Not Tonight, Josephine

Enzo G. Castellari’s The Loves and Times of Scaramouche (1976 – originally Le aventure e gli amori di Scaramouche) has been released on DVD in the UK by Cornerstone Media. It’s an Italian/Yugoslavian co-production set at the time of the French Revolution, with Michael Sarrazin as the eponymous philandering hero. The animated title sequence promises Carry On-style bawdy farce, but the movie is tamer, a slapstick period comedy. Scaramouche escapes Paris and via unlikely circumstance, he and his comrade, a barber named Whistle (Giancarlo Prete), end up in the French army fighting the Austrians and Russians.

The Loves and Times of Scaramouche was shot in Italy (the familiar tiered Monte Gelato waterfalls in Lazio appear) and in Yugoslavia, and boasts a good battle sequence and first rate costumes and settings. Aldo Maccione played Napoleon Bonaparte as a buffoon and the film’s mocking tone constantly ridicules the French (who significantly had no financial input into this Euro co-production). The cast is filled with familiar faces from Italian genre cinema. Lee Van Cleef’s stunt double Romano Puppo played Napoleons’ sultan-like bodyguard, Sal Borgese appeared as an inept assassin, Riccardo Garrone was a French captain, and Michael Forest played secret service agent D’Anglade. Also keep your eyes peeled for Peter Berling (from Aguirre, The Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo), Massimo Vanni, Dante Cleri, Enzo Fiermonte and stunt coordinator Rocco Lerro. Gisela Hahn played Babette, one of Scaramouche’s conquests, and ‘Alan Collins’/Luciano Pigozzi was her understandably irate husband.

The film’s trump card is the presence of Ursula Andress, as Napoleon’s Josephine. Andress shot to fame as ‘Bond Girls’ Honey Ryder in Dr No (1962) and Vesper Lynd in Casino Royal (1967). The ‘sex goddess’ wasn’t nicknamed ‘Ursula Undress’ for nothing. She was often employed throughout the 1960s and 1970s in such adventures as Scaramouche, to add a little spice and to disrobe, as what might be termed ‘set undressing’. She did this regularly in films, including The Blue Max, The Southern Star, Perfect Friday, Red Sun, The Sensuous Nurse, The Fifth Musketeer, Mountain of the Cannibal God, Stateline Motel and Mexico in Flames, to name a few. In 1965 she posed nude for Playboy magazine. When asked why, she simply answered, ‘Because I’m beautiful’.

Castellari completists will want to see Scaramouche, as it’s one of the cult director’s films not to have seen the light of day on DVD. Andress and James Bond completists will want to see it for the brief moment towards the end when Andress parodies her star-making walk from the surf in Dr No. The many fistfights, swordfights, duels and trampolining acrobatics imitate the physical style of Terence Hill and Bud Spencer’s comedies of the period. The Euro-pop sing-along theme song and bubblegum score by Bixio-Frizzi-Tempera are guaranteed to grate on your nerves after a while. While Castellari is an excellent action director – check out Kill them All and Come Back Alone, Eagles Over London, The Marseilles Connection, The Inglorious Basterds, 1990: The Bronx Warriors and Keoma for evidence of his finest work – he’s no farceur. The non-stop zaniness on display here eventually becomes tiresome and the running gags barely stumble. Euro-completists will view it from a historical perspective, as it’s yet another little-seen 1970s comedy, and it’s good that it has finally had an official UK release. The Region 2 DVD is fullscreen (the picture’s a bit soft and may be from a videotape source), with the English language dub, and is available from Amazon UK.

For more information on Castellari’s work, read Cinema Italiano: The Complete Guide from Classics to Cult, which has recently received two more reviews, in Electric Sheep magazine (read here) and the Canadian Chronicle Herald (read here)

Who Was Solomon King?

