Il fiore dai petali d'acciaio / The Flower with Petals of Steel

Although I had seen The Flower with the Petals of Steel before, it was only via a rather fuzzy bootleg video copy. As such, I hadn't felt comfortable about discussing it until now, when the opportunity to see the film via a considerably better looking Italian television sourced rip emerged courtesy of Cinemageddon.

As it turns out, my feelings about Gianfranco Piccioli's giallo remain much the same.


The enigmatic opening sequence takes place under water

Visually many of the scenes are still dark, though it is a film with a lot of skulking around at night. Aurally Marcello Giombini's score, while at least distinctive from the dominant Morricone/Nicolai idiom of the time by virtue of following his own style, still seems that bit out of place.

It has a decent cast, headed by Gianni Garko and Carroll Baker; some nice production design – especially the titular sculpture and a broken doll scene – along with plenty of early 70s fashions; some nudity – the ever-game Baker in the shower, plus more from Paola Senatore and Pilar Velazques – and, to top it all of, prominent J&B placement and use.


There's plenty of this sort of thing from Senatore and Velazques, a bit less from Baker

In the main the film can perhaps best be compared to Four Flies on Grey Velvet, in that it's a study of a guilty protagonist and places suspense over surprise.

The obvious difference is in what happens immediately after the pivotal death upon which the narrative rests:

In Four Flies' Roberto Tobias flees the theatre after accidentally stabbing the man who has been following him and causing his fall into the orchestra pit.

Doctor Andreas Valenti (Garko) here is not in a position to flee, the accidental impalement of his lover Daniela (Senatore) onto the sharp metal flower sculpture occurring in his own home.


An accident waiting to happen

Valenti's immediate provides for one of the film's more shocking sequences, as he calmly dismembers Daniela's body, bags up the pieces and drives off to dispose of them in a grinder.

But these actions also make sense, as we later learn that his ex-wife – whom he inherited a considerable sum from – was committed to an asylum shortly after their marriage, vanished from the institution, and has not been seen since.


A Spasmo-esque moment

Still, no body equals no crime – but for a few complications:

Someone saw Valenti in the act and soon starts sending him the evidence to prove it.

Another ex-lover, Evelyn (Baker), who is presently in a relationship with Daniela, wonders where she is, especially since her car is still parked outside Valenti's house, and duly involves the police...

This narrative is bookended by two underwater sequences, with the opening one remaining absolutely detached from the main narrative and remaining unanswered until the end. This in itself isn't necessarily a problem, if one thinks of the similar fragments in, say, Rabid Dogs, but there the beginning, middle and end at least cohere into one film. Here, by contrast, the linkage between the parts just feels arbitrary and strains credibility, even by the already tolerant standards of the filone.

5 per l'inferno / Five for Hell

Directed by Frank Kramer / Gianfranco Parolini from a Sergio Garrone story, this is a routine Dirty Dozen inspired World War II action / caper film that illustrates what we might, building on the insights of film academic Christopher Wagstaff and screenwriter Ernesto Gastaldi, refer to as an example of the “hat movie”.

By this, I mean a film whose genre could easily have been altered by the simple act of changing the characters hats and other paradigmatic details of costume and setting: substitute Nazis with Mexicans and occupied Europe with the US-Mexico border and we would have something close to a spaghetti western like Kramer's Sabata.


Luciano Rossi does his look

We begin with Gianni Garko's always smiling Lieutenant Hoffmann recruiting his hand-picked team of misfits, including a safecracker, a baseball pitcher, an acrobat, a strongman and Sgt Johnny White, who doesn't seem to have any special talents but maybe doesn't need any on account of being played by the man himself, Luciano Rossi.

Their mission, which involves the skills of each member in that typical Parolini specialists and gimmicks way, is to steal the details of Hitler's secret attack plan K to save the lives of 50,000 of their comrades, knowledge of the plan and its location having come through Margaret Lee's undercover agent, Helga Richter.


Lee and Kinski, to the manner born

The challenge is the plans are located in a Wolf's Lair like base guarded by troops led by the arrogant and sadistic SS Colonel Hans Mueller, incarnated with typical disdainful relish by Klaus Kinski.










