Noir Diary # 12: Big House U.S.A. (Howard W. Koch, 1955)

With a plot that takes in extortion, kidnapping, blackmail and child murder whilst offering up an utterly unsympathetic, morally reprehensible protagonist and setting him against a supporting cast of equally loathsome, cut-throats heavies, John C. Higgins’ screenplay for ‘Big House U.S.A.’ (from a story by George Slavin and the supremely named George George) seems to scream its film noir credentials to the rafters. Director Howard W. Koch and producer Aubrey Schenck’s presentation of this grim subject matter however..? Not quite so much. (1)

Indeed, I was rather taken aback as the film begins by taking us to some kind of summer camp in the picturesque mountains of Colorado, where a plucky young lad wants to compete against the other boys in running races, despite his chronic asthma. After descending into a coughing fit and being threatened with a big needle by the camp’s nurse, the humiliated kid runs away into the wilderness, and search parties are dispatched to find him.

In unhurried fashion, we are subsequently introduced to the steadfast local sheriff, to the missing boy’s panicked (and apparently very rich) father, and to assorted forest rangers, cops and such. Meanwhile, the tearful lad is discovered hiding on the undergrowth by a wandering fisherman, who would seem fairly benevolent at first, were it not for the fact that he’s played by Ralph Meeker of ‘Kiss Me Deadly’ fame - an actor who, rather uniquely, combines the energy and good looks of a traditional Hollywood leading man with an aura of sheer malevolence which clearly marks him out as a grade-A piece of shit.

And, thus he proves to be; instead of alerting the authorities, Meeker leaves the boy imprisoned in a remote/abandoned lookout station whilst he calls up Panicked Dad and gives him the low-end on what appears to be a pre-meditated kidnapping scheme. This in turn prompts the introduction of a smug FBI agent (Reed Hadley), who arrives in good time to drone on and on about the fool-proof, scientific methods utilised by the feds to deal with such cases.

Complete with all the thrills and spills of an episode of ‘Little House on the Prairie’, this kidnapping plotline proceeds to plod along for ten minutes, then twenty, then eventually a full half hour, as I gradually found myself wondering whether the good folks at Kino Lorber had mixed up the reels with some other movie when they created their transfer of this film. Where was this “Big House U.S.A.” we’d been promised? And what of the incredible rogue’s gallery of b-movie sluggers promised by the poster? When are they all going to to factor into things?

Well, our journey toward them eventually gets underway when, in the first of several moments of startlingly callous brutality which punctuate the movie, the kidnapped kid takes a fall and dies whilst trying to escape his captor. Without so much as a second thought, Meeker picks up the kid’s body and hurls it over the nearest cliff into the rushing river far below.

After this shocker, things understandably take a darker turn, as Meeker is caught red-handed attempting to leave the National Park after retrieving (and secretly stashing away) the ransom money provided by the father. He tells the feds that he never actually laid eyes on the kid and was merely taking advantage of the situation by shaking down the dad for some quick dough, and, unable to prove a definite connection between Meeker and the kid’s disappearance, the cops have no choice but to allow the faux-fisherman - who has earned himself the tabloid nickname “The Ice Man” for his both determination to stick to his story and his refusal to disclose the location of his ill-gotten gains - to cop a plea on an extortion charge.

Thus we get to see Meeker merrily shipping out to spend a year or two cooling his heels on (FINALLY) a thinly-veiled fictional analogue of Alcatraz Island - but of course our man’s troubles are far from over. Despised by his fellow inmates as a probable child-killer, he finds himself transferred - via the connivings of Mr Smug FBI Man - to a cramped cell housing the worst of the worst of the prison’s hard-nuts.

Headed up by sly mob boss Broderick Crawford, this happy crew also comprises Lon Chaney Jr (“a nice guy, so long as he’s locked up”), a young Charles Bronson (introduced as a mad-dog killer, his character is really more of a practically-minded, musclebound moralist), and best of all, William Talman (‘The Hitch-Hiker’ himself!) as Crawford’s jittery, bug-eyed lieutenant.

The general idea is that, placed in such tough company, The Ice Man will soon melt and spill his guts to the feds. Unbeknownst to the powers-that-be however, Crawford and the gang are mid-way through planning their Big Break Out, and the prospect of taking Meeker with them and forcing him to hand over his hidden loot is just too good to resist.

Unsurprisingly, this central ‘prison movie’ section is by far the most entertaining part of ‘Big House U.S.A.’, ploughing through the usual clichés with gusto, whilst the gang’s escape plan presents a sublime bit of craziness straight out of a Men’s Adventure magazine. Basically, they’ve been stockpiling stolen oxygen cylinders, keeping them hidden in a hollow chamber inside the giant furnace which forms the centrepiece of the prison’s factory floor. When the time comes, they’re just gonna slide their way into the water via the machine’s waste pipe and frogman their way to freedom, getting picked up on open water by a fishing boat rented by Crawford’s outside cronies.

Unfortunately, we don’t get to spend half as much time as we might have liked with this esteemed line-up of craggy-faced bruisers (more Bronson in particular would have been welcomed), but they all do fine work in what little screen time they’re allotted, and the sheer sight of them all crammed together in a tiny cell will be worth the entry price alone for some viewers.

