Un Uomo dalle pelle dura / The Boxer is a film that cannot but play differently in hindsight through the casting of the notoriously troubled Robert Blake in the titular role of the tough-skinned pugilist. For Teddy 'Cherokee' Wilcox is a man with some severe anger management issues, seemingly tailor-made for the perfectionistic, method-to-madness actor.
Within two minutes Teddy has walked out on his manager after discovering, in time honoured fashion, that boxing is a dirty game where his chances of a shot at the big time are not as much in his own hands as he would like.
Hitting the road Teddy meets a hippy stranger who asks him for a lift; that he's played by Tomas Milian suggests less a casual encounter than one which will prove important. Teddy declines, less because he fears the stranger is a Manson type – remembering the counter-counter cultural reaction against the hippy around the time of the film's release – as that he's not one to help his fellow man out: “I got my own troubles pal,” as he explains.
Arriving at a diner, Teddy then shows how much of a jerk he can be when, given admittedly slow service, he makes a mess of the counter and almost punches out the guy behind him before realising he is in fact an old friend, Mike.
As the two catch up on each other's lives we learn that Teddy is a college graduate, a decorated Vietnam veteran – he caught a bullet in the leg four months into his tour of duty and was invalided out, but killed 13 Vietcong on one occasion before this – and an ex-con; if an odd combination, it's one that is telling in terms of his personality.
As it so happens Mike also knows an old-time trainer, Nick, who worked with some of the greats, lives nearby and is always looking for young prospects. Under Nick's tutelage Teddy soon back in the ring and climbing the ranks. “We'll make boxing what it used to, what today's kids don't know.”
At this point Nick is approached by the syndicate who make threats on his life – we might wonder why they don't threaten his daughter were it not that she is the obvious love interest figure in the otherwise male-dominated tale – and tell him that Teddy must lose his next fight.
With Teddy not one to take dive, the trainer impairs his vision part of the way through the fight but the boxer somehow manages to prevail.
Realising that he has been betrayed by Nick, Teddy goes to sort things out. Arriving, he is is taken by surprise and knocked unconscious. He comes to to find Nick dead, beaten to death. in what Captain Perkins, assigned to investigate the case, surmises to be the manner of a professional...
If The Boxer unfolds like a piece of cheap pulp fiction that plays every cliché of the boxing / crime film it at least acknowledges this fact, as when Perkins proclaiming that Teddy's file “reads like a cheap novel”.
Indeed, given that Tarantino referenced Blake's TV character Baretta in Reservoir Dogs and has a long-standing interest in Italian trash cinema, one wonders if the film had in some way influenced Pulp Fiction's boxer story alongside the more obvious likes of The Set Up.
Where The Boxer departs from Hollywood formula is in the inclusion of a certain giallo touches, including fetishistic close-ups of the real killer donning black gloves before he goes to work, along with the wider investigative scenario that develops as Teddy tries to prove his innocence to the sceptical Perkins.
This in turn leads to a number of scenes of the investigators scrutinising still photographs, tapes and film clips for that vital clue, including a a neat variation on the classic giallo “testimone oculare” formulation as a lip-reader makes out some enigmatic remarks – “There may be some broken gears in the cash register. The firm sent me to fix the machinery.” – in a cinesthetic modulation from the aural to the visual back to the aural.
More generally the film benefits from mondo specialist Franco Prosperi's distinct ability to modulate between documentary and fiction styles, that knack for making his documentary material more visually exciting through more obvious interventions and the fiction material more realistic through use of documentary-style techniques.
Thought some moments like an apparent breach of the 180 degree rule don't quite come off, the montages depicting Teddy's ascendancy in the ring, accompanied by Carlos Pes's signature theme, are effective. The frequency of awkward pans in the panned and scanned version under review also suggests an effective use of the widescreen space.
Though all the cast, which also includes Ernest Borgnine as Perkins and Gabriele Ferzetti as Nick, are good the other stand-out beside Blake is Catherine Spaak as Nick's daughter. Whilst obviously there as eye-candy roles, that she otherwise portrays a character whose appearance, personality and mannerisms are very different from her role in Cat o' Nine Tails – indeed, the viewer who has seen both films may need a double take – serves to indicate her underrated abilities as an actress and that casting for one set of considerations need not preclude another.
[The film is available for download from Cinemageddon]
Saturday, 27 September 2008
Friday, 26 September 2008
Affare Concorde / The Concorde Affair / S.O.S. Concorde
Disaster movies and the Airport series were two staples of 1970s cinema. 1979 brought them together with Concorde: Airport 79 and, predictably enough, spawned this Italian imitation / cash in, directed by the ever-reliable Ruggero Deodato.
Like its models Concorde Affair features something approximating an all-star cast, with Joseph Cotten, Edmund Purdom, Mimsy Farmer and James Franciscus in the name roles and such familiar Italian cinema faces as Dakar, Venatino Venantini and Meg Fleming amongst the supporting players.
Cotten and Purdom play the villains. With their airline threatened by Concorde's success, they've decided that a campaign of sabotage is called for, leading to a nice symbolic cut from the launching of Cotten's clay pigeon target to the doomed Concorde taking off.
The plane duly goes down over the ocean, near to one of the Antilles. All on board are killed, with the exception of Farmer's stewardess, Jean Beneyton, who is rescued from the water by two fishermen, one of them played by Dakar.
