On the Big Screen: THE TRAITOR (Il traditore, 2019)

At age eighty, and after more than fifty years of filmmaking Marco Bellocchio is arguably the elder statesman of Italian cinema. In the 21st century he's become an intermittent chronicler of Italy's 20th century. His latest film is a companion piece with his 2009 Mussolini film Vincere and his 2003 Aldo Moro-Red Brigades picture Good Morning Night. The "traitor" of this one is Tommaso Buscetta (Pierfrancesco Pavino), Italy's answer to Joe Valachi: the first man who spilled the beans on organized crime in his country in a major way. This happened in the 1980s, after Buscetta, a career criminal and ex-con, decided to leave the business and move to Brazil, where he had done "business" before. Relatives who remain in Italy, including two sons, are killed in a Mafia war, while the Brazilian government accuses him of drug trafficking. The Brazilian government of the day didn't play around; they try to force a confession by threatening to throw Tommaso's wife (Maria Fernanda Candido) from a helicopter into the ocean. Whether he had anything to confess or not, Buscetta ends up back in Italy, where he decides that he has actual stuff to confess to crusading prosecutor and eventual martyr Giovanni Falcone (Fausto Russo Alesi). He becomes the star witness at the so-called Maxi Trial, which becomes the film's central spectacle. For non-Italians, the unusual trial procedures stand out, particularly allowing defendants to cross-examine witnesses. This makes possible dramatic confrontations between Buscetta and his former colleagues, who naturally call him a liar when they aren't heckling him as a cuckold from their cages in the rear of the vast courtroom. Buscetta holds his own in these encounters -- though he fares less well later when he lobs accusations at politicians who clearly can afford better lawyers than mafiosi can -- but he hardly can enjoy his victories when the bosses are convicted. He knows all too well that the Mafia's reach and memory are long. Exiled in an American witness-protection program, he retreats from New Hampshire to Colorado after a restaurant singer in a Santa costume serenades him in Sicilian dialect as if he were the coward Robert Ford. To the day of his peaceful demise he has to remain on guard, because he knows the Mafia like he knows himself....

Accustomed as U.S. audiences have become to expansive, seemingly comprehensive Scorsese-style chronicles of crime, Il Traditore can't help seeming incomplete no matter how well made and performed it mostly is. We're likely to become conscious of gaps or omissions as Buscetta clarifies his motives for informing. He tells Falcone and the judges at the Maxi Trial that he still considers himself a "man of honor" but that his peers, particular Salvatore Riina (Nicola Cali) were the true traitors to the traditional values of La Cosa Nostra by going all in on the heroin trade, regardless of its cost to their own families. Something can't help but seem missing when Buscetta repeatedly reiterates how Riina has ruined La Cosa Nostra, yet Riina has a relatively minimal presence in the film and we see very little of the "golden age" Buscetta idealizes -- which we definitely would see in a Scorsese epic -- before Riina took over. Rather than show this idealized past, Bellocchio challenges us to take Bruscetta's word for it or question his actual motivation. The director presents the past in non-linear fashion rather than giving us a conventional rise-and-fall narrative. The film's flashbacks aren't self-consciously narrated by Bruscetta, but arrive more like unfiltered memories, though one important reminiscence midway through the picture is interrupted and only taken up again at the very end.  An exception to the general rule is a flashback to the murder of Buscetta's sons, based on the testimony of a new informer who took part in the killing. This scene, and Buscetta's reaction to the testimony, suggest guilt over abandoning his children to almost certain death as the his ultimate motive, since his indifference to whether they joined him in Brazil belies his claim that his real family ultimately mattered more to him than the Mafia family. In the end, I think, Bellocchio is too careful to offer a perfect "Rosebud" explanation for Buscetta's "treason." He keeps a certain distance from his subject that is arguably European if only by comparison to Hollywood's insistence on definitive answers. Overall, I rather like Favino's performance for its comparative understatement. He makes Buscetta seem like a real person rather than an archetype. I don't know if Favino and Bellocchio have given us the "real" Buscetta -- alternate presentations seem possible -- but they did make me want to know more about the man, and that should count as some kind of success.

NIGHT AFFAIR (Le desordre et la nuit,1958)

Jean Gabin's film career lasted from the 1930s to the 1970s and had two major phases. In the first, he was a leading man. In the second, from 1954's Touchez pas au grisbi forward, he was a middle-aged tough guy in films presumably appealing primarily to men. Unsurprisingly, Gabin could still play the leading man at least early on in this latter stage, even though he'd become a thicker, courser looking figure. The Gabin character's romance with the female lead in this Gilles Grangier detective story may be its most challenging feature, not just because of the 25-year age difference between the star and Nadja Tiller, but also because of the initially violent way these kooky Frenchpersons bond with each other.

Like many a French crime picture, Night Affair focuses on a nightclub. This one's a jazz club operated by Marquis (Robert Berri), who has a stable of black entertainers including floor show dancers, a band and star singer Valentine Horse (blacklisted U.S. chanteuse Hazel Scott). It boasts a racially mixed clientele, though it's hard for an outsider to tell whether this marked the place as progressive or decadent in the eyes of the original audience. The club hosts a tense meeting between a drug dealer (Roger Hanin) and his impatient buyer, Blasco, (Robert Manuel), after which the dealer, with his moll in tow, goes out to pick up his supply. From out of nowhere the buyer is shot down, and the moll, Lucky Fridel (Tiller) abruptly drives away.

