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.
Less than five months after its Swedish premiere, Ingmar Bergman's newest has its American premiere in New York City.
This film will go on to win that Best Foreign-Language Film Oscar -- and Bergman would get nominated again the following year for writing it. As Tino Balio noted in The Foreign Film Renaissance on American Screens, Janus Films did a brilliant job establishing Bergman as a brand name. We can see a sample of their salesmanship in this trailer, uploaded by MagicWorksofBergman.
The trailer's a historic artifact in its own right. Notice how it flaunts the good word of Bosley Crowther, the New York Times reviewer who was already a byword for philistinism in some quarters yet actually played an instrumental role, as Balio notes, in promoting the foreign-film boom starting back in the 1940s. Notice, too, how some reviewers were so well known that their first names could go unmentioned. It's either that, or the names didn't really matter at all, just the papers. But were they right? Only those who've seen this one can say.
The spring of 1934 was the climax of Pre-Code cinema. Every week seemed to bring new outrages to theaters across the country, answered by growing clamor for reform or control. In July, Newspaper Enterprise Association correspondent Dan Thomas described H. Bruce Humberstone's Merry Wives of Reno as an "extreme in objectionable pictures...This film was loaded with suggestive situations and with dialogue which seemed to a majority of critics not only objectionable but scarcely even entertaining....Parents who dropped into the neighborhood theaters with their children for an evening's entertainment found it difficult to justify this picture as either high or low comedy."
Did patrons in Pittsburgh bring their kids? Sanford L. Cooper of the Press reported on May 25 that opening-night audiences there went crazy for Merry Wives. For him, that response revealed the film as a typical Warner Bros. product. "With regularity that is far from being monotonous these farces without stars that Warner Brothers dote on come along and make people laugh. In every one of them you'll find Guy Kibbee and Hugh Herbert and Glenda Farrell and Frank McHugh and Ruth Donnelly, and in every one of them you'll find cause for guffaws."
If you think about it, there wouldn't be anything for the moralists to complain about if films like this weren't popular -- so what does the apparent popularity of something like Merry Wives of Reno tells us about Pre-Code audiences? What does Merry Wives itself tell us? Artistically, it's an argument against the auteur theory and in favor of the studio system. Humberstone wasn't one of Warner's house directors; he only stuck around for one more picture before moving on to Fox. But his film looks like authentic Warner Bros. stuff, a studio product stressing a stock company over stars. If there's an auteur at work it's story-department mastermind Robert Lord, who started work on Merry Wives, according to the papers, way back in 1931. The project simmered for three years -- would it have been less scandalous had it come out earlier? When it did appear, Warners pitched it in some advertising as "Funnier than Convention City" -- the Lord-scripted film that has grown legendary as the picture the studio had literally to destroy, making it the most recent major-studio release to be deemed a lost film, because it was judged impossible to edit to Code-enforcement standards. We can't verify the comparison, alas, but Merry Wives is a pretty funny film in an almost appalling way.
Merry Wives of Reno is a bawdy farce, as the mock-Shakespearean title suggests. It's a tale of three couples. Frank and Madge Hammond (Donald Woods and Margaret Lindsay) are a young New York couple celebrating their first anniversary. Frank has bought Madge a fur coat, and she's bought him an overcoat. Their next door neighbors are a middle-aged couple on the outs, Tom and Lois Fraser (Guy Kibbee and Ruth Donnelly). Sick of Tom's lies and casual infidelities, Lois has chased him out of their apartment. Frank and Tom will cross paths when Frank, a boat salesman, is invited to dinner at the home of a couple interested in making a purchase. Turns out that only the lady of the house, Bunny Fitch (Glenda Farrell) is home, and she isn't really interested in a boat. She caught a glimpse of Frank earlier outside his office and wanted to inspect him more closely. He faithfully refuses her but has to hide in her bedroom when the door seems to announce the unexpected early return of Bunny's husband, the sheep breeder J. Kingsley Finch (Hugh Herbert). But it isn't Mr. Finch -- it's Tom Fraser, who seems to know Bunny well. When Mr. Finch does arrive, both Tom and Frank have to make quick exits out a window -- but Frank has left his new overcoat behind.
