Somewhere in the Night (1946)

After throwing himself on a grenade, a soldier (John Hodiak) in World War II suffers from amnesia. He’s probably called George Taylor, or so the facts suggest. He’s not too keen on finding out more about himself, and even hides his condition from the Army, because he has found a letter among his belongings that suggests he might not be the nicest of guys.

Yet when the opportunity arises to be released to his apparently native Los Angeles, he still grasps it. Once there, the shell-shocked George even learns he might have had an actual friend by the name of Larry Cravat. Looking for something, anything to hold onto, George decides to find Larry. What follows is a series of encounters with the night people of LA, various attacks on his life, and even more questions concerning his own former habits and personality. Bar chanteuse Christy Smith (Nancy Guild) appears quite smitten by George, so things aren’t all bad, confusing and traumatic, even though our protagonist’s face has the sweaty Hollywood glow of stress on his face most of the time.

In many regards, Somewhere in the Night is a bit of a best of collection of the tropes later decades decided would make up the character of the noir as a genre. As many a noir, it isn’t an orderly constructed mystery, it hardly even is a laissez faire one, but rather a film that puts its audience very much into the same position as its protagonist has stepped into: utter confusion about his self and the world surrounding him, chasing shadows while encountering characters – all played by brilliant character actors – whose importance to his own questions or his life he can neither grasp nor understand for much of the film’s running time.

This sense of dislocation and confusion isn’t a weakness of writer/director Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s film, however, but its point. If ever there was a film about existentialist angst and a world that has broken down so much, a person even has to doubt their own identity and character, this one is it. As a portrayal of this, Somewhere in the Night is flawless.

Even George’s encounters with people who will turn out to have very little to do with his problems have a point in this regard, as Somewhere in the Night shows most of these characters to be just as much in the dark about the world, the plot and their roles in it as he is. Even the film’s main villain knows only parts of what is actually going on, and about these, he isn’t exactly right. Confusion and doubt are just the natural state of the film’s world.

All of this gives Somewhere the quality of an anxiety driven dream even before Mankiewicz and DP Norbert Brodine drench much of it in shadows not so much of night but of our ideal of night.

The dialogue wavers between sharp, clever and sarcastic quips and bouts of depression and existentialist doubt – all of which is about as naturalistic as a Shakespeare monologue, and therefore perfectly fitting to the artificial depths of the noir.

Somehow – perhaps because Hodiak looks and feels like a guy who really deserves a break, and Guild projects a genuine kind of  goodness that makes one root for the guy she goes out of her way to protect – I’m not even annoyed about Somewhere in the Night’s happy end, usually  a small irritant in noirs for me. Nightmares do turn into more pleasant dreams from time to time, after all.

The Boss (1973)

Original title: Il Boss

Sicily. After the old bosses have been driven into exile by the authorities, everyone left, be it newcomers from Calabria, the former small fry, or those dons not deemed important enough to get rid of, begins to violently scrabble for territory and influence. Gang wars minor and major flare up.

Right in the middle of it is Nick Lanzetta (Henry Silva), a guy who won’t think twice blowing up a private porn cinema exhibition for an enemy clan with some well-placed grenades. When the daughter (Antonia Santilli) of his boss Don Giuseppe (Claudio Nicastro) is kidnapped by the Calabrians of Don Corrasco (Richard Conte), the old man asks Nick to get her back. The first problem with this project is that the guy the next step up the ladder of Don Giuseppe has explicitly forbidden any action, literally leaving the girl’s fate up to God with a nice little shrug; the second one is that Nick has plans of his own.

If you’re one of the people who tend to be taken aback by how polite the portrayal of the mafia can get in many gangster movies, and how much films can buy into the concepts of honour etc that make up the PR of the group, you won’t need to approach Fernando Di Leo’s Il Boss with any trepidation.

This is a film very much working the same field as the post Battles without Honour and Humanity yakuza film, portraying the mafia and its members as brutal, traitorous thugs who only ever use their fabled honour and responsibility when it is useful as a weapon for them, otherwise breaking trusts with not even the slightest sign of second thoughts. Not that the film is any nicer to the legal authorities - those are either too cynical to even still be able to countenance any kind of action beyond mopping up the blood the gangsters leave, or corrupt to the bone like Gianni Garko’s Commissario Torri here. Also not getting away un-scorned are politicians (as corrupt as Torri just more polite about it) and the youth movement (only in it for sex and drugs). Needless to say, this is about as angrily political a movie as you’ll find in the field.

