HOW TASTY WAS MY LITTLE FRENCHMAN (Como Era Gostoso o Meu Francês,1971)

The Vietnam War and the final throes of European imperialism inspired a wide range of revisionist views of confrontations between "civilized" and "primitive" peoples in 1970s cinema. While the benevolence of the white man was, to say the least, not taken for granted, the nobility of savages wasn't always taken for granted, either. Cinematic aboriginals ranged from the idealized Native Americans of revisionist U.S. westerns to the utter savagery, albeit provoked, of Italian cannibal movies. Nelson Pereira dos Santos's movie comes early in the wave and is more likely influenced by the global interest in the primal kulturkampf than by other countries' movies. While it may have given world audiences the fashionable thrill of seeing a white man undone by tribal folk, it doesn't exactly offer a blueprint for a Third World uprising. Como Era Gostoso is a grim, unheroic affair that sees brutality and selfish ambition everywhere, though its main attraction is probably its abundance of nudity, male and female.

The little Frenchman (Arduino Colassanti) never gets a name. Condemned by his own people, who are competing in 1594 with Portugal in the colonization of Brazil, he is weighed down with a ball and chain and dumped into the sea. He somehow makes it to shore and eventually falls in with some Portugese who make him their gunner. He gets captured by the Tupinamba tribe, to whom he struggles to prove that he is French, and therefore an ally, and not a Portugese enemy. They may not know either language, but they think they can tell the two apart when Europeans speak. Their chief, Cunhambebe (Eduardo Imbassahy Filho) decides that his prisoner is Portugese, mainly because he wants a slave to sacrifice as a ritual meal -- and the French trader who visits the Tupinambas regularly has no interest in correcting the chief's error. The most he'll do for his fellow Frenchman is hold out hope that Cunhambebe will eventually free him before he decides to kill him.

 

For the moment, the Frenchman is useful. The tribe has salvaged two small cannons from their raid, and their prisoner knows not only how to fire them but how to make more gunpowder. Cunhambebe hopes for a decisive victory against his tribe's traditional enemies, the Portuguese-allied Tupiniquins. While he prepares for war, the Frenchman introduces the tribeswomen to new ideas in agriculture, sheds his European clothes and cuts his hair tribal style. This last bit actually makes it easier for Cunhambebe to grab him and yank him around, to assert his dominance. You can see concern in the chief's eyes even as everything seems to go his way -- a suspicion that his slave and his cannon might get more credit for the eventual victory over the enemy tribe. Meanwhile, the Frenchman has been given a woman, Seboipepe (Ana Maria Magalhães) and notices that the "bead" she wears in her navel is actually a silver coin. He and the trader find a buried treasure but squabble over the split, our hero killing his momentary partner. He's still hoping to make a break, maybe with the woman and definitely with the treasure. Everything comes to a head when Cunhambebe decides abruptly, after brooding in the middle of a victory celebration, that it's time for his slave to die. The girl explains the role the Frenchman must play in a scripted ritual, and stops him from escaping with his loot. The climactic question is whether the ritual is symbolic only, whether a Pocahantas scenario will be played out, or whether Cunhambebe ain't playin'...

 

The objectification of the Frenchman is the starkest fact of the story. If the French think of him as a criminal, and the Portuguese as an enemy, the Tupinambas see him as food, albeit a special kind of meal they can taunt as he's dragged into their village. This taunting may make the Tupinambas seem more evil or depraved, if not more savage, than the mindless-seeming cannibals of Italian gore films. The more that we see that the Tupinambas have a culture, from their elaborate rituals to their purely ornamental fashion sense, the more disturbing their cannibalism seems and the more, perhaps, we want to think that they don't really mean it, that all this talk of eating someone is just a game. Seboipepe;s attitude may be the most troubling of all; does she grow truly affectionate toward the Frenchman, or is she simply turned on by the idea of playing with her food? Despite any horror we feel toward his fate, it remains hard to root for the Frenchman, as he remains viciously greedy in a way the filmmakers may have felt was characteristically European for the time. Como Era Gostoso is a film without a hero, since Cunhambebe seems hardly less odious in his egotistical ambition and readiness to exploit the white man and his weapons. As the chief, Filho practically steals the film from Colassanti, his surly ambition trumping the title character's somewhat generic traits. He manages more than anyone else to convey a performance with body language and facial expressions while speaking a language foreign to him and parading about practically starkers. The cast as a whole manages to transcend self-consciousness in portraying the topless and bottomless tribespeople, probably because they understand that feathers and bodypaint are as much their clothing and their identity as shirts, pants, etc. are ours.

