A randomly comprehensive survey of extraordinary movie experiences from the art house to the grindhouse, featuring the good, the bad, the ugly, but not the boring or the banal.
My friend Wendigo wants to be upfront about John Landis's vampire-vs-gangster story; he considers it a guilty pleasure. Let's start with the guilt: honesty compels him to admit that it's clearly not a good movie. He regards it as a half-hearted effort that brings no fresh viewpoint to either of its genres. On the surface, on pure storytelling terms, it's pretty sad. But once you get past the superficial details and consider the body of Anne Parillaud, you see how the film can still be a pleasure whenever she gets naked. Wendigo is willing to admit that the only thing Landis got right was to get the erstwhile Femme Nikita out of her clothes as often as possible.
Anne Parillaud plays a passive-aggressive vampire in Innocent Blood.
Most of the other actors do all right with the material they're given, with one huge exception: the male romantic lead, Anthony LaPaglia. He's a stiff with no chemistry whatsoever with Parillaud; during their big love scene he seems to be in pain, as if intercourse with this inviting actress was somehow distasteful or embarrassing for him. As an undercover cop, he's given little to work with since the story focuses on the vigilante vampire and the cartoonish gangsters. Landis and writer Michael Wolk have an obsolete notion of organized crime. While Robert Loggia tries hard as the gang boss turned vampire, neither he nor any of his minions seem like convincing criminals of 1992. It's two years after Goodfellas, but you can't tell that from this movie. Landis's gangsters seem like something out of Scarface -- and we don't mean Tony Montana, man. There's nothing automatically wrong with this retro approach, but in Landis's hands it's all lifeless, and not in the way it should be.
Robert Loggia doesn't get the satisfaction he hoped for from his meatsicle.
From the director of An American Werewolf in London this is a shockingly inept film. When it tries for comedy Landis seems to make every wrong decision possible, and the action seems all wrong for a vampire film. There are way too many car chases and crashes. This is a movie that could have used more gore, but all too often our vampire heroine dispatches bad guys with the cliche neck-snap you got from every action hero in those days. This approach reminds Wendigo of Lon Chaney Jr.'s kills in the Wolf Man movies; he'd shake someone a few times and drop them, and you'd find out later that the victim had his throat torn out. Universal could barely get away with that in the 1940s (admittedly, they had to), but in 1992 you expect better from a monster movie. It's more frustrating because there are some good effects. Parillaud's first kill (of Chazz Palmintieri) is a nasty bit of work, while a vampirized Don Rickles has an awesome death by daylight disintegration. But the film never maintains that level of viciousness.
"Landis, I know they call me Mr. Warmth but this is ridiculous!" Don Rickles makes his exit (above), while Loggia's stuntman tries to top him (below).
Anne Parillaud is lovely to look at, but her vampire effects are pretty weak. She gets a variety of mood-colored eye effects when she feeds or tries to scare folks, and she has a silly-sounding devil voice that is no more intimidating than the vocals on a death-metal album. The film's concept of vampires is a little unusual. These fangless creatures can be killed zombie-style, with a bullet to the brain, rather than with stakes through the heart. Religion is irrelevant, since our heroine can romp around a church with no ill effects in a badly-filmed POV scene that leaves you wondering if she's running, climbing, flying or turning into a bat. Vampires come with the usual package of heightened strength and senses ("I can hear an angel fart," Loggia explains).I called Parillaud a vigilante vampire, but Wendigo doesn't really agree. She isn't motivated by any sense of justice, just by the thought that criminals are expendable and preferable to innocent people as food. Since she does hunt humans she isn't really what we think of now as a noble vampire, but I suppose she's good enough for what the film wants to do. There's some backstory hinted at at the beginning, but Wendigo is actually glad that they didn't go into it. Better to maintain some mystery sometimes. He sees some Anne Rice influence in small details, but in other ways it's an old fashioned movie. While the setting and the action might make Innocent Blood look like a precursor of today's urban-fantasy genre, the fact that Parillaud plays a lone vampire and the only supernatural entity in the city probably limited its influence. Here the interaction of vampire, cops and robbers is merely boring.
She's a "bloodsucking superbitch" and she's packing heat!
