This Duccio Tessari western reunites the director with his Ringo star Giuliano Gemma to intermittently amusing if ultimately decidedly less noteworthy than these and their other collaborations together.
Gemma plays city slicker Monty Mulligan (his forename presumably a reference to Gemma's frequent Anglophone billing as Montgomery Wood) whose financial worries may be over if he can find his brother Ted, played by Nino Benvenuti, out west and get him to agree to their spending six months together in order to fulfil the criteria of their uncle's will and collect $300,000.
The first obstacle is that there's no love lost between the two brothers with their very different lifestyles and attitudes. The second through umpteenth come via a series of episodic adventures with outlaw Jim and his gang and some bumbling attempts at criminality by the brothers themselves, most notably when they kidnap banker's daughter Scarlett only to discover that he's quite glad to be rid of her and is in no hurry to pay the ransom. (Cue invitable “I don't give a damn” punchline.)
Thought distributed in the US under the title Sundance Cassidy and Butch the Kid and the more defensive please don't sue us tagline of “Don't confuse them with the other two,” one suspects that the more immediate model for the film and reference point for “the other two” were Terence Hill and Bud Spencer, with the brothers relationship and their slapstick antics more remiscent of the Italian than Hollywood caper western.
This is most apparent in the resolution of the bankers daughter subplot: whereas in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid the broadly comparable Katherine Ross character is there to attempt to refute the homosexual or homosocial hints that the two men might be something other than conventional red-blooded heterosexuals (how successfully it does so being another matter, in that the selfsame need to make a point of demonstrating their heterosexuality and masculinity also inevitably raises these other spectres) here we get a more juvenile, non-sexual, fraternal resolution to the whole scenario that seems to suggest that boys will be boys but little more. (Unless, of course, one wants to read the film as some sort of paean to homosexual incest.)
The film's main asset beyond Gemma's irrepressible charm, and the sense that no-one – including Tessari or such reliable supporting players as George Rigaud, who plays the wily old banker; Cris Huerta, as comic book sadist bandit; and Sydne Rome, as Scarlett – is taking things all that seriously anyway, is the operatic (well, horse opera) chorus provided by Italian country and western duo John and Wayne, whose yee-ha ballads provide an amusing commentary on the action throughout and a nice counterpoint to Gianni Ferrio's more conventional themes. (John and Wayne are also featured in the Frank Wolff narrated documentary / promo on the Italian western that was included as one of the extras in the old Blue Underground Spaghetti Western Box Set; they were a real duo of Italian country and western fans, not just an invention of this film.)
Friday, 6 June 2008
Confessione di un commissario di polizia al procuratore della repubblica / Confessions of a Police Captain
Commissioner Bonavia has hygiene-obsessed mafioso Lipuma release from the insane asylum where he has been incarcerated for the past six years knowing fullwell that Lipuma's first action once released will be to make an attempt on his former rival Dubrosio's life.
Indeed this is what Bonavia, who is pursuing his own personal vendetta against Dubrosio is counting on; he knows that there is no point in pursuing legal channels when just about the entirety of the Palmero administration and judiciary is in league with Dubrosio.
The introductory image – an unidentified hand groping around in the dark
Unfortunately for Bonavia, someone tips Dubrosio off, so that the only victims of the ensuing shoot-out are Lipuma and three of Dubrosio's hired guns – all conveniently from out of town.
Public prosecutor Traini is assigned to investigate alongside Bonavia, and soon comes to realise that his erstwhile colleague knows more than he is letting on.
But beyond this motives and allegiances remain obscure. Bonavia suspects that the idealistic young prosecutor may already be in someone's pocket or, if not, will soon be offered the chance to further his personal position at the expense of the people and the law he professes to represent without prejudice or preference, while Traini cannot be sure that Bonavia is not pursuing Dubrosio on behalf of one of his rivals. And even if they can overcome their mutual suspicions and differences, it is still uncertain whether there is anyone else they can trust.
Images of the figures behind bars recur throughout, creating a sense of the characters' entrapment and inability to escape their world
Confessions of a Police Captain is, quite simply, an excellent film that accomplishes everything it sets out to do: to wit to entertain, to inform – specifically about the collusion of civil and criminal societies in 1960s and 1970s Sicily around construction and development projects – and to convey a complex reality in an accessible way.
The film's three pillars are Damiano Damiani's writing and direction and the impressive central performances of Martin Balsam and Franco Nero in the roles of Bonavia and Traini.
