During the 1960s and 1970s Carlo Lizzani made a number of interesting genre films marked by a combination of solid entertainment, social comment and commitment, a logical extension of earlier neo-realist styled works such as Achtung Banditi and Cronaca di poveri amanti into the prime years of the filone cinema.
While preceded by Il Gobbo, about Rome resistance fighter and latterly bandit Alvaro Concenza, Svegliati e Uccidi - closer to Wake Up and Kill, rather than Wake Up and Die in English translation- marks an important step in the evolution of Lizzani's crime cinema, in engaging with contemporary Italian gangsterism rather than looking back to the 1940s.
The equivalent to Concenza here is petty criminal turned public enemy number one Luciano Lutring (Robert Hoffmann), another real-life bandit, Milanese rather than Roman, who became a respected writer and painter after his release from prison.
Lutring - whose name was also sufficiently well-known to be an alternative homonymous title for the film in Italy - is a complex character with obvious personal issues. First seeking to impress night-club singer Yvonne (Lisa Gastoni), whom he soon marries, he anaesthetises himself with drink and counters his feelings of inadequacy by carrying a machine gun he hardly knows how to use.
As an impulsive amateur rather than a professional, he emerges as something of the polar opposite of his counterpart in Bandits in Milan, Pierro Cavallero, who treats crime as a rational business like any other.
While Robert Hoffman is entirely satisfactory as Lutring the best performance in the film is probably that of Gian Maria Volonte, as his nemesis cum protector Inspector Moroni.
It's a testament to Volonte's abilities that while Moroni is very different from Cavallero in the later film, both characters are utterly convincing.
Moroni is also where the film gets even more interesting in political terms. In the Italian set portions of the film we see how he allows the media to focus on Lutring at the expense of other, actually more troublesome criminals whom he wishes to divert attention from and / or lull into a false sense of security, with a pragmatic emphasis on the either / or.
Ironically their number include one gang whom the naive Lutring brings a daring plan for a daylight robbery but who then decide to carry it out by themselves shortly before the arranged time in the hope that their erstwhile colleague will arrive just as the police do and serve as the fall guy.
The social commentary continues as Lutring flees to France, as different groups within the French police compete to be the ones who bring him to book, with predictable results.
Given all this, Lutring's position ultimately emerges as something of a riff on Peter Lorre's character in M, as a helpless figure whom everyone else, rather than wanting out of the picture, wishes to take advantage of.
Lizzani achieves a nice balance between modes in his direction, with enough style to avoid simply being a documentary and enough documentary to effectively convey the reality of the characters and their world as part of our own. This is perhaps best realised in the nightclub scenes, which are simultaneously realistic and expressive to convey a sleazy glamour, and the set-piece robberies, as a how (not) to do it guide.
Ennio Morricone's score is beautiful in its simplicity, building tension through the use of quasi-minimalist 'cells' of piano and percussion in the suspense and action sequences and expanding out for lush vocal numbers in the nightclub scenes.
Volonte's younger brother Claudio Camaso - if anything an even more intense performer - also appears in the film.
Showing posts with label Carlo Lizzani. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Carlo Lizzani. Show all posts
Sunday, 8 February 2009
Monday, 30 June 2008
Storie di vita e malavita / The Teenage Prostitution Racket / Prostitution
I've watched this 1975 film from Carlo Lizzani three times now and still can't quite get my head around it and whether it's offering serious social commentary on its subject, is exploiting it for sensationalist purposes, or – most likely on balance – a bit of both.
Certainly the first few moments pull no punches and make for decidedly uncomfortable viewing, as we get a grandmother pimping her purportedly 13-year-old granddaughter to passing motorists, with the girl exposing her breasts and pudenda before quickly moving to perform implied fellatio on the van driver who had thought he was only giving them a lift only a few moments earlier.
Their run-ins with a group of pimps who don't take kindly to incursions onto their turf forms a running thread through the remainder of the film, which presents a series of documentary-style reconstructions, each based on co-writer Marisa Rusconi's research.
The first of these case studies also works well, mainly because it seems more typical and credible. In it a naïve 16-year-old, Rosina, arrives in Milan from Sardinia. Her father died in an industrial accident, leaving Rosina to support the rest of the family. Being reluctant to marry a family friend several decades her senior, she has come to the city to take up work through her cousin. The job Rosina gets is, however, marginal at best, putting together bootleg tapes at piecework rates – if, that is, she even gets paid at all. At the weekend, another of the girls in the house-cum-workshop suggests that they go dancing. At the disco Rosina meets Salvatore, AKA Velvet. A pimp on the lookout for fresh meat, he turns on the charm and sweeps Rosina off her feet. By the time she realises his true nature, it is already too late...
