Tutti figli di mammasantissima / Sons of the Godmother / Italian Graffiti

While no one could ever mistake Sons of the Godmother for a good film, it is a prime example of the possibilities that don't exist now. For its director, writer and co-star Alfio Cantalbiano was best known as a master of arms and stuntman. After his film career ended he then established a gymnasium. In other words, he was the sort of talented jack of all trades with little place now other than doing one thing and one thing only.



Moreover, the film is one which doesn't quite fit into the post-Godfather gangster filone as might be expected. While familiar crime film faces such as Tano Cimarosa and Luciano Catenacci are present, the protagonist and set up actually have more in common with the spaghetti western “servant of two masters plot” and the general sensibility the comic western.

The place is Chicago, the time is 1929. But Capone is conspicuously absent, as the Italian and Irish gangs of the Morano brothers (Catenacci and Cimarosa) and 'The Reverend' (Cantalbiano, under his Alf Thunder name) vie for control of the bootleg liquor trade, especially whisk(e)y.

They are in a stalemate until the arrival of Salvatore Mandolea (Pino Colizzi) from Sicily in a crate.

But rather than siding with his countrymen he proves a trickster figure intent upon playing both sides against the middle, although there is a departure from spaghetti western formula here insofar as romance with Catenacci's daughter Assunta is as important as the money to Mandolea; being played by Ornella Muti, one can understand why.

The spaghetti western aspect is enhanced by the frequent mass brawls, along with the use of accelerated motion and slapstick elements in the manner of the Trinity series.

The opportunity to evaluate Cantalbiano's directorial abilities more generally is hampered when watching the film in a panned and scanned version.

The De Angelis brothers provide a typically eclectic soundtrack, although one which also works in terms of indicating to us that we are not supposed to take anything too seriously.

[Interview with Cantalbiano: http://www.thewildeye.co.uk/blog/?p=525]

[Pollanet page: http://www.pollanetsquad.it/film.asp?PollNum=123]

Tano Cimarosa

I was watching Damiano Damiani's The Most Beautiful Wife last night and got confused at one point because there's a character in the film called Tano Cimarosa whom I was sure was being played by the actor Tano Cimarosa. I checked on the IMDB and, in addition to confirming that actor and character name were indeed identical, was saddened to learn that he had died only last week.


Tano Cimarosa, 1922-2008

For what it matters, Cimarosa's very good in the film, which is as much a drama as a crime film and was based on a true story. He plays the peasant farmer father of the girl whom a rising local mafioso decides to take for his bride. Despite all his daughter suffers, Cimarosa's character is unwilling / unable to take a stand or defend her. It's a powerful performance in which he beautifully conveys the frustration and helplessness of the character with his body language and gestures.

Il Vizio ha le calze nere / Reflections in Black

One of the joys of the giallo, for me, is the sense that that's always something new out there waiting to be discovered and perhaps rescued from the enormous condescension of cinematic posterity. While some films manage to transcend their grey market origins all too many others leave you wondering whether they are intrinsically bad films or are just victims of circumstance through panning-and-scanning; wear and tear; unsympathetic cuts; burned-in subtitles intruding on the image and all those other ignominies that we come to know and to develop a tolerance for. (Or, as cultists, bear like battle scars.)

Tano Cimarosa's Reflections in Black at first seems as though it is going to be a case in point, opening in the classic fashion with the death of a beautiful woman at the hands of a black-gloved, razor-wielding assassin, here also identified by the black stockings she wears and which give the film its original Italian title, Il Vizio ha le calze nere (i.e. “Vice has black stockings”)


Black gloves...


... black stockings...


... and a straight-razor...


... wielded to deadly effect...

Nevertheless, some curious jump cuts – one minute the assassin has entered the house, the next their victim is seeing exiting it, wounded – serve to suggest the intrusion of the censors early on; an intrusion that appears to have continued thereafter if the unusually short running time of just over 70 minutes and which must have excised some quite hard material if what still remains is anything to go by.

With the only eyewitness being a policeman who was almost run over by the killer's vehicle, the amateur detective plot is absent, with the emphasis instead being placed squarely upon the professional; a paradigmatic choice which helps situate the film as a relatively late giallo, coming around that point in the mid-1970s by which the box-office balance and public taste had tipped in favour of its poliziotto counterpart. Even so, while the pervasive attitude of the anni di piombo is conveyed by a number of remarks about widespread corruption and collusion between the upper echelons of civil and criminal society, these prove to be more throwaway than anything else, with the three men conducting the investigation also marked by an action second rather than first approach.




Cimarosa tries to throw suspicion on someone in the crowd as the first victim's body is discovered

Inspector Lavina (John Richardson) is in charge. Below him are Panto – played by the director in his more usual role as character actor – and Gerrini, representing hard-won on-the-job experience and a more modern, scientific approach respectively.

Their investigation soon focusses in on the dead woman's acquaintances, a curious combination of high and low class types including a countess (Magda Konopka), a photographer (Dagmar Lassander), a hairdresser and a junkie (Ninetto Davoli).


A photo that may hold the key to the mystery

Nonetheless, it is clear that they are on the right track as the killer strikes again, slitting the throat of a woman in the park and knocking her boyfriend unconscious – the latter element suggesting someone with a clear set of designated victims rather than a maniac striking at random. (Always assuming, of course, that there is only one killer and that he or she didn't deliberately change modus operandi to confuse matters.)




Having the lovers surprised while he's changing a tyre is a nice touch...

It's also around this point that the film's weaknesses come to the fore. While Cimarosa clearly understood what his audience wanted by way of sex – particularly of the sapphic variety, as we soon see – and sadism and does his level best to meet expectations on both counts, his direction looks to be sorely lacking in style. The bigger problem, however – and one that cannot be really be put down to the copy under review here – is that there are just too many characters and complex inter-relationships to reward keeping track of, especially in light of the killer's predictably unpredictable identity and a summing up which, as Adrian Luther Smith suggests in his Blood and Black Lace review, not even the one offering it seems entirely convinced by.




A lady above suspicion with her forbidden photographs / photographs suggesting a forbidden love


This bleached out dream / fantasy sequence goes on like this for a minute...


... clearly something hot is going on...




The killer also wields stockings


If this composition were intentional it would be almost Godard-like in its audacity

On the plus side, Carlo Savina's main theme, variations on which accompany the stalk and the slash sequences, sets a suitably downbeat tone, whilst it's always pleasing to see Konopka and Lassander, even if both also seem a little tired looking when compared to the likes of Satanik and Femina Ridens of a few years earlier. Still, there's something about such rapidly fading grandeur that is distinctly appropriate to Cimarosa's end-of-the-line giallo...