Il consigliori / The Counsellor

As the title suggests, Il consigliori / The Counsellor lies squarely within the filone inaugurated by the success of The Godfather.


An Amati film set in San Francisco with a Riz Ortolani score, but it's not Perversion Story

But as a cut-price Italian imitation of its model, it also necessarily differs from its Italian-American counterpart in a number of significant ways.

Most obviously there is its duration, an hour and a half rather than three hours, along with the concomitant lack of epic grandeur.

But it is also evident in the western rather than eastern US settings, which take us away from the traditional US mafia heartlands, and the composite rather than xerox nature of the three main characters, as incarnated by Martin Balsam, Tomas Milian and Francesco Rabal.

Balsam plays the film's godfather figure, Don Antonio Macaluso.

Milian plays the Don's adoptive son, consigliori and lawyer Thomas Accardo.

But with Don Macaluso having no actual family Milian also occupies a somewhat Michael Corleone type role as reluctant heir-apparent and through his relationship with Dagmar Lassander's Kay Adams-like schoolteacher.

It is this that creates a tension with Rabal's character, Vincent Garofalo.

If he's the prodigal son and villain of the piece, he's also one who we can have some sympathy for, considering the way he he is treated by the Don.

The story begins with Accardo about to be released from jail and the Don and Garofalo deciding that former colleague Lucchese must be killed as, insane and liable to shoot his mouth off, he is a threat to the organisation as a whole.


Lucchese

The key tropes are the classic ones: First, once you are in, you don't leave except for via a casket. Second, it's nothing personal, only business.


Re-united, if only temporarily; note the classic use of empty space to suggest distance

When Accardo is freed and announces his intention to leave the family, Don Macaluso breaks these rules by agreeing to let him go. What makes this all the worse in Garofalo's eyes is that the Don also refuses to let him establish his own family.

Accordingly Garofalo makes a deal with some rival families and attempts a coup. Unfortunately for him the attempts on both the Don's and Thomas's lives fail...

Around about this point another key difference between The Godfather and The Counsellor emerges.

The Corleone family would personally act only if there was no other option, as with Michael's killing Solozzo and Captain McCluskey, or when it took precedence over business concerns, as with Sonny's tendency towards hot-headed impulse decisions. Personal involvement entailed greater risk of being implicated in a crime, whose actual commission was best left to a “button man”.

Here, by contrast, the Don, Accardo and Garofalo tend to lead their men by example, entering into the fray when it isn't strictly necessary. It's maybe not particularly plausible – though, again, given the cut-rate nature of these mobs, it could be – but does at least allow for plenty of action.


Obligatory car chase

Another pleasing aspect of the film in this regard is the unpleasantness of its violence, as with the little girl who gets blown up by the package intended for Accardo or the feeding of a restaurant owner who shelters the Don into a pizzeria oven; since the film's cinematographer was Aristide Massaccessi, one half wonders if this image inspired Annie Belle's fate in Absurd.

Those who prefer Milian's more mannered performances may be disappointed by the relative restraint he displays here. The important point is that this is in line with his character and, as such, serves to demonstrate Milian's dynamic range.

Alberto De Martino's direction is functional, efficient and very much what the film needs. It's only business (filone cinema), after all, and nothing personal (auteur cinema).

Tomas Milian book

This arrived this morning, and looks very cool:

Messalina, Messalina / Caligula II: Messalina, Messalina

This is one of those films whose production history is perhaps more interesting than what is on screen.

Telling the story of the infamous, sexually insatiable Roman empress in the form of a comedy, replete with nudity, vulgar humour and much softcore romping, before culminating with a played for laughs bloodbath in which limbs and heads are lopped off, it's reminiscent of a Decamerotic made several years after that filone had peaked commercially – not the sort of thing you would expect of a canny professional like Bruno Corbucci.

The explanation lies in the title and an opening credit about the source of the impressive Roman sets. For the film was made in the hope of cashing in on the success of the Bob Guiccone bankrolled Caligula, only to be released in advance of its much-troubled model in a case of what critic Kim Newman calls “premature emulation”: second guessing the market in the hope of being there first amongst a successful productions sullo stesso filone imitators, only to back the wrong film.

