The Case is Closed, Forget It: Another Damiani downer

The Case is Closed, Forget It aka L´istruttoria e chiusa: dimentichi (1971), Dir. Damiano Damiani, 106 mins, Blu-Ray

Right, back to that (pause for breath) Cosa Nostra: Franco Nero in Three Mafia Tales By Damiano Damiani boxset from Radiance, and its second film, the 1971 prison drama The Case is Closed, Forget It. Having now watched this and The Day of the Owl a few nights ago, its already now clear what kind of film-maker Damiani was- a very accomplished director with a very Western leaning in his approach, with an intense social conscience and interest in the Everyman. Someone quite willing to end his films with a cautionary, even defeatist approach- as I noted before, sometimes the bad guys win.

Franco Nero stars as Vanzi , a wealthy architect who is thrown in jail for a misdemeanour traffic violation to which he protests his innocence, while awaiting his case to be seen by a judge. His social standing and life of privilege is stripped away as he faces the grim reality of life behind bars. In many ways there is little unusual about the film, we see the usual prison drama tropes – incarceration in solitary, prison riot breaking out –  with the plight of the inmates, disenfranchised, some mentally challenged, but here the mafia openly controls corrupt prison officials. Again, there’s that theme of corrupt authority seen in The Day of the Owl.  Realising how things ‘work’ in prison,  Vanzi learns how he can use some of his money from ‘outside’ to ease his life while behind bars, such as the corrupt doctor who provides a hooker from the adjacent women’s wing to entertain Vanzi, and access to better food, but Vanzi soon runs foul of the wrong people who really run the prison and such privilege’s are stripped away, his life as a prisoner taking a distinct turn for the worse.

What pushes this film to a higher level is the climax- there is a moment of violence, a murder that has been built up to, that is truly horrifying,  a slow-motion murder that feels like a gut-punch. Its a really gruesome event that is very powerful. Even on top of that, and perhaps even more troubling, is the following coda in which Vanzi ‘sells out’, becomes a part of the injustice and corruption. As Franco Nero points out in an on-disc interview, Vanzi is a coward. He takes the easy way out, that costs him nothing (apart from maybe his soul). Yes, its another Damiani downer.  At least in The Day of The Owl, our handsome hero had a moral backbone and stood up for what he believed in. One wonders if Vanzi really believes in anything, other than his life of luxury outside. Perhaps Damiani is voicing some opinion of the upper-class elite- its noticeable that Vanzi’s wife is quite fine with the revelation that he slept with a prostitute, actually opining that perhaps she should thank her.

This Radiance boxset is turning out to be a very strong one- it just goes to show that a set of films one has never heard of, by a director unknown, can be very worthwhile. Maybe not essential, but it’s clear that there are some excellent films out there that we should have better access to or knowledge of and I count these among them. I watched the film in its original Italian, but there is an English option which I may try next time around. There is another frank (sic) and open interview with Nero, this time focusing on this film, alongside an archival documentary featurette about the making of the film, and a visual essay on the career of Damiani Damiani by critic Rachael Nisbet. Picture quality for the film itself is excellent and the subtitles very clear- another solid release by Radiance that serves this film very well.  As usual I haven’t dug into the book yet as I tend to wait until I’ve seen all the films in order to avoid spoilers.

I just fear that I need cheering up a little with something a little rosier and lightweight before tackling the last film in this boxset…

The Day of the Owl: Sometimes the bad guys win

The Day of the Owl aka Il Giorno Della Civetta/ Mafia (1968), Dir. Damiano Damiani, 109/103 mins, Blu-Ray

Here we go again- yes, another Radiance title, this time The Day of the Owl, from Radiance’s three-film boxset Cosa Nostra: Franco Nero In Three Mafia Tales By Damiano Damiani- bit of a mouthful of a title that. Its a set I’d had my eyes on for awhile but finally bit the bullet when it was reduced in price and declared 95% sold out (at time of writing this, its still available). It does seem clear that I’m branching out into world cinema a lot more this year, and Radiance single-handedly undoing my intent on reining in my disc buying. As usual with Radiance, its a very solid set- I hadn’t seen any of these three films before, but the extras are plentiful, and the box includes a 120-page book, so its certainly good value for money at the reduced price I bought it… well, if the films are enjoyable, anyway. Blind buys can be tricky, sometimes (can’t say I was really enthused by a spaghetti western Sartana boxset from Arrow that I bought early last year- I have yet to finish watching all the films in it)

