La mano lunga del padrino / The Long Arm of the Godfather

In that the main conflict in this 1972 poliziotto is in fact between rival gangsters, with the police barely making an appearance despite the gunning down of several soldiers and the theft of a consignment of arms, this is this is one of those filone entries which qualifies as a poliziotto in name only.


Groovy credits superimposed over cold blooded killing

It's also a somewhat difficult film to otherwise place. The groovy credits and the breezy lounge score (complete with frequent use of la la la la type male and female vocalism) are at odds with the cynicism, violence and general air of misogyny and/or misanthropy that is otherwise the film's stock in trade. Perhaps tellingly the film was also the only credited work for composer Silvano D'Auria and co-writer and director Nando Bonomi alike.


Casual violence and sadism

Elsewhere we are on more familiar ground, insofar as the other co-writer and editor was Giulio Berruti of Killer Nun note, the three leads are Adolfo Celi, Peter Lee Lawrence and Erica Blanc and many of the gang members familiar faces.

Celi plays the Godfather of the title, Lawrence the treacherous underling who does a double crosses and tries to sell the arms on himself, and Blanc the moll whom he wishes to impress.

The pacing is often somewhat leisurely and the game of cat and mouse not as tense as it could have been.

This is partly down to the characterisation of the leads: Celi’s Don Carmelo is a criminal mastermind in the Thunderball or Danger Diabolik mode, confident he’s always at least one move ahead of everyone else:

Goon: Don't you want revenge?
Don Carmelo: Romantic notions don't interest me. I want the money.

Lawrence’s Vincenzo thinks he is smarter than he actually is, but is also adept at improvising his way out of sticky situations:

Vincenzo: For the moment I'm still winning.
Sabina: Don't count on that.
Vincenzo: I always do.

It is also down to the fact that the action quickly relocates from Italy to somewhere in North Africa or the Middle East, such that we get a fair amount of tourist style sightseeing worked into the narrative.






And something a bit more disturbing, perhaps

Things do get back down to the serious business after a bit, albeit again with some awkward inconsistencies in tone, not least when Blanc’s Sabina is brutalised by one of Don Vincenzo’s thugs to some incongruous but not obviously intentionally ironic musical accompaniment.

In sum, an oddity that doesn’t always work but which isn’t the kind of disaster that its first and only film nature might lead you to assume.

Il Terzo Occhio / The Third Eye

This little known film is something of a missing link in the history of Italian post-Psycho and necrophile cinema, taking as it does elements from Freda’s Hichcock diptych earlier in the 1960s (both also being Panda productions) while itself providing the model for D’Amato’s Beyond the Darkness a decade later.


Diana Sullivan is in fact Erica Blanc; the entire cast and crew hides behind sometimes unconvincing English credits, including the transliteration of Olga Solbelli as Olga Sunbeauty

The Freda connection sees the music box theme from The Ghost being reused, while the roles played by Erica Blanc, as sisters Laura and Daniella, could easily have been shoe-ins for Barbara Steele were it not for the fact that neither is possessed, undead or actually malevolent.

Instead the villain roles are filled by veteran Olga Solbelli, whose career extended back to the 1930s, and Gioia Pascal, in what was her only acting role, with murderous necrophile Mino, played by a young Franco Nero, a more (sym)pathetic figure by comparison.

Solbelli plays the elderly widowed Countess who will not allow her son to marry his beloved Laura, while Pascal plays the loyal family servant, Marta, who covets Mino for herself, along with what is left of the family’s admittedly diminished estate, as payment for her father's loyal service in decades past.








The mise-en-scene augments the dialogue, as a conspiracy is formed

To achieve her goals Marta cuts the brake cable on Laura’s car, causing the vehicle to roll off an embankment and into a lake, and murders the Countess, pushing her down the stairs.

This also marks the one way in which D’Amato’s film departs from its model: He makes housekeeper Iris something of a composite of Solbelli and Pascal’s characters and begins with his Mino, Frank, already orphaned through the deaths of his parents in a car accident. In so doing he also gives his film more of a supernatural horror aspect, by having Iris cause Frank’s beloved Anna to sicken and die through black magic.

The shock of the his mother’s and, more importantly, Laura’s deaths drives the already mentally troubled Mino over the edge. He takes Laura’s body and preserves it; unlike D’Amato’s film there’s no subplot of having to steal the body from its grave, nor lovingly detailed exploration of the taxidermical process itself, although Mino does earlier give a bird the Norman Bates treatment.






