L'assassino... è al telefono / The Killer is on the Phone

Whilst preparing for  the murder of his current target hitman Ranko Dragovic (Telly Savalas) has a chance encounter with Eleanor (Anne Heywood), the wife of one of Dragovic's previous victims from five years earlier. She had been suffering from amnesia about this traumatic event, but now begins to recall details of it, thus making herself a threat to the killer.

I'd previously seen this 1972 giallo by Alberto De Martino from an old VHS source, and dubbed into English, so it was a welcome opportunity to see it again for the first time in a clean, widescreen, Italian dub with English fansubs.

Savalas is a suitably menacing, near-silent presence, recalling his role in Bava's Lisa and the Devil, while Heywood passes muster in the Frightened Woman role more usually assigned to an Edwige Fenech, Florinda Bolkan, Carroll Baker or Dagmar Lassander.

The theme of the unreliability of memory is, of course, a staple of the filone -- one thinks of The Girl Who Knew too Much, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage and Lizard in a Woman's Skin before this, and of Footprints on the Moon and The Man Without Memory a couple of years afterwards.

While not reaching the heights of these points of comparison, The Killer on the Phone is nevertheless a solidly put together production, benefiting in particular from a lush Stelvio Cipriani score and attractive cinematography from Aristide Massaccessi.

De Martino tries to inject a bit of style into proceedings, but his contributions are more hit and miss. The slow-motion lyrical flashback scenes as Eleanor recovers her previously repressed memories whilst under the influence of a truth drug are a bit over the top in that post Elvira Madigan way. The director is on surer footing when it comes to such staples of the form as the fetishisation of weaponry and black gloves; the close-ups of eyes; the shock zooms and, yes, plenty of product placement for Justerini & Brooks.

The use of the theatrical milieu is also worth noting, Eleanor being an actress by profession. This allows for some confusion over reality versus role-play, as the boundaries between her dramatic work and her traumatic psychodrama become blurred; despite currently being in preparation for a production of Lady Godiva she recites Lady MacBeth's famous murder speech, potentially hinting that she's not as innocent in the affair as appears on the surface.

The theatre space provides the location for an effective finale that sees 'the curtain descend, everything end' or 'bring the house down' in an almost literal way for at least one of the dramatis personae; to say more would spoil things.

Il consigliori / The Counsellor

As the title suggests, Il consigliori / The Counsellor lies squarely within the filone inaugurated by the success of The Godfather.


An Amati film set in San Francisco with a Riz Ortolani score, but it's not Perversion Story

But as a cut-price Italian imitation of its model, it also necessarily differs from its Italian-American counterpart in a number of significant ways.

Most obviously there is its duration, an hour and a half rather than three hours, along with the concomitant lack of epic grandeur.

But it is also evident in the western rather than eastern US settings, which take us away from the traditional US mafia heartlands, and the composite rather than xerox nature of the three main characters, as incarnated by Martin Balsam, Tomas Milian and Francesco Rabal.

Balsam plays the film's godfather figure, Don Antonio Macaluso.

Milian plays the Don's adoptive son, consigliori and lawyer Thomas Accardo.

But with Don Macaluso having no actual family Milian also occupies a somewhat Michael Corleone type role as reluctant heir-apparent and through his relationship with Dagmar Lassander's Kay Adams-like schoolteacher.

It is this that creates a tension with Rabal's character, Vincent Garofalo.

If he's the prodigal son and villain of the piece, he's also one who we can have some sympathy for, considering the way he he is treated by the Don.

The story begins with Accardo about to be released from jail and the Don and Garofalo deciding that former colleague Lucchese must be killed as, insane and liable to shoot his mouth off, he is a threat to the organisation as a whole.


Lucchese

The key tropes are the classic ones: First, once you are in, you don't leave except for via a casket. Second, it's nothing personal, only business.


Re-united, if only temporarily; note the classic use of empty space to suggest distance

When Accardo is freed and announces his intention to leave the family, Don Macaluso breaks these rules by agreeing to let him go. What makes this all the worse in Garofalo's eyes is that the Don also refuses to let him establish his own family.

Accordingly Garofalo makes a deal with some rival families and attempts a coup. Unfortunately for him the attempts on both the Don's and Thomas's lives fail...

Around about this point another key difference between The Godfather and The Counsellor emerges.

