A randomly comprehensive survey of extraordinary movie experiences from the art house to the grindhouse, featuring the good, the bad, the ugly, but not the boring or the banal.
Italo Zingarelli started producing spaghetti westerns all the way back in 1964, the year of Fistful of Dollars. His first try at the genre was Gunmen of Rio Grande; that its hero was Wyatt Earp suggests that Zingarelli was still trying to ape American films. He followed the Italian practice of recruiting American stars: Guy Madison for Gunmen; Mark Damon for Johnny Yuma; John Ireland for Hate for Hate. In between westerns he made Franco and Ciccio comedies. In 1968 Zingarelli got ambitious; he would cast two Americans in his next western, and hire an American director, Don Taylor. The lead would be Peter Graves, whose stock had risen considerably since joining the Mission:Impossible show in its second season. His co-star would be Dennis Weaver, late of Gunsmoke, later of McCloud. Production was to start early in 1969, but Mission:Impossible fell behind schedule and by the time Graves was available, Weaver was off the project. Taking his place was veteran TV character actor and recent Emmy winner James Daly. To fill out the cast, Zingarelli seems to have taken inspiration from the film Today It's Me, Tomorrow You, hiring Bud Spencer from that film's cast as the requisite lummox and hiring Japanese star Testuro "Tiger Tanaka" Tanba. While Today It's Me had cast Tatsuya Nakadai as a Mexican bandit, Zingarelli and Taylor were less daring. Tanba would play a Japanese man called "Samurai," and despite the actor's reputed skill with the English language his role would be mute. Nino Castelnuovo made it a five-man army.
Zingarelli and Taylor (and co-writer Dario Argento) made a caper picture, and the only thing missing in that respect is a scene of Graves, as "The Dutchman," in his lair studying daguerreotypes of his prospective partners before settling on the explosives expert (Daly), the blades master (Tanba) and the lummox. Castelnuovo's character is in on the plan from the start and brings the skills of a circus acrobat. While his resume was dispiriting to hear -- I'd rather do without acrobatics in my spaghettis, please -- I was relieved to learn that tumbling and flipping never really came into play. Instead, the character developed into a master of the slingshot. Apart from that, however, The Five Man Army is almost completely disappointing. Taylor's direction is uninspired and Graves epitomizes uninspired acting. He hasn't a whiff of ruthlessness or roguishness about him, and the late twist that has him betray his four partners plays out unconvincingly even before it proves a tease. The Dutchman couldn't turn on his buddies because he's greedy or selfish, after all. Instead, he betrays them for the noblest of causes: the Revolution. He's brought them together to pull off an "impossible" train robbery and nab a Mexican government gold shipment, promising his partners even shares of the loot. Afterward, he thinks he can get away with leaving them a grand apiece while delivering the rest to the revolutionaries. But when government troops find their hideout and attack before he can get away, all five join in the fight, and when the revolutionaries arrive to mop things up, all five happily join the revolution. Joy!
Of our five stars, Daly makes the best impression as a grizzled, fatalistic cynic who gives the requisite talk about the old days being gone for good. Tanba is wasted by the failure to give him dialogue, even though Argento and co-writer Mark Richards give him the film's only romantic subplot, making him the object of a Mexican beauty's affections. Tanba also gets the spotlight in a brief moment of swordplay -- most of the time he throws knives -- and what was presumably intended as the film's action highlight. Having fallen off the train, Samurai must dash across the landscape, finding shortcuts so he can try to catch up and get back on board. The scene takes several crucial minutes that paralyze the picture. While Ennio Morricone labors frantically to make the moment dramatic, Taylor hasn't the pictorial instinct or even the sense of direction (in any sense of the word) necessary to make it all work. Meanwhile, Spencer stands out for his predictable feats of strength and gags about his appetite. In the American edition, his character talks with an unexpected accent -- that couldn't be Carlo Pedersoli's own voice, could it? Finally, I find that I have nothing to say about Castelnuovo, and perhaps it's best to be forgettable in as forgettable a film as this.
Before the film was released, Zingarelli tried to build confidence in it by announcing that he would use Peter Graves in his next picture, tentatively titled Deadly Legion. That film was never made. Instead, Zingarelli retained Bud Spencer for his next western, assigning him to director Enzo Barboni and teaming him with Terence Hill. The rest is history, specifically They Call Me Trinity and the triumph of the comic spaghetti western.¿Quién sabe? Maybe if Five Man Army had been more successful we may have been spared that.
