Surveying the Italian popular cinema from the late 1950s to the late 1980s we might draw an initial distinction between those who were able to shape trends and those who had to adapt to them.
In the former, much smaller, category we might place Sergio Leone and Dario Argento:
Leone was not the first to make a western but A Fistful of Dollars signalled a shift from Hollywood style westerns made by Italians to distinctively Italian style westerns.
Argento occupies a comparable position in relation to the thriller, although in his case Bava’s The Girl Who Knew too Much and Blood and Black Lace meant there were already existing distinctively Italian models to draw upon.
In the latter, larger, category we might place Bava, Sergio Martino, Lucio Fulci, Umberto Lenzi, Antonio Margheriti, Sergio Corbucci and just about everyone else.
Differences emerge between these filmmakers, however, when we plot their work on a horizontal axis of filone and a vertical axis of approximate accomplishments: Martino made films in all manner of filone and though clearly more comfortable in some than others generally produced work of a relatively high overall quality. Lenzi’s output was equally diverse but also showed more differences in quality if we compare, for instance, his poliziotto films with his forays into comedy.
Then, somewhere in between, there is Enzo Castellari. On the one hand his output is more diverse than that of Leone and Argento. On the other hand it is less diverse than that of the other directors mentioned.
Castellari excels as a director of action, whether in a western, war, crime or – as here – adventure context. Though he sometimes ventured further afield, as with his giallo Cold Eyes of Fear, he also famously turned down the opportunity to direct Zombie. He felt horror was not his thing, and was confident enough of being able to get work on his own terms.
Perhaps reflecting this, The Shark Hunter at times feels a bit like Castellari and his regular screenwriter Tino Carpi re-working Zombie for themselves:
You imagine them thinking of the shark meets zombie scene in Zombie and asking themselves how they could rework and build on it to accord with Castellari’s strengths.
The answer: Remove the zombie, add more sharks as one of the many obstacles in the way of Franco Nero’s protagonist, and generally rework the film as The Deep, all italiana.
Unfortunately this shift still doesn’t quite showcase Castellari at his best.
The main issue, one suspects, is that too much of the action is outwith his control: There are lots of underwater scenes where there was nothing he could really do but issue instructions to the stunt-men and the underwater team. (Have you ever seen an underwater scene which is directed in the same manner as a surface one; are there those trademark Fulci extreme close ups and rack focus in the shark-zombie scene in Zombie?)
But Castellari also doesn’t help matters: The first ten minutes of the film come across like a music video, full of images and sounds – the De Angelis brothers supply the soundtrack, which is very nice in itself – but with minimal narrative significance.
Yes, okay, Nero is the shark hunter.
We get it.
And?
The narrative proper doesn’t begin until 20 plus minutes in and even then we aren’t cued in to Nero’s motivation until much later: His wife and child were killed by a drunk-driver. He was a member of a mysterious organisation. He took advantage of a plane crash to go AWOL. He’s now intent on getting the money that was on said plane, which lies with the sharks...
Moreover, Nero wears a bad wig; think Keoma with a bleach job.
Up against him are (the always welcome) Werner Pocath and Eduardo Fajardo, along with Castellari, who plays a hitman and also shows of his puglistic abilities.
The final scene nicely replays Castellari’s spaghetti western Any Gun Can Play.
Whatever...
Showing posts with label Enzo Castellari. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Enzo Castellari. Show all posts
Sunday, 25 July 2010
Friday, 22 May 2009
Sensitivita / Kyra - La signora del lago / The House by the Edge of the Lake / etc.
Sensitivita is one of those films that is inherently intriguing on account of the likelihood of a clash between the director and his material, namely Enzo G Castellari approachinging horror-thriller material with a female protagonist and considerable sexual elements.
For Castellari is an undisputed master of no-nonsense action cinema, with his westerns, like Keoma, and crime and war films, such as The Grand Racket and The Inglorious Bastards, ranking amongst the best in their respective filone.
But he's also someone who was quick to dismiss his giallo entry Cold Eyes of Fear as an awkward piece of post-Bird with the Crystal Plumage trend following - an evaluation that perhaps sells the idiosyncratic film short - and who subsequently declined the offer of directing Zombie on the grounds that he didn't feel horror to be his forte.
Beyond this, there's the fact that even within Castellari's preferred genres his previous work had been marked by something of an awkwardness - admittedly one common to many action filmmakers - in handling more intimate material, especially in relation to male-female relationships and the sexually explicit.
The main thing to emerge from Sensitivita is that Castellari could direct a surrealistic cum absurdist nightmare to rival Argento's Inferno and Fulci's The Beyond, but with one very important caveat: It's not clear how far he had any intention to do so, nor of the extent to which there is an underlying poetic logic or symbolism to the images and events depicted.
Let's try to summarise:
As a young girl Lilian watches her mother be pulled into the lake by a hand. As a young woman she returns, on motorcycle, to the area. Riding to the lake, Lilian almost runs over a a blind girl who assembles dolls from mismatched parts. The girl gives Lilian a doll without a head - its head, rolling out onto the road, nearly precipitated their collision. At the abandoned house by the lake, Lilian is pursued by a axe-wielding figure, but escapes. She has a series of encounters, both discursive and sexual, with some of the locals, usually apparently being observed by a mysterious young woman, Lilith. After one sexual encounter - these often being accompanied by Lilith's masturbating - Lilian goes into a death-like state, whilst after another her partner dies in an accident, leading to a police investigation that goes nowhere. Everywhere the same symbol, )o(, keeps cropping up...
If it's probably the case that I missed something through watching the film in Italian I don't think English subtitling or dubbing would make things terribly much clearer. Rather, it's a film where things just happen, without definite rhyme nor reason.
But if we cannot make definite conclusions, we can begin to make interconnections, noting the way the film's images have their antecedents and descendants, that "generator" function identified by Tohill and Tombs in Immoral Tales as a key component of the European fantastique cinema of the period.
Thus, for example, Lilian and Lilith are clearly connected in both name and function, being figures of feminine power and monstrosity of the the type connoted by the monster of Jewish myth to whom the latter's name first applied.
From then we can emphasise dualistic and doppelganger ideas, that the two figures and the forces of light and dark they represent, must either combine or destroy one another, and note the particular affinities with the likes of Franco's Doriana Gray / Die Marquise von Sade, via the psychic link between the two women, there more obviously halves of the same whole as twin sisters played by the inevitable, inimitable Lina Romay; Bazzoni's The Lady in the Lake, via Sensitivita's alternate Italian title and their shared gloomy, old, small town settings; and Pensione Paura, via the shared presence of the beautiful, talented and risk-taking Leonora Fani in the lead role.
Castellari, who amusingly and tellingly cameos as the detective leading the investigation nowhere, uses about every technique in the book at some point, be it slow-motion, split-screen, shock zooms, colour filters, rapid shock edits and montages - the latter particularly to convey the significance of the )o( symbol in case we miss it - and dramatic compositions.
