A randomly comprehensive survey of extraordinary movie experiences from the art house to the grindhouse, featuring the good, the bad, the ugly, but not the boring or the banal.
There's a small genre of Italian caper films from the late Sixties set and often filmed in the U.S., including Machine Gun McCain, They Came to Rob Las Vegas, and Duccio Tessari's I Bastardi, that are the nearest things to modern-dress spaghetti westerns. They reflect a fascination with modern-day American among imperialistic Italian filmmakers that found its most aggressive expression in Zabriskie Point. The Italian films share a critical fascination with American commercial art and architecture that make them arguably more valuable documents of what the country looked like than many Hollywood films. The other films like Bastardi presumably are less critical of American culture than Zabriskie, but is it possible that there are implicit criticisms of, or at least commentary on the culture in the more generic films? Commentary, I suppose, can be read into Tessari's casting of Rita Hayworth in his film, insofar as Hayworth was an icon of film noir by virtue of her title roles in Gilda and The Lady From Shanghai. It's definitely a sad commentary to see her here, clearly past her prime, playing a lush all too convincingly, though on the other hand this may be her last fully committed performance -- over the top, in fact, in a way I can't recall seeing her before. But how else could she convince us that she was Klaus Kinski's mother? She's more than convincing, in fact; Kinski is reduced to a straight-man in her presence, and not because he was phoning in his performance this time. But what could he do? In a typical scene Kinski is trying to have a conversation with Giuliano Gemma, who plays Kinski's half-brother and the default hero of the piece. They're seated on a sofa while Hayworth is parading and raving in the background, above their heads on the screen. She seems like comic relief at first, though seeing Hayworth this way isn't necessarily funny, but as the film goes on she develops into something more nearly opposite that.
Gemma and Kinski are crooks, sons of different fathers neither knew, bound by crime and mother-love. Otherwise they're rivals, with Kinski determined to muscle in on Gemma's latest score. Gemma is tough, Kinski clever. We see how clever when Kinski's gang finally seem to have Gemma and his girlfriend cornered. Where are the stolen jewels? Beating Gemma won't make him talk, so how about slapping his girlfriend around? How about yanking down her undies and teasing rape? Gemma can't allow that, so he spills -- and then he finds out that the girl was in cahoots with Kinski, or else had changed sides on the spot. Revenge would seem to be in order, but Kinski tries to preempt that by having the tendons of Gemma's shooting wrist severed, effectively paralyzing his right hand.
But when did mutilation get in the way of vengeance? Gemma stumbles into a new romance and gradually trains himself as a southpaw. Knowing that Kinski plans an armored-car heist, Gemma preempts him by planning his own operation with a counterfeit armored car. That's not vengeance enough, though; Gemma wants a definitive showdown, but Mom won't tell him where Kinski's laying low. Gemma figures it out from the return address on some of Mom's mail. Then a reunion with his old flame rekindles his old feelings -- and hers, it seems; she'll help set Kinski up for the kill. But we're not surprised to learn that she's still playing him for a sap; she's actually going to set Gemma up for Kinski to kill, and at this point Tessari and his two co-writers apparently realized that they'd plotted themselves into a corner.
The final scenes have a deus ex machina quality that ends up suiting the tragedy Tessari had in mind. Gemma's staying in a motel in a small New Mexico town near Kinski's hideout and just going to bed when he notices a suspicious movement. The suspicious movement is coming from the ceiling lamp. Soon the whole room is moving; an earthquake has shaken up everyone's plans. Hayworth learns from a poorly staged TV broadcast that an unprecedented quake for that region has killed thousands of people. These were the good old days of TV news; the anchor is on for about a minute with this ghastly news, and then he sends us back to the regularly scheduled program. But things don't go back to normal for Hayworth, since she realizes in screaming horror that her boy Kinski's in harm's way. Meanwhile, Gemma has gotten out of his motel deathtrap and is running through the desert to chez Kinski, now a ruin. His old flame has been snuffed, but Kinski is buried alive. Gemma rescues him, but only because he won't let anything deny him vengeance, not even God. But while he may insist on the final word on the whole matter, there are other interested parties who'll have something to say before the film is over.
Bastardi isn't Tessari's best work -- the Alain Delon vehicle Tony Arzentais his masterpiece as far as I'm concerned, and his Chicago-shot Three Tough Guys is a pulpy guilty pleasure. The problem here is that Gemma (at least as dubbed into English) is a relatively dull hero or antihero, with little of the charisma he brings to other films I've seen, while Hayworth's antics overshadow everything and keep the tone uncertain until the end. Kinski comes off the best with a restrained performance reminiscent to me of the weaselly characters the young Kirk Douglas played in his earliest noirs, the twerp who temporarily outwits the noble lug. The tragic finish cinches the impression that Tessari had attempted a kind of updated, broad-daylight film noir, with a genre veteran (Hayworth) blessing/cursing the next generation of lugs, thugs and femmes fatales. The pieces don't quite fit together the way he hoped, but to an extent you can admire the ambition.
In the year of Sergio Leone's Fistful of Dollars Harald Reinl released his third western based on the writings of German novelist Karl May. Reinl's head start availed him not as numerous Italian rivals passed him by on the way to the western film canon, while the German Winnetou series continues to languish in relative obscurity. As I suggested while reviewing Winnetou Part 1, Reinl suffered from bad timing, at least as far as the world outside West Germany was concerned, working at a time of relatively low interest in American Indians. His films are also inescapably more corny than most Italian westerns. The second Winnetou film, reuniting Pierre Brice in the title role and top-billed Lex Barker as frontiersman Old Shatterhand, reiterates that corniness, but also reinforces Reinl's standing as a superior action-adventure director.
