Krimi Casebook: Das Verrätertor / ‘Traitor’s Gate’ (Freddie Francis, 1964)

BLOGGER’S NOTE: It was actually a complete coincidence that I had this post, which discusses the intricacies of a curious Anglo-German co-production, scheduled to appear on the day of the UK referendum on membership of the European Union. As a strong believer in co-operation between nation states, open borders and the breaking down of cultural & economic boundaries, I’m unsure at the time of writing whether I’ll be weeping tomorrow morning or merely putting the whole sorry mess behind me and moving on, but – checks watch – I believe there’s still time to get to the polls today, so would urge all UK citizens reading to please consider rejecting petty nationalism and doing the decent thing. And hey, why not let this tale of zany Germans running around idyllic 1960s London waving guns about guide your hand..? (Ok, maybe not.)

[Political mithering ends. / Movie review begins.]

By late 1964, Copenhagen-based Rialto films had been churning out Edgar Wallace ‘krimis’ for the West German market for nearly five years, and had released no less than seventeen entries in the loosely connected series.

Given this level of productivity, and the creative burnout it must inevitably have incurred in the studio’s small stable of writers, directors and actors, it makes sense that someone in Rialto’s boardroom must have sat up one day and realised that the film industry in the UK – where all of these films were ostensibly set – also boasted its own, equally efficient, genre movie production line, as exemplified in particular by Hammer studios, whose unprecedented international success in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s could scarcely be ignored by other European producers.

Perhaps those fuzzy stock shots of Big Ben and Trafalgar Square were starting to get a bit ragged, or constantly redressing those ‘Scotland Yard office’ and ‘cobbled East End back street’ sets was getting a bit tedious - or perhaps Joachim Fuchsberger and Harald Reinl just REALLY needed a holiday - but whatever the reason, feelers were extended, hands shaken, and when ‘Das Verrätertor’, the 18th entry in Rialto’s Wallace series, went into production, it did so in actual, real life London, with Freddie Francis (fresh off ‘The Evil of Frankenstein’) in the director’s chair, and a script provided (under a pseudonym) by Hammer’s Jimmy Sangster.

Sadly, the eventual result of all this bold co-productionin’ sass is an odd mish-mash that basically plays out as if a few of the more distinctive faces from the ‘krimi gang’ (Klaus Kinski and Eddi Arent) had accidentally blundered into a mediocre British thriller in which everyone inexplicably speaks German - but nevertheless, it is not without its merits, and it remains vaguely interesting as a historical curio, at the very least. (1)

Things certainly get off to a good start, with an edgily shot prison break from a joint that I suppose is supposed to be Dartmoor (eventual destination of all krimi ne’erdowells). Bleak, wide angle overhead shots are here mixed with juddering, handheld footage and a tense, mod jazz soundtrack, as our protagonist (British actor Gary Raymond) scrabbles across scrubland with armed guards in close pursuit, only to find himself rescued by a Luger-toting Kinski, who ushers him into a waiting helicopter in which the pair make their getaway.

Back in London however, it soon becomes clear that this going to be another one of those creaky old “plan to steal The Crown Jewels” type heist capers, with all the discussions of alarm systems, guard duty rotas and unspeakably tedious footage of Beefeaters trooping about exchanging keys that that invariably entails.

Perhaps this might have all carried a bit more of a sense of novelty to German audiences than it does to us Brits, but it’s more likely that ‘Das Verrätertor’ simply suffers the kind of narrative structure that – much like that of the routine whodunit – has withered particularly badly under the glare of our somewhat different 21st century entertainment expectations.

I mean, first off, hands up who really gives two shits about the Crown Jewels? I suppose back in the ‘60s they probably still carried a certain mystique and cultural importance vis-à-vis British identity and so on, but now… well, you tell me when concern for their security last crossed your mind. And do any of us *really* care that much about the rather routine and unsurprising methods by which some fictional crooks might go about stealing them..?

No, what we really want to see in a story like this is the excitement that ensues during the after the heist, as things go wrong and people get hurt, as the perpetrators flee the law and double-cross each other, and so on. The jewels themselves should be little more than a McGuffin to set up the human drama. Unfortunately though, this is a point that Sangster and Francis (and perhaps Wallace, assuming anything in this yarn can actually be traced back to him) largely fail to appreciate, instead choosing to take us again and again through the not-terribly-riveting aspects of the gang’s planning whilst saving the big jewel-grab itself for the final reel.

Normally, Sangster was a writer who could be relied upon to put a cynical new twist on the formulaic genre material he was assigned to work on, but, perhaps playing it safe for a co-production aimed at an overseas audience, ‘Traitor’s Gate’ is an uncharacteristically bland effort, hitting the expected beats of its plotline with nary a trace of surprise or innovation. (A shame, as the twisted aesthetic of the krimis might in other circumstance have made for a perfect match with the black humour and imagination of Sangster’s better writing.)

Elsewhere in the film, Eddi Arent pops up as – I bet you never saw this one coming - a bungling German tourist, who gets inadvertently involved in the heist gang’s plans when, in the course of his day-to-day bungling, he accidentally visits a pleasantly authentic-looking Soho strip joint, the “Dandy Club”, wherein he witnesses triggerman Kinski doing away with a snitch – the gunshots muffled by the drummer in the house band playing a roll on the snare.

Slickly staged by Francis, this episode is just as much fun as it sounds, and indeed, there are some lovely bits of authentic London street footage to enjoy here too, largely shot around Piccadilly and Soho, all of which serves to make the corresponding passages of ‘changing of the guards’ / ‘buggering about with the beefeaters’ type material go down a little easier. (2)

In fact, Francis’ direction is probably the film’s strongest suit. He keeps things brisk and visually interesting through even the dullest stretches, occasionally experimenting with bold techniques and stylish moments which, it must be said, do not really equate to anything found in the British horror films he was directing at around the same time. This leads me to wonder whether he was in fact simply following the dictats of his producers in tailoring the look of the film to fit Rialto’s preferred “house style”, incorporating the kind of tricks (wide angle and deep focus shots, use of on-screen camera lens and mirrors, handheld shots and the like) that we have previously attributed to ‘krimi’ specialists like Reinl and Alfred Vohrer.

As you might have expected given the plot-line, ‘Traitor’s Gate’ features absolutely none of the macabre or fantastical elements that have livened up the others krimis we’ve thus far examined in this review strand, but as a straight-down-the-line crime caper, it is executed with what must have passed for a somewhat glamorous, high-tech sheen in 1964, exhibiting a particular fascination for camera lenses, telescopes, hidden tape recorders, clocks and so forth, verging momentarily into the realm of total ridiculousness for one particularly enjoyable moment in which the film’s heroine falls afoul of a specially modified taxi that fills the back-seat with knockout gas at a simple button push from the driver.

For the most part however, ‘Das Verrätertor’ is disappointingly down to earth. Presumably due to the fact that it was actually made in the UK with the participation of British personnel, the “bizarro world London” flavour that gave films like ‘Dark Eyes of London’ such a unique, out-of-time atmosphere is entirely lacking here, as the more buttoned down, English way of doing business vis-à-vis low budget thrillers leaves us instead with a far more quote-unquote “realistic” portrayal of London in 1964, completely devoid of psychotic masked villains, knife-wielding vagabonds, subterranean gangster hideouts, blood-thirsty fetishized murders and the like, although the presence of Kinski does at least bring a hint of this kind of thing to the table.

