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.

Eye in the Labyrinth (1972)

Original title: L'occhio nel labirinto

Following a dream in which she sees him stabbed to death in somewhat labyrinthine surroundings, Julie (Rosemary Dexter), starts to investigate the disappearance of her psychiatrist and lover Luca (Horst Frank). Nobody else, not even his colleagues, seem all that bothered by his disappearance to places unknown, but then, everything we learn about the guy’s character throughout the movie suggests they are most probably throwing a secret party celebrating his absence when Julie’s not looking.

Something’s really fishy about Luca’s fate, though. For one, an armed guy with a gun appears and attempts to smack Luca’s whereabouts out of Julie, something that only strengthens her resolve to find out what’s going on. Not enough to get her to go to the police, mind you, for she has visa issues. Once our heroine manages to find some curious clues leading to a small coastal town where Luca might have gone to, things turn really strange. There are repeated, awkward, attempts at Julie’s life, while her most helpful contact is a gropy disgraced American gangster (Adolfo Celi) who now lives in the cellar of an orphanage. Every other man she meets is a sleaze and/or a voyeur, too.

Eventually, Julie finds out that Luca stayed for some time at a villa on a nearby island where a group of weird bohemians flock around a female millionaire, but what he did there and where he went are quite different questions.

Internally, I had Eye in the Labyrinth’s director Maria Caiano flagged as the kind of Italian genre director who managed to follow every fad and make decent and entertaining but not spectacular movies in it. This giallo, though, is very special indeed. While it is absolutely fulfilling its genre quota of nudity (Julie does tend to undress at the slightest provocation) and violence, it also really hits a wonderful point of low budget surrealism: everything around our heroine takes on the visual qualities of a labyrinth, be it the run-down building that nearly collapses on her head at the beginning, the orphanage or even the villa; everything is filmed with a sense of slight dislocation. In fact, there’s so much of it, the film doesn’t even have to bother with a trip scene when somebody takes actual LSD.

There’s also a wonderful thread of paranoia running through the film. It’s not just that everyone here is a shit heel with no ethical values (and Luca probably was the worst of them all, turning Julie’s search for him more than just a little ironic and sad even before she finds out the identity of the killer). Motives are shifting and dubious too, as are genders, sexual interests and power structures between people. It’s a world where you can’t be sure of anyone, and where even the strange orphan boy who might be your best witness is also a sleazy little voyeur watching you while you sleep (of course in the nude, because Julie does everything in the nude). Julie is confronted with an astonishing amount of sexual harassment of one kind or the other too. The film’s never quite saying that this sort of pressure on a young woman is one of the shittiest elements of the society it takes place in and may have dire consequences for everyone involved, deforming trust and human connections in the worst possible ways, but it is most certainly suggesting it, at least when you’re watching it today.

Of course, human connection and trust twisted and deformed, and how this twists and deforms the human subject does seem to be the main theme running through Eye in the Labyrinth – apart from nudity and violence, of course – with nearly every scene, sometimes in an underhanded and tricky way you’ll only get later on like the business with a witness and a car, making a practical demonstration of some of these things, until stabbing someone to death seems rather more like a logical reaction to circumstances than madness.

Ten Little Indians (1974)

aka And Then There Were None

Under various pretexts, the mysterious U.N. Owen invites a group of people (Oliver Reed, Elke Sommer, Adolfo Celi, Herbert Lom, Gert Fröbe, Maria Rohm, Charles Aznavour, Stéphane Audran, Alberto de Mendoza and Richard Attenborough) into an unused hotel smack dab in the Iranian desert next to some picturesque ruins.

On their first evening, a tape message by the voice of God, or Orson Welles, accuses everyone in the house of being responsible for the death of at least one other person. Usually, that would be quite enough to stop every party, but this one takes until Charles Aznavour sings a song with an invisible band to get antsy; or the sudden nervousness might be on account of his death by poisoning shortly afterwards.

Now, our protagonists find themselves trapped in the Hotel, for the desert seem rather unconquerable, and there are neither cars nor telephones around. Soon, more people die based on a free very interpretation of the “Ten Little Indians” nursery rhyme, and people become increasingly paranoid, convinced the killer must be one amongst their ten.

Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians seems to be a book that brings out the best in the people adapting it, perhaps because it lacks a single annoying detective and replaces her or him with a perfect opportunity for a bunch of actors to emote, chew scenery, or something of that kind.

Dubious yet sometimes lucky British producer Harry Alan Towers loved the material so much, he made three adaptations of it, about one every fifteen years. Okay, I suspect he needed to keep making them to keep a license alive, but given that two out of these three films are actually rather good, that’s not the worst that could have happened. As far as I understand, this second Towers version uses much of the dialogue from his first version, but it still retains a character very much of its own thanks to its acting ensemble, its locations, and Peter Collinson’s direction.

Collinson, a man with mediocre as well as quite great films on his CV, clearly saw the opportunities the locations Towers acquired gave him to build a rather macabre mood. His camera finds the inherent threat in the hotel’s interiors where spacious oriental kitsch meets occidental colour-blindness, he uses spectacular staircases for playing games of the audience watching someone watching someone else while he himself is being watched without needing more camera involvement than decidedly clever placement, etc, and so forth.

The film’s visual style seems highly influenced by the giallo, the camera generally being positioned in the more peculiar and telling ways available with no conversation – and this is a very conversation heavy peace – not enhanced by direction that seeks to express the mood inside a room via its own movement and positioning even before the actors do anything at all. Like many a giallo director, Collinson succeeds in leapfrogging an audience’s scepticism towards a faintly – or very – ridiculous plot by creating a mood that suggests dreamscapes and the workings of the subconscious, making it very easy to read the resulting films in a manner where what a film’s plot has to say becomes secondary to what its mood tells us about its characters and the meaning of the world surrounding them.

I am – obviously – very fond of that approach to filmmaking, perhaps even to a fault, but I think this particular Christie novel just calls for it. This is, after all, a film about members of the upperclass and the bourgeoisie having to show and confront the truths behind their masks and the lies they tell themselves to get to sleep at night. Why, two of the more working class characters might even be called innocent, which would probably be more telling in a class-political sense if the other two weren’t just as murderous the bourgeois.

These characters are brought to life in various ways between subtlety, thespian grandstanding, and good old scenery-chewing with most of the involved well able and willing to use all three approaches, depending on what any given scene calls for. It’s all rather lovely to watch, particularly in scenes like the surreal confrontation between Lom and Attenborough with two packs of matches and a billiard table as a prop.

This all adds up to a very fine movie, even if the ending eschews to embrace the darkness of the novel and goes for a rather more normal happy end that only fits the tone of what came before vaguely. Despite the problem of the ending, Ten Little Indians is another exception to my usual “Ugh, Agatha Christie” rule.

Technorati-Markierungen: british movies,italian movies,french movies,spanish movies,german movies,reviews,mystery,peter collinson,oliver reed,elke sommer,herbert lom,gert fröbe,richard attenborough,alberto de mendoza,stéphane audran,adolfo celi,maria rohm,charles aznavour

In short: The Perfect Crime (1978)

Original title: Indagine su un delitto perfetto

After the head of large, multi-national corporation dies in a toy plane explosion, his potential successors are desperately shuffling to get themselves into a good position for the election for the next company president. The potential candidates are race driver Paul De Revere (Leonard Mann), Sir Arthur Dundee (Joseph Cotten) and Sir Harold Boyd (Adolfo Celi), and they are just all too willing to transform the expected round of metaphorical backstabbing into some actual backstabbing.

First to go is Paul. Somebody sabotages the breaks of his car, causing the guy to collide with a truck, drive off a cliff and burn to difficult to identify parts in his sports car - it's like three deaths for the price of one.

Sir Arthur for his part has a fantastic plan of how to get rid of Sir Harold: Arthur sics his own lover Polly (Gloria Guida) on his rival to poison him during sex. Let's just hope it'll happen fast enough so that no one will kill Arthur by frying his pacemaker with some sort of microwave gun.

Sir Harold has his own problems anyway. His wife Gloria (Janet Agren) is the spouse who actually owns parts of the company, and she has proof for some of his shadier dealings she uses as protection against any murder attempts, so he has to keep her happy. Which is easier said than done with a woman like Gloria who really likes to rub her husband's nose in his helplessness - and in her affairs with various young men, including Paul.

Scotland Yard's Superintendent Hawks (Anthony Steel) - who just happens to be a cousin of Paul's - has quite a job in front of him.

Giuseppe Rosati's The Perfect Crime belongs to the sub-genre of the Italian giallo that has its fun with portraying the oh-so-decadent lives of the rich and mean in a cross of an especially mean-spirited soap opera with an exploitationed-up landhouse mystery in Agatha Christie's style - though it has to be said that the Italians' class politics are much less abhorrent than Christie's ever were.

The Perfect Crime takes up a perfect middle ground in its chosen sub-genre. It's not as unpleasant and misanthropic as some of its brethren and seems more interested in playing up the fun factor. While all the characters are abhorrent in one way or the other, Rosati's film's not wallowing in all the details of their abhorrence as much as it could, so there may be a few scenes of rich people being satisfyingly mean to each other, a bit of nudity by Guida and Algren, but nothing that should shock anyone not writing for Christian movie review sites. Rosati puts a higher emphasis on the mystery content of his movie, and has visible fun with the convoluted construction of his doubly convoluted plot, inventing some perfectly silly murder methods of the type that don't make much sense but are fun to watch especially because they don't make sense.

Of course, it's all a very slight affair, only mildly stylish directed, and most definitely not the sort of film that'll leave one with any new or interesting insights into humanity nor even just the evils of the rich. But - also of course - there's nothing at all wrong with a movie about unpleasant people doing fun yet murderous things to each other for profit being slight, as long as it actually is fun. And fun, The Perfect Crime is.

 

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