The best proof of the success of Piedone lo sbirro (1973) is the making of an official sequel two years later. It reunited star Bud Spencer and director "Steno" and a few of the cast members from the first film. Inspector Rizzo's landlady and her son, our hero's surrogate family, aren't back, but Enzo Cannavale returns as his comedy-relief assistant, Inspector Caputo, while the three American sailors who helped "Flatfoot" out in the first picture make a surprise appearance in the Crown Colony in mid-sequel.
By now Rizzo has become the captain of the Naples Narcotics Squad. Despite his triumph over the Marseilles mob in the first movie he's had a hard time stemming the drug tide. Naples is just a stop in a global network, the scope of which brings an American law-enforcement official (Robert Webber) to town to advise the local authorities. Already burdened by the usual idiot police bureaucracy, Rizzo resents the American's interference. The sequel maintains the original's reactionary, almost anti-imperialist tone regarding the U.S. presence, as our hero complains that the Americans treat Naples "like a colony." At the same time, an even more menacing American arrives: Frank Barella, a deported mobster who seems intent on muscling in on the drug network that extends all the way to Asia. He looks like the prime suspect in the death of the current boss. That man was beaten to death, and we've already seen that Barella is nearly as good with his fists as Rizzo is. Of course, the manner of death makes Rizzo himself an object of suspicion in the eyes of his stupid superiors. One thing everyone knows is that the dead gangster had an informant inside law enforcement, known only to him and his contacts in Asia. To get to the bottom of the corruption on his own side, Rizzo must race Barella to Bangkok, and from there to Hong Kong, to get the info that will help one break the network, while possibly making the other its master....
Captain Rizzo (Bud Spencer) pumps the locals for information in Bangkok (above) and fulfills his title obligation by being in Hong Kong (below)
Steno has two really bright ideas this time. One is to send Bud Spencer to Asia so that super-pugilist Rizzo can test his might against Muy Thai masters, Chinese boxers and sumo wrestlers. After seeing the first Piedone movie I suggested that the series might serve as Italian counterparts to Asian martial arts movies, and the sequel makes the comparison explicit. Asian martial arts fans will probably object to the ease with which Rizzo bludgeons Orientals into submission with his mighty fists, but let's all lighten up. These films are comedies; even though their crime plots are played straight and sometimes turn deadly serious, the fact that Rizzo never uses lethal weapons licenses Steno to milk his brawls for laughs. Just like the first film, this one enjoys an enthusiastic stunt crew who know how to sell Spencer's brawling style, and the original Italian cohort is supplemented by an equally adept Asian stunt crew. If you enjoy pure kinetic knockabout action and can stand some slapstick humor thrown in, Piedone a Hong Kong is great fun to watch.
One thing Rizzo has going for him is an ability to soak up damage. This comes in handy often during Flatfoot in Hong Kong.
The other bright idea was to cast a Seventies icon, Al Lettieri, as Frank Barella. I don't know what was going on with his career that sent him to Italy in the last year of his life after a tremendous run of Hollywood work (The Godfather, The Getaway, Mr. Majestyk etc.) but this film is staged on such a global scale that it doesn't look like he was slumming. As a mighty lummox in his own right he's a perfect foil for Bud Spencer, and he brings enough two-fisted charisma to the part that you buy him as a worthy antagonist for Rizzo. The only disappointment you might feel is that a plot twist late in the story makes what looked like an inevitable fist-to-fist showdown between the two stars impossible.
Al Lettieri in Flatfoot in Hong Kong. Below, Rizzo pretends that he's the mobster while Barella's a cop. So what's the truth?...
Sometimes the comedy here is too crude (as when Caputo has to dress in drag for a sting operation), and there's an ominous turn toward childish sentimentality with the introduction of an orphaned Japanese boy -- notice that this brat, who doesn't even appear until about two-thirds through the picture, makes it onto the poster -- but Bud Spencer as a solo act is easier to take than when he's saddled with Terence Hill as his partner. I like Spencer's low-key, sardonic manner as Rizzo when he's not brawling, and his style still sets the tone for the movie as a whole. The first two Flatfoot films have been pretty entertaining, and I recommend them to anyone interested in trying poliziottesci lite on the Italian Seventies menu. Steno's direction remains efficiently dynamic while the de Angelis brothers work fresh variations on the Piedone theme into a score rich with familiar cop-movie music. The Asian angle and Al Lettieri in one of his last movies incline me to recommend the sequel even more than the original. Neither is anything close to a masterpiece but they're good, dumb fun that don't make you feel stupid watching them.
