Summer of Santo: The Diabolical Hatchet (José Díaz Morales, 1965)

 After taking a well-earned break from Mexico’s cinema screens following his memorable visit to The Wax Museum, Santo, The Man in the Silver Mask, returned some eighteen months later to face an altogether more intractable problem in director José Díaz Morales’ ‘The Diabolical Hatchet’ (‘El Hacha Diabólica’, 1965).

Turning to my go-to source of info on Luchadore cinema, the late Todd Stadtman’s Lucha Diaries website, I learn that ‘The Diabolical Hatchet’ was actually one of a series of quickie, low budget pictures The Man in the Silver Mask made for producer Luis Enrique Vergara, following the completion of his prior contract with the slightly more up-market Filmadora Panamericana.

Now, I’ve previously had bad experiences with jumping blindly into these off-brand, Vergara-produced Santo movies (witness the listless Santo Attacks The Witches from '64), but rest assured - though its budgetary constraints are plainly evident, ‘The Diabolical Hatchet’ at least hits way above its class in terms of sheer weirdness - which is the main thing that draws us to these films in the 21st century, let’s face it.

In fact, this one actually turns out to be something of a crack-brained pulp masterpiece, compressing an epic tale of time travel, diabolism, hereditary super powers, atavistic hauntings, Manichean dualism and the cyclical nature of myth into 74 minutes and still finding time for both several extended wrestling bouts and loads of boring footage of people walking from one place to another.

Right from the outset, the film immediately wrong-foots viewers, as we see a procession of hooded, torch-bearing monks bearing a stretchered body toward a funeral service. As the solemn corpse-bearers progress through several moody shots, we gradually realise that the body they are carrying is that of none other than El Santo himself!

Furthermore, when the monks reach their destination, they lower our hero into a tomb bearing the legend, ‘Santo, El Enmascarado de Plata - Year of Our Lord 1603’.

What the hell is going on here?! I don’t know, but I bet you’re dying to find out, right?

After the chief monk has intoned a moving eulogy, declaring that the departed El Santo was “a man who knocked on our door many years ago, seeking peace and rest”, and who “fought against the dark forces which came after him and woman dear to his heart,” the brothers file out of the crypt, only to be replaced at the graveside by menacing figure clad in black boots, a black wrestling tunic and an executioner’s hood, wielding - yes - a bloody great hatchet.

“I won’t ever let you rest,” gloats The Black Mask (for it is he), “I will follow you through time until I carry out my vengeance!”

And with that, we jump forward to the twentieth century, where Modern Day Santo is performing some rather half-hearted warm-up exercises in his dressing room before the evening’s big match at The Coliseum. (I found it spiriting to observe that the champion’s routine actually resembles my own morning exercises - which are no grand spectacle, let me assure you, readers.)

Anyway, our hero’s subsequent bout is rudely interrupted when The Black Mask appears out of thin air waving his axe around, and basically begins trying to fuck shit up. Unfortunately, the villain proves a tough man to bring down, but the combined efforts of El Santo, his original opponent in the match, the referee and several members of the audience eventually prevail, forcing the supernatural blaggard to beat a hasty, spectral retreat.

Understandably spooked following a further incident in which the Black Mask attacks him at night in his bed (the curtains in his high rise apartment are lovely), Santo turns for advice to the latest in a long line of learned scientist-friends whose daughters he happens to be dating. (As his fans will be aware, El Santo’s passion for scientists with beautiful daughters rivals even that of Fu Manchu in those Harry Alan Towers-scripted movies.)

Evidently a man of wide-ranging talents, Santo’s scientist-friend (sadly I have been unable to identify the actor who plays him on this particular occasion) immediately confirms the titular hatchet (abandoned by its own following his night time escapade) does indeed date from the 17th century, and notes that it is inscribed with “a symbol of evil, the powers of Satan” (ie, a skull and cross-bones).

Moved by the doctor’s observations, Santo is seemingly prompted to begin making an absolutely astonishing revelation about his own origins.

So, as it turns out, El Enmascarado de Plata’s iconic mask and cloak were actually bequeathed to him by his father, and are made of a mysterious, indestructible material which also helps charge him with energy in times of need. Sewn into Santo’s mask is a triangle inscribed with repetitions of the word “ABRACADABRA”.

“The word abracadabra comes from the name of a wise man who practiced the science of good, called Abraca,” the doctor informs us, rather questionably, after consulting one of inevitable dusty volumes of occult lore.

This disconcerting discussion of El Santo’s metaphysical origins is interrupted however when, right on cue, lightning strikes, and a female ghost whom Santo is inexplicably able to identify as “Isabel” (played by his frequent co-star Lorena Velázquez) appears, warning our hero that he must destroy The Black Mask, a feat which can only by accomplished by removing said mask and laying bare the evil-doer’s face.

She also says this, which is kind of cool:

How to solve a problem like this then, eh? Well, waiting until the bugger next shows up and pulling his mask off would seem like a satisfactory plan to me, and, clearly conscious of the fact the movie has another 45 minutes or so left to run, the doctor has an alternative suggestion for getting to the bottom of things.

“I can send you into the past, Santo,” he announces within seconds of the ghost’s departure, “you can solve the mystery.”

Naturally, the big man is up for the challenge, and, if you were wondering what that weird machine which looks like a radio set with a kind of modernist wind vane sticking out of the top of it in the corner of the doctor’s under-furnished lab is, well… guess what;

Back in ‘the past’ (presumably the late 16th century), we’re treated to a series of murky, rather poorly staged vignettes concerning a romantic rivalry played out between two Zorro-esque masked caballeros - one of whom of course wears a white mask, the other black - who are competing the affections of the still-very-much-alive Isobel.

These scenes seem to be attempting, rather shoddily it must be said, to replicate the feel of a contemporary historical melodrama, but, even here, high weirdness abounds.

Spurned by Isobel, the Black Caballero retreats to his taxidermy-strewn subterranean lair, where he… kneels before the altar of a moth-eaten bat god named Ariman, apparently.

Considerably upping the ante on his conflict with The White Caballero, the bad guy pledging his eternal soul to his diabolical master, in exchange for possession of Dona Isobel. He is, of course, swiftly transformed into The Black Mask, and heads off, axe in hand, to kidnap his beloved. Returning to his regulation gothic horror dungeon, he then attempts to win her heart by chaining her to the wall and waving piles of the jewels in her face whilst gloating like a fiend, the ol’ charmer. 

Not to be outdone, the Good Caballero responds to this provocation by hiking out into the desert and consulting a benign, white-haired hermit / wizard man who lives in a poorly wrought polystyrene cave. This is, of course, a descendant of the aforementioned Abraca.

“You will never use weapons to fight your enemies,” the hermit tells his visitor, “for that would destroy your strength and eclipse your heart’s kindness. You will fight against the forces of evil for generations to come. You are now Santo, the Man in the Silver Mask.”

And thus, our hero is born - well over three hundred years earlier than was previously assumed to have been the case.

It’s difficult to convey just how bizarrely off-kilter this hastily bolted on origin story feels, over a decade into El Santo’s real life career as a wrestler and public figure. 

Drawing comparisons is difficult, but… let’s just say that it’s as if you went to see the latest James Bond movie, and Bond suddenly revealed that he was actually part of a lineage of smarmy establishment thugs dating back to the crusades, and that the thread of his tuxedo had been blessed by Merlin the Magician, or somesuch. Unexpected, to say the least.

Given that the spirit of 20th century Santo has travelled back in time to observe the heroic rebirth of his noble ancestor, you would think the natural next step would be for the filmmakers to raise the implication of what happens when he bumps into his outwardly identical 16th century forebear, but… mercifully perhaps, the possibilities arising from that one are skipped over. In fact, I think the implication is that Santo and his scientist-friend have merely returned to the past ‘in spirit’, helpfully allowing them to view a bunch of pre-edited flashbacks.

Anyway, after a bit more uneventful scrapping on the one bit of suitably old looking street which the filmmakers were able to shoot their 16th century segments on, The Black Mask finds himself arrested by the inquisition, who naturally take a dim view of him marauding around the place calling upon the powers of his diabolical gods and suchlike. Thus, we’re treated to one of the stranger reiterations the famed opening of Mario Bava’s ‘Black Sunday’ (1960) you’re ever likely to see.

As 16th Century Santo calmly looks on, the black-clad miscreant is burned at the stake, vowing infernal vengeance against his opponent’s descendants, before - in a winningly peculiar twist on the formula - he escapes the flames by transforming into a particularly scrappy looking, rather overweight bat and making his wobbly, wire-bound exit, accompanied by a deluge of traditional bad guy cackling.

Once 20th century Santo has returned to the present day, back story duly filled in, fight fans in the film’s original audience may have been forgiven for assuming that ‘El Hacha Diabólica’ was finally about to settle down into a pattern of more traditional, down-to-earth luchadore business, as our hero inevitably sets about breaking the curse by removing his supernatural antagonist’s mask in the manner which comes most naturally to a seasoned grappler.