Farce requires people to behave stupidly, or at least to tell panicky lies in a crisis as most people do. Frank doesn't think that Madge will believe that a crazy customer tried to seduce him and that he left his coat behind in his haste to leave, so he tells a whopper about feeling pity on a freezing beggar and giving him his nice new coat. Madge finds the story fishy but can't disprove it until the next day, when she coincidentally gets her hair done in a salon booth next to Bunny Finch, who tells her stylist all about her weird night and the young man who left his coat with her. Lois Fraser is even less trusting of Tom's tale of taking his coat (also left at Bunny's) to a late-night laundry after spilling catsup on it at a diner -- even though he does have the stuff all over his vest. The two neighbor women find themselves sharing a railroad berth to the legendary land of Reno to divorce their husbands.
The ease of divorce today makes Reno's fame obsolete, and the movie Reno may as well be a fantasyland of blithe amorality where trainloads of wives arrive to shed their marriages under Nevada's liberal laws, where lawyers flourish and everyone looks out for the main chance even more than anywhere else in the WB universe. A typical Reno denizen is Al (Frank McHugh), a glorified bellboy who doubles as a tout for divorce lawyer Oliver Derwent (Hobart Cavanaugh) and nabs Madge and Lois as clients for him. Meanwhile, after being dragged into a wild party at Tom's place to celebrate the old boy's newfound freedom, Frank takes a fast train to Reno to save his marriage, only to discover Tom on the floor of his sleeping car. "My mouth tastes like a Chinese family just moved out," the hungover Tom declares. In Reno, they track down Madge, but instead of telling the truth Frank tries to convince Madge that Tom is the very beggar to whom he gave the overcoat, and Tom backs him up with a tall tale about selling the coat and starting a business with the proceeds. The story collapses predictably enough when Lois joins the party and recognizes her husband.
While the Frasers seem irreconcilable, Madge has a hard time making up her mind to dump Frank, calling Lawyer Derwent repeatedly to cancel and then restart divorce proceedings. Her indecision forces drastic mood swings on the lawyer, who takes out his frustrations on a Venus de Milo statue. The separate appearances of the Finches in Reno complicates matters further, the overcoats appearing like accusing ghosts to damn Frank, Tom and finally Bunny as Mr. Finch renounces his unfaithful wife.
Time is running out for the inevitable reconciliations, so do you think that at least Frank will figure out the right thing to do, assuming Tom and Bunny to be hopeless? If so, you haven't seen enough Pre-Code movies, or else those you've seen won't prepare you for this one's big finish. Instead of repenting, all three spurned spouses plan revenge against their accusers. With the assistance of unscrupulous Al, who we've seen fleecing alimony from divorcees while teaching them craps, and with further assistance from trained mice, they entrap Madge, Lois and Mr. Finch into going to bed together and being caught there. With the tables turned, and witnesses confirming their contrived infidelities, the accusers capitulate and reconcile with their spouses -- even though all justice is on their side in at least two of three cases. Al claims the ladies' fur coats as payment from Frank and Tom, telling them that he could easily rat them out to their wives, and leaves the film with the furs draped over two new girlfriends. The film itself closes with Derwent getting the news of both Madge and Lois cancelling their divorces and kicking his own wife out of bed.