The sequel makes a somewhat bad impression right away as our Apache hero intervenes in a fight between Ribanna, an Indian maiden (Karin Dor), and a bear. There's really no way to make it look good, but the scene does set up a romance between Winnetou and the woman of the Assinaboin tribe. Neither can speak the other's language, but both know English, and their courtship is carried on in regrettably stilted fashion. In the English dub, they tend to speak of themselves and each other in the third person. Fluent otherwise, they suffer from what Daffy Duck might call pronoun trouble. Also, while Pierre Brice became a beloved film idol in German playing Winnetou, the actor dubbing his lines into English makes the Apache warrior sound like a complete stiff. I hope Winnetou sounds better auf Deutsch.
Do you see a tragic romance in the making? Congratulations, but it isn't as bad as you might first fear. To spoil things a little, Ribanna is still alive when the film is over. But Winnetou isn't the only man who falls for her. Another is a U.S. Cavalry officer captured by the Assinaboin (my spelling is speculative) but freed thinks to Winnetou's intervention. Later, this Lt. Merril gets the bright idea of furthering peace between whites and Natives by marrying Ribanna. Everyone's impressed by this idea except for Ribanna, but even Winnetou, who seems like an ever-self-sacrificing sort, sees the wisdom of the plan, and Ribanna's dad, the chief, urges her to take one for the team. In time, Ribanna and Merril bond while protecting themselves and the Assinaboin women and children from the film's villains, so if the end is somewhat sad that applies to Winnetou only. At least he had a girlfriend for a while. His buddy Shatterhand is stuck with sidekicks -- not one, but two. We see and hear mercifully little of the one who only talks in rhyme -- he does it all the time! -- while the late Eddi Arent proves more tolerable as this movie's comic Briton, apparently a necessary ingredient in Karl May movies. It's not as if spaghetti westerns did without comic-relief characters, but the comic relief weighs down the Winnetou movies more than you notice in the Italian films.
I ought to note that Lt. Merril is played by Mario Girotti, who had yet to change his film name to the once globally recognized Terence Hill. The presence of the future Trinity makes Winnetou 2 seem slightly like a rough draft of a spaghetti western. Mario Adorf gave the previous film some of that vibe playing its villain, and Reinl's challenge for Part 2 was to cast a villain to rival or top the mighty Mario. Where oh where will a German director find someone up for that challenge?
Reinl doesn't quite nail it; Klaus Kinski is only the number-two villain of the story, though he easily makes a stronger impression than Anthony Steel, who gets the role of greedy would-be oil baron Joe Forrester. This guy wants to expand his holdings onto Indian land and is willing to provoke a war to do so, using his right-hand man Lucas (Kinski) to massacre Indians, so the army will be blamed, and settlers, so Indians will be blamed. Lucas proves a resourceful, dangerous character. Captured by Merril and left with the Indians for safekeeping, the bound Lucas manages to free himself with a burning branch from a campfire and kill two guards while making good his escape. It's very disappointing, then, to see the Kinski character die in long shot, in a hail of anonymous gunfire, rather than in epic combat with Merril, Shatterhand or Winnetou. Even more than Girotti/Hill, Kinski signifies the potential of Euro-westerns already present in the Reinl films.
Once the film gives up on the Winnetou-Ribanna romance, Reinl really picks up the pace of the action. Again working on German and Yugoslav locations with cinematographer Ernst W. Kalinke, the director deftly coordinates the movements of multiple forces -- Shatterhand and Castlepool (Arendt), Merril and Ribanna, the Assinaboin warriors, the U.S. Cavalry, Forrester's private army, the escaping Lucas and eventually a lone Winnetou -- until all converge at a spectacular mountain site riddled with picturesque caves. Before that, he had staged a spectacular and dangerously explosive battle at Forrester's refinery, which the villain chooses to blow up in an effort to kill Shatterhand, setting an alarming number of stuntmen on fire. In general, Reinl has a panoramic way with the moving widescreen image. After first filling the frame with men and landscape, he pans to show you something more that had been going on just out of sight. Combining his natural and financial resources, he gives the first two Winnetou movies an epic energy that more than makes up for the dismal comedy and stilted romance. They don't catch the zeitgeist of the time they were made the way so many spaghetti westerns do, but they're big and entertaining adventure films that earn a small but respectable place in the history of westerns.
Bruce Chatwin's historically-inspired novel The Viceroy of Ouidah has a story worthy of a swashbuckling adventure from the golden age of Hollywood. It tells of a poor farmer who became a bandit only to be exiled to a foreign land where he overthrew a mad tyrant. Chatwin published his novel in 1980, long after the golden age. By then, it was a subject worthy of Werner Herzog, and a different kind of film resulted. Herzog predictably cast Klaus Kinski as the hero, which signalled that the character, the Brazilian bandit Francisco Manoel de Silva aka "Cobra Verde," would hardly be a hero. Whether Herzog's script and Kinski's performance reflects Chatwin's text, I can't say. I can say that, were that Chatwin's character, Hollywood would have whitewashed him into a more romantic, swashbuckling figure. Herzog presents him warts and all as an amoral rather than romantic figure.