And indeed, several extended, fixed camera bouts between El Santo and The Black Mask do follow in quick succession, but, even here in its final stages, ‘Diabolical Hatchet’ is still determined to be as weird as hell.

In particular, I enjoyed the plot point which sees Santo determine that he must lay to rest the spirit of Isobel, by tracking down the location of the basement in which The Black Mask imprisoned her. Excitingly, The Champion of the People achieves this goal by sitting at his desk, studiously consulting an enormous reference work cataloguing colonial-era buildings.

This pursuit obsesses him to such an extent that, when his latest girlfriend (the daughter of the professor, of course) calls late at night to let him know that, “something terrible is happening here,” as lightning strikes and shadow of The Black Mask looms upon her wall, instead of nobly rushing off to save her as we might reasonably expect, Santo takes an uncharacteristically cynical approach, merely calling the police and informing them that a woman has just been murdered at a certain address, dutifully promising to take his revenge upon the killer, before returning to his reading! 

(“Just tell your boss Santo called,” he growls down the phone line, briefly turning the movie into some kind of morbidly surreal film noir.)

In technical terms, it must be said that ‘The Diabolical Hatchet’ is no great shakes. Though the extensive nods to Poe-derived gothic horror are a nice touch, we're a far cry from the era’s more lavishly appointed Mexican gothics. Morales’ direction is pretty perfunctory, largely comprising awkwardly-framed, point-and-shoot medium shots, whilst the sets are threadbare, the performances muted, and… oh boy, all those extended scenes of people walking from one place to another really become intolerable after a while.

The most egregious example of this phenomenon is a sequence at the film’s conclusion in which, having finally discovered the ancient house in which The Black Mask’s historical depredations were committed, our hero proceeds to walk around every inch of it very s-l-o-w-l-y for six solid minutes… right at the point at which any sensible action-adventure movie would be gearing up for its rip-roaring finale! 

Admittedly, Santo walks like a boss, but still, it is rather perplexing to see this kind of blatant padding employed to such an extent in the midst of a film which, as I think has been demonstrated above, contains enough crazy ideas to keep the wheels spinning for hours, if only the filmmakers had bothered to explore them properly.

Once again though, it is the sheer, shameless weirdness of ‘El Hacha Diabólica’ which makes it worth seeking out. From wantonly assigning a previously unguessed at mystic / supernatural origin story to an otherwise earth-bound franchise character, to creating its own highly specific yet totally random mythology of demons and wizards, to the callous murders of several major characters at the hands of the gloating villain…. its total refusal to give a fuck about the continuity and conventions governing pop cinema storytelling make it feel more like a story written by an imaginative eleven year old than a professional screenwriter.

Three months after ‘El Hacha Diabólica’s release, Santo was back on solid ground, taking on ‘The Strangler’ in René Cardona’s ‘Santo vs El Estrangulador’; must have been a relief after this caper.

I mean, I can't absolutely say for sure, but what’s the betting that, in the course of his myriad subsequent adventures, Santo never again deigned to mention that he and his ancestors were gifted with magical powers by the descendent of a wizard named Abraca, or that his mask and cloak date from the 16th century and convey protective and restorative powers?

Well, modesty is one of the Champion of the People’s many virtues, I suppose. He probably wouldn’t want to shout it from the rooftops, would he? I’m sure a few bewildered kids who ended up stuck in front of this one at the Saturday matinee had a few tales to tell the playground about Santo’s secret origin story, and I’m sure they wished they’d never bothered, as the strange tale of Ariman and Abraca and Santo’s distant Caballero ancestor faded into (probably quite justified) obscurity. 

 

Krimi Casebook: The Green Archer (Jürgen Roland, 1961)

It’s been far too long since we last took a peek into the head-spinning world of Rialto Films’ series of West German Edgar Wallace adaptations, so what better way to get re-acquainted with their particular brand of ersatz-English weirdness than by screening 1961’s ‘The Green Archer’ (or ‘Der Grüne Bogenschütze’, as the Germans more poetically have it)?

This was the fourth entry in the series insofar as I can make out, released just one month prior to Alfred Vohrer’s definitive The Dead Eyes of London, and… it certainly gets off to a flying start.

Thunder crashes, and lightning splits a tree in the midst of a field of rain-lashed stock footage countryside overlooking an imposing gothic manor house. Immediately kicking a few bricks out of the ol’ fourth wall, series mascot / comic relief supremo Eddi Arent adjusts his regulation Stan Laurel-esque bowler and speaks straight to camera; “You couldn’t possibly make a movie out of this. Impossible!”

The scene, we gradually realise, is a dark and stormy night in Garre Castle, wherein elegantly attired secretary / caretaker Julius Savini (Harry Wüstenhagen, looking rather like a young Martin Landau) is conducting a public tour, apparently without the permission of his absent employer.

Arent’s characteristically eccentric reporter character (he works ‘for the newsreels’, and carries an antiquated box camera, despite this film being set in the early 1960s) is among the guests at this rare function, who, helpfully, are in the process of being briefed by Savini on the legend of The Green Archer - an emerald-hued avenger who is said to have fought against the house’s tyrannical medieval owners back in the 12th century, and whose spirit is now alleged to haunt the joint.

Quite why the aforementioned tyrannical owners chose to retain a statue of this irksome individual in their study is anyone’s guess, but… there ya go.

As the tour moves on, an elderly gentleman lingers, carefully examining the statue of the archer with an eyeglass. Shortly thereafter, the man turns up dead, with a bloody great green arrow sticking out of his back!

In true Krimi style, the other guests respond to this cold-blooded slaying with a mixture of amusement and mild annoyance, whilst a crash zoom brings us back into Arent’s confidence. “Yes, I think this will make a very nice movie,” he concludes.

Roll credits (featuring more rollickingly weird, Peter Thomas-esque music from the delightfully named Heinz Funk), and…. before we know it, we’re being haphazardly introduced to a bewildering multitude of loosely sketched out characters and sub-plots. Trying to keep track of what the hell is actually going on here in fact proves quite challenging, but, for the sake of this review, I’ll gird my loins and try to give it my best shot.

So, first of all, there’s this wealthy young man named John Wood (Heinz Weiss), who appears to have bought the abandoned building which sits opposite the gates to Garre Castle, with the intention of turning it into an orphanage. (“Bringing happiness to children is my greatest joy,” he exclaims, not at all suspiciously, shortly before we see his face reflected in a broken mirror.)

He is accompanied in this mission both by Valerie (the flawlessly beautiful Karin Dor), and by a silver-haired gent who appears to be her father, though the exact relationship between these three characters remains somewhat unclear. Valerie is apparently in desperate search of her biological mother, and believes (for reasons which also initially remain mysterious) that she can make progress in this direction by snooping around Garre Castle. As such, I suppose the implication must be that she is a former resident of one of the other orphanages administered by Weiss, and that the silver-haired fellow must be her adoptive father, but… who knows.

Anyway, Valerie also appears to be involved in secret tryst with one Mr LaMotte (top-billed Klausjürgen Wussow), whom we initially meet lurking around in a darkened room in her new home. It subsequently turns out though that he is actually a police inspector working undercover, and in this capacity he subsequently pops up, cunningly disguised behind a set of false whiskers, as a kind of handyman / wood carrier within the castle.

In doing so, he is replacing yet another ancillary character, an even shiftier, disgruntled handyman who some comes a-cropper, becoming the second latter-day victim of The Green Archer after inviting Arent’s reporter character back to his bungalow in, uh, Stanmore, apparently (hmm, someone’s been looking at the tube map, methinks) to dish the dirt on his employer.

This leads us on to the police contingent, sadly not headed up on this occasion not by everyone’s favourite playboy detective Joachim Fuchsberger or his principal Sir John, but by the rather more down-at-heel, fish-faced Inspector Higgins (Wolfgang Völz). He and his unequally unmemorable crew of underlings are of course soon all over Garre Castle like a rash, though they initially seem less intent on solving the attention-grabbing murder that has recently occurred there than they are on merely keeping tabs on the house’s errant and disreputable owner (of whom more later).

Meanwhile, there’s also this gargantuan, bald-headed fellow named ‘Coldharbour Smith’ knocking about. Resplendent in white suit and dark glasses, Coldharbour Smith (played by Stanislav Ledinek) runs “a disreputable nightclub down by the docks”, named ‘The Shanghai Bar’. (In a regrettably lazy touch, this more urban locale is introduced via stock footage of Piccadilly Circus - an area of London not notably close to any “docks”.)

Within the rather groovy, tiki-styled interior of the Shanghai Bar, we are introduced to an additional floozy (Edith Teichmann) whom, it transpires, is the wife of Julius Savini (you remember, the castle secretary guy), and who also appears to be somehow involved in… whatever the hell it is that may or may not be going on in or around Garre Castle.

Amidst this scattered and salty crew however, by far the most memorable character in the film turns out to be the aforementioned owner of the castle, Abel Bellamy (Gert Fröbe), who eventually arrives, disembarking from a flight at good ol’ London Airport, having apparently just spent some time over in the USA.