Fleming's character, Nicole Brody, notices Jean and informs her ex-husband, Franciscus's down-on-his-luck investigative reporter Moses Brody, who duly flies out from New York. Unfortunately by the time he arrives Venantini and his gang have already recaptured Jean and disposed of Fleming and Dakar. Worse, with the downing of one Concorde apparently not having the desired effects, his paymasters are planning a second disaster...
While there is nothing unusual in Concorde Affair's depiction of evil businessmen willing to kill a few hundred innocent people for the sake of profit – and here remembering the Ford Pinto saga during the 1970s – what makes it more interesting is the way in which Cotten emphasises that the multinational corporation is like a state:
“Since time immemorial nations have been sacrificing hundreds of millions of lives to protect their interests. Well, we too are a nation. A multi-national state. Our citizens are workers, employees, technicians – and shareholders. The shareholders, gentlemen! And it is our responsibility to protect their interests, which at the moment are being threatened by the Concorde.”
There's an inherent believability gap in the story that it's hard to accept that the Concorde with its limited passenger and cargo capacity and noise could have ever offered a real threat to conventional jumbo jet based air-travel. The idea of a South American airline commissioning 12 new Concordes also seems highly dubious considering that only 20 models were ever built and operated by the UK and France, only 14 of these seeing operational use.
Given environmental concerns, a more plausible Concorde '79 story would perhaps have been one of Cotten, Purdom and company bribing politicians and encouraging astroturfing (i.e. fake grassroots) campaigns rather than corporate murder. This, of course, would doubtless have been a scenario that wouldn't have offered the same dramatic potential.
Reading the interview with Mimsy Farmer in Spaghetti Nightmares, where her commitment to Marxist politics helps indicate just why she found Europe a more congenial environment than the USA, one wonders if this anti-corporate aspect was part of the reason underlying her involvement in the project. If not, its anti-bourgeois tone is certainly in accord with House on the Edge of the Park and Waves of Lust in relation to Deodato's oeuvre.
Another problem in terms of plausibility is that there is no sense of any official investigation within the film, with nobody from the aviation authorities present in the Antilles searching for the Concorde or its black box, nor any other reporters converging on the islands.
Indeed, the whole scenario seems to operate in a curious vaccuum. We get little sense of Cotten and company having seen to it that rumours about the Concorde are already in circulation – especially given that waging the propaganda war is surely an important prelude to waging a real war; that they likely wouldn't escalate the conflict to blowing up planes without exhausting other methods first. The question of exactly how you go about moving a 200-foot long, 78,700kg plane off on the seabed and hiding it without anyone noticing or wondering what you're up to also goes unanswered.
In this regard the film, with its extensive waterworks, is also touch reminiscent of an inverse Jaws or The Last Shark in that the bad guys should be trying to publicise the danger as much as possible rather than downplaying it; note here also that the surname of Franciscus's character is the same as that of Roy Scheider's in Spielberg's film.
If the individual investigative journalist also shows up in the like of Fulci's Zombie and City of the Living Dead around the same time – not to mention his more specialised anthropologist variant in Deodato's own Cannibal Holocaust – the scenarios in which these characters are placed are that bit lower-key: the killing of a cop or the death of a reputed medium in unusual circumstances are worth a newshound's nosing around a bit, but of a different order to an iconic aircraft going down with the loss of 100-plus lives.
Gaunt and Bolla
Another reason for mentioning Cannibal Holocaust is, of course, the casting of that film's Robert Bolla as the one of the ground control team at London the airport as the film builds to its race against time climax.
What's less frequently been remarked upon, however, is the presence of another 70s woodsman amongst the team, namely Michael Gaunt who, in one of our six degrees of separation filone style, also appears in City of the Living Dead as one of the gravediggers opposite another Cannibal Holocaust alumnus, Perry Pirkanen.
Reading Gaunt's credits on the IMDB makes for some bizarre juxtapositions, ranging from long running British children's TV programme Jackanory to Radley Metzger's The Opening of Misty Beethoven to Doris Wishman's Let Me Die a Woman; I can't say I remembered Gaunt in either of these films but will definitely be keeping an eye out when I revisit them.
Returning to the inherent plausibility issues with the film, the point that needs to be made in closing is that, having outlined what I think are the problems with the film, they ironically really matter except to the critic commenting on the film in retrospect: Deodato knows that as long as he keeps things moving at a fair pace and throws in moments of spectacle like the killing of the fishermen; an extended scuba diving sequence; and the preparation, planting and triggering of the devices intended to down the second plane etc. – at regular intervals, his target audience aren't going to care too much.
What most impresses about his direction is again his versatility and professionalism, especially when we remember that he made the very different Concorde Affair and Cannibal Holocaust in the same year.
Stelvio Cipriani provides a workmanlike score, well suited to the action but not particularly memorable.
[An English-dubbed, Greek subtitled video rip is available for download from Cinemageddon]
Like its models Concorde Affair features something approximating an all-star cast, with Joseph Cotten, Edmund Purdom, Mimsy Farmer and James Franciscus in the name roles and such familiar Italian cinema faces as Dakar, Venatino Venantini and Meg Fleming amongst the supporting players.
Cotten and Purdom play the villains. With their airline threatened by Concorde's success, they've decided that a campaign of sabotage is called for, leading to a nice symbolic cut from the launching of Cotten's clay pigeon target to the doomed Concorde taking off.
The plane duly goes down over the ocean, near to one of the Antilles. All on board are killed, with the exception of Farmer's stewardess, Jean Beneyton, who is rescued from the water by two fishermen, one of them played by Dakar.
