In Brief: REVENGE (Boi s Ten'yu 2: Revansh, 2007)

At first glance, nothing seemed to say "wild world of cinema" more than an action-packed Russian movie about a boxer feuding with the Mexican mafia, but Anton Megerdichev's movie, a Weinstein Company DVD release in America, is both more and less than meets the eye. For starters, "Revenge" proves to be a sequel to an earlier "Shadow Boxing" movie that may not be available as an American disc. But even without a recap of the previous film, it's fairly easy to figure out what's been happening. Our hero is Artem Kolchin (Dennis Nikiforov), an aspiring fighter in a middling weight class. His path to a title fight with an American champion took a detour that sent him to jail. The detour involved a powerful gangster who also ended up in prison. The sequel (which is subtitled "Revenge" in the original Russian) shows Artem a free man with his wife, presumably retired from boxing until his old manager comes up with a deal that will finally land him that title shot. Artem goes to America to train and shakes his ring rust quite fast. He wins his first comeback fight by a one-punch knockout. That makes him the hero of the gym, except in the eyes of Cesar, a Mexican kid with a big chip on his shoulder and a desire to be the alpha dog. Their rivalry finally explodes when a sparring match gets out of control and Artem accidentally beats Cesar to death.

Cesar's dad is Felix Mendez, a bigtime gangster who demands the same revenge the title does. After he sends a hitman into Artem's rented home, our hero decides to flee the country, but he and his wife take separate flights. He makes it back to Russia, but she doesn't. Now she'll be killed if Artem doesn't return and submit himself to Mendez's vengeance. Somehow, word of all this has reached the gangster from the first film in his cell in the city of Vladimir. Since Mendez has ties to Russian organized crime, a tough cop (also from the first film?) negotiates a scenario in which the gangster will leave prison, take out Mendez and help Artem rescue his wife. Fearing a double-cross by the cops, the gangster soon violently shakes his police tail. When he and Artem reach America, the gangster promptly delivers Artem to Mendez. But Artem's friends in the States have a hidden ace: the gangster has a son here whom the good guys take hostage, demanding Artem and his wife in exchange. While the intrigues between the Mexican and Russian crimelords play themselves out, Artem has to get back in shape fast to make his title fight date....

I'm not sure what I was expecting that would give this film a distinctly Russian flavor, but I finished it thinking it could have been made practically anywhere. It's filmed in a kind of generic global style that's heavy on needless flashbacks and flashy camera tricks. Megerdichev tries every trick in the book to make his fights visually interesting; the results are inevitably hit-or-miss, but in the climactic title bout especially he does succeed in dramatizing boxing in some fresh ways. To his credit, he doesn't stage Rocky fights in which every punch is a haymaker; his fighters duck and block and make each other miss, and even clinch at times. He films at variable speeds and freeze-frames occasionally to highlight near-misses and decisive blows. He shakes the camera and blurs the image and throws in disorienting montages to portray Artem's punchy perspective at crisis moments. The director's most successful gambit comes just as Artem is making his big comeback. The champ is still getting in some heavy shots, and after one solid hit to Artem's head the screen goes black -- and stays black for tense seconds before fading back in to as Artem shakes off the effects of a powerful blow. Megerdichev also doesn't overdo the comeback; the champ remains a formidible opponent throughout, defying our expectations by getting up not once, but twice after potential knockout blows from our hero. He takes the best Artem dishes out, and that keeps the fight suspenseful until a clever anticlimax. Once the champ gets up that second time, you're most likely asking yourself whether Artem has got anything left to put him down with, and you may be thinking he can still lose -- but then the bell rings to end the fight. That leaves us with a different kind of anticlimax: a split decision.

"Shadow Boxing 2," as it's known in some territories, disappointed me as an action movie -- Artem does too much running and not enough ass-kicking for my taste -- but it ends up an interesting experiment in post-Raging Bull boxing expressionism. If there'd been more boxing in it, I'd be willing to call it at least a halfway-decent fight film. As it is, it's a muddled, overlong, sometimes overstylized affair that might still be of interest to fight-film fans and anyone curious about Russian cinema outside the art houses.

