Mondo Exotica

I've just been reading Mondo Exotica: Sounds, Visions, Obsessions of the Cocktail Generation, which I would heartily recommend to anyone with an interest in the lounge revival of the 1990s.

This, of course, also translates into a recommendation for any readers of this blog insofar as it brought us reissues of the likes of Piero Umiliani's mondo scores for Luigi Scattini or a renewed interest in the work of Les Baxter, AIP's go-to man for re-scoring Italian horror films in the 1960s.



Author Francesco Adolfini's discussions of Italy's colonial experiences, particularly under fascism, are also of particular interest from the perspective of the country's popular cinema and culture.

Discussing the battle of Adua in Ethopia in 1896, in which some 15,000 Italian soldiers were killed by the native forces, he notes how the Ethopian Emperor Menelik's name entered into the vocabulary, "synonymous with 'bad,' 'devil' or 'rebel'."

I'd be tempted to say that the names of Diabolik, Satanik and other fumetti neri figures of the 1960s bear a trace of this legacy.

Likewise, I wondered how far the fate of Sandokan was tied up with politics: As a anti-British figure encouraged by the fascists, who made two films of his adventures in the early 1940s, was he too politically suspect to be revived prior to the 1960s, when he could be refashioned as a more general anti-colonial figure?

More widely, was it easier for Italians (or Germans) to be anti-colonial at this time because there was less of a direct impact compared to Britain and, especially, France? (Also, is this one of the many problems with Africa Addio: that 'they' should be free to rule themselves, but 'they' are not ready yet seems to be its message? )

Such discussions also provide useful background for understanding the likes of the Black Emanuelle films of the 1970s, as when Adolfini quotes Nico Fidenco's intentions with his scores and then brings out their unintentionally racist subtexts and discourses around the exotic other.

A fuller review may follow if this hasn't been enough to convince you...

Fine primo tempo

The kind of Italian films that get discussed in this blog would be shown with an intermission splitting them up into two parts; sometimes when watching an Italian-sourced print you'll see the intermission cards within the film.

But were there intermission placements standardised, or left up to the projectionist to decide upon when he was making up the film from its component reels?

And has anyone ever discussed the construction of the film in relation to this: in the former case that there needed to be a climactic moment at the designated intermission reel change point or, in the latter, that each reel had to have its own discrete climax, so that the intermission could be placed after any reel?

Or, to put it another way, is there a Planet Hong Kong for Italian popular cinema circa 1956-84 that relates the formal properties of the films to their mode of production in a comparable manner

Argento budget question

I've just been watching the documentary Italian Kings of B, which has a brief segment with Tony Musante. He says The Bird with the Crystal Plumage was sufficiently low-budget to be made with ends of film stock, and that Argento would say cut as soon as he felt a scene was done, while Storaro would keep shooting if there was something that interested him. What do you think is the truth of this? I'd be inclined to disbelieve him, that even at this point Argento wasn't exactly the Italian equivalent of poverty-row, but is / was buying ends of film really such a rarity for a first-time director, or a lower budget production? (After all, didn't the spare wood left behind by Lawrence of Arabia furnish spaghetti westerns shot in Almeria?)

And, indeed, does anyone have a sense of who are reliable sources and not in Italian popular cinema (e.g. Fabrizio Jovine as someone who the Lucio Fulci Remembered DVD people found to be a ‘key informant’), or anything to do otherwise triangulating sources?

The documentary itself is great; I just wish there was more of it...

Yeah, whatever

Every visit to the cinema, despite the utmost watchfulness, leaves me dumber and worse than before.”
- Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia

Yeah, and a hearty 'fuck you' to you too!

La legge dei gangsters / Gangster's Law / Quintero

We open in medias res, with the robbery of bank robbery. This is followed by a series of flashbacks, introducing the various robbers and how they came to be together on the job. Then, it is revealed that there is a traitor in the men’s midst…

It could be a brief summary of Reservoir Dogs or any of a number of Hollywood crime films inspired by it, but in fact it’s the opening half of Siro Marcellini’s 1969 Italian thriller Gangster’s Law.