The vice squad assigns Inspector Vallois (Gabin) to the case, despite his enduring affection for "grape juice." He ends up taking the flirtatious Lucky to her apartment, where they exchange slaps -- she starts it -- before going to bed. It looks like it'll only be a one-night stand when Vallois discovers, to his disgust, that Lucky, a German girl who aspires to singing like a Negro, is a cocaine addict. Still, the lonely detective follows her to a party at Valentine Horses's apartment in the hope of finding more out about her milieu. When the party ends violently, Blasco goes for treatment to a private physician or pharmacist (Danielle Darrieux) who may hold crucial pieces of the drug ring and murder puzzle.

Night Affair is more whodunit than crime story -- there's little urgency felt among the criminal element about the abrupt interruption of the drug supply -- and even more than that it's Vallois' crusade to redeem Lucky. Even though Gabin is technically a romantic lead, his is really a patriarchal role. It's telling that the film ends with Lucky entering a rehab facility, with the promise of a happy reunion with Vallois, rather than with the reunion. That finish is reminiscent of those relatively sympathetic morality plays where the repentant outlaw agrees to serve a light sentence on the understanding that he'll live happily afterward. The important thing here seems not so much that Lucky and Vallois might live happily ever after, but that by convincing Lucky to take her medicine, so to speak, Vallois has restored some moral order to the world. On some level you could call it a conservative film for that reason, but regardless of that the music is quite good and the spectacle of Gabin righteously slapping folks around -- men, too -- is entertaining on your choice of levels.

DANGER PAYS (1962)

In recent years American audiences were made acquainted with "Nikkatsu noir," the Japanese studio's sometimes gritty, sometimes stylish crime films of the 1950s and 1960s. Nikkatsu made other kinds of crime film as well, including this Ko Nakahira film that might best be described as Runyonesque in the manner, if without the music, of Guys and Dolls. It showcases a colorful crowd of cartoonish crooks, led by Nikkatsu noir standout Jo Shishido as Glass-Heart Joe, a petty purple peacock of a hood who putters around town in his tiny two-seater looking for the main chance. When gangsters on a larger scale hijack a truck carrying paper used to print currency, Joe figures out that there's counterfeiting to be done. The thing to do in such circumstances is to nab the top counterfeiter, an old man known as The Expert (Bokuzen Hidari), and ask a high price of the hijackers for his services. Unsurprisingly, Joe isn't the only guy to get that idea. He has to deal with two semi-friendly rivals: Slide Rule (Hiroyuki Nagato), so named because of his Mad Thinker-like habit of calculating the probabilities in any situation, and Dump Truck Ken (Kojiro Kusanagi), so named because that's what he drives. They have Joe's number because they know his weakness. Rub two pieces of glass together and the squeaky sound drives Joe bananas and renders him helpless.

These three cancel each other out initially, letting the hijack gang get away with The Expert, who proves a bit of a prima donna. He demands ideal work conditions, i.e., working in the basement of the Cabaret Acapulco  with a glass ceiling giving him a private angle on the showgirls performing on stage. His new employers prove quite accommodating, being desperate for a big payday when they exchange their counterfeit yen for authentic U.S. dollars from unsuspecting Hong Kong crooks.

The rest of the film follows the three small-timers' attempts to snatch The Expert until they're forced to join forces for their own protection. Along the way, Joe picks up a feisty sidekick when his machinations get Tomoko, an innocent secretary (Ruriko Asaoka) fired from her office job. She proves to be a judo and akido expert who gets to throw Joe across a room in one scene and gets into an extended brawl with a randy trucker in another. Pound for pound she's probably the toughest of our protagonists, as long as firearms aren't involved. She otherwise makes a helpful accomplice when Joe's trying to convince the hijackers, for his life's sake, that he's wearing a wire and the cops are listening in.

Since everyone's hoping for a big payday, the danger has to match the prize. However goofy the main characters seen, this is still a take-no-prisoners crime film. It opens with the original truck drivers getting murdered, and reaches its climax when our fighting foursome, after escaping a gassy deathtrap, somehow shoot their way out of an elevator shaft, slaughtering the entire hijack gang. The joke here is that two-fisted Tomoko gets ill at the sight of blood. The irony is that those gangsters gave their lives for nothing. On a whim, the Expert had tricked them, putting a subtle flaw in the engraving that renders the fake bills even more worthless -- but our heroes hope to put one over on the Hong Kong crew before those fools have a chance to figure things out....

It's a fun change of pace to see Jo Shishido in something like Rat Pack mode, and the probability that he'll bungle everything keeps him sympathetic throughout. The comedy is broad though not embarrassingly so, and the vivid cinematography of Shinsaku Himeda, a frequent collaborator with Shohei Imamura, makes the whole thing lovely to look at. International audiences don't get comedies like these as often as they get any country's more violent and cool genre pictures, but something like Danger Pays probably brings us closer to popular taste in Japan than the more arty or outrageous films. We need more comedies like this to round out our picture of one of the most prolific film industries of the golden age of international cinema.

BUYBUST (2018)

 Under President Rodrigo Duterte, the Philippines has faced international criticism for its draconian drug war as waged by a thuggish, purportedly authoritarian leader. Filmmaker Erik Matti reportedly is a critic of the Duterte government, but his ambitious action film feels like an attempt to have it both ways about the drug war. Both sides, pro and anti-Duterte, can read what they want into it. One side can point to a gruesome orgy of excessive force and the film's peeling away of layers of police duplicity and corruption. The other may find confirmation in the film of a belief that the slum dwellers among whom the drug dealers flourish are little better than rabid animals. The desired effect may well be to call a plague down on both houses, crooks and cops alike.

