I'm not saying times are tough, I'm saying now more than ever we could use a man like Aristotle "Telly" Savalas to toss us a shiny lollipop and/or a cigarette and regale us with that marvelously sonorous poli kala voice, that deep octave Greek zest for whatever comes along, that signature oral fixation. And ain't it our good luck he didn't just do Kojak? That show was and is a little too rugged for my taste, but I'm a fan of the man from Garden City, NJ, especially a bunch of wild and wooly films he made in Europe during the early 70s. Sometimes he just pops in for a few scenes, but he always leaves an impression. He steals the show and sometimes saves it from the abyss. Like an actor version of the counterpoint melody in an Ennio Morricone theme, he instinctually recognizes dead areas on the spectrum and fills them in, and always without seeming to ever act at all, at least not in any other role but himself.
Who could forget his sonorous cooing ("remember when you came here? How you hated chiggens? ") as the best of all Blofeldts in maybe the best of all Bonds? How about his swaggering Cossack officer in Horror Express ("Who are da killers? Who? Who are da troublemakas?")? And of course, the the mannequin-toting mephistophelean butler in Lisa and the Devil ("Very little escapes me")? Those films are all classics in their respective ways, largely, or at least partly, because of that charismatic bald-headed, chain-smoking, stuffy nosed Greek-American with that wonderfully sonorous boom of a voice. Paradoxically debonair and earthy, larger than life yet hardly a ham, he'd be perfect doing one man show about the Russian revolution, oscillating between Rasputin, Czar Nicholas, Lenin, Marx, Stalin and even Peter III, crushing every part without even needing a wig. Regardless of whether he's supposed to be Italian, Russian, or Swiss, his characters all disappear into his oceanic vastness. He encompasses them, devours and forgets them without so much a waiver in that groovy New York accent.
Every moment in his company is a treasure. I can't really watch Kojak (too gritty) but man do I want to hang out with him every moment he's in Europe, gluing cracked mannequins back together with him while knocking back cognac and cakes at his fog-wreathed Italian villa, knocking back cognac and cigarettes in his wintry Alpine mountaintop fortress, or knocking back vodka and cigarettes in a cozy Trans-Siberian train station.
On that note, here are the troublemakers.
LISA AND THE DEVIL
(1974) Dir. Mario Bava
Or hell, of course. It is the same.
Obsessed by a little musical carousel of macabre figures chronicling the looped procession of love and death and back around, Lisa begins to wake into that special nightmare we've all had wherein you turn around on a cool autumn afternoon and suddenly its dark and you're all alone and lost in an empty narrow streeted maze in a foreign land, all the windows shuttered and no one in sight. You finally catch a ride in old car from a rich couple (the younger wife having an affair with the chauffeur, the older husband too world-weary to care) But then their car breaks down near a weird old villa where you run up against a cockblocking Hitchcockian matriarch played by Alida Vialli (Suspiria, The Third Man) keeping her deliriously John LaZar-eyed son Maximillian (Alessio Orano) from hooking up with you. And he's..... so lonely. And of course, emceeing the show is Telly as their mephistophelean butler, replete with white gloves and a lollipop since Madame doesn't like smoke in the house. 
Naturally, Lisa looks just like Alessio's dead wife and--when he later corpses her in the same bed as his dead wife's sleeping skeleton, his lonesome kinkiness gets so creepy on so many levels you just have to laugh a mirthless mocking laugh. Then it's like he hears you, and thinks it's his dead wife's ghostly mocking, ringing out at what was probably his inability to get it up with a girl who could look back at him; eventually she takes a lover, who of course ends up cracked in the head, and of course he's also the cracked mannequin she sees in the beginning. Yes, this is a zone where mannequins come to life and play the parts of long dead lovers or whomever is needed, and the killer kills them. Funeral marches are held on the spot, as the latest body is wheeled around on a serving cart through the vast semi-decayed mansion, around in an endless procession, life to death, two by two, in procession, crib and corpse cart all bound up in one ornate dessert tray. So much death being around, a whole lavish room of the mansion has been converted to a wake/funeral parlor, which Alessio later tries to change into a marriage chapel by kicking over the plethora of decaying wreaths. Of course for him it's really all the same, but he's too far gone to see the music box procession tightening around his neck with a song i
n its black heart. And that song is of course Rodrigo's Concerto of Aranjuez.
