COLD EYES OF FEAR (1971)

I'm trying to get into a Halloween mood, but this wasn't a very good start. I launched Enzo G. Castellari's Gli Occhi Freddi Della Paura (the English title is a literal translation) expecting something like a giallo, but the closest we get to that is an opening gag that seems to give us what we're looking for -- a scantily clad woman menaced by a man with a knife -- only to pull back and reveal one of those morbid cabaret shows that Europeans were fond of in those days.

 

Karin Schubert stars in the live giallo within the film

This is England, actually, and Cold Eyes of Fear is yet another Italian film that imagines the sceptred isle as the land of dark doings. My hunch is that we're seeing the influence of Edgar Wallace and the German films (often themselves set in England) made from his novels in these Italian movies. In many ways, Cold Eyes is an old-fashioned thriller, if not necessarily the kind Wallace wrote.

In any event, among the audience for the sex-&-violence show are young lawyer Peter Flower (Gianni Garko) and an expatriate Italian prostitute, Anna (Giovanna Ralli) who romp through Swinging London a while before heading to the home of Peter's uncle, a highly respected judge (Fernando Rey). Little do they know that an intruder has already broken in and killed the butler. Julian Mateos plays the intruder, but the dominant performance is by whoever dubbed the role into English. While the rest of the dub artists play things straight, or dull, Mateos's dubber heads straight for cartoonland, issuing the sort of Cockney accent you might hear from a drunk anglophobic American.

The intruder is only setting the stage for his partner and mastermind, who arrives disguised as a policeman, having taken the uniform from a victim sent to the house by the judge to give Flower instructions for finding certain documents. It becomes apparent quickly that the home-invaders are working at cross purposes. Quill (Mateos) is only after money, while Welt (Frank Wolff) is after different kinds of papers. As delusional flashbacks reveal, Welt was sent up the river by the judge while his accomplices got off. Ever since, he has suspected that the accomplices bribed the judge to escape justice, and he hopes to find the proof in the judge's house. At the same time, he has booby trapped the judge's office to blow up should the official pull his door open to leave. Presumably he intends to publicize whatever evidence he expects to find to show the world why the judge deserved to die.

 

The majesty of the law: Fernando Rey presides; Frank Wolff protests

 

Cold Eyes is basically a cat-and-mouse story made occasionally interesting by the contrast between a fearless, defiant Anna and the feckless weakling Flower. Take Gianni Garko out of his Sartana costume and he's a lot less formidable, but his character hardens the more he comes to believe that Welt might be right about the judge, until he's at last ready to take violent action against his tormentors. Death by JB bottle is sure to be a highlight for certain fans of Italian genre cinema. Meanwhile, there are strong insinuations that Quill is a misogynist homosexual, though it's unclear whether Welt is that kind of a partner with him. This sort of story really isn't an ideal vehicle for an action specialist like Castellari, who entertains himself with Welt's fantasies of destruction and his persecution-complex flashbacks. The film definitely becomes less linear once Welt takes center stage, as if giving in to the villain's madness, but that description may make the film sound more interesting visually than it actually is. I dug the neon-lit night scenes actually shot in London, but otherwise it's a fairly uninspired film. Not even Ennio Morricone can do much to jazz it up. It must have seemed like an old-fashioned film even at the time it came out, because there's something timelessly tired about it.

THE PRICE OF DEATH (Il Venditore di Morte, 1971)

The Italian title means, "the salesman of death," and it refers to the man called Silver, played by Gianni (Sartana) Garko. This guy is Sartana in all but name. When he's on the job, he dresses like Sartana: dark suit, red tie, etc. He carries little trick guns like Sartana. But this film, written and directed by Lorenzo Gicca Palli, alias "Vincent Thomas," shows us something we never see in a proper Sartana film: the bounty hunter at his leisure. We find him at his hacienda, attended by two Mexican mistresses, in the middle of judo practice. His sparring partner throws Mr. Silver all over the mat until our hero gets up and lays the master out with a punch to the face. Then it's time to talk with potential clients: a poor couple who want him to track down the man who raped and killed their daughter. We saw this at the start of the picture in a giallo-esque POV attack scene.

The only clue the parents have is a decorative belt buckle that must belong to the rapist. They leave it with Silver, but he refuses to take their case: he's a bounty killer, not a detective.

Gianni Garko as Sarta--er, Silver in repose (above) and in his work clothes (below).

