Z

Concurrently, the military banned long hair on males; mini-skirts; Sophocles; Tolstoy; Euripedes; smashing glasses after drinking toasts; labor strikes; Aristophanes; Ionesco; Sartre; Albee; Pinter; freedom of the press; sociology; Beckett; Dostoyevsky; modern music; popular music; the new mathematics; and the letter "Z", which in ancient Greek means "He is alive!"

Director: Costa-Gavras
Writer: Vasilis Vasilikos (source), Jorge Semprun
Cast: Yves Montand, Irene Papas, Jean-Louis Trintignant, Jacques Perrin, Charles Danner, Francois Perier, Pierre Dux

IMDB

The late 1960s was a tumultuous, fear-filled era, and the Costa-Gavras film "Z" (1969) - recently released by the Criterion Collection - plays like a dispatch from the front lines. Based on the Greek government's assassination of a leftist political leader in 1963, it told the story of the ensuing cover-up and its unraveling, and it did so in a tense, suspenseful, action-filled way that captured the imagination of the world. It's one of the few foreign-language films to be nominated for a best picture Academy Award.

This French production - shot on the fly, with a low budget, with French actors working for next to nothing because they believed in the project - has lost nothing in 40 years. Movies have gotten faster, but "Z" still moves. Independent productions have made a virtue of the rough and ready film style, but "Z" still looks raw and vital. And Costa-Gavras' experiments with flash cutting - in which characters' memories of past events are rendered in quick cuts lasting a fraction of a second - remain innovative and psychologically perceptive.

So the movie has lost nothing, but we have - namely two things, which are implicit in every frame of "Z": a belief in the power of protest and a belief in the power of cinema.

It's a curious thing to look at such a dark document as "Z" and see optimistic assumptions lurking around its edges. In most ways, this is a cynical, angry film. Its vision of the Greek government - and by extension, all organized authority - is bleak. Authority is corrupt, evil, entrenched, small-minded and, amazingly, convinced of its own virtue. It's as resilient as a monster. Lop off a limb, and it grows one back overnight.

Human nature as depicted in "Z" doesn't allow much room for hope, either. People are stupid and cowardly, easily manipulated and intimidated. And many of them love being part of a mob.

Yet despite that, "Z" assumes that protest can make a difference. The title refers to the slogan - "Z" for "Zei," meaning "he lives" in Greek - that was adopted by protesters in the aftermath of Dr. Gregoris Lambrakis' assassination in 1963. Yves Montand plays the role inspired by Lambrakis, and the movie's faith is that, by keeping Lambrakis' spirit alive, the protesters will someday bring about the return of democratic government in Greece. (This did happen, but more than a decade after Lambrakis' death.)

Costa-Gavras also assumes that movies can become a vital part of the international conversation. Costa-Gavras made "Z" to entertain people but also to move them and bring about political action. That's an enormous ambition and would seem, by today's standards ... not naive (Costa-Gavras is anything but naive), but grandly optimistic.

Forty years later, we know that wars can happen, despite mass protests. We know that political assassinations, like the one depicted in "Z," stall progress and dishearten people more than they galvanize public anger. And we know that films made with the intent of changing the world - especially documentaries such as "Food, Inc.," "An Inconvenient Truth" and "Sicko" - face such entrenched power that they're practically tilting at windmills.

Perhaps that's what's most invigorating about "Z" all these years later, even more than its expert plotting and pacing: Costa-Gavras' faith is the energy behind his film's energy. It's that faith that enables this movie about old politics to stay new.

Review by Mick LaSalle
SF Chronicle

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http://rapidshare.com/files/32370104/zcg.part1.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/32379461/zcg.part2.rar
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http://rapidshare.com/files/32444773/zcg.part7.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/32446399/zcg.part8.rar

Subtitles (English):
http://rapidshare.com/files/32446403/zcgs.rar

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http://rapidshare.com/files/55904700/Z.Costa.Gravas.1969.DVDRip.XviD.Parkyns.part1.rar
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Criterion Restored Version With Extras
http://rapidshare.com/files/300320111/Costa-Gavras-Z.1969-SMz.part01.rar
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Il Portiere di Notte

Director: Liliana Cavani
Writer: Barbara Alberti (source), Amedeo Pagani (source), Liliana Cavani (screenplay), Italo Moscati (writer)
Cast: Dirk Bogarde, Charlotte Rampling, Philippe Leroy, Gabriele Ferzetti, Giuseppe Addobbati, Isa Miranda, Nino Bignamini, Marino Mase

IMDB

The Night Porter is a provocative and problematic film. Made in 1974 by Italian director Liliana Cavani, it can be seen as an exercise in perversion and exploitation of the Holocaust for the sake of sensationalism. On the other hand, a closer reading of this English-language psychological thriller suggests a dark vision of compelling characters doomed by their World War II past.

