SARAJEVO (Das Attentat: Sarajevo 1914, 2014)

The U.S. will soon observe the centennial of its entry into World War I. With that in mind, Netflix is currently streaming Andreas Prochaska's Austro-Czech TV film, which looks to be the JFK of World War I movies. It's about the investigation by Austrian authorities in Sarajevo, the capital of Austrian-ruled Bosnia, of the assassination there of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary. The Archduke and his wife were killed on the second try that day by Serbian nationalists. Holding the Kingdom of Serbia responsible for their action, Austria issued an ultimatum most observers feel was designed to be rejected so that the Hapsburg empire, backed by Germany, could invade Serbia. Historians are certain that rogue elements within the Serbian government, if not the government itself, supported the conspiracy, but the assassination, given its world-historical consequences, has been an overdue target for more creative conspiracy theorists. Why, they might ask, was the Archduke allowed back on the street after the first assassination attempt, a bombing, failed? Why did the second motorcade seem to stop right in front of Gavrilo Princip, the gunman who succeeded where the bomber failed? And why would any Serbians carry out a conspiracy that amounted to national suicide?

The assassin's creed: If at first you don't succeed, try, try again.

Prochaska and writer Martin Ambrosch go for the solution that probably seems most obvious to the modern conspiracist. Since Austria's ultimatum seemed to show that they were spoiling for war, might they not have tried to create a pretext for war themselves? Franz Ferdinand was a controversial figure thought to desire greater rights for the empire's ethnic minorities; that would make him expendable, presumably, to some in the Hapsburg establishment. But according to Ambrosch the ultimate motive is more venal. Investors wanted to build a railroad linking Germany to the farther reaches of the Ottoman Empire, reaching from Berlin to Bagdad. To be feasible the road would have to go through Serbia. Better than if Serbia were subject to the German powers in Berlin and Vienna. Serbs had reasons of their own to lash out at Austria -- they resented the perceived subjugation of fellow Serbs through the Austrian annexation of Bosnia in 1908 -- but given how obvious it now seems that Austria would punish Serbia with war, the Serbs can only seem patsies furthering what looks like an Austrian or German agenda.

A mere functionary like Leo Pfeffer can be told what to think; he has less luck convincing others.

So it comes to seem to Leo Pfeffer (Florian Teichtmeister), the magistrate put in charge of the initial investigation. He comes under increasing pressure to produce a report blaming the Serbian government as soon as possible, as if a timetable had already been determined. But as Pfeffer sees the apparent implausibilities in the events as they played out, and as he falls in love with the daughter of a Serbian industrialist who has fallen under suspicion, he begins to stall for time to get at the truths that his superiors seem increasingly uninterested in learning. As he keeps raising questions, and keeps pressuring Princip and the other Serb prisoners to tell all they know, he is made more conscious of his outsider status as a Jew who's in love with a Serb. Pfeffer was a real person who isn't highly thought of by historians who see him as an underqualified provincial. Das Attentat imagines a more conscientious Pfeffer who's forced to sign the required indictment of Serbia -- his motive here is to secure his lover's release from prison -- while continuing his own dogged quest for the truth to universal indifference. The filmmakers can change the historical Pfeffer, but their more heroic Pfeffer still can't change history. Teichtmeister gives a good slow-burn performance that permits some sympathetic suspension of disbelief as you hope he'll find something that might stop the war in its tracks. Inevitably Das Attentat must take the form of tragedy, and that tone seems appropriate to the tragic truth of the Great War, even if the filmmakers' historiography is unsound.