Depending on your affection for that 'giant pointed 70s collar out over smoking jacket lapel' look Alessio sports you may not like the fashions. And if the score was Morricone twang instead of lush, endlessly repeating orchestrations of Rodrigo's Concerto of Aranjuez or if Bava was his own cinematographer and giving us his usual deep painterly colors instead of the twinkly romantic haze offered by DP Cicilio Panaqua (union rules dictated the film needed a Spanish DP), this would be Bava's best 70s work, but hey, there's interesting giallo-esque sing-song motif playing under all the broken clock cutaways, of which there are enough to rival Bergman's Wild Strawberries.
And I almost forgot, whether macking on a lollipop the color of Elke's raincoat, dropping double meaning Satanic inferences like "very little escapes me," sneaking one of the chauffeur's cigarettes before loudly admonishing him for smoking indoors when the blind Madame complains, or wryly talking to himself and having a good time drinking cognac and repairing mannequins, Telly loves the screen, and he loves you, baby, and the screen loves Telly. Devil or not, he's divine. Some say his performance swamps the rest of the film; it becomes the Telly show. But you can't blame the devil for doing the devil's work.
(1969) Dir. Peter R. Hunt
George Lazenby's first and last Bond is also the one where he goes undercover as a posh British snob and then later gets married and then cries when he loses her. He also goes undercover as a poncy genealogist to infiltrate Blofeldt's top of the Alps allergy clinic. Between the crying and the poncy airs, and all falling in love and showing weakness, Lazenby was derided as a weak, bland, snobby Bond. But criticizing Lazenby for having range isn't really fair. I can't even imagine Connery being vulnerable or actually dimming down his swagger and actually turning dull, stiff and pompous to go undercover as a dull genealogist or falling in love, not in a tacky way, but in a real way. Especially in the 60s, for some reason, the public rejected a good actor as Bond-- they want a handsome mannequin tough guy to project themselves on. So Pierce Brosnan is picked over Timothy Dalton, and it's not really until Daniel Craig that we finally get both, and then some. But for Craig's era, men were allowed to cry. We'd all gone WEAK!
Lazenby's Bond has since been reappraised in today's more socially enlightened clime, and we can't help but admire how he fearlessly puts on a posh droning bore professor demeanor that--on closer viewing--is a dead-on impression of the posh genealogist who briefed him. So rather than label Lazenby dull, why not blame Salzman and Broccoli for daring to expand a working, beloved formula into something more meaningful. I guess it's like if Michael Myers started talking, or Groucho Marx decided to do a serious dramatic role, sans mustache and cigar and glasses. Even if they nailed it, and the movie was great, maybe later on hailed as a masterpiece, the damage to the characters cohesiveness would be done. Fans would consider it a betrayal. And rightly. The movie is not made for them, but for the future audiences to finally appreciate. 1969 was a year of major upheavals, of course, so Bond was simultaneously an imperialist relic for the hippies and a source of macho comfort for the hard-hats. This sensitive Bond was a source of alarm for a core audience whose idea of a swinging sexually-satisfied super-hipster was being directly threatened both onscreen and off.
And another one who got slightly drubbed is Savalas, who for some makes a funny Blofeldt. And he is, but there's no way you can say a line like "to begin with, I was born without ear lobes" and keep a totally straight face and yet let you know he's cracking up deep inside?
Me, I always crack up when Bond's mountain fortress conquest throws herself to sleep at the sound of Telly's voice booming out with mind control tape and color lights: "You remember when you first came here? How you hated chiggens?" Savalas' nicotine perma-cold nasal voice can't do the hard-K but he makes up with it by turning the cooing Telly magic on full blast. It's just so random ---no chickens have even been mentioned up to now. Nor are any ever seen. Filthy things. But Telly gets the ladies over that hump: "But all of that is over now.. I've taught you to love chickens.. to love their flesh, their voice..."
But I love that he doesn't put on any phony airs--he's already bald so that's covered but rather than get all feline like Dr. No or Donald Pleasance's or Charles Gray-ish like Charles Gray, he just stays himself but with more of a self-satisfied air. You get the impression he could be launching this cockeyed 'Vida Omega" scheme, or speeding along in his luge, or doing any other macho cool thing Bond can do as well as, in the end, getting the ultimate revenge by sten gunning Bond's bride and then making him cry like a little bitch!