Innocent Blood is pointlessly self-indulgent, loaded with film clips of dubious relevance and the usual list of cameos, including the inevitable Forrest J. Ackerman. I could believe that Landis was more interested in these bits of trivia than the story he had to tell. But even though it looks like the once-mighty director has hit bottom, Wendigo finds moments and concepts that make him fell even more guilty about liking the film, because he knows that Landis could have done so much better. At the time of American Werewolf the director said that he'd wanted to do a vampire movie but felt that the concept had been done to death already. If it hadn't been, Landis did his best to drive a stake through it here.
Wendigo has a crappy fullscreen DVD that won't even play on his Blu-Ray player. It doesn't even come with a trailer, but NakedBrotha2007 has posted it to Dailymotion.
The title of Marco Bellocchio's new film translates as "win" onscreen, but it seems like it should be "WIN!" There's an imperative quality to the term that we see incarnated in the movie's two main characters: ambitious socialist agitator Benito Mussolini and his mistress, Ida Dalser. Benito will accept nothing short of winning total power; politics is his only alternative to what he knows would be a life of mediocrity in the arts or any other profession. Ida will accept nothing short of Benito's total commitment to her, his reciprocation of her total dedication to him. But it's not going to happen. Despite her sacrifices to support him when he breaks with the Workers' Party and loses his editorial job over his support for Italy's entry into World War I -- she sells most of her possessions to provide him capital for starting his own newspaper -- he starts to cut her off as his rise to power requires him to maintain a respectable image with his jealous wife. But Ida refuses to compromise, even when it would make the difference between freedom and imprisonment in an insane asylum. If anything, she maximizes her demands: she insists on being recognized as Il Duce's wife and the mother of his first-born son. Like her erstwhile lover, she demands all or nothing -- but gets nothing. Bellocchio's suggestion at the end, however, is that all who gamble as big as they did -- all who tempt fate -- lose in the end.
Marco Bellocchio has been directing features in Italy for 45 years now, rising from a wunderkind to one of the Italian film industry's elder statesmen. I haven't seen many of his films, but 2003's Good Morning, Night, his account of the Aldo Moro kidnapping, is one of my favorite movies of the late decade. Vincere takes a drastically different approach to history, though the two films have in common the perspective of a relatively peripheral female character. The new film has the feel of an old-fashioned biopic, enhanced for modern sensibilities by nudity and sex scenes featuring the young, studly mustachioed Mussolini (Fillippo Timi) and the attractive Ida (Giovanna Mezzogiorno). It aspires only occasionally to epic style, albeit on a small scale. There's one well done scene that shows an air raid (?) on Milan; as smoke fills an arcade, you see handfuls of people hurrying and stumbling through in panic as Ida placidly pushes her stroller along. There's a more satiric sequence in which a fight breaks out between anti-war socialists and Mussolini's patriots in a movie theater. Bellocchio shows us the silhouette of a brawl in front of newsreel footage of the war as the theater pianist doggedly plays a martial tune.
This is as good a time as any to mention the role of music and movies in this film. Benito and Ida are operatic in their passion, and the socialists and fascists as a whole seem operatic in their political passion. We hear snippets of opera on the soundtrack and characters sing what I presume to be either opera arias or patriotic songs of the period. Music suffuses most of the movie, but I'm not literate enough in Italian music to tell how much comes from credited composer Carlo Crivelli and how much is classical sampling. It's very florid and feverish to fit the spirit of the time, and Vincere itself is operatic in its subject matter of a spurned lover and her son cast into madhouses. As time marches on, this operatic atmosphere yields to the more modest accompaniment you usually got for silent films, pianos or accordions. The moving image looms large in the film, from newsreels to a Passion Play to Chaplin's The Kid (for which a pianist miraculously approximates the score Chaplin himself would record nearly fifty years later). Most important, eventually, are newsreel images of the real Benito Mussolini, from silent shots of the leader rassling with a lion cub to sound footage of a typical Thirties oration. I'm not sure about this, but my gut feeling is that Bellocchio means to show the extent of Mussolini's totalitarian domination, so that his voice and his image crowd out all the opera and imagery of the past. It may also just illustrate the totality of Ida's obsession with the man.