In addition to borrowing Caligula's sets, female leads Anneke di Lorenzo and Lori Wagner also reprise their roles as Messalina and Agrippina. Given that both were Penthouse Pets, its fairly clear where their talents do and do not lie, but also that the nature of the piece means a paucity of thespian abilities doesn't matter too much.

Tomas Milian and Bombolo seem to have stepped out of one of their poliziotto for Corbucci, with Milian wearing the same Monnezza wig and delivering the same kind of exaggerated, gesture-driven performance as Baba, a low-life vox populi, thief and conman who has the (mise en scène)fortune to come to the attention of Messalina and her emperor husband, while Bombolo plays a dim-witted career soldier charged at one point with finding men who measure up to Messalina's exacting criteria. Giovanni Cianfriglia also has a small action / stunt role.

Banditi a Milano / Bandits in Milan

For me, Carlo Lizzani is one of the largely unsung heroes of the Italian cinema. A politically committed figure who started out as the writer of a number of neo-realist films and as a documentarist, he increasingly moved into directing genre films in the 1960s and 1970s.

It sounds like a somewhat unlikely career trajectory until we bear in mind that the best known of his early works, Guiseppe De Santis's Bitter Rice, itself combine neo-realism and noir, political engagement and entertainment.

An expose of the exploitation of itinerant rice planters and harvesters in the Po Valley it was ironically criticised by Marxist commentators for its own exploitative elements, most famously the iconic image of Silvana Mangano wearing a tight sweater and short trousers working in the fields. These, the critics argued, had nothing to contribute to the class struggle.

What these critics forgot and what Lizzani has always remembered is that exploitation is a way to expose the mass audience to political content. It was all well and good for these same critics to prefer Luchino Visconti's La Terra trema on grounds of ideological and aesthetic purity but not so effective when we consider that it had to be subtitled in Italy itself for the characters' Sicilian dialect to be comprehensible and that its box-office failure put an end to the Visconti and the PCI's plans for two further similarly themed films.




Though some of the images are somewhat non-documentary realist, it's worth remembering that the interrogation and torture sequences in Rome, Open City are expressionist rather than realist.

Pre-dating the post-Dirty Harry and French Connection boom in Italian police films, Bandits in Milan has a different look and feel to the typical 70s poliziotto, with Lizzani taking an documentary like approach to his subject – a reconstruction of a real heist which turned the center of Millan into a racetrack and unfortunate bystanders into targets.

At the same time, however, Lizzani is careful not to let forget that we are watching a movie, whether the opening freeze frame that shows one of the bandits in flight and then presents his capture by an angry mob, or the later – but chronologically earlier – scene in which the robbers' lookout tries to convince a curious passer by that a commercial is being filmed inside the bank, that it's not being robbed for real.

The film has a curious structure, beginning with ten minutes of little vignettes that, besides introducing Tomas Milian's police chief, give a kaleidoscopic portrait of crime and the city.


Milian, facing the press.

Following an old timer's remarks that the new generation of career criminals have no restraints and no respect, we get the shaking down of a nightclub and a gambling den by a protection racket. Then, in what seems like a dress rehearsal for the later Storie di vita e malavita, we get the recruitment of a naïve young woman, played by Margaret Lee, into prostititution and her eventual murder at the hands of her pimp.


Robber, terrorist or ultra?

Finally, as one of the robbers is interrogated by Inspector Basevi, the main story begins to unfold via his confession.

Basevi learns that the Turin-based gang were behind the robbery of three Milan banks in the space of half an hour the previous year, hitting the first one and making sure that the alarm is triggered to draw police cars there as they move on to the second, repeat the trick there and then go on to the third.


Volonte looking for inspiration

The mastermind behind the gang, who have made some 17 bank robberies over the preceding few years is Cavallero, played by Gian Maria Volonte. A keen strategist who leaves nothing to chance and enjoys the thrill of robbery as much as the money it brings, he's charismatic, megalomaniac and has a liking for existentialist literature and military history.

Cavallero has also seen to it that the gang have set themselves up a legitimate business as a front, complete with a secretary, whom he amusing tells not to wear short skirts and, more practically, to never have her boyfriend around the office. He also keeps a balance sheet of the profits and losses from each robbery, all the way down to noting the amount of ammunition fired and the cost per bullet.


