Saturday, 28 February 2009
Melltoron / Vocoder / whatever
So, I am watching The Beyond for the howeverthmany time, and thinking about the soundtrack, with the and "you will live in" chorus, which predates the vocoder-ed paura theme in Tenebre, but are there any instances of this treatment which are before both of them in the Italian cinema?
Tuesday, 24 February 2009
Robert Quarry RIP
Another cult great gone; Count Yorga: Vampire and its sequel are two of the best modern day vampire films, and Quarry makes a nice foil for Vincent Price in the Dr Phibes sequel :-(
Nice piece over on Cinemafantastique Online: http://cinefantastiqueonline.com/2009/02/23/robert-quarry-remembered-the-deathmaster-knocks-at-the-madhouse-of-dr-phibes/
Nice piece over on Cinemafantastique Online: http://cinefantastiqueonline.com/2009/02/23/robert-quarry-remembered-the-deathmaster-knocks-at-the-madhouse-of-dr-phibes/
Sotto il vestito niente / Nothing Underneath
After he receives the sensation that his sister Jessie, an up and coming Milan based model, is in some sort of danger, Yellowstone Park ranger Bob Crane catches the first flight to the city. Finding Jessie missing, he contacts the authorities, who are understandably nonplussed by his (non-)explanation of why he is there, but nevertheless soon come to agree that something must be up as two other models turn up dead in short order...
Nothing Underneath – the Italian title, translating as nothing underneath the clothes is at once simpler and more suggestive – is a classic example of the style-driven, post-Tenebre giallo that time has not yet been kind to.
More than being less distanced style wise than such 70s fashion world counterparts as The Crimes of the Black Cat and Strip Nude for Your Killer, it’s also the kind of film whose makers try oh so hard, but unfortunately fail to make style and substance cohere, with a relative surfeit of the former and paucity of the latter.
The area where this is most evident is in the inclusion of the telepathic connection device. It just about works as a means of introducing the characters and their situation, but thereafter is largely dropped with the result that it emerges overall as a crude contrivance which raises more questions than it answers.
Worse, it also encourages negative comparisons with both Argento’s Phenomena – as another grab bag of ideas, albeit more the director’s own rather than ones general to the giallo – and, De Martino’s Extrasensorial, where the theme is central throughout rather than throwaway; perhaps not coincidentally Argento collaborator Franco Ferrini worked on the scripts of both Phenomena and Nothing Underneath, the latter in conjunction with Marco Palma, whose novel it was derived from.
Another point of reference is Inferno, with its juxtaposition of magic – the acousmatic voices of the three mothers, heard and felt but rarely seen – and technology – the trans-Atlantic telephone call between Mark and Rose which is cut off by a (magical?) storm and Mark’s flight from Rome to New York in search of his sister.
At issue in each case is the reality we are dealing with. The other three films establish their distinctive worlds, like but not our own, and make us suspend our disbelief. Here, by contrast, we are presented with two different versions of the same world, rural America and urban Italy, the timeless and the a la mode, where the comparable admixture of the magical and technological – or specifically psychoanalytic – just does not quite work off. It’s less a case of broken mirrors or broken minds, as in Suspiria, Inferno and Don’t Look Now, but broken minds.
I throw Don’t Look Now into the mix here on account of an obvious bit of symbolism for the viewer, if not the protagonist, as the telephone operator responsible for making the connection between the Rockies and Milan in order to save Jessie tellingly spills her red nail polish over the international dialling code details for the city. (Another case of the “it’s not blood, it’s red” formula for distanced giallo violence?)
Other aspects of the film are more successful, making one imagine an alternate, more mundane, version where Bob doesn’t receive some calls from Jessie that he has been expecting, is dissatisfied with the answers he gets from her circle and arrives after a couple of weeks to begin his investigation, as working better throughout.
In particular, the high fashion world, with all its excesses of greed, drugs and opportunistic sex, and its glamour, of that familiar distinction between the glittering surface and the corruption beneath, is well captured, to form a further point of connection via the aforementioned 70s murder a la mode entries all the way back to that founding text of the form, Blood and Black Lace.
