On the Big Screen: INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS (2009)

To the layman, "Once upon a time" means "fairy tale." To the movie buff, it means "Sergio Leone" or, perhaps more generally, "spaghetti western." The new film by Quentin Tarantino is advertised on some posters and announced in its opening chapter as "Once Upon a Time in Occupied France." While the story is structured according to Tarantino's peculiar preference for breaking things down into chapters, some of the fundamental elements of the classical spaghetti remain apparent. Most obviously, there is a division of characters into good, bad and ugly as in Leone's film of that name as well as Once Upon a Time in the West. The good is Shoshanna Dreyfus aka Emmanuelle Mimieux, lone survivor of a Jewish family harbored by French dairy farmers yet brought down by the bad, "Jew Hunter" Hans Landa, in the opening chapter. Shoshanna is the story's avenger, but her prominence in the story is obscured to the point of false advertising by the emphasis given to the ugly, Aldo Raine and his band of "Basterds," in the ads for the film.

Understanding Brad Pitt's actual role in the film goes a long way toward solving the riddle of his performance. Some reviewers get it, others don't. The latter blame Pitt for clownishness, which seems unfair when Raine is meant to be a clown. He's Tuco to Melanie Laurent's Shoshanna as Blondy, though they never interact and aren't aware of each other's existence; he's also Cheyenne to her Harmonica. Pitt is meant to be crude and brutal and to be funny doing it, and he succeeds admirably. He is an unheralded comic genius, as he first intimated in his previous performance of a Tarantino script in True Romance and demonstrated again more recently in Burn After Reading. Pitt and Laurent are counterpoints as Tarantino challenges himself to juggle tragedy and comedy while the two plots play out in the same movie theater.

Basterds doesn't play entirely by spaghetti rules. Shoshanna appears less interested in avenging herself on Landa (though she assumes he'll be among her victims) than on Nazi Germany in general. That's appropriate in a war story, since war isn't supposed to be about individuals. That in turn makes adapting spaghetti formulae into a war-movie framework a tricky business. Tarantino complicates things further by making most of the well-rounded characters Germans, whether it's ambivalent war hero-turned-film star Frederick Zoller, Wilhelm the common soldier who celebrates the birth of his son in the wrong place at the wrong time, or the brave officer who defies the Basterds at the brink of death by baseball bat.

I leave Hans Landa off this list, and I confess that I find Christoph Waltz's lauded performance somewhat overrated. I suppose that's because he just doesn't match my idea of a Nazi villain. That idea allows for considerable range, but Landa seems too much like a glib Tarantino villain rather than a Nazi. I know: it's a Tarantino movie, so what's my point? My point is, that while I understand that Landa is less a Nazi than a spaghetti archetype in a German uniform, which he proves by ultimately looking out for himself rather than the Party or the Fatherland, Waltz just doesn't ring true for me in a way I feel he should. Having said that, I think he gives a fine performance as a glib Tarantino villain, and that goes a long way toward selling the twists Landa makes along the way.

Spaghetti westerns weren't known for their historical accuracy, but they also weren't known for borrowing characters from history very often. Tarantino's claim of similar if not greater creative license in the context of World War II has shocked some reviewers and provoked accusations of inappropriate frivolity or insufficient engagement with the evil of Nazism. On the other hand, I've seen at least one reviewer argue that Tarantino's license restores some of the necessary unpredictability to World War II dramas -- the sense that anything can happen identified with a certain type of thriller. With Basterds, Tarantino has made a distinctive verbal thriller. He fills the space in which suspense builds with his customary verbiage, but he's figuring out how to use his verbosity dramatically. Reviewers have made a lot of the initial scene of Landa chatting with a French farmer, but Tarantino's skill really shines in the tavern scene at the center of the film. With the grumbling title characters relegated to the basement, the celebration of the aforementioned Wilhelm and a "what's my line" type of card game share space with a crucial meeting between a British spy and a turncoat German actress, the problem being how soon to leave without attracting suspicion and how long to stay without attracting suspicion. That scene may be Tarantino's best work to date as a writer.

The final half hour of Basterds is pretty much indescribable if I don't want to spoil things for the uninitiated, but it is spectacular stuff, shocking and cathartic. Those who think there's something inherently wrong (historically speaking) with it should remember the "Once Upon a Time" sign up front and attempt to recall whether they were expecting a true story or not.