Dos Santos films in appropriately spare style, stripping the story of any European romanticism while showing off impressive art direction in the Tupinambas village. While the quotations from contemporary writers commenting on native savagery really only interrupt the story, except for a probably predictable epilogue, they don't disrupt the viewer's immersion into an authentically alien human environment. The picture's invocation of a dead culture is convincing, though one might wonder whether dos Santos meant ultimately to show that it deserved death. No paradise was lost, it seems, and primitive life promises no refuge for a drop-out from European civilization, whether accidental or deliberate. How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman is a vision of human nature in the raw, in more than one sense, and has a place in movie history as a discordant variation on the savage-vs.-civilized theme.

MAN IN THE WILDERNESS (1971) and LAST CANNIBAL WORLD (1976)

At first I was just going to review Ruggero Deodato's first essay into cannibal cinema, which I saw for the first time earlier this month under its exploitative nom de video Jungle Holocaust. I had a backlog of other films to write up, however, and in the meantime I read venom5's survey of Italian cannibal and related horrors at his Cool Ass Cinema blog. In it, he noted that the pioneer film of the cannibal genre, Umberto Lenzi's Man From Deep River (as yet unseen by me) was a retelling of A Man Called Horse, the movie that made Richard Harris an unlikely Western star. That point provoked me to ponder the differences between the American wilderness genre and its Italian counterpart -- counterpoint may be the better word. It occurred to me while thinking about it that Indians never factored much in spaghetti westerns. I've never seen one in which they play the noble-savage role (with increasing emphasis on noble) that became common in American films. You see Mexicans more than Indians in Italian westerns, at least in my experience. The absence of Indians is understandable, I suppose, since American moviemakers are playing out issues from their nation's recent past that have no parallel that I can think of for the Italian moviegoer. Yet Italians seemed to have a distinct idea about aboriginal cultures, or at least their exploitation producers did, and it's profoundly different from the prevailing American idealization of Natives. Arguably it extends to profoundly different ideas of nature itself and the possibility of achieving harmony with it.

So I decided on a comparative approach, matching the Deodato with an American counterpart. I happened to have one at home: Richard C. Sarafian's Man in the Wilderness, starring none other than Richard Harris. It actually isn't the ideal film for comparison, since its Indians are rather peripheral to its story, but there are a few moments with surprisingly exact counterparts in Last Cannibal World, leading me to wonder whether Deodato was commenting on or parodying Sarafian.

Man in the Wilderness is at the least a case of truth in advertising. It consists mostly of Richard Harris in the wilderness. He's Zach Bass, a member of a peculiar trapping expedition circa 1820. The trappers are hauling a big boat through our title wilderness, intending to ride it down the Mississippi. It's a powerful eerie image to open the film with, and its progress gives us a visual jolt whenever we see it, but it promises a stranger, more interesting film than Sarafian actually made.

John Huston and his ship-on-wheels often seem to be part of a different, more surreal or sinister film than Man in the Wilderness, but that's where they're stuck.

The trouble begins when Zach is mauled by a bear in a nicely staged scene with some nasty wound effects. By the time his comrades have shot the bear down, Zach is at least half dead. It tells you about the influence Italian films have had on me when I assumed, when one of the trappers says, "At least he left us some meat for the rest of the journey," that the trapper meant Zach, not the bear. I realized my error quickly. The chief of the trappers, Captain Henry (John Huston) is concerned mainly with giving Zach a Christian burial before they move on. Since Zach is still alive, he details two men to stay with him until he dies, then bury him. He gives them two days; if Zach's still alive then, they should kill him, bury him, and rejoin the main group. Harris is uncommunicative but conscious enough to hear this.

