The Boss (1973)

Original title: Il Boss

Sicily. After the old bosses have been driven into exile by the authorities, everyone left, be it newcomers from Calabria, the former small fry, or those dons not deemed important enough to get rid of, begins to violently scrabble for territory and influence. Gang wars minor and major flare up.

Right in the middle of it is Nick Lanzetta (Henry Silva), a guy who won’t think twice blowing up a private porn cinema exhibition for an enemy clan with some well-placed grenades. When the daughter (Antonia Santilli) of his boss Don Giuseppe (Claudio Nicastro) is kidnapped by the Calabrians of Don Corrasco (Richard Conte), the old man asks Nick to get her back. The first problem with this project is that the guy the next step up the ladder of Don Giuseppe has explicitly forbidden any action, literally leaving the girl’s fate up to God with a nice little shrug; the second one is that Nick has plans of his own.

If you’re one of the people who tend to be taken aback by how polite the portrayal of the mafia can get in many gangster movies, and how much films can buy into the concepts of honour etc that make up the PR of the group, you won’t need to approach Fernando Di Leo’s Il Boss with any trepidation.

This is a film very much working the same field as the post Battles without Honour and Humanity yakuza film, portraying the mafia and its members as brutal, traitorous thugs who only ever use their fabled honour and responsibility when it is useful as a weapon for them, otherwise breaking trusts with not even the slightest sign of second thoughts. Not that the film is any nicer to the legal authorities - those are either too cynical to even still be able to countenance any kind of action beyond mopping up the blood the gangsters leave, or corrupt to the bone like Gianni Garko’s Commissario Torri here. Also not getting away un-scorned are politicians (as corrupt as Torri just more polite about it) and the youth movement (only in it for sex and drugs). Needless to say, this is about as angrily political a movie as you’ll find in the field.

Di Leo portrays his cast of bastards and assholes – the least immoral character is probably Don Giuseppe’s nymphomaniac daughter (the portrayal of women isn’t great by today’s or even 1973’s standards) – with what feels like seething anger, barely held in check, and no hope for anything about the way Italy was in the 70s changing at all. You might call it nihilist, but in my experience, true nihilists don’t get angry at the state of the world like this, but revel in it.

Because Di Leo is also one of the great commercial directors of this genre, he packages his rage in a series of (often darkly funny) dialogue scenes that bitterly portray the state of his country, and just as many brutal, tight and absolutely relentless action scenes that do tend to get more than a little crazy. Henry Silva and the rest of the cast are of course perfect for portraying these specific kinds of assholes and monsters, often adding a self-conscious theatricality to their scenes that’s an ideal way of demonstrating that their characters’ only real use for emotion is faking it to look like human beings. They’d also rip the hearts out of Coppola’s mannered Mafiosi in the blink of an eye, making this a rather useful antidote to The Godfather (which is nonetheless a great film trilogy, don’t get me wrong).

Il Boss may very well be one of the very best European gangster movies, blowing up the competition before desecrating their graves, one supposes.

Megaforce (1982)

The secret international military force MEGAFORCE (whose name just might be a tiny bit of overcompensation) fights the good fight against evil. Yep, that’s their mandate, so when the military leader (Edward Mulhare already in Knight Rider mode of pretending he’s not surrounded by utter bullshit) and the president’s daughter (Persis Khambatta) of one beleaguered state somewhere ask for help against some sort of revolutionaries that went and hired themselves the mercenaries of one Duke Guerera (Henry Silva), their answer is of course hell yes.

After a romance subplot between Khambatta and MEGAFORCE commander Ace Hunter (Barry Bostwick), there’s a tiny little night raid followed by some sort of betrayal by POLITICIANS(!) (ewww), and MEGAFORCE has to fight their way out, because, umm, seriously, the film’s ideas of politics and military tactics don’t make a lick of sense, so you’re on your own here.

If this hadn’t been made in 1982 just when the toy line was re-configured, I’d have sworn this was Golden Harvest’s and some unlucky US investors’ attempt at jumping on the G.I. Joe bandwagon without the help of minor geniuses like Larry Hama, so I suppose something like this was just in the air. Of course, where some of the G.I. Joe stuff (at the very least Hama’s comics) was actually a whole lot of fun, Hal “Smokey and the Bandit”’ Needham’s Megaforce just looks like a turkey to my eyes.

