Deadly Inheritance (1968)

Original title: Omicidio per vocazione

Somewhere in rural France. The patriarch of a rich family whose members are still somehow involved in the daily running of a train station including signal duty (shades of Charles Dickens for me there, if the filmmakers wanted it or not, and they probably didn’t) dies in what is probably an accident. There’s quite a nice inheritance to be had, but Father has put a rather interesting stipulation into his will: nobody is getting at anything but the interest on the money until mentally unstable Janot (Ernesto Colli) will come of age and turn twenty-one in three years time and can be shoved off into the best mental health care. The fact that the guy playing him is twenty-eight and looks like forty nor the availability of mental health care for people under twenty-one notwithstanding. This isn’t terribly good news for parts of the family: there are bills to be paid, lovers in need of money to pay off their future ex-wives, and so on.

So it comes not completely as a surprise when other family members - of course including Janot who has another unfortunate train accident leaving him quite in pieces – start dying in accidents and things supposedly like it. Because local boss cop Etienne (Virgilio Gazzolo) isn’t deemed enough, the big city sends Inspector Greville (Tom Drake) to take care of business. Eventually, Greville brilliantly deduces that there’s something suspicious about all of these murders and proceeds accordingly.

Vittorio Sindoni’s Deadly Inheritance is a strange example of late 60s giallo filmmaking. For at least the first half of the film, you see some of the standard tropes of the genre, but they are for the most part used like in a standard and pretty boring mystery. There are dirty secrets, but these are neither treated as a doorway to sleaze nor to get snarky about the ways of the decadent rich, but feel more like necessary plot points the film needs to work through. The cast features some well-liked Italian genre actresses – at least heroine Femi Benussi and Valeria Ciangottini should fall under this umbrella – but they aren’t used to much effect, and Tom Drake’s Greville is about as boring as any protagonist of a movie can be imagined to be. Stylistically, everything feels very dry and lacking in punch.

But the longer the film goes on, the more elements of interest begin to emerge: suddenly, there’s a tightly and aesthetically pleasing chase sequence with a bunch of people after the Inspector’s favourite suspect, running through a very geometrically framed countryside; the murders don’t become exactly more bloody, but certainly more elaborately staged and filmed. Sindoni also begins doing clever things. Take for example the film’s best murder scene: the victim is alone locked into her home, with the police outside to protect her. Things start with a – pretty great as composed by one Stefano Torossi – giallo typical female voice singing an appropriately haunting melody on the score. Our heroine hears something, opens a door, finds a record player playing said haunting melody, which she thankfully lets play on to properly accompany the following set piece of stalking and killing. This is staged in such a matter of fact manner by Sindoni, it doesn’t feel too clever by half but delightful, funny and just the right bit macabre.

Once Deadly Inheritance has reached its final half hour, there’s very little that makes this recognizable as the same film of the plodding and naff to look at first act. Every scenes now has something to draw the viewer in, so much so, the film gets away with a last act double twist that’s as improbable as it is awesome. It also suggests that some of the boringness of the first part of the film was actually there on purpose, meant to manipulate its audience into a couple of very specific expectations concerning the roles of detectives, suspects, and victims in any kind of mystery. It’s quite a thing to do in highly commercial genre cinema, expecting a degree of patience from its audience I’m certainly not always willing to spend on a movie. It’s till a pretty great trick that provides Deadly Inheritance with a fantastic ending.

Three Films Make A Post: Featuring the Longest Kiss in Cinema History!

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011): Guy Ritchie's second movie about the adventures of a very pulp hero Sherlock Holmes played by Robert Downey Jr. and his especially long-suffering Watson Jude Law shares all the virtues of the first movie, and is therefore pretty much as good as mainstream adventure cinema gets. It's fun, it's silly, it's playful, and so totally divorced from Victorian reality or the self-image of Victorians as evidenced in Doyle's work, it develops something of a subversive edge simply by treating both with as little respect as they deserve yet also with as much - probably more - love as they do.

Bonus points for a Moriarty who doesn't act like a hyperactive twelve-year-old, Noomi Rapace (who would make a pretty great pulp Holmes too, I think) and the most off-handed Reichenbach Falls ever.

The Life of the World to Come (2010): For some reason, this film doesn't appear on Rian Johnson's IMDB page, but this was made by the director of Brick and The Brothers Bloom anyway. It's a one take/long take concert film without an audience of The Mountain Goats (in this case in the form of John and Rachel) performing the whole of "The Life of the World to Come", the (not exactly religious) album on which all songs are titled with bible verses - which honestly is much better in practice than it may sound in theory; a description that fits The Mountain Goats in general.

