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.
Like his American forebear, the spaghetti western cowboy is typically a laconic figure, if somewhat more sardonic than the original. He is a man of few words and many bullets. But every rule has its exception, and Thomas Hunter is an exceptional spaghetti western star. Carlo Lizzani's western was Hunter's second essay in the genre. He plays a wronged outlaw, one who sacrifices himself to the army, having stolen from them, in the expectation that his partner, who gets away with the loot, will take care of his family while he does time. He does some pretty hard time, as an opening credits sequence illustrates, and when he's released he finds his family home a ruin and his family gone. His wife's journal reveals her declining fortune and a betrayal by the hero's partner, who has not shared his plunder. The truth hurts, and Hunter wants you to feel it with him.
Before long, men are out to kill our hero, Jerry Brewster. Right at that time, Jerry discovers a squatter on his desolate property. The squatter, Winny Getz (Dan Duryea), is armed, but finding Jerry the underdog under siege takes his side. Jerry learns that his old partner has taken another name and used his ill-gotten gains to become a big rancher. Winny gets a job as a ranch hand to spy on the wealthy Mr. Seagull (Nando Gazzolo) while Jerry heads into the nearest town and picks a fight with some of Seagull's bullying ranch hands in a saloon. He impresses the saloon keeper, who complains of Seagull's oppression of the town and agrees to back Jerry's scheme to ruin the rancher. But before things can go further Jerry is waylaid by more of Seagull's goons, led by foreman Mendez (Henry Silva). Not knowing Jerry's real agenda, Mendez is impressed enough by the man's toughness against heavy odds to give him a job on Seagull's ranch. Along the way, Jerry befriends a boy being raised by Seagull's sister; the kid's mannerisms strongly remind our hero of his own long-lost son. He also makes an enemy of the local saloon singer, who resents the way his lucky gambling streak distracted from her performance his first night in town. She pines for Mendez while Mendez himself has eyes on Seagull's sister.
It sometimes seems like every Henry Silva movie has a shot like this.
If they don't, they should.
Jerry's now ideally placed to stage a large-scale robbery of Seagull's horses and to send the town intelligence on Seagull's plans. When Seagull orders a reprisal against the town, and Mendez expects him to ride with the other hands, Jerry entrusts a warning message to the kid, only to find that it never reached the saloon keeper. No longer able to rely on the town's support, Jerry finds the odds growing against him when the singer, having nabbed the kid, rats him out to Mendez. Our hero will need Winny's help if he hopes to get his revenge on Seagull.
Dan Duryea (below) is our hero by default just for getting Thomas Hunter (above) to shut up.
Thomas Hunter didn't do many spaghetti westerns, though he did return home to do a Gunsmoke episode and play Ike Clanton in a TV movie before making his most substantial contribution to cinema as author of The Final Countdown. His approach is all wrong, though director Lizzani, making his first western, probably should share the blame. Lizzani at least learned his lesson and followed up with Requiescant (aka Kill and Pray), a more highly regarded effort. Showing your emotions shouldn't be forbidden in spaghettis or any western, but Hunter's emoting goes way over the top. It would be over the top in any genre, and it's not a good idea for a western hero to sound like a whiner. Worse, Hunter's histrionics encourage the worst hammy impulses in Silva, with little apparent effort from Lizzani to check either actor. By default, Dan Duryea, a great villain in Hollywood westerns, comes off best, despite his age and apparent illness, as a comparatively laconic, enigmatic figure. Duryea doesn't really have much to work with but it's still cool to see him play a hero -- and ride off into the sunset -- in one of his last roles.
Lizzani -- still working at age 90, with a film out last year -- doesn't have the same pictorial genius as Sergio Leone or Sergio Corbucci, but he stages two impressive large-scale action scenes: the horse-rustling scene, complete with flaming logs reminiscent of Spartacus, and a gunfight in the deserted town pitting Hunter and Duryea against Silva's goon squad. Hunter's more personal showdowns with Silva and Gazzolo are anticlimactic by comparison. Ennio Morricone contributes a score that's characteristic but not much more than that. He's credited as "Leo Nichols," and you could believe that "Nichols" was just a Morricone imitator. The music still sounds good, but it's really just another day at the office for the maestro. At least he got a respectable pseudonym. Lizzani was stuck with "Lee W. Beaver." Hills Run Red isn't a top-flight spaghetti western; whether that's the fault of the star subverting the story or the story subverting the star is hard to say. But it has its moments and you definitely can do worse.