The English-language trailer (under the alternater title Flatfoot Goes East) also plays up "the little Japanese boy" a lot more than the picture justifies. It was posted to YouTube by Spencerhilltrailer:
And for the sake of comparison, here's a German trailer that makes no distinction between "Buddy" Spencer and the character he plays. This one was uploaded by Rialtofilm:
Bud Spencer is getting a lifetime achievement award from the Italian film industry at this year's Donatello ceremony, Italy's equivalent of the Oscars. The man born Carlo Pedersoli will be sharing the honor with his frequent screen partner, Mario "Terence Hill" Girotti. In the U.S. Spencer is probably best known, to the few who know him at all today, as Bambino, the hulking sidekick of Hill's Trinity in the series of cowboy comedies that for many sounded the death knell of the spaghetti western. Spencer teamed with Hill in a wider range of films, including contemporary stories after westerns finally went under. He also earned opportunities to star in movies without Hill, which is where things get interesting for me. Terence Hill has the sort of face you want to slug, and his shtick gets old really fast by my clock. Spencer, by contrast, is just a big oaf, and there's nothing inherently wrong with that. So why should he suffer by association with Hill? With that generosity of spirit I recently acquired the latest Spaghetti Western Bible collection from our old friends at Videoasia. This fourth volume is the second devoted to Hill and Spencer, and while it's dubiously labeled in that only two of the ten films included are spaghetti westerns (Damiano Damiani's A Genius and the infamous spaghetti musical Rita of the West) it does include all four films in the Piedone series of police comedies Spencer made between 1973 and 1980.
A closer translation of the first film's title would be "Bigfoot the Cop," but you can imagine the confusion that'd create in the U.S., however sasquatch-like Spencer may seem at times. "Flatfoot," meanwhile, is good old American slang for a cop and signals the somewhat comical nature of this series. All four Piedone films are directed by the mononymous "Steno" (Stefano Vanzina), who directed many films for the popular comedian Toto. He launches the series with a dynamic action scene that sets the tone for the first episode.
A black American sailor has gone crazy in the middle of Naples. He's made his way to the top of a tall building and has started taking potshots at the crowds below while raving about hating white people and being free. Steno films this on a massive scale with extras fleeing the sailor's gunshots as snipers move into position atop nearby buildings. He films from below, with the sailor a speck high above, and from the roof as the gunman commands a vast expanse of cityscape. Nobody wants to shoot the sailor, but there's no reasoning with him, and an American officer leaves his fate to the police. At that moment, as a cop on street level raises his rifle, a big foot comes down on top of it, and from a low angle we see the full bulk of Bud Spencer as he finishes a cigarette. Who's this guy? the American officer asks. "That would take a long time to explain," a cop replies.
As the credits roll over a jaunty theme by the the de Angelis brothers, Inspector Rizzo -- Piedone -- makes his way patiently up to the roof. He spies the sailor reloading, then waits for him to empty his gun again before charging. A brief battle follows, with the American putting up more of a fight than Spencer's fans might expect and nearly throwing Rizzo off the roof. Eventually Rizzo doesn't so much knock the man out as he knocks him back to his senses. After he surrenders, the inspector finds a telltale white packet on him. Cocaine has come to Naples.
Rizzo is a policeman who refuses to use a gun. He appears to despise all weapons, later dismissing a knife as a child's toy unfit for men. He's confident in his ability to settle matters with his fists, but he's not just a primitive brute, appearances notwithstanding. One reason he avoids guns is that he strives to keep situations from escalating into violence as much as possible. He's developed a rapport, a modus vivendi even, with the Sicilian Mafia, which this film presents as a conservative force in a society that finds itself under siege by the drug menace. Piedone lo sbirro is a reactionary, populist film, the sort that probably isn't meant for viewers outside Italy. It reminds me of Japanese movies with its ambivalent emphasis on the presence of Americans, and it teases briefly that they might be the source of the new drugs. The truth is a little closer to home: gangsters from Marseilles (i.e. "the French connection") are moving the drugs with help from a sleazy, flashy pimp called "the Baron." His men are handing out free samples outside schools to get kids hooked, including the son of Rizzo's landlady. "Flatfoot" takes a paternal interest in the boy (and a potentially matrimonial interest in the mother) that extends to slapping the brat when he catches the kid stealing to pay for more dope.