The acting: Waltz is overrated and Pitt overrated, but both are good. Laurent should be a global star, while Diane Kruger as the actress makes up for Troy. The guy who really impressed me was Til Schweiger as Hugo Stiglitz, a renegade German recruited into the Basterds. Schweiger plays his part in a perpetual slow burn that marks him as the most dangerous man in any room he enters. He does this without a lot of dialogue, which is a testament to his own talent and to Tarantino the director as opposed to the writer. At the other extreme, Mike Myers as British General Fenech makes a fortunately brief appearance that had the local art-house audience giggling just at the sight of him and the sound of his voice. Whether this was the desired effect of casting him I'm not quite sure, though I was happy to see Rod Taylor as Churchill sharing the scene with him.

I'm not quite sure yet of where to rank Basterds among Tarantino's films. It's definitely an improvement on Death Proof (which the director himself now seems to dismiss), and if I have to treat the two parts of Kill Bill as one film then I'd lean toward saying Basterds is his best work since Jackie Brown. At the same time, some aspects of his style are starting to wear on me, and for all that I liked a lot of what I heard on the soundtrack, if I had the man in a room and could make one request of him, I'd challenge him to commission an original score for a film. Tarantino remains a brilliant yet problematic filmmaker and, despite his detractors, one who's still evolving and perfecting his style and remains worth watching while he continues to do so.

Hello to GOODBYE UNCLE TOM (1971)

Of D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation Woodrow Wilson supposedly said it was like "history written with lightning." The magnum opus of Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi could well be described in the same way.

Griffith made his film, in part, in defense of slavery. The makers of Mondo Cane made Addio Zio Tom, in part, to condemn slavery. Yet both Birth of a Nation and Goodbye Uncle Tom have been called racist films. Worse yet, the Italians have been accused of exploiting slavery, even while condemning it. That's a sort of backhanded tribute to the incendiary, provocative power of the film's images. But there's also a kind of instinctual recognition that such a visceral re-enactment of historic atrocity can, maybe must stir up ugly emotions, including titilation as well as indignation. Add to the brew the fact that some of the most horrific scenes were filmed in Haiti with the cooperation of a monstrous tyrant, and people can't be blamed for feeling that there's something wrong with and about this film. And the filmmakers aren't playing innocent, either. They meant the movie as a provocation as well as an explanation -- but what was being explained, and what did they mean to provoke?

Those questions wouldn't be worth asking if Addio Zio Tom wasn't one of the most powerful visual statements ever filmed. I first saw the American edition on a dupey videotape about a decade ago, having never heard of it before, and I was stunned by its epic scope, not to mention the majestic, feverish score by Riz Ortolani. I've now had a chance to see what Jacopetti considers the definitive Italian version of the film, which includes material left out of the American edition and excludes stuff I remember from my first viewing. Since this is Blue Underground's DVD, the imagery is even more powerful.

This is an introduction to a series of posts I'm going to do on one of my favorite movies, one which I rank among the greatest of the 1970s. My approach to Uncle Tom emulates that of Nigel M.'s I Spit On Your Taste blog, where he dissects movies one theme or idea at a time. With Uncle Tom I have a lot of ground to cover: what were Jacopetti & Prosperi trying to say about slavery and its relevance to America in their own time? Were they racist? Were they exploiting the heritage of slavery, and how would we know if they were? Why did they go the extra mile to associate themselves with the controversy over William Styron's novel The Confessions of Nat Turner when they were probably in enough trouble before the final act? What are the differences between the Italian and American editions of the film, and is one more racist or exploitative than the other? There might not be one post per question, but I have a lot to say about this film and it seems advisable to present it in digestible chunks. Numerous posts also allow me to use a lot of screen captures. Just bear in mind that what you'll see here is the tip of an artistic iceberg, or volcano if you prefer.

Now that I've announced my preview, here's the trailer for the international version (known only as Uncle Tom), uploaded to YouTube by HumanoidCableDreads. Anyone likely to offended by mass display of naked breasts or the simulated dashing of babies against a bedroom wall had better not look.

LE SAMOURAI (1967)

The title of Jean-Pierre Melville's thriller may deceive some first-time viewers. Our image of a samurai is likely to be more swaggering, more superpowered, more badass than Melville's title character, Jef Costello. I actually had an irreverent thought when I saw Costello (Alain Delon) stalk into Martey's nightclub in his hat and raincoat, with his hands in his pocket and a stony demeanor on his face. I was strangely reminded of Wilmer Cook, the hapless gunsel played by Dwight Frye and Elisha Cook Jr. in different versions of The Maltese Falcon. That's about the diametric opposite of a modern-day samurai, but the swagger, the badassness, weren't what Melville had in mind. His epigraph to the film defines the samurai as the ultimate solitary man. Allegedly quoting from "Bushido: The Book of the Samurai," he says that the samurai's solitude can be compared only to that of a tiger in the jungle...maybe.