The use of Mussolini as both fictional and historical character is a challenging aspect of the movie. At a certain point, Fillippo Timi withdraws from the film, and from that point the only Mussolini we see is the real one in newsreel form. It's probably the most drastic way to illustrate the complete break between Benito and Ida, and it forces us to focus on her for the rest of the film as someone cut off from what she thinks is her proper place in history. Bellochio sees no need to have Timi shave his head or put on weight because Mussolini has refused to remain a character in Ida's story. The actor returns in the third act, however, as Ida's college-age son, Benitino. The boy has been raised alone in an orphanage for most of his life but hasn't been broken of his mom's conviction that he's the son of Il Duce. When we see him grown, however, it looks like this claim has become little more than a joke. Benitino's classmates goad him into doing a Mussolini impersonation in public that gets him thrown into a madhouse. He's the most tragic illustration of Mussolini's pervasive imposition of his own will over Italy, as we last see him raving in an imitation of the leader speaking German.
Vincere is the sort of film that I don't feel certain of after one viewing. Bellocchio seems to be aiming for a complex effect, and I'm not really sure if the payoff justifies the effort. I'd say it's worth seeing for the acting by Timi and Mezzogiorno, and for often-eloquent images crafted by the director and cinematographer Daniele Cipri. But if you're looking for the Benito Mussolini story or some explication of Italian fascism, this is the wrong film for you. It's mainly the story of two people caught up in the passions of a cultural moment and the comeuppance that comes eventually to both of them. At the end, Bellocchio returns to the scene that opened the film: Benito is taking part in a public debate on the existence of God. He uses a cheap trick to refute God, challenging the deity to strike him down within five minutes and claiming victory when time runs out as Ida looks on admiringly. I don't think the director is saying that they suffered later for their sacrilege then, but coming back to this implies at least a "don't tempt fate" moral that Bellocchio can't mean -- can he? Maybe he's just trying to be ironic. I invite global film fans to watch and judge for themselves.
But watch the IFC Films trailer first, as uploaded to YouTube by CinemaItaly:
Videoasia's Sonny Chiba 4 Film Set is a peculiar little collection. One of the four films hardly counts as a Chiba film, since the great man only contributes a cameo, but that film proved to be a crazy diamond: Machine Gun Dragon, a Japanese re-working of White Heat with Bunta Suguwara in the Cagney role. The film that shares one side of the disc with Dragon is indeed a Sonny Chiba vehicle, but Videoasia neglected to note in its box copy that it is also a film by my second-favorite Japanese director, the relentless Kinji Fukasaku of Yakuza Papers and Battle Royale fame. You'd think that'd be a detail that would guarantee more sales, but Videoasia makes some peculiar calculations sometimes.
Don't let that title fool you, either. It might make you expect a cartoon character or a K9 crimefighter, but it's the title of a popular manga series by a writer who pseudo-named himself after Charles "Buronson" to give readers an idea of what to expect from his pen. I couldn't find out very much about the character more commonly known as Detective Doberman (or Doberman Deka in his native tongue), so I don't know how faithfully Fukasaku represents the comics here. I'll just have to judge the film on its own merits, which emerge only gradually.
The title character's real title is Detective Kano. He's a cop from Okinawa, the sticks of Japan as far as this film is concerned. The vibe is like a McCloud episode or the movie Coogan's Bluff, only imagine Dennis Weaver or Clint Eastwood as a hillbilly instead of a westerner. How hilly is this billy? The opening credits roll over scenes of him wandering through a red-light district of Tokyo with a pig in his arms. It's meant to be an offering to the Tokyo police for their help in resolving a missing person case. Kano has come to the big city to help identify a prostitute who was murdered and burned in her apartment, apparently the latest victim of a serial killer. The Tokyo cops believe the body is Yuna Tamashiro, a girl who ran away from Kano's home village some years ago.
As Kano explains, Yuna is "sort of" his wife, or at least was predicted to become his wife by her mother, the local noro or sorceress. This authority is also convinced that Yuna is not dead. The Tokyo cops may scoff (wouldn't you?) but Kano's own analysis appears to confirm her perception. He casts a bag of seashells on a table and counts those face down and face up in "she loves me, she loves me not" fashion to determine whether Yuna is alive. Don't freak out, though: he's also a quite competent conventional detective and, also being Sonny Chiba, more than capable of handling himself in dangerous situations.
"Knock, Knock!"
Kano suddenly becomes a national hero when he uses unconventional means to rescue an aspiring nightclub singer, Miki Haruno, from a psycho who's taken her hostage in her hotel room. Chiba does most of his own stuntwork in this sequence, rapelling off the hotel roof and traveling at least a dozen stories down to set up his crash dive through a window into Miki's room. This exploit earns him the nickname "Detective Tarzan," just to make things more confusing. It also boosts Miki's profile in advance of her appearance on "A Star is Born," the Japanese Idol of its time. As we learn later, that's just what her ruthless manager Hidemori, a former yakuza, was betting on. But as Kano learns when he watches her sing her signature tune, "My Memory," Miki is almost certainly Yuna Tamashiro.
