The Case of the Scorpion’s Tail (1971)

Original title: La coda dello scorpione

Warning: I’m going to spoil an early twist!

The plane the businessman husband of Lisa Baumer (Evelyn Stewart) is on is destroyed by a bomb while the good lady is having a bit of fun with her lover. Hubby had insured his life for a nice million dollars, and the insurance company seems perfectly willing to pay out at once, without any investigation into the matter. Lisa only has to come to Greece to get the money, for reasons. In truth, the company isn’t really as happy to oblige Lisa as it pretends to be, and has put sexy investigator Peter Lynch (George Hilton) on her trail.

He doesn’t seem to be the only one interested in Lisa, though, for a shadowy figure in classical giallo killer get-up is following her around. For some reason, Lisa wants to take the money due her in cash; and once she has it in her hands, the killer loses little time in dispatching her and absconding with the money.

After Lisa’s death, the female protagonist role shifts to journalist Cléo Dupont (Anita Strindberg), who is rather too nosy for staying healthy in a giallo environment. Of course, there are further murders and curious plot twists coming.

I am quite the admirer of the giallos of director Sergio Martino, and The Case of the Scorpion’s Tail is no exception here. This is certainly one of the more conventional of Martino’s giallos, seeing as it follows a properly constructed, if overconstructed (it is a giallo after all), thriller plot that even borrows its early protagonist death from Psycho as if this were a Jimmy Sangster script for one of Hammer’s thrillers of the 60s. This is not a complaint, mind you, for Martino, as was his wont at this stage of his career, puts out all the visual stops: hand camera, POV shots, dramatic close-ups, wonderfully artificial light, unconventional camera angles are all part of his toolkit, as are picture postcard beautiful shots of Greece, and a good bit of bloody business.

Because Martino at this point was one of the masters of this sort of thing, this intense stylishness isn’t just a way to distract the director and his audience from implausible plotting, and the tedium of straightforwardly shot dialogue, or to make his beautiful cast look even more glamorous, but also creates the flow and energy of the film, the tension and release quality so important for thrillers and horror films. As is often the case in the giallo, the director’s style takes on the function of the choreography in a martial arts film or a musical, turning what could be a dry presentation of twists into a sort of dance. Style becomes substance.

Salt in the Wound (1969)

aka The Liberators

aka War Fever

Original title: Il dito nella piaga

World War II, somewhere in Italy. Lieutenant Michael Sheppard (George Hilton), freshly arrived at the front from West Point, manages to bring himself into quite a bit of trouble on his very first mission, getting the shooting squadron he commands killed by sheer obstinacy, and ending up having to team up with the two men he was supposed to have being shot – Corporal Brian Haskins (Klaus Kinski) and Private John Grayson (Ray Saunders).

After various violent misadventures the not exactly loving trio ends up “liberating” a small Italian village. Here, the cynical Haskins learns he still has love, though probably not much decency, in his heart, and Grayson finds himself protecting a little boy, while Sheppard just might learn something about the realities of the lives of people not born into the best of circumstances. Unfortunately, the soldiers’ new found self-realizations and the peaceful village life that makes them feel like human beings again might not amount to much for them in the long run, for a German combined arms unit is closing in to “liberate” the village right back.

Salt in the Wound is one of the clear highpoints in the storied career of Italian genre film director Tonino Ricci. Ricci was one of those low budget filmmakers who could turn out pretty horrible crap, but when provided with an interesting script, actors actually there to act (if only a little), and a smidgen of money, his films ended up rather interesting, or even – as in this particular case – pretty damn great. Ricci, going by the resulting films, was putting as much visible effort into his films as the budgets allowed, with many a beautiful shot of unbeautiful things, and much clever – if not exactly subtle – editing. Competence (and more) in the required action scenes is pretty much a given in this context anyway.