The Corleone family would personally act only if there was no other option, as with Michael's killing Solozzo and Captain McCluskey, or when it took precedence over business concerns, as with Sonny's tendency towards hot-headed impulse decisions. Personal involvement entailed greater risk of being implicated in a crime, whose actual commission was best left to a “button man”.

Here, by contrast, the Don, Accardo and Garofalo tend to lead their men by example, entering into the fray when it isn't strictly necessary. It's maybe not particularly plausible – though, again, given the cut-rate nature of these mobs, it could be – but does at least allow for plenty of action.


Obligatory car chase

Another pleasing aspect of the film in this regard is the unpleasantness of its violence, as with the little girl who gets blown up by the package intended for Accardo or the feeding of a restaurant owner who shelters the Don into a pizzeria oven; since the film's cinematographer was Aristide Massaccessi, one half wonders if this image inspired Annie Belle's fate in Absurd.

Those who prefer Milian's more mannered performances may be disappointed by the relative restraint he displays here. The important point is that this is in line with his character and, as such, serves to demonstrate Milian's dynamic range.

Alberto De Martino's direction is functional, efficient and very much what the film needs. It's only business (filone cinema), after all, and nothing personal (auteur cinema).

Último deseo / The People who Own the Dark

You could be forgiven for mistaking this 1976 Spanish horror entry as being the work of Amando De Ossorio, featuring as it does a horde of unseeing, zombie-like monsters much like his Blind Dead along with a small group of people holed up by said monsters a la Return of the Evil Dead.

In fact, however, the film was directed by Argentinean ex-pat Leon Klimovsky from a scenario co-authored by Blood Spattered Bride director Vicente Aranda.

We begin with the introduction of a dozen characters as they assemble at a mansion house for a masked, de Sade-inspired orgy. The six men including Alberto De Mendoza as scientist Professor Fulton and Paul Naschy as military man Bourne. One of the six women functions as mistress of ceremonies. The others, including Teresa Gimpera and Maria Perschy, are there to service the men's requirements.





But before the orgy moves into Jesus Franco territory the dungeon is shaken, as if by an earthquake.


Being a pre-destape film, this is about as far as it goes nudity wise

Venturing into the upper levels of the mansion to see what is going on, the participants find the servants blinded, their eyes burned white. Fulton realises that these symptoms are indicative of a nuclear explosion nearby. (Yes, this makes no sense, except in a Protect and Survive or Duck and Cover don't tell the public too much of the truth about nuclear armageddon way.)


The Beyond meets Horror Express?

Come morning the six men drive into the nearest town to find out what has happened and stock up on supplies. Victor cracks under pressure and kills some of the blind people before himself being killed by Edward; back at the mansion, Edward in turn suffers a breakdown, stripping naked and crawling around on all fours as if he were a pig.


Naschy blasts some of the local wildlife

The situation becomes more desperate as night falls and the blind march on the mansion intent on killing all those within...


A Birds meets Night of the Living Dead shot

One of the greatest strengths of the horror film is often its capacity for allegorical use, the way it allows the filmmaker to obliquely comment on social and political issues to cutting effect.

This can be seen in Night of the Living Dead, as an obvious inspiration for both The People Who Own the Dark and De Ossorio's Blind Dead films, and the Blind Dead themselves: Romero's film allowed him to comment upon the likes of the Vietnam War and the continuing necessity of the Civil Rights movement, while the Blind Dead enabled Ossorio to sneak criticism of the Franco regime past the Spanish censors.




Random Naschy images

The problem in this regard for The People Who Own the Dark is a relative lack of clarity about what the film's message is. With the Blind Dead it was easy to see, in that here were these ancient undead figures who killed those amongst the younger generations who failed to keep silent, or had the temerity to raise an oppositional voice.

Here by contrast we have a mixed bag of reference points also including Pasolini's Salo, Bunuel's The Exterminating Angel, Saura's La Caza, Petri's Todo Modo – coincidentally released in the same year – and, amongst less exalted / more generic texts, Wyndham's The Day of the Triffids and Romero's The Crazies.

The thing that these works have in common with the Blind Dead films and Night of the Living Dead is an internal consistency. Once you have accepted that the bourgeois in The Exterminating Angel cannot leave the house; that the dead are returning to life to eat the living; that there are ambulatory killer plants on the loose amongst an almost entirely blind population; or that a group of bourgeois sadists are intent on exploring every facet of power and perversity that they can, everything else follows logically. You know how to engage with the film, where your sympathies are supposed to lie or, indeed, if you are to take a more detached, observational position.