I know, the film does by now have some minor cult film reputation in the camp-loving part of the community but I don’t really see it. At least, I’ve seen many a film a lot better at being bad and without Megaforce’s long stretches of boredom. The film’s first half in particular is just a terrible drag, with little of interest happening beyond the film repeatedly telling the audience how awesome MEGAFORCE is supposed to be without ever laying down anything that makes you believe their awesomeness or doing it so badly you’ll find yourself laughing or even a tiny bit interested in their hilarious misadventures (of nothing happening). Sure, everything about and around MEGAFORCE is patently ridiculous, from their stupid motorcycles to their stealth mode dune buggies, but the film isn’t very good at actually making use of that in any interesting way, instead letting actors deliver horrible dialogue, play absurdly “rousing” music, and show nothing that’s actually worse seeing apart from Persis Khambatta’s legs, and those aren’t reason enough to drag yourself through awesome plot developments like Ace Hunter (tee-hee) testing her for her ability to work with MEGAFORCE, she making the grade, he don’t taking her anyway, and so they both deciding to go to a London hotel once the film is through, which is a) stupid, b) time-hogging and c) not a very good distraction from the fact that there’s little of interest happening.

And really, that’s mostly how the rest of this thing plays out too: the scenes of military action mostly consist of music, smoke, and if you’re really lucky some explosions, but excitement really dwells somewhere else; the plot is about as exciting (let’s not even start on the logic) as watching dough rise; and the “humour” is courtesy of the director of films like Smokey and the Bandit. To my eyes, it’s the sort of cult film you enthuse about when you haven’t encountered the actual good stuff, and pretty much a waste of anyone’s time.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,hong kong movies,in short,sf,action,hal needham,barry bostwick,henry silva,persis khambatta,edward mulhare

Quella carogna dell'ispettore Sterling (1969)

aka The Falling Man

aka Frame Up

Inspector Sterling (Henry Silva being intense and a bit disturbing, as he does best) of the San Francisco Police Department has had a bit of a rough time these last few months: first, he's framed for killing an informer by the two hoods who actually did it in front of his own eyes, then he loses his job, then he witnesses said hoods in a payroll hold-up while staking them out (for revenge, one assumes) and sees his former colleagues botching the easy catch, then his little son is killed in a drive-by shooting by you know who, and finally his wife leaves him. It's like the most depressing country song ever written, except for the lack of a dying dog.

Giving this series of events, it's not exactly a surprise that Sterling is now out for vengeance, nor that he is perfectly willing to torture the hoods, threaten a model (Beba Loncar) somehow connected to the mysterious mastermind of the whole affair, or provoke shoot-outs. Sterling's former boss Inspector Donald (Keenan Wynn) is none too happy with Sterling's new hobby, but then, he doesn't seem to be getting anywhere with his more lawful investigative methods.

Not that Sterling himself is all that successful, really. His best witnesses have the tendency to get killed by somebody before he can punch what he wants to know out of them. Worse, all the violence he commits and suffers through finds him in an increasingly deteriorating physical and mental state. The question is only if he'll be able to catch whoever his enemy might be before he breaks down completely.

Quella carogna dell'ispettore Sterling was directed by the rather wonderful Emilio Miraglia whose small filmography in all of everyone's favourite Italian movie genres is a thing to behold, though all of his few films but his two giallos, The Red Queen Kills Seven Times and The Night Evelyn Came Out Of The Grave, are increasingly difficult to find in complete versions with decent print quality. Going by the wonderful surreal spy movie Assassination and the film at hand, this state of affair is quite a loss. For my tastes, there's absolutely no reason why Miraglia shouldn't be up there with his better-known colleagues of Italian genre cinema, and I'm sure the two of his films I haven't been able to see until now won't change my mind about that.

Anyway, Quella carogna dell'ispettore Sterling is not quite as surreal and dream-like as Assassination (also starring Silva) was, but its narrative style isn't exactly straightforward. Unlike in my synopsis, Sterling's background and motivation are explained in a series of intense, feverish flashbacks throughout the film, mirroring the character's increasingly alienated sense of his surroundings, and increasing the feeling that Sterling is just a short step from a total mental breakdown; something his actions make quite clear already. Often, it even seems as if Sterling's actions have become divorced from his supposed motives for them, as if he had lost himself so much his actions have become automatic.

Driven by the flashbacks, the rest of the movie's action consists of scenes of Sterling attempting to make sense of the few clues he has by punching them, Sterling looking at 1969's pop culture with a disgusted and confused face (this sure isn't the world he grew up in, one can't help but assume), and Sterling in various violent altercations and chases. The further the film progresses, and the more obsessed Sterling becomes, the less Miraglia seems interested in action movie realism or the logic of his mystery, and the more Quella carogna dell'ispettore Sterling shares Sterling's own reduction to his simplest impulses, the world becoming a truly strange place to him and to his audience.