Two days later, it looks as if Zach is actually getting better thanks to the minimal patching up he received. Orders are orders, however, -- except when Indians are close. The two trappers, one unwilling to kill Zach in the first place, chicken out and skedaddle, abandoning the still gravely hurt man in the middle of nowhere. From here the film consists of Zach's slow recovery, from dragging himself to a watering hole to regaining the use of his legs, from scavenging in rivalry with wolves to trapping and hunting on his own. For variety's sake we're treated to flashbacks that reveal Zach as a sullen, undemonstrative fellow. We see him as a child getting rapped repeatedly on the knuckles for refusing to answer the question, "Who made the world?" One of this film's problems is that we can't tell from this scene whether little Zach is a precocious agnostic or clinically dense. In later life we see him about to abandon his pregnant wife, but not without telling the child in her womb that he wishes them both the best despite his belief that it's foolish to be born in such a world as ours. Later yet, we see him return to find the wife dead from childbirth and his son a toddler tended by Zach's mother-in-law. Our hero was content to leave things that way, reluctant even to greet the boy. We're rooting for a real winner here, but rooting for him to do what?

The trappers continue on their way but take a detour while the Indians dither over whether to attack them. Captain Henry grows obsessed with Zach, believing like many of his men that their colleague is still alive and most likely powerfully pissed off at all of them. Having a ship in his picture with John Huston as its captain is Sarafian's way of begging for comparisons with Moby Dick, but screenwriter Jack DeWitt gives Huston little to work with. The old man has a striking costume and a proven presence on film, but he isn't sufficiently villainous or crazy to get us anticipating a showdown between him and Harris. That's a good thing, I suppose, since that showdown is an incredible anticlimax that leaves you wondering what the point was of it all.

Sarafian's wilderness isn't a benign place. It tests people, but like many wilderness films it seems to argue that the hero's ordeal has a positive or purifying effect. The location work is the film's strongest suit apart from the imagery of the ship on land. Harris's performance is almost entirely physical. He has little more than a dozen lines of dialogue in the whole picture, it seems, but he does invest his role with nonverbal expressiveness. Apart from Huston, the trappers (including James "Scotty" Doohan) are a nondescript bunch. The Indians notice Harris's existence occasionally, but usually leave him alone because he wears some sort of Indian sign. Henry Wilcoxson is their chief, which rather limits their ability to represent natural authenticity. He has a big scene with Harris in which he talks entirely in untranslated native language. There are no initiation scenes of the kind that made Man Called Horse notorious. There is, however, a moment in which Indians teach Zach Bass about humanity, and this is where I found an evil echo in Last Cannibal World.

On his road to recovery, on the trail of the trappers, Zach comes across an Indian woman by a riverbank. She's there to give birth to a baby. Our hero watches raptly, and the sight inspires the flashback to his first and only sight of his son. His eyes appear to ache with sympathy for the mother as he suddenly and clearly misses his own child. This feeling grows stronger as he sees the father lovingly claim the new baby and take the mother home.This sets up what the writer wants to be the payoff of the final confrontation between Harris and Huston, and while you can see what his point was, it's still an anticlimax, and a fatal one for this sort of film. Still, we have to note this one moment when the taciturn, solitary white man learns the value of family from "savages."

In Last Cannibal World, Robert Harper (Massimo Foschi) is on the run from his cannibal captors somewhere in the Philippines when he pauses to espy a similar sight. While the Indian mother in Wilderness is fully clothed, the Cannibal mother is as naked as most of the rest of the cast. With louder birth pains she brings her baby into the world. Like the Wilderness mother she bites through the umbilical cord. She then throws the baby into a river, presumably to be eaten by an alligator.

Apart from scenes of violence against animals (which Deodato denies shooting in a video intro to the Shriek Show DVD), this business with the baby is the most appalling part of a pretty appalling film. Deodato's primitives have no family values that we can notice, and maybe no values whatsoever. Their collective feasts of human flesh or fresh-killed alligators are free-for-alls that see fellow tribesmen fighting each other for the best bits. They seem to be envisioned as sub-human; one civilized character claims that the tribespeople don't even have a language. This is meant to be more alarming to the audience because, while the American wilderness films are set in the past, the Italian cannibal films take place in the present.