Silva is no "social bandit" or revolutionary, no rallying point for the poor. Rather, Herzog shows him witnessing a mass whipping of prisoners in a public square with indifference. When one of the prisoners breaks loose, Silva stops the man in his tracks, basically telling him to go back and take his medicine. He impresses a wealthy plantation owner who doesn't know Silva's bandit identity. He hires Silva as his foreman, only to grow furious when the new man impregnates his half-caste daughters. Only then does Silva reveal himself as Cobra Verde. Rather than have him killed outright, the planter and his cronies give him a new job. They send him across the Atlantic to Africa to purchase slaves from the Kingdom of Dahomey. The trade has lapsed for many years and the king is rumored to be mad. No one really expects Silva to make good or even return alive. Once again they have underestimated their man.
Against the odds, Silva revives the trade, exchanging men for rifles and taking residence in an abandoned fort. The Brazilians weren't kidding about the king, however, and Herzog warms to the challenge of having someone on screen crazier than Kinski. The king demands to see Silva, but the trader demurs, insisting that he must always have one foot in the ocean -- he must stay on the coast. The king's men simply kidnap him; respecting his obligations, they fill a jar with sea water and stick his foot in it. At court, the king asks after the health of his peers, the crowned heads of Europe, then asks why Silva has gathered a fleet of several hundred thousand ships to invade his country, and why Silva has poisoned his pet.
Silva has a lucky escape and joins a conspiracy to replace the king with a bug-eyed, perhaps equally mad yet more compliant relative. Now at last Silva is the kind of rebel you would expect to see in a swashbuckler. He is tasked with training an army of topless women, the men of the land having proved unreliable. He shows them how to fight with spears and ferocity. This is where most people will put in a screencap of Kinski grimacing and brandishing a spear. Thanks to them, I don't have to; google it if you like.
An army of bare-breasted Amazons is a natural Herzog subject, and as in all his pictures there are plenty of sidewise glances at small details that make scenes more real (animals) or more weird (crippled people). He manages an impressive level of human spectacle in the Amazon scenes and the scenes at the king's court, where skulls are the popular design motif. He might be accused of objectifying the Africans as savages had he not established Silva as no more than a savage himself. If anything, Herzog objectifies humanity as savage or, at best, pitifully grotesque. There's something uncomfortably exploitative in his having Kinski attended in the film's final scenes by a handicapped man who walks more like an ape than a man, propelling himself with strong arms while withered legs drag behind, but by now you also understand that the grotesque is a reality principle for Herzog. Addressing slavery, Cobra Verde slightly resembles Jacopetti & Prosperi's Goodbye Uncle Tom in its gruesome pretensions of objectivity. To many it will seem cold if not hateful. Kinski's character has no arc of development, learning or enlightenment. Like many a movie gangster, Silva simply rises until he falls, without really enjoying his rise in the ways that endeared gangsters to guilty moviegoers. Silva does remarkable things but barely counts as an interesting person. Instead of rebelling against injustice, he embraces it at the first opportunity and arguably embodies it. This is Herzog at perhaps his most misanthropic. It's a legitimate worldview, but few will like it.
As for Kinski, he may finally have been getting too old for this shit. He gives a mostly sullen performance, albeit one appropriate for the character, and this is probably just what Herzog wanted from his longtime collaborator and "best fiend." You feel for him, however -- the actor, not the character -- as Herzog has him struggle to drag a boat off a beach while the tides punish him and the human quadruped watches. Sympathy isn't what Herzog wants, however. If you can sit through a picture without needing to sympathize with anyone -- I'm such a person myself so don't take this as a rebuke -- you may well be impressed with the epic rigor of Herzog's historical vision. It is quite a show and I was duly impressed, but if you finish the film with a shrug or a scowl, I can't really blame you -- and Herzog might not, either.
While no equal to its erstwhile Axis partner Italy in the generation of cinematic genres and subgenres, Germany has cultivated its own national styles and genres, from the globally-influential expressionism of its silent films to the question-begging "New German Cinema" of the Seventies and Eighties. The Germans' most distinctive contribution to the global grindhouse of pop cinema may be the krimi, a genre of crime film as much inspired by a foreign writer (England's Edgar Wallace, a co-author of King Kong) as by national traditions (Dr. Mabuse, etc.) Krimis usually deal with some sort of supercriminal or gang pitted against the intrepid investigators of Scotland Yard -- an Italian tendency to set numerous gialli and other horror films in England may reflect a krimi influence. The German films have several distinctive features, the most prominent arguably being the use of loud, jazzy or loungy soundtracks that give them a dated quaintness today -- and the frequent participation of rising star Klaus Kinski.
Die Blaue Hand, directed in lurid color by krimi specialist Alfred Vohrer, is a Kinski showcase. He's being sentenced for murder as the film opens -- or rather, Dave Emerson is until the respected, monocled Dr. Mangrove (Carl Lange) informs the court that Dave is insane and requires hospitalization. The court so rules, provoking Dave to prove both his innocence and his sanity by leaping out of his box and screaming at the judge. How can you say no to that? All the while, another Kinski watches -- this is Dave's twin brother Richard. Unfortunately, Vohrer's effects budget limits our chances to experience the certain madness of two Kinskis on screen simultaneously.
Subdued, Dave is in a police van awaiting transport to Mangrove's asylum when someone tosses a key inside. Dave has no idea who did this, but he isn't questioning his good fortune either. That night, he breaks out of the asylum and heads for the Emerson mansion, where he gets past an exiting Richard and holes up in his brother's bedroom. Is it a coincidence that, at the same time, a hooded figure sporting an armored, spiked (and yes, blue) gauntlet starts punching people to death at the mansion? It is an old family heirloom, after all.
"You see? It's blue!"