 

Basically a cross between The Raid and The Warriors, the film follows an elite police unit into one of the worst slums in an attempt to capture a notorious druglord. New to the team is Nina Manigan (Anne Curtis), recently the sole survivor of a bungled earlier raid. In training for her new role she's undisciplined, determined to take the initiative when her instructors insist on her following orders. As you might expect, exactly those qualities the instructors deplore will come in very handy when this raid also falls apart and proves to be a trap set for the cops. Lured into a labyrinthine urban kill-box, the team must undertake a grim anabasis back the way they came, fighting their way through neighborhoods mobilized to kill them. Some of the slum dwellers are clearly drug-crazed; others hope to earn a bounty on the cops; others still simply hate cops for making their communities collateral damage in the drug war. Others yet are plainly terrorized into cooperating, or else too terrified to help the police.

The force is winnowed down to two as we near the climax: Manigan and the hulking, Diesel-esque and almost indestructible Yatco (Brandon Michael Vera). They fight with increasing savagery even when repeated stabs and slashes should have worn or bled them out. However implausibly, Manigan outlasts the valiant Yatco and against all odds manages to capture the druglord. Her confrontation with Biggie Chen (Arjo Atayde) leads to a perhaps-predictable all-you-thought-you-knew-was-wrong moment when the gangster informs on Manigan's superiors, who prove all too eager to silence Biggie and possibly Manigan as well. Meanwhile, the news media reports thirteen killed in the raid when audiences might find ten times that number a conservative estimate.

Whatever critical intent Matti had is probably undermined by his heroine's almost cartoonish resilience and her slightly unconvincing prowess as a killing machine -- Anne Curtis is a pop singer and variety-show hostess in real life, but then again Takeshi Kitano was a game show host once upon a time -- and also by his arbitrary, inconsistent treatment of the slum dwellers. He wants them to be seen as victims as monsters at the same time, but since we presumably want Manigan, who is not corrupt, to survive we presumably root for her to annihilate all the obstacles in her path. The violence goes way over the top at times as Yatco decapitates a female attacker with garden shears after smacking her in the face with a cactus and he and Manigan escape a mob thanks to a mass electrocution. If over-the-top action is all you're looking for then I can recommend BuyBust as a compelling compendium of carnage enhanced by excellent cinematography by Neil Derrick Bion. But as a commentary on the Duterte drug war it's too enthusiastic about its ghoulish work and too easily tempted to dehumanize the actual victims of the story to say anything meaningful beyond the obvious. Something is clearly very wrong in that country, but BuyBust may be more a symptom than a diagnosis.

THREE (2016)

The Chinese director Johnnie To is one of today's best crafters of crime thrillers, but his latest genre exercise sacrifices his talent to technology. Three starts strong enough but goes badly off the rails in an overindulgent final act. The title presumably refers to the lowest score possible on the Glasgow Coma Scale, indicating deep if not irreversible unconsciousness, as explained by the neurosurgeons in whose hospital ward most of the action takes place. Like an old all-star-cast medical melodrama, Three introduces us to several patients in the ward, including a childish old man who serves as comedy relief and a patient who angrily discovers that he's partially paralyzed after emergency surgery. His anger is aimed at Tong Qian (Zhao Wei), who has several crises of confidence and conscience as the film goes on. Her newest patient is Shun (Wallace Chung), a gangster who was shot in the head by a cop during an interrogation. Detectives led by Ken (Louis Koo) hover over him at all times, waiting to whisk him to jail once he recovers from surgery. But there's the rub. Shun has suffered a lucky hit that leaves him fully conscious and alert even though the bullet remains lodged dangerously in his brain. Erudite and philosophical in classic movie-villain fashion, he refuses surgery, against Tong's advice, on the assumption that so long as he remains a patient in critical condition, he can't be taken to jail. He's gambling that his gang can work up a plan to break him out of the hospital, while Ken, taking such a plan for granted, prepares his defense. For Tong, their chess match is a frustrating if not terrifying experience, understanding as she does the risk Shun is taking and the dread consequences of any medical error.

So far, so okay, even if Wallace Chung lays the taunting-genius-villain act on a bit thick. Working with admirable economy -- the film is under 90 minutes long -- To deftly sets us the inevitable showdown only to botch it completely. My opinion may just be a matter of taste, however. I happen to think that a good aesthetic principle for thrillers is "less is more." Pacing, achieved through editing, matters more here than in any other genre. But for Three's climax To decides to do without editing entirely. For some inscrutable reason he chooses to shoot most of the attack by Shun's gang on the neurological ward in a single CGI-enhanced take, dialing the speed of the action up and down and making the scene look more like a Zack Snyder ripoff or a scene with that speedy kid from one of the recent X-Men movies, or a video game, than anything dramatic or suspenseful. Of course, it's all set to some sappy pop tune.

Once To finally tears himself away from this spectacle, things don't really get any better. As Shun and Ken dangle unconvincingly from a hospital window, chaos spills into the hospital as a whole while the angry paralyzed guy wheels himself toward a grand stairway in an apparent suicide bid. So out of touch has Johnnie To suddenly become with the basics of thriller filmmaking that he wastes a perfectly good "Odessa steps" situation in a way that should make Brian De Palma want to smack him. More in keeping with medical-melodrama tradition, this poor idiot goes tumbling wheels over head all the way down the stairs only to pick himself up and announce that he is cured and can walk again. Will someone please tell me that Three was a tongue-in-cheek exercise in camp? Whether it was meant that way or not, tongue-in-cheek may be the only way to appreciate this trainwreck of a thriller.

