The unconscious truth revealed by a Suspiria poster?

'The Only Thing More Terrifying Than The Last 12 Minutes Of This Film Are The First 92,' or that one of Suspiria's few possible weaknesses is peaking too early, in establishing an intensity that cannot be sustained?

Articles on or interviews with Bruno Mattei?

One of my film studies colleagues is looking for information on Bruno Mattei.

Can anyone suggest any magazines or fanzines, that have career profiles or interviews with him, especially in English?

I have some myself somewhere in ETC or suchlike, which I'm going to look out, but am sure there are others that I'm not aware of.

Thanks in advance...

Deep Red versions straw poll

A quick question:

If you've seen different cuts of Deep Red / Profondo Rosso, which do you prefer overall, if you have a preference, and why do you prefer it?

* The English-language version(s), which omits much of the romantic comedy subplot and interplay between Marc Daly and Gianna Brezzi.

* The Italian-language version, which includes all of this material.

* The Japanese Suspiria 2 version which, although I have never seen it myself, is apparently in between the English and Italian versions in length.

* Another version I'm maybe not aware of, e.g. in French or German; if so, can you also say a little bit about what it best compares to in content and length.

There is a somewhat obscure logic behind this question, which I will explain if anyone wants to know it before answering and once the results are in in any case.

Così sia / They Called Him Amen

Has anyone seen the 1972 western Così sia / They Called Him Amen, directed by and co-starring Alfio Caltabiano? Dario Argento has a co-writing credit on it, which I would guess must be for an old script dating back three or four years. Intriguingly one of the keywords to describe the film on IMDB is 'gay,' leading me to also wonder if there are any quirky gay characters along the lines of those in the Animal Trilogy.

Bueller?

Marisa Casale - script girl

I started watching Probability Zero earlier, a late 1960s Dirty Dozen style war movie for which Dario Argento wrote the story; his father Salvatore produced it. The most intriguing credit for me, however, was for the script girl, Marisa Casale. Was she also Argento's wife, and Fiore Argento's mother?

A quick question

Recently I watched Sergio Martino's Arizona si scatenò... e li fece fuori tutti in which Gildo Di Marco, who plays Garullo the pimp in The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, has a more prominent role as a character nicknamed Filthy Bottle.

He also seems at times to have a stutter or tic, just like Garullo. So, I'm wondering: is this just a coincidence, that the one actor happened to have two roles with this trait, or was it something he specialised in, or really had himself? The last possibility would seem odd, but not impossible in the crazy world of Italian genre cinema we all know and love.

Looking at Gildo Di Marco's credits, I was also surprised to discover he plays the hapless postman in Four Flies on Grey Velvet, though the absence of a good print of it makes it hard to see what he's saying there...

A Cat o' Nine Tails question

How do people understand Braun's murder and the discovery of his body by Manuel and Giordani in Cat o' Nine Tails.

Did Manuel's ex- kill Braun and send Giordani there in the hope of implicating him in the crime, or was Braun killed by Casoni because he knew too much / was a threat?

I guess the vagueness here reflects the way in which throughout the film no-one really knows much about the others' motives, as with the not quite intersecting blackmail and industrial espionage conspiracies; well, that and the need to fit a German guest star into the film for the co-production partners and their krimi audience...

An Argento question

Dario Argento's mother Elda Luxardo is usually referred to as Brazilian. Her name, however, doesn't sound like it is a Portuguese one. So is she Brazilian-born from a family of Italian extraction? (There is an Italian maraschino drink called Luxardo, after the founder of the distillery which makes it; http://www.figuralminibottles.com/luxardo/luxardo.shtml)

Greece and the giallo - a question

If the number of old videos with Greek subtitles out there is anything to go by, gialli seem to have been especially popular with Greek audiences. If there's anyone reading this from Greece, or with experience of the Greek home video market, is this the case? If so, why? Or is it just a skewed perception that comes from my not being aware of a wider range of product and having other Greek set and / or co-produced euro-cult films like Anthropophagous and Emanuelle Queen of Sados in my collection?

Help

I'm trying to track down which issue of Video Watchdog has a review by Tim Lucas of Stephen Thrower's book Beyond Terror. I've been through a stack of issues, trying to find it but coming up with nothing; it's especially frustrating because I know I'm not imagining things and must have the issue lying around somewhere...

Random Inferno point

In Inferno there's an odd moment when we and Mark hear a woman's laugh on the soundtrack. He asks Elise if she heard it, but she did not. Our perspective and Mark's are thus shared, perhaps creating suspicion over Elise's identity and function within the narrative. Did she really not hear the sound or is she lying and, if so, why?

Earlier, however, on the discovery of Sara's body, there's a scream as it rips through the curtain, half in the non-diegetic soundtrack, half not, the film being one which has a complex sound design that, as is often the case in Argento (cf. the 'turn it down' moment in Tenebrae, Edda Dell'Orso's vocalism in the gallery sequence in The Bird with the Crystal Plumage) blurs and confuses such boundaries. It is not Sara, as she is already dead. So who is it, why does Mark not seem to hear it and what, if anything, is the reason for the difference between the position and response to these screams?

The Villa Borghese

A number of gialli and horror films used a / the Villa Borghese as a location. Who owned the property and made it available for filmmakers? Was it ex /neo-fascist Junio Valerio Borghese, who made an abortive attempt at a coup in 1970? It would make for an amusing little connection...

Today's question

Are there any examples of Dario Argento's film criticism from the 1960s readily available, whether in Italian or English? I'm not talking so much about paraphrases or references, as with reading in Christopher Frayling about how he liked A Fistful of Dollars or elsewhere about his liking for Bava and Freda and questions over Blow-Up, more whether there's an unexpurgated piece or three, sort of like some of the early pieces in Tom Milne's Godard on Godard or The Early Film Criticism of Francois Truffaut collection; the kind of thing that would hopefully give an idea of his position at that time.