The subsequent case studies have a tendency to be more sensationalistic and mondo-eseque. In one a girl from a good home, Gisella, is blackmailed into having relationships with men after she is photographed in a compromising situation. While one doesn't doubt that it could happen, it seems a somewhat inefficient and risky way of working compared to targeting others in Rosina's situation. In another a second respectable middle class girl prostitutes herself to express her contempt for her parents, before eventually confronting her father over his own liking for underage girls. Again, it seems too much like choosing the rarer specific case over the more routine and general one.
These later stories are also more explicit, with borderline hardcore footage of fellatio, pseudo-lesbian activity with a strap-on and penetration shots inserted into the narratives.
Insofar as this takes the film coming perilously close to itself exploitation what it is purporting to expose and condemn, it's difficult to know what director and co-writer Lizzani and his collaborators were thinking of here. Two possibilities do however spring to mind. One is that, like Salo as a whole or the final act of Di Leo's To Be Twenty, they are using a bait and switch approach, luring the spectator in with the promise of more routine exploitation pleasures before giving us rather more than we had bargained upon. Another is that it represents another part of Lizzani's political critique, that he wanted to universalise things more for the middle class audience than a succession of Rosina-type scenarios would have allowed for, with this allowing for a running theme of exploring and exposing the exploitative relationships inherent within capitalism society at all levels. (Or, to allude to another relevant but more straightfowardly generic title here, is it what have 'they' done to 'their' daughters, what 'you' have done to 'your' daughters or what 'we' are doing to 'our' daughters collectively?)
The young actresses look the age of their characters (“As far as make up goes, put on as little as possible – you always want to look younger than you are,” as Velvet instructs Rosina) making it the kind of film that it's hard to imagine someone contemplating making in today's climate and which, were it to somehow get backing, would in all likelihood still experience distribution and censorship problems; in this regard it is also worth noting that the Italian Raro Video release as Storie di vita e malavita omits the harder footage found in the Greek English-dubbed VHS as The Teenage Prostitution Racket.
Ennio Morricone provided the soundtrack and Franco Fraticelli was the editor.
Certainly the first few moments pull no punches and make for decidedly uncomfortable viewing, as we get a grandmother pimping her purportedly 13-year-old granddaughter to passing motorists, with the girl exposing her breasts and pudenda before quickly moving to perform implied fellatio on the van driver who had thought he was only giving them a lift only a few moments earlier.
Their run-ins with a group of pimps who don't take kindly to incursions onto their turf forms a running thread through the remainder of the film, which presents a series of documentary-style reconstructions, each based on co-writer Marisa Rusconi's research.
The first of these case studies also works well, mainly because it seems more typical and credible. In it a naïve 16-year-old, Rosina, arrives in Milan from Sardinia. Her father died in an industrial accident, leaving Rosina to support the rest of the family. Being reluctant to marry a family friend several decades her senior, she has come to the city to take up work through her cousin. The job Rosina gets is, however, marginal at best, putting together bootleg tapes at piecework rates – if, that is, she even gets paid at all. At the weekend, another of the girls in the house-cum-workshop suggests that they go dancing. At the disco Rosina meets Salvatore, AKA Velvet. A pimp on the lookout for fresh meat, he turns on the charm and sweeps Rosina off her feet. By the time she realises his true nature, it is already too late...
The subsequent case studies have a tendency to be more sensationalistic and mondo-eseque. In one a girl from a good home, Gisella, is blackmailed into having relationships with men after she is photographed in a compromising situation. While one doesn't doubt that it could happen, it seems a somewhat inefficient and risky way of working compared to targeting others in Rosina's situation. In another a second respectable middle class girl prostitutes herself to express her contempt for her parents, before eventually confronting her father over his own liking for underage girls. Again, it seems too much like choosing the rarer specific case over the more routine and general one.
These later stories are also more explicit, with borderline hardcore footage of fellatio, pseudo-lesbian activity with a strap-on and penetration shots inserted into the narratives.