Spending much of his time obsessively licking his fingers and dispassionately threatening people with guns as only he can, one particularly surreal scene back-stage at the aforementioned strip joint sees Klaus lurking about near the head of a pantomime horse, whose teeth he at one point pretends to examine. In fact, I’d say that Kinski’s presence alone makes ‘Das Verrätertor’ worth seeking out, were it not for the fact that the unspeakable bastard made so many other films through the ‘60s in which he similarly delivers the goods, making such completism unnecessary for any but the most dedicated fans of his unique brand of strangely hilarious psychopathic menace.

Above and beyond the various drawbacks I have outlined above, there is one central fault that I feel stops ‘Traitor’s Gate’ from overcoming them and hitting home as a decent bit of entertainment, and that is the fact that no one else in the film is remotely interesting. With the exception of Kinski and Arent (who are both basically just goofing on their established screen personas), there is not a single character here who will stick in your mind after viewing – in fact I can barely remember a thing about any of them, and I watched this damn thing twice for review purposes.

A far cry from the sweaty-palmed blackmailers, seedy servants and playboy detectives we expect to find rounding out a krimi cast-list, in ‘Das Verrätertor’, the crooks, the innocent lead couple whom the persecute and the cops who peruse them barely have two character traits to rub together, and the blandly professional cast play out their assigned roles within the story as if they were simply experiencing a mildly stressful day working in an insurance office.

As a result, there is simply no suspense, and nothing beyond the occasional nice shot or visual flourish to even keep us awake. Will the heist succeed or not? Will the crooks be brought to justice? What do we even care, when we barely know enough about anyone concerned to decide who we should cheer or boo?

Though the film’s production values and technical credits are solid and the Rialto crew do their best to entertain, it is easy to conclude that ‘Traitor’s Gate’ – which remains one of the more obscure entries within the already obscure krimi canon - has been lost to history for good reason, relevant only to genre historians seeking an easy explanation for the reasons why the rich possibilities for Anglo-German krimi co-productions were never really followed up. (3)

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(1) According to IMDB, Rialto’s only production partner on ‘Traitor’s Gate’ was an outfit named “Summit”, and my assumption is that this must be said company’s only known venture into the film industry, given that IMDB lumps them in with a US distributor of the same name who have no credits prior to 1983.  (Actually, it’s a fair bet that the IMDB page in question amalgamates the credits of at least three different companies, but it’s scarcely our business to complain about that here.)

(2) Outside of central London, one particularly lovely establishing shot captures the riverside beer garden of the London Apprentice pub in Ilseworth, Middlesex, which remains largely unchanged to this day.

(3) In so far as I can tell, only other Rialto krimi to feature significant UK input was 1966’s The Trygon Factor, which was directed by Cyril Frankel (‘The Witches’, ‘Never Take Sweets From A Stranger’) and starred Stewert Granger and Robert Morley. Again, no actual UK production partner is listed, and I’m not aware of the film being much of a hit on either side of the channel.

A Visit to Jean Rollin’s Grave.

Earlier this month, I visited Paris for the first time in many years, and naturally I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to visit the resting place of one of my favourite filmmakers, the great Jean Rollin.

Approaching Père-Lachaise Cemetery through the quiet lanes leading to the side entrance off the Rue de la Rèunion, the city’s muted roar of traffic gradually gives way to bird song from the trees overhead and the muffled clamour of morning break-time at the nearby primary school, and it is hard not to reflect that, as much as his fans might have envisaged his ashes being scattered into waves at Dieppe, there is really nowhere more appropriate for Rollin to be entombed than alongside the great and the good of his city, deep within this veritable cité des morts.

Despite the frequent intrusion of ill-mannered tourists wrestling with their google-map equipped devices in perpetual search of Jim Morrison’s regrettably placed monument, Père-Lachaise retains its unique atmosphere, with its sheer scale and prevalence of overhanging foliage giving the cemetery’s central portions a sense of complete isolation from the outside world – a feeling that Jean Rollin must surely have appreciated, even as he endeavored to embody a similarly rarefied atmosphere in many of his films. [Needless to say, Rollin actually used the cemetery as a location in both ‘Lèvres de Sang’ (1975) and ‘Les Deux Orphelines Vampires’ (1997).] When night falls, as the gates are locked and the tourists depart, is there anywhere he would feel quite as at home as here?

A small, wedge-shaped block in the central Eastern part of the cemetery, Division # 27 of Père-Lachaise can be easily reached by climbing the winding steps surrounding the colossal tomb of the Baroness Elizaveta Alexandrovna Stroganova (pictured above), just off the pathway known as the Chemin des Chèvres.

Though #27 is thankfully one of the smaller Divisions in the older part of the cemetery, it still took us a good fifteen minutes of off-the-path searching to locate the modest Morel / Le Gentil family tomb within which Jean Rollin is interred, commemorated by a simple stone plaque appended to the tomb’s frontage, next to that of his son Carel, who sadly passed away in 2001. Though he was born Jean Michel Rollin Roth Le Gentil, Jean’s plaque simply bears the name by which the world knew him best.

Raising the metal bar that secures the gate to the railings around the tomb, I took a brief step inside to leave my own small tribute. Perhaps not quite un rose de fer, but the closest I could come up with at short notice. Rest in peace Jean, and may your spirit run free among these mysterious stones, dreaming of stories and pictures, for as long as they stand.

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Appendix # 1: Whilst kneeling at the base of the tomb, I couldn’t help but notice a small red and black beetle with a striking ‘deaths head’ type design on its carapace making its way across the step. Not exactly being an expert on beetles, I have been unable to identify this species, and am uncertain of their commonality within the cemetery, or whether or not any significance is attached to them, but either way, it seemed an odd bit of synchronicity.

Appendix # 2: The location of the Le Gentil / Rollin tomb, it should be noted in closing, actually borders on the cemetery’s larger 28th Division, which is seemingly the chosen resting place of assorted military generals and 20th century descendants of the Morat / Bonaparte dynasty. The thought of Jean Rollin quietly sneaking in under the grandiose noses of these representatives of a very different French culture amused me greatly.

Appendix # 3: Some bonus cemetery photographs? Why not.

Random Paperbacks: A Woman in Spaceby Sara Cavanaugh(Ace/Stoneshire books, 1983)

When I added this early ‘80s romance paperback to my library, certain parties questioned my decision.

All I can do in response was to draw their attention to the cover photograph and back cover blurb, and to paraphrase Electric Wizard: you think you’re civilised, but you will never understand.

Research-wise, any chance I may have had of finding a brief history of the ‘Tiara’ series of books via google has been effectively obliterated by a popular children’s manga series of the same name, and the internet also gives us nada on ‘Sara Cavanaugh’ beyond a few cover scans and broad mockery of this novel, suggesting either a one-off house pseudonym or an unsolicited manuscript that got… well I hesitate to say “lucky”.

SF columnist & humourist David Langford obviously made his way through ‘A Woman in Space’ at some point however, as he picked out the following passage as part of a collection of sci-fi goofs & howlers:

“A few hours had passed since they had been pulled away from the moon. A few hours and millions of miles. The moon was no longer visible, not even as a star. The whole thing was so crazy, weird and far-out. It was as though they were floating in a giant vacuum.”

Arrow Round up: Eaten Alive (Tobe Hooper, 1976)

Independent producer Mardi Rustam must have thought he’d hit the grindhouse horror jackpot when he signed up the director of ‘The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’ (then still knocking people’s socks off on its initial theatrical run) to make a movie about a backwoods hotel proprietor feeding his guests to a giant alligator, starring a bus load of old-hand Hollywood character players and a handful of pretty girls.

