I Bastardi / The Bastard

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.

Vivi o, preferibilmente, morti / Alive or Preferably Dead / Sundance Cassidy and Butch the Kid

This Duccio Tessari western reunites the director with his Ringo star Giuliano Gemma to intermittently amusing if ultimately decidedly less noteworthy than these and their other collaborations together.

Gemma plays city slicker Monty Mulligan (his forename presumably a reference to Gemma's frequent Anglophone billing as Montgomery Wood) whose financial worries may be over if he can find his brother Ted, played by Nino Benvenuti, out west and get him to agree to their spending six months together in order to fulfil the criteria of their uncle's will and collect $300,000.

The first obstacle is that there's no love lost between the two brothers with their very different lifestyles and attitudes. The second through umpteenth come via a series of episodic adventures with outlaw Jim and his gang and some bumbling attempts at criminality by the brothers themselves, most notably when they kidnap banker's daughter Scarlett only to discover that he's quite glad to be rid of her and is in no hurry to pay the ransom. (Cue invitable “I don't give a damn” punchline.)

Thought distributed in the US under the title Sundance Cassidy and Butch the Kid and the more defensive please don't sue us tagline of “Don't confuse them with the other two,” one suspects that the more immediate model for the film and reference point for “the other two” were Terence Hill and Bud Spencer, with the brothers relationship and their slapstick antics more remiscent of the Italian than Hollywood caper western.

This is most apparent in the resolution of the bankers daughter subplot: whereas in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid the broadly comparable Katherine Ross character is there to attempt to refute the homosexual or homosocial hints that the two men might be something other than conventional red-blooded heterosexuals (how successfully it does so being another matter, in that the selfsame need to make a point of demonstrating their heterosexuality and masculinity also inevitably raises these other spectres) here we get a more juvenile, non-sexual, fraternal resolution to the whole scenario that seems to suggest that boys will be boys but little more. (Unless, of course, one wants to read the film as some sort of paean to homosexual incest.)

The film's main asset beyond Gemma's irrepressible charm, and the sense that no-one – including Tessari or such reliable supporting players as George Rigaud, who plays the wily old banker; Cris Huerta, as comic book sadist bandit; and Sydne Rome, as Scarlett – is taking things all that seriously anyway, is the operatic (well, horse opera) chorus provided by Italian country and western duo John and Wayne, whose yee-ha ballads provide an amusing commentary on the action throughout and a nice counterpoint to Gianni Ferrio's more conventional themes. (John and Wayne are also featured in the Frank Wolff narrated documentary / promo on the Italian western that was included as one of the extras in the old Blue Underground Spaghetti Western Box Set; they were a real duo of Italian country and western fans, not just an invention of this film.)

The Bloodstained Butterfly / Una Farfalla con le ali insanguinate

Following a seemingly insignificant credits sequence that it is worth paying attention to in its own right – I shall say no more, on this, however – this 1970 giallo from Duccio Tessari proceeds to introduce a wide array of characters, identifying their familial and professional relationships and roles:


Marta Clerici


Françoise Pigaut


Sarah Marchi


Maria, Sarah's mother (Ida Galli)


Alessandro, her husband


Giulio Cordaro, lawyer (Günther Stoll)


Giorgio (Helmut Berger)


Eriprando Villarosa Venostra, Giorgio's father


Diamante, Giorgio's mother

Following this, the action shifts to a park in middle of storm. One of a pair of girls, clad in yellow – i.e. giallo – macintoshes and hats, interrupts Françoise's murderer, who flees before the girls' nanny can raise the alarm. Nevertheless the man, clad in a concealing hat and coat, is seen by several eye-witnesses, including a woman in a lover's lane, Gabriella Justi, who later picks television presenter Alessandro out of a police line-up.


Chi l'ha vista morire? – she did

Coupled with Alessandro's lack of an alibi and an array of evidence against him – a distinctive car-seat cover, a muddy raincoat whose cleaning nevertheless fails to remove a singular chemical trace, a bloodstain on his shirt; with the strong emphasis on the forensic, police procedural and legal aspects of the case unusually engaging for a giallo – the case against him is compelling.

