The first thing to note about this film is the implications of its Italian and English titles. The Italian title translates as The Bastards, whereas the English title and the English lyrics to the theme song (“he’s a bastard”) refer to The Bastard. This plural/singular distinction is an important one, since the English version is likely to make the viewer think that the titular bastard is Jason (Giuliano Gemma) whereas the Italian is likely to make the viewer also think of Jason's older, hypochondriac, half-brother Adam (Klaus Kinski) and perhaps also Jason’s girlfriend Karen (Margaret Lee) and the rest of their gang.
The narrative begins in medias res as Jason flees with a bright yellow bag filled with jewels into the waiting getaway car. Having got out of town, Jason and his two accomplices find their way blocked by a police car. Jason encourages his driver to slowly go forwards and then suddenly accelerate. The stratagem works, but the police car pursues and eventually traps the robbers. The three men get out and the two accomplices are then summarily gunned down by the two cops, who prove to be other associates of Jason’s in disguise.
Jason is the bastard.
Then, however, the cops in turn seek to betray Jason.
Everyone is a bastard.
Jason, however, had predicted as much and, having chained the bag to the floor of the car, manages to take them out.
Having disposed of the getaway car and removed the false fittings from the ‘police’ car, Jason arrives in the next town, stops off for a glass of milk – this an apparent nod to Gemma and co-writer/director Duccio Tessari’s earlier collaborations on the Ringo spaghetti westerns – and then meets up with the waiting Karen.
After dealing with another attempted betrayal in a night club – Karen turning the music up so Jason’s shots will not be heard – the duo rendezvous with Adam, their mother, and the other members of the gang.
At this point also we get a more diegetic explanation for Jason’s avoidance of alcohol, his mother being an alcoholic. This said, he later sends his mother a crate of whiskey as a gift; Adam, whether out of concern for his mother and/or a desire to discredit his half-brother, has the bottles watered down. When Jason learns of this, he gifts his mother another lot of the proper, good stuff. Amusingly, this time we see the bottles, complete with telltale J&B labels.
Rather more important in relation to the narrative, however, is that Jason announces he is not going to share the loot with his brother and the others, instead intending to use the $100,000 to bankroll setting up his own gang. To this end, he has hidden the loot; it may be significant that we do not see him do this.
Jason is the bastard.
What Jason proves not to have foreseen, however, is Karen’s betraying him to Adam. Worse, Adam has his surgeon associate (an unrecognisable Umberto Raho) shoot Jason up with drugs and sever the tendons in the wrist of his gun hand.
Jason is taken in by ranch-owner Barbara (Claudine Auger) who helps him to recover (Gemma here displays his athletic prowess by jumping backwards and somersaulting into the swimming pool, apparently on the first take). Barbara’s kindness makes Jason begin to question his previous life, but not to the extent of foregoing revenge.
Jason may not be the bastard, but he is still one of the bastards.
It is somewhat ironic that, having made some comparably Hollywood-style westerns in Spain, Tessari and Gemma should go to New Mexico to do a crime film with a contemporary setting. This said, the trope of the gunman with a maimed hand is a common one in the Italian western (cf. Django, The Great Silence) and a scene of Jason practising by shooting out the strings of a harp and his donning of a leather wrist-guard seem inspired by A Fistful of Dollars.
Tessari makes good use of the landscape, contrasting its brown and green exteriors with some yellow, blue and red interiors (Dante Ferretti has an early design credit here). Tessari's direction is similar, the obvious stylistic flourishes in some scenes (e.g. Jason’s flashbacks/hallucinations as he stumbles deliriously through the near desert landscape) forming a nice contrast with the less emphatic functional approach elsewhere.
Gemma, Kinski and Lee each acquit themselves well, even if none is being called upon to deliver anything outside of their comfort zone. Hayworth's performance is harder to judge, on the grounds that she was afflicted by undiagnosed Alzheimer’s disease at the time. Without seeing the original script, it is thus difficult to know the extent to which her character's drunkenness was there from the outset or was improvised during filming as a response to difficulties.
One aspect of the script, as written or rewritten, that comes across as rather unsatisfactory is the somewhat deus ex machina ending with its rather too-neat settling of accounts (this term, referenced within the dialogue, is yet another spaghetti westernism).
In sum, a film that starts off well, but loses its way a bit towards the end – much like its lead character, admittedly.
Showing posts with label Margaret Lee. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Margaret Lee. Show all posts
Sunday, 31 March 2013
Sunday, 5 April 2009
I Maniaci / The Maniacs
First things first: despite the associations that the title and director Lucio Fulci may suggest today, this is a comedy rather than a thriller or a horror film.
The madness is not that of the black gloved killer but rather of an everyday sort, specifically the ordinary madness of people like you or I – or more specifically our Italian counterparts circa 1964.
