to bed with anyone in case his you-know-what doesn't work any more.”

“Ah yes, that's natural. But he shouldn't worry about it. Talk to your, em, cousin and reassure him. [...] The fact is that one doesn't turn into a homosexual like that in only two hours.”

“Yes, that's what I told him too, but the jerk he wouldn't listen.”

“But you said he was having an affair on the side. That's great: he should go straight to her, do what comes naturally. I guarantee he'll feel better right away unless... unless he's unable to perform. Then we know that on that night you described in such detail he was ...”

“Deflowered”

“Naturally”

“Oh...”

When Liu then accidentally cuts herself and Costante sucks the blood out the wound less it result in an infection another truth thus begins to dawn: he has become a vampire.

Whether this is better or worse depends, of course, on if this condition has taken is a distinctly masculine oral-sadistic or more worryingly polymorphously perverse form.

Or, in less Freudian terms, is Costante a heterosexual vampire or not?

This 1975 comedy forms a natural companion piece to The Eroticist, a satirical fantasy-comedy one-two that showcase Lucio Fulci's versatility and the evident rapport he had with leading man Lando Buzzanca.

The main difference between the two films is perhaps that whereas The Eroticist's affinities with the rest of Fulci's work were evident at both the levels of form and content, the balance in Il Cav. Costante Nicosia demoniaco, ovvero: Dracula in Brianza / Dracula in the Provinces shifts somewhat towards the latter, with a more restrained – if still excessive - mise en scène and fewer set-pieces.

Another way of saying this might be to suggest that if The Eroticist was the film of a Surrealist-Marxist, Dracula in the Provinces is the film of a Marxist-Surrealist, premised on the notion that “Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks,” to quote Marx, albeit a Marx clearly in more poetic than scientific mood.

Given the to-and-fro of influence between Fulci and Argento, it's worth nothing that the film also features a German shepherd guard dog called Gestapo with a tendency to attack people according to its own distinctive unfathomable logic, two years before Suspiria.

Il Cav. Costante Nicosia demoniaco, ovvero: Dracula in Brianza is essential viewing for anyone working on a comparative study of political and sexual subtexts in the European horror-comedy/satire of the period (alongside Vampire Sterben Nichts, Dance of the Vampires, Hanno cambiato faccia and the Warhol/Morrisey/Margheriti Dracula and Frankenstein pair etc.) or who just enjoys something a bit more immediately thought-provoking than the usual T&A driven Italian comedies of the 1970s.

Il Gatto dagli occhi di giada / The Cat with the Eyes of Jade / The Cat's Victims / Watch Me While I Kill

[This is another piece written for the writing on film class and thus assumes less background knowledge of the giallo; any comments on whether you could understand it as a typical filmgoer welcome, along with whether it contains spoilers if you've seen / know the film.]

The 1970s were a time of considerable economic, social and political unrest within Italy. One way in which this manifested in the country’s cinema was a resurgence of interest in directly addressing the legacies of fascist and war periods, arguably not seen since the early year of neo-realism immediately after World War II.

Though this interest was manifest across both popular and art cinemas, there were noticeable differences in their approaches. Whereas art films like Bertolucci’s The Conformist and 1900 and Pasolini’s Salo often took a confrontational, less comfortable stance in presenting Italian complicity in Fascist evils, their popular counterparts more usually displaced attention onto Nazism and presented narratives of heroic Italian resistance.


Some vaguely Suspiria style lighting

Given this distinction, one of the most intriguing things about Antonio Bido’s The Cat with the Eyes of Jade is the way in which it straddles divide, using the popular form of the murder mystery thriller or giallo to expose a story of collaboration with the Nazis.

It all starts innocently enough as dancer Mara (Paola Tedesco) unwittingly stumbles upon a murder at her local chemists. In a hurry to get to work and reluctant to become involved , she thinks little more of the incident, but is then herself threatened and thus seeks the assistance of her Luca (Corrado) – a move in accord with both the wider giallo preference for amateur investigator protagonists and anti-authoritarian mistrust.

Meanwhile Luca, a recording engineer by profession, has been given a tape of a threatening phone call received by his neighbour, the loan shark Bozzi (Fernando Cerulli). He soon determines that the mixture of noises includes barking Dobermans, marching, shouting and industrial machinery, possibly an incinerator.