Mill Creek Invasion: TOP LINE (1988)

Few movie stars have had a more diverse career, to put it mildly, than Franco Nero. For the longest time I knew him only as the guy from the Camelot musical, where he started his epic on, off and currently very much on relationship with Vanessa Redgrave, and some today may know him only as the old guy who was Redgrave's romantic interest in Letters to Juliet. It came as a surprise to me as I became a student of cult and global pop cinema that Nero had such an extensive career in genre cinema, from his international breakthrough as Django to a forthcoming performance as Aleister Crowley -- insert your own exclamation points. There's a lot of strangeness in between, over more than 170 appearances on film so far. Nero seemed capable of doing schlock and prestige almost simultaneously; he seems to have turned nothing down. For instance, before reporting for Franco Zeffirelli's Young Toscanini, Nero was in Colombia shooting a number of films and fathering a child. One of those Colombia-shot shows was this action film directed by Nello Rossati, who had filmed the one-and-only official Django sequel with Nero one year earlier. Top Line (that appears to be its original title) is a kind of compendium of Eighties genre motifs. coming on at first like a Romancing the Stone or Raiders type adventure story before snowballing through blatantly derivative sci-fi conspiracy themes with an inexorably wacky momentum that makes the film entertainingly bad.

Nero plays Ted Angelo, a journalist sojourning in Colombia, where he's pressured by his publisher, who happens to be his ex-wife, into fulfilling his writing contract. The hard-drinking Ted has women trouble all over the place; when he tells his Colombian girlfriend he's feeling tired, she pulls a knife on him. He explains quickly that he didn't mean he was tired of her. Getting back to work, he investigates an amazing find by a local hunter: a trove of Central American trinkets and a ship's log. The log may rewrite history because it indicates that one of the early transatlantic expeditions of "500 years ago" made a hitherto unknown stop in Colombia. For more info about the treasures, Ted tries to interview Heinrich Holzmann (George Kennedy, dubbed by someone else), a prominent collector and Nazi war criminal. After Holzmann rebuffs him, things start falling apart. Ted's apartment is ransacked and one of his friends is killed. He barely escapes from stalkers, only to find himself chased barefoot through a cactus patch by a car driven by a cackling Holzmann. He escapes Holzmann by burying him under a ton of salt, but a Nazi George Kennedy is only a warm-up.

The problem is, Ted's made the discovery of the century. Guided by the hunter, he's found the old Spanish ship -- and a spaceship. As he frantically urges his publishers to pick up the story, shadowy forces close in on him and his new girlfriend (Deborah Barrymore, who is related not to Drew but to Roger Moore). After more hairbreadth escapes, including one where he rides in the bed of a produce truck driven by a drunk and defeats his pursuers by throwing eggs at their windshield, things get still worse in a small town when a bulky, vaguely teutonic looking fellow opens fire on a crowd with a machine gun. This new adversary seems superhuman, tossing people aside two at a time. He can take a fireworks rocket to the eye with only cosmetic damage that reveals him as a termina--oh, let's call him a robot or cyborg or something else. With no heavy machinery that might crush the artificial life out of this mechanical menace, Ted must save himself the natural way. That's right; our hero must trap the relentless automaton in a corral with a bull. And that's all she wrote. It isn't even close. Had Skynet miscalculated and sent the original Terminator back to the Old West, one begins to suspect, the poor thing wouldn't have stood a chance.

Following the recent ban on human bullfighting in Barcelona, Catalonian tourist authorities are testing a futuristic, bull-friendly alternative.

Finally, rescue seems at hand when Ted's ex arrives with a boat. But no; she's part of the conspiracy, too -- a 12,000 year old conspiracy to cover up aliens' mining of a special element essential for space travel. For most of that time, the ex explains, mankind wasn't a threat because we were just too stupid. But "your evolution was a threat, so we took measures." Those measures included disguising as humans and becoming the leaders of all levels of society, including the publishing business, as this so-called woman demonstrates by stripping, vomiting on herself, sweating very heavily and enduring a round of face-pumping until she shows her true, hideously alien form. As his new girl faints, Ted gapes in disbelief. What have you done with my ex-wife, he asks? "Here I am, honey," the alien answers, as the film takes a final, queasy turn. She's now equipped with a projectile tongue that wraps around Ted's neck and yanks him toward her yawning fanged mouth. "You still taste good to me," the beast coos, "I am partial to your flavor." That's just dirty....

