The Third Man (1949)

Pulp western writer Holly Martins (Joseph Cotton) comes to a post-war Vienna that’s all Dutch angles, high shadows and people of dubious trustworthiness. His childhood friend Harry Lime (Orson Welles) has lured him there with a vague job offer, and where Harry calls, Holly goes, vagueness or not. Alas, when Holly actually arrives, his friend is not in a fit state for providing a job, for he is about to be buried. Apparently, Harry Lime died in an automobile accident, not the kind of death you’d expect for a larger than life personage like him.

Apart from Holly, Harry Lime leaves behind an actress lover with a secret (Alida Valli) and British and Russian military policemen so happy about his death, they’re not going to actually investigate it. As Holly soon learns, his friend was apparently involved in large scale black market operations.

Holly really can’t believe that of his roguish but not evil childhood buddy and sets out to find a bit more about the Harry Lime situation than the police is ready to tell him. While Holly is doing that, he stumbles upon the fact that a mysterious third man appears to have been part of the accident that killed Harry. His friend’s death might very well have been murder. Together with Harry’s lover Anna Schmidt, Holly goes further and further done a proper rabbit hole of an investigation, while of course falling for the lady.

Carol Reed’s The Third Man is an indelible classic, situated somewhere where noir and Hitchcockian thriller meet. I’d argue that its portrayal of individuals trapped in the aftermath of a political conflagration, in the hand of secretive powers they can’t fully comprehend, is an important milestone on the road to the kind of pessimism the 70s conspiracy thriller would deal in. This version of Vienna is the incubation point of many things that would go wrong and grow worse in the coming two decades, as well as the way the movies would look at them.

Stylistically, I find The Third Man particularly fascinating as an example on how to use real locations (among some choice sets) and make them look unreal and threatening, how to see and shoot them as places where the shadows outside do indeed mirror the shadows inside the hearts of the characters. The abundance of Dutch angles portray an off-kilter world, the huge, often more than simply thick, shadows are bringing to the surface the undercurrents of reality in ways only a movie can.

As a German, I’m always surprised by the film’s use of actual Austrian actors for the minor roles, who, unlike what you encounter in most Hollywood films, speak actual idiomatic German, and whose dialogue feels utterly probable for the time and place. This adds a further layer of reality only accessibly to an audience who understands what these actors are saying.

There’s a very specific quality to The Third Man that suggests a film where everything comes together just right: the obvious visual artistry, the interest in getting details right, the interplay between heightened style and naturalism, the acting (Welles leaving a deep impression of a very complex character in only a couple of scenes, Cotton and Valli probably giving the performances of their lives without looking as if they are trying), the curious decisions that turn out to be just right (that zither score is such a strange idea, when you think about it). At the same time, it is one of those highly constructed films that never feels as if it were trying all that hard – it just is.

In short: The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971)

Medical doctors in 1920s London are killed in various peculiar and grotesque ways. It does take some time until the inauspiciously named Detective Inspector Trout (Peter Jeffrey) figures things out, but the only thing these doctors have in common apart from their titles is that they all took part in an operation which left their patient, one Victoria Regina Phibes (various very fetching photos of Caroline Munro), very dead indeed. It is the dead lady’s husband, the supposedly dead renaissance genius Dr Anton Phibes (Vincent Price) – assisted by the beautiful, talented and fashionable (that’s important) Vulnavia (Virginia North) - who is committing the murders, inspired by the biblical plagues no less. In between bouts of vigorous organ playing and monologues to his dead wife, of course. Will the police catch him before he manages to teach the last of the medicos, Dr Vesalius (Joseph Cotton) a valuable lesson from his bible studies?

I’m actually rather surprised I’ve never written even a tiny piece like this about this particular high water mark in the career of the great Vincent Price, as directed by Robert Fuest in his own career best moment. It’s high pop art in look and feel (some would say high camp), a film so stylish and stylized, so clearly understanding how the funnily grotesque and the macabre are related, it is still a feast for horror kids of all ages and tempers. It’s not a film for anyone of my kind of taste to simply enjoy but one to feel completely at home in, a comfy chair/favourite blanket combo of absurd murder methods, bright, popping colours, and production design that is at once strange, bizarre and makes absolute sense in context. Of course Dr Phibes would have his own tin robot band, and of course he’d have an organ that not just glows in the most intense red but also moonlights as a practical elevator perfect for dramatic entries and exits.

Price is absolutely brilliant here (as he so often was), projecting a grotesque operatic grandness even though the script by James Whiton and William Goldstein – in one of those perverse decisions that can turn out to be pure genius – lets Price use his wonderful voice only occasionally, in a scratchy form, when he’s plugged into his self-made voice box. But no matter for our hero, he can use body language just as well and nuanced in its bigness as his voice, gifting the film (and the audience) a performance that’s just as bizarre and perfectly right as the rest of this pretty perfect movie.

Past Misdeeds: A Whisper In The Dark (1976)

Original title: Un sussurro nel buio

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts without any re-writes or improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.