21st century observers may not buy the hype for Pre-Code cinema because there's almost no nudity to it and nobody swears, but Pre-Code is a matter of mood rather than explicitness, and the mood in Merry Wives of Reno is as amoral as Pre-Code gets. What we get here basically is three more or less inoffensive people being punished, in effect, for daring to be judgmental when their spouses lie to them. What a trio of killjoys, right? But you can hardly hold it against the film because its amorality is so good-natured that it isn't really passing judgment on anyone. Merry Wives is a hard-boiled comedy of the life's-a-big-joke school that leaves no hard feelings behind, no matter how insensitive it seems to us sometimes. It has the bracing "no hugs, no learning" quality of the best Seinfeld episodes, but I suppose the best comparison might be to the current ribald comedies identified in some way or other with Judd Apatow -- and it may be that the distance of time allows me to be more amused by Pre-Code comedy than by contemporary stuff that might reflect poorly on my generation or my society. Maybe the critics of 1934 just felt the same embarrassment at their films that I sometimes feel for those of my time -- maybe they thought them as stupid as they were immoral. Objectively speaking, I suppose, Merry Wives is a pretty stupid film, given that farce depends upon stupidity. But there's a right way to do stupidity, and Merry Wives does it entertainingly to say the least.
It helps to have the Warners stock company in the picture. Guy Kibbee, who gets top billing here, was one of those Pre-Code phenomena whose stardom may not have been possible in any other era of cinema. In a few years (tracked by a birthday-tribute marathon on Turner Classic Movies last week that climaxed with this film) Kibbee rose from minor but memorable character actor to character star in his early fifties. He was a lovably pathetic satyr, sometimes a playful predator, often the prey of WB's arch golddiggers like Glenda Farrell. His porcine features and manner made him a dependably comic drunk, albeit a few steps below W.C. Fields on the evolutionary ladder, but he could also get over as a middle-aged Everyman, a sap who often thought he knew more than he did. He was the sort of comic I imagine you won't see in an Apatow film: an identification figure for middle-aged moviegoers who sympathized with his struggles to keep sowing those old wild oats. This isn't really a star vehicle for him, but he's a highlight of nearly every Pre-Code film he's in. People like Farrell, Hugh Herbert and Frank McHugh -- who's probably as masterfully devious here as the archetypal stooge ever was -- are at least as essential to Warners' identity as the big guns like Cagney and Edward G. Robinson. On the evidence of Merry Wives and its reception in Pittsburgh, at least, they may have been more essential, the constants that defined humanity as Warners saw it. Were they the greatest studio stock company ever? I wouldn't dare say, but they're a lot of reasons, not to mention Joan Blondell, Allen Jenkins, etc., why I'd give any Pre-Code WB film a try.
Pre-Code remains subject to criticism for tending at extremes to a nearly-inhuman cartoonishness that leaves the period arguably more shallow than the "classical" Code-Enforcement era that followed. Merry Wives of Reno may be guilty of that shallow cartoonishness in its refusal to dwell on the emotional hurts of spousal mistrust, but you could also argue for a humane principle at play in its "judge not lest ye be judged" resolution. Its "no harm, no foul" attitude toward infidelity probably enraged the professional moralists of the day, but it's also what makes Merry Wives a strangely likable film today, as well as another essential Pre-Code document.
The original trailer sells the show with extra sex appeal, thanks to Turner Classic Movies.
Wendigo didn't know that Lina Romay had died until I told him, but he knew the name when I said it. He'd first seen her in the pages of Famous Monsters of Filmland, but got to know her better, he's not ashamed to admit, in the pages of Celebrity Sleuth and Celebrity Skin. Because the latter two magazines were fairly informative about their subjects' careers, he had some awareness of the late actress's work and her relationship with Jess Franco, but he doesn't recall seeing any of Romay's films before I showed him Franco's Female Vampire last weekend. He was more familiar with it under the alternate title The Bare Breasted Countess and had a good idea of what he was in for -- but it didn't help much. Wendigo's a Franco skeptic -- he thinks poorly of his Count Dracula, for instance, -- but was willing to give the cult auteur another shot.
We cheated: this is a shot from Erotikill, an alternate version of Female Vampire.