As Kano gets entangled in the story of Miki and Hidemori, the would-be impresario emerges as a lead suspect in the murder mystery, as the victim seems to be someone who knew something potentially compromising about Miki. Hidemori is a kind of Svengali figure, a manipulator who plies the neurotic Miki with drugs to get her onstage and choreographs her stage movements. But writer Koji Takada and actor Hiroki Matsukata give this villain more depth than we initially expect. Hidemori is a man who has chosen show business as an alternative to yakuza life, only to find that representing your talent can be as hardball a business as whatever unsavory work he did in the past. We also learn that he has genuine feelings for Miki, whom he says he met in New York City and saved from a drug habit. He clearly sees her as a meal ticket, but he also says that she's the first person he's ever felt a desire to help. Their relationship turns out to be something more complex than we thought as it becomes clear that Miki is something more than a helpless Trilby in thrall to her master. Unlike Trilby, she doesn't fall silent when her Svengali is silenced. At the same time, while she flourishes, Kano consults his oracle again, counts the shells, and comes to a dramatically different conclusion than he did the last time. The finale is poignantly downbeat as a devastated Kano packs up his pig and quits Tokyo. Fukasaku and Chiba aren't normally the types to play for pathos, but they earn it here with a perfectly serviceable film noir storyline at the heart of the usual Toei Studio mayhem.
Janet Hatta as Miki and Hiroki Matsukata practically steal Doberman Cop from Chiba, who admirably doesn't overdue the yokel act, despite his costume. Below, Miki's apotheosis at the moment of her mentor's destruction.
Never forgetting that this is a Sonny Chiba movie, Fukasaku stocks the story with plenty of fight scenes filmed in his patented frenetic, topsy-turvy fashion. Our hero is as handy with a Magnum as he is with his fists and feet, blowing one man's head clean off in the film's most violent scene. He has to deal with Hidemori's thugs as well as with the masked serial killer, not to mention the stupidity of most of the Tokyo cops. He gathers up a motley array of allies along the way, including a motorcycle gang and a stripper and her irascible manager.
In the movie's strangest sequence, the stripper Kosode is smitten by Kano and his pig as they watch her prepare to fellate a dildo. The pig goes out of control and runs on stage, and while the whiny manager wrangles it offstage, Kosode drags Kano onstage and strips him with the aid of other spectators. The yokel's protests fade away as Kosode gives him a free ride in front of everybody. Later, Kano tells her that she and her boss are the "most normal" people he's met in Tokyo. Draw whatever conclusion you like from that.
If this is "normal" treatment by Kano's standards, his Okinawan village must be a more happening kind of place than most Tokyo snobs assume.
Doberuman Deka is obviously not in the same league as Fukasaku's yakuza epics or the late-career apocalypse of Battle Royale, but it has a visceral vitality and a surprising emotional range from bumpkin bawdiness to torch song tragedy. Some of that may come from the source material, and some of it is the director's distinctive touch. Perhaps more so than Chiba's martial-arts films that traveled around the world, this film is a piece of authentic Japanese pop culture, and one that may never have been meant for foreign eyes. While the widescreen transfer on the Videoasia disc is far from optimum, the film's mere presence alongside Machine Gun Dragon make the company's Chiba set a must-have until better, more official editions come along.
There's better picture quality in this Japanese trailer, uploaded to YouTube by ssape21. You never see that dog in the movie itself, by the way.