Di Leo portrays his cast of bastards and assholes – the least immoral character is probably Don Giuseppe’s nymphomaniac daughter (the portrayal of women isn’t great by today’s or even 1973’s standards) – with what feels like seething anger, barely held in check, and no hope for anything about the way Italy was in the 70s changing at all. You might call it nihilist, but in my experience, true nihilists don’t get angry at the state of the world like this, but revel in it.

Because Di Leo is also one of the great commercial directors of this genre, he packages his rage in a series of (often darkly funny) dialogue scenes that bitterly portray the state of his country, and just as many brutal, tight and absolutely relentless action scenes that do tend to get more than a little crazy. Henry Silva and the rest of the cast are of course perfect for portraying these specific kinds of assholes and monsters, often adding a self-conscious theatricality to their scenes that’s an ideal way of demonstrating that their characters’ only real use for emotion is faking it to look like human beings. They’d also rip the hearts out of Coppola’s mannered Mafiosi in the blink of an eye, making this a rather useful antidote to The Godfather (which is nonetheless a great film trilogy, don’t get me wrong).

Il Boss may very well be one of the very best European gangster movies, blowing up the competition before desecrating their graves, one supposes.

Hollywood Story (1951)

New York Producer Larry O’Brien (Richard Conte) moves to Los Angeles to found and head a new independent movie studio. Buying an old studio building that’s been unused since 1929, he learns of the unsolved murder of former silent star director Franklin Ferrara. Ferrara was shot right in his office on the lot, too, so it’s easy for Larry to become somewhat obsessed with the matter.

Clearly, the combination of oldest school Hollywood glamour and an unsolved murder should make box office gold, so Larry decides to turn this particular true crime story into his first Hollywood film, despite misgivings from friends and very shouty misgivings from his money man Sam Collyer (Fred Clark). And because Larry’s a bit of a method producer, he starts hiring old talent for that project, former silent actors as well as Ferrara’s old script writer Vincent St. Clair (Henry Hull). Also not amused by his project – or is it his deep dive into the matters of the case? – are the daughter of Ferrara’s favourite star (Julie Adams) as well as the actual killer.

Supposedly made as Universal’s answer to Billy Wilder’s Sunset Blvd, and directed by William Castle, this mystery doesn’t actually have much in common with the Wilder movie beyond the call-backs to the silent era and some cameos and small part appearances by actual silent era actors whom Universal, staying classy as always, decided to pay the lowest rates possible. It’s also, keeping with being classy, a thinly veiled version of the actual unsolved murder of silent movie director William Desmond Taylor, leading to a film that’s strangely meta in a very different way to Wilder’s film.

But then, Sunset Blvd was all about Hollywood and what it does to (at least some) people, whereas this one’s a zippy murder mystery whose moments of meta and strange resonance seem less based on an explicit artistic program but just come about through a combination of a somewhat exploitative set-up, a director in William Castle insisting on a degree of authenticity when it comes to places and their feeling by using actual silent sound stages as well as a couple of well-known Hollywood spots, and the magic that a film where production and plot can’t help but mirror one another a little simply cannot avoid when made by dedicated professionals. So while there’s no direct attempt at depth or more than a small critique of Hollywood life in the film’s script, there’s a certain resonance to the proceedings, as if this particular film had stumbled into a particularly liminal space by a mix of accident and mercenary commercialism, providing things with an air of the slightly weird throughout.

Thanks to being an actual murder mystery, and its willingness and ability to tell a genre story, Hollywood Story also avoids the horrors of artier movies about filmmaking, a sub-genre much beloved by Ebert-style film critics and certain directors that’s typically comparable to all those Great Novels about middle-aged writers, their writing blocks and their wish to fuck their grand-daughter-aged students. That is to say, this stuff is really of no interest to anyone but the makers and their cliques.