Indeed, although you wouldn’t necessarily know it from the German language track, Bellamy is meant to be FROM the USA, where he appears to made his name as a notorious, Al Capone-styled gangster who, for some reason, has bought himself a historic English manor house, where he wishes to live in privacy.

Fat chance of that however, as he is mobbed by a phalanx of reporters at the airport, firing questions at him about his unsavoury associations back in Chicago, and the murder which just took place on his property. A bullish and aggressive man whose Churchillian girth surpasses even that of Coldharbour Smith, Bellamy responds with rage, intimidation and violence - qualities which continue to define his interactions with pretty much everyone through the remainder of the movie.

Now, if you’re wondering how all of the above is able to coalesce into a coherent plotline, well… cards on the table, I haven’t the faintest idea. Simultaneously horrendously convoluted and hopelessly vague, Wolfgang Schnitzler and Wolfgang Menge’s adaptation of Wallace’s 1923 novel represents a singularly unsatisfactory example of the screenwriter’s art. (1)

In fact, by the time the thread of the narrative degenerates into a repetitive series of nocturnal creeping about, confinements and escapes during the latter half of the film, it’s probably best just to give up trying to figure things out, and just go with the flow.

After all, we have essentially got everything a Krimi fan could ask for at easy reach here. A creepy, ancient house full of labyrinthine corridors, complete with the inevitable secret passage leading down to a set of subterranean caverns; an over-stuffed cast of shifty, scheming oddballs; touches of urban modernity provided by nightclubs and gangsters; and, most importantly, some loon in a costume derived from a medieval spectre, running around murdering extraneous characters in a suitably outlandish manner.

Jürgen Roland’s direction is… decent. Though he lacks the attention-grabbing eccentricity of Alfred Vohrer or the pulp kineticism of Harald Reinl, he nonetheless utilises some stylish framing here, revelling in the pleasures of cramped, chaotic, multi-layered compositions, perhaps mirroring the film’s tangled plotting. He rarely fails to arrange the all-too-numerous figures on-screen into interesting patterns anyway, throwing in plenty of nice, looming foreground objects and subtle, gliding camera moves to keep things lively whilst he’s at it.

He is greatly aided in this by both Heinz Hölscher’s top notch black and white photography, and Mathias Matthies & Ellen Schmidt’s splendid production design, which incorporates many of those neat little props and macabre oddities found in all the best Rialto Krimis. (The skull and crossbones flag appended to castle gates to warn of an electric fence, the arm of the archer statue serving as the secret passage lever and the scurvy stuffed monkey in the interior of the bar, provide just a few examples).

The cast do solid work too, on the whole. I found Arent a lot less annoying here than in some other films in the series (or, perhaps I’m just gradually warming up to his unique comic stylings, god help me). Dor meanwhile is absolutely radiant, and Frobe certainly makes an impression as perpetually furious Abel Bellamy (both he and Ledinek’s Coldharbour Smith prove great heavies).

It’s a shame then, that - as I may have already mentioned once or twice - the film’s egregious scripting deficiencies mean that none of these qualities ever quite gel together the way they should.

Despite providing a fair amount of ambient / aesthetic enjoyment, ‘The Green Archer’ eventually sinks under weight of its own convolutions, combined with a lack of any fully sympathetic or charismatic characters, and a failure to deliver anything truly memorable or outlandish.

Most egregiously, The Green Archer himself is given very little to do, ultimately playing only a minor role in proceedings. A decision seems to have been taken to keep the phantom bowman either entirely off-screen or confined to the shadows, which strikes me as a very bad move. After all, the titular evil-doers in Monk with a Whip or The Face of the Frog weren’t at all shy about turning up to wreak on-camera havoc on a regular basis, lending a sense of berserk surrealism to proceedings which is sorely missed here.

That said though, after dragging rather dreadfully through its middle half hour, ‘The Green Archer’ does at least come to life a bit in its final ten minutes, briefly descending into all-out chaos as Abel Bellamy launches all-out war against the men of Scotland Yard, who are attempting to lay siege to his castle.

Suddenly, we’ve got machine guns blazing, detectives brandishing fizzing, cartoon-style bombs, half the remaining cast desperately trying to escape from one of those classic rapidly flooding dungeons, Eddi Arent roaring around in a weird little car… and all is right with the world.

This is all topped off with my favourite bit of ersatz-English weirdness in the film, which occurs during the the closing wrap-up scene, where we find a burly police constable moving between the shell-shocked survivors, sternly offering them “TEA WITH RUM” - a hearty beverage which seems to perfectly capture the essence of this uniquely odd sub-genre, and which I will henceforth make a point of enjoying each time I brave a visit to Krimi-land.

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(1)Quoth IMDB trivia: “The producers originally wanted Wolfgang Schnitzler to become on of the regular writers of their Edgar Wallace Series. When Schnitzler’s script of this film was re-written by Jürgen Roland’s regular screenwriter Wolfgang Menge, Schnitzler was displeased and decided to leave the series.”

Deathblog: Kenneth Anger (1926-2023)

“I’ve always considered movies evil; the day that cinema was invented was a black day for mankind.” —Kenneth Anger, 2002

And so we say farewell to Kenneth Anger, a man whose influence runs through the underground of 20th century American culture like a particularly potent seam of viscous, glimmering oil.

Normally, it would be unusual to apply such superlatives to an artist whose core body of work over 50+ years essentially consists of one book and a couple of hours of film, but Anger’s key works - into which category I would place the trilogy of ‘Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome’ (1954), ‘Scorpio Rising’ (1963) and ‘Invocation of the Demon Brother’ (1969), along with ‘Hollywood Babylon’ (published 1959) - are so densely packed, reflecting and refining so many parallel streams of culture, and setting off such explosive series of artistic/aesthetic chain reactions in their wake, that each of them feels monumental in stature.

And, that’s before we even factor in his presence as a central instigator/lightning rod for what we might broadly term Californian High Weirdness, and an observer/participant in many of the weirdest, wildest, scariest and (ultimately) most transformative moments in mid-century culture. More so than merely a guy with his finger on the pulse, he often seemed (in keeping with persona as a self-styled grand magus) as if he was the one setting, or at least quickening, that pulse (for better or for worse).

Indeed, what I find so remarkable (nay frightening) about the films I’ve listed above is that, more-so than just boiling down their respective cultural moments into a heady, psycho-active sludge, they seem to pre-empt (or, in keeping with Anger’s core belief that the act of viewing one of his films equates to participating in his magic(k)al practice, actively invoke) a psychic darkness lurking just over the horizon.

In ‘..Pleasuredome’ - so resonant of opium-soaked cocktail lounge exotica and the spirit of mystical/irrational/‘unAmerican’ weirdness germinating within the shadows of old Hollywood and the West Coast Military Industrial Complex during the 1950s that it might as well be soundtracked with theremins and spliced with footage from ‘Forbidden Planet’ - we can already see the drift toward decadence and narcissism which would wreak havoc on the lives of some of the film’s participants as the excesses of bohemian lifestyles took hold.

Then, a few years later in ‘Scorpio Rising’, we see the unstoppable juggernaut of American POP crushing all before it, revealed in its pure, pagan strangeness (and indeed queerness), filtered this time through a lens of MK Ultra LSD, casting Brando in ‘The Wild One’ and his retinue of clones as the quasi-futurist storm troopers of the flaming, maximalist, self-immolating culture to come, as U.S. consumer capitalism spread across the globe. It remains such an overwhelming experience that it’s oft-referenced role as a pivotal precursor to both gay fetish aesthetics and MTV-era video editing seem almost like side notes.

And in ‘..Demon Brother’, first screened in mid-1969 (exact dates seem to be disputed), we see the imminent black nightmare spirit of Manson and Atlamont practically conjured and made flesh before our eyes, as nameless rituals are conducted in what looks like the dankest basement in Haight Ashbury, where soon-to-be convicted murderer Bobby Beausoleil holds court as Lucifer, intercut with footage of U.S. marines descending upon the Vietnamese jungle, as clouds of noxious hash smoke seep from a skull-shaped bong and Mick Jagger (warming up for ‘Performance’) wheezes out a horrendous, atonal din on his shiny new Moog; a film almost too evil to exist.

Which seems like an appropriate note to bring us on to the way that, as a personality, Anger almost seems to have functioned entirely outside the framework by which we might usually judge a person’s beliefs and behaviour. By any conventional standard, he proved himself over the years to be spiteful, mean, narcissistic, duplicitous, vengeful and borderline unhinged, instigating public feuds and outrages at seemingly every opportunity (his disruption of Curtis Harrington’s memorial service providing an especially unforgiveable example), and turning the majority of his friends and collaborators against him at one point or another. Yet, taken on his own terms, this all just seemed like part of the package - an essential component of a man who defined himself as existing beyond good and evil, and followed that philosophy through to the bitter end.