When the film was released in the United States, critical response was hardly favorable; indeed, Vincent Canby’s New York Times review was nothing short of scathing. Under the headline “The Night Porter Is Romantic Pornography,” he began, “Let us now consider a piece of junk.” And some viewers were disturbed that a woman director was portraying a female concentration camp survivor as the masochistic sex object of her Nazi captor.

However, much like another controversial Italian director at the time, Lina Wertmüller, Cavani has never presented herself as a “feminist” director; indeed, her subsequent movies, such as The Skin (1981, with Marcello Mastroianni and Burt Lancaster), and Francesco (a.k.a. St. Francis of Assisi, 1989, with Mickey Rourke), were hardly concerned with positive female role models.

Cavani’s casting of in The Night Porter Dirk Bogarde as Max and Charlotte Rampling as Lucia recalls the roles they played five years earlier in Luchino Visconti’s The Damned. Bogarde’s potential for sleek savagery and Rampling’s skeletal beauty are well suited to these demonic films, where the only exit is death.

The action is set in 1957 Vienna, where a secret organization of former Nazis meets periodically and “eliminates” dangerous witnesses. Max, a former SS officer, is a night porter in an elegant hotel. When Lucia enters the lobby with her husband, there is a tense exchange of looks whose significance is fleshed out in flashbacks: she was a concentration camp inmate. Images of the past punctuate the present narrative with urgent frequency, and suggest that Lucia survived by being Max’s plaything.

Amid the growing tension of their mutual anxiety over being alone together, Max eliminates a former prisoner who had been his friend. He and Lucia are finally reunited in a scene of violent passion, all the more steamy for their accumulated repression. Rather than “file her away,” as he is told to do, he locks his willing partner in his apartment where they replay their concentration camp scene.

Lucia is not the only former prisoner who seeks to re-create the conditions of intense sensation—there is also a young male dancer who used to perform seminude for the SS, and who now has Max arrange lights in his hotel room so that he can do his number once more.

The obscene instances of replay constitute a role-reversal, for one flashback presents Lucia as a Nazi emblem: in the requisite smoky cabaret scene (of which variations can be found in The Damned, Cabaret, Just a Gigolo, The Serpent’s Egg, Lili Marleen, and The Formula) Lucia sings in German—wearing only pants, suspenders, and an SS cap—while invoking Salome.

The obsessive love of Max and Lucia ultimately re-creates a concentration camp situation in which they are both victims. They experience paranoia because they are being pursued; they no longer go out; finally, hunger and lack of air make them regress to an animal level. The core of the film might be Max’s confession that he works at night because during the day, in the light, he is ashamed.

His repressed guilt is perhaps as great as his initially repressed lust, and Max’s ultimate action is to turn himself into a physically degraded and emotionally shattered prisoner. The Night Porter depicts not only the political continuity between wartime Nazism and 1957 Austria, but also the psychological continuity of characters locked into compulsive repetition of the past.

Review by Annette Insdorf
Criterion

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http://rapidshare.com/files/323113429/IPDNott3.part2.rar
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http://rapidshare.com/files/323166238/IPDNott3.part7.rar
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Sitting Target

Director: Douglas Hickox
Writer: Alexander Jacobs (screenplay), Laurence Henderson (source)
Cast: Oliver Reed, Jill St. John, Ian Mcshane, Edward Woodward, Frank Finlay, Freddie Jones, Jill Townsend

IMDB

After watching Douglas Hickox' Sitting Target, it's easy to see why Quentin Tarantino named a character after the late director in his Inglourious Basterds. Tarantino also talks about the film with Edgar Wright on their rollicking Hot Fuzz commentary. The hard-charging Sitting Target is one of the great British crime films and stands tall against other moody, early '70s genre cinema, whatever nationality. Screenwriter Alexander Jacobs, he of the great Point Blank, as well as French Connection II, The Seven-Ups, and Hell in the Pacific, adapted Laurence Henderson's novel of the same name. From the very first strains of Stanley Myers' propulsive, ominous score set to images of a determined Oliver Reed doing an intense exercise routine in his jail cell, I knew I was in for a treat.