Jef Costello is no loner -- he has a girlfriend and a group of poker buddies (at least for alibi purposes) -- but he lives alone, except for a songbird, in spartan simplicity. And as it turns out, there's a limit to how much anyone can help him in his predicament as it develops. It's no big revelation that Jef is a hitman; probably everyone who watches this film from its Paris premiere to a DVD arriving in the mail today knows that going in. The first act of the film shows him at work. It is quiet work, involving him stealing a car with help from his hefty ring of keys and getting its plates changed. Exactly ten minutes pass before a line of dialogue is spoken, when he visits his girlfriend. He stops at the card game, promising to come back later. Then he goes to Martey's, where he kills Martey, outgunning him in an unexpected shootout. He leaves, but encounters the house pianist in the hallway. He is seen in part by other employees. This is sloppy work; he is no samurai in any sense of mastery or elegance of execution. He is no super criminal; Melville's criminal protagonists never are.

The minimal description of a man in a hat and raincoat is enough to get Jef caught in a dragnet along with dozens of the usual suspects. A few at a time they are lined up on stage for the Martey's staff to examine. One man is positive that Jef is the killer, but the pianist, who has looked at him point blank, will not confirm his identity. The flics aren't satisfied; they consider Jef a principal suspect, but they can't get more than the one old man to i.d. him. Throughout the scene, Melville maintains a deliberate, almost documentary pace when other filmmakers might rush through this business to establish the main point: the pianist's refusal to identify Jef. In this way he sustains an atmosphere of authenticity; the scene seems to play out in real-time, or something closer to it than we're accustomed to in thrillers, despite all the editing going on. The editing is an invisible balancing act that keeps the scene going to build our anticipation of something happening without making us impatient with the film. Dispensing with most of the usual gimmicks for dramatizing the situation, Melville still induces a sensation that something important can happen at any moment.

You'd think anyone would recognize Alain Delon, even with his hat on, but Caty Rosier (below) wants the law to believe she doesn't.

Jef is sprung, but tailed. He shakes the tail (which will only grow in scope) to rendezvous on a bridge with a contact who will pay him for the hit on Martey. But his employers are dissatisfied with his sloppiness in leaving witnesses and Jef finds himself in a fight for his life. Melville heightens the suspense of the moment by obscuring it: we see the abrupt fight through the screen of the bridge itself, in a tracking shot. Jef escapes wounded. We see him treat the flesh wound in his grungy kitchen. Melville films the therapy with the same realist deliberation as the other sequences, patiently observing all the steps.

While the police intensify their surveillance, and their pressure on his girlfriend (who stands by her man), Jef decides to track down the employer who betrayed him. Melville's deliberation really pays off in a sequence in which Jef never acknowledges but struggles stoically to shake a hydra-like tail of male and female flics on the metro as headquarters track his movements on an electronic map. He finally manages to confront his criminal persecutors, who make him an offer to redeem himself: kill the pianist and everyone's problems are just about solved. But that he cannot do. He owes her a debt (and it's no accident storywise that she wears a robe with an oriental motif at home) even as he realizes that she most likely protected him because she was ordered to. This is one aspect of the samurai archetype in which Jef ultimately matches our expectations: he has a sense of honor and is willing to sacrifice his own life to uphold it. One moment of awful simplicity tells us what's going to happen. Jef returns to Martey's and leaves his hat with the hat-check girl. She gives him a hat-check, and he leaves it at the counter....

Jef Costello sees a lot in Le Samourai. Some he may like; some probably not.

For a long time, before Army of Shadows made its belated arrival on American shores in 2005, Le Samourai was considered the definitive Melville film. I wonder whether that's the reason I'd waited so long before looking at it. It ends up being the seventh Melville that I've seen. Could it live up to the epic expectations? As a matter of fact, it could. It is a masterpiece of the thriller genre, or at least of a certain kind of thriller. There are at least two kinds: the race against time, and the kind Melville specialized in, in which suspense is the feeling that anything can happen and it'll probably be bad. That's the suspense you feel in North by Northwest when Cary Grant stands on the roadside waiting to meet someone before the crop duster shows up, except that Melville can keep that mood going for an entire film.

All thrillers are manipulative in some way, since they must focus your attention on important details, but Melville does his manipulation subtly, not blatantly, mostly through editing rather than through the sensationalist gimmickry common today. There's no moment when Delon suddenly starts walking in slow motion to telegraph that something big is going to happen. There's nothing wrong with a director doing that if it's done right, but that sort of thing is overdone now to the point of devaluation, which makes Melville's style a huge gust of fresh air. It's a style that respects intelligence and trusts the viewer to figure out what's going on, since it's all presented quite clearly.