This is an extreme makeover.

Top Line is nonstop zaniness held together by Franco Nero in hysterical action mode. It passes for science fiction without relying too much on special effects, which is a good thing given that the effects, for the robot-man especially, are "special" in the unflattering sense of the word. From the limited evidence of the typically ravaged Mill Creek copy, the Colombia locations keep things consistently picturesque while giving things that edge-of-civilization feel of so many Italian genre films from the Eighties. The film moves fast and gets crazier as it goes along, and for a bad movie that's a good thing. Depending on your mood, Top Line can make for an amusing 90 minutes; for everyone, I hope it was amusing to read about.

Mill Creek Invasion: EYES BEHIND THE STARS (Occhi dalle stelle, 1978)

Roy Garrett, the credited writer and director of Eyes Behind the Stars, was a member of the National Investigation Committee on Aerial Phenomena and a field investigator for the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization. All of that seems to be true except for the man's name. "Garrett" was the sometime screen name of Mario Gariozzi, who is cited as an investigative researcher in some UFO literature online. In his hands, Occhi dalle stelle becomes a cross between Sunn Classic Pictures's Hangar 18 and Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up. The Antonioni part is the film's MacGuffin. A fashion photographer inadvertently catches evidence of a UFO landing during a lengthy photoshoot in the woods. The aliens take no chances with him, kidnapping and probing him in ways best left to the imagination. Just laying on a slab is enough to fill the picture snapper with bug-eyed terror. The aliens themselves are not left to the imagination -- unless you want to see them out of uniform.

Maybe the aliens are meant to look menacing, but I just want to pet them.

They also try to zap all film evidence of their presence, without realizing that several crucial frames have been given to ex-cop turned reporter Tony Harris (Robert Hoffman) who becomes our dogged protagonist in an increasingly paranoid scenario. He has to worry not just about aliens but agents of the British government (like many Italian genre films, this one is set in the U.K.) dedicated to silencing all inquiries about UFOs in order to prevent global panic. These silencers are always a few steps and a few punches ahead of him, leading him to suspect that one of his supposed allies is actually part of the conspiracy? Could it be the girl with the suspicious cast on her arm (Nathalie Delon)? Could it be the all-too-convincing UFO conspiracy buff who doubles as an antiques dealer? There are simply too many details that can't be explained normally. Why doesn't Martin Balsam, playing a policeman, speak in his own voice? Was the 1966 Best Supporting Actor Oscar Winner incapable of speaking in a British accent? And where do our heroes find a telepath all of a sudden to probe the mind of an abductee? I guess if UFOs are real, then all things are possible.

Our hero (above center) has his troubles fighting men, but takes no chances with women.

Despite the superficial sci-fi trappings, Occhi dalle stelle is more conspiracy thriller, at least in intention, than futuristic fantasy. There are fewer scenes of saucers in flight, or even of fuzzy-costumed aliens probing victims, than there are of Robert Hoffman fighting conspirators and their goons with fists and guns. Some of the stagings and set design suggest a Vittorio Storaro influence on cinematographer Erico Menczer, but the usual limitations of a Mill Creek disc make a fair appraisal impossible. Most of the alien activity consists of POV camera crawls, flashing lights and vanishing objects. It's a grim affair in more ways than one, capped with a typical Seventies finish that here, given the auteur's own interest in the subject, sounds almost like a cri de coeur against the cover-up that simply must exist. By Mill Creek standards, Eyes Behind the Stars has some camp value thanks to the goofy photo-shoot scene, the funky looking aliens, and the random telepath, but there's also a mean-spiritedness to it, possibly reflecting the director's frustrations as a UFO researcher, that has its darkest expression when the hero takes out his frustrations on a female character. That puts a little edge on the goofiness that viewers might find gratifying, but for its current target audience of Mill Creek fans the film probably could have used more goofiness.