Romay plays Countess Irina von Karlstein, last of an accursed line and vacationing in Portugal. The mute Irina is more like a succubus than a vampire in the current sense of the word, -- except in the alternate Erotikill version -- but Wendigo notes that vampires in pre-modern folklore were not exclusively blood-drinkers, and that a succubus is really just a kind of vampire, or vice versa. In Irina's case, it's succubus with an emphasis on suck. She drains your life force through oral sex -- but she's increasingly unhappy with her plight. The big problem seems to be that her sex partners die
before she can be satisfied.
Here's Romay in a mood more typical of the Female Vampire version.
Seeking satisfaction, she can't stop preying on people, or humping her bed, or fellating her bedpost. Recklessly, she drains the masseur of the hotel she's staying in, as well as a reporter sent to interview her notorious aristocratic self. Courting danger, she briefly turns vigilante vampire to break up some sort of torture-snuff ring before falling hard for a morbid poet (Jack Taylor) who wants her to take him "beyond the mists." This isn't just a poetic metaphor; after Irina kills the reporter, we see her escort the bare-breasted victim literally beyond the mists and into a magical forest from which she never returns.
Interview with the Female Vampire, and its sequel
Irina can only show the way but can't follow until the poet's example awakens the idea that she could will her own death. But maybe she won't have to go to that trouble, since the dedicated Dr. Roberts ("Jess Franck"), advised by the inevitable (for Franco) "Dr. Orloff," is determined to track down a vampire perpetrator of recent murders despite the skepticism of the local police. Will the intrepid occult investigator overcome Irina's equally-mute manservant in time to confront the countess in her Kool-aid filled bathtub -- because there's no way Franco's telling us that's blood -- before more people die or Wendigo falls asleep?...
There's your story, but Franco's real subject is ennui -- terminal dissatisfaction despite all efforts. In Wendigo's opinion, that choice of subject inherently limits the film's appeal, because even if Franco succeeds in creating empathy in the audience, their shared ennui would only leave them indifferent to Irina's fate or anyone else's. He might get away with it if Female Vampire were more successful on an artistic level, but Wendigo felt that Franco succeeded only sporadically in creating the right mood. He manages it best in the purely pictorial scenes when Romay wanders through the woods. There are other odd or arguably surreal moments that impressed or amused him. He was tickled by the way Romay would start to flap her arms like bat wings as if about to transform, only to have Franco cut to the flapping bat-winged hood ornament of a limousine as Irina delivers her self-pitying internal
monologues.
I bought a vampire limousine
But there's too much going on in the movie, and not enough, to maintain the tone. The movie suffers, in Wendigo's view, whenever it returns to Dr. Roberts and his desultory investigations. These scenes have a perfunctory quality -- Franco himself is lifeless in the vampire-hunter role -- and the English dubbing we subjected ourselves to was awful. But the real problem is Franco's all-too-obvious desire to film his girlfriend screwing and masturbating. To a certain extent you need these scenes to drive home the theme -- lack of satisfaction is one of the few themes capable of artistic realization in porn -- but Franco doesn't know when to quit. The sex and masturbation scenes just go on and on, far longer than necessary to make any point Franco can think of. They contributed to my own feeling that something like Female Vampire could never really have what we think of as a "director's cut" -- a definitive version of Franco's vision from which nothing can be cut. My hunch is that he thought almost everything he shot was provisional or expendable -- and the history of variants running between 70 and 110 minutes seems to bear me out. This may be the perfect case of a film being less than the sum of its parts. The way Wendigo sees it, Franco failed by succeeding. Female Vampire does inspire the ennui it describes. It leaves one drained and indifferent -- or at least that's how Wendigo felt.
While we watched, I suggested that this could be Franco's imitation of a Jean Rollin film, and Wendigo is willing to agree to a degree. Wendigo likes Rollin better because the Frenchman was capable of seeing magic in practically any setting or any object, while Franco, in my friend's opinion, has all the magical sensibility of a Polaroid camera. He has some sense of style, but Wendigo senses an essential absence of ideas or real imagination that limits Franco as a cinematic fantasist. His nice Portuguese location goes largely to waste, for instance, while he spends precious time in Romay's bedroom. We also compared Franco unfavorably to fellow Spaniard Paul Naschy -- you can tell the difference when you consider the awful scenes with Franco as Dr. Roberts. Naschy was a true believer in material like this, but Franco is clearly just going through the motions. Those scenes are just excuses to cast himself and get a Dr. Orloff into the movie -- and all the scenes could easily be cut without harming the story.