For the most part, the film consists of the camera shifting position around Darnielle while he plays on the piano or the guitar, providing the film with an aesthetic that is minimalist and - thanks to the long take business - just a bit awkward at times, which again fits The Mountain Goats nicely, for this is the music of a guy who has always been willing to accept and own moments of awkwardness instead of excising them.

I'm too much of a fan of Darnielle (whose music, together with that of the Go-Betweens, Lucinda Williams, Epic Soundtracks, and the Fellow Travellers may very well have kept me sane at one point in my life) to say much about the quality of the music or the performance, except that the film made me cry just a little.

Finalmente… le mille e una notte aka 1001 Nights of Pleasure (1972): As a genre, the Italian sex comedy, even in its (in theory) more classy aspect, never did much for me, despite sharing at least the female half of its casts with those Italian genres of the same eras I do love. Their ideas about what's funny and mine just disagree a bit too much with each other.

So I found myself rather surprised when (house favourite) Antonio Margheriti's provoked quite a few smiles and even two or three guffaws from me here. The film's combination of low-brow comedy, nudity graciously provided by actresses like Barbara Bouchet and Femi Benussi (and, if that floats your boat, to a lesser degree actors like Gino Milli and, well, whoever plays the other semi-nude guys), and pretty nice to look at production design doesn't exactly add up to something everyone should see, but the film is a fine enough piece of exploitation for those evenings when something deeper, cleverer or less friendly would be too much. This is also another film that supports my theory of Margheriti being - generally (let's pretend we don't know his war movies) - one of the most good-natured of all Italian genre directors, for there's really nothing nasty about the film, even when the joke's by all rights should feel nasty. I imagine Margheriti as a happy man.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,italian movies,adventure,action,music,comedy,exploitation,robert downey jr,jude law,guy ritchie,rian johnson,the mountain goats,antonio margheriti,barbara bouchet,femi benussi

In short: So Sweet, So Dead (1972)

Original title: Rivelazioni di un maniaco sessuale al capo della squadra mobile

A provincial town in Italy is hit by a series of murders. All victims are women from the upper rungs of the bourgeoisie, all of them were married and all are found surrounded by photos showing them having sex with men who clearly aren't their husbands. Because he's polite and something of an overachiever, the killer scratches the men's faces off the photos, which makes the life of the investigating cop, Inspector Capuana (Farley Granger, in a subtle and complex performance mostly based on looks instead of facial impressions) that decisive bit more difficult by helping potential witnesses who have reasons of their own not to want to talk to him avoid answering unpleasant questions.

Capuana's investigation is difficult enough as it is, for the town's upper class may be great at committing adultery, but most of its members do not like to talk about their hobbies to the police, and sure are influential enough to get special treatment from the police. Given the miserable state of evidence in the cases, it'll take a long line of victims (Femi Benussi, Krista Nell, Susan Scott - it's half of Italy's giallo actresses for the price of one) until Capuana will be able to get his man. And even then, he might just learn something about his own wife (Sylva Koscina) that'll make him act in a manner morally much worse than adultery could ever be.

So Sweet, So Dead is one of the small group of movies that try to cross the Italian style "ripped from the headlines" police procedural with the giallo; unlike many other films making that attempt, Roberto Bianchi Montero's is actually successful at doing what it sets out to achieve. Many films with the same idea as So Sweet (and isn't it interesting how the film's Italian title emphasises the film's identity as a police procedural while the English language one identifies it as a giallo?) suffer from the peculiar choices their director make when deciding what element from which genre to take, often leading to movies combining the least interesting and the most annoying elements of both genres. Sadly, this has resulted in more than one movie about bored looking men sitting in drab rooms talking police procedural stuff while crawling through a plot that is confusing but equally drab.

Montero goes about his business a bit more intelligently, making the murder and sex scenes, as well as identity and motivation of the killer, stylistically and in their content part of the giallo genre, while the social commentary, the central cop character and the cynical ending are coming right from the police procedural. One could argue that Montero uses the copious scenes of nudity of a minor who is who of Italian genre actresses and the sexy, sleazy violence to make his semi-realist observations about the life of the upper classes more interesting to a rather jaded audience. The director succeeds in this project rather well, especially because he seems to be stylistically at home in both genres (which does not come as too big a surprise seeing as Montero worked in any film genre you might care to name), making the giallo parts suspenseful, their violence disquietingly enticing, and the police procedural parts' observations about the mental state of provincial Italy 1972 believable and human.

There is, alas, a real possibility that the director agrees with the killer about the adulterous women being "whores" who deserve to die, although there's an equally large possibility that position is part of the bourgeois hypocrisy he is trying to criticize. In good exploitation film tradition, you can base an argument for both positions on So Sweet, So Dead.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,giallo,crime,roberto bianchi montero,farley granger,sylva koscina,susan scott,krista nell,femi benussi,in short