On the Big Screen: THE GHOST WRITER (2010)

When a woman hands a man the confidential manuscript of a memoir and tells him he has a limited time to read it, I don't need to see the white pages turn into a snowy landscape to know that the spirit of Orson Welles is in the room. Roman Polanski's new film is Wellesian in theme if not in style or structure. If it hints at Citizen Kane at some points, it points to Mr. Arkadin in others. One can only imagine what Welles might make of the situation Polanski has adapted from Robert Harris's novel, in collaboration with the author. The title character is an unnamed writer (Ewan McGregor) hired to polish the memoir of a former British prime minister (Pierce Brosnan) after the politician's original collaborator dies. The previous ghost writer got separated from his car and the ferry that bore it under circumstances that grow increasingly suspicious, while the pressure on the present ghost to finish the book grows more urgent as his subject faces an International Criminal Court indictment for war crimes. Adam Lang (meant as a stand-in for Tony Blair, though Brosnan attempts no imitation) is accused of placing four alleged terrorists into the hands of CIA torturers. Is there a connection between his legal jeopardy and the death of his previous ghost writer? Does the project put the present writer in jeopardy? It wouldn't be much of a thriller otherwise.

McGregor's character is a kind of doppelganger for Lang and may be set up to die for Lang's sins if he isn't careful. As he comes to question the official version of his predecessor's demise, he stumbles across some supplemental research the first writer had undertaken on Lang's rise to power. As he traces the first ghost's fatal steps, the new ghost puts himself in danger of ending up in the same place, setting up some nicely handled set pieces of pursuit and escape. Meanwhile, he finds himself in a potentially dangerous relationship with Lang's wife (Olivia Williams), who's jealous of hubby's closeness with his chief assistant (Kim Cattrall). All of this is handled very well by the sure-handed director. The film betrays nothing of the constrained circumstances of its final assembly, Polanski having edited it in jail while extradition to America for an extended stay seemed likely. The acting is good all around, possibly excepting Brosnan. He doesn't strike me as the sort of wonky politician I expected Blair or a fictional counterpart to be, but in his defense the movie politician is supposed to be less than meets the eye; that's part of the plot. Polanski gets the most from limited use of such American character actors as Timothy Hutton, Jim Belushi and the mighty Eli Wallach. Someday, at the end of the world, Wallach and Ernest Borgnine will face each other as the last men standing, and while Wallach looks a little frail here I wouldn't count him out.

The Ghost Writer is an effective, entertaining film that I readily recommend, but it left me wondering whether the conspiracy thriller genre is going obsolete. Thrillers of this kind work by withholding and gradually revealing information in a process that doesn't seem realistic in the current information age. Without spoiling anything, let me note that The Ghost Writer saves a major piece of circumstantial evidence for its final revelation. That revelation is meant to have you suddenly think differently about a major character. In retrospect, however, you sense that the writers had manipulated you into an artificial presumption of innocence. Given the internet research our hero undertakes to discover the sinister ties linking other characters, it seems unlikely, given that final revelation of a detail that seems to have been public knowledge, that the ghost would not have stumbled onto something online that at least suggested the association that so floors him later. When you consider that one tidbit he learns from a single website is accepted by an important person as decisive proof of a monstrous, decades-long conspiracy to manipulate British politics, his failure to find anything to warn him of a more dangerous truth seems even more unlikely. Movies are simply falling behind the ability of the conspiratorial imagination to draw inferences. As a result, it was in its final minutes when The Ghost Writer suddenly seemed most old fashioned -- and its extra revelation of a hokey secret code didn't help. But overall, Polanski's film is old-fashioned in good ways, and many people may not feel the same way about the ending as I did. Maybe I'm just too conspiracy-minded -- but that's just what they'd like you to believe....