OPERAÇÕES ESPECIAIS (2015)

The modern standard for Brazilian cop films was set by Jose Padilha's 2007 film Tropa de Elite, known in the Anglophone world as Elite Squad. Tomas Portella's film returns us to that violent milieu from the novel perspective of a female cop. Francis (Cleo Pires) is a bank employee who decides to try out for the police after rescuing a child during a robbery. To her disgust, she finds a bank security guard cowering in the same rest room where she'd taken the child. She proves a solid marksman, but learns quickly that shooting at targets is no substitute for the real thing.

While Francis turns out fairly badass, the film is realistic about her physical limitations. During one raid, she's bowled over effortlessly while guarding a stairwell when a suspect charges her. Portella and his co-writers also show her all too plausible terror during her baptism of fire, a combined car chase and fire fight. It's an impressively staged action scene, as are all the film's set pieces -- and it's made better by the director's emphasis on Francis's fear and discomfort as tight turns slam her from side to side of the car or bounce her off her partners. At one point, having struggled to pick her gun off the floor, she's crouched down in the back seat  after gunfire has blown out the rear window. One of her colleagues blasts away at the gangsters with his automatic next to her, and the empty cartridges rain down on Francis's neck while she frantically brushes them away.

That's Cleo Pires as Francis in the lower right in both shots.

Above, you can see a gangster jumping down from the upper left while another 

(in the little box just right of center) gets ready to open fire.

Francis careens from terror to recklessness in another major urban battle scene. The cops are trading fire with gangsters in a terraced apartment complex across the street, the gangsters hopping like mountain goats from terrace to terrace while gunmen try to cover their getaway. On the cops' side, a man is down and helpless with a leg wound, crying for help as Francis clings to cover. Finally she puts her own life in jeopardy, forcing her buddies to cover for her, as she drags the wounded man to shelter. She gets reprimanded for this, but it marks a turning point for her as she begins to overcome her rookie terror and win acceptance from her macho colleagues.

 The life of a cop is not all glamorous violence, but all over the world, that's what people pay to see.

 

Our heroes are federal police sent to a crime ridden town where an ex-cop is one of the leading gangsters and organized crime has much of the municipal infrastructure and public opinion on its side. At one point, the cops have to break out the candles and manual typewriters in order to take statements and file reports after their station loses power or, more likely, has it taken from them. I guess it's a good thing that they never throw anything out. The tide seems to turn after Francis loses a partner to a drive-by, but the politicians snatch defeat from the jaws of victory and reassign Francis and her team elsewhere. Despite that nod to the apparent facts of corruption in Brazil, Portella ends his film on an optimistic or at least a defiant note with the team arriving in a new town, ready for a new fight. Whether that means a sequel can be expected remains to be seen, but  Portella's skill as an urban action director and Cleo Pires' empathetic performance as Francis would make a reunion a welcome event.

IN ORDER OF DISAPPEARANCE (Kraftidioten, 2014)

American movie fans nowadays will most likely recognize Stellan Skarsgaard as dear, dotty old Dr. Selvig from the Thor and Avengers movies. Closer to home, apparently, the 65 year old actor is a Scandinavian Liam Neeson, at least for this one film by his frequent collaborator, Hans Petter Moland. He'd have some credibility with home audiences in such a role, as he'd played the "Swedish James Bond" Carl Hamilton in a couple of movies back in the Nineties, among other heroic parts. But unlike the typical Neeson character in his post-Taken vehicles, or even Michael Caine's Harry Brown, Skarsgaard's aged vigilante in Kraftidioten -- that Google Translates from Norwegian to "Power Idiot," though I like the translated from Swedish option, "Power Jerk," better --  doesn't seem to have a background that would give him the very special skills required to wage a one-man war on crime. Instead, he's the Swedish snowplow driver and Man of the Year of a snowy Norwegian town whose son ends up as collateral damage during a bit of gangster discipline. The kid was left propped up on a park bench to look as if he'd overdosed, but Nils Dickmann knows that his boy wouldn't do drugs, and so deduces that he was murdered. When the boy's buddy, the gangsters' intended victim, tells him the true story, Nils goes on the warpath.

Since Kraftidioten is described as a black comedy, we probably shouldn't ask how Nils manages to get the jump on supposedly badass gangsters so often. We are, after all, dealing with idiots led by "The Count" (Pal Sverre Hagen), whose most formidable antagonist seems to be his ex-wife until a mystery man starts bumping off his flunkies. He counts as a "Count," presumably, because he's tall, thin and evil-looking, somewhere between a John Carradine Count and a Christopher Lee type. Understandably not suspecting a civilian vigilante, the Count convinces himself that the local Serbian mob (he keeps confusing them with Albanians) must be trying to muscle in on his territory, despite their agreement to share the local airport. Nils thus inadvertently starts a gang war.

Ironically, once Nils tries to think like a gangster, he begins to screw up. Realizing that he's unlikely to reach the top man in the organization, he goes to his brother, a onetime minor mobster nicknamed "Wingman," for advice on hiring a hitman. Once Nils pays him in full up front (Wingman advised only half), the hitman takes him for an easy mark and sells him out to the Count, only to be killed for offending the mob leader's sense of honor. Unfortunately, the hitman only knew his employer as "Dickmann," and the only person of that name the Count knows is Wingman. In short order, Nils has more to avenge, while the Serbs (led by the Swiss actor Bruno Ganz) go to war to avenge their own, wrongly blamed for Nils' rampage.This escalating conflict actually gives Nils some breathing space. He and the Serbs have the same idea of kidnapping the Count's son, but when a round of negotiation stalls the Serbs staking out the boy's school, Nils has an opening to snatch him. Conveniently also, once the Count finally figures out who's been plaguing him, he can't take proper revenge on Nils, or get his boy back, before the Serbs come charging in for a final bloody showdown....