If the filters suggest a certain sub-Suspiria derivativeness, the use of three way split screen to showcase an exploding car is pure Castellari.
In the end, what you think of Sensitivita perhaps depends on what you think of its incoherence and the effortless way in which Castellari achieves that Euro-fantastique / Eurotrash sensibility.
I couldn't say for sure what I felt afterwards, other that that it was definitely an experience.
For Castellari is an undisputed master of no-nonsense action cinema, with his westerns, like Keoma, and crime and war films, such as The Grand Racket and The Inglorious Bastards, ranking amongst the best in their respective filone.
But he's also someone who was quick to dismiss his giallo entry Cold Eyes of Fear as an awkward piece of post-Bird with the Crystal Plumage trend following - an evaluation that perhaps sells the idiosyncratic film short - and who subsequently declined the offer of directing Zombie on the grounds that he didn't feel horror to be his forte.
Beyond this, there's the fact that even within Castellari's preferred genres his previous work had been marked by something of an awkwardness - admittedly one common to many action filmmakers - in handling more intimate material, especially in relation to male-female relationships and the sexually explicit.
The main thing to emerge from Sensitivita is that Castellari could direct a surrealistic cum absurdist nightmare to rival Argento's Inferno and Fulci's The Beyond, but with one very important caveat: It's not clear how far he had any intention to do so, nor of the extent to which there is an underlying poetic logic or symbolism to the images and events depicted.
Let's try to summarise:
As a young girl Lilian watches her mother be pulled into the lake by a hand. As a young woman she returns, on motorcycle, to the area. Riding to the lake, Lilian almost runs over a a blind girl who assembles dolls from mismatched parts. The girl gives Lilian a doll without a head - its head, rolling out onto the road, nearly precipitated their collision. At the abandoned house by the lake, Lilian is pursued by a axe-wielding figure, but escapes. She has a series of encounters, both discursive and sexual, with some of the locals, usually apparently being observed by a mysterious young woman, Lilith. After one sexual encounter - these often being accompanied by Lilith's masturbating - Lilian goes into a death-like state, whilst after another her partner dies in an accident, leading to a police investigation that goes nowhere. Everywhere the same symbol, )o(, keeps cropping up...
If it's probably the case that I missed something through watching the film in Italian I don't think English subtitling or dubbing would make things terribly much clearer. Rather, it's a film where things just happen, without definite rhyme nor reason.
But if we cannot make definite conclusions, we can begin to make interconnections, noting the way the film's images have their antecedents and descendants, that "generator" function identified by Tohill and Tombs in Immoral Tales as a key component of the European fantastique cinema of the period.
Thus, for example, Lilian and Lilith are clearly connected in both name and function, being figures of feminine power and monstrosity of the the type connoted by the monster of Jewish myth to whom the latter's name first applied.
From then we can emphasise dualistic and doppelganger ideas, that the two figures and the forces of light and dark they represent, must either combine or destroy one another, and note the particular affinities with the likes of Franco's Doriana Gray / Die Marquise von Sade, via the psychic link between the two women, there more obviously halves of the same whole as twin sisters played by the inevitable, inimitable Lina Romay; Bazzoni's The Lady in the Lake, via Sensitivita's alternate Italian title and their shared gloomy, old, small town settings; and Pensione Paura, via the shared presence of the beautiful, talented and risk-taking Leonora Fani in the lead role.
Castellari, who amusingly and tellingly cameos as the detective leading the investigation nowhere, uses about every technique in the book at some point, be it slow-motion, split-screen, shock zooms, colour filters, rapid shock edits and montages - the latter particularly to convey the significance of the )o( symbol in case we miss it - and dramatic compositions.
If the filters suggest a certain sub-Suspiria derivativeness, the use of three way split screen to showcase an exploding car is pure Castellari.
In the end, what you think of Sensitivita perhaps depends on what you think of its incoherence and the effortless way in which Castellari achieves that Euro-fantastique / Eurotrash sensibility.
I couldn't say for sure what I felt afterwards, other that that it was definitely an experience.
Tuesday, 31 March 2009
Quel maledetto treno blindato / The Inglorious Bastards / Deadly Mission / GI Bro / Counterfeit Commandos / The Dirty Bastards
The first thing to say about this 1978 war actioner from Enzo Castellari is that it’s difficult to talk too much about the story without spoiling it for the first-time viewer. Or, make that stories, since like From Dusk Till Dawn, it’s something of two different films in one.
After the nicely Rotoscoped titles, accompanied by Francesco De Masi’s suitably stirring martial music, we’re introduced to our protagonists, four GI’s and an air force lieutenant.
Berle is a coward who involuntarily pisses himself whenever in danger; Nick a compulsive thief; Tony an ex-gangster and all-round bad guy whose only loyalty is to himself, and Fred (Fred Williamson) an African-American sentenced to death for the accidental killing of a racist officer. Lieutenant Yaeger (Bo Sevenson) is an air-ace, court-martialled after repeatedly going AWOL and using his plane to visit his girlfriend in London. (Though the “make love not war” epithet otherwise applies better to Nick, as a long-haired proto hippy.)
By making the MPs escorting the prisoners as unsympathetic as possible, not caring whether their charges get to their destination dead or alive, the filmmakers do a good job of getting us on the side of characters that in some cases we might otherwise find it harder to care about. Indeed, as a Nazi plane strafes the party the MP’s are quite happy to gun down the prisoners as they too attempt to take cover.
In the confusion, Berle, Nick, Tony, Fred and Yaeger manage to escape and to turn the tables on the MPs. Here we also get further indicators of the rules by which the film is playing as the MPs are briefly humiliated and then sent marching back to camp rather than subjected to anything more extreme and with none of the other prisoners, those who were not introduced nor individuated, surviving the encounter.
Deciding to head for neutral Switzerland, whose border is only 100 or so miles away, the men set off in the hastily repaired truck.
Unfortunately it is soon destroyed by a Nazi mortar, in what proves to be the first of a series of episodic encounters whose temporal and geographical relationships and resolution, if not always as clear as they might be, nevertheless also help convey an appropriate sense of confusion, that no-one really knows what is going on and where the enemy is. (If the Rotoscoped titles recall A Fistful of Dollars, this aspect is more reminiscent of The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, especially since identities and uniforms are rarely what they seem at first sight.)
This continues as, hiding out in a barn, the men discover a German deserter, Adolf Sachs (Raimund Harmstorf), and, with the rest of the countryside ahead of them swarming with the Wermacht, enter into an uneasy alliance.
An encounter with a group of skinny dipping female Nazi soldiers follows soon after, significantly ending before any real shooting to establish a contrast with an otherwise comparable scene in Peckinpah’s Cross of Iron to further emphasise that this is more fantasy adventure than realistic depiction of warfare.