With the rediscovery of his 1962 crime comedy Mafioso, Alberto Lattuada got his foot in the door of cinematic history. Previously known internationally only for co-directing Variety Lights with Federico Fellini, Lattuada looked like another master from a golden age of Italian movie comedy, the years when "Italian Style" became a global brand. Lattuada had 40 directing credits in a career of nearly 50 years, but nothing of Mafioso's prestige has emerged lately. Instead, you can find some of his pictures streaming on Netflix, including his entry in the spy-parody sweepstakes that followed in the wake of the James Bond phenomenon. The director joined forces with four other writers to come up with a story that's sometimes sharply satiric toward the Cold War, and sometimes hopelessly childish.
Somewhere in Red China, Perry Liston (Patrick O'Neal) is being tortured on a machine that spins him like a top. He's a journalist, but the Chinese are convinced that he's a spy. Sharing his cell are Hank Norris (Henry Silva), who actually is a sort of freelance spy, and an elderly Chinese man who's happened to hold on to a valuable ring. In an unconscious cross between J.R.R. Tolkien and the origin of Iron Man, this dying sage bestows upon Liston a magic ring. Actually, it secretes a liquid which, when absorbed into the skin, makes a person invisible for exactly twenty minutes, but this can be done only once every ten hours. Hank scoffs at the whole idea, but when Liston vanishes in front of a firing squad he yells for the guard -- he now has valuable information to sell.
With the aid of a Chinese general's wife, Liston flies back to the Free World, where we next see him being tortured on exactly the same machine the Chicoms used on him -- the Americans later admit that they bought it from China. Matchless plays occasionally with the essential similarity of all the superpowers. The Chinese have surgically altered some of their citizens to pass for American; the Americans have apparently done the reverse. Later, we watch the Americans watching Liston on a spy camera, only for Lattuada to pull back to reveal that the Russians are watching the Americans. Again, he pulls back to show the Chinese watching the Russians on another screen. I may have forgotten the correct order, but you get the idea. Mocking the Cold War is arguably a mature approach to the spy parody, but most of the time Matchless plays like a bad B movie out of old-time Hollywood. Its invisibility effects are no advance on what John P. Fulton had been doing since the 1930s and the concept of an invisibility ring itself seems too primitive for the spy genre.
Likewise, later in the picture, after the Americans have recruited Liston to take down the eccentric millionaire Andreanu (the coincidentally cast Donald Pleasence -- You Only Live Twice came out that same summer), our hero's first move is to break up the villain's fight-fixing racket. The racket consists of having a hypnotist in the stands to mesmerize the opposing fighter so Andreanu's man will win. Liston takes care of the hypnotist by invisibly throwing ashes in his face, and to make things more certain gets into the ring to distract Andreanu's fighter, finally holding his legs in place so the other fellow can flatten him. Andreanu's mansion is staffed by robots that wouldn't look out of place in a Republic serial, apart from the 18th century livery they wear.
While robots keep his guests liquored up, Donald Pleasence enjoys a night at the fights -- but not for long.
Maybe there's a point to these juvenile gimmicks. Maybe for someone of Lattuada's age the whole Bond phenomenon was the stuff of comic books or Italy's counterparts of the pulps. But if a spy-parody picture is to some extent supposed to ape the style or supposed sophistication of the actual Bond pictures, Matchless fails except on the most superficial level of snazzy location shoots and attractive women. O'Neal and Silva get to chase each other around New York City and Hamburg, among other locales, and Lattuada got to film impressively on the roof of the Pan Am Building. The women are Princess Ira von Furstenberg, whom many ads promoted as the star of the picture, as Liston's artistic ally, and Nicoletta Machiavelli as Hank Norris's eventual sidekick.
Above, Princess von Furstenberg explains modern art to Patrick O'Neal -- and there is an explanation. Below, she gets the drop on Nicoletta Machiavelli.
Only Pleasence and the ladies, the former understandably, seem to understand what the genre requires. Pleasence gets to throw fussy tantrums and display an obsession with sunglasses, while the Matchless Girls are effortlessly charismatic. O'Neal, on the other hand, gives a cranky performance that does little to win an audience over, while Silva gives just about the worst performance I've ever seen from him. His Hank Norris is a buffoon from beginning to end and Silva plays him as an absolute barking idiot, clapping like a child while watching cartoons or gibbering like a lunatic after O'Neal eludes him yet again. In short, the role does not play to the actor's strengths, though he seems to have had fun playing a moron. At times, he seems like the only person having fun in the picture, and he's definitely having more fun than the audience.
