Crystalbrain (1970)

Sir Cliffton Reynolds (or maybe Reynold Cliffton according to the subtitles I had, but either way he’s played by Eduardo Fajardo) is a London judge plagued with intense headaches of late.  Dr. Chalmers (Frank Wolff) tells Cliff that he has about six months left to live, but the good doctor also has a possible solution.  Chalmers suggests that what Cliff needs is a new brain, comparing his proposed procedure to the transplanting of primate hearts into humans.  Cue Ginetto Lamberti (Simón Andreu), a working man who currently lies dying in the street, but whose brain is in perfect (this is subjective) working order.  But will this transplant prove to be a transmigration of Ginetto’s soul, or just an excuse for Cliff to go insane?

Juan Logar’s Crystalbrain (aka L’uomo Dal Cervello Di Cristallo aka Trasplante De Un Cerebro) is an amalgamation of genres.  It owes as much to gialli as it does to science fiction, as it does to psychothrillers, as it does to horror.  What it harks back specifically to, however, is the classic The Hands of Orlac and its profligate progeny.  The earlier story concerns a pianist who has the hands of a murderer grafted onto his arms, and the “influence” the hands begin to exert on his psyche.  This conceit, that a foreign body part introduced onto/into a “normal” person having a deleterious effect, is an intriguing one.  It plays both as a straight horror paradigm and as an investigation of pure human nature.  Most people like to think that they are, at heart, good.  But what if you were given an excuse to unleash your id, to behave in a way antithetical to your public personality?  Characters in these types of stories believe so deeply that their transplants have power, they allow their personae to transform, and rarely for the better.  Their darkest aspects rise to the forefront.  Many times, they become obsessed with discovering why their transplant died or with taking revenge on those who killed them.  Who, then, is the true personality?  The one who existed before the operation or the one who was created afterward?  Was one just masking the other?  Cliff appears to be a decent person before his procedure.  He believes that “justice balances right and wrong.”  He loves his wife Susan (Nuria Torray) and his brother Peter (Angel del Pozo).  While he doesn’t turn evil after the transplant, Cliff certainly becomes more than a little unhinged.  One way to look at the ensuing events in his life is that his sense of morality intensifies and drives him to find closure in the name of Ginetto by appropriating the Italian fisherman’s psyche.

In this same way, there is the notion that transplants actually do have power over the transplantee.  In these cases, the fantastic element raises issues of identity and loss of same, perhaps even more than looking at it through a purely psychological lens.  The introduction of organs not our own suggests an invasion of our body (in fact, that’s exactly what it is), an attack on who we are.  The invader is usually malignant in nature and more powerful than the host body.  The transplant typically proceeds in wreaking havoc on the transplantee’s life and loved ones, and there is nothing the weaker of the two can do because, through the process of the transplant, they are, by definition, no longer wholly themselves.  Their identity is no longer their own because their bodies are no longer their own, strictly speaking.  In Crystalbrain, this idea is a bit easier to believe because the human brain is the whole of our conscious being.  Our hands may be adept at a certain skill, but that’s because our mind has trained them to be so.  Naturally, this trope also implies in some way that muscle memory goes further than being the unconscious ability to perform constantly repeated tasks.  Here, pieces of the donor contain the active personality (or aspects of the personality) of the donor.  The transplantee, being in a weakened state, is possessed through these parts.  It’s a bit like The Thing in that every piece of a donor contains the whole of him/herself.  

We, as an audience, may or may not buy any of this under normal circumstances.  A hand or a kidney is truly nothing more than a machine (or a part of a machine) without a power source.  Nonetheless, the big question that comes up in this film is how does Chalmers not consider that Cliff’s personality would be completely changed by his operation?  When questioned about this (“Do you think it’s morally responsible to destroy a soul to heal a body?”), he simply states that doctors have to stave off death whenever they can.  But he’s not saving Cliff’s life.  If anything, he’s saving Ginetto’s life by giving him Cliff’s body.  What the hell kind of medical professional do you have to be to not understand that?  The only way to explain it is that Chalmers believes that our psyche (or here, our “soul”) resides in our whole body, not just in our skulls (and he’s supposedly a man of science).  Frankly, he never should have been given a medical license, but what can you do?  