Reed plays career criminal Harry Lomart who finds out soon into his latest incarceration that his beloved wife Pat (Jill St. John, trying on a not entirely successful British accent) isn't going to wait for him when his 15-year jail spell ends. Adding insult to injury she tells him that she has met someone else and wants a divorce. When he hears this, in a show of raw power and rage, Harry somehow gets his hand through the partition separating them and attempts to strangle his wife to death. Prison guards separate Harry from his wife before he can finish the deed, but the stage is set for a daring escape so that Harry can exact his revenge. However, to its credit, the film doesn't play out exactly as one would expect and it has quite a few surprises up its sleeve right up until the final reel.

This is a nasty ride with nary a sympathetic character in sight. Hickox keeps the film moving at a good, energetic pace throughout the film's 93 minutes, fitting in an exciting, tension-filled prison escape, a chase involving motorcycle cops and hanging laundry that defies description, and an emotional finale with a twist that leaves things on an appropriately somber note. Reed's legendary strength and brutish qualities are put to good use here and he turns in a great performance as the emotionally broken Harry. He's joined by a young Ian McShane as his partner in crime, Edward Woodward as the cop hunting them down, Frank Finlay as a duplicitous former associate, and Freddie Jones as a fellow prison escapee.

Review by Ned Merrill
Obscure One Sheet

My friend Pita-San wanted to see this movie, Sitting Target, with Oliver Reed and Ian McShane, so I went on the hunt. Turns out it was rated X in Britain when it came out for brutality. They had me at "brutality." Of course I expected it to be tame now, and in many ways it is- there's nothing as racy as Lee Marvin throwing a naked man out a window as in the spectacular Point Blank, or as brutal as um, Lee Marvin smashing a pot of hot coffee in a woman's face, as in The Big Heat (Marvin's a bad-ass among bad-asses). But it remains a gritty and yes, brutal thriller about a crook who busts out of prison to get revenge on his woman when she shacks up with a well-off acquaintance, instead of waiting for him.

That crook is Harry Lomart, played by Oliver Reed, a bad-ass on and off the screen. Let us have a moment of loudness to remember his passing, at the age of 63, during the filming of Gladiator. He was at lunch, drinking 3 bottles of rum, a half dozen beers, and various shots of whiskey and cognac, and had a heart attack after besting five Royal Navy sailors at arm-wrestling. There are method actors, and there are forces of nature that you are lucky enough to capture on film. Ollie "Mr. England" Reed, so self-proclaimed because he was one of few celebrities to flee Britain's high taxes in the '70s, was certainly one of the latter.

Sitting Target begins with Harry getting the bad news from his girl, who's on the other side of the prison glass, talking to him on the phone. When he learns that she's been untrue and is leaving him, he bashes through the barrier with one punch and seizes her by the throat. The guards beat him down with their truncheons, and drag him back to his cell. But he's already been planning a breakout with pal Birdy Williams, played by Ian McShane (you know, Al Swearengen from "Deadwood," among many other roles). Harry does his time by sticking to a cruel training regimen, working out in his cell. In an age when even hunks had the uni-ab, he's got the definition of a Greek statue and he's cold and hard as marble.

He breaks out by hiding during the night roll call, hanging from the ceiling in a feat of physical strength, and swinging down to clobber the guards when they search the cell. They're the same guys who beat him when he choked his wife, and he gets his revenge. To show how driven he is to pay back his wife's betrayal, when they finally escape the prison after dealing with guard dogs, search lights, and climbing across guy wires in the dark, Harry has to climb barbed wire with his bare hands. The other guys used rags to protect themselves, but there's no time. So he does it the hard way.