I don't regret watching Matchless because it was often very pretty to look at as a virtual tourist of the past. Italian films from this period will usually look great if they have nothing else going for them, and cinematographer Alessandro D'Eva and art director Enzo Del Prato meet that minimal obligation with ease. But Matchless really tests how long you can watch pretty pictures without your intelligence feeling insulted, and it raises a question for future study: was this or Mafioso more typical of Alberto Lattuada's career?
As censorship receded around the world in the 1960s and afterward, the U.S. embraced sex while Europe embraced violence. This is a very broad generalization, but I'm still grappling with the importance of cruelty and brutality in European popular cinema and some of its art cinema. In many cases, it seems to be a kind of reality principle, a sign that the filmmaker is trying to tell it like it is. It's a conscious rejection of romantic idealism and enforced optimism, a crude antithesis to the romanticism often expressed in the films' own lush and soaring scores. What were audiences supposed to make of it all? We assume that they got a kick out of the violence, but how did they react to the worldview, the cynicism and pessimism that so often prevail in these films? In historical films, I've described it as an acknowledgment of the injustice that prevailed in the past, whether in medieval Europe or in the savage border country of spaghetti westerns. What about cruel pictures set in the present day? Did audiences accept those as truth-telling exposes of modern injustice? Were these films consciousness-raising exercises or did they contribute to conservative complacency? Did they tell viewers that there was no hope in a violent world, or did they suggest that violence was the only answer?
Watching Andrea Bianchi's brutal Mafia potboiler, whose Italian title translates literally as "Those Who Matter," I couldn't help wondering whether people were meant to enjoy the experience, or whether they were supposed to be satisfied by recognizing some sort of violent truth in the derivative story. In fact, the story is derivative of spaghetti westerns. It has the Fistful of Dollars/Yojimbo/Red Harvest element of a protagonist playing two factions off each other. It also has the Once Upon a Time in the West element of a killer who performs his own theme music with mysterious significance. Instead of playing a harmonica, Tony Aniante (Henry Silva) whistles an enigmatic, strangely amplified tune while enemies stand about stupefied or confused until Tony steps out of cover and shoots them. He's an American gangster sent to Sicily to settle a local squabble over heroin, some of which was being smuggled inside of "cut up babies." He also has an agenda of his own, hinted at by the whistling and the occasional black and white flashback to some scene of uncertain relevance. Tony is not quite a spaghetti western bounty hunter transplanted to Seventies Sicily, however.
Silva gives a laconic, tightly wound, uncomfortable performance. He talks (dubbing his own voice) in a stilted way, as if keeping in sync with the rest of the cast (dubbed with other people's voices). His delivery gives lines like, "I am a damn good driver!" an unintentional mock gravitas. Silva seems to have worn the same yellow shirt through the entire shoot in steamy Sicily, often under a jacket, and you can believe that every sweat stain is real. There's something robotic about Tony Aniante, but you eventually realize that this is self-restraint, that he's keeping something essential about himself in check -- and not just his secret revenge agenda.
Margie (Barbara Bouchet) hints ever so slightly that she's attracted to Tony
Margie (Barbara Bouchet), the trophy wife of one of the rival gangsters, challenges Tony's resolve with some of the least subtle come-ons in movies. She comes across like a character out of a soft-core sex comedy, pouring milk over herself and sucking a banana to get Tony's attention. She gets it, in spades. Tony likes it rough, it turns out, if he can even be said to like it. It's enough to drive her wild the first time, and he can't get her out of his mind. He daydreams of her while her husband plots strategy with him, but he clearly resents his own desire. Maybe it just gets in the way of his job and his secret agenda.
He warns her to stay out of his way but she won't listen. The next time he gives her all he's got. He beats the crap out of her with his fists and both ends of his belt before raping her in a barn. Not long afterward, she kills herself. Notified of this in the middle of a final showdown with her husband, Tony says, "I'm sorry," but by then his own problems have escalated and he's a bloody, sweat-stained mess in his own right. Even if he gets out of this predicament, he still has his own business to settle, and that flashback to explain....