GOOD MORNING, NIGHT (Buongiorno, Notte, 2003)

Chiara and Ernesto, newlyweds, have just moved into a new apartment, and friends are helping them put the finishing touches on a new bookcase. It's a new year, 1978 -- an annus horribilis for Italy, introduced with a countdown on a tacky TV variety show. And one morning, alone at home, Chiara hears the roar of a helicopter overhead. She watches with unusual eagerness, and starts impatiently flipping the channels with her remote control until she finds a news bulletin: Aldo Moro, the former president of Italy and present head of the Christian Democratic party, has been kidnapped in an attack that has left several bodyguards dead.

Chiara practically jumps for joy, and then there's a knock on the door. It's the next-door neighbor; she needs to leave her baby with Chiara while she goes to the store. It's impossible to say no, but Chiara clearly knows little about tending a baby. She props it up on some pillows on the couch as she avidly watches the live reports.

Now there's another knock. She leaves the baby on the couch and lets in her friends, who bring in a large crate. The bookcase they were working on is a passageway into a hidden room, into which they drag the crate, one man asking, "Which end is his head?" Everyone pauses when the neighbor knocks to reclaim her baby, but then it's back to work. The man in the crate may have some broken ribs; Chiara is sent to get some medical supplies. These are the Red Brigades, and Aldo Moro is their prisoner.

This chilling sequence sets the tone for Marco Bellocchio's increasingly hallucinatory meditation on one of the darkest chapters in modern Italian history. It's one of many Italian films from this decade that look back on the 1970s, the time we movie fans identify with giallo thrillers and tough-cop action films. This is a look at the reality of violence and tension in which those genres flourished, but at the same time Bellocchio contemplates the unreality of the intersection of history and mundane life. Chiara is the focal figure, since she must continue to hold down a job in a library and must maintain a pretense of normality among outsiders. But the outside is politicized, too. Her friend from the library, Enzo, is a kind of radical (and the author of a screenplay about terrorists taking hostages called Good Morning, Night), and a bus Chiara rides fills up with red-flag waving strikers to the disgust of elderly women. Chiara and Enzo attend a family reunion of some sort (are they related?) and listen to old guys singing Communist partisan songs from World War II--and as you see Chiara listening you can see her growing ever more alienated from people who simply talk or sing about revolution.

At the same time, she seems to question the reality of her own incredible situation as the jailer of Moro, and the audience has even more reason to question the reality of her comrades' claim to represent the proletariat as they put Moro on trial for his life. Bellocchio does a terrific job of disorientation through the simple juxtaposition of the ordinary and the extraordinary.

The Brigadistas watch TV and do household chores and wonder why their great gesture has not inspired the masses to rise against the state. "Why is no one rebelling?" one complains as they watch politicians (including our old friend Giulio Andreotti) bloviate against terrorism. Later, all four of the gang start chanting "The working class must command" as if doing that will dispel the facts they see on TV. At that moment the Brigadistas seem almost inhuman, but Bellocchio isn't out to demonize them. Chiara is meant to be the human face of terrorism, the enemy embedded among us, the person who still has a job to worry about and isn't a full-time revolutionary, but is capable of terrible deeds. Her shuttling back and forth from work or outings with Enzo to her home -- Moro's prison -- makes her gradually question everything about her experience. As politicians and the Pope refuse to bargain for Moro's release, his captors tell him that his old friends no longer recognize him. He replies that he no longer recognizes himself. The same thing seems to be happening to Chiara. Her disorientation finds expression in dreams or delusions in which Moro moves freely about the apartment, or she tries to help him escape (only to find a horde of police outside her door), or Moro is finally free to feel the fresh air and morning rain after she poisons her comrades.

The fantastical details of Chiara's reverie of rescue include her Red Brigade comrades saying grace before slurping down their poisoned soup (above) and the poignant image of Aldo Moro at liberty (below)

It also finds expression in her alarm as Enzo (supposedly ignorant of her activities) imagines her as a character in his screenplay about terrorists and has her helping the victim in an irrational act of goodness. It finds objective expression in a brilliantly filmed moment of tension when Chiara, climbing the stairs in her library building, hears a host of police hurrying up behind her and expects her own arrest at any moment, only to see them take Enzo away instead.