A large part of Salt’s effectiveness does of course rest on its acting ensemble, with fine, multi-dimensional performances by Hilton and Saunders and a Kinski palpably enjoying to be allowed to show other emotions in a genre film beyond craziness; though Klaus does of course do craziness here too, and even particularly fine. That’s probably because the film actually gives him (as well as Saunders) opportunity to show where all the violence he expresses comes from. Having said that, I suspect people not fond of the ways of Italian genre cinema will not be satisfied with even these performances, for while the film has some interesting ideas of its own, and its characters are more multi-dimensional than in a shoot ‘em up style war film, it shows these things in the most unsubtle ways possible, with many an opportunity for melodramatics for everyone involved. For me, this approach fits the themes involved well. I also don’t believe war movies are a very good place for emotional subtlety (not to be confused with psychological subtlety), with melodrama’s heightened emotional states rather more fitting to the experiences the characters in these films go through.

Watching Salt, I found particularly impressive how little this film with a traditional “redemption through violence” plot actually believes in violence as being redemptive, eschewing that idea not only in the final scene when the film’s last survivor of our protagonists puts his new medal unto the grave of an unknown soldier (who just might have been one of our other protagonists). For a film of its style, Salt seems honestly and deeply bothered by the cost of violence, not just as a melodramatic gesture but at its actual emotional core. It is hardly a sign one can misinterpret that the film’s most directly redemptive moment for any of its characters is when Saunders breathes life back into a little boy, a thing that – in a film from a very Catholic country that starts quoting from the bible and sees Saunders character struggling with the difference between his religious belief and the way the world is – is hardly an accident, and is pretty much the opposite of redemption through violence.

It’s also rather uncommon in the genre to not just show bad men (or rather “bad men”) redeem themselves in dubious manner, but for a film in it to actually show why these men probably weren’t quite right even before the war began. Again, it’s all very melodramatically realized, but it’s also effective and thoughtful.

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,reviews,tonino ricci,george hilton,klaus kinski,ray saunders,betsy bell,war

Siete Minutos Para Morir (1971)

Working in Hong Kong, US agent Al Monks is instructed to pick up a list containing all members of the "Nationalist Resistance" and transport it to the US embassy. Alas, the list never arrives where it should be, and Monk's car explodes, leaving behind a corpse that might very well be the agent.

The CIA (or whichever of the States' gazillion of secret services is at work here - I only know it isn't Delta Green) learns that the list has not reached Chinese hands yet, but seems on its way into the hands of a sub-set of the mafia and so disturbs the vacation plans of one of their best men, Bill Howard (Paolo Gozlino, who looks good in a suit and in action scenes), who also just happens to be an old Korean War buddy of Monks. Howard should be just the right man to get the list back.

Of course, Howard has hardly been told his mission when the first attacks on his life begin. Turns out neither Gamma (the mafia-like organization), nor the Chinese, nor the very much not dead Monks want Howard to stick his nose in their affairs. But the American turns out to be very difficult to kill.

He isn't half stupid either, and soon cops to the fact of Monks survival. It's not too difficult to find Monk, really. Howard just has to follow his old friend's girlfriend Karin Foster (Susan Scott in one of the few films where she's working under her real name Nieves Navarro) to Milan. There, Monk has taken the place of his own twin brother, whom he murdered to have a convincing corpse in Hong Kong, and is still trying to sell off the list.

Howard will have to use all of his powers of wearing a suit, shooting, punching guys in the face and charming ladies - like Monk's secretary Virna (Betsy Bell), for example - in improbable ways to solve the case. Oh, and there might be treachery from a cameoing George Hilton afoot, too.

Spanish director Ramon Fernandez' Siete Minutos Para Morir is a film finding itself quite in the middle ground of the Eurospy genre. It's neither one of the truly, ravingly insane films, nor one of the dark and earnest ones of the genre. There's a certain amount of silliness afoot - Monk has an awesome hand guillotine in his safe, the Gamma leader likes to work his magic from a cardboard computer room, there's a silver death trap room of the old fashioned squeezing sort, and George Hilton gets a wonderfully ridiculous fake helicopter cockpit to shake in - but it's all in service of basic pulp thrills and not of camp.