But how can you root for Tony after what he does to Margie? Is it a mitigating circumstance that he has a murder in his past to avenge? I doubt it. But I also question whether Italian (or later American) audiences were meant to cheer as Tony destroys Margie. The rape scene strikes me as an instance of cruelty as a reality principle, a refusal to turn this tough crime picture into a romance. We're supposed to be satisfied to have it confirmed that Tony is a vicious beast, and that such men tend to prevail, however implausibly in plot terms. Tony's behavior probably serves to confirm a worldview viewers already had. They could tell themselves that this film didn't insult their intelligence -- though their sense of cinematic taste might still be a casualty.
It's hard to judge Quelli che contano as a cinematic experience on the evidence of the Substance DVD. This pan-and-scan edition of the American dub looks like a VHS tape that's been dragged out of the earth. The picture quality is on the level of a Mill Creek DVD -- though many Mill Creek editions actually look better. Somehow, the presentation seems appropriate to the content. Cry of a Prostitute is an experience that should be as little aestheticized as possible. Whatever virtues it has shouldn't be dependent on lighting, vivid color or balanced compositions. At its worst, morally speaking, it's riveting in an appalling way, as if part of the point is the way the film dares you to watch. That's in keeping with Italian exploitation, if not with the wider European cinema of cruelty. Whether you care to watch depends on whether you think the truths of these films are worth telling, or whether they're the truth.
Patty Hearst was still a hot topic when United Artists picked up Giovanni Fago's crime drama, which has little else to recommend it from an exploitation standpoint, for American distribution. I gave it a chance as a Netflix instant streaming video, expecting a typical Italian tough-cop movie, with the redoubtable Henry Silva as the cop, but Fatevi vivi fell somewhat short of that. Silva's Commissario Caprile talks tough but accomplishes hardly anything here.
Caprile has to solve the kidnapping of an industrialist's young daughter, but he uses the crime as an excuse to harass his old enemy, crime boss Frank Salvatore (Gabriele Ferzetti, "Mr. Choo-Choo" from Once Upon a Time in the West). Salvatore has clout enough to get Caprile transferred or kicked upstairs whenever he becomes an annoyance. Now that he's an annoyance again, Salvatore figures that the best way to get him out of his hair is to solve the kidnapping himself. It's an expedient as old as M, and it's hard to go wrong with it, especially when the mobsters prove more effective investigators than Caprile's cops. Meanwhile, the three masked kidnappers (one a drug-addict played by Rada Rassimov) answer to "the Professor" (Phillipe Leroy), who slowly eliminates his accomplices on his way to a speedboat-chase showdown on Lake Como with Salvatore's gang.
Masks help our kidnappers make a dramatic entrance (above) but viewers may consider it a waste for Rada Rassimov (below) to keep her mask on for much of the rest of the picture.
If Kidnap isn't really a cop film, it isn't really a mob film, either. Nor is it much of a kidnapping movie, since we learn nothing about the Professor's motives or anything else to make him an interesting villain, and we never get a strong sense of the child's peril until the speedboat chase. None of the characters is very deeply developed, though Silva and Ferzetti get some nice, sociable ball-busting scenes together. A prostitute who witnessed the kidnapping (Lia Tanzi) is set up as a pivotal character -- largely ignored by Caprile but intimidated into cooperating with Salvatore, she stumbles upon a crucial clue twice over in a big coincidence -- but gets forgotten by the film once her specific plot function is over. As far as Fago is concerned, Tanzi's main function may have been to perform the obligatory topless scene. He directs with little emotion or engagement, draining the film of most of its dramatic or exploitative potential. At the climax, you do wonder whether he'll go all the way and kill the child, but the action footage shot on the water comes out misty and smeary.
Gabriele Ferzetti is about to make Lia Tanzi an offer. Will she refuse?
Kidnap isn't an outright bad film -- Silva makes the most of his limited role, the other actors don't embarrass themselves, and there's a good score by Piero Piccioni -- but it's the sort of movie that leaves you asking, "Is that it?" after 99 minutes. I expected plot twists, like the exposure of secret collaborators with the kidnappers, that never arrived, and the story had nothing unique to say or show us about cops, crooks or kidnappers. Unfortunately, that is it.
