Requiem Apache

Before Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns were worldwide hits in the 1960s, there had already been a hugely successful European overhaul of the American western format by a series of West German westerns shot in the ‘wild west’ of Yugoslavia and based on the works of Karl May. His frontier novels depicted the adventures of Mascalero Apache warrior Winnetou and his white ‘blood brother’, Old Shatterhand. In other stories, such as Among Vultures, Winnetou is teamed with another hero, Old Surehand. When 11 of the stories were filmed in the 1960s, Winnetou was played by French actor Pierre Brice, Lex Barker was Old Shatterhand and Stewart Granger was Old Surehand. The first film, The Treasure of Silver Lake (1962) was a massive success – it was the most profitable film of all time in West Germany, outgrossing even the James Bond films, and is still popular today. The second film, Winnetou the Warrior, aka Apache Gold (1963) with Mario Adorf as the villain Frederick Santer, was an even bigger hit and remains the best of the adaptations. The series continued with Last of the Renegades (1964), which had perhaps the best cast – it featured Anthony Steel, Karin Dor, Klaus Kinski and Terence Hill in supporting roles. Among Vultures (1964 – aka Frontier Hellcat) saw Granger take over from Barker as the hero, and Elke Somer, Götz George, Sieghardt Rupp, Terence Hill and Walter Barnes cropped up in the cast.

Amazon UK is currently an interesting four-film set of German ‘Winnetou’ westerns. These films have never had an official release in the UK since they played in theatres in the 1960s. The release is a Danish collector’s edition, is good value and comprises:

The uncut, restored version of Last of the Renegades, in 2.35:1 CinemaScope, with a full English language track.

The uncut, restored version of Among Vultures, in 2.35:1, with a full English language track.

The uncut version of The Treasure of Silver Lake, in 2.35:1. This one is mostly in English, but there are several brief dialogues in German only, with no English language subtitles. I much prefer the shorter International release of this film, which is missing the bits of comedy from Ralf Wolter’s irascible scout Sam Hawkens and Eddie Arent’s butterfly collector, the Duke of Glockenspiel. If you look on Euro-western collector’s DVD sites, you’ll find the abridged international print easily enough. This DVD release is still an excellent version of the film however and the diversions into German don’t spoil this magnificent Euro-western too much – especially given that the film features unsubtitled Indian dialect mixed in there too and the plot is straightforward enough to follow.

Winnetou the Warrior (1963) is also the uncut German version, in 2.35:1, but this differs considerably from the English language release. Much was cut for the International print which is now pacier, with no diversions for comedy. The German version runs 107 minutes, the English language release 87. The full German language version features Chris Howland as an effete, bumbling English photographer, Lord Tuff-Tuff, who is trying to take pictures of Indians for the Oxford Times – all his awful comedy scenes were removed from the international cut of the film. There’s also many bits of German dialogue, from asides to full conversations, from Howland and scout Ralf Wolter (notably a scene where he romances a plump Apache squaw) which mar the pace (and have no English language subs). This is a good example of an International edit prepared for foreign distribution vastly improving a film. If you’re buying this solely for Winnetou the Warrior, then you’d be better off looking for the abridged English language print. The film is worth seeing however for the best set piece of all the ‘Winnetou’ films, the spectacular Battle of Roswell.

The DVD set also includes behind-the-scenes bonus footage (no sound), a short doc on Karl May, and original trailers, all in German with no English subs. The four Winnetou disks are also wrongly labelled, with the film titles indicated differing from those on the disk, but all four films are there. As a bonus, the set also includes Sergio Corbucci’s wintry western The Great Silence (1967) in English language, in a wooden collector’s box.

The four Winnetou movies offer an interesting snapshot at what Euro-westerns looked like before Leone. They boast excellent, percussive scores from Martin Böttcher, some of the greatest CinemaScope and Eastmancolor cinematography of the 1960s, stunning locations in areas of outstanding natural beauty in the former Yugoslavia, and of course plenty of action.

To buy this set, visit Amazon UK.

There’s more about the ‘Winnetou’ films in my book, Once Upon a Time in the Italian West: The Filmgoers’ Guide to Spaghetti Westerns.