Once they are out, they are hot and have to leave the country, but not before Harry finishes his business. They break an unspoken rule of "no guns" in the underworld, and pick up a broomhandle Mauser with a removable stock, that can be fired full auto. This leads to a brutal gunfight with motorcycle cops in the back alleys that is probably what gave the film its X certificate. A cycle bursts into flames, and Douglas Hickox's direction makes it seem documentarian and all too real. As Harry hunts down his wife and realizes he's made more enemies with his obsession, double crosses lead to more gunplay and an excellent car chase through a railyard with a Land Rover. It's a forgotten and memorable piece of '70s crime, and while it may not be a classic like Get Carter, it's a fine thriller that stands on its own, and deserves a DVD release.

Review by Tommy Salami
Pluck You, Too!

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The Criminal

Director: Joseph Losey
Writer: Alun Owen (screenplay)
Cast: Stanley Baker, Sam Wanamaker, Gregoire Aslan, Margit Saad, Jill Bennett, Rupert Davies, Patrick Magee

IMDB

Johnny Bannion (Stanley Baker) is due for release from prision tomorrow. He essentially runs this wing of the gaol and when a prisoner from a rival wing is put in his territory, it is not long before that man suffers a brutal beating at the hands of one of Bannion's fellow inmates. The Prison Governor wants Bannion out however and he heads back home to meet up with his old gang who have another job ready to go. Things are complicated though when he falls for a rather insistant young woman named Suzanne. He goes through with the job but decides to hide the money in a field and when he is arrested later that day, his gang resort to the only method they can to get Johnny to tell where he has hidden the loot - they kidnap Suzanne...

Writer Alun Owen provides this crime thriller with a tense and unrelenting storyline. The crime film had become newly popular in the 1960s as the rise of social realist cinema turned the tables on tradition and showed the action from the side of the criminals rather than the law. Owen goes a step further here and puts the focus entirely on the criminals and the playboy Johnny Bannion, who is a long way from the genre's usual working class characters. The majority of the films revolved around the thrill of the big 'job' and the planning and aftermath but Owen's script takes a different view, with the robbery itself being a minor scene in the middle of the film, focusing instead on characters, prison life and the way the underworld works.

Although the 1960 realist crime boom pushed the boundaries of cinema, Criminal is often touted as the most brutal of the era and it is a reputation it deserves. The scenes in the prison try to show a completely unromanticised view of life behind bars, where men can be beaten up for no reason, where the prisoners seem to have more power than the guards and where the prison governor is powerless to intervene, just having to go along with what the criminals say. The underworld as well is not the big well family of the old mob movies, but a dangerous heirarchy of men all trying to outdo each other and prepared to go to extreme lengths to get their way. Characterisation is almost unusually strong, Owen makes sure we know not just about the main characters, but provides us with a lot of interesting details about the periphery as well. There are fascinating hints dropped about the prison warden Barrows suggesting that he might be in the pocket of one of the criminal leaders, similarly the motivations of Suzanne remain vague throughout the film. Rather than coming across as plot holes, these are things that Johnny himself does not know and fit in with the film's aim to show us everything through his eyes. This all means that things move pretty quickly and there is no spoon feeding of the plot so the audience need to stay focused to keep up. The pace never slackens in the second half and it all builds to a particularly effective climax.

Director Joseph Losey might have been turfed out of his home country by anti-communists, but it is clear that he has well found his feet in the UK. Every frame of this film's stark black and white footage looks superb. Unlike some of his other works, particularly his Harold Pinter collabarations, this is a much more straight forward film with none of the surreality that marked an entry like The Servant (1963), but he does include a couple of unorthodox shots, firstly of a character looking through a kaleidoscope and later a theatrical soliloquy from a prisoner with the background dissolving into black. In keeping with the brutal script, Losey is not afraid to focus in on the violence, particularly in a cell beating early on, where another film might have cut away, he stays and we see the reactions of the poor victim - similarly during the prison riot we see a number of prison officers being attacked by the inmates. A haunting main theme on the soundtrack is used very well to emphasise the sorrow and dispair running through the whole film; the rest of the score is fittingly contemporary jazz.