Crawford and Talman do great work her as a tag-team of comic book villains, whilst Chaney, looking shockingly haggard here considering he’d been slogging his way through Universal’s dapper ‘Inner Sanctum’ mysteries only a decade beforehand, is his usual doddering, likeable self nonetheless. He is also gifted with what is by far this film’s best line, delivered after Meeker protests that, “I’m no skin diver, I can’t even swim,”. “You’ll make out, just pull the water toward you like it was a big dame” - truly a tough guy swimming lesson for the ages.

I confess, if I were reading this review, I’d be thinking at this point that ‘Big House U.S.A.’ sounds like an absolute riot, but seriously folks - don’t build yr expectations up too high for this one. Writer Higgins and producer Schneck had previously worked together on 1947’s T-Men, and unfortunately the same feeling of a solid, hard-boiled story sabotaged by reams of ass-covering “crime doesn’t pay” procedural bullshit also predominates here.

Unlike that earlier film however, ‘Big House..’ has neither John Alcott’s majestic photography nor Anthony Mann’s brooding, no bullshit direction to fall back on. Instead, Koch’s pacing is stupefying slack, largely compressing the ‘good stuff’ we came to see into a middle half hour sandwiched between the workmanlike, TV drama opening described above and a listless, tension-free trudge toward the story’s dispiriting conclusion, whilst Higgins’ scripting meanwhile is full of needless complexity and annoying incongruities.

Beyond the inevitable, ‘Dragnet’ style voiceover which patronisingly book-ends the movie, we spend what feels like hours hanging around in the Park Rangers’ office in the company of self-satisfied Special Agent Hadley and boring cop Roy Roberts as they trudge through every pain-staking step of building their case against Meeker, then as they proceed to snidely torment him once he’s behind bars - all wasting valuable time we could instead have spent watching Broderick Crawford puffing on a bootleg cigar or Bronson cracking his knuckles (or indeed, checking in with Felicia Farr, who has a great bit-part here as Meeker’s duplicitous female accomplice).

With the unrivalled efficiency and moral superiority of the forces of law and order reinforced at every turn, it’s enough to get the attendees of yr average PTA meeting yelling “fuck you, cop!” back at the screen, but worse than that, this concentration on the unflappable righteousness of the fuzz completely ruins the movie’s final act.

Handled differently, Meeker, Crawford and Talman’s fugitive journey across state lines, frantically trying to get one up on each other as they navigate their way toward the Colorado treasure-trove, could have made for some fantastically gripping, hard-boiled stuff. Here though, this potential is just thrown away - and not only because their journey conveyed via an unconvincing series of time-compressing ellipses, clearly thrown together as time and/or funding was running short.

As eccentric and perversely charismatic as these crooks may be, the film has basically granted them little agency, no intelligence, and no chance to develop anything beyond a one dimensional persona for themselves. As they approach their goal, we know that law enforcement is one step ahead of them, lurking in the bushes with fingers on their triggers, and the hoods’ collective failure is a foregone conclusion.

On paper, the downbeat fate doled out to these admittedly horrible characters should be an explosion of classic noir fatalism, but as executed here by Koch and co, it’s simply banal, with Special Agent Smug Bastard adding insult to injury as he dusts off his hands and warns us all to stay straight and fly right.

Though noteworthy for its stellar cast, unconventional structure and stark moments of callous (albeit off-screen) violence, ‘Big House U.S.A.’ is ultimately a poorly rendered disappointment which does little to capitalise on the talents of those on either side of the camera. A passable mid-week watch, but one best left for completists or the morbidly curious, I suspect. 

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(1) After directing this movie back to back with the more highly regarded b-noir ‘Shield for Murder’ (1954), Howard W. Koch’s brief directorial career went on to include the likes of ‘Bop Girl Goes Calypso’, ‘The Girl in Black Stockings’ (both ’57) and the oddball Boris Karloff vehicle ‘Frankenstein 1970’ (1958) before he transitioned into a far more successful career as a producer from dawn of the ’60s onward.

Bloody NEL: The Making of Tania: The Patty Hearst Story by David Boulton (1975)

If I approached New English Library’s cash-in Patty Hearst book expecting the same kind of questionable laffs I extracted from their cash-in Manson book, disappointment was soon the result.

Perhaps having learned a thing or two since they entrusted their earlier true crime opus to a pseudonymous London-based hack channelling a fictitious Californian hipster, NEL instead assigned this gig to David Boulton, a legit journalist and broadcaster whose achievements to this date had included a book about Conscientious Objectors during the First World War and a history of the Ulster Volunteer Force.

As such, ‘The Making of Tania’ presents what I am inclined to believe is a fairly sober and credible overview of the facts as they stood at the time of writing, largely avoiding the kind of sensationalism I was expecting (and, to be honest, quite looking forward to), and resorting to speculation only when gaps in the factual narrative make it unavoidable.

Above all, Boulton’s book serves to remind us that, extraordinary though the Hearst case may seem when viewed at a distance, the deeper one digs into the details, the more senseless and depressing the events surrounding Patty’s kidnapping in February 1974 become. Tapping into the very dankest corners of America’s pre-Watergate darkness, it is a story that leaves almost everyone involved looking irresponsible, ineffectual and ultimately idiotic.

One of the most interesting aspects of reading a factual account written so soon after the events described is the huge holes that remain in the centre of the narrative Boulton builds from the sources available to him (holes that to a certain extent remain unfilled, or at least bitterly contested, to this day).

At the time of writing, the majority of the Symbionese Liberation Army’s core members were already dead, and the survivors (including Patty/Tania) were on the run, their whereabouts unknown. Unsurprisingly, none of them had stopped to give any interviews.