The writing is of the quality where merely recording the actors reciting it would have been sufficient in itself for a less conscientious filmmaker. An illustrative sample exchange, taken from a point late on where Bonavia and Traini have each begun to covertly investigate one another:
“You never experienced that, right? You never thought that you were a kind of executor, looking after the interests of whoever happens to be in power?”
“A cop who's an anarchist. You're a living contradiction Bonavia.”
“Haven't you ever had any doubts about enforcing unjust laws?”
“It's not for us to judge the law...”
“... But to enforce it. Yes I knew you would say that. But let's say tomorrow the law stated that we had to use torture.”
“Don't be absurd.”
“Why? It used to be the law, it could be the law again. It's only a matter of principle. Then you would use torture if the law said so.”
“You're using an extreme example!”
“All right then, what's your limit? How much injustice would you stand for to satisfy the people we work for?”
“If you go on, I'll arrest you!”
“I was only referring to Rizzo's ideas...”
Bonavia puts up his hands to indicate his innocence of sedition, that he is only referring to Rizzo's ideas, in an ironic mirroring of a gesture earlier made by Dubrosio when one of his gunmen shot the selfsame union organiser.
If Damiano avoids more visible stylistic flourishes, he nevertheless expertly conveys a pervasive sense of confusion and distrust with his mise en scène with deep shadows and recurring use of bars as a motif, along with preferring to gradually fill in details rather than lay it all out for us in an obvious manner.
Thus, for example, we open with a shot of hands feeling along a wall in the dark, introducing the characters in the asylum without quite knowing what it is, who they are, what they are doing there or why. Likewise, the small, easy ignored or missed detail of another of the patients / inmates (for it is not clear that Lipuma is actually certifiably insane) requesting that Bonavia talk to him later assumes a deeper significance later as, when repeated on Bonavia's subsequent visit to the place with Triani it suggests that he has been there before. Triani thus gets the wrong clue for the right solution.
There is also an appealing lack of resolution to the whole thing that neatly provides an agreeable balance between the needs of the vernacular audience to see the bad guys receive some sort of punishment and of Damiano, as a politically committed filmmaker, to convey the ongoing struggle against organised, systematically endemic corruption and criminality. The individual hero prepared to take a stand for the good of the collective is similarly granted a degree of ambiguity: necessary, but also dangerous in what he implies.
As with The Most Beautiful Wife Damiani brilliantly captures the complexities and contradictions of Sicilian life and the difficulties faced by the Marxist filmmaker – as “organic intellectual,” in the Gramsian sense – in attempting to represent and reach a population brought up to understand that the well-being and honour of the family were far more important than any wider notions of class solidarity.
It is, we might say, Marxism's version of the free rider and prisoner's dilemma problems: If the benefits of political action will accrue to me because of my position as a member of a certain class why should I as a rational individual take the risks involved in this selfsame action that will bring them about, when they are considerable for me and mine? Alternatively, if these benefits only accrue to the loyal members of the party and its vanguard, isn't there then the risk of becoming another small, narrowly self-interested group like the others? (Francesco Rosi's Hands Over the City is also recommended viewing in this regard.)
The scenes where the is most clearly conveyed are the flashback ones involving Rizzo, the Communist Party Union organiser from the same village as Bonavia, whose valiant attempts to encourage his people to stand together against the mafia meet with predictable indifference and consequences.
The face of challenge and defiance – Rizzo
Rizzo also understands the rules of this world better than almost anyone else in the film. Having been shot by an unseen, unidentified gunman after publically challenging Dubrosio, the police do nothing. He thus lies bleeding, declining to be taken away until the mafioso and his men have departed, causing Dubrosio to lose face and transforming an apparent defeat into a kind of victory. (“That episode made Rizzo a hero, only being a hero isn't always an asset.”)
The PCI HQ, with its heroes and martyrs
The greatest shame of all meanwhile to the critics who rejected the film and others like it for being conventionally well-made, under the mistaken belief that radical form necessarily equated to radical content, while largely ignoring the question of whether such films ever possessed any wider appeal beyond their own circle.
Damiani, who started his directorial career in the neo-realist period with a documentary, La Banda d'Affori, and frequently blended left wing politics with popular genres in his subsequent genre films, including the seminal Zapata western A Bullet for the General, surely knew his audience better than these elitist fellow-travellers abroad.
A world of shadowy figures and relationships
The other key political issue related to all this, strange though it may seem, is dubbing versus subtitling. To explain: for a film to be accessible to the vernacular audience, it has to be in the vernacular, i.e. the language of the people. As such, it was better that Confessions of a Police Captain be dubbed than subtitled for international release, so that it might reach the widest possible audience beyond the art cinema ghetto.
