5 per l'inferno / Five for Hell

Directed by Frank Kramer / Gianfranco Parolini from a Sergio Garrone story, this is a routine Dirty Dozen inspired World War II action / caper film that illustrates what we might, building on the insights of film academic Christopher Wagstaff and screenwriter Ernesto Gastaldi, refer to as an example of the “hat movie”.

By this, I mean a film whose genre could easily have been altered by the simple act of changing the characters hats and other paradigmatic details of costume and setting: substitute Nazis with Mexicans and occupied Europe with the US-Mexico border and we would have something close to a spaghetti western like Kramer's Sabata.


Luciano Rossi does his look

We begin with Gianni Garko's always smiling Lieutenant Hoffmann recruiting his hand-picked team of misfits, including a safecracker, a baseball pitcher, an acrobat, a strongman and Sgt Johnny White, who doesn't seem to have any special talents but maybe doesn't need any on account of being played by the man himself, Luciano Rossi.

Their mission, which involves the skills of each member in that typical Parolini specialists and gimmicks way, is to steal the details of Hitler's secret attack plan K to save the lives of 50,000 of their comrades, knowledge of the plan and its location having come through Margaret Lee's undercover agent, Helga Richter.


Lee and Kinski, to the manner born

The challenge is the plans are located in a Wolf's Lair like base guarded by troops led by the arrogant and sadistic SS Colonel Hans Mueller, incarnated with typical disdainful relish by Klaus Kinski.










Only in a Parolini film would a baseball and a trampoline be typical military equipment

A good ensemble cast, a high-spirited if anachronistic score, no-nonsense direction and a general sense of everyone enjoying themselves make Five For Hell worth a look for fans of the stars and auteur, though those with a preference for harder-hitting war action or a more realistic and historical approach would do better looking elsewhere.

Zio Tom / Farewell Uncle Tom

In this challenging mondo / documentary hybrid two Italian filmmakers, Jacopetti and Prosperi, travel from the present day to around about 1850 to investigate the history of slavery, presenting a kaleidoscopic portrait of the instution and its role in the southern USA through reconstructions of real personages, places, incidents and testimony that show the contradictory scientific, religious and other discourses offered by white southerners in defence of the indefensible.


The I am Cuba style opening to Zio Tom

Thus, to identify one recurring motif, the black could be denied human rights and dignities if he or she were understood as an animal rather than a human, but this then raised questions over what it meant for the white man to be sexually attracted to the black woman, implying that he were engaging in a kind of bestiality.

Existing in two somewhat distinct 'official' forms, Farewell Uncle Tom / Zio Tom is unsurprisingly a difficult film to watch and to attempt to write about given its content and, more unusually, production history.

Like the earlier Africa Addio, to which it was intended as an anti-racist response to refute the allegations that had been made against the filmmakers – allegations which that film's discourses support to some degree, insofar as the argument seems to be that Africa was not yet ready to be given its freedom by the hastily retreating colonial powers, comparing them at one point to parents who had abandoned their unruly child – it is a film that cannot fail to evoke a strong response in the viewer, where emotional and visceral reactions constantly threaten to overwhelm the ability to take a more detached view.

Much as with the previous film, Prosperi and Jacopetti come across as misguided, with their film becoming what it sought to expose through the very process of taking a documentary style approach.

The biggest single problem is that, in order to convey the scale of the slave enterprise and have access to enough compliant blacks who could be subjected to the same degradations as their great-grandparents, they made the proverbial deal with the devil in the form of Haitain dictator Papa Doc Duvalier.



Two images from the slave ship, suggesting the sheer scale of the film and the enterprise of slavery

While the hundreds of extras in the Haitian sequences – others were shot in the US, in Florida, Louisiana and Mississippi – were probably not slaves in the strict sense, we might well wonder how far their own lives were significantly better and whether they were really in a position to give free and informed consent to their participation in the film in full knowledge of what would be required of them.