Jean-Pierre Bouyxou as "Dr. Orloff" looks up -- to show that he's blind,
while "Jess Franck" (left) looks on.
Wendigo hasn't seen much Franco, and hasn't seen anything that he's liked yet -- though he's curious to see the shorter, blood-oriented Erotikill version of this film. I've seen some that I've liked so I'm still willing to cut Franco some slack, but I can understand Wendigo's frustration. His admiration for Lina Romay's attributes remains undiminished however, and we agree that there is new poignancy now in the final moments when the countess, no longer bare breasted and possibly redeemed, finally walks on her own through the mist into posterity. Like the countess, Lina Romay herself now belongs to the ages.
Leo McCarey's Satan Never Sleeps has been rolling out across the country since its New York opening back on February 23. 20th Century-Fox offered starkly contrasting ad campaigns to exhibitors, who could judge what to use based on their markets. From Daytona Beach, here's an example of the more heartwarming campaign based on McCarey's rep for heartwarming stuff like Going My Way.
Later this month we'll see some samples from the other campaign that emphasizes atrocities and torture. But for now here's a trailer that has it both ways, uploaded by faithflixtv
Opening in Milwaukee, like a grave....
This is the third film in Roger Corman's Edgar Allan Poe cycle, from the days when you could sell a horror film based on literary prestige. AIP kept that going for another decade, though the films were often of dubious fidelity to Poe. Still, back then Poe was a name producers could exploit like Jules Verne -- maybe that says something for the cultural literacy of the time. The trailer (uploaded by justjoined) stresses the prestige of Ray Milland's performance -- he was only just starting to do this sort of work.
Milwaukee may get a first-run horror, but a Charleston drive-in has Three Titans of Terror! Dig all the old-time ballyhoo in this handmade ad.
Speaking of handmade, here's this weekend's big open-air attraction in Rockingham NC:
This isn't what you might think, but Luis Bunuel's English-language picture The Young One. Here's a clip uploaded by Filmboblog.
Finally, let's sneak a peek at a coming attraction in Altus, OK.
Gerald Thomas's film looks like a British riff on the Peyton Place phenomenon. The early Carry On films had whetted American appetites for any seemingly ribald Britcom. No trailer online for this one, so you'll have to see it for yourselves some day.
The New York reviewers have lots of love for No Love for Johnnie. Will Palm Beach share the love?
Basically, Finch as a British MP has to choose between love and politics. Do you suppose JFK watched this picture and laughed? I suppose a lot of British politicians laughed, too.
In Prescott AZ, how big a gamble is The Big Gamble for moviegoers?
This is a personal production of Daryl F. Zanuck co-starring his protege Juliette Greco. The protagonists have to ship beer across Africa, making this one part Wages of Fear, one part Trader Horn and another Smokey and the Bandit. Richard Fleischer directed, so it has potential. Maybe FXMovies will run it some morning.
Meanwhile, Barry Mahon's Morals Squad hits Baltimore nearly two years after its original release.
Here's what TCM has to say about the picture. And here's the second feature at the same theater. The Something Weird synopsis makes this one sound like a real piece of work.
There's a weekend's worth of attractions coming tomorrow -- don't miss 'em!