Whilst the SLA’s movements and activities could be pieced together with a reasonable degree of accuracy (more thanks to the efforts of the media than the police, it seems), the details of what actually transpired within the group – their personal relationships, the balance of power, decision-making processes, and the means by which the members (most of them fairly comfortable, educated, white twenty-somethings lest we forget) ended up being driven to such an extreme degree of fanaticism – all of these things were (and to a significant extent, still are) a complete unknown.

Although a substantial amount of space in the book is taken up with reproducing the SLA’s assorted communiqués and tape transcripts in full, this feels less like an easy way to fill pages, and more like a necessary decision on Boulton’s part. After all, these unedifying diatribes – so charmless, hypocritical and sickeningly self-congratulatory you’re forced to wonder how their authors could possibly have taken them seriously – represent the only insights we have into the thought processes of the people who are ostensibly the “main characters” of our story.

One can easily imagine the frustration that legitimate activists working for left-wing/socialist causes must have felt when these ridiculous, gun-toting bozos suddenly came out of nowhere to instantly dominate all media coverage of progressive politics, but, they could hopefully at least take some succour from the fact that the SLA saga also served to show the USA’s state and federal law enforcement agencies at their absolute worst.

Repeatedly, the authorities’ failure to properly secure crime scenes or follow up evidence led to them missing easy chances to apprehend SLA members (potentially without bloodshed), and, when they did eventually catch up with them – in a casual rooming house in Compton, South Central L.A. in which the bulk of the group had inexplicably taken up residence, apparently without making the slightest effort to disguise their identity – the resulting confrontation was handled appallingly by both the LAPD and FBI.

That no innocent bystanders were killed as the cops opened up with automatic weapons, smoke bombs and hand grenades in a heavily populated urban area, without even bothering to make certain that the buildings in front of them were free of civilians, is little short of a miracle. (Astonishingly, Boulton reports that at one point they were moments away from opening fire on the wrong house, until a passing child(!) informed them that the “white girls with guns” were actually behind them, on the other side of the street.) Would the Feds have behaved like this had the SLA chosen a more affluent white neighbourhood for their showdown? You tell me.

Likewise, the six SLA members within the house may have been armed, dangerous and deluded individuals, culpable for any number of crimes including several murders, but they did not deserve to die like dogs - shot down as they tried to flee, or left to suffocate in the basement of a burning building. Whilst I have limited sympathy for their half-baked ideology and misguided activities, the descriptions herein of their final minutes are enough to make any reader feel sick to the stomach.

I’d like to think I’m not the kind of person to automatically criticise law enforcement agencies without good reason, but reading Boulton’s note that the charred body of Camilla Hall – shot in the head by a police marksman - was found next to the skeletal remains of the Siamese kitten that had accompanied her since her pre-SLA days as a Berkeley drop-out, led me to share the anger of the Compton resident who subsequently spray-painted a perfect, elliptical epitaph on the side of a building overlooking the smouldering ruins: “IT TOOK 500 COPS…” .

Meanwhile, the evidence Boulton presents regarding Donald DeFreeze – aka ‘General Field Marshall Cinque’, de facto leader of the SLA – vis-a-vis the possibility that he was working as a paid informant and agent provocateur for a (no pun intended) “black ops” unit within the CIA right up to (and even beyond) his suspiciously hassle-free ‘escape’ from Soledad prison in 1973, is extremely compelling.

I’m not sure what info has come to light on this in subsequent years, and I’m aware that relying on a single source for something like this is always a mistake (particularly when the source in question is a 40+ year old New English Library paperback), but again, this is an instance in which the facts seem to speak for themselves.

DeFreeze was unaccountably acquitted of serious criminal charges (all involving firearms) on half a dozen occasions during his time in LA, and, when he finally ended up behind bars, he was allowed to practically walk out of a disused wing of Soledad, after Vacaville prison’s anarchic ‘Black Cultural Association’ programme had allowed him to establish personal connections with the unaffiliated Berkeley ‘radicals’ with whom we would later go on to form the SLA.

Again, you can do the math. Could this ‘wild card’ police operative – already noted for his schizophrenic tendencies and dangerous obsession with guns and explosives – have slipped his handlers and gone off-piste only when he realised the fun he could have leading a cabal of machine gun-toting white chicks, provided he could keep his “political” bullshit flowing well enough for them to buy him as a revolutionary Black Power guru..?

Thanks to the gusto of the police gunmen in Compton, we will never know whether or not ‘Field Marshall Cinque’ genuinely believed in the revolutionary ideals he espoused via the SLA’s propaganda, and, in fairness, Boulton doesn’t extend his speculation quite as far as I have in the preceding paragraph. But, it is certainly not beyond the realms of possibility that DeFreeze was deliberately placed within the initially harmless Berkeley milieu in order to inform on and incriminate its occupants... thus potentially making this whole sorry mess just another gift to the people, courtesy of the paranoid excesses that predominated within US law enforcement during the final years of J. Edgar Hoover’s tenure at the FBI.

Surprisingly, about the only person to emerge from Boulton’s book with any dignity at all is Patty’s father, Randolph Heart (the fourth son of William Randolph Hearst). Following his daughter’s kidnapping, Hearst went to great lengths to arrange meetings with representatives of organisations affiliated with the SLA, and announced, apparently in earnest, that his view of the world had been changed as a result of these discussions. He implemented the SLA’s demands for a vast public food programme about as well as he could within the prohibitive timeframe and guidelines the kidnappers had outlined, eventually sinking so much money into it that the solvency of his business empire was put in jeopardy, and he enraged the editorial staff of his newspapers by ordering them to re-print the SLA’s monotonous tracts in full, as they had demanded.

