Quando le donne avevano la coda / When Women Had Tails

This prehistoric comedy might perhaps be glossed as a live action version of The Flinstones done in the style of the commedia all'italiana meets The Marx Brothers and The Three Stooges, with an effective mixture of physical and visual humour, which comes across regardless of the language one is watching it in, and wordplay, which obviously requires a knowledge of Italian - at least in the version under discussion here.

The always-welcome Senta Berger plays Filli, a thoroughly modern looking cavewoman dressed in figure-accenting furs.


Berger

Frank Wolff, Guiliano Gemma, Aldo Giuffrè and company play the five cavemen who adopt her - or are adopted by her, insofar as they are that bit more primitive, wielding clubs whereas she uses a parrot as an opener in true Flintstones style and being made up so as to be almost unrecognisable. (Indeed, her Cheetah-like companion chimpanzee is smarter than the cavemen as well, placing coconuts beneath their dinosaur-bone framed hut so that they will break the shells when they land.)


The cavemen

To differentiate then each of the cavemen has a particular trait: Wolff's werewolf-looking figure combines a more inquisitive nature with a bad temper; another has a propensity to lose parts of his anatomy in accidents, but for a time regrow them, before spending the latter part of the film as just a head; while a third, complete with a Harpo Marx style hairdo, is coded as gay and soon falls in love with a more civilised, trickster-conman type caveman played in characteristic self-deprecating manner by Lando Buzzanca.


Buzzanca

Buzzanca's character, meanwhile, predictably seeks to take advantage of the five cavemen's relative guilelessness to win Filli away from them whilst also ridding himself of his own bride - at least that's what I think he / she was...

When Women Had Tails is a very different experience from the otherwise comparable Hammer prehistoric epics, fur bikinis notwithstanding. As already noted, language is more important. It is also an exclusively studio based project, with all the action taking place in an expansive papier-mache, plasterboard and polystyrene type landscape with painted backdrops of volcanoes and so on.

One major point of note about the film is that it was written by future art-house favourite Lina Wertmuller, though unsurprisingly seems to be the sort of film that she and her supporters would prefer to downplay. Nonetheless, the battle of the sexes aspect is telling, with the imbalance in numbers between them also perhaps hinting at a connection to Seven Beauties, as a later inversion with one more civilised man and seven less civilised / attractive women, whilst the isolated prelapsarian setting recalls Swept Away.

Another point of interest, in relation to the history of gay characters in the cinema, as outlined by Vito Russo in his pioneering study The Celluloid Closet, is the inevitable end that befalls the only gay caveman: suicide.

Might make for a nice double-bill with Themroc.

Il Tempo degli avvoltoi / Time of Vultures / Last of the Badmen

Directed by Nando Cicero, this is one of those spaghetti westerns which deserves to be a lot better known than it would appear to be, with only two comments on the IMDB.

Featuring the winning combination of George Hilton and Frank Wolff, giving one of the best performances of his under-rated, all too brief career, alongside a solid supporting cast including Eduardo Fajardo, John Bartha, Femi Benussi and Pamela Tudior, it's an unusually harsh and cynical tale even by the standards of the genre.

Hilton plays Kitosch, a gun for hire who is caught in bed with his boss Don Fernando's wife Steffy, for which he is punished with a branding. Kitosch escapes the Don's clutches, makes it to the nearest town and asks for protection from the sheriff. Instead, he is arrested and thrown into jail, to be handed over to the Don's men once they arrive.

At this point another outlaw, Wolff's black-clad Joshua Tracy, intervenes. He kills the sheriff and the two outlaws take off and team up. It doesn't take long, however, for Kitosch to realise that his erstwhile rescuer and partner is literally mad, bad and dangerous to know, prone to fits and consumed by a desire for revenge on his ex-wife and her current lover.

It is almost as if the characters of Mortimer and El Indio from Leone's For a Few Dollars More had been fused into the one man - a difficult role, full of contradictions for the performer to embody. The versatile Wolff, equally comfortable in Francesco Rosi's Salvatore Guiliano and Sergio Corbucci's The Great Silence, was one of the few actors fully capable of tackling the role.

Under these circumstances, everyone else's contributions, while perfectly adequate and to type - Fajardo is the villainous Don, Bartha the sheriff etc. - are overshadowed somewhat. Nevertheless, the film is always watchable, with plenty of action and twists in the tale to keep things interesting even when Wolff isn't on screen.

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.

Femmine insaziabili / The Insatiables / Beverly Hills / Mord im schwarzen Cadillac / Excess

Italian journalist Paolo Vittori (Robert Hoffmann) arrives in Los Angeles at the behest of his old friend. Now known to millions as the public face of International Chemicals (clearly not Incorporated) after winning a competition which took him far away from his old life, Giulio Lamberti, who now goes by the anglicised name Julius Lambert, is in big trouble.