Fleming's character, Nicole Brody, notices Jean and informs her ex-husband, Franciscus's down-on-his-luck investigative reporter Moses Brody, who duly flies out from New York. Unfortunately by the time he arrives Venantini and his gang have already recaptured Jean and disposed of Fleming and Dakar. Worse, with the downing of one Concorde apparently not having the desired effects, his paymasters are planning a second disaster...
While there is nothing unusual in Concorde Affair's depiction of evil businessmen willing to kill a few hundred innocent people for the sake of profit – and here remembering the Ford Pinto saga during the 1970s – what makes it more interesting is the way in which Cotten emphasises that the multinational corporation is like a state:
“Since time immemorial nations have been sacrificing hundreds of millions of lives to protect their interests. Well, we too are a nation. A multi-national state. Our citizens are workers, employees, technicians – and shareholders. The shareholders, gentlemen! And it is our responsibility to protect their interests, which at the moment are being threatened by the Concorde.”
There's an inherent believability gap in the story that it's hard to accept that the Concorde with its limited passenger and cargo capacity and noise could have ever offered a real threat to conventional jumbo jet based air-travel. The idea of a South American airline commissioning 12 new Concordes also seems highly dubious considering that only 20 models were ever built and operated by the UK and France, only 14 of these seeing operational use.
Given environmental concerns, a more plausible Concorde '79 story would perhaps have been one of Cotten, Purdom and company bribing politicians and encouraging astroturfing (i.e. fake grassroots) campaigns rather than corporate murder. This, of course, would doubtless have been a scenario that wouldn't have offered the same dramatic potential.
Reading the interview with Mimsy Farmer in Spaghetti Nightmares, where her commitment to Marxist politics helps indicate just why she found Europe a more congenial environment than the USA, one wonders if this anti-corporate aspect was part of the reason underlying her involvement in the project. If not, its anti-bourgeois tone is certainly in accord with House on the Edge of the Park and Waves of Lust in relation to Deodato's oeuvre.
Another problem in terms of plausibility is that there is no sense of any official investigation within the film, with nobody from the aviation authorities present in the Antilles searching for the Concorde or its black box, nor any other reporters converging on the islands.
Indeed, the whole scenario seems to operate in a curious vaccuum. We get little sense of Cotten and company having seen to it that rumours about the Concorde are already in circulation – especially given that waging the propaganda war is surely an important prelude to waging a real war; that they likely wouldn't escalate the conflict to blowing up planes without exhausting other methods first. The question of exactly how you go about moving a 200-foot long, 78,700kg plane off on the seabed and hiding it without anyone noticing or wondering what you're up to also goes unanswered.
In this regard the film, with its extensive waterworks, is also touch reminiscent of an inverse Jaws or The Last Shark in that the bad guys should be trying to publicise the danger as much as possible rather than downplaying it; note here also that the surname of Franciscus's character is the same as that of Roy Scheider's in Spielberg's film.
If the individual investigative journalist also shows up in the like of Fulci's Zombie and City of the Living Dead around the same time – not to mention his more specialised anthropologist variant in Deodato's own Cannibal Holocaust – the scenarios in which these characters are placed are that bit lower-key: the killing of a cop or the death of a reputed medium in unusual circumstances are worth a newshound's nosing around a bit, but of a different order to an iconic aircraft going down with the loss of 100-plus lives.
Gaunt and Bolla
Another reason for mentioning Cannibal Holocaust is, of course, the casting of that film's Robert Bolla as the one of the ground control team at London the airport as the film builds to its race against time climax.
What's less frequently been remarked upon, however, is the presence of another 70s woodsman amongst the team, namely Michael Gaunt who, in one of our six degrees of separation filone style, also appears in City of the Living Dead as one of the gravediggers opposite another Cannibal Holocaust alumnus, Perry Pirkanen.
Reading Gaunt's credits on the IMDB makes for some bizarre juxtapositions, ranging from long running British children's TV programme Jackanory to Radley Metzger's The Opening of Misty Beethoven to Doris Wishman's Let Me Die a Woman; I can't say I remembered Gaunt in either of these films but will definitely be keeping an eye out when I revisit them.
Returning to the inherent plausibility issues with the film, the point that needs to be made in closing is that, having outlined what I think are the problems with the film, they ironically really matter except to the critic commenting on the film in retrospect: Deodato knows that as long as he keeps things moving at a fair pace and throws in moments of spectacle like the killing of the fishermen; an extended scuba diving sequence; and the preparation, planting and triggering of the devices intended to down the second plane etc. – at regular intervals, his target audience aren't going to care too much.
What most impresses about his direction is again his versatility and professionalism, especially when we remember that he made the very different Concorde Affair and Cannibal Holocaust in the same year.
Stelvio Cipriani provides a workmanlike score, well suited to the action but not particularly memorable.
[An English-dubbed, Greek subtitled video rip is available for download from Cinemageddon]
Sunday, 21 September 2008
Sbirro, la tua legge è lenta... la mia... no! / Hunted City
Merli, Merola and Massi
How can you go wrong?
You can't, though it's true that the way in which Merli and Merola's characters operate is perhaps not quite as fans would expect at times, whilst Massi's direction might also come across as somewhat lazy in its frequent reliance upon the zoom.
The truth, I would argue, is that Hunted City has a different approach to the poliziotto that, when considered in wider relation to the films of Umberto Lenzi and Massi's earlier filone entries such as the Marc the Narc series gives a tentative sense of an emergent auteur at work.