I'm a taxidermist; I hate parties

From this point on the two films follow pretty much the same path, with the key points being their necrophile’s compulsion to pick up women and make love to them while in the presence of his immortal / preserved beloved; his equal compulsion to then kill them; his relationship with his housekeeper / would-be lover, and the eventual arrival of his beloved’s double to bring the whole thing to a shocking denouement.

Gore-hounds will likely prefer D’Amato’s film to Mino Guerreri’s for the simple reasons that it’s more explicit and is in colour rather than black and white. Others may be more open to Il Terzo Occhio’s own achievements.


Blanc uses 'no chance' bubble-bath

As far as explicitness goes, it's actually quite extreme, with Marta at one point bringing down her heel on the injured Countess's face, along with plenty of shots of the various female cast members (the 68-year-old Solbelli excluded) in their underwear and diaphanous nightwear that wouldn't have been out of place in a fumetti neri of the time.








The Countess's fall

Nero is clearly a better, more subtle, actor than Buio Omega’s Kieran Canter, his performance all the more interesting for being in such contrast to his most famous role, Django, which he had essayed only the year before. The other leads likewise hold their own, with Blanc welcome as always and the Sobelli/Pascal one-two proving as memorable as Franco Stoppa.

Where the film really impresses, however, is Guerreri’s direction, with set-ups that make make good use of foreground and background space, mirrors-based framings, and natural dividing elements; elegant and complex camera movements (including mounting the camera inside a rolling car and tracking the Countess's fall down the stairs), along with expressionistic superimpositions (including an apparently Vertigo-inspired nightmare sequence) and off-balance compositions. Though otherwise something of a journeyman, whose credits comprising a predictable mix of filone product, he really hit the ball out of the park with this one.




Why use words when images will suffice?

The cinematography is also beautifully crisp, bringing out the quality of the production design, whilst the romantic score moves the film out of the realm of “necrophile soap opera” – as critic Kim Newman once described Buio Omega, with its cold, detached Goblin score – towards that of necrophile melodrama.














Visions in Mino's Third Eye

The film is presented as being a free adaptation of a story by Gilles de Rais. Whether or not this is true, it’s worth noting in closing that Buio Omega’s story is credited to one Giacomo Guerrini, whose paucity of credits makes it difficult to determine for sure whether he was Mino Guerrini’s brother and had perhaps also provided the story credited to de Rais, although this does seem possible or even plausible.

La Mano lunga del padrino / Long Arm of the Godfather

We open with a daring attack on an army convoy carrying a consignment of weapons. But for the technology on display – cars, trucks and submachine guns – it could easily be a scene in a spaghetti western, all the more so when one of the robbers proceeds to make off with the loot, leaving his companions for dead.

As Long Arm of the Godfather's title suggests, however, we're actually in poliziotto territory. In truth, however, the term is something of a misnomer here insofar as no members of the police or other authorities are ever seen ever as taking any interest in the case, which is a curious omission given that you would think that soldiers would be the kind of crime to that attention.




Noir-ish imagery with Lawrence

This is not to say, however, that the perpetrator of the betrayal, Vincenzo, is about to have things easy since his ex-boss Don Carmelo is, as his title indicates, a rather prominent gangster and soon proves to have also survived the incident.

And then there's the issue of actually finding a buyer for the guns...


Erica Blanc, intelligent and charming as ever

Directed and co-written by Nardo Bonomi, whose only credit this is, the latter role in conjuction with Giulio Berutti of Killer Nun fame, this is nasty little crime film where Peter Lee Lawrence / Karl Hirenbach's Vincenzo provides our point of identification almost by default.

About the only things he has going for him in comparison with Adolfo Celi's old school Don are that he is the attractive young underdog aspiring to have his day and is acting at least partly out love, in the form of Erika Blanc's somewhat more level headed and forward thinking moll, Sabina.





Shades of giallo

Otherwise, however, they're cut from much the same cloth, with the action providing that familiar mix of car chases, shootouts, men beating one another and women up to car door slamming type sound effects, and a reasonable degree of suspense over what is going to happen next.


This is the kind of film where the nightclub owner is more interested in whether the dancer can also serve drinks than her primary talents


Yet another savage beating

Though nothing outstanding Bonomi's direction is efficient, with a good use of locations and some eye-catching camera set-ups. The performances are more going through the motions than truly inspired, although there is an added poignancy to the denoument if one is aware Lawrence and Blanc's rumoured real-life relationship and of the actor's subsequent suicide less than two years later.

La Rossa dalla pelle che scotta / The Red Headed Corpse / The Sensuous Doll

Written and directed by Renzo Russo, this is one of the stranger gialli out there – if, that is, it can actually be called a giallo. It certainly features a number of characteristic giallo tropes: an alienated, artistic protagonist; a femme fatale figure or three; conspiracy and mystery and, above all, lots of mannequin action and imagery.

It's the last aspect which also, however, offsets the others to some extent, insofar as we're never too sure what's actually going on and what to make of the femme fatale, the conspiracy and the mystery which seem, instead, to have just as much in common with an E T A Hoffmann fantastique.

At one point a Mr Gonzales goes to the police station to report a missing person. Asked to name her, he hesitates, tellingly opening with the remark that “to me she was my doll, my sensuous doll,” while the direction focuses on his hands to the exclusion of his face. As he confesses to breaking into a house in search of the missing woman we get what would otherwise be a classic giallo subjective camera stalking scene, except for the fact that we know the identity – yet still not the face – of the stalker.




Living, bleeding doll?

It's possible that the version of the film I saw, with the title of Sweet Spirits, had been re-edited so that this scene appeared out of sequence. Nevertheless such changes would appear to have only added to a weirdness that was already there, with a blending of past and present, dream and reality throughout that demand an active involvement in making sense of the film.

What is clear is that Farley Granger plays an unsuccessful, alcoholic artist by the name of John Ward. The dealers don't want his paintings and he refuse to change his style or subject to meet the tastes of the market.

One day while out walking in the woods he happens upon a group of hippies, one of whom gives him a mannequin. “She's better than the real thing – she's always there and she'll never talk back to you,” he explains. Ward takes the mannequin home and repairs its damaged face: “I'll fix you up. You'll see.”


A composition that would likely look even more impressive in the proper aspect ratio

Later, in a bar, he meets a hooker who, on learning that he is an artist, suggests that she could model for him.

Back home, this seems to cause him to imagine that the mannequin has come to life, though at this point she remains silent and passive.

After some drinks, Ward falls asleep with his model/mannequin/muse. On awakening she has changed into another woman (Erika Blanc) and now talks to him.

After again being told that what the market wants is naked women, the model/mannequin/muse suggests that she might pose for John.


Pictures of Lily, er Erica

Reluctantly he agrees – they do need the money. The resulting painting sells and the dealers want more. So does the model: “Don't forget the chocolate, and the stockings – and bring me a few magazines.” More than this, however, she also takes another lover, in the form of a local huntsman, the aforementioned Gonzales (Venantino Venantini), and attracts the attentions of one of the dealers, Omar Bey.


Erica in seductive mode

It can all only end badly – if, that is, we can even say that there is such a thing as an ending in a film like this.

For taken as a whole it's a bit like that famous mobius strip sequence in Bava's Kill Baby Kill where, walking through the castle in pursuit of the child, Paul Eswai ends up also chasing after himself; perhaps not coincidentally a similar image appeared in The Archers' Tales of Hoffman, in the Antonia story segment, with that film's Olympia segment featuring a similar red-headed mannequin come to life who also meets a similarly disturbing end.

The Granger/Blanc relationship intriguingly recalls that between John and Mildred Harrington in A Hatchet for the Honeymoon, another Bava film which pushed the boundaries of giallo representation, while Blanc's dualistic character has affinities with her role as the succubus temptress in The Devil's Nightmare – indeed at one point she even wears a similar “threw it on and nearly missed” navel-revealing dress.

Gradually, that is, it all starts to make sense...

If, however, working at this isn't your thing there are the incidentals: the pleasing easy listening score; Granger's method-esque performance (the only person I can imagine playing the role better would be Frank Wolff); some nice little directorial touches, like ending a scene and coveng Granger's character's mood by having Granger him walk into the camera; and, of course, all that eye-candy.

L' Uomo più velenoso del cobra / Cobras humanas / Human Cobras

Gangster Tony Gardner (Giorgio Ardisson) receives news that his brother Johnny, has been murdered. Returning to New York to investigate poses a risk, as he was banished from the city by the mob and is still hunted by his enemies. Duty calls, however.






Classic double images; Johnny and Tony are also apparently identical looking

Watched at every turn by a mysterious figure, Tony manages to make contact with his brother's wife, Leslie, who was with him when he was shot with a sniper rifle whilst attending a football game, and uncovers evidence that a man by the name of Mortimer (Luciano Pigozzi) may be behind his brothers death.

Receiving the mob's permission to go after the small-time figure – “we're not going to bother you if you don't bother us," they suggest, although obviously suspicious of the motives behind this seeing altruism – Tony tracks him down.