To read more about the true-life conflicts of the Apache Wars, read my Pocket Essential Guide to The American Indian Wars, which is available both in a paperback edition and as a Kindle download.

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 5

This week all’Italiana, three great Italian films which feature memorable villains – a loco bounty hunter, a comic book super-thief, a black-clad murderer – and a trio of timeless Ennio Morricone scores.

The Big Silence (Sergio Corbucci, 1967)

Corbucci’s snowy western, largely shot near the ski resort at Cortina D’Ampezzo, is perhaps the best non-Sergio Leone Italian western. Jean-Louis Trintignant starred as mute gun-for-hire Silence, who lets his Mauser Broomhandle machine pistol do the talking. But it’s the despicable villain, Loco, a cowled killer stalking in a winter wonderland, that you’ll remember. He’s played by madcap Klaus Kinski in one of his finest performances. The memorable supporting cast includes Vonetta McGee, Frank Wolff, Luigi Pistilli and Mario Brega. Morricone composed the emotive music which is quite unlike his ‘Dollars’ trilogy scores and compliments the chilly setting perfectly.

It’s available on DVD in the UK and in the US.

It is worth seeking out the UK Eureka! release from a few years ago, which also features the Italian language cut of the film, with newly-translated English subtitles.

Morricone’s soundtrack CD also features Un Bellissimo Novembre.

Diabolik (Mario Bava, 1968)

This comic book masterpiece is Fellini-meets-Bond, in a wild collision of pop art visuals, groovy outfits and futuristic gadgets. John Phillip Law plays masked thief Diabolik, who with his bombshell lover Eva (Marisa Mell) steals from the rich to keep it for himself. His colourful underground lair, with its fleet of E-type Jags, is a sight to behold. This may be Bava’s best movie – it’s certainly his most consistent and pacy. Michel Piccoli, Adolfo Celi and Terry-Thomas crop up in support.

It is available on DVD in the UK and the US.

Both releases feature highly informative, entertaining commentary tracks, with Bava’s biographer Tim Lucas in conversation with John Phillip Law.

As all fans of the film know, two different English language audio dubs of Diabolik were prepared: one for theUS market, one for international release. The alternative English language dub is still available in the US on VHS tape.

Ennio Morricone’s score is one of his most sought-after with collectors, as it has never had an official release, though there have been bootlegs. The title song, ‘Deep Down’, sung by Christy, is included on the excellent 1960s vocal compilation ‘Canto Morricone’, which also contains ‘Se Telefonando’ by Mina.

The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (Dario Argento, 1970)

Argento’s directorial debut is an astonishingly assured murder mystery. From its opening gallery murder scene, with a witness trapped helplessly between automatic glass doors like a fly twixt double-glazing, this one never lets up. Tony Musante played Sam Dalmas, an American writer in Rome, who is the star witness to the gallery attack. Suzy Kendall was his girlfriend Julia and Enrico Maria Salerno played Inspector Morosini, who thinks that Sam isn’t telling him everything. With his passport confiscated, Sam turns amateur sleuth which leads to both his and Julia’s lives being endangered. The visuals, in widescreen Cromoscope, are breathtakingly shot by Vittorio Storaro (Apocalypse Now, The Last Emperor). Morricone composed a bold, avant-garde score, which echoed his work with experimental group Nuova Consananza.

The definitive version of this film is Anchor Bay’s Region 1 release, available in the UK and US.

Morricone’s score is available on CD with two more Argento movies, Cat O’nine Tails and Four Flies on Grey Velvet

To read more about The Big Silence, Diabolik and The Bird With the Crystal Plumage, check out my book, Cinema Italiano: The Complete Guide from Classics to Cult.

My spaghetti western book Once Upon a Time in the Italian West includes an in-depth discussion of The Big Silence, and Corbucci’s film also features, alongside 33 other important movies, in my Kamera Guide to Spaghetti Westerns

Roma Therapy 4

Continuing my look at essential films of the golden era of Italian filmmaking (roughly the late-1950s to the early-1980s) with three from ’66: a classic of political cinema, a murder mystery without a body and the quintessential spaghetti western.