Massi's films are more complex in their characterisation, narrative and politics whilst Lenzi's tend to have the superior set-pieces. This is not, however, to diminish the action sequences here or elsewhere in Massi's oeuvre. They're perfectly satisfactory but just don't have the same jaw-dropping intensity as those of Lenzi at his best.
Hunted City begins in classic fashion with the gunning down of a mafia-connected financier, Mr Guidi, followed by the arrival of Merli's cop, Commissioner Paolo Ferro – a name suggestive of his iron nature and also recalling a previous Massi / Merli collaboration, Il Comissario di Ferro – in Milan, where he is met by sidekick Arrigo, on hand to provide comic relief and a sense of contrast with Merli's ubercop.
The first deviation from formula comes when we are introduced to Merola's restauranteur Raffaele Acampora, an ex-mafioso – or at least member of the Camorra; as with most subtitled Italian crime films the distinctions aren't always made clear – telling and showing some punks who try to shake him down for protection exactly where they can go.
He's the sort of character you wouldn't get in a Lenzi film where things tend to be that much more obvious. At this point in the Lenzi version, we'd no doubt have a scene in which we were told that Merola was only using his restaurants as a legitimate front to conceal his illegal activities; a scene which would also likely preclude the preceding shakedown attempt unless it has been staged for the benefit of Merli.
But here, in Massi's vision and version of Violent Milan, we go straight the arrival of Merli's cop as the men are ejecte, being comparatively warmly received by Merola and given the information he's after. It's not so much that Acompara has an alibi, which is as would be expected, as that he had already satisfactorily completed his business dealings with Guidi and, in any case, appears to be doing far better as a legitimate businessman than an illegitimate one. This said, as the film progresses another aspect of Massi's shades of grey approach that emerges is to repeatedly blur the boundaries around respectability and legitimacy anyway; while Lenzi's films also blur the boundaries as a means of criticising the society of the times his protagonists tended to stand apart and above such compromises.
Next, Ferro visits his sister and her family. It's here that one of the film's dramatic contrivances emerges as we recognise her son Stefano's friend as the hitman who killed Guidi. An improbable coincidence perhaps, but one that is excusable and explicable in relation to genre formula whilst also providing for much needed suspense and drama given the anti-climatic nature of the preceding sequence: is Stefano also mixed up in the syndicate? If so will Ferro realise in time and how will he react?
As the assassinations continue, the next victim being a lawyer who is gunned down by some masked, tennis-bag carrying hitmen, another party becomes involved in the form of Don Alfonso, played by Francisco Rabal – albeit almost unrecognisable with / without (not being certain of which is the case) his hairpiece.
Though Alfonso and Ferro have a shared past, the way this works again proves distinctive. Regarding one another as honourable and worthy opponents, a rare commodity in the film's milieux and arguably that of the wider society it represents, the two men agree to put past differences behind them in pursuit of their common enemies:
Ferro: “I once did you a favour”
Alfonso: “But that's how honoured family members speak”
Again, in our imagined Lenzi version of the film it's hard to see the lines being crossed in this way whilst even if they were there would surely be a double-cross from the mafioso sooner or later. Here, by contrast, Ferro is sufficiently trusting to eventually have the Don arrange a hit on him through his contacts – a desparate strategy that he hopes will bring the elusive murder syndicate into the open...
Returning to the subject of Massi's direction, I would argue that it encapsulates the kind of vernacular poetry discussed by Mikel Koven in his study of the giallo. Koven's ideas here are based on the theories of Pasolini, who argued for a distinction between a classical “cinema of prose,” which effaced the signs of its own construction, and a modernist “cinema of poetry,” which foregrounded them.
The key aspect of this theory in relation to Hunted City seems less the intersubjective nature of the poetic camera, as revealing the consciousness of the director behind his characters – although I suspect a case could be made for the use of the zooms in and out as conveying a sense of urgency and immediacy whereby no-one has much time to waste – as constantly making us aware of the camera's presence.
Essentially where the classical cinema would use cuts to break a scene up, going from the establishing shot to the medium shot or the close up and reframing whenever someone or something new enters into the set, Massi instead zooms in or out or, less frequently, racks focus instead, as when the camera picks out three gunmen who know one another from the tennis rackets they are carrying across a plaza.
The danger, of course, is that such an approach can easily be seen as lazy filmmaking, the kind of approach that was adopted by filone filmmakers for economic more than aesthetic reasons. Against this it can be noted that Massi also makes use of handheld; some comparatively elaborate mirror based set-ups; false POV shots from inside a vending machine, all in addition to finding some imaginative locations, most notably a church whose hall has been transformed into a firing range. (In this we also get a neat variant on the Dirty Harry “did he fire six bullets or only five” trope, as Ferro calmly blows away the bad guy who's holding a gun to Arrigo's head in the knowledge that the weapon, one of his, is empty.)
The performances are also pleasing, with Merli, Merola and Rabal each giving their characters greater depth than is often the case. Though they may still not be playing the full eight octaves range in a manner acceptable to art cinema snobs, they are considerably more than one note.
The way Massi handles Ferro's love interest is also noteworthy here. First, because he even gets one, as an apparent departure from single-minded duty. Second, because it gives Merli the opportunity to play – as distinct from be – vulnerable. Third, because the way the scenario ultimately plays out is in accord with the comparatively strong female characters present in some of his other films, most obviously the Baader-Meinhof gang styled terrorist played by Marcella Michelangeli in Mark Strikes Again.