A typical heroic inspector (top-billed Harald Leipnitz) is soon on the case, visiting the Mangrove asylum and inspecting the remaining inmates. This means a literal peepshow view of an insane stripper who apparently suffers from what we might call interpretive insanity. That is, she interprets her insanity by stripping. Nothing else is quite that interesting, though there's also one of those big, bald, stupid looking fellows who are often up to no good in krimis, sitting quietly for the moment in his cell.
Dr. Mangrove's controversial strip therapy concept was denounced in his time, but he could probably make millions with it today.
The investigation moves on to the Emerson place, where the inspector quickly figures out that the man passing himself off as Richard is actually Dave the fugitive, who has cleaned and dressed himself and exploited the fact that no one in his family -- a mother, two younger brothers and a sister -- can tell the twins apart. The inspector also realizes that Dave is innocent of one thing at least, since die blaue Hand attacks the Emerson girl while Dave is standing in front of him. Now the inspector is willing to entertain Dave's story of a larger frame-up, especially if Dave can help him stop the gent with the gauntlet from wiping out the other Emersons. Richard is already presumed missing, and in short order the two remaining brothers are dispatched, while the brave and comely Myrna (Diana Koerner) undertakes an investigation of her own.
The good guys eventually discover a conspiracy to wipe out the Emerson children and frame Dave for it. Dr. Mangrove is a willing collaborator; his asylum is no more than a dumping ground for people who want to be rid of inconvenient relatives. He'll declare anyone insane for a price, and he'll keep people in line with drugs and torture if necessary. He has his own orwellian Room 101 full of rats and snakes to scare victims like Myrna into compliance if she can't be rescued in time. The mystery, if that's the right word for it, is who's paying Mangrove and having the kids killed. The deeper mystery is why someone needs to parade about in a cloak and use a mailed fist to kill them, but let's indulge the krimi genre in its eccentricities.
You can't get much more evil than Karl Lange's Dr. Mangrove -- but what if you add snakes???
After that characteristic opening scene, Kinski may actually be the biggest disappointment of the film. Since Dave is soon established as one of the heroes, and Richard is absent for most of the picture, the great man doesn't really have many opportunities to do his crazy thing. The idea of twin Kinskis should have resulted in something amazing in its own right, but Creature with the Blue Hand probably never meant to be that film.
Fortunately, Die blaue Hand is a pretty wild movie on its own terms. It crams a lot of bizarre digressions into a mere 74 minutes, not counting some stuff reportedly inserted after the fact by an American distributor. You get a room full of hanging mannequins, a butler who reveals himself as the disgruntled ex-husband of the Emerson materfamilias, and a second inspection of the insane stripper, on top of everything I've already mentioned. If Kinski recedes during the story, Karl Lange emerges as an awesome looking villain in the Germanic Caligari tradition of evil asylum keepers, while Diana Koerner makes Myra an appealing heroine. Visually, even in something well short of restored form, Hand looks great in moody, Bava-influenced color, and the admitted datedness of the music is a point in the film's favor as far as I'm concerned. However faithful he may or may not be to Edgar Wallace, Vohrer came up with a vivid modernized mix of the Mabusian crime tradition and the American "old dark house" style. A film like this was probably campy when it first appeared, but if you can tolerate its absurdities you'll probably be as entertained by this brisk adventure as I was.
Forty years after Tod Browning's seminal film, Dracula needed no introduction to movie fans, but any attempt to film Bram Stoker's novel needs to introduce the Count all over again. Even forty years after Jess Franco's interpretation of the story, writers and directors are looking for different angles from which to show the legend as it's evolved in our collective mythology, quite independently from Stoker or any single filmmaker.
In an interview on the DarkSky DVD of Count Dracula, Franco explains that his objective was to do the most faithful film version of Stoker to date. Looking back, the prolific director scoffs at the notion that Francis Coppola's version was more faithful to Stoker than his. My friend Wendigo, who may count as more of a vampire expert than Jess Franco, claims that the 1970 Count Dracula is really no more faithful, cumulatively speaking, than Coppola's. He admits that Franco is right about how Coppola's romance storyline deviates from Stoker's more simply bloodthirsty intentions, and concedes that Franco doesn't taint his version with like sentimentality. But Franco then proceeds to distort the story in so many different ways of his own that his claim of fidelity becomes ludicrous. He eliminates characters and changes some of the relationships among the survivors, making Dr. Seward an assistant at Van Helsing's clinic and Lucy Westenra the fiancee of a British (not Texan) Quincey Morris. Franco also innovates, giving Renfield a backstory with a daughter who became Dracula's victim during a tour of Transylvania, giving Van Helsing a stroke so Herbert Lom doesn't have to travel to another location with the vampire hunters, and having Dracula attack Mina in a box seat at a theater while a chorus sings Fahoo Dores or some such thing. Most laughably, the director improvises a sort of attack upon the vampire hunters by Dracula's menacing yet immobile collection of taxidermy, and has the gall in retrospect to tell us that that was a nice scene to look at. Wendigo could go on at great length on these deviations, and is talking faster than I can write, but I think his point has been made quite sufficiently.
To be fair, Wendigo acknowledges that Franco did do some bits of Dracula right for the first time in movies. Working closely with Christopher Lee, he gives us a Count in the opening scenes that really resembles the character in the novel, and a speech that is verbatim Stoker. Dracula's brides also get to say their original lines, and the Count offers them a baby in a bag to keep them off Jonathan Harker, as in the novel. Most importantly, Lee enacts the novel's youthening process for the vampire as he gluts himself on fresh blood, going from fake grey to hair dye in dramatic fashion. As a rule, Wendigo says, whenever Lee is on screen Franco lives up to his supposed intention. Otherwise, without Lee looking over his shoulder, the director assumes artistic license, though without much artistry. Franco is off-key in a different way than Coppola is, but both versions strike plenty of false notes, though in different spots.