Gratuitous picture of Margaret Lee

With the other long-term members of the gang, played by reliable hands like Don Backy and Peter Martell, equally professional but less extraordinary, the other main focus of attention is newcomer Tuccio, played by a fresh-faced Ray Lovelock.

A promising footballer who works in Cavallero's father's garage, Tuccio happens upon a stash of hidden guns and, having proven to Cavallero that he can be trusted, is invited to train with the gang and join them for their next job. (When he's learning to shoot, Cavellero still keeps track of the ammunition used.)


Let's go to work...

Finally, the day of the heist comes, along with the introduction of the various unfortunates whose lives are about to fatally intersect with the bandits. The job itself comes off fine, with the gang having earlier timed the traffic lights and noted that they would also have a clean getaway, but the police pursuit proves unexpectedly dogged. This causes Cavallero to start deliberately shooting at passing traffic and people in the hope of forcing the police to give up the chase.

It doesn't work...

Bandits in Milan has so many strong points, including quality performances; powerful, hard-hitting action sequences; believable characters; naturalistic dialogue (in which a number of distinctively Turinese idioms are used for extra veracity) and a somewhat open ending, that it is hard to actually find much to criticise.

One potential weakness is that Milian plays his role straight and as such is perhaps less interesting and engaging than in the likes of Almost Human and Brothers Till We Die where he is more over-the-top. Likewise, Lee's role amounts to only two or minutes screentime.

If Milian and Lee's fans may be disappointed, those of Volonte will be delighted. Compare his character and performance here to those in, say, Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion or Io ho paura, and you cannot but be impressed with his ability to inhabit radically different roles – a self-satisfied, superior, fascistic police chief and an anxious, increasingly paranoid cop assigned as bodyguard to a judge investigating terrorism – and the sheer commitment he brought to them.


More mediation

Another thing I wasn't entirely sure about was the extra-diegetic music. It's fine in itself, but at times threatens to expose a split between the genre and documentary aspects of the film by providing additional commentary and emotional cues which I felt were somewhat superfluous given the power of the writing, performances and direction. This said, I must also having similar feelings towards a number of neo-realist films, so it may just be that I don't quite get this melodramatic aspect of wider Italian culture as it applies there and here. Or, rather, I 'get' it at an intellectual level, understanding how musical cues helped the Italian audience make sense of the film by providing emotional cues, but just cannot have this same response myself in the case of more realistic films.

Taken as a whole, however, Bandits in Milan deserves to be much better known and acknowledged as one of the great heist movies in the same breath as the likes of The Asphalt Jungle, Rififi, The Killing, Reservoir Dogs and Heat. It is that good.

Delitto al Blue Gay / Ein Superesel auf dem Ku'Damm / Cop in Drag

Delitto al Blue Gay opens with six minutes of non-stop action, albeit at least in part culled from previous poliziotto films, accompanied by a voice-off introducing Tomas Milian's Nico Giraldi character to those unfamiliar with him; I have the strong suspicion that the opening clip actually sees Milian pursuing himself, in the guise of one of his Lenzi characters.

Next we get a lip synched song and dance number, “man or woman, makes no difference on stage” delivered by a bunch of men in drag, at the Blue Gay club. Following some backstage bitching between leading diva Columba Lamar and her understudy and rival, Nadia, the introduction of visiting German film director Kurt Linder, and another stage routine, Nadia is found in her dressing room, murdered.


Columba and Nadia, moments before the latter is murdered


A bunny girl with a difference

No prizes for guessing who is assigned the job of going undercover at the Blue Gay or who he ropes in to help him...




The many faces of Nico Giraldi

Directed and co-written by Bruno Corbucci, this 1984 film is the 11th and last entry in the Giraldi series inaugurated by Cop in Blue Jeans eight years before. The formula remains much the same as its predecessors, with a mixture of action and crude comedy episodes centred around the endearingly scruffy Nico, his bumbling petty criminal sidekick Venticello and common-law wife Angela, who has just had another baby.