One could argue that the film wastes a perfectly good set-up for a tale about two former friends who find themselves on different sides of the spy game. Siete Minutos isn't, however, a film that ever even suggests it might go in that more subtle (or melodramatic) direction. Instead, Fernandez uses his (pretty miniscule) budget to deliver a series of action scenes taking place in sometimes rather cramped, and always un-exotic locales, while archetypal spy movie music plays. Well, and to catch a few looks at the film's various pretty ladies, some of whom will even be competent except for their inexplicable love for our chauvinist hero.

Though this might not sound all that exciting, in practice, Siete Minutos turns out to be perfectly fine spy fodder thanks to Fernandez' tight and dynamic direction. The man didn't have much money to realize his action scenes, but by the movie gods, he'd use every single cent he got, producing a film that never slows down, racing from one bit of cheap excitement to the next, very much in the spirit of the old serials. Which is clearly preferable to a ponderous film full of filler.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: spanish movies,reviews,ramon fernandez,paolo gozlino,betsy bell,susan scott,george hilton,eurospy,spies

In short: They Call Me Hallelujah (1971)

aka Heads I Kill You, Tails You're Dead!

aka Deep West

Mexican revolutionary general Ramirez (Roberto Camardiel) hires the mercenary gunman Hallelujah (George Hilton) to retrieve a bag full of jewels "Emperor" Maximilian has sent to the US to buy machineguns with.

It's a more difficult job than anybody could have suspected. At first, Hallelujah manages quite easily to get the jewels from the bandits (who just love to dress up as monks) of a certain Fortune (Paolo Gozlino), only to realize that these particular jewels are fakes and therefore quite useless. Hallelujah's next step is to have a look if Mr. Krantz (Andrea Bosic), the man selling the machineguns, has already gotten his pay. That's a dead end, too, and certainly not the last one the gunman will enter.

And of course Hallelujah, Fortune's men, Ramirez and Krantz aren't the only ones looking for the jewels, there are also the soldiers of Maximilian, a nun with peculiar talents (Agata Flori) and later on a Cossack with a shooting balalaika (Charles Southwood). Fortunately, Hallelujah is not only the owner of a shit-kicking grin, but also likes to stuff things in people's mouths before he hits them. Well, and owns a sewing machine which moonlights as a machine gun and a grenade launcher (or the other way round). Whatever could go wrong for him?

As you might imagine, They Call Me Hallelujah is firmly on the absurdist comedy side of the Spaghetti Western divide. That fits the talent of its director Giuliano Carnimeo - as I might have mentioned once or thrice by now never one to let depth get in the way of his fun - quite nicely, of course.

This time, Carnimeo actually makes a handful of jokes that could be read as political, as we have untrustworthy revolutionaries, dubious priests and corrupt people in power getting ridiculed, but apart from a vague sympathy for the revolutionaries, Carnimeo's again not committing to anything. It's understandable, too, because the director has way too much on his hands already with presenting his increasingly silly cast of characters with increasingly silly plot twists that not always tend to make sense, and working quite hard at putting a smile on my face.

There's no idea too obvious or too silly for Carnimeo, yet I find myself unwilling to criticize this theoretical problem in a film that is so enthusiastic about presenting everything from black humour about the problems with hanging doctors to jokes about diarrhoea to absurd characters like the "Cossack" Alexei with the delighted gestures of someone having the time of his life.

The actors are also having their fun it seems, with Hilton, Southwood and Camardiel carrying the main load of the absurdities and the fun with verve and a wink.

By now, I'm quite convinced that Carnimeo was the king of the light Spaghetti Western, only slightly less insane yet much more in control of the pacing, the actors and the craftsmanship of his films than most of the other of the less ambitious filmmakers of the genre. Often, making films that only want to entertain is a tired excuse for filmmakers to not put any of their heart and soul into their films. Carnimeo on the other hand seems to have put all his heart and soul into making his films entertaining.