Harper's sojourn among the cannibals is in no way purifying. Quite the opposite; he ends up raping the native woman (Me Me Ly) who helps him escape a captivity intended to fatten him up into alligator bait. When one of his civilized colleagues reunites with him, he thinks that Harper is going insane. In the thematic climax of the film, Harper faces down his last pursuers by ripping the heart from one he's just killed and tucking into it as a form of intimidation. I was reminded of this a little when in Wilderness Harris chomps on a hunk of raw meat he'd just cut from a still-quivering buffalo after beating wolves away from the body. That moment is meant to make you a little queasy, but the Deodato scene is far more horrific and powerful because Harper has turned cannibal not from necessity, but out of pure viciousness. It represents his victory over the cannibals but also his final descent into savagery, his eventual return to civilization and his reported marriage and retirement to Mexico notwithstanding.

Last Cannibal World hearkens back to Man Called Horse in its ritual humiliation of Harper, who is stripped naked, has his penis fondled by curious or contemptuous natives, and is pissed upon by children. In the wilderness films you can construe this treatment as a kind of breaking down of the defective "civilized" personality before the hero can be built up as a better, more natural man. In Deodato's film there's no room for idealistic fantasy; Harper's story is an ordeal of degradation from beginning to end, which he survives only by becoming more savage than his oppressors.

Massimo Foschi is made to fly like an eagle (or an airplane) by the literal cavemen of the Last Cannibal World. Below, an eagle resents the comparison.

Critics have been speculating for nearly forty years about the roots of the Italian fascination with cannibals. If the cannibal films are a response to the American wilderness films they can be seen to some extent as a grim satire on American noble-savagery. I don't know if the notions about noble savages popularly identified with Jean-Jacques Rousseau had much influence in Italy, but I do know that Italians were little exposed to aboriginal peoples compared to other European powers that had more extensive colonial empires. Maybe they had no colonial guilt to drive them to idealize the primitive, and maybe they had a stronger sense of original sin than other nations that immunized them against noble-savage idealism. I have to defer to the experts on this one.

I've long been a defender of Deodato's magnum opus, Cannibal Holocaust (1980), and having now seen Ultimo Mondo Cannibale I can definitely say that the later film is an advance on the earlier one. Holocaust is often taken as a satire on "Mondo" moviemakers, but in the context of Deodato's career it could also be an act of self-criticism, or willful self-parody. While holding no illusions about its cannibals, Holocaust takes their side, to an extent, against its predatory filmmakers. That's progressive compared to Last Cannibal World, but just about anything would be. More so than Holocaust, the earlier film is one whose power must be acknowledged in spite of, or perhaps because of the profound feelings of loathing it may provoke. It taps into an atavistic fear that most people had hoped to forget, or might prefer to experience in the sublimated or (strange to say) euphemistic form of the flesh-eating zombie film. Did the cannibal films fill a perceived void left by some supposed denial at the heart of the wilderness films? It depends on how you see the wilderness films, and how you see the wilderness.

FIRES ON THE PLAIN (Nobi, 1959)

Japan's World War II movies are equivalent to America's Vietnam movies. Military defeat provokes a lot of soul-searching and self-recrimination, and probably some defensive rationalization or justification as well. Not surprisingly, the rest of the world sees the movies in which Japanese writers and directors say that the war sucked. Kon Ichikawa's film, based on a controversial novel by Shohei Ooka and adapted by Ichikawa's wife, says that the war really sucked toward the end, and does an effective job illustrating that point.

Early in 1945, the Japanese still occupied parts of the Philippines, but their situation was deteriorating fast. Rations and other resources were dwindling away. This is bad news for PFC Tamura. Though diagnosed with tuberculosis, he's been booted from a military hospital because he can still walk and able-bodied grunts shouldn't be using up the hospital's scanty provisions. This doesn't seem to bug Tamura much until he reaches his unit. They don't want him either, mainly because he's an extra mouth to feed. Back to the hospital he goes, but they still don't want him. He's stuck hanging around outside with other rejects, including the team of Yasuda and his apparent flunky Nagamatsu. These guys are down to their last yams, but Tamura has some extra goodies he took from a Filipino farmer on his way over. When the Americans start shelling the area, the officers get away, Tamura and some of the rejects manage to get away (though he loses track of Yasuda and Nagamatsu) and most of the sickest people get blown to hell.

Eiji Funakoshi as PFC Tamura in Fires on the Plain.