Say what you like about Prosperi and Jacopetti, they knew how to compose an image

Indeed, in some instances like the silver and gold painted pre-pubescent 'twins' included in a reconstruction of a camp specialising in slaves for sexual and breeding purposes – some white men apparently developing a taste for pairs of black children for pederastic sex – it's entirely possible that the filmmakers' dubious show-and-tell reconstructions would actually be deemed illegal today.




The 'twins' and the pederast slaver


The freakshow continues – the General, a midget black slaver, and an extra special slave who “has three”


The same slave resists the camera eye, putting his hands up to block our gaze

At the surface level the Italian and English language versions of the film play quite differently.

Some material is unique to one version or the other, like the Erzebet Bathory like sadist who only shows up in Zio Tom and the slave church with its synchretic voodoo-style reinterpretation of Christianity in Farewell Uncle Tom.

Other scenes play in slightly different ways, with the race scientist Samuel Cartwright only being named and contexualised via voice-over introduction in the English version which runs a bit longer than its Italian counterpart.


In the English version an educated slave expresses his false consciousness in identifying with his master while also inadvertently making the Marxist sounding statement that “Workers are not free and never will be”

At other points the same footage is used in different places. For example, in Farewell Uncle Tom the image of a helicopter flying over a plantation introduces the filmmakers arrival in the past and the south, whereas in Zio Tom it appears at the end to signals their and our departure.

Even the musical cues differ, with the English version making use of a more varied range and tending more towards mickey mousing, as when a mammy's waddle up the stairs is accompanied by a ponderous elephant like theme, whereas the Italian sticks largely to variations on the main catchy march theme.

Most of these changes are not particularly significant in terms of meaning however, with the quantity of unpleasantness still much the same, being sufficient for the casual viewer not to need to subject themselves to both films and to quell the need for an ultimate “atrocity exhibition” type edit that incoporates each and every scene in its entirety.

The biggest difference between the longer Italian version, at 136 minutes, and the shorter English one, at 123 minutes, is that the former begins with a contemporary prologue and cuts back and forth between past and present on a number of occasions throughout the narrative whereas the latter begins and stays in the past until the final present-day sequence it shares with the Italian version.

Taken as a whole I would probably say that linear English version is the more coherent, insofar as it really helps us to understand the climactic sequence, while the Italian version's juxtapositions of past and present are more problematic if thought-provoking.

The filmmakers point in the Italian version through this seems to be that the more things change the more they stay the same. This emerges as a critical notion when it highlights ingrained racism in the dominant white society of 1960s America – white and black as two nations, separate and unequal – but is decidedly awkward when it tends to deny his black counterpart a voice with which to counter the same 19th century slave stereotypes, incorporating him mainly through unrepresentative footage of riots and carnivals that makes him alternately threatening / dangerous and simple minded / harmless.

Yes, whites are in the carnival footage as well, but 'we,' the implied white audience, 'know' they are like us, as individuals as well as representatives of types: watching the preceding material we probably do not identify with a slave trader like Mr Schultz but with anti-slavery figure like William Makepeace Thackeray or Harriet Beecher Stowe, even as we notice the historically bounded limitations of their discourses.

Thackeray's criticism of slavery is based on its inefficiency, that five servants in the Englishman gentleman's home perform the same work as 30 in his southern counterpart's and without the same overheads, while Beecher Stowe voices her belief that the black is inherently inferior even as she has the idea of writing Uncle Tom's Cabin.

This said, the inclusion in the Italian version of different political figures responses to Martin Luther King's assassination, such as Leroy Jones saying that he was an Uncle Tom figure and advocating violent revolution and Eldridge Cleaver the need for continuing his work, do illustrate contrasting and sometimes contradictory perspectives in the 1971 present.

Indeed, they prove dishearteningly prescient in prefiguring the love / hate speech and juxtaposition of quotations from King and (early) Malcolm X in Do the Right Thing, nearly 20 years later. The fundamental questions remain the same:

What is the right thing?

Forgiving and forgetting?

Forgiving but not forgetting?

Seeking reparation?

Seeking revenge?

Both versions of the film are stunningly constructed, making a strong case that Prosperi and Jacopetti as one filmmaking entity that traditional auteurism, with its focus on heroic figure of the individual director, needs to come to terms with.