Stelvio Cipriani delivers a solid score, with dynamic suspense and action cues incorporating slapped bass and wacka wacka guitar, further demonstrating his stylistic adaptability by substituting disco themes for the kind of organ-heavy shake cues that would have omnipresent earlier in the 70s in the film's obligatory nightclub scene.
[The film is available to download from Cinemageddon]
How can you go wrong?
You can't, though it's true that the way in which Merli and Merola's characters operate is perhaps not quite as fans would expect at times, whilst Massi's direction might also come across as somewhat lazy in its frequent reliance upon the zoom.
The truth, I would argue, is that Hunted City has a different approach to the poliziotto that, when considered in wider relation to the films of Umberto Lenzi and Massi's earlier filone entries such as the Marc the Narc series gives a tentative sense of an emergent auteur at work.
Massi's films are more complex in their characterisation, narrative and politics whilst Lenzi's tend to have the superior set-pieces. This is not, however, to diminish the action sequences here or elsewhere in Massi's oeuvre. They're perfectly satisfactory but just don't have the same jaw-dropping intensity as those of Lenzi at his best.
Hunted City begins in classic fashion with the gunning down of a mafia-connected financier, Mr Guidi, followed by the arrival of Merli's cop, Commissioner Paolo Ferro – a name suggestive of his iron nature and also recalling a previous Massi / Merli collaboration, Il Comissario di Ferro – in Milan, where he is met by sidekick Arrigo, on hand to provide comic relief and a sense of contrast with Merli's ubercop.
The first deviation from formula comes when we are introduced to Merola's restauranteur Raffaele Acampora, an ex-mafioso – or at least member of the Camorra; as with most subtitled Italian crime films the distinctions aren't always made clear – telling and showing some punks who try to shake him down for protection exactly where they can go.
He's the sort of character you wouldn't get in a Lenzi film where things tend to be that much more obvious. At this point in the Lenzi version, we'd no doubt have a scene in which we were told that Merola was only using his restaurants as a legitimate front to conceal his illegal activities; a scene which would also likely preclude the preceding shakedown attempt unless it has been staged for the benefit of Merli.
But here, in Massi's vision and version of Violent Milan, we go straight the arrival of Merli's cop as the men are ejecte, being comparatively warmly received by Merola and given the information he's after. It's not so much that Acompara has an alibi, which is as would be expected, as that he had already satisfactorily completed his business dealings with Guidi and, in any case, appears to be doing far better as a legitimate businessman than an illegitimate one. This said, as the film progresses another aspect of Massi's shades of grey approach that emerges is to repeatedly blur the boundaries around respectability and legitimacy anyway; while Lenzi's films also blur the boundaries as a means of criticising the society of the times his protagonists tended to stand apart and above such compromises.
Next, Ferro visits his sister and her family. It's here that one of the film's dramatic contrivances emerges as we recognise her son Stefano's friend as the hitman who killed Guidi. An improbable coincidence perhaps, but one that is excusable and explicable in relation to genre formula whilst also providing for much needed suspense and drama given the anti-climatic nature of the preceding sequence: is Stefano also mixed up in the syndicate? If so will Ferro realise in time and how will he react?
As the assassinations continue, the next victim being a lawyer who is gunned down by some masked, tennis-bag carrying hitmen, another party becomes involved in the form of Don Alfonso, played by Francisco Rabal – albeit almost unrecognisable with / without (not being certain of which is the case) his hairpiece.
Though Alfonso and Ferro have a shared past, the way this works again proves distinctive. Regarding one another as honourable and worthy opponents, a rare commodity in the film's milieux and arguably that of the wider society it represents, the two men agree to put past differences behind them in pursuit of their common enemies:
Ferro: “I once did you a favour”
Alfonso: “But that's how honoured family members speak”
Again, in our imagined Lenzi version of the film it's hard to see the lines being crossed in this way whilst even if they were there would surely be a double-cross from the mafioso sooner or later. Here, by contrast, Ferro is sufficiently trusting to eventually have the Don arrange a hit on him through his contacts – a desparate strategy that he hopes will bring the elusive murder syndicate into the open...
Returning to the subject of Massi's direction, I would argue that it encapsulates the kind of vernacular poetry discussed by Mikel Koven in his study of the giallo. Koven's ideas here are based on the theories of Pasolini, who argued for a distinction between a classical “cinema of prose,” which effaced the signs of its own construction, and a modernist “cinema of poetry,” which foregrounded them.
The key aspect of this theory in relation to Hunted City seems less the intersubjective nature of the poetic camera, as revealing the consciousness of the director behind his characters – although I suspect a case could be made for the use of the zooms in and out as conveying a sense of urgency and immediacy whereby no-one has much time to waste – as constantly making us aware of the camera's presence.
Essentially where the classical cinema would use cuts to break a scene up, going from the establishing shot to the medium shot or the close up and reframing whenever someone or something new enters into the set, Massi instead zooms in or out or, less frequently, racks focus instead, as when the camera picks out three gunmen who know one another from the tennis rackets they are carrying across a plaza.
The danger, of course, is that such an approach can easily be seen as lazy filmmaking, the kind of approach that was adopted by filone filmmakers for economic more than aesthetic reasons. Against this it can be noted that Massi also makes use of handheld; some comparatively elaborate mirror based set-ups; false POV shots from inside a vending machine, all in addition to finding some imaginative locations, most notably a church whose hall has been transformed into a firing range. (In this we also get a neat variant on the Dirty Harry “did he fire six bullets or only five” trope, as Ferro calmly blows away the bad guy who's holding a gun to Arrigo's head in the knowledge that the weapon, one of his, is empty.)
