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).

Una Donna per sette bastardi / The Sewer Rats

With both the One Woman for Seven Bastards and Sewer Rats titles proving apposite, this is one nasty little film from first - a sequence including a POV shot from the perspective of a man being buried alive - to last.

Based on a story by star Richard Harrison, it plays a bit like a contemporary riff on Greed, crossed with A Fistful of Dollars - the film which Harrison turned down, to the eternal detriment of his career, which I suspect The Sewer Rats can't exactly have done much for either - and elements of The Good, The Bad and the Ugly, Cut Throats Nine, Django Kill and McCabe and Mrs Miller.

Indeed, were it not for the fact that Harrison's mysterious crutch-using stranger arrives in the no-horse town after his car breaks down on the road or that there's J&B whisky in the bar, the film could easily be taken for a western filmed on some extremely run-down Spanish or Italian set.


Even the J&B bottle looks beaten up

Pleasantville it is not, with the nameless place perhaps resembling nothing so much as Hammett's Poisonville instead in the effect it has on all the existing inhabitants, each of whom has their own story and secrets, and the newcomer whose arrival threatens the already precarious dynamics between them.

Antonio Casale plays Carl, the jealous husband who owns the tavern and forms the only point of contact with the outside world, making regular 300km trips in his pick-up to stock up on J&B, beer and other necessities. He's also, in possible reference to The Good, The Bad and the Ugly, in possession of a stolen strongbox.


Casale, disreputable looking as ever

Gordon Mitchell plays Gordon, an ex-military man wanted for desertion or other offences, whilst Luciano Rossi plays a harmonica playing mute with a penchant for spying on Carl's wife, Rita.


Rita in defiant mood

She, meanwhile, is incarnated by the beautiful Dagmar Lassander in full-on tramp mode, taking great pleasure in turning on the men, in both senses of that term, whilst fully enjoying her effects upon them and pursuing her own agenda.






The film is replete with the kind of scenarios that implicate the viewer in whatever dubious pleasure he takes from them

Even without the scuzziness of the Danish-subtitled VHS sourced presentation under review, this is the kind of film that leaves you wanting to take a shower afterwards. As such, Roberto Bianchi Montero, the director of The Slasher is a Sex Maniac, is perfect for it. Unfortunately the same cannot be said for the music, which adds neither atmosphere nor tension.

Gli Amici di Nick Hezard / Nick the Sting

Here's an interesting one: crime auteur Fernando Di Leo directing a script by Alberto Silvestri that seems less written for him than as an obvious imitation of The Sting for whomever happened to be available to take on the project.

The closest point of comparison amongst Di Leo's own films as a writer-director – and sometimes producer– is probably probably Colpo in canna, as another relatively light-hearted entry where the cat and mouse games are more for fun than keeps.

The story is simple: Nick Hezard, played with winning charm by Luc Merenda, wants to avenge the dead of one of his friends at the hands of Robert Clark, played by Lee J. Cobb, and plans an elaborate con to achieve this end.

While Clark is a more or less direct stand in for the Robert Shaw character in The Sting, there is perhaps also a Di Leo element in that he has clearly transgressed against the kind of rogue's code often found in the director's work. Killing someone because they successfully conned you and thereby demonstrated themselves to be a better player of the game than you is fundamentally 'against the rules' that these men (and occasionally women) live by.


Umberto Raho and Tom Felleghy


Lassander and Merenda, in exaggerated form

The most pronounced departure from The Sting is that the film is less a buddy movie than a buddies movie, as highlighted by the alternative The Friends of Nick Hezard title. There is no figure comparable to Paul Newman's character in George Roy Hill's film, but rather a host of endearing supporting characters ranging from Valentina Cortese's eccentric mother to Luciana Paluzzi's jealous girlfriend to Gabrielle Ferzetti's fellow professional.

Besides the already formidable array of talent already mentioned, the cast also includes the likes of Dagmar Lassander, William Berger, Umberto Raho and Fulvio Mingozzi to make for arguably the best ensemble Di Leo would ever work with and a virtual who's who of Italian popular cinema around this time.