Stanley Baker had built his career through the 1950s and was breaking through as one of the biggest starts in British cinema in 1960. His leading role here is perfect casting and an acting masterclass - he looks every bit the part and really convinces in the fight scenes. The rest of the cast is a veritable who's who of British cinema with the highlights being Patrick Magee's hard-to-read portrayal of Burrows the prison guard, which works with the script to leave us puzzling, and Nigel Green as a ruthless 'heavy'. Sam Wanamaker is more than just the token American and his sly but menacing attitude is ideal for the role. The rest of the cast are solid, look out for familiar faces like Noel Willman, Edward Judd, Tom Bell and Patrick Wymark.

Possibly the best of the many crime films that Britain produced around 1960, Criminal gets a strong script, some seriously fine acting and an excellent director. A film that all classic cinema fans should track down and a must have for any fans of Losey, Baker or the film noir/Brit-crime eras. Highly recommended.

Review by Timothy Young
Mondo Esoterica


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http://rapidshare.com/files/180191215/TC-JL-1960.part01.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/180206912/TC-JL-1960.part02.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/180202988/TC-JL-1960.part03.rar
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http://rapidshare.com/files/180223434/TC-JL-1960.part08.rar

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Suspiria

Director: Dario Argento
Writer: Dario Argento, Daria Nicolodi, Thomas De Quincey (source)
Cast: Jessica Harper, Stefania Casini, Flavio Bucci, Miguel Bose, Barbara Magnolfi, Susanna Javicoli, Eva Axen

IMDB

Ah, the 1970s. Everything was hip…mod. Colors, lights…style. At least in the horror genre.

Although I had heard about Suspiria over the years, and the consensus was that it is a very good horror flick, I had never feasted on the visual artistry or shocking violence…until now.

The setting for Suspiria is an exclusive ballet academy in Germany. Suzy Bannion (Jessica Harper) is, we find out, a new student from the United States…and she’s not having a good day. Her plane arrives at the airport late at night and she notices as she approaches the door to outside that there is a severe storm in progress. She is absolutely drenched by the time a taxi finally stops to pick her up…and the cabbie will not lift a finger to help her with her bags. The cab driver proceeds to be extremely rude to her, clearly not pleased with her incorrect pronunciation of her intended destination.

Finally Suzy arrives at the school and is almost knocked down by a young woman dashing out into the rain and wind. The woman looks terrified and is saying something to an unknown person just inside the door before racing off. What was it she said? Iris? Secret? Suzy cannot tell for sure. What she does know, however, is that the young fleeing woman did not leave the door open for her…and the voice on the other side of the intercom refuses to allow her entry. Tired and soggy, Suzy returns to her taxi and is driven to a hotel for the night.

The fleeing woman will not be so comfortable. She is in a state of horror and panic over something associated with the school. Then, while at a friends house planning her early morning escape from the country, fleeing woman is attacked and killed in one of the most brutal and shocking scenes that I have ever seen. My heart was racing and I yelled out loud repeatedly before the scene was over.

Once inside the school the next day, Suzy meets the Head Mistress and teachers of this very strict ballet academy. She also meets several of the students…and they are all very strange indeed. The teachers were all over-the-top militant in their demeanor, and the students interacted like a bunch of Jr. High kids.

The story unfolds to reveal secret plots, evil magic and impending doom. I loved it!

Suspiria is considered by many to be the best work ever by Dario Argento. The use of lighting, camera angles, close-up and music (performed by The Goblins with input from Argento himself) create a sinister and surreal shroud of dread and angst. The secret purpose of the school and everyone employed there develops slowly before building to climax of intensity and sheer horror. Heck, there is even a zombie!

Argento has many film trademarks that are all displayed in Suspiria, such as close-ups of the eyes, the use of imaginative shadows and colors… and the intense violent nature of the murders of beautiful women. Many suspect that Argento has a hatred of women that manifests itself in his films. Argento’s response to such accusations? He has stated many times that someone is going to die in a horror movie anyway, so it might as well be a beautiful woman so that there is at least something pretty to look at on the screen. Hard to argue with that logic.

Controversy aside, Suspiria is classic horror in grand 70s style, and deserves a place on the classic horror shelf of any Horror Freak’s movie collection. Just don’t watch it while eating spaghetti.