This Russian trailer was uploaded to YouTube by sjada22:

FLATFOOT (Piedone lo sbirro, 1973)

Bud Spencer is getting a lifetime achievement award from the Italian film industry at this year's Donatello ceremony, Italy's equivalent of the Oscars. The man born Carlo Pedersoli will be sharing the honor with his frequent screen partner, Mario "Terence Hill" Girotti. In the U.S. Spencer is probably best known, to the few who know him at all today, as Bambino, the hulking sidekick of Hill's Trinity in the series of cowboy comedies that for many sounded the death knell of the spaghetti western. Spencer teamed with Hill in a wider range of films, including contemporary stories after westerns finally went under. He also earned opportunities to star in movies without Hill, which is where things get interesting for me. Terence Hill has the sort of face you want to slug, and his shtick gets old really fast by my clock. Spencer, by contrast, is just a big oaf, and there's nothing inherently wrong with that. So why should he suffer by association with Hill? With that generosity of spirit I recently acquired the latest Spaghetti Western Bible collection from our old friends at Videoasia. This fourth volume is the second devoted to Hill and Spencer, and while it's dubiously labeled in that only two of the ten films included are spaghetti westerns (Damiano Damiani's A Genius and the infamous spaghetti musical Rita of the West) it does include all four films in the Piedone series of police comedies Spencer made between 1973 and 1980.

A closer translation of the first film's title would be "Bigfoot the Cop," but you can imagine the confusion that'd create in the U.S., however sasquatch-like Spencer may seem at times. "Flatfoot," meanwhile, is good old American slang for a cop and signals the somewhat comical nature of this series. All four Piedone films are directed by the mononymous "Steno" (Stefano Vanzina), who directed many films for the popular comedian Toto. He launches the series with a dynamic action scene that sets the tone for the first episode.

A black American sailor has gone crazy in the middle of Naples. He's made his way to the top of a tall building and has started taking potshots at the crowds below while raving about hating white people and being free. Steno films this on a massive scale with extras fleeing the sailor's gunshots as snipers move into position atop nearby buildings. He films from below, with the sailor a speck high above, and from the roof as the gunman commands a vast expanse of cityscape. Nobody wants to shoot the sailor, but there's no reasoning with him, and an American officer leaves his fate to the police. At that moment, as a cop on street level raises his rifle, a big foot comes down on top of it, and from a low angle we see the full bulk of Bud Spencer as he finishes a cigarette. Who's this guy? the American officer asks. "That would take a long time to explain," a cop replies.

As the credits roll over a jaunty theme by the the de Angelis brothers, Inspector Rizzo -- Piedone -- makes his way patiently up to the roof. He spies the sailor reloading, then waits for him to empty his gun again before charging. A brief battle follows, with the American putting up more of a fight than Spencer's fans might expect and nearly throwing Rizzo off the roof. Eventually Rizzo doesn't so much knock the man out as he knocks him back to his senses. After he surrenders, the inspector finds a telltale white packet on him. Cocaine has come to Naples.

Rizzo is a policeman who refuses to use a gun. He appears to despise all weapons, later dismissing a knife as a child's toy unfit for men. He's confident in his ability to settle matters with his fists, but he's not just a primitive brute, appearances notwithstanding. One reason he avoids guns is that he strives to keep situations from escalating into violence as much as possible. He's developed a rapport, a modus vivendi even, with the Sicilian Mafia, which this film presents as a conservative force in a society that finds itself under siege by the drug menace. Piedone lo sbirro is a reactionary, populist film, the sort that probably isn't meant for viewers outside Italy. It reminds me of Japanese movies with its ambivalent emphasis on the presence of Americans, and it teases briefly that they might be the source of the new drugs. The truth is a little closer to home: gangsters from Marseilles (i.e. "the French connection") are moving the drugs with help from a sleazy, flashy pimp called "the Baron." His men are handing out free samples outside schools to get kids hooked, including the son of Rizzo's landlady. "Flatfoot" takes a paternal interest in the boy (and a potentially matrimonial interest in the mother) that extends to slapping the brat when he catches the kid stealing to pay for more dope.