Unfortunately with all this there's also the sense of not really trying to go beyond a somewhat tired formula, that we've seen it all before and done better before, with two exceptions. The first, the inclusion of the song and dance numbers, most notably an interminable breakdancing and body popping zombie music video a la Thriller, soon become tiresome. The second, a chase in which Nico, dressed as a roman centurion, pursues a car in a chariot, is a nice idea, but fails to convince – how slow is the car going for the chariot to keep up – and also means there is no real possibility for more crazy stunts.


A familiar sight




Breakdancing zombies

The English title, Cop in Drag, is also something of a cheat in that Nico himself never actually dresses up as a woman, and keeps the beard and moustache throughout, with it being Venticello who is assigned the task of impersonating a woman on their visits to the Blue Gay.

This said, despite the stereotypical gay characters and frequent references to “fags” and “faggots” in the dialogue, the filmmakers prove surprisingly progressive and sympathetic in their portrayals of the Blue Gay's habitues, with Nico soon largely overcoming his masculine heterosexual anxieties and even incorporating Columba into his extended family by the end.

La Banda del trudico / Destruction Force

Recently promoted following the murder of his predecessor, Taddei, Commissario Ghini (Luc Merenda) faces an unenviable situation. Crime, petty and serious, is spiralling out of control and three notorious underworld figures, Lanza (Franco Citti), Belli and Tocci, have congregated on Rome, clearly with nefarious deeds in mind...


Note Milian's extra credit

Meanwhile 'married' and with a son, Monnezza Jr, Monnezza (Tomas Milian) is running a restaurant – its speciality is abusing customers alongside their meal – and trying to stay out of trouble. This doesn't mean giving up a life of crime per se, more working according to an honourable, old-time credo of “no guns, only balls” and teaching a gang of apprentices the tricks of the trade...


Monnezza's trattoria

While Ghini pursues Lanza, whom he suspects of being behind Taddei's murder – a hit which has clearly been sanctioned by someone high up in the underworld, and for which Lanza has likely gained permission to return to the city following an exile in Sardinia – Monnezza is visited by an old associate, Gianni, who offers him the job of getaway driver on an upcoming score. Though Monnezza declines, wary that Gianni's methods are not always in accord with his own ethos, he suggests that his friend Frog might be a suitable replacement, little realising that the decidedly trigger happy Belli and Tocci are the ones behind the job...


Guns and flipper; there's also the obligatory pool tables there as well...

Predictably their raid on a jewellery wholesalers goes somewhat Reservoir Dogs, leading Belli to cover his tracks and putting him on collision course with Monnezza and Ghini, who has by this time dealt with Lanza...

As this synopsis perhaps suggests, La Banda del trudico / Destruction Force is the kind of film which works more in terms of individual (action) set pieces and (comedy) routines than as a coherent whole, with the Merenda and Milian halves not quite coming together nor being deployed to any particular evident end besides that of crossing off extra checkboxes in the hope of appealing to a wider audience.


Another Jimmy il fenomeno sighting?

It's the way in which – to use a succession of sequences from the midway point – an extended chase and shoot-out between Ghini and Lanza is followed by Monnezza explaining his philosophy of life to his infant son as he prepares a meal, with this in turn succeeded by Lanza's invasion of Ghini's home in search of revenge, followed by yet more ineptitude from Monnezza's apprentices.

There's no real relationship between the four sequences nor any indication of the passage of time between them – Lanza was shot in the shoot out, and has had the wound patched up by the time he enters Ghini's home, the latter sequence also beginning in media res as Ghini receives a phone call from his girlfriend / wife – with a strong impression thus that the Monezza material, credited to Milian, was been inserted more or less at random into the main script, credited to Massi and the Elisa Briganti / Dardano Sacchetti combo. (As an aside, are there any interviews with Briganti out there? Given her work on Zombie and others, one would think she's an ideal subject for further research, particularly around the nature of her collabrations / co-credits with Sacchetti.)






Roma a mano armata

Again, however, none of this necessarily mattered as far as the filone audience was concerned, forty-five minutes of Milian being better than zero, but it does also impart that sense of trying to please everyone and thus failing to completely satisfy anyone when compared with the more consistent and focussed approach one finds in a Milian / Monnezza vehicle or, indeed, Massi's Marc trilogy.


