The Nude Princess / La principessa nuda

Ajita Wilson, who plays the title character, was an African-American transgender male to female who found work in a number of European sexploitation films in the 1970s and 1980s -- including roles with Carlos Aured and Jess Franco -- before dying as a result of a road accident in 1987. While some of her roles, such as in Eva Man alongside the intersexed Eva Robins, played upon this aspect of her biography others, including this one, do not. (Robins may be most familiar to from his role as the woman in the red shoes in Tenebrae's flashback scenes.)

The Nude Princess is Miriam Zamota, a US-born former model with a law degree, who has since married Kaboto, the ruler of the African country of Taslamia. She is sent by her husband as the head of a trade delegation to Milan, Italy, with the job of negotiating Italian industrialists' construction of various public works and infrastructural projects in Taslamia.



One of the Italian trade delegates meets Miriam

The first complication is that the Italians do not intend to play fair: Rather than submitting separate tenders, they agree to collude and divide up the commissions between them. The second is the presence of an industrial spy Gladys, played by Tina Aumont. The third is the desire of scandal sheet journalist Marco, played by Luigi Pistilli, to catch Zamota in a compromising position. The fourth is the presence of protesters against Kaboto's regime, along with dissidents and refugees from it.

Some of these complications prove more easily resolved than others -- the Italian businessmen and the industrial spy are smitten by Zamota's beauty. Others prove more complicated, notably Zamota's relations with her countryfolk. For when Zamota is taken to a 'primitive'/'native' religious ceremony/drug party/orgy she has a flashback to a traumatic incident, revealing a previously unknown (or repressed) facet to her relationship with Kaboto. Here, in the Germaine Greer influenced feminist discourse then current she remarks “I’m a female eunuch”



One of the ceremony/party/orgy participants

Writer/director Cesare Canevari has a filmography that can best be described as unusual. Over the course of 20 years he directed nine features, five of which I have now seen: A Hyena in a Strongbox; Matalo!; I, Emmanuelle; this, and The Gestapo's Last Orgy. The main characteristics of these are that they fit into identifiable genres or filone -- Hyena is a crime thriller with Gothic overtones -- but don't always quite play as you would expect -- Matalo! is a Western, but one that seems to dispense with the main antagonist too early on, then presents some Antonioni-esque “dead time” in a deserted town, not to mention a boomerang throwing protagonist.

The one with most in common with The Nude Princess is probably the following year's Nazisadism entry. Both are unsurprisingly exploitative and sleazy, with extensive nudity and softcore sex, yet also have a degree of socio-political comment and artistry to them.

The main theme is the legacies of colonialism, both for the European and the African. Kaboto professes that the only white man he respects is Adolf Hitler, while his dictatorship is presented as a positive, Westernising force in the promotional film shown.



Mocking the neo-colonialist?

The main method, as expressed by this film within the film and Pistilli's occupation, is to constantly make us aware of the mediated nature of the images presented. For elsewhere the image is rarely stable, with Canevari liking to zoom in and out, move the camera independently of the characters, and rapidly cross-cutting between seemingly unconnected scenes. Sometimes it works, sometimes it's tiresome. A nice touch is when he presents us with a line of four character's faces, racking focus to bring three of them into sharp relief, one after the other.

In sum, one of those films that's not quite art, but not quite trash either. Or, to put it another way, the kind of film I tend to like...

La Battaglia d'Inghilterra / Eagles Over London / Battle Squadron / Battle Command / Sur ordres du Führer / El Largo día del águila

Enzo G. Castellari is not a director who I mention terribly much on this blog. It’s probably because the two main filone I tend to focus on, the giallo and horror film, are ones which he is not important in.

It was Castellari, after all, who was first offered the directors’ chair for Zombie and who recommended Fulci for the job, feeling that it horror wasn’t his thing, and who only made one comparatively unusual foray into the giallo, Cold Eyes of Fear, more a thriller than a mystery whose most giallo moment was a self-contained nightclub act.


A self-reflexive moment

There is no question, however, that when it comes to action films, Castellari is pretty much the man.