Classic giallo tape recorders and photographs

The two cases intersect as an associate of Bozzi’s is murdered and further inquiries uncover that both victims had served on the same jury a year earlier. It was an open and shut case, involving a career criminal by the name of Ferrante (frequent Pasolini collaborator Franco Citti) who had threatened revenge – and who escaped some two months previously.

As so often happens in the giallo what seemed to be a straightforward matter then turns out to be anything but, compelling Luca and Mara to delve ever deeper into the mystery and what one character tellingly dismisses as ancient history, best forgotten about.

There is no getting away from the fact that The Cat with the Eyes of Jade is a derivative film.

Sometimes it seems that just about every image and motif in it can be traced back to one or other of Dario Argento’s films in particular, be it the enigmatic aural and visual fragments that must be deciphered; a traumatic event thought buried in the past but which now murderously erupts into the present; the choreographing of the suspense and violence number set-pieces to propulsive jazz/prog rock freak outs; the enigmatic animal-referencing title itself, or the unsettling proliferation of possible point-of-view shots.




The littlest detail, here the position of two cups, can matter a lot

Yet much like De Palma in relation to Hitchcock, it’s hard to find fault with Bido’s logic here: If you’re going to take another filmmaker as your generic model, doesn’t it make sense to both choose the best available, for obvious reasons, and to make it obvious, forestalling any charges of plagiarism?

Indeed, the one area where Bido’s Argento-isms arguably lead him astray is his use of false point of view. In Argento’s Deep Red, the cumulative effect of such shots is to convey the existence of another inexplicable, irrational, supernatural world shadowing onto this one. The crime that propels the narrative is, after all, a psychic’s recognition of a killer in her audience and precognition that this killer will kill again. Here, by contrast, the world that is unveiled is one which was, alas, all too real.

Yet this also foregrounds one area in which Bido actually goes further than Argento as he takes what was a relatively under-developed subtext in Deep Red and Suspiria and transforms it into a more explicit theme, resulting in a tragic killer-as-victim figure that rivals any in the giallo canon.

Perhaps the greater irony, however, is that a number of facets of the hidden history which constitutes The Cat with the Eyes of Jade’s narrative also emerge when we consider the film’s own mistreatment. Thanks to being released in the USA under the frankly exploitative title Watch Me When I Kill (tagline: “When I go berserk...you're better off dead!”) with the kind of dubbing that makes it all but impossible to fairly evaluate the dialogue and performances, the film was virtually guaranteed to be ignored by the kind of critic who might otherwise have recognised its thematic affinities with the arthouse and have appreciated Bido’s intent.

While I do not wish to claim that The Cat with the Eyes of Jade is a lost masterpiece, I would argue that it is a film that deserves to be rediscovered and re-evaluated in its own terms – broadly speaking those of a European popular cinema aspiring to more than the lowest common denominator – without prejudice. This is what it deserves, not least for being a film which is itself ultimately about the dangers of forgetting the past and of responding to the unfamiliar through easy stereotypical formulations.

Cinema and Fascism: Italian Film and Society, 1922-1943

The cover of the book is from a Maciste film poster, further suggestive of pre- and post-fascist cinema connections, with the character having appeared in films in all three periods

What's the relevance of a book on cinema in fascist Italy to the post-war popular cinema? The answer depends, of course, on how you choose to frame the question. Directly Steven Ricci's Cinema and Fascism: Italian Film and Society, 1922-1943 is not immediately, obviously relevant. But indirectly there is a lot of useful information and thought-provoking analysis that helps one think about later filone cinema in a different light.

Much like the recently rediscovered “Italian secret cinema” of the 1960s and 1970s, the films produced in the 21 years of Italian fascism were long ignored, typically summarily dismissed on account of their presumed politics or lack thereof in the wake of post-war re-adjustments and re-alignments: whether the overt propaganda of the “black” film or “white telephone” distractions from political and social realities, fascist films were examples of what cinema should not be.

Ricci notes, for instance, that Pierre Leprohon's oft-cited The Italian Cinema devotes 25 pages to the inter-war era compared to 200 on the post-war years.