He's more receptive when an old friend, the lawyer Jeff Plummer, asks him to track down the man who shot up a saloon and killed one of the saloon girls. We saw that earlier, too. Two of the three robbers were shot down at the scene. The authorities think they have the third man in jail already: local no-goodnik Chester Conway (Klaus Kinski). Saloon proprietress Polly Winters (Gely Genka) has her own grudge with Chester, but she's convinced that he's being railroaded in this particular case. He claims to have an alibi, but won't divulge it. She wants to save him from the hangman so she can have her own revenge later. Because the authorities are aligned against her and Jeff, she sends him with money enough to get Silver interested. As he gets closer to the truth, a hooded gunman starts picking off his informants, including Polly. And as it turns out, Chester is a patsy, set up to take the rap for powerful people who were out to preempt a blackmail scheme. On the other hand, Chester isn't exactly an innocent man....

What kind of a town is it when they keep a poor soul like Klaus Kinski in prison (above, taunting Gely Genka), when they let the guy below run free?

Some of the subject matter here is pretty brutal, but just as you can see a sort of giallo influence in the rape scene you can also see the more direct influence of They Call Me Trinity in the more laid-back hero Garko plays and the broad comedy bits thrown in at odd moments. Consider this: Silver has brought a miner into town thinking that he can identify someone who can help clear up the mystery. The hooded killer promptly drills the miner. Silver chases the killer while a dumb deputy chases Silver, thinking him the killer. Caught between two fires, Silver ends up climbing to the second floor of the saloon and diving in through a window. He startles a prostitute who starts pelting him with intimate apparel while cutesy-funny music from Mario Migliardi tinkles in the background. Migliardi's score overall is actually pretty interesting, different from the usual Morricone-inspired sound with a sinister-sounding main theme. The film as a whole tries to strike a balance between the sinister and the satirical, maybe seeking to be more sophisticated than Trinity. It can't help being a mixed bag, with some good action sequences and the right kind of lead performance from Garko, but also with really pointless comedy bits like a subplot involving the constantly-brawling miners that ends up going nowhere. On the other hand, it's the sort of story that needs to throw potential plot threads all over the place in order to keep you guessing about who killed whom, who raped whom, etc. You can tell while you're watching that the movie's a bit of a mess, but there's enough going on, and you see enough of Garko and Kinski, to keep you interested over its reasonable running time. Il Venditore di Morte should end up on no one's list of top spaghetti westerns, but it should entertain fans of the Italian genre in their more undemanding moments.

THEY CALL HIM GRAVEYARD (1971)

To be precise, they call him "Cemetery," but more often in the English dub of Giuliano "Anthony Ascott" Carnimeo's semi-comical spaghetti western Gianni Garko's heroic gunfighter is called "the Ace of Hearts." Ace is a man who went the way of the gun when his wife was killed by bandits years ago, but despite a shot of him mourning at her grave this film has nothing to do with revenge. But it turns out to be a little something more than the dismal comedy that it threatened to be at first.

At first we follow two brothers, John and George McIntire, returning from the East to their father's ranch. They've been citified and college educated and, while they're not exactly effete and not exactly fops, they don't really fit into the wild west, the land where babies have bullets for pacifiers and an old lady can shoot a cactus to pieces from a moving train. But they do see themselves as gentlemen with a code of honor to uphold, and this gets them into trouble with the local roughs until the Ace of Hearts intervenes.

The McIntire brothers (Christ Chittell and John Fordyce) are plucky lads but tend to end up in compromising positions despite the Ace of Hearts' (Gianni Garko) efforts to cover for them.

The McIntire boys soon learn that their dad is paying protection money to an extortion gang with an unknown leader. They won't stand for such treatment of their father and with their new retainers Chico and Pedro (the gringos have a hard time telling them apart) they set out to seek justice, only to be caught with their pants (and everything else) down in a pond until the Ace of Hearts intervenes. This time the boys wise up, buy some guns, and ask for instructions from Ace. The helpful gunfighter tries to teach the Mexicans the art of the shotgun, but Chico and Pedro are just as good with throwing knives as they'll ever get with guns.

The film follows the McIntires' quest to learn the identity of the head extortionist, with Ace as their muscle. But the gang has their own hired gun known simply as The Duke (William Berger). "Acey" and "Dukey" know each other quite well and share a mutual professional respect that borders on real affection. In subtle ways they manipulate events so each can get a bigger payday, but both are reluctant to be forced into a potentially fatal showdown -- until there's a $100,000 payday at stake.

The camaraderie between the two gunfighters is the best thing about Graveyard. Garko gives a genial, relaxed performance that has just enough gravitas thanks to the scene at his wife's grave to keep him credible. Berger is even better as a world-weary yet unflappable fellow who never becomes the villain you might expect. He avoids being provoked into fights, responding to insults by agreeing with them, giving an antagonist every chance to walk away until gunplay becomes absolutely necessary. Paid in advance to keep Ace at bay while the gang attacks the McIntires, Duke sees no need to do so by killing him. The grudging friendship between the two gunmen is so well developed that I thought the film would evolve into tragicomedy with one man finally felling the other. But while Garko and Berger give the film a needed edge by playing their characters largely straight, not for slapstick, the film remains a comedy in the end, avoiding any downer finale and even (by modern standards) leaving open another encounter of "Acey" and "Dukey" someday.