Insofar as this takes the film coming perilously close to itself exploitation what it is purporting to expose and condemn, it's difficult to know what director and co-writer Lizzani and his collaborators were thinking of here. Two possibilities do however spring to mind. One is that, like Salo as a whole or the final act of Di Leo's To Be Twenty, they are using a bait and switch approach, luring the spectator in with the promise of more routine exploitation pleasures before giving us rather more than we had bargained upon. Another is that it represents another part of Lizzani's political critique, that he wanted to universalise things more for the middle class audience than a succession of Rosina-type scenarios would have allowed for, with this allowing for a running theme of exploring and exposing the exploitative relationships inherent within capitalism society at all levels. (Or, to allude to another relevant but more straightfowardly generic title here, is it what have 'they' done to 'their' daughters, what 'you' have done to 'your' daughters or what 'we' are doing to 'our' daughters collectively?)
The young actresses look the age of their characters (“As far as make up goes, put on as little as possible – you always want to look younger than you are,” as Velvet instructs Rosina) making it the kind of film that it's hard to imagine someone contemplating making in today's climate and which, were it to somehow get backing, would in all likelihood still experience distribution and censorship problems; in this regard it is also worth noting that the Italian Raro Video release as Storie di vita e malavita omits the harder footage found in the Greek English-dubbed VHS as The Teenage Prostitution Racket.
Ennio Morricone provided the soundtrack and Franco Fraticelli was the editor.
Sunday, 29 June 2008
Banditi a Milano / Bandits in Milan
For me, Carlo Lizzani is one of the largely unsung heroes of the Italian cinema. A politically committed figure who started out as the writer of a number of neo-realist films and as a documentarist, he increasingly moved into directing genre films in the 1960s and 1970s.
It sounds like a somewhat unlikely career trajectory until we bear in mind that the best known of his early works, Guiseppe De Santis's Bitter Rice, itself combine neo-realism and noir, political engagement and entertainment.
An expose of the exploitation of itinerant rice planters and harvesters in the Po Valley it was ironically criticised by Marxist commentators for its own exploitative elements, most famously the iconic image of Silvana Mangano wearing a tight sweater and short trousers working in the fields. These, the critics argued, had nothing to contribute to the class struggle.
What these critics forgot and what Lizzani has always remembered is that exploitation is a way to expose the mass audience to political content. It was all well and good for these same critics to prefer Luchino Visconti's La Terra trema on grounds of ideological and aesthetic purity but not so effective when we consider that it had to be subtitled in Italy itself for the characters' Sicilian dialect to be comprehensible and that its box-office failure put an end to the Visconti and the PCI's plans for two further similarly themed films.
Though some of the images are somewhat non-documentary realist, it's worth remembering that the interrogation and torture sequences in Rome, Open City are expressionist rather than realist.
Pre-dating the post-Dirty Harry and French Connection boom in Italian police films, Bandits in Milan has a different look and feel to the typical 70s poliziotto, with Lizzani taking an documentary like approach to his subject – a reconstruction of a real heist which turned the center of Millan into a racetrack and unfortunate bystanders into targets.
At the same time, however, Lizzani is careful not to let forget that we are watching a movie, whether the opening freeze frame that shows one of the bandits in flight and then presents his capture by an angry mob, or the later – but chronologically earlier – scene in which the robbers' lookout tries to convince a curious passer by that a commercial is being filmed inside the bank, that it's not being robbed for real.
The film has a curious structure, beginning with ten minutes of little vignettes that, besides introducing Tomas Milian's police chief, give a kaleidoscopic portrait of crime and the city.
Milian, facing the press.
Following an old timer's remarks that the new generation of career criminals have no restraints and no respect, we get the shaking down of a nightclub and a gambling den by a protection racket. Then, in what seems like a dress rehearsal for the later Storie di vita e malavita, we get the recruitment of a naïve young woman, played by Margaret Lee, into prostititution and her eventual murder at the hands of her pimp.
Robber, terrorist or ultra?
Finally, as one of the robbers is interrogated by Inspector Basevi, the main story begins to unfold via his confession.
Basevi learns that the Turin-based gang were behind the robbery of three Milan banks in the space of half an hour the previous year, hitting the first one and making sure that the alarm is triggered to draw police cars there as they move on to the second, repeat the trick there and then go on to the third.
Volonte looking for inspiration
The mastermind behind the gang, who have made some 17 bank robberies over the preceding few years is Cavallero, played by Gian Maria Volonte. A keen strategist who leaves nothing to chance and enjoys the thrill of robbery as much as the money it brings, he's charismatic, megalomaniac and has a liking for existentialist literature and military history.