The admixture of classical, realist, impressionistic, surrealistic and expressionistic techniques within the mise en scène as and when appropriate; the skilful match cuts and montage editing; the memorable and evocative music: are all are spot on to the extent that watching only one version of the film, you would be hard placed to to find anything that looked or sounded out of place or which could be imagined as being otherwise.


Jacopetti and Prosperi once more remind us of their and the camera's presence

Indeed, given that all this and the filmmakers constant voice-off interventions and interjections – one tending to be questioning and the other knowing – along with the very anachronism of their presence constantly make us aware that we are watching a film, perhaps the only way in which a criticism based on form rather than content might make sense is through the relative conventionalism of Farewell Uncle Tom / Zio Tom's sound-image relationships.

Music is always employed conventionally in an emphathetic / anti-empathetic manner, while contrasts between the word and image are resolved in favour of the latter giving the lie to the former in an image centric fashion, as when the slave transporter tells the buyer that his ship is clean while beneath deck cockroaches and rats add to the misery of his cargo.

Had the filmmakers not done this and created a greater distance between sound and image, one wonders what left-wing critics would have said on being presented with a film that could lay some claim to formal and political radicalism, albeit with a decidedly ambiguous, quite possibly 'wrong' politics.







Black rage, white fear




Zabriskie Point

Yet again this is also one of the things that is most refreshing about the film. Rather than preaching to us and pretending the know the solution, Prosperi and Jacopetti present the facts of the intractable problem of slavery and its racist legacies, leaving it up to us to draw conclusions on the way forward.

A good example of this is the casual question to Cartwright of whether he is Jewish, to which he replies in the affirmative. It is not a singling out of one group over another, in that the filmmakers also making comparable points about Protestant and Catholic southerners elsewhere – e.g. having received a papal edict that they were no longer to own slaves, one group of Louisiana Jesuits sold rather than freed theirs – but rather a point of detail that allows a point about later racist pseudo-science to also be made. What Cartwright does here in his attempts to prove that the black is not a human is really little different to the Nazi's subsequent attempts to demonstrate that the Jew was similarly other less than a century later: the oppression and dehumanisation stay the same, even if the identity of the victimisers and their victims changes.

In this regard it is apparent that, whatever their faults, Jacopetti and Prosperi's films do express a consistent worldview, even if it often amounts to little more than cynicism and a despairing, even nihilistic cry: “we are all fucked, more or less.”

For all its contradictions, Farewell Uncle Tom / Zio Tom emerges as Prosperi and Jacopetti's masterpiece and an absolutely vital piece of cinema whose power to shock and to provoke a response – in my case, this piece of writing – has not been diminished one bit.


The black man assumes control of the camera and its power to objectify








And of the world, or at least a microcosmic metaphoric representation of it in a child's beachball

Indeed, I would be tempted to place the final ten minutes of the film, a slow motion eruption of spectacular violence to acid rock freak out somewhat reminiscent of Zabriskie Point's finale, in which we witness a black man entertain fantasies of killing his white oppressors – or random stupid people on the beach; take your pick – whilst quietly reading William Styron's The Confessions of Nat Turner, amongst the finest moments of the Italian cinema of this period. It is at the same level of accomplishment as the Ecstasy of Gold and Truel sequences in The Good, The Bad and the Ugly or the opening quarter-hour of Suspiria, the kind of thing that remains burnt into your memory long afterwards and which can be endlessly watched and thought through.

Something else to think about in relation to the film, galleries of racist caricatures and imagery: http://www.ferris.edu/htmls/news/jimcrow/menu.htm

Virus / Inferno dei morti viventi / Hell of the Living Dead / Zombie Creeping Flesh / Apocalipsis caníbal

We open to the strains of Goblin's driving prog rock, playing over images of a chemical plant. Something is wrong at the euphemistically titled “Hope Project” in New Guinea.


Das blinkenlights

Just how much becomes evident as two technicians discover a dead rat in what is supposed to be a sterile area, before the creature reanimates, climbs inside one of the men's protective suits and bites him to death.