 

Technorati-Tags: italian movies,spaghetti western,comedy,giuliano carnimeo,george hilton,in short

The Moment To Kill (1968)

It is about a year after the end of the US Civil War. Justice of Peace Warren (Rudolf Schündler) has sent for two old associates, the gunmen Lord (George Hilton) and Bull (Walter Barnes), to come to the nameless frontier town he resides in.

When Lord and Bull arrive, there's no trace of Warren to be found. His office is locked and empty, and nobody in town is willing or able to tell the men where the judge disappeared to, even though the two men prove to be quite persistent in their quest.

The duo's pesky asking around has consequences for them. One night, a rather large assembly of rather unfriendly armed men attempts to take them on. Lord and Bull aren't exactly surprised by this turn of events. This and their superior abilities in playing slasher-like tricks on their enemies in the dark are more than enough to keep our protagonists alive. It is becoming quite clear to the gunmen that the boss of the enemy horde is a certain Forester (Carlo Alighiero), the man who also controls the town.

Before they can have more than a nice little chat with Forester and his psychopathic son Jason (Horst Frank), the surprisingly still alive judge calls his friends to his secret hideaway. There, he discloses to them why so many people are trying to kill him and everyone looking for him and what it is he needs their help with. Turns out that the secret gold reserve of the former Confederacy is hidden somewhere in town. Judge Warren wants to get his hands on the gold to finance a second Civil War, but he has trouble finding the gold. He knows that there are two things he needs to locate it - Regina (Loni von Friedl), the wheelchair-bound daughter of the man who hid the gold and the man's favourite book of poems, but Forester has kidnapped Regina and stowed her away somewhere, and the book isn't to be found where it's supposed to be. Before they can discuss matters any further, the judge is killed and Lord and Bull will have to begin their search for girl and gold without further instruction.

Fortunately, they are quite capable men.

The Moment to Kill is only the fourth movie in the long and interesting career of its director Giuliano Carnimeo, and the second of thirteen Westerns he'd direct between 1966 and 1973. Going by the handful of them I have seen until now, most of these films aren't of the type you will find listed in books about the Spaghetti Western as being especially important for the genre's development. Carnimeo's films are instead the products of craftsmanship that should make up the middle ground of any proper genre. That is, unless we are talking about the Sword and Sorcery film, which doesn't have any middle ground to encounter.

Carnimeo's film is very much a Spaghetti Western like you'd expect it to be, taking place in a West where dusty men of dubious morals, with even more dubious motivations, walk dusty (or sometimes muddy, just for a change) streets, trying to outwit and outshoot antagonists clearly lacking any morals or sanity. While there really aren't any surprises to be found, Carnimeo's film does deliver the expected with a lot of technical acumen. You'd think that all the killing, torturing, and all those shifty looks would get stale when you have already seen a few dozen other Spaghetti Westerns, but Carnimeo injects his film with a nervous energy punctuated by scenes of a more brooding atmosphere I found quite thrilling. As befits a film with its title, The Moment to Kill is also on the more brutal side of the Spaghetti Western, but it does not seem to share the sadistic side of its characters as much as it wants to make us uncomfortable through it. Trying to disturb viewers with nastiness and brutality is an old Spaghetti Western trick, of course, and something that connects the genre in my mind as much with the horror genre as it does with the US Western.

What the film does not do is to develop any sort of depth. At the point where the judge explains his plans to "let the South rise again", I thought I was in for at least a little subtextual fun with the historic background, or even a few thoughts about the psychology of members of the losing side of a war, but these things are dropped as soon as they have been brought on the table and are never thematized again.

There also aren't any attempts at doing something more than the obvious with the characters - excluding one plot twist I am not going to spoil here - but everyone does his or her iconic job of laughing madly and looking even madder (Frank) or staring shifty-eyed (everyone else) well. As someone who got to know George Hilton through the sleazy pretty boy roles he played in a lot of giallos, I'm always a bit surprised to see him perform as a stoic Western anti-hero as well as he does here; he's a bit like Anthony Steffen with facial expressions.

All in all, I'm quite fond of The Moment to Kill, although I suspect that how much a viewer will get out of it will heavily depend on a given viewer's interest and love for the Spaghetti Western genre in general. I had my fun with it.