Film directors love to stage violence in wintry landscapes, for they make the ideal ironically immaculate backdrop for the darkest dirtiest deeds. Kraftidioten will certainly remind American viewers of Fargo, but there are plenty of Japanese films, Sergio Corbucci's Great Silence, Tarantino's Hateful Eight and no doubt some Scandinavian movies that do the same things. Moland has an ace collaborator in Philip Ogaard, who really makes the most of the Norwegian locations. Together, director and cinematographer make Kraftidioten a constantly picturesque film with plenty of screencap opportunities. The way their picture really reminded me of a Japanese movie was the way they recorded characters' deaths, with an obituary title card for each victim and a rather crowded one after the final shootout. This gimmick, which presumably inspired the film's English-language title, put me in mind of Kinji Fukasaku's Battles Without Honor and Humanity, but for Moland the effect is meant to be more comically distancing than appalling. It's really not that comic a film, however, unless you agree that violence is innately funny. One of its comic climaxes comes when the stressed-out Count finally lashes out and KOs his ex with one punch. That may strike some people as politically incorrect, but I think the joke is that he knows no other way to deal with her, not that she's a bitch who got what was coming to her. However, I can't really make an excuse for the joke that ends the film, a poorly executed payoff to a gag that had been started and presumably forgotten a long time before. It just looked like a desperate attempt to end the film on a jokey grimdark note and put one more obit card on the screen. Overall, though, Kraftidioten is pretty entertaining, always fine to look at and sometimes genuinely funny as far as black crime comedies go, even as Skarsgaard plays his avenger utterly straight like a killer Keaton. Don't take it too seriously and you may well enjoy it.

Too Much TV: GOMORRAH (2014 -?)

Inspired by Roberto Saviano's dangerous expose of organized crime in Naples, and presumably also by Matteo Garrone's film adaptation of Saviano's book, Stefano Sollima's TV series debuted in Italy in 2014 and reached the U.S., subtitled rather than dubbed, on the Sundance Channel this summer. By the time the first season premiered in America, a second season had wrapped in Italy, with more reported on the way. Sollima is the son of the late Sergio Sollima, who directed some decent crime films back in the 1970s along with his better known spaghetti westerns. Perhaps fitting for a second-generation director, Gomorrah is a blend of old and new. It's still relatively new in its deromanticized portrait of Italian organized crime, leaving behind the stylish men of respect for tattooed goons in hoodies like you'd see just about anywhere on earth. But at its heart the TV Gomorrah is a familiar sort of family saga of tragic dimensions, anchored by powerful performances by Maria Pia Calzone and Salvatore Esposito as a mother and son struggling to hold their crime family together after Don Pietro Savastano (Fortunato Cerlino) is sent to prison, and even better work by Marco D'Amore as the man who comes between mother and son and eventually becomes a mortal enemy to both.

Gennaro Savastano (Esposito) starts out as a spoiled, overgrown kid who idolizes one of his dad's best soldiers, Ciro Di Marzio (D'Amore). Don Pietro wants Ciro to make more of a man of his boy by taking him out on his first killing. Genny is eager but uncertain, impatient to prove himself yet prone to freezing at crucial moments. Tasked with killing a man, Genny manages to wound him but can't bring himself to finish the victim off. Shamed by his failure despite Ciro's attempt to cover for him, Genny wipes out on his motorcycle and the accident leads to Don Pietro's arrest. Caught speeding on the way to the hospital, Pietro is caught carrying drugs by cops who refuse to be bribed or intimidated. At first it looks like Pietro will keep running things from behind bars but the state isn't as pliant as it used to be. As he's forced into solitary confinement, it becomes Genny's responsibility to lead the family. Ciro sees this as his big chance to be the power behind the throne as Genny's top adviser, but Genny's mother Imma (Calzone) doesn't trust Ciro. Lady Imma, as she's usually called, is not your grandmother's mob wife. She knows full well what her husband does and has some strong ideas on how to run a mob herself. She effectively becomes Don Pietro's regent and makes a point of marginalizing Ciro. Imma has a global vision as well as solid plans for expanding operations on the ground, and she doesn't scruple at having people whacked to further her plans. People who dig the powerful women on American TV should see Imma as a sister-in-arms.

In her most drastic move to separate Genny and Ciro, Imma sends her son on a dangerous mission to Honduras to arrange for a new supply of drugs while sending Ciro to Spain to negotiate with an old enemy of his, Salvatore Conte (Marco Palvetti), whose mother's apartment was torched by Ciro in the first scene of the series. For a while, you wonder how ruthless Imma is, whether she's interested in either Ciro or Genny coming home. But each mission proves a success, despite some rough treatment for both men. Genny returns transformed by his ordeal: leaner, meaner and initially embittered toward his mother. But if Ciro thinks that things will improve for him, he soon learns otherwise. Genny is now determined to be his own master, and finally begins to reconcile with Imma when she explains that that was why she sent him to Honduras. Whether she expected him to return as vicious as he becomes -- he now can shoot a waiter in cold blood for reminding him of having been a fat boy -- is doubtful, but they soon join forces in Genny's scheme to put a new political regime, beholden to him personally, in power at the next election.