The reanimating agent and the zombies that result sweep through the facilty with alarming celerity until no-one is left alive.




Zombie technicians / technocrats and natives

Professor Barrett does, however, manage to put out a final message, indicating that “Operation Sweet Death” must be considered a failure and pleading “may God forgive us and pardon us for this evil that we have created.”

The next sequence presents a stand-off between a “terrorist” group, who have taken the US consulate hostage, and the authorities, who are preparing to send in an elite four man SWAT team, comprising Lieutenant Mike London and his men, Osborne, Vincent and Santoro to deal with the situation.


The SWAT team

They do so, without particularly worrying about whom they are killing nor the terrorist's demand that the Hope Centres be shut down and dying delivery that they are all doomed, their attentions being more focused on New Guinea vacation they are given as a reward.

The team soon have cause to doubt their masters, find themselves deposited in the middle of nowhere without radio contact: “You can always count on the government for a perfect example of organisation,” as London says. (Coincidentally the SWAT team then proceed by “dead reckoning,” the same name as is given to the battle-bus in Land of the Dead.)

Meanwhile investigative journalist Lia Rousseau – a reference to the enlightenment philosopher and through Romanticism and Emile the notion of the noble savage? – her cameraman Max, and the family with whom they are travelling – the child having been bitten and succuming rapidly to zombification – encounter some of the flesh eaters in an otherwise deserted settlement.


The zombie child; is it just me or are zombie children and elderly under-represented within the genre?

The SWAT team arrive in time to save the filmmakers, although this poses them with a dilemma. For the nature of their secret mission, any notion of a vacation forgotten in what could either be taken as careless writing or anothercomment on official duplicity, is such that they cannot allow any witnesses to live.

Fortunately for Lisa and Max, who are here to investigate the rumours around the Hope Centre, the ever growing number of zombies provide a bigger threat to everyone for the time being...

The greatest difficulty in writing about Hell of the Living Dead is that no description can really be adequate to it, as the kind of special film which really needs to be experienced for oneself.

Directed by Bruno Mattei under his Vincent Dawn alias – the surname of course further cuing us in to the film's main inspiration, Dawn of the Dead – and written by his long-term partner in crime Claudio Fragasso, the film is nothing if not entertaining, albeit with the likelihood that you will be laughing more than anything else.

Combining the zombie and mondo filone, the film's highlights include masses of poorly integrated stock footage of animals not native to New Guinea, like elephants and jerboa, much derived from Barbet Schroeder's documentary The Valley Beyond the Clouds; characters who quickly establish that the only way to stop the zombies is by shooting them in the head Romero-style but nevertheless persistently fail to pursue this approach; a spot of dubious anthropology as Lia strips down to her thong and paints herself in order to befriend a native tribe; and a near-deserted lecture theatre seeing service as a United Nations debating chamber.


The debating chamber

At the same time, however, there's a certain idiot-savant quality to the last of these, suggesting as it does that the first world really does not care about the third except for when it is understood as a problem for the west, in line with film's discourse around population control and the way in which first world's attempts to deal with this via the ironically named Hope centres becomes an issue only at the point when it it threatens to go out of control and cause a fatal PR disaster.

The message seems to be that having the population of New Guinea or other third world country consume themselves is fine, but having the same happen in the US, whose population, per head, consume far more than their equitable share, is not.

In this regard, one also wonders if the film's recycling of ideas, music and footage from other productions could in itself be taken as a gesture in the direction of an ecologically friendly approach to filmmaking or as a comment on the inherently cannibalistic nature of Italian filone production itself. Probably not, in all honesty, but intriguing possibilities nonetheless.

The whole media aspect is also surprisingly well handled, conveying confusion, disbelief, the suppression of information and the dubious self-interest of the reporter in a manner that actually predates the recent Diary of the Dead at times, even as elsewhere – a talking head scientist indicating how a cadaver with all four limbs removed still reanimated – the film's sullo stesso filone Dawn of the Dead origins are again being highlighted.