Here by contrast we don't get any particular cues. This is most apparent when it comes to the most attractive of the female characters, Perschy's tart with a heart. Before the catastrophe, she has an encounter with a blind beggar and gives him alms. Later, post-apocalypse, she attempts to leave the mansion with one of the men to go in search of help.

It's the kind of selfless, heroic gesture that would conventionally be rewarded.

But the couple are then captured and killed by the blind, much like young lovers Judy and Tom in Night of the Living Dead were by the ghouls. The thing is that whereas the ghouls operated on a pure instinctual need to feed, the blind mob is being led by the aforementioned beggar, and dumps the mutilated bodies before the sighted for added impact.

Assembling this, my dominant impression was perhaps of a universe informed by Machiavelli – in the kingdom of the blind the one eyed man is king or, as we might formulate it here, the lifelong blind man is king amongst the recently blind – De Sade and Nietzsche in which the greatest error is not to take advantage of others' weakness when you have the chance for, resenting you, they will seek your destruction as soon as they get the chance.

These ideas aren't a problem, if you are a Pasolini or a Bunuel and attracted their kinds of audience, or if you're single-mindedly intent on making as unrelenting a film as possible, but Klimovsky doesn't appear to be.


Survival?

At least the cynical and nihilistic ending, with with some decidedly ironic use of Beethoven's Ode to Joy via A Clockwork Orange and / or Murder in a Blue World, is well realised and consistent with what has gone immediately before it, to indicate who really owns the dark, the light and the (brave new) world and to take you out of the film satisfactorily.

Alas, it's a slog getting there, with too little in the way of sex, violence and spectacle for the kind of hardened Euro-trash fan who is likely to be the primary audience for the film today.

In sum, very much an oddity as a rip-off of a rip-off that nevertheless subverts imitation with its own curious innovations.

Dalle Ardenne all'inferno / The Dirty Heroes

Wow, what a mess!

An intermittently entertaining one, to be sure, but a mess nonetheless.

For this post- Dirty Dozen WWII action / caper crossover can't seem to decide what it wants to be, the tone it wants to take, and generally outlives its welcome somewhat thanks to a resulting lack of focus and a near two-hour running time.

We begin with the escape of two Chicago gangsters, Joe Mortimer (Frederick Stafford) and Randall (Howard Ross) from a Nazi POW camp, aided by one of the guards, Sergeant Rudolph Petrowsky; Petrowsky just happens to also be from the Windy City, having had to leave the US in a hurry and take advantage of his dual nationality sometime before the war.

The three men are intent on steal some diamonds and plans for the V1 and V2 rockets from the Nazis. To accompany these goals they need the assistance of three people.

The first person is local resistance leader, Luc Rollman (Adolfo Celi). He unfortunately expects that the diamonds should be returned to the Dutch people from whom the Nazi's appropriated them...

Students of geography and military history will at this point note that the Ardennes, as referred to the in film's Italian title, is in Belgium rather than Holland; suffice to say that this proves an early indicator of the film's somewhat slapdash approach to such matters.

The second person is Kristina von Keist (Daniela Bianchi). She's the wife of the local Wermacht commander, General von Keist (Curd Jurgens). She's also Jewish, her real name being Hannah Goldschmitt.

Needless to say it would be very bad for her and her husband if recently arrived SS commander General Hassler (Helmuth Schneider) were to find out.

Being intent on pursuing what his army counterpart Keist feels to be a lost cause, Hassler's has brought about an end to the uneasy truce that had existed between Rollman's partisans and Keist's men by a series of punitive SS actions.

The third person - finally we get there - is another of the men's old Chicago crime colleagues, O'Connor (John Ireland) who's now a Colonel in the advancing US army. They need him to create a diversion by launching an attack on the German positions at the right time. The complication here is that O'Connor doesn't really have the authority to make such an attack...

In sum, what we have is an convoluted and co-incidence based story that alternates awkwardly between war as hell and war as caper approaches, with few clichés left unexplored - the good German and the bad Nazi, the Jewish woman passing as 'Aryan' - and some dubious treatments of the partisan struggle and the Holocaust where attempts at pathos tend instead to come off as bathos.