Here's a minor example of the Rat Pack aesthetic, produced by Peter Lawford and featuring Sammy Davis Jr. on screen and on the soundtrack, as well as Joey Bishop as a car salesman. The director is an odd choice for what proves to be a very hard-boiled crime story: William Asher is probably best known for the AIP "Beach Party" cycle of eccentric teen comedies. Those films have their virtues (I watch 'em for Harvey Lembeck, the celebrity cameos and girls in bikinis, in no particular order) but those don't necessarily translate to a tough Mob tale. Asher may explain why we see such unlikely gangsters as Jim Backus and John McGiver, though by comparison they manage to make Elisha Cook Jr. look respectable as a higher-ranking mafioso. Asher definitely explains why we have Elizabeth Montgomery as the ingenue. They were married and on the brink of Bewitched at this time, so this is the Montgomery who showed dramatic potential (to me, at least, in retrospect) as the mute soldier waging a solo postapocalyptic war against Charles Bronson in a Twilight Zone episode. All of these people seem like strange company for the star of Johnny Cool: the mighty Henry Silva in a rare bit of top billing. Silva had built up a nice resume of action roles (we've seen him in The Tall T and The Bravados, among others), but he may also count as a sort of protege of the Rat Pack, having been one of the original Ocean's 11 and an antagonist for Sinatra in The Manchurian Candidate. Asher's film may have been Lawford's attempt to boost a deserving player's career, but it didn't quite work out.
Adapted from a novel, The Kingdom of Johnny Cool, by John McPartland, the film follows the fortunes of Salvatore Giordano, a thinly disguised version of Salvatore Giuliano, of whom I'll have more to say after my next Netflix shipment arrives. Giordano is a bandit who grew up in the hard climate of World War II Sicily and has ever since defied both the government and the mafia. An American reporter (Richard Anderson) manages to land an interview with him just before the hammer finally comes down. Silva in beard and sunglasses is a strange, Joaquin Phoenix-like visage, albeit more personable, but that thankfully doesn't last. Giordano somehow ends up on foot chased by a helicopter. Brought down, he's replaced on the ground by a double whose impersonation is enhanced by having his face blown off, while Giordano himself is whisked away and left in the opulent study of one John Colini (Marc Lawrence), a deported American gangster on the Lucky Luciano model. Colini likes Giordano's style, ruthlessness and resiliency and has deemed him the right man for a mission of revenge against the gangsters who ratted him out and stole his power and fortune. The exile still has the power and means to send Giordano on a Grand Tour to learn the ropes of international organized crime. To make his intentions clear to the Americans, Colini gives the cleaned-and-duded-up Giordano both his name and his nickname, "Johnny Cool."
From there, the film is a cross-continental rampage as "the new Johnny Cool" takes out Colini's enemies, the biggest of whom is played by Telly Savalas, which is more like it for this kind of movie. Along the way, Salvatore/Johnny picks up a groupie, Dare Guinness (Montgomery), a society girl who falls for him after watching him beat a man up in a nightclub. Her vulnerability complicates his mission, especially when two goons pretending to be cops (Joe Turkel's one of them) employ the tried-and-true rape method of interrogation on her while Johnny's busy cleaning out a gambling den by forcing eyepatched dice-master "Educated" (Davis) to roll winners at gunpoint. Discovering Dare is dishabille and disarray, Johnny coolly marches back where he came from, finds the two offenders in a parking garage, and gets medieval on them. Undeterred, Dare becomes Johnny's accomplice and driver in a plot to blow up another gangster. She weakens, eventually, as a traffic ticket causes her plans for a final rendezvous with Johnny to unravel. For his part, Johnny's resolve is jolted when another victim warns him that Colini will destroy him eventually the same way he's using Johnny to destroy his old allies. He decides to double down, following through on Colini's revenge while plotting Colini's own demise so that he, Salvatore Giordano, will rule the American Mafia, little realizing that Dare has already sealed his fate, one that seems accurately described as living death....