Almost by definition, the vast majority of magickal practitioners and edgelord types who embrace ‘The Left Hand Path’ are unspeakable arseholes whose lives end in justifiable misery, but Anger strikes me as an incredibly rare example of an individual who - more so even than his beloved Crowley - seemed to thrive on an atmosphere of lies, obfuscation and psychic aggression, as evidenced by his apparent ability to hold back the ravages of time, passing away earlier this month (sharp and well-preserved as ever, insofar as I can tell) at the age of 96.

Back in 2007-2008-ish (I don’t remember the exact date), I attended a public appearance by Anger, at the Imperial War Museum, of all places, where he was presenting some of his films and answering questions. To be honest, I remember very little of what he actually said that night, but I found his sheer presence mesmerising.

Aside from anything else, I was amazed that a man who made his first surviving film in 1947 could seem so young (faint Dorian Gray vibes), and I was surprised too that - contrary to his fiery, hex-throwing reputation - he seemed so humble, self-deprecating and soft-spoken. Above all though, he had a sense of presence about him - an ‘aura’ or ‘energy’ I might say, were I of a more hippie-ish persuasion - which is difficult to explain in words. I mean, perhaps I was just projecting here, based on his legendary life and exploits, but… it felt a bit like sharing a room with one of the denizens of ‘the other place’ from a David Lynch film, if that makes any sense? All cynicism aside, it made his boasts of magickal mastery seem eerily plausible.

As another latter-day memory, I’m reminded of a cover story the British music magazine The Wire ran on Anger in around the same period (and, the very fact they put a non-musician on their cover for what might well be the first and only time in their history tells you something vis-à-vis his underground stature I suppose). As I recall, the interviewer met Anger in Griffith Park in Los Angeles, and hailed him… only to see him walk straight into a pond! The photographer caught him emerging from the mire, drenched head to foot in pond weed, looking like Swamp Thing, pulling an exaggerated military salute. Extraordinary stuff.

All in all, it feels incredibly banal to drop a mere “rest in peace” on a figure like Anger, but…. whatever idyll his Luciferian spirit is resting in (hopefully not pond weed), let’s hope it’s fiery, thrilling, awe-inspiring, frightening and strange.

It’s a real shame he didn’t make it to 100.

(In the spirit of ‘Hollywood Babylon’ by the way, I’ve not bothered fact-checking any of the above, but if any of it turns out to be grossly inaccurate -- all the better.) 

Noir Diary: Witness in the City [‘Un Témoin dans la Ville’] (Édouard Molinaro, 1959)

Whilst the first two films in Kino Lorber’s French Noir Collection were both interesting, enjoyable and well worth making time for, it is the third and final movie in the set which proved by far my favourite.

Édouard Molinaro is back at the helm, and Lino Ventura is back on the street, for ‘Un Témoin dans la Ville’ [‘Witness in the City’], in which a Boileau & Narcejac script (with an additional writing credit for none other than Le Dos au Mur’s Gérard Oury) reshuffles a few of the plot elements from Molinaro’s earlier film, honing them into a movie which sits on the cusp between being a distinctly superior programme picture and an out-and-out genre classic.

Proceedings certainly begin in alarming fashion, with the sight of a screaming woman being callously thrown from a speeding train. Composing himself after returning to his compartment, her killer (Jacques Berthier) pulls the emergency cord, and we cut straight to the courthouse, where a clearly disgusted judge is forced to dismiss the case against him due to a lack of evidence. (“Doubt… your closest collaborator,” the judge dryly remarks to the man’s lawyer, perhaps in homage to a certain Hitchcock movie featuring similar train-bound maleficence.)

On his way home, the liberated murderer is delayed by a minor road accident which leaves his car out of commission, forcing him to rely on taxis to complete his journey. Far greater trouble awaits him though back at his remote and luxurious home.

In the meantime, y’see, we’ve been presented to a succession of gloriously menacing, giallo-esque POV shots, depicting a looming, trench-coated fellow (soon revealed to be Ventura) breaking into Berthier’s house. Sabotaging his fusebox and leaving mementos of his late mistress meaningfully strewn around the rooms (photo in the picture frame, dress laid out on the bed), Ventura proceeds to lurk in the shadows, awaiting his intended victim’s return. Not a sight any wealthy playboy really wants to be confronted with after a hard day spent clearing himself of his mistress’s murder, needless to say.

Ventura’s character Monsieur Ancelin is, of course, the dead woman’s husband. And, if you’re at all familiar with his usual screen persona in this era, you’ll realise he’s not about to take any guff from Monsieur “honest guv, I didn’t push her, it was suicide, she couldn't live with her betrayal, she loved only you.”

Long story short, the confrontation between the two men is beautifully played out, shot in brooding, gothic horror-esque candlelight, with Berthier’s two-faced pleading crashing hopelessly against the rocks of Ventura’s immoveable, soul deadened cynicism. Once the former has been left swinging from the rafters, Anselm sweeps the joint to remove traces of his presence, before making a swift exit, and…. running head-first into Pierre (Franco Fabrizi), the driver of the radio taxi Berthier ordered a few minutes before his untimely demise! Oops.

As Pierre’s taxi screeches off, Ancelin scribbles down the registration number… and his hunt for the titular witness begins.

During the movie’s second act, our focus shifts to Pierre, his blossoming romance with switchboard operator Liliane (Sandra Milo), and the close-knit community based around the offices of the Radio Taxi company for which they both work.

In contrast to the character work in the two earlier films in the Kino set, the relationships here are simply and believably sketched out, and ultimately very endearing. There’s a real sense of the fleeting pleasures of day-to-day life and of the excitement of young love here, as passing details like couple’s brief clinch as they wait to board a crowded metro live long in the memory.

Another very nice touch is the scene in which Pierre uses his taxi’s radio to broadcast the sound of a group of drunken American soldiers singing ‘Red River Valley’ in the back seat of his cab through Liliane’s headset, prompting momentarily hilarity in the switchboard office. Indeed, the use of this song, whose indelible melody becomes a kind of totem for the lovers, proves extremely effective, adding a very poignant note once events take a darker turn later in the film.

Speaking of which, the implacable Ancelin - who has effectively become the film’s antagonist at this point - is of course lurking always in the lovers’ shadows. Ventura’s unmistakable features and elongated eyebrows lend him an almost Nosferatu-like quality here, as he silently stalks the city streets, trailing Pierre in a succession of stolen cars and seeking a way to put him out of commission before he can report what he’s seen to the police.

From hereon in, the story ‘Un Témoin dans la Ville’ tells is entirely linear in its development, but the ambiguities created by the way our point of view shifts back and forth between Ancelin and his potential (and actual) victims make it kind of fascinating nonetheless.

By the film’s final act, Ventura’s character has mutated into an entirely different breed of expressionist monster - closer perhaps to Chaney’s hunchback or Lorre’s child killer in ‘M’ - as, hunted, bloodied and limping, he is run to ground by the combined forces of the (largely unseen) police, and the small army of radio-equipped taxi drivers upon whom the action largely concentrates.

Though no melodramatic flourishes are employed to jog our memory, it’s impossible not to recall here that the reign of terror Anselin has by this point inflicted upon the taxi-driving community was, ultimately, triggered by love - or at the very least, by a perceived masculine obligation to avenge the death of his beloved wife.

Whilst committing additional acts of violence purely in the name of self-preservation is never a good look for a revenger, we’re inclined to wonder by this point whether Anselim was always a remorseless psychopath, or whether the loss of his wife has simply pushed him over the edge, causing him to lash out at the world in some kind of grief-driven death-trip. This is a question which the film pointedly declines to address, leaving us unsure quite how to read this frightening and desperate character with whom we are to some extent encouraged to sympathise.

An additional level of bleakness is added to Anselin’s Harry Lime-esque plight through the fact that, whilst his crimes have all been committed against individuals whom we’ve spent some time with and grown to like, his eventual fate is entirely anonymised by the film.

There are no reassuring ‘job well done’ back-slaps or closing clinches for the ‘heroes’ here; indeed, the survivors’ lives are presumably left in pieces. Instead, the ‘villain’ of the piece is disposed of in a series of high angle long shots, taken down by an unseen army of cops behind a blinding circle of headlights, forcing us to reflect on the sad cycle of violence which has led him to this sorry fate.

The knack for visual storytelling Édouard Molinaro demonstrated in the opening sequence of ‘Le Dos au Mur’ reaches its full expression in ‘Un Témoin dans la Ville’, and the way in which the film manages to wrangle a mass of logical/procedural detail without resorting to dry exposition is inspired. 

In fact, for a mid-century crime drama, it’s remarkable how little the screenplay relies on dialogue. Almost everything we need to know here is conveyed visually, and, once Anselin is on Pierre’s trail, the movie is almost all action (of one kind or another), keeping the characters perpetually in motion.

The fact that the film’s events all take place in or around cars naturally helps to maintain this sense of momentum, and the eventual series of chases and confrontations which comprise the final act are genuinely thrilling, allowing us to perhaps file this one alongside Don Siegel’s The Line-Up in the pre-history of car chases movies, even as the narrow alleyways and boulevards of Paris rarely allow the motors here to pick up much speed, keeping things more at a gear-grinding, ‘stalking and blocking’ kind of level.