Tough love from Flatfoot. "So, I'm not your father, eh!" Actually, he's not, but he feels entitled to slap anyone, anyway. I'd say, "Bad cop; no donut," except I don't think he eats donuts. Can you imagine if he did???

Rizzo thinks he can crack down on the drug trade by getting tough on the Baron -- he may have a code against killing but he's not above using his ham fists to torture folks -- but he's held back by a by-the-book new police commissioner who frowns on our hero's unorthodox tactics and his semi-cordial relations with the Mafia. Rizzo gets suspended after the commissioner catches him in the middle of an unauthorized beatdown of the Baron, but he carries on the fight with still more help from the Mafia and some crucial assistance from his new friend Jho, the cleaned-up American sailor, and some of his fellow gobs. Things get further complicated when one of his favorite informants and the Baron are killed, leaving Rizzo to wonder who the real villain is. Could it be one of his quasi-allies in the Mafia? Could it be the commissioner who seems to do everything possible to impede the investigation? It all gets very confusing, and as Rizzo tells the commissioner, "You know what Flatfoot does when he's confused." If you don't, he punches people, and if he punches enough of them, he may find out the truth in time....

The stakes can be high in Flatfoot, as a dwarf informant learns, but the film maintains a lighthearted tone throughout.

Flatfoot seems designed as a family-friendly poliziotteschi movie, free from extreme gun violence, nudity and other distinguishing traits of the adult version of the genre. At the same time, its emphasis on choreographed unarmed combat makes it look like an attempted Italian answer to Asian martial-arts films. In this respect, the film is pretty good. Spencer is a convincing brawler and he's supported by a game stable of stuntmen who sell well for him. Steno keeps the different fight scenes lively, particularly one in which Rizzo routs an entire motorcycle gang with just a borrowed chain for a weapon.

Steno can pull off the kind of car and cycle chases you expect from the Italian cop genre, but Flatfoot's unarmed combats are its highlights.

The regrettable exception is the major comic set piece, a melee set on a fishing boat pitting Rizzo and the three Americans against drug smugglers. The problem isn't that the scene is shot for laughs, but that it goes on too long after it runs out of invention. It's amusing to see Spencer swatting people with fish, but Steno clearly runs out of ideas at some point. Worse, one of the Americans is an acrobat. Does it strike any of you that Italians have some odd obsession with acrobats? They seem to like to see guys turning backflips and somersaults without appreciating that stunts like that only make their fight scenes look more fake. I can't suspend disbelief with some idiot tumbling all over the place, but for an Italian audience all that matters is that it looks funny. But that aside, I found Flatfoot fairly amusing just for its peculiar approach to material I'm used to seeing handled in a far more brutal fashion. I'd recommend it to any fan of Italian police movies just for the sake of variety.

Inspector Rizzo becomes a globe-trotter in the three later films, which take him to Hong Kong, South Africa and Egypt. I assume that someone in Europe released the Piedone series on DVD, since Videoasia probably wouldn't have them otherwise. Piedone lo sbirro looks a little battered in spots but comes, as do all the sequels, in nicely letterboxed format. The new collection, deceptively titled Trinity:Hands Up! Eyes Down! Pockets Out! teams Spencer with Terence Hill in two Africa-set adventures, All the Way Boys and I'm For the Hippopotamus, while Hill stars in the two westerns as well as Renegade (which first appeared in Grindhouse Experience Vol. 2) and Virtual Weapon. I'm looking forward to the other Flatfoots and to the two spaghettis, so expect to read more about them in the near future.

Here's an English-language trailer for Flatfoot aimed at the American market, uploaded to YouTube by spencherhilltrailer.

Wendigo Meets INNOCENT BLOOD (1992)

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.

Innocent Blood (Theatrical Trailer)
Uploaded by NakedBrotha2007. - Full seasons and entire episodes online.

On the Big Screen: VINCERE (2009)

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:

Sonny Chiba in Kinji Fukasaku's DOBERMAN COP (1977)

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.

SORCERER (1977)

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.

DEVIL'S DOORWAY (1950)

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.

Here's the trailer from the TCM website: