This is one of the more unusual Italian co-productions to deal with the Second World War. For the simple fact is that it isn’t really a war film per se: There’s no near-impossible suicide mission upon which could hinge the outcome of the war, it having already been decided in the Allies favour. Nor are there any mass combat sequences as such, though the scale of the film is nevertheless suitably impressive when it needs to be.
This, combined with the facts that it based on a true story; features courtroom drama elements; and is about freedom, authority, law, order, justice and mercy in their various permutations, marks it out as exploring similar territory to director Giuliano Montaldo's later Sacco and Vanzetti.
The story opens some time after D-Day. That the Allies have advanced into the Netherlands and the wintry conditions suggest sometime in late 1944 or early 1945. The German army is in disarray.
While the Allies, under the command of General Snow, undertake the task of transforming a Nazi concentration camp into an Allied POW camp, two German army deserters, Bruno Grauber and Reiner Schultz, eke out a desperate and precarious existence stealing food from farmers who barely have anything of their own. Food first, then morals, again.
The older Grauber, played by Franco Nero, deserted some months back, after eight reluctant years in the Fuhrer’s army. The younger, Schultz, played by Larry Aubrey, either deserted or became detached from his unit - the circumstances are deliberately left unclear - in which he had only served a few months.
Initially Schultz has both a uniform and a gun, but discards them at Grauber’s disgust / insistence. It is a gesture which is to prove of profound significance in the coming months.
Dressed in civilian clothing, the two men eventually find their way to the camp, which is now under the control of the well-intentioned but seemingly indecisive Captain John Miller, played by Richard Johnson.
His German opposite number Colonel Von Bleicher, played by Helmuth Schneider, controls his fellow prisoners/men with an iron rod, and is intent on maintaining the order and discipline upon which the German army and now the POW camp depend: There are to be no unauthorised escape attempts, for instance. Those POWs who try are captured by their fellow soldiers, tried by court-martial and whipped in punishment, all right under the noses of Miller; when this is discovered, the German soldiers claim their wounds were caused by the barbed wire.
Initially Von Bleicher remains ignorant of Grauber and Schultz, who are instead assigned kitchen duties by soldier Jelink. It’s a cushy job, not least since Jelinek is played by none other than Bud Spencer, in characteristically bluff mode.
But when Von Bleicher finds out about the two men's presence, he determines that they should be be court martialled, under which desertion meriting the punishment of death by firing squad...
Yet do wartime laws apply now that it is peace is first at hand and then arrives? How can the sentence be carried out given the Germans no longer have arms? Who benefits if it is carried out?
Even more so than its successor, The Fifth Day of Peace is a thought-provoking film. One reason for this is that the dividing lines between the good guys and the bad guys are less clear: There are no obvious heroes or villains, just different men with different understandings of the situation. Another is the absence of back-story. Whereas the flashbacks and investigation in Sacco and Vanzetti diegetically establish that the two men are innocent of the crimes against them and are the clear victims of anti-anarchist and racist prejudice, here we know nothing about Von Bleicher, Glauber and Schultz's pasts.
Von Bleicher plays the honourable German solider but not necessarily a fanatical Nazi card expertly: If order is not maintained, then anarchy will prevail.
Glauber meanwhile may have actual political motives for his desertion or may just have had enough and saw an opportunity. Whatever the case by now failing to modulate his behaviour - at one point he literally pisses upon an Allied NCO who might otherwise have been more sympathetic - he is now marked out as a figure who threatens the order of the camp and, by extension, the establishment of the right kind of regime and peace in the defeated Germany.
The alternative titles are also significant here: The 'Crime of Defeat' is one that applies more to Von Bleicher, as the career soldier, than Glauber, as the reluctant draftee. 'God,' meanwhile, is not 'with us', that is the protagonists, but silent, offering no counsel. Tellingly that which is offered to Miller, as the man who must decide between Von Bleicher's and Glauber's cases and futures, comes from General Snow, and whose decision will undoubtedly have consequences for his own career.
Of course, it doesn’t matter what ideas a film contains if the execution is flawed. Thankfully The Fifth Day of Peace is a film where everything works. The lead performances are uniformly strong - Nero energetic bordering on manic at times; Schneider formal and precise; Johnson now apparently hesitant and now apparently resolute, and Aubrey pathetic. The technical aspects of production design, cinematography, editing and scoring are universally accomplished. And, most importantly, Montaldo does what the director should do: Orchestrate these elements, bringing them together harmoniously along with make his own contributions and control evident without overshadowing those of his collaborators or grandstanding. He particularly impresses in his ability to move between levels of scale, of finding the small details within the bigger picture and vice-versa - something which recapitulates the themes of the piece as a whole.
Showing posts with label Franco Nero. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Franco Nero. Show all posts
Friday, 2 October 2009
Saturday, 1 August 2009
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.
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.
Saturday, 8 November 2008
Tecnica di un omicidio / Professional Killer / Hired Killer / No Tears for a Killer / Technique d'un meurtre
This is another film by the non-mondo Franco Prosperi, a man whom I've managed to confuse with his better known counterpart on at least one previous occasion. The date of the film, 1966, makes it easier to distinguish between the two men, however, since the other Prosperi would have been busy with Africa Addio around the same time.
The story is nothing special. Clint Harris, an ageing hitman, is hired by the shadowy organisation to do one last job before retirement: locate and terminate Frank Secchy, an independent who is suspected of making a deal with the authorities.
After Harris's brother is murdered, he agrees to take the job although the high fee he requests and receives – $200,000 compared to the initially offered $50,000 – leaves it open whether the matter is more business or personal.
Admittedly there are complications that would justify the fourfold increase in price. The first is that no-one knows what Secchy looks like, as he has undergone face changing surgery of variety seemingly much more common as a movie McGuffin than in real life. The second is that Harris, who normally works strictly alone, is required to take an up and coming youngster, Tony Lo Bello, along on the job and show him some of his hard-won professonal wisdom.
It's a collection of clichés, yes, but certainly provides a solid framework for the requisite action scenes that demonstrate Harris's no-nonsense professionalism and further allow for the development of his and Lo Bello's personalities and relationships with one another. Even if they don't quite emerge as fully rounded, believable individuals, they are nevertheless something more than instantly forgettable types. Nor is this the fault of the actors or the writers, instead simply being the archetypal effect that the filmmakers were going for.
One point of comparison that comes to mind is Point Blank: if Boorman's film is more complex in its narrative structure in disrupting chronology and making it hard to tell what is real and what being imagined by the protagonist, Lee Marvin's Walker is nevertheless is a similarly memorable instance of an impossibly single minded man on a mission, a human Terminator. (As another similarity both films also feature a drug-addicted supporting female character.)
Crucially, however, it is not that Robert Webber, who plays Harris, represents a poor man's Marvin, nor that Tecnici di un omocidio is merely a more straightforwardly structured version of Point Blank for the Italian vernacular audience and its international counterparts. Boorman's film, after all, wasn't released until after it.
Prosperi's mise en scene, use of location and the urban landscape impress
Rather, it's that both Prosperi and Boorman were drawing inspiration from the same hard boiled, film noir world and seeking to adapt its premises to an ever more technocratic, bureaucratic world in which romantic, independent figures were concomitantly more and more of an anachronism. (The lone avenger of Fuller's Underworld USA, with his one man vendetta against the faceless organisation that was responsible for the only business death of his father, would be another case in point.)
This is also reflected by Tecnici di un umodicio's visual style. Prosperi makes extensive use of the zoom, moving in and out on his characters from a distance. It is however excessive in a meaningful rather than overused sense, neatly establishing a shared paranoiac atmosphere. Harris is never sure if he is under surveillance by the organisation, his younger counterpart or the mysterious Secchy and the spectator of which of these points of view – if any – he or she might be momentarily sharing / occupying. Adding to this effect is the director's neat use of unusual angles to isolate and dwarf the characters against their environs, a probing use of hand-held camera and a persistent self-referentiality through repeatedly bringing techologies of vision and surveillance to the fore.
Paul Virilio or the panopticon?
The main attraction for many Eurocult fans will, of course, be the presence of a young Franco Nero in the role of Lo Bello. Clean shaven and wearing thick framed glasses and a sports jacket, he's almost unrecognisable compared to Django, with the part allowing him an early opportunity to demonstrate his range and avoid the typecasting that Corbucci's film and other spaghetti westerns could so easily have led to. (With regard to the spaghetti western, it's also worth noting that the relationship between the older and younger hitmen has some similarities with the Van Cleef / Eastwood pairing in For a Few Dollars More and the various films in the Day of Anger mould in which Van Cleef played a mentor figure; Unforgiven also fits this pattern somewhat, albeit with a more complex take on the relationship between the old timers and the newcomer out to make a name for himself.)
Robby Poiventin's score, all big-band brassy crime jazz, is another major asset, beginning with an opening theme that really draws one into the film's world and never really letting up thereafter.
Well worth a look.
The story is nothing special. Clint Harris, an ageing hitman, is hired by the shadowy organisation to do one last job before retirement: locate and terminate Frank Secchy, an independent who is suspected of making a deal with the authorities.
After Harris's brother is murdered, he agrees to take the job although the high fee he requests and receives – $200,000 compared to the initially offered $50,000 – leaves it open whether the matter is more business or personal.
Admittedly there are complications that would justify the fourfold increase in price. The first is that no-one knows what Secchy looks like, as he has undergone face changing surgery of variety seemingly much more common as a movie McGuffin than in real life. The second is that Harris, who normally works strictly alone, is required to take an up and coming youngster, Tony Lo Bello, along on the job and show him some of his hard-won professonal wisdom.
It's a collection of clichés, yes, but certainly provides a solid framework for the requisite action scenes that demonstrate Harris's no-nonsense professionalism and further allow for the development of his and Lo Bello's personalities and relationships with one another. Even if they don't quite emerge as fully rounded, believable individuals, they are nevertheless something more than instantly forgettable types. Nor is this the fault of the actors or the writers, instead simply being the archetypal effect that the filmmakers were going for.
One point of comparison that comes to mind is Point Blank: if Boorman's film is more complex in its narrative structure in disrupting chronology and making it hard to tell what is real and what being imagined by the protagonist, Lee Marvin's Walker is nevertheless is a similarly memorable instance of an impossibly single minded man on a mission, a human Terminator. (As another similarity both films also feature a drug-addicted supporting female character.)
Crucially, however, it is not that Robert Webber, who plays Harris, represents a poor man's Marvin, nor that Tecnici di un omocidio is merely a more straightforwardly structured version of Point Blank for the Italian vernacular audience and its international counterparts. Boorman's film, after all, wasn't released until after it.
Prosperi's mise en scene, use of location and the urban landscape impress
Rather, it's that both Prosperi and Boorman were drawing inspiration from the same hard boiled, film noir world and seeking to adapt its premises to an ever more technocratic, bureaucratic world in which romantic, independent figures were concomitantly more and more of an anachronism. (The lone avenger of Fuller's Underworld USA, with his one man vendetta against the faceless organisation that was responsible for the only business death of his father, would be another case in point.)
This is also reflected by Tecnici di un umodicio's visual style. Prosperi makes extensive use of the zoom, moving in and out on his characters from a distance. It is however excessive in a meaningful rather than overused sense, neatly establishing a shared paranoiac atmosphere. Harris is never sure if he is under surveillance by the organisation, his younger counterpart or the mysterious Secchy and the spectator of which of these points of view – if any – he or she might be momentarily sharing / occupying. Adding to this effect is the director's neat use of unusual angles to isolate and dwarf the characters against their environs, a probing use of hand-held camera and a persistent self-referentiality through repeatedly bringing techologies of vision and surveillance to the fore.
Paul Virilio or the panopticon?
The main attraction for many Eurocult fans will, of course, be the presence of a young Franco Nero in the role of Lo Bello. Clean shaven and wearing thick framed glasses and a sports jacket, he's almost unrecognisable compared to Django, with the part allowing him an early opportunity to demonstrate his range and avoid the typecasting that Corbucci's film and other spaghetti westerns could so easily have led to. (With regard to the spaghetti western, it's also worth noting that the relationship between the older and younger hitmen has some similarities with the Van Cleef / Eastwood pairing in For a Few Dollars More and the various films in the Day of Anger mould in which Van Cleef played a mentor figure; Unforgiven also fits this pattern somewhat, albeit with a more complex take on the relationship between the old timers and the newcomer out to make a name for himself.)
Robby Poiventin's score, all big-band brassy crime jazz, is another major asset, beginning with an opening theme that really draws one into the film's world and never really letting up thereafter.
Well worth a look.
Friday, 6 June 2008
Confessione di un commissario di polizia al procuratore della repubblica / Confessions of a Police Captain
Commissioner Bonavia has hygiene-obsessed mafioso Lipuma release from the insane asylum where he has been incarcerated for the past six years knowing fullwell that Lipuma's first action once released will be to make an attempt on his former rival Dubrosio's life.
Indeed this is what Bonavia, who is pursuing his own personal vendetta against Dubrosio is counting on; he knows that there is no point in pursuing legal channels when just about the entirety of the Palmero administration and judiciary is in league with Dubrosio.
The introductory image – an unidentified hand groping around in the dark
Unfortunately for Bonavia, someone tips Dubrosio off, so that the only victims of the ensuing shoot-out are Lipuma and three of Dubrosio's hired guns – all conveniently from out of town.
Public prosecutor Traini is assigned to investigate alongside Bonavia, and soon comes to realise that his erstwhile colleague knows more than he is letting on.
But beyond this motives and allegiances remain obscure. Bonavia suspects that the idealistic young prosecutor may already be in someone's pocket or, if not, will soon be offered the chance to further his personal position at the expense of the people and the law he professes to represent without prejudice or preference, while Traini cannot be sure that Bonavia is not pursuing Dubrosio on behalf of one of his rivals. And even if they can overcome their mutual suspicions and differences, it is still uncertain whether there is anyone else they can trust.
Images of the figures behind bars recur throughout, creating a sense of the characters' entrapment and inability to escape their world
Confessions of a Police Captain is, quite simply, an excellent film that accomplishes everything it sets out to do: to wit to entertain, to inform – specifically about the collusion of civil and criminal societies in 1960s and 1970s Sicily around construction and development projects – and to convey a complex reality in an accessible way.
The film's three pillars are Damiano Damiani's writing and direction and the impressive central performances of Martin Balsam and Franco Nero in the roles of Bonavia and Traini.
The writing is of the quality where merely recording the actors reciting it would have been sufficient in itself for a less conscientious filmmaker. An illustrative sample exchange, taken from a point late on where Bonavia and Traini have each begun to covertly investigate one another:
“You never experienced that, right? You never thought that you were a kind of executor, looking after the interests of whoever happens to be in power?”
“A cop who's an anarchist. You're a living contradiction Bonavia.”
“Haven't you ever had any doubts about enforcing unjust laws?”
“It's not for us to judge the law...”
“... But to enforce it. Yes I knew you would say that. But let's say tomorrow the law stated that we had to use torture.”
“Don't be absurd.”
“Why? It used to be the law, it could be the law again. It's only a matter of principle. Then you would use torture if the law said so.”
“You're using an extreme example!”
“All right then, what's your limit? How much injustice would you stand for to satisfy the people we work for?”
“If you go on, I'll arrest you!”
“I was only referring to Rizzo's ideas...”
Bonavia puts up his hands to indicate his innocence of sedition, that he is only referring to Rizzo's ideas, in an ironic mirroring of a gesture earlier made by Dubrosio when one of his gunmen shot the selfsame union organiser.
If Damiano avoids more visible stylistic flourishes, he nevertheless expertly conveys a pervasive sense of confusion and distrust with his mise en scène with deep shadows and recurring use of bars as a motif, along with preferring to gradually fill in details rather than lay it all out for us in an obvious manner.
Thus, for example, we open with a shot of hands feeling along a wall in the dark, introducing the characters in the asylum without quite knowing what it is, who they are, what they are doing there or why. Likewise, the small, easy ignored or missed detail of another of the patients / inmates (for it is not clear that Lipuma is actually certifiably insane) requesting that Bonavia talk to him later assumes a deeper significance later as, when repeated on Bonavia's subsequent visit to the place with Triani it suggests that he has been there before. Triani thus gets the wrong clue for the right solution.
There is also an appealing lack of resolution to the whole thing that neatly provides an agreeable balance between the needs of the vernacular audience to see the bad guys receive some sort of punishment and of Damiano, as a politically committed filmmaker, to convey the ongoing struggle against organised, systematically endemic corruption and criminality. The individual hero prepared to take a stand for the good of the collective is similarly granted a degree of ambiguity: necessary, but also dangerous in what he implies.
As with The Most Beautiful Wife Damiani brilliantly captures the complexities and contradictions of Sicilian life and the difficulties faced by the Marxist filmmaker – as “organic intellectual,” in the Gramsian sense – in attempting to represent and reach a population brought up to understand that the well-being and honour of the family were far more important than any wider notions of class solidarity.
It is, we might say, Marxism's version of the free rider and prisoner's dilemma problems: If the benefits of political action will accrue to me because of my position as a member of a certain class why should I as a rational individual take the risks involved in this selfsame action that will bring them about, when they are considerable for me and mine? Alternatively, if these benefits only accrue to the loyal members of the party and its vanguard, isn't there then the risk of becoming another small, narrowly self-interested group like the others? (Francesco Rosi's Hands Over the City is also recommended viewing in this regard.)
The scenes where the is most clearly conveyed are the flashback ones involving Rizzo, the Communist Party Union organiser from the same village as Bonavia, whose valiant attempts to encourage his people to stand together against the mafia meet with predictable indifference and consequences.
The face of challenge and defiance – Rizzo
Rizzo also understands the rules of this world better than almost anyone else in the film. Having been shot by an unseen, unidentified gunman after publically challenging Dubrosio, the police do nothing. He thus lies bleeding, declining to be taken away until the mafioso and his men have departed, causing Dubrosio to lose face and transforming an apparent defeat into a kind of victory. (“That episode made Rizzo a hero, only being a hero isn't always an asset.”)
The PCI HQ, with its heroes and martyrs
The greatest shame of all meanwhile to the critics who rejected the film and others like it for being conventionally well-made, under the mistaken belief that radical form necessarily equated to radical content, while largely ignoring the question of whether such films ever possessed any wider appeal beyond their own circle.
Damiani, who started his directorial career in the neo-realist period with a documentary, La Banda d'Affori, and frequently blended left wing politics with popular genres in his subsequent genre films, including the seminal Zapata western A Bullet for the General, surely knew his audience better than these elitist fellow-travellers abroad.
A world of shadowy figures and relationships
The other key political issue related to all this, strange though it may seem, is dubbing versus subtitling. To explain: for a film to be accessible to the vernacular audience, it has to be in the vernacular, i.e. the language of the people. As such, it was better that Confessions of a Police Captain be dubbed than subtitled for international release, so that it might reach the widest possible audience beyond the art cinema ghetto.
It's also curious that critics didn't seem to be in favour of dubbing as a device for popular films even when it could have helped to show up the arbitrariness of the sound-image relationship in cinema and presumably thereby encourage a more distanciatiated approach to the text, or somesuch. Instead, reading reviews from the time, all we typically get are references to “bad dubbing”.
Why, one wonders, were the same criteria not applied to subtitled Italian films which featured post-synchronised sound even in the Italian? Why did no-one complain that in a Fellini film the voices weren't 'fixed' in the manner that these evaluative criteria imply that they ought to have done? Presumably Fellini's intentions were recognised, but then why was intentionality recognised and accepted when the talk elsewhere was of the death of the author and the ideologically regressive implications of auteurism?
The two leads make for a fascinating contrast: the domestic star and the US character actor. While it's a combination found in countless Italian films of the period, there's something more about the way it works here, that the two men are present for what they could bring to the project as actors rather than as just marquee names for the domestic and international audiences. That Balsam was a character actor (once remarking that “the supporting role is always potentially the most interesting in a film”) rather than an immediately recognisable and typed star name – even if a B-list one – means that you approach his performance and character without much in the way of presuppositions, while he clearly seems to have relished the opportunity to get his teeth into a more substantive role than usual. Nero again excels at taking what could otherwise have been a routine figure and going the extra mile in giving him a more complex characterisation (see also his compromised hot-headed alcoholic journalist investigator in The Fifth Cord, or his post-Death Wish vigilante with doubts in Street Law.)
Those familiar with Luciano Catenacci from his appearances in Lenzi poliziotti may be surprised to see him here in the role of Dubrosio. Though required primarily to be the sneering villain – with this also perhaps the area where the films and Damiano's limits are more evident, insofar as there's perhaps too much of a personal mano a mano element to his conflict with Balsam, leading to a corresponding de-emphasis on the political and business aspects – he again impresses as someone capable of holding his own against more widely acknowledged performers, even when saddled with an awkward looking hairpiece in the flashback scenes.
A number of other familiar faces – Calisto Calisti, Arturo Dominici, Marlilu' Tolo – round out the cast effectively, while Riz Ortolani's powerful, melancholy score is another asset.
Highly recommended.
Indeed this is what Bonavia, who is pursuing his own personal vendetta against Dubrosio is counting on; he knows that there is no point in pursuing legal channels when just about the entirety of the Palmero administration and judiciary is in league with Dubrosio.
The introductory image – an unidentified hand groping around in the dark
Unfortunately for Bonavia, someone tips Dubrosio off, so that the only victims of the ensuing shoot-out are Lipuma and three of Dubrosio's hired guns – all conveniently from out of town.
Public prosecutor Traini is assigned to investigate alongside Bonavia, and soon comes to realise that his erstwhile colleague knows more than he is letting on.
But beyond this motives and allegiances remain obscure. Bonavia suspects that the idealistic young prosecutor may already be in someone's pocket or, if not, will soon be offered the chance to further his personal position at the expense of the people and the law he professes to represent without prejudice or preference, while Traini cannot be sure that Bonavia is not pursuing Dubrosio on behalf of one of his rivals. And even if they can overcome their mutual suspicions and differences, it is still uncertain whether there is anyone else they can trust.
Images of the figures behind bars recur throughout, creating a sense of the characters' entrapment and inability to escape their world
Confessions of a Police Captain is, quite simply, an excellent film that accomplishes everything it sets out to do: to wit to entertain, to inform – specifically about the collusion of civil and criminal societies in 1960s and 1970s Sicily around construction and development projects – and to convey a complex reality in an accessible way.
The film's three pillars are Damiano Damiani's writing and direction and the impressive central performances of Martin Balsam and Franco Nero in the roles of Bonavia and Traini.
The writing is of the quality where merely recording the actors reciting it would have been sufficient in itself for a less conscientious filmmaker. An illustrative sample exchange, taken from a point late on where Bonavia and Traini have each begun to covertly investigate one another:
“You never experienced that, right? You never thought that you were a kind of executor, looking after the interests of whoever happens to be in power?”
“A cop who's an anarchist. You're a living contradiction Bonavia.”
“Haven't you ever had any doubts about enforcing unjust laws?”
“It's not for us to judge the law...”
“... But to enforce it. Yes I knew you would say that. But let's say tomorrow the law stated that we had to use torture.”
“Don't be absurd.”
“Why? It used to be the law, it could be the law again. It's only a matter of principle. Then you would use torture if the law said so.”
“You're using an extreme example!”
“All right then, what's your limit? How much injustice would you stand for to satisfy the people we work for?”
“If you go on, I'll arrest you!”
“I was only referring to Rizzo's ideas...”
Bonavia puts up his hands to indicate his innocence of sedition, that he is only referring to Rizzo's ideas, in an ironic mirroring of a gesture earlier made by Dubrosio when one of his gunmen shot the selfsame union organiser.
If Damiano avoids more visible stylistic flourishes, he nevertheless expertly conveys a pervasive sense of confusion and distrust with his mise en scène with deep shadows and recurring use of bars as a motif, along with preferring to gradually fill in details rather than lay it all out for us in an obvious manner.
Thus, for example, we open with a shot of hands feeling along a wall in the dark, introducing the characters in the asylum without quite knowing what it is, who they are, what they are doing there or why. Likewise, the small, easy ignored or missed detail of another of the patients / inmates (for it is not clear that Lipuma is actually certifiably insane) requesting that Bonavia talk to him later assumes a deeper significance later as, when repeated on Bonavia's subsequent visit to the place with Triani it suggests that he has been there before. Triani thus gets the wrong clue for the right solution.
There is also an appealing lack of resolution to the whole thing that neatly provides an agreeable balance between the needs of the vernacular audience to see the bad guys receive some sort of punishment and of Damiano, as a politically committed filmmaker, to convey the ongoing struggle against organised, systematically endemic corruption and criminality. The individual hero prepared to take a stand for the good of the collective is similarly granted a degree of ambiguity: necessary, but also dangerous in what he implies.
As with The Most Beautiful Wife Damiani brilliantly captures the complexities and contradictions of Sicilian life and the difficulties faced by the Marxist filmmaker – as “organic intellectual,” in the Gramsian sense – in attempting to represent and reach a population brought up to understand that the well-being and honour of the family were far more important than any wider notions of class solidarity.
It is, we might say, Marxism's version of the free rider and prisoner's dilemma problems: If the benefits of political action will accrue to me because of my position as a member of a certain class why should I as a rational individual take the risks involved in this selfsame action that will bring them about, when they are considerable for me and mine? Alternatively, if these benefits only accrue to the loyal members of the party and its vanguard, isn't there then the risk of becoming another small, narrowly self-interested group like the others? (Francesco Rosi's Hands Over the City is also recommended viewing in this regard.)
The scenes where the is most clearly conveyed are the flashback ones involving Rizzo, the Communist Party Union organiser from the same village as Bonavia, whose valiant attempts to encourage his people to stand together against the mafia meet with predictable indifference and consequences.
The face of challenge and defiance – Rizzo
Rizzo also understands the rules of this world better than almost anyone else in the film. Having been shot by an unseen, unidentified gunman after publically challenging Dubrosio, the police do nothing. He thus lies bleeding, declining to be taken away until the mafioso and his men have departed, causing Dubrosio to lose face and transforming an apparent defeat into a kind of victory. (“That episode made Rizzo a hero, only being a hero isn't always an asset.”)
The PCI HQ, with its heroes and martyrs
The greatest shame of all meanwhile to the critics who rejected the film and others like it for being conventionally well-made, under the mistaken belief that radical form necessarily equated to radical content, while largely ignoring the question of whether such films ever possessed any wider appeal beyond their own circle.
Damiani, who started his directorial career in the neo-realist period with a documentary, La Banda d'Affori, and frequently blended left wing politics with popular genres in his subsequent genre films, including the seminal Zapata western A Bullet for the General, surely knew his audience better than these elitist fellow-travellers abroad.
A world of shadowy figures and relationships
The other key political issue related to all this, strange though it may seem, is dubbing versus subtitling. To explain: for a film to be accessible to the vernacular audience, it has to be in the vernacular, i.e. the language of the people. As such, it was better that Confessions of a Police Captain be dubbed than subtitled for international release, so that it might reach the widest possible audience beyond the art cinema ghetto.
It's also curious that critics didn't seem to be in favour of dubbing as a device for popular films even when it could have helped to show up the arbitrariness of the sound-image relationship in cinema and presumably thereby encourage a more distanciatiated approach to the text, or somesuch. Instead, reading reviews from the time, all we typically get are references to “bad dubbing”.