Naturally, this concentration on exteriors means that the vast majority of the film is shot on location in the city, and the rain-sodden, night-for-night streets and avenues look absolutely beautiful, as they rightfully should, given that the legendary Henri Decaë (cameraman of choice for Melville, Truffaut and Louis Malle, amongst many others) was calling the shots as DP.

Alongside the swathes of inky shadow we’d reasonably expect, the diffused gleam of streetlamps, headlights and neon signage adds a hazy ‘endless night’ kind of feel to the film’s sprawling urban landscape, whilst the conclusion - staged at the historic Jardin d’Acclimatation amusement park - incorporates a series of absolutely exquisite deep focus long shots, as Ventura stumbles to his doom through a nocturnal maze of empty gardens and attractions. (Some may feel Molinaro’s decision to intercut Anselin’s flight with close-ups of the park’s caged birds of prey is a bit heavy-handed, but this attention-grabbing directorial flourish actually works very well in context.)

Also noteworthy meanwhile is a great, sultry modern jazz score from saxophonist Barney Wilen, who had played with Miles Davis on his indelible score for Malle’s ‘Ascenseur pour L'échafaud’ a year earlier. This was presumably what inspired the decision to hire Wilen here, and if the material he and his group cooked up for ‘Un Témoin dans la Ville’ feels slightly more akin to the buttoned down, compositional approach to jazz that Johnny Dankworth was busy bringing to British crime films of this era, well… that’s certainly no bad thing.

For my money, this all adds up to a nigh-on flawless example of a late ‘50s European crime film. Devoid of pretention or self-importance but still loaded with powerful imagery, ‘Un Témoin dans la Ville’ maintains an unsettling sense of moral greyscale amid its blinding headlights and sepulchral shadows, whilst its refusal to offer a conventional, reassuring resolution means that, like all the best noir, it is liable to haunt the darker corners of viewers’ memories for a long time to come.

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Though Kino Lorber’s French Noir Collection pointedly fails to bear the legend ‘Volume # 1’, they are surely doing the lord’s work in bringing films like this one to an English-speaking audience on blu-ray, and we can only hope there are more such releases in the pipeline.

Noir Diary: Back to the Wall [‘Le Dos au Mur’] (Édouard Molinaro, 1958)

In stark contrast to Gilles Grangier’s no nonsense directorial approach on Le Rouge et Mis, director Édouard Molinaro begins ‘Le Dos au Mur’ [Literal translation: ‘Evidence in Concrete’, but more snappily retitled for English-speaking viewers as ‘Back to the Wall’] - the second film in Kino Lorber’s French Noir Collection - with an audacious, near wordless seventeen-minute sequence depicting a man (future writer/director Gérard Oury) breaking into a ground floor apartment and methodically cleaning/rearranging the scene of a murder, before managing to drag the carpet-wrapped corpse of the victim (Philippe Nicaud) to his car, driving it to a construction site and burying it beneath a layer of freshly laid cement.

A real tour de force of noir technique, perhaps reflecting the influence of ‘Rififi’s famed heist scene, this sequence boasts expressionistic, John Alton-esque photography from DP Robert Lefebvre, full of brightly illuminated details emerging from inky pools of darkness, fragments of light gleaming off glass and chrome and the rain-sodden headlight beams momentarily blinding us as they flash through the black void. (1)

In visual storytelling terms too, this is riveting stuff, with menacing low angles and rhythmic, Hitchcockian cutting cranking the tension, as Oury is forced to hide his nefarious activities from the attentions of sundry nocturnal witnesses.

It is only once our man’s unsavoury night’s work is over, and he is once again behind the wheel, cruising ‘Lost Highway’ style through the darkness, that - in true noir style - we drift into flashback, and the story proper gets underway.

Unfortunately, this involves the film’s visual style settling down into a far more conventional routine of set-bound chat and exposition, as we join Oury’s character - who it transpires is some kind of construction/cement magnate? - as he discovers that his much younger wife (Jeanne Moreau, fresh from ‘Ascenseur pour L’échafaud’ and already something of a crime/noir veteran by this point in her career) has been cheating on him with a feckless artist/under-employed actor type (Nicaud).

Given what we’ve already learned from the opening sequence, it’s not exactly a spoiler to reveal that Oury does not take this news well.

Clearly veering more toward the James M. Cain-derived, murder/adultery strand of noir than the gangster/crime thread represented by ‘Le Rouge et Mis’, ‘Le Dos au Mur’s concentration on the travails of a desperate, obsessive (and ultimately doomed) central character also brings a strong Cornell Woolrich flavour to proceedings.

Pedants might wish to note that the film also features one of those flashback structures full of scenes which the character recalling the tale couldn’t possibly have witnessed first-hand, but… needless to say, I’m not going to split hairs over details like that, especially given that the plot, based on Frédéric Dard’s novel, actually proceeds to unfold into a rather ingenious scenario, one whose possibilities would have provided plenty of red meat for any contemporary Hollywood screenwriter to get their teeth into.

Rather than rushing straight into a campaign of vengeance after discovering his wife’s infidelity y’see, Oury’s character’s preferred course of action is to instead begin blackmailing the adulterous couple, setting himself up with a fake ID, dispatching the requisite anonymous letters, and claiming back the resultant dough (which Moreau has already finagled from his pocket using an increasingly strained series of excuses) from a post office box in another part of town.

As you might imagine, this instigates an extended game of cat and mouse between the two parties, as, amongst other things, Oury hires a sublimely shifty private detective to gather more evidence against his targets, whilst the couple in turn engage the services of some underworld heavies to track down their blackmailer, whilst both sides attempt to gain the confidence of a barmaid in the drinking hole where Nicaud and Moreau often meet.

All of which adds up to a hell of a lot of plot to wade through here, so it’s just as well that it’s all pretty engaging, fun stuff. Really though, by far the most interesting factor in play at this point is the twisted and desperate motivations behind Oury’s decision to pursue his blackmail scheme in the first place.

Driven on by a toxic combination of vengeance and crippling fear of loneliness, he not only seeks to destroy Moreau and Nicaud’s relationship through the pressures created by his financial demands, he also wants Moreau to then return to him and voluntarily confess the errors of her ways, if you can believe that - sheer desperation blinding him to the realisation of what a nightmare this artificial extension of their long dead relationship would prove, even in the unlikely event it could be achieved.

Unfortunately, it is again the lack of development of the supporting characters which proves a stumbling block for this otherwise intriguing yarn. I must confess, Moreau is a star whose appeal has always been rather lost on me, and the script gives her precious little to work with here.

I mean, we might assume that her character is a woman who has married for wealth and convenience, only to seek solace in the arms of a younger and more exciting partner when she tires of her cold fish husband - but this is just a projection on our part as viewers. Nothing in the film actually bothers to communicate this to us, leaving the errant wife’s motivation, back story and emotional life a mystery.

Likewise, Nicaud’s character also feels like an empty vessel; imbued with no real character traits beyond being shiftless and a bit lazy, he certainly doesn’t convince as the kind of passionate lover capable to tearing a wealthy and glamourous woman away from the security of her marriage, and as a result, the scenes the couple share together fail to develop much in the way of either chemistry or, crucially, audience sympathy.

Conventional movie morality would tend to suggest we should kind-of, sort-of end up on their side, in preference to the scheming, tyrannical husband, but… in this case, it’s honestly difficult to care.

Sadly then, we’re left with a bit of a one-sided love triangle, but thankfully Oury’s extraordinary performance alone proves strong enough to hold it together, maniacal intelligence and emotional desolation battling behind his eyes as he glowers, simmers and broods his way through the film, at times almost contorting his lanky frame like a physical manifestation of the tangled mess he’s created for himself - the ‘hanged man’ per excellence.

It’s fitting therefore that, as a member of that hallowed sub-category of noirs which effectively begin with their endings (paging both Mildred Pierce and Walter Neff), ‘Le Dos au Mur’ dwells heavily on that most noir of themes - man’s inability to escape his fate. In fact, it even verges into Poe-derived gothic territory to a certain extent, as a restaging of the ever-popular ‘bricked up wall’ ending, clearly inspired by either ‘The Cask of Amontillado’ or ‘The Black Cat’, ends up accidentally prefiguring Roger Corman’s adultery-enhanced fusion of both those stories in his 1962 anthology ‘Tales of Terror’. Who’d have thunk it!

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(1) Exploitation fans might be interested to learn that although Robert Lefebvre was already a veteran of the French film industry by this point, having worked as a DP since the early 1930s, he actually ended his long career working on a series of erotic / sex films during the ‘70s, including Max Pécas’ ‘Je Suis Une Nymphomane’ (1971) and Radley Metzger’s ‘The Image’ (1975).

Noir Diary: Speaking of Murder [‘Le Rouge et Mis’] (Gilles Grangier, 1957)

 To those of us in the English-speaking world, it can sometimes feel as if France’s contribution to the culture surrounding mid-century crime/noir cinema remains an obscure and mysterious prospect. Such a conclusion begins to seem increasingly misguided though, the longer one spends scanning shelves and considering the matter.