Johnny Cool plays out like a delusion of grandeur, with Silva an impossibly invincible army of one until he's betrayed by a woman. It's a story in the Public Enemy or Scarface mode, measuring how far one man can go on guts, cunning and violence, but it never feels as deceptively convincing as those films. It's not Silva's fault; he proved himself quite capable of playing such a role in numerous Italian crime films during the 1970s. The problem with Asher's film is its overall tone. From the casting of comic character actors to the Batman-like music from Billy May and the godawful theme song sung by Davis, Johnny Cool seems to want to be a straight drama and a send-up at the same time. When it finally settles on the former with a brutal finish and a grim coda as Dare turns herself in, it doesn't have the tragic power it should have. Johnny's reversal of fortune is so abrupt and absolute that it only leaves you stunned. I'm sure everyone involved felt badass ending the film that way, but I just felt manipulated in a way that wouldn't be as bad if the film had maintained a more consistent mood.
Silva is perfectly fine at what he does, while Montgomery is stuck with a thankless job playing a character that audiences will despise by the end of the film. At least she's attractive and reasonably convincing in the role. The depth of character acting here is impressive on paper, but not many of the actors have that much to do. Savalas isn't yet fully himself as a personality (he isn't fully shaved yet, either) and doesn't get to do much beyond giving orders and dying. Sammy Davis makes a weird impression in his one scene, while Bishop makes none beyond his car pitch. If the Rat Pack (albeit the B team) really brought anything to Johnny Cool, it was most likely bad taste, or a quality that we recognize from a distance of decades as camp. Henry Silva deserved better.
Along with James Stewart and Anthony Mann, director Henry King and star Gregory Peck set the darker, more mature tone for 1950s westerns with The Gunfighter (1950). According to legend, the film failed at the box office, and 20th Century-Fox mogul Darryl F. Zanuck blamed the failure on Peck's insistence on wearing a moustache. Peck made no such error when he and King teamed up again eight years later for this widescreen revenge story. By 1958 the concept of the "adult western" was widely enough understood that Fox could promote The Bravados as such a film. For the studio's purposes, however, the term probably didn't denote the moral ambiguities and "psychological" tone the genre had developed so much as the fact that King's movie dealt with rape.
Peck first appears as a stranger riding towards a town where he's heard there'll be a hanging. A deputy is under instructions to allow no one into town but Mr. Sims, the hangman, but he decides to escort a disarmed Peck in so the sheriff can question him. That official finds Peck's interest in the hanging a bit ghoulish, -- he claims not to know the four condemned men -- but agrees to let him stay. In these early scenes Peck is almost menacingly taciturn and icily indifferent to what others think of him.
Beer is fine for socializing before a hanging, but both Gregory Peck and Joan Collins may want stronger stuff later in the picture.
Most people in town mistake Peck for the hangman and open up about the crimes for which the foursome will die; they robbed a bank and killed men doing it. One person knows him, however; Josefa Velarde (Joan Collins), a rancher's daughter who hasn't seen the man she knows as Jim Douglass in some time. For now, Douglass is more interested in meeting the four doomed criminals, the "bravados." The sheriff allows him to take a look, a privilege he'll only grant otherwise to the chubby, avuncular Sims, who's finally arrived in town. Peck gives the quartet a good looking over, but none of them seem to recognize him, and after he leaves, they wonder among themselves who he is and what he's about.
Ladies and gentlemen, The Bravados: Stephen Boyd and Albert Salmi on top, Lee Van Cleef and Henry Silva below.
But the bravados have more important business: breaking out. The profoundly unthreatening hangman is not Mr. Sims but their man ("Curly Joe" DeRita!), waiting for the right moment to stab the sheriff in the back. It comes while Douglass, Josefa and most of the town are attending Mass. In this sequence old-timer Henry King beats Francis Ford Coppola to the punch by 14 years in crosscutting between a religious service, complete with eerie sacred music, and sinister doings elsewhere. He also milks maximum suspense out of the bravados' desperate effort to reach the jail key that fell out of the sheriff's pocket. "Sims" was supposed to use it to unlock their cell, but the sheriff managed to shoot him down before succumbing. The four men reach for it with their arms, legs, a ladle and a blanket, missing several times.
They're still struggling for it when we cut back to the church and the early departure of a shopkeeper's daughter (Kathleen Gallant). She goes to Dad's store, only to get jumped by the head bravado (Stephen Boyd), the gang having made good on their breakout offscreen. Now they have a hostage and human shield, as well as a head start on any pursuers. A posse forms quickly, but Douglass won't join them until morning, assuming that they'll have little chance of gaining ground on the gang at night.