The performances are also pleasing, with Merli, Merola and Rabal each giving their characters greater depth than is often the case. Though they may still not be playing the full eight octaves range in a manner acceptable to art cinema snobs, they are considerably more than one note.
The way Massi handles Ferro's love interest is also noteworthy here. First, because he even gets one, as an apparent departure from single-minded duty. Second, because it gives Merli the opportunity to play – as distinct from be – vulnerable. Third, because the way the scenario ultimately plays out is in accord with the comparatively strong female characters present in some of his other films, most obviously the Baader-Meinhof gang styled terrorist played by Marcella Michelangeli in Mark Strikes Again.
Stelvio Cipriani delivers a solid score, with dynamic suspense and action cues incorporating slapped bass and wacka wacka guitar, further demonstrating his stylistic adaptability by substituting disco themes for the kind of organ-heavy shake cues that would have omnipresent earlier in the 70s in the film's obligatory nightclub scene.
[The film is available to download from Cinemageddon]
Saturday, 20 September 2008
I Familiari delle vittime non saranno avvertiti / Crime Boss / New Mafia Boss
Directed by the underrated Alberto De Martino this is one of those Italian crime films that followed in the wake of The Godfather's international success, though its pace and dynamics are perhaps more reminiscent of classic Hollywood gangster films like Little Caesar, insofar as it deals with the ascendancy of a 'proletarian' gangster rather than with the power struggles of a well-established family in the crime aristocracy.
Unlike the 1930s films, however, there's no censorship or other requirement to present the protagonist's subsequently inevitable and thereby tragic fall. Instead, as with the Corleone family in The Godfather he can be better understood as succeeding by one set of criteria (business) and failing by another (personal).
We open with Antonio Mancuso (Anonio Sabato) getting permission from the local Don to leave Sicily for Milan, away from the possibilities that he sees as defining his future: starvation or being torn apart by lupara blasts.
The country mouse in the city?
On arrival in Milan, Antonio is given a high-profile job by Turi Petralia: the assassination of Loretto Abondano. It has a personal aspect as well, with Abondano being responsible for the murder of Antonio's father Vito many years ago. The situation is complicated by the fact that Vito was reputedly a traitor – a fact Turi had hoped to exploit by disposing of Antonio once the job is done.
The killer coming with a smile on his face
But Antonio is not the country bumpkin that he has appeared – “I know what you think Turi: I'm young, I've got no friends, I'm a country hick. Nevertheless, I'm no shit. I got the picture. I took some precautions and here I am” – and surprises Petralia.
The minions waiting in a spaghetti western configuration
Rather than killing Petralia, Antonio leaves him alive and indebted, declining a bundle of money in favour of his agreed-upon fee. It is all, as both men agree, strictly a matter of business.
Antonio next contacts his brother, Nicola, who has hitherto been a moderately successful pimp with “a stable of six or seven” in and hatches a plan: they secretly switch a consignment of narcotics from Godfather Don Vincenzo's men, let the replacement consignment be captured by the police and then offer to retrieve the original – i.e. the only one anyone else is aware of – in exchange for place in his family.
The daring plan succeeds – here we can forgive the skirting over the obvious plot holes as part and parcel of the 90 minute genre formula movie, especially since Vincenzo quickly surmises what has really happened – with the two men soon developing a close relationship, almost father-son like at times. (“You know something? I was like you when I was young” “I'd like to be like you. What do I have to do?”)
Unfortunately Vincenzo soon proves to not quite be the man he once was, showing signs of weakness and megalomania that can only re-ignite Antonio's ambition, especially when fuelled by the scheming of the ex-Don's daughter, Vincenzo's niece the beautiful Monica (Paola Tedesco).
Given the various locations within and outwith Italy – Palermo, Rome, Milan and Hamburg – and the presence of Savalas in the guest-star role, Mob Boss clearly had a reasonable budget.
Antonio Sabato again seems more comfortable playing a bad guy than a hero. If we perhaps engage with his character in more of a detached, observational manner we also prefer him to most of the other mafioso presented insofar as he at least has vestiges of a code of honour about him, being committed to his family's reputation and well-being and against the indiscriminate killing of civilians who have not chosen the gangster's life, as seen when one unfortunate is thrown out of a speeding car: “You shithead!” “Why? Are you afraid of killing?” “I only kill on commission or in self defence.”
The most significant scene in this regard is probably that of the family's reunion dinner where over complaints about Nicola's occupation – “a common pimp – I'd rather he was a killer or a thief. Even if he ended up in jail at least he'd have some self-respect,” remarks his wife – and a delightfully spaghetti eating montage, De Martino places a folk-sounding theme complete with ocarina: if ever you want an image of old southern / Sicilian attitudes and habits transcending time and place this would be a contender.
Domestic life
It's also a scene which perhaps indicates how the character of Antonio might have played to the intended vernacular audience, as someone more “like us” than the others presented and thus more of an identification figure, however ambiguous, than he appears to outsiders such as myself.
This in turn also impart an air of uncertainty over how to interpret some of the earlier lost in the city antics. Does he express bemusement at the automatic door of the airport because he doesn't know any better or because he knows that he's being appraised by Turi's men? Are 'we' laughing at him, with him, or being suckered just like his diegetic watchers, with their evalaution that “He's a real peasant [...] nothing but a punk kid, a cafone”?
Savalas doesn't doesn't completely convince as the Godfather figure, especially when he's the only American actor in the cast. His character also seems inconsistently written at times, though his forgetting the “only business” mantra when seeking to position himself above the rest of the family and referring to “cosa mia” could also be read as a sign that he is losing touch.
