1970 - ***
While its lighting is a little flat, this film's got ballsy twists, and the ability to go there without getting depressingly graphic (the severed heads are numerous but humorous). Even though you've got no clue who's who til the final denouement it's worth being confused for a finale that's like having eight Brian De Palma Hitchcock climax wigs coming off at the same time. Plus there's mod clothes and Ultramannish paint swirl credits. Jesus Villa Rojo (?) did the score, which prefigures SILENCE OF THE LAMBS in places, and as long as the lurid topless Auschwitz flashback doesn't get your PC braids in a knot you'll be all right. and if you like mixing metaphors like you're a student at Freud's psychosexual taboo bartending school after a night of banging against the wall trying to study for finals during his roommate's orgy, then you'll be all right. And if you like crazy chicks, you'll love IN THE FOLDS, for THE FLESH is not weak!
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1972 - ***
Edwige Fenech is having weird nightmares ever since the accident that killed her unborn child. Is Richard gaslighting her? Why is he slipping blue powder in her water and refusing to let her see a shrink? Her sister brings her to get psychiatric help while her neighbor has a better idea: that old black magic, in a ritual led by a Robert Downey Jr-esque hippy with blonde hair and long gold fingernails. Meanwhile, is that strange-looking man (Ivan Rassimov) stalking her or is he a hallucination? The 'is there or is there not a guy trying to kill you' aspect makes it all similar to another Italian flick which is almost a near giallo in itself, THE ROMAN SPRING OF MRS. STONE (my review here) - maybe there's just a lot of phantom killer pretty boy gigolos skulking around Europe, or there were in that golden time before AIDS.
COLORS star Edwige Fenech is a sultry icon in some blog circles, and I'll admit she does have nice boots, which look good running amidst the fallen autumnal foliage of England where this film was shot. However I think it was rather a mistake to film this in England; the dreary skies and colorless Tudor architecture are a far cry from the chiaroscuro trimmings of Rome, where most gialli are lensed. Still if that's my only complaint, bravo, and it is, aside from the way Bruno Nicolai's score seems largely ripped from the stuff he conducted two years earlier for Ennio Morricone --that "la la la la" child's singsong motif from BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE is thrown in for almost no reason at all, though I guess it was originally stolen two years before that, from ROSEMARY'S BABY, but that's beside the point. Stealing is part of the culture in Roma! But this is England.
1971 - ***
Argento purists often give CAT the airs, but let me tell you it does the best it can with Karl Malden and James Franciscus in the leads, stead of folk like Jessica Harper and David Hemmings, who made their weird holidays (SUSPIRIA and DEEP RED respectively) in fucked-up continental Europe extra terrifying; their big eyes and little noses helped give them a helpless aura that Malden and Franciscus lacketh.
Argento men need to be feminine and the women masculine to suit his melted-down gender aesthetic: his real-life scary-sexy wife Daria Nicolodi (Asia's mom) played Hemmings' love interest in DEEP RED and watching them together was like feeling chaffed, as if you'd skinned your knee, with that eerie masochistic lower spine tingle for fear mom would put iodine on it. Malden is less iodine and more like oxidized bronze. Franciscus is Heston-painted lead. Neither could in a million years turn out to be drag kings, and there is no place for manly gravitas in Argento (except as red herring eccentrics eating cats and visiting coffin conventions), so when an old ugly hunk of black Irish method is lollygaging around in dark glasses, I may as well be looking in a mirror as bothering with the crappy looking Westflix DVD Netflix keeps sending me. One day I'd like to actually get to see this film. Here's a screenshot from the DVD Netflix sent, followed by one I found online from a 'real' DVD version. Apparently an awesome blu-ray is due by the end of May! So I'll be back on this one laters:
Kitty, I feel your pain.
POSTSCRIPT: I bought the Blu-Ray DVD and its awesome. What a difference. I bumped the rating up to *** at top (from 2) - still this is more of a crime-mystery thriller set in Rome with Americans in it rather than a 'giallo' in the more macabre sense of the term. But on those terms, bravo!
1971 - ***1/2
Sometimes there comes a film like THE FIFTH CORD, that is so good it's impossible to follow, at least when your brain is as toasted as mine was last time I saw this. I recall that Franco Nero smolders and drinks valiantly against the current of ennui and fatalistic Ennio Morricone music; that he bravely exposes the vanity and childish narcissism of handsome, drunk, egotistical men like his character, who have been presuming their charm will melt even the frostiest of ex-wives for so long that even when they realize it's no longer working they can't change it. I recognize the Nero expose' of Italian machismo - and I salute him.
And while all the international architecture and blinds; the roving, knowing camera, crisp sets, and good dubbing elevate this to the top of the giallo food chain, there's a sense of phoniness inside the souls of the characters that not only excuses phoniness in the film, but mirrors it all to create a withering sense of that old Antonioni-esque fatalism. Even when the crippled heiress is being afraid, she's framed beautifully by a lion, or lounging in bed blasting Morricone's organ fugues, elegantly framed in mirrors, shadows and dark yellow curtains, and a gray cat. When she crawls around on the floor the camera catches the sexual frustration in her snake-like wiggle towards the disappearing wheel chair. The blacks are so deep she seems like she's crawling out of the letterbox frame into the outer black bars. And there's a cool use of International style architecture's lines as both prison and protection: every scene is so layered in vertical and horizontal lines that when they finally aren't there the characters seem suddenly, horrifically exposed.
As a recovering alcoholic I recognize myself in Nero's self-deluding eyes, and while the way he slaps around young hoods in motorcycle jumpsuits is commendable, the way he treats women isn't, but the film's cognizant of that and thus it works. Cops with glasses and goofball smiles, typing, smoking and drinking and obscene whispered phone calls from the killer round out the package. As Michael Mackenzie at Home Cinema notes:
"That The Fifth Cord (Giornata Nera per l'Ariete, which translates as "Black Day of the Ram") could pass for a film made by the maestro himself is high praise indeed, and it is to the credit of its director, the elusive Luigi Bazzoni, that the film so perfectly captures the mood of Argento's "Animal Trilogy" without ever coming across as a slavish copy.".
1964 - ***
The film that started it all--the black gloves, the mannequins, the terrified fashion plates--and it's the one that should most be on Blu-ray! It's sooo pretty and rich with the titular textures and deep red gel lighting that the sleazy misogynist relish of lingering on screaming women's faces, necks, and bodies is almost forgivable. After all, it's not the women's or director Mario Bava's, but Roman Catholic culture's fault that Italy invented the Madonna/Whore complex.
Here's why I think it is: the Catholic-Italian suffocating power of a mother's love and guilt trips make your sexual desires painfully ungratified while growing up, and meanwhile the moms of girls you know make sure you're not allowed to get within ten feet of them unsupervised. Even masturbation is a sin, and your mom makes it impossible to try. The giallo is the result of all that pent up sexual poison while chained to mom's apron; the curdled venom of semen retentum distilled into the fantasmatic repressed, lashing out with a phallic blade at those hydra-like apron strings projected on the white blouse wall, and there's nothing wrong with that, if it's via artistic sublimation (pretending to kill women for a movie is much better than to kill them in real life, capito?) Now that we know it's wrong, and why, and why we'll never do it again, can we have cake?
Nice article ,thanks for the information.
ReplyDeleteHey is that Steve Ditko's The Question ?
ReplyDeleteIs that like Mr. A?
ReplyDelete