His friend and defence counsel, Giulio, nevertheless manages to discredit Gabriella and cast doubt on the relevance of the the scientific evidence. This is still, however, insufficient to definitively save Alessandro. He is thus compelled to reveal that at the time in question he was with his mistress, Marta Clerici, who cut her hand on broken glass, hence the bloodstain.

Unfortunately for Alessandro, Marta cannot be found nor can he satisfactorily explain why he should have hidden the shirt if this was all it was. Thus, he is convicted of Françoise's murder; the case seems over.

At this point, however, we learn that Giulio and Maria have themselves been conducting an affair and so conspired to use events to get Alessandro out the way.

Then, with Alessandro still behind bars, there is another murder in the park, similar enough to that of Françoise to suggest that Alessandro was indeed the wrong man...

Revisiting this 1970 giallo from Duccio Tessari, I was compelled to question my own earlier judgement, that he was a master of the classic giallo.

The first thing to say here – and those not in the mood for some random pseudo-intellectual ramblings might well want to jump to the end – is that it is not in terms of the film being in any way lacking. Writing, direction, performances and most everything else are uniformly accomplished – if I were to single out one thing especially it would have to be Gianni Ferrio's evocative score, with its fusion of Tchaikovsky and lounge/jazz – and combine to make for an enthralling piece of giallo cinema.

Rather, what I found most thought-provoking about the film was its deployment of what would conventionally, too straightforwardly and readily, be identified as flashbacks. For, as with the repeated re-visions of the gallery sequence that Sam Dalmas plays through in his mind and which Argento doubles for us on the screen in The Bird with the Crystal Plumage what we often seem to have here are more like “crystal images” of the type described by Gilles Delezue, “the uniting of an actual image and a virtual image to the point where they can no longer be distinguished,” and which he identifies as a key component of the modernist cinema of the “time-image”.

Thus, as the police construct a version of Françoise's murder and as the various witnesses to it give their evidence, we are not being presented with a true picture of what happened – which is what Dalmas works towards, even if he can only grasp this truth by gradually abandoning his old interpretive frameworks for understanding the world – but rather a demonstration of a kind of Nietzschean perspectivism in which there are not so much facts as interpretations.

Is this image someone's memory or a reconstruction? Is it true or false? Or, as with the likes of a Resnais film, is it ultimately indeterminate and unimportant in relation to what is it perceived and believed to be?

Here we might note, for example, the vaguely Last Year at Marienbad-style conversation between Giorgio – and ambiguous haunting and haunted presence whose status as hero, suspect and / or red herring remains unclear until the end – and Sarah Marchi, an exchange that singularly fails to indicate the truth of their past encounter, possible ulterior motives, and so on; or the cross-cutting between Giorgio's solitary walk down a street in the present and with Françoise in another, possibly imaginary, time. (In relation to the first of, Inspector Morisini's throwaway “haven't we met somewhere before” remark to Giulia in The Bird with the Crystal Plumage seems hopelessly weak by comparison, both unnecessary and unsatisfactory.)


“You had short hair and you were going to the sorority school. You didn't notice at all - it was long. Yes, of course, it was long. And you wore it down to your shoulders, like this. I wore it in braids, always in braids - my mother made me. Anyhow, now we really know each other. Right.”


“Maybe fables become facts under oath.”

Or, in more concrete, less cinematically imaginative terms – although the contrasts between the TV studio and the home, monochrome and colour etc. still show Tessari's desire to do something more than just get the film in the can as efficiently as possible – there are the early exchanges between Alessandro and footballer Giorgio Chinaglia where they debate a players' strike on the sports programme. Is it a case of the big-name stars protecting their own positions, thus prefiguring the kind of self-interest that is later echoed in Giulio and Maria's betrayal of Alessandro? Or is it (also, perhaps) an honest expression of solidarity with the more rank-and-file, in relation to a otherwise random political banner that Giorgio passes and Tessari's camera lingers on later on.






A mediated reality - the reporter, the TV and the 'real' images

Such moments could also, one supposes, again be examined in relation to Nietzche and Deleuze, as exemplars of the “power of the false” whereby what is false may also be the more life-affirming. (Nietzsche: “Memory says, I did that. Pride replies, I could not have done that. Eventually memory yields.”)