The strengths and weaknesses of Inglorious Bastards are pretty much those common to all Castellari’s work.
Most obviously in terms of strengths, he really knows how to sell an action scene and how to make maximum use of the available resources.
Note how the opening scenes in the US base are comparatively large scale, with various extra trucks and tanks in the background. Thus taken in we may not notice the smaller scale of some of the intermediate battle scenes, where at times it looks as though the one exterior set has been shot from different angles or with the props moved around, nor the matte paintings and models representing ruined towns, squadrons of aircraft and things generally getting blown up.
In terms of weaknesses, meanwhile, it’s an awkwardly integrated love subplot with a female resistance fighter, made all the less credible by involving the least likely member of the group, Tony.
Allowing for the inclusion of a touch of glamour in the form of William Berger's daughter Debra, this is however hardly a fatal flaw.
The filmmakers also deal rather more ably with the complicating presence of an African-American in the group, going beyond a couple of scenes where he plays the Chewbacca role of captive to explore the contrast between Yaeger and Tony, the former commenting on the link between prejudice and the war itself and the latter a prime example of home-grown US bigotry.
Donal(d) O’Brien turns in a memorable cameo as a SS officer, venomously spitting out a line about the US being a nation of mongrels, of blacks, Jews, Germans, and Irish, with delicious irony, whilst the denouement presents a nice example of the pen(cil) being mightier than the sword.
Recommended, especially in the extras-laden three-disc set released by Severin last year.
After the nicely Rotoscoped titles, accompanied by Francesco De Masi’s suitably stirring martial music, we’re introduced to our protagonists, four GI’s and an air force lieutenant.
Berle is a coward who involuntarily pisses himself whenever in danger; Nick a compulsive thief; Tony an ex-gangster and all-round bad guy whose only loyalty is to himself, and Fred (Fred Williamson) an African-American sentenced to death for the accidental killing of a racist officer. Lieutenant Yaeger (Bo Sevenson) is an air-ace, court-martialled after repeatedly going AWOL and using his plane to visit his girlfriend in London. (Though the “make love not war” epithet otherwise applies better to Nick, as a long-haired proto hippy.)
By making the MPs escorting the prisoners as unsympathetic as possible, not caring whether their charges get to their destination dead or alive, the filmmakers do a good job of getting us on the side of characters that in some cases we might otherwise find it harder to care about. Indeed, as a Nazi plane strafes the party the MP’s are quite happy to gun down the prisoners as they too attempt to take cover.
In the confusion, Berle, Nick, Tony, Fred and Yaeger manage to escape and to turn the tables on the MPs. Here we also get further indicators of the rules by which the film is playing as the MPs are briefly humiliated and then sent marching back to camp rather than subjected to anything more extreme and with none of the other prisoners, those who were not introduced nor individuated, surviving the encounter.
Deciding to head for neutral Switzerland, whose border is only 100 or so miles away, the men set off in the hastily repaired truck.
Unfortunately it is soon destroyed by a Nazi mortar, in what proves to be the first of a series of episodic encounters whose temporal and geographical relationships and resolution, if not always as clear as they might be, nevertheless also help convey an appropriate sense of confusion, that no-one really knows what is going on and where the enemy is. (If the Rotoscoped titles recall A Fistful of Dollars, this aspect is more reminiscent of The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, especially since identities and uniforms are rarely what they seem at first sight.)
This continues as, hiding out in a barn, the men discover a German deserter, Adolf Sachs (Raimund Harmstorf), and, with the rest of the countryside ahead of them swarming with the Wermacht, enter into an uneasy alliance.
An encounter with a group of skinny dipping female Nazi soldiers follows soon after, significantly ending before any real shooting to establish a contrast with an otherwise comparable scene in Peckinpah’s Cross of Iron to further emphasise that this is more fantasy adventure than realistic depiction of warfare.
The strengths and weaknesses of Inglorious Bastards are pretty much those common to all Castellari’s work.
Most obviously in terms of strengths, he really knows how to sell an action scene and how to make maximum use of the available resources.
Note how the opening scenes in the US base are comparatively large scale, with various extra trucks and tanks in the background. Thus taken in we may not notice the smaller scale of some of the intermediate battle scenes, where at times it looks as though the one exterior set has been shot from different angles or with the props moved around, nor the matte paintings and models representing ruined towns, squadrons of aircraft and things generally getting blown up.
In terms of weaknesses, meanwhile, it’s an awkwardly integrated love subplot with a female resistance fighter, made all the less credible by involving the least likely member of the group, Tony.
Allowing for the inclusion of a touch of glamour in the form of William Berger's daughter Debra, this is however hardly a fatal flaw.
The filmmakers also deal rather more ably with the complicating presence of an African-American in the group, going beyond a couple of scenes where he plays the Chewbacca role of captive to explore the contrast between Yaeger and Tony, the former commenting on the link between prejudice and the war itself and the latter a prime example of home-grown US bigotry.
Donal(d) O’Brien turns in a memorable cameo as a SS officer, venomously spitting out a line about the US being a nation of mongrels, of blacks, Jews, Germans, and Irish, with delicious irony, whilst the denouement presents a nice example of the pen(cil) being mightier than the sword.
Recommended, especially in the extras-laden three-disc set released by Severin last year.
Thursday, 19 March 2009
La Battaglia d'Inghilterra / Eagles Over London / Battle Squadron / Battle Command / Sur ordres du Führer / El Largo día del águila
Enzo G. Castellari is not a director who I mention terribly much on this blog. It’s probably because the two main filone I tend to focus on, the giallo and horror film, are ones which he is not important in.
It was Castellari, after all, who was first offered the directors’ chair for Zombie and who recommended Fulci for the job, feeling that it horror wasn’t his thing, and who only made one comparatively unusual foray into the giallo, Cold Eyes of Fear, more a thriller than a mystery whose most giallo moment was a self-contained nightclub act.
A self-reflexive moment
There is no question, however, that when it comes to action films, Castellari is pretty much the man.
And, with Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds currently reminding us of Castellari’s near namesake – and others Eurocult subjects beside, if such character names as “General Ed Fenech” and “Sgt Hugo Stiglitz” are anything to go by – what better time to (re)visit one of Castellari’s other contributions to the Euro-war cycle?
Though a bit more serious and less of a caper movie that Inglorious Bastards, Eagles Over London – or Battle of England, to translate the Italian – is nevertheless unmistakably Castellari, with plenty of fist fights, derring-do and explosions.
The story opens in Dunkirk, with the allies in retreat. Sent to look for stragglers, part of the detachment commanded by Captain Paul Stevens, finds a group of men from another British regiment, not realising that they are in fact Nazi agents in disguise.