I like the way Melville can invest modest or petty crime with a tragic gravitas. Jef Costello is something different from the typical Melvillian gangster, but he's clearly from the same milieu. He is no super-hitman and is all too fallible, but he's also indisputably formidable, a man you mess with at your peril and not anyone who can be brought down easily. The nearest thing to too-good-to-be-true is Jef's ability to orchestrate things in order to die on his own terms, but even then it doesn't look like he exactly enjoys going out the way he does. Melville's crime fantasies are ingenious in the way they convince you that they aren't taking place in a fantasy world, and as Jef Alain Delon embodies the balance between ordinariness and pure pulp power. If he wasn't already an international star with both art and action credentials he would have been once this film appeared. Melville would use him well again in Le Cercle Rouge and Un Flic, in sharply contrasting roles, and he vies with Lino Ventura as the director's ideal leading man.

Le Samourai is a high point of French cinematic cool, a manner averse to melodramatics though not to earned emotion. In contrast to Hollywood hyperbole or variations on that style from Tokyo to Bollywood, the French manner might seem cold or distant, but it often rewards the attentiveness it requires with a rich sense of human experience or social observation. Melville's films make a good gateway to French cinema for the otherwise uninitiated because there are well-staged shootings and other action along the way. Samourai itself is a great gateway to the rest of Melville's work.

The trailer was uploaded by Annie7676

GHAJINI (2008)

Ghajini is the Bollywood Memento -- that is, with songs, a real hissable villain, lots more ass-kicking action than the original, and a happy ending. In addition, Ghajini is the Hindi Ghajini, a bigger-budgeted remake of a Tamil-language "original" also directed by A.R. Murugadoss. So: do you remember the bad old days when movie buffs dreaded the announcement that an American studio would remake some recent foreign hit? It seemed inevitably to mean the original story would be dumbed down to be more palatable to the mallrats. The same thing happens elsewhere, it seems, but does this mean we should dismiss out of hand a film that has reportedly become the unadjusted-for-inflation Indian box office champion?

Murugadoss was apparently smitten with the idea of a man with short-term memory loss who has to tattoo notes to himself on his body to keep himself on a mission of revenge for the death of his life. His approach to the material is nearly the reverse of Christopher Nolan's original concept. He introduces Sanjay, his antihero, as something of a monster, almost as much Max Cady as Leonard Shelby. He's capable of nearly superhuman rage, which comes in handy for a number of brutal fight scenes, and other characters treat him as a menace as they learn of his past killings and his looming vendetta against one Ghajini Dharmatma. Only gradually do the protagonists discover a true story from Sanjay's notes, and not before the original police investigator is abruptly eliminated from the story, leaving it to Sunita, a female medical student to dig deeper while warning Ghajini of the threat Sanjay poses.

And here the tide turns, as Murugadoss leaves behind the ambiguity and tragedy of Memento in favor of crowd-pleasing melodrama, establishing that Ghajini, heretofore seen as a businessman and philanthropist, is far more of a monster than Sanjay has seemed, while Sanjay himself emerges as a pitiable victim who had the love of his life torn from him in a vicious manner. Once we learn the full truth through Sunita's research, we're ready to have Sanjay pointed in the right direction for some righteous revenge. The payoff is a relentless fight and chase scene with a perhaps unintentionally hilarious outcome, as Ghajini puts enough goons between himself and Sanjay that the poor slob forgets what the hell he was fighting about by the time he's through. He confronts Ghajini and hasn't clue the first about who he is.

So you're a villain and your enemy has totally forgotten who you are and why he should care. Do you:
a) Shake hands and walk away, perhaps to find some goons still walking who might whack him at your convenience.
b) Give him a new reason to be mad at you by attacking him from behind and stabbing him in the gut with a piece of broken pipe.

In defense of A. R. Murugadoss, it must be noted that Ghajini was racing toward the three-hour mark at this point, so it may not have been unreasonable to want to speed things up a little. Also, melodrama villains are never known for their subtlety, and I suppose this was Ghajini's best chance to be rid of his tormentor for good. Still, even with a broken pipe embedded in his bowels, you have to think that an enraged Sanjay would be more than a match for a stocky middle-aged businessman. In the final analysis, all Ghajini did was give the man another weapon to use, in tried-and-true martial arts fashion. There isn't really anything new in the final act of this film, but Murugadoss and Aamir Khan execute it all with a breathless intensity that at least makes it fun to watch.

Those three hours, of course, include a number of musical numbers, most of which involve Asin Thottumkal as Sanjay's lost love, and a lot of meet-cute material from the two long flashback scenes. There's simply more story here than in Memento, though quantity doesn't necessarily guarantee superior quality. This film is a long slog between scenes when Aamir Khan goes ape. It's been available at the Albany Public Library, but I hadn't thought I'd have time for a three-hour Bollywood brawl while doing my homework on Sixties cinema. But when Ghajini turned up on IFC yesterday morning I couldn't tear myself away. It's definitely a film of interest, if only as an example of how some powerful story concepts get translated from one film culture to another, and what often gets lost in translation.