 

Technorati-Tags: italian movies,spaghetti western,george hilton,giuliano carnimeo,reviews,horst frank

In short: Last of the Badmen (1967)

The weirdly named Kitosch (George Hilton) works as a ranchhand for a certain Don Jaime (Eduardo Fajardo) on a farm close to the Mexican border. His real specialty aren't cows; he rather has a thing for married women. Don Jaime takes this mostly with good cheer and lots of lashings of Kitosch's backside. Kitosch himself seems to be perfectly alright with this kind of treatment. Things change when Don Jaime finds his whipping boy in a, well, let's say problematic situation with the Don's own wife (Pamela Tudor). This time the Don isn't quite as amused by Kitosch's antics, which are for once not what they look like, and decides that branding the cowboy's ass with his brand is a fitting penalty.

After this, Kitosch doesn't really want to stay on the ranch anymore (what a surprise). Alas Don Jaime doesn't take kindly to Kitosch's wish for a change of employer and does his worst to make the man stay.

After some minor cat and mouse games and severe beatings, Kitosch escapes, only to get arrested by the corrupt Sheriff of the next village.

There's a nice rope already waiting for him, when Black Tracy (Frank Wolff) - an infamous bandit and killer - comes to town and has his own little run-in with the Sheriff and his men during which Kitosch saves his life.

A sort of friendship develops between the men and soon both are robbing gold and taking revenge on some friends of Tracy's who once betrayed him.

The longer they are together, the more obvious it becomes (even to the somewhat slow Kitosch) that Tracy is a psychopath, a sadist and an epileptic (which Kitosch finds worse than his friends other problems). Even worse: Tracy is not what I would call a dependable friend.

It doesn't take long until the rather less bloodthirsty Kitosch and Tracy come to blows. In the end, only one of them can survive.

 

One shouldn't underestimate the ability of a typical Italian journeyman filmmaker like Nando Cicero to make a damn good film when the possibility shows itself.

His direction of Last of the Badmen certainly isn't flashy or all that creative, but he does quite a nice job in letting a well written script do its thing.

An added bonus are the fine performances of Hilton (who is a much more believable gunman than I had expected) and Wolff that really let the film become a fine exploration of moral shades of gray (of course one of the big themes of the Spaghetti Western).

 

Technorati-Tags: italian movies,in short,western,george hilton,frank wolff,nando cicero

In short: The Devil Has Seven Faces (1971)

For some reason she isn't aware of, Julie Harrison (Carroll Baker), an American living in Holland, is suddenly shadowed by, later even threatened by a bunch of gangsters and mysterious strangers from the home country. It seems her twin sister Mary was involved in a diamond robbery and made off with the booty. Her former partners now think Julie to be her sister and won't stop from anything to get it.

Fortunately, Julie can rely on the help of her lawyer Dave Barton (Stephen Boyd) who is infatuated with her and his friend Tony Shane (George Hilton), whom she promptly falls in love with. But is it possible that one or both of the men have other motives for their actions than their macho libidos? And what about the insurance investigator Steve Hunter (Luciano Pigozzi)?

 

The Devil Has Seven Faces is an entertaining if neither original nor aesthetically thrilling giallo of the apolitical criminal conspiracy sub-type. If you have seen a few of these films, you'll probably know how it will all end and which character has what secret just by my short plot synopsis and the actors playing them (come on, it's George Hilton!). But Osvaldo Civirani's direction moves at a nice pace and the main actors are all quite impressive in the same roles they are playing so often, so the film provides a nice enough time without delving into any of the depths other giallos explore or reaching the visual heights of films by Bava, Argento or Martino.

Additionally, the friend of Seventies fashion can find some fine examples of the work of colorblind designers in Baker's costumes, as well as some of the most atrocious wigs I ever had the dubious pleasure to see.

 

Technorati-Tags: italian movies,giallo,carroll baker,george hilton,stephen boyd,luciano pigozzi,osvaldo civirani,in short