While fascist-era cinema was actually already undergoing a process of re-evaluation within Italy at around the same time as books like Leprohon's continued to tell this same old story, these re-evaluations took the form of depoliticised aesthetic and auteurist readings, culminating in the publication of a 1979 volume entitled The Fabulous Thirties.

The task Ricci sets himself is to chart the history of Italian cinema during the fascist period without falling prey to these or any other extreme positions and by paying close attention to the films themselves. There were both continuities and discontinuities between pre-fascist, fascist and post-fascist Italian cinemas. Indeed, part of the picture that emerges is that what you see often depends on where you look.

A good example here is dubbing. The history of Italy as a dubbing country dates to the fascist era, with the passing of a law stipulating that all foreign-language films had to be dubbed into Italian. For the fascist regime, dubbing provided a way of literally rewriting films and of promoting their standard version of the Italian language. Thus, for example, The Adventures of Marco Polo, a 1938 adventure in which Gary Cooper plays the Venetian explorer, could be retitled and recontextualised as Uno scozzese alla corte del Gran Khan – i..e a Scotsman in the Great Khan's Court – because the regime disapproved of the film and the actors' representation of a noted Italian hero. For a neo-realist, meanwhile, using regional dialects and accents was a way of signalling a break from and opposition to this past.

Though Ricci does not bring out the connection with the fast and loose approach to time and place (or “chronotope” in a more theoretical vocabulary) in the peplum and adventure films of the early 1960s, it does leave one wondering about the likes of Riccardo Freda's Maciste all'inferno / The Witch's Curse, in which Maciste – renamed Samson for the international audience unfamiliar with a specifically Italian character – finds himself in 17th century Scotland.

This is all the more so since another of Ricci's major themes, the representation of the (male) body in the silent-era strongman film and later more explicitly propagandistic adventure films, almost cries out for an extended comparison with the peplum, superspy and spaghetti western filone. Is it the case, for instance, that all that really happens is that the poles reverse, insofar as a Maciste performs the same mighty deeds in defence of the people but transforms from a fascist to a anti-fascist hero inasmuch as the villain of the fascist era film is coded as a decadent liberal and his 1960s counterpart as a fascist?

Tellingly in both cases the mythical-historical past seems likely to be an national rather than a pre-national one, whereby ancient Rome represents and resembles nothing so much as it does 20th century Italy.

At the same time, however, if we also consider Mikel Koven's vernacular cinema thesis here, it is clear that national identity was likely not the only issue here either, that the same film would say different things to a terza visione spectator in the south as to a prima visione spectator in the north. (Many of the differences in audience patterns discussed in Koven's La Dolce Morte can also be traced back to the pre- and fascist periods, as Ricci's analysis makes clear.)

This brings us on nicely to the giallo. Given of the fascist regime's attempts to purge foreign influences on the Italian language and their close relationship with publisher Mondadori, one first of all wonders if there's a secret history of the term itself waiting to be brought out. How far, that is, did giallo become the preferred term here because i thriller was an Anglicism and noir a French import? What were the political implications of using one or the other?

Whatever the case, it seems clear that part of the reason for the giallo film's late emergence was fascist regime's distinctive stance on crime literature and film: they were tolerated, even acceptable, so long as they presented events taking place outwith Italy's borders to thereby remind the audience of how bad things were in the non-fascist world and of what the regime was protecting them from. Thus, the Hollywood gangster movie was acceptable precisely because it was American, so long as the criminal was not coded as an Italian-American – which dubbing could sort, at least in part.

And again the picture becomes more complex as one looks further, insofar as the likes of Ossessione and Bitter Rice then represent the (re-)emergence of crime in Italian contexts. Moreover there are also important differences from film to film that need to be taken into account: Despite being an adaptation of Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice, Ossessione presents an essentially indigenous criminality untainted by outside influences and thus implicitly attacks the fascist regime: “This is not Italy,” as Count Ciano famously remarked.

In contrast the post-liberation Bitter Rice presents a criminality influenced by Hollywood gangster movies and US culture and arguably presents an emergent left-wing critique of the new post-war Italian re-alignment: “This is not Italy, or at least the Italy we on the left fought for,” as it were.

Linked in with this, Ricci also provides useful discussions of the role of travel and tourism, hinting that the giallo emphasis on jet planes and in-between places and states noted by Gary Needham in his article on the filone might also be re-read as part of a longer history.