Di Leo's regular composer Bacalov contributes a score that is by turns suspenseful and whimsical, demonstrating his versatility by avoiding more contemporary instrumentation and stylings – this despite the film's present day setting – in favour of jazzy clarinet, oboe and so on.






Split screens

Di Leo's own work is replete with gimmicks both old and new, such as irising, wipes, split screens and multiple images. If this proves a combination that at times feels a touch schizophrenic as a mix of 1920s and 1960s idioms, it also helps further distance the film from its sepia-toned period inspiration and, with the split screens recalling the original version of The Thomas Crowne Affair and thereby highlighting another possible caper film inspiration.

Importantly, however, sometimes this technology amount to more than a gimmick, as when the fragmentation of the characters' spatial relations during a car journey hints of Nick's closeness to his mother in one frame within the frame and his relative distance from girlfriend in another in a way a conventional two or three shot perhaps couldn't.


Nick and his friends

Likewise these constant reminders that we are watching a film – as another carefully orchestrated performance – neatly c(l)ue us in to the film-within-the-film finale, where Nick plays a role comparable to Di Leo's own.

A welcome further demonstration of Di Leo's talents and versatility.

I Gabbiani volano basso / Seagulls Fly Low

In this obscure 1978 thriller Maurizio Merli is cast somewhat against type as a professional killer. I say somewhat because, as we soon learn, he's not really a bad guy and more a victim of circumstance: a Vietnam veteran who grew tired of the war and deserted, he found himself in Italy where he was forced into working for businessman-cum-criminal Micheli, played by Mel Ferrer.

The film begins with what is supposed to be Merli's last job, the assassination of Martini, a former business partner of Micheli and his colleague Calvi; though some of the organisation's own men, like the one played by Franco Garofalo, could easily have performed the hit just as well, Micheli correctly felt it safer to employ an outsider.

Merli's problems only really start as he boards the plane for New York, equipped with a one-way ticket and a forget passport. One of the other passengers suffers a heart attack and everyone has to disembark and wait in the departure lounge. In an uncharacteristic loss of composure, Merli comes to believe that his fake passport has been detected by the airport security, and thus flees from the airport and back to Micheli.


Maurizio Merli as Jeff Blynn?


Maurizio Merli sans moustache

We might however wonder if he doesn't make too much a show of his panic, running through the airport, stealing a car and then driving off at high speed; perhaps airport security was just that bit more relaxed 30 years ago.

While Micheli deals with the situation with customary calmness, helping Merli to change his appearance and arranging for another passport to be made – I keep using the actor's name because his character tellingly doesn't really have one, being referred to as “the mechanic” and “the freak” initially and then using the alias “Albert Morgan” – Calvi starts to worry about his own exposure and thus orders Garofalo to take care of Micheli, setting up Merli to take the fall...




Some dubious red tinted Vietnam flashbacks

Competently if unexceptionally directed, as the kind of film where the stylish moments tend to come across as such, rather than being seamlessly integrated into the whole, and featuring a good cast, also including Dagmar Lassander as a nightclub proprietor and Nathalie Delon as the lost soul who takes sympathy on Merli (“you mustn't give up now; it's not as if you've killed somebody” ironically foregrounding exactly what he cannot tell her) to add glamour and romance, it's something of a mystery why Seagulls Fly Low isn't better known.

Featuring a passable quotient of action, plenty of suspense and a suitably dark and cynical 70s worldview – though film noir and French poetic realism certainly establish a longer heritage here – the film gives Merli far more to do as an actor than was usually the case, his role being marked by a world-weary reluctance to use a gun or his fists alien to his Iron Inspector characters and, after he meets Delon, the tentative possibility of his life taking another course.

Perhaps part of the problem was that Merli's fans were happy to see him play an essentially tragic, doomed character, but wanted to see him go down fighting rather more if he was not to ultimately be triumphant. To make a neo-noir comparison, trying imagining a Point Blank where Lee Marvin's character didn't go on a quixotic quest for his money.