A rich Italian family lives the life of the rich and idle in their palatial mansion in the country. Things aren't quite as perfect as they seem, though. It's not just that family father Alex (John Phillip Law) is something of a jerk who cheats on his wife Camilla (Nathalie Delon) with a friend of hers who is staying as a house guest, or that the regularly visiting grandmother is a nasty old bint hiding her unpleasant interior behind impeccable manners, or that the family's two daughters make eardrum-shattering screeching noises whenever they open their mouths, or that Camilla's nerves are so on edge that she's bound to become the sort of hysteric that only exists in the mind of Freudians and filmmakers one day. No, all that is minor trouble when compared to the family's true problem.

Their little son Martino (Alessandro Poggi), you see, has an invisible friend called Luca on whom he seems to be more fixated than can be seen as healthy, but, quite unlike most invisible friends, Luca has a way of making his presence known physically. Luca moves objects around often enough to have Camilla and the nanny Francoise (Olga Bisera) believe the invisible child is more than just a figment of Martino's imagination. What's even more disturbing for Camilla is the fact that the name her son has given to his invisible playmate is the same she and Alex had given the stillborn boy they had before Martino, something the kid shouldn't know about at all.

Luca's presence becomes ever more direct, and though he seems to have the family's best interests in mind, he's not exactly unthreatening. Alex and Camilla decide their son needs professional help, but - not surprising to anyone watching - the usual neurological examinations find nothing at all. Alex manages to get hold of a rather dubious professor (Joseph Cotten) interested in the Weird, who is willing to move in with the family to take a closer look at Martino (and Luca). Although Alex doesn't realize it (obviously, being a jerk he ignores all of his wife's doubts), the Professor's interest in Martino isn't so much that of a doctor wanting to cure a patient, but rather that of a man having found an especially interesting lab rat. Of course, this isn't the sort of thing Luca will tolerate, and he defends his brother/creator/father in a rather lethal way. Alas, once a supernatural entity has begun with the murders, it tends not to stop with them again that easily.

Marcello Aliprandi's A Whisper In The Dark is Italian horror cinema of the 70s at its most typical: stylishly directed, beautifully photographed and drenched in a dream-like mood that is heightened by a fantastic Pino Donaggio soundtrack. It's a film occupying itself with creating an atmosphere for the audience's minds to inhabit, and not so much one interested in telling a clearly defined story. The film's pace is slow, very slow, from beginning to end, and what might sound like a clear increase in dramatic tension when looking at the plot on paper never feels as such when one is actually watching the film, because Aliprandi doesn't do dramatic tension as it us usually understood. Instead of working by the dramaturgical rules of the thriller, the film stops and starts, interspersing moments of tension and drama with scenes that prefer to circle around the things that are happening, or just hint at the things that might be happening or the motives that might be lying behind the characters' actions. For example, the film clearly insinuates that Cotten's Professor isn't wholly trustworthy through a certain shiftiness in the actor's behaviour (and the fact that he likes nothing more than let the family's maid bring him iced vodka to his bathtub, something he calls "imperative" for his mind to work), but it never outright shows or tells how bad his plans truly are, so that it never becomes clear how much of an act of self defence by Luca and/or Martino (again, if Luca is a telekinetic product of Martino's subconscious or his dead brother or something else is kept ambiguous) his murder truly is.

As an audience, we can speculate about the clearly supernatural, we can put our interpretative faculties into understanding it, yet we can never really know it.

Aliprandi uses a similar technique when it comes to the thematic underpinnings of his film. It's quite obvious that a part of the film's subtext is circling the way the child they have once lost has influenced the marriage and life of Camilla and Alex, and that Luca might be more of an externalisation of Camilla's inability to let go of her lost child (which in turn might be responsible for Alex being like he is), an interpretation that is certainly strengthened by the film's ending, but this isn't the sort of film ever willing to get concrete about, well, anything. Instead, A Whisper in the Dark hints and insinuates, and let's the audience do the thinking for themselves.


That's probably the point where friends of clear, linear narratives and directness in their horror movies will throw their remotes disgustedly at their TVs, but A Whisper in the Dark, like many of the most interesting European horror movies of the 70s, was not made with ideas like clarity and directness as virtues in mind at all, and therefore wasn't made for anybody expecting these things. It's all about the mood, the things that might be, and the things that happen inside of a viewer just willing to take a look, to feel and to speculate.

In short: The Perfect Crime (1978)

Original title: Indagine su un delitto perfetto

After the head of large, multi-national corporation dies in a toy plane explosion, his potential successors are desperately shuffling to get themselves into a good position for the election for the next company president. The potential candidates are race driver Paul De Revere (Leonard Mann), Sir Arthur Dundee (Joseph Cotten) and Sir Harold Boyd (Adolfo Celi), and they are just all too willing to transform the expected round of metaphorical backstabbing into some actual backstabbing.

First to go is Paul. Somebody sabotages the breaks of his car, causing the guy to collide with a truck, drive off a cliff and burn to difficult to identify parts in his sports car - it's like three deaths for the price of one.