And, with Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds currently reminding us of Castellari’s near namesake – and others Eurocult subjects beside, if such character names as “General Ed Fenech” and “Sgt Hugo Stiglitz” are anything to go by – what better time to (re)visit one of Castellari’s other contributions to the Euro-war cycle?

Though a bit more serious and less of a caper movie that Inglorious Bastards, Eagles Over London – or Battle of England, to translate the Italian – is nevertheless unmistakably Castellari, with plenty of fist fights, derring-do and explosions.

The story opens in Dunkirk, with the allies in retreat. Sent to look for stragglers, part of the detachment commanded by Captain Paul Stevens, finds a group of men from another British regiment, not realising that they are in fact Nazi agents in disguise.

With the advantage of surprise the Nazis, led by the sinister Major Krueger, kill all the detachment whilst suffering one casualty of their own, take their dog tags and pay books, and then split up, mingling amongst the rest of the retreating allied soldiers.


Split screen

Wondering where his men have got to, Captain Stevens goes back to check, indicating to his loyal NCO, Sergeant Mulligan, that the bridge separating them from the advancing Nazi forces should be blown up regardless of whether he comes back in time or not.

Stevens finds the dead men and, hurrying back, saves one of the German agents, Martin, from being blown up along with the bridge.

Back in Blighty, Stevens offers Martin a place to stay, little realizing that Martin is in fact one of the saboteurs he is trying to root out before they can infiltrate the British radar defence system, vital to the country’s defence.

For his part Martin feels increasingly conflicted by his loyalties to the Fuhrer against those of the new friend who saved his life at risk to his own…

If the historical backdrop means that aspects of the eventual resolution have a sense of inevitability – it’s hopefully not giving too much away to say the British win both this cloak and dagger battle and the Battle of Britain – Castellari and his collaborators nevertheless succeed in keeping one guessing exactly what will happen between Stevens and Martin until the end, and in intertwining the smaller and larger scale narratives.


The saboteurs

Similarly, if some of the antics of Stevens and company seem a bit far-fetched, suggesting that the war could have been won by them almost single-handed, the integration of levels of narrative conflict also means that you can well imagine the film being an extrapolation, Castellari style, from a real incident hidden in the secret archives or lost less the truth be known.

In this regard, the use of Winston Churchill’s speeches is also clever. If, “never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few,” in explicit reference to the RAF, that the RAF’s ability to repel the Nazi blitzkrieg is presented as depending on the radar stations being kept operative adds another implicit layer of meaning, that this few in turn owed much to the efforts of the even fewer.

Another nice touch here is the depiction of Nazi overconfidence and infighting, that the saboteur’s mission is one which one leader has mounted on his own whereas another believes, like the (unseen) Fuhrer, that the British radar does not exist.


Obligatory control room scene; I recently visited a decommissioned nuclear bunker and saw one just like this, but smaller

While sticklers for historical accuracy will likely find much to fault in the film’s costumes, armaments and other props, this can be excused by the sheer scale of some of the set pieces relative to the film’s likely budget.

For Euro-cult fans, meanwhile, the all-star cast – Frederick Stafford as Stevens, Francisco Rabal as Martin, Luigi Pistilli as Kruger, Renzo Palmer, Ida Galli, Teresa Gimpera and Van Johnson among the name roles; George Rigaud and Edouardo Fajardo visible as British and Nazi officers – should override this, along with the inherent humour of seeing Italians and Spaniards playing Germans impersonating Englishmen and speaking the language with quasi-received pronunciation (non-)accents. (Indeed, the odd man out here is Van Johnson, the British air commander with a American accent.)

Both groups can surely appreciate Castellari’s direction, with some delightful if very of its time deployment of split screen, and particularly good use of screen space and depth in unexpected ways to impart visual interest to even the more mundane material.

He also paces the film nicely. Just as we begin to wonder what the role of two Free French Pilots is, for instance, other than allowing for some more international appeal and air battle sequences, one of them is murdered by a Nazi seeking a new identity, thereby bringing the main plot neatly to the fore.

Not surprisingly he’s weaker on the obligatory romantic subplot stuff. It’s characteristic that a love scene between Stafford and Galli – who is torn between Stevens and the air commander – takes place amidst the backdrop of an air raid and sees Castellari discretely pull the camera away to then show a building opposite explode as it is hit by a bomb.

Went the Day Well meets The Eagle Has Landed, Euro-style?

The Killers are our Guests / Gli assassini sono nostro ospiti

The question the student of Italian genre cinema may find themselves asking is whether The Killers are our Guests / Gli assassini sono nostro ospiti is a poliziotto posing as a giallo, a giallo posing as poliziotto, or just a crime thriller that happens to oscillate between filone in a way that made box-office sense in 1974 and complicates things for us today in trying to write about it.

Certainly the opening pre-credits sequence, in which a woman, Elisa (Margaret Lee), steals a car is more poliziotto in its dynamics: the street is too well lit and open for a giallo, the danger more that from bag snatcher than black gloved, blade-wielding assassin. Yet much will ultimately come to hang on this, via the victim's testimone oculare. (The poliziotto detective does not need the eye-witness; he knows who the bad guys are, his problem to prove it.)

This comes with hindsight, however, with the first act of the movie proper being very much poliziotto in its dynamics, as a group of three masked robbers – including, as we later learn, Elisa – hold up a jewellery store, the whole operation apparently masterminded by a fourth figure, Eddie, who is located in the cafe opposite where he acts as lookout and runs interference on the play by making a distracting telephone at the moment the others rush in.

Things do not go according to (Nice Guy?) Eddie's gameplan, however, and a shoot-out ensues, leaving the jewellery store owner's son and a customer dead and one of the robbers, Franco, with a life-threatening bullet wound.

Fleeing the scene in the getaway car, Franco, Mario and Elisa debate the situation:

Franco: “What went wrong?”

Mario: “I'll tell you what went wrong: having a woman with us. They warned me not to take you!”

Elisa: “I told you I didn't know how to shoot. Anyway Franco got in front of me!”

While Mario is in favour of getting out of the city as fast as possible and letting Franco take his chances, Elisa insists that they take him to the nearest doctor. The matter is settled when, swerving to avoid a truck that appears out of the mist, their driver crashes, fatally injuring himself – unhesitatingly Mario puts a bullet in his brain – and leaving the others trapped in the city and forced to go along with Elisa's proposal. Accordingly they head for the nearest doctor, one Dr Guido Malerva (Anthony Steffen), and burst in on him and his wife, Mara.

At this point the film becomes more the traditional The Desperate Hours style thriller – or, if one wants Italian reference points, Enzo Castellari's Cold Eyes of Fear and Ruggero Deodato's House on the Edge of the Park – as the householders look for the opportunity to escape, alert the authorities or turn their situation to their respective benefit, as their already fraught relationship is pushed to breaking point.


“Get up Mara!”
“Why should I?!”


“Look, we'll just have to do what they tell us to do – we don't have any choice.”

This also leads to one of the odder seeming sequences in the film as Mara and Elisa find the time for a pseudo-lesbian encounter. Crucially, however, alhough its primary function is obviously that of providing an extra little frisson for the (assumed male) spectator, it is not completely gratuitous in terms of also showcasing Mara's desire to humiliate a husband she sees as weak and ineffectual and her relentless probing for weaknesses in the intruders' armour, with a degree of critical distance also being imparted by the way in which it the scene is consciously presented as a pseudo-lesbian act staged for the benefit of Guido and / or Mario.







It is also true to say, however, that writer-director and cinematographer Vincenzo Rigo never quite manages to really get to grips with the scene and communicate what it might mean beyond this. Indeed, this is something which the film as a whole suffers from, its dynamics being neither satifactorily those of giallo nor poliziotto, suspense nor shock. Again, however, the combination is a difficult one to pull off. And if The Killers are our Guests' denouement is hardly on a par with that of Rabid Dogs – Bava's film being a textbook example of how to do the suspense / shock thing in a way that just makes you appreciate every nuance of dialogue, performance and direction that second time round – it feels less contrived than House on the Edge of the Park and demonstrates more of a sense of aspiration. (Again, however, this is not to criticise Deodato per se. Rather, his film, like Castellari's, has its own strengths, delivering what is expected but not striving to go beyond this as a goal.)


A moment of giallo style abstract artistry


Pistilli with major sideburn action


One of those 70s faces as Mario


The mille miglia look, circa 1974

Whatever one ends up feeling about Rigo's film, Margaret Lee and Luigi Pistilli are good value, the latter's role as the cop assigned the case again enhancing the overarching sense of thriller-ness by being neither classic giallo amateur detective nor classic poliziotto man-on-a-mission. Roberto Rizzo's effective score also makes one wonder why his name is not more familiar.

The Iguana with the Tongue of Fire / L' Iguana dalla lingua di fuoco

The body of a young woman is found in the trunk of a car belonging to the Swiss ambassador to Ireland, Sobieski (Anton Diffring). Her throat has been slit and her face melted by acid, making identification all but impossible until an anonymous parcel containing her passport is sent to the police and identifies her by name and as of Dutch origin.


The Iguana strikes with his fiery tongue...


... leaving a victim with a face burned beyond recognition


Close ups and zooms on glasses and cut throat razors are everywhere in the film


Do you think Freda is telling us that that ring means something?

With Sobieski recently having arrived from the Netherlands, suspicion falls upon him. Unfortunately he is also protected by diplomatic immunity and has influential connections, compelling Inspector Lawrence to use what he terms “unorthodox methods”.

These it transpires entail getting former colleague Norton (Luigi Pistilli) AKA “the beast”, who was thrown off the force following the death of a suspect whilst in his care, to see what he can find out through more covert means from the ambassador's wife (Valentina Cortese), daughter (Dagmar Lassander) and the embassy staff.

Sure enough, Norton soon uncovers a web of intrigues, including blackmail and drug smuggling. Meanwhile, the killer is steadily working his or her way through the blackmailers and, as Norton gets too closer to the truth, then targets the ex-cop's own daughter and mother – an eccentric old woman who refuses to wear her glasses and takes her own, Miss Marple-like interest in the case...




A blackmailing Tori Amos-alike gets hers

One suspects that responses to The Iguana with the Tongue of Fire will fall into two distinct camps: those who take it as just another giallo directed by a no-name filmmaker, and those who know that behind the multiple credits to “Willy Pareto” lurks one of the founding fathers of Italian horror and thriller cinema, Riccardo Freda.
Taken as just another giallo, the film delivers pretty much what we would expect – a black gloved killer, sleaze, sadism, stalking, sex and set pieces – and is not really any worse than innumerable others. Taken as a Freda film it is frankly a disappointment. Importantly, however, the use of Pareto rather than his more usual Robert Hampton pseudonym indicates that Freda himself was dissatisfied with the film and effectively disowned it.


Lassander doing what she did best




And as the woman in peril in one of the film's few truly effective and accomplished sequences

The questions that then emerge, seeing that Pareto is listed as co-writer, director and editor, are at what point Freda gave up on the film; itself one of the recurring features of his cinema. A man of independent means, Freda was in the apparently enviable position of not having to really worry about where his next paycheck was coming from. The downside, however, was that if he lost interest in a project there was little anyone could do to force him to redouble his efforts. On I Vampiri and Caltiki the Immortal Monster it had not mattered because of Mario Bava's involvement, precisely because his more precarious financial position meant that he could not afford to turn away work or risk getting a reputation for being difficult to work with.

Indeed, in this regard, a comparison of Iguana with Bava's Five Dolls for an August Moon seems instructive: While Bava took over that project at the 11th hour and freely admitted to having no enthusiasm for the script he was given, one gets a sense of real enjoyment when watching it, of a filmmaker having fun playing with technique and the spectator's expectations. Here, however, it almost seems as if Freda had an equally muddled script that he thought could be brought to life in the course of filming, only to fail to find a spark at this point, and thus then endeavoured to save it at the editing stage, with little more success.