Forty years later, when I threw this disc on without much prior research to headline a Friday night of mindless horror movie fun, I’ll confess I had broadly similar expectations…. but as it turns out, fate dealt both Mardi and I a pretty ugly hand on this one.

To put it plainly: ‘Eaten Alive’ (also widely known as ‘Death Trap’) is a real fucking weird one, and not necessarily in a good way. Despite the foolproof simplicity of its drive-in friendly premise (‘Psycho’ + alligators + tits & gore = $$$, basically), the film that eventually emerged from the production’s evidently quite troubled set is one of the most ramshackle, disquieting and uniquely off-putting attempts at making a commercial horror film I’ve ever seen. (1)

The reasons for this are many and varied, but I suspect, at the end of the day, there was simply a bad moon on the rise (or some equally calamitous astrological conjunction) the day that the film’s creative principals convened on a low-rent Hollywood sound-stage to throw this thing together. There is just something.. off.. about the whole venture. Depending on circumstances and personal taste, some may find that this freaked out, weirdie vibe could add greatly to the film, but…. well, let’s just say that on this occasion it didn’t do a lot for my proposed programme of popcorn consumption and solfa-based relaxation, and leave it at that.

Although ‘Eaten Alive’s consciously artificial, set-bound visual style – all glowing red gel-lighting, swathes of candy floss fog and garishly camp costume/set design – suggests an intention on Hooper’s part to take a 180 degree U-turn from the realism of ‘Chainsaw..’, the spirit of that film was clearly still very much on the director’s mind, and his actual direction here is just as disorientating and stylistically extreme as it was on his earlier classic. Dutch angles, sweaty facial close-ups and prolonged sequences of twitchy discomfort are all very much in evidence, whilst the director’s favoured soundtrack (recorded in conjunction with Wayne Bell, as per their work together on ‘Chainsaw..’) comprises a genuinely alarming selection of jagged, atonal noise loops that, combined with a near-continuous barrage of shrieking, squelching, canned animal noise and incoherent radio chatter, makes the film a constant, low level assault on the senses. (2)

Whereas this approach worked very well for ‘Chainsaw..’s assaultive “descent into hell” structure however, it wreaks havoc with the slower, more conventional narrative utilised here, leaving viewers lost and confused, unable to grab hold of anything to help us connect with or understand the parade of increasingly grotesque insanity unfolding on-screen.

One of the main problems here (if indeed you see it as a problem) is that, of the distractingly large cast of characters, most appear just as unbalanced and unpredictable as Neville Brand’s psychopath hotelier, leaving us searching in vain for the kind of vaguely sympathetic protagonist figures necessarily to anchor (and more importantly, drive the suspense of) this kind of slasher / bodycount set-up.

Robert Englund’s smirking cowboy rapist, Stuart Whitman’s sleazy, ineffectual sheriff, Carolyn Jones’ doddering brothel madam – all of these are potentially intriguing characters, but they’re also almost comically dislikeable and entirely absorbed in their own strange tangents, giving the film a rambling, “lunatics have taken over the asylum” feel that persists despite the belated introduction of Mel Ferrer and Crystin Sinclaire as a theoretically sympathetic (but actually also quite dysfunctional) father / daughter team about halfway through the run-time. (3)

I don’t know what kind of advice and/or freaky treatment Hooper gave his cast here, but, whether their characters demand it or not, just about everyone on-screen is completely out-to-lunch, which doesn’t exactly help matters. This is most evident early in the film, when a bickering family unit of rent-a-victims (the parents played by Brian De Palma regular William Finley and ‘Chainsaw..’s Marilyn Burns) pull up outside Brand’s decaying boarding house. Finally, we think, some normal people to help put things in perspective… but it’s not to be.

Shot dispassionately from above as they stomp around their hideously decaying hotel room, Finley and Burns’ domestic disagreements soon assume the quality of shrieking, operatic hysteria, with Finley in particular going so far off the map it’s hard to believe anyone let him get away with it. By the time he begins scrabbling around on the floor, apparently channeling some acid-damaged reject from a way-out experimental theatre production as he mimes a search for his “eyes”, which he accuses his wife of having scooped out of his skull, we’re forced to wonder whether the couple’s terrified child – currently hiding under filthy bed sheets having already been traumatized by the sight of her pet poodle getting chomped by the alligator – wouldn’t be better off taking her chances with the muttering, brain-damaged axe murderer downstairs.

So yeah – it’s that kind of movie.

At the centre of all this derangement, probably the most genuinely disturbing (as opposed to just fingers-down-the-blackboard grating) aspect of ‘Eaten Alive’ is the casting of Neville Brand in the central role of the aforementioned psychopath.

Apparently one of the most highly decorated American veterans of World War II, Brand often claimed that he initially turned to acting (with a particular emphasis on The Method) as a means of coping with the ravages of what we would probably now term Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (back then, they probably just went with “shell shock”, or did that ‘silently tapping the side of yr head’ thing). Though extremely successful in his new career (his filmography is quite a read), by the time he got to ‘Eaten Alive’ Brand had also resorted to treating his condition through the more traditional means of raging alcoholism, resulting in a tendency toward dysfunctional behavior that shines through all too clearly here.

It is often difficult to discern how much of Brand’s incoherent performance is a result of his “immersion in the role” and how much is simply a reflection of his damaged mental health at the time of filming, but either way, he makes for an extremely uncomfortable presence on screen. Constantly muttering to himself and occasionally raising his voice to make odd, fractured pronouncements to whoever happens to be around, the vast majority of Brand’s dialogue is either inaudible or meaningless, meaning that, although we spend a great deal of time following him stomping about his living space as distorted country n’ western blares on the radio, we learn very little of his character’s personal history, or the motivation for his apparently random crimes.

He does sometimes seem to experiencing flashbacks or hallucinations of a military nature, suggesting that the character, like the actor playing him, is a traumatised veteran of some kind (thus aligning ‘Eaten Alive’ as a potential distant cousin to the sub-genre of “shell shock” horror flicks represented by Bob Clark’s ‘Deathdream’ (1974) and Buddy Giovinazzo’s ‘Combat Shock’ (1984)), but this is never really explored, and again, the ratio of “stuff that was in the script” versus stuff that Brand was simply improvising on the spot remains unclear.

All we can say for sure is that, based on opinions culled from the extensive extras on Arrow’s release of the film, most of the cast and crew were frightened of Brand, finding his behaviour threatening and unpredictable (one interviewee recalls him eating from a huge jar of honey between takes, like some perverted Winnie the Pooh), whilst many of his scenes convey the impression of a man suffering from severe dementia who has been pushed onto the set and left to fend for himself.

As with many of his later films, Hooper himself doesn’t seem to have been an easy collaborator either, and his constant clashes with ‘Eaten Alive’s producers appear to have led to his walking off and returning to the production like a yo-yo, with many cast members recalling pivotal scenes instead being directed by cinematographer Robert Caramico (whose attitude could be summarised as “LET’S GET THIS FUCKING THING DONE AND GO HOME”), or by Rustam himself.

Under the circumstances, it is a testament to the strength of Hooper’s vision that the finished film continues to embody his directorial sensibility so strongly, but his obvious absence from large chunks of the shooting nonetheless lends ‘Eaten Alive’ a fragmented, piecemeal quality that makes it an even stranger viewing experience, full of threads left hanging, entirely gratuitous bits of character business and some sequences whose very existence remains entirely inexplicable.