Alberto De Martino's direction is a mixed bag, some effective compositions and set pieces - most notably the underwater sequence in which our (anti-)heroes enter the Nazi compound through the canal system - being offset by a lack of imagination in the battle scenes, some poorly integrated stock footage and, most laughably, a moment when a reconnaissance plane commandeered by O'Connor transforms into a bomber, delivers its payload, and metamorphoses back again.

Bruno Nicolai and Ennio Morricone contribute some suitably stirring martial music.

The leading men acquit themselves well enough in the derring-do stakes - Howard Ross looking as though he'd been working out particularly hard - whilst Bianchi makes for a suitably attractive love interest and sympathy figure.

The cast are nicely rounded out by some of those always welcome Eurocult faces, including, in two rather unimaginative pieces of casting John Bartha as an SS officer and Tom Felleghy as one of his allied counterparts.

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]

Extrasensorial / Blood Link / The Link / Blutspur

You never know quite what you're going to get with an Alberto De Martino film. Responsible for some of the worst examples of filone cinema, such as Puma Man and Miami Golem, he's also made directed some seriously underrated films like 7 Hyden Park, A Special Magnum for Tony Saitta and this 1982 horror-thriller.

Indeed, had Blood Link / Extrasensorial been directed by someone better known like Brian De Palma or David Cronenberg – as two contemporary reference points, for reasons that will become clear – I have little doubt that the film would be acknowledged as a classic of its type.

Dealing with the romantic theme of the doppelganger in a contemporary guise that incorporates extra sensory powers – hence the alternative title – the film opens with a waltz scene that turns into a murder scene to recall the opening moments of Shadow of a Doubt.

Given that Hitchcock's film was also intimately concerned with doubles we may assume this to be a deliberate quotation on De Martino's part, especially given that the killer, like his counterpart in Hitchcock film targets lost soul type older women.

Beyond this the film riffs on a number of more general Hitchcockian themes, such as the transference of guilt and the double pursuit narrative whereby the “wrong man” must catch the guilty one to prove his own innocence to the typically unimaginative and ineffectual authorities.






Just a dream?

Martino also subtly misdirects us in this opening sequence as, breaking it down logically, the killer would have to have murdered his victim in plain sight of all least some of the others in the ballroom.

As the narrative continues, Dr Craig Mannings wakes up from his seeming nightmare – “I guess it was just a nightmare” – to the sound of the telephone ringing. It is his colleague and girlfriend Dr Julie Warren, reminding him that they have an important meeting at the university where they have to demonstrate that their research warrants further funding.

The meeting does not go well. Mannings insults the board and refusing to tell them what they want to know, with its head in any case being somewhat biased against their research, which involves the use of acupuncture and electric shocks with Mannings himself as the chief test subject, as unscientific.






Waking dreams?

Worse for Mannings, however, are the visions that trouble him on his way to campus, in which he sees himself picking up and murdering another woman, along with various curious details like writing on a boat in German – a language he has little or no knowledge of.

Mannings starts to believe that his experiments have unleashed something within him connected to his past – a past which, even by the standards of the Italian giallo is unusually traumatic.

For starters he and his brother Keith were born conjoined. Then their parents died in an accident when they were seven years old, leaving them to be brought up by different foster parents. Then Keith himself apparently died in another accident when he was 17. “I've been searching for the answers since I was seven years old,” as Craig remarks.


Stalk and slasher imagery with a twist

Or, rather, didn't: Keith is alive and killing in Hamburg, Germany – thus explaining the boat – and, sharing a psychic connection with his brother, also knows that Craig is well on his way to realising this and endevouring to stop him...

With its wintry locations, psychosomatic weird science and conjoined twin motif Extrasensorial recalls elements of De Palma's Sisters and Cronenberg's The Brood and Scanners. Crucially, however, De Martino uses these building blocks to create something that is recognisably his own, as further testified to by the way in which Dead Ringers and Raising Cain seem to almost return the compliment at times by then further developing some of Extrasensorial's themes and ideas.


The old through a fish tank shot

And there are certainly a lot going on around such seemingly uncharacteristic Italian horror topics as memory and identity and – perhaps more familiar, if because commonly used as an analytic tool here – the workings of the unconscious. It's not difficult to interpret Craig and Keith as representing ego and id respectively or Keith as the repressed side of Craig who gives free rein to anti-social and murderous impulses his brother denies, or to see them as introvert and extravert incarnations of the same person.