The Old Testament has provided the inspiration for many works of art, from cinema, sculpture and painting, to classical music. In the world of film it has inspired Hollywood epics such as The Ten Commandments and Solomon and Sheba, big budget international co-productions like Sodom and Gomorrah and The Bible…in the Beginning and lower-tier Italian sword and sandal flicks such as David and Goliath and The Old Testament.

In the early 1960s, Marcello Baldi made four films – a short film and three features – depicting various stories from the Old Testament. They were shot on location in Spain and on sets at Cinecittà Studios in Rome, and were Italo-Spanish co-productions.

The short film, Genesis (1963), was 34 minutes and depicted the Creation (via paintings), and then re-reacted with actors the stories of Cain and Abel, Noah’s Ark and the Great Flood, and the Tower of Babel.

Jacob, the Man Who Fought With God (1963 – I patriarchi della bibbia) took up the story, with Abraham and Lot in the Promised Land, the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, and the tale of Jacob and his conflict with his wildman brother Esau.

The film’s reverence is closer in atmosphere to Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St Matthew than Hollywood epics or Italian pepla. It was shot on location near Madrid – the landscape looks like the area at Alto De Morcuera – and is poetic, realistic, if a bit plodding and longwinded at 105 minutes, in its telling of a story that isn’t exactly brimming with action.

Saul David (1964) is much better and is perhaps the best of Baldi’s adaptations, thanks to its good performances and large-scale battle scenes. Gianni Garko played harpist shepherd David and Norman Wooland played despot King Saul. Wooland is a monstrosity, his overbearing performance brilliantly dominating the film. Future spaghetti western star Garko is good too, as Saul’s rival for the throne of Israel. Interiors and city sets were at Cinecittà, while location work was lensed in Almeria, southern Spain, on the same deserts and sierras used in Sergio Leone’s ‘Dollars’ westerns, which were shot there in the same period. Sergio Sollima (as ‘George Higgins III’) worked on the film’s dialogue, and actors such as Milo Quesada, Antonio Molino Rojo and Aldo Sambrell propped up the supporting cast. It runs 114 minutes, but is never dull.

The Great Leaders (1965 – Il grandi condottieri) brought the series to a close with a 105 minute two-parter. Francisco Perez-Dolz is the film’s credited director, but Baldi oversaw the production. The first episode had Gideon (Ivo Garrani) advised by a mysterious stranger (Fernando Rey) on how to defeat the Midianites and become King of Israel – with a bit of help from Jehovah, of course. Expansive, arid location shooting in Almeria again makes this look tremendous. The second story, the sorrowful tale of Samson (Anton Geesink) and Delilah (Rosalba Neri), is closer in style and content to what we expect from Italian pepla, with location scenes even shot at Tor Caldara, Lazio (as well as in Almeria and Cinecittà). Samson is up against the Philistines, his only weapon the jawbone of an ass. Paolo Gozlino was an excellent villain in Gaza and Ana Maria Noe was well cast as Samson’s mother. If Saul and David is the best film of Baldi’s series, then this one packs the greatest emotional punch.

Baldi’s films were shot on a grand scale, with dozens of extras and convincing sets and costumes. Giacomo Alberione was billed as ‘Biblical Consultant’ and he seems to have carried out his task well. Teo Usuelli provided the music for each film and the magnificent scores to Saul and David and The Great Leadersare tremendously moving, lifting the drama several notches.

These little-seen epics are now available on DVD in a boxed set called, appropriately enough, Epics of the Old Testament. None of them are fantastic picture quality (the blurb claims they are ‘digitally re-mastered’), though they are presented in 1.85:1 widescreen (they should be in 2.35:1 Techniscope). The set also includes Irving Rapper’s Italian-Yugoslavian production Joseph and his Brethren (1960 – Sold into Egypt) which was a retelling of dreamer Joseph and his ‘coat of many colours’. The anglo guest star here is Robert Morley, as Egyptian Potifar. Geoffrey Horne starred as Joseph, sold by his brothers into slavery into Egypt, and the cast includes Vira Silenti, Belinda Lee, Arturo Dominici (as usual, the villain) and Terence Hill as Benjamin. It also seems the English language dubbers were having some fun here too.  When an Ishmaelite calls over two of his henchmen – ‘Mohamed! Ali!’ – it is perhaps the only instance of a world champion boxer being namechecked in a Biblical epic.