An example of the latter is provided by one extraordinary diversion during a scene set in a local bar, when David Haywood, the wondering cowboy with the violin case from Robert Altman’s ‘Nashville’, turns up, apparently playing the same character he portrayed in that film. Haywood proceeds to be terrorised in an exceptionally odd manner by two unsavory gentlemen – cohorts of Englund’s character – who rival Brand in the “authentically fucking creepy” department, in a meta-textual bit of pre-Lynchian menace that defies any kind of rational explanation.

Buried somewhere beneath ‘Eaten Alive’s distressed, almost avant garde surface is a great little fun-time horror movie (the one Rustam initially wanted to make, presumably) just fighting to get out. It is ironic that, despite turning off most of horror crowd with its sheer, rambling weirdness, the film’s actual murder set pieces are outstanding. More audacious and explicitly gory than most mid-‘70s American horrors, they border on the cartoon splatter of ‘80s Italian fare in their best moments – in fact I’m sure a carefully assembled trailer of the bloodier highlights could have had gore-hounds queuing ‘round the block, were it not for the fact that the total failure of the movie’s animatronic crocodile (alligator? I dunno, who cares..) simultaneously undercuts the laudable achievements of the film’s effects team in other areas, making a laughing stock out of any hopes the producers might have had of scoring some topical, ‘Jaws’-style action.

The more acclaimed classics of 1970s American independent horror might have gained a rep for their dark, twisted innovation, but for sheer berserk extremity I think ‘Eaten Alive’ pretty much tops them all, even whilst it’s lavishly eccentric production design instead seems to hark back to the ‘60s gothics, or early Technicolor melodramas. Going considerably further in its audience alienation tactics than most viewers are liable to tolerate even today, I can only assume it must have been met with consternation, walk-outs and general bafflement when it first made the rounds of America’s grindhouse/drive-in circuit back in the mid ‘70s.

Like most of Hooper’s post-‘Chainsaw..’ films, I wouldn’t go so far as to say that ‘Eaten Alive’ is a ‘good’ or artistically successful film – and it is certainly not one I’m be liable to recommend to anyone for the purposes of ‘entertainment’ – but it is definitely a unique experience, and that counts for something. Whatever you make of him as a director, Hooper’s bloody-minded pursuit of his own peculiar vision, combined with his apparent refusal to ever actually make the film his producers or audience want him to, is difficult not to admire.

Just spare a thought though for poor old Mardi Rustam, head in hands beside his account ledger a year or so after ‘Eaten Alive’ wrapped, wondering what the hell went wrong.

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(1)Other AKAs include ‘Horror Hotel’, ‘Starlight Slaughter’, ‘Legend of the Bayou’, ‘Brutes and Savages’ (appropriate?), ‘Akuma No Nuwa’ [‘The Devil’s Swamp’] in Japan and, as demonstrated via the superb poster above, ‘Quel Motel Vicino alla Palude’ [‘The Motel Near the Swamp’] in Italy.

(2) I’m sure all this has been widely discussed before, but with my “music fan” hat on, I can’t help but reflect on how ahead of their time Hooper & Bell were with their scores for ‘Chainsaw..’ and ‘Eaten Alive’, and how influential they must have been on the emergence what we’d today classify as ‘harsh noise’ or power electronics. I mean, who else, outside of the farthest reaches of avant garde composition, was busting out this kind of thing in the mid-‘70s?

(3)Amusingly, the perpetually dignified Mel Ferrer also ended up appearing in Umberto Lenzi’s ‘Eaten Alive!’ (1980).

Arrow Round up: Thieves’ Highway (Jules Dassin, 1949)

Though the precise boundaries of “film noir” within modern movie-chat are nebulous at best (and seem to become more so each year, as the genre’s key era sinks further into history), I’m afraid I’ve got to raise my hand from the outset here and say that I don’t believe Jules Dassin’s ‘Thieves’ Highway’ – trumpeted as being “as tough as noir gets” in Arrow’s marketing materials – fits the category at all. In terms of imagery, worldview and subject matter, we’re looking at something quite different here… unless one were to expand the concept of “noir” to include every black & white Hollywood film that takes a somewhat cynical approach to life.

Not that I blame Arrow (or anyone else who has marketed this film over the years) for hitting the “noir” button. Based on plot synopsis alone, Dassin’s film is admittedly a bit of a hard sell, and this was apparently the case even on the film’s original release, when, despite glowing critical notices, local exhibitors in the US had a devil of a time actually getting people into cinemas to see the damn thing.

In one of the supplements to Arrow’s edition, critic Frank Krutnik makes the case for reclassifying ‘Thieves Highway’ under the banner of what is apparently known as “film gris” – a designation that I was previously unaware of. Coined by film scholar Thom Anderson, this term has been applied chiefly to a set of films released in-between the two Hollywood HUAC hearings in 1947 and 1951, wherein a clique of broadly left-leaning directors, keeping a low profile in the realm of the low budget crime programmers and to some extent shielded from criticism by sympathetic producers, turned away from the existential / individualist concerns of “classic” noir, and instead began to offer up a thinly veiled critique of American capitalism and the corrupt social interactions it encourages. (John Huston’s ‘The Asphalt Jungle’ (1950), itself an obvious precursor to Dassin’s ‘Rififi’ (1955), would seem a key text here.)

Though it is not really a crime film in the conventional sense, ‘Thieves’ Highway’ would indeed seem to hit this alternative category with a perfect bulls-eye.

More than anything however, Dassin’s film reminded me of another movie by a blacklisted American director exiled in Europe (as Dassin would be shortly after finishing this film), Cy Endfield’s ‘Hell Drivers’ (1957). Like that film, ‘Thieves’ Highway’ is in some ways chiefly notable for the way in which it takes incredibly mundane subject matter – in this case, the travails of self-employed truck drivers transporting cargos of fruit from Fresno orchards to the San Francisco produce market – and crafts it into a compelling, tough guy adventure story.

Whereas ‘Hell Drivers’ takes a wildly pulpy, OTT approach to this task though, ‘Thieves Highway’ emerges as a little more… down to earth? Like the film’s hero Nick Garcos (played by Richard Conte), scriptwriter A.I. Bezzerides (‘They Drive By Night’, ‘Kiss Me Deadly’) was himself a second generation Greek immigrant whose father ran trucks of fruit between Fresno and San Francisco, and, like Garcos, Bezzerides also took up the yoke of the family business before Hollywood dough allowed him to make it as a professional writer.

As such, it’s a fair bet that a hefty chunk of autobiography made its way into both Bezzerides’ source novel (‘Thieves’ Market’ - published in ’48) and the script he developed it into. Certainly, ‘Thieves’ Highway’ carries a sense of realism and an attention to the day-to-day realities of working class life that is rare indeed in ‘40s Hollywood product, compressed into a sparse, forward-driving narrative that is gutsy enough to remain surprisingly compelling to this day.

By all accounts, one of Bezzerides’ overriding concerns as a writer lay in using his position to expose the multitude of “rip offs” foisted upon the common man at every level of society (a goal to which the crime/gangster genre is uniquely suited, needless to say), and with ‘Thieves’ Market’ / ‘Thieves’ Highway’ (note the pointed change in emphasis between the novel and movie titles) we can assume he landed the opportunity to do so more directly than at any other point in his writing career.