Cavallero has also seen to it that the gang have set themselves up a legitimate business as a front, complete with a secretary, whom he amusing tells not to wear short skirts and, more practically, to never have her boyfriend around the office. He also keeps a balance sheet of the profits and losses from each robbery, all the way down to noting the amount of ammunition fired and the cost per bullet.
Gratuitous picture of Margaret Lee
With the other long-term members of the gang, played by reliable hands like Don Backy and Peter Martell, equally professional but less extraordinary, the other main focus of attention is newcomer Tuccio, played by a fresh-faced Ray Lovelock.
A promising footballer who works in Cavallero's father's garage, Tuccio happens upon a stash of hidden guns and, having proven to Cavallero that he can be trusted, is invited to train with the gang and join them for their next job. (When he's learning to shoot, Cavellero still keeps track of the ammunition used.)
Let's go to work...
Finally, the day of the heist comes, along with the introduction of the various unfortunates whose lives are about to fatally intersect with the bandits. The job itself comes off fine, with the gang having earlier timed the traffic lights and noted that they would also have a clean getaway, but the police pursuit proves unexpectedly dogged. This causes Cavallero to start deliberately shooting at passing traffic and people in the hope of forcing the police to give up the chase.
It doesn't work...
Bandits in Milan has so many strong points, including quality performances; powerful, hard-hitting action sequences; believable characters; naturalistic dialogue (in which a number of distinctively Turinese idioms are used for extra veracity) and a somewhat open ending, that it is hard to actually find much to criticise.
One potential weakness is that Milian plays his role straight and as such is perhaps less interesting and engaging than in the likes of Almost Human and Brothers Till We Die where he is more over-the-top. Likewise, Lee's role amounts to only two or minutes screentime.
If Milian and Lee's fans may be disappointed, those of Volonte will be delighted. Compare his character and performance here to those in, say, Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion or Io ho paura, and you cannot but be impressed with his ability to inhabit radically different roles – a self-satisfied, superior, fascistic police chief and an anxious, increasingly paranoid cop assigned as bodyguard to a judge investigating terrorism – and the sheer commitment he brought to them.
More mediation
Another thing I wasn't entirely sure about was the extra-diegetic music. It's fine in itself, but at times threatens to expose a split between the genre and documentary aspects of the film by providing additional commentary and emotional cues which I felt were somewhat superfluous given the power of the writing, performances and direction. This said, I must also having similar feelings towards a number of neo-realist films, so it may just be that I don't quite get this melodramatic aspect of wider Italian culture as it applies there and here. Or, rather, I 'get' it at an intellectual level, understanding how musical cues helped the Italian audience make sense of the film by providing emotional cues, but just cannot have this same response myself in the case of more realistic films.
Taken as a whole, however, Bandits in Milan deserves to be much better known and acknowledged as one of the great heist movies in the same breath as the likes of The Asphalt Jungle, Rififi, The Killing, Reservoir Dogs and Heat. It is that good.
It sounds like a somewhat unlikely career trajectory until we bear in mind that the best known of his early works, Guiseppe De Santis's Bitter Rice, itself combine neo-realism and noir, political engagement and entertainment.
An expose of the exploitation of itinerant rice planters and harvesters in the Po Valley it was ironically criticised by Marxist commentators for its own exploitative elements, most famously the iconic image of Silvana Mangano wearing a tight sweater and short trousers working in the fields. These, the critics argued, had nothing to contribute to the class struggle.
What these critics forgot and what Lizzani has always remembered is that exploitation is a way to expose the mass audience to political content. It was all well and good for these same critics to prefer Luchino Visconti's La Terra trema on grounds of ideological and aesthetic purity but not so effective when we consider that it had to be subtitled in Italy itself for the characters' Sicilian dialect to be comprehensible and that its box-office failure put an end to the Visconti and the PCI's plans for two further similarly themed films.
Though some of the images are somewhat non-documentary realist, it's worth remembering that the interrogation and torture sequences in Rome, Open City are expressionist rather than realist.
Pre-dating the post-Dirty Harry and French Connection boom in Italian police films, Bandits in Milan has a different look and feel to the typical 70s poliziotto, with Lizzani taking an documentary like approach to his subject – a reconstruction of a real heist which turned the center of Millan into a racetrack and unfortunate bystanders into targets.
