La vendetta di Spartacus (1964)

aka The Revenge of Spartacus

aka Revenge of the Gladiators

Spartacus isn’t dead! A band of his surviving companions led by Arminius (Gordon Mitchell) cut him down from his cross (this is Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus, not the historical one who most probably died in battle, you understand), giving hope to slaves and the victims of Empire everywhere. There’s no full-on slave revolt this time around but various small groups of rebels are hitting the power of Rome with guerrilla tactics.

The Roman senate is set on not letting this new slave revolt grow into a full-grown war, and does attempt to quell the revolution with proper Roman military might from the get-go, though with less success than they’d hope for. Particularly senator Lucius Transonius (Daniele Vargas) is pushing the matter hard, though part of his eagerness is obviously bound up with an attempt to make his son Fulvius (Giacomo Rossi Stuart with very distracting hair) the general of the legion(s) quelling the insurrection. That part of Fulvius’s plan isn’t going over too well with the rest of the senate, whose members clearly prefer somebody with more to recommend him than a big head of hair for a military leadership role but Fulvius gives way in that point rather fast. Why, given the rest of his oratorical and political manner, you’d think he has a plan up his sleeve to get Lucius the position one way or the other. For now, Lucius is going to have to play the part of Henchman Number One.

While all this is going on, Roman Valerius (Roger Browne) returns to the family farm from a stint in the legions, only to find his parents and his young brother slaughtered by legionnaires under the command of Lucius. Valerius’s parents were hiding his badly wounded older brother Marcellus (Germano Longo) who had thrown in his lot with Spartacus and was indeed one of the men taking part in Spartacus’s rescue. Somehow, the Romans found out they did, killing the family, even though Marcellus managed to escape. Valerius makes short work of the three legionnaires still plundering his former home, and is left with a whole load of grudges he doesn’t know where to direct. Fortunately, his family’s former slave – set free by his brother – Cynthia (Scilla Gabel) – sent by the rebels to warn the family of the Roman raid – arrives just before he can decide the way to go is to walk right into the rest of Lucius’s cohort and die heroically. Cynthia, who is very right, and very very pretty, convinces Valerius that 1) the slave revolt is a right and just thing and 2) his best chance of at least finding his brother alive is to join with the rebels, so off they go. Valerius, it soon turns out, is rather a natural in the whole guerrilla work thing, so there still might be hope for true freedom in the Roman Empire.

Whew, and this is just the plot of the film’s first half hour or so. As a matter of fact, Michele Lupo’s La vendetta di Spartacus is one of the rare peplum films that very much seems to pride itself on having a sensible and reasonably complex plot where even the historical freedoms it takes will turn out to mostly fit into the gaps of recorded history, where characters are larger than life as are their plans yet still have discernible motivations (yes, even the bad guys).

So, quite atypical for the genre, the film doesn’t tell a series of vaguely related cool episodes (not that there’s anything wrong with that, mind you) but an actual story, and while there’s not quite enough money going around here to go for the true epic scale of the Kubrick film on whose coattails the film quite obviously rides – in fact, the footage of the Romans losing various skirmishes against the rebels used in a senate session is clearly from another film, what with the Romans enemies looking rather Teutonic – this is a film that puts all its efforts into making what it can put on screen as memorable as possible.

I had the film’s director Lupo generally pegged as more dependable than exciting, but there’s true enthusiasm on display here, as well as what looks to my eyes like an honest attempt at using the actual history. Not in the sense of Lupo actually aiming for or achieving real historical authenticity, of course - this is still a peplum and therefore a pulpy historical adventure but clearly one working from a consciousness of the actual history, using some of it to good effect (the senate scenes may look a bit small scale but do feel a lot like the stuff I’ve read in Latin class in their oratorical approach and the style of their intrigue, for example), and stepping away from it not out of laziness but because this is supposed to be an exciting and melodramatic adventure.

