Due maschi per Alexa / Fieras sin jaula / Two Men for Alexa

The opening moments of this 1970 noir-esque thriller from Juan Logar nicely establish its basic operating principles, that we have to pay attention and do some work in piecing together the fragments for ourselves.


A Citroen DS = France

Three scenes are intercut with one another, introducing the four main characters around whom almost all the action will revolve: Caterina expresses her concerns for her father Roland, that his second wife Alexa (Rosalba Neri) only loves his money and is possibly unfaithful. Simultaneously Alexa demonstrates her infidelity by making love with her boyfriend Pietro (Juan Luis Galiardo) on a beach, as an older man – Roland (Curd Jurgens) – drives to the property nearby, observes the couple, and makes various preparations.




Unmotivated use of colour filters in a 'normal' scene

Some time later, Roland catches Alexa and Pietro in bed together and pulls out a gun and shoots himself. As Pietro goes to open the door, Roland's trap is sprung: Steel shutters close over the windows and doors, locking the three of them in the room together.

As the lovers desperately search for a way out and increasingly crack under the pressure, we see what led to this tragic, as in inevitable, denouement...


The dead man who speaks

Two Men for Alexa should particularly appeal to at least two audiences.

The first are fans of leading lady Rosalba Neri. There are no issues here, not least since as the film provides not only ample demonstration of her physical charms but also of her often underrated acting abilities.

The second are those who like stories about twisted relationships and situations that can only end badly. Some directors and films that come to mind here as reference points are Fritz Lang's Scarlet Street, Claude Chabrol's L'Enfer, Luis Bunuel's The Exterminating Angel and Roman Polanski's Bitter Moon. The issue here, is that these films have the respectability and name recognition value that this low-budget French-set, Spanish-Italian co-production, as an apparent piece of European trash cinema, doesn't.

For while Two Men for Alexa certainly has elements of this, it is considerably more intelligently written, directed and performed than this blanket label might suggest.

One scene that immediately comes to mind is the first encounter between Alexa and Pietro: Inasmuch as it occurs in a nightclub and plays out against a groovy Piero Piccioni theme, it initially seems a classic case of retro kitsch.

But then we have consider that Roland is also present and very much out of place in this youthful setting. And there is the wordless exchanges of looks between the trio at the fateful moment: Alexa and Pietro's sense of recognition in finding another like themselves – young, attractive, vivacious and in search of the easy life – alongside Roland's world-weary resignation that this is the beginning of the end for his and Alexa's relationship.










The fateful encounter

The film in general is replete with little poetic touches like these, with objective and subjective, imagined and real deliberately taken to the point of confusion or indiscernibility. The use of voice-off is particularly noteworthy in this regard: The summing up of the case presented by the dead or dying narrator is a familiar noir trope if we think of the likes of Double Indemnity and Sunset Boulevard.

The first difference is that Roland has a degree of self-awareness throughout that his younger counterparts in these films do not, in explicitly telling Alexa he's offering his wealth in exchange for her youth. Gloria Swanson's character in Sunset Boulevard may be an ageing vamp and coded as a kind of vampire, but she is never quite so up front as this about feeding on her young writer lover/prey.

The second is that we also get Alexa and Pietro's perspectives on the same events, such that we also hear from the fatal man and woman as well as from their victim/fall guy. Or perhaps this is itself yet another point of distinction, that there is no one victim here, nevermind an innocent one.

Credit is due to those at Cinemageddon who reconstructed the film from Italian and Spanish language sources and provided English subtitles.

I Gabbiani volano basso / Seagulls Fly Low

In this obscure 1978 thriller Maurizio Merli is cast somewhat against type as a professional killer. I say somewhat because, as we soon learn, he's not really a bad guy and more a victim of circumstance: a Vietnam veteran who grew tired of the war and deserted, he found himself in Italy where he was forced into working for businessman-cum-criminal Micheli, played by Mel Ferrer.

The film begins with what is supposed to be Merli's last job, the assassination of Martini, a former business partner of Micheli and his colleague Calvi; though some of the organisation's own men, like the one played by Franco Garofalo, could easily have performed the hit just as well, Micheli correctly felt it safer to employ an outsider.

Merli's problems only really start as he boards the plane for New York, equipped with a one-way ticket and a forget passport. One of the other passengers suffers a heart attack and everyone has to disembark and wait in the departure lounge. In an uncharacteristic loss of composure, Merli comes to believe that his fake passport has been detected by the airport security, and thus flees from the airport and back to Micheli.


Maurizio Merli as Jeff Blynn?