After all, Jules Dassin’s ‘Rififi’ (1955) and the films of Jean-Pierre Melville are universally revered touchstones of the genre. Classics like Jacques Becker’s ‘Touchez pas ou Grisbi’ (1954) and ‘Le Trou’ (1960), and Henri Decoin‘s ‘Razzia sur la Chnouf’, (1955), are all available on nice, sub-titled editions, as of course are arthouse/nouvelle vague-affiliated genre entries such as Truffaut’s ‘Shoot the Piano Player’ (1960) and Louis Malle’s ‘Ascenseur pour L'échafaud’ (1958). Claude Sautet’s heart-rending ‘Classe Tous Risques’ (1960) starring Lino Ventura has received a release from the BFI, and I bet your local library can still dig up a DVD of Julien Duvivier’s ground-breaking ‘Pépé le Moko’ (1937) upon request.

Nonetheless though - what unites the films listed above is their quote-unquote “importance”. All are critically acclaimed, top tier productions which - despite their intermittent brutality and nihilism - remain thoroughly respectable. They’re all great movies, no question, but, taken in isolation, can they really furnish us with a full picture of the wider culture from which they emerged?

It’s as if we’ve been given access to the Gallic equivalents of Double Indemnity, ‘Laura’, ‘White Heat’ and ‘Touch of Evil’…. but where are the Parisian analogues of ‘Raw Deal’, of The Big Combo, or of Framed..? Were the stars and directors we know from their more celebrated pictures also battling it out week by week in scuzzier, run-of-the-mill programme pictures? And if so, can we watch them please?

Such are the questions I was hoping Kino Lorber’s inaugural French Noir Collection - gathering three late ‘50s examples of the form from the Gaumont archives which I don’t believe have previously been granted much international exposure - would begin to address. Long story short: it doesn’t disappoint.

Straight out of the gate, Gilles Grangier’s ‘Le Rouge et Mis’ (1957) opens with a sight sure to warm the heart of any French crime enthusiast, as genre heavyweights Jean Gabin and Lino Ventura lead a four-man gang carrying out a stick up job on a street corner bank in a quiet Parisian suburb.

The film’s recurrent theme of violence erupting from placid, everyday surroundings is disturbingly foreshadowed as Ventura, scowling intently in regulation trench-coat, briefly turns his tommy-gun in the direction of a cowering mother and her children who have inadvertently wandered into the midst of the robbery. Pausing, Ventura’s character ‘La Gitan’ (‘The Gypsy’) seems to be thinking it over, before he comes to his senses and ducks into the getaway car - demonstrating a sense of restraint which he will increasingly abandon as the movie progresses.

Rather inadequately retitled as ‘Speaking of Murder’ for English-speaking audiences (wouldn’t something closer to the literal ‘The Red is Lit’, or ‘The Red Light Is On’ have worked better?), Grangier’s film has the particular ice-cold, proletarian atmosphere which defines so many post-war French crime movies down pat.

Certainly, there’s little of the smoky glamour and lethargic ennui which defined some of Gabin’s other films in the genre be found here. Instead, he and his gang conduct their day-to-day from remote lock-up garages, chrome-countered street corner bars and shabby rural outbuildings. Mirroring the atmosphere of dour alienation later perfected by Jean-Pierre Melville (who had directed his first crime film a year earlier), the gang members are squinty-eyed hard cases who’d rather lose a limb than express emotion in front of their colleagues. Everywhere looks absolutely freezing.

Despite this though, Grangier dials back the nihilism considerably here, humanising his crooks, and (with the help of his fine cast) making their interplay rather fascinating. Admittedly, ‘La Gitan’ is indeed the remorseless, taciturn psycho which our initial encounter with him suggested, but ‘Sailor’ (Jean Bérard) provides rather rather more reluctant muscle, whilst Gabin (‘The Blond’) provides a rather more paternal presence, labouring under the strain of keeping the outfit together whilst also affecting the appearance of a legitimate businessman. The fly in the ointment meanwhile is Fredo, ‘L’American’ (Paul Frankeur), the gang’s fixer, a slimy chancer Ventura doesn’t trust as far as he can throw him, but whom Gabin - much to his later chagrin - insists is legit.

With all this good heist movie stuff already in play, I confess I was slightly disappointed that much of the remainder of the film concentrates instead on Gabin’s relationship with his much younger brother Pierre (Marcel Bozzuffi, later of ‘The French Connection’), a feckless kid who’s just got out of the joint on bail, but insists on skipping town to hook up with his girlfriend Hélène (Annie Girardot).

Regrettably, Hélène is characterised here in strictly one-dimensional terms, as a greedy, black-hearted bitch who cuckolds naïve Pierre at every possible opportunity, mocking him behind his back and earning the contempt of his far cannier big brother in process. Meanwhile of course, the cops are hovering, keen to pull Pierre in for breaking his bail conditions and hoping they can persuade him to spill the beans on his brother’s outfit to avoid heading back to the slammer.

The scenes between Gabin, Bozzuffi and their elderly mother (Gina Licloz) convey a great deal of warmth, establishing their strained and unconventional family dynamic rather nicely, but beyond that, it’s a shame that the film’s story eventually takes a rather melodramatic turn, incorporating a series of door-slamming familial confrontations, and culminating in a would-be tragic denouement hinging on the consequences of an easily resolved misunderstanding.

It’s difficult to credit that this rather bathetic bit of plotting came from the pen of Auguste Le Breton (whose novels provided the inspiration for about half of the calssics I listed in this review’s opening paragraphs), but… many a slip betwixt page and screen, I suppose.

For the most part, Grangier’s direction here is plain and unobtrusive, devoid of the stylistic flourishes we usually associate with noir, but, perhaps for that very reason, the film’s intermittent scenes of bloodthirsty violence stand out. In particular, a bungled armoured car heist followed by a vehicular chase and massacre midway through the movie really makes an impression, framing outbursts of chaotic carnage against a bleak, uninhabited rural backdrop, whilst the climactic confrontation between Gabin and Ventura (you knew it was coming) achieves an impressive level of intensity.

If ‘Le Rouge et Mis’ can be seen then as a rock-solid exemplar of French crime cinema, its routine story-telling elevated by a seedy atmosphere and an exceptional cast, the second film in Kino’s French Noir set proves a far more unconventional and off-beat proposition… as we shall discover in a few days.

The Other Breakfast in the Ruins & other updates.

So, first of all, I owe loyal/remaining readers an apology for yet another lapse in posting. I had been looking forward to regaining a bit of free time to devote to this-sort-of-thing during March and April, but, once again, the responsibilities and nasty surprises of grown up life have contrived to do a number on me. We’ll see how things go moving forward, but for now at least I’ve finally got a few new posts together to keep things ticking over through May.

Meanwhile though, imagine my surprise when I saw an update on Andrew Nette’s Pulp Curry blog last month, stating that he’d made an appearance on The Breakfast in the Ruins Podcast (talking about New English Library biker paperbacks, no less).

After momentarily feeling a bit dizzy and contemplating the possibility of there being some (appropriately Moorcockian) multiverse-blurring type shenanigans going on, I eventually reached the more prosaic conclusion that The Breakfast in the Ruins Podcast has been operating out of Bradford since 2019, is hosted by Andrew Stimpson, and covers a wide variety of pop cultural topics spinning off from the work of Michael Moorcock.

I’ve been sampling some episodes over the past few weeks, and it’s a great listen, which I’m sure readers of this blog would enjoy.

I’m very happy to have discovered the podcast, and I hope that Andrew and his collaborators won’t bear a grudge against me for sitting on the blogger, gmail and mixcloud IDs they could otherwise have claimed. (Well, I suppose they got the coveted .com, so that’s cool.)

Anyway - hopefully our shared belief that Breakfast in the Ruins is a great name for a thing on the internet will help overcome such petty differences and bring us together, fingers crossed.

In other podcast-related news, I was also overjoyed last month to note the appearance of a new episode of one of my all-time favourites, El Diabolik’s World of Psychotronic Soundtracks - their first in several years.

I’ll save the hyperbole, and instead merely state that I find the show (and it is more in the spirit of a broadcast radio show than what we’d usually think of as a ‘podcast’, really) entertaining, educational and strangely relaxing, and it is great to see them back in action.

There are few greater pleasures in my life than cueing up a few episodes from their archive to accompany a long walk in the countryside, and I’m confident that anyone with a passing interest in film and library music and associated esoteric mysteries of ‘60s/’70s pop culture will find the experience similarly fulfilling.

Right - that’s all for now. Proper content on the way very soon.

Exploito All’Italiana: The Weapon, The Hour, The Motive (Francesco Mazzei, 1972)

Although you wouldn’t necessarily know it from reading this weblog, I spend a lot of my time watching Italian gialli. Why I’ve so rarely written about them over the years, I’m not quite sure, as there is undoubtedly still a lot to be said about this feverishly creative and endlessly rewarding genre, even beyond the efforts made by the multitude of English language critics and commentators who’ve taken a crack at it over the years.