While Marta, who was not wearing her glasses at the time she saw Alessandro, and the treacherous Giulio admittedly have somewhat banal reasons for endeavouring to impose their versions of the truth, the character of Giorgio is far more interesting in this regard, precisely because of his existential estrangement from his family, privileged background and world as a whole, and corresponding commitment to his own particular set of values. ("Father, our family motto reads "Born a bastard to become a king." Well, I never got a crack at the king. On the other hand I wasn't lucky enough to be born a bastard.")

Whether his actions in relation to these are seen as affirmative or destructive is another question; all I will say is that The Bloodstained Butterfly's resolution is one of the most morally ambiguous in the entire giallo canon. It answers one question – who killed Françoise – but asks you a whole lot more. (Nietzsche again: “That which is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil”)

Again, then, one comes back to Argento and The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, as a film whose endings – a Psycho-like psychologist summing up the case, in which a man “who loved not wisely but too well” sought to cover for his murderous wife, and the departure of Sam and Giulia for the USA – likewise contrive to be ambiguously, undecideably, modern.

But – and this is the point where we welcome those uninterested in these theoretical digressions back – whether a film is modern or classical, what really matters, following the “two kinds of music” distinction attributed to Kurt Weill, Duke Ellington and others, is whether it is good or bad.

The Bloodstained Butterfly is undoubtedly good and, even based on the version I saw and from which these screen caps come from, well worth seeing; while there are Italian and Spanish DVDs out there unfortunately neither is fully satisfactory from the non-Italian speaker's perspective.

La morte risale a ieri sera / Death Occured Last Night

The key words that sum up this 1970 giallo from Duccio Tessari are downbeat, depressing and disturbing – and I mean those as compliments.

At the same time, one can easily appreciate how this would not help its recognition by closed-minded genre fans – good time, trashy entertainment it is not – while the same fact of being made by someone previously responsible for sundry pepla, spaghettis and superspies likely meant it tended to go under-appreciated by mainstream critics; as evinced by Tom Milne's Monthly Film Bulletin review of the time, wherein he argued that the film seemed “to be wrestling with ideas rather above its station”.

If only it were a case of 'their loss being our gain', but with only grey market sources available – and here I must thank Paul for giving me the opportunity to at least see the film – it is another instance where the limitations of the presentation mean that a certain degree of dedication to the cause, above and beyond what should really be required is necessary; this is a film which deserves a top-notch official release from the likes of Blue Underground, Noshame or Mondo Macabro.

Though the seriousness and character-driven nature of the film makes it of a piece with the director's other equally impressive gialli, I also wonder whether some of Death Occurred Last Night's particular qualities might also be attributed to co-writer and producer Artur Brauner.

While better known as a purveyor of lowest common denominator fare like his (Bryan) Edgar Wallace adaptations and for giving Fritz Lang the opportunity to make another Dr Mabuse film before then subjecting the character to the indignities of becoming little more than a franchise figure, Brauner was also someone who had also long striven to re-establish the artistic credibility of his adopted homeland's cinema. He had, for example, written and produced one of West Germany's first films about Nazi atrocities, Morituri and advocated a “risky wave” of more challenging cinema in advance of the Oberhausen Manifesto; if he was guilty of producing the kind of crass, conservative, commercial cinema the Oberhausen signatories criticised, he was also someone who saw that a healthy cinema could and should support a diversity of production – indeed, the same year as he produced this film he also had a credit on Vittorio De Sica's Garden of the Finzi-Continis.

In terms of Death Occurred Last Night specifically the Italian and German sides of the co-production seem to emerge in the contrast between the official / krimi police procedural investigation that dominates the first half of the film and the subsequent shift into more private / giallo / poliziotto quests as the inadequacies of the law in the face of widespread social weakness, corruption and indifference become all-too evident.

The film opens with distraught widower Berzaghi (Raf Vallone) paying a desperate visit to high-ranking policeman Dr Lamberti (Frank Wolff). Berzaghi explains that his daughter Donatella has been missing for the past month. Thinking he has heard it all before, Lamberti asks how old the missing girl. On hearing the answer 25, he thinks he knows it all too.