Maurizio Merli sans moustache

We might however wonder if he doesn't make too much a show of his panic, running through the airport, stealing a car and then driving off at high speed; perhaps airport security was just that bit more relaxed 30 years ago.

While Micheli deals with the situation with customary calmness, helping Merli to change his appearance and arranging for another passport to be made – I keep using the actor's name because his character tellingly doesn't really have one, being referred to as “the mechanic” and “the freak” initially and then using the alias “Albert Morgan” – Calvi starts to worry about his own exposure and thus orders Garofalo to take care of Micheli, setting up Merli to take the fall...




Some dubious red tinted Vietnam flashbacks

Competently if unexceptionally directed, as the kind of film where the stylish moments tend to come across as such, rather than being seamlessly integrated into the whole, and featuring a good cast, also including Dagmar Lassander as a nightclub proprietor and Nathalie Delon as the lost soul who takes sympathy on Merli (“you mustn't give up now; it's not as if you've killed somebody” ironically foregrounding exactly what he cannot tell her) to add glamour and romance, it's something of a mystery why Seagulls Fly Low isn't better known.

Featuring a passable quotient of action, plenty of suspense and a suitably dark and cynical 70s worldview – though film noir and French poetic realism certainly establish a longer heritage here – the film gives Merli far more to do as an actor than was usually the case, his role being marked by a world-weary reluctance to use a gun or his fists alien to his Iron Inspector characters and, after he meets Delon, the tentative possibility of his life taking another course.

Perhaps part of the problem was that Merli's fans were happy to see him play an essentially tragic, doomed character, but wanted to see him go down fighting rather more if he was not to ultimately be triumphant. To make a neo-noir comparison, trying imagining a Point Blank where Lee Marvin's character didn't go on a quixotic quest for his money.

Another possibility is that in initially looking a bit like Jeff Blynn, with longer and bushier hair than usual, and then losing the iconic moustache, he simply wasn't immediately recognisable as Merli. To make a noir comparison, we might think of Orson Welles's deconstruction of Rita Hayworth's image in The Lady from Shanghai.


The familiar image of a plane departing

Or maybe it's just the title: while its meaning is explained in the course of the film, it doesn't exactly tell you what to expect. In the world of the filone cinema this mattered, as director Giorgio Cristalli clearly knew from previous credits such as You're Jinxed, Friend, You've Met Sacramento and Four Gunmen of the Holy Trinity.

To summarise, a film that's worth the Merli fan's attention but which probably won't appeal to the more casual poliziotto viewer who only wants to see car chases, shootouts and fist-fights.

[The film is available on VHS rip from Cinemageddon]

Il Corpo / The Body

The presence of Carroll Baker in this 1975 film from Luigi Scattini neatly makes its claims to be a giallo that bit clearer. For, if featuring no black gloved killers nor traumatic incidents in a characters past now erupting into the present, it does include a noir style conspiracy in which the participants are motivated by passion and / or prospective financial advantage.

But unlike the various films she made with Umberto Lenzi a few years earlier, Baker is here cast in a supporting role rather than as a conspirator or victim, with the majority of the drama instead revolving around the triangle of Enrico Maria Salerno, Zeudi Araya and Leonard Mann.

Salerno plays Antoine, a New York cabbie who won the lottery and left the rat race behind to go live in the tropical paradise of Trinidad.

That, at least, was the theory.

The practice has thus far proven somewhat different, entailing little more than a change of scenery, more mosquitoes, and a shift from driving a cab to piloting a boat.

Indeed, given that the story actually starts with two locals attacking Antoine because he apparently owes them money it's possible that his life could even be considered to have gotten worse, were it not for one major compensation.


Antoine and Alan

That is Araya. She plays Princess, a beautiful islander who serves as Antoine's lover and housekeeper.

Mann plays Alan, the drifter who rescues Antoine. With Alan soon proving as handy with boats as with his fists, Antoine offers him work and a place to stay.


Images of the characters behind symbolic bars recur throughout the film to convey their senses of entrapment

Though Princess initially gives Alan a frosty reception, this facade soon melts as they spend some time together away from Antoine's watchful eye.


Princess tries on the yellow rather than black dress as she prepares to make her move

Then, however, Princess turns cold again, although this only proves to be a test of Alan's commitment to their relationship and how far he is willing to go to be with her:



“Alan, do you really love me?”

“You know I love you.”

“Do you really love me very much? Do you love me enough to do anything at all for me?”

“Yes”

“Then, darling, I want you to kill him.”

But, as with Ossessione – a possible model given its own noir origins, comparable triangle of two men and one woman, and oppressive setting that the woman wants to get away from – the question is first whether words are one thing and deeds another and then, once the deed is done, whether the conspirators will get away with it...