Paola Tedesco provides some compensation by virtue of doing more than just providing eye candy and love interest in pursuing her character's own enigmatic agenda.
De Martino's direction of the chases, shoot-outs and brawls is competent rather than inspired. Normally this would be a weakness though here it functions to film's overall benefit, giving it a more balanced feel than is often the case with filone cinema.
Indeed, the most memorable sequence is a montage dealing with the aftermath of mob rub out, in which one of the losers is processed into soap and then sent back to his bemused boss, who is clearly at something of a loss over what to do.
Turi gets punched in the face
Elsewhere we also get some nice single-shot set pieces and cuts, like Turi's opening the door to dramatically receive a punch in the face from Antonio's fist coming unexpectedly into the frame, ot one of those camera move transitions between inside and outside worlds through the window itself.
Francesco De Masi's crime jazz score is decent but nothing particularly outstanding or memorable, with most of the cues – the eating scene excepted – being rather generic and not always ideally suited to the on-screen action.
The dubbing of the film, in accented English, causes an element of confusion at times, with Sicilian rather than Italian terms being left untranslated and an English conversation at a bar in one of the German-set scenes being butted into by Antonio on grounds of 'unexpectedly' hearing his Italian mother tongue.
[The film is available for download from Cinemageddon]
Unlike the 1930s films, however, there's no censorship or other requirement to present the protagonist's subsequently inevitable and thereby tragic fall. Instead, as with the Corleone family in The Godfather he can be better understood as succeeding by one set of criteria (business) and failing by another (personal).
We open with Antonio Mancuso (Anonio Sabato) getting permission from the local Don to leave Sicily for Milan, away from the possibilities that he sees as defining his future: starvation or being torn apart by lupara blasts.
The country mouse in the city?
On arrival in Milan, Antonio is given a high-profile job by Turi Petralia: the assassination of Loretto Abondano. It has a personal aspect as well, with Abondano being responsible for the murder of Antonio's father Vito many years ago. The situation is complicated by the fact that Vito was reputedly a traitor – a fact Turi had hoped to exploit by disposing of Antonio once the job is done.
The killer coming with a smile on his face
But Antonio is not the country bumpkin that he has appeared – “I know what you think Turi: I'm young, I've got no friends, I'm a country hick. Nevertheless, I'm no shit. I got the picture. I took some precautions and here I am” – and surprises Petralia.
The minions waiting in a spaghetti western configuration
Rather than killing Petralia, Antonio leaves him alive and indebted, declining a bundle of money in favour of his agreed-upon fee. It is all, as both men agree, strictly a matter of business.
Antonio next contacts his brother, Nicola, who has hitherto been a moderately successful pimp with “a stable of six or seven” in and hatches a plan: they secretly switch a consignment of narcotics from Godfather Don Vincenzo's men, let the replacement consignment be captured by the police and then offer to retrieve the original – i.e. the only one anyone else is aware of – in exchange for place in his family.
The daring plan succeeds – here we can forgive the skirting over the obvious plot holes as part and parcel of the 90 minute genre formula movie, especially since Vincenzo quickly surmises what has really happened – with the two men soon developing a close relationship, almost father-son like at times. (“You know something? I was like you when I was young” “I'd like to be like you. What do I have to do?”)
Unfortunately Vincenzo soon proves to not quite be the man he once was, showing signs of weakness and megalomania that can only re-ignite Antonio's ambition, especially when fuelled by the scheming of the ex-Don's daughter, Vincenzo's niece the beautiful Monica (Paola Tedesco).
Given the various locations within and outwith Italy – Palermo, Rome, Milan and Hamburg – and the presence of Savalas in the guest-star role, Mob Boss clearly had a reasonable budget.
Antonio Sabato again seems more comfortable playing a bad guy than a hero. If we perhaps engage with his character in more of a detached, observational manner we also prefer him to most of the other mafioso presented insofar as he at least has vestiges of a code of honour about him, being committed to his family's reputation and well-being and against the indiscriminate killing of civilians who have not chosen the gangster's life, as seen when one unfortunate is thrown out of a speeding car: “You shithead!” “Why? Are you afraid of killing?” “I only kill on commission or in self defence.”
The most significant scene in this regard is probably that of the family's reunion dinner where over complaints about Nicola's occupation – “a common pimp – I'd rather he was a killer or a thief. Even if he ended up in jail at least he'd have some self-respect,” remarks his wife – and a delightfully spaghetti eating montage, De Martino places a folk-sounding theme complete with ocarina: if ever you want an image of old southern / Sicilian attitudes and habits transcending time and place this would be a contender.
Domestic life
It's also a scene which perhaps indicates how the character of Antonio might have played to the intended vernacular audience, as someone more “like us” than the others presented and thus more of an identification figure, however ambiguous, than he appears to outsiders such as myself.
This in turn also impart an air of uncertainty over how to interpret some of the earlier lost in the city antics. Does he express bemusement at the automatic door of the airport because he doesn't know any better or because he knows that he's being appraised by Turi's men? Are 'we' laughing at him, with him, or being suckered just like his diegetic watchers, with their evalaution that “He's a real peasant [...] nothing but a punk kid, a cafone”?
Savalas doesn't doesn't completely convince as the Godfather figure, especially when he's the only American actor in the cast. His character also seems inconsistently written at times, though his forgetting the “only business” mantra when seeking to position himself above the rest of the family and referring to “cosa mia” could also be read as a sign that he is losing touch.