This state of affairs is foreshadowed by an early scene where Sterling witnesses a group of young, pretty people killing each other in a shoot-out that is then revealed to be the shooting of a jeans commercial, a revelation Sterling reacts to with a mixture of confusion, disgust yet also disinterest. I somehow doubt the Levi's logo used here is product placement, or you'd have to doubt to sanity of the PR people responsible.

All this does of course have clear parallels to the tales of alienation so often told in noir movies on more than just the most basic plot level, it's just that the world the film's hero is alienated from (possibly by) is quite a different one from that of the 1940s, and therefore his alienation needs to be expressed a little differently, pop art aspersions replacing German expressionism.

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,emilio miraglia,henry silva,beba loncar,keenan wynn,eurocrime,reviews

In short: Assassination (1967)

Spy Jonathan Chandler (Henry Silva) is saved from the electric chair - to which he was condemned for a crime he may or may not have actually committed - by his spy masters, so he can take on the role of his non-existent brother Philip and attempt to infiltrate some sort of dangerous group that will much later turn out to plan the assassination of a US senator to disrupt peace talks between the USA and the USSR. Plagued by an identity crisis, an unresolved obsession with his wife (Evelyn Stewart), and a thirst for vengeance towards someone or something, Chandler stumbles from New York to Hamburg, confused, attacked and threatened by his own side, as well as the side he's supposed to infiltrate.

This debut feature of director Emilio Miraglia (whom you should know from two fine, and sometimes equally ambiguous giallos - The Red Queen Kills Seven Times and The Night Evelyn Came Out Of The Grave) is a Eurospy movie only if you call every movie about spies made in Europe one, but it's tonally too different from other films of the genre to fit the label for my taste. Rather, it's a film working at inducing a feeling of alienation in its viewers equal to the confusion and alienation of its protagonist. It does this via a spy movie assassination plot that isn't really explained, character whose motives are not just being slightly ambiguous but opaque to utterly confusing, and a conscious avoidance of explaining anything that's going on for most of its running time. It's a bit as if Kafka instead of Ian Fleming had written the James Bond books, and Italian filmmakers were now desperately trying to rip off the adventures of James K. instead.

Watching Assassination is a peculiar experience which is as close as suffering from actual hallucinations instead of just watching a movie as some of the weirdest noirs were, the film always threatening to break down on itself completely. The movie is just held together by Miraglia's very stylish direction, a particularly intense Henry Silva going through the film as if it were a series of hallucinations he'd just love to punch in the face, and Evelyn Stewart making patented Evelyn Stewart tragic suffering faces. Though "held together" really is a rather relative description for a film as purposefully confusing and frayed as this one is.

In any case, Assassination is a pretty fantastic movie if you're willing to share in its perspective on life as a tragic, perhaps frightening and quite unanswerable question for an hour and a half of your time.

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,in short,emilio miraglia,henry silva,evelyn stewart,fred beir,spies

Black Noon (1971)

The Old West. Reverend John Keyes (Roy Thinnes) and his wife Lorna (Lynn Loring) are crossing the desert on their way to the good reverend's new place of employment. Alas, John is a preacher and not a ranger, and consequently the couple soon enough loses their way.

They'd probably die of thirst, if not for the sudden fortunate appearance of Caleb Hobbs (Ray Milland), his mute daughter Deliverance (Yvette Mimieux) and their factotum Joseph (Hank Worden). They rescue the preacher couple and bring them into the town Caleb's mayor of, picturesque - if slightly un-frontier-like looking - San Melas (see what they did there?). John recovers from his near-death experience speedily, but Lorna seems to have been hit a bit harder by dehydration and exhaustion, so the couple will have to stay in town for a bit before they can continue on their journey.

Their hosts sure don't mind. It's been quite a while since a preacher has been in town, and the populace is just all too glad to have the chance to get some holy vibes. When he's not staring at Deliverance in a way quite unfitting for a married preacher, John obliges his hosts' wishes of doing some preaching for them with a vengeance. Why, look, his first smug sermon even manages to heal a lame boy! And while he's being heroic, he also puts himself against the lone gunman (Henry Silva) who has been terrorizing the town.