With little gimmickry, Bellocchio has built a great film around a great performance by Maya Sansa. The only part of it that really rings false for me is the director's use of black-and-white newsreel or old movie footage in what seems like an attempt to illustrate the Brigadistas' revolutionary consciousness. I doubt whether they imagined the Revolution in such antique style, and the inclusion of some Stalinist frolics in the footage undercuts Bellocchio's attempt to foreground the kidnappers' humanity by making them look like totalitarian idiots. More successful is one montage of execution scenes played over Pink Floyd music from Dark Side of the Moon; the combination of image and sound clicks then, and it's all meant to illustrate Chiara's response to a book of condemned men's letters she's been reading, in anticipation of reading the condemned Moro's missives. The music overall, composed or compiled by Riccardo Giagni, evokes the era effectively while inserting original notes of dread or tension.

When I was still just a kid I had a subscription to Time magazine and read about the Moro crisis as it developed in 1978. I knew little about Italian movies then, -- I'd heard of Fellini but that was about it, -- but over time my interests in the country's cinema and its turbulent modern history have fed one another. By a certain point I was probably wondering more about what kind of culture produces such peculiar movies. By now I suppose that contemporary history is yet another Italian genre among the many the country's created. If so, then Good Morning, Night, is one of that genre's definitive films.

It's not pretty, but here's a wordless teaser for the movie that's really just an early scene on an elevator which does strike a representative note of dread.

THE PRICE OF POWER (1969)

The President is coming to Dallas. He's going to promote his social agenda, including racial reconciliation and an agricultural reform program that'll be paid for "from the pockets of the rich," despite protests from reactionary elements. It's so bad in some quarters that they've put up posters claiming that the President is "Wanted for Treason." His Texan Vice-President is of little help, since he's believed to be in thrall to powerful local interests who have damning evidence against him from his early days. The year is... Actually, I don't know what year it is. They never say, but I guess it would be Eighteen Something. For that matter, they never say what the President's name is, either, but you can guess who he represents. That's because Tonino Valerii's political thriller retells the story of the Kennedy assassination in the form of a spaghetti western.

Van Johnson is The President, but he's just Mr. President to his friends.

The nameless President is played by Van Johnson (though some filmographers claim that he's playing James A. Garfield), who did not stick around to redub his English dialogue in the recording studio. It's always strange to see a familiar actor and not hear his familiar voice, but if anything the vocal stand-in sounds more presidential than Johnson might have. This President was a Union colonel during the Civil War, and in that capacity condemned a Texas Unionist, Bill Willer (Giuliano Gemma), and his black sidekick Jack Donovan to ten years in prison for refusing to fire on Bill's father, a Confederate general. The elder Willer in the present day stumbles onto knowledge of an assassination plot because his old cronies don't realize that he's loyal to the reunited nation. The conspirators bump off the old man, but not before Bill thwarts plot number one: a scheme to blow up a railroad bridge as the presidential train passes over.

Giuliano Gemma weighs the charges against the President.

Jack, still Bill's sidekick and a resourceful character in his own right, is wounded in the early action. He recuperates in a central-city doctor's office that gives him a perfect view of the President's coach as it rolls through town -- and a perfect view of two snipers on an overpass who plan to plug the chief executive. Jack tries to thwart plot number two, but in the confusion is arrested as the successful assassin, playing the Oswald patsy role of conspiracy myth. Bill struggles to win Jack's freedom, reveal the real killers and get to the bottom of the obvious conspiracy, but his efforts are complicated by the conspirators' collapse into separate cut-throat factions (including one led by Fernando Rey) and a Presidential security officer determined to cover up the truth in order to avert a second civil war while pursuing the conspirators himself.

Back and To the Left: The President has been shot in The Price of Power. Who benefits? Fernando Rey, for one.

