Colpo Rovente / Red Hot Shot

When businessman Mac Brown is assassinated on a busy New York street, there is only one man to head the investigation: Frank Berin. For the previous year Berin had conducted extensive inquiries into Berin’s business dealings, but had been unable to find incontrovertible evidence of any criminal activity or conspiracy. Unfortunately for Berin, Brown’s daughter Monica has put up a $250,000 reward for information on her father’s killer(s). Worse still, the killers always seem to be one step ahead of him...

Colpo Rovente is stylishly directed by co-writer Piero Zuffi, with some particularly good use of mirror shots and of (then) high-technology to heighten the sense of modernist paranoia.

The film also benefits from smart deployment of New York and other US locations, along with clever opportunism in some found moments of spectacle, with Berin’s visiting Acapulco to follow up a lead inevitably occurring during the Day of the Dead celebrations.

The production design, in what Tim Lucas has characterised as the Continental Op style, nicely captures the contrasting milieus of their inhabitants – the psychedelic hippie happenings; the criminal boardroom; the laboratory replete with vials of brightly coloured liquids; the Greenwich Village gay bar. Pierro Piccioni’s bold, brash crime-jazz score propels the action along, as does the sharp editing by the incomparable Franco Arcalli.

In sum, even though the source of the fan-subbed AVI is cropped, with some familiar names in the credits being somewhat chopped-off, the film still looks good enough to convince that a digital restoration of the original materials would be justified. The main downside is that the narrative can be difficult to follow at times, perhaps most notably when Berin goes undercover and infiltrates a Hells Angels-type biker gang; aficionados of filone cinema will recognise Ugo Fangareggi among their number. There is a justification for this confusion, however, with the denouement also encouraging the viewer to retrospectively re-evaluate a couple of scenes and some key exchanges within them. It is the first of these, incidentally, that seems to provide further explanation for the Red Hot Shot title.

[NB: Spoilers follow after the pictures]

A blade in the dark... 

Black gloves and a gun... 

There's a very good reason for the framing of this shot.

The press reports...

The media reacts... 

The photofit #1 

The photofit #2 

Barbara Bouchet in her fancy penthouse

More a crime drama than a giallo perhaps, the film might be viewed as an alternate configuration of Elio Petri’s Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion. There we know that the titular investigator, the right-wing police chief, is also the his mistress’s killer. By being so obvious about it his culpability, however, he effectively conceals it. Here we don’t know that Berin set events in motion by assassinating Brown. When we learn this we might reconsider the identity parade and photo-fit session, where Berin uses himself as one of the reference points for the portrait of the murderer. Likewise, his brutality against a Bud Spencer lookalike festooned with bad tattoos, comes to make more sense.

Against this, though, we can also see that Berin has been responsible for the deaths of some innocents – if, that is, the world depicted is one where any innocents still exist, as certainly suggested the film’s conflation of business and crime, along with the closing scene of hippies over which are projected images from the film itself and culled from the news. This would also tie in with the importance of drugs to the narrative, even if the effects of LSD and heroin sometimes seem conflated.

All-told, gripping, stylish and provocative. And the always-welcome Barbara Bouchet. And, for those with less mainstream tastes, an appearance by experimental film-maker and all-round renaissance man Carmelo Bene as her reviled husband.

Finalmente... le mille e una notte / Les mille et une nuits érotiques / 1001 Nights of Pleasure

One of the basic criticisms made of filone cinema is that it it was imitative. Clearly imitation and innovation are placed in hierarchical terms, the latter valued above the former. But what then isn’t clear is what we should make of non-filone art films when they themselves form series.

Should Pasolini have made The Canterbury Tales and The Arabian Nights after The Decameron? Should there have been a Trilogy of Life? Why couldn’t he have said everything he wanted to in the one film?

These questions are all the more important here in that what we have is a Decamerotic made in imitation of The Decameron but which takes as its source text The 1001 Nights – and this a good year or two before Pasolini’s version.