You don't need to know the language to get the idea from this trailer, uploaded by nhjg6

A BULLET FOR THE GENERAL (Quien Sabe?, 1967)

The American title sort of gives things away, but it sounds cool. The Spanish title of this Italian western translates as "Who knows?" It is only uttered at the very end of the film when Chuncho (Gian Maria Volonte) is pressed to explain why he's about to kill El Nino (Lou Castel), the gringo who befriended him and saved his life in Mexico. Chuncho is a revolutionary bandit who encounters Nino on a train the bandits have ambushed. He thinks Nino is a prisoner, being handcuffed, who wants to ride with the bandits as an alternative to execution back in the States. But we've seen Nino put the cuffs on after shooting an engineer, effectively stopping the train.

Above, Lou Castel as El Nino. Below, Gian Maria Volonte as Chuncho, with Klaus Kinski as Santo.

We know long before Chuncho realizes it that Nino has a hidden agenda. But for the time being he seems like many an American adventurer in Mexico, trying to steer Chuncho in a socially conscious direction. The bandit sides with the revolution mainly for money; he can sell guns to Elias, the rebel general, for a pretty peso. But he's prone to distractions, while Nino urges him to hook up with Elias directly to take an active part in the actual revolutionary fighting. For a time, Chuncho thinks he can be a rebel leader himself, or at least the power behind one, in the village of San Miguel. After he kills the local padrone, he "elects" one of the town's few literate men as leader and sets himself up to train their militia. But he gets bored, and then gets angry when his erstwhile partners ride off to take "his" machine gun to Elias. He abandons the village and his religious-fanatic brother Santo (Klaus Kinski) to take back the gun, but after a battle with government troops in which he and Nino get to use the weapon, he decides to go with the survivors all the way to Elias.

"Now I have a machine gun. Ho, ho, ho!"

After treating Nino for a sudden outbreak of malaria, during which he discovers a mysterious golden bullet in the American's valise, they meet the rebel general, who informs Chuncho that the town he left behind was massacred without his leadership, with only an angry Santo surviving. A chastened Chuncho concedes that he deserves death for cowardice, with Santo happy to oblige, but Nino thinks differently. He takes time from his own secret mission (can you guess?) to save Chuncho, whom he told earlier to meet him afterward in Ciudad Juarez, where rewards and civlized luxury await him.

So why does Chuncho want to shoot Nino despite the debt he owes him, and despite the fortune Nino has given him with no strings attached? I suppose that if we asked director Damiano Damiani and co-screenwriter Franco Solinas (coming off The Battle of Algiers) they'd say it was a matter of revolutionary necessity. Nino deserves to die no matter what he's done for Chuncho, especially if the bandit sticks to his own objective realization in Elias's camp that he deserved to die for abandoning San Miguel. If that was so, then Nino's rescuing him shouldn't count for anything, even though it shows that, for whatever reason, Nino considered Chuncho a friend. That's the peculiarity of this story. Nino is a villain, and he dislikes Mexico. But a true villain wouldn't give a damn whether Chuncho is executed or not, or wouldn't share his ill-gotten earnings 50-50 with the man, even if Chuncho did sort of save his life during that bout with malaria. I think we're meant to conclude that Nino's feelings for Chuncho are sincere -- and that they shouldn't matter.

Quien Sabe? is an early example of the Revolutionary subgenre of spaghetti westerns. This was a natural direction for the genre to go in with so many Italian creative people having a Marxist bent. Perhaps ironically, this particular revolutionary film actually has more of an American feel in its sweep and scope than the pioneering spaghettis that emphasized stylized gunfights. Also contributing to that impression is the powerful score by Luis Enriquez Bacalov under Enrico Morricone's supervision. It sounds less like Morricone than Aaron Copland by way of Elmer Bernstein. The score and the spacious cinematography give this film a vastness that many spaghettis lack. Damiani handles the battle scenes forcefully, but also makes sure you see the executions, so that you understand that revolution is a rough, maybe dirty business and, from his point of view, a necessary one.