Paola Tedesco provides some compensation by virtue of doing more than just providing eye candy and love interest in pursuing her character's own enigmatic agenda.
De Martino's direction of the chases, shoot-outs and brawls is competent rather than inspired. Normally this would be a weakness though here it functions to film's overall benefit, giving it a more balanced feel than is often the case with filone cinema.
Indeed, the most memorable sequence is a montage dealing with the aftermath of mob rub out, in which one of the losers is processed into soap and then sent back to his bemused boss, who is clearly at something of a loss over what to do.
Turi gets punched in the face
Elsewhere we also get some nice single-shot set pieces and cuts, like Turi's opening the door to dramatically receive a punch in the face from Antonio's fist coming unexpectedly into the frame, ot one of those camera move transitions between inside and outside worlds through the window itself.
Francesco De Masi's crime jazz score is decent but nothing particularly outstanding or memorable, with most of the cues – the eating scene excepted – being rather generic and not always ideally suited to the on-screen action.
The dubbing of the film, in accented English, causes an element of confusion at times, with Sicilian rather than Italian terms being left untranslated and an English conversation at a bar in one of the German-set scenes being butted into by Antonio on grounds of 'unexpectedly' hearing his Italian mother tongue.
[The film is available for download from Cinemageddon]
Friday, 19 September 2008
Dog Tags
As a filone film from the director of the impressive giallo A White Veil for Mariale and slasher Nightmares in a Damaged Brain, Romano Scavolini, it comes as little surprise when Dog Tags quickly demonstrates itself to have aspirations higher than the bulk of Italian war entries by dint of opening with a prologue and concluding with an epilogue re-iterating the factual basis of what we have just seen.
War is hell
While certainly still indulging in some action movie clichés, the result emerges as a worthy attempt by the self-proclaimed auteur to translate something of his own experiences of the Vietnam war as a photographer – a role translating in the film into a German freelance photographer in search of a scoop who bribed some soldiers to take him along – to the screen, with the tone more Platoon or Apocalypse Now than Rambo and the question thus less whether “we” get to win this time as who this “we” refers to in the first place.
The truth and nothing but?
In between the prologue and epilogue the action is divided up into acts, a somewhat artificial device that lessens the documentary angle but that otherwise presents one of Scavolini's concessions to entertainment, against the general backdrop of unpleasant characters and situations along with a callousness and cynicism unlikely to appeal to the more casual viewer looking for a fun way to spend 90 minutes.
We begin the story proper with the rescue of a number of American prisoners from Vietnamese tiger cages by a special forces type, Cecil. So far so conventional.
The rescuers and the rescued are then commanded by Captain Newport to retrieve some strongboxes of secret documents from a downed South Vietnamese helicopter, from where they will then be picked up by the re-scheduled helicopter.
The men accomplish this against heavy odds despite their generally poor physical condition and lack of equipment, but sustain some casualties in the process. Again, pretty conventional.
Then they discover the real contents of the strongboxes: looted gold. While this revelation in turn is perhaps somewhat predictable, as are the differences in opinion over what to do next, the result is anything but a harmless war-caper entry. Rather the men increasingly turn on one another for possession of the loot, as when some favour leaving a comrade with an infected leg behind and re-distributing his share, with rather fewer laughs and hi-jinks than a Kelly's Heroes or Inglorious Bastards.
War is hell
While certainly still indulging in some action movie clichés, the result emerges as a worthy attempt by the self-proclaimed auteur to translate something of his own experiences of the Vietnam war as a photographer – a role translating in the film into a German freelance photographer in search of a scoop who bribed some soldiers to take him along – to the screen, with the tone more Platoon or Apocalypse Now than Rambo and the question thus less whether “we” get to win this time as who this “we” refers to in the first place.
The truth and nothing but?
In between the prologue and epilogue the action is divided up into acts, a somewhat artificial device that lessens the documentary angle but that otherwise presents one of Scavolini's concessions to entertainment, against the general backdrop of unpleasant characters and situations along with a callousness and cynicism unlikely to appeal to the more casual viewer looking for a fun way to spend 90 minutes.
We begin the story proper with the rescue of a number of American prisoners from Vietnamese tiger cages by a special forces type, Cecil. So far so conventional.
The rescuers and the rescued are then commanded by Captain Newport to retrieve some strongboxes of secret documents from a downed South Vietnamese helicopter, from where they will then be picked up by the re-scheduled helicopter.
The men accomplish this against heavy odds despite their generally poor physical condition and lack of equipment, but sustain some casualties in the process. Again, pretty conventional.
Then they discover the real contents of the strongboxes: looted gold. While this revelation in turn is perhaps somewhat predictable, as are the differences in opinion over what to do next, the result is anything but a harmless war-caper entry. Rather the men increasingly turn on one another for possession of the loot, as when some favour leaving a comrade with an infected leg behind and re-distributing his share, with rather fewer laughs and hi-jinks than a Kelly's Heroes or Inglorious Bastards.
The Satanik look
One of my other odd interests is the work of the late Italian designer Massimo Osti, who founded the clothing companies CP and Stone Island and conducted a lot of experiments with fabrics.
On Found_NYC, a site for these companies' enthusiasts and collectors there's a post-Osti collection for CP Company Donna which I could imagine Satanik or other 60s fumetti anti-heroine wearing:
On Found_NYC, a site for these companies' enthusiasts and collectors there's a post-Osti collection for CP Company Donna which I could imagine Satanik or other 60s fumetti anti-heroine wearing:
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