The film begins with Nick Garcos returning home from a stint in the navy to discover that his good-natured, easily manipulated father has been crippled after being sent home drunk in a sabotaged truck by his duplicitous creditors, and from that point on the movie is a roll-call of hard luck cases, from the immigrant farmers & fruit pickers being scammed on their produce by fast-talking truckers, to Nick’s partner Ed (Millard Mitchell) struggling to get to market in a jalopy “held together with spit”, to his fiancée (Barbara Lawrence), who flies to SF on the promise of marriage the next morning, only to find her would-be groom has been rolled by thugs for his newly acquired fortune and is recuperating in a prostitute’s apartment.

All of these are struggling, hardworking and sympathetically portrayed characters, but all are still clambering over each other to make a fast buck, whilst the apples they’re fighting over fly off the back of the trucks a tight corner, or sit rotting in the sun. Although ‘Thieves’ Highway’ never gets preachy or overtly political for a second, the script’s implications regarding the wasteful and corrupting nature of life in America could scarcely be clearer, whilst the fact that just about everybody on screen is a first or second generation immigrant adds a poignant verisimilitude to the portrayal of a treacherous world in which everyone seems to some extent an outsider.

Particularly pertinent in this regard is the late entry of Rica (celebrated Italian actress Valentina Cortese in her American debut), the aforementioned prostitute who, uh, ‘befriends’ Nick (this was a Code era picture remember) upon his arrival in San Francisco. A strange character whose introduction shifts the emphasis of the movie considerably, Rica doesn’t ring even remotely true as a lonely French (huh?) woman supposedly turning tricks in an apartment above a fruit market. In fact, it’s fair to say that Cortese’s performance seems to belong to an entirely different movie (a more elegant, sexually charged European one, to be precise) from the tough guy trucking stuff that surrounds it.

I can’t quite fathom Dassin's intention in placing such heavy emphasis on Cortese’s character in the second half of the film - the story of her romance with Nick certainly proves very difficult to reconcile with the otherwise sparse and fast-moving revenge narrative – but I’m hesitant to write her inclusion off entirely as a misjudgment, as her scenes with Conte undoubtedly have a certain frisson all of their own, adding a new dimension to the film that seems a deliberate attempt to take things in a potentially interesting direction, even if it is ultimately too tonally jarring and undermined by Production Code censorship to fully succeed.

Thinking further in fact, the notion that the hero of ‘Thieves’ Highway’ chucks his blonde, materialistic wife-to-be in order to take up with an iterant and melancholic woman of foreign extraction and questionable virtue – and for the new couple to furthermore be gifted with a deeply unconvincing “drive into the sunset” happy ending – seems a provocative addition to the edgy political subtext that can be extrapolated from the rest of the film.

Speaking of that revenge narrative meanwhile, for the sake of convenience the film’s assorted evils are all stacked at the door of crooked San Fran produce dealer Mike Figlia (Lee J. Cobb), an archetypal manipulative capitalist bully whose greedy scheming sees him regularly skirting the edges of the law. Whilst Nick’s dogged campaign to take him down comes with a pleasantly raw tang of “revenge of the downtrodden” vengeance about it, I feel that one of the few shortcomings of Bezzerides’ excellent script is his failure to “take things higher” in terms of delineating the chain of “rip-offs” at work in the produce market by bringing in the forces (whether cops, gangsters or local government) who are in turn leaning on Figlia, rather than leaving him as the end-of-the-line vis-à-vis the movie’s villainy.

Of course, it is entirely possible that Bezzerides himself was not to blame for this oversight (I’ve not read his source novel, so can’t compare the two). As appropriate as it may seem to modern viewers, explicitly calling out federal corruption and/or the influence of organized crime on market forces might well have pushed this already politically dicey property way beyond the studio’s comfort zone in this particularly sensitive era of American history.

As a director, Dassin always seemed to at drawing us into the precise mechanics of closed-system, masculine worlds – whether the high security prison of ‘Brute Force’ (1947), or the definitive police procedural of ‘The Naked City’ (’48) – and his depiction of the California trucking / fruit trading world in ‘Thieves’ Highway’ is equally vivid and believable.

Like many classic Hollywood directors, Dassin’s stylistic flourishes are all but invisible, but their contribution to the film’s overall effectiveness is profound. As in many of his films, the extensive (and, at the time, still quite novel) use of location shooting proves extremely beneficial, and, on the level of pure cinema, ‘Thieves Highway’ remains a blast, despite its potentially dispiriting subject matter.

Though the film’s political aspects and the stuff with Rica may provide meat for the theory-hounds, it is the high octane trucking stuff that will live longest in the memory of most viewers, with the gear-churning night-drives across winding mountain roads, the sweaty, fast-talking chaos of the market and the images of spilled apples cascading down placid hillsides all majestically portrayed.

Though anyone who comes to ‘Thieves’ Highway’ anticipating black hats, gats and femme fatales will be soundly disappointed, it nonetheless stands as both a uniquely raw and audacious film to have emerged from this particular time & place, and as a quintessential example of the kind of masculine, working class story that has pretty much entirely disappeared from cinema as demographics have shifted through the decades.

How often, these days, do you see commercial movies in which the precise method of repairing a drive shaft on an army surplus truck, or the per-box wholesale rate on golden delicious apples, are the key narrative issues upon which our heroes fates hang? As one of ‘Thieves Highway’ biggest action set-pieces unfolded, involving Nick being rescued by his driving partner after being nearly suffocated by roadside sand when his jack collapses mid-way through changing a wheel, I couldn’t help but reflect that you just don’t see this stuff on-screen any more. From such obvious companion pieces as Clouzot’s ‘The Wages of Fear’ (1953) to grimly proletarian post-war thrillers like Cliff Owen’s ‘A Prize of Arms’ (1962) and the aforementioned ‘Hell Drivers’, it is a spirit of dour, engine oil-encrusted male enterprise that hasn’t so much disappeared from the world itself as it has simply disappeared from our culture.

It is interesting to reflect that the market conditions dramatised here probably remain largely unchanged to this day – in fact their impact has probably only been magnified by the advent of bigger, better transport networks and the march of economic globalisation – yet to all intents and purposes, they have simply become invisible to us. The fact is, the people involved with this level of industry simply don’t go to the movies anymore, and even if they did, chances are they wouldn’t care to see their own workaday struggles staring back at them.

Meanwhile, those of us who do have the time and money to invest in an increasingly privileged popular culture probably can't much relate to the life represented by some lowly grease-monkey wrestling with a hand-crank at the side of the road (or his nearest 21st century equivalent), just as we prefer not to spend too much time thinking about where our apples come from. Chances are, they’re still spilling down hillsides and rotting in the sun en route to our preferred ethically rebranded supermarkets, but on a scale Dassin and Bezzerides could scarcely have imagined, as the cameras look elsewhere.

Arrow Round up: The Rambling Guitarist (Buichi Saitô, 1959)

When I first began reading up on Japanese cinema a few years back, I’ll confess I found Nikkatsu studio’s oft-referenced “borderless action” style a difficult concept to grasp. From my clueless Western perspective, the Nikkatsu films I had seen up to that point didn’t seem particularly noteworthy for their globe-trotting agenda or concentration on “action”. On the contrary, they seemed fairly conventional stories of Japanese people doing things in contemporary Japan, so… what’s the big idea, y’know?

Having now read (and more importantly, watched) far more widely around the subject however, I hope I am more able to appreciate the extent to which Nikkatsu’s house style from the mid/late ‘50s onwards represented a significant departure from the established norms of Japanese commercial filmmaking, immediately differentiating the studio’s output from that of its competitors.

Watching films made by those competitors during the ‘50s and ‘60s – be they Daiei historical dramas and ghost stories, Toho prestige pictures or Toei ninkyo yakuza productions – it soon becomes clear that the ethical and social imperatives guiding their narratives are of a very different order to those we take for granted in the West, reflecting (if not always uncritically) the complex patterns of mutual responsibility and obligation that underpin Japan’s unique social order.