It feels fittingly perverse therefore that I should break the fast of giallo content in these pages, not by looking at any of the more celebrated or representative examples of the genre, but by instead turning my attention to what is, by anyone’s standards, an extremely marginal entry in the canon. Indeed, it’s probably fair to say that one-shot director Francesco Mazzei’s 1972 magnum opus ‘L’arma, L’ora, Il Movente’ languished in near total obscurity until Arrow saw fit to reissue it as part of a blu-ray box set last year. (1)

Suffice to say, even now that it’s easily obtainable, ‘L’arma..’ is unlikely to make it onto many giallo fanatics’ top ten lists. To be honest, I’m not even sure it would even make my top fifty at this point. But, it is at least incredibly strange, which counts for a lot around these parts - especially when it comes to inspiring me to hit the keyboard and begin trying to figure out what the bloody hell I just watched.

Of course, we all know there are a lot of very strange gialli out there, and seasoned fans of Italian genre cinema will have long since learned delight in these films’ refusal to abide by the dreary rules of narrative logic which American (and indeed British) culture have hammered into most of us from birth. But… ‘L’arma..’ is not really one of those films, if you know what I mean.

In fact, for much of its run time, it’s a perfectly linear murder mystery / police procedural kind of joint, doggedly moving from A to B…. except when it suddenly decides it would rather spend some time hanging around in Q or X instead, which is where the fascination begins. Returning to the jigsaw metaphor I was utilising just last month, it’s a film full of bulbous, misshapen pieces which stubbornly fail to coalesce into any kind of coherent whole, no matter how long you spend trying to force them into place.

So, let’s get down to cases. Basically our setting here seems to be a convent, located somewhere in rural southern Italy. Our characters are the strange gaggle of people who either live at the convent, work there, or just inexplicably hang around, enjoying the suspiciously boozy and indulgent meals which seem to be frequently served in the institution’s bucolic gardens.

Central to this social milieu is Don Giorgio (Maurizio Bonuglia), an attractive, blonde-haired young priest, who is soon revealed to be having affairs with not one, but two, married women. In fact, he is currently in the process of ditching teacher and wife-of-rich-businessman Orchidea (Bedy Moratti) in order to devote more of his time to tarot card reader and alleged ‘witch’ Giulia (Eva Czemerys). In addition, he has also attracted the steadfast devotion of almond-eyed nun Sister Tarquinia (played by the magnificently named Claudia Gravy), who insists with barely-concealed lust that Don Giorgio is “..a saint”. (1)

In a certain sense, perhaps Don Giorgio’s enthusiastic embrace of the ways of the flesh could be seen to reflect a devotion to the same kind of transcendent, non-denominational spirituality practiced by Oliver Reed’s character in Ken Russell’s ‘The Devils’, carrying with it the same implied critique of papal dogma and clerical celibacy… but, as with so many things, Mazzei’s film never really gets its ducks in line sufficiently well to express this idea very clearly.

Meanwhile, much screen time is also devoted to the travails of a small boy named Ferruccio (Arturo Trina), who appears to live at the convent. Late in the film, a throwaway line of dialogue belatedly informs us that he is an orphan whom the nuns have unofficially adopted, but I don’t think we’re ever offered an explanation as to why they keep him confined to his bedroom, or why the aforementioned Orchidea visits him each day to administer some kind of injection.

Anyway, before long, Don Giorgio is found dead - stabbed in the back whilst seated at the organ in the convent’s chapel - and down-at-heel, motorcycle-riding Commissario Bioto (veteran comedy actor Renzo Montagnani) is soon on the scene, determined to crack the case in his best bumbling Maigret / Columbo type manner.

Soon though, the Commissario also finds himself smitten by Orchidea, instigating a romantic relationship which takes him way beyond the realm of professionalism, given that she is both a prime suspect in the murder case, and, lest we forget, already married.

So far then, a pretty standard issue whodunit, seasoned with a heady mix of religion, rural Southern superstition, sexual intrigue and implied child abuse which will inevitably remind genre fans of Lucio Fulci’s classic ‘Don’t Torture a Duckling’, even as Mazzei immediately steers things in an entirely different direction.

Because, really, it is the extraordinary series of non-sequiturs which accumulate on the fringes of this central plotline which make ‘L’arma, L’ora, Il Movente’ stand out.

We’ve already mentioned the strangeness of poor Ferruccio’s situation, which in most films would surely be treated as an immediate red flag that something nefarious is going on at the convent. But here, everybody - the police included - just seems to take it for granted that the nuns keep a drugged orphan locked in his bedroom.

Meanwhile, we’re also treated to what I can only describe as several one-off outbursts of gratuitous nunsploitation (an addition which is certainly in keeping with director Mazzei’s history as the producer of several mondo and sexploitation titles during the ‘60s).

At one point, the nuns strip off and begin indulging in an extended bout of topless self-flagellation, working themselves up into a state of orgasmic frenzy as a gliding camera tracks them against a black background; a scene which, again, invites comparison to ‘The Devils’, but, beyond its value as pure exploitation, it has no wider significance to anything else which happens in the film in thematic/narrative terms.

Even stranger is a subsequent scene, in which the nuns all take a shower together (still wearing their bloomers and gym slips), and appear entirely unconcerned when the heretofore unmentioned leering, snaggle-toothed ex-con gardener character suddenly wanders in to invade their privacy. The “joke”, I suppose, is that they then all lose their shit in predictably comedic fashion when the Commissario’s bungling sidekick Moriconi (Salvatore Puntilo) inadvertently intrudes on them, but… so many unanswered questions here. Rather than the sexy comic interlude which was presumably intended, it basically all just seems - at the risk of repeating myself - really strange.

The incongruous antics of the nuns pale into insignificance though once we get deeper into the film and find ourselves assaulted with several full strength descents into - albeit potentially unintentional - surrealism.

One of these occurs when young Ferruccio, fleeing from Orchidea as she pursues him wielding a syringe, descends to the cellars beneath the convent, where, incredibly, he enters a chamber full of cobweb-covered skeletons, arranged in some kind of morbid diorama, clad in moth-eaten regal vestments and bearing bejewelled medieval goblets!

Up to this point, I should clarify, the film has featured no hint of overt gothic horror imagery whatsoever, and yet here we are suddenly in the midst of an extraordinary feat of production design, straight out of Mario Bava or Riccardo Freda’s darkest nightmares.

Of course, neither Ferruccio nor Orchidea seem at all perturbed by this. It’s never mentioned in dialogue, never explained, and the set is never returned to. The characters simply run straight through it all as if it weren’t there.

So, what in the absolute hell is going on here?! Has something crucial been lost in translation, perhaps? Do convents in southern Italy routinely keep ancient skeletons posed in elaborate tableaus in their basements? Would domestic audiences have recognised this as an accepted phenomenon and taken it in their stride? I have no idea. (A more likely explanation perhaps is that the film’s crew just stumbled upon the set for a gothic horror movie shooting on a adjacent sound stage and decided, “eh, why not”?)

Either way though, this merely amplifies the confusion for those of us earnestly trying to figure out where in the hell ‘L’Arma..’ is coming from. I mean - murdered horny priests, sexually frenzied nuns with very strange showering arrangements, imprisoned orphans, skeleton dioramas in the basement… not to mention the fact there’s a ‘witch’ hanging around the place, and boozy dinners for sleazy local benefactors regularly going on in the gardens. In any - ahem - ‘normal’ film, a picture would surely be being painted here of a corrupt/decadent institution in which something very, very bad indeed is going on - but, nope.

Somehow, ‘L’arma..’s narrative never draws any connection between these isolated events. Outside of those directly suspected of Don Giorgio’s murder, no one at the convent is ever accused of conspiracy or foul play by the screenplay. Seemingly, day-to-day life in this whacko nunnery is going just fine so far as Mazzei and his co-writers are concerned, give or take perhaps some broad criticism of Catholic dogma and its attendant hypocrisies.

Weirder still though is the segment of the film which I will simply refer to as, “all that business with the restaurant”.

Long story short: in the throes of their new love, Orchidea and Commissario Bioto at one point go motoring off into the countryside, and stop on a whim at a restaurant located within an idyllic country villa. Therein, things take on an almost fantastical / fairy tale quality, as they are seated at a grand table in the centre of an otherwise empty palatial living room, and presented with a ridiculously extravagant bill of fare (bowls piled high with fruit, entire cakes, decanters of wine, etc.).

Suddenly though, it’s ‘David Lynch directs’, as Orchidea disappears, and the restaurant’s proprietors (an older lady and - we presume - her daughter) lurk around in the corners of the room, staring menacingly at their remaining guest.

“I have a son in Haiti,” the older lady announces. 

“Tahiti..?” ventures Bioto, confused. 

“No, Haiti.” 

The conversation ends there.

Bioto then rises, and POV camerawork takes us on a tour through the labyrinthine corridors of the building, until he eventually finds Orchidea reclining in a bedroom, ready to receive him in her arms for a bout of off-screen passion.