Likewise, if the killer’s metonymic black gloves are primarily a throwaway generic signifier, albeit one with some of the usual use-value in terms of denying us the sight of obviously male or female hands, the choice of scissors as a weapon fits better with the fashion context than the more usual knife and also prefigures the maniac’s suitably obsessive collection of cut out scrapbook type images.
The nature of the film’s setting makes it hard to gauge most of the performances. As fashion types, most of these people are here to look good rather than act, with a certain element of vacuity to be expected; indeed female lead Renee Simonsen was a top model of the time.
Much the same can be said of Tom Schanley’s Crane in a different way, insofar as he is playing the country mouse type out of his element in the big city.
Donald Pleasance is very much in collect the paycheck and run mode, though this sense of going through the motions, not quite 100 per cent aware of where he is and on which film he’s actually working is also strangely appropriate to his character, the cliche figure of the old detective whose last case this is.
Note must also made of the finale, which manages to combine the slow-motion crash through glass of Four Flies on Grey Velvet with the more conventionally seen plummet to the death of The Crimes of the Black Cat, Don’t Torture a Duckling, Who Saw Her Die and others.
In sum, decent entertainment for 90 or so minutes, but almost “nothing underneath” by way of substance or subtext to reward repeat viewings.
Nothing Underneath – the Italian title, translating as nothing underneath the clothes is at once simpler and more suggestive – is a classic example of the style-driven, post-Tenebre giallo that time has not yet been kind to.
More than being less distanced style wise than such 70s fashion world counterparts as The Crimes of the Black Cat and Strip Nude for Your Killer, it’s also the kind of film whose makers try oh so hard, but unfortunately fail to make style and substance cohere, with a relative surfeit of the former and paucity of the latter.
The area where this is most evident is in the inclusion of the telepathic connection device. It just about works as a means of introducing the characters and their situation, but thereafter is largely dropped with the result that it emerges overall as a crude contrivance which raises more questions than it answers.
Worse, it also encourages negative comparisons with both Argento’s Phenomena – as another grab bag of ideas, albeit more the director’s own rather than ones general to the giallo – and, De Martino’s Extrasensorial, where the theme is central throughout rather than throwaway; perhaps not coincidentally Argento collaborator Franco Ferrini worked on the scripts of both Phenomena and Nothing Underneath, the latter in conjunction with Marco Palma, whose novel it was derived from.
Another point of reference is Inferno, with its juxtaposition of magic – the acousmatic voices of the three mothers, heard and felt but rarely seen – and technology – the trans-Atlantic telephone call between Mark and Rose which is cut off by a (magical?) storm and Mark’s flight from Rome to New York in search of his sister.
At issue in each case is the reality we are dealing with. The other three films establish their distinctive worlds, like but not our own, and make us suspend our disbelief. Here, by contrast, we are presented with two different versions of the same world, rural America and urban Italy, the timeless and the a la mode, where the comparable admixture of the magical and technological – or specifically psychoanalytic – just does not quite work off. It’s less a case of broken mirrors or broken minds, as in Suspiria, Inferno and Don’t Look Now, but broken minds.
I throw Don’t Look Now into the mix here on account of an obvious bit of symbolism for the viewer, if not the protagonist, as the telephone operator responsible for making the connection between the Rockies and Milan in order to save Jessie tellingly spills her red nail polish over the international dialling code details for the city. (Another case of the “it’s not blood, it’s red” formula for distanced giallo violence?)
Other aspects of the film are more successful, making one imagine an alternate, more mundane, version where Bob doesn’t receive some calls from Jessie that he has been expecting, is dissatisfied with the answers he gets from her circle and arrives after a couple of weeks to begin his investigation, as working better throughout.
In particular, the high fashion world, with all its excesses of greed, drugs and opportunistic sex, and its glamour, of that familiar distinction between the glittering surface and the corruption beneath, is well captured, to form a further point of connection via the aforementioned 70s murder a la mode entries all the way back to that founding text of the form, Blood and Black Lace.
Likewise, if the killer’s metonymic black gloves are primarily a throwaway generic signifier, albeit one with some of the usual use-value in terms of denying us the sight of obviously male or female hands, the choice of scissors as a weapon fits better with the fashion context than the more usual knife and also prefigures the maniac’s suitably obsessive collection of cut out scrapbook type images.