In sum, though the fan may not have the same theoretical or cinematic background as Ricci, he or she may well get a lot more out of this book than might have been thought; certainly there are numerous other little details and spurs to further reflection and research which I'll leave the reader to discover for themselves...

Phantom of the Paradise tribute site

Very nice site dedicated to Brian de Palma's The Phantom of the Paradise, an important Argento intertext:

http://www.swanarchives.org/Index.asp

Some questions

I've been thinking a lot about dubbing and subtitling cultures and their effects on how we receive and understand a film.

My impression is that in the UK he distinction between the subtitling and dubbing has historically been a strong one and that in the 1960s or 1970s the circuit on which a Italian (specifically) film would circulate was strongly dependent on which conventions it followed.

Putting it very crudely and reductively, I get the sense that subtitles equalled art equalled a middle class arthouse audience whilst dubbing equalled entertainment equalled a lower class fleapit audience.

But what I'm wondering is how things played out in other countries and of what the longer term legacy has been with regard to the film cultures that developed - e.g. is Argento a more 'respectable' figure for more 'mainstream' critical discussion in France partly because there was more of a dubbing culture and thus less of a class prejudice between films and audiences?

I'm thinking, for example, of the 'official' position of a Cahiers du cinema compared to the BFI, of Thoret's auteur study of Argento published by Cahiers' imprint against the BFI's Companion to Italian Cinema with its clear sense of awkwardness as far as names like Bava and Argento are concerned.

Anyone got any insights from where they are to help fill out my UK-centric picture?

Baciamo le mani / Kiss My Hand / Mafia War / Family Killer

Though obviously inspired by and in the style of The Godfather, this is one of those films which showcases the strengths of the filone cinema by putting a distinctive twist on its material in expressing a preference for more downbeat, fatalistic and realistic resolutions whereby the black hats tend to triumph over the light and dark grey hats.

The bad guys are represented by Gaspare Ardizzone, effectively played by John Saxon in scenery-chewing mode. He’s decided that the old ways are outmoded and that honour and respect matter little compared to money and power. His first act, the one which propels the rest of the narrative, is to summarily gun down one of the Ferrante family.

They’re the less bad guys. Godfather figure Angelino Ferrante, played by Arthur Kennedy with appropriate dignity and restraint, is the traditionalist who finds himself fighting an ever more difficult battle to keep his family together. Whereas some quiet words were once sufficient to settle disputes, now it is easier to resort to murder as a first rather than last resort; the rules of the business have changed.

The point where the difference between Baciamo le mani and The Godfather is perhaps most evident, however, is in the Michael Corleone type quiet one among Angelino’s sons, Massimo. Rather than getting drawn into the family business, Massimo wants nothing to do with it. Though he goes to New York to be with his older brother Luciano, this is very much against the wishes of his father, for whom “America is like a sickness”.

While the experience encourages Massimo to change his mind and plan a return to Palermo to set things right, he’s then randomly stabbed to death by a junkie before he can put this into effect; a doubly ironic demise given that this same junkie is likely a consumer of the product the Ferrante family have reluctantly become involved in trafficking, and which would surely have formed an important plank in his own acceptance of the new realities.

Featuring good use of locations and some striking compositions, the main area where the film falls short of its rival is that of duration. Often we don’t get a sufficient sense of how much time passes between scenes, as when the widowing of Mariuccia Ferrante is quickly followed by her becoming pregnant by her deceased husband’s right hand. Towards the end things perhaps also become that bit too “action movie” and perfunctory with a corresponding loss of epic and tragic dimensions and details. Then again, this could conceivably be turned into a strength of sorts, as yet another indication that the old ways and world have now passed. (One here thinks especially of Leone’s Once Upon a Time… films, or of Visconti’s The Leopard.)

The origins of Baciamo le mani are worth noting, with director Vittorio Schiraldi – only in his early 30s at the time – adapting his own novel of the same name. Though he has a few other noteworthy writing credits to his name, including two unusually critical and thought-provoking gialli, L’Assoluto Naturale and Il Gatto dagli occhi di giada, Schiraldi only ever directed one other film, the war documentary Lettere dal fronte. We don’t seem, that is, to be dealing with your typical genre filmmaker and, for better more than worse, it shows.