A movie about trucks could have worked in 1977. One did, in fact, but that was Smokey and the Bandit. Despite the title, however, which is the name of a truck, William Friedkin's follow-up to the one-two punch of The French Connection and The Exorcist isn't really about trucks. It's a respectful remake of a great film, The Wages of Fear (1953). Friedkin dedicates his film to Henri-Georges Clouzot, who directed Wages and died a few months before Sorcerer's release, but he claims to be adapting the source novel, written by Georges Arnaud. In fact, Friedkin opens up the story to give it global sweep, creating dramatic backstories for the four men who end up driving trucks loaded with nitroglycerin through hellish terrain to help put out an oil well fire somewhere in Latin America. One is a French banker fleeing the imminent collapse of a shady business venture. Another is a Palestinian terrorist fleeing the wrath of the Mossad after a Jerusalem bombing. A third is a New Jersey criminal (Roy Scheider) and sole survivor of a church robbery in a powerful gangster's parish. The fourth is a hit man (Francisco Rabal), and once he arrives in the same squalid company town where the other three labor in obscurity we're supposed to wonder which of the three he's here to kill, as it could be any one. But when he kills a fourth man, a German, in order to make himself the final member of the nitro team that consists coincidentally of our other three protagonists, the suspense dissipates in confusion. Did he kill the German so he'd be in a position to take out his real target, or was the German, a character of which we know relatively little, his real target after all? We know, or are led to believe, that some Germans in the vicinity are Nazi war criminals, so it is a possibility. But it seems unlikely that a hit man would have any reason of his own to undertake a probably-suicidal job, so I assumed that he was still after one of the other three. In any event, there's no payoff to this whole angle, and that's one of the frustrating things about this movie, which famously flopped when it appeared in the summer of Star Wars after a two-year production.
You're not getting any screen caps for Sorcerer because the DVD currently available is an inexcusable fullscreen edition of a film that had an epic production design based on location shooting. Anything I snipped from the disc would be a mockery of Friedkin and designer John Box's big-screen vision. Sorcerer is one of those films of apocalyptic ambition for which no studio shortcuts are acceptable. Friedkin had to span the globe, stopping in Paris and Jerusalem along the way, to realize his vision of violence, exploitation and desperation. Simply in terms of its ambition, Sorcerer is a peer of such diverse fare as Apocalypse Now, Heaven's Gate and Fitzcarraldo in its effort to remake the real world in its cinematic image.
What Sorcerer lacks is a strong character or relationship to hold everything together. Roy Scheider is the only American star in the cast, but he's an ensemble player here, and like his co-stars he has a situation rather than a character. We understand the predicament of each protagonist and the danger each is in with the hitman hanging around, but there's nothing particularly interesting about them as people -- and that goes for the hitman, too. For me the French banker (Bruno Cremer) was the most interesting character, with the most personal background apart from his crime. Looking at the film from 33 years later, I was intrigued by the remarkably non-judgmental presentation of the Palestinian (Amidou), who could just as easily have been Irish or Basque for the purpose he serves. In the pre-jihad days of 1977, the terrorist isn't shown as a generic Muslim, but as basically the same sort of hard-boiled, quick-thinking problem solver as his colleagues.
Subtleties of characterization take a back seat in this film to the intimate spectacle of a few men in peril. The truckers' journey doesn't even begin until the film's half over, but the second half alone probably makes Sorcerer worth seeing, even in its defaced DVD form. There are several great moments in the final hour, including the crossing of a rickety and crooked wooden bridge, topped by the crossing of a disintegrating rope bridge during a rainstorm. These scenes may look more awesome now than they did in the Seventies if you appreciate the reality of everything you see compared to the ease of doing it CGI style today. Just as engrossing is a patiently detailed sequence in which the truckers solve the problem of a giant fallen tree in their path. The outdoor action of Sorcerer is brilliantly done and as well done as what Clouzot achieved in Wages of Fear. It's when he tries to top Clouzot by making what comes before as epic as the truck trek itself that Friedkin falls short. But his is definitely an honorable failure, and it didn't make Sorcerer a bad film at all. If this ever comes out in a better edition, I'll be in line to give it another chance.
The trailer isn't letterboxed either, but it's still pretty intense and features some hellacious music by Tangerine Dream. realmrl3londe uploaded it to YouTube.
In the course of three months, from July through September of 1950, three different studios released the first westerns of Anthony Mann. The best-known, Winchester '73, appeared in July, followed by The Furies in August and M-G-M's vehicle for Robert Taylor late in September. Along with Delmer Daves's Broken Arrow and Henry King's The Gunfighter, Mann spearheaded the new decade's trend of "adult" or "psychological" or socially conscious westerns, with Devil's Doorway falling into the socially-conscious category. This time out, Mann directs a screenplay by Guy Trosper that's a stroke of conceptual genius, combining two of the most popular western tropes in the form of a cattle baron resisting the encroachment of sheepmen and homesteaders -- who happens to be an American Indian.
