Death Carries A Cane (1973)

Amateur photographer Kitty (Susan Scott) witnesses the brutal murder of a naked woman by a someone dressed all in black – of course wearing the mandated black leather gloves - through a telescope. This isn’t going to be the last murder committed by this particular killer, who takes care of witnesses as much as of his core victims.

Curiously, the murders seem somehow connected to Kitty’s social circle, and soon, the investigating Comissario (Jorge Martín) seems so interested in Kitty’s boyfriend, the not the least bit suspicious and shifty Alberto (Robert Hoffmann), Alberto feels motivated to do some amateur sleuthing to save his own skin.

If ever you wanted to see a “typical”, made completely out of tropes, middle of the road, giallo, Maurizio Pradeaux’s Death Carries A Cane has your back. It is fair to say the film has no ideas of its own, but it has studied its giallo contemporaries and forebears well enough, it is able to apply the ideas it has borrowed from them consistently and coherently (as far as any giallo ever aspires to coherence). Thus this base-line giallo is also a very satisfying watch that gets what the genre is all about and what an audience likes about it.

The film’s only nearly original element is that it can’t quite decide who its central amateur detective is going to be – first it’s Kitty, then Alberto, then it’s back to Kitty again – which does hamper its narrative focus from time to time yet also keeps the audience on their toes.

On the level of style, this isn’t up to par with Argento, Bava or Martino, but Pradeaux does make great use of the contrast between run-down looking exteriors and the fully fashioned up interiors all giallo characters are bound by law to inhabit. The killings are also rather well done, often very effectively using dark blues and deep shadows before we get to the artificial red of cut throats. The climactic stalking – with a Kitty who has by now descended into hysteria – is particularly fine and again makes great use of locations and all the colours of the dark.

There’s little of substance here, of course, but some October nights, you just want to see a tale of pretty people of dubious moral fibre, a killer with a great fashion sense, and brutal murders. Well, make that most nights.

Grand Slam (1967)

Original title: Ad ogni costo

Retiring from his job as a professor at a Brazilian girl’s school, James Anders (Edward G. Robinson) goes to visit a childhood buddy of his, Mark Milford (Adolfo Celi), with a plan a lifetime in the making. On paper, the former academic has a complicated yet eminently feasible and thoroughly thought out idea for getting at a considerable amount of diamonds from a building right across from his old school. While the good Professor was teaching, Milford has become quite an exalted member of the mob, so he should be able to provide Anders with a specialized crew for the job.

In fact, Milford has an index catalogue worth of criminals on offer, sorted by keywords like “Playboy”, “Vatican”, or “Syndicate Killer”. So off Anders goes to instruct a military man (Klaus Kinski), a playboy (Robert Hoffman), an electronics expert (Riccardo Cucciolla) and a safe cracker (George Rigaud) in his plans.

Once in Rio, the Professor is mostly going to be hands-off, leaving his team to sort out various snatches in the plan – for example, it turns out seducing a Hollywood-frumpy middle-aged woman (Janet Leigh) is more difficult for our playboy than expected – and go through the old dance of shouty discussions and double-crosses without him.

Giuliano Montaldo’s Grand Slam is a somewhat typical example of the kind of crime and heist movie made as a European co-production – and therefore carrying a somewhat higher budget – that occurred pretty regularly in the latter half of the 60s. In this particular case it’s an Italian, Spanish and German co-production, but fortunately, the Italian side provides most of the behind the camera workforce. The money is otherwise well used in some globe-trotting location shots.

There’s the usual cast of European character actors and Hollywood stars on the downwards trajectories of their careers. All of them mix rather well here. Robinson nicely uses a certain grandfatherly quality to underplay how ruthless his character actually is. Leigh does more with the role of the seduced than you’d expect in this sort of thing. Everybody else is excellently cast to type, with Kinski for once not playing an outright psycho but a mostly calm, cool, and exceedingly dangerous professional, and he’s doing it rather well.