Gli fumavano le Colt...lo chiamavano Camposanto is an unpretentious western with generally decent dubbing, though the sound mix on the VideoAsia DVD in the Spaghetti Western Bible Vol. 3 set is a little muddy. Carnimeo's direction is effective but not as flashy as his Sartana films, and some of the comedy is overdone, particularly an overlong barroom brawl scene. Bruno Nicolai throws in a whistling theme tune and adds some mildly melancholy notes later on. There's nothing really special or spectacular about this movie apart from two spaghetti stalwarts, Garko and Berger, doing some of their best acting in the genre. If Ace and Duke had ever crossed paths again, I wouldn't have complained at all.

Here's an Italian trailer uploaded to YouTube by MrSpaghettiWestern:

IL BOSS (1973):"Family Doesn't Matter."

It's been claimed that Fernando Di Leo's use of an interracial team of hitmen in La Mala Ordina (aka Man Hunt) inspired Quentin Tarantino's casting of Samuel L. Jackson and John Travolta in Pulp Fiction. If so, then is it possible that the climax of Inglourious Basterds begins with the opening of the third film of Di Leo's so-called "Milieu" trilogy? Consider: a mystery man sneaks into a building where important men are arriving. His destination: a projection booth where he cows the projectionist into compliance. The mystery man is Henry Silva. The projectionist pleads for mercy.

Projectionist: Jesus, don't shoot!
Silva: He won't....Only he doesn't like skin flicks.
Projectionist: Jesus, my god!
Silva: He's not coming, so just keep quiet!

An elite audience of criminals has gathered to watch porno films. "That goes to show that not all Swedes are natural blonds," one comments as they watch the unseen show. Above and behind them, Silva sets himself to work. His weapon is a grenade launcher. He fires into the screening room.

He fires three times more, then uses a fifth grenade on a guard who comes running in at the wrong time. This is carnage above and beyond Di Leo's two previous films, and a police official will later equate the violence with the Vietnam War. "I'll bet they'll be using tanks soon," he remarks. This sets the tone for Il Boss, a devastating deconstruction of the crime film genre, dispensing even with the one sympathetic protagonist you can find in either Milano Calibro 9 or La Mala Ordina.

Silva plays Nick Lanzetta, a hitman and orphan who was for all intents and purposes adopted by Don Giuseppe Daniello, an underling of Don Corrasco (Richard Conte). They've sent Nick to destroy Don Attardi, who collaborated with interlopers from Calabria in selling hard drugs in Sicily when they were only supposed to pass through on the way to foreign parts. It turns out that I was wrong in assuming that all three Milieu films took place in Milan, since Il Boss plays out in Palermo, where, ironically, the Sicilians despised elsewhere in Italy look down on the Calabrians. That attitude extends to the Palermo police, represented by Commisario Torre (Gianni "Sartana" Garko). The Calabrians, represented by gang leader Cocchi, despise the Sicilians in return.

Cocchi: We're just rag-ass peasants to you! I know, if a man has nothing, Commisario, life is very simple. So my men will take risks that you'll never take. They've nothing to lose.
Torre: Bravo, Cocchi, bravo! Apparently you've become Maoist.

Again, Di Leo introduces social and political context that's often absent from crime or poliziotteschi films. On this occasion, he also overturns the tough-cop archetype of the poliziotteschis, since Garko's cop, who comes on strong as he interrupts the mourning for the porno movie victims, turns out to be a piccione, an informant for Don Giuseppe and Don Corrasco. It amused me to see the actor I identify with one of the ultimate badass spaghetti western heroes playing a complete weasel, a twisted authoritarian who blames the current chaos in Palermo on the government's exiling the old Mafia leaders. "It's just that there's no discipline," he argues at one point, "We need order, even if it's Mafia order." Adapting a novel, Il Mafioso, by Peter McCurtin, Di Leo subverts the typically reactionary stance of Italian cinema cops by putting an explicitly reactionary cop on the side of equally reactionary crime bosses.