Given the absence of flashbacks from the second half of the film and the way in which it then proceeds in a linear manner, it seems likely that the heist was chosen as a starting point to grab the viewer’s attention and give top-billed Klaus Kinski some early screen time.


Kinski, one minute in

Absent for the next forty or so minutes, he’s also predictably the traitor…

This said, the extended flashbacks also allow Marcellini and his co-writer Piero Regnoli to introduce an element of social comment as the background story of each of the gangsters, Kinski’s Reiner excepted, is given in turn. (Curiously, in the version I watched, Regnoli is credited as Dean Craig with his real name given underneath.)


Citti, in a characteristic proletarian role

Franco Citti’s Bruno Esposito is the southerner who has come north – in this case to Genoa – in search of a better life for himself and his dependents, only to find that he is habitually treated without respect by the northerners. Getting beaten up in a nightclub after he seeks to dance with a local girl who is already spoken for, he is the one picked up by the police afterwards and who then loses his job as a panel-beater as a result.


Poli; in an Italian crime thriller it's a bad idea to get into a car with him to perform a heist (cf. Rabid Dogs)

Maurice Poli’s Rino Quintero is, like Reiner, a professional criminal, but at a different position in the criminal class hierarchy. Quintero is recently released from jail, whereas Reiner has always keep his hands clean. Quintero needs Reiner’s money to bankroll the job, while Reiner needs someone like Quintero to pull it off: Significantly it is not that Reiner is the brains and Quintero the muscle, but rather than the Reiner is the capitalist.

The other two robbers, Franco and Renato, are young rich kids involved with the counter-culture. Renato is bored and looking for ways to kick against the system he is otherwise destined to be a paid up member of, while Franco has some gambling debts his Countess mother is unwilling to pay off.

Between them they thus hatch a plan to have the Countess’s villa broken into that brings them into Quintero’s orbit.

Their presence also allows for some of the more awkward social comment, precisely because it is inserted into the film as a piece of speechifying via Renato’s girlfriend:

“Its so easy for us to change everything, to try to freak out [..] to put down morality, conventions, to try to break with the past and its taboos. But where do we stop trying to change things? For your sake I hope you realise that your 'joke' wasn't just your fault but a whole generation's fault, and that now you have a responsibility.”

The female characters in turn are also one of the film’s weak points as a whole. They were obviously felt necessary in box-office terms but are both underwritten by comparison with their male counterparts – the long-suffering moll girlfriend type is prominent – and by thus taking up screen time lessen the extent to which the 90-ish film can explore masculinity more deeply compared to Reservoir Dogs.


The distanced opening heist

Marcellini’s direction is hit and miss. The opening heist and chase are largely perfunctory. Some of their counterparts later on do, however, have more energy to them, with there also being some nice long tracking shots and good use of dockside locations and - yes – a fairground haunted hose for one shoot-out, with all the opportunities it affords being taken.




Images from the haunted house; note that the film makes use of blue-yellow contrasts in a number of places


Didn't we see this spider in Bloody Pit of Horror as well?

The film also benefits from wonderful Piero Umiliani score that supplies the right mood for each and every scene, be it 60s disco for the club Esposito visits, psychedelic-tinged grooves in the hipper underground venues habituated by Renato and Franco, or just straightforward crime-jazz suspense cues.

The preparation for the heist also sees Marcellini experiment with stopping the music momentarily in time with the freeze-frames of the photographs the men take.

Il Terzo Occhio / The Third Eye

This little known film is something of a missing link in the history of Italian post-Psycho and necrophile cinema, taking as it does elements from Freda’s Hichcock diptych earlier in the 1960s (both also being Panda productions) while itself providing the model for D’Amato’s Beyond the Darkness a decade later.


Diana Sullivan is in fact Erica Blanc; the entire cast and crew hides behind sometimes unconvincing English credits, including the transliteration of Olga Solbelli as Olga Sunbeauty

The Freda connection sees the music box theme from The Ghost being reused, while the roles played by Erica Blanc, as sisters Laura and Daniella, could easily have been shoe-ins for Barbara Steele were it not for the fact that neither is possessed, undead or actually malevolent.