Battle of Algiers (Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966)

A ‘how to’ guide for starting your own insurrection, Battle of Algiers was shot by Pontecorvo and his 9-man Italian crew on location in the city. This visceral docu-drama tells the story of the Algerian peoples’ struggle against French occupation and colonialism. The principle story follows Omar Ali, alias ‘Ali La Pointe’ (Brahim Haggiag), an Algerian street criminal who joins the rebel National Liberation Front (FNL). The film, an Italian-Algerian co-production, was co-written by Franco Solinas, who also worked on many other Italian political films, including Salvatore Giuliano, Hands over the City, The Big Gundown, A Bullet for the General, A Professional Gun, Tepepa and Burn! The anthemic, elegiac score was co-composed by Pontecorvo and Ennio Morricone. This powerful depiction of revolution and counter-revolution admirably doesn’t take sides and in 2003, during the occupation of Iraq, it was screened in the Pentagon.

It is available on DVD in the UK and as an excellent Criterion Collection release in the US.

Blowup (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1966)

Antonioni’s murder mystery is one of the most iconic ‘London’ films of the 1960s. Like The Ipcress File, it presents the city via the cold paranoid gaze of a fractured lens, a million miles away from ‘Swinging London’ as depicted by the popular media of the era. Photographer Thomas (David Hemmings) snaps a couple embracing in Maryon Park, Charlton, but when he develops the photos he discovers he has witnessed as murder – blow-ups of the images reveal a gunman hidden in the bushes. The interesting cast includes Vanessa Redgrave, Sarah Miles, John Castle, Peter Bowles, Jane Birkin and the Jimmy Page-era Yardbirds. How the mystery unravels makes for riveting cinema, in this, Antonioni’s most accessible and commercially successful film.

Blowup is available on DVD in the UK and US.

The excellent soundtrack, featuring cues by Herbie Hancock, The Lovin’ Spoonful, The Yardbirds and Tomorrow, is also available.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (Sergio Leone, 1966)

The third of Leone’s ‘Dollars’ trilogy, this would today be called a threequel, though it’s actually a prequel to Fistful of Dollars (1964) and For a Few Dollars More (1965). Three gunmen become entangled in a search for a $200,000  Confederate army payroll buried in a war cemetery, as the Civil War sweeps through New Mexico in 1861-62. Clint Eastwood played bounty hunter Blondy, Lee Van Cleef was hired killer ‘Angel Eyes’ and Eli Wallach was garrulous Mexican bandido Tuco Ramirez. This is the great Italian western and career highpoints for all concerned. The Spanish landscapes look beautiful, the long desert sands filling the screen with their emptiness. The cast features a rogue’s gallery of craggy-faced spaghetti western regulars including Aldo Sambrell, Benito Stefanelli, Lorenzo Robledo, Antonio Molino Rojo, Romano Puppo, Frank Braña, Al Mulock, Luigi Pistilli and Mario Brega. The famous score was by Morricone and includes the towering ‘L’estasi dell’oro’ (The Ecstasy of Gold), with its soaring soprano vocal by Edda Dell’Orso, which Morricone still conducts today in his live concerts – a reprise of the composition is often used as the final encore.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is available in many versions, of varying quality and length, but the classic version is still the 154 minute international release (161 minutes in the US) which is available on DVD in the UK and US.

The Complete Original Motion Picture Soundtrack from GDM features 21 tracks, including many that have previously remained unreleased.

Eli Wallach includes several interesting anecdotes about the film’s making in his autobiography, The Good, the Bad and Me.

The film tie-in by Joe Millard is available too.

To read more about Battle of Algiers, Blowup, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and other films discussed here, buy my book Cinema Italiano: The Complete Guide from Classics to Cult.