Men: Are you tired of going grey? You need fresh blood for darker, fuller hair! (Allow several treatments to get the full effect)
Sir Christopher Lee has been privileged (cursed, he might say) with opportunities to offer more than one interpretation of Dracula (the entire Hammer series counting as one), with the Franco film representing his own idea of authenticity as well as the director's. Unfortunately, Wendigo feels that Lee's work here is weaker than in his best Hammers. Even out of elderly makeup, Lee comes across too often as a tired old man, without the energy he enjoyed a dozen years earlier. His speech about his crusading ancestors should be a bombastic, warlike oration -- Gary Oldman actually does better here -- but Lee's delivery is bland and complacent like a retired British general recalling the good old days in camp. Wendigo allows that Lee may have overstated his feebleness the better to sell his rejuvenation in England, but thinks that the star's performance never really recovers from the lackluster first impression. He doesn't invest the character with the uncanny quality Bela Lugosi provides with his eerie slowness, which doesn't project health but isn't feeble, either. Wendigo doesn't really think Lee gives a bad performance here, but feels that Lee has done better in less faithful Dracula films.
Lee's limitations may be obscured by the black hole on screen that is Klaus Kinski as Renfield (or "Reinfierd" in the DVD's Italian closing credits). Wendigo and I have heard Kinski's performance here praised for years after we'd first seen the Franco film, and that's always left us wondering whether something had been cut out of the version we saw, since our recollection was that Kinski did nothing but stare at the padded walls of his cell and grab the occasional insect. Now, having seen a presumably complete DVD, Wendigo says: "I'd criticize his performance if he gave a performance." But there's nothing there. People involved with the production clearly realize that they have to explain something about Kinski. Producer Harry Alan Towers claims that he had to trick Kinski into doing his scenes by telling him he wasn't making a Dracula movie, while Franco says Towers is full of it. But Kinski's is a singularly uncooperative act. We can believe that the great man may have refused to speak lines or even utter sounds for Franco. When he's offscreen, we hear great howls and screams that are attributed to Renfield, but inside the cell sits a mute who plays with bugs or finger paints with gruel flung on his wall. Wendigo sees that Franco and his writers may have had an innovative notion of Renfield as a man who has shut down mentally after losing his daughter to Dracula, only to spring to dangerous life by the vampire's mental commands, but a mute Renfield does nothing for the story. Totally gone is the mania that defines the Stoker character and must be expressed verbally. We're left with a virtual actor's strike on screen, an appearance that can only be praised by Kinski cultists, just as the movie as a whole can be approved only by indiscriminate Franco fanatics.
Kinski's stunt-dummy gives a livelier performance.
I've seen Jess Franco at something closer to his peak form, while Wendigo hasn't. Count Dracula leaves Wendigo doubting whether Franco has any talent as a director. This film has little sense of art direction or Gothic expressionism apart from whatever Franco found on his locations or could apply with a generous use of cobwebs. He does little with composition or camera movement to create atmosphere, with rare exceptions like Dracula's appearance in Mina's box seat. This is one of the films that earned Franco a reputation for a lazy reliance on zooms; a comparison with Tod Browning's use of dolly shots is telling. Franco shows little skill with the actors, leaving Herbert Lom (whom Wendigo thinks a near-ideal Van Helsing) lost while treating the other vampire hunters almost interchangeably. He certainly flatters Maria Rohm and Soledad Miranda, but Count Dracula probably is not his best showcase for either actress.
Junior vampire Soledad Miranda starts small while Dracula hunts the big game (Maria Rohm).
As for special effects, Wendigo did like a few attempts, like the double-exposure materialization of Dracula's brides out of their coffins and the simple yet effective dissolve of Dracula's shadow, a moment straight out of Stoker. Franco makes decent use of simple gimmicks like smoke and mist for appearances and disappearances of characters. On the other hand, Count Dracula may have the worst bat effects ever, exemplified by the Transylvanian Glider Bat that sails unflappably past Lucy's window so often and by the bouncing boulders that the hunters drop on hapless gypsies. One of those giant rocks hits a horse smack on the head, but the animal is almost undisturbed, and after we see them come to rest after scattering the crowd, Franco cuts to a shot of gypsies somehow crushed under these paperweights. Wendigo also objects strenuously to Franco's substitution of police dogs for wolves, something the director apologizes for in his interview. Wendigo's view is, if you don't have the means to do something right, skip it -- just as Franco (probably wisely) skipped anything to do with the Demeter and its voyage to England.
The vampire hunters had staked two of Dracula's brides without a mess before Quincey Morris (Jack Taylor) hit a gusher on the third attempt. Had they missed vital organs before?
Seeing Count Dracula after many years has only decreased Wendigo's opinion of the movie and its director. Speaking for myself, having seen more Francos (including Vampyros Lesbos, which I may get Wendigo to watch someday), it strikes me that the director is only fully engaged and energized when working with his own personal mythology and symbolic iconography, regardless of the genres involved. He may talk big about his ambitions for Dracula now, but the film looks like a work for hire in which he invested little of his own particular creativity. Whatever interest Count Dracula has rests entirely on Christopher Lee's variation on a favorite theme; apart from that, there's little here for vampire fans or Franco fans, though Wendigo can speak only for the former.