For these efforts, Hearst received nothing but abuse from all quarters, including from his own daughter. Given his impossible situation, one can hardly blame him for effectively washing his hands of Patty’s fate following the Compton blood-bath, and withdrawing from the public eye insofar as was possible. For this of course, he received yet more abuse – all of which leaves me feeling rather sorry for the poor guy, regardless of his nominally unsympathetic status as the multi-millionaire son of a notorious tyrant.

All of which, I realise, tells you very little about the aesthetic or editorial policy of New English Library, which is what I instigated this series of posts in order to discuss. But what can I say – as an example of no nonsense, long form journalism, ‘The Making of Tania’ proved an unexpectedly engaging read, blowing the dust off a series of now-historical events that I was broadly aware of, but had never really taken the time to read up on in this level of detail.

I hope I won’t need to derail this weblog into factual/, ‘true crime’ territory too often – rest assured, no icky serial killer fascination is forthcoming - but, like the Manson murders a few years earlier, the Hearst/SLA saga is a tale that has entirely transcended it’s historical context, becoming a key ingredient in the stew of the crazy culture that BITR exists to celebrate, and as such I find that freshening up my knowledge of the genuine article every now and then proves quite rewarding.

Exploito All’Italiana: Mad Dog Killer (Sergio Grieco, 1977)

Arriving towards the tail-end of the poliziotteschi’s ‘golden age’ in October 1977, the premise of Sergio Grieco’s ‘La Belva Col Mitra’ (which google tells me this translates literally as ‘The Beast With a Uterus’ – surely some mistake!?) most closely resembles that of Umberto Lenzi’s seminal ‘Almost Human’ (1974), telling as it does the unedifying tale of Nanni Vitali (Helmut Berger), a remorseless, adrenalin-crazed psychopath who has just broken out of prison with the help of his loyal gang of thugs, and  of Inspector Santini (Richard Harrison), the dogged cop who is hot on his trail.

Despite adopting this ‘Dirty Harry’-derived “cop vs psycho” framework however, ‘Mad Dog Killer’ (let’s just call it that and avoid the whole ‘uterus’ business) never really gets the engine running as either a police procedural or an action movie, with Grieco instead spinning the wheel in a different direction entirely. (1)

Clearly this was a pretty rushed, slap-dash production, and Grieco’s direction often feels pretty amateurish. Editing is ragged, continuity between shots is all over the place, and DP Vittorio Bernini’s framing and photography is the very definition of ‘perfunctory’, all of which suggests that this crew had little desire to compete in the high stakes game of ‘70s crime movies.

To highlight one of the movie’s more glaring technical shortcomings - we expect exterior shots during car chase sequences to be undercranked in films like this in order to create the illusion of speed, but how are we supposed to react to a movie that apparently can’t be bothered to re-adjust to the correct speed for interior car shots, thus lending the vehicles’ occupants the twitchy, insane mannerisms of hummingbirds?

Or, to put it another way, can you imagine the sheer amount of non-fuck-giving it takes to shoot footage like this and keep it in the final cut of your commercially released crime movie? Even Jess Franco – who was occasionally known to fake slow-motion by getting his actors to move slowly – must surely salute Grieco’s audacity here.

If questioned on the matter, I’d imagine Grieco’s answer would likely have been that there was no time to re-shoot, and anyway, it looks wild, so gives a fuck? Such is the punk-ass ideology that seems to prevail throughout ‘Mad Dog Killer’, and, once you get into the spirit of things, it’s difficult to deny that it suits the film’s unpalatable subject matter pretty well.

More problematically however, this approach also serves to make a nonsense of what should be one of the movie’s pivotal set-piece scenes, in which Berger’s gang carry out a raid on the factory where Marisa Mell’s character’s father works as a security guard, unaware that Harrison’s cops await them in hiding. It’s the perfect set-up for an absolutely storming, off-the-hook action sequence, but unfortunately things are conceived and staged in such a nonsensical manner that it falls completely flat, with logic, character motivations and physical geography all so woefully skewed that viewers are simply left confused, rather than enthralled.

You’d think a guy who spent most of the ‘50s and ‘60s making pirate and spy movies would be able to keep a better handle on things, but again, Grieco’s spirit whispers in my ear, who gives a fuck? I mean, this clearly wasn’t the kind of thing they were going for here anyway.

What they were going for, in a word, is *nastiness* - pure, nails-down-the-blackboard post-‘Last House On The Left’ grindhouse sadism. And, on that score, ‘Mad Dog Killer’ delivers in spades, subjecting us to a sweaty, gasoline-choked ordeal somewhat in the vein of Mario Bava’s ‘Rabid Dogs’ or Pasquale Festa Campanile’s Hitch Hike (if, admittedly, at rather the other end of the scale of cinematic competence).

As such, the movie’s REAL calling card sequence (or at least, one of two, along with the astonishing finale), occurs right out of the gate, as Berger and his gang kidnap the informer who got him put away in the first place and his wife (Giuliana, played by Marisa Mell), and drive them to an isolated quarry. Once there, Vitali has his men beat the informer to the point of death and bury him alive, pouring corrosive quick-lime over his barely conscious body. After forcing her to bear witness to this, Vitali then proceeds to rape Giuliana in the dust, an act he performs with the casual, emotionally numb brutality of a man carrying out a distasteful, but expected, duty.