Another possibility is that in initially looking a bit like Jeff Blynn, with longer and bushier hair than usual, and then losing the iconic moustache, he simply wasn't immediately recognisable as Merli. To make a noir comparison, we might think of Orson Welles's deconstruction of Rita Hayworth's image in The Lady from Shanghai.


The familiar image of a plane departing

Or maybe it's just the title: while its meaning is explained in the course of the film, it doesn't exactly tell you what to expect. In the world of the filone cinema this mattered, as director Giorgio Cristalli clearly knew from previous credits such as You're Jinxed, Friend, You've Met Sacramento and Four Gunmen of the Holy Trinity.

To summarise, a film that's worth the Merli fan's attention but which probably won't appeal to the more casual poliziotto viewer who only wants to see car chases, shootouts and fist-fights.

[The film is available on VHS rip from Cinemageddon]

Femina Ridens

Co-written and directed by Piero Schivazappa, this film goes by a number of different titles, each placing its own distinctive slant on the proceedings – The Laughing Woman, The Frightened Woman and Games of Love, Games of Death.

Philippe Leroy plays Dr Sayer, a misogynist obsessed with male virility and the threat of a female-dominated future. He's also a sadist who enjoys regular weekend sessions with a high class hooker. When she cancels at the last minute, Sayer decides to take advantage of feminist journalist Maria, played by Dagmar Lassander, inviting her to come over to his apartment later to collect some papers she needs to be able to write up her article over the weekend. There, Sayer slips Maria a drugged J&B and takes her to his country home, with the intention of re-educating her as to the 'proper' places of men and women...








Images haunting sayer's dreams / nightmares

There's not much more than can be said without spoiling things for the first time viewer, except that, like Deep Red or Kidnapped / Rabid Dogs, it's worth paying close attention to the opening sequence. And, in common with these other masterworks of Italian popular cinema, The Laughing Woman is also sufficiently rich in its images and ideas to reward repeat viewings once the surprise is over.


A shot that would not be out of place in The Conformist


The duplicitious woman, framed in the mirrors


The buttoned-up, straight-laced Maria




Some of Sayer's abstract paintings, based on viruses under the microscope

As the synopsis indicates, we're very much in battle of the sexes territory, with all the usual structural oppositions in place: male / female, master / slave, active / passive, bearer of the gaze / object of the gaze, sadist / masochist, victimiser / victim etc. Yet The Laughing Woman also goes a considerable way towards challenging these binaries, treating them in a distinctly ironic manner and encouraging the viewer to take another look.


Sayer and Marie in a cage


Sayer and “the usual phallic cutlery”


Sayer's ideal man, himself


The voiceless woman

Again, it's difficult to say much without spoiling things. Despite all his attempts to master and discipline his own flesh and that of Maria and her predecessors, Sayer's position is ultimately one of fear and weakness. He has a revulsion for intimacy with the female, believing that she will kill him once she has mated in a manner akin to a scorpion he saw in his boyhood, while his dreams are dominated by the image of a giant vagina dentata, an abyss into which men enter never to return.


Obvious sexual symbolism


Sayer photographs his trophy




But to play the great white hunter, he must place himself in the frame and the camera's eye, surrendering a degree of power


Maria usurping the gaze

The thing that really sets the film apart is how beautifully stylised it all is. Moreover, it is not just about style for its own sake. Rather, form and content are intertwined, body and mind becoming a single flesh. It's not just the way in which the gigantic sculpture of vagina dentata and curvaceous, contoured abstract female form around it so brilliantly incarnates Sayer's fears, but also the suggestiveness of the relentlessly rigid and linear compositions around him, with their parallel connotations of a need for control, order, domination and systematisation.

