Quella carogna dell'ispettore Sterling (1969)

aka The Falling Man

aka Frame Up

Inspector Sterling (Henry Silva being intense and a bit disturbing, as he does best) of the San Francisco Police Department has had a bit of a rough time these last few months: first, he's framed for killing an informer by the two hoods who actually did it in front of his own eyes, then he loses his job, then he witnesses said hoods in a payroll hold-up while staking them out (for revenge, one assumes) and sees his former colleagues botching the easy catch, then his little son is killed in a drive-by shooting by you know who, and finally his wife leaves him. It's like the most depressing country song ever written, except for the lack of a dying dog.

Giving this series of events, it's not exactly a surprise that Sterling is now out for vengeance, nor that he is perfectly willing to torture the hoods, threaten a model (Beba Loncar) somehow connected to the mysterious mastermind of the whole affair, or provoke shoot-outs. Sterling's former boss Inspector Donald (Keenan Wynn) is none too happy with Sterling's new hobby, but then, he doesn't seem to be getting anywhere with his more lawful investigative methods.

Not that Sterling himself is all that successful, really. His best witnesses have the tendency to get killed by somebody before he can punch what he wants to know out of them. Worse, all the violence he commits and suffers through finds him in an increasingly deteriorating physical and mental state. The question is only if he'll be able to catch whoever his enemy might be before he breaks down completely.

Quella carogna dell'ispettore Sterling was directed by the rather wonderful Emilio Miraglia whose small filmography in all of everyone's favourite Italian movie genres is a thing to behold, though all of his few films but his two giallos, The Red Queen Kills Seven Times and The Night Evelyn Came Out Of The Grave, are increasingly difficult to find in complete versions with decent print quality. Going by the wonderful surreal spy movie Assassination and the film at hand, this state of affair is quite a loss. For my tastes, there's absolutely no reason why Miraglia shouldn't be up there with his better-known colleagues of Italian genre cinema, and I'm sure the two of his films I haven't been able to see until now won't change my mind about that.

Anyway, Quella carogna dell'ispettore Sterling is not quite as surreal and dream-like as Assassination (also starring Silva) was, but its narrative style isn't exactly straightforward. Unlike in my synopsis, Sterling's background and motivation are explained in a series of intense, feverish flashbacks throughout the film, mirroring the character's increasingly alienated sense of his surroundings, and increasing the feeling that Sterling is just a short step from a total mental breakdown; something his actions make quite clear already. Often, it even seems as if Sterling's actions have become divorced from his supposed motives for them, as if he had lost himself so much his actions have become automatic.

Driven by the flashbacks, the rest of the movie's action consists of scenes of Sterling attempting to make sense of the few clues he has by punching them, Sterling looking at 1969's pop culture with a disgusted and confused face (this sure isn't the world he grew up in, one can't help but assume), and Sterling in various violent altercations and chases. The further the film progresses, and the more obsessed Sterling becomes, the less Miraglia seems interested in action movie realism or the logic of his mystery, and the more Quella carogna dell'ispettore Sterling shares Sterling's own reduction to his simplest impulses, the world becoming a truly strange place to him and to his audience.

This state of affairs is foreshadowed by an early scene where Sterling witnesses a group of young, pretty people killing each other in a shoot-out that is then revealed to be the shooting of a jeans commercial, a revelation Sterling reacts to with a mixture of confusion, disgust yet also disinterest. I somehow doubt the Levi's logo used here is product placement, or you'd have to doubt to sanity of the PR people responsible.

All this does of course have clear parallels to the tales of alienation so often told in noir movies on more than just the most basic plot level, it's just that the world the film's hero is alienated from (possibly by) is quite a different one from that of the 1940s, and therefore his alienation needs to be expressed a little differently, pop art aspersions replacing German expressionism.

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,emilio miraglia,henry silva,beba loncar,keenan wynn,eurocrime,reviews

In short: Fuller Report (1968)

Original title: Rapporto Fuller, base Stoccolma

Thanks to his galaxy-sized ego and his peanut-sized brain, testosterone-driven monstrosity/professional racing driver Dick Worth (Ken Clark) stumbles into an espionage conspiracy and becomes a murder suspect while he's visiting Stockholm with his manager.