This is about as close to a De Niro / Pacino moment between Milian and Merenda as we get

Likewise, one does wonder what the moral of the tale is when Monnezza's apprentices repeatedly meet with failure in their attempts to be 'honest', old-style criminals and the more direct route of the modern armed robber appears the one more likely to get results, even if the issue is then that of holding on to this loot for long enough to convert it to ready cash...


Milian / Monnezza in full effect

Massi's direction is a touch zoom happy but he counters this with some energetic circling handheld camera, effective handling of the all-important action scenes and inventive set-ups. Again, something seems to be lacking at times, however, as when Monnezza's demonstrations of sleight of hand are broken down in a way that you don't see what Milian is doing when he lifts a wristwatch with his finger or that it's actually his hands doing three card monte. (One here thinks of the way the action and comedy are successfully integrated in the likes of the Police Story films, and the necessity of showing the reality of certain stunts and tricks.)


A show off composition, but what is being shown off to best effect ;-)

Bruno Canfora's score, while pushing the right funky buttons, sounds suspiciously more like pre-existing pieces than tailor-made cues, with some of the action pieces perhaps not as well integrated as they might be; certainly there's no Ghini signature theme along the lines of Marc's “my name is Marc” disco theme. More positively, a spaghetti western cue gives the right mock-serious drama to a sequence in which two of Monnezza's bungling apprentices attempt to snatch fur coats from a hairdressers only to find their getaway car has in turn been stolen; later on there's also a moment where Monnezza strikes a match on his skinhead apprentice's head, reminiscent of the Lee Van Cleef / Klaus Kinski exchange in For a Few Dollars More.

Though Luc Merenda is billed first, there appears little question that it is Tomas Milian who was really running the show, as indicated by the aforementioned dialogue credit and that of his dubbing voice, Ferrucio Amendola. (At this time Milian didn't feel sufficiently comfortable in delivering Monnezza's highly idiomatic dialogue convincingly with his own voice.) This isn't in itself a bad thing, insofar as Milian is clearly having a ball with the character and infects the viewer with his unbridled enthusiasm, but equally there is again that impression of two different half-films passing one another.

Perhaps the emblematic moment here stems from one of the blink-and-you'll miss them scenes of Ghini's domestic life, as he asks his girlfriend / wife whether she would prefer to go see a movie and then have dinner, or to have dinner and then see a movie. Recently recovered from a near rape, she says that if they go to cinema it would have to be for “a funny movie, not a horrible Italian [cop] thriller”

I wonder what she would have made of Destruction Force itself in this regard...

La Vittima designata / The Designated Victim

It took Dario Argento thirty-five years to formally acknowledge his indebtedness to Hitchcock in the form of Do You Like Hitchcock, in which a film student comes to suspect his neighbour has taken inspiration from the Anglo director's 1951 Patricia Highsmith adaptation Strangers on a Train when her mother is murdered. It was by no means the first giallo to do so, however, as this 1971 entry from the little-known Maurizio Lucidi demonstrates.

At first glance Milanese businessman Stefano Argenti seems to have it all: wealth, success, and a beautiful girlfriend, Fabienne. In reality, however, he is still dependent on his neurotic and shrewish wife, Luisa. She got him started in the advertising business and holds the shares in their agency in her name. Neither is she about to sell up at a bargain price just so that Stefano can go back to his homeland, Venezuela, with no particular stated aim in mind; Stefano can hardly explain that Fabienne rather than Luisa is the one who figures in his plans.


The first moment of contact between Stefano and the as yet unidentified Count, and also a concessions to black-gloved convention

Enjoying a few days away in Venice with Fabienne, a solution to Stefano's dilemma presents itself in the form of a seemingly chance encounter with Count Matteo Tiepolo. Coincidence soon transforms into conspiracy as the two men exchange stories and, releasing that they are in a identical positions in having unwanted relatives, make a tacit agreement to switch murders: Tiepolo will take care of Luisa, then Stefano will kill Matteo's brother...