Then Berzaghi explains: Donatella has the mental age of a three-year old. She is also physically attractive, trusting and if not necessarily “nymphomaniac” - a term that I think would imply a more 'adult' awareness of things – certainly flirtatious.

Deciding that Donatella has most likely been abducted for use as a prostitute, Berzaghi and his colleague Mascaranti (Gabriel Tinti) call on an ex-pimp contact, Salvatore, now working in a car showroom – in keeping with the pervasive mood, perhaps not really that much of a change of occupational direction; a sense again conveyed by the preceding scene in which a woman poses as a customer, takes a sports car for a test drive and leaves Salvatore with the vehicle once she has reached her destination.

Reluctantly Salvatore takes Lamberti and Mascaranti around Milan's brothels as they search for a lead. The undercover investigation seems, however, to be going nowhere, especially after the hot-headed Mascaranti reacts instinctively to the appearance of a couple of heavies and thereby alerts the underworld. Lamberti, however, also makes contact with an independent prostitute, Terrell, who indicates that one of her clients might have seen the missing girl and thereby provides a new avenue for investigation. Concerned for her safety, Lamberti takes her home with him, much to the consternation of his long-suffering wife (Eva Renzi).

A few days later, Salvatore contacts Lamberti indicating that he has heard that Donatella's abductors want to be rid of her, and agrees to help arrange a meet / sting operation. Unfortunately Salvatore is not being entirely honest and in trying a scam only succeeds in bringing about Donatella's murder, her horribly burnt body being found in a field...

Wolff's Dr Lamberti is a policeman who wears the weight of the world on his shoulders, his conscience and commitment to his job such that he cannot permit himself two weeks leave to have his sinus problems treated - it is not as if the criminals would also take a fortnight's holiday, he explains - while the torment and anguish Vallone's father goes through and the way he expresses them are heart-wrenching.

Tessari's direction is fairly straightforward for the most part, putting the camera at the service of story and performers rather than engaging in self-conscious displays of technique. At the same time, however, one of the most memorable moments sees him shoot a stairway from below in almost abstracted fashion as oranges rain down in slow motion. But crucially it is not gratuitous. Rather it stands out precisely because in the context of the narrative it comes at the moment when one of the conspirators reveals herself and drops her shopping.

Indeed, to return to an argument I made in relation to Puzzle, where I suggested that Tessari might be considered a master of the traditional thriller, it is a moment that seems distinctively Hitchcockian, in terms of Gilles Deleuze's notions of the Hitchcock “demark”- i.e. the thing that should not be; that does not belong there, and which which thereby stains or reveals the guilty - with the teddy bear Berzaghi is carrying functioning in a similar way to, for instance, the distinctive necklace forgetfully donned by Judy in Vertigo.

Although there is a nice moment early on as a flashback sequence showing the Berzaghi family's daily routine sees Donatalla put on a record - with forceful vocals by the inimitable Mina - which then plays diegetically over the scene, I cannot help feel that it often detracts from the sombre tone of the film, being too bold, brash and upbeat and insufficiently melancholy. Some of the cues even sound almost interchangable with those composer Gianni Ferrio provided for the very different - i.e. trashy fun - Death Walks at Midnight; not a good thing however enjoyable listening they are in their own right. Still, this is but a minor issue in a film otherwise distinguished by sensitive, thoughful - and thought-provoking - writing, direction and performances.

Puzzle / L'uomo senza memoria

The puzzle of the English title begins in London as Peter Smith (Luc Merenda), l'uomo senza memoria of the Italian, goes to see his doctor (Tom Felleghy, in yet another character role) to see if there isn't any way he can speed up the process of remembering the past he lost in a car accident some nine months ago.

The doctor tells him that there isn't and it's all a matter of time, but evidently had not considered the way in which a death sentence might speed the process up.

For when Peter returns home he finds an old acquaintance – alas he cannot remember who – waiting for him. Thing is this man knows him as Ted Walden, 30 years old, married and living in Portofino, Italy. Worse, he's now going to shoot Peter/Ted in revenge for some past deed.