Pretty vicious stuff by anyone’s standards, it was likely this scene that was primarily responsible for gaining ‘Mad Dog Killer’ an honourable mention in Section # 3 of the infamous DPP ‘Video Nasties’ list in the UK (making it one of very few crime films to achieve this dubious distinction), and indeed it sets the tone pretty well for the gruelling, mindless violence-packed rampage that comprises the remainder of the movie.

‘Mad Dog Killer’s main asset in pursuing its sundry outrages against taste and decency of course is Helmut Berger himself, who lends a startlingly intense performance to this haggard wreck of a movie. Potted online biographies of Berger would tend to suggest that the actor was at a particularly low ebb at this point following the death of his partner/patron Luchino Visconti in 1976, and it seems reasonable to assume that he channelled at least some of his grief and frustration into what was, at the time, a relatively rare foray into commercial/genre cinema on a CV dominated by more high-minded arthouse fare.

Berger was, of course, a fairly unsettling presence even at the best of times (Visconti famously stated that he was attracted to him as his perfect image of a “demonic, insane and sexually perverted man”), and he seems to have taken the opportunity with this role to take the more sinister aspects of his screen persona to fairly ludicrous extremes, oozing psychopathic menace with the kind of slavering glee rarely seen since the days of Todd Slaughter.

I’m sure there must be tales to tell about Berger’s conduct and state of mind whilst making this film, but I don’t know any of them, so I’ll limit myself to simply observing that he looks as if he’s having the time of his life whenever he is called upon to commit acts of torture, casual brutality and sexual assault, conveying a sense of misanthropic, death-trip fatalism that feels disturbingly authentic, even as he mugs and stares and chews up the scenery like a pro.

Meanwhile, you’d be hard-pressed to find a greater contrast to this approach to acting than that provided by Berger’s opposite number here, Richard Harrison. Appearing a few years after his second wind as a spaghetti western regular had come to an end, and a few years before he accepted Godfrey Ho’s fateful call on the Garfield phone for ‘Ninja Terminator’ and it’s endless cut’n’paste sequels, Harrison must be the least confidence-inspiring avenging cop in poliziotteschi history. Sweaty, red-faced, with thinning hair plastered across his forehead, Inspector Santini looks like a shaky ex-alcoholic trying very hard to stay on the wagon, who really doesn’t need this shit in his life.

Convention dictates that Harrison must triumph in the end, but, pitched against the hulk-like hyperactivity of Berger, we certainly don’t fancy his chances, and, given this movie’s taste for cynical, gratuitous mayhem, the sundry innocents whose fate lies in Santini’s hands should consider themselves pretty much fucked, whether figuratively or otherwise.

Which brings us, I suppose, to poor old Marisa Mell. Where did it all go wrong? Her fans may disagree, but it’s always seemed to me that, after her defining role as a paragon of voluptuous ‘60s loveliness in ‘Danger! Diabolik’ (1968), it was a steep downhill curve all the way for Ms Mell. As you might well imagine, she is subjected to a hell of a rough time in this one, and, if she puts in good performance, that could just be due to the fact that her key note of brutalised, pouting resentment accurately reflects her off-screen attitude toward having to appear in this movie in the first place, as much as it does the travails of her character.

Ultimately, for all its technical drawbacks and unhinged, exploitative cruelty, it’s difficult not to admire a movie like ‘Mad Dog Killer’ on some level. Mirroring the attitude of its anti-hero/antagonist, it is a film that gets by on pure, mad-cap energy, thundering across your screen with zero concern for either quality control or human empathy – a ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’ movie that will likely draw you into its own airless realm of spittle-flecked intensity whether you like it or not.

The final showdown, in which Harrison inevitably goes mano-a-mano with Berger against the backdrop of an abandoned warehouse, is genuinely impressive stuff, viciously ratcheting up the tension as Berger agonisingly takes a knife to the torso of his teenage hostage (Santini’s estranged daughter) and lustily paws the young male punk who has ill-advisedly teamed up with him, precipitating a beyond-macho, might-is-right finale that effectively delivers on the only possible way a desperate story like this can end.

Essential viewing for all Helmut Berger fans (though Richard Harrison or Marissa Mell fans might want to think twice), ‘Mad Dog Killer’ ranks as one of grittiest exploitation head-kicks that Italian cinema has to offer. If you find yourself in the right mood to take the kind of punishment it’s doling out, it’s well worth a look, for Berger’s extraordinary performance if nothing else.

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(1)To clarify this title business - it actually takes but a few seconds of googling to confirm that this movie has frequently been released in English as ‘Beast with a Gun’, which presumably reflects the true meaning of the Italian title, but I’ve kept the ‘uterus’ stuff in the main text because it’s funny, and kind of interesting. Please consult your nearest Italian speaker for more info on the no doubt fascinating derivation and usage of the word “mitra”. Other English AKAs for this movie by the way include: ‘Street Killers’, ‘Mad Dog’, ‘The Human Beast’, ‘Ferocious’ and – apparently - ‘Wild Beasts with Machine Guns’.

Exploito All’Italiana: Hitch-Hike(Pasquale Festa Campanile, 1977)

(Original Title: ‘Autostop Rosso Sangue’.)