It's also curious that critics didn't seem to be in favour of dubbing as a device for popular films even when it could have helped to show up the arbitrariness of the sound-image relationship in cinema and presumably thereby encourage a more distanciatiated approach to the text, or somesuch. Instead, reading reviews from the time, all we typically get are references to “bad dubbing”.
Why, one wonders, were the same criteria not applied to subtitled Italian films which featured post-synchronised sound even in the Italian? Why did no-one complain that in a Fellini film the voices weren't 'fixed' in the manner that these evaluative criteria imply that they ought to have done? Presumably Fellini's intentions were recognised, but then why was intentionality recognised and accepted when the talk elsewhere was of the death of the author and the ideologically regressive implications of auteurism?
The two leads make for a fascinating contrast: the domestic star and the US character actor. While it's a combination found in countless Italian films of the period, there's something more about the way it works here, that the two men are present for what they could bring to the project as actors rather than as just marquee names for the domestic and international audiences. That Balsam was a character actor (once remarking that “the supporting role is always potentially the most interesting in a film”) rather than an immediately recognisable and typed star name – even if a B-list one – means that you approach his performance and character without much in the way of presuppositions, while he clearly seems to have relished the opportunity to get his teeth into a more substantive role than usual. Nero again excels at taking what could otherwise have been a routine figure and going the extra mile in giving him a more complex characterisation (see also his compromised hot-headed alcoholic journalist investigator in The Fifth Cord, or his post-Death Wish vigilante with doubts in Street Law.)
Those familiar with Luciano Catenacci from his appearances in Lenzi poliziotti may be surprised to see him here in the role of Dubrosio. Though required primarily to be the sneering villain – with this also perhaps the area where the films and Damiano's limits are more evident, insofar as there's perhaps too much of a personal mano a mano element to his conflict with Balsam, leading to a corresponding de-emphasis on the political and business aspects – he again impresses as someone capable of holding his own against more widely acknowledged performers, even when saddled with an awkward looking hairpiece in the flashback scenes.
A number of other familiar faces – Calisto Calisti, Arturo Dominici, Marlilu' Tolo – round out the cast effectively, while Riz Ortolani's powerful, melancholy score is another asset.
Highly recommended.
Indeed this is what Bonavia, who is pursuing his own personal vendetta against Dubrosio is counting on; he knows that there is no point in pursuing legal channels when just about the entirety of the Palmero administration and judiciary is in league with Dubrosio.
The introductory image – an unidentified hand groping around in the dark
Unfortunately for Bonavia, someone tips Dubrosio off, so that the only victims of the ensuing shoot-out are Lipuma and three of Dubrosio's hired guns – all conveniently from out of town.
Public prosecutor Traini is assigned to investigate alongside Bonavia, and soon comes to realise that his erstwhile colleague knows more than he is letting on.
But beyond this motives and allegiances remain obscure. Bonavia suspects that the idealistic young prosecutor may already be in someone's pocket or, if not, will soon be offered the chance to further his personal position at the expense of the people and the law he professes to represent without prejudice or preference, while Traini cannot be sure that Bonavia is not pursuing Dubrosio on behalf of one of his rivals. And even if they can overcome their mutual suspicions and differences, it is still uncertain whether there is anyone else they can trust.
Images of the figures behind bars recur throughout, creating a sense of the characters' entrapment and inability to escape their world
Confessions of a Police Captain is, quite simply, an excellent film that accomplishes everything it sets out to do: to wit to entertain, to inform – specifically about the collusion of civil and criminal societies in 1960s and 1970s Sicily around construction and development projects – and to convey a complex reality in an accessible way.
The film's three pillars are Damiano Damiani's writing and direction and the impressive central performances of Martin Balsam and Franco Nero in the roles of Bonavia and Traini.
The writing is of the quality where merely recording the actors reciting it would have been sufficient in itself for a less conscientious filmmaker. An illustrative sample exchange, taken from a point late on where Bonavia and Traini have each begun to covertly investigate one another:
“You never experienced that, right? You never thought that you were a kind of executor, looking after the interests of whoever happens to be in power?”
“A cop who's an anarchist. You're a living contradiction Bonavia.”
“Haven't you ever had any doubts about enforcing unjust laws?”
“It's not for us to judge the law...”
“... But to enforce it. Yes I knew you would say that. But let's say tomorrow the law stated that we had to use torture.”
“Don't be absurd.”