The set is available from Amazon UK and from Amazon US

All the titles are also available separately.

And so as to the identity of Solomon King. The stories told in the Old Testament also inspired one of my favourite pieces of choral music, ‘Zadok the Priest’, by George Frederic Handel. After over a minute’s build-up, the opening lyric to this Coronation anthem reveals:

‘Zadok the Priest and Nathan the prophet anointed Solomon King

And all the people rejoiced!’

Read more about Italian Biblical adaptations, including The Bible…in the Beginning, The Gospel According to St Matthew, Esther and the King, Moses the Lawgiver and Sodom and Gomorrah, in Cinema Italiano: The Complete Guide from Classics to Cult.

2011: A Spaced Odyssey

‘Twenty eleven’, or ‘Two thousand and eleven’? We don’t say that World War II ended in ‘One thousand, nine hundred and forty five’, or the Battle of Hastings took place in ‘One thousand and sixty-six’, so the consensus seems to be that ‘Twenty eleven’ is the correct terminology. Film title-wise, that means Bernardo Bertolucci once made a film called Nineteen zero zero and that Stanley Kubrick directed a science fiction ‘Space Odyssey’ called Twenty-Zero-One, or even simply Twenty-One.

As I mentioned in my last post, I’ve spent quite a large part of 2011 researching and writing about science fiction movies for Outer Limits: The Filmgoers’ Guide to the Great Science Fiction Films. In addition to watching the classics which are freely available on DVD (or failing that videotape), I’ve been looking at some of the interesting US Region boxed sets, each containing 50 movies. Though the picture quality is usually of the ‘worse than faded VHS’ variety, these sets are filled with oddball and unusual delights of sci-fi cult cinema and are great value.

Sci-Fi Classics has the great Japanese giant turtle Gamera on the cover and includes such anti-classics as Cosmos: War of the Planets, Killers from Space, Mesa of Lost Women, First Spaceship on Venus, Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, Teenagers from Outer Space, Voyage to the Planet of the Prehistoric Women and the immortal Eegah, about a giant caveman (played by a pre-James Bond ‘Jaws’ Richard Kiel) wandering around the Californian desert.

The Nightmare Worlds 50-movie set includes the Italian Alien rip-off Alien Contamination, The Day the Sky Exploded, The Manster, Radio Ranch, Star Odyssey, This is Not a Test, The Disappearance of Flight 412 and three of the imaginative Japanese ‘Starman’ series, Atomic Rulers of the World, Attack from Space and Evil Brain from Outer Space.

The latest of these releases, the Sci-Fi Invasion 50-movie set, includes such hearty fare as Battle Beyond the Sun, Hundra, Mission Stardust, Night of the Blood Beast, R.O.T.O.R., Raiders of Atlantis (aka Atlantis Interceptors), War of the Robots, Top Line (with Franco Nero), Star Knight (with Harvey Keitel and Klaus Kinski), Horst Frank in the German horror The Head, Jack Palance in Welcome to Blood City and the killer carpet movie, The Creeping Terror. It also features an Italian Close Encounters rip-off called Eyes Behind the Stars, an Italian Terminator rip-off, Hands of Steel (filmed in Arizona), and the unforgettable Spanish E.T. knock-off Extraterrestrial Visitors, with an alien that resembles someone wearing a baby elephant costume.

Don’t expect too much in terms of picture quality – nor indeed, in some cases, of filmmaking quality – but these entertaining movies are still better than anything you’ll find on our dire TV channels these days.

My favourite film book published this year was Kim Newman’s Nightmare Movies, a great read which I discussed in an earlier post.