Review by Don Sumner
Best Horror Movies

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http://rapidshare.com/files/305251677/Suspiria.1977.DVDRip.XViD.AC3-NoGrp.part1.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/305252112/Suspiria.1977.DVDRip.XViD.AC3-NoGrp.part2.rar
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http://rapidshare.com/files/305255012/Suspiria.1977.DVDRip.XViD.AC3-NoGrp.part7.rar
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Profondo Rosso

Director: Dario Argento
Writers: Dario Argento, Bernardino Zapponi
Cast: David Hemmings, Daria Nicolodi, Gabriele Lavia, Macha Meril, Eros Pagni, Giuliana Calandra

IMDB

If there’s a problem with Suspiria, often regarded as the high point of Dario Argento’s career, it’s that the bare-bones characterisations and equally minimal storyline build in off-kilter style to a bit of an anticlimax. By contrast, Deep Red offers a veritable banquet of Argento’s imagination: a Gordian knot of a narrative and an array of interesting characters whose interplay both explicates and conceals deadly clever clues and themes.

Argento had taken a brief break from horror-thrillers to make an historical drama, Le Cinque Giornato (1973), and in returning to the genre with Deep Red, offered what is in most essentials a remake of his crisp debut, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970)—a tale of a misplaced foreign artist in Rome who witnesses a murder, and, to solve the mystery of the steadily mounting carnage, must discern an unperceived clue in what he witnessed. Argento overlaid that template with everything he’d ever learnt about cinema in a scant five years. The result was a symphonic classic and one of the great films of the ’70s.

It is also a film where Argento pays several distinct compliments to filmmakers and visual artists who inspired him. The interrogation of the very act of looking, built around investigation and mystery that screws relentlessly toward a point of infantile dissolution, and having David Hemmings as the hero, inevitably evoke Antonioni’s Blow Up (1966). The staging in many sequences, with giant close-ups of eyes or the hero’s hand, poised like a gunfighter’s over his weapon, clearly reference his old collaborator Sergio Leone, whose intricate tactics of ecstatic tension/violent release Argento transposed into a different genre. In the film’s middle third, the visuals constantly evoke the crisp art-deco style of another former collaborator, Bernardo Bertolucci, essayed in his great The Conformist (1970), and like that films digs into the problems of gender and the family unit. And the spirit of Hitchcock lurks approvingly in every frame, particularly in one scene utilising birds. Argento also plays ceaselessly with the tropes of the giallo genre’s literary inspirations, such as Arthur Conan Doyle, Edgar Wallace, and Frederic Brown, to the point where in classic tradition, one victim attempts to etch the name of her killer at the point of death, here on the steam-smothered walls of her bathroom; and whether it will be detected becomes a nerve-jangling question. And yet Argento’s visualisation moves far beyond the necessities of the mystery genre, his camera composing operatic fantasias of colour and motion.

Hemmings plays Marc Daly, an English jazz musician teaching conservatory students who delivers a speech at the outset that feels like a kind of mission statement for Argento, reminding his students that jazz “began in the brothels” and can’t be too elegant or clean. The musicians are played by the members of Goblin, the conservatorium-trained prog-rock group that Argento dug up to conjure the film’s nerve-jangling score, which, like the film’s entire template, would powerfully influence John Carpenter’s Halloween and the entire slasher genre. Yet, Deep Red is far greater than any of its Hollywood imitations. Argento mixes astoundingly beautiful cinema with volatile, hilariously appalling violence, like any good jazz man appreciating the way grit and glam must entwine. He pays constant homage to the rhythms and flow of music, particularly in one startling sequence in which Marc labours at composition whilst being stalked by the killer. He also tips his hat to artists like Edvard Munch and Edward Hopper in his set decoration and visual compositions.

Argento cuts from Marc’s rehearsal and mission statement to a theatre where an audience listens to the pronouncements on parapsychology by a team of New Age professors led by Bardi (Piero Mazzinghi). Argento’s camera enters and exits the theatre in a flourish of red curtains, immediately announcing his film as pure show business. Medium Helga Ulmann (Macha Meril) realises someone in the audience is a murderer. Soon enough, Ulmann is butchered in her apartment: it's an amusing touch that she senses the malevolent intent of the person knocking at her door, but isn’t quick enough to escape. Out on the street, Marc and Carlo (Gabriele Lavia), an alcoholic, self-loathing pianist, are chatting when they hear Ulmann’s screams. Marc rushes to the scene, misses the killer, and later swears to the police that something was removed from the apartment’s main hallway, suspecting it might have been one of the Munch-like artworks that hang there.