At first glance, Lance Poole (Taylor) is as assimilated and Americanized an Indian as you could ask for. He returns to his father's ranch in Wyoming in the uniform of a sergeant major of the U.S. Cavalry, a decorated veteran of the Civil War. But times are changing for the worse in the once-unorganized territory. The Pooles have friends in town, including the future marshal (Edgar Buchanan), but an Indian-hating lawyer, Verne Coolan (Louis Calhern) is starting to make nasty noises in Lance's presence. His contagion spreads to the town doctor, whose contempt for Indians arguably contributes to the death of Lance's father. Lance inherits the ranch and prospers as a cattleman, but the formal organization of the Wyoming Territory opens the land to settlers under the Homestead Act. Worse, as Coolan stands ready to argue for sheepmen's rights (with likely ulterior motives), the law no longer recognizes the Pooles' right to their land; Indians are barred from owning land in the territory.
As determined as any cattleman to turn back the sheepmen, and with an ethnic chip on his shoulder, Lance seeks out a lawyer to counter Coolan's influence. When he finds that the attorney he chooses to consult is a woman (Paula Raymond), Lance is tempted to head right out the door; he has prejudices of his own to overcome. But she proves quite capable of stalling the inevitable, organizing a petition campaign to have Lance's land claim recognized as a precondition to accommodation with the sheepmen. That doesn't suit Coolan, who goads one well-meaning sheepman into a violent confrontation with Lance that will justify Coolan raising a posse to take down the man he insists on calling "the Indian." Lance's military training helps keep the posse at bay, but his lawyer may have to betray his trust by calling on the Cavalry to come to his rescue....
Superimposing the "vanishing Indian" archetype over the figure of the reactionary cattleman is a masterstroke. Lance displays the same intransigence in the face of purported progress that usually makes cattle barons villains in westerns, but because he's an Indian and a victim of racial prejudice the viewer is practically invited to root for him and against the people usually portrayed as the true bearers of civilization. But Devil's Doorway presents Lance Poole as a tragic figure, one who really is in some ways obsolete. Lawyer Masters is appalled to witness the final stage of a Shoshone initiation test as young Jimmy crawls the last few feet to the Poole house to beat a deadline after having three days to catch an eagle and take his talons with a knife. Lance says it's necessary because the small Shoshone population needs as many real men as it can get, but I feel certain that the audience is meant to identify with Masters's horror at the ordeal imposed on a mere boy. Masters herself is a tragic figure, prejudiced just enough against Indians in her own right to preempt the movie's last chance for a happy ending: a romantic union with Lance. Progressive though she is, she's not quite progressive enough -- though the M-G-M ballyhoo plays up the interracial love angle (in the wake of Broken Arrow's success). As Lance says, things might have turned out differently "a hundred years from now."
Visually, Devil's Doorway is on a level with Mann's other breakthrough westerns, featuring terrific location work and noirish cinematography by John Alton. The story is probably the most downbeat of the three films, with no happy ending for anyone -- though the actual ending comes with too much of an abrupt thud for its own good. Robert Taylor is an interesting choice for the lead. He's not particularly convincing as an Indian, but that actually helps keep Poole a complex, problematic antihero. Should we see him as Indian or cattleman? Mann gives us visual cues as Lance gradually adopts traditional Indian dress (before returning to his cavalry uniform at the end), but the director also shows us that this isn't so much a case of Poole reverting to savagery but being reduced to prejudiced whites' image of a hostile redskin. He's not an innate savage, noble or otherwise, but a conflicted product of his country's contradictory influences. This much Taylor conveys pretty well.
Devil's Doorway is the least known of Mann's 1950 westerns, most likely because Taylor hasn't stood the test of time as well as James Stewart (Winchester '73) or Barbara Stanwyck (The Furies). Having seen it for the first time today on TCM, I think it's fit company for the other two films, and further proof that Mann had instantly become a major player in the genre at the start of its greatest decade.
A horse-drawn wagon rolls hurriedly through a wilderness as a man settles down to a dubious picnic lunch: a chalky looking loaf of bread and two hard-boiled eggs. The man will eat the eggs, but saves the bread for another time. It's our old friend Sartana, dapper as ever but now looking more like George Hilton than Gianni Garko. He's gone back to the grubby three-day growth look of his earlier outings instead of the blond moustache Garko adopted later. Appearances aside, Sartana didn't come out here just to have a snack. He wants to kill a man; the driver of the wagon has a price on his head. But someone beats him to it. A gang of bandits pop out of trapdoors in the earth and blow away the driver and his escort. They gather up the riderless horses, but what of the wagon's contents? They don't seem to care. In fact, they throw a stick of dynamite at it and ride away.