Buster Keaton had a theory of cinema and a theory of comedy -- defining theory broadly to encompass the views of an unacademic clown. The theory of cinema is what we identify with him most: the no-faking rule that obliged him to do his own stunts and film gags in one shot as often as possible. His theory of comedy is less easy to pin down. Keaton had a parodic temperament and often mocked pop-culture phenomena, from William S. Hart's westerns in the silent short The Frozen North to amateur-hour radio shows in his talkie short Grand Slam Opera. His commitment to realistic gagging did not preempt a sense of the absurd that came naturally to practitioners of the burlesque violence of vaudeville. A strong narrative sensibility sometimes surrendered to an impulse to do gags for their own sake. That's what happened in his sixth silent short, in which a hackneyed "old dark house" plot provides a macguffin for a riot of gags out of all proportion to the situation.
The situation is that a bank official (Joe Roberts) is running a counterfeiting operation out of an allegedly haunted house and releasing the fake bills through the bank. The house's haunted reputation is expected to keep snoopers away -- how different then than now! -- but the counterfeiters have gimmicked up the place to further discourage intruders. Sheet-wearers and skeleton-suits work shifts scaring folks, while the main stairway is something out of an amusement park; pulling a lever makes the stairs collapse into a slide. Obviously the devil's work.
Buster works at the same bank, and in the first gag to make no sense, he is chauffeured to his job even though he seems to be no more than a teller. In a scene surreally foreshadowing Keaton's own profligate ways, he dips his hand in a glue pot while trying to moisten his fingers and sticks wads of money together in his hapless mitts. The stickiness spreads until four check-cashers form a synchronized chorus line trying to fling the dollars off their palms. Much money is torn apart this way, but is Buster destroying the counterfeits or good currency? Later, when robbers appear with guns drawn, he can barely get his sticky hands out of his pockets to raise them.
Framed for Roberts's crimes, Buster flees to the haunted house, not knowing what awaits there. At the same time, a cut-rate theatrical troupe is driven from their stage after their prop house collapses in mid-performance of Faust, and the actors, including a man in a devil suit, head to the same house. This creates ample opportunity for confusion, but Keaton strangely misses the chance to get much humor out of the fake-ghosts getting scared by the devil-man. Instead, once in the house, he throws away all narrative logic. The haunting is carried out on a ridiculous scale, and he stairs collapse beneath Buster without anyone seeming to control the lever. One moment simply can't happen outside cinema: as Buster watches, two skeleton-men appear to assemble a mannequin from various body parts. Once the head is added, and after an almost invisible edit, they reveal their handiwork as a living, breathing person. No wonder Buster is terrified! And terrified he often is here -- whatever happened to that great stone face?
In fact, Keaton and co-director Eddie Cline want to show off how expressive Buster can be within his self-imposed limitations. His big acting moment comes when he stumbles upon two alleged ghosts with their sheets half-off having a casual chat. The illusion of horror dispelled -- despite that earlier hellacious vision -- Keaton conveys with a purse-lipped sigh his new awareness and anger at both the crooks for pulling a fast one on him and himself for falling for it. From this point he mocks the ghosts -- who don't note the mockery -- by playing traffic cop as they parade through a hallway before finally turning the tables and snatching a sheet to disguise himself and get the drop on Roberts.
Buster's triumph pales before what's probably the short's most famous gag, the topper that comes after our hero has been knocked out in mid-rescue. He envisions a celestial stairway and climbs to the pearly gates, doffing his hat to angels along the way. But St. Peters turns him down, and the stairs become another slide sending Buster all the way down to the infernal region until he wakes up for the actual happy ending. This is often taken as some authorial statement on the futility of Buster's existence, but while Keaton's humor was often sardonically fatalistic -- he ends films with tombstones more than once -- here I think he was just so enamored with the sliding stairs that he wanted to give them an encore on a cosmic scale.
The paradox at the heart of Keaton's cinematic comedy is that however much he strives to make his gags realistic, he also insists that things on screen aren't as they seem. The Haunted House is probably his most blatant exercise of that essential contradiction, but he would play with his own and the audience's misperceptions more subtly and effectively in later shorts like The Goat. Here he's still discovering the potential of cinema and figuring out the rules he wants to play by while also expressing some satirical nostalgia for the old barnstorming theatrical days. He's also imitating Harold Lloyd's Haunted Spooks to some extent, just as Lloyd probably took some inspiration from Keaton's next short, Hard Luck, when making Never Weaken later in 1921 -- but that's a topic for another time. For now, let's concede that getting scared by fake ghosts is beneath Keaton, and that he still got a fairly amusing short out of the concept.