Soon, Dick finds himself hounded by US agents, Soviet agents and people of undisclosed allegiance. All of them think Dick has something to do with what is known as the Fuller Report, so chasing him, kidnapping him and being involved in shoot-outs with him is the natural way to find out what that damn report actually is. Once the Americans have ascertained that Dick does in fact not have a clue about anything except driving cars and trying horrible pick-up lines on women, they decide to press him into service as their worthless, know-nothing professional bear bait, a position he is just too qualified to take, especially since he has somehow made a good impression on ballerina Svetlana Golyadkin (Beba Loncar), an escapee from the Soviet Union and the daughter of a former higher official there. Somehow, Svetlana is involved in the whole Fuller Report affair too, but how, nobody is really sure. Ironically, Dick just might be in a position to find out.

Sergio Grieco's Fuller Report is a fun little example of the Eurospy movie that does not partake in too much of the crack headed madness of large parts of its subgenre (its improbable hero and improbable plot are minor compared to what I'm used to from these films), and doesn't really feature much globe-trotting, yet still includes many of the other elements fun about the sub-genre.

The film makes itself at home in its audience's brains with many silly yet fun twists in its silly yet fun plot, clearly not giving a damn about plausibility when it can spend its time more profitably giving a damn about variety. There's also some lip service towards the concept of the spy game being dark and somewhat immoral, but the film is clearly more interested in involving its amateur spy jerk hero in outrageous yet budget-conscious adventures than in exploring anything more serious for long. That's of course an approach perfectly okay with me as long as a film does provide in the spy action department. Fuller Report certainly does that, for there's hardly a minute when its thematically appropriately named hero is not involved in one pretty exciting situation or the other: shoot-outs, car chases, kidnappings and a bit of torture are all there and provided for, and better, they're all filmed with verve and a sense of excitement.

Ken Clark, at that point already a veteran in Italian genre films, is not exactly a great thespian, but has enough screen presence to keep the frequently dickish Worth something of a charming jerk, and is certainly throwing himself into any and all action sequences with the sort of conviction that makes a cheap yet clever fight when a lackluster performance could have broken it.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,spies,eurospy,in short,sergio grieco,ken clark,beba loncar,lincoln tate

In short: Don't Look In The Attic (1982)

Original title: La Villa Delle Anime Maledette

aka House of the Cursed Spirits

aka House of the Damned

Three relatives and one spouse (Annarita Grapputo, Tonino Campa, Fausto Lombardi and Ileana Fraia) who didn't know about each other's existence because they've all been scattered around the world by their parental generation, inherit the family fortune and the family mansion. Alas, the fortune comes with the condition to live in the mansion, and the mansion is cursed, having cost the lives of many a generation of the family by driving them to murder and suicide.

This time around, family member Elisa has a direct connection to the beyond, but despite her mother's dire warnings from the grave, she - and her male cousins - still end up living in the unhealthy family home. Elisa's cousins soon succumb to the house's bad influence, and it's only a question of time until a bloodbath will happen and/or a completely random explanation for what's happening in the movie will pop in out of nowhere.

Carlo Ausino's (whoever he might be) Don't Look In The Attic is a shoddy and threadbare movie even for the not exactly high standards of Italian movies made at the beginning of the 80s. I've become used to the often stiff and always slightly off nature of the English dubbing of these films, but Don't Look beats most everything I've encountered from these quarters by virtue of swinging in a wildly out of sync way between the incomprehensible and the plain stupid.

The dubious quality of the English language dub is quite a good thing, for it adds entertainment value to a film in dire need of it. Between its too few expected moments of batshit insanity, Don't Look is quite a bore, you see, so it's actually necessary that its longish discussions of the reproductive problems of some family members (really) and the non-relationship between one of the family lawyers and his secretary Martha (Beba Loncar), who will also swing a mean silver dagger later on, are made more interesting through the dubbing.

The main problem standing between Don't Look and a place in my heart is that it spends too much time on scenes of nothing happening at all, and too little on expanding my mind with true Italian weirdness. It's true that there are moments of the skewed and nonsensical beauty I'm looking for in this sort of film, but these moments are drowned out by the wrong, which means the uninteresting instead of the hypnotic, kind of boredom. Don't Look In The Attic is a film that can even make an incestuous rape attempt look utterly boring.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,horror,in short,carlo ausino,beba loncar,annarita grapputo