Antonio Margheriti’s approach is very different from Pasolini’s, of course, but this serves to further establish that the film and other Decamerotics were selectively rather than slavishly imitative, tending to get rid of the more serious elements.








Though probably not a particularly big-budget film, the money is all there on the screen.

Taken in its own right the film has a lot going for it, with attractive locations, production design and costumes – the last often not amounting to much as far as the female cast are concerned.

It is also pretty funny in places.

The film consists of three stories – how far they are actually found in The 1001 Nights I cannot say – vaguely connected by a framing device in which sultan Al Mamoun challenges three storytellers to arouse him with erotic / pornographic tales in order that he can satisfy the latest addition to his harem, Zumurud, incarnated by Femi Benussi.


Benussi's boobs

The first of the three stories features another arbitrary and unjust sultan whose magic mirror tells him that he is not the greatest lover in the kingdom. He has the man who is sought out and sets him a test intended to demonstrate otherwise. Inevitably it doesn’t do what the sultan wanted...


More boobs, and some strategically placed fruit

This also means, however, that the storyteller’s work fails to satisfy Al Mamoun, who has him executed. Cue the second storyteller, whose fate is equally certain.

The second stort features Aladdin – or more exactly an Aladdin – and a Genie. Aladdin has the genie turn him invisible in order that he can sneak into a rich merchant’s house and make love to his wife Mariam, incarnated by Barbara Bouchet. Aladdin then makes use of a flying carpet to sneak her away. This flying carpet is distinguished by not going down until whoever is using it also ‘goes down’. Aladdin doesn’t have a problem with this when it is Bouchet, but inevitably the husband soon ends up on the flying carpet instead...


Bouchet auditions for The Sex Life of the Invisible Man

The third story begins with a parody of a spaghetti western as a mysterious stranger arrives in town to take up the challenge of satisfying a cruel princess thirteen times in one night. He proves more than up to this thanks to some duplicity that’s nicely, well, mirrored in Margeriti’s compositions...

L'uomo dagli occhi di ghiaccio / The Man with the Icy Eyes

Arizona state senator Neil Robertson has been murdered by a man with distinctive “icy eyes.” The police soon arrest a Mexican immigrant, Valdez. Thanks in the main to the testimony of an eyewitness, a stripper by the name of Anne Saxe (Barbara Bouchet), Valdez is found tried, found guilty and sentenced to die in the gas chamber. Italian-American journalist Eddie Mills (Antonio Sabato) is not convinced by the neatness of the whole affair and embarks upon his own investigation, which soon uncovers evidence that Valdez is innocent and the real man with icy eyes still at large...

Though released near the peak of the giallo boom, this 1971 entry from Alberto De Martino has more in common with the American thriller – I Want to Live! seems an obvious point of reference, albeit with the focus here being less on the one condemned and more on their would-be saviour – thanks to its unusual setting and the downplaying or reconfiguration of some of the more usual generic motifs and thematics.

Thus, for instance, while testimone oculare obviously has an important role, it is here less about the protagonist being unwittingly misled by their hitherto taken for granted perceptual framework, as in The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, than a duplicitous supporting character who may well have deliberately lied about what they saw. (There is still something of a pattern element, in that Valdez's conviction is aided by his having prior criminal form.)

What weakens L'uomo dagli occhi di ghiaccio / The Man with the Icy Eyes – besides an admitted distaste for Antonio Sabato's somewhat smug, self-satisfied persona – is the failure to fully integrate their two main narrative threads, as the identity of the killer declines in importance as saving Valdez becomes more so, rather than their being intertwined, along with the sense that less is made of the socio-political aspects of the piece than might have been the case.

Although the film-makers do certainly try here, as further evinced the way references are frequently made to Mills's Italian origins – with one also wondering whether there's possible (over-)analytical mileage to be made in the casting of Uber-Aryan Bouchet as a character by the name of Saxe, as in Saxon / WASP – I can't help thinking that the relocation of the action to a northern Italian city and commutation of Valdez to a southern Italian or non-Italian immigrant wouldn't have given the film a sharper edge.