Given that it was borrowed from other films – Romero's, Beyond the Darkness and Contamination – Goblin's music is actually rather well used, rarely feeling out of place and highlighting Mattei's long experience as an editor.


Yes, this is a man in a top hat and tutu doing a dance routine as zombies close in

The performances are over the top but impossible to assess beyond this on account of the dubbing. It doesn't really matter though, inasmuch as the two combine to impart a live cartoon or comic book like feel, with this impression further enhanced by the frequent what-the moments, the best of which is perhaps one character's donning a top hat and tutu and doing a singing in the rain routine – without regard for the small detail of being in a house surrounded by zombies at the time.




Two acceptable faces of exploitation cinema


And a less acceptable one – how would the filmmaker or viewer feel if this were their child?

Gore fans will not be disappointed by Hell of the Living Dead, though there is a clear split between the harmless comic book zombie splatter material, which culminates in one victim having their tongue torn out and the zombie them forcing their eyeballs out from the inside, and the more exploitative and distasteful footage of native practices, apparently derived from Akira Ide's 1974 mondo movie Nuova Guinea: Isola Dei Cannibali.

Another nice blog

With various links that will be of interest to Italian and Eurotrash junkies, including some Al Brescia sci-fi.

http://cosmobells.blogspot.com/

Kaput Lager Gli Ultimi Giorni Delle SS / Achtung! The Desert Tigers

Kaput Lager Gli Ultimi Giorni Delle SS

The title card is odd, half in German and half in Italian.

Wouldn't a kaput lager be a broken camp?

Maybe if it's the last days of the SS then it might make sense.

Whatever, it certainly cues us in as to the kind of thing to expect from this late Nazisploitation entry from Luigi Batzella, directing under his Ivan Kathansky pseudonym, and starring Richard Harrison as the heroic US commando, Gordon Mitchell as the camp commander and Lea Lander as the sadomasochistic lesbian doctor.

Rather than the European theatre of war, our location is North Africa, as a mixed group of British and American soldiers, along with some Arab alllies, mount a daring raid on a German base.

Some murkily photographed confusingly directed action scenes follow, the kind where the confusion seems less the filmmakers's attempt to convey the reality of a firefight than basic lack of ability.


A dangerous mission


An over-confident doh! moment

Major Lexman (Harrison) and company lay their demolition charges and blow stuff up, but are captured as they make their getaway and sent to the nearest POW / concentration camp, where von Stolzen (Harrison) gets a chance to strut his stuff and ve have vays voice, ordering that a Jewish prisoner be whipped regardless of the small detail that he is already dead.

Next, the action shifts to an Arab settlement, where the Nazis drag off some women, whom they take to Dr Lessing (Lander) for her inspection and approval. The story's location again makes things a little odd, as Lessing spouts the obligatory Nazi racial inferiority stuff as if her prisoners were the more usual Slavs or Jews. Then again, it could be the filmmakers' attempt at subtly critiquing the notions of race, along the lines of Arabs also being a Semitic people, although this would probably once more be to grant them too much credit.

Later, von Stolzen takes Lexman around the camp's dungeons, including the castration of some Bedouins who attacked his staff car, while Lessing turns her attentions to the Jewish virgin who has conveniently been brought to the camp for normal service to be resumed. The girl's humiliation arouses Lessing, who then tries to get it on with the English nurse / prisoner, Clara, begging that she be whipped. “I've been dying for it for so long,” she explains, in what is presumably not intended as an ironic reference to the Nazi's actual treatment of homosexuals nor as a commentary on the attraction / repulsion dynamic often bubbling away barely beneath the surface of fascist sexual ideologies but rather as the checking off of another generic requirement or two.


The wonders of point of view: note how we are positioned on the same side of the bars as the prisoners, looking out at our / their tormentors.

The worst crime that the film commits is not this parade of bad taste – this synopsis only takes us about one-third of the way in – given that this is after all what we expect from a Nazisploitation movie and watch it for. Rather, it is being boring.