It would appear though that Italian crime films were of a higher calibre (sic) than the Spaghetti western genre films. I certainly enjoyed Sergio Solima’s Revolver and Lenzi’s The Tough Ones last year. Well, it looks like this set is a winner, at least on the evidence of this first film- The Day of the Owl is absolutely brilliant. Franco Nero stars as Carabinieri  captain Bellodi, an honest cop in a distinctly corrupt Sicilian town whose attempts to bring Mafia boss Don Mariano (Lee J.Cobb) to justice are repeatedly thwarted by an at best indifferent, at worse outright criminal, populace and a political system that seems rotten to the core (indeed, in some ways I suppose this film could almost be considered neo-noir, it is so nihilistic).

This is an extremely well-crafted film. Shot on location in a provincial town baking under the hot Italian sun, it feels authentic, there’s absolutely a sense of a grittily real place. It is tense, with a twisting script offering a few surprises and very well acted with an excellent cast (screen icon Claudia Cardinale has a meaty role to get into, rather than just serve as eye-candy).  This is one of those films which is, for all intents and purposes, pretty much faultless. The sense of time and place, the idyllic beauty of the Italian town masking intrinsic corruption, is perfectly realised, peppered with interesting, and convincing characters on both sides of the law- indeed very often the cast look and sound like real people, not actors at all.

Its interesting that this film predates by Mario Puzo’s novel The Godfather (published in 1969) and Francis Ford Coppola’s film of 1972, because it reminded me so much of Coppola’s film. Cobb is terrific as the Mafia Don, and physically his presence and intensity  isn’t too far from that of Brando, and the film’s music score by Giovanni Fusco is so close to the score of Coppola’s film…. well, lets just say if it was the other way around, and this film had followed Coppola’s film,  I would have likely considered it an obvious knock-off. Surely Coppola had watched this film before making his own Mafia opus?

I watched the (slightly longer) Italian cut of the film- the Radiance disc includes an English-language version which I sampled afterwards, which noticeably benefits from Cobbs own voice completing his performance (he’s dubbed by someone else in the Italian cut). I think I’ll watch this English version next time if only to get a fuller representation of Cobb’s performance- Cobb was such a great actor and he’s very good in this anyway, even dubbed by someone else, which shows what a physical presence he had. There are some very good video featurettes on the disc- including a frank and entertaining interview with Franco Nero that was done for this release, as well as an archive one, an archive interview with Claudia Cardinale from 2011 that has moments of surprise (albeit I’m not at all sure she’s being entirely honest sometimes) and a video essay about Italian crime cinema by Mike Molloy. There’s also a thirty-minute video essay about Lee J Cobb that I haven’t watched yet, and of course the book’s essays on the film that I haven’t read yet so as to avoid spoilers, so yes, its a brilliant package for a great film. As usual regards Radiance, I think it could have done with a commentary track, and if I were being really greedy, I’d have loved to have seen one of those ‘then and now’ featurettes where someone goes to the locations that the film was shot in and compares areas to how they look now-  the town was such a character in the film, I would have found something like that fascinating, I’m sure.

Fill ‘Er Up with Super: A road to nowhere? Not quite.

Fill ‘er Up with Super (1976), Dir. Alain Cavalier, 97 mins, Blu-ray

Another week, another Blu-ray from Radiance (post-Christmas sale, this time). This film is something of a curio; a 1970s road movie from France, its a film in which largely nothing happens and in which none of the characters actually grow, develop or even manage what we’d remotely call a character arc: the characters largely end the film exactly as they begin it, having learned hardly anything about themselves at all.  I always thought road movies were narratives about self-discovery, of journeys as internal as external. To that end, I admit I expected Fill ‘er Up with Super to be a  Gallic Fandango.

