Svegliati e Uccidi / Wake Up and Die

During the 1960s and 1970s Carlo Lizzani made a number of interesting genre films marked by a combination of solid entertainment, social comment and commitment, a logical extension of earlier neo-realist styled works such as Achtung Banditi and Cronaca di poveri amanti into the prime years of the filone cinema.

While preceded by Il Gobbo, about Rome resistance fighter and latterly bandit Alvaro Concenza, Svegliati e Uccidi - closer to Wake Up and Kill, rather than Wake Up and Die in English translation- marks an important step in the evolution of Lizzani's crime cinema, in engaging with contemporary Italian gangsterism rather than looking back to the 1940s.

The equivalent to Concenza here is petty criminal turned public enemy number one Luciano Lutring (Robert Hoffmann), another real-life bandit, Milanese rather than Roman, who became a respected writer and painter after his release from prison.

Lutring - whose name was also sufficiently well-known to be an alternative homonymous title for the film in Italy - is a complex character with obvious personal issues. First seeking to impress night-club singer Yvonne (Lisa Gastoni), whom he soon marries, he anaesthetises himself with drink and counters his feelings of inadequacy by carrying a machine gun he hardly knows how to use.

As an impulsive amateur rather than a professional, he emerges as something of the polar opposite of his counterpart in Bandits in Milan, Pierro Cavallero, who treats crime as a rational business like any other.

While Robert Hoffman is entirely satisfactory as Lutring the best performance in the film is probably that of Gian Maria Volonte, as his nemesis cum protector Inspector Moroni.

It's a testament to Volonte's abilities that while Moroni is very different from Cavallero in the later film, both characters are utterly convincing.

Moroni is also where the film gets even more interesting in political terms. In the Italian set portions of the film we see how he allows the media to focus on Lutring at the expense of other, actually more troublesome criminals whom he wishes to divert attention from and / or lull into a false sense of security, with a pragmatic emphasis on the either / or.

Ironically their number include one gang whom the naive Lutring brings a daring plan for a daylight robbery but who then decide to carry it out by themselves shortly before the arranged time in the hope that their erstwhile colleague will arrive just as the police do and serve as the fall guy.

The social commentary continues as Lutring flees to France, as different groups within the French police compete to be the ones who bring him to book, with predictable results.

Given all this, Lutring's position ultimately emerges as something of a riff on Peter Lorre's character in M, as a helpless figure whom everyone else, rather than wanting out of the picture, wishes to take advantage of.

Lizzani achieves a nice balance between modes in his direction, with enough style to avoid simply being a documentary and enough documentary to effectively convey the reality of the characters and their world as part of our own. This is perhaps best realised in the nightclub scenes, which are simultaneously realistic and expressive to convey a sleazy glamour, and the set-piece robberies, as a how (not) to do it guide.

Ennio Morricone's score is beautiful in its simplicity, building tension through the use of quasi-minimalist 'cells' of piano and percussion in the suspense and action sequences and expanding out for lush vocal numbers in the nightclub scenes.

Volonte's younger brother Claudio Camaso - if anything an even more intense performer - also appears in the film.

La Seduzione / Seduction

La Seduzione is a key film for anyone interested in Fernando Di Leo. Unfortunately it's also a film that many fans of his action movies will likely dismiss on account of being a melodrama and which those with a more exclusively arthouse orientation will resist as derivative and, in its more explicit scenes, exploitative if hardly pornographic. (As Last Tango in Paris reminds us, the ways in which this kind of 'adult' film and the debates around it are framed are crucial: art or exploitation, erotica or pornography)

I sat this because the subject matter of the drama – a middle-aged man, Giuseppe Lagana, returns to his old home town after years abroad, embarks upon a relationship with a woman his own age, Caterina, and then becomes involved with her adolescent daughter, Graziella – has obvious affinities with Nabokov's Lolita and Kubrick's adaptation of it.

Nevertheless, Seduction is its own film, with less of a paedophiliac subtext given Graziella's older age and greater maturity; the casting of the more womanly 20-year old Jenny Tamburi in the role of Graziella compared to the 15-year-old Sue Lyon in the title role of Kubrick's film; and the fact that the contours of the characters' relationships are different.

Most importantly the film was adapted from a respectable literary source, in the form of the 1970 novel Graziella by the Catanian writer Ettore Patti, which if obviously post-dating Nabokov's novel can also be placed in the context of a writing career stretching back to the 1920s in which he had earlier also approached the subject of Peter Pan syndrome – i.e. men refusing to grow up and accept adult roles and responsibilities.

While it would take an extraordinarily brave critic to favourable compare Di Leo's direction to that of Kubrick, it is clear in any case that Di Leo has his own approach to the subject matter, one that is less detached and observational and more involved.

Similarly, if none of the male players, led by Maurice Ronet in the role of Giuseppe, are quite as memorable as James Mason and Peter Sellers in Lolita, this may also be an advantage insofar as we often now remember Sellers' performances more than the films in which they appeared and characters they related to. As it is, Ronet does well in making his character neither pathetic, nor a monster, but a believable, if flawed, human being whom we may feel for even as we recognise his wrongdoing.

The two female leads, the other being Lisa Gastoni as the mother, are beautifully played, both actresses delivering the kind of brave and sensitive performances that deserved more attention and recognition than they ever received.

Interestingly, Di Leo had originally considered Ornella Muti for the role of Graziella, but was apparently given something of a her-or-me ultimatum by Gastoni and thus went with Tamburi. While there seems little doubt that Muti's presence would have changed the dynamics of the film considerably, if we think of the likes of her work for Damiani as the young bride of The Most Beautiful Wife – itself another film that reminds us of the culturally specific aspects around adolescent sexuality and community moral standards – it's a testament to the under-rated and sadly subsequently under-utilised Tamburi that one also finds it difficult to re-imagine the film without her. Anyone seeking more evidence of her abilities is advised to check her out in Silvio Amadio's Smile Before Death, where she plays a similarly (not so?) innocent victim.

[Some Italian references on Patti and his work:

http://www.girodivite.it/Graziella-di-Ercole-Patti.html
http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ercole_Patti
http://nuke.ilsottoscritto.it/Recensioni/RecensioniP/ErcolePattiGraziella/tabid/261/Default.aspx]