Also look out for a new guide to Italian fumetti comic book superheroes on film in Matt Blake’s Fantastikal Diabolikal Supermen.

For me the DVD release of 2011 was the BFI’s excellent presentation of Bernardo Bertolucci’s little-seen Before the Revolution (1964), an unheralded classic of Italian cinema which can be seen as a precursor to The Conformist (1970).

The best film at cinemas was the Coen brothers’ version of True Grit, which really captured the flavour of Charles Portis’ book and pithily authentic frontier language.

April 2011 saw the publication of my book on the golden era of Italian Cinema, Cinema Italiano: The Complete Guide from Classics to Cult, which I’m pleased to say has received some very good reviews:

Kamera

BUFVC

Spaghetti-Western.net

Subtitled Online

Filmjuice

I was also proud to hear from my friend Tom Betts that at the First Los Angeles Spaghetti Western Festival in March, I was mentioned – alongside other writers and film historians including Bill Connolly of Spaghetti Cinema, Sebastian Hasselback of the Spaghetti Western Web Board, Sir Christopher Frayling, Ulrich Bruckner, John Nudge and authors Tony Williams and Laurence Staig – ‘For keeping the spaghetti western heritage alive’. This festival featured film screenings and guest appearances by spaghetti western stars Mark Damon, Hunt Powers, Richard Harrison, Robert Woods, Brett Halsey, Michael Forest, Dan van Husen and Edd Byrnes.

Other DVDs I’ve enjoyed this year include the 4-film Sophia Loren Collection (Region 1) which includes Attila (1954, co-starring Anthony Quinn) and the superb shot-in-Spain Napoleonic War comedy Madame Sans-Gêne (1962). The set also includes De Sica’s Sunflower (1970, co-starring Marcello Mastroianni) and the beautifully photographed musical, Neapolitan Carousel (1954).

I also contributed the collector’s booklet this year for Face to Face (1967), the spaghetti western DVD release by Eureka! in April. Another DVD set worth looking out for is The Best of Spaghetti Westerns 20-film Region Free set, which includes great prints of No Room to Die, A Coffin for the Sheriff, Cemetery Without Crosses, In a Colt’s Shadow, Shoot, Gringo…Shoot!, A Pistol for Ringo, The Return of Ringo, One Silver Dollar, Forgotten Pistolero, and many others, though the sound occasionally goes out of synch on some of them, these are still a bargain.

This year I’ve also seen one of the best Italian pepla, Ursus in the Land of Fire, in a widescreen English language version prepared by a film collector that is simply tremendous – it’s a shame more films of this type, from this era, aren’t available in such great presentations. One that has been released on DVD in widescreen and English is Mark Forest’s The Magnificent Gladiator.

Not necessarily new DVD releases, but I’ve also enjoyed Goke Bodysnatcher from Hell (excellent Japanese sci-fi/horror), Visconti’s Rocco and his Brothers, Night of the Comet (cult 1980s sci-fi), Raiders of Old California (an early Lee Van Cleef western), the eerie-yet-inept The Legend of Boggy Creek, Tonino Valerii’s giallo My Dear Killer, the classic Universal creature feature Creature from the Black Lagoon and the BFI’s swinging 60s release The Pleasure Girls (starring Francesca Annis, Ian McShane and Klaus Kinski).   

I’m continuing to contribute regularly to film magazine Cinema Retro and their new season begins with a great issue largely devoted to the big screen film format Cinerama. I attended the Widescreen Weekend in Bradford in April and saw How the West Was Won on the Pictureville’s curved screen in this format and would highly recommend anyone to attend the screening in 2012. The new issue of Retro has features on Krakatoa, East of Java and The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm, and Sir Christopher Frayling has written an excellent in-depth article on the making of How the West Was Won. My contribution is a 10-page article on the Congo-set mercenary adventure Dark of the Sun (1968 – aka The Mercenaries) starring Rod Taylor and Jim Brown, which features many full-colour posters and behind the scenes info and stills.       

