Biancaneve & Co. / Snow White and the 7 Wise Men

This 1982 film is an adaptation of the adult fumetti of the same name by Leone Frollo, an erotic, comic version of the Biancaneve – i.e. Snow White – legend, albeit with seven wise men rather than the dwarfs that Anglophone audiences might be familiar with and a foregrounding of the sexual subtexts inherent in the original not-so-innocent tale.

C'era una volta...

After Biancaneve's mother, the Queen, dies giving birth to her the weak willed King (Aldo Sambrell) is tricked into remarrying. A number of years pass and Biancaneve (Michela Miti) blossoms into a beautiful young woman. The wicked Queen / stepmother (Damianne Saint-Clair) resents the threat she perceives Biancaneve represents and hires Jack il silenzatore to murder the girl. Jack, however, is smitten by Biancaneve's and cannot bring himself to kill her. Instead, after taking Biancaneve's virginity he takes a lock of her pubic hair and presents this to the queen as proof that Biancaneve is dead. Unable to return home, Biancaneve wanders the kingdom and has various adventures, invariably putting her in various states of undress...


The wicked stepmother and the king


Biancaneve


The mirror in the TV set


Biancaneve strips for her assassin, Jack the Silencer


Biancaneve meets the seven wise men

Miti is a winning heroine, who brings the right mixture of innocence, playfulness and sexiness to the role. It's a shame her emergence coincided with the decline of the Italian popular cinema as one could well imagine her having become a next generation Edwige Fenech otherwise – or, had the film been made ten years later during the heydey of the Decamerotics, the delightful possibility of seeing Fenech herself in the title role.

Everyone else enters into the spirit of things, with Sambrell effortlessly sleazy as ever and a nice cameo from Oreste Lionello as the sorceror the wicked Queen goes to for help on realising that Biancaneve is still alive.

The familiar magic mirror is replaced with a gold-framed television set, but otherwise performs the same mythic function of answering the wicked queen/stepmother's questions and indicating to her that she is no longer the fairest of all as Biancaneve's beauty blooms, with the magic mirror telephoning the director to check. (Lacanians will probably also have a field day here with the Queen's little secret.)

Another amusing anachronism, besides telephones, projectors and porn films, a prince in a tracksuit and welding gear, sees the queen looking for an assassin to take care of Biancaneve in the giallo – i.e. yellow – pages, where there are also entries for the likes of squartatore – i.e. rippers – before settling on Jack the silencer.

Despite the English lyrics on the catchy theme tune (“Snow White she's a beautiful girl / She's a venus with a pony tail / Put your head in her world / She will give you fun / She never fails”), the film itself is in Italian, without subtitles. It matters because, alongside the visual humour and attractions, there appears to be a lot of wordplay, most of it delivered at screwball comedy speed and much with exaggerated voices: one character is called Stronzolo – i.e. little(r) piece of shit, while one of the wise men's attempts at installing himself as a pimp sees his target say she doesn't need any help from murderers, rippers, thieves or politicians.

Hopefully subtitles will surface some day. Until then...

...e vissero felici e contenti

Diario segreto da un carcere femminile / Love and Death in a Women's Prison / Women in Cell Block 7

This 1973 women in prison / poliziotto / whatever marked the writing and directorial debut of Rino De Silvestro of Naked Werewolf Woman infamy. Those who've seen that 1976 oddity will pretty much know what to expect: quality sleaze trash that can't quite seem to make up its mind about what sort of film its trying to be.


The two New York mafiosi


And their assassin

We open at full tilt, with a wealth of plot information thrown at us via voice-over in the space of a few minutes: Interpol agents had planned to intercept some American mafioso as they picked up a heroin shipment from their Rome counterparts. Unfortunately another gangster unexpectedly gunned down the mafioso and made off with the drugs. And, before he could be brought in and made to divulge who had informed him of Interpol's plans, he was involved in a fatal car accident. His moll / girlfriend Daniela Vinci (Jenny Tamburi) survived the crash and is jailed as an accomplice despite professing to know nothing about the now-vanished drugs. Seeking to clear up the mystery and her father's name, as the gangster's contact and the suspected mastermind behind the scheme, Hilda (Anita Strindberg) – who is herself an Interpol agent, unbeknownst to her father – goes undercover in the same women's prison. Meanwhile, the mob closes in on her father...