And though she's nowhere near the level of Lotte Lenya, Ilse Stepatt comes off like Divine crossed with a German shepherd as Blofeldt's butch administrative assistant/enforcer. Together they're as tenacious and relentless as Bond in that justifiably renowned downhill skiing to parade to ice rink, to car chase sequence, the grim shadow to Bond and Emma Peel - who does some great defensive driving to show she's just as capable and cool as anyone else, and so there's a much more even match between them, which is refreshing, as it's almost always Bond and his target gallery while the villain just boasts of his master plan and then maybe blows up. Savalas is more like a gypsy than royalty, but unlike so many others in his role, he seems at ease and believable as someone who enjoys being evil for the sake of it, like a true megalomaniac, which explains why he's so quick to brag out his plan to Bond, that's what those guys do - they can't not do it. Yet he's also legit believable as a leader--the type who wouldn't throw a lackey to a shark just for failing some difficult task
HORROR EXPRESSOriginal title: Pánico en el Transiberiano
(1972) Dir Eugenio Martin
This Spanish-British horror union of Horror Express (1972) is really the best of everything--the best pairing of Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing (as posh scientists), Alberto de Mendoza as a superstitious priest playing the Rasputin to a bemused young countess (Silvia Tortosa) and her older inventor husband), and the best 'frozen ape man/alien defrosts aboard the Orient Express' film ever. The Chariots of the Gods-savvy script zips along most pleasingly and in addition to the countess there are several strong female characters, including Miss Jones ((Alice Reinheart) the droll older assistant to Cushing who wryly sizes up the other women and delivers acidic bon mots: a sultry corporate spy (Helga Liné) and a lady passenger, friend for the countess (Faith Clift)
I love train films in general but when they switch tracks as deftly as this one, like when a drop of ocular fluid from the ape man's eye is seen under the microscope revealing images of dinosaurs and what the earth looks like from outer space. But that's not the reason that superstitious beady-eyed monk steals it off the tray and offers it to its new host, the detective investigating the first murder, now possessed, flipping over to worship him as the devil ("thy will be done as it is in Hell!"). Hey, he plays the favorite, you can't blame him. Or can you?
As a fan of classic Mexican horror I also notice a lot of weird similarities between the Horror Express alien and its habid sucking brain contents through the victim's eyes and the comet-riding, brain-sucking baron in The Brainiac (1961). They even both drink the brain of an inventor of a new steel that can withstand a flight to space, so they can each presumably build a rocket to finally leave this shitty brain-dead planet, if they ever get a chance. The alien may be relentless here, hopping from body to body, but his possessed characters hint at the intense centuries of loneliness it's gone through and we also feel for it. Crash-landed here long before life even began, working his way up from single cells up to the caveman he was then frozen in since the last Ice Age; it's bound to make anyone a little desperate.
All that is rather marvelous, but then comes the final perfect late-inning addition as scene stealer Telly Savalas and his Cossack crew come barging onto the train once it stops on the Siberian border, rocking his usual awesome ridiculous hamminess after receiving orders to board the train and take charge, rounding up everyone in first class in the dining car and giving them the collective third degree: "Who are da killas!? WHO!??" he shouts at them, waving his gun and whip around. "Who are da trubble makers!?" We love you, Telly!
"You're excellency," says the possessed cop, "I'm a police inspector." He shouts back "Everybody here Is UNDER ARREST!
The alien red eyes sucks up information way fast, especially the count's knowledge of metallurgy, but we get a tragic and profound sense of science still having a long way to go before we can escape the gravity of these archaic bone machines, and return to our true home... out there, in a galaxy far away.
With plenty of droll humor, lush atmosphere, nonstop action, no wasted time on pathos or some lame romance, instead there's this liberating feeling that everything that happens is quickly disseminated through the passengers and crew, taken as fact rather than scoffed at, "you mean to tell me a two million year old ape man is alive on this train, killed the baggage man and locked him in the crate all neat and tidy!?" / "YES!" and all of it building to its apocalyptic finale as Telly's men get their brains wiped out by those glowing red eyes (but that's just the start of it, once the light goes out. The result of all this makes Horror Express a shining jewel in the Euro-horror crown. And Telly, you bald-headed bounty of badass bliss, who loves ya? Europe, since it's smart, and me of course (don't ya think ahm smaht?!). You're the walking talking equivalent of a warm fire, ready to burn you or save your life if you need thawing. And damn do we ever.
