002 Agenti Segretissimi

On the advice of a computer, our two heroes are secretly recruited by the Italian secret service to serve as decoys while the real agents go about their business unmolested; Franco also has a false formula implanted in a filling in his teeth. The complication is that he and Ciccio prove surprisingly elusive and effective, perhaps precisely because they don’t have a clue...




As usual Ciccio is the smarter of the two, but that isn't saying much; besides being Bondian the 002 refers to their low intelligence levels

Highlights include a visit to a health farm, with some amusing double-entendres and with a couple of gay-coded peplum type bodybuilders; a scene at a club where confusion over who is wearing the jackets with the X marked on them leads to the assassins from different enemy powers inadvertently killing one another; and the duo’s being taken as subjects for female agents to practice their seduction skills on – one getting the aged teacher rather than a beautiful young student.


I think Mary Arden from Blood and Black Lace plays the student seductress here

A visit to a Chinese restaurant, where the orders lead to plates of worms, bowls of beetles and suchlike, is perhaps a bit un-PC, but in keeping with our heroes limited view of the world – at another point, while burgling a house, they reject a Da Vinci as worthless in favour of an unknown painter with a Sicilian name.


The Italian cultural context is important in these films, which were more for domestic consumption (especially in the south) than international distribution.

Lucio Fulci directed, in that anonymous, professional, efficient way that tended to be the case for anyone working with the two comedians. An issue here, much as with the Bond films it spoofs in fact, is that the franchise was more important than the filmmaker. (This is why Tarantino, despite his avowed desire to do a Bond film, will probably never get the chance.) Basically it was don’t get in the stars’ way and let them do their thing.

Neither the best or the worst of its type, it moves along at a decent pace and is good natured enough, with Piero Umiliani’s breezy soundtrack a further plus.

Special thanks to Merlin for the custom subs.

Piero Umiliani website

Website for one of my favourite Italian composers, who scored many filone films in the 1960s and 1970s and penned The Muppet Show theme.

http://www.umiliani.com/index.html

El ojo del huracán / The Eye of the Hurricane / La volpe dalla coda di velluto / Lusty Lovers / Suspicion

Despite its Argento-like Italian title, which translates as The Fox with the Grey Velvet Tail, this 1971 Italian-Spanish co-production is another one of those gialli that is in fact more closely related to the kind of filone entries Umberto Lenzi in particular was putting out a couple of years earlier.

The set-up is straightforward: Despite his pleas that they might be reconciled, Ruth (Analia Gade) is going to divorce Michel (Tony Kendall) and marry the charming Paul (Jean Sorel), whom she met some two months earlier.

Ruth: “Darling, I'm scared”
Paul: “Oh, what of?”
Ruth: “This happiness”

Crucially, Ruth is the one with the money.

Ruth almost crashes her car, with its brake fluid then found to have been drained, then almost drowns when diving as her oxygen tank runs out, with its gauge proving to be faulty.

That Paul had both been driving the car and using the diving gear moments earlier exonerates him from Ruth’s suspicions, which falls upon Michel.

But is all as it seems?

I won't spell it out, N-O, but I'm sure you, dear (intended / implied) reader, can guess...

And what do Paul’s ex-army friend Roland (Maurizio Bonuglia) and the mysterious woman (Rosanna Yanni), who keeps on showing up, have to do with things?

Due to the amount of time spent establishing the dynamics of the relationships between Ruth, Michel and Paul this is a somewhat slow moving giallo initially.

For fully half of the running time we are wondering if there is genuinely a conspiracy and what its nature is.

Then, suddenly, dramatically, the conspiracy is revealed – “Okay, she ought to be asleep by now. Let's go – it's getting late” and everything kicks into high gear.

Things thus become much more tense and interesting, with unpredictable twists and turns along the way to a pleasingly ironic denouement.

José María Forqué's direction is variable, with a non-signifying overuse of the zoom to be counterweighed against some nice compositions – often ones which obscure or problematise the nudity that otherwise presents one of the film's major attractions – symbolic use of the colour yellow and the general beauty of the sun-kissed locales, all nicely captured by cinematographers Alejandro Ulloa and Giovanni Bergamini.

The beauty is enhanced by Piero Umiliani's apt score – thought I must here confess to being somewhat biased when it comes to his work – and the art deco inspired credits, which later also prove to have a diegetic significance in relation to Ruth's art and world, one in which a swan is also significant.

Sorel and Yanni do what is required, being charming and beautiful/bitchy as required, with the latter also the victim of a crass English dub.