Tamura is on his own for an odyssey that takes him through abandoned villages for various adventures. In a great shock moment, he's attacked from behind by a feral dog as the camera follows him through a village. He has to kill the beast with a bayonet, and while Ichikawa isn't going to give you a real money shot of impaled dog, scenes of monochromatic blood spattering the ground and Tamura's face put the point across quite well.

As he trudges on toward a rendezvous point, Tamura starts to lose his bearings. In a coastal village he encounters a young couple who've returned to recover some hoarded salt. When the girl screams in panic, he lowers his weapon to assure them of his peaceful intentions. In the next moment, on an inexplicable impulse he shoots her in the chest. The man runs away, leaving Tamura to grab the salt, which will serve him well later when he runs into three stray soldiers commanded by a would-be badass who tries to tell him that this is all nothing compared to New Guinea, where they had to resort to cannibalism. He has to be kidding, right?

On the road, Tamura catches up with Yasuda and Nagamatsu. Yasuda's still suffering from an injured, swollen leg, so he has Nagamatsu hawk tobacco leaves to passing officers. Yasuda keeps these leaves wrapped around his chest for security and, perhaps, added pungency. When Nagamatsu presents his wares to an officer, the superior slaps him in the face and tells him to stop malingering. Yasuda chides his sidekick: get the money before you show them the leaf next time!

To reach their rendezvous point, the Japanese have to cross a road and stream under heavy enemy fire. Many don't make it, and Tamura finds himself pretty much on his own again, wandering through a hellscape of corpses and wreckage. Along the way there's a brilliant sequence involving boots on a muddy road. There sits a reasonably intact pair of boots that someone's abandoned. A soldier finds them and shucks off his ragged pair to walk off with them. Another soldier decides that that pair can replace his practically sole-less boots, which he leaves behind in the same spot. Finally Tamura comes along, sees little to choose from between those and his, and decides to go on barefoot through the mud.

Eventually Tamura finds Nagamatsu again. It's vice versa, actually, as Nagamatsu finds him collapsed in the wide open. He tries to revive Tamura with a piece of meat he fishes from his bag, but Tamura's gums have rotted to the point where he can't chew properly. He has to spit it up, and Nagamatsu puts it back in the bag. What was that stuff, anyway? Monkey meat, Nagamatsu explains.

"Monkey meat." Uh-oh. Kinji Fukasaku's Under the Flag of the Rising Sun taught me what "monkey meat" means, and it ain't monkey. Worse, Nagamatsu hunts "monkeys" to keep himself and Yasuda in an approximation of health. But he and his pal aren't getting along the way they used to. In fact, Nagamatsu is convinced that Yasuda, crippled leg and all, is out to kill him and eat him. Taking Tamura in his confidence, he makes plans to win that battle when it comes. When it does, Nagamatsu marks his triumph in a hair-raising scene that again shows what Ichikawa can do with suggestion. You don't need to see the man tuck into Yasuda Italian-style, but a splash of blood on the ground and the blood-spattered, blood-drooling visage of the crazed soldier tells us and Tamura all we need to know, and probably a little more. The only questions left are whether Tamura can avoid becoming monkey meat himself and whether he has any chance of reaching civilization of any kind again....

Mickey Curtis as Nagamatsu deserves mention alongside the many notable cinema psychos and terrors who strode across movie screens in the 1959-60 period.

Making Nobi in black and white allows Ichikawa and his cinematographers to make a film that's beautiful in its barbarism. Like many Japanese directors, Ichikawa took to widescreen like a duck to water, and the film is spectacular to look at if you can stand the horrors-of-war imagery. Eiji Funakoshi (whom some may recognize from the first Gamera movie) effectively conveys Tamura's blasted consciousness beneath a facade of mannered stoicism, but is often a straight man for the more extreme ravings of Mickey Curtis (don't let the name fool you, though he speaks fluent English in an interview for the Criterion Collection) as Nagamatsu and Osamu Takizawa as Yasuda. Curtis is especially freakish as a character who evolves from a sort of flunky of Yasuda's to a full-throttle psychopath. This may be a black-and-white war movie, but it has many of the qualities of horror or more extreme cinema, and all rendered with a clear artistic touch. I don't know if I can say that American Vietnam cinema ever touched the depths the way this film does, but the Japanese in WW2 had it worse than our boys did in 'Nam. In any event, anyone who digs 'Nam movies in particular (and war movies in general) will find a lot to admire here.