With the advantage of surprise the Nazis, led by the sinister Major Krueger, kill all the detachment whilst suffering one casualty of their own, take their dog tags and pay books, and then split up, mingling amongst the rest of the retreating allied soldiers.
Split screen
Wondering where his men have got to, Captain Stevens goes back to check, indicating to his loyal NCO, Sergeant Mulligan, that the bridge separating them from the advancing Nazi forces should be blown up regardless of whether he comes back in time or not.
Stevens finds the dead men and, hurrying back, saves one of the German agents, Martin, from being blown up along with the bridge.
Back in Blighty, Stevens offers Martin a place to stay, little realizing that Martin is in fact one of the saboteurs he is trying to root out before they can infiltrate the British radar defence system, vital to the country’s defence.
For his part Martin feels increasingly conflicted by his loyalties to the Fuhrer against those of the new friend who saved his life at risk to his own…
If the historical backdrop means that aspects of the eventual resolution have a sense of inevitability – it’s hopefully not giving too much away to say the British win both this cloak and dagger battle and the Battle of Britain – Castellari and his collaborators nevertheless succeed in keeping one guessing exactly what will happen between Stevens and Martin until the end, and in intertwining the smaller and larger scale narratives.
The saboteurs
Similarly, if some of the antics of Stevens and company seem a bit far-fetched, suggesting that the war could have been won by them almost single-handed, the integration of levels of narrative conflict also means that you can well imagine the film being an extrapolation, Castellari style, from a real incident hidden in the secret archives or lost less the truth be known.
In this regard, the use of Winston Churchill’s speeches is also clever. If, “never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few,” in explicit reference to the RAF, that the RAF’s ability to repel the Nazi blitzkrieg is presented as depending on the radar stations being kept operative adds another implicit layer of meaning, that this few in turn owed much to the efforts of the even fewer.
Another nice touch here is the depiction of Nazi overconfidence and infighting, that the saboteur’s mission is one which one leader has mounted on his own whereas another believes, like the (unseen) Fuhrer, that the British radar does not exist.
Obligatory control room scene; I recently visited a decommissioned nuclear bunker and saw one just like this, but smaller
While sticklers for historical accuracy will likely find much to fault in the film’s costumes, armaments and other props, this can be excused by the sheer scale of some of the set pieces relative to the film’s likely budget.
For Euro-cult fans, meanwhile, the all-star cast – Frederick Stafford as Stevens, Francisco Rabal as Martin, Luigi Pistilli as Kruger, Renzo Palmer, Ida Galli, Teresa Gimpera and Van Johnson among the name roles; George Rigaud and Edouardo Fajardo visible as British and Nazi officers – should override this, along with the inherent humour of seeing Italians and Spaniards playing Germans impersonating Englishmen and speaking the language with quasi-received pronunciation (non-)accents. (Indeed, the odd man out here is Van Johnson, the British air commander with a American accent.)
Both groups can surely appreciate Castellari’s direction, with some delightful if very of its time deployment of split screen, and particularly good use of screen space and depth in unexpected ways to impart visual interest to even the more mundane material.
He also paces the film nicely. Just as we begin to wonder what the role of two Free French Pilots is, for instance, other than allowing for some more international appeal and air battle sequences, one of them is murdered by a Nazi seeking a new identity, thereby bringing the main plot neatly to the fore.
Not surprisingly he’s weaker on the obligatory romantic subplot stuff. It’s characteristic that a love scene between Stafford and Galli – who is torn between Stevens and the air commander – takes place amidst the backdrop of an air raid and sees Castellari discretely pull the camera away to then show a building opposite explode as it is hit by a bomb.
Went the Day Well meets The Eagle Has Landed, Euro-style?
It was Castellari, after all, who was first offered the directors’ chair for Zombie and who recommended Fulci for the job, feeling that it horror wasn’t his thing, and who only made one comparatively unusual foray into the giallo, Cold Eyes of Fear, more a thriller than a mystery whose most giallo moment was a self-contained nightclub act.
A self-reflexive moment
There is no question, however, that when it comes to action films, Castellari is pretty much the man.
And, with Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds currently reminding us of Castellari’s near namesake – and others Eurocult subjects beside, if such character names as “General Ed Fenech” and “Sgt Hugo Stiglitz” are anything to go by – what better time to (re)visit one of Castellari’s other contributions to the Euro-war cycle?
Though a bit more serious and less of a caper movie that Inglorious Bastards, Eagles Over London – or Battle of England, to translate the Italian – is nevertheless unmistakably Castellari, with plenty of fist fights, derring-do and explosions.
The story opens in Dunkirk, with the allies in retreat. Sent to look for stragglers, part of the detachment commanded by Captain Paul Stevens, finds a group of men from another British regiment, not realising that they are in fact Nazi agents in disguise.
With the advantage of surprise the Nazis, led by the sinister Major Krueger, kill all the detachment whilst suffering one casualty of their own, take their dog tags and pay books, and then split up, mingling amongst the rest of the retreating allied soldiers.
Split screen
Wondering where his men have got to, Captain Stevens goes back to check, indicating to his loyal NCO, Sergeant Mulligan, that the bridge separating them from the advancing Nazi forces should be blown up regardless of whether he comes back in time or not.
Stevens finds the dead men and, hurrying back, saves one of the German agents, Martin, from being blown up along with the bridge.
Back in Blighty, Stevens offers Martin a place to stay, little realizing that Martin is in fact one of the saboteurs he is trying to root out before they can infiltrate the British radar defence system, vital to the country’s defence.
For his part Martin feels increasingly conflicted by his loyalties to the Fuhrer against those of the new friend who saved his life at risk to his own…
If the historical backdrop means that aspects of the eventual resolution have a sense of inevitability – it’s hopefully not giving too much away to say the British win both this cloak and dagger battle and the Battle of Britain – Castellari and his collaborators nevertheless succeed in keeping one guessing exactly what will happen between Stevens and Martin until the end, and in intertwining the smaller and larger scale narratives.
The saboteurs
Similarly, if some of the antics of Stevens and company seem a bit far-fetched, suggesting that the war could have been won by them almost single-handed, the integration of levels of narrative conflict also means that you can well imagine the film being an extrapolation, Castellari style, from a real incident hidden in the secret archives or lost less the truth be known.
In this regard, the use of Winston Churchill’s speeches is also clever. If, “never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few,” in explicit reference to the RAF, that the RAF’s ability to repel the Nazi blitzkrieg is presented as depending on the radar stations being kept operative adds another implicit layer of meaning, that this few in turn owed much to the efforts of the even fewer.
Another nice touch here is the depiction of Nazi overconfidence and infighting, that the saboteur’s mission is one which one leader has mounted on his own whereas another believes, like the (unseen) Fuhrer, that the British radar does not exist.
Obligatory control room scene; I recently visited a decommissioned nuclear bunker and saw one just like this, but smaller
While sticklers for historical accuracy will likely find much to fault in the film’s costumes, armaments and other props, this can be excused by the sheer scale of some of the set pieces relative to the film’s likely budget.
