Film Review: Danger: Diabolik (1968)

I'm not going to say that Danger: Diabolik is a fine film. No film starring John Philip Law, an ambulatory totem pole of an actor, can stake any claim to greatness. It is, however, a wonderful B-movie, even a cult film, and what makes Diabolik special is something that's representative of Italian cinema of the 1960s: a frantic desire to startle and delight the audience with over-the-top visual elements and eccentric soundtracks.

Diabolik (a character from a popular series of Italian comic books) is an anti-hero masterthief who steals from the rich and gives to himself. He wears a ridiculous latex catsuit, kills policemen who get in his way, has an eye-popping underground lair and an equally eye-popping girlfriend, Eva, who wears outfits a stripper would blanch at. The plot has Diabolik stealing jewels and a gold shipment, running afoul of a gangster, and rescuing Eva from a kidnapper. As befits something based on a comic, the action is fast and silly, and the story whizzes by with only a passing wave at logic and the laws of physics. A great many contemporary superhero movies could learn a thing or two from Danger: Diabolik. Here's a taste of what's on offer in the film:

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Lots of critics point to the American cinema of the 1970s as a golden age in filmmaking. Certainly from the point of view of storytelling, directors such as Hal Ashby, Peter Bogdanovich, William Friedkin, Francis Coppola, Bob Rafelson, Sidney Lumet and the like set new standards in what kinds of stories could be told, the honest depiction of sex and violence, and the use of actors who looked like the man or woman on the street rather than groomed movie stars. But for my money the Italian films of the previous decade (with some spillage into the early '70s) were a more true golden age. Italian filmmakers of this era were busy playing with the language of film, finding new ways to use all the tools in the filmmaker's utility belt from sound to costuming to set design to music to cinematography (here's a link to my related post on "gesamtkunstwerk" films).

Federico Fellini would be the poster boy for Italian films of this period. His films are studies in artfully combining all the visual and aural qualities available to a director. If you were asked to think of a memorable moment from any Fellini film from this period you'd most likely recall a scene with extravagant sensory appeal. Ask the same question of, say, a Coppola film from the '70s and you'll most likely think of a scene that's important to the plot or defines a character. To put it another way, American directors were novelists, Italian directors were conceptual artists. Check out this "fashion" show from Fellini's Roma:

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Fellini was far from the only Italian director creating films that used everything in the filmmaker's toolkit. Sergio Leone redefined and deconstructed the western almost entirely through his use of visuals and Ennio Morricone's iconic music. As with Fellini, Leone's most memorable sequences in the Dollars films are those that combine bold cinematography and even bolder music, such as this one:




What the two clips show is that Italian films of that era often seemed to put the cinematography and music in competition, with each element trying to outdo the other in originality and power. American and English films of the time generally don't do this; the music supports the visuals in these films, whereas in Italian cinema it sometimes seems the music is trying to elbow the visuals aside and vice versa. Composers like John Barry and Maurice Jarre composed soundtracks that complemented the film. Morricone, Riz Ortolani, Nino Rota and Carlo Rustichelli produced soundtracks so distinctive it was though they were daring the director to create visuals that lived up to the music.

Michaelangelo Antonioni, Bernardo Bertulucci, Pier Pasolini and Elio Petri can be added to the list of Italian directors maximizing all the possibilities film has to offer, and that brings us to the question of why the Italians and not so much everyone else? I don't really have an answer for that, but I'll toss out a few theories. The first is that many Italian directors came to film after having attained success in other fields. Bertolucci, Pasolini and Fellini were writers first, Petri a political activist, and Mario Bava, the director of Danger: Diabolik, began as a painter. These were people who brought more to the party than a degree from a film school. And then there's Catholicism. Did the intense visual symbolism and pageantry of Catholic churches and religious processions create a strong appreciation for meaning and story transmitted entirely through visual means? Finally, there might be a technical reason for the visual strength of Italian films. It was customary in Italian cinema to "loop" or post-dub all the dialogue. This meant that directors didn't have to worry about the position of sound equipment when framing shots or mapping out camera movements; and because there weren't any flubbed lines to worry about, or time spent coaching actors on their line readings (actors were often told to just count out loud during on-camera dialogue scenes, all the director needed to see was their lips moving), more time could be spent on the look of the film.

Contemporary Italian cinema is a shadow of its former self, but recent films such as Il Divo (2008), Le Quattro Volte (2010)  and Reality (2012) show that there's still some artistic life left in the industry.

Film Review: Malena (2000)

Back in the late 1970s and early '80s my friend Andrew and I were frequent attendees at Toronto's trio of grindhouse cinemas: the Rio, the Biltmore and the Coronet. Of course, back then the term grindhouse didn't exist. We just thought of these theatres as places where for one low price you could watch five extravagantly crappy movies. The patrons were exclusively male and either retired, unemployed or homeless. A lot of snoozing went on at these grindhouses. One of the three had a cat that liked to patrol up and down the aisle, feasting on the mice that hoovered up the spilled popcorn. And the washroom of the Biltmore was either a gay cruising spot or a drug den. I never hung around long enough to find out which.