Sir Arthur for his part has a fantastic plan of how to get rid of Sir Harold: Arthur sics his own lover Polly (Gloria Guida) on his rival to poison him during sex. Let's just hope it'll happen fast enough so that no one will kill Arthur by frying his pacemaker with some sort of microwave gun.

Sir Harold has his own problems anyway. His wife Gloria (Janet Agren) is the spouse who actually owns parts of the company, and she has proof for some of his shadier dealings she uses as protection against any murder attempts, so he has to keep her happy. Which is easier said than done with a woman like Gloria who really likes to rub her husband's nose in his helplessness - and in her affairs with various young men, including Paul.

Scotland Yard's Superintendent Hawks (Anthony Steel) - who just happens to be a cousin of Paul's - has quite a job in front of him.

Giuseppe Rosati's The Perfect Crime belongs to the sub-genre of the Italian giallo that has its fun with portraying the oh-so-decadent lives of the rich and mean in a cross of an especially mean-spirited soap opera with an exploitationed-up landhouse mystery in Agatha Christie's style - though it has to be said that the Italians' class politics are much less abhorrent than Christie's ever were.

The Perfect Crime takes up a perfect middle ground in its chosen sub-genre. It's not as unpleasant and misanthropic as some of its brethren and seems more interested in playing up the fun factor. While all the characters are abhorrent in one way or the other, Rosati's film's not wallowing in all the details of their abhorrence as much as it could, so there may be a few scenes of rich people being satisfyingly mean to each other, a bit of nudity by Guida and Algren, but nothing that should shock anyone not writing for Christian movie review sites. Rosati puts a higher emphasis on the mystery content of his movie, and has visible fun with the convoluted construction of his doubly convoluted plot, inventing some perfectly silly murder methods of the type that don't make much sense but are fun to watch especially because they don't make sense.

Of course, it's all a very slight affair, only mildly stylish directed, and most definitely not the sort of film that'll leave one with any new or interesting insights into humanity nor even just the evils of the rich. But - also of course - there's nothing at all wrong with a movie about unpleasant people doing fun yet murderous things to each other for profit being slight, as long as it actually is fun. And fun, The Perfect Crime is.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,in short,giallo,giuseppe rosati,gloria guida,joseph cotten,adolfo celi,janet agren

On WTF: A Whisper In The Dark (1976)

Original title: Un sussurro nel buio

One of the things I love best about the Italian horror movies of the 70s is their insistence on hiding ambiguity, incongruity and a total disinterest towards classical narrative techniques behind highly polished surfaces.

Marcello Aliprandi's A Whisper In The Dark (made with a pretty fantastic cast including Nathalie Delon, John Phillip Law and Joseph Cotten) might be the poster boy for this technique. My write-up on WTF-Film tells all!

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,john phillip law,nathalie delon,joseph cotten,reviews,horror,marcello aliprandi,other places

Latitude Zero (1969)

A trio of intrepid explorers, Dr. Tashiro (Akira Takarada), Dr. Masson (Masumi Okada) and annoyingly rude American reporter Lawton (Richard Jackel) are on a deep-sea diving mission, when a beautiful model underwater volcano erupts a little too close to their bathysphere. Fortunately, the sub-marine of humanitarian genius Captain Craig McKenzie (Joseph Cotten, probably slumming, certainly having fun) is close by.

McKenzie is the founder of a secret utopian society of scientists and other do-gooders based in an underwater city called Latitude Zero.

As our heroes will soon see, it's a very late Sixties kind of utopia, a place where funky architecture meets glowing buttons, where women wear vinyl, gold and short skirts, where no man (not even Joseph Cotten) likes to keep his breast fully covered and where the wondrous is the ordinary.

Of course a good genius needs an evil genius as his archenemy. McKenzie has his nemesis in form of Malic (Cesar Romero), a specialist in the creation of nonsensical chimeras like ape-bat-monsters, cute little attack bats and his crowning achievement, a lion-costume/vulture-costume-hybrid with the brain of his betrayed lover. He will - in contrast to my own feelings - be very surprised to learn the creature doesn't like him all that much.

The feud between the two men comes to a climax when Malic kidnaps Dr. Okada (Tetsu Nakamura), a scientist just on his way to Latitude Zero.

McKenzie and his new-found friends pay a visit to Malic's charmingly named island lair of Blood Rock. Will magical science like their jet-packs and their imperviousness to bullets help our heroes win the day? What are the giant rat costumes planning? Is vinyl the future of fashion?

If you haven't got it by now, let me tell you: Latitude Zero is a very silly movie, full of gorgeous late Sixties production design, monster costumes so cute, you want to cuddle them and actors playing gamely along with every silly idea director Ishiro Honda can come up with. As the friend of Toho Studios' kaiju and SF movies will understand, this means an astounding amount of silliness that would be enough to fill two or three comparable American movies. Fortunately, Honda never believed in a less is more aesthetic and prefers to deliver simply more of everything.

Of course, Latitude Zero is not a masterpiece, but very fun pulp SF that steals only the best from Jules Verne without all that pesky science.

 

Technorati-Tags: japanese movies,reviews,sf,ishiro honda,joseph cotten,tetsu nakamura,akira takarada