Gialli Good Fun

You simply can't beat a giallo film for tawdry entertainment value. Gialli were one of the staples of Italian cinema from the late 1960s to the mid '70s, offering a lurid mix of violence, sadism, voyeurism, sex, and deeply twisted plots. They were what Alfred Hitchcock might have made had he let his freak flag fly. In Italian, giallo means yellow, and the films were given this name as a reference to a publisher who reprinted English mystery/thriller novels with distinctive yellow covers. The films themselves owe a big debt to Hitchcock, Psycho in particular. Many of the films feature heavily disguised killers who attack beautiful women (always with bladed instruments) for a variety of warped or mercenary reasons.

Exploitation elements aside, gialli deserve appreciation for their cinematic qualities and enthusiastic attempts to befuddle the audience with devious plots. These were low to middling budget films, but they certainly tried to put on a good visual show. The interiors and women's fashions in gialli are usually the epitome of '70s style, which is both good and bad, but always eye-catching and/or eye-watering. The musical soundtracks are a mix of the weird and the overblown, and even a big name like Ennio Morricone did work on some gialli. What really keeps these films worth watching are the plots. The producers couldn't invest much money in stars or stunts, but they certainly urged the scriptwriters give it their all. The mystery at the centre of each giallo may be highly improbable, but the plotting is often surprisingly clever and keeps the audience on board, which is crucial since gialli also suffer from some pronounced defects.
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You don't watch these films for the acting. Or the dialogue. Some performances are respectable, the remainder range from wooden to overwrought. Interestingly, it's usually the women who give the better performances. The men often seem more interested in modeling their turtleneck sweaters (a fashion staple in gialli) than doing any actual acting.

So the reason for this post is that I recently got a Roku attachment to my TV, which means I can stream films from YouTube onto the big screen, and the first thing I did was have a giallo film festival with myself as the guest of honour. Herewith are some of the better ones I've seen.


Death Walks on High Heels (1971)

Did I mention that gialli often have ludicrous titles? This one starts out as a standard story of a beautiful woman pursued by a masked madman, but then gets progressively more complicated and surprising. When the mystery is finally unraveled you'll be applauding the scriptwriter for his amazingly intricate and logical, if  bizarre, plotting. The acting here is mostly over the top, at times leading to unintended laughter, but everyone attacks their roles with gusto, especially the actor who utters the immortal line, "Porco!" when confronted with a transvestite.

Who Saw Her Die? (1972)

The young daughter of a sculptor living in Venice is murdered and he tracks down her killer. The plot isn't much to speak of, but the location photography is stunning. The director, Aldo Lado, was from Venice and he clearly knew all the best locations for capturing the spooky oddness of the city. I can't help wondering if this film somehow inspired or influenced Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now which came out a year later.

Death Walks at Midnight (1972)

Another Byzantine plot from the director of Death Walks on High Heels. This time a fashion model witnesses a murder in the building across from her apartment but can't prove that it actually happened. There are some plot holes in this one, but it's still very intriguing and the look of the film is '70s to the max. A sidenote: based on all the gialli I've seen, 80% of the Italian female population at this time were models with the remainder strippers and/or homicidal maniacs.

The Case of the Bloody Iris (1972)

If you're going to dive into the giallo genre you have to see at least one starring the gorgeous Edwige Fenech. Fenech is to Italian B-movies of the '70s what the Virgin Mary is to Catholicism. She starred in gialli, cop movies, horror films, and lots and lots of sex comedies. In Iris she wears a variety of improbable outifts, including body paint, and spends the rest of the time forgetting to lock her windows and doors, thus allowing maniacs access to her at all hours of the day and night.

Footprints on the Moon (1975)

This is the outlier in the giallo genre. It begins like many gialli, with a beautiful woman facing a seemingly impossible puzzle: she appears to be missing two days from her life. It's soon clear that this isn't any kind of exploitation film. Florinda Bolkan plays the lead character and she's a superb actress. More importantly, the cinematographer is Vittorio Storaro, the genius behind the camera on films such as Last Tango in Paris, Apocalypse Now, and Woody Allen's latest, Cafe Society. The look of the film is amazing, and the story is an elegant, mysterious, subtle attempt to visualize a kind of waking dream. There's no big pay-off to the film, but it's a crime that it's not more widely known or available on DVD. Are you listening, Criterion Collection?