When Genny's man wins it looks like all's well with the Savastanos, but Giro is tired of being trod upon. Seeing no room for advancement with Genny and Imma in the way, he decides to bring the whole thing down by secretly provoking a war between the Savastanos and the Contes. Until this point you could sympathize with Ciro because for all his amoral ruthlessness he has seemed a good soldier and faithful to Don Pietro, and you could argue that first Imma, then Genny, have treated him unfairly. But in the last hours of the first season Ciro proves himself a monster, goading a dumb kid into killing a Conte man, on the assumption that Genny will be blamed, then trying to blot out his trail by killing the kid. When the kid proves elusive, Ciro kidnaps the kid's girlfriend and tortures her to death to find out what she might know. The kid ends up in Conte's hands and confesses that Ciro put him up to the killing, while Imma receives a cellphone that luckily recorded Ciro's kidnapping of the girl as she was trying to send a message. This sets up a showdown between the show's two real masterminds, Imma and the "Immortal" Ciro, as Gomorrah builds to a suspenseful climax -- in fact, a double cliffhanger -- that tests Imma's ability to think steps ahead of Ciro and Ciro's survival instincts and pure luck. To go into more detail would spoil a show that doesn't deserve such treatment; the final hour is one of the most exciting hours of TV I've seen in a while, and I regret to report that it had me actually rooting for one group of brutal murderers and drug dealers to defeat another. That's really a tribute both to Marco D'Amore's success at playing a slow-burn villain and a natural empathy for family that Sollima and his writers exploit masterfully. It's good to know that Season Two is already in the can, though I wonder what can be done with so many in the large cast eliminated. Now it's just a matter of how soon Sundance wants to release it. For me, it cannot be too soon.

THUNDERBOLT (1929)

 

Josef von Sternberg's career can be divided into two phases. He's best known for the period when he was identified with his protege Marlene Dietrich. In the earlier stage, he was identified with George Bancroft. There's a contradiction for someone to reconcile. Sternberg became a star director putting burly Bancroft through his criminal paces in Underworld, and starred him again in his seedy romance The Docks of New York. He depended on Bancroft, who had since become the Wolf of Wall Street, to put over his talkie debut. Sternberg reportedly wanted to work as creatively with soundscapes as he had worked with images, and you can hear that in Thunderbolt's diegetic soundtrack and in occasional thematic devices like a sort of hyena laugh that hovers in the atmosphere of the Black Cat nightclub. Inevitably, however, a Sternberg film works best on the visual level, and to an extent Bancroft's voice limits this one. Most of the time he has an unusually smooth delivery as the title character, a gangster named for his lethal punch, but as I've noticed in other Bancroft talkies, the star has a bad habit of slowing...his lines...down...very...deliberately in his big dramatic moments, to the point that you can imagine him intoning the infamous "Take him ... for ... a ride" line from Lights of New York. That's a shame because Bancroft gives an interesting performance overall as a rather peculiar gangster.

 

Above: Thunderbolt enters the Black Cat.

Below: Fay Wray as the woman Thunderbolt has lost, and 

Theresa Harris as the dream of another possibility.

 

What's peculiar about Jim Lang is his detachment, or his ability to detach himself from his concerns to dwell in moments of pleasure or play. You notice how he hangs out at the Black Cat, apparently an integrated nightclub with black entertainers, and how he lingers before leaving to take in the uncredited Theresa Harris's song, "Daddy Won't You Please Come Home?" Sternberg and Bancroft convey Thunderbolt's appreciation of Harris's voice and figure, but just as interesting as his appreciation of black beauty is his readiness to stop everything and enjoy the moment. Later, Jim enters an apartment building to kill Bob Moran (Richard Arlen), the new lover of his erstwhile moll Ritzy (Fay Wray). He's followed inside by a stray mutt from the street that's attached himself to the gangster. Thunderbolt wants to be rid of the yapping dog and tries to attract it back downstairs by getting on all fours, shaking his rump and sliding with a weird smoothness across the carpet. You get the impression that despite his mission of death Jim will take as long getting the pooch's attention as he needs to, that now all that matters is getting that dog to come to him. And as we'll see, he doesn't really want to be rid of the dog at all, even if the dumb animal gets him pinched. Thunderbolt is used to doing whatever he wants, and in moments like these there's an almost endearing modesty to his whims.

 

Above, Thunderbolt acts as virtual executioner for "Bad Al" (Fred Kohler).

Below: Bob confronts his enemy at last.

Inevitably, Thunderbolt is a melodrama typical of its decade. As noted, Thunderbolt wants to destroy Bob, the man he assumes is cuckolding him. Even on death row -- it's unclear what exactly he was convicted of -- he has enough influence to take belated revenge on Moran. He has his men lure Bob to the bank from which he was recently fired -- his relationship with Ritzy came to light and might have harmed the establishment's reputation -- and plant a gun on him while robbing the place. Lives are taken and Bob promptly finds himself on death row across from Thunderbolt, even though you'd think the bank president's testimony would have substantiated Bob's defense that he was lured to the bank by a crank call. Bob is so thoroughly railroaded that he's scheduled to burn before Thunderbolt. Everybody takes for granted (even though no one can prove it in court, presumably) that Thunderbolt framed Bob, but despite entreaties from Ritzy and Bob's mother (Eugenie Besserer, who couldn't be more different from her Jazz Singer mom in a wonderful scene where she and Bob are playfully roughhousing in their bathroom) Jim refuses to fess up. It's only when Ritzy and Bob have a death-house wedding that Thunderbolt relents and admits to the frame. This is where such stories usually end, with the pathos of renunciation as Jim gives up Ritzy once and for all, but Sternberg and the screenwriting Furthman brothers create fresh suspense by having one of Jim's cronies confide that Thunderbolt is still playing a long game. What he really wants, we're told, is a chance to kill Bob with his super punch, which we've already seen knock another con into a coma. To do this, he needs Bob to stay in his cell (while the paperwork for his release is prepared) until the day Jim himself is scheduled to die. Jim will get a chance to shake hands with all his death row playmates, and when it's Bob's turn, POW! Everything leads to a climactic long take that's both corny and brilliant, as Jim and Bob say their farewells while Sternberg calls our attention to Thunderbolt's deadly hand moving from bar to bar of Bob's cell. Then Bob hits Jim with a final revelation: it turns out that he'd been Ritzy's childhood sweetheart, but that Jim had fairly won her away from him until she tired of gang life. This idea tickles Thunderbolt, and he moves on to the death chamber in good humor.