You want realistic sleaze? You've got it – Tamburi undergoes a cavity search

What ensues is an entertaining if not terribly coherent mish-mash of beatings, shoot outs, car chases and prison intrigues, including the obligatory lesbian, shower and catfight sequences and all the stock characters like the sadistic warden, the inmate running the show and not taking kindly to any newcomer challenging her position, and the crazy one.




The stunts are surprisingly decent

Tamburi and Strindberg are certainly game and do the best they can with the material given them, but the actorly pickings are definitely somewhat slim in comparison with their roles in Smile Before Death and Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key.

This said, the writing is difficult to judge anyway in that much of the dialogue sounds as if it has been substantially rewritten for the English dub by the film's US distributors, Terry Levene's Aquarius, with this also providing some presumably unintentional laughs through frequent dubiously macho references to the inmates balls' and ball-busting one another.






Classic WIP images

There are some moments of inspiration like a crane shot which takes us over one prison wall to reveal another, larger structure behind it; the mournful 99 Women / Caged Heat style blues vocal number that is unexpectedly positioned as diegetic as one prisoner tells another, admittedly positioned offscreen, to shut up, which can probably be attributed to Levene and company; or a shot of Hilda's father, mirrored upside down in a pool of water curiously reminiscent of David Hemmings at the end of Deep Red. The locales for the action sequences are also well chosen in the main, with the prison interiors and bit players also looking authentically lived in and world-weary.


Prisoners like these disappear whenever there's a shower scene


Cue Peter North jokes...

But in general there remains something of the feel of different films and tones battling against each other for dominance – now wanting to be serious and hard-hitting, now schlocky and sleazy. Without wanting to make any claims for De Silvestro as some kind of undiscovered auteur, its worth noting here that Naked Werewolf Woman and Red Light Girls had something of the same distinctive sensibility to them, with the latter offering a curious amalgam of giallo thrills and mondo-esque prostitution expose.

In keeping with the rest of the film, the music is also somewhat schizophrenic, mixing funky action themes with mood music, but even so works well to provide the emotional cues and glue required, particularly during a long dialogue-free sequence of girl-on-girl frottage.

A sublime image

I was watching Once Upon a Time in the West again last night and was really struck by this image, of Cheyenne looking out the window of the McBain homestead at the construction of Sweetwater by a mass of nameless, faceless labourers. With the narrower vista of the window frame within the screen frame, it just seemed to perfectly encapsulate the themes of the film – the end of the old west and the beginning of a new one, and the triumph of history, woman and “ultimate man” over myth and “superman”.

Un Angelo per Satana / An Angel for Satan

This was one of two gothics directed by the veteran Camillo Mastrocinque, following on from the Carmilla styled Terror in the Crypt. Adapted from a novella by Luigi Emmanuelle, whose other writing credits include the story for the spaghetti western This Man Can't Die, it's an atmospheric and effective piece with some exceptional images and strong performances that's well worth a look for any enthusiast of the form who values subtlety over shock.

Set in the late 19th century in a remote Italian community, the the story begins with the arrival of young artist Roberto Merigi (Anthony Steffen) by boat. He's been commissioned by Count Montebruno (Claudio Gora) to restore a statue that's recently been recovered from the lake.

Legend has it that the statue bears a curse and, indeed, no sooner has Roberto arrived than the boat that brought him in sinks on the lake with the loss of all aboard.


An almost neo-realist image

As a modern man, however, Roberto puts this down to coincidence. His attitude contrasts sharply with that of the superstitious villagers working the Montebruno estates. The most notable of these is the fearsome Carlo Lionesi (Mario Brega) who does not take kindly to Roberto's sketching and accuses him of having the evil eye, leading to a brawl that comes uncomfortably close to western territory – especially when we consider the two combatants' associations with the spaghetti genre.


An almost spaghetti western image – Brega confronts Steffen

Fortunately things are soon back on the Gothic track as, with the arrival of the Count's adoptive ward, Harriet (Barbara Steele), from her school in England the story really kicks into gear.


The statue


And Steele


The resemblance is striking

For Harriet is not only the spitting image of the statue but may be its reincarnation or possessed by its spirit, as she starts to manifest a split personality, alternating between her own demure and frightened self and the cruel, sadistic Belinda to unpredictably turn to and on Roberto, the Count, Carlo and the other men around her...






Another beautiful transition, from an eerie painting to the statue

It's impossible to imagine An Angel for Satan working quite so well with any other actress in the Harriet / Belinda roles. Steele was quite simply born to play these dualistic parts that made the most of her unique features, that strikingly expressive mask which provided her with an unsurpassed capacity for switching from victim to monster, masochist to sadist, object of the gaze to its bearer, with a little curl of the lips or movement of the eyes.