You know this one of course. An Italian-shot / American-set three-hander in which Franco Nero plays a boorish Italian journalist and Corinne Clery his long-suffering wife. We meet the couple mid-way through an especially cantankerous caravanning/hunting holiday in a not-quite-right looking Arizona, and, when they ill-advisedly offer a lift to fugitive bank robber and all-round psychopath David Hess, the spirit (if not the precise detail) of what follows can be most eloquently expressed by the awkwardly collaged cover of this Raro DVD edition.

So.. yeah. Basically, Campanile’s film rose far, far above my (relatively low) expectations, swiftly revealing itself to be a brutally effective, edge-of-seat kidnap/survival thriller in which the outrageous outbursts of violence and psychological handbrake turns necessary to keep such a tale rolling are handled with enough gravitas to ensure the tone remains serious as cancer throughout, creating a “literally anything could happen next” atmosphere that ratchets the tension mercilessly.

When it comes to critical writing (particularly on the subject of horror or crime movies), it has long been a cliché for reviewers to try to explain their dislike for a particular authorial voice by falling back some variation of the old “when every character is completely dislikeable, why should we care what happens to them?” argument. Perhaps I’ve even used this once or twice here myself over the years, I don’t recall, but anyway – following in the footsteps of any number of talented writers and filmmakers who have provided persuasive answers to that hypothetical question, ‘Hitch-Hike’ offers a stark lesson in just how shallow and wrong-headed such a judgmental approach to story-telling can be.

As such, let the record state that every character with a speaking part in ‘Hitch Hike’ is an absolute bastard, plain and simple. The only sympathetic emotion either Nero or Hess are liable to extract from an audience is one of pity, and even then, their constant, self-centered whining gets old pretty quick. Clery meanwhile is so steely she doesn’t even have that much going for her, shrugging off the assorted indignities she suffers through with an expressionless acceptance that suggests she’s angling to push both of her ugly suitors straight off the edge of a precipice as soon as is humanly possible.

When, as here, though, the writing and performances are strong enough to force you to walk a mile or two in the characters’ shoes, well... who gives a damn for your conception of whether or not you “like” them? If you’re looking to spend some time with people whose company you’d enjoy at a dinner party, you’re in the wrong genre here right from the outset, let’s face it.

Watching ‘Hitch Hike’ in its American dub – which is really the best option, given that we get Hess as nature intended and Nero dubbing himself in heavily accented English (which makes perfect sense, given that his character is an Italian tourist) – Clery’s performance inevitably suffers as the only dubbed member of the central trio, but to be honest she’d probably make the least impression in any language. You’d be hard-pressed to find any film more comprehensively disdainful of the demands of the Bechdel test than this one, and, devious though Clery’s character may be, we’re in the darkest heart of ‘70s machismo here, and it’s the tragic dance between Nero and Hess that really commands our attention – two deeply pathetic, animalistic losers, practically frothing at the mouth to try to grasp alpha-male status from the other, straining at the leash to take each other down, with the woman serving as a combined prize, servant and all-purpose hate object.

Nero in particular gives a fantastic performance, dragging the reprehensive thought processes of a man a less imaginative film might simply have pegged as our ‘hero’ into full view and letting them sizzle and melt in the sunlight, whilst Hess – true to form – gives us a leering human monster to rival Al Lettieri in ‘The Getaway’, Andrew Robinson in ‘Dirty Harry’ or Tomas Milian in ‘Almost Human’, even as he openly mocks the off-the-peg “I came from a broken home / society made me do it” self-justifications offered by those characters, opining at one point that he had a perfectly happy childhood and supportive family, but turned to the dark side because… well, you fill in the blanks. (We’ll get the ghost of Michael Winner to mark your answers after the show.)

Taken out of context, the scene in which Hess eventually rapes Clery whilst her husband watches tied to a chair (you’re watching a movie with Hess in, so you know he’s got to do his thing, right?), would be difficult to even sit through. But, coming at the point in the film at which it does, with the black-hearted, calculating intent of all three characters writ large upon their faces, the ‘big event’ takes on an entirely different complexion. As director, Campanile deserves huge kudos for presenting this scene less as the titillating act of gratuitous abuse most of his peers would have settled for, and more as a kind of hideous, inevitable ritual through which all three parties are angling toward their own, mutually exclusive goals. Like so many bits of business in ‘Hitch Hike’, it’s the kind of scene that sticks in your mind after viewing, encouraging you to start picking at its emotional residue like a dried scab, against your better judgment. Nasty, but irresistible.

Actually, Campanile and his collaborators excel all round here. Though ‘Hitch-Hike’ rarely gets stylistically flashy, as an efficient piece of dramatic film-making in the ‘70s crime idiom, it pretty much nails it. Character interactions are text-book exemplars of bug-eyed, whisky-soaked tension (you can almost feel the spirit burn at the back of your throat), whilst the film’s action sequences are surprisingly elaborate and often pretty awesome, incorporating wild-ass, verge-of-disaster stunt work and Peckinpah-esque cross-cutting that pretty much embodies everything you’ve ever loved about low budget ‘70s action cinema.

Running an unexpectedly lengthy 105 minutes, the film’s final act may induce a certain amount of head-scratching as the story continues to ramble on for a good fifteen minutes after what seems to be its natural conclusion, but I suppose they just figured, hey, we’ve got our movie-making mojo working so good here, let’s just keep on rolling (there’s that spirit of generosity I mentioned in the previous post in full effect)… and when we do eventually reach the final pay-off, you’ll get the point loud and clear.