A landowner asks if Chuncho is going to kill him because he's rich. The answer is no; the people are going to kill him because they're poor and he's done everything in his power to keep them down. That's a crucial difference in emphasis. It's not so much that some people deserve to die, but some need to die for the rest to get their due. The filmmakers don't hide the dirty work and don't romanticize revolution. You could very well look at this film and decide the revolutionaries are no better or worse than the government they're fighting. But leaving politics out of the discussion, Quien Sabe? works as a dynamic action film and an interplay of two strong personalities, the underplaying Castel as the subtly sinister Nino and Volonte (from the first two Sergio Leone westerns) as the archetypal spaghetti bandit. As usual, someone else speaks Kinski's lines, but he's really into the action and dominates his scenes as El Santo.

Kinski as a mad monk is a natural, but his performance in Quien Sabe? isn't quite that.

A Bullet For the General would make a good introduction to spaghetti westerns for people used to American westerns, and a good introduction to the revolutionary subgenre for those who identify spaghettis with lone gunfighters and bounty hunters. Any fan of westerns and action films in general will probably enjoy it.

Here's the U.S. trailer posted by BlueUnderground.

THUG CITY CHRONICLES Vol. 1: DVD Bargain of the Year?

The merry buccaneers at Videoasia may have put out their best collection yet. This time out it's a promising "Volume 1" of "Thug City Chronicles," billed as "10 O.G. Films, 100% Snitch-Free. It's one of their most geographically sweeping sets yet; while the majority of films are Italian, the Phillipines, Hong Kong and Mexico are also represented. The emphasis is on urban crime, so let's see what they came up with.

Duccio Tessari's Tony Arzenta (1973)was just written up quite enticingly by Hans A. over at Quiet Cool a week ago. Alain Delon is a hitman with a grudge. Richard Conte is one of the gangsters. Erika Blanc and Rosalba Neri are on hand. The Thug City copy is letterboxed, as are most of the films in the set, I'm happy to report. The English dub is the only option, of course. Looks good and after Hans's write up to have this show up at Best Buy was like manna from heaven. Check out the Italian trailer uploaded by jonnyredeyes.

This one film might make the whole set worthwhile. But there's more.

Massimo Dallamano's Bandidos is the ringer of the set. It's actually a spaghetti western, also known as You Die But I Live. It lacks the major spaghetti names, the best known performer probably being Enrico Maria Salerno, but it's letterboxed, looks and sounds good. It ought to be something to discover. Let's start with the Italian trailer, uploaded by Mart85

Efrem C. Pinon's Blind Rage is about a gang of blind bank robbers. It is not letterboxed, but it makes up for that by including the mighty Leo Fong and a final-act appearance by Fred Williamson as his Jesse Crowder character. I'm there.

Godfather's Daughter is short for Feng Ke An's The Godfather's Daughter Mafia Blues (1992), the main selling point of which is Japanese action starlet Yukari Oshima. Martial arts are promised as well as crime. This is taken from a letterboxed Mei Ah print retaining the original Chinese soundtrack, with English subtitles.

Now we come to what the box calls the "Italian Mob Trilogy." This consists of three films by Fernando Di Leo: Milano Calibro 9, Man Hunt (La Mala Ordina), and The Boss (Il Boss). The good Rev. Phantom has reviewed Man Hunt over at Fantamorte under the title The Italian Connection, and you shoud check out his homemade trailer for this flick.

In his review, the Rev. says he considers the other two films must-sees on the strength of the one. Well, now's his chance. All three are letterboxed, with English dubs the only option. The Boss looks incredibly brutal, or at least it starts that way with Henry Silva turning a private screening room into a charnel house with explosive ammo, while Milano Calibro 9 has a score by Luis Enriquez Bacalov that sounds like a classic just from the pre-credits sequence.
Here are the original Italian trailers for Milano Calibro 9 and Il Boss, both uploaded by jonnyredeyes



These three films will probably cinch the deal for a lot of people if the aforementioned films hadn't. And there's still more.

City Rats is the English title of actor-director Valentin Trujillo's Ratas de la Ciudad (1986). This looks to be a sort of juvenile delinquent film about a gang of mostly pre-teen feral kids and a slightly more affluent youth who falls in with them. It's probably the rattiest film in the set -- pun intended -- with a relatively fuzzy picture and a seriously defective soundtrack. But it has an awesome pre-credit sequence of mass murder by children. In fact, take a look at it in the original Spanish, courtesy of tehchinghe

Now imagine the kids attacking to the repeated dubbed yell for "MONEY! MONEY!" and you might agree with me that this, too, may be a prize piece of junk cinema. But there's still one more disc to check out.