Also, my Once Upon a Time in the Italian West includes an entire chapter devoted to the making of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

Una Giornata in Spiaggia (A Day at the Beach)

Tall Acre Beach: After the Apocalypse © Howard Hughes 2011

I need to go to the beach at least once a month. To see the sea, to check it’s still there. In the North West of England we’re fortunate to have the North Wales coast and the Wirral within easy drive, both great coastlines, with some excellent beaches for walking or sitting. There’s still something special in the ritual of going to the beach. Gritty sandwiches for lunch, those weird windbreaks that are essentially blankets threaded on poles, the screeching hark of gulls, the distant sigh of waves flopping onto the shore. The hubbub of noise on a busy, sunny day and the family left on the beach, long after everyone else has gone home, frantically digging, because some little tyke has buried daddy’s car keys in the sand, but can’t remember where.

There have been many famous film moments that take place on beaches, from the finned terror of Jaws and the chess game with Death in The Seventh Seal, to the apocalyptic endings of Kiss Me Deadly and Planet of the Apes, the amphibious landing in Saving Private Ryan and the Lancaster-Kerr clinch in From Here to Eternity. The most-photographed beach in film history lies to the west of Rome, on Anzio Cape, though most people won’t have even heard of it. It’s called Tor Caldara and has appeared in literally scores of A and B-movies over the years, including mythical epics such as Hercules and Hercules Unchained, sci-fi movies such as The Day the Sky Exploded and westerns, including Django.

Tor Caldara Nature Reserve, Anzio Cape, Italy.

Reserva naturale regionale Tor Caldara – Tor Caldara Nature Reserve – is 44 hectares of beach, an inlet, a sandy clearing and a stream surrounded by woodland oaks, south of Anzio. It also boasts unusual fauna and flora, and is a protected WWF site. There’s a circular medieval watchtower on the headland and the Nature Reserve features sulphurous springs – in some films distinctive yellow strata can be seen in the landscape – which when they are bubbling give the area the smell of rotten eggs. It was one of the beaches used by the Allies during Operation Shingle – the Anzio Landings in Italy in January 1944 – and since then it’s seen plenty of action, both as a popular beauty spot and, especially in the 1960s, as a filming location.

Scenes featuring Tor Caldara can be spotted in Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St Matthew and Medea, and it’s the beach with a defensive German bunker that is assaulted in the low-budget WWII movie Hell in Normandy. It was particularly popular with makers of sword and sandal epics and features in, or is the principle setting for, Hercules Conquers Atlantis, Maciste against the Vampire, Mole Men against the Son of Hercules, Perseus the Invincible, The Giant of Marathon, The Giants of Rome and most prominently in Hercules against the Moon Men. It was later a useful ‘desert’ (with the sea and headland kept well out of shot) in many, many spaghetti westerns, including Texas Adios, Django Shoots First, Vengeance, This Man Can’t Die, Adios Gringo and Johnny Hamlet.

Whenever Italian filmmakers needed a modest stretch of desert and woodland or cliffs and a beach close to their Rome studios, Tor Caldara was the go-to location. The site was particularly popular with directors Mario Bava and Sergio Corbucci. Bava featured scenes at the beach and inlet in Danger: Diabolik, Hercules in the Centre of the Earth (aka Hercules in the Haunted World), the Viking movies Erik the Conqueror and Knives of the Avenger, the horror titles The Whip and the Body, Five Dolls for an August Moon and Shock and extensively in the alleged comedy western Roy Colt & Winchester Jack. Corbucci used the area in a variety of genre films, including the swashbuckler The Man Who Laughs and the Roman epic, Duel of the Titans (aka Romulus and Remus). It also cropped up in several of his westerns, including Ringo and his Golden Pistol (aka Johnny Oro), Navajo Joe and The Hellbenders.  

Perhaps the most famous scene shot at Tor Caldara was the opening title sequence to Corbucci’s Django in the winter of 1965-66, with Franco Nero (starring as the eponymous hero) dragging a coffin through the mud and pouring rain. You’d never guess the Mediterranean is only a few hundred yards away, over that rise.

Tor Caldara was also used for Django’s later scenes at the rope bridge – including the infamous moment when Nero has his hands mangled by horses’ hooves – and for the final shootout amid the crosses of desolate Tombstone cemetery.

To read more about the varied films directed by Corbucci and Bava, and many other films discussed here, check out Cinema Italiano: The Complete Guide from Classics to Cult published by I.B. Tauris.