Rather than exploring this madness through a single set of characters and narrative, the film is structured around a series of vignettes, most based upon a reversal of expectation.
For instance, a driver races what he assumes to be the car alongside him, taking greater and greater risks as he endeavours to prove his masculine potency, as expressed by his macchina, against his challenger, only to be overtaken by a jumbo jet...
While some of the segments, like this one, work regardless of the viewer’s knowledge of Italian history, politics and culture, it’s probably fair to say that to get more out of the film you really do need to have some background.
For the Fulci fan, aware of his own personal background and politics, the film meanwhile provides some early indicators as to why he never fulfilled his early promise as a specialist in the Italian style comedy and became ghettoised as a cult horror director. Specifically, he was just too harsh and too cynical in his approach, too willing to bit the hand that might otherwise have fed him by criticising both left and right, modernity and tradition.
This comes through most strongly in the segment starring Enrico Maria Salerno as a hypocritical left-wing / avant-garde / intellectual author who advises an old colleague who comes asking for advice to spice up his realist account of partisan activity with extraneous sex, violence and bad language, only to then deny the result publication as inauthentic and immoral; Salerno’s character’s dog is telling called Pier-Paolo, whilst he himself makes apparent allusions to the likes of Accatone and Mama Roma.
Another story, in which a souther hitch-hiker and his northern lift gradually convince themselves that the other is out to kill them, helps illuminate Fulci’s understanding of regional relations, to indicate again that his representations of the south(erner) in Don’t Torture a Duckling were not merely an easy resort to stereotype but something more worked / thought through.
There’s also an anti-clerical and anti-bourgeois skit, as two antique hunters think they’ve bought a load of valuable items from a monastery at a bargain price, only for the punchline to reveal that the monastery buys these as seconds wholesale from the furnishers nearby. The segment also features its own internal running gag, with the monk refusing the various things offered him by the couple on religious grounds, to then decline wine on account of his ulcer.
For those less interested in identifying Fulci’s auteur signature, I Maniaci boasts the attraction of a superior ensemble cast, featuring the likes of Lisa Gastoni, Barbara Steele, Margaret Lee and Franco and Ciccio. It also has a charming pop score by Ennio Morricone, with vocal performances by the likes of Nico Fidenco and Rita Pavone.
The madness is not that of the black gloved killer but rather of an everyday sort, specifically the ordinary madness of people like you or I – or more specifically our Italian counterparts circa 1964.
Rather than exploring this madness through a single set of characters and narrative, the film is structured around a series of vignettes, most based upon a reversal of expectation.
For instance, a driver races what he assumes to be the car alongside him, taking greater and greater risks as he endeavours to prove his masculine potency, as expressed by his macchina, against his challenger, only to be overtaken by a jumbo jet...
While some of the segments, like this one, work regardless of the viewer’s knowledge of Italian history, politics and culture, it’s probably fair to say that to get more out of the film you really do need to have some background.
For the Fulci fan, aware of his own personal background and politics, the film meanwhile provides some early indicators as to why he never fulfilled his early promise as a specialist in the Italian style comedy and became ghettoised as a cult horror director. Specifically, he was just too harsh and too cynical in his approach, too willing to bit the hand that might otherwise have fed him by criticising both left and right, modernity and tradition.
This comes through most strongly in the segment starring Enrico Maria Salerno as a hypocritical left-wing / avant-garde / intellectual author who advises an old colleague who comes asking for advice to spice up his realist account of partisan activity with extraneous sex, violence and bad language, only to then deny the result publication as inauthentic and immoral; Salerno’s character’s dog is telling called Pier-Paolo, whilst he himself makes apparent allusions to the likes of Accatone and Mama Roma.
Another story, in which a souther hitch-hiker and his northern lift gradually convince themselves that the other is out to kill them, helps illuminate Fulci’s understanding of regional relations, to indicate again that his representations of the south(erner) in Don’t Torture a Duckling were not merely an easy resort to stereotype but something more worked / thought through.
There’s also an anti-clerical and anti-bourgeois skit, as two antique hunters think they’ve bought a load of valuable items from a monastery at a bargain price, only for the punchline to reveal that the monastery buys these as seconds wholesale from the furnishers nearby. The segment also features its own internal running gag, with the monk refusing the various things offered him by the couple on religious grounds, to then decline wine on account of his ulcer.
For those less interested in identifying Fulci’s auteur signature, I Maniaci boasts the attraction of a superior ensemble cast, featuring the likes of Lisa Gastoni, Barbara Steele, Margaret Lee and Franco and Ciccio. It also has a charming pop score by Ennio Morricone, with vocal performances by the likes of Nico Fidenco and Rita Pavone.
Sunday, 13 July 2008
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.
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.
Wednesday, 14 March 2007
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.
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.
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