Scattini's direction is simple but effective, juxtaposing a direct handheld camera style that gives a raw documentary feel with more carefully composed touristic imagery and some generally judicously used shock zooms.

The performances from Baker, Salerno and Mann are pleasing, benefitting from their willingness to engage with their characters, warts and all.


Unusually Antoine drinks rum rather than J&B whisky

One moment that particularly stands out in this regard is the first encounter between Baker and Salerno, in which we also learn of their past history together:

Madeleine's latest love has left her, as Antoine foretold he would. Having hit the bottle hard she is torn between being her desire not to be seen by her former husband in such a dissolute state and her momentary craving for his attention and affection, as those selfsame things that he is unable and unwilling to give.


The deglamourised Baker

If this scene would pose no threat to Baker in the context of a stage production of some respectable play about a middle-aged, alcoholic racist, commutated to the screen in the form of a popular film it carried more of a risk of typecasting for the 40-something star, as someone only suitable for portraying faded and tarnished glamour. (“You don't want that black bitch. Don't you understand – you don't own her, you're the slave, the slave of a black body!”)

As The Body of the title, Araya's role necessarily provides less to work with. Though perhaps not managing to transcend its limitations, her performance is nevertheless credible and belies her history as a beauty queen and model in a way that makes it clear Scattini was justified in casting her in a number of his films. (It also left me wondering what she might have brought to the Black Emanuelle franchise, in that disregarding Laura Gemser's beauty the Dutch-Indonesian actress does tend towards a certain inexpressiveness that sometimes detracts when her character presents the same blasé indifference to each and every encounter, no matter how outre.)






The body – Araya displaying her charms


Not Tinti and Gemser, but Mann and Araya

Scattini, Massimo Felisatti and Fabio Pittorru's writing is also better than average. Though they throw a number of twists into the tale, some of which are also pleasingly ironic, there is nothing that emerges as contrived either whilst watching the story unfold or reconstructing it retrospectively.

Instead, seemingly incidental aspects come to attain a greater significance. Note, for example, Antoine's drunken remarks to Alan that drifters and thieves are one and the same after they have failed to catch some apparent intruders one night, as an indication of suspicions of his new friend and that he's more on the ball than his habitually dishevelled, drunken state suggests. Or note Princess's request that Antoine get her a pair of shoes when he is in town, having hitherto declined to wear them.

Piero Umiliani contributes a beautifully evocative score that is by turns soothing, melancholy, romantic and impassioned, with Hammond organ grooves, lush vocalism and all the his trademark ingredients present; more generally, looking at the list of Umiliani and Scattini's collaborations, it's clear that they were very much in tune with one another, resulting in a series of scores that work beyond the images they support and which, like the film, can be enthusiastically recommended to those willing to go beyond the more familiar Argento / Martino / Morricone / Nicolai giallo idioms of the time.

[I watched the film through an English dubbed AVI from Cinemageddon]

Cronaca di un amore / Story of a Love Affair

Investigation of a woman above suspicion?

Wanting to know more about his considerably younger wife Paola's past and possibly suspecting her of being unfaithful, Milanese businessman Enrico Fontana hires private investigators to look into her life. While the investigation finds nothing particularly untoward, it does reveal that one of Paola's friends, Giovanna Carlini, died in an accident shortly before she was due to be married and mere days before Paola's move from Ferrara to Milan.







Lifts and stairs have an important place in the film; cinematographer Guiseppe Rotunno later worked on The Stendhal Syndrome

It also, however, has the unanticipated consequence of bringing Giovanna's fiance, Guido, to the city, to alert Paola to the fact that she is under observation. Soon they rekindle their old relationship and start to dream of a new life together – a life in which Enrico has no place but his wealth does...


Antonioni's skill in using found architectural features is already evident. 20 years on would these have been J&B bottles?

Michelangelo Antonioni's debut feature has been described as an Italian film noir and, as such, is of interest to the giallo enthusiast as a borderline predecessor of the form. While it doesn't have a black gloved killer wielding a gleaming blade, bars playing easy listening hammond grooves and serving endless glasses of J&B (though modish jazz music and brand names both have their place in the film), it does present a traumatic incident whose consequences reach out of the past and a less than flattering portrait of sophisticated, fashionable, high society (but not yet jet-set) life; it's this shift in socio-economic position that also makes it an important development from Luchino Visconti's earlier Ossessione, whose impoverished, rural characters are less representative of the giallo as it was to develop in line with the “economic miracle”.


The fatal or the suffering woman?