Yet, this is also a charge that could be levelled against most entries in the filone, with their tendency to present a few moments of jaw-dropping what-were-they-thinking material strung together with longer passages of utter banality.


The obligatory degenerate Nazi orgy scene

As such, the real problem is that even the sex, sadism and sleaze set-pieces just aren't that memorable, lacking the delirious qualities of their counterparts in SS Experiment Camp – no line here comes close to topping the all-time classic of “you bastard, what have you done with my balls” – and Batzella's more notable contribution to the cycle, The Beast in Heat, which may have an equally awkward mix of Nazisploitation and war movie tedium but at least has those completely over-the-top performances from Macha Magall and Salvatore Baccaro to enliven the former aspect.




The whip and the body...

In this regard, the biggest surprise is perhaps the presence of Lander, given that she is better known for her appearances in classier fare like Blood and Black Lace, where she appears as Lea Kruger, and Rabid Dogs.

That Lander appeared as Lea Kruger can be put down to her more famous cousin, Hardy Kruger. Seeing as he disliked playing Nazi roles because they reminded him of his own time in the Hitler Youth and Wermacht, one wonders if he had any thought of his cousin's involvement here, or just recognised it as part of the reality of being a working actor in Italy circa 1977.

Marcello Giombino provides entertainingly cheesy score as appropriate to the proceedings as it would be inappropriate to anything more serious, complete with kitschy lieder playing over Lander's sexy scenes as a twisted leitmotif.

L'Occhio selvaggio / The Wild Eye

Before Cannibal Holocaust there was The Wild Eye.

For this 1967 films presents an indictment of the mondo film-makers mentality but, like its later counterpart, uncomfortably sometimes comes perilously close to becoming what it seeks to condemn – albeit with this also having the effect of implicitly asking the audience to question their own motives in viewing such material.

Director Paolo Cavara was certainly well-placed to make the film, having served as assistant to Prosperi and Jacopetti. Having become increasingly dissatisfied with their methods he attempted to put his past behind him, here presenting several scenarios and situations clearly derived from the Mondo Cane films and Africa Addio to illustrate his former colleagues working methods.

The film opens in the savannah, with a scene that could almost have been taken from a behind-the-scenes or making-of type documentary on Africa Addio.

The filmmaking crew, comprising director Paolo (Philippe Leroy) and cameraman Valentino (Gabriele Tinti) relentlessly pursue a gazelle in their jeep with the intention of making its heart burst, much to the distress of Barbara (Delia Boccardo).

Barbara: “I can't stand to see that poor animal suffer.”
Paolo: “Then shut your eyes.”

While Prosperi and Jacopetti's film doesn't feature the exact same image, it is full of hunting and safari sequences where the coincidental presence of the filmmakers as yet another slaughter takes place cumulatively emerges as contrived.

It becomes apparent, however, that Paolo – the match with the director's own forename almost too obvious to be worth mentioning, though his own role in relation to his former colleagues films would seem to have been more like that of Valentino, the hired hand doing what he is told in an only obeying orders way – is focussed less on cruelty to animals than mankind, as he then stages the jeep's running out of petrol to make the safari party endure a dangerous trek through the drylands with inadequate supplies of water to add a bit more drama to the material, filming at opportune moments along the way.

With some of the party fearing imminent death, Paolo even tries to persuade them to make last confessions to the camera. “If any of you, in this extremely dramatic moment – you must realise the predicament we're in – would care to record a statement of any sort, you can do it now.”



A multiplicity of wild / savage eyes

Already, however, we have also got an indication of where the filmmakers cannot go, insofar as the mise en scène within the chase sequence contained shots taken from multiple points of view to indicate that there was in fact a second jeep and camera crew always present at the scene but unacknowledged, namely that of Cavara and company, recording Paolo.

The film's limit point is thus established: if The Wild Eye proceed to present the diegetic Paolo's Nietzschean “gaze into the abyss,” his extra-diegetic counterpart does not allow us a gaze into the film's own potential mise-en-abyme. Situated at the crossover between popular and critical cinemas, we are not about to get a more thoroughgoing examination of the roles played by editing, post-synchronised sound and the addition of empathetic musical cues in the construction of the film expeience. Dziga-Vertov Group era Godard it is not.