A Toei yakuza in a contemporary-set film may adopt Western dress and (to a certain extent) Western habits, but his goals, and the ways in which he goes about achieving them, will be very different to those of a French or American gangster, and it is this basic difference in narrative drive that can sometimes make such films a tough gig for non-Japanese viewers to fully engage with.

As a result, the phenomenally popular ninkyo sub-genre of the early 1960s remains largely off the menu to us subtitle-dependent crime movie fans, whilst even the more widely celebrated jitsuroku (‘True Account’) films of the early ‘70s have a tendency to leave unprepared foreign viewers emotionally sideswiped when they reach the inevitable blood-soaked conclusion - feeling as if we should be sharing in some grand emotional catharsis, but unable to put the pieces together well enough to understand quite what form it should take.

Returning to Nikkatsu’s output with this background in mind, their “borderless action” concept – concisely defined as an attempt to tell stories which are “IN Japan, but not OF Japan” - suddenly begins to make a whole lot of sense. To the Western viewer, the studio’s run-of-the-mill genre programmers (as opposed to the work of their more audacious and experimental directors, which we’ll leave to one side for the moment) feel breezy, comfortable and familiar. Far more explicitly modelled on American (and to some extent European) templates, they still strive to tell distinctly Japanese stories, but recalibrated to fit a frame of reference that those raised on classic Hollywood thrillers and European melodrama can immediately understand.

This approach, together with Nikkatsu’s co-operative approach to licensing their back catalogue for foreign release, has helped make the studio’s output feel far more prominent for overseas fans of Japanese cinema than it presumably would have been for contemporary domestic audiences, but nonetheless, it is worth noting that Nikkatsu certainly didn’t have foreign distribution in mind when they concieved their “borderless” style. Rather, our easy enjoyment of their films today is an unintentional by-product of the studio’s deliberate attempts to cultivate a younger, more cosmopolitan audience within Japan itself, targeting a segment of quasi-rebellious, pro-Western youth whose aspirations had thus far been largely ignored by the other studios.

With the shadow of Japanese national identity thus looming over them like a particularly aggressive elephant in the room, Nikkatsu’s contracted filmmakers were left with several options for fulfilling their “borderless” agenda. On the one hand, they could choose to simply ignore Japanese culture altogether, as can be seen in such gangster films as Yasuharu Hasebe’s ‘Massacre Gun’ and Takashi Nomura’s pointedly titled ‘A Colt is My Passport’ (both 1967), creating an eerie trans-Pacific urban dreamland in which to play out universal dramas that, with a few tweaks here and there, could just as easily have taken place in Paris or Chicago.

Or, more interestingly, Nikkatsu’s directors and scriptwriters could kick the proverbial elephant in the guts (so to speak) and use the “borderless” blueprint to directly explore the cultural dislocation of life in post-WWII Japan, thus cementing the themes that drive many of Nikkatsu’s best (or at least, most interesting) films. Foreign characters (who pretty much never appear in other Japanese films of this period) are frequent visitors to Nikkatsu’s world, whilst their melodramatic youth films are often set near ports or American airforce bases, and make great play of dramatising the reactions of young people to the brand names, pop music and other exotic imports that characterise such transitory, almost literally borderless, locations.

Within this mixed up world, the heroine of Noboru Kaji’s frothy ‘Whirlwind of Love’ (1969) flits around Tokyo channeling Audrey Hepburn in a very un-Japanese fit of perpetual romantic indecision, whilst Tamio Kawachi’s rich buddies jet off to The Alps, where they still somehow manage to swig from bottles of Asahi, in Koreyoshi Kurahara’s The Woman From The Sea (1959). In Kurahara’s ‘Black Sun’ (1964), Kawachi’s jazz-obsessed drop-out gabbles away to Chico Roland’s rogue GI in fragments of broken English, whilst the best entries in the Stray Cat Rock series (1970-71) poignantly explore Japanese youth’s love / hate relationship with American pop culture and the colonial ambitions it represents.

If you’re wondering what in the hell all this extended scene-setting has to do with assessing the merits of Buichi Saitô’s ‘The Rambling Guitarist’ (as released for the first time with English subs on Arrow’s recent ‘Nikkatsu Diamond Guys’ set), well, the truth is that, basically, it is a film about which I can find very little to say, beyond the broader context provided above.

Whilst global cinephiles might have been introduced to Nikkatsu through the ground-breaking work of auteurs such as Kurahara, Kon Ichikawa and of course my man Seijun Suzuki, in truth those directors were all outsiders, whose best work stood out simply because it went against the grain of official company policy. Beyond the sheer novelty of their “borderless” ideology in fact, the vast majority of Nikkatsu’s pictures were extremely conservative in stylistic terms, with studio bosses demanding a steady schedule of slick, crowd-pleasing vehicles for their ever-expanding roster of proto-idol heart-throb star performers – a phenomenon of which ‘The Rambling Guitarist’ represents a quintessential example. In case you’re wondering, that means Saito plays it safe and sticks firmly to the former of the two categories I outlined above.

Seemingly modelled on the light-weight formula of Elvis Presley’s early movies (minus most of the music), the film sees charismatic, guitar-strumming drifter Akira Kobayashi arriving in a small seaside town where, in classic Zatoichi style, he soon becomes embroiled in a feud between the local yakuza clan, sparking up a romance with the daughter of the slightly less nefarious of the two bosses (played by Nobuo Kaneko, whom you recognize from his role as the perpetually scheming Yamamori-san in Kinji Fukasaku’s ‘Battles Without Honour & Humanity’ saga) and obtaining an advanced apprenticeship in yakuza cool from the ubiquitous Jô Shishido - who looks just as bad-ass as ever here, prior to his regrettable ‘hamster cheeks’ plastic surgery disaster, and sporting some nifty powder blue duds.

Fast-paced, brightly and beautifully photographed in no-expense-spared colour and full of likeable characters, easily resolved moral dilemmas and much romantic beach-side moping, ‘The Rambling Guitarist’ is seventy-something minutes of the finest undemanding, professionally rendered entertainment that Japan’s commercial movie industry had to offer.

A showdown on a fishing boat between Kobayashi and Shishido is a particular highlight (apparently, ‘60s yakuza liked to retain their uniform of tailored suits and shades even when crewing on a sea voyage), but that aside, basically everything here falls out of one’s brain immediately after viewing, leaving little behind beyond a vague feeling of having been satisfactorily entertained - which, I suspect, is exactly the way the big-wigs at Nikkatsu liked to do business.

Mildly diverting tales of happy-go-lucky drifters hanging out with chicks on the beach may not necessarily equate to essential viewing for us 21st century, first world viewers, but if you can put yourself in the shoes of someone born into the hunger and chaos of 1940s Tokyo, with nothing to watch at the flicks except endless tales of doomed, conscience-stricken Samurai, then innocuous films like ‘The Rambling Guitarist’ can take on a new significance. Steeped in what now seems a strain of forlorn, nostalgic optimism, they offer a fleeting fantasy of unburdened personal freedom that can speak just as strongly of the hopes and fears of Japanese youth at this point in time as any of their national cinema’s more weighty offerings.