The nature of the film’s setting makes it hard to gauge most of the performances. As fashion types, most of these people are here to look good rather than act, with a certain element of vacuity to be expected; indeed female lead Renee Simonsen was a top model of the time.
Much the same can be said of Tom Schanley’s Crane in a different way, insofar as he is playing the country mouse type out of his element in the big city.
Donald Pleasance is very much in collect the paycheck and run mode, though this sense of going through the motions, not quite 100 per cent aware of where he is and on which film he’s actually working is also strangely appropriate to his character, the cliche figure of the old detective whose last case this is.
Note must also made of the finale, which manages to combine the slow-motion crash through glass of Four Flies on Grey Velvet with the more conventionally seen plummet to the death of The Crimes of the Black Cat, Don’t Torture a Duckling, Who Saw Her Die and others.
In sum, decent entertainment for 90 or so minutes, but almost “nothing underneath” by way of substance or subtext to reward repeat viewings.
Antonio Trashorras Goes Giallo With BREED
"Best known as the writer of Guillermo Del Toro’s The Devil’s Backbone Spanish film maker Antonio Trashorras is also an increasingly accomplished director in his own right. And with his latest directorial effort Trashorras indulges his love for classic giallo. With Cristina Pons in the lead Dos manos zurdas y un racimo de ojos manchados de gris - amusingly titled simply Breed in English - the film is twenty minutes of surreal, bloody mystery and horror with all the style and smarts that you’d expect. But don’t take my word for it, we’ve got the entire film - English subtitled, no less - in the Twitch Player below the break."
Ricchi, ricchissimi... praticamente in mutande / Don't Play with Tigers
There’s quite a difference between the Italian and English titles for this three part sex comedy anthology directed by Sergio Martino.
The Italian, Ricchi, ricchissimi, practicamente in mutande literally translates as rich, richer, practically in (the) underwear, referring to hotter / colder kind of game and thus providing a more apt analogy for the ‘nearly there’ sexual outcomes of the three stories.
They are framed via the device of a day in the life of a court, where the judge presides over the three cases, each presented via flashback narrated by the male accused, incarnated by Pippo Caruso, Lino Banfi and Renato Pozzetto respectively.
In the first he takes his wife and sons to the beach and builds a beach hut but is then understandably threatened and troubled by the presence of a free-living and loving group of French nudists, led by a rather well-endowed man, who have also decide to set up camp there...
In the second he’s a businessman, the owner of a successful sausage factory, who believes he has attracted the attentions of a German contessa, with all manner of farcical antics ensuing as he thus tries to avoid his own family...
In the third he’s another businessman, the owner of an struggling shipbuilders, who sees salvation in the form of persuading an Arab sheik to commission a yacht. Unfortunately the sheikh takes an undue interest in his wife, wanting her to join his harem as the brunette pearl amongst the existing 12 blond ones as part of the deal.
While the second and third episodes also feature Janet Agren and Edwige Fenech respectively, the latter also being paired with her old giallo colleague George Hilton as the Sheikh, fans of the two actresses may be disappointed the lack of actual T&A on display, all of which is concentrated in the first story and of an equal opportunities nature.
If the filmmakers may be accused of playing on stereotypes, particularly in the third episode, this is offset by their fair-minded skewering of various Italian types, whether the judiciary, the bourgeoisie or the proletariat and the various comic reversals and misidentifications that occur as the narratives are resolved.
Here, we might also consider a skit from the contemporaneous British show The Young Ones, representative of a new comedy that purported to reject the racist and sexist values of its predecessor: in an Arab court, the advisor asks the sheikh if he would like to see the foreign ambassador over the subject of their alleged mandatory cruelty. Yes, replies the sheikh. Which bit of him would you like to see? asks the advisor.
Above all, however, is that it is simply funny - and more specifically essentially harmlessly so.
The Italian, Ricchi, ricchissimi, practicamente in mutande literally translates as rich, richer, practically in (the) underwear, referring to hotter / colder kind of game and thus providing a more apt analogy for the ‘nearly there’ sexual outcomes of the three stories.