Italian cinema's pursuit of reality has always been ambiguous. The country invented the neorealist movement, but how realistic can fiction film be? Things got still more questionable with the advent of Mondo movies, ostensible documentaries widely assumed to include scripted or otherwise "fake" footage. All art tells us something about the world -- at the furthest remove, it tells us what someone thinks about the world, or what someone assumes that others believe. Francesco Rosi's bullfighting drama gets you to thinking about such things. It's more than a film about bullfighting -- Budd Boetticher's Arruza is arguably the last word on the subject as a subject unto itself. Rosi uses the career of a bullfighter to say something about poverty in Spain and the exploitation of the poor everywhere. But he wanted his movie to have unprecedented spectacular authenticity. Instead of casting a male idol or rising star of the moment, -- an Alain Delon or Franco Nero -- he hired a real star bullfighter, Miguel Mateo, aka Miguelin, to play a fictional bullfighter dubbed Miguelin. The idea was that he could film Miguelin close up and close in, actually in action in the ring, instead of using stunt doubles and process shots. I assume much of the footage is taken from live bullfights -- if so, then Miguelin is putting his life on the line as you watch. Like Buster Keaton or Jackie Chan, "no faking" is the rule and the selling point of the movie -- except for the actual moment of truth.
The fictional Miguel Romero leaves his rural village and his family's poor farm to make a living in the big city. In Rosi's unromantic vision, Romero is only ever in the bullfighting game for the money, and as soon as he strikes it rich he's thinking about quitting. After all, why take chances? Because there's money in it for someone else: an agent who programs Romero for a punishing schedule of fights in big cities and small towns. It becomes clear that the matadors are ultimately as dispensable as the bulls they kill. Exploitation rather than moral corruption is the root of Romero's ruin. As in many a melodrama, he's seduced by an amoral female -- here a jet-setter played by the late Linda Christian -- but for Rosi that's just an episode, not a betrayal of anything. "The bull is sacred," someone says, and the film is bracketed with religious rites. But the overall, overwhelming impression is one of human sacrifice. The "moment of truth" for the film, toward which everything seems to build up, isn't the death of a bull but the death of a matador. Spoiler coming up....
So of course the entire rationale for the picture (from an exploitation standpoint) falls apart at the very end because Rosi is not about to get the real Miguelin killed, but he wants Miguel Romero to die. The result is as fake as you would expect, and while you don't want Rosi to trod the alleged path of some Mondo makers and stage real death for his camera, it still seems strange that this should be the literal moment of truth. Whether the film can survive that moment depends on whether you think Rosi has told enough truth by then.
Of course, you can enjoy Il momento as sheer spectacle -- not just for its actuality footage of bullfights but for the vibrant widescreen cinematography by a three-man team. The movie may be too beautiful sometimes -- the scenes in Romero's village are more thoroughly composed than the bullring scenes and the color creates a probably unwanted idyllic impression. The bullfighting is what it is, and Rosi films it unflinchingly. Some will understandably find it as repellent as any Mondo violence toward animals -- and Mondo Cane had already covered the topic. Some will find it thrilling, and that goes for the running-of-the-bulls footage, too, as human bodies go flying in that unwilled way that special effects still can't recreate. In the end, Rosi is in the same predicament as any Mondo-monger or exploitation expert. I don't doubt that he finds it all quite barbaric and cruel to man and bull alike. But he can't criticize it without showing all the things that have made bullfighting attractive for centuries. It still attracts spectators and participants. I read in the paper this morning about a matador who made a comeback this weekend mere months after getting an eye gored out by a bull. If you read such a story and wonder why, and actually want an answer, The Moment of Truth may have one for you.