Taking the script to begin with, Sobieski is too obviously guilty for the attempted whodunnit aspect to really work. It would have been better, one feels, had be been explicitly identified as the killer at the outset, thus allowing the cat and mouse game to be foregrounded. Unfortunately what we get instead is the introduction of Pistilli and Lassander as suspects, with the former's crude proposition – “Well now me fleet footed filly, are we going to have it off in the bushes or on the bike?” – being greeted with the kind of enthusiasm from the latter that would only really make sense in a porn film.

While we do eventually learn Pistilli's true role and that Lassander is well aware of who he is, it does rob us of any strong points of identification until nearly midway through the film and places a sense of dubiety on both characters that fails to completely vanish. Likewise, the conflict between Norton as caring family man, traumatised by an incident in his past – itself shown in repeatedly flashbacks in that classic “primal scene” way – and as violent brute is never satisfactorily resolved.

In terms of the direction and editing, what we have are a few effective set pieces outweighed by a overall crudeness of approach in which far too many scenes degenerate into shock zooms in on and / or close ups of “significant” details, almost – but, crucially not – to the point of obvious parody.

The excessive violence that some have remarked on as further detracting from the film did not, however, seem that out of place as far as I was concerned. While this could be a reflection of desensitization or simply finding the effects work unconvincing, I would prefer to think it is down to the razor slashings and acid splashings being less a radical departure and more a logical continuation of the kind of thing already present in Barbara Steele's hand-held subjective camera razor attack om Peter Baldwin in The Ghost.


Dressed to kill?

Or, that rather than borrowing from Argento, Freda was merely reclaiming his own – albeit in the context of a black-gloved killer and a soundalike title shoehorned into the dialogue that, for better or worse, served to disguise this. (Reversing things, one further wonders if Argento, who has often proclaimed his admiration for Freda in interview, perhaps borrowed from the film's climax for the sequence in Opera where Betty, her vision similarly impaired, unwittingly invites the disguised killer into her apartment.)

One thing that remains is the performances. Though it could be argued that Pistilli and Diffring are really given little opportunity to do anything other than play to type, as man with issues and cold-eyed villain respectively, they perform these roles so well that it is hard to really be bothered. Valentina Cortese, meanwhile, seems to have been the one person to have genuinely enjoyed herself, playing the Ambassador's wife with a mixture of boredom, flirtatiousness, sardonic wit, hauteur and downright out there-ness. Lassander is eye candy, no more, no less.

Another is Stelvio Cipriani's score. Thought some of the cues are used as diegetic shock effects, lessening their value in their own right, the lush, romantic piano pieces with vocalism by Nora Orlandi – an equally talented composer in her own right – that play in the nightclub scene / scene of the second murder are pleasant compensation.

Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key

Oliviero Ruvigny (Luigi Pistilli) is a burnt-out, alcoholic, mother-fixated writer who has not written a line in three years and survives by selling off the furniture from the crumbling family mansion. His main pleasure in life is taunting his beautiful wife Irina (Anita Strindberg) who also attentions of her dead mother-in-law' cat, a malevolent creature that more than live up to its name, Satan, as far as she is concerned.






Yet another picture that holds a power


An early appearance by Dalila Di Lazzaro, later the lead in Flavio Mogherini's The Pyjama Girl Case

Visiting the village for much-needed supplies after hosting another party for the hippies at the nearby commune, Oliviero arranges a rendezvous with the girl from the bookstore, Fausta (Daniela Giordano). But while waiting for him to arrive, she is murdered by a sickle-wielding, black-gloved figure.




Daniela Giordano in a particularly thankless role.

When the police call at the villa the next day Oliviero claims that he was with Irina all evening. This satisfies the police but leaves Irina – seemingly too frightened to tell them the truth – ever more worried.