Paolo does what he can, beginning with taking a beating and having his face shoved in his own vomit by a couple of thugs by way of demonstrating that he doesn’t know where his friend is, but proves unable to prevent Giulio from being murdered shortly afterwards.

Paolo resolves to find out who was responsible and bring them to justice. The list of suspects is long, including an ex-wife, ex-mistresses and about half the board of International Chemical.

But as the investigation proceeds, with each new contact revealing further unpleasant aspects of Giulio’s personality and how it had changed with wealth and fame, we may begin to wonder if his murder wasn’t entirely justified…

Given the succession of flashbacks deployed here, it is tempting to read The Insatiables /Femmine insaziabili as a somewhat Wellesian film, Citizen Kane meets The Lady from Shanghai (with a key exchange in both films occurring in an aquarium) all’ italiana.

The subtle shift in meaning between the English and Italian titles is significant: the Italian suggests insatiable women threatening the male with their desires, the English probably more accurate in making it clear that near everyone, man and woman alike, wants more and according with the cynical resolution to the whole affair. (According to the IMDB, Le Insaziabili was also the working title for the film in Italian.)

One of the film’s flaws is the unconvincing way in which the Italian characters are inserted into the Los Angeles environment. It’s understandable in light of the film’s primary audiences, as a means of providing extra exoticism, glamour and distance, but never quite convinces, insofar as the same basic country mouse / town mouse type theme might have worked more naturally with two provincial Italians in Rome or two Americans from some Midwest Hicksville.

Another is perhaps the way the film doesn’t deal with all the suspects in Giulio’s murder. Though we’re informed that the probabilities of each of International Chemicals’ major shareholders being involved in the affair are directly proportional to their stakes in the company some of them, including John Karlsen’s 25 per cent man, hardly feature at all.

Then again, if the choice is between scenes foregrounding Karlsen’s grey eminence and Romina Power’s hippie chick looking for kicks wherever she can find them, the filmmakers’ choice again makes sense. (Having watched Power play almost the exact same role in Perversion Story, it's doubtful how far she could act, but she certainly had look and attitude down pat.)

Like Bruno Nicolai’s brash big band score, Alberto De Martino’s direction is rarely subtle but all the better for it in terms of conveying the alternately glamorous and sleazy world of the film’s characters.

De Martino handles the violence well, not least when Paolo avenges himself on the two men who beat him up and their paymaster, but is less convincing when it comes to the sex, with one of those lobster-like ‘one on top of the other’ orgy scenes where the women remove their clothes and the men keep theirs on where it matters throughout. Nevertheless, the very inclusion of some full frontal female nudity suggests that the director was keen to push the envelope here as well.

The performances are variable. Robert Hoffman is somewhat impassive as per usual, good for conveying a determination to get to the bottom of the whole affair but less adequate when required to suggest how this demi monde is actually getting to him.

The female leads – Luciana Paluzzi, Dorothy Malone and Nicoletta Machiavelli – are better, bringing glamour and complexity to their roles.

Best of all, however, is the always impressive Frank Wolff as Frank Donovan, here playing an effete gay sophisticate far removed from the likes of his bluff sheriff in Corbucci’s The Great Silence and Irish settler in Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West.

In sum, an enjoyable thriller that, if not doing anything particularly new or envelope stretching – 1967’s Omicidio per appuntamento has a somewhat similar set-up, albeit with the action occurring in Italy – is nevertheless a pleasing way to spend 100 or so minutes and another useful reminder of the diversity of the post-Bava, pre-Argento giallo.

[ An AVI of the film is available from Cinemageddon; there's a link to the OST here should you want to try before you buy ]

La morte risale a ieri sera / Death Occured Last Night

The key words that sum up this 1970 giallo from Duccio Tessari are downbeat, depressing and disturbing – and I mean those as compliments.

At the same time, one can easily appreciate how this would not help its recognition by closed-minded genre fans – good time, trashy entertainment it is not – while the same fact of being made by someone previously responsible for sundry pepla, spaghettis and superspies likely meant it tended to go under-appreciated by mainstream critics; as evinced by Tom Milne's Monthly Film Bulletin review of the time, wherein he argued that the film seemed “to be wrestling with ideas rather above its station”.

If only it were a case of 'their loss being our gain', but with only grey market sources available – and here I must thank Paul for giving me the opportunity to at least see the film – it is another instance where the limitations of the presentation mean that a certain degree of dedication to the cause, above and beyond what should really be required is necessary; this is a film which deserves a top-notch official release from the likes of Blue Underground, Noshame or Mondo Macabro.

Though the seriousness and character-driven nature of the film makes it of a piece with the director's other equally impressive gialli, I also wonder whether some of Death Occurred Last Night's particular qualities might also be attributed to co-writer and producer Artur Brauner.

While better known as a purveyor of lowest common denominator fare like his (Bryan) Edgar Wallace adaptations and for giving Fritz Lang the opportunity to make another Dr Mabuse film before then subjecting the character to the indignities of becoming little more than a franchise figure, Brauner was also someone who had also long striven to re-establish the artistic credibility of his adopted homeland's cinema. He had, for example, written and produced one of West Germany's first films about Nazi atrocities, Morituri and advocated a “risky wave” of more challenging cinema in advance of the Oberhausen Manifesto; if he was guilty of producing the kind of crass, conservative, commercial cinema the Oberhausen signatories criticised, he was also someone who saw that a healthy cinema could and should support a diversity of production – indeed, the same year as he produced this film he also had a credit on Vittorio De Sica's Garden of the Finzi-Continis.

In terms of Death Occurred Last Night specifically the Italian and German sides of the co-production seem to emerge in the contrast between the official / krimi police procedural investigation that dominates the first half of the film and the subsequent shift into more private / giallo / poliziotto quests as the inadequacies of the law in the face of widespread social weakness, corruption and indifference become all-too evident.

The film opens with distraught widower Berzaghi (Raf Vallone) paying a desperate visit to high-ranking policeman Dr Lamberti (Frank Wolff). Berzaghi explains that his daughter Donatella has been missing for the past month. Thinking he has heard it all before, Lamberti asks how old the missing girl. On hearing the answer 25, he thinks he knows it all too.

Then Berzaghi explains: Donatella has the mental age of a three-year old. She is also physically attractive, trusting and if not necessarily “nymphomaniac” - a term that I think would imply a more 'adult' awareness of things – certainly flirtatious.

Deciding that Donatella has most likely been abducted for use as a prostitute, Berzaghi and his colleague Mascaranti (Gabriel Tinti) call on an ex-pimp contact, Salvatore, now working in a car showroom – in keeping with the pervasive mood, perhaps not really that much of a change of occupational direction; a sense again conveyed by the preceding scene in which a woman poses as a customer, takes a sports car for a test drive and leaves Salvatore with the vehicle once she has reached her destination.

Reluctantly Salvatore takes Lamberti and Mascaranti around Milan's brothels as they search for a lead. The undercover investigation seems, however, to be going nowhere, especially after the hot-headed Mascaranti reacts instinctively to the appearance of a couple of heavies and thereby alerts the underworld. Lamberti, however, also makes contact with an independent prostitute, Terrell, who indicates that one of her clients might have seen the missing girl and thereby provides a new avenue for investigation. Concerned for her safety, Lamberti takes her home with him, much to the consternation of his long-suffering wife (Eva Renzi).

A few days later, Salvatore contacts Lamberti indicating that he has heard that Donatella's abductors want to be rid of her, and agrees to help arrange a meet / sting operation. Unfortunately Salvatore is not being entirely honest and in trying a scam only succeeds in bringing about Donatella's murder, her horribly burnt body being found in a field...

Wolff's Dr Lamberti is a policeman who wears the weight of the world on his shoulders, his conscience and commitment to his job such that he cannot permit himself two weeks leave to have his sinus problems treated - it is not as if the criminals would also take a fortnight's holiday, he explains - while the torment and anguish Vallone's father goes through and the way he expresses them are heart-wrenching.

Tessari's direction is fairly straightforward for the most part, putting the camera at the service of story and performers rather than engaging in self-conscious displays of technique. At the same time, however, one of the most memorable moments sees him shoot a stairway from below in almost abstracted fashion as oranges rain down in slow motion. But crucially it is not gratuitous. Rather it stands out precisely because in the context of the narrative it comes at the moment when one of the conspirators reveals herself and drops her shopping.

Indeed, to return to an argument I made in relation to Puzzle, where I suggested that Tessari might be considered a master of the traditional thriller, it is a moment that seems distinctively Hitchcockian, in terms of Gilles Deleuze's notions of the Hitchcock “demark”- i.e. the thing that should not be; that does not belong there, and which which thereby stains or reveals the guilty - with the teddy bear Berzaghi is carrying functioning in a similar way to, for instance, the distinctive necklace forgetfully donned by Judy in Vertigo.

Although there is a nice moment early on as a flashback sequence showing the Berzaghi family's daily routine sees Donatalla put on a record - with forceful vocals by the inimitable Mina - which then plays diegetically over the scene, I cannot help feel that it often detracts from the sombre tone of the film, being too bold, brash and upbeat and insufficiently melancholy. Some of the cues even sound almost interchangable with those composer Gianni Ferrio provided for the very different - i.e. trashy fun - Death Walks at Midnight; not a good thing however enjoyable listening they are in their own right. Still, this is but a minor issue in a film otherwise distinguished by sensitive, thoughful - and thought-provoking - writing, direction and performances.

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.