Logar and company deal with the disparate personalities of Cliff and Ginetto in a stylistically interesting way.  During Cliff’s surgery, he flashes back to the many people on whom he has passed judgment, and they each appear in double exposure alongside Cliff as he pronounces sentence.  They are voiceless; Cliff is in power, and his sense of justice is secure.  Later, when Cliff visits the cemetery where Ginetto’s body is buried, he envisions a series of people who are directly in his and Ginetto’s lives (Chalmers, Susan, Ginetto himself, et cetera), again in double exposure, and they all call out to him.  They are now tormenting Cliff.  He is no longer in control of his life or his being, but justice must still be served.  The duality of Cliff and Ginetto is tied together in this simple way, and I felt it was fairly successful.  

The editing of the film is also fragmented.  Time and space change in a heartbeat with little to no establishment of what’s going on or when these events take place.  Like the Crystalbrain of the title, not only is Cliff’s mind fragile, ready to be shattered, but the cinematic world these characters inhabit is equally splintered.  It’s an off-kilter approach, and it reflects what Cliff is going through.  He’s uncertain of who he is (right up until he’s certain, yet even then…).  His mind is unreliable, and the film’s construction is equally untrustworthy (although, as with so many foreign films of this ilk and time period, we can’t be completely certain how many editors’ hands this passed through), forcing us to fill in blanks and play catch up; essentially placing us in the protagonist’s shoes to some small degree or another.  Admittedly, the film is headscratching in its logic, and Cliff acts in a manner easy to disbelieve, even with all that’s happening to him.  It treats its supporting characters like props more than people, and I think this robs the film of the impact it may have had.  Even at eighty-five minutes, the story is not particularly well-paced, either.  And yet, it stands out among its peers, even if only as a curiosity rather than a revelation.

MVT:  The approach to the narrative is distinctive and interesting, and I would guess that the filmmakers at least tried to tell their story in a unique fashion.

Make or Break:  The scene in the cemetery, where Cliff (or Ginetto, depending on your perspective) hallucinates (or does he?).

Score:  6.5/10    

Death Occurred Last Night (1970)

Amanzio Berzaghi  (Raf Vallone) pleads with top cop Duca Lamberti (Frank Wolff) and Duca’s smartass subordinate Mascharanti (Gabriele Tinti) to find Amanzio’s missing daughter Donatella (Gill Bray/Gillian Bray).  Even though she’s twenty-five and well over the threshold of adulthood, she’s also mentally challenged and has the maturity level of a three-year-old.  Plus, Donatella’s a full-blown flirt who “loves doing anything men ask of her,” forcing her father to keep his apartment locked down like a fortress.  Now it’s a race to see who will find the culprits first and what will happen to them afterward.

Duccio Tessari’s Death Occurred Last Night (aka La Morte Risale A Ieri Sera) is a Eurocrime/Poliziotteschi film, but it hews slightly closer to an American Police Procedural in its general approach to the narrative.  The film isn’t action-packed like, say, The Big Racket or Live Like A Cop, Die Like A Man.  It is very much a slow burn with a slow build, focusing on the banality of the day-to-day tasks of investigating a crime in Milan.  It is interesting, then, for how unexploitive the majority of the film is in terms of violence, how very exploitive it is in terms of sex.  The hookers shown all do their damnedest to put it all out there, and they drop their clothing like they would a used tissue.  There also seems to be a very conscious decision on the part of Tessari in the casting and depiction of Donatella.  Without being too indelicate or insensitive, she is closer in the looks department to a model than to someone most people would identify as mentally challenged.  She dresses in apparel designed to show off her womanly assets, and there is even a lingering shot of her trying to figure out how to put on her bra, which focuses almost exclusively on her breasts.  Further, as Amanzio describes the life he had with his daughter, the film gives off a very distinct whiff of incest.  This, thankfully, is never explored, and their relationship is nothing more than one of familial love, giving more power to this father’s anguish.