This two-film disc focuses on the Italian crime work of Telly Savalas. I've already reviewed Silvio Narizzano's Redneck (aka Senza Ragione) from a streaming video, but the Thug City copy is a letterboxed upgrade. Savalas's partnership with Franco Nero, which Telly dominates as a hymn-singing loon, is definitely worth a look. The other film on the disc is here titled New Mafia Boss, but is also known as Crime Boss in other cheapo collections. It's directed by Alberto De Martino of Rain of Fire (Holocaust 2000) and Blazing Magnum fame and boasts cinematography by Aristide "Joe D'Amato" Massaccesi and a score by Francesco "Lone Wolf McQuade" De Masi. Unlike the copy that turns up in some Mill Creek Entertainment box sets, New Mafia Boss is not letterboxed here. However, it does have the complete opening credits, which the Mill Creek copy lacks, and may differ in other ways. I'll have to watch both versions to find out more.

By true DVD conoisseur standards none of these can be considered definitive editions, since viewing options are strictly limited and there's no supplemental material. But as an opportunity to see so many promising genre flicks, good and goofy alike, and most in what looks like very good condition, this is a great deal. I can't outright recommend it until I watch some of these films in their entirety, but I think I've given enough information for you to draw your own conclusions.

PIERROT LE FOU (1965): Ideas, Feelings and Images

At one extreme of cinema we have the films we categorize as camp and those I've described as a form of folk art; those films that are unintentionally revealing of truths their makers may never have meant to tell. At the other is the avant garde, films designed to be "difficult," that resist passive absorption by complacent audiences by disrupting narrative expectations, usually in the hope of provoking critical thought. Perhaps paradoxically, film buffs often respond to both kinds of film in the same way, which is contrasted to the alleged losing of oneself in the illusion of reality classical narrative cinema supposedly aspires to. The difference between Jean-Luc Godard and Ed Wood, for instance, is arguably not as great as that between either director and, say, Ron Howard (Godard himself might suggest Spielberg as the counter-example). The difference between the unwitting camp champ and the innovator of vague novelty is still a real one. Wood would have been a Howard rather than a Godard if he could, we suspect. But there's a real similarity as well, because Godard seems always to be grappling with the task of expressing himself on film, and is unashamed of showing his erratic experiments to a candid world.

I haven't watched much Godard. He wasn't one of my early enthusiasms when I first researched what I consider the heroic age of international cinema. His reputation for egotistical pretentiousness preceded him. But when I first bought a DVD player I was in a mood to experiment. At that time Contempt was a recent release from the Criterion Collection, and on sale at the store I shopped at, so I gave it a try. As a matter of fact, there was a fair amount of that pretentiousness I'd been led to expect, but there was also incredible imagery and an overall mood that impressed me more than I'd hoped. Since then I've seen Weekend and liked that even more, and I've thought well of A Woman is a Woman and In Praise of Love. On the other hand, I couldn't get through either Band of Outsiders or Notre Musique. That could be me, or that could be him. I find myself still willing to give him chances. Besides Pierrot le Fou I have a copy of Made in USA yet to see that I picked up during the last weekend of the Barnes & Noble Criterion sale from last month.

Maybe I'm a mark for the mystique of Godard and I'm willing to try each film as another chapter in the Auteur saga, an episode of the great man's life and thought. For fans of Godard, I suppose, that attitude is obligatory. The stereotype is that Godard films are about Godard, though I think that can be overstated sometimes. Pierrot, for instance, is supposed to be a commentary on his failed relationship with Anna Karina and a somewhat mean-spirited blow-off to her (though she returns once more in Made in USA). Even knowing that going in, I thought the film was more fair than some say. But I'd still say that Pierrot is a film about Godard, though not just in the most obvious way.

Godard crafted Pierrot le Fou out of a novel by noir author Lionel White, who's also the source for Stanley Kubrick's The Killing. You can see some vestiges of the crime story in the captures I included in the preview post. The story deals with Ferdinand (Jean-Paul Belmondo), a bored intellectual sick of the bland life of his wife's society, including a party only partially enlivened by special guest Samuel Fuller. His desire to live the life of the mind compels him to run off with the governess, Marianne Renoir (Karina), who turns out to have family ties to heavy-duty crime and a lethal way with scissors (the dwarf may be her second victim) that belies her otherwise-apparent vapidity. She represents freedom and playfulness for Ferdinand, but she can't fully embody his ideal because she lacks his obsessive interest in literature. In turn, he resists playing whatever role she intends for him, bristling every time she calls him Pierrot instead of his real name. Despite moments of joy, here mostly portrayed musical-comedy style through song and dance, they are ultimately incompatible, especially so long as Ferdinand insists on a dream of perfect compatibility. You'll notice I'm indicting Ferdinand while the film is often assumed to be indicting Marianne. But Godard is too smart a writer for my impression to be purely unintentional.

A neat Godard sight-gag. He has us focus on the incongrous details in the kitchen (the Picasso, the firearms), and only later lets us notice the corpse in the room.