“Why? It used to be the law, it could be the law again. It's only a matter of principle. Then you would use torture if the law said so.”
“You're using an extreme example!”
“All right then, what's your limit? How much injustice would you stand for to satisfy the people we work for?”
“If you go on, I'll arrest you!”
“I was only referring to Rizzo's ideas...”
Bonavia puts up his hands to indicate his innocence of sedition, that he is only referring to Rizzo's ideas, in an ironic mirroring of a gesture earlier made by Dubrosio when one of his gunmen shot the selfsame union organiser.
If Damiano avoids more visible stylistic flourishes, he nevertheless expertly conveys a pervasive sense of confusion and distrust with his mise en scène with deep shadows and recurring use of bars as a motif, along with preferring to gradually fill in details rather than lay it all out for us in an obvious manner.
Thus, for example, we open with a shot of hands feeling along a wall in the dark, introducing the characters in the asylum without quite knowing what it is, who they are, what they are doing there or why. Likewise, the small, easy ignored or missed detail of another of the patients / inmates (for it is not clear that Lipuma is actually certifiably insane) requesting that Bonavia talk to him later assumes a deeper significance later as, when repeated on Bonavia's subsequent visit to the place with Triani it suggests that he has been there before. Triani thus gets the wrong clue for the right solution.
There is also an appealing lack of resolution to the whole thing that neatly provides an agreeable balance between the needs of the vernacular audience to see the bad guys receive some sort of punishment and of Damiano, as a politically committed filmmaker, to convey the ongoing struggle against organised, systematically endemic corruption and criminality. The individual hero prepared to take a stand for the good of the collective is similarly granted a degree of ambiguity: necessary, but also dangerous in what he implies.
As with The Most Beautiful Wife Damiani brilliantly captures the complexities and contradictions of Sicilian life and the difficulties faced by the Marxist filmmaker – as “organic intellectual,” in the Gramsian sense – in attempting to represent and reach a population brought up to understand that the well-being and honour of the family were far more important than any wider notions of class solidarity.
It is, we might say, Marxism's version of the free rider and prisoner's dilemma problems: If the benefits of political action will accrue to me because of my position as a member of a certain class why should I as a rational individual take the risks involved in this selfsame action that will bring them about, when they are considerable for me and mine? Alternatively, if these benefits only accrue to the loyal members of the party and its vanguard, isn't there then the risk of becoming another small, narrowly self-interested group like the others? (Francesco Rosi's Hands Over the City is also recommended viewing in this regard.)
The scenes where the is most clearly conveyed are the flashback ones involving Rizzo, the Communist Party Union organiser from the same village as Bonavia, whose valiant attempts to encourage his people to stand together against the mafia meet with predictable indifference and consequences.
The face of challenge and defiance – Rizzo
Rizzo also understands the rules of this world better than almost anyone else in the film. Having been shot by an unseen, unidentified gunman after publically challenging Dubrosio, the police do nothing. He thus lies bleeding, declining to be taken away until the mafioso and his men have departed, causing Dubrosio to lose face and transforming an apparent defeat into a kind of victory. (“That episode made Rizzo a hero, only being a hero isn't always an asset.”)
The PCI HQ, with its heroes and martyrs
The greatest shame of all meanwhile to the critics who rejected the film and others like it for being conventionally well-made, under the mistaken belief that radical form necessarily equated to radical content, while largely ignoring the question of whether such films ever possessed any wider appeal beyond their own circle.
Damiani, who started his directorial career in the neo-realist period with a documentary, La Banda d'Affori, and frequently blended left wing politics with popular genres in his subsequent genre films, including the seminal Zapata western A Bullet for the General, surely knew his audience better than these elitist fellow-travellers abroad.
A world of shadowy figures and relationships
The other key political issue related to all this, strange though it may seem, is dubbing versus subtitling. To explain: for a film to be accessible to the vernacular audience, it has to be in the vernacular, i.e. the language of the people. As such, it was better that Confessions of a Police Captain be dubbed than subtitled for international release, so that it might reach the widest possible audience beyond the art cinema ghetto.
It's also curious that critics didn't seem to be in favour of dubbing as a device for popular films even when it could have helped to show up the arbitrariness of the sound-image relationship in cinema and presumably thereby encourage a more distanciatiated approach to the text, or somesuch. Instead, reading reviews from the time, all we typically get are references to “bad dubbing”.
Why, one wonders, were the same criteria not applied to subtitled Italian films which featured post-synchronised sound even in the Italian? Why did no-one complain that in a Fellini film the voices weren't 'fixed' in the manner that these evaluative criteria imply that they ought to have done? Presumably Fellini's intentions were recognised, but then why was intentionality recognised and accepted when the talk elsewhere was of the death of the author and the ideologically regressive implications of auteurism?
The two leads make for a fascinating contrast: the domestic star and the US character actor. While it's a combination found in countless Italian films of the period, there's something more about the way it works here, that the two men are present for what they could bring to the project as actors rather than as just marquee names for the domestic and international audiences. That Balsam was a character actor (once remarking that “the supporting role is always potentially the most interesting in a film”) rather than an immediately recognisable and typed star name – even if a B-list one – means that you approach his performance and character without much in the way of presuppositions, while he clearly seems to have relished the opportunity to get his teeth into a more substantive role than usual. Nero again excels at taking what could otherwise have been a routine figure and going the extra mile in giving him a more complex characterisation (see also his compromised hot-headed alcoholic journalist investigator in The Fifth Cord, or his post-Death Wish vigilante with doubts in Street Law.)
Those familiar with Luciano Catenacci from his appearances in Lenzi poliziotti may be surprised to see him here in the role of Dubrosio. Though required primarily to be the sneering villain – with this also perhaps the area where the films and Damiano's limits are more evident, insofar as there's perhaps too much of a personal mano a mano element to his conflict with Balsam, leading to a corresponding de-emphasis on the political and business aspects – he again impresses as someone capable of holding his own against more widely acknowledged performers, even when saddled with an awkward looking hairpiece in the flashback scenes.
A number of other familiar faces – Calisto Calisti, Arturo Dominici, Marlilu' Tolo – round out the cast effectively, while Riz Ortolani's powerful, melancholy score is another asset.
Highly recommended.
Wednesday, 4 June 2008
Angeli bianchi... angeli neri / White Angel... Black Angel / The Satanists / Witchcraft 70
This is one of a number of mondo films made by Luigi Scattini, along with Sexy magico, L' Amore primitivo, Sweden: Heaven or Hell and Questo sporco mondo meraviglioso.
Presenting the usual combination of documentary footage and reconstructions of dubious provenance and authenticity accompanied by a supercilious voice-over commentary (courtesy of Edmund Purdom, who performed similar chores on Sweden: Heaven or Hell) there's not much to be said about the film except it is impossible to take seriously yet sometimes places barriers to enjoyment at the camp level through the obligatory animal killing footage, including that of a hen and a goat in the context of a Brazilian magic ceremony where the initiate has her freshly shaven head doused in their blood and daubed with feathers.
With most of the participants in the black magic scenes either the kind that you wouldn't particularly want to see naked anyway or those that you wouldn't mind but who seem to always keep themselves strategically covered, the film's saving grace is Piero Umiliani's soundtrack.
Umiliani worked with Scattini regularly and produced some of his best and best known work, if we consider that The Muppet Show's mahna mahna theme originated in Sweden: Heaven and Hell for him, with Witchcraft 70 offering a pleasing mix of easy listening, bossa, samba and psychedelia-tinged cues that also showcase the talents of Edda Dell Orso, Nora Orlandi, I Cantori moderni and Lydia MacDonald amongst others.
Fans of Anton Lavey may also be interested to know that the brilliantly self-publicising ex-carny man and his The Church of Satan are included in one of the segments, though little insight into his philosophy is provided.
Presenting the usual combination of documentary footage and reconstructions of dubious provenance and authenticity accompanied by a supercilious voice-over commentary (courtesy of Edmund Purdom, who performed similar chores on Sweden: Heaven or Hell) there's not much to be said about the film except it is impossible to take seriously yet sometimes places barriers to enjoyment at the camp level through the obligatory animal killing footage, including that of a hen and a goat in the context of a Brazilian magic ceremony where the initiate has her freshly shaven head doused in their blood and daubed with feathers.
With most of the participants in the black magic scenes either the kind that you wouldn't particularly want to see naked anyway or those that you wouldn't mind but who seem to always keep themselves strategically covered, the film's saving grace is Piero Umiliani's soundtrack.
Umiliani worked with Scattini regularly and produced some of his best and best known work, if we consider that The Muppet Show's mahna mahna theme originated in Sweden: Heaven and Hell for him, with Witchcraft 70 offering a pleasing mix of easy listening, bossa, samba and psychedelia-tinged cues that also showcase the talents of Edda Dell Orso, Nora Orlandi, I Cantori moderni and Lydia MacDonald amongst others.
Fans of Anton Lavey may also be interested to know that the brilliantly self-publicising ex-carny man and his The Church of Satan are included in one of the segments, though little insight into his philosophy is provided.
Gli Uomini dal passo pesante / The Tramplers
The casual viewer can be forgiven for confusing this 1965 spaghetti western from hypenate writer-producer-director Albert Band with Sergio Corbucci's 1966 entry The Hellbenders, also produced and co-authored by Band.
Both films see Joseph Cotten playing much the same character, the southern patriarch who refuses to accept that the war is over and that things are changing, spurring a familial and generational conflict that pits father against son and brother against brother.
The chief differences are that here Cotten's character is less interested in making the south rise again as in re-establishing his iron rule over his own little community and that the lines of conflict are quicker to be drawn.
The story starts with the men of the Cordeen clan returning to the Texas town, El Crossing, that Temple Cordeen (Cotten) had built up, along with his cattle business, from nothing.
Their first act is to take advantage of a legal technicality to lynch Fred Wickett for having spread abolitionist messages at a time when it was illegal to do so, thereby sending a strong message to northerners, ex-slaves and other 'undesirables' that their presence is not welcome here. “Cordeen's waiting for them all and he's not running out of rope,” as the sheriff, powerless to do anything, later explains.
One of the family, Lon Cordeen (Gordon Scott), is late to the necktie party and proves to take a dim view of the rest of his clan's activities, even attempting to express his regrets to Wickett's daughter Edith, who has resolved to have Temple brought to justice for his actions: “I'll build me a scaffold with the help of the law. The real law.” But when Edith learns of Lon's parentage she rebuffs him. (“That's my family, not me,” you can almost imagine Lon saying.)
The battle lines are confirmed when Temple then sends Lon and another of his sons, Hoby (James Mitchum), to convince Charlie Garvey (Franco Nero, billed as Frank Nero) that he should not marry their sister, Bess, and ought to leave the territory and his new ranch for the good of his health.
Temple's plan that this will effect Lon's return to the fold backfires however when he sides with the good-natured Garvey and convinces Hoby to go along with him.Worse, Garvey also brings his new brothers-in-law in on a lucrative cattle driving scheme that puts them in competition with Temple for control of the town and its future...
Unfolding almost like an Elizabethan or Greek Tragedy at times, The Tramplers is a curious example of its type that blends the traditional generic material of fist fights, gun fights and so forth with a rare degree of dramatic weight and rounded characterisations that give the players plenty to work with.
Though Cotten probably takes the acting honours, he is pushed every inch of the way by the other leads, most notably James Mitchum's Hoby, who returns from his mission to track down an elusive drover minus an arm and with a whole load of new psychological hang-ups. Nero's role is a small, straightforward one.
While the pan and scan presentation doesn't help, Band's direction is unfortunately more routine, with the budgetary limitations show through in the presentation of the cattle drive via stock footage accredited to Bovril Argentina (!)
Angelo Francisco Lavagnino's score is effective, though again somewhat more generic than it might be.
Both films see Joseph Cotten playing much the same character, the southern patriarch who refuses to accept that the war is over and that things are changing, spurring a familial and generational conflict that pits father against son and brother against brother.
The chief differences are that here Cotten's character is less interested in making the south rise again as in re-establishing his iron rule over his own little community and that the lines of conflict are quicker to be drawn.
The story starts with the men of the Cordeen clan returning to the Texas town, El Crossing, that Temple Cordeen (Cotten) had built up, along with his cattle business, from nothing.
Their first act is to take advantage of a legal technicality to lynch Fred Wickett for having spread abolitionist messages at a time when it was illegal to do so, thereby sending a strong message to northerners, ex-slaves and other 'undesirables' that their presence is not welcome here. “Cordeen's waiting for them all and he's not running out of rope,” as the sheriff, powerless to do anything, later explains.
One of the family, Lon Cordeen (Gordon Scott), is late to the necktie party and proves to take a dim view of the rest of his clan's activities, even attempting to express his regrets to Wickett's daughter Edith, who has resolved to have Temple brought to justice for his actions: “I'll build me a scaffold with the help of the law. The real law.” But when Edith learns of Lon's parentage she rebuffs him. (“That's my family, not me,” you can almost imagine Lon saying.)
The battle lines are confirmed when Temple then sends Lon and another of his sons, Hoby (James Mitchum), to convince Charlie Garvey (Franco Nero, billed as Frank Nero) that he should not marry their sister, Bess, and ought to leave the territory and his new ranch for the good of his health.
Temple's plan that this will effect Lon's return to the fold backfires however when he sides with the good-natured Garvey and convinces Hoby to go along with him.Worse, Garvey also brings his new brothers-in-law in on a lucrative cattle driving scheme that puts them in competition with Temple for control of the town and its future...
Unfolding almost like an Elizabethan or Greek Tragedy at times, The Tramplers is a curious example of its type that blends the traditional generic material of fist fights, gun fights and so forth with a rare degree of dramatic weight and rounded characterisations that give the players plenty to work with.
Though Cotten probably takes the acting honours, he is pushed every inch of the way by the other leads, most notably James Mitchum's Hoby, who returns from his mission to track down an elusive drover minus an arm and with a whole load of new psychological hang-ups. Nero's role is a small, straightforward one.
While the pan and scan presentation doesn't help, Band's direction is unfortunately more routine, with the budgetary limitations show through in the presentation of the cattle drive via stock footage accredited to Bovril Argentina (!)
Angelo Francisco Lavagnino's score is effective, though again somewhat more generic than it might be.
L'Ultimo squalo / The Last Shark
This is, of course, the Italian entry sullo stesso filone Jaws that was felt to be too close to its model and thereby barred from being distributed in the US following court action by Universal Studios. It's also, as with all Enzo Castellari's work, a technically well made, unpretentious piece of low-budget B-cinema that accomplishes everything it sets out to do – except perhaps bring in the money thanks to Universal's pack of legal sharks...
A big shark, eating people. What more can you really say?
The deja vu, cut-and-paste plot is as follows:
The resort community of Port Harbour is about to celebrate its centennial with a regatta and windsurfing competition. The favourite is out practicing his moves when he suddenly disappears from view.
The search party, led by chief of police Peter Benton (James Franciscus) and grizzled old fisherman Ron Hamer (Vic Morrow), later discovers part of the surfer's board with bite marks suggestive of a massive great white shark.
Unfortunately Mayor Wells (Joshua Sinclair) refuses to accept this possibility for fear it will disrupt the celebrations and thus his own election campaign, giving the shark opportunity to wreak further havoc, including going after a boat crewed by his son and Benton's daughter...
As Luigi Cozzi once remarked, the Italian popular cinema strongly privileged imitation over innovation: “In Italy [...] when you bring a script to a producer, the first question he asks is not 'what is your film like?' but 'what film is your film like?'. That's the way it is, we can only make Zombie 2, never Zombie 1.”
Cast in these terms, the success or failure of certain filone as a whole might be explained in terms of a combination of budgetary requirements and cultural background.
For an Italian filmmaker to make a science fiction film to cash in on Star Wars was relatively difficult, not just because of the cost of high-tech effects (as distinct from traditional Bava or Margheriti style smoke, mirrors and model-work) but also because science fiction had never quite imprinted itself on the public consciousness.
Indeed Cozzi is a case in point here. An avowed science fiction enthusiast who had made his debut in the genre, with the non-commercial, festival screened The Tunnel Under the World, he soon found that while he could easily smuggle science fiction elements into gialli it was near impossible to actually get a straight science fiction project off the ground in the early and mid 1970s.
For an Italian filmmaker to make a horror film to cash in on Halloween was relatively easy not only because slasher films required little in the way of resources, but also as the American slasher film had itself borrowed heavily from the Italian giallo – a fact which reminds us, along with the obvious influence of the spaghetti western on the post-spaghetti US western, that it was never just about Italians 'ripping off' Hollywood anyway.
Someone fails to get out the shark repellent bat spray in time
We can thus perhaps begin to get an insight into how and why The Last Shark works and the problems it faced on account of this.
The simple fact is that there is probably not very much you can really do here except follow the Jaws template, all the more so when Spielberg's film is itself little more than a big budget B-movie that rigorously adheres to an old, well-established narrative trajectory:
1) There is an monstrous threat to the community.
2) The hero realises the nature of this threat.
3) Those in a position of power refuse to acknowledge the threat until it is almost too late.
4) The hero defeats the threat.
Seen in this light, the only other real difference between Jaws and Invaders from Mars, The Blob or Invasion of the Saucer Men is that it also threws in a touch of Moby Dick, presumably in a Corman-esque appeal to the more cultured segment of its audience.
The problem with The Last Shark, I suspect, is that it is thus not just too close an imitation of its model – Benton = Brody; Hamer = Quint; Wells = Vaughan; the failure to make the syntygmatic substitution of a giant alligator or killer whale for the shark etc. – but also that bit too well made and thus threatening to Hollywood's own sequels and cash-ins, not least the tawdry and tardy Jaws 3D.