At the same time, however, Lizzani is careful not to let forget that we are watching a movie, whether the opening freeze frame that shows one of the bandits in flight and then presents his capture by an angry mob, or the later – but chronologically earlier – scene in which the robbers' lookout tries to convince a curious passer by that a commercial is being filmed inside the bank, that it's not being robbed for real.
The film has a curious structure, beginning with ten minutes of little vignettes that, besides introducing Tomas Milian's police chief, give a kaleidoscopic portrait of crime and the city.
Milian, facing the press.
Following an old timer's remarks that the new generation of career criminals have no restraints and no respect, we get the shaking down of a nightclub and a gambling den by a protection racket. Then, in what seems like a dress rehearsal for the later Storie di vita e malavita, we get the recruitment of a naïve young woman, played by Margaret Lee, into prostititution and her eventual murder at the hands of her pimp.
Robber, terrorist or ultra?
Finally, as one of the robbers is interrogated by Inspector Basevi, the main story begins to unfold via his confession.
Basevi learns that the Turin-based gang were behind the robbery of three Milan banks in the space of half an hour the previous year, hitting the first one and making sure that the alarm is triggered to draw police cars there as they move on to the second, repeat the trick there and then go on to the third.
Volonte looking for inspiration
The mastermind behind the gang, who have made some 17 bank robberies over the preceding few years is Cavallero, played by Gian Maria Volonte. A keen strategist who leaves nothing to chance and enjoys the thrill of robbery as much as the money it brings, he's charismatic, megalomaniac and has a liking for existentialist literature and military history.
Cavallero has also seen to it that the gang have set themselves up a legitimate business as a front, complete with a secretary, whom he amusing tells not to wear short skirts and, more practically, to never have her boyfriend around the office. He also keeps a balance sheet of the profits and losses from each robbery, all the way down to noting the amount of ammunition fired and the cost per bullet.
Gratuitous picture of Margaret Lee
With the other long-term members of the gang, played by reliable hands like Don Backy and Peter Martell, equally professional but less extraordinary, the other main focus of attention is newcomer Tuccio, played by a fresh-faced Ray Lovelock.
A promising footballer who works in Cavallero's father's garage, Tuccio happens upon a stash of hidden guns and, having proven to Cavallero that he can be trusted, is invited to train with the gang and join them for their next job. (When he's learning to shoot, Cavellero still keeps track of the ammunition used.)
Let's go to work...
Finally, the day of the heist comes, along with the introduction of the various unfortunates whose lives are about to fatally intersect with the bandits. The job itself comes off fine, with the gang having earlier timed the traffic lights and noted that they would also have a clean getaway, but the police pursuit proves unexpectedly dogged. This causes Cavallero to start deliberately shooting at passing traffic and people in the hope of forcing the police to give up the chase.
It doesn't work...
Bandits in Milan has so many strong points, including quality performances; powerful, hard-hitting action sequences; believable characters; naturalistic dialogue (in which a number of distinctively Turinese idioms are used for extra veracity) and a somewhat open ending, that it is hard to actually find much to criticise.
One potential weakness is that Milian plays his role straight and as such is perhaps less interesting and engaging than in the likes of Almost Human and Brothers Till We Die where he is more over-the-top. Likewise, Lee's role amounts to only two or minutes screentime.
If Milian and Lee's fans may be disappointed, those of Volonte will be delighted. Compare his character and performance here to those in, say, Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion or Io ho paura, and you cannot but be impressed with his ability to inhabit radically different roles – a self-satisfied, superior, fascistic police chief and an anxious, increasingly paranoid cop assigned as bodyguard to a judge investigating terrorism – and the sheer commitment he brought to them.
More mediation
Another thing I wasn't entirely sure about was the extra-diegetic music. It's fine in itself, but at times threatens to expose a split between the genre and documentary aspects of the film by providing additional commentary and emotional cues which I felt were somewhat superfluous given the power of the writing, performances and direction. This said, I must also having similar feelings towards a number of neo-realist films, so it may just be that I don't quite get this melodramatic aspect of wider Italian culture as it applies there and here. Or, rather, I 'get' it at an intellectual level, understanding how musical cues helped the Italian audience make sense of the film by providing emotional cues, but just cannot have this same response myself in the case of more realistic films.
Taken as a whole, however, Bandits in Milan deserves to be much better known and acknowledged as one of the great heist movies in the same breath as the likes of The Asphalt Jungle, Rififi, The Killing, Reservoir Dogs and Heat. It is that good.
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