Film Review: Duck You Sucker (1971)

There comes a point when film directors, especially the best ones, begin repeating themselves. And some even end up producing unintentional parodies of their own work. David Lean fell to earth with Ryan's Daughter, an overblown, overproduced flop that brought an epic scale to a pipsqueak of a story. Fellini's final few films, especially And the Ship Sails On and City of Women, felt like clumsy homages to the Fellini style. And Stanley Kubrick's detached, cool style reached a spectacular dead end with Eyes Wide Shut, a film about sex that barely had a pulse. Duck You Sucker is Sergio Leone's swan song as a director of westerns. It's an ugly way to go.

In the Man With No Name films Leone redefined and deconstructed the western. He took a genre that was on its last legs and blended in some elements from folklore, mythology and religion, and then added a wholly original look and sound. But after three films there really wasn't a lot more Leone could do with the western. In Once Upon a Time in the West, his fourth western, Leone tried his hand at a film John Ford might have recognized, and ended up with something that doesn't satisfy fans of either director. Once looks good and sounds good, but the plot is ponderous, slow-moving and confused. It's really a film that's held together by a handful of striking set-pieces and one wickedly entertaining performance by Henry Fonda as the antithesis of every western character he'd ever played.

With Duck You Sucker it's clear Leone is running up the white flag on his enthusiasm for the western. Even the ever-reliable Ennio Morricone stubs his toe with a score that veers wildly between cloyingly sentimental and perversely odd. Duck is unashamedly political in its ambitions. The story is set during the Mexican Revolution and centres on Juan, a roguish brigand who leads a gang consisting of his numerous sons. Juan teams up with an ex-IRA bomber to crack open a bank, but they're sidetracked into fighting for the revolutionary forces. Leone takes the view that the little guy (represented by Juan) always gets screwed in any kind of revolution, no matter who is leading the forces of revolt or what their aims are. This is an unsophisticated and unoriginal idea, and Leone certainly doesn't develop it with any kind of imagination. It's clear this aspect of the film was his reaction to the stormy political climate in Europe, and Italy in particular.

Politics is only one of the problems in Duck You Sucker. Rod Steiger as Juan delivers one of the hammiest performances in his long and jambon-filled career. His performance also moves him into a tie with Al Pacino in Scarface and Speedy Gonzales for worst attempt at a Spanish accent. James Coburn, as John the IRA bomber, does a Lucky Charms Irish accent, which is bad, but not as awful as the flashbacks he finds himself in. These flashbacks give us John's backstory, which is presented without dialogue but with a lot of soft focus and the worst music Morricone ever created. The backstory is a grisly bit of sentimentality: poor John has to shoot his best friend who's a traitor to the cause and is also one-third of a romantic menage a trois he and John are involved in. The third member is a girl, just in case you were wondering.

If the film has a saving grace it's that Leone does manage to work his visual magic in several set-pieces.  Some things get blown up real good, and there some crowd scenes around a railway station that are brilliantly shot and choreographed, but beyond that Duck You Sucker feels like the work of someone who's going through the motions. At this point in time Leone was only competing against himself and it clearly wasn't a fight he had much energy for. Click here for my review of Leone at his peak with The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

Film Review: Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (1970)

The most shocking thing about this film, from a 2012 point of view, is that it wears its political heart on its sleeve. I mean, when's the last time you saw a film that made a political statement in a loud voice and did it in an imaginative and entertaining way? Hollywood occasionally lobs liberal spitballs at easy targets like Big Business, but generally speaking mainstream films are politcally emasculated. You know this is true when Fox News has to attack The Muppets when they want to find a film that's anti-capitalist.

Anti-establishment films were practically mainstream in the 1960s and early '70s, especially in Europe, and Investigation is one of the best. The plot is beautifully simple: the head of the homicide squad in Rome murders his mistress and then leaves an abundance of clues pointing directly to himself. He wants to see just how far his position and power protect him from investigation. Along the way the director and scriptwriter Elio Petri neatly dissects the workings of the fascist mind. The nameless head of the homicide squad is a strutting bully to his inferiors, a worm to his superiors, and contemptuous towards ordinary citizens, especially those who are left of centre.

Investigation is far from subtle in its point of view, but the filmmaking is first-rate. The Roman locations and interiors are often from the Brutalist, fascist school of architecture, with the notable exception of the murdered woman's flat, which is a riot of Art Deco design elements. The difference between her apartment and her killer's is startling and intentional. The cinematography is fluid and clever, and Enno Morricone's score is, as usual, weird and wonderful.