The bill of fare at these cinemas usually consisted of a kung fu film, a horror/slasher offering, an action movie of some kind (western, cop, adventure), an older A-list film, and finally, and inevitably, some softcore porn. The porn usually took the form of a sex comedy, and they came from the four corners of the world, although by the time they made it to Toronto they were usually heavily scratched and missing whole scenes. And in this way I received a beginner's course in sexy-time world cinema.

Robin Askwith-Jagger

The Brits were represented by the Confessions of (a Window Cleaner/Driving Instructor, etc.) series of films, and, to a less sexy degree, the Carry On films. The Confessions franchise (four in all) starred Robin Askwith, an actor who owed his success to looking like Mick Jagger's brother. Whether he was a better-looking or uglier brother is up for debate. Anyway, Robin's role was always that of a cheery, chirpy working-class bloke, Cockney division, who stumbles and bumbles his way into ogling, or having sex with, a variety of women, most of whom sit a few rungs up on the social ladder. The key point in these films (and the Carry On films) is that the men are generally reluctant Lotharios. They always seem baffled or embarrassed by the prospect of sex. This certainly helps fuel the comedy, but the lesson learned is that Brits find sex to be an essentially ridiculous activity.

As for German sex comedies...well, comedy in reference to anything German is probably stretching a point, but they did try. Their films often took the form of traveler's tales, beginning with a group of men and women meeting in a railway carriage, bar or hotel who decide to pass the time by telling stories of sexual escapades. As a storytelling device this format dates back to Boccaccio's The Decameron, but it was an effective way to trot out six or seven erotic tales. And the Germans were all about the eroticism. No fannying about like the English; the German films kept the comedy at its most basic level ("Oh, no! Your badly-behaved dachsund has torn my dress off!") and moved straight to the romping. Germans seem to take their sex seriously.

American sex comedies ran towards stories about horny teenagers in high school. They were dull and predictable, and the teenagers always looked closer to their thirties than their teens. Occasionally the grindhouse would offer up an older American blue movie, the sort of film that featured tales of wife-swapping and lots of polyester clothing. I'd have to say Americans just don't approach sex with any kind of imagination.

And now we come to the Italians. As you would expect from a country that produced Silvio "Bunga Bunga" Berlusconi, Italian sex comedies have off-the-charts levels of testosterone. The men in these films are inflamed and engorged by the slightest glimpse of a woman's anatomy, and to that end a lot of time is spent in scenes of voyeurism. And once they spot naked female flesh, their exaggerated cries and hoots act like a Greek chorus of lust . Need I mention the accompanying hand gestures and arm waving? Interestingly, these films often had the least amount of actual sex. The whole point of them was apparently to show male desire reaching the boiling point. The other peculiarity of these films is that they often feature young teens (sometimes very young teens) lusting after adult woman and even bedding them. Want another oddity? Each of these films seemed to have a requirement for one terrifically ugly male to end up getting it on with a Sophia Loren lookalike. I suppose the answer to all this weirdness lies in the toxic combination of Catholicism, machismo and patriarchy, but it makes for some awesomely bad and entertaining schlock.

And how does Malena fit into all this? The answer is that it's nothing less than a big budget, epically-scaled version of the classic Italian sex comedy, which thereby makes it possibly the worst Italian film of all time. Why? Because it's attempting to hide it's softcore, exploitation roots behind a patina of production values, top quality cinematography, hordes of extras, and the heady combination of Monica Belluci's sex appeal and acting ability. I hope she got a boatload of lira for this film because the director doesn't miss a chance to exploit her body. When she isn't being spied upon while undressing, she's being groped by a conga line of gargoyle-ugly men. On top of all this we have a boy barely in his teens who worships her from afar and likes to imagine himself in her arms, breasts, legs and so on. The plot? Malena (Belluci) is the town hottie and all the men lust after her. Vile rumours circulate that she's bedding men for money, rumours that everyone is happy to believe in. Malena eventually decides she might as well profit from her reputation and becomes a prostitute, largely because it's the only way she can provide for herself in World War II Italy.

Malena is also a blatant ripoff of Fellini's Amarcord, copying that classic's comic tone and style down to the last detail. There's a definitely a case of copyright infringement here. The other film it steals from is Malizia, a classic cheapo sex comedy from the 1970s starring Laura Antonelli, the Monica Belluci of her day. That film was also rife with voyeurism and horny little boys. The most shocking thing about Malena is the respect it's garnered over the years. There are special edition DVDs, and I wouldn't be surprised if the Criterion Collection added it to its catalogue one of these days. This is further proof, as if any was needed, that the film world is still in the sweaty hands of 16-year-old boys.

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.