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.

In short: So Sweet, So Dead (1972)

Original title: Rivelazioni di un maniaco sessuale al capo della squadra mobile

A provincial town in Italy is hit by a series of murders. All victims are women from the upper rungs of the bourgeoisie, all of them were married and all are found surrounded by photos showing them having sex with men who clearly aren't their husbands. Because he's polite and something of an overachiever, the killer scratches the men's faces off the photos, which makes the life of the investigating cop, Inspector Capuana (Farley Granger, in a subtle and complex performance mostly based on looks instead of facial impressions) that decisive bit more difficult by helping potential witnesses who have reasons of their own not to want to talk to him avoid answering unpleasant questions.

Capuana's investigation is difficult enough as it is, for the town's upper class may be great at committing adultery, but most of its members do not like to talk about their hobbies to the police, and sure are influential enough to get special treatment from the police. Given the miserable state of evidence in the cases, it'll take a long line of victims (Femi Benussi, Krista Nell, Susan Scott - it's half of Italy's giallo actresses for the price of one) until Capuana will be able to get his man. And even then, he might just learn something about his own wife (Sylva Koscina) that'll make him act in a manner morally much worse than adultery could ever be.

So Sweet, So Dead is one of the small group of movies that try to cross the Italian style "ripped from the headlines" police procedural with the giallo; unlike many other films making that attempt, Roberto Bianchi Montero's is actually successful at doing what it sets out to achieve. Many films with the same idea as So Sweet (and isn't it interesting how the film's Italian title emphasises the film's identity as a police procedural while the English language one identifies it as a giallo?) suffer from the peculiar choices their director make when deciding what element from which genre to take, often leading to movies combining the least interesting and the most annoying elements of both genres. Sadly, this has resulted in more than one movie about bored looking men sitting in drab rooms talking police procedural stuff while crawling through a plot that is confusing but equally drab.

Montero goes about his business a bit more intelligently, making the murder and sex scenes, as well as identity and motivation of the killer, stylistically and in their content part of the giallo genre, while the social commentary, the central cop character and the cynical ending are coming right from the police procedural. One could argue that Montero uses the copious scenes of nudity of a minor who is who of Italian genre actresses and the sexy, sleazy violence to make his semi-realist observations about the life of the upper classes more interesting to a rather jaded audience. The director succeeds in this project rather well, especially because he seems to be stylistically at home in both genres (which does not come as too big a surprise seeing as Montero worked in any film genre you might care to name), making the giallo parts suspenseful, their violence disquietingly enticing, and the police procedural parts' observations about the mental state of provincial Italy 1972 believable and human.

There is, alas, a real possibility that the director agrees with the killer about the adulterous women being "whores" who deserve to die, although there's an equally large possibility that position is part of the bourgeois hypocrisy he is trying to criticize. In good exploitation film tradition, you can base an argument for both positions on So Sweet, So Dead.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,giallo,crime,roberto bianchi montero,farley granger,sylva koscina,susan scott,krista nell,femi benussi,in short

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