Here's a German trailer for Nachts wenn Dracula erwacht uploaded by DocPhnoeker. It's actually pretty easy to follow regardless of language.
There's a tragicomic quality to Mario Costa's western, with a strong but possibly unintentional emphasis on the comic in its treatment of the presumptive title character. Crazy Johnny has no special skills with gun or knife or any other weapon, and nothing to avenge. All he has going for him is the fact that he's played by Klaus Kinski, which means, on this occasion, that Johnny pursues his interests with an elan that justifies the "Crazy" label. Over time, you can't help, though you probably should, feeling sorry for Johnny, who spends the film pining with a Wile E. Coyote-like hunger for poontang, but suffers from chronic rape-us interruptus.
"Ah cain't git no...sat-is-fack-shun." For some reason, a dubbed Southern accent has never seemed so appropriate for Kinski as it does in The Beast.
From the start of the show Johnny's on the trail of tail, and he has no time for courtship, dating or other civilized minutiae. Before the credits roll he pounces on a female, only to be driven off before he can consummate his crazed (crazing?) desire. This establishes the pattern for the rest of the film. Repeatedly, Johnny will have women in his power, only to be chased off, shot at, or otherwise repelled. Sometimes the women themselves fight back, exploiting an unbecoming naivete in our horndog antihero. In one scene, he pressures his prisoner for sex. She consents, but requires him to step outside so she can undress. He dutifully complies, and when he enters again, his victim breaks some furniture over his head.
Resistance only prompts his wrath, however, and when women fight back and flee, he ends up killing rather than raping them when he catches up. Asked to account for himself after one such murder, he affects righteous indignation. "She was killed because she wouldn't let me make love," he protests.
"You're beginning to bore me, old man," Johnny explains as he blasts a rare male victim who dared question his murder of the girl in the coach.
Sometimes the mere absence of women is enough to set him off. At one point, Johnny finds himself in a town and heads straight for the bar. Demanding women, he's told that the floor show won't start for another hour or so. That provokes a glass-tossing tantrum and a quick exit on the way to fresh adventures. Thus La Belva shapes up as a spaghetti epic (albeit filmed in Spain) of sexual frustration and its violent consequences.
But there's a plot beyond Johnny's perpetual lustquest, the sort of mundane storyline one might find in a Marx Bros. or early Abbott & Costello film to keep those people interested who are bored by the comedians. It involves the Old West form of identity theft, a labor-intensive business that requires you to kidnap a person before you can pretend to be her. In this instance, Johnny falls in with some conspirators who want to appropriate a young woman's inheritance. It's up to him to keep the girl captive while the female conspirator, proper papers in hand, goes to town to claim the money. This is where Johnny gets his head busted, and when he takes a lethal vengeance that has repercussions for his fellow conspirators. There are Mexican bandits involved as well, but the details seem secondary to the perverse pathos of Crazy Johnny's pilgrimage of failure.
In the absence of a master gunfighter or a revenge plot, and due to the odd imbalance of the identity-theft plot and Crazy Johnny's exploits, La Belva has a disorganized quality verging on randomness. It's almost appropriate, given the picaresque aspect of Johnny's adventures, but it more likely reflects the brute fact that Costa had a star and story that didn't quite fit together. For that reason I feel that I can only recommend this film to Kinski fans, but to them I definitely recommend it. For some reason it seems like a role he was destined to play, and it's certainly a part he seems to empathize with. Perhaps it struck closer to home than the great man might have cared to admit, but if so it didn't stop him from doing very watchable work.
It might be more watchable in some form other than the copy in VideoAsia's Spaghetti Western Bible Vol. 3 box set. It's the one film in that ten-film collection not to be letterboxed, if I remember right, and my poor screencaps testify to the quality of the transfer. Despite being identified as The Beast on the box, the film itself has latter-day opening credits that identify it as Rough Justice, a title of surpassing vagueness but one that at least wouldn't have caused people to mistake La Belva for a monster movie. See it this way if you must, but hold out for better if you can.
The American title sort of gives things away, but it sounds cool. The Spanish title of this Italian western translates as "Who knows?" It is only uttered at the very end of the film when Chuncho (Gian Maria Volonte) is pressed to explain why he's about to kill El Nino (Lou Castel), the gringo who befriended him and saved his life in Mexico. Chuncho is a revolutionary bandit who encounters Nino on a train the bandits have ambushed. He thinks Nino is a prisoner, being handcuffed, who wants to ride with the bandits as an alternative to execution back in the States. But we've seen Nino put the cuffs on after shooting an engineer, effectively stopping the train.
Above, Lou Castel as El Nino. Below, Gian Maria Volonte as Chuncho, with Klaus Kinski as Santo.
We know long before Chuncho realizes it that Nino has a hidden agenda. But for the time being he seems like many an American adventurer in Mexico, trying to steer Chuncho in a socially conscious direction. The bandit sides with the revolution mainly for money; he can sell guns to Elias, the rebel general, for a pretty peso. But he's prone to distractions, while Nino urges him to hook up with Elias directly to take an active part in the actual revolutionary fighting. For a time, Chuncho thinks he can be a rebel leader himself, or at least the power behind one, in the village of San Miguel. After he kills the local padrone, he "elects" one of the town's few literate men as leader and sets himself up to train their militia. But he gets bored, and then gets angry when his erstwhile partners ride off to take "his" machine gun to Elias. He abandons the village and his religious-fanatic brother Santo (Klaus Kinski) to take back the gun, but after a battle with government troops in which he and Nino get to use the weapon, he decides to go with the survivors all the way to Elias.