For Euro-cult fans, meanwhile, the all-star cast – Frederick Stafford as Stevens, Francisco Rabal as Martin, Luigi Pistilli as Kruger, Renzo Palmer, Ida Galli, Teresa Gimpera and Van Johnson among the name roles; George Rigaud and Edouardo Fajardo visible as British and Nazi officers – should override this, along with the inherent humour of seeing Italians and Spaniards playing Germans impersonating Englishmen and speaking the language with quasi-received pronunciation (non-)accents. (Indeed, the odd man out here is Van Johnson, the British air commander with a American accent.)
Both groups can surely appreciate Castellari’s direction, with some delightful if very of its time deployment of split screen, and particularly good use of screen space and depth in unexpected ways to impart visual interest to even the more mundane material.
He also paces the film nicely. Just as we begin to wonder what the role of two Free French Pilots is, for instance, other than allowing for some more international appeal and air battle sequences, one of them is murdered by a Nazi seeking a new identity, thereby bringing the main plot neatly to the fore.
Not surprisingly he’s weaker on the obligatory romantic subplot stuff. It’s characteristic that a love scene between Stafford and Galli – who is torn between Stevens and the air commander – takes place amidst the backdrop of an air raid and sees Castellari discretely pull the camera away to then show a building opposite explode as it is hit by a bomb.
Went the Day Well meets The Eagle Has Landed, Euro-style?
Wednesday, 4 June 2008
L'Ultimo squalo / The Last Shark
This is, of course, the Italian entry sullo stesso filone Jaws that was felt to be too close to its model and thereby barred from being distributed in the US following court action by Universal Studios. It's also, as with all Enzo Castellari's work, a technically well made, unpretentious piece of low-budget B-cinema that accomplishes everything it sets out to do – except perhaps bring in the money thanks to Universal's pack of legal sharks...
A big shark, eating people. What more can you really say?
The deja vu, cut-and-paste plot is as follows:
The resort community of Port Harbour is about to celebrate its centennial with a regatta and windsurfing competition. The favourite is out practicing his moves when he suddenly disappears from view.
The search party, led by chief of police Peter Benton (James Franciscus) and grizzled old fisherman Ron Hamer (Vic Morrow), later discovers part of the surfer's board with bite marks suggestive of a massive great white shark.
Unfortunately Mayor Wells (Joshua Sinclair) refuses to accept this possibility for fear it will disrupt the celebrations and thus his own election campaign, giving the shark opportunity to wreak further havoc, including going after a boat crewed by his son and Benton's daughter...
As Luigi Cozzi once remarked, the Italian popular cinema strongly privileged imitation over innovation: “In Italy [...] when you bring a script to a producer, the first question he asks is not 'what is your film like?' but 'what film is your film like?'. That's the way it is, we can only make Zombie 2, never Zombie 1.”
Cast in these terms, the success or failure of certain filone as a whole might be explained in terms of a combination of budgetary requirements and cultural background.
For an Italian filmmaker to make a science fiction film to cash in on Star Wars was relatively difficult, not just because of the cost of high-tech effects (as distinct from traditional Bava or Margheriti style smoke, mirrors and model-work) but also because science fiction had never quite imprinted itself on the public consciousness.
Indeed Cozzi is a case in point here. An avowed science fiction enthusiast who had made his debut in the genre, with the non-commercial, festival screened The Tunnel Under the World, he soon found that while he could easily smuggle science fiction elements into gialli it was near impossible to actually get a straight science fiction project off the ground in the early and mid 1970s.
For an Italian filmmaker to make a horror film to cash in on Halloween was relatively easy not only because slasher films required little in the way of resources, but also as the American slasher film had itself borrowed heavily from the Italian giallo – a fact which reminds us, along with the obvious influence of the spaghetti western on the post-spaghetti US western, that it was never just about Italians 'ripping off' Hollywood anyway.
Someone fails to get out the shark repellent bat spray in time
We can thus perhaps begin to get an insight into how and why The Last Shark works and the problems it faced on account of this.
The simple fact is that there is probably not very much you can really do here except follow the Jaws template, all the more so when Spielberg's film is itself little more than a big budget B-movie that rigorously adheres to an old, well-established narrative trajectory:
1) There is an monstrous threat to the community.
2) The hero realises the nature of this threat.
3) Those in a position of power refuse to acknowledge the threat until it is almost too late.
4) The hero defeats the threat.
Seen in this light, the only other real difference between Jaws and Invaders from Mars, The Blob or Invasion of the Saucer Men is that it also threws in a touch of Moby Dick, presumably in a Corman-esque appeal to the more cultured segment of its audience.
The problem with The Last Shark, I suspect, is that it is thus not just too close an imitation of its model – Benton = Brody; Hamer = Quint; Wells = Vaughan; the failure to make the syntygmatic substitution of a giant alligator or killer whale for the shark etc. – but also that bit too well made and thus threatening to Hollywood's own sequels and cash-ins, not least the tawdry and tardy Jaws 3D.
With Castellari at the helm, it really was a case of Italians doing it better, accomplishing more with less – yes, the shark here is unconvincing, but those in Jaws aren't significantly better despite the hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on them – and generally knowing how to get round their limitations by acknowledging them, most notably when a ratings-seeking TV crew discusses the possibility of incorporating in some stock footage to spice things up on the grounds that their viewers wouldn't be able to tell anyway.
It's all about affecting the audience...
A big shark, eating people. What more can you really say?
The deja vu, cut-and-paste plot is as follows:
The resort community of Port Harbour is about to celebrate its centennial with a regatta and windsurfing competition. The favourite is out practicing his moves when he suddenly disappears from view.
The search party, led by chief of police Peter Benton (James Franciscus) and grizzled old fisherman Ron Hamer (Vic Morrow), later discovers part of the surfer's board with bite marks suggestive of a massive great white shark.
Unfortunately Mayor Wells (Joshua Sinclair) refuses to accept this possibility for fear it will disrupt the celebrations and thus his own election campaign, giving the shark opportunity to wreak further havoc, including going after a boat crewed by his son and Benton's daughter...
As Luigi Cozzi once remarked, the Italian popular cinema strongly privileged imitation over innovation: “In Italy [...] when you bring a script to a producer, the first question he asks is not 'what is your film like?' but 'what film is your film like?'. That's the way it is, we can only make Zombie 2, never Zombie 1.”
Cast in these terms, the success or failure of certain filone as a whole might be explained in terms of a combination of budgetary requirements and cultural background.
For an Italian filmmaker to make a science fiction film to cash in on Star Wars was relatively difficult, not just because of the cost of high-tech effects (as distinct from traditional Bava or Margheriti style smoke, mirrors and model-work) but also because science fiction had never quite imprinted itself on the public consciousness.