Instead the villain roles are filled by veteran Olga Solbelli, whose career extended back to the 1930s, and Gioia Pascal, in what was her only acting role, with murderous necrophile Mino, played by a young Franco Nero, a more (sym)pathetic figure by comparison.

Solbelli plays the elderly widowed Countess who will not allow her son to marry his beloved Laura, while Pascal plays the loyal family servant, Marta, who covets Mino for herself, along with what is left of the family’s admittedly diminished estate, as payment for her father's loyal service in decades past.








The mise-en-scene augments the dialogue, as a conspiracy is formed

To achieve her goals Marta cuts the brake cable on Laura’s car, causing the vehicle to roll off an embankment and into a lake, and murders the Countess, pushing her down the stairs.

This also marks the one way in which D’Amato’s film departs from its model: He makes housekeeper Iris something of a composite of Solbelli and Pascal’s characters and begins with his Mino, Frank, already orphaned through the deaths of his parents in a car accident. In so doing he also gives his film more of a supernatural horror aspect, by having Iris cause Frank’s beloved Anna to sicken and die through black magic.

The shock of the his mother’s and, more importantly, Laura’s deaths drives the already mentally troubled Mino over the edge. He takes Laura’s body and preserves it; unlike D’Amato’s film there’s no subplot of having to steal the body from its grave, nor lovingly detailed exploration of the taxidermical process itself, although Mino does earlier give a bird the Norman Bates treatment.






I'm a taxidermist; I hate parties

From this point on the two films follow pretty much the same path, with the key points being their necrophile’s compulsion to pick up women and make love to them while in the presence of his immortal / preserved beloved; his equal compulsion to then kill them; his relationship with his housekeeper / would-be lover, and the eventual arrival of his beloved’s double to bring the whole thing to a shocking denouement.

Gore-hounds will likely prefer D’Amato’s film to Mino Guerreri’s for the simple reasons that it’s more explicit and is in colour rather than black and white. Others may be more open to Il Terzo Occhio’s own achievements.


Blanc uses 'no chance' bubble-bath

As far as explicitness goes, it's actually quite extreme, with Marta at one point bringing down her heel on the injured Countess's face, along with plenty of shots of the various female cast members (the 68-year-old Solbelli excluded) in their underwear and diaphanous nightwear that wouldn't have been out of place in a fumetti neri of the time.








The Countess's fall

Nero is clearly a better, more subtle, actor than Buio Omega’s Kieran Canter, his performance all the more interesting for being in such contrast to his most famous role, Django, which he had essayed only the year before. The other leads likewise hold their own, with Blanc welcome as always and the Sobelli/Pascal one-two proving as memorable as Franco Stoppa.

Where the film really impresses, however, is Guerreri’s direction, with set-ups that make make good use of foreground and background space, mirrors-based framings, and natural dividing elements; elegant and complex camera movements (including mounting the camera inside a rolling car and tracking the Countess's fall down the stairs), along with expressionistic superimpositions (including an apparently Vertigo-inspired nightmare sequence) and off-balance compositions. Though otherwise something of a journeyman, whose credits comprising a predictable mix of filone product, he really hit the ball out of the park with this one.




Why use words when images will suffice?

The cinematography is also beautifully crisp, bringing out the quality of the production design, whilst the romantic score moves the film out of the realm of “necrophile soap opera” – as critic Kim Newman once described Buio Omega, with its cold, detached Goblin score – towards that of necrophile melodrama.














Visions in Mino's Third Eye

The film is presented as being a free adaptation of a story by Gilles de Rais. Whether or not this is true, it’s worth noting in closing that Buio Omega’s story is credited to one Giacomo Guerrini, whose paucity of credits makes it difficult to determine for sure whether he was Mino Guerrini’s brother and had perhaps also provided the story credited to de Rais, although this does seem possible or even plausible.

The Fry's Chocolate Kuleshov Experiment?

Early 20th century Fry's Chocolate advert that could perhaps be combined with the Kuleshov experiment into montage:



Or would this be continuity editing rather than discontinuity montage?