Pierre Clementi as the vampire-like Count; coincidentally director Maurizio Lucidi later worked uncredited on Nosferatu in Venice

Although it is difficult to fully gauge La Vittima designata / The Designated Victim – the alternate Slam Out title seems meaningless and inappropriate – from the slightly cropped, English dub version I saw here, it nevertheless comes across as a quality piece of work; in this regard is worth also noting that this is one of those films where a credit for preparing the English-language version is given. (Unfortunately, while the film is now available on DVD, there does not seem to be the optimal English subs / Italian dub option.)

Clementi is perfectly cast as Tiepolo, while Milian once again impresses with his versatility as Argenti. Although the female leads are adequate in performance and eye candy respectively, I couldn't help mentally substituting Laura Betti for Marisa Bartoli as Luisa and Dagmar Lassander for Katia Christine as Fabienne respectively and finding my imaginary cast more enticing; I suspect others will find something similar.

The score, composed by Luis Enrique Bacalov and performed by The New Trolls has a symphonic / progressive rock vibe to it. Not only is it comparatively unusual compared to the more usual easy listening, musique concrete and party music idioms, it works. Milian also contributes here, providing the gently sung title theme, with lyrics derived from Hamlet of all things – “to die, to sleep, maybe to dream...” – that recurs throughout the action and, crucially, resonates beyond the final act.

The mise en scène is subtle by the standards of much filone film-making, making it clear that Tiepolo is Argenti's douple without resorting to more characteristic, heavy-handed devices. Shock zooms and extreme close-ups are conspicuous in their absence (Perhaps we have a nicely ironic doubling between Luisa's repeated insistence that her husband be quiet, as yet another little tic adding to his sense that she must die, and the filmmakers' preferred approach to their material?)

Milan and Venice are used effectively – if the latter's representation perhaps smacks of tourist cliché, the point is that such touristic imagery, as seen in the first exchange between Argenti and Tiepolo, is warranted precisely because Argenti and Fabienne are at that moment tourists sightseeing in the city.

We also have to remember that their respective roles, as ad-man and model, are in a sense all about the perpetual (re)definition of signifiers. A romantic weekend in Venice or a bouquet of flowers equals love (per “say it with flowers”) and Tiepolo is to all intents and purposes that image besides that dictionary definition of decadent, decaying aristo.

Thus, if the filmmakers do not manage to transcend their source material they do engage with and go some way towards subverting or Italianising it. While the basic themes are the same as those of Strangers on a Train – exchange / transference of guilt, the double etc.– there are sufficient variations on that film's patterns to establish The Designated Victim as something more than – to here throw in some cliché metaphors of one's own – spiced-up leftovers with added garlic sauce (i.e. post-studio code nudity etc.)

In this regard, Argenti is also quickly established as a more compromised character than Strangers on a Train's Guy Haines. Rather than being shocked by Tiepolo's making good on his proposal, Argenti takes it at face value and attempts to make the most of the situation. His problem is not murder per se, but queasiness over having to perform the act itself by way of reciprocation, with a further interesting variation insofar as the absence of either man's family also means that he never actually sees the monstrous brother whom he is to slay.

It is this same unease that also establishes something of a distinction between the two men; that they are not complete doubles. (Although of course we can always here bring in the mirror double as meconnaissance / misrecognition if we want to get all psychoanalytical; as per usual I don't.) for while Tiepolo may well be a psychopath in the mode of Bruno Anthony or the later Tom Ripley, Argenti needs another to spur him into action and fundamentally appears to lacks the requisite guile and cunning. Here we can note his feeble early attempts at convincing Luisa to sell her shares for their mutual benefit, with his use of “I” rather than “we” putting her on guard. Or consider the awkwardness with which he gives his alibi to the police, able to tell them he was “at the movies” but not what film he saw, other than it was “a western”.

Yet perhaps this is also an honest statement of fact about the filone cinema and the way many critics have consistently failed to engage with in by relegating films like this to the status of inferior-Italian-imitation-with-nothing-to-say almost as a matter of policy rather than approaching them without prejudice and with an openness to the possibility that they might actually be something more. This was, after all, the great achievement of the French critics of the 1950s in looking anew at American Hitchcock vis-a-vis British. The challenge now, I would contend, is to afford this same consideration to the 1970s Italian post-Hitchcock of the giallo, especially as it exists beyond Argento.