 

Watch that hand, Bob!

What happened here, exactly? There's room to see it two ways. It may be that something about Bob's story made Jim relent, but for all we know that other gangster was talking through his hat and Jim never had any intention to kill Bob after the wedding scene. Conceding some ambiguity makes the moment somewhat less corny, and my overall impression of Jim Lang is that he is too easily amused by things to be as deadly as everyone assumes, and that even his frame-up of Bob is little more than a practical joke. At the very end we leave him laughing at a guard having the name Aloysius. You could almost believe that Thunderbolt is tired of his life without actually realizing it. I may question Bancroft's line readings sometimes, but there's a subtlety to his performance that makes my view of Jim's bemused ambivalence seem plausible. Whatever Sternberg's intentions, Thunderbolt isn't one of his characteristic spectacles, though it is nicely shot. That may be because his camera doesn't really worship Fay Wray the way he'd worship Dietrich, or the way he worships Theresa Harris during her song. In the end, it's Bancroft's imperfect but intriguing performance that makes the film worth seeing.

Pre-Code Parade: SINNERS' HOLIDAY (1930)

Preceding Little Caesar into theaters by several weeks, John G. Adolfi's Sinners' Holiday arguably marks the beginning not only of the fabled Warner Bros. gangster genre but of "Warner Bros." itself as an archetype or style rather than a mere studio. It's the first film pairing of James Cagney, whose film debut this was, and Joan Blondell, making only her second feature film, and they instantly make it recognizable as a "Warner Bros." film in a way many studio releases of the same year aren't. Blondell and Cagney came to Hollywood to recreate the roles they played on Broadway, when the play was known as Penny Arcade and an appreciative Al Jolson, Warners' big musical star, was in the audience. They are not the primary characters, though Cagney plays a pivotal role. They seem immediately at home in a milieu of cynical, hard-boiled fast talk that soon would define the studio product. That milieu is a boardwalk full of carny attractions, including the once-titular arcade operated by Ma Delano (Lucille LaVerne). Cagney's her youngest, Harry, and the role reminds me of Kirk Douglas in some of his earliest pictures when he might have been typed as a weasel. Keeping his voice at a high pitch, Cagney plays Harry as the sort of physical, mental and moral weakling moral experts then assumed gangsters to be; watching this, you understand why he was cast initially as the sidekick in The Public Enemy. While his Ma thinks him a good boy, Harry hangs out in pool halls, sucking up to Mitch (Warren Hymer), a bootlegger who runs some of the boardwalk concessions. The actual main character of the film is Angel (Grant Withers), an ex-con barker fired by Mitch and hired by Ma Delano to repair her arcade machines. She can use Angel but doesn't trust him, and she definitely doesn't want him hanging around her daughter Jennie (Evalyn Knapp). Harry has a crush on Myrtle (Blondell), a small-time gold digger, and an unlikely rival for her attentions in Happy (Hank Mann, Chaplin's opponent in the City Lights boxing match and quite adept in talkies.), another boardwalk carny.

The main plot kicks in when Mitch is pinched and has to serve time. Harry takes a chance and takes over the bootlegging operation, explaining his new wealth to his ma with vague remarks. When Mitch gets out he's out to get Harry, who shoots his erstwhile mentor in panic during a threatening confrontation. Jennie has seen the shooting but keeps silent as the cops start investigating. Suspicion swirls circumstantially around Angel, while Harry bribes Myrtle into providing an alibi for him. Ma starts to notice the holes in the stories Harry's telling, and doesn't like the way Myrtle is flaunting an apparent new power over her boy. Under pressure, Harry cracks in Cagney's big scene on both stage and screen. Blubbering like a baby, Harry begs Ma to cover for him. Still hostile to Angel, Ma agrees to help frame him for the killing, not realizing how easily Jennie can destroy their plan....

The stage is set for a tragic family showdown, but at the supreme moment Sinner's Holiday simply runs out of gas. The trap is almost shut around Angel when Jennie turns on her mother and brother. When she spills, we'd expect, after seeing Cagney's abject antics earlier, to see Harry have another breakdown, or attempt a breakout and go out like Cody Jarrett, a role for whom in some ways Harry Delano seems like a rough draft. But no, none of the above: once Jennie rats him out he surrenders instantly and dispassionately, like a good loser, consoling Ma by telling her, "You tried." This scene practically defines "anticlimax." The ultimate disappointment probably explains why Sinners' Holiday isn't as well remembered or regarded as its place in history might lead you to expect. Nevertheless, it's an indisputable milestone in the evolution of Warner Bros., with Cagney and Blondell -- aided admirably by the underrated Withers -- virtually creating a cinematic world before our eyes, or at least beginning the process.