Marc soon hooks up with spirited journalist Gianna Brezzi (Daria Nicolodi), who is covering the case. The two begin flirting a la His Girl Friday by way of Gloria Steinem, Marc’s drolly observed discomfort over his highly unmacho job and shakiness in the face of horror show his proclaimed dislike of women’s lib, inspiring Gianna to challenge and beat him in arm-wrestling. Marc and Gianna’s scenes are pitched as pure screwball comedy, a fascinating divergence for the normally all-business Argento that enriches the film enormously. The lightly handled tensions of sex and equality gives Marc and Gianna’s romance sauce underpin much darker preoccupations of the narrative.

In the opening credits, Argento interrupts the parade of white-on-black titles for a brief, completely bewildering scene of apparent murder—a scream and darting feet in front of a postcard Christmas scene, before blithely resuming the titles. One can only deduce that there’s a victim, a killer, and a young witness. It’s a wicked gambit by Argento, because he has both positioned the scene with intense deliberation and yet also counts on the audience to forget about it immediately. Later, his camera drifts languorously in studying the killer’s weapons, props, and totems of meaning in ultra-close-up, evoking the notion of being too close to something to see it properly. The killer taunts and plays with victims like a child, hanging plastic dolls to frighten the prey; setting a mad, mechanical doll upon one to distract him from where to expect the real attack; releasing birds from their cages; and playing a creepy tape of children singing the same tune we heard in the opening.

As coscreenwriter Bernardino Zapponi explained of his and Argento's method, things to do with infancy are always somehow scary, and, indeed, childhood motifs—creepy dolls, eerie singalongs, perverted parent-child relationships and decaying family homes—are rife in Argento’s films, as well as in those of his precursor, Mario Bava. In several attacks, the killer pointedly bashes the victims’ teeth out, evoking Freudian theories of prepubescent sexuality. As Marc follows the relentless, inward spiral of clues, he becomes implicated as a suspect, but he continues to peel the layers off the onion, which demands peeling off the layers from how sexual and social personae are constructed, moving closer and closer to a fetid, secreted heart locked within the family home. Marc finally traces a clue to the killer’s background through a book on contemporary urban folklore, and when that book’s author, Amanda Righetti (Giuliana Calandra) is one of the victims—drowned in a bathtub full of boiling water—it confirms he’s on the right track. The book leads him to an abandoned family villa, cared for by Rodi (Furio Meniconi) and his mean little girl Olga (Nicoletta Elmi), within which he first discovers a child’s rendition of the murder from the beginning buried under plaster and, eventually, a secreted corpse.

Argento’s intricate structure keeps throwing up red herrings that subvert many clichés of the contemporary thriller almost before they were invented. When it’s revealed Carlo is gay, the possibility that his eyeliner-smeared boyfriend could be the killer is hinted, in a homophobic twist a la Silence of the Lambs. Likewise, when the disturbingly strong Gianna seems to transform in one scene into a darkly angelic femme fatale, even in the act of saving Marc’s life, the film recalls the anxiety over upended gender codes exploited by Basic Instinct. The feet of the child in the opening are sexually ambiguous—high-heeled shoes and high socks could be either boy or girl in old-fashioned dress; so, too, are the killer’s, in modern style. But Argento keeps zeroing in on the concept of familial homicide. When Marc sees the grotesque mural from the house reproduced by Olga on her bedroom wall, he presses her and learns she copied it from an old picture she’d found amongst her school’s art class archives. When Marc and Gianna head to the school to find the original, Argento reveals that the killer seems to have beaten them there through the ominous signifiers of the running taps and the scrawled message on the wall: “Kill Your Father and Mother”.