Looking forward to 2012, my new book When Eagles Dared: The Filmgoers’ History of World War II is available to pre-order now and will be published in the UK in January. It looks at the history of the war, chronologically, through the films that have depicted the historical events, from Dunkirk and Battle of Britain, to The Longest Day, A Bridge Too Far, Saving Private Ryan and Downfall. Here’s a preview of the excellent jacket design for it, by Chris Bromley.

Roma Therapy 7

In the last instalment of my Top 20 essential Italian movies, we have two mid-1970s classics, from two masters of their field.   

Illustrious Corpses (Francesco Rosi, 1975)

In the days before Italian politics was synonymous with media ownership and bunga-bunga parties, Italian political cinema was a global force to be reckoned with. At the forefront of the movement was Francesco Rosi, whose films still stand today as visceral depictions of the Italian political process, which was often riddled with corruption and scandal. Rosi’s key films include Salvatore Giuliano (depicting the famed post-war Sicilian bandit), Hands Over the City (corruption in the building trade which leads to the collapse of an apartment block), The Mattei Affair (the suspicious death of a prominent oil magnet), Lucky Luciano (the later years of the famed gangster) and Christ Stopped at Eboli (with Gian Maria Volonté as novelist Carlo Levi). All are fine films, but Rosi’s finest is Illustrious Corpses, his depiction of a killing spree by an assassin with a judge grudge. Lino Ventura played Inspector Rogas, who is on the trail of a murderer that is targeting the judiciary, apparently avenging a miscarriage of justice. A powerful, engrossing film, based on Leonardo Sciascia’s 1971 novel Il contesto (‘Equal Danger’ in its English language version), it was photographed on location in Sicily, Naples and Rome by Pasquale De Santis, and plays like an overtly politicised police procedural, or a whodunit giallo thriller with a political edge.

DVD distributors take note: this excellent film is not currently available on DVD in the UK or US. It was screened many years ago in the UK on BBC2, as part of a Rosi season in ‘The Film Club’. Leonardo Sciascia’s novel is available however, with Day of the Owl, another crime thriller which was made into a film by Damiano Damiani, with Franco Nero and Claudia Cardinale

Suspiria (Dario Argento, 1977)

The gialli master was back with a vengeance in 1977, as Argento struck out in a bold new direction with the accent on supernatural witchery. Suspiria starred Jessica Harper as Suzy Banyon, an American student who arrives to study at the Freiberg Tanz (Dance) Academy, a ballet school in Germany, which she later discovers is the cover for a coven of witches (including Joan Bennett and Alida Valli) who worship the Black Queen. The first part of Argento’s ‘Three Mothers’ trilogy (followed by Inferno and Mother of Tears), this suspenseful, bloody masterwork is many Argento fan’s favourite. He certainly hasn’t equalled its visceral power since. The film’s shock tactics are greatly abetted by Goblin’s menacing score.

Suspiria has been released on DVD in the UK and US. It is also available on Blu-ray and Goblin’s score is out on CD.

So that’s my top 20. In my opinion, the essential classics of the golden age of Italian cinema are La dolce vita, The Mask of Satan, Hercules Conquers Atlantis, The Horrible Secret of Dr Hichcock, The Leopard, Contempt, The Gospel according to St Matthew, Castle of Blood, Fists in the Pocket, Battle of Algiers, Blowup, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, The Big Silence, Diabolik, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, The Conformist, Violent City, The Marseilles Connection, Illustrious Corpses and Suspiria.  

Next week I’ll begin looking at my Top 20 Italian cult movies – the great, the good and the downright odd – in a new thread, RomaDrome.

To read more about Illustrious Corpses, Suspiria and other films by Argento and Rosi, check out my book, Cinema Italiano: The Complete Guide from Classics to Cult

Roma Therapy 6

This week three Italian films from the early 1970s that look at murder in its varied forms – as a political tool, as a living wage and as a way of life.