Though there are a few more characters at the start and end, the bulk of the film is essentially a two hander between Leroy and Lassander. As such, it's crucial for the success of the piece that both deliver strong performances, with Leroy especially successful in conveying his character's preening narcissism and Lassander winning the viewer as well as Sayer over.

Lassander has long been something of an enigma to me. To put it crudely and admittedly cruelly, what happened to her between this film, So Young, So Lovely, So Vicious, where she plays the new stepmother and rival to Gloria Guida's teenage temptress, and The House by the Cemetery, where her Mrs Gittelson is very much middle aged and non-sexual, with only that fiery hair as a reminder of past glories. Was it simply time and nature taking a harsher toll than on any of the other starlets of similar age, or of Lassander's enjoying that bit too much of la dolce vita in the intervening years?

Whatever the case, she's in her absolute prime here, with her own particular dance of the one long veil to Stelvio Cipriani's “sophisticated shake” with its breathy female vocals surely counting as one of the most wonderfully erotic and sensuous moments to come out of the entire Italian cinema of this time. Its also a crucial moment of spectacle within the film gestalt, again foregrounding a somewhat more complex dynamics of looking and being looked at inasmuch as Maria is here putting on a performance that shifts the balance of power between her and Sayer for the first time.


Lassander's dance; note the teeth motif on the wall and the obligatory J&B bottle


Another stunning composition


Both characters again in a cage

It's telling in this regard that the film was picked up for international distribution by Radley Metzger's Audubon Films, given the still subversive nature of Metzger's own erotic and pornographic films of the same period such as Score, The Lickerish Quartet and The Punishment of Anne, with their aims of stimulating the viewer both physically and mentally; in Metzger's masterpiece The Opening of Misty Beethoven, for example, passengers boarding a routine jet flight are asked which meal option they would like and whether or not they want oral sex administered in a manner reminiscent of a scene in Bunuel's The Phantom of Liberty in which eating is done in private and is a taboo subject, whereas everyone gathers around the table to do the toilet. The point, there as here, is reminding us that the 'natural' and 'normal' are at least partly conventional.

If it would be going too far to say that The Laughing Woman is a Nieztschean film, despite the philosopher's notorious and revelant proclamation that “when you go to a woman, you should take a whip with you,” it does have that quality of making you think about such things. (Intriguingly, however, Bertrand Russell also opined that “Nine out of ten women would get the whip away from him [Nietzsche], and he knew it, so he kept away from women, and soothed his wounded vanity with unkind remarks,” with this being a remark well worth thinking about on a repeat viewing.)

The Laughing Woman also features a stunning score from Stelvio Cipriani, which has itself recently been re-issued on CD by Digitmovies. Besides the aforementioned Sophisticated Shake, other standout tracks include a spaghetti western style deguello theme, which plays over the final showdown between Maria and Sayer, replete with alernating close-ups of their eyes, and the closing “A Man like You,” sung by Olimpia in her deliciously accented phonetically pronounced English.

The weakest aspect of the film is perhaps its dialogue, with some awkwardly arch lines that today's audience may find dated and hard to take seriously. Even here, however, it's evident that the filmmakers took considerable care over what they were doing, with some subtle little hints here and there of what is to come. The self-consciously 'meaningful' nature of many of the exchanges also helps in the creation of an enclosed world with its own particular rules and logics, in keeping with the production design, direction and overarching themes of the piece.

Take, for example, one of the initial exchanges between Maria and Sayer, after he has learned that she prefers to work at weekends: “You have a very odd way of spending your weekends.” “I seem to work better on those two days. I like to shut myself off from people and not be distracted.” The point is that Sayer's own weekend activities are not particularly normal, while in abducting Maria and subjecting her to various bondage scenarios, he is himself helping shut her off from (other) people and anything that might distract (or detract) from her experiencing her full quotients of suffering and he of pleasure.

In sum, a stunning one-off that still holds up well nearly 40 years after its original release while also providing a fascinating time capsule of the beginnings of second wave feminism and its social and cultural reverberations.