The real star of the film is Gian Maria Volonte as the head of the homicide squad. Most film fans will be familiar with him as the villain in the first two Clint Eastwood spaghetti westerns. Volonte never made the transition to Hollywood films (he would have made a great Bond villain), and that's a pity because this film makes it clear that he was one of Italy's finest actors. He and Elio Petri, both members of the Italian Communist Party at various times, collaborated on several films, of which Investigation is the most famous, winning the Oscar for Best Foreign Language film. It really deserves to be remade, perhaps with Kermit in the Volonte role and Miss Piggy as his mistress.

Film Review: Seduced and Abandoned (1964)

This film is remarkably similar in theme to the novel Bell' Antonio, which I reviewed in August. Both are about the corrosive effects of Sicilian codes of honour and machismo. The novel takes a look at an arranged marriage that falls apart, while Seduced, made in 1964, is about various frustrated attempts to arrange a marriage.

Seduced begins during a siesta in the affluent Ascalone household. Everyone's asleep except Peppino Califano, who's engaged to Matilde Ascalone, and Agnese, Don Vincenzo Ascalone's youngest (15) and most beautiful daughter. Peppino and Agnese steal away to a deserted corner of the large house and the deed is done. It's not clear if they love or even like each other, but they definitely succumb to a mutual lust, with Peppino leading the charge.

Sure enough, Agnese is left pregnant by her one tryst with Peppino and that begins a comic war between Vincenzo and the Califano family. Vincenzo wants Peppino to marry Agnese to save his family's honour. Peppino counters that he doesn't want to marry a girl who can be seduced so easily; it clearly means she's a whore at heart. The battle takes some twists and turns, and in the end the Califanos find themselves being forced to beg Vincenzo for his daughter. And along the way there's been an attempted honour killing and what can only be called a ritual kidnapping. A wedding finally takes place, but it's left nothing but scorched earth behind it and no future prospects for happiness.

This film is described as a comedy, but only in the sense that it's a ruthless satire of Sicilian culture. There are some laughs, but what's to be enjoyed here is the meticulous examination of the hypocrisy and idiocy of Sicilian concepts of honor and pride. None of the characters come away looking good or innocent, and the final shot in the film is a brutal but effective commentary on the pointlessness of upholding honour. Pietro Germi was the director, and he did an excellent job of keeping a nice balance between acidic satire and silliness.

The cast is excellent, led by Saro Urzi as Vincenzo. You may recognize him from The Godfather where he played the father of the Sicilian girl Michael Corleone takes as his wife. Choosing Urzi for this role was clearly a tip of the hat to Seduced and Abandoned from Francis Ford Coppola. The cinematography is also good, and the soundtrack by Carlo Rustichelli sounds remarkably like something Ennio Morricone might have created. I wonder who influenced who.

Sicilian codes of honour don't have much contemporary resonance, but the film can still be enjoyed for the sheer craft and pleasure and wit that went into making it. There's a film version of Bell' Antonio and I'm going to have to hunt it down to compare and contrast.

Film Review: The Unknown Woman

I knew nothing about this film, other than it had picked up a load of Donatello awards (Italy's Oscars), as well as being the Italian nominee at the Oscars for best foreign language film in 2007. In a nutshell, the film is about an ex-prostitute (Irena) trying to insinuate herself into the life of an affluent family. She believes that the family's young daughter is actually her daughter. Irena is originally from the Ukraine and came to Italy to work as a prostitute. She fell under the control of a brutal pimp who arranged for the several babies she had to be sold to childless couples. Now, after running away from her pimp, Irena becomes the family's cook, cleaner and nanny, and tries to gain the love of their daughter.

Early on the film looks and feels like a Hitchcockian thriller, thanks to some nice cinematography and Ennio Morricone's score. Eventually, however, it becomes clear that this film is also about the way Italian society relies on thousands of "unknown" women from impoverished countries to act as cleaners, caregivers, sex workers, and even as surrogate mothers. On that level it's subtle and effective, especially thanks to its bittersweet ending.

The thriller aspect of the plot works fairly well, although there a few holes, and one improbably quick recovery from a grievous wound. Kseniya Rappoport as Irena is superb and gives the the film a lot of its power. Well worth seeing.