Not the best, but not the worst of its (sub-)type.

Original Piero Umiliani vinyl

For anyone with £80 - £120 to spend per LP:

Blue Nude

Rocco is an aspiring Italian-born actor and screenwriter, resident in New York, who in the meantime performs whatever hustles he needs to to get by, ranging from stripping to acting in porn films and as an escort, and endeavours to extricate himself from the various tricky situations these tend to get him into with gangster lowlife types.

Though not framed as a mondo, with the only voice-off we hear a vaguely Taxi Driver style one of Rocco's working in his room on the screenplay in which he is the main character, the film actually ends up capturing more of a particular time, place and world than many a comparable documentary might through the presence of several actual porn performers of the time including Wade Nichols, Carter Stevens and Susan McBain; a roughie shoot that results in an accidental piece of quasi-snuff, and lots of actuality shots of 42nd Street type locations. (I say quasi-snuff because, to their credit, the filmmakers avoids the more obvious and sensationalist scenario of a film being made with the intention of murdering its female performer at the climax.)

Another reference point is Sylvester Stallone, a poster of whom as Rocky adorns Rocco's wall, encourgaging us to think of the actor's parallel struggles to bring Rocky to the screen and not so hidden porn past with The Party and Kitty and Stud's / The Italian Stallion.

If Taxi Driver is a film about the relationship between film and real life, Travis Bickle taking inspiration from the heroes of the western film and trying to apply their mythic solutions to the real-world situation of New York circa 1976 with decidedly ironic results, Blue Nude performs a similar function for the relationship between Italian-American actors and filmmakers of the period such as Stallone, De Niro and Scorsese and its own Italian protagononist.

Rocco's voice-off as he works on the screenplay in which he is the protagonist echoes Bickle's reading / writing of his diary serves to suggest that, whilst certainly possessing more self-awareness than Bickle and a fundamentally different attitude of being able to adapt to circumstances, also fails to adequately recognise the difference between his situation as an Italian immigrant and those of his Italian-American models.

A telling exception is Rudolf Valentino, though Rocco's need to identify who Valentino is to his new girlfriend signals that there is a problem here as well. Valentino and the Latin Lover type he represented were, after all, figures from half a century ago. Yet the myth of the American Dream, as promulgated by Hollywood, has endured. (In that it was inspired by the real life case of Chuck Wepner, the almost unknown boxer who went the distance with Muhammad Ali, Rocky provides a partial exception to this rule.)

One difficulty in making sense of all this is that the dubbing of the film into Italian makes it harder to ascertain how far Rocco is actually out of place. We don't know if he is thinking and writing in English rather than Italian, or if his screenplay suffers from translations of the “hill of boots” variety, although a reference to linguistic misunderstanding in the dialogue does sees Rocco correct a fellow immigrant on the distinction between Scorsese and Scozzese.

Rocco's misunderstandings perhaps thus appear more in terms of attitudes and his awareness of the porn demi-monde in particular, as when he wonders about the mixture of milk, whisky and honey he and the other male performer are served – apparently the 1970s equivalent of viagra – and later attacks his colleague, failing to recognise that the man and his new girlfriend are only acting when declaring their affections for one another in the course of the shooting of another film.

Renato Romano / Raf Valenti is credited as executive producer and Giacomo Rossi Stuart as assistant director besides their acting roles.

A sense of continuity with director Luigi Scattini's earlier mondo films is provided by Piero Umiliani's music, with snippets of score (and dialogue) from Sweden Heaven and Hell audible on the audio track. The main theme here, with acoustic guitar, electric piano and commentative lyrics about New York, rather than vocalism and organ, is quite different from most of the composer's other work for Scattini.

Svezia, inferno e paradiso / Sweden Heaven and Hell

This 1969 mondo is mainly known for one thing: it is the film which gave the world The Muppet Show theme, manha manha. It was written by Piero Umiliani, writer-director Luigi Scattini's composer of choice.

The film itself is very much business as usual, presenting the usual mixture of the defamiliarised, like the state-run alcohol shop, and the downright strange, like the team of the blind divers who salvage things from Stockholm harbour, accompanied by an intermittently informative but mostly sceptical, supercilious and non-sequitur voice-off:

“Sweden covers little more than a quarter million sqaure miles of Europe. Its population is eight million, which means statistically around thirty four and one-quarter inhabitants to every square mile. The quarter inhabitant is an infant. At sixteen he or she acquires the status of a half and at twenty graduates to a whole.”