"Now I have a machine gun. Ho, ho, ho!"
After treating Nino for a sudden outbreak of malaria, during which he discovers a mysterious golden bullet in the American's valise, they meet the rebel general, who informs Chuncho that the town he left behind was massacred without his leadership, with only an angry Santo surviving. A chastened Chuncho concedes that he deserves death for cowardice, with Santo happy to oblige, but Nino thinks differently. He takes time from his own secret mission (can you guess?) to save Chuncho, whom he told earlier to meet him afterward in Ciudad Juarez, where rewards and civlized luxury await him.
So why does Chuncho want to shoot Nino despite the debt he owes him, and despite the fortune Nino has given him with no strings attached? I suppose that if we asked director Damiano Damiani and co-screenwriter Franco Solinas (coming off The Battle of Algiers) they'd say it was a matter of revolutionary necessity. Nino deserves to die no matter what he's done for Chuncho, especially if the bandit sticks to his own objective realization in Elias's camp that he deserved to die for abandoning San Miguel. If that was so, then Nino's rescuing him shouldn't count for anything, even though it shows that, for whatever reason, Nino considered Chuncho a friend. That's the peculiarity of this story. Nino is a villain, and he dislikes Mexico. But a true villain wouldn't give a damn whether Chuncho is executed or not, or wouldn't share his ill-gotten earnings 50-50 with the man, even if Chuncho did sort of save his life during that bout with malaria. I think we're meant to conclude that Nino's feelings for Chuncho are sincere -- and that they shouldn't matter.
Quien Sabe? is an early example of the Revolutionary subgenre of spaghetti westerns. This was a natural direction for the genre to go in with so many Italian creative people having a Marxist bent. Perhaps ironically, this particular revolutionary film actually has more of an American feel in its sweep and scope than the pioneering spaghettis that emphasized stylized gunfights. Also contributing to that impression is the powerful score by Luis Enriquez Bacalov under Enrico Morricone's supervision. It sounds less like Morricone than Aaron Copland by way of Elmer Bernstein. The score and the spacious cinematography give this film a vastness that many spaghettis lack. Damiani handles the battle scenes forcefully, but also makes sure you see the executions, so that you understand that revolution is a rough, maybe dirty business and, from his point of view, a necessary one.
A landowner asks if Chuncho is going to kill him because he's rich. The answer is no; the people are going to kill him because they're poor and he's done everything in his power to keep them down. That's a crucial difference in emphasis. It's not so much that some people deserve to die, but some need to die for the rest to get their due. The filmmakers don't hide the dirty work and don't romanticize revolution. You could very well look at this film and decide the revolutionaries are no better or worse than the government they're fighting. But leaving politics out of the discussion, Quien Sabe? works as a dynamic action film and an interplay of two strong personalities, the underplaying Castel as the subtly sinister Nino and Volonte (from the first two Sergio Leone westerns) as the archetypal spaghetti bandit. As usual, someone else speaks Kinski's lines, but he's really into the action and dominates his scenes as El Santo.
Kinski as a mad monk is a natural, but his performance in Quien Sabe? isn't quite that.
A Bullet For the General would make a good introduction to spaghetti westerns for people used to American westerns, and a good introduction to the revolutionary subgenre for those who identify spaghettis with lone gunfighters and bounty hunters. Any fan of westerns and action films in general will probably enjoy it.
Here's the U.S. trailer posted by BlueUnderground.
Gianni Garko may not be as well known a spaghetti western star as Clint Eastwood or even Franco Nero, but on the other hand, he was never made to sing in a Lerner and Loewe musical. What the man could definitely do is wear a suit of clothes, though Giuliano "Anthony Ascott" Carnimeo's film, his first in the Sartana series, raises questions about what else Garko was really capable of.
Is Sartana really nothing more than a suit of clothes? The opening credits actually invite you to ponder that point, which is relevant to the story at hand. The credit sequence is quite imaginative, or at least different for a spaghetti, starting with a mannequin and cut-by-cut building the Sartana costume on it. -- already presumably instantly recognizable even though Garko had only worn it once before at this point. We cut again to a living Sartana showing off some card tricks, but you notice quickly that we're only seeing the man from the neck down. You never do see Gianni Garko doing this stuff. But you might be distracted from that realization by the kick-ass theme music by the team of Vasco and Mancuso, the best music so far in the series. Take a look and a listen yourself, thanks to SpoonMHD.
From here we go to the town of Iron Hat, home of the North Western Bank, one of the region's soundest financial institutions.
Like Sartana, the NWB's bounty-killer security guards wear a recognizable uniform, which probably makes quite a deterrent as a rule. It's not likely to intimidate the man in the familiar hat and cloak, however, who arrives to make an everyday sort of financial transaction. Here's how banking worked in the Old West. Let's say you're a bounty killer. You've just gotten your man, but the local government isn't immediately able to pay out your reward. All you need to do is bring the corpse up to the teller window, dump it on the counter, and collect from the bank. The state or federal government will pay them back later. Only Sartana seems to have made a mistake. I'm pretty sure that bank rules require the wanted man to be dead before you bring him in for exchange, and this character proves to be very much alive. It turns out that the bank personnel have made a mistake, because that dude in black is not Sartana. That pales beside an even graver error: not all those liveried bank guards are actually employed by the bank. They join "Sartana" in riddling the place with bullets and taking $300,000. It's rare to see two small armies going at it inside a bank, but that's why God made spaghetti westerns.