The reason I ask is that I'm intrigued to know how an Italian critic pursuing a post-Cahiers kind of line - always assuming that's what it was, of course; I may be wrong - could work when the national cinema of the previous generation(s) was not a Cinema du papa that relatively few were prepared to defend, but the revered neo-realists and their successors.

Where did these critics find their opposition - the easy target of the fascist-era telefono bianco types? Or was it possible to pursue a neutral course, going on a film-by-film and directory-by-director basis, that there are fundamentally two sorts of cinema - the good and the bad? Freda, after all, seems at times to have situated himself in opposition to neo-realism and out and out fantasy; while we all know about the giallo as the telefono rosso film...

Sherry Buchanan

One Eurocult performer of the 70s and 80s who intrigues me is Sherry Buchanan, seen in the likes of Zombie Holocaust, Last House on the Beach and The Heroin Busters. Specifically, was she Anglo or Italian?

Her name sound more like a British or North American one, but her first screen appearance was in What Have They Done to Your Daughters where she's playing a schoolgirl and looks about the right age, suggesting her to Italian, along with the lack of US productions in her filmography. So was she like Ray Lovelock, Italian but with an Anglo parent and name to confuse the unwary? Or is Sherry Buchanan / Cheryl Buchanan / Cheryl Lee Buchanan just a stage name and it's that her real name has never come out into the open?

Romero's Spasmo footage

I've been reading up on George A. Romero over the past few days. In Paul Gagne's book The Zombies that Ate Pittsburgh he quotes Romero about working on Umberto Lenzi's giallo Spasmo, adding some new footage to spice up the American version:

"It was really nicely shot, and very rich looking. In the Italian version, you never saw the killer actually doing the killings, so we added about ten minutes showing the kills." (p. 68)

Has anyone out there seen this version and how well or badly does Romero's footage integrate with the film as a whole? Is this version available anywhere?

Name to the face

Who is this actor? I think I've seen him in Emanuelle and the White Slave Trade, where he plays a mechanic who gives his female clients a full service ("no one works the way he does"); Zombie, where he's the assistant at the morgue with the less than sharp scalpel, and City of the Living Dead, where he is one of the participants in the seance.

A slightly technical question on the meaning of 70mm

I'm involved in my local film society here in Edinburgh. We've been working on programming our next season and one of the themed ideas we came up with was a selection of 70mm films. The films we would be showing are probably the obvious choices, things like 2001: A Space Odyssey and Lawrence of Arabia. But, in browsing giallo posters on Ebay over the years, I've often noticed that a fair number, especially on the Spanish ones, seem to suggest that they were 70mm presentations.


The Bloodstained Butterfly


My Dear Killer


All the Colours of the Dark

Is this the case and, if so, is it 'true' 70mm or just a process that allowed the description to be used but wasn't really the same thing at all as far as quality went, perhaps akin to the widescreen processes often used on Italian westerns a few years earlier.

Again, it would seem unlikely that these films were still available in 70mm and even less likely that they would be viable in terms of getting an audience – it's more that enquiring minds want to know...

Deodato?

I was watching Ruggero Deodato's The Washing Machine a couple of nights back. At one point in the film the main character's neighbour comes to his door, disturbed by the noise. Is this a cameo by Deodato himself?

Commentaries and a question

I've been listening to Michael McKenzie's excellent commentaries on Profondo Rosso and Suspiria over the weekend - they are available from his site Whiggles.com, by the way, if anyone has not already heard them - and just transferred them to my MP3 player.

This, of course, got me wondering: what is the easiest, and cheapest, way of taking a DVD with an existing commentary track, ripping it and converting it to MP3, as it is something I think I would to do with - for example - the official Bird with the Crystal Plumage and Tenebre commentaries.

Another question

I was revisiting The Case of the Bloody Iris earlier this week and noticed the All Move Guide quote on the DVD cover, that it is "One of the few gialli of the time which is as good at mystery as it is at sleaze."

It got me thinking about the various reasons we have for watching gialli and how important the mystery aspect is: does a giallo need a mystery to work or not, or does it all depend on what else is on offer by way of 'attractions' - the beautiful people; the style; the liberal doses of violence and titillation; the sounds.

I suppose at the wider level, I am wondering about the relationship of narrative and spectacle in Italian filone cinema again, and whether a film that goes too far in one or other direction will fail with some sections of the presumed audience - e.g. in Argento-land whether a Suspiria or Inferno is too overloaded with sensations and a Card Player or Do You Like Hitchcock? too restrained and (seemingly) pedestrian.

It is also one of the things that I wonder about in Koven's vernacular cinema hypothesis, where he suggests that the giallo audience in the terza visione cinema was more like the TV audience, using the less attentive glance rather than the focused gaze, such that the announcing of the spectacular set piece via musical cues or the switch to subjective killer's eye view etc., said when the viewer should pay attention.

I do not have any problems with this per se, more with wondering what comes next: if the narrative aspect is not (as) important to this audience then why not concentrate on the spectacular and, in the case of Argento particularly, what happens when your audience is also in the prima visione.

Is it a matter of few, if any, filmmakers being able to sustain the intensity of the set piece for 90-odd minutes (a common criticism of even Suspiria is that after the first double-murder it has nowhere left to really go - a case of cinematic premature ejaculation, as it were); the cost, in terms of both conventional and psychic economics (it costs more and is too draining on the spectator); or the reluctance of many / most spectators to genuinely submit to / subject themselves to the film and filmmakers' demands, and watch in a manner akin to Betty in Opera without averting their eyes.

So, when you watch an giallo or Italian horror film, what do you watch it for and how do you usually watch it?