They are framed via the device of a day in the life of a court, where the judge presides over the three cases, each presented via flashback narrated by the male accused, incarnated by Pippo Caruso, Lino Banfi and Renato Pozzetto respectively.
In the first he takes his wife and sons to the beach and builds a beach hut but is then understandably threatened and troubled by the presence of a free-living and loving group of French nudists, led by a rather well-endowed man, who have also decide to set up camp there...
In the second he’s a businessman, the owner of a successful sausage factory, who believes he has attracted the attentions of a German contessa, with all manner of farcical antics ensuing as he thus tries to avoid his own family...
In the third he’s another businessman, the owner of an struggling shipbuilders, who sees salvation in the form of persuading an Arab sheik to commission a yacht. Unfortunately the sheikh takes an undue interest in his wife, wanting her to join his harem as the brunette pearl amongst the existing 12 blond ones as part of the deal.
While the second and third episodes also feature Janet Agren and Edwige Fenech respectively, the latter also being paired with her old giallo colleague George Hilton as the Sheikh, fans of the two actresses may be disappointed the lack of actual T&A on display, all of which is concentrated in the first story and of an equal opportunities nature.
If the filmmakers may be accused of playing on stereotypes, particularly in the third episode, this is offset by their fair-minded skewering of various Italian types, whether the judiciary, the bourgeoisie or the proletariat and the various comic reversals and misidentifications that occur as the narratives are resolved.
Here, we might also consider a skit from the contemporaneous British show The Young Ones, representative of a new comedy that purported to reject the racist and sexist values of its predecessor: in an Arab court, the advisor asks the sheikh if he would like to see the foreign ambassador over the subject of their alleged mandatory cruelty. Yes, replies the sheikh. Which bit of him would you like to see? asks the advisor.
Above all, however, is that it is simply funny - and more specifically essentially harmlessly so.
Tuesday, 17 February 2009
I ragazzi del juke-box / The Juke-Box Kids
Unlikely as it may sound, future horror specialist Lucio Fulci made his directorial debut with this musical comedy.
A kind of Italian take on the Elvis film, Rock Around the Clock, It’s Trad Dad, or any number of other films of the time exploiting the rise of the new post-war youth culture, I ragazzi del juke-box / The Juke-Box Kids’ plot is back-of-the-envelope stuff, replete with the usual tropes of inter-generational and familial conflict and a happy ever-after ending.
To wit fuddy-duddy daddy Commander Cesari doesn’t ‘get’ his daughter Giulia’s taste in music, only to be shown the error of his ways and old-fashioned tastes when she and her friends take over the running of his record label and save it from bankruptcy.
While the results may be test your tolerance for Adriano Celentano, Betty Dorys, Fred Buscaglione and other hip young performers of the era at times, they also have many points of interest.
Celentano, doing the Elvis thang
First, Fulci’s direction is pretty stylish, handling the song and dance routines well and combining superimpositions and slow motion in some of the later Vorkapich-style montage sequences.
One of the montages - three images, plus slow motion
Fulci and Buscaglione
Second, he also makes his first cameo appearance, as an A&R or talent scout type who, in characteristic self-deprecating manner, proves more interested in the women than the music; or, alternatively, draws into question the purity of the product, that it is as much ‘sex’ as music which is really being bought and sold here, a point further made by an impromptu striptease routine at an otherwise stage-managed battle of the bands type event.
Third, the cast contains other figures later to play prominent roles the filone cinema, including Elke Sommer, later seen in the likes of Baron Blood and Lisa and the Devil, and Anthony Steffen, here billed as Antonio de Teffe and looking very different from his Django days a decade or so later.
Steffen without stubble
Fourth, there’s even a hint of horror, with one of the kids being nicknamed Dracula, and a song entitled 'I Hate Old Women' with a delightfully manic performance from the singer alongside some suitable odio(us) old women.
Io odio vecchia donne
Or, in sum, enough to make it worthwhile viewing for the dedicated Fulci enthusiast.