Now, given his good qualities, the townsfolk would really like John to stay for a bit longer, perhaps as their new preacher. John is tempted to oblige that wish, but Lorna has a bad feeling about that, as she has about the whole place.

She's quite right, too. Not everything in the oh-so-subtly named town is quite right. Why does John have strange nightmares and even daytime hallucinations of a bleeding man since he has come to town? Why does Lorna get worse instead of better the longer she is staying in town? Might it have something to do with the witchcraft Deliverance practices in her free time? Or is it all part of a Satanist conspiracy? One thing is sure, John's moral compass is pointing in more awfully un-priestly directions the longer he stays.

Black Noon is a very neat little TV movie directed by long-time TV director Bernard L. Kowalski, and written by TV western specialist Andrew J. Fenady. As I have mentioned before, I'm very fond of films attempting to mix the western and the horror film, and finding a rather obscure example of a film mixing the Satanist conspiracy sub-genre and the western is the sort of thing that makes my day.

Even better for that day is that Black Noon has merits beyond its mere existence. Nobody will ever call a US TV movie from the 70s stylish or visually exciting, but Kowalski is the sort of professional director who can make the visual straightforwardness the TV format demands from him work to his film's favour; and if the situation demands it, like in the dream sequences, Kowalski is even able to use cheap old dream sequence standards in an effective way Roger Corman would have approved of. If nothing else Kowalski brings a tightness to the visuals as well as the pacing that fits the at its core very simple story well.

Fenady's script really has its moments too, never showing the silent and inescapable corruption/seduction of the priest and his beliefs with too grand a gesture. In the end, Black Noon's tone seems to imply, what we witness is terrible (and frankly a bit unfair) in its consequences, but in the end nothing unusual in the history of humanity; pithy corruption's just a normal, daily occurrence. Good old honest 70s bleakness didn't even stop from infecting TV movies, it seems.

But even when it's not about the basic weakness of people, the Black Noon's script does its best too avoid becoming overtly melodramatic. Of course there are louder scenes, but these scenes are actual emotional turning points the film worked up to while hinting at their underlying emotional complexities. This hinting at the film's themes does work so well not only because of Fenady's writing, but also because Black Noon's ensemble cast is rather great. Everyone (well, except for Henry Silva's porn moustache, but what can you do?) seems out to treat a set-up that could be played as a carnival side-show with earnestness and concentration, strengthening the human side of the story in favour of the film's potential for camp.

 

 

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,american tv,horror,western,reviews,roy thinnes,yvette mimieux,ray milland,henry silva,bernard l. kowalski

In short: The Secret Invasion (1964)

1943. The British Major Richard Mace (Stewart Granger) is tasked with freeing the former commander of the Italian troops in the Balkans, General Quadri (Enzo Fiermonte) from German captivity in Dubrovnik, in the hopes that the general will be able to rouse his loyal troops into changing allegiances and fighting the Germans.

To achieve this goal, Mace is provided with various prisoners of dubious talents as a commando troop. They are Roberto Rocca (Raf Vallone), an Italian with excellent talent for operational planning who would in peace times probably be the wise middle-aged boss in a caper movie; Terence Scanlon (Mickey Rooney, as dreadful as is to be expected), an "Irish" terrorist/freedom fighter and demolitions expert; Simon Fell (Edd Byrnes, even more dreadful than Rooney), forger and whiner; John Durrell (Henry Silva), a silent and reserved professional killer; and Jean Saval (William Campbell), the guy they took on because Tony Curtis wasn't available professional thief and man-with-a-thousand-faces-and-badly-plucked-eyebrows.

The group only has to get to Yugoslavia, meet up with the local partisans, and break into the German headquarters in Dubrovnik to get their man. Whatever could go wrong?

The Secret Invasion is one of Roger Corman's higher budgeted (different sources talk about $500,000 to $750,000) efforts, and Corman seems to have made the most out of it by shooting the film in Yugoslavia. For the sort of movie I'm usually talking about here, it's sensational to have a film mostly taking place in Dubrovnik that was actually shot there instead of a random studio backlot. Corman seems to have relished this opportunity. At least, he's using the attractive landscape and the city as much as possible, to quite satisfying effect.

On the negative side, Corman with a high-ish budget isn't Corman at his most daring, and so much of the film plays out exactly as one would expect from a war movie of this type, if a very competently done one featuring equally competent actors (except for Rooney and Byrnes, obviously) - or in the case of Silva and Vallone, competent actors being casually much better than anyone else on screen.