Il Prezzo del Potere is an act of cinematic audacity on a WTF level. Its generic cross of spaghetti action and conspiracy thriller is an unusual mix that gives the film a different feel from most Italian westerns. In the typical spaghetti the hero is always in control of the situation, or acts as if he is, apart from the requisite beatdown in the middle of the picture. Here Gemma must maneuver around forces that are clearly bigger and more powerful than he is, and the inevitability imposed by importing the JFK archetype gives the movie an atmosphere of inescapable doom, at least for the first two-thirds of it, that may be unique to the genre. The picture shakes loose of its pseudo-historical shackles late in the game, however, as Gemma gradually gains the upper hand and hunts down the conspirators who aren't busy destroying each other. Valerii doesn't do entirely without generic spaghetti shenanigans, introducing such details as a repeated guns-and-cigars game that requires antagonists to shoot at one another in the dark and a crippled journalist friend of Gemma who reveals his ownership of a crutch gun at a timely moment.

The corrupt sheriff (Benito Stefanelli) arranges for Jack Donovan's transfer to Fort Worth, with a posse of Jack Rubies lying in wait.

The film automatically raises the question of whether it reflects Valerii or screenwriter Massimo Patrizi's actual beliefs about the Kennedy assassination. Van Johnson embodies their idea of Kennedy when he speaks out in favor of racial equality and quotes lines associated with Robert Kennedy -- "I see things that could be and ask why not," etc. The Texan veep who's elevated into the Presidency by the assassination is aware of the conspiracy but torn by guilty feelings while wrestling with a determination to be his own man in Washington. His desire, shared by the security man MacDonald, to suppress any evidence of conspiracy for the sake of peace approximates what some people take to be Lyndon Johnson's own view, though in his case it's suspected that he didn't want to discover a Cuban connection to Kennedy's death because it might provoke World War III rather than an internal American conflict. The portrait as a whole of a relatively minor character is an ambivalent sketch of Johnson, who is more of an outright villain in some accounts. Jack Donovan's role as a patsy implies that the filmmakers believed that Oswald was one as well. While Oswald was seen as a leftist set up by rightists to take the blame, Jack, who is indisputably innocent, is blamed by the conspirator sheriff despite the exculpatory claim that Jack loved the President, "like all the poor and oppressed." The real enemy, the filmmakers insist, is a reactionary racist elite, some of whom are ready to risk renewed war to get their way, while others would be content to control the new men in power.

This, too, is America. Norma Jordan plays Annie, Jack Donovan's girlfriend who's willing to sell him out for a new wardrobe and the nearest thing to a femme fatale in The Price of Power.

Sometimes, though, the Kennedy conspiracy narrative and the spaghetti western genre don't fit well together. Consider the hero's determination that two men shot the President from the fatal overpass. Why two? Because no man can fire a gun twice in ten seconds. Leave aside the veracity of that claim and try to deal with the fact that this assertion is being made in a spaghetti western! Talk about what a motivated man can do with his rifle...

Oddly, The Price of Power ends up endorsing the idea of a cover-up for the good of the nation. In the penultimate act, an enraged Bill Willer forces MacDonald to turn over his documents proving a conspiracy so he can publicize the truth. He says he has two good reasons for taking the papers: he has a gun and he'll kill MacDonald if the security man doesn't turn them over. But in the last scene Willer returns the papers to MacDonald, saying, "You need them more than I do."

This is probably a spaghetti western that any genre buff should see, simply because there is and can be no other film like it. You may not agree with what it insinuates about the Kennedy assassination or about American politics in the 1960s, but the film is so uniquely and straightfacedly weird about its work that its worth a stop by any tourist in the wild world of cinema.

The Videoasia DVD of Price of Power, part of its new Spaghetti Western Bible Vol. 3 set, comes without a trailer or bonus materials, but does present a letterboxed copy of the film. The Italian trailer, uploaded to YouTube by mart85, shows off some of the impressive location work and some of the impressive score by Luis Enriquez Bacalov.