On the technical side, Grand Slam is utterly competent filmmaking that provides exactly the kind of suspense and the reversals of fortune you’ll expect going on in a satisfying and effective manner, without ever climbing quite the heights it should need for greatness. There is nothing wrong with that, of course, though it really leaves me with relatively little to write about.

Very little, that is, apart from the fact that Grand Slam quietly and off-handedly pulls no punches when it comes to showing how shitty our criminals actually are. The seduction plot most other films would play as a bit of a joke, for example, is deathly serious. Montaldo is very clear about the cruelty of this particular approach, and Leigh is only too happy to act accordingly. Because of this, the inevitable double crosses feel purposefully constructed to be such, instead of being a trope; and the film’s final, deeply cynical twist doesn’t come out of nowhere but is perfectly in keeping with everything Grand Slam taught us before about what kind of people we’re watching here.

Past Misdeeds: A Black Veil For Lisa

Original (much better) title: La morte non ha sesso

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only  basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.


Warning: there will be spoilers

Hamburg's drug scene is hit by a series of professional killings. All victims are enemies of drug kingpin Schürmann (that's the way you'd actually spell it in German, not the way the film spells it), so the police seems to have their work cut out for them.

Unfortunately, whatever investigating Inspector Franz Bulon (John Mills) does leads him nowhere. Witnesses disappear, or are murdered just after Bulon first hears of them. Why, one could think there's a mole in the police force very professionally delivering vital information about the investigation to Schürmann. But that's not the only problem with Bulon and his investigation. The aged cop is driven to distraction by outbursts of insane jealousy for his much younger wife Lisa (Luciana Paluzzi), whom he met during a criminal investigation where she was suspected of being involved in the drug trade somehow. Lisa is understandably dissatisfied with the way her husband treats her. But then, she's acting in ways to not only make a paranoid old cop wonder, so the way Bulon treats Lisa is still quite insane but also not very surprising. Later developments will even make it clear that Bulon isn't actually wrong about Lisa. This doesn't make the cop's behaviour any more sane, though.

After many a false trace and despite all jealous fuming, Bulon - who must have been a ruthless yet effective cop once - finds the professional killer who does Schürmann's dirty work. Max Lindt (Robert Hoffmann), as he is called, is just about to leave Hamburg forever when Bulon catches up to him, having his own troubles with his boss. And that would surely be that for the case, if Bulon didn't see something that convinces him absolutely of Lisa's cheating ways right when he is hauling Max in. Why not offer the killer freedom in exchange for murdering a cheating wife?

Bulon's insane idea results in further complications. Lindt, beginning to enjoy himself, decides to first make contact with Lisa before killing her. Making contact with Lisa and falling madly in lust with her is (and I won't say that I blame the man) a question of minutes. From here on out, things proceed rather a lot like anybody not one of the film's characters would expect.

Massimo Dallamano's A Black Veil For Lisa starts out as that most curious of things, a police procedural I actually enjoy watching, spiced up with at first little yet ever more frequent occurrences of giallo elements. Once Bulon decides - if you can call something based on pure irrational rage a decision - to have his wife killed and betray everything he must have believed in once in the process, the police procedural completely transforms into a very noir-ish giallo. The orderly, sober-minded world of the police procedural turns crazy and emotional.

I particularly love how Dallamano and his four co-writers decide not to use a sudden turn from police procedural to giallo here but show the film's style slowly turning from police procedural to giallo, as Bulon's state of mind and morals slowly deteriorate further (he's already deeply compromised in the film's beginning) until he reaches a breaking point that finishes the transformation. It's not difficult to interpret this approach as a political statement that also tells the audience something about the central character (or the other way around): chaos and disorder are living especially under the veneer of pronounced orderliness and discipline, and are all the more explosive in the proponents of order because they repress and deny them. Even though order - such as it is - is restored in the end of the film, it's an ending that comes with a heavy price, leaving questions unanswered and the world only set right again in the most superficial interpretation.