Indeed Cozzi is a case in point here. An avowed science fiction enthusiast who had made his debut in the genre, with the non-commercial, festival screened The Tunnel Under the World, he soon found that while he could easily smuggle science fiction elements into gialli it was near impossible to actually get a straight science fiction project off the ground in the early and mid 1970s.
For an Italian filmmaker to make a horror film to cash in on Halloween was relatively easy not only because slasher films required little in the way of resources, but also as the American slasher film had itself borrowed heavily from the Italian giallo – a fact which reminds us, along with the obvious influence of the spaghetti western on the post-spaghetti US western, that it was never just about Italians 'ripping off' Hollywood anyway.
Someone fails to get out the shark repellent bat spray in time
We can thus perhaps begin to get an insight into how and why The Last Shark works and the problems it faced on account of this.
The simple fact is that there is probably not very much you can really do here except follow the Jaws template, all the more so when Spielberg's film is itself little more than a big budget B-movie that rigorously adheres to an old, well-established narrative trajectory:
1) There is an monstrous threat to the community.
2) The hero realises the nature of this threat.
3) Those in a position of power refuse to acknowledge the threat until it is almost too late.
4) The hero defeats the threat.
Seen in this light, the only other real difference between Jaws and Invaders from Mars, The Blob or Invasion of the Saucer Men is that it also threws in a touch of Moby Dick, presumably in a Corman-esque appeal to the more cultured segment of its audience.
The problem with The Last Shark, I suspect, is that it is thus not just too close an imitation of its model – Benton = Brody; Hamer = Quint; Wells = Vaughan; the failure to make the syntygmatic substitution of a giant alligator or killer whale for the shark etc. – but also that bit too well made and thus threatening to Hollywood's own sequels and cash-ins, not least the tawdry and tardy Jaws 3D.
With Castellari at the helm, it really was a case of Italians doing it better, accomplishing more with less – yes, the shark here is unconvincing, but those in Jaws aren't significantly better despite the hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on them – and generally knowing how to get round their limitations by acknowledging them, most notably when a ratings-seeking TV crew discusses the possibility of incorporating in some stock footage to spice things up on the grounds that their viewers wouldn't be able to tell anyway.
It's all about affecting the audience...
Tuesday, 27 May 2008
Ammazzali tutti e torna solo / Go Kill Everybody and Come Back Alone
We open with a long essentially dialogue free pre-credits sequence in which six “bandits, killers and thieves” infiltrate a Confederate stronghold using a combination of stealth, strength, skill, acrobatics and technological gimmicks, most notably a kind of dynamite firing gun.
It perhaps plays a bit more like a Gianfranco Parolini / Frank Kramer sequence than an Enzo Castellari one, but otherwise very much sets the scene for what is to follow: lots of action and comparatively little talk; adept utilisation of the widescreen Techniscope frame, with some beautiful foreground / background compositions and uses of the arid Spanish landscapes; a rousing Francesco De Masi score and, above all, a strongly masculine world.
Indeed, throughout the film's 90 odd minute running time we see absolutely no female faces whatsoever, never mind any stock types let alone rounded characters.
Rather, as the closing theme states, the thing that “all men desire” is GOLD
The six:
Clyde MacKay, the group's spokesman, de facto leader and brains.
Deker, “the smart one,” “who can do anything with dynamite – anything unpleasant, that is”
Bogard, “strong enough to break a man in two with his bare hands” and “the kind that doesn't need much of a reason” to do so.
Blade, a half-indian, half-Mexican knife specialist who “likes to cut – people mainly”.
Hoagy, “a strange boy – light fingered, especially with a gun. He'll kill if he has to but then he's sorry afterwards”
Kid, who “moves like a monkey” and has “one virtue – he's a pure killer”
Their mission, accepted by Clyde: to penetrate a Union stronghold and steal one million dollars in gold which is intended for use in purchasing armaments. The treasure is located in a munitions store, intermixed with explosives – one spark or stray bullet and the whole lot will be blown sky-high.
It maybe doesn't make a whole lot of sense if you think about it too much, especially when a first complicating factor, from which the film takes its title, is revealed to Clyde alone: to dispose of any survivors amongst his team, should there be any, and make sure he's the only one who returns.
Why exactly? Why don't the confederates wan't the gold for themselves?
It also gets still more improbable when the team is unexpectedly joined by a would-be seventh member in the form of Lynch, the apparently loyal Confederate counter-espionage agent who first discovered the Union's scene and the location of the gold.
Lynch; note that he is the only one of the three characters to be framed in the mirror
Still, how many other spaghetti westerns featured similarly unstable identities and shifting allegiances and required similar leaps of faith to accept their (il)logics at times?
For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly for two, the latter connection further cemented by the importance of a prisoner-of-war camp to the latter part of the proceedings, not to mention Castellari and writer Tito Carpi's other, obvious Leone tribute, Vado... l'ammazzo e torno – i.e. Go Kill and Come Back – with its Stranger, Mexican bandito and three-way corrida finale.
The most obvious difference between the two treasure hunts lies in their cast. Whereas Go Kill and Come Back features three actors and as such relegates its stuntmen to lesser roles, the balance here shifts somewhat towards the latter group, with Ken Wood / Gianfrano Cianfriglia (the subject of a lengthy and informative interview on the Wild East DVD) and Ottaviano Dell'Acqua playing Blade and the Kid respectively. The acting contingent is headed by the perpetually grinning Chuck Connors, the always impressive Frank Wolff and Franco Citti, whose kill and pray role might be an in-jokish reference to frequent collaborator Pier Paolo Pasolini's casting as a radical priest in Requiescant.
Some examples of Castellari's striking compositions, lensed by the reliable Alejando Ulloa
Though Castellari hadn't at this stage in his career quite developed the full expressive vocabulary he would later employ to such great effect on the likes of Keoma, with more zoom and less slow-motion, his grasp of cinema is nevertheless remarkably assured for someone who was barely 30 at the time.
Well worth a look.
It perhaps plays a bit more like a Gianfranco Parolini / Frank Kramer sequence than an Enzo Castellari one, but otherwise very much sets the scene for what is to follow: lots of action and comparatively little talk; adept utilisation of the widescreen Techniscope frame, with some beautiful foreground / background compositions and uses of the arid Spanish landscapes; a rousing Francesco De Masi score and, above all, a strongly masculine world.
Indeed, throughout the film's 90 odd minute running time we see absolutely no female faces whatsoever, never mind any stock types let alone rounded characters.
Rather, as the closing theme states, the thing that “all men desire” is GOLD
The six:
Clyde MacKay, the group's spokesman, de facto leader and brains.
Deker, “the smart one,” “who can do anything with dynamite – anything unpleasant, that is”
Bogard, “strong enough to break a man in two with his bare hands” and “the kind that doesn't need much of a reason” to do so.
