The Ghost (1963)

Original title: Lo spettro

Somewhere in the Scottish countryside in 1910. Dr John Hichcock (Elio Jotta) suffers from a nearly complete paralysis of a kind respectable medicine has no way of curing. Hichcock himself has come up with experimental treatments using curare and other poisonous substances. Given his state, he can’t really experiment on himself, though. It has taken the good doctor quite some to time to find another physician willing to commit to these experiments, but when the film starts, Dr Charles Livingstone (Peter Baldwin) has been living in the mansion, testing Hichcock’s treatments for some time now. Until now without any success, unfortunately.

What Hichcock doesn’t know is that his wife Margaret (Barbara Steele) and Livingstone have started an affair. Margaret is working on convincing Livingstone to murder her husband. The younger doctor is after all excellently positioned to make it look like a death from natural causes, and Margaret would very much like to get rid of her old, mean-spirited husband but keep his money. Livingstone eventually agrees – the Power of Barbara Steele compels thee – but murdering a man and ending up happily ever after are different things.

For one, Hichcock hasn’t actually left all of his money to Margaret, and the couple need to do rather a lot of grubbing, perhaps adding a bit of grave robbery to their list of crimes, to get around that little problem by stealing the loot before anyone knows how much of it is there. Then there’s a less easily soluble bit of trouble – the couple appear to be haunted by Hichcock’s ghost, who shows himself in increasingly intense ways that put rather a lot of strain on the murderers’ relationship.

To my eyes, The Ghost is among director Riccardo Freda’s best films. For much of its running time, its combination of Gothic and thriller tropes produces more than just a pleasant frisson, though it certainly does that as well. The film clearly takes place in the same imagination space like Poe’s “The Black Cat” or “The Cask of Amontillado”, but Freda never quotes directly from this particularly Gothic forbear. Instead he is aiming for a shared mood of psychological derangement as expressed through the art of deep shadows and tellingly symbolic colour contrasts. Even in the mediocre print I’ve seen shots like that of Steele in full Victorian widow garb, clutching a bunch of red flowers to her chest while kneeling in front of Hichcock’s tomb are pretty spectacular to look at, suggesting all those darkly romantic ideas about beauty, death and guilt that are part and parcel of the poe-etic.

Steele is as wonderful as ever. Her inherent mix of attraction, weirdness and intensity always made her a spectacular presence in Gothic horror surroundings, so much so that looking at her actual characters as written tends to be beside the point.

The only element of The Ghost I’m not terribly happy with is its unsurprising revelation of the haunting being no such thing. Though, to be fair, the supposedly mundane explanation includes astral projection. This isn’t a deal-breaker, especially since it also sets up a very macabre ending for everyone involved, but a natural explanation feels like a bit of a cop out after a film has gone so out of its way to create an atmosphere of the gothic macabre.

In short: The Giants of Thessaly

Original title: I giganti della Tessaglia (Gli argonauti)

After having been robbed of its godly gift, the Golden Fleece, Thessaly is slowly devoured by volcanoes, for the gods are assholes. Thessaly's king Jason (Roland Carey) takes a crew full of heroes and the mighty ship Argo to sail to the other side of the world and steal the Golden Fleece back.

Alas, the voyage is slow and dangerous, and at the point the film starts, Jason and his crew have been gone from home for long months. Jason's cousin Andrastes (Alberto Farnese) is taking care of the throne and Queen Creusa (Ziva Rodann) while the King is away. Unfortunately, Andrastes has long held a dangerous crush on Creusa and power, and uses the opportunity to find fiendish ways to undermine the country's trust in the success of Jason's mission, marry Creusa and buy himself a new kingdom with Thessaly's treasure.

All the while, Jason and his companions encounter bad weather, hunger, witches, a cyclopean ape, young love and other every day troubles of mythical Greece.

I was expecting a bit more of The Giants of Thessaly than I actually got out of it, given the immense reputation its director Riccardo Freda has won over the years.