DVR Diary: BLOODY MAMA (1970)

Imagine Christopher Nolan making a Batman movie and casting an actor from the 1966 TV show as the villain -- as the same villain he or she played on the show -- and the effect would be similar to Shelley Winters, Batman's Ma Parker, playing that character's real-life model, "Ma" Barker, in Roger Corman's film. I suppose it was a case of no other actress being imaginable for such a role at the time, especially if you take a "print the legend" approach portraying Ma as the violent mastermind of her family's gang, despite testimony to the contrary from contemporaries. There's really little difference between Winters playing the role straight and her camping it up, and given the strong hints of incest in the Corman film, and Winters' mature acting style, you could argue that she camped it up both times. For Corman it was a resumption of a gangster cycle he had started with 1958's Machine-Gun Kelly and resumed with 1967's St. Valentine's Day Massacre. By 1970 no film in that genre could go uninfluenced by Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde, and Corman shows its influence in an increased gore quotient and a concern with sexual dysfunction, from an incestuous bent in Ma herself dating back to a childhood rape at the hands of her brothers to the homosexuality of one of her sons. The drug addiction (and eventual overdose) of one son (Robert DeNiro) only adds to the decadence. Corman probably also owes to Bonnie and Clyde a consciousness of economic injustice that in this case doesn't really make the Barkers sympathetic. Bloody Mama is a more cynical film that discourages sympathy with Ma in many ways. It acknowledges the folk-hero popularity of country bandits like her family as Ma notes that she'd probably get more fan mail than Eleanor Roosevelt if people knew her address, but the film also makes clear that she doesn't deserve it, most pointedly in a narrative read over newsreel footage in which Ma notes with contempt the debate in Congress over an anti-lynching bill, then notes with relief its defeat with help from "some good people," aka the Klan. Ma is all too conscious of inequality, but no sense of solidarity results from it. "It's supposed to be a free country," she says at one point, "But unless you're rich you ain't free, so I aim to be freer than the rest of the people." Depression ethics are dog-eat-dog ethics as far as Ma is concerned, while her boys are too stupid even to consider ethics. If Bonnie and Clyde influences most of the film, Corman seems to take his cues for the climax from The Wild Bunch as the Barkers inflict far more casualties on the cops besieging their Florida hideout than history records. History apparently confirms the added satirical note Corman adds to the Peckinpah-style finish by having spectators arrive with picnic lunches to watch the siege and gasp whenever a cop gets shot. Overall Bloody Mama is an energetic film with decent shootout and chase scenes and the right amount of sleaze to make it contemporary. Your tolerance for it will depend on your tolerance of Shelley Winters, still playing a cartoon character but in deadly earnest.

Bonus Content: American-International Pictures sent young Robert DeNiro on press junkets to promote Bloody Mama, and inevitably to promote himself as a possible future movie star. Here's a typical interview from the Spartanburgh Herald Journal of March 22, 1970.

BLACK SOULS (Anime nere, 2014)

Francesco Munzi's crime film dominated last year's David di Donatello awards, Italy's equivalent of the Academy Awards. Munzi won Best Director and shared in the Best Screenplay award for an adaptation of a novel by Gioacchino Criaco. Black Souls is a stark picture that challenges the "family" myth of organized crime in unsettling ways, mainly by moving family drama to the forefront. In short, it's the story of a competition for influence over a young man between his father and his uncle. The father, Luciano (Fabrizio Ferracane) is actually the eldest brother of the family, while Luigi (Marco Leonardi) is the youngest. Theirs is a crime family, but Luciano has kept out of the business to raise goats, leaving middle son Rocco (Peppino Mazzotta) to run the business end of the family while Luigi acts as legman for drug deals and enforcer, and acts even more like an overgrown kid, and like an older brother to Luciano's boy Leo (Giuseppe Fumo). While Luciano has aged into a stubborn isolato, Leo emerges from adolescence eager to "command respect" in a way his father doesn't. When Leo gets involved in a petty local beef Luciano wants to shut him down, but Luigi only encourages him. You get the dreadful feeling that Luciano doesn't have a chance with his kid. Leo isn't the most emotive of rebels; rather, it looks like something's already dead in the lad's contemptuously poker-faced expression that Luciano can't bring to life.

Tragedy ensues as the local conflict escalates. When Luigi is killed, Leo rejects all warnings from his father and resolves to avenge his uncle. The naive punk promptly gets himself set up to be whacked in turn. You see where this is headed, right? Now Luciano is going to assert himself and take out his family's enemies. He thought he was out for life, but now he's dragged in. Perhaps he will prove more ruthless than Luigi or Rocco. Well, sort of and sort of. Following the pictures will be spoilers for the end of the film.

 

(l-r) Fabrizio Ferracane as Leo, Marco Leonardi is Luigi, Giuseppe Fumo as Leo

 

 

Anime Nere's ending is a genuine shocker. Luciano does go on the warpath, but he takes his wrath out on Rocco and other family members, those he presumably blames for his so taking the wrong path. At its climax Munzi's film veers violently from the cliches of the crime genre and upends whatever notion we may have had of Luciano as an honorable loner. The ending puts his isolation, his jealousy of his brothers' influence over Luigi, and even his distance from organized crime in a different light, or a darker shade. More than a jealous patriarch, he appears as an anti-social, self-righteous if not plain selfish man, someone who never sought to command respect because he never gave a damn what anyone thought of him. The image of his abandoned flock of goats at his doorstep after he leaves for his final showdown with his family is perhaps too on-the-nose in its symbolism, but it's definitely telling. It's a cunning, nearly cruel swerve by the filmmakers and the original author, since we're conditioned to think of the lonely man who holds himself aloof from organized crime as a hero, even when it means keeping aloof from his own family. But the family aspect of it all should have tipped us off that something more (or less) than a morality play was playing out here. That the ending shocks while ringing true is a tribute to the actors (none of whom scored a David, by the way) and Munzi's psychological craftsmanship. I haven't seen any of Black Souls' competitors for those awards, but at first glance it looks like those it won were well deserved.