A kind of Italian take on the Elvis film, Rock Around the Clock, It’s Trad Dad, or any number of other films of the time exploiting the rise of the new post-war youth culture, I ragazzi del juke-box / The Juke-Box Kids’ plot is back-of-the-envelope stuff, replete with the usual tropes of inter-generational and familial conflict and a happy ever-after ending.
To wit fuddy-duddy daddy Commander Cesari doesn’t ‘get’ his daughter Giulia’s taste in music, only to be shown the error of his ways and old-fashioned tastes when she and her friends take over the running of his record label and save it from bankruptcy.
While the results may be test your tolerance for Adriano Celentano, Betty Dorys, Fred Buscaglione and other hip young performers of the era at times, they also have many points of interest.
Celentano, doing the Elvis thang
First, Fulci’s direction is pretty stylish, handling the song and dance routines well and combining superimpositions and slow motion in some of the later Vorkapich-style montage sequences.
One of the montages - three images, plus slow motion
Fulci and Buscaglione
Second, he also makes his first cameo appearance, as an A&R or talent scout type who, in characteristic self-deprecating manner, proves more interested in the women than the music; or, alternatively, draws into question the purity of the product, that it is as much ‘sex’ as music which is really being bought and sold here, a point further made by an impromptu striptease routine at an otherwise stage-managed battle of the bands type event.
Third, the cast contains other figures later to play prominent roles the filone cinema, including Elke Sommer, later seen in the likes of Baron Blood and Lisa and the Devil, and Anthony Steffen, here billed as Antonio de Teffe and looking very different from his Django days a decade or so later.
Steffen without stubble
Fourth, there’s even a hint of horror, with one of the kids being nicknamed Dracula, and a song entitled 'I Hate Old Women' with a delightfully manic performance from the singer alongside some suitable odio(us) old women.
Io odio vecchia donne
Or, in sum, enough to make it worthwhile viewing for the dedicated Fulci enthusiast.
Monday, 16 February 2009
L'Assassino / The Lady Killer of Rome
This was the first film from Elio Petri, a more mainstream director than those usually covered here, but one who is worthy of consideration as something of a forgotten figure in the Italian cinema of the 1960s and 1970s.
For, besides making a number of excellent films that managed to combine social comment with entertainment, he also happened to win the Best Foreign Film Oscar in 1970 with Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion, a film that also out-grossed The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, released in the same year.
A classic stairwell shot
Like Investigation; A Quiet Place in the Country; We Still Kill the Old Way and Todo Modo, L’Assassino / The Lady Killer of Rome could be broadly termed a giallo. But, again in common with these films, it takes a distinctive approach to its subject matter.
More specifically, it could be understood as a companion piece to Investigation, offering an inversion of the later film’s structure. There the protagonist, the murderer, incarnated by Petri’s later fetish actor Gian-Maria Volonte, is the police commissioner leading the investigation into the crime he himself has committed. Here, the protagonist, incarnated by Marcello Mastroianni, is the man suspected of the murder of his mistress, which itself is never seen, a citizen very much under suspicion on account of his amoral, playboy lifestyle.
Alienated man, dominated by his environment
Mastroianni’s character, Nello Poletti, also happens to be an antique dealer, indebted to and thus dependent on said mistress, suggesting a possible interconnection with Blood and Black Lace beyond the 'assassin' of their Italian titles and the presence in a supporting role of Franco Ressel.
Besides creating a Kafka-esque nightmare out of these situations, where no-one except the powerful is innocent and the law arbitrary and absolute, the other major influence here emerges as Camus, with the various flashbacks – or pseudo-flashbacks – to pivotal incidents in the character’s life, such as his selfish treatment of his mother, older mistress and younger girlfriend, the former seeming to reference The Stranger, and his once failing to intervene to prevent a man’s suicide, a la The Fall.
Both the central performance from Marcello Mastroianni and Petri’s direction are highly impressive, with the actor’s nuanced performance skilfully making us unsure of whether or not he is in fact guilty, and indeed also raising questions of what exactly this word might mean in this particular context, and the director utilising a nice mixture of neo-realist, post-neo-realist and expressionist / expressive images.