Only in a Parolini film would a baseball and a trampoline be typical military equipment

A good ensemble cast, a high-spirited if anachronistic score, no-nonsense direction and a general sense of everyone enjoying themselves make Five For Hell worth a look for fans of the stars and auteur, though those with a preference for harder-hitting war action or a more realistic and historical approach would do better looking elsewhere.

Il Fiore dai petali d'acciaio / The Flower with Petals of Steel

Surgeon Andrea Valenti (Gianni Garko) has a problem: he has just accidentally killed his latest girlfriend, Daniella (Paola Senatore), after she somehow contrived to impale herself on a jagged metal sculpture, presumably the flower with the petals of steel of the characteristically enigmatic title.

Andrea takes stock of the situtation. He wanted rid of her anyway and there is no-one to suspect that she is here. Accordingly he makes use of his skills, dismembers her body, disposes of it in a vat and generally plans to act as if nothing had happened.

Needless to say, there is quickly a complication. Daniella's half-sister Evelyne (Carroll Baker), who was once also Andrea's lover, wonders where she has disappeared to and, convinced that he knows more than he is letting on, goes to the police.




Mandatory Carroll Baker shower moment

While Ispettore Garrano's investigation finds nothing to directly implicate Andrea in the crime – if indeed it is a crime, seeing as there is no body nor trace of one to substantiate Evelyne's suspicions – the circumstantial evidence mounts when it is revealed, again via Evelyne's intervention, that the womanising doctor owes his position to an advantageous marriage. Or, rather, a marriage which was advantageous to him, insofar as his wife has long been institutionalised in the asylum...


The flower

Meanwhile, Andrea receives mysterious telephone calls and incriminating photographs of the incident with Daniella...

This Italian-Spanish co-production has one major problem. It just doesn't work, being the kind of film whose surprise ending – itself a somewhat ironic and ambiguous one, the conspirators on their boat thinking themselves to have gotten away with it all whilst the authorities are at the quayside; the kind of crime does (not) pay ending that one could well imagine being reworked for different territories, moralities and censorship regimes – produces a profound sense of dissatisfaction.


Iconic image #1


Iconic image #2


Iconic image #3 (that's a black gloved hand with a blade)


Iconic image #4

Part of the issue is that neither Garko nor Baker has a character we can particularly identify with and, more importantly, that we do not really know what positions we are supposed to take towards them and the situations presented within the narrative. It is not, of course, that a giallo needs to have a single strong, positive protagonist. Four Flies on Grey Velvet's Roberto Tobias is also responsible for an accidental death after all, but at least we know that his predicament is central to the unfolding narrative. Likewise, if Death Laid an Egg encourages us to take a detached view of its quartet of conspiring bourgeois, we understand that this is what director Questi wants us to do, the rules of his particular game.

Here, by contrast, we don't know if Evelyne, who clearly knows Andrea all too well, is conspiring against him or genuinely concerned for her sister, while the simple fact of the philandering Andrea's dismembering and disposing of Daniella's body makes somewhat difficult to have any positive feelings towards whatsoever. Again, however, we don't really understand his actions from what is presented before us.

Building on these reference points, it's also the sense that writer-director Gianfranco Piccioli doesn't really have anything to say and is just going through the motions, whether it be Baker's seemingly contractual shower sequence; Garko hitting the J&B; the detective / analyst comparisons as the police inspector pays a visit to the asylum and its head, played by Umberto Raho, or the inevitable point-of-view razor slashing and pseudo-lesbian sequences.


Effective compositions highlight the ambiguity of the characters, but leave the viewer without an obvious point of reference


Are we supposed to be on the left or the right, with Baker or Garko?

You accept the directorial sleights-of-hand and plot contrivances in Argento and Questi's films because they are themselves part of these films' problematics, the way in which, for instance, if Roberto fails to realise the identity of his persecutor until it is almost too late then this is precisely because he's never really thought about this individual and their relationship until this point; or the way that his deus ex machina salvation actually comes through the hand of God(frey).

Here, however, you watch the build up to the pivotal sequence a second time and note all the false connections and misdirections but conclude that they have no purpose beyond setting up a no longer susprising surprise ending.

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.