Blade, a half-indian, half-Mexican knife specialist who “likes to cut – people mainly”.
Hoagy, “a strange boy – light fingered, especially with a gun. He'll kill if he has to but then he's sorry afterwards”
Kid, who “moves like a monkey” and has “one virtue – he's a pure killer”
Their mission, accepted by Clyde: to penetrate a Union stronghold and steal one million dollars in gold which is intended for use in purchasing armaments. The treasure is located in a munitions store, intermixed with explosives – one spark or stray bullet and the whole lot will be blown sky-high.
It maybe doesn't make a whole lot of sense if you think about it too much, especially when a first complicating factor, from which the film takes its title, is revealed to Clyde alone: to dispose of any survivors amongst his team, should there be any, and make sure he's the only one who returns.
Why exactly? Why don't the confederates wan't the gold for themselves?
It also gets still more improbable when the team is unexpectedly joined by a would-be seventh member in the form of Lynch, the apparently loyal Confederate counter-espionage agent who first discovered the Union's scene and the location of the gold.
Lynch; note that he is the only one of the three characters to be framed in the mirror
Still, how many other spaghetti westerns featured similarly unstable identities and shifting allegiances and required similar leaps of faith to accept their (il)logics at times?
For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly for two, the latter connection further cemented by the importance of a prisoner-of-war camp to the latter part of the proceedings, not to mention Castellari and writer Tito Carpi's other, obvious Leone tribute, Vado... l'ammazzo e torno – i.e. Go Kill and Come Back – with its Stranger, Mexican bandito and three-way corrida finale.
The most obvious difference between the two treasure hunts lies in their cast. Whereas Go Kill and Come Back features three actors and as such relegates its stuntmen to lesser roles, the balance here shifts somewhat towards the latter group, with Ken Wood / Gianfrano Cianfriglia (the subject of a lengthy and informative interview on the Wild East DVD) and Ottaviano Dell'Acqua playing Blade and the Kid respectively. The acting contingent is headed by the perpetually grinning Chuck Connors, the always impressive Frank Wolff and Franco Citti, whose kill and pray role might be an in-jokish reference to frequent collaborator Pier Paolo Pasolini's casting as a radical priest in Requiescant.
Some examples of Castellari's striking compositions, lensed by the reliable Alejando Ulloa
Though Castellari hadn't at this stage in his career quite developed the full expressive vocabulary he would later employ to such great effect on the likes of Keoma, with more zoom and less slow-motion, his grasp of cinema is nevertheless remarkably assured for someone who was barely 30 at the time.
Well worth a look.
Monday, 12 November 2007
Castellari: Action Italian Style
This, the latest in Midnight Media’s ongoing series looking at Italian cult cinema presents a interview with Enzo Castellari and filmography, the 44-page glossy A5 booklet being illustrated with stills, DVD and video covers, poster art and so forth.
While there’s maybe not too much in the interview that dedicated Castellari fans won’t have heard elsewhere, with the volume in some ways serving as something of an update to the interviews in European Trash Cinema #9 and #10, for example, its an entertaining and informative read that also provides some interesting insights as to certain of his films.
One is intrigued, for instance, in reading how the desire to make Cold Eyes of Fear on a couple of sets was inspired by William Friedkin’s gay drama The Boys in the Band, not so much for learning how it allowed Castellari to shoot the film in sequence – normally a technique that is too costly for time-is-money productions – but more for the possible light it sheds on the relationship between the two home invaders played by Julian Mateos and Frank Wolff.
I just wish there was more of it, and more like it...
Sunday, 31 December 2006
Cold Eyes of Fear / Gli Occhi freddi della paura
Respectable lawyer Peter Flower (Gianni Garko) picks up Italian prostitute Anna (Giovanna Ralli) at a London nightclub and takes her back to his uncle's town-house. They soon discover the body of butler Hawkings – who was supposed to have left, Peter having telephoned to inform him of wanting to be left alone – and worse. For a gunman, Quill (Julian Mateos), is waiting.
Peter's Uncle, Judge Baddell (Fernando Rey), telephones about a case they are working on, affording the younger man the opportunity to attempt to convey the danger of the situation in a coded form.
When a policeman turns up at the door shortly afterwards with a note, Peter thinks that he and Anna are saved. But the policeman, Welt (Frank Wolff) is in fact, bogus and in league with Quill, whom he has convinced the house contains a safe filled with valuables. Welt himself, meanwhile, is motivated by a desire for revenge on Baddell, whom he blames for his 15-year prison sentence...
Also known as Desperate Moments – a title that (over)emphasises the Desperate Hours like nature of the piece – this Italian-Spanish co-production is the kind of giallo that raises interesting questions of the generic label. While undoubtedly qualifying in the broader, literary sense of the term by virtue of being a thriller, it lacks many of the typical characteristics of the giallo film.
The on-screen title of Desperate Moments
The opening sequence, in which a scantily clad woman is menaced by a knife-wielding attacker, then seems to consent to his advances, then manages to get the knife at stab him, is instructive in this regard, as the camera pulls back to then reveal the presence of an audience and the status of the piece as a nightclub act.
Does the absence of black gloves and white sleeve already indicate that nothing is quite as it seems here?
Be on your guard; do not trust what you are seeing is thus the emphatic message even before characters like the fake cop are introduced as such; this message enhanced by Castellari's distinctively cinematic approach here and elsewhere, with a emphasis upon dramatic angles; jarring edits; zooms; tight close-ups; slow motion; rack focus; cross-cutting and other devices to counterbalance the element of theatricality otherwise inherent to any piece with limited locations and characters.
Is that a J&B I see before me? Early on, Peter comments that his uncle must be Scottish because he hides the whisky. But it soon appears...
Though the production design is generally quite subdued - and thereby perhaps better in conveying the conservative good taste of the judge and his nephew - there does seem a subtle element of yellow running through many of the sets and set-ups.
At the same time a slight over-abundance of fist-fights as the film progresses – most notably an otherwise unrelated gang brawl that prevents a patrol car from calling on the house two-thirds of the way through – also gives the sense that the director would have been more comfortable dealing with straightforward action fare of the western or cop types that make up the majority of his filmography. (Castellari was, after all, also the man first offered directorial duties on Zombie, which he declined in favour of Fulci, at that time just coming off the disappointment of the supernatual giallo Sette note in nero.)
One of Castellari's most striking shots in a film full of them
A reminder that this is the man who did The Big Racket and The Bronx Warriors
"He's just a poor boy, from a poor family" - Julian Mateos in Freddie Mercury mode
Another part of the same psychedelic nightmare sequence
There are also some basic continuity problems with the exteriors, which sometimes switch haphazardly between night and day, as if the filmmakers did not not manage to grab enough location footage on their London sojourn before returning to Cinecittà.