The many faces of Steele - vamp, sadist and innocent victim

The real surprise among the performers is thus Steffen who, clean cut and frock coated rather than unshaven and scruffy, presents an almost entirely different persona to his other period appearances, more talkative than taciturn, yet still full of the same self-assuredness – that spaghetti brawl, though it at least resolves differently and slightly more realistically than in one of his Django type roles – at least to begin with.

Indeed, the film as a whole is marked by this distinctive combination of the gothic and the realist, where a storm at an (in)opportune moment may be natural or supernatural, a chess game knight move followed by a checkmate potentially symbolic, all the way through to an ambiguous ending that is the very definition of the fantastique.




Making connections, and another Steele double image

Mastrocinque plays up these coincidences or connections in his compositions and editing, frequently cutting or dissolving between matched images – the statue and Harriet / Belinda, Harriet / Belinda and the Count both looking at themselves in the mirror, a painting and the statue etc.

The icing on the cake is provided by Francesco De Masi's lush romantic score, full of drama and emotion and providing yet another illustration – if any were needed – of just how versatile Italian film composers of the period were in adapting their idiom to suit the film at hand.

Der Fälscher von London / The Forger of London

Released in 1961, this was the seventh Edgar Wallace krimi overall and the third of five to be directed by Harald Reinl, here working with his then-wife Karin Dor for the second time in the series.

Based upon Wallace's 1927 novel The Forger, it's an unusual piece in that it begins with a marriage – that of Dor's heroine Jane Leith to Peter Clifton – and then proceeds to suggest that Peter may well hereditarily insane with schizophrenia and amnesia, and the titular Forger of London to boot, before moving onto more familiar territory as Inspector Burke of the Yard proceeds to conduct his investigations along the lines that the mounting evidence against his friend – including the facts that he was known to have passed one of the forged notes, is an expert lithographer and is discovered by Jane in a secret room late one night working a printing press – is just that little bit too cut and dried...


We open at the Derby, with Edwardian class distinctions in full effect

Director Harald Reinl's Fritz Lang obsession is again apparent both in the wonderfully expressionistic mise en scène and the Mabuse-like plot machinations that ensue, ultimately revolving around a heard but not seen “acousmetric” figure behind the crimes who issues orders and counsel to his many minions from a room behind a one-way mirror, Blomberg.

Burke also fits into a Langian framework somewhat, being something of an ambiguous Scotland Yard man whose tactics, like those of like his counterparts in Lang's Dr Mabuse der Spieler and Spione, do not seem particularly different from those of his quarry at times, while another departure from the krimi norm circa 1961 raises the spectre of corruption within the ranks of the Yard itself.






Three views from Blomberg's lair

Indeed, with a bit more Door with the Seven Locks-style mad science on display one could almost imagine the film working as a Dr Mabuse entry, a point perhaps not lost on production company Rialto's rivals CCC who would release Scotland Yard jagt Dr. Mabuse, directed by Paul May and featuring several krimi film regulars including Klaus Kinski and Werner Peters, two years later. (As a throwaway speculation, we might also wonder whether May adopted his surname in reference to Joe May, one of the founding fathers of German popular cinema and the man who gave Lang an important early break.)


The obligatory Home Counties ancestral pile

Another thing worth noting is the way The Forger of London deals with psychological themes, especially when at one point modern art is deployed in an ambiguous 1940s Hollywood meets Nazi entartete kunst manner, hinting at a character's badness. (Within Lang's Scarlet Street, Edward G. Robinson's character Chris Cross, encouraged to embark on a life of crime by the woman he obsesses over, paints in a distinctly modern, non representational style, though there is a distinct irony if we consider Lang and Robinson's Jewish heritages – Robinson's given surname, which he reduced to his middle initial in the often racist Hollywood of the time, was Goldenberger – and the actor's own interest in abstract art and progressive politics.)




When the woman looks

Beyond the Langian references, the film is pretty much business as usual, with an effective Martin Bottcher score; reasonably well integrated if still obvious library footage; atmospheric use of location and studio sets; stock players like Eddi Arent performing their stock characters with customary aplomb, and that general sense of a group of filmmakers who knew where to fine tune their formula to keep things fresh and interesting and where to leave well alone.