The titles and customary statement of fact with slow-motion spacehopper action

The specific theme or question tying all the vignettes, which also include the likes of sex education classes, sex shops, swingers' and lesbian clubs, together is that of the title: does the Swedish model society of the time represents more a heaven or a hell on earth?

The answer, unsurprisingly, is a balance of both. Thus, for example, the selling of alcohol through the Systembolaget apparently meant that the authorities avoid supplying registered alcoholics, who would then purchase their booze from other customers allowed to use the store. Others, presumably no longer able to afford the marked-up prices are seen inhaling from petrol soaked rags and eating shoe polish on bread to get a hit. Or, to recast things in sociological terms, it's about the unanticipated consequences of a essentially well-intentioned but at times paternalistic social-democratic welfare state.


Shoe-polish on bread. Mmm

The balance also presumably depends on where and when you were viewing the film, your own social values and – one suspects, having only seen the film in English – the particular slant given the material by the voice-off, Edmond Purdom supplying the English narration and Enrico Maria Salerno the Italian.

For the contemporary viewer at nearly 40 years distance of the material comes across as dated rather than shocking, providing a point of contrast with the harder edged strain of mondo typified by the slaughterfest likes of Africa Addio.

Indeed, the biggest shock may be in the attitudes espoused by the voice-over, with its indiscriminate 'drugs are bad' lumping together of hash and heroin and 'women become lesbians because they've been raped or otherwise actively turned off men, whom they should naturally desire' discourses.


The 'desperate', 'unhappy' 'lesbians'

Another criticism is one endemic to the mondo as a whole, that too often we're shown five minutes of things that that could in themselves have made 'proper' 50 minute documentaries, such as the aforementioned blind divers (what it is it like to experience the world as they do?) or the centre for troubled children (what does the existence of a 12-year-old prostitute say about the failings of the system?)


A cold war era nuclear bunker of a type that may unfortunately be coming back into fashion; note the vehicle at the bottom of the image providing for the rapid tracking style shot

Beyond this the apparent banning of the film in Sweden itself because some material was collected covertly without the informed consent of those caught on camera is also of interest when considering the mondo filone with their tendency to exploit the third world more than the first, whilst also providing another indicator of the strength of the Swedish social democractic idea(l) in its defence of the otherwise relatively powerless. It also provides an intriguing point of connection to Fredrick Wiseman's Titicut Follies, as a 'legitimate' documentary that suffered comparable legal challenges.

By turns intentionally and unintentionally funny, sad, touching and surreal – the opening credits sequence, of identically clad girls on grinning faced orange spacehoppers bouncing in slow motion – Sweden Heaven and Hell remains sufficiently entertaining, for the right and wrong reasons, to be worth a look, while again giving plenty to think about.

[Tim Lucas' s Video Watchblog post on the film: http://videowatchdog.blogspot.com/2008/06/cincinnati-heaven-and-hell.html]

Angeli bianchi... angeli neri / White Angel... Black Angel / The Satanists / Witchcraft 70

This is one of a number of mondo films made by Luigi Scattini, along with Sexy magico, L' Amore primitivo, Sweden: Heaven or Hell and Questo sporco mondo meraviglioso.

Presenting the usual combination of documentary footage and reconstructions of dubious provenance and authenticity accompanied by a supercilious voice-over commentary (courtesy of Edmund Purdom, who performed similar chores on Sweden: Heaven or Hell) there's not much to be said about the film except it is impossible to take seriously yet sometimes places barriers to enjoyment at the camp level through the obligatory animal killing footage, including that of a hen and a goat in the context of a Brazilian magic ceremony where the initiate has her freshly shaven head doused in their blood and daubed with feathers.

With most of the participants in the black magic scenes either the kind that you wouldn't particularly want to see naked anyway or those that you wouldn't mind but who seem to always keep themselves strategically covered, the film's saving grace is Piero Umiliani's soundtrack.

Umiliani worked with Scattini regularly and produced some of his best and best known work, if we consider that The Muppet Show's mahna mahna theme originated in Sweden: Heaven and Hell for him, with Witchcraft 70 offering a pleasing mix of easy listening, bossa, samba and psychedelia-tinged cues that also showcase the talents of Edda Dell Orso, Nora Orlandi, I Cantori moderni and Lydia MacDonald amongst others.

Fans of Anton Lavey may also be interested to know that the brilliantly self-publicising ex-carny man and his The Church of Satan are included in one of the segments, though little insight into his philosophy is provided.