With Castellari at the helm, it really was a case of Italians doing it better, accomplishing more with less – yes, the shark here is unconvincing, but those in Jaws aren't significantly better despite the hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on them – and generally knowing how to get round their limitations by acknowledging them, most notably when a ratings-seeking TV crew discusses the possibility of incorporating in some stock footage to spice things up on the grounds that their viewers wouldn't be able to tell anyway.
It's all about affecting the audience...
A big shark, eating people. What more can you really say?
The deja vu, cut-and-paste plot is as follows:
The resort community of Port Harbour is about to celebrate its centennial with a regatta and windsurfing competition. The favourite is out practicing his moves when he suddenly disappears from view.
The search party, led by chief of police Peter Benton (James Franciscus) and grizzled old fisherman Ron Hamer (Vic Morrow), later discovers part of the surfer's board with bite marks suggestive of a massive great white shark.
Unfortunately Mayor Wells (Joshua Sinclair) refuses to accept this possibility for fear it will disrupt the celebrations and thus his own election campaign, giving the shark opportunity to wreak further havoc, including going after a boat crewed by his son and Benton's daughter...
As Luigi Cozzi once remarked, the Italian popular cinema strongly privileged imitation over innovation: “In Italy [...] when you bring a script to a producer, the first question he asks is not 'what is your film like?' but 'what film is your film like?'. That's the way it is, we can only make Zombie 2, never Zombie 1.”
Cast in these terms, the success or failure of certain filone as a whole might be explained in terms of a combination of budgetary requirements and cultural background.
For an Italian filmmaker to make a science fiction film to cash in on Star Wars was relatively difficult, not just because of the cost of high-tech effects (as distinct from traditional Bava or Margheriti style smoke, mirrors and model-work) but also because science fiction had never quite imprinted itself on the public consciousness.
Indeed Cozzi is a case in point here. An avowed science fiction enthusiast who had made his debut in the genre, with the non-commercial, festival screened The Tunnel Under the World, he soon found that while he could easily smuggle science fiction elements into gialli it was near impossible to actually get a straight science fiction project off the ground in the early and mid 1970s.
For an Italian filmmaker to make a horror film to cash in on Halloween was relatively easy not only because slasher films required little in the way of resources, but also as the American slasher film had itself borrowed heavily from the Italian giallo – a fact which reminds us, along with the obvious influence of the spaghetti western on the post-spaghetti US western, that it was never just about Italians 'ripping off' Hollywood anyway.
Someone fails to get out the shark repellent bat spray in time
We can thus perhaps begin to get an insight into how and why The Last Shark works and the problems it faced on account of this.
The simple fact is that there is probably not very much you can really do here except follow the Jaws template, all the more so when Spielberg's film is itself little more than a big budget B-movie that rigorously adheres to an old, well-established narrative trajectory:
1) There is an monstrous threat to the community.
2) The hero realises the nature of this threat.
3) Those in a position of power refuse to acknowledge the threat until it is almost too late.
4) The hero defeats the threat.
Seen in this light, the only other real difference between Jaws and Invaders from Mars, The Blob or Invasion of the Saucer Men is that it also threws in a touch of Moby Dick, presumably in a Corman-esque appeal to the more cultured segment of its audience.
The problem with The Last Shark, I suspect, is that it is thus not just too close an imitation of its model – Benton = Brody; Hamer = Quint; Wells = Vaughan; the failure to make the syntygmatic substitution of a giant alligator or killer whale for the shark etc. – but also that bit too well made and thus threatening to Hollywood's own sequels and cash-ins, not least the tawdry and tardy Jaws 3D.
With Castellari at the helm, it really was a case of Italians doing it better, accomplishing more with less – yes, the shark here is unconvincing, but those in Jaws aren't significantly better despite the hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on them – and generally knowing how to get round their limitations by acknowledging them, most notably when a ratings-seeking TV crew discusses the possibility of incorporating in some stock footage to spice things up on the grounds that their viewers wouldn't be able to tell anyway.
It's all about affecting the audience...
Mother of Tears in Denver
Thanks to Alexis at Trashwire.com for alerting me to screenings of Mother of Tears in Denver, June 27 - July 3.
Details are here: http://www.denverfilm.org/filmcenter/detail.aspx?id=21787
Details are here: http://www.denverfilm.org/filmcenter/detail.aspx?id=21787
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