On a visual level, Giants succeeds quite wonderfully. The film's sets are particularly beautiful, full of interesting details, and clearly constructed to woo the audience with a sense of the monumental. Freda's direction emphasises this aspect of his film greatly, with nary a shot that isn't framed with a painterly eye, and compositions that often have a classicist feel to them, as is only too appropriate in a peplum.

Unfortunately, being beautiful and painterly isn't all a film needs to be. Giants suffers from several problems even Freda's obvious eye for beauty can't distract from forever. It is, to start with, a badly paced film, with the operatic melodrama going on in Thessaly permanently undermining what could and should be the flow of a fast-paced adventure movie. The film's main problem here isn't so much the existence of the melodrama - I for one approve of Freda's wish to also dive into the tragedy and emotion of Greek myth - but how badly it is realized and integrated with the adventure movie elements. There's something too stiff and too operatic surrounding all emotional scenes here that goes beyond the usual peplum stiffness and melodrama, as if the director were neither conscious of the flatness of the writing in these scenes nor of the inability of his actors to play them convincingly in either a naturalistic or a stylized manner. Consequently, the film drops dead in its trail whenever anything related to human emotions comes up, be it Andrastes being ineffectually evil, or Orpheus making a supposedly moving speech on love. It's quite a shame, for it's easy to imagine a film managing to realize these moments convincingly, providing the film they are in with emotional and thematic richness and at the same time making it's adventurous moments more interesting by virtue of given them actual stakes beyond the spectacle.

Alas, that's not what we get with The Giants of Thessaly, and so I'm left with a very pretty movie with okay peplum action that seems to be moving at a snail's pace even though it's just ninety minutes long.

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,in short,peplum,riccardo freda,roland carey

In short: Caltiki, The Immortal Monster (1959)

A group of scientists (at first I took them to be archaeologists, but later developments show them to be of the fabulous two-fisted all-round scientist persuasion I highly approve of) explores some Mayan ruins to finally answer the question why the Mayans one day just up and left their cities to settle in a far away region.

After some rumblings of the local volcano open a hole in the wall of a ruin, they discover a hidden temple to the terrible god Caltiki and the answer to their question. Caltiki was a very real being, a gigantic monocellular organism with a healthy appetite for just about everything. When a radioactive comet came close to Earth, it turned out that Caltiki thrived on radioactivity and reacted with nigh unstoppable growth. Hence the Mayans' flight. But Caltiki is still very much alive.

Fortunately for the expedition, their leader Dr. John Fielding (John Merrivale) is a man of action who knows what to do with a giant monster and truck full of gasoline.

Less fortunate is the fact that the expedition takes a piece of Caltiki with them. And wouldn't you know, the radioactive comet is coming around again soon...

 

Most of the things I read about Caltiki let me expect this to be a typical middling Fifties monster movie, with the direction of Riccardo Freda and photography, effects and parts of the direction by Mario Bava as its only interesting features.

After having seen it in all its glory, I declare Caltiki to be one of the best monster movies of the Fifties. Sure, it has the usual silly science and standard plot points, but presents everything with a lot of verve and tempo. It helps a lot that the b-plot isn't the usual unromantic romance but the story of one of the expedition's survivors going mad and complicating the work of our heroes. It's a nice way to keep the level of interest up.

The special effects are cheap but fine. Caltiki (of the formless, pulsating mass variety) is a great monster and to my mind even a little Lovecraftian in type as a creature that just grows and grows and eats, while it never acts or thinks or plans still destroying everything that surrounds it through its mere presence.

Finally the film just looks gorgeous. Freda and Bava provide mood-building framing, great looking sets, a surprising amount of gore and every lighting trick known in black and white pictures, all the while keeping the movie dynamic; the last point being something that is often painfully absent from monster films of the era.

 

Technorati-Tags: in short,italian movies,horror,giant monsters,mario bava,riccardo freda