That said, I think the juxtaposition of the hookers with Donatella and their treatment by the filmmakers is relevant to one of the film’s themes, and it is one of objectification of women.  These women are essentially pieces of meat to be traded for money; their bodies their only value.  Were Donatella of sound mind, she may have been able to escape her captors or think her way out of her situation.  Because she can’t, she can only cry out for her father’s help.  Errera, the black hooker (essentially a double strike against her from her experience with Milanese society) whom Duca takes into his flat, understands her situation all too well, although she tries to play it as if she were in control of her life (“There’s no pimp behind me; I’m free”).  Nevertheless, later the truth will come out (“I’m still on the streets with a different pimp”), and it is this acknowledgement of her station that causes Herrera to go down a self-destructive path.  Additionally, it is another character’s desire to be wanted physically which plays a large part in the film’s resolution.  Yet this desire clearly rises from a place of loneliness and possibly from the consideration that it is physicality which defines beauty and worth.  This mindset would almost certainly emanate from the behavior of men in regards to hookers and the bodies of women like Donatella, who do not appear to have anything else to offer a person outside of their anatomy.

Beyond this is a debate on morality and the value of human life, and this is, intriguingly, played out not in the police activity with local pimp Salvatore (Gigi Rizzi) or the dealings with Amanzio, but in the scenes of Duca and his wife/girlfriend (Eva Renzi, whom I’ll refer to as his “lady,” since I couldn’t find a name given to the character either in the film’s subtitles or on IMDB) at home.  Duca is of the opinion that people are predominantly scum, and they are exploited by other people, who are equally scum-esque.  This first comes up when he visits his lady at her newspaper job and comments on the violent photos they use.  When she states that people are violent and they are merely reporting such, Duca retorts that he wants it to end, that in some way, by keeping these types of things in the public eye, they continue to be propagated.  Despite this cynical, world-weary view of life, Duca tries desperately to cling to a sliver of hope.  He plays guitar and sings while at home.  He is a giving romantic with his lady.  This also explains why he takes Errera into his home.  Ostensibly, it’s so she won’t be harmed by anyone or harm herself before he can find Donatella.  Yet, as the film plays out, his and his lady’s conversations with her tend to revolve around her inability to recognize her value as a human being.  In spite of this, neither one can stop the hooker’s self-harming tendencies.  This presents us with the central question of the film, and to my mind, it’s not the obvious one of who has the correct perspective on life; Duca or Errera.  Rather, I like to think that it takes for granted a pessimistic attitude toward mankind and instead asks “why should we care?”  Clearly, we can only answer such questions for ourselves, but I think that Tessari’s confidence in his audience’s ability to parse out this conundrum is what ultimately makes this film as strong as it is.

Another way this film differs from other Eurocrime films, at least to my reckoning, is in the stylistic techniques Tessari employs.  The sequences where Amanzio recounts Donatella’s kidnapping and their life before that are strung together in fractured time.  The editing leaps back and forth, with very little to anchor the viewer as to when the events take place.  When we flashback to sequences of the Berzaghis’ happiness, it is accompanied by an oddly rowdy lounge-tinged song, further reinforcing the idea that even when times were good, they were still filled with disarray and a sense of anxiety.  In all of this, the full exposition of the story is given while simultaneously cultivating a stark sense of chaos, mirroring Amanzio’s mental state and desperation.  As Duca and Mascharanti search the city, many of the scenes which we would expect to be loaded with banter or with Procedural dialogue are edited with music rather than any diegetic sound.  What they say in the course of their routines is inconsequential.  In fact, the audience could likely recite it all for them with little effort, because their dialogue in these scenes is not the point of the film.  The kidnapping investigation is merely the context for the content of a deeper conversation Tessari wants his audience to contemplate.  It shades the film as something of an odd duck at first glance, but once the veneer of genre is stripped away, what remains is a philosophical quandary which may have a simple end but hardly by simple means.

MVT:  Wolff does a very nice job of playing a man at odds with his existence.  He cares, but he can’t really show it in public.  He is frustrated by the world he encounters, but he believes it can be changed.  All encapsulated by an actor with a truly shrewd and withering glare.

Make Or Break:  Without divulging anything, the ending of this film is outstanding.  It satisfies while also putting a period on the end of sentence which is still a question.  The more I think on this film, the more affected I become by it and its final frame.

Score:  7.25