Having gotten this criticism out of the way – and admittedly only a criticism if one takes an ultramontane view of critical cinema, taking a preaching to the converted film like Wind from the East as the ideal over a mass appeal one like A Bullet for the General – it has to be acknowledged that The Wild Eye works well both as expose of Jacopetti and Prosperi's practices and as thought-provoking entertainment, not least for making us think about exactly what the term entertainment means when the mondo film and its offshoots, all the way down to today's 'reality television' are considered.

After the group have been rescued – as Paolo and Valentino always knew they would – the episodic, travelogue nature of the narrative is established, along with a romantic subplot between the Paolo and Barbara, with whom he has become obsessed in an otherwise uncharacteristic display of emotion and lack of professionalism. (One wonders if there's here a roman a clef element to the piece, that Barbara might represent Belinda Lee to Paolo's Jacopetti.)

Paolo pursues Barbara and her husband to Egypt and soon persuades Barbara, who still has not realised that he staged the desert incident, to come with him to Singapore and continue to appear in episodes of his documentary, as “the straight-laced English woman, who is always being shocked at the same time as she is succumbing to the so-called lure of the orient.”


An 'exotic,' 'oriental' image

After a spot of sightseeing in Singapore, Paolo is soon back at work, having Valentino film scenes of mute prostitutes negotiating with their clients using sign before then deciding that no-one would believe the footage – “Reality is boring, lies are entertaining,” as he later summarises – and finding a drugs rehabilitation program that can be more readily sensationalised:

“What means have you to help these opium addicts?”

“With whatever little charity we receive.”

“Look I'm ready to make charity enough to get these gentlemen fat as Buddhas. Of course, I'll have to make some changes when I shoot, if you agree. But you'll be satisfied.”

This cues in a nightmarish scene of the men, lying on the floor, having their cravings whipped out of them as the still-credulous Barbara looks on in horror. (“Take Barbara as a contrast now and then,” instructs Paolo to Valentino, ever-alert to the cinematic possibilities of getting “a good scene.”)

The rest of the film continues in much the same way, as we witness – amongst other scenes – Paolo trying to persuade a Buddhist priest to immolate himself for the camera in what is likely a reference to Mondo Cane 2's reconstruction of the same famous image; negotiating with a group of soldiers to have them execute their prisoners against a wall where the composition is more photogenic, implying the degree to which Jacopetti and Prosperi may have been complicit in a similar scene in Africa Addio; and, as the grand finale, withholding knowledge of a terrorist bombing so that he can have his camera set up beforehand to capture the carnage as it happens.

Within the parameters outlined, the filmmakers scarcely put a foot wrong, the mise en scène convicingly conveying the anti-mondo message. The dialogue, however, is perhaps a touch heavy at times, over-stating what we have already obtained via the camera, editing and scoring. (Interestingly the highly-regarded Italian author and intellectual Alberto Moravia has a credit for contributing to the writing.)

The uniformly solid performances help to get round this didactic element somewhat. Leroy and Tinti could always be relied upon when playing cynical or jaded characters, with the former, much like in Femina Ridens, making his more excessive lines that bit more credible than they would otherwise be by convincing us that they are expressions of his more extreme character. (“I have decided for once and for all where my place in life is – with the bosses. And I'm not ashamed of it like many others.”) Boccarro delivers a remarkly assured, mature performance given her age at the time, 19, giving Barbara an adult understanding of interpersonal relationships and a youthful idealism and naïvete as to how the world as a whole tends to work.

Recommended; hopefully someone will put out a proper DVD version.

Two new Argento books

Two new books on Argento in French, although one, the Jean-Baptiste Thoret one, looks to be an updated edition of a 2002 volume.

More information here:

http://www.amazon.fr/Dario-Argento-Vivien-Villani/dp/8873016170/

http://www.amazon.fr/Dario-Argento-Magicien-Jean-Baptiste-Thoret/dp/2866425197