Pierrot le Fou is said to be a sort of deconstruction of crime stories like White's as well as an admission that those genre narratives no longer held Godard's interest. His approach to the genre is clearly comical as Pierrot almost becomes a road movie in the Hope-and-Crosby sense. Marianne beats up a gas station attendant using tactics she claims to have learned from Laurel and Hardy. Ferdinand breaks the fourth wall at one point to address the audience, provoking Marianne to ask who he's talking to. She accepts his explanation without batting an eye. Later, she pleads with him to go back to their crime movie after she grows bored with their reverie on the beach. In a way, too, the comedy reminds me of Woody Allen's work, and this goes to the core. Despite having Belmondo to play with, Godard had perhaps become incapable of imagining a male protagonist who was unlike himself. The absurdity of Pierrot comes from Godard imagining how someone like himself would behave in Ferdinand's position, the same way Allen would deconstruct crime, revolution and science fiction by inserting his nebbish persona into genre situations. Pierrot gets extra absurdity points because the Godard persona is incarnated by macho-man Belmondo. In any event, if the film is about Godard than it's as much a critique of the Godard persona as it is of the feminine preference for feeling over ideas embodied by Karina. The overall black-comedy framework and the spirit of self-criticism allows him to get away with a lot of hit-or-miss experimentation along the way.

Extremes of togetherness and alienation in Pierrot le Fou.

Where he's too smart for his own good, or not smart enough, is his engagement with ideas and politics. It eventually became a cliche that any film Godard made ended up being about Godard trying to make a film. However just that charge, it may be more true that whenever he consciously set out to make a film of ideas, it ended up being about him groping to express those ideas. Here you may see the Ed Wood parallel. I'm not saying that Godard is guilty of dumb ideas, though please remember that I haven't seen a lot of his output. I just think that he too often expresses them clumsily. He seemed to have a hard time integrating his ideas into a narrative that could express them artistically. The way I see it, he prefers to tell rather than show. Godard strikes me as a man who enjoys reading aloud, and there's too much of that in his movies: undigested quotes dropped in for erudition's sake (or agitprop), or sometimes key words or names uttered like spells, as if the quote or the word was argument enough. My hunch is that some of the clumsiness is intentional, driven by a distrust of seamless narrative and an autodidact's lecturing impulse. In Pierrot a lot of it can be excused because the main character can (or should) be seen as a failed man of ideas

Politically, Pierrot finds him not long before he went nutty for Maoism, more cynical than committed. Ferdinand tells a story about the man in the moon leaving home for Earth because the Soviet astronauts tried to teach him Leninism while the Americans force-fed him Coca-Cola. Later, he and Marianne get the odd idea of staging a street play about Vietnam for American tourists. You know Godard's an anti-imperialist, but the little play in which Marianne paints her face yellow and seems to speak in mews and meeps while Ferdinand swaggers about roaring, "Yeahhh!" and "Surrrre!" is so ludicrous that comedy conquers any offense the politics might give. I admit that I found the reaction shot of a U.S. sailor clapping and cheering moronically to be pretty funny as well. In that scene politics merges with the playfulness that constantly tempts Ferdinand from his fantasy calling of serious literature. The scene also demonstrates the overall narrative style of the film, which is structured in a succession of numbers (as in musical numbers) that render the whole of Pierrot a kind of pseudo-intellectual vaudeville with an ultimate bittersweet effect as Godard plays for pathos with the failure of Ferdinand's romantic and intellectual dreams.

Pierrot le Fou is Godard in widescreen color mode, with cinematographer Raoul Coutard in the house. I'd seen enough of their collaborations already to know the film would look great. Whether they're filming idyllic landscapes or Total gas stations, they give the film the epic look it needs for the mock-epic story to have its proper effect. Antoine Duhamel did the often darkly elegiac music, though he gets victimized by some Godardian experimentation. There are a couple of scenes in which Duhamel is nicely building a suspenseful mood only for Godard to cut the music entirely for a few lines of dialogue, only to resume it again. I'm sure he had some rationalization for it, but it smacks of gratuitous audience alienation in order to get them thinking about...what, exactly?

In the end, this is one of the Godards I like, warts and all. I guess that's how you have to like any Godard, since the warts come with the package and sometimes add to its peculiar charm. He's a brilliant visionary but also someone who needs to be admired sometimes in spite of himself. I actually dig his kind of personal filmmaking, especially when it breaks out of pure storytelling and attempts to communicate ideas or impressions. Pierrot le Fou doesn't go that far, and it doesn't really go so far as to turn off casual viewers, as long as they understand what they're getting into.

This is the first time I've grappled with Godard in writing. I don't know if the man himself or his true fans will be gratified with the results, but he got his way, anyway; he made me think.