Why, one wonders, were the same criteria not applied to subtitled Italian films which featured post-synchronised sound even in the Italian? Why did no-one complain that in a Fellini film the voices weren't 'fixed' in the manner that these evaluative criteria imply that they ought to have done? Presumably Fellini's intentions were recognised, but then why was intentionality recognised and accepted when the talk elsewhere was of the death of the author and the ideologically regressive implications of auteurism?
The two leads make for a fascinating contrast: the domestic star and the US character actor. While it's a combination found in countless Italian films of the period, there's something more about the way it works here, that the two men are present for what they could bring to the project as actors rather than as just marquee names for the domestic and international audiences. That Balsam was a character actor (once remarking that “the supporting role is always potentially the most interesting in a film”) rather than an immediately recognisable and typed star name – even if a B-list one – means that you approach his performance and character without much in the way of presuppositions, while he clearly seems to have relished the opportunity to get his teeth into a more substantive role than usual. Nero again excels at taking what could otherwise have been a routine figure and going the extra mile in giving him a more complex characterisation (see also his compromised hot-headed alcoholic journalist investigator in The Fifth Cord, or his post-Death Wish vigilante with doubts in Street Law.)
Those familiar with Luciano Catenacci from his appearances in Lenzi poliziotti may be surprised to see him here in the role of Dubrosio. Though required primarily to be the sneering villain – with this also perhaps the area where the films and Damiano's limits are more evident, insofar as there's perhaps too much of a personal mano a mano element to his conflict with Balsam, leading to a corresponding de-emphasis on the political and business aspects – he again impresses as someone capable of holding his own against more widely acknowledged performers, even when saddled with an awkward looking hairpiece in the flashback scenes.
A number of other familiar faces – Calisto Calisti, Arturo Dominici, Marlilu' Tolo – round out the cast effectively, while Riz Ortolani's powerful, melancholy score is another asset.
Highly recommended.
Sunday, 4 November 2007
Il Bandito dagli occhi azzurri / The Blue Eyed Bandit
Downtrodden, diffident and slightly disabled, middle-aged accountant Renzo Dominici (Franco Nero) is always the last to leave the bank where he works at night. Everyone else thinks it is just foolish dedication, with no-one suspecting that he is in fact a considerably younger man who keeps in shape and is just waiting for the right moment to rob the place before making off for a new life in the sun.
Enrico Maria Salerno?
Or Franco Nero?
With an unusually large amount of money being kept over the holiday weekend, that time has come.
While the robbery itself goes largely as Renzo had planned, as does his attempt to manufacture the perfect alibi by way of being elsewhere as his unrecognisable blue eyed alter-ego holds up the place and deliberately flashes his distinctive blue eyes to mislead his co-workers, he also drops a cigarette lighter and forgets that his cufflinks are visible.
Time to go to work...
... cause a distraction...
... rob the place...
... leave them something to remember you by...
... but forget about something ...
These little details lead the office canteen’s borderline nymphomaniac pastry chef Stella (Dalila Di Lazarro) and a grasping security guard to suspect that something is not quite right about their colleague, while elsewhere gay hustler and petty thief Ricky develops certain suspicions that the blue eyed man who frequents the Turkish baths where he works might be the bandit...
Where have I seen those cufflinks before?
The Blue Eyed Bandit's writer-director Alfredo Giannetti was primarily known for his work in the latter capacity – he had earlier won an Oscar for his contribution to Pietro Germi's Divorce Italian Style - with a certain lack of visual style evident in his approach.
While good at building character and place through an attention to little details, the more attentive viewer may also feel slightly let down by the way in which he later returns to some of these selfsame details with that excessive obviousness that denies the value of paying attention.
Here we can note, for example, that the distinctive cufflink worn by Nero qua Renzo are casually introduced as a seemingly non-signifying detail within a cutaway as he checks his watch before the robbery to later be similarly indicentally visible during it and thus later to become the object of meaningful close-up and zoom-in as the security guard notices Renzo wearing them.
Such misgivings aside, however, Giannetti's approach works insofar as it gives Nero plenty of scope to develop his character(s) and generally showcase his acting abilities – watching the opening scenes prior to the revelation that it is Nero in the role you could be forgiving for thinking that Enrico Maria Salerno is making an uncredited appearance as Renzo – without succumbing to obvious grandstanding or schticks. When he takes out the insole that makes him limp and the brown-eyed contact lenses concealed behind Renzo's thick, heavy spectacles you can easily believe that he had been wearing these props for the past several hours to help him get into the part.
One does also wonder, however, if more might have been made of the homosexual subtext to the character and whether this might have strengthened the whole. There's the hint of something about the character's double life, the way he visits the sauna as himself, yet runs from Ricky's pick-up attempt without really articulating why when combined with his heartfelt voice-off to his senile mother, whom he regularly visits incognito at a nursing home – “Why don't you die so I can live my life the way I want to”– that feels a bit, well, queer, but also the sense of a reluctance on someone's part to really push this angle.