One of the most interesting questions is how calculating a woman Lisa truly is. The film never really makes clear if she only married Bulon to milk him for information from the very beginning, or if it was Bulon's inability to have any faith in her that drove her to it. I'm glad the film leaves this aspect open, because it also leaves room for Lisa being an actual human being instead of the mythical femme fatale. The film's ending really suggests the more human interpretation, too, but it leaves enough of what happened between Lisa and Bulon in the past untold to make this question unanswerable for any outsider.

This might have something to do with the next interesting aspect of Dallamano's film: unlike many mysteries - be it giallos, police procedurals, cozies - the film is not at all interested in judging its three central characters. Bulon, Lisa and Max are all three capable of committing - and are in fact committing - various amoral, illegal and horrible acts, yet the film just isn't willing to judge them for these acts at all. Instead, there's a feeling of unsentimental sympathy for all of them running through the film, as far from the cynical sneer the giallo often loves as it is from staunch moralizing or singing hymns to vigilantism. In that sense, this is as humanist a giallo as I can remember seeing, which might be what must happen to a film that is as carefully concentrated on understanding its characters as A Black Veil is.

In his project of keeping his characters human, Dallamano is helped along by very strong performances from Mills, Paluzzi and Hoffmann. On one hand, the actors manage to fulfil the expectations an audience will have for the mystery archetypes they embody, yet on the other they give them a subtle and believable humanity and complexity that makes them more than mere archetypes.

Dallamano's visual treatment of the film is often equally winning as the acting and the script are. The director gives even the rather talking head bound early phases of the film a high degree of dynamism, as if to demonstrate that yes, you can film even a brown and bland office that is quite believably German, and therefore particularly brown and bland, in interesting yet not distracting ways. Dallamano actually uses quite a few flashy techniques, but he puts them so organically in service of the film's plot and characters you have to watch out for them to realize what he's doing. It's pretty fantastic.


Which also turns out to be a fitting description of the film as a whole. Where else will you find a humanist, elegant, and subtle noir-influenced giallo than here?

Ragazza tutta nuda assassinata nel parco (1972)

aka Naked Girl Killed In The Park

Despite its title and the fact that it actually does feature a naked dead girl in a park, said naked dead girl is only a minor aspect of the plot of Alfredo Brescia's giallo. The film takes place in Germany (I think). A rich man named Wallenberger is killed in the tunnel of horrors of an amusement park. For some reason, he has a large amount of money with him, which the murderer of course absconds with. Curiously, Wallenberger had just taken out a very large life insurance a few hours before his death.

The insurance company would very much love to find that one or all of Wallenberger's heirs - his wife Magda (Irina Demick) and his daughters Barbara (Patrizia Adiutori) and Kathrin (Pilar Velázquez) - had something to do with the murder, which would make them the most impatient killers imaginable, too. The company assigns its best investigator, Chris Bayer (Robert Hoffmann) to the case.

Chris is specialized in sexspionage, so his first order of business is to slime himself into Kathrin's bed and confidence. Something clearly is not right at all with the case: threatening phone calls disturb Kathrin (who has a the vapours-style heart disease), and a rather threatening man follows her every step; why, it's enough to make Chris rather protective of her.

At that point, Kathrin invites Chris to a very interesting weekend in the family home, where the rest of the family performs the usual rich people in a giallo freak show. Magda drinks too much and speaks with her dead husband, Barbara is a cynical bitch who sleeps with the hired help, and even the servants, particularly stable boy Günter (Howard Ross) are rather on the strange side. Of course, more strangeness and murders occur until the truth becomes clear.

We all (that is, me) know and love Alfredo Brescia for his wonderful, threadbare SF films about dysfunctional space captains fighting cardboard robots and progress, and/or having sex.