Il Vizio ha le calze nere / Reflections in Black

One of the joys of the giallo, for me, is the sense that that's always something new out there waiting to be discovered and perhaps rescued from the enormous condescension of cinematic posterity. While some films manage to transcend their grey market origins all too many others leave you wondering whether they are intrinsically bad films or are just victims of circumstance through panning-and-scanning; wear and tear; unsympathetic cuts; burned-in subtitles intruding on the image and all those other ignominies that we come to know and to develop a tolerance for. (Or, as cultists, bear like battle scars.)

Tano Cimarosa's Reflections in Black at first seems as though it is going to be a case in point, opening in the classic fashion with the death of a beautiful woman at the hands of a black-gloved, razor-wielding assassin, here also identified by the black stockings she wears and which give the film its original Italian title, Il Vizio ha le calze nere (i.e. “Vice has black stockings”)


Black gloves...


... black stockings...


... and a straight-razor...


... wielded to deadly effect...

Nevertheless, some curious jump cuts – one minute the assassin has entered the house, the next their victim is seeing exiting it, wounded – serve to suggest the intrusion of the censors early on; an intrusion that appears to have continued thereafter if the unusually short running time of just over 70 minutes and which must have excised some quite hard material if what still remains is anything to go by.

With the only eyewitness being a policeman who was almost run over by the killer's vehicle, the amateur detective plot is absent, with the emphasis instead being placed squarely upon the professional; a paradigmatic choice which helps situate the film as a relatively late giallo, coming around that point in the mid-1970s by which the box-office balance and public taste had tipped in favour of its poliziotto counterpart. Even so, while the pervasive attitude of the anni di piombo is conveyed by a number of remarks about widespread corruption and collusion between the upper echelons of civil and criminal society, these prove to be more throwaway than anything else, with the three men conducting the investigation also marked by an action second rather than first approach.




Cimarosa tries to throw suspicion on someone in the crowd as the first victim's body is discovered

Inspector Lavina (John Richardson) is in charge. Below him are Panto – played by the director in his more usual role as character actor – and Gerrini, representing hard-won on-the-job experience and a more modern, scientific approach respectively.

Their investigation soon focusses in on the dead woman's acquaintances, a curious combination of high and low class types including a countess (Magda Konopka), a photographer (Dagmar Lassander), a hairdresser and a junkie (Ninetto Davoli).


A photo that may hold the key to the mystery

Nonetheless, it is clear that they are on the right track as the killer strikes again, slitting the throat of a woman in the park and knocking her boyfriend unconscious – the latter element suggesting someone with a clear set of designated victims rather than a maniac striking at random. (Always assuming, of course, that there is only one killer and that he or she didn't deliberately change modus operandi to confuse matters.)




Having the lovers surprised while he's changing a tyre is a nice touch...

It's also around this point that the film's weaknesses come to the fore. While Cimarosa clearly understood what his audience wanted by way of sex – particularly of the sapphic variety, as we soon see – and sadism and does his level best to meet expectations on both counts, his direction looks to be sorely lacking in style. The bigger problem, however – and one that cannot be really be put down to the copy under review here – is that there are just too many characters and complex inter-relationships to reward keeping track of, especially in light of the killer's predictably unpredictable identity and a summing up which, as Adrian Luther Smith suggests in his Blood and Black Lace review, not even the one offering it seems entirely convinced by.




A lady above suspicion with her forbidden photographs / photographs suggesting a forbidden love


This bleached out dream / fantasy sequence goes on like this for a minute...


... clearly something hot is going on...




The killer also wields stockings


If this composition were intentional it would be almost Godard-like in its audacity

On the plus side, Carlo Savina's main theme, variations on which accompany the stalk and the slash sequences, sets a suitably downbeat tone, whilst it's always pleasing to see Konopka and Lassander, even if both also seem a little tired looking when compared to the likes of Satanik and Femina Ridens of a few years earlier. Still, there's something about such rapidly fading grandeur that is distinctly appropriate to Cimarosa's end-of-the-line giallo...