Sartana's curiosity is piqued. Why didn't they loot the wagon? He wants to take a look for himself, but that means preventing the explosion. That should be a simple matter, for a gunhawk like him, of shooting away the fuse before the fire reaches the dynamite. But Sartana doesn't do things the easy way. Instead, he tosses his water canteen far into the air and shoots a hole through it. The water puts out the fiery fuse. It takes our hero a full credit crawl before he reaches the wagon. I don't know what he expected, but he finds sacks of sand in a safe.
If it all seems familiar to Sartana, he doesn't let it show, but it reminded me of one of his earlier films in which the villains faked stage robberies as part of an insurance fraud scheme. The rest of this film, directed by "official" Sartana hand Giuliano "Anthony Ascott" Carnimeo, traces the hero's effort to track down the gold that everyone else believes has been stolen. His detective work pits him against the bandit gang and an evil banker, along with various satellite villains. The main thing is that there be plenty of people for him to shoot.
Sartana is like The Shadow of the spaghetti west. His gimmick is that he sees all and knows all. The gag is that he's always at least one step ahead of the opposition. His gunplay tends toward the cartoonish, the gunfights ending up like sight gags. There's an almost classical slapstick quality to his showdowns this time out, since he almost always cheats. He always seems to have a gun hidden somewhere, whether in his boot, in a deceptively empty holster, or in that nasty loaf of bread. The bread becomes the main running gag of the film, provoking the funniest line in the English dub when a bandit, on to his tricks, orders Sartana: "On your feet, and keep your hands away from that loaf of bread!" When Sartana makes a big reveal of three loaves of bread on a table during his final showdown with the bandit leader, you can't doubt that Carnimeo and writer Tito Carpi have tongues in cheeks more than ever this time out. There's no realism to the gunfights, since Sartana's enemies uniformly violate the Tuco Rule and talk, talk, talk (one even tells his men to count to three!) when they should shoot, shoot, shoot. The gags wouldn't work otherwise. It still works, somehow; I was amused by the brazenness of it all.
This is why they called it Boot Hill.
When Sartana plays with his food, he plays for keeps.
The filmmakers throw a couple of wild cards into a mix: a ruthless saloon girl played by Erika Blanc, and a rival gunfighter named Sabbath. This man (some online reviewers point out that, in some countries, he'd be called Sabata) is in some ways Sartana's antithesis. He wears white while Sartana wears black, for instance. He's also an effete, poetry-reading, parasol-carrying Englishman -- or at least he sounds that way in the dub. He reveres his mother's memory and insists on etiquette toward ladies; he kneecaps a thug who was threatening to rough up the saloon girl in order to make him "curtsy" properly. In this showcase role, the American actor Charles Southwood nearly steals the picture from a charismatic George Hilton. I got the impression that this film may have been a tryout for a separate Sabbath series that never happened, though Carnimeo and Carpi later pitted Hilton and Southwood against each other again in a film in the Alleluja series.
Erika Blanc (top) and Charles Southwood (below) complicate things for Sartana and keep us guessing which side each will end up on.
This last "official" Sartana film -- the last with either Carnimeo or Garko involved -- is a refreshing comedown from the ridiculous excess of Garko's last outing, in which Sartana turned a church organ into a machine gun. Perhaps with Garko out of the way Carnimeo could poke fun at the character and his conventions instead of simply escalating the outlandishness quotient. Hilton makes a good replacement, he's supported by a good cast, and he's backed by a nice score by Francesco (The Inglorious Bastards, Lone Wolf McQuade) de Masi. It's still the sort of gimmicky film that hardcore spaghetti fans aren't necessarily supposed to like, but I'll recommend it for being well-paced, action-packed, and pretty amusing in its silly way.
While the version included in VideoAsia's Spaghetti Western Bible Vol. 2 collection is full-frame, here's a widescreen Italian language trailer, uploaded to YouTube by MrSpaghettiWestern.