A curiously off-centre composition visually repeats the message of the dialogue
Yet, if there is an element of Antonioni’s style in this post-neo-realist aspect of the film, Petri also resists making an anti-giallo in which the mystery – did he or didn’t he do it – would have remained unresolved.
Of particular note is the handling of the aforementioned ‘quasi-flashbacks,’ precisely because they can’t quite be read so clearly as such, having that Rashomon-like quality of being the subjective, interested reconstructions of their originator.
As to the actual resolution, I’ll leave to watch the film for yourself, even if anyone with a knowledge of Petri’s background, work and politics and probably work it out for themselves...
Or, rather, one resolution, for apparently in some territories – including Australia, the subtitled version under review having come from an Australian TV broadcast – the ending was altered to give it a different inflection – an element which raises the wider question of what happens, as is so often the case with Euro-cult films, when the distributor or censors become effective co-authors.
With crisp black and white cinematography courtesy of none other than Carlo di Palma, sharply written dialogue by Pasquale Festa Campanile and Massimo Franciosa, and a pleasing jazzy score, The Ladykiller of Rome, well, slays...
For, besides making a number of excellent films that managed to combine social comment with entertainment, he also happened to win the Best Foreign Film Oscar in 1970 with Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion, a film that also out-grossed The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, released in the same year.
A classic stairwell shot
Like Investigation; A Quiet Place in the Country; We Still Kill the Old Way and Todo Modo, L’Assassino / The Lady Killer of Rome could be broadly termed a giallo. But, again in common with these films, it takes a distinctive approach to its subject matter.
More specifically, it could be understood as a companion piece to Investigation, offering an inversion of the later film’s structure. There the protagonist, the murderer, incarnated by Petri’s later fetish actor Gian-Maria Volonte, is the police commissioner leading the investigation into the crime he himself has committed. Here, the protagonist, incarnated by Marcello Mastroianni, is the man suspected of the murder of his mistress, which itself is never seen, a citizen very much under suspicion on account of his amoral, playboy lifestyle.
Alienated man, dominated by his environment
Mastroianni’s character, Nello Poletti, also happens to be an antique dealer, indebted to and thus dependent on said mistress, suggesting a possible interconnection with Blood and Black Lace beyond the 'assassin' of their Italian titles and the presence in a supporting role of Franco Ressel.
Besides creating a Kafka-esque nightmare out of these situations, where no-one except the powerful is innocent and the law arbitrary and absolute, the other major influence here emerges as Camus, with the various flashbacks – or pseudo-flashbacks – to pivotal incidents in the character’s life, such as his selfish treatment of his mother, older mistress and younger girlfriend, the former seeming to reference The Stranger, and his once failing to intervene to prevent a man’s suicide, a la The Fall.
Both the central performance from Marcello Mastroianni and Petri’s direction are highly impressive, with the actor’s nuanced performance skilfully making us unsure of whether or not he is in fact guilty, and indeed also raising questions of what exactly this word might mean in this particular context, and the director utilising a nice mixture of neo-realist, post-neo-realist and expressionist / expressive images.
A curiously off-centre composition visually repeats the message of the dialogue
Yet, if there is an element of Antonioni’s style in this post-neo-realist aspect of the film, Petri also resists making an anti-giallo in which the mystery – did he or didn’t he do it – would have remained unresolved.
Of particular note is the handling of the aforementioned ‘quasi-flashbacks,’ precisely because they can’t quite be read so clearly as such, having that Rashomon-like quality of being the subjective, interested reconstructions of their originator.
As to the actual resolution, I’ll leave to watch the film for yourself, even if anyone with a knowledge of Petri’s background, work and politics and probably work it out for themselves...
Or, rather, one resolution, for apparently in some territories – including Australia, the subtitled version under review having come from an Australian TV broadcast – the ending was altered to give it a different inflection – an element which raises the wider question of what happens, as is so often the case with Euro-cult films, when the distributor or censors become effective co-authors.
With crisp black and white cinematography courtesy of none other than Carlo di Palma, sharply written dialogue by Pasquale Festa Campanile and Massimo Franciosa, and a pleasing jazzy score, The Ladykiller of Rome, well, slays...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)