We know that the perpetrator isn't Sartana because the director hasn't shown us Gianni Garko's face and the man's dubbed voice sounds mean. He's so mean, in fact, that he wipes out most of his cohorts shortly after the getaway. But the poor slobs in the movie don't know it isn't Sartana, so posters promptly put a $10,000 price on our hero's head. The invitation to cash in arouses the most eclectic collection of mighty men since Van Halen's "Pretty Woman" video. You've got some Indian dude. You've got genre badass Gordon Mitchell living in the lap of luxury, yet deciding this will give him something to do. You've got Klaus Kinski (back from the previous Sartana film) as a gambling addict who needs the reward money to pay off his debts. At one point, you have an entire town gunning for our innocent hero, as if they meant to share the reward.
Kinski: Will Work For...
Sartana is annoyed to discover that he could be impersonated so easily. He's also chagrined to learn that expert craftsman Homer Crown, who designed Sartana's signature spinning-top/bullet cylinder for his little four-barrel pistol, has been making knock-offs for practically anyone who asks. So there's nothing to be done but track down whoever impersonated him and whoever framed him. Once I saw the real man, I could confirm that the makeover I noted when I inadvertently watched the next film in the series, Have A Nice Funeral...Sartana Will Pay actually takes place in that film. There he has a clean-shaven chin and a full, blond mustache, while here he has the same stubble he wore in his first appearance as the heroic Sartana in If You Meet Sartana, Pray For Your Death. I'm not the final authority in such matters, but I like the stubble better, though I suppose the big 'stache was an inevitable development once the series reached the Seventies.
Our hero actually has help of a sort from a sidekick, Buddy Ben, played by Frank Wolff in slovenly mode. The script makes a mostly successful effort to keep us guessing whether this guy will backstab Sartana or not, but the character himself isn't that interesting. A disappointing thing about this film is that it sets up these big-time bounty killers to chase Sartana, only to throw less interesting characters at us who prove to be more important to the plot. Gordon Mitchell, for instance, doesn't show up after his introduction until the film has less than ten minutes to go, and even then his motivation for pursuing Sartana seems like a secondary matter. The Indian, played by Jose Torres, comes off better. He gets a cool scene in which he pins Sartana down in a miner's cabin and seems to have an answer for every escape attempt. Sartan tries to lasso his rifle from his horse's saddle and drag it to him, but the Indian shoots the rope. Sartana throws dynamite at him, but he shoots it out of the sky. It's fun to see Sartana sweat these things out sometimes.
Kinski has more yet to do, but his bounty killer emerges as a kind of comedy relief character. He's saddled with a theme motif that has reminded more viewers than me of "Santa Claus is Coming to Town." The running gag is that he's a better gunfighter than a gambler, but can't help himself. "I'm a pig" when it comes to gambling, he says at one point. This extends to a scene where he loses at cards to a fellow passenger on a stagecoach. In this case, he finds that the man's wife, seeming to snooze next to him, has actually been spying on him and signalling hubby with her foot. Amazingly, Kinski resolves this situation without shooting anyone, though he does get to wipe out a gang of bandits, whom he has loaded on top of the coach so he can cash them in in town.
When he finally catches up to Sartana, it's in a casino, so he's surrounded by temptation. Complicating things further is the revelation that Sartana is yet another of his creditors. This makes Kinski reluctant to kill him, after all, because it might look like he was welshing on a debt. This sets up a curious confrontation with a more curious resolution: a happy ending for Kinski. This is another instance where Angel of Death (also known as Sono Sartana, il vostro becchino, commonly translated as "I am Sartana, your gravedigger," among many alternate titles) is less brutal than it could or possibly should be.
Angel of Death is, in my opinion, the weakest of the series so far, though there's enough going on to keep it an entertaining film. Carnimeo doesn't seem to have a real grasp of what to do with Sartana yet. The character doesn't retain the quasi-supernatural vibe he had in If You Meet Sartana, and comes the closest here to being just a generic spaghetti hero. Part of the problem is that this film is focused on Sartana himself in a way the ones that come before and after aren't. In those, the writers came up with settings and situations for Sartana to intervene in as a dangerous x-factor. In Angel of Death, nothing more is at stake than Sartana's own name, however good that might be. That's plotting at a comic-book level, with no offense meant to modern comics. Fortunately, I can assure you (since I saw it last week) that Carnimeo got his act together by the next film.
Nor is Angel of Death without good moments. I've already mentioned Sartana's battle with the Indian bounty hunter. Now I'll add a nicely done action scene in which Sartana has to fight his way out of a hostile town. Carnimeo films a lot of this from inside the moving covered wagon as Sartana shoots down enemies, only to have more appear. The director also experiments with violent camerawork that he won't repeat in Have A Nice Funeral. When people get shot in this film, Carnimeo seems to slap the camera around so that it tips and lurches as Sartana's victims tumble and fall. He definitely deserves credit for trying things with the widescreen image in the honorable spaghetti tradition. If you like spaghetti westerns in general, you'll probably like this one.
As with Have A Nice Funeral, VideoAsia has used a German DVD copy of Angel of Death (the German title translates to something like "Sartana: Corpses Were Like His Daily Bread"). The letterboxing appears to be correct and the picture is sharper than Funeral was. So whatever the ethics of the Grindhouse Experience Sartana package, the aesthetics of it are quite satisfactory this time.
Between Have A Nice Funeral and the next "official" Sartana film starring Garko, imitation Sartanas began to appear, as if invited by the concept of Angel of Death. Before moving on to Carnimeo's Light the Fuse...Sartana is Coming, I'll take a look at some of the imitators stating next week.
B