A gunman's bullet from the window opposite puts paid to the man's plan, but also prevents him explaining further “at the point of dying” and leaves Peter/Ted with a body – which tellingly he seems rather too adept at dealing with, potentially offering a foretaste of things to come – and a slew of new questions.

Who is he really?

Why did this man want to kill him?

Who saved him?

Why?

Unsure of what to do next, the timely arrival of a telegram from Sara (Senta Berger) in Portofino seems to offer some answers. On arrival, however, the questions only multiply. Ted does not recognise his wife, instead requiring her to be pointed out by a third party – who of course has his own agenda, soon to be revealed – before learning that she didn't send for him, doesn't trust him and can't really help him ...

Though there's one of those unconvincing falling dummy moments late on, where its head comes off as it lands in the sea, this is otherwise a well made, tightly scripted and effective thriller that keeps you engaged and guessing right up to the end.

While perhaps a little slow for some tastes, taking time to establish character and situation, there really isn't any waste to speak of. Everything that's there – a kid's photography hobby; the chainsaw that Sara puts back in the kitchen cupboard; a prominently displayed clock; a burglary where nothing seems to have been taken; the cross-cutting between Sara and Ted as they separately prepare for bed etc. – has a reason for being.

Similarly, if stalk-and-slash suspense dynamics and set pieces are downplayed, this only serves to strengthen the slow-burn menace of some of the encounters – most notably when a immobile Sara is terrorised by one of the bad guys flicking matches on her decidedly flammable nightdress – and the impact of the climactic settling of accounts when the straight razor comes out in apparent concession to genre requirements...

And if the amnesia McGuffin is clearly lifted from Hitchcock's Spellbound, the filmmakers have also put sufficient spin on it to make it their own. Whereas that film's protagonist was set free by the uncovering of his true past, here is serves instead to only make things worse for Ted.

Okay, there is undoubtedly a classical model for this in Oedipus, if we want to go back that far, but again the psychoanalytic/Freudian focus of the conventional giallo is conspicuous in its absence, in favour of a more existential reading that (as with Hal Hartley's Amateur some twenty years later) asks whether a man can still be held accountable for the actions of a past self that no longer represents his present and future – if, that is, he still has one...

As far as the casting goes, the only potentially weak link would seem to be Luc Merenda. Yet even here his characteristic inexpressiveness and reliance upon good looks paradoxically work in the film's favour, better conveying the sense of a man whose life is pretty much a tabula rasa, as does his facility with action, implying a kind of muscle memory from his past.

All told, if Puzzle suggests that Dario Argento was right to say that Duccio Tessari was not the man to direct his The Bird with the Crystal Plumage to best effect, it also indicates that this was less down to any lack of facility with the thriller form – The Bloodstained Butterfly is similarly impressive, even in the compromised pan and scan version I saw – than a different accent and set of dynamics.

Put another way, if Argento is the master of the modern giallo thriller, Tessari must be ranked as a master of its classical counterpart.

This Region 2 coded PAL format disc from new Danish outfit Another World Entertainment, billed as the first in their giallo series, presents Puzzle in an ultrabit anamorphic transfer in its original 1.85:1 aspect ratio. The transfer is clean and vibrant, perhaps a little soft but undoubtedly far superior to the kind of bootleg sources some might have encountered the film on previously.

While the sound suffers from a bit of snap, crackle and pop, it's never too distracting nor sufficient to detract from overall enjoyment of the film. While both Italian and English tracks are provided, there isn't the option of listening to the former subtitled in the latter, with the choices here – Danish, Swedish, Norwegian and Finnish – apparently reflecting the main target market for the disc, while also providing hope that someone elsewhere might yet license the film and provide this.

The extras are a bit thin on the ground, being confined to the film's trailer; a straight off the IMDB style filmography for Tessari, and a small slideshow gallery.

Okay, there's also a trailer gallery of future releases from the company, but these are for films – Cannibal Ferox, Mountain of the Cannibal God, City of the Living Dead, Cannibal Holocaust, Eaten Alive and The Beyond – that are all already well represented on DVD – except perhaps for with Finnish subtitles...