Tough love from Flatfoot. "So, I'm not your father, eh!" Actually, he's not, but he feels entitled to slap anyone, anyway. I'd say, "Bad cop; no donut," except I don't think he eats donuts. Can you imagine if he did???
Rizzo thinks he can crack down on the drug trade by getting tough on the Baron -- he may have a code against killing but he's not above using his ham fists to torture folks -- but he's held back by a by-the-book new police commissioner who frowns on our hero's unorthodox tactics and his semi-cordial relations with the Mafia. Rizzo gets suspended after the commissioner catches him in the middle of an unauthorized beatdown of the Baron, but he carries on the fight with still more help from the Mafia and some crucial assistance from his new friend Jho, the cleaned-up American sailor, and some of his fellow gobs. Things get further complicated when one of his favorite informants and the Baron are killed, leaving Rizzo to wonder who the real villain is. Could it be one of his quasi-allies in the Mafia? Could it be the commissioner who seems to do everything possible to impede the investigation? It all gets very confusing, and as Rizzo tells the commissioner, "You know what Flatfoot does when he's confused." If you don't, he punches people, and if he punches enough of them, he may find out the truth in time....
The stakes can be high in Flatfoot, as a dwarf informant learns, but the film maintains a lighthearted tone throughout.
Flatfoot seems designed as a family-friendly poliziotteschi movie, free from extreme gun violence, nudity and other distinguishing traits of the adult version of the genre. At the same time, its emphasis on choreographed unarmed combat makes it look like an attempted Italian answer to Asian martial-arts films. In this respect, the film is pretty good. Spencer is a convincing brawler and he's supported by a game stable of stuntmen who sell well for him. Steno keeps the different fight scenes lively, particularly one in which Rizzo routs an entire motorcycle gang with just a borrowed chain for a weapon.
Steno can pull off the kind of car and cycle chases you expect from the Italian cop genre, but Flatfoot's unarmed combats are its highlights.
The regrettable exception is the major comic set piece, a melee set on a fishing boat pitting Rizzo and the three Americans against drug smugglers. The problem isn't that the scene is shot for laughs, but that it goes on too long after it runs out of invention. It's amusing to see Spencer swatting people with fish, but Steno clearly runs out of ideas at some point. Worse, one of the Americans is an acrobat. Does it strike any of you that Italians have some odd obsession with acrobats? They seem to like to see guys turning backflips and somersaults without appreciating that stunts like that only make their fight scenes look more fake. I can't suspend disbelief with some idiot tumbling all over the place, but for an Italian audience all that matters is that it looks funny. But that aside, I found Flatfoot fairly amusing just for its peculiar approach to material I'm used to seeing handled in a far more brutal fashion. I'd recommend it to any fan of Italian police movies just for the sake of variety.
Inspector Rizzo becomes a globe-trotter in the three later films, which take him to Hong Kong, South Africa and Egypt. I assume that someone in Europe released the Piedone series on DVD, since Videoasia probably wouldn't have them otherwise. Piedone lo sbirro looks a little battered in spots but comes, as do all the sequels, in nicely letterboxed format. The new collection, deceptively titled Trinity:Hands Up! Eyes Down! Pockets Out! teams Spencer with Terence Hill in two Africa-set adventures, All the Way Boys and I'm For the Hippopotamus, while Hill stars in the two westerns as well as Renegade (which first appeared in Grindhouse Experience Vol. 2) and Virtual Weapon. I'm looking forward to the other Flatfoots and to the two spaghettis, so expect to read more about them in the near future.
Here's an English-language trailer for Flatfoot aimed at the American market, uploaded to YouTube by spencherhilltrailer.