There, Gianna is near-fatally stabbed, and Marc is confronted by Carlo, who drew the picture: the police, on Marc’s tail, arrive in time to drive Carlo off, and he is killed when he is dragged behind a truck and his head crushed by a passing car. However, Marc, realising that Carlo could not have committed all the murders because he was standing next to him when Ulmann was killed, finally discerns that the memory that haunted him from Ulmann’s apartment was not a painting, but a reflection in a mirror, that of Carlo’s mother (Clara Calamai). A former movie actress, who was forced by her husband, a German writer (one doubts the suggestion of roots of psychosexual trauma in the Axis alliance is accidental), to give up her career; she had many stays in an asylum until she rebelled one Christmas day and knifed her husband in the back, and event Carlo in which was forever implicated.

f the notion of the small Calamai committing the ferocious murders throughout the film is a bit of a laugh, Argento nonetheless ties together the film’s restless ideas and acerbic perspective with radical potency. Before he got stuck playing to the more conservative, misogynistic horror audiences of the ’80s with less and less inspiration, Argento found real delight in toying with expectations over who was doing what kind of violence to whom. He never abandoned his liking for substantial female characters, and here, of course, he found Nicolodi, who became his long-time girlfriend and mother of Asia) provided the vital ideas for the “Three Mothers” trilogy. She delivers a hilariously spry and sexy performance as Gianna, particularly when she gyrates her way out of Marc’s apartment after seeing a sketch of his last girlfriend, mocking him for a previous predilection for “super sexy vamps.”

Horror cinema hardly comes better than this.

Review by Roderick Heath
Ferdy on Films, etc

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4 Mosche di Velluto Grigio

IMDB

Director: Dario Argento
Writer: Dario Argento, Luigi Cozzi, Mario Foglietti
Cast: Michael Brandon, Mimsy Farmer, Jean-Pierre Marielle, Bud Spencer, Aldo Bufi Landi, Calisto Calisti

Roberto, a musician, notices he is being followed and confronts the man after rehearsals one night. In an empty theatre, the two struggle, a knife is pulled and the stalker gets stabbed. All this is witnessed from the gallery by a masked photographer. When Roberto starts to get threatening notes and night visits he engages the help of his friends, God and the Professor, as well as a largely unsuccessful Private Eye, Arrosio. His maid falls victim to his blackmailer, as does Arrosio when he gets too close and then Maria, his wife’s cousin. Roberto buys a gun and decides to face off the night visitor when they next arrive on a stormy night.

The final film in Argento’s Animal trilogy is a blackmail thriller with whimsical characters and dodgy science thrown in. It is a film that has had few proper releases and that fans have relied on poor quality dupes and cobbled together grey market versions to see. Roberto is a character that Brandon based on Dario and the physical resemblance is quite striking. After it’s relatively poor reception, Dario sought refuge in a TV series and the altogether different affair of Five Days in Milan.

Four Flies shows Argento experimenting more with filmmaking technique and taking risks in his writing of characters. The opening of the film is a montage of Roberto being followed by his stalker intercut with a rehearsal of Roberto’s band where he is pursuing a troublesome fly. The ironic juxtaposition here kinda makes fun of the very set up of the movie with Roberto killing both irritants after he pursues his stalker. Similarly the masked photographer who photographs the murder is wearing such an inappropriate mask that this again seems a deliberately playful device. This playfulness extends itself to the knowing writing of character. One character is referred to as God and is constantly used for advice, which is nearly always right, and is introduced by a “hallelujah” in Morricone’s score.

Best of all in technique in Four Flies is some wonderful uses of Mixage. When Roberto visits Arrosio, the sound of his cars engine drives him up the steps and into Arrosio’s office. This then makes the contrast between the surging narrative and the camp chilled Private Eye even more fun. Arrosio is a wonderful character, a detective with 84 failures and not one success who is delighted to solve the case even though in doing so it brings his end.

The thriller conventions are further satirized in the revealing of the killer. The old wives’ tale about eyes retaining the last image they see like a camera is used and this reveal is signaled in the title of the film, not only that but this reveal is backed up by a piece of animation to show the audience how four flies on grey velvet happened! Similarly the dreams of Brandon about decapitation foreshadow how justice will be delivered – very witty stuff.

This playing with the preposterous and deliberate fun with character is one of the strong points of Four Flies and far more enjoyable than the hokey thriller at it’s core. Brandon is very good as a Dario surrogate, and the fun supporting cast are uniformly excellent. Morricone delivers his best early Argento score mixing prog rock with the atonal squawks that peppered Bird. Four Flies is a film by a director spreading his wings and outgrowing his genre. This creativity would reach it’s zenith with Profondo Rosso but Four Flies is an immensely enjoyable giallo.

Review by John White
10,000 Bullets


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