Instead its rather different, frustratingly so, to be honest, at least until I read the booklet that accompanies this disc, which offered an observation that opened the film in a new light for me. Fill ‘er Up with Super concerns a young car salesman, Klouk (Bernard Crombey), who is bullied by his boss to deliver a Chevrolet station wagon a thousand miles across France to its new owner.  In order to make the trip more enjoyable, he invites his friend Philippe (Xavier Saint-Macary) to accompany him, and at Phillipe’s suggestion shortly after beginning the journey they pick up two other men they come across on the road; Charles (Etienne Chico) and Daniel (Patrick Bouchitey).  The structure of the film is predictably episodic, depicting various events on the journey as Klouk and Phillip get to know Charles and Daniel.

But really, nothing happens. They jerk around, share depreciating observations of women and commentary about sex, deliver the car. The end. Well, that’s being somewhat unfair but essentially that’s it. The guys are dysfunctional, immature, and what they have to say has little value at all, either for each other or the audience.

The booklet, however, has an essay which suggests that this is exactly the point. These guys are indeed jerks, and its no mistake they are emasculated and seemingly unfulfilled. Klouk’s wife berates him at the beginning of the film, frustrated that he is unable to accompany her on a trip to see her family because he wouldn’t stand up to his boss. Near the start of the roadtrip, Phillipe’s ex turns up to confirm their own relationship is over and to say goodbye. At a loss, Daniel calls his ex on the phone, disturbing her sleep, to hear her confirm, weary of repeating it yet again, that their romance is over. Charles meets his estranged wife on the road, having trashed her room, and urinated on her bed. She has a new man in her life now, she has moved on., and is indifferent to him, dismissing his trashing of her room as perhaps just another example of why she left him. And indeed, this is the point of the film, it seems- the men are stuck in the past,  and the women in their lives have moved on, taken charge of their lives, left the men behind (Agathe literally going off to see her family, the other women moving on into other relationships) to spout empty machismo rhetoric as if to justify their lives and worth while wasting their time with foolish japes. The women have grown up – its the mid-1970s post-feminism era, and the men are left behind without their women.

To add further emphasis, the director Alain Cavalier lost his wife in a car crash in 1972, and  devastated by the loss did not make any more films until he embarked on Fill ‘er Up with Super, a film which concerns four men without women, who are bereft at what they have lost, unable to articulate it even to themselves.

So Fill ‘er Up with Super is certainly not the empty, pointless, aimless film I initially thought it to be. Its not brilliant, its rather too experimental and free-form than it should be for its own good, but I think in hindsight I understand it more now.

I Am Waiting: A great Japanese Noir

I Am Waiting (1957), Dir. Koreyoshi Kurahara, 91 mins, Blu-ray

First film in Radiance’s World Noir boxset (yep, another Christmas present) is the 1957 Japanese noir I Am Waiting.  I thought this was a genuinely great movie: it has a great cast, a sharp script and such an enchanting atmosphere, taking me to some other place I’ve never been before: a 1950s waterfront noir in Japan. I can’t overstate just how lovely this film looks and sounds; its foreign location and sumptuous black-and-white photography giving it a deeply otherworldly feel, evoking a time and place likely as alien to present-day Japanese viewers as it does to me here in the UK. Being a noir, it always nods a little towards Western sensibilities and style, which perhaps intensifies that otherworldly feel: not quite wholly Japanese, not quite wholly Western, but something new. Perhaps this is the prime selling-point for this World Noir series, as it makes even those of us so familiar with American Noir suddenly excited at seeing some new slant on what we know, breathing a freshness into something that might become jaded.

Yujiro Ishihara stars as Joji Shimaki, a washed-up ex-boxer now running a waterfront restaurant while waiting for news from his brother who left for Brazil a year ago. Late one night he walks the waterfront mulling on his lot (and wondering why he has yet to hear from his brother) when he comes across Saeko (Mie Kitahara), a desperate woman on the run who seems to be contemplating suicide. Saeko is a singer who has lost her voice and successful career, now reduced to being forced to sing in a downbeat cabaret bar owned by a mob boss. Kindred souls with former glories and unrealised dreams, they strike a rapport and live and work together in the restaurant, gradually falling in love until their seperate pasts begin to catch up with them, neither realising those pasts are surprisingly linked.