In his Spaghetti western survey 10,000 Ways to Die Alex Cox calls Tonino Cervi's film "a near perfect revenge Western." But Cox had reached a point in the survey where he was beginning to give perhaps too much credit to fairly ordinary films that at least didn't insult his intelligence, as too many "circus westerns" that depended on technical gimmicks or outlandish stunts were doing at this point in genre history. I'm not saying that Oggi a me...Domani a te is a completely ordinary film -- it's far from that -- but it's also further from perfect than Cox cares to admit.
The thing that bugs me right away is that our avenger hero, Bill Kiowa (Montgomery Ford a.k.a. Brett Halsey), spends the first third of the movie putting a gang together. It just seems to me that a nearly perfect revenge Western should have a lone avenger. Maybe I wouldn't be bugged by it if his gang had more going for it. It's a collection of types: a dandy, a gambler (William Berger), a veteran sheriff, and Bud Spencer doing here for what Cox says is the first time his standard spaghetti character of a big lummox. Spencer and Berger have a certain charisma, which explains why they became spaghetti stars, but the other two characters are ciphers; the one interesting thing the sheriff does is quit his job when Kiowa offers pay in advance and appoint his one prisoner as the new sheriff. Berger doesn't have much to do apart from delaying the plot a bit when he runs away from the gang, but he gets one good line later when he complains about bloodstains on his frilly white shirt. "I paid five dollars for it," he laments, "and I only got two years' use out of it." Ford/Halsey/Kiowa himself is dull (Cox euphemizes this as "unsmiling and obsessed") and we only gain interest in him when we learn what he's really out to avenge.
Montgomery Ford as Bill Kiowa (above and center below) and his gang in Today It's Me...Tomorrow, You.
At the beginning, Kiowa is finishing a stint in prison, having been framed by erstwhile pal James Elfego, a comanchero bandit. Kiowa needs extra men, I suppose, because Elfego has a small army of bandits to hit stagecoaches with. But he wants to deal with Elfego himself because, as a sepia flashback shows us, the wiry little cuss congratulates Kiowa on his wedding by raping Mrs. Kiowa and gunning her down in front of him.
The interesting, if not extraordinary thing about Today It's Me... is that Elfego is played by Tatsuya Nakadai, one of the titans of Japanese cinema. It's an incredible bit of stunt casting that nods to the genre's sources, since Nakadai played Toshiro Mifune's gun-toting antagonist in Yojimbo. More recently, he had scored hits in such diverse samurai fare as Harakiri and Sword of Doom, and bringing him to Europe was a coup just short of getting Mifune himself. Ironically, Mifune had already played a disreputable Mexican in a Mexican film, and he would finally confront the West on his own terms, as a samurai teamed up with Charles Bronson against Alain Delon, in the awesome-on-paper Red Sun. Probably by this point playing a bandit doomed to be dispatched by "Montgomery Ford" was beneath Mifune's station, but Nakadai, not so well known in the West, was game and gets into his work as the leering, sort of nervous seeming bandito.
Cervi was quite self-conscious about the stunt casting, and it shows in the Asiatic-sounding gong included in Angelo Lavagnino's score and in the way Elfego wields a machete like a samurai sword. This makes for one of the most peculiar fight scenes in spaghetti history, something you wouldn't expect to see outside one of those computer simulation scenarios that pit Spartans vs. Ninjas: Nakadai with the blade vs. Bud Spencer with a tree branch.
Spencer already has a bullet in his belly, and Nakadai carves a few rashers off of him before the rest of the good guys arrive to save the big man's bacon. I suppose that's another of the things that annoys me about this movie: given the number of expendable assistant heroes, not one of them is killed. And Dario Argento co-wrote the thing! You'd think he would have come up with some way to get rid of some of these guys. Not doing so leaves the impression that the deck is stacked in favor of the good guys.
Apart from the unique contribution from Nakadai, Today It's Me (also known as Today We Kill, Tomorrow We Die) didn't live up to Cox's admiring review. It's not a terrible film -- we're not talking about White Comanche here -- but it struck me as fairly uninspired beyond the stunt casting. It lacks intensity for a large portion of the story and the action is too one-sided for it to be very suspenseful. On the other hand, I only paid $1.97 for it at a local FYE, the sort of store where you can still find obscure items that have long since vanished from other store shelves, so I don't feel that let down. It should throw Alex Cox's critical standards open to question, however, for anyone planning to buy that book.
Here's a mixed trailer with Italian dialogue and English titles, uploaded to YouTube by LindbergSWDB