Accomplished as it may be in technical terms, ‘Hitch Hike’ exhibits absolutely no traces of self-conscious artistry or social responsibility, and frankly a story this relentlessly hard-boiled is better off without them. It’s as if an Umberto Lenzi movie crashed head-first into a Jim Thompson novel leaving bullet casings and panties scattered across the asphalt, and it doesn’t need no fuckin’ auteur theory getting in the way.

Though it is often pegged as a poor cousin to Mario Bava’s broadly similar ‘Rabid Dogs’ (1975), I’ve got to admit that, in my heart of hearts, I think ‘Hitch Hike’ is the better of the two films. It’s a harrowing, high octane floor-punch of a movie, and if you’ve managed to side-step it thus far in your cinematic career, now is as good a time as any to take it on the chin and see if you’re still standing when the credits roll. [Spits out blood and teeth before staggering off toward the next review.]

(PRO TIP: For a great double bill, why not try this one out alongside Luigi Bazzoni’s style-is-the-substance giallo masterpiece ‘The Fifth Cord’ (1971)? Two very different varieties of Italian filmmaking, united by their shared status in the rarefied sub-genre of “movies in which Franco Nero has his Hemingway-esque macho self-image systematically destroyed whilst he stares out at the world with big, sad eyes”.)

La Nuit La Plus Longe / ‘Sexus’ (José Bénazéraf, 1965)

Of all the eccentric directors who roamed the hinterlands between art and exploitation in European cinema through the ‘60s and ‘70s, the Moroccan-born, Paris-based José Bénazéraf (1922 – 2012) remains one of the more elusive. Lacking either the poetic earnestness of Rollin or the grindhouse ubiquity of Franco, denied the arthouse cred of Alain Robbe-Grillet, and without ever achieving a breakthrough hit like Larraz’s ‘Vampyres’, Bénazéraf is very much an outsider even within this crew of outsiders, and if Tombs & Tohill hadn’t seen fit to allot him space alongside his aforementioned peers in their definitive Immoral Tales, it seems likely that his work would have been entirely forgotten in the English-speaking world - instead of ALMOST entirely forgotten, as is currently the case.

Naturally, this very obscurity along piques my interest, and, having recently found a source for a few of Bénazéraf’s early movies, now seems a good point at which to jump in and see how this cat stacks up against the aforementioned pantheon. First up, 1965’s ‘La Nuit La Plus Longe’, also known as ‘L'enfer Dans La Peau’, which hit American shores the same year, distributed by Radley Metzger’s Audubon Films under the name ‘Sexus’ (a title perhaps pilfered from the Henry Miller book of the same name?)

‘La Nuit..’ was actually Bénazéraf’s fifth feature film as producer/writer/director – a fact that greatly surprised me, given that what transpires on screen often seems more like the work of some nineteen year old firebrand who just saw a Godard movie and grabbed the nearest camera, rather than that of an experienced independent filmmaker in his forties.

Thus the opening minutes here give us sharply angled, quasi-verité street footage, with a foxy dame (Virginie Solenn) wandering around Paris as bongo fury erupts on the soundtrack. For a while we’re completely in the dark re: context and genre, but when two guys eventually appear and poke a gun in her ribs, it becomes clear we’re looking at a CRIME STORY.

Bénazéraf’s potential inclusion in the nouvelle vague may be questionable beyond his appearance as “man in white car” in ‘À Bout de Souffle’ (thanks IMDB!), but hey, check out what we’ve got here so far: a girl and a gun. Like it or not, the sort of brutal, chauvinist minimalism that can be found peeping through the corners of Godard and Chabrol’s early work is delivered here in spades, as if José had taken Jean Luc’s famously misquoted maxim and run with it… even if the question of whether he was pursuing it for the sake of artistic expression or easy dough remains open for debate.

Soon, we’re settled into a familiar kidnap scenario at a criminal gang’s rural hideaway, and there is a certain audacity to the way that Bénazéraf, before even establishing his credentials with a glimpse of excitement or drama, already has us literally clock-watching along with his blank, cipher-like characters, as they sit around smoking, cracking open beer cans with a screwdriver and staring at the oversized cuckoo clock whose tick-tocking dominates much of the film’s soundtrack, awaiting the arrival of their boss.

In its early stages, the film seems at pains to evoke the contrived, poker-face pose of a street corner tough guy, as characters speak in muttered non-sequiturs, ignore each other’s questions, and generally fail to give us an inch. Except when they do, breaking the spell to clearly explain for our benefit that so-and-so will here in an hour and that the ransom must be paid by 4am and so forth – which is all a bit disappointing, given the gimlet-eyed audience stare-down that has proceeded it.

Gratuitous boobs and mildly eroticized violence proceed to push things firmly into the sexploitation/roughie bracket – Bénazéraf really spreading his net wide in terms of saleable genre elements - and basically at this point the whole thing becomes a cynical, psychosexual free-for-all; a kind of suspense-free ramble through the kind of “killers & victims in a confined location” set-up that would later be perfected in films like Polanski’s ‘Cul de Sac’ and Frederick Freidel’s ‘Axe’/’Lisa Lisa’. Thus, a series of menacing gestures, slow stripteases, theatrical knife fights and stammered confessional monologues ensue, with any thread of emotional/dramatic coherence rendered largely incidental.