Could there be another reason why Renzo is uncomfortable with Stella's attentions?
This said, one could well imagine that to make the character overtly homosexual would have made him less sympathetic for mainstream audiences in 1980 were concerned, too much attention here easily leading to jokes about the Blue Eyed Arse Bandit to the detriment of everything else.
As it is all concerned have done all they can to make us root for Renzo, whether presenting everyone else as just as bad or worse, his avoidance of violence except as a last resort – this must be one of the few Italian crime films of the period where rapine doesn't degenerate into shooting – or just because we want to see the archetypal little man win one over the system.
Ennio Morricone's uncharacteristic soundtrack, with its jazz shuffle and waltz themes, sightly reminiscent of a big(ger) band version of Take Five, is quirky but reasonably effective – a description that might, on reflection, apply to The Blue Eyed Bandit as a whole...
I watched the film via the Dutch subtitled, English dubbed VHS; there was a torrent of the film in circulation a few months ago.
Enrico Maria Salerno?
Or Franco Nero?
With an unusually large amount of money being kept over the holiday weekend, that time has come.
While the robbery itself goes largely as Renzo had planned, as does his attempt to manufacture the perfect alibi by way of being elsewhere as his unrecognisable blue eyed alter-ego holds up the place and deliberately flashes his distinctive blue eyes to mislead his co-workers, he also drops a cigarette lighter and forgets that his cufflinks are visible.
Time to go to work...
... cause a distraction...
... rob the place...
... leave them something to remember you by...
... but forget about something ...
These little details lead the office canteen’s borderline nymphomaniac pastry chef Stella (Dalila Di Lazarro) and a grasping security guard to suspect that something is not quite right about their colleague, while elsewhere gay hustler and petty thief Ricky develops certain suspicions that the blue eyed man who frequents the Turkish baths where he works might be the bandit...
Where have I seen those cufflinks before?
The Blue Eyed Bandit's writer-director Alfredo Giannetti was primarily known for his work in the latter capacity – he had earlier won an Oscar for his contribution to Pietro Germi's Divorce Italian Style - with a certain lack of visual style evident in his approach.
While good at building character and place through an attention to little details, the more attentive viewer may also feel slightly let down by the way in which he later returns to some of these selfsame details with that excessive obviousness that denies the value of paying attention.
Here we can note, for example, that the distinctive cufflink worn by Nero qua Renzo are casually introduced as a seemingly non-signifying detail within a cutaway as he checks his watch before the robbery to later be similarly indicentally visible during it and thus later to become the object of meaningful close-up and zoom-in as the security guard notices Renzo wearing them.
Such misgivings aside, however, Giannetti's approach works insofar as it gives Nero plenty of scope to develop his character(s) and generally showcase his acting abilities – watching the opening scenes prior to the revelation that it is Nero in the role you could be forgiving for thinking that Enrico Maria Salerno is making an uncredited appearance as Renzo – without succumbing to obvious grandstanding or schticks. When he takes out the insole that makes him limp and the brown-eyed contact lenses concealed behind Renzo's thick, heavy spectacles you can easily believe that he had been wearing these props for the past several hours to help him get into the part.
One does also wonder, however, if more might have been made of the homosexual subtext to the character and whether this might have strengthened the whole. There's the hint of something about the character's double life, the way he visits the sauna as himself, yet runs from Ricky's pick-up attempt without really articulating why when combined with his heartfelt voice-off to his senile mother, whom he regularly visits incognito at a nursing home – “Why don't you die so I can live my life the way I want to”– that feels a bit, well, queer, but also the sense of a reluctance on someone's part to really push this angle.
Could there be another reason why Renzo is uncomfortable with Stella's attentions?
This said, one could well imagine that to make the character overtly homosexual would have made him less sympathetic for mainstream audiences in 1980 were concerned, too much attention here easily leading to jokes about the Blue Eyed Arse Bandit to the detriment of everything else.
As it is all concerned have done all they can to make us root for Renzo, whether presenting everyone else as just as bad or worse, his avoidance of violence except as a last resort – this must be one of the few Italian crime films of the period where rapine doesn't degenerate into shooting – or just because we want to see the archetypal little man win one over the system.
Ennio Morricone's uncharacteristic soundtrack, with its jazz shuffle and waltz themes, sightly reminiscent of a big(ger) band version of Take Five, is quirky but reasonably effective – a description that might, on reflection, apply to The Blue Eyed Bandit as a whole...
I watched the film via the Dutch subtitled, English dubbed VHS; there was a torrent of the film in circulation a few months ago.
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