There are, however, two moments in The Secret Invasion that don't fit into the "war as a nice adventure for boys mould" it slavishly follows at all. First, there's the scene in which Silva accidentally smothers a baby to death while hiding out from German soldiers, breaks down into a crying fit and is comforted by the dead child's (partisan) mother. This sort of existential grimness isn't something you can expect to find, well, anywhere apart from 70s horror films, and feels like a secret invasion of actual human pain and suffering of a film that just doesn't deal with that sort of thing.

The other moment of equal import is The Secret Invasion's incredibly cynical ending, in which the good guys win, but achieve their victory in such a way that only the most thoughtless audience member will be able to cheer for it. Like the baby sequence, it doesn't fit the rest of the film's tone too well, but it's these two little shocks of a less easily digestible idea of what a war movie might be that make this movie worth watching, and not the routine and the competence.

 

Technorati-Tags: american movies,war,roger corman,stewart granger,raf vallone,henry silva,in short

In short: The Last Match (1990)

Susan (Melissa Palmisano), the daughter of star quarterback Cliff Gaylor (Oliver Tobias), is arrested for drug smuggling when she tries to leave the South American (or is it Caribbean, as the plot description on IMDB says?) country she is vacationing in with her boyfriend.

Shortly after that, her father arrives in the mysterious country, willing and able to buy his daughter out with the good ol' American dollar. Alas, his money doesn't get him far. Neither do the American consul (Charles Napier), nor a sleazy local lawyer (Martin Balsam). It seems as if there is a certain degree of anti-American feeling in the air. Worse for Susan, her jailor is the mean and sadistic warden Yashin (Henry Silva), who likes the US even less than anyone else there.

Fortunately, Gaylor's football team (coached by Ernest Borgnine) arrives loaded with money to help him bribe his daughter out. No, sorry, I was joking, that would make sense. They arrive loaded with money to buy weapons to break their quarterback's daughter out. This will most certainly turn out well.

Quite at the end of the Italian jungle action cycle (chronologically as well as in quality), Fabrizio De Angelis produced this experiment in making a jungle action film without a jungle and without any action, and if that was his goal I have to say he succeeded admirably.

The Last Match is best known in cult film circles for some awesome stills of guys in football uniforms (including helmets) brandishing automatic weapons, and I won't say these pictures are lying. There are in fact at least ten minutes of uniformed footballers shooting people in here. The problem are the other 80 minutes of movie, 80 very long minutes someone less cruel (or cost-conscious) than De Angelis would have cut back to about 10 minutes. I can't even call it filler anymore, because the term "filler" suggests that something is in fact used to fill the running time between more exciting scenes, which would be stretching the truth a bit too much for the way The Last Match plays out.

What we get to see are endless scenes of airplanes landing and Oliver Tobias showing his single facial expression in scenes of him talking at excruciating length to aged actors who have seen better days and aren't even willing to pretend to be on screen for anything else than a paycheck. Not even Henry Silva seems awake in this one, and Martin Balsam was obviously already dead and performed his role as a zombie. The only one trying is poor old Ernest Borgnine. He is - of course - utterly dreadful, but at least in his usual interesting manner.

And that's all there is to say about The Last Match. It is best not to watch it, but to look wistfully at the machinegun footballer stills and dream of the silly entertaining piece of crap the film should have been, instead of the boring piece of crap it truly is.

 

Technorati-Tags: italian movies,action,ernest borgnine,henry silva,in short

In short: Colombian Connection aka The Hard Way (1987)

A Central American drug kingpin rules his part of the rain forest with the help of an impressive mercenary army, lead by Henry Silva.

A small American commando unit sneaks into the country to assassinate him, but the tables soon turn and the three men (including Miles O'Keeffe who for once does an adequate acting job due to the fact he hasn't got to do any acting) have to flee through the jungle.

Being tough-minded professionals, they soon decide to attack the enemy camp and accomplish their initial mission at any cost.

The Hard Way (directed by Michele Massimo Tarantini) is the non-silly Italian Eighties action film condensed to its essence. After the initial exposition there is barely anything else than lots and lots and lots of explosions, shoot-outs and brawls, spiced up with people running through the jungle, cheap synthie music and Henry Silva.

Personally, I prefer the less tight and lean and more idiotic type of Italian action films, but if you have your mind set on seeing a lot of explosions, you'll certainly have a fine time with this.

 

Technorati-Tags: italian movies,action,michele massimo tarantini,miles o'keeffe,henry silva,in short