Arrow Round up: Hired To Kill (Nico Mastorakis, 1990)

Hitting shelves soon as part of Arrow’s inexplicable campaign to revive the work of VHS-era Greek exploitation kingpin Nico Mastorakis (whose 1986 film ‘The Edge of Terror’ aka ‘The Wind’ we covered here a while back as a VHS Purgatory post), ‘Hired To Kill’s forthcoming release reminded me that I have actually owned the film on DVD for years and never got around to watching it -- until now, that is.

Purchased as part of a “10 DVDs for £10” deal from a local junk shop if I recall correctly, my copy of the film bears the seal of Hollywood DVD – celebrated suppliers of Godfrey Ho ninja movies to Poundland stores across the nation – and, at the time, my rationale for dropping 50p on it probably didn’t extend much beyond “Oliver Reed? SOLD!”, to be honest.

(Further proof, as if it were needed, that whatever inflated pay-packets independent movie producers might dish out to contemptuous, washed up legends to ensure their cooperation in creatively bankrupt genre vehicles, it’ll be worth it in the long run as long as goons like me are still buying the tickets.)

Anyway, as it transpires, ‘Hired To Kill’ is a head-spinningly goofy sub-Cannon action flick starring a charisma-free muscle dude named Brian Thompson, who perhaps ever so slightly resembles a very young Lee Marvin if you squint, but basically spends the bulk of his screen time looking like he just got thrown off the university rugby team for banging his head against the locker-room wall too many times.(1)

Thompson plays a mercenary hired by sleazy uber-capitalist George Kennedy to take down Oliver Reed, who is the tyrannical ruler of some ill-defined rogue nation. This will allow their local power-to-the-people resistance movement (headed by a barely-in-this-movie-at-all Jose Ferrer) to take charge, ready for Kennedy and his shady CIA-backed cohorts to sweep in and exploit the hell out of everybody. Or something.

From this agreeably cynical starting point, things swiftly descend (ascend?) into la-la land when it is explained that security in Reed’s dictatorship is so tight that there is only one possible plan that will get Thompson inside. That of course being that he will pose as a famous fashion photographer, recruiting a dirty half-dozen of beautiful female fighters (a women’s prison boxing champion, a duplicitous Mossad agent, a mute girl who bloodily dispatched the soldiers who murdered her family – you get the idea) to serve as his “models”, thus allowing them to infiltrate the highest echelons of wherever-the-hell-it-is society and to pad out the middle half hour of the movie with gratuitous Andy Sidaris style swimsuit footage until such a point as it is deemed prudent for the girls to change back into their khakis and go all “paintballing weekend” for the inevitable closing reel of exploding barns and low flying helicopters. Splendid.

You might be thinking that seems like a fairly unlikely means by which to effect a coup d'état in a military dictatorship, but look here – George Kennedy says his experts have looked at ALL the possibilities, and this is the ONLY ONE that will work - so you can shut up.

(Let the record state that ‘Doin’ It For The Money’, the sleazed up, sub-Prince electro-pop number that accompanies all of the fashion shoot / pool loungin’ sequences, is a minor masterwork.)

At this point, we should probably address the confusion regarding where this film is actually supposed to be set. Although the text on the back of the DVD box refers to “a volatile Mid East nation”, in practice it looks an awful lot like a quiet Greek island, and all references to the country’s name or location are pointedly avoided during the first half of the film… until that is, Mastorakis suddenly drops the pretense and has his characters begin referring to it as – uh – “CYPRA”. Subtle, Nico.

No one however seems to have communicated any of this to Oliver Reed, who turns up to the party as a full-on South American ‘El Presidente’ type figure, complete with a mangled Hispanic accent, a red star peaked cap and a truly magnificent moustache.

Happily though, Ollie is a lot more engaged and enthusiastic here than he was in many of his latter-day “descent into cheque-collecting ignominy” appearances, probably due to Mastorakis’s wise decision to place his character in a lot of scenarios that the old boy presumably quite enjoyed – shouting at people whilst waving a machine gun around, quaffing wine at a dinner table surrounded by glamorous ladies, and, in one intensely uncomfortable sequence, holding forth about the artistic qualities of his own love-making whilst groping a woman’s breasts from behind.

The latter scene, it should be noted, occurs shortly before Thompson – whose fashion designer cover story requires him to undertake the least convincing impression of a homosexual ever seen on screen – kisses Reed full on the mouth, in a sequence you can guarantee never reached take # 2. Whilst I would generally tend toward the opinion that you’d have to be out of your mind to buy ‘Hired To Kill’ for full price on blu-ray, the chance to see Reed’s subsequent reaction shot in HD should be worth the entry price alone.

If, reading this, you’re thinking ‘Hired To Kill’ sounds like a dose of pure trash movie nirvana, well, to a certain extent you’re not wrong. The dialogue and line delivery alone are enough to potentially make this the stuff of snarky Youtube legend, and, if you do the decent thing and wait until the point in the evening when you’ve reached the end of a six pack before hitting play, the sheer ridiculous, wrong-headed grandeur of the whole venture will leave you speechless…. for about fifty minutes or so.

At that point, you might find yourself checking your watch and reflecting that that this cheapo sub-Cannon action movie you’ve been watching has been conspicuously lacking in any cheapo, sub-Cannon action. In fact, aside from the inevitable training montage, there has actually been no action whatsoever, which is something of an astounding oversight for a film of this nature.

Much like its close cousin Ted V. Mikels’ ‘The Doll Squad’ (1973), ‘Hired To Kill’ is the kind of “action” movie in which the campy faffing about that leads up to the action is a sheer delight, but when it gives way to the actual real deal of people in army boots with prop machine guns creeping around door-frames and throwing hand grenades, well…. I guess the basic issue is, to make that kind of stuff exciting (as opposed to a show reel for a second rate stunt team) takes a certain degree of talent for dynamic filmmaking and narrative tension, so… yeah.

I’m sure the dozen or so stuntmen who comprise Oliver Reed’s unstoppable army [cue compulsory Elvis Costello singalong] all did their best, and it’s my duty to point out that some of the women who comprise Brian Thompson’s all-girl commando squad actually seem like fairly capable and interesting actresses who richly deserved better roles than those assigned to them here, but regardless – clearly the all-out, insurance policy defying, seat-of-yr-pants destruction fest that could have sent us out on a high and secured ‘Hired To Kill’s place as an all-time dumb-ass classic just didn't materialise.

At the end of the day, the sad fact is that all Nico Mastorakis movies, however entertaining they may initially appear, seem to eventually succumb to the all too familiar haze of safe, under-achieving blandness common to post-1990 straight-to-video productions, and ‘Hired to Kill’ is unfortunately no exception, with its essential failure to fulfill the expectations of its genre condemning it to splutter out and hit the curb, irrespective of the uproarious highlights that have kept us rolling to within reach of the hour mark.

But still – Oliver Reed in unexpected man-on-man kiss.

By the way, did you know that ‘Nights Of Cabiria’ and Antonioni's 'The Passenger' aren’t out on blu-ray yet?

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(1)A quick IMDB trawl reveals that Brian Thompson previously appeared as “Punk” in The Terminator, and in the no doubt pivotal role of “Night Slasher” in Stallone’s ‘Cobra’. In between numerous Hollywood bit-parts, he also headlined a Fred Olen Ray movie (‘Commando Squad’), and, with crushing inevitability, wrote, directed and starred in a 2014 production named ‘The Extendables’.

Arrow Round up: Day of Anger (Tonino Valerii, 1967)

Lacking in either the stylistic grandeur of Leone, the sweaty political heft of Sollima or the transgressive pulp grit of Corbucci, Tonino Valerii’s first Spaghetti Western initially seems a pretty routine affair, very much channeling the workaday professionalism of the kind of movies Joel McCrea or Randolph Scott were headlining in America ten years earlier.