Mortimer indicates that he was approached by Johnny about a year ago on a visit from Kenya, and that the two men had formed a profitable drugs smuggling operation, his own innocence in the affair being effectively demonstrated by his murder shortly afterwards. The assassin – the same man who has been almost manages to slash Leslie’s throat with a straight razor before making his escape.

A clue left by Mortimer leads Tony and Leslie to Nairobi, Kenya and Johnny's other business partner George MacGreves (Alberto De Martino), against whom the weight of evidence soon piles up, most notably in his facility with a hunting rifle and a flight log indicating his own crossing the Atlantic.

But is all as it seems?





More a crime thriller than a giallo per se, Human Cobras (the Italian title literally translating as more like 'The Man More Venomous Than the Cobra') emerges as one of those films which it is more interesting to ruminate on than watch, as one attempts to account for its curiously inconsistent lack of affect.

The scene where Leslie receives a threatening phone-call and then thinks she spies Johnny lurking outside, before signs of his – or at least someone’s – presence are found inside the house is exemplary in this regard. While well-mounted by the director and suitably suspenseful at the time, it emerges as all too contrived in retrospect. Viewers familiar with the work of co-scenarist Ernesto Gastaldi will also note a similarity to the scenario in The Whip and the Body, as a pair of muddy boots and a bloodstain inexplicably appear. Unfortunately the supernatural reading, that Johnny has returned from the dead, does not carry the same weight as its counterpart as in Bava’s masterpiece of sadomasochistic amour fou, simply because here we are operating in the realm of the mundane, not the Gothic imaginary.

In this regard it’s also worth noting that while the Kenyan setting and extended safari sequence in particular certainly allow for the anticipated exotic and touristic images, Tony nevertheless finds himself moving through much the same milieux of bars, nightclubs and casinos and responds to his new environment in much the same way as the old, Note, for instance, how a scenic waterfall proves a convenient location for disposing of a body, not really all that different from a landfill back home; he is here on business and merely commutated the urban jungle for the savannah whilst his quarry remains the same.





On safari, but who is the hunter and the hunted?

There is a general disinterest shown in the characters and their psychological make-up, again more reminiscent of the crime film more generally. Tony wants to avenge his brother’s death pure and simple, with he and the film-makers failing to concern themselves – or us – in exploring whether Johnny’s death was in any sense justified or what the wider codes of this world are. Likewise for those conspiring against him it is a simple case of business, no more and no less. While the same could be said of some of Bava’s films, the difference is that not only do we not have an exploration of psychosis (an Argento signature) but we are also not presented with the expectation of a psychosis to be explored, the way in which financially motivated killers may give their crimes the appearance of a sexual psychopath at work in order to throw their investigators off the scent, as per the likes of Blood and Black Lace.

This absence of subtext also makes one more aware of the plot contrivances, insofar as each time Tony meets someone who is about to tell him something they meet an untimely end at exactly the right / wrong moment, with the effect of not only making the identity of the figure pulling the strings that bit too obvious to the viewer attuned to the rules of the game – i.e. suspect everyone, but discount the most likely suspect as red herring in favour of those you least expect; here with a more limited set of alternatives than usual – but also making you wonder, in the end, why the Scott Evil approach wasn’t applied to Tony at the outset.

The performances are adequate, although hardly stretching the capacities of the leads. If Ardisson does not make for a particularly engaging or likeable protagonist, this is less his failing than that the role he has been given. Likewise, while De Mendoza does not exactly stretch his range as MacGreves, that signature charm that makes his every gesture seem suspect, which is precisely what the film needs. Blanc is, you feel, essentially too good for the film. It does not deserve her; she did deserve thankless roles like this. She does, however, fare better than Janine Reynaud, in what amounts to a show-up-and-die cameo as Johnny’s ex-girlfriend.

Stelvio Cipriani’s score is a mish-mash of recycled pieces and motifs. The opening theme sounds like something Lalo Schiffrin might have penned, complete with funk / jazz flute, while elsewhere there’s a obvious take off on Cream’s Sunshine of Your Love riff and Cipriani’s own Femina Ridens theme, one of those pieces which is so infectious and charming in its broken English way I actually don’t mind hearing it again.

Albertini’s direction – he is credited under the name Albert J Walker on the Spanish-dubbed version of the film from Video Search of Miami that I watched – is unexceptional, coming alive in some of the set pieces but otherwise largely a combination of functional set ups and predictable shock / time saving zooms.