Here we might also note Craig's more assertive / aggressive response to the review board and his remark to its head: “I trust you have no difficulty finding the right patients?” “No, actually I have a great deal of difficulty. In fact we're looking right now for a really tight-assed subject to see how we can loosen him up. Would you volunteer Dr Adams?”

The thing is that it's almost too easy to invoke the ideas of Freud, Jung and company here. A more cinema-specific alternative is to read the opening scene as establishing a kind of Deluzean “crystalline image” with a temporary circuit of the real and the virtual chasing one another; significantly Deleuze entitles a key chapter of his Cinema 2: The Time-Image “From recollection to dreams”. With that “irrational cut” from the ballroom to the antechamber we can't definitively say whether we're seeing a representation of Keith's actions, Craig's visions of them, or something in-between. (“I meet my siamese twin after all these years and he calls me a murderer!” “I saw you!”)

If generic requirements mean that De Martino ultimately has to provide a clearer resolution than the more thoroughgoing Deleuzean critic might like, as epitomised by the way in which the final shock is more a detachable fragment in the manner of Carrie than a challenge to narrative closure, the director nevertheless does repeatedly confuse things and states by continually using mirrors within his compositions along with some adroitly executed match cuts that take us from one brother and location to the other. (Unfortunately, as is so often the case with this kind of film, the unsatisfactory pan and scan presentation has a tendency to make a something of a mockery of the filmmakers work, undoubtedly further contributing to their ghettoisation.)


The curse of panning and scanning strikes again

The other cornerstones of the film are Michael Moriarty's performances as the brothers, who start out with their own particular mannerisms – Craig plays with his hair when he is nervous, for instance – but quickly pick up on each others quirks, albeit with an apparent difference insofar as Keith consciously imitates Craig whereas Craig seems unawares that he is picking things up from Keith.


Keith


Craig


Keith and Craig

Cameron Mitchell plays an over the hill ex-boxer turned wrestler who has relocated from the US to Germany with his daughter, an old acquaintance of Craig's who has the misfortune to come across Keith first. His performance is also endearingly (sym)pathetic, making for a satisfying contrast with the smug, self-satisfied Max Morlacchi of Blood and Black Lace nearly 20 years earlier. (The use of German locations is explained by the co-production partners on the film being Italian, American and German.)




Who am I? Where amI?

The two female leads, Sarah Langenfeld as Mitchell's rightfully concerned daughter, and Penelope Milford, as Dr Warren, likewise deliver more than satisfactory performances, helped by the fact that their roles having more depth to them than many comparable films. Both are active rather than passive characters, going some way towards offsetting the more straightforwardly exploitative 'tits and a scream' aspects of the roles, although their divergent fortunes could be read as telling.

No less than Ennio Morricone delivers a simple but effective score that is by turns romantic and suspenseful while Inferno and Phenomena cinematographer Romano Albani meets all the demands of De Martino's sophisticated mise en scene, producing several layered foreground / background compositions and distorting effects.

Una Magnum Special per Tony Saitta / A Special Magnum for Tony Saitta / Blazing Magnums / A Strange Shadow in an Empty Room

This 1976 Italian-Canadian-Panamanian (!) co-production, made in Montreal with a North American cast is, not surprisingly, a somewhat difficult film to place. At times it feels like a poliziotto, with plenty of sustained hard-hitting action scenes and an alternately cool jazz and driving funky soundtrack courtesy of Armando Trovajoli, at others like a giallo, with a labyrinthine murder-mystery plot and long list of individuals to be eliminated from the inquiries by the investigators – if, that is, the killer doesn't get to them first...

The basic giallo vs poliziotto structure, broadly corresponding to an alternation between plot, character and narrative focused material alternating with dialogue free action sequences, is neatly established from the outset.

On the university campus student Louise Saitta argues with her teacher and presumed lover Dr George Tracer (Martin Landau) while some other students play frisbee and catch football nearby, including Louise's ex-boyfriend, Fred (Jean LeClerc).

Clearly distressed at something, Louise tries to telephone her brother, indicating that it's imperative that she speak to him.