This said, as the example of the Australian-set Pyjama Girl Case demonstrates, it is undoubtedly possible for the giallo to have both a foreign setting and specifically Italian cultural resonances. The difference, perhaps, is that the stranger in a strange land aspect there is less tacked on than integral to the meaning of the film as a whole, with its inspiration in fact coming from a real-world murder case. Or perhaps the problem for the filmmakers here was that the kind of thing they might have drawn on for inspiration had already been used, Giuliano Montaldo's Sacco e Vanzetti having been released in Italy the previous month.

One point of note for the Argento fans is that the film also makes use of the precognition idea found in Deep Red, as a supposed psychic / astrologer type tells Mills that he predicts three deaths before the night of Valdez's execution is out – the last being that of the reporter himself...

The French Sex Murders

From the sublime to the ridiculous – there is really no other way to summarise the difference between Death Occurred Last Night and this 1972 giallo which, lacking style, substance or budget, throws everything it can at the audience in hope that something will connect in that all-but-patented Dick Randall way.

The big gimmick, as signalled by the alternative The Bogeyman and the French Murders title is the presence of professional Humphrey Bogart lookalike Roberto Sacchi as the detective investigating a series of call-girl murders. He cannot really act – or more kindly is not given the opportunity to show that he can – but does seem to have his model's look and mannerisms down pretty well.

His case, introduced via flashback to allow for some 1940s film noir style voice over from Sacchi's English dubber and some quick scene setting via a Citroen DS pulling up beneath the Eiffel Tower, from which an unidentified silhouette then plunges – an undeniably effective opening, with the animated silhouette a refreshing departure from the more usual dummy and probably used because they could not get away with throwing one off the structure – at first seems open and shut.






Bogey lookalike in Paris

Following the theft of some jewels Gottvales (Peter Martell / Pietro Martellanza) retreats to the brothel belonging to Madame Colette (Anita Ekberg) to see his favourite girl, Francine (Barbara Bouchet). He wants her to leave with him, but she declines, causing him to get violent.

The next thing we see is Gottvalles leaving the scene in a hurry as American writer Randall – confusingly played by Raf Valentu / Renato Romano rather than Randall, though the producer does have one of his customary cameo roles later – who is researching for an article on the place, finds Francine's bloody corpse.


There are two things wrong with this picture - Bouchet is not naked and her character is already out of the film


A negative image like Alphaville, remembering that Howard Vernon was in Godard's film


or a cop out of A Bout de souffle; really any resemblance is purely coincidental

Inspector Bogart and his men quickly hunt down Gottvalles who protests his innocence. No-one really believes him, however, nor feels inclined to challenge the circumstantial nature of the evidence against him, and thus he is found guilty and condemned to be guillotined. Crazed, Gottvalles swears that he will have revenge on the judge and those who have betrayed him.

En route to what seems a hastily scheduled execution Gottvales seizes the chance to escape, but is then decapitated when his motorbike slams into a parked truck with an (in)conveniently positioned razor-sharp ledge.










The same person later did the effects on Alien and E.T., believe it or not

As Professor Waldemar (Howard Vernon) remarks it seems as if a kind of divine justice has intervened.

Then there is a second murder with the same modus operandi as the first. Either Gottvales has returned from the grave or they got the wrong man and the real maniac is still at large.

The list of suspects is, as usual, a long one. The Professor himself is distinctly of the mad scientist variety and was in possession of the dead man's head. Then there is his friend, the Judge; handsome assistant and beautiful daughter who – for good measure – are also carrying on a clandestine relationshp against his wishes. Then we have Gottvales's ex-wife Marianne (Rosalba Neri) and her current lover, a sleazy nightclub impresario with a wandering eye. And assorted other suspects / red herrings.


More of this, please

Only one thing is really certain: this list will be much shorter by the time Inspector Bogart delivers his summing up.