By the time he catches up with the posse they've been pinned down by sniper fire by Bravado No. 2 (Albert Salmi), who departs amid their confusion to rejoin his pals. The gang quickly makes out that they man they know only as "the hunter," the stranger who visited them in jail, is their main pursuer. Boyd delegates the weakest link of the foursome (Lee Van Cleef) to ambush the hunter. Being the weakest link, he is himself ambushed by the stealthy Douglass. He's less interested in finding the other three bravados than in showing Van Cleef a pocket watch. It has a photo of a woman and child inside. It doesn't play a tune, but the scene, including Van Cleef's presence, has to have influenced Sergio Leone a little in the making of For a Few Dollars More. In any event, Douglass wants to know if Van Cleef recognizes the woman. He doesn't, he says, but Douglass won't believe him. It becomes clear that Douglass believes that the bravados raped and murdered this woman -- his wife. That's why he wanted to see them die, and why he's out to make them die now....
Peck's Jim Douglass is the archetypal obsessive antihero of Fifties westerns. His motives are selfish and self-righteous at the same time, and the interest of society in seeing the bravados captured and punished are a secondary consideration at best. Douglass has been letting his grievance stew for an unhealthy period of time. That comes out during his interrogation of Van Cleef, as he regales the terrified man with his imagined version of his wife's pleas for mercy. It's like a man picking at a scab in order to see his own blood and feel familiar pain, and it has gruesome consequences for the men he catches. A lot is left of necessity to our imagination, probably due to Production Code requirements, but we seem to be meant to assume that Douglass tortures two of the bravados to death during his quest. I'm going to spoil the ending in the next paragraph, so some of you may want to skip it.
Fifties audiences may have decided that Stephen Boyd's character deserved death for raping women, but is his death just as deserved if he dies for the wrong reasons?...
In a lot of the Fifties Westerns the antihero relearns civilized values in time to back off from committing any real atrocity. The Bravados is one of the exceptional films that doesn't grant its protagonist that luxury, since he doesn't realize the error of his actions until after he's already done them. Douglass has reduced the foursome to a lone survivor (Henry Silva, portrayed as the brains if not the leader of the group) whom he tracks across the Mexican border. He follows Silva to his home, where his wife is tending a sick child. Douglass invades the home to ambush Silva, only to get KO'd with a ceramic pot by Mrs. Bravado. When he wakes, Silva wants to know what it's all been about. Douglass brings out the watch again and, like all the others, Silva denies knowing the woman. Before crossing the border, Silva and Boyd had killed an old miner who lived near Douglass's ranch, and Silva had pocketed a sack of gold the miner had tried to run off with. Douglass now recognizes the sack as his property, lost the day his wife died. As Silva explains how he got it (which we know to be the truth), and as Douglass explains that the miner had tipped him off in the first place to the four men who had passed through the territory that day, Douglass realizes at last that the miner had fingered the bravados in order to throw the trail off himself. The miner had murdered Mrs. Douglass and taken her gold. The realization devastates Douglass, as well it might. We've seen plainly that the bravados are not nice guys. Boyd, in particular, is a rapist, and when Josefa learns of his latest rape she hysterically urges Douglass to wipe out the gang. But if you go after men, and kill some of them, for something they didn't do rather than what they have done, you may as well have killed innocent men. That's the message of this screenplay by the ubiqitous Philip Yordan, at least, and the most it can offer Douglass at the end is the consolation of the Church and the promise of Josefa's healing love.
King gives The Bravados all the sweep you'd want in a widescreen western. The film looks like it was shot entirely on locations, and that seems to have compelled King to do a lot of day-for-night shooting. It almost works when the old hand uses filters to recreate the tinting effects he'd have used in silent days, but the effect is ruined whenever the camera catches bright white clouds in the sky. Peck gives a strong performance, minimalist at first to keep us wondering about Douglass, then more intense as his catharsis is repeatedly denied. The bravados are a fine ensemble and work well together. Especially good is a scene between Boyd and Salmi in which they commit to stick together after they lose the posse. Boyd explains that his one weakness is women, and Salmi admits that his is cards. We finally realize that this has been an elaborate exercise in outlaw etiquette enabling Salmi to gracefully leave Boyd alone with their female hostage. It's a classical male-bonding scene with a chilling effect at the end. While King can't invest the film with all the outdoor expressionism of Anthony Mann or the lean rigor of Budd Boetticher, The Bravados shares much of the mood of their movies and deserves inclusion among the better westerns from the decade when Americans did them best.
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.