Ruvigny hits the J&B

Then the Ruvigny's maid (Carla Brait) is killed. Again proclaiming his innocence, Oliviero convinces Irina that the best thing to do is wall up the body in the cellar and, if anyone asks, say that she left their service; to go to the authorities "would be like putting a noose around my neck" he explains.


The maid dons Oliviero's mother's dress and suffers the consequences


Ivan Rassimov, looking shifty as ever

The last thing either of them needs, then, is the unexpected arrival of Olivieri's niece Floriana (Edwige Fenech), although Irina warms to her as she stands up to Oliviero and offers her aunt more than a shoulder to cry on.


I love the abstract, gestalt figure qualities of this composition





Unfortunately at this point, the film loses its way somewhat.

Fausta's killer is unmasked as an escaped lunatic, thereby removing the burden of suspicion from Oliviero but also making his and Irina's subsequent actions less believable.

More damaging, however, is the dirt bike sequence that follows, which effectively puts a brake on the narrative for the better part of five minutes.

Happily things pick up after this as the various plots come together, though never quite recapturing the lost momentum of the first half.


All work and no play makes Oliviero a dull boy?

Combining familiar generic themes and motifs with more overtly Gothic elements drawn from Edgar Allen Poe's short story The Black Cat – itself later adapted by Lucio Fulci and Dario Argento in giallo / horror style – this 1972 entry boasts one of the most extravagant titles in the entire giallo filone, itself stemming from a line in the filmmakers' earlier The Strange Vice of Signora Wardh.

At the helm, Sergio Martino again demonstrates his undoubted technical abilities, although some of his choices also feel a touch over-emphatic. It is not that an extreme close-up, shock zoom or sudden cut-in has no place here – that would be an absurd suggestion to make – more that they feel somewhat redundant when the point has already been made through dialogue, performance or other, more subtle, aspects of mise-en-scene. Sometimes more is less.

Against this, however, there are some beautifully realised moments. A love scene between Floriana and Irina, for instance, may use all the slow-dissolve, hands-clasping-in-ecstasy cliches, but in doing so it perhaps indicates not only their pleasure as immediate meaning but also a retrospectively element of falseness when it becomes evident that both participants are playing particular roles.

Bruno Nicolai's score lacks variety compared to his work for Martino elsewhere, with an absence of suspense and lounge themes in favour of numerous minor variations on the same gentle, romantic harpsichord and string led theme. This also, however, perhaps allows for a better fit with the overall tone of the film, insofar as the emphasis is more upon the relationships between the characters than the woman-in-peril scenario.

While Strindberg is perhaps the designated victim, she is more the victim of systematic abuse than a clear cut conspiracy of the sort experienced by Edwige Fenech in The Strange Vice of Signora Wardh or All the Colours of the Dark.

Fenech herself is intriguingly cast against type as a conniving bitch with her own agenda, leaving Rassimov with the short end of the stick once more as yet another sinister presence; while his exact allegiance and part in the various plots and counter-plots remains a mystery until late on, it is evident from his very first appearance that can be up to no good.

To an extent Luigi Pistilli might also appear typecast, insofar as he is again given the role of someone troubled, haunted and compromised following his reluctant co-conspirator of a forceful Lady Macbeth type wife in Bay of Blood and his policeman traumatised by a suspect's death in The Iguana with the Tongue of Fire. Again, however, what matters is the way he differentiates each such figure from the others, with his alcoholic Oliviero also giving an ironic twist to the omnipresent J&B bottle as more a signifier of failure ("It's all poison", as the character remarks at one point) than la dolce vita.


Leering local layabouts


The Blue Eyes of the Broken Doll?


La Chute, again

It is also worth noting that the film features both dummy and doll action. There is also a scene repeated in Torso, as a gang of locals leer at and make crude remarks as to what they would like to do to Irina: if Martino gives the (implied) male spectator his “visual pleasures” he also likes to explicitly problematise them on occasion. I also find these moments curiously reminiscent of those in Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Avventura where Monica Vitti's character similarly finds herself being eyed up and objectivised; whether the allusion is conscious or not is if course another matter entirely...