Throughout the film, Bénazéraf taps straight into the core of base gangster movie instincts. The women dance and get naked, the men take care of business and get violent. Delighting in that peculiarly ‘off’ sense of fake-ness that seems to characterise action scenes in many low budget French films (though it looks like they put a lot of effort into the choreography of the big knife fight, bless ‘em), the intent seems to be to make clear that everything here is *performance* - vaguely pushing toward the very same kind of hipster-gangster metaphysical revelation that led former Paris resident Donald Cammell to cook up such extraordinary results just a few years later.

But anyway; that sad-eyed, sympathetic-yet-creepy looking fellow playing the gang boss - he looks familiar, doesn’t he? Why, yes, it’s Jean Rollin regular Willy Braque in an early role! What a lovely surprise. It’s always nice to see him. And the younger, handsomer dude swinging a touch of Delon-like charisma, he’s a pretty strong presence too. He actually looks a lot like an older version of John Moulder-Brown from ‘Deep End’, but he isn’t, obviously. (He is Alain Tissier, for the record, and he didn’t appear in any other films I’ve seen.)

Despite a music credit for Chet Baker being prominently displayed on posters, the soundtrack here seems like a pretty rum business too. In between stretches of silence and that infernal tick-tocking, we get snatches of mambo, jazz and African drumming that sound like they’ve probably been pulled straight from LPs in the director’s record collection, and copyright be damned. Baker’s own music only appears in the film’s more, uh, ‘sensuous’ moments, adding a touch of arty mystique to Solenn’s gamboling naked in the woods, and so forth.*

A particularly freaked out passage of exotica-esque tribal percussion and dissonant piano-bashing can be heard when the film takes a sudden, unscheduled leap away from the isolated kidnap scenario into a Franco-esque risque lesbian bondage act, observed by a bunch of people we’ve never seen before in the middle of one the most cramped looking faux-nightclub sets you ever saw. This thing really comes out of nowhere - no reason, no convincing context - but I’m kinda glad it did, because the psycho-sexual kidnap drama thing had just about run its course by this point, and, as with Franco, such kinky material really seems to kick-start Bénazéraf’s engines, leading to some wild low angle shots, snappy editing and coldly classy Helmut Berger-esque b & w photography, as a pair of dancers play out their act in the middle of the bar-room floor, with the louche patrons carefully stepping around them.

Whilst the faux-new wave pillow-talk sometimes gets a bit much, the film’s final twenty minutes, in which the kidnapped girl and the more handsome gangster evolve a kind of oblique relationship as they await their inevitable demise, works very well, achieving a kind of simple, utilitarian poignancy that almost manages to salvage the film’s more high-brow aspirations, in spite of its numerous instances of boredom, sleaze and silliness. As if realising he’s suddenly hit the right note, Bénazéraf then sadly proceeds to overplay his hand almost immediately, ploughing straight into cliché, as the sound of Baker’s lonesome horn accompanies Tissier’s existential, head-bowed walk toward across bare fields to greet his machine gun-delivered doom, at which point we freeze-frame, ‘Platoon’ poster style, as the credits roll. A little on the nose, you might say.

Overall, ‘La Nuit la Plus Longe’, gives the impression of José Bénazéraf being a bit of a chancer, but not necessarily in a bad way. More than any of the other loosely defined ‘art / exploitation’ directors, he really is poised on the knife edge between the two impulses, never really allowing viewers to settle safely into one mindset or the other. Those with a pre-existing belief that the director is a neglected visionary may take this as an uncomplimentary review, but that’s really not the case. Cynical though I may be about Bénazéraf’s true intentions, I enjoyed this film a great deal, and, though the results may be nowhere near as powerful or challenging, the general thrust of Bénazéraf’s approach strikes me as being as close to a madman like Koji Wakamatsu as it is to someone like, say, José Ramón Larraz.

Like Wakamatsu, Bénazéraf’s films (in this time period at least) have a free-wheeling, “anything could happen next” sort of vibe to them that I really appreciate. They seem like films made entirely out of sight of industry or authority, brazenly biting the hand that feeds them as they plough whatever miniscule amount of dog-eared cash was invested in their production into a kind of “we’ve got nothing to prove, we’ll film what the hell we like” anti-methodology that feels bracing and fun compared to the more tightly structured and critically picked over work of the era’s better known filmmakers.

That’s not to say that Bénazéraf is anything less than a canny technical operator – he has a great sense of filmic rhythm and a good eye for framing and photography – but there is nonetheless a kind of steely absurdity and uncertain, amateur hour thuggery to ‘La Nuit la Plus Longe’ that verges into an almost accidental kind of ramshackle movie poetry. Though difficult to really defend in terms of its artistic merit (however much it may strive for such recognition), this is strung out, marginal b-cinema at its finest – a warped postcard from the unmapped badlands of ‘60s Paris, where Cashiers de Cinema feared to tread - and I look forward to catching up with more of this peculiar filmmaker’s oeuvre post-haste.

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* Chet Baker’s music here, I should add, is certainly an exquisitely ragged example of the trumpeter’s particular art, even if the clichéd visual accompaniment here perhaps does not showcase his talents to their best advantage. Music by Baker actually turned up in several early Bénazéraf films, presumably recorded whilst he was living in Paris, but I’m not really sure of the nature of their collaboration. Maybe they were best buddies and close collaborators, or maybe José just turned up at Chet’s hotel room one day with a tape recorder and a wad of smack money? Who knows. Answers in the comments please if you can enlighten us further.