Like a number of gialli, we begin with a telephone call

Tony Saitta (Stuart Whitman) is an inspector in the Ottawa police who is currently occupied with intercepting some armed robbers, armed with machine guns and acting very much like their Roman or Milanese counterparts despite the unfamiliar location.


Rome or Ottawa – it's all the same?


But with some local colour as well...

After a chase, Saita forces their car off the road – through a shop window – then calmly shoots three of the four with his magnum before forcing the other to surrender.

This guy is tough, so tough that the the bad guy doesn't even think about chancing whether he'd fired six shots or only five...

Unfortunately he's also perhaps not the best suited to the case about to ensue, having a distinctly poliziotto tendency to act first and worry about asking questions later, in addition to also being more like an amateur than a professional investgator in the way his personal involvement in the case about to ensue repeatedly clouds his judgements.


Yet another photo of a lady above suspicion?

Later that night Louise and Fred play a practical joke on Dr Tracer at a party also attended by all the other suspects, red herrings and victims to be, with Louise pretending to have some sort of seizure.

Then, after Dr Tracer has attended to her and the joke has been revealed, Louise does have a seizure and drops dead, despite the doctor's desperate ministrations.

Tony arrives in Montreal for the funeral, where he meets the Tracer and Cohn families along with the other suspects, red herrings and victims to be; the only one whose role is clear being the blind Julie (Tisa Farrow).


A line (up) of some of the suspects

Learning of Louise's desperate and frightened state from Julie, Tony has his contact in the local police, Sergeant Matthews (John Saxon) arrange for an autopsy to be performed, which reveals traces of poison...

In the meantime, Tony follows up leads, learning that Louise was seeing Dr Tracer. Seeing motive in the respectable doctor's need to avoid a scandal and an opportunity, Tony puts things together and, after Margie Cohn refuses to corroborate that she could be certain what Tracer administered Louise, has him arrested on suspicion of murdering his sister. (To add to the suspicion and sleaze Tony finds Margie (Gayle Hunnicutt), whose name is apposite insofar 'she spreads easily' for just about everyone except her husband, in bed with Tracer's son, Robert.)

The question that eventually emerges is whether Tony has added two and two to come up with three or five.

A bottle of nail varnish found on the mangled remains of a transvestite found in a rock crushing machine leads Tony, via a sex shop (?!), to a transvestite club, one of those cross-dressing fight scenes that cropped up with surprising regularity in Italian films of this time, and the revelation that Margie's brother, Terry, was mixed up in the case and knew too much, specifically about a necklace Louise was wearing in one of the last photographs taken of her. Either Dr Tracer is innocent or has a co-conspirator...


The key to the mystery?

The quest leads Tony to a locker and a quest to track down three fences.

The first, whom he chases through the underground station and proceeds to interrogate via water torture in the men's room, proves to know nothing...

The second, whose car he pursues recklessly through the streets of downtown Montreal in one of those ridiculously over-the-top chases, choreographed by none other than Remy Julienne, at least knows something, thus dragging us back into the giallo plot for the third act after this second dominated by a succession of poliziotto action sequences...






Stunt cars!

Imagine a cross between The Bloodstained Butterfly and Violent Naples if you can and you have a fair idea of what you're in for here. A Special Magnum for Tony Saitta perhaps won't work as well as either of these films for the purist, having too many plot convolutions for the poliziotto fan and insufficient opportunity to engage with the mystery for oneself for their giallo counterpart, but which never lets up and delivers 100 per cent entertainment for those willing to ascribe to the simpler taxonomy of dividing films into the two camps of the good and the bad.


A giallo style blade in the dark, but not from a black-gloved hand


A poliziotto cop with his big, loud weapon

This said, while the film's greater emphasis on action inhibits the extent to which Alberto De Martino can engage in directorial sleights of hand, there are nevertheless enough subtleties to his direction to reward a second viewing.

The same can also be said of Gianfranco Clerici and Vincenzo Mannino's writing providing one is willing to overlook the question of exactly how Saitta, outwith his jurisdiction and pursuing what increasingly comes across as a personal vendetta, is allowed to get away with it all, with a number of telling exchanges and seemingly throwaway lines that gain renewed significance with the benefit of hindsight:

“I've just left Tracer's colleagues.”
“And?”
“As far as they're concerned he's a good doctor, a straight shooter and a family man. Can you believe that? He's a guy that's been living a double life and all this time he's been getting away with it.”