This being post-Leone though, there’s also a strong strain of blood-thirsty, samurai-style lone wolf violence in the mix here too, and whenever things hustle toward a showdown, Valerii steps up to the plate with a controlled, dramatic directorial sensibility that, if somewhat more retrained than those of his aforementioned contemporaries, nonetheless delivers the goods just the way we want ‘em.

Needless to say, Lee Van Cleef is a total bad-ass in this one, playing one of his best ever ruthless, squinty-eyed gunfighters (which is saying something, given the extent to which he cornered the market in ruthless, squinty-eyed gunfighters), and if you like your westerns full of the kind of lightning fast, unpredictable kill-shots that raise an involuntary “woop!” or “hell yeah!”, ‘Day of Anger’ has you well covered.

Meanwhile, a miscast Giuliano Gemma as Van Cleef’s protégé / successor plods through his “zero to hero” story arc divertingly enough as various crooks and baddies (Harry Alan Towers regular Walter Rilla and the great Al Mulok amongst them) creep and seethe on the margins, awaiting their comeuppance. Ernesto Gastaldi’s script is pretty good as far as these things go (by which I mean pacing is solid and the characters consistent, with only occasional outbreaks of errant nonsense), but when Van Cleef is off-screen and folks start yapping, things inevitably simmer down a bit, hitting a comfortable “dusty ol’ B western” comfort zone.

The film’s second half has a lot of great stuff with Van Cleef building a grand, quasi-psychedelic casino/saloon whose visual aspect is just as awesome as it is historically questionable, and generally striding around in ass-kicking “I own this town” type fashion, all of which is splendidly enjoyable for those of us who always find ourselves cheering for Van Cleef even when (as usual) he’s playing an utter bastard.

‘Day of Anger’ is also notable for featuring one of the most absurdly contrived set-pieces I’ve ever seen in a non-comedic western, wherein some guy appears out of nowhere and challenges Van Cleef to a duel, before specifying that this is to take place on horseback, with powder & shot muskets. Valerii and co. obviously thought the resulting sequence was a big showstopper, but in truth it simply comes across us ridiculous (not least because it causes us to wonder why this sinister stranger specified such an unusual manner of engagement, given that he is apparently not very good at it).

Elsewhere, Riz Ortolani’s music is none the worse for sounding like it was mainly knocked up on a few electric guitars and a pair of bongos, and the movie’s US poster [reproduced above] is one of my all-time favourites. According to IMDB, no less a personage than Paul Naschy pops up here as an extra, but I didn’t spot him.

Despite the attempts of both Gastaldi and Italian critic Roberto Curti to attribute grand mythic weight to ‘Day of Anger’s storyline on the extras to the Arrow edition, this movie is basically a pure potboiler, largely devoid of politics, realism or any but the most basic thematic significance. Whilst it can’t pretend to measure up to the work of the three Sergios or the other one-off masterpieces that comprise the A-list of Spaghettis though, it’s certainly entertaining and, for want of a better word, COOL, enough to give it a top table position on the genre’s B-team.

Arrow Video Round-Up.

 

Whilst I would never wish to post anything on this blog that could be seen as shilling for or uncritically cheerleading for a particular brand or commercial enterprise, it nonetheless behests me to repeat a truth that should be plainly obvious to anyone who still maintains an interest in owning niche/genre films on physical media: namely, that the UK’s Arrow Video have been absolutely killing it over the past couple of years, orchestrating a seemingly endless schedule of releases, the breadth, depth, quality and general audacity of which is enough to send even the most grounded of fans into an occasional frenzy.

Whilst I don’t by any means support all of Arrow’s title choices or marketing decisions, their Japanese releases alone have been enough to repeatedly push me into “dreams come true” territory, and I’d go as far as to say that their previously unthinkable restoration & revival of such mistreated masterworks as Borowzyck’s ‘Dr Jekyll et les Femmes’, Donald Cammell’s ‘White of the Eye’ and Matt Cimber's ‘The Witch Who Came From the Sea' represent an invaluable gift to the world of cinema as a whole. From a euro-horror POV meanwhile, they deserve a whole other set of high fives simply for finally getting decent looking versions of ‘Blood & Black Lace’ and ‘Nightmare City’ on the shelves, and, well… you get the idea.

As if that weren’t enough, Arrow have also recently upped their charm offense against yours truly by allowing me to win a prize draw stemming from their annual customer survey, thus allowing me to claim a huge pile of their releases entirely gratis. In addition to the substantial haul of discs acquired via several recent sale events, this basically means I currently have Arrow blu-rays comin’ outta my ears – a situation that will no doubt be familiar to many people with a fondness for films and a certain amount of disposable income.

By means of channeling this happy circumstance into some long-overdue content for this blog therefore, I thought it might be a good time for me to flex my shorter-than-usual movie review muscles and knock out a few summations of my thoughts on some off the odder and less-celebrated films that could easily get lost in the shuffle of Arrow’s big-hitter releases.

I’ll be posting these one every few days over the next couple of weeks, sans screen-shots but hopefully plus some second-rate wise-cracking and helpful “what the hell is this movie – should I buy it?” style consumer advice. We begin tomorrow. What thrills!

Brit Apocalypse Redux.

(Manor Books [U.S.], 1974 / cover artist unknown.)

CATASTROPHE: Mass immigration / civil war.

(Hodder, 1968 / cover artist unknown.)

CATASTROPHE: Earthquakes.

Always the way isn’t it? Just a few weeks after my doom-sodden Nature of the Catastrophe post, I snagged a couple of great additions to my collection of British apocalypse literature, both acquired from a decidedly un-apocalyptic Falmouth, where the proprietor of Benford Books on High Street uttered the fateful words, “I’ve got a few more boxes of science fiction out the back, if you want to have a look.”

It’s interesting to see ‘Fugue For a Darkening Island’ slightly retitled for this American edition (presumably somebody decided those backward colonials wouldn’t know what a “Fugue” is), with a lovely ‘70s action movie styled illustration that belies the book’s grimly dispiriting tone. I lost my previous copy of this book some time ago, but I have extremely strong memories of it, so look forward to revisiting it.

I’ve never read ‘A Wrinkle In The Skin’, but, given how unhealthily fixated I am on Christopher’s ‘The Death of Grass’, I can only hope it will prove similarly edifying.

My apologies for the recent dearth of content here, by the way. All I can do is vainly promise that a wealth of new content – with actual writing and stuff – is currently in the works, so keep watching this space, etc.

Random Paperbacks: The Mabinogion (Everyman Library, 1975 / originally published approx. 1350-1425AD)

Providing commentary on The Mabinogion – jewel in the crown of surviving Celtic culture and foggy well-spring of Arthurian myth – is somewhat beyond the remit of this weblog, but I can at least draw your attention to Jeff Thomas’s superbly lysergic cover art for this mid-‘70s Everyman Library paperback.

Initially bright and eye-catching, Thomas’s illustration – like all good psychedelic graphics – becomes more queasy and unsettling the longer one looks at it. If his ravenous, glassy-eyed crystalline beasts seem unlikely to have roamed the hills of Wales even in the realms of fantastical antiquity, they are no less nightmarish for it, and are, in my view, entirely in keeping with the singularly mind-bending outpourings of medieval weirdness found within.

By way of an example, here’s a representative passage from ‘Culhwch and Olwen’, concerning Arthur’s unseemly scuffles with a hag, amongst other things;