Again, I feel there may be a certain element of cross-cultural confusion playing out here. Would this whole set-up have been something contemporary Italian viewers would have recognised? Was this restaurant, say, the kind of place where rich folk in rural areas might have routinely gone to enjoy illicit liaisons of one kind or another? Was there some some element of the food or decor which may have explained the elderly lady’s strange conversation?

Anyway. Back at the convent, Commissario Bioto receives an anonymous note, advising him to investigate the restaurant he just visited in connection with Don Giorgio’s death. Returning, he finds a workman taking down the restaurant’s shingle. This man casually informs him that the joint has closed down because, “the proprietors have been murdered(!)”

Entering the building, Bioto engages in a brief chase and scuffle with an initially unseen intruder, who is soon revealed to be his own colleague Moriconi, who also saw the note and got there before him. After a bit of mutual backslapping and exasperation, the pair leave, and the whole business with the restaurant is never mentioned again.

So, let me get this straight. Our protagonist here is a homicide detective. When visiting a restaurant to follow up a lead on the case he’s investigating, he’s told that the people he wishes to question have been murdered, and, after mooching around for a few minutes, his reaction is basically, “eh, never mind then, none of my business”..?

And from a commercial filmmaking POV meanwhile…. wouldn’t a scene in which a pair of women are stalked and killed within a beautiful old villa have been just this ticket to boost this film’s (otherwise rather scant) giallo / horror credentials..? We know from events elsewhere in the film that Mazzei wasn’t averse to a bit of totally gratuitous exploitation, so why just report this potentially shocking and exciting occurrence second-hand via a throwaway line of dialogue?

I can’t claim any insight into what might have been going on behind the scenes on ‘L’arma, L’ora, Il Movente’, but - to repeat myself once again - some of the decisions taken here seem very strange.

Speaking of giallo / horror credentials meanwhile, based on what I’ve written so far, readers might be forgiven for questioning the extent to which ‘L’arma..’ even qualifies as a giallo at all, at least in the Argento/Bava-derived sense usually employed in the English-speaking world.

Indeed, I was wondering the same thing myself up until the exact halfway point of the film, when somebody seems to have suddenly woken up and remembered the conventions of the then-extremely popular genre the film’s financing and eventual marketing was clearly geared toward [see the poster at the top of this review]. So, without further ado, a female character is murdered by a scissor-wielding POV camera, in a startling and technically well-executed scene as shocking, fetishistic and borderline misogynistic as anything you’d find in a contemporary Sergio Martino or Umberto Lenzi picture.

This scene is brief, only loosely motivated by the plot, and - you will probably not be surprised to hear by this point - nothing remotely similar happens at any other point in the film. But, it earns it its “Hi! I’m a giallo” badge, which was presumably the point of the exercise.

Now, dedicated genre fans will be aware of course that there is a distinct sub-set of lower tier Italian movies (often by first-time / one-time directors) which are disjointed to the point of being almost entirely incoherent. (Angelo Pannacciò’s lamentable ‘Sex of the Witch’ (1973) immediately springs to mind as an example.)

The difference though is that those films tend to be cheap, obviously amateurish affairs, whereas ‘L’arma, L’ora, Il Movente’ is actually quite a lavish production by comparison. The staging and camerawork is generally very good, executed with a certain amount of stylistic flair. The locations and production design are excellent, and most of the performances are entirely credible. Somebody clearly spent some money on this thing, and put some thought into it.

And, as I outlined towards the start of this review, neither is this one of those Italian horror movies which seek to evoke a flat-out crazy or disorientating atmosphere, revelling in delirium and oneiric weirdness for its own sake. Outside of the assorted oddities I’ve outlined above, the setting of ‘L’arma..’ is broadly realistic, and the tone is measured, assured and, if not exactly ‘serious’, at least fairly sincere in its intent - a fact which makes all the head-scratching diversions feel even stranger.

In trying to make sense of the succession of non-sequiturs which comprises so much of ‘L’arma..’s run time therefore, I found myself turning to some of the ideas explored by the critic Mikel J. Koven in his 2006 book La Dolce Morte: Vernacular Cinema and the Italian Giallo Film.

Therein, amongst other things, Koven seeks to draw attention to the context in which these movies were consumed and experienced by domestic audiences at the time of their release, and how this may in turn have fed into the development of subsequent films within the genre - an aspect of their existence which is all too easy to overlook in an era when we are far more likely to view them in an isolated, epicurean manner in our own homes.

In a review of Koven’s book published by Senses of Cinema, Alexia Kannas concisely summarises his arguments on this point as follows:

“..Koven draws on Wagstaff’s analysis of prima, seconda and terza visione (first, second and third run) cinemas. Both writers liken the giallo’s terza visione audience to that of a televisual (rather than cinematic) audience who talk, drink, smoke and are mobile during the screening. This is certainly useful for both indicating to and reminding the reader that, with gialli, we are not necessarily looking at classical narratives of cohesion or linear construction, but to something else of cinematic value.”

It is probably worth noting at this point that, unlike many higher profile Italian exploitation films, ‘L’arma, L’ora, Il Movente’ was clearly not made with foreign distribution in mind. Aside from the cultural specificities discussed above, no English dub ever seems to have been created for the film, suggesting that Mazzei and his collaborators were not under pressure to consider the expectations of an overseas (for which read: American) audience when assembling their final cut.

Reframed through this lens, and via the context of the terza visione screening experience which Koven helpfully reminds us of, a film like ‘L’arma..’ suddenly, miraculous, starts to make sense.

What might our hypothetical terza visione patron - say, a working joe in some provincial town - have taken away from a movie like this, assuming he took it in which one eye on the screen, in between heading out to the lobby for a few smokes, buying a lollypop, chatting to a local shop owner about business, and yelling at so-and-so’s son for trying to feel up such-and-such’s daughter in the back row..?

Well, I reckon our man probably have broadly followed the drift of Commissario Bioto’s murder investigation and been satisfied with its mildly ingenious conclusion, much in the same way we might get the gist of an episode of a TV detective show whilst absent-mindedly flipping between channels.

He might have enjoyed Renzo Montagnani’s eminently likeable performance as the Commissario, and might even have been touched by his ill-fated romance with the leading lady, or his burgeoning paternal relationship with the young orphan.

Beyond that though, he would totally have remembered a few of the way-out images which might have forcibly drawn his attention back to the screen every now and then. Freaky nuns! Skeletons! A chick in a mini-skirt getting slashed across her tits!

For better or for worse, these are the kind of things that tend to make an impression on an inattentive audience, then as now. And, whether our man was exhilarated or appalled by such spectacles, maybe, just perhaps, they might have inspired him to start telling his co-workers about the film the next day, prompting them to get down to the cinema in turn to check this shit out for themselves.

As to why all these things happen in the film, how they all fit together, the jarring shifts in tone they create, and all the other things which are liable to torment us 21st century cinephiles as we sit down in our darkened screening rooms paying close attention to ‘L’arma, L’ora, Il Movente’ from beginning to end…. well, that’s just so much water under the bridge, so long as it kind of feels like a proper movie from a distance, and so long as our man’s pals turned out the next night and coughed up a few lira for their tickets.

Francesco Mazzei’s brief filmography as a producer suggests he’d had a hard scrabble through the lower depths of the Italian film industry in the decade or so before he finally stepped up to make ‘L’arma, L’ora, Il Movente’. Contrary to what we self-styled giallo connoisseurs might think as we try to puzzle our way through his oblique intentions today, I’m sure he knew his business well enough to understand exactly what he doing back in 1972 - and there’s a fair chance it paid off for him too. 

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(1) Also including Giuseppe Bennati’s excellent gothic giallo ‘The Killer Reserved Nine Seats’ and Silvio Amadio’s enjoyably frivolous, Rosalba Neri-starring trifle ‘Smile Before Death’, safe to say Giallo Essentials: Black gets a big thumbs up from these quarters, even though I’d question the deeply misleading “essentials” tag assigned to these sets.

(2) To save clogging up the main text with an extended round of who-was-in-what, let’s get it all out of the way here instead. Maurizio Bonuglia has prime giallo cred, having appeared as Mimsy Farmer’s arsehole boyfriend in ‘The Perfume of The Lady in Black’, and Franco Nero’s pal in ‘The Fifth Cord’. Eva Czemerys is probably best remembered for meeting with a memorably sadistic end as one half of the ill-fated lesbian couple in the aforementioned ‘The Killer Reserved Nine Seats’. Claudio Gravy became something of a minor sexploitation star during the ‘70s, with appearances in the likes of ‘Byleth: The Demon of Incest’, ‘The Nun and the Devil’ and ‘La Llamada de Sexo’, as well the expected avalanche of largely forgotten sex comedies; she continued to work prolifically in film and TV right through the ‘90s and ‘00s. Despite being effectively second billed, Bedy Moratti is probably the least recognisable face in the central cast here; though she played small roles in a handful of noteworthy films between 1968 and 1975, her career never seems to have really taken off.