Despite dysfunctionality and sex being somewhat important in the genre, I did not expect Brescia's talents to map very well to a giallo, because the word I don't use when thinking about Brescia is "style", and a giallo without style is just a rather confusing mystery movie. However, provided with a bit more money than he had for his SF films (and isn't that actually ironic, given that SF theoretically needs the believable creation of a future world unlike the rather more modest modern one of the giallo?), Brescia actually does get a bit stylish. He isn't on the level of a Sergio Martino or Dario Argento, of course, but there's some creative misuse of zoom racks, mood-building blocking of people behind carefully framed objects, and at least one clever visual idea per scene. The result isn't completely dream-like but always slightly surreal and definitely as lurid as plot and genre demand, with some actually suspenseful moments like Kathrin's first near-encounter with her stalker, or the death of the maid, thrown in for good measure.

Finding visually arresting ways to tell overcomplicated melodramatically violent plots about the corrupt ways of rich pretty people (you don't get much prettier than Pilar Velázquez or Robert Hoffmann) is of course what most second row giallos are all about. Even though Brescia's film isn't much of a serious critique of social class or does much that's thematically interesting, it is very good at that basic function of a lesser giallo, and therefore a perfectly great time when one is in the mood for this sort of thing (as I always am). As an added bonus, Ragazza ends in a perfectly ridiculous triple climax which drags the plot from the barely believable into the realm of the wonderfully absurd until it becomes rather difficult not to congratulate the film for its sheer wrong-headedness, or Alfredo Brescia for just being Alfredo Brescia.

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,spanish movies,reviews,giallo,robert hoffmann,pilar velázquez,alfredo brescia

On WTF: A Black Veil For Lisa (1968)

Original (much better) title: La morte non ha sesso

I'm not much of a fan of police procedurals, but I'm making an exception for one that's as great as this one by Massimo Dallamano, particularly when it's also a police procedural that turns into a giallo.

Click on through to my column on WTF-Film to learn more (and you really, really should)!

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,reviews,massimo dallamano,john mills,luciana paluzzi,robert hoffmann,giallo,other places

In short: Spasmo (1974)

One suspects rich ne'er-do-well Christian Bauman (Robert Hoffmann) does expect a rather different night than the one he gets when he picks up Barbara (Suzy Kendall) while his supposed girlfriend is watching. What he gets is a gunman (Adolfo Lastretti) assaulting him in Barbara's bathroom while he's shaving off his beard (don't ask). Christian manages to shoot said gunman with his own gun, but then decides that going to the police would be much too complicated and goes on the run with Barbara.

Next up is breaking into an old tower that belongs to one of Barbara's friends, because what would be more logical? This is only the beginning of a rather bizarre time for Christian. Soon enough, he as well as the audience will have to question his own sanity, everyone else's sanity, and the probability of really dumb conspiracies. All while people die and someone leaves very creepy latex dolls picturing murdered women lying around everywhere.

Generally, director Umberto Lenzi's and my sensibilities are in complete opposition to each other; and that's when I just ignore how boring I find many of the man's films. Spasmo, however, is the sort of film to provoke me into rethinking a whole body of work thanks to the sheer power of its wrong-headed awesomeness.

The Italian giallo is often criticized for having ridiculously illogical, random and obtusely constructed plots (even I as a fan of the genre won't deny these criticisms completely), but in Spasmo's case, Lenzi and his four co-writers seem to have decided to pretend to treat that criticism as a rule, to see how far weird yet intense acting, a fantastic Morricone score that gets increasingly strange with the increasing strangeness of the film, and oodles of style can take a film whose narrative decisions are based on characters always doing the least probable thing, with a plot that makes less sense the more of it is explained. Turns out the place a film reaches this way is also known as "my heart", for how could I not love a film that consciously revels in being as insane as possible (because half of its characters are supposed to be insane, which really isn't much of a spoiler) without ever returning to the land of logic and boring normal plotting?

It can be dangerous for a film to be as weird for the sake of weirdness as Spasmo is, but this is an Italian film, and if there's one thing the country's genre films were good at (let's just ignore their usually fantastic aesthetics for the sake of argument here), it's being weird for the sake of weirdness in a natural and organic way, as if strangeness weren't something they strive for, but their natural state of being.

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,in short,giallo,umberto lenzi,robert hoffmann,suzy kendall,ivan rassimov,wtf