A blade in the dark


The Joyless Street, 35 years and one war later

If there's an element of “what's in a name” emerging throughout this piece – Blomberg or Mabuse, the world of Wallace or Lang – it's perhaps best to conclude by indicating that, regardless of where else you might place it, The Forger of London belongs in the 'worth seeing' group of krimis.

Der Grüne Bogenschütze / The Green Archer

The country estate of American emigre Abel Bellamy (Gerd Fröbe, in fine intimidating form) is haunted by the ghost of the Green Archer, a 14th century Robin Hood type figure who terrorised the former lords of the manor.

Now, with the gangster coming home on vaguely defined business and his niece Valerie (Karin Dor) arriving with her adoptive father to take up residence in the adjacent mansion, much to Bellamy's annoyance, the archer has returned.

Who is he and what does he want?


The cloth-capped, working class thief, whose death starts the story

This 1961 krimi from Rialto and Preben Philipsen, directed by Jürgen Roland, presents the third film adaptation of Edgar Wallace's 1923 novel of the same name, following two US serial versions in 1925 and 1940.

Though coming early in the krimi cycle and thereby remaining relatively faithful to the spirit of Wallace and free of intentional (if not unintentional) camp, there was just something about Der Grüne Bogenschütze which just failed to work for me, at least in the the way I had expected.




Town and country – the twin poles of krimi space

The usual ingredients are certainly there: an incomprehensible plot whose machinations the viewer-detective has absolutely no chance to figure out for him- or herself; a dastardly villain; a mysterious avenger with a gimmick; a beautiful damsel to be placed in situations of distress; country houses replete with secrete passages and dungeons; an array of quirky supporting characters cum victims cum suspects; a trip into the heart of darkest Soho; stock shots of the Houses of Parliament and Picadilly Circus to add a veneer of authenticity to the German imaginary London and, of course, the stalwart men of Scotland Yard there to unmask the guilty and save the day.

I think that the two biggest difficulties I had with taking the film in the usual way revolved around the first and last entries in this laundry list. There are almost too many characters, subplots and incidents to keep track of at times, in part because the Scotland Yard man who usually represents our route into and through the story is working undercover and not introduced as such until over half-way through.

What the film does have going for it is a somewhat more self-conscious approach to the whole business of the krimi.


A giallo-esque black glove moment




A giallo-esque black glove / telephone moment, with a more krimi costumed villain

While we can ascribe the absence of “hallo hier spricht Edgar Wallace” to watching the English language edit of the film, the opening sequence is noteworthy for foregrounding the sort of distantiating strategies that – at least according to theory – popular films don't engage in as two characters, a journalist and a tour guide, breach the fourth wall and directly address the spectator:

“There's nothing to make a decent film of here friends. A murder with a bow and arrow. Come on, they can't be serious! That terrible green archer – an absurd idea!”

“All who visit here are deceived, so of course they all come here. No one here believes in ghosts. Oh but they pay to come in here – they want to know why they don't believe in them.”

A few moments later, after the tour guide has done his spiel about the 10 shilling book detailing the “lurid history” of the castle and the archer in greater depth, he and the reporter discuss the authenticity of the archers' green-painted bow:

“Well, you know how it is. They want a little atmosphere. But how about doing a little story on it, eh?”

“Shoot some shots for the newsreel?”

“Uh-huh”

“I am a reporter, not a press agent!”

“Yes, well, we all have to live”

Then one of the tour party is found dead with a green arrow in his back, allowing the story proper to begin:

“Is he dead?”

“Yes; I guess we have a story for the film after all”

If events proceed along more conventional lines hereafter, the journalist (the ubiquitous Eddi Arent) again turns to us intermittently throughout the narrative, signalling pantomine-like that we must be quiet as he sneaks up on some of the bad guys and so forth, to remind us that it's not for real.






Breaching the fourth wall

It's not the epitome of cinematic modernism, but does server as a useful reminder that the avant-garde perhaps wasn't always as avant as it thought and never held a monopoly on such practices / praxis. (After all, couldn't Wallace's patented plot wheel be read in quasi-structuralist terms, as revealing similar kinds of paradigmatic and syntygmatic combinations as, say, Proppian analyses of narrative?)


Expressionism redux

Another point of interest in relation to the Wallace universe is the way the film treats its foreign and working class characters. Though some subalterns certainly follow the conventional villain pattern, others unusually get away with their schemes, perhaps because of their Robin Hood-esque “rob from the rich” quality.