The French Sex Murders' co-writer and director Ferdinando Merighi – credited as F. L Morris – looks to be one of the forgotten me of Italian genre cinema, with only a fistful of other credits to his name. On this evidence, it is both understandable and probably for the best. Excepting some experiments with inverted and tinted images there is a distinct lack of visual flair to the proceedings, with insufficient dynamism and inventiveness to overcome the flat lighting and functional set-ups characteristic of Randall's low budgets.






La dolce morte of la dolce vita's Anita Ekberg x3


A piece of near-classic giallo imagery

Despite coming from future Academy Award winner Carlo Rambaldi the set-piece gore effects are marked more by enthusiasm than accomplishment. Again this seems more down to limited resources than anything else. The previous year Rambaldi had, after all, managed to create mutilated dogs on Fulci's Lizard in a Woman's Skin that were sufficiently convincing for him to have to produce them to prove he was not guilty of animal cruelty.

Although the cast looks good on paper and is further bolstered by some uncredited cameo appearances the ensemble nature of the piece prevents any individual from getting as much screen time, characterisation or – putting things squarely in exploitation terms – physical exposure as one might like. Rosalba Neri does at least deliver a seductive singing number, but Bouchet does not even get naked before her character is killed off. Likewise, while there is plenty of nudity and softcore fumbling amongst the rest of the cast, is it consistently – and unintentionally no doubt – subverted by the an all-pervading 70s porn ambience.


A nod to Fritz Lang's classic, remembering that Howard Vernon was his great friend in later life, post The Thousand Eyes of Dr Mabuse

Bruno Nicolai's score is a definite plus, but also sounds suspiciously like it has been taken from other films; the kind of secondhand, mix and match approach that seems, in fact, to typify the entire enterprise. (Unless – and I suppose it is possible, given the sheer number of scores most of the usual suspects amongst Italian composers were turning out at this time and the sometimes questionable attribution of certain scores to one or another – the cues originated here or were of a more library nature to begin with.)

The French Sex Murders is available on a nice DVD from Mondo Macabro, released as part of their Dick Randall collection. For the more casual giallo fan, however, the same company has also released the far superior The Killer Must Kill Again, accompanied by better – and more giallo-centred – extras.

Amuck!

Following the disappearance of her friend Sally Reece – and, as we soon learn lover; got to love that characteristic genre double standard with regard to male and female homosexuality – Greta Franklin (Barbara Bouchet) takes a job as a typist for decadent author Richard Stuart (Farley Granger) and residence in his Venice mansion.

After being drugged and seduced by Richard's partner Eleonora (Rosalba Neri) Greta is invited to one of the couples swinging parties where a porn film featuring Sally as Little Red Riding Hood is only one of the entertainments for the bourgeois couple's party.

But soon it seems that the Stuarts are getting wise to Greta's investigations: The plot of Richard's latest novel presents a covert warning to the girl who would know too much, while an invitation to go duck hunting in the marshes around the mansion almost sees Greta accidentally shot and then nearly sucked under the swamp…

Also known by the more exploitative titles Hot Bed of Sex in the UK and Leather and Whips in the USA, along with the more honest Alla Ricerca del piacere (i.e. In Search / Pursuit of Pleaure) this 1971 giallo from occasional genre contributor Silvio Amadeo is nothing if not sleazy fun.

If, however, one can look beyond the pulchritude on display – a task that is difficult when both the female leads look to have nearly missed when throwing on those outfits, which they also tend to change and / or remove at any opportunity – there are other reasons to appreciate the film.

In particular Amadeo exhibits a good sense of how to build suspense and mystery, smartly exploiting the ambiguities of the image and the intertextual associations of Farley Granger via Hitchcock's Rope and Strangers on a Train through some telling remarks about "the perfect crime".

Unfortunately a pan-and-scan presentation and poor source materials - the real crime here, we might say - means that this release from Eurovista is less easy to recommend, despite some nice supplemental materials in the form of short interviews with the two female stars and a photo gallery.