Maybe the plot is where this film falters- like many noir, its deliberately, overly complex, the characters finding it as difficult to get a grip of their troubles as  we do making sense of the many threads in the story. Wat we assume to be wholly seperate characters gradually become wrapped up in each other’s issues and problems, apparent coincidences unfold becoming more frequent until it all coalesces into dark revelations approaching the finale: coincidences that slowly wear on credibility.  I often think that in noir, characters aren’t being paranoid or their fate overly convoluted- in noir, the universe really IS a conspiracy out to get them. I think that’s one of the things I find most appealing about film noir and why they seem so timely, particularly now. We often live our lives feeling we lack control, that we are subject to the whims of fate in a world in which our leaders and people in authority don’t listen to us, or answer to other agendas. So accepting it on that level, as one must most every noir, its a very good film and very rewarding, beginning to end.

Yujiro Ishihara was a huge star in Japan- his first name was as iconic as that of Elvis in the 1950s and 1960s. Indeed, in a similar vein to how Elvis was in film, I wouldn’t suggest that Yujiro was particularly talented as an actor -at least in early films such as this- but its clear that he had an immense screen charisma, a charm through the camera lens, that many more gifted actors could never attain for all their talent. Its just a sheer natural gift, a screen presence gifted by a camera that adored him. His co-star Mie Kitahara is clearly a better, more talented actor, but the main highlight is her screen chemistry with Yujiro which is so obvious (and they appeared in subsequent films together) that its little surprise that it bled out into real life and that the two got married.

Yujiro passed away at just 52 years of age in 1987; he was greatly mourned by fans at the time and his popularity doesn’t seem to have waned at all (they even opened a memorial museum to him).  I assumed that this was the first film I have seen him in, but he did in fact feature in a minor role in the popular 1965 comedy Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines, likely a vain attempt to break into Western films. While his career in the West never took off, he was as iconic in his native Japan as many hugely popular Western stars are to us here in the West.  Think Elvis, James Dean. He was that big.

This Radiance disc looks as excellent as one might expect, and is the film’s first Blu-ray release in the world- something that surprises me, I would have thought it would have been more popular, yet another example of so many deserving films not released on disc. Well at least this one managed it, and on Region B at that. Typically for Radiance, the film has some very well-chosen extras; an informative audio commentary and a visual essay discussing the life of Yujiro, and a real curio- Yujiro’s Travel Diary, a 41-minute documentary about the star while location shooting in Europe during 1959, which serves as something of a time-capsule of images and sounds of European cities like Paris while revealing an affectionate, irreverent aspect to the actor. Its really quite fun and the street scenes etc are absolutely fascinating and beautifully shot. Its a great extra. The World Noir box set also has an 80-page book, with an essay that examines Japanese noir as well as other essays regarding world noir.

Pietro Germi? Who?

Pietro Germi died on 5th December, 1974. I was eight years old back then; it would take nearly fifty years before I finally even knew he existed. I don’t know why things like that bug me sometimes, but they do. When I was watching Germi in his great noir murder mystery The Facts of Murder from 1959 (a film whose existence itself I have been utterly ignorant of), I kept thinking, wow, this guy is great. The hat, the dark shades, the cigars he smokes, he strikes an iconic and arresting character and performance.  He’s brilliant.

Only later did I realise he also directed the film, one of those rare instances when an actor not only commands the screen in the scenes he is in, but somehow also manages to compose and direct those scenes and the rest of the cast around him. There are traces of Hitchcock in some of the direction, as well as Howard Hawks, and some marvellous shorthand, for instance in the way just the casting alone does so much work establishing the characters. The Facts of Murder is briskly paced and wonderfully realised, it’s a great film.

But only later did I learn that Germi was also a screenwriter and had co-wrote the film too. I mean come on, lead actor, director, co-screenwriter….?  I then learned that he had won an Oscar in 1963 for the screenplay for Divorce, Italian Style in fact, and was also nominated for Best Director for that film too.

So forgive me for thinking, who the hell is this Pietro Germi guy? And naturally following that, that I must be some kind of idiot for having never heard of him before. Well, just further proof that we all live and learn.

Composite-horror madness

Scream and Scream Again, Dir. Gordon Hessler, 1970, 95 mins, Blu-ray

Quite utterly insane, this is a film absolutely all over the place, which is rather appropriate as it turns out. Dig deep enough into its confused plot, and it seems the film concerns a race of super-beings called Composites, who are assembled, Frankenstein-fashion, from the body parts of victims. So its fitting indeed, perhaps, that the film feels throughout like its the composite of four or more different films stitched together in the editing room. Seriously, I’ll include three shots from the film in this post, you’ll be forgiven for thinking they are from three different movies.

Firstly its a mad-scientist flick with blatant Frankenstein connotations, but its also a serial-killer movie with both sexual undertones and vampirism involved, and then its a political/spy thriller set in a foreign military state, and its also a police procedural. To add further confusion, the three horror stars so cynically top-billed on the films posters feature separately in those ‘films’ and in fairly minor roles.  Peter Cushing (and I’ll blame/thank dear old Peter, because its him that attracted me to this one, as I always seek out his films) features in a three-minute scene shot in one day, Christopher Lee in two or three short scenes largely superfluous to the plot, and Vincent Price, while taking what would usually be the central mad scientist role of the film, only features chiefly in scenes that bookend the film, bizarrely disappearing for the  main central stretch (imagine one of those Frankenstein Hammer films starring Peter Cushing with his Doctor Frankenstein largely absent from the entire film).

In some ways it just doesn’t work at all but it is utterly fascinating, like a celluloid car crash from which you cannot pull your eyes away. Its also thoroughly nasty, a surprisingly unpleasant and gory film that feels quite ahead of its time as far as horror films go, prefiguring where the increasingly graphic genre would proceed in successive decades. It also has a scene in a subway tunnel that is eerily similar to the iconic scene in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, which was made later -it is so similar in fact I dare wonder if Kubrick watched this film and took inspiration (the idea of the intellectual Kubrick actually watching a film as cheap and dirty as this one gives me a chuckle).

And yet, while I describe it as ‘cheap and dirty’, its true that it is also very ambitiously shot, with some very long single takes that are very accomplished indeed and mightily impressive with lengthy camera moves coordinating a large number of actors and extras. Its strange that the film seems so ambitious, even though at its heart its so exploitive. There is a car chase sequence that could have been routine and uninspired but instead really pushes it to the limit- while some continuity fails amid editing trickery  can be discerned, one has to applaud the evident attempt to raise the sequence to something more than films like this would generally get and possibly deserve.

So really, its a very odd film, a composite, if you will, of different films stapled together that almost works in spite of itself. Vincent Price would later comment that he had no idea what the film was about, and its little wonder.

Bless him, Peter Cushing was uncomfortable having his name associated so boldly on the film’s marketing which suggested that he’d got a bigger part in it than he did, for fear of misleading his fans (a sentiment I appreciate all these years later). But while, yes, it was Peter Cushing’s association that mislead me into buying this Radiance edition of a film I’d never even heard of, I find myself glad I did, even though I know I’ve been had (like many before me no doubt). I expected a horror film starring three of the genre’s old greats – Cushing, Price and Lee – and instead found myself watching a messy sci-fi/horror hybrid that doesn’t really star either of them;  Scream and Scream Again is a bizarre, fascinating curio indeed.  Four out of ten for the film, eight of ten for the weirdness value.

That all being said, its no doubt a surprise to many that not only did Radiance deem this film worthy of a UK Blu-ray premiere, but also afforded it some substantial extras and packaging.  I doubt anyone, a few years after the film was released theatrically, could have imagined in their wildest dreams something like this happening over fifty years later, but the world of physical media/ film collecting is very strange indeed. There are video interviews with surviving cast and crew, a very good commentary track, an excellent booklet with essays, as well other extras. As should be expected with such things, they increased my understanding and appreciation of the film so do their job superbly.  An unlikely winner for physical media then (albeit close to an own-goal considering how broken the film largely is, but then…)

Mind, on the subject of broken films, this brings me to how this one features a link with Tobe Hooper’s Lifeforce, my favourite bad horror movie.  Scream and Scream Again features Michael Gothard playing the “smooth mover” (the film’s description, not mine) serial killer/vampire Keith. Isn’t Keith a smashing name for a serial-killer vampire? Anyway, I digress…. years later Gothard would feature in Lifeforce as Dr. Leonard Bukovsky, part of the British space programme  that brings the space vampires to Earth. Gothard was a good actor who deserved more success than he had (appearances in Scream and Scream Again and Lifeforce notwithstanding), whose fairly successful career stalled in the mid-eighties, suffering from depression before finally committing suicide in 1992. A sad end to a promising talent.