The Conformist (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1970)

Despite his considerable achievements – and greater commercial success – with projects after this film, Bertolucci’s political thriller is still, in my opinion, his best. Jean-Louis Trintignant gives a marvellously uptight performance as Marcello Clerici, who just wants to blend in, to become one of the crowd, to give a semblance of ‘normal life’, even if the reality is anything but. His facelessness also facilitates his mission – he works for fascist organisation OVRA and is assigned to assassinate a prominent anti-fascist in exile in Paris. Georges Delerue’s haunting score and Vittorio Storaro’s cinematography make this Bertolucci’s most effective, emotional work. Locations include Rome and Paris and the period setting – the late 1930s – is recreated perfectly. The exemplary cast features Gaston Moschin and Ezio Tarascio, and Dominique Sanda and Stefania Sandrelli perform a sexy tango in Joinville. The Conformist expands on ideas first seen in Bertolucci’s Before the Revolution (1964), but with more coherence and greater resonance, both politically and emotionally. The chopped up, non-linear narrative is a trademark of editor Franco Arcalli, who also worked on Django Kill! and Once Upon a Time in America.

The good news is that The Conformist is being released in the UK on dual format Blu-ray/DVD in January 2012.

It is currently available in the US, on Region 1.

Delerue’s rare score is available on CD and vinyl.

Violent City (Sergio Sollima, 1970)

This sees Charles Bronson at the zenith of his European-based popularity, before he finally broke into the US market in 1974 with the mega-hit Death Wish. ‘Hits’ are also on Bronson’s mind in this movie, as he plays Jeff Heston, a professional hitman who finds himself a pawn in Jill Ireland’s rise to mafia Godmother. This is easily the best of the films Bronson and his wife Ireland made together. The strong Euro-cast includes Michel Constantin and Umberto Orsini, and Telly Savalas shows up as a New Orleans crime kingpin and head of the billion-dollar ‘Organisation’. Violent City was shot on location in the US (including New Orleans) and the Island of St Thomas in the Virgin Islands. In the wake of The Godfather’s success, it was released, abridged, in the US as The Family. The excellent stunt work and car chases were staged by Remy Julienne, who oversaw the Minis in The Italian Job (1969)

Ennio Morricone provided the score, including the pulsating, whining, still-popular theme tune.

The uncut version is now available on DVD in the UK and in the US.

The Marseilles Connection (Enzo G. Castellari, 1973)

Also known as High Crime, Castellari’s cop movie is one of the finest examples of Italian ‘poliziotteschi’ (police films). Franco Nero played Vice-commissioner Belli of the Squadra Volante (Flying Squad) who attempts to sever the Marseilles Connection – a drug smuggling route from France to Genoa. Its obvious inspiration is The French Connection (1971) and Fernando Rey reappears here as gangster Cafiero. James Whitmore played Belli’s by-the-rules boss. Like Violent City and The French Connection, Marseilles Connection features a car chase – here cut to G & M De Angelis funky ‘Gangster Story’ cue which reappeared in many other films, including Violent Rome (1976 – Forced Impact) starring Maurizio Merli. Nero worked with Castellari on several occasions during this period, including the crepuscular western Keoma, a hokey sharksploitation movie The Shark Hunter (Guardians of the Deep) and a Death Wish vigilante flick, Street Law. Marseilles Connection is their best collaboration and one of the top cop movies of the 1970s.  The trailer is a classic.

The Marseilles Connection is currently only available in the UK on videotape, but there are rumours that a DVD release is in the offing

It is also available on tape in the US as High Crime.

The De Angelis brothers’ score to Violent Rome, which includes the ‘Gangster Story’ cue, is available on CD.

If you’d like to read more about The Conformist, Violent City and The Marseilles Connection, and other films discussed here, they (and many more) are included in my book, Cinema Italiano: The Complete Guide from Classics to Cult.