Così dolce... così perversa / So Sweet So Perverse

Jean (Jean-Louis Tritignant) and Danielle's relationship is not what it was. While still married they lead somewhat separate lives dominated by ennui; “It keeps getting harder and harder to feel excited,” as Jean remarks prior to what proves to be a dispassionate, dissatisfying and above all thoroughly routine and businesslike affair with another of their circle, Helene Valmont (Helga Line).

One evening soon thereafter Jean is disturbed by noise coming from the apartment above. Going to investigate – (not) coincidentally he has both a dropped ear-ring to return and a key to the apartment, which Danielle was thinking of also renting – he encounters their new neighbour, Nicole (Carroll Baker) with whom he soon becomes infatuated.

Though Jean's feelings are genuine, its also perhaps the sense of excitement which the presence of her sadistic, possessive ex-boyfriend Klaus (Horst Frank) brings to the relationship and the opportunity it affords for him to play the hero, “The Victorian image of the dominant male [...] a little out of place today,” as Danielle tellingly puts it.








Mirror, mirror on the wall...

Indeed, it then transpires that Danielle (Erica Blanc) and Nicole have themselves conspired against Jean, Klaus being the hitman hired to murder him. But, after Klaus has apparently fatally stabbed Jean – crucially neither we nor the women, whilst present at the scene, actually witness this fatal blow – and pitched his car over a cliff to leave a horribly burnt corpse for Danielle to (mis)identify for the police as that of her husband, the intrigue deepens still further, with little ultimately proving to be as it seems...

Released shortly before The Bird with the Crystal Plumage changed the face of the giallo forever, Umberto Lenzi's second venture into the filone works along the same broad lines as his first, Orgasmo / Paranoia, by attempting to refashion – or sex up – the Les Diaboliques style thriller for the late 1960s audience.

It is less successful as its predecessor, however, having more of an obviously 'mechanical' feel to it, with contrivances and misdirections that work the first time round but don't stand up as well on repeat viewings, most notably a flashback that retrospectively appears false and scenes where characters externalise feelings as if to another while they are not actually “under observation” in this manner nor required to thereby “put on a show”.

Perhaps more of a problem, however, is that it's hard to see why Danielle should be conspiring against Jean in the first place. She is not desperate for money, a divorce or anything else, their tacic agreement to live separate lives apparetly a more or less mutually (dis)agreeable one.






A love that could not speak its name?

One answer, perhaps also alluded to by that suggestive title – a suggestiveness continued by the film, which is actually less explicit in what it shows than its at-the-time X-rated predecessor – is the strong intimation that she has lesbian tendencies: You wonder if she herself was infatuated with Nicole to begin with, but correctly surmised that Jean, in his masculine pride, could never accept her having a relationship with another woman, and accordingly realised he had to go, and whether the need to join the dots beyond this indicates a certain nervousness about going too far on the part of the filmmakers.






Shifts in and fun with focus

In her interview in 99 Donne, Erica Blanc indicates that she was originally slated to play Nicole and Baker Danielle, but that the American actress, perhaps wary of over(t)ly repeating her Orgasmo role, then had them switch. It is a testament to each actresses' abilities that you would likely never know otherwise. While Trintignant, Frank and Line inherently have less room to maneuvre, with each playing largely to type - i.e. Tritignant as the neurotic, shifty bourgeois, Frank as the smug sadist of Aryan demeanour, Line as the sophisticated, glamourous love interest – there is nothing to complain about in that if ain't broke don't fix it way.


Classic giallo imagery #1 – the stairwell and the lift to the scaffold


Classic giallo imagery #2 – the barely identifiable remains in the morgue


Classic giallo imagery #3 - the tape recorder


Classic giallo imagery #4 – the jet plane

Lenzi's contribution is difficult to fully appreciate on account of panning and scanning that makes a mockery of any inventive use of widescreen, but several nice touches do come through including the familiar symbolic / suggestive use of mirrors and some almost three-dimensional explorations of focus effects. A high-speed driving sequence meanwhile suggests not only his characters' search for thrills to momentarily relieve their boredom but also later poliziotteschi, whilst some unexpected discontinuity editing – note the way Jean and Helene's tryst is presented – further reminds us that the gap between the worlds of Lenzi and Antonioni and their audiences implied by Kim Newman is less absolute than relative.

Riz Ortolani's score is another asset, providing a characteristic mix of lush, sophisticated jazz-inflected easy listening and pop that further situates the film in giallo erotico territory, even as title track “Why” later cropped up in psycho-killer on the loose outing Seven Bloodstained Orchids.