Wolff, Ralli and Garko deliver quality performances. It is harder to evaluate Mateos's contribution on account of the unconvincing Mockney accent his English dubber has saddled him with, while Rey seems a touch underused, being literally allowed to telephone in his lines for much of the film
The cast also benefit from a finely crafted screenplay, credited on screen to Castellari and Tito Carpi but to Leila Buongiorno and José María Nunes's on the IMDB entry. Whoever is responsible - the IMDB can be unreliable with films like this, whose credits in turn are not always to be trusted - they have given the characters more convincing motivations and complex personalities than those found in the typical Italian-Spanish co-production.
Thus, for example, Welt's desire for revenge is overlaid with a strong sense of being made the fall guy on account of his lowly class position, whilst Quill's relationship with his co-conspirator is complicated by his homosexual desires towards him. Consequently, even if the viewer is not necessarily invited to identify with them, he or she at least gets a sense of their reality and complexity. This is all the more so when it comes to Anna, presented as a refreshing antithesis to the conventional tart stereotypes and, arguably, the strongest character in the film.
Here it is also interesting to note some of the parallels between Cold Eyes of Fear and Ruggero Deodato's better-known, nastier - yet ultimately perhaps less effective, precisely because its excesses do not always convince - House on the Edge of the Park. Tracing things through, we find that Buongiorno later collaborated with Park co-writer Gianfranco Clerici on Marino Girolami's Italia a mano armata – Marino being Enzo's father – and was subsequently reunited with both Nunes and Castellari on Sensitività, suggestively retitled in English as The House by the Edge of the Lake and The Last House Near the Lake. (As ever, more information on when the film was released in English under each title and by whom etc. would be instructive.)
Ennio Morricone's partially improvised, free jazz style score is another of Cold Eyes of Fear's plusses. It is not the sort of thing you would necessarily want to listen to for pleasure – tellingly during some early scene setting as Peter and Anna take in the London nightlife the Belinda May theme is used, as the score lacks any lounge or bossa nova cues – but in this context serves to rack up the tension.
Peter's Uncle, Judge Baddell (Fernando Rey), telephones about a case they are working on, affording the younger man the opportunity to attempt to convey the danger of the situation in a coded form.
When a policeman turns up at the door shortly afterwards with a note, Peter thinks that he and Anna are saved. But the policeman, Welt (Frank Wolff) is in fact, bogus and in league with Quill, whom he has convinced the house contains a safe filled with valuables. Welt himself, meanwhile, is motivated by a desire for revenge on Baddell, whom he blames for his 15-year prison sentence...
Also known as Desperate Moments – a title that (over)emphasises the Desperate Hours like nature of the piece – this Italian-Spanish co-production is the kind of giallo that raises interesting questions of the generic label. While undoubtedly qualifying in the broader, literary sense of the term by virtue of being a thriller, it lacks many of the typical characteristics of the giallo film.
The on-screen title of Desperate Moments
The opening sequence, in which a scantily clad woman is menaced by a knife-wielding attacker, then seems to consent to his advances, then manages to get the knife at stab him, is instructive in this regard, as the camera pulls back to then reveal the presence of an audience and the status of the piece as a nightclub act.
Does the absence of black gloves and white sleeve already indicate that nothing is quite as it seems here?
Be on your guard; do not trust what you are seeing is thus the emphatic message even before characters like the fake cop are introduced as such; this message enhanced by Castellari's distinctively cinematic approach here and elsewhere, with a emphasis upon dramatic angles; jarring edits; zooms; tight close-ups; slow motion; rack focus; cross-cutting and other devices to counterbalance the element of theatricality otherwise inherent to any piece with limited locations and characters.
Is that a J&B I see before me? Early on, Peter comments that his uncle must be Scottish because he hides the whisky. But it soon appears...
Though the production design is generally quite subdued - and thereby perhaps better in conveying the conservative good taste of the judge and his nephew - there does seem a subtle element of yellow running through many of the sets and set-ups.
At the same time a slight over-abundance of fist-fights as the film progresses – most notably an otherwise unrelated gang brawl that prevents a patrol car from calling on the house two-thirds of the way through – also gives the sense that the director would have been more comfortable dealing with straightforward action fare of the western or cop types that make up the majority of his filmography. (Castellari was, after all, also the man first offered directorial duties on Zombie, which he declined in favour of Fulci, at that time just coming off the disappointment of the supernatual giallo Sette note in nero.)
One of Castellari's most striking shots in a film full of them
A reminder that this is the man who did The Big Racket and The Bronx Warriors
"He's just a poor boy, from a poor family" - Julian Mateos in Freddie Mercury mode
Another part of the same psychedelic nightmare sequence
There are also some basic continuity problems with the exteriors, which sometimes switch haphazardly between night and day, as if the filmmakers did not not manage to grab enough location footage on their London sojourn before returning to Cinecittà.
Wolff, Ralli and Garko deliver quality performances. It is harder to evaluate Mateos's contribution on account of the unconvincing Mockney accent his English dubber has saddled him with, while Rey seems a touch underused, being literally allowed to telephone in his lines for much of the film
The cast also benefit from a finely crafted screenplay, credited on screen to Castellari and Tito Carpi but to Leila Buongiorno and José María Nunes's on the IMDB entry. Whoever is responsible - the IMDB can be unreliable with films like this, whose credits in turn are not always to be trusted - they have given the characters more convincing motivations and complex personalities than those found in the typical Italian-Spanish co-production.
Thus, for example, Welt's desire for revenge is overlaid with a strong sense of being made the fall guy on account of his lowly class position, whilst Quill's relationship with his co-conspirator is complicated by his homosexual desires towards him. Consequently, even if the viewer is not necessarily invited to identify with them, he or she at least gets a sense of their reality and complexity. This is all the more so when it comes to Anna, presented as a refreshing antithesis to the conventional tart stereotypes and, arguably, the strongest character in the film.
Here it is also interesting to note some of the parallels between Cold Eyes of Fear and Ruggero Deodato's better-known, nastier - yet ultimately perhaps less effective, precisely because its excesses do not always convince - House on the Edge of the Park. Tracing things through, we find that Buongiorno later collaborated with Park co-writer Gianfranco Clerici on Marino Girolami's Italia a mano armata – Marino being Enzo's father – and was subsequently reunited with both Nunes and Castellari on Sensitività, suggestively retitled in English as The House by the Edge of the Lake and The Last House Near the Lake. (As ever, more information on when the film was released in English under each title and by whom etc. would be instructive.)
Ennio Morricone's partially improvised, free jazz style score is another of Cold Eyes of Fear's plusses. It is not the sort of thing you would necessarily want to listen to for pleasure – tellingly during some early scene setting as Peter and Anna take in the London nightlife the Belinda May theme is used, as the score lacks any lounge or bossa nova cues – but in this context serves to rack up the tension.
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