By the time Di Leo is done, all ideas of authority and loyalty are pretty much dashed. The main plot of the film involves the kidnapping of Don Giuseppe's daughter Rina by Cocchi's men as revenge for the movie bombing. Cocchi wants Giuseppe to give himself up in return for his daughter, and the old man is willing, but Don Corrasco forbids it. Compromising in any way with Cocchi is unacceptable; that goes for paying ransom as well. This is when Corrasco tells Giuseppe that "family doesn't matter." But which family is he talking about? Isn't the Mafia made up of families? Indeed, the Mafia family takes precedence. "Nothing is yours," he tells Giuseppe, "not even your daughter, not when it endangers your family and the organization." After sending Giuseppe away, he instructs Nick to kill Giuseppe, his surrogate father, if he attempts to negotiate separately with Cocchi. In time, Giuseppe will urge Nick to disregard the order. Despite Nick's assertion that "Don Corrasco is God," Giuseppe insists that Corrasco has no right to dismiss Rina's likely death as "the will of God." He finally convinces Nick to see things his way and to set up a ransom payment, or so we think until the time of the scheduled rendezvous, when Nick kills Giuseppe as ordered, along with Giuseppe's right-hand man. In this scene, Silva conveys the death of a man's soul; you can see the self-loathing in his eyes as he embraces his victim and his own betrayal of the nearest thing he ever had to real family. Just as Mario Adorf successfully portrayed two different characters for Di Leo in Calibro 9 and Mala Ordina, Silva accomplishes the same feat in Mala Ordina and this film.

Meanwhile, Rina has also been betraying her father's honor. He's paying her way through college, where she's become a frivolous student radical, a drug user, and a tramp. It takes little more than one glass of booze to get her fraternizing with her captors, notwithstanding their threat that "you're gonna get laid until your feet come." Apparently that would be fine with her. And when Nick finally rescues her, after killing her father and pocketing his ransom money, she just as carelessly shacks up with him in his dismal porno-papered bachelor pad in a relationship of bodily satisfaction and mutual contempt. "You just screw baby, don't think," he advises her. He's disgusted by her lack of feeling when he finally tells her that her father's dead, but she answers with contempt for a father who was nothing but a criminal. Family really does mean nothing.

As Rina, Antonia Santilli submits for inspection, but from then on its pretty much consensual all the way.

Nor does it mean anything to Don Corrasco, who yields pretty quickly to political pressure to make peace with Cocchi by throwing Nick under the bus and setting up Torre to kill him. That guarantees that family will finally mean nothing to Nick, since the film will climax with his outright rebellion against the Don. But there are betrayals yet to come beyond the climax, and never has it been so bleak a moment when a movie closes not with the word "Fine," but with "Continua."

Gianni Garko negotiates with Richard Conte (above) and Henry Silva (below), not exactly from a position of strength in either case.

Il Boss is a soul-crushing film, and I mean that as a good thing. It's a movie of nihilistic moral cruelty that indicts cops, criminals and civilians alike, leaving no one for audience identification unless the audience suffers from collective low self-esteem. Our putative hero is really a scumbag, but who's any better? At least in Nick's case you can see that he was brought up in a certain quasi-moral system built on certain premises that are suddenly all kicked out from under him. None of the conventional escape routes in genre fiction (the police, the love of a good woman) are available to him. He can only keep doing what he's been doing, which is to exterminate all the brutes until somebody maybe takes him out someday. The fact that Nick is the only one of the trilogy's protagonists to survive gives us an idea of the larger point Di Leo is making.

The story of Il Boss is hellish enough, but why not include a literal metaphor for Hell in the form of a fiery furnace in which the mobsters deposit victims, dead or alive?

Luis Enriquez Bacalov is back after skipping La Mala Ordina with a score that's less classical but more forceful and percussive to fit the brutality of Il Boss. As usual, the location work is outstanding and the action sequences get to the point without overstated choreography. There's nothing here to compare with the amazing chase scene in Mala Ordina but the overall effect is more overwhelming than the earlier film, which fizzles a little once the chase is over. In closing, Il Boss is just about equal to Milano Calibro 9, though the two bookend films of the trilogy differ profoundly in tone. Calibro 9 is really a classical noir with pulp vitality, while Boss is like the Ran of the Italian crime genre in its despairing portrait of moral chaos. Having now seen all three films, I can say more confidently that the Milieu films deserve mention alongside Coppola's Godfather films and Kinji Fukasaku's Battles Without Honor and Humanity series, not necessarily as equals in quality but as a like-minded project of deromanticizing the crime genre, and perhaps with a similar, possibly unintended effect of re-romanticizing it for the next generation. They definitely set the standard for all other Seventies crime films from Italy, and any enthusiast for Italian cinema should enjoy all three.

Here's the Italian trailer again, which rightfully boasts of Di Leo's past work and promotes Il Boss as if it really was the culmination of a trilogy rather than the open-ended affair the film itself claims to be.