Stuart Whitman's no-nonsense, take-no-prisoners approach to the role is appropriate, conveying his confidence and certitude that he is in the right, regardless, while Martin Landau's more nuanced portrayal of Dr Tracer works nicely as a counterpoint, conveying an apparent ambiguity and uncertainty that his erstwhile nemesis lacks.

John Saxon's role is a largely thankless one in that he doesn't really get involved with the action scenes and remains a largely peripheral figure in the investigations. Still, even walking onto the scene from time to time, his is always a welcome presence.

The overall message of the film might perhaps be summed up as there being “none so blind as those who would not see”. Even if its cross-filone compromises mean it perhaps fails to convey this as convincingly or consistently as the likes of The Bird with the Crystal Plumage or Deep Red, A Special Magnum for Tony Saitta remains, like De Martino's work as a whole, well worth a look from any Italian popular cinema enthusiast willing to go beyond the more familiar names.

L' Assassino... è al telefono / The Killer Is on the Phone / Scenes from a Murder

Arriving back in Ostend after spending a few days working in London, acclaimed actress Eleanor (Anne Heywood) suffers a shock when she crosses paths with hitman Drasovic (Telly Savalas).


We open with the arrival of a ferry rather than a jet, though elsewhere Drasovic repeatedly reschedules a flight to London

The effect is to make her forget all that has happened in the last five years - neither that her home in Zune Street has long been demolished; nor that her fiance, Peter, was killed by Drasovic; nor her subsequent marriage to George.








The moment of recognition; a OAR presentation would undoubtedly help us appreciate the scene better here

But whereas Eleanor can't yet place where she has seen Drasovic before, he realises that she is an unforeseen loose that needs tying up before he returns to the job at hand, that of assassinating the man responsible for brokering a deal between oil producers and petrochemical companies.


A later moment of misrecognition as the assassin strikes at who he believes to be Eleanor; note the use of the screen between the two as an echo of the earlier images

The mystery, meanwhile, is whether someone amongst Eleanor's personal and professional circle might have hired Drasovic all those years ago; certainly there is no shortage of suspects:

Dr Chandler: I'd like to try a shot of Pentathol

Thomas, Eleanor's stage partner: Isn't that dangerous

Dorothy, Eleanor's sister and potentially jealous understudy: Only if you're afraid of the truth

Dr Chandler: Is anybody here afraid of it?

George: Of course not.

Cue potentially telling exchange of glances between those present.

The film has a literate, self-reflexive script, even referencing Pirandello at one point (“one shot of pentathol and his philosophy [of truth] goes down the drain,” according to Thomas) but is ultimately too conventional to succeed as a Tenebre-style mise-en-abyme deconstruction of giallo conventions.




A fetishistic arrangement of watches conceals the real tools of the assassin's trade

There's no real prospect that Eleanor will emerge as the one who conspired to have Peter killed and that this explains her repressed memories, for instance.

While it can fairly be argued that this isn't its goal, as further demonstrated by the identity and motive of Drasovic's employer five years earlier, the film is also less successful than Puzzle as an amnesia themed giallo.

One thus gets the same impression as with Alberto De Martino’s other gialli, such as Man with the Icy Eyes and Blood Link: he certainly has an affinity for the genre and the capacity to come up with intriguing situations, but never quite manages to bring them to realization on screen to their full potential.

The characterisations of Eleanor and Drasovic are too straightforward (though the latter’s penchant for collecting model soldiers is a nice touch) while the mise-en-scene lacks the kind of enigmatic details to draw one in and reward careful or repeat viewings; there is nothing comparable to the musical clock in Tessari's film.

Yet if the one-note nature of Heywood and Savalas's characters largely restricts their performances to neurotic woman-in-peril and killer automaton cliche, it cannot be denied that both are effective, playing their roles as if to the manner born.

Moreover, this also creates that bit more space and purpose for the supporting cast, insofar as in addition to fulfilling the usual functions of suspects, red herrings and additional victims, somewhere amongst their number we know there must be the point of connection between the leads, grating each line or gesture that potential additional bit of gravitas.

The film was lensed by Aristide Massaccessi and, as such, looks good. Stelvio Cipriani’s mournful themes are another asset, as are his effective suspense cues and shock stingers.