If you’ve first encountered the great William Castle, king of the gimmick movie, with his later, independent productions, and heard and seen all those lovely gimmicks, it’s often easy to forget that the man had had a healthy career as a studio contract director before that. It’s a bit ironic that this film made in his studio phase is also a bit of a gimmick movie with its “ripped from the old headlines” approach, but it’s not Castle’s gimmick, it’s the studio’s.


The gimmicks also can tend to hide Castle’s considerable abilities as a director, like his command of pace – as a rule, a Castle movie is never slow nor full of filler – or the generally short but deft and effective use of expressionist filmmaking stand-bys like chiaroscuro effects, stark shadows, and so on and so forth. Hollywood Story in particular features some clever tracking shots, and well-staged suspense sequences, but its high point is the film’s actual climax that’s about three minutes of a beautiful potted noir chase through a studio lot by night, wonderfully mixing Castle’s talent for the efficiently brief and the expressionist.

Malocchio (1975)

aka Eroticofollia

aka Evil Eye

Playboy Peter Crane (Jorge Rivero) goes through some heavy times. Dreams where a bunch of butt-naked evil hippies (is that a penis dangling in semi-slow motion?) make googly eyes at him and make funny noises. The dreams disturb Peter's wild(ish) lifestyle, but things become really disturbing when he meets up with a woman named Yvonne (Lone Fleming) who tells him she had a dream in which her dead husband warned her that a man named Peter Crane was going to kill her. Which would be reason enough to either seek psychiatric help or avoid people called Peter Crane in the future, but obviously not for her. Yvonne is quite different - the next night, she meets Peter again, and even follows him to his villa.

But the making out session first turns into a manifestation of poltergeist phenomena, and then sees slick Peter suddenly turn into a glowering strangler. The next morning, Peter remembers nothing of what he's (probably) done. Somebody seems to have taken care of the dead body too. This is the first in a series of murders Peter may or may not commit under some sort of occult influence. There will be more poltergeisting, an old family friend who may have an agenda of his own (Richard Conte), a frightfully attractive female psychiatrist with dubious ethics (Pilar Velázquez), a blackmailing factotum (Eduardo Fajardo), and a lot of oddness (and I don't just mean a couple brushing each other's teeth in the shower though that scene would be odd enough for most). From time to time, the film pops in to the investigation of the murders as made by Inspector Ranieri (Old Wooden-Face Anthony Steffen) whose attempts to make sense of anything that happens in the movie are bound to fail.

Despite beginning like a giallo with slight supernatural elements, Mario Siciliano's Malocchio soon enough turns out to be one of these really weird pieces of continental European horror movies from the 70s that pride themselves in making as little sense as possible. Sure, one could, if one wanted, read a lot of what's going on as metaphor, squint at some of the film's backstory, add up what one imagines (audience hallucinations are always a possible effect in these movies), and arrive at some sort of explanation of everything that's going on here that may even be the explanation the screenwriters thought of (if indeed they were in the thinking business). However, I don't think that effort would be as worthwhile as just taking the film's oddness at face value.

The narrative is as jumpy and illogical as you'd expect in a case like this, with nobody's actions making much sense, motivations that seem made up on the spot, and only the loosest idea of dramatic tension. The film's climax does indeed seem wilfully un-climactic, and the filmmakers decision to do the ouroboros thing in the end gives the impression they just ran out of napkins to write on rather than leaving the audience with the shock of finding the main character trapped in a never-ending nightmare.

Of course, as you'd also expect in a film like this, that insistence on only making the vaguest sense, on leaving every scene dipped in a haze of the unreal is also Malocchio's greatest strength. This is, after all, a movie whose protagonist can't tell dreams from reality and truth from lies - why should it be any different for the audience?

If there's one problem I had with the film, it's that Siciliano's direction is not quite strange enough for the strangeness of the material. His direction is not bad - especially in the evil hippie demon dreams and assorted scenes - but he's often coasting a bit on the wonderful mugging and eye-rolling of his actors and the oddness of the script without adding quite enough oddness all his own.

But in the end Malocchio is confusing and dream-like enough to satisfy me, even if I've experienced films that were even more confusing and dream-like than it is.

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,spanish movies,mexican movies,horror,wtf,mario siciliano,jorge rivero,richard conte,eduardo fajardo,anthony steffen,pilar velázquez