Erle C. Kenton's comedy hit screens early in 1934, the year that mostly Catholic moral reformers finally succeeded in pressuring Hollywood into cracking down on the more salacious or sensational elements that made "pre-code" cinema what it was. The stricter code enforcement most likely made Search for Beauty unreleasable for many years afterward. To be honest, that was no great loss. While today's movie buffs revere pre-code for its sophisticated frankness and stylish transgressions, Kenton's film points to another, maybe more likely evolutionary path Hollywood may have taken had there been no crackdown. Beauty is a crude, bawdy and stupid show self-consciously dedicated to pushing the envelope in some ways without really delivering the goods in other respects. It points more toward sitcoms and bad British softcore comedies than the liberated expressiveness of the Seventies and beyond.
As a New York Times review explains, Search is the payoff of a publicity stunt Paramount Pictures perpetrated in 1933. The studio sought out the most perfect physical specimens, male and female (whites only, of course) in the English-speaking world in order to recruit them for pictures. They ended up getting no mention individually in the opening credits, being listed only as the 30 contest winners, but they are prominently placed throughout the picture. They provide the bulk of the beefcake and cheesecake in the picture, with more beef than cheese on display because the boys can go topless -- and bottomless in one locker-room scene. The women are more modest, though one can tell that they aren't wearing bras beneath their one-piece uniforms.
Buster Crabbe near the finish of his Search For Beauty. Below, Crabbe as seen in the Oppressive Female Gaze (of actress Gertrude Michael) at the film's facsimile of the 1932 Olympic Games.
The young leads are established actors, Larry "Buster" Crabbe and teenaged Ida Lupino as Olympic gold medalists (Crabbe was one in real life) who are hired as celebrity editors of a health-and-fitness magazine whose new publishers -- including ex-con Robert Armstrong in dumbed-down Carl Denham mode -- see the venture as a vehicle for sexy pictures of scantily clad specimens. Crabbe and Lupino are true believers and resent the publishers turning their project into trash. Armstrong uses Crabbe's idea for a global fitness contest as an excuse to send the lad out of the country so he and his partners (including the always-amusing, though less amusing than usual, James Gleason) can run the show unhindered, voting down Lupino consistently in editorial conferences.
James Gleason and Robert Armstrong rub their hands greedily while well-intentioned editrix Ida Lupino fumes. She ought to; even Crabbe treats his supposedly equal partner like a secretary, telling her to "take a letter" in one scene.
Crabbe returns with an idea to convert a health-farm owned by the former publisher into a modern fitness hotel, and has put the contest winners under personal contract to himself rather than the magazine, outwitting Armstrong when the huckster proposes a split meant to leave him in control of the bodies beautiful. The rest of the film involves Armstrong's scheme to regain control of the hotel on its opening weekend, the highlight of which is a big floor show featuring all the contest winners.
The floor show is the film's make-or-break moment that could redeem the inane comedy of the huckster publishers and the so-far tepid exploitation of its physical specimens. It proves an uninspired, turgid sequence. For a choreographer or art director it really needed the unholy love child of Busby Berkeley and Leni Riefenstahl -- but Mitchell Leisen might have worked in a pinch. Paramount had no such luck, and by the Berkeley standard this sequence would have a hard struggle to be second-rate. In a way, it's topped by a climax that comes across as a parody of the quasi-fascist films of the period that show dynamic people taking decisive, often extra-legal action against social problems. In Search, this uprising takes the form of the contest winners forcefully rousting the inaugural weekend guests -- uniformly old or fat -- out of their beds at a beastly hour of the morning for compulsory calisthenics conducted by Crabbe and Lupino. To add insult to insult, the "guests" are instructed to "whistle gaily" on their forced march, and when bare-chested men compel male weaklings to do so, you know and the filmmakers know what whistling gaily can mean.
In the spirit of pre-code exploitation, here's Toby Wing as Lupino's impressionable younger cousin.
The end is typical of the film, as Gleason takes the final bow.
There are a few good Depression zingers in the screenplay. Armstrong, on his release from prison, complains that some of the money stashed away on his arrival is missing; he tells the guards that jail is nearly as bad a place to keep your money as a bank. But for the most part the picture lacks that social relevance that gives many pre-codes an extra edge. Search for Beauty is basically a brain-dead comedy without comedians (Gleason is reduced to malapropisms while Armstrong only blusters) and a half-hearted attempt at exploitation. But it probably earns its place as the last film in Universal's Pre-Code collection by showing exactly how far films could go by the end of that remarkable era.
By the way, here's the full "Symphony of Health," uploaded to YouTube by MataMachree -- the poster no man can resist!