Consequently, the action scenes are rather exciting too, with some of the better stunts you’ll find in a non-mythological peplum and an energy to them that reminded me pleasantly of the best of US serials from decades past. I was surprised by how good the melodrama - usually the parts when I roll my eyes, raise my eyebrows in these movies - worked here, with many a close-up of Mitchell’s, Browne’s and Gabel’s faces in quite effectively realized states of big emotion. Big emotion even, which resonates with the film’s ideas about freedom, loss and betrayal instead of feeling shoved into the script because you need melodrama in your peplum. In the final act, there are also a few poignant scenes, staged by Lupo with a sense of dignity I didn’t really expect to find in the film, giving the latter stages of the film true emotional weight.

The melodrama also fits into the film’s not terribly difficult to see subtext about a democracy (of sorts) at a point in its development when it is only too easily convinced by a strong man, as long as he’s telling it that it can do no wrong and kicks the people who are weakest. That’s something Italians and Germans know quite a bit about, though it does seem like many of us right no prefer to forgot these lessons of history.

Past Misdeeds: California (1977)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts without any re-writes or improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.

The US Civil War is over. The former Confederate Army is being dissolved, which leads to an army of men without money or food trying to get home passing through areas where they aren't exactly welcome anymore.

A man (Giuliano Gemma) who has given himself the pseudonym of Michael Random - after a brand of tobacco, the film informs us, not the plotting proclivities of Italian scriptwriters - is one of those men. While he is not a bad guy at heart (as proven by his heroic efforts in protecting a helpless kitten from being eaten), Michael is rather cynical about the war and his shadowy past in which (as we will learn much later) he was a gunman known as "California", so he would really rather keep to himself and cultivate his aloof pose. That's easier said than done when a very young, very much not cynical former soldier named Willy Preston (Miguel Bose) starts to follow Michael around like a loveable little puppy.

At first, the older man is annoyed by his new companion, but Willy's excessively kind nature and the vagaries of travelling together let the men grow close.

At the same time, a group of fur-coated bounty hunters lead by a certain Whittaker (Raimund Harmstorf) is prowling the ex-Confederate refugees as the easiest prey imaginable. Whittaker is in league with some Union generals who are just too eager to produce new victims for him.

Somehow Michael and Willy are always able to just barely avoid direct run-ins with Whittaker's group, but those guys are not the only danger awaiting them.

After some strokes of bad luck, Willy ends up dead with a bullet in his back for a horse he had to steal to keep alive. Michael decides to do the decent thing for once, and travels to the Preston farm, telling Willy's family that their son died as a hero in the war.

Willy's parents (William Berger and Dana Ghia) are just too willing to take Michael in as a kind of adoptive son, while Willy's cute sister Helen (Paola Bose) takes quite a shine to the man. It seems as if Michael could make a peaceful life for himself on the farm, but one day, when visiting the nearby town, more bad luck leads to Helen's abduction by Whittaker and his gang, who have just fallen out with their former friends in the military.
Michael swears to bring Helen back, whatever the cost might be.

Before director Michele Lupo ended his career with a string of shitty Bud Spencer vehicles, he made this excellent late-period Spaghetti Western.

It's a slow film mostly built on two of the most important fundaments of Spaghetti Western filmmaking - mood and mud. A large part of the film trades in a silent mood of melancholia. To produce that effect, Lupo drenches his film in muted autumn colours, fog and the aforementioned mud. It is quite a beautiful film to look at if you are a friend of the colder seasons, and definitely a visually well-composed one.

The film keeps the Spaghetti-typical nasty violence a bit more low-key than usual. This doesn't mean that there is no violence on display, rather Lupo uses violence and the undercurrents of violence as silently waiting below much of human interaction instead of throwing it into our faces all the time. Unlike many American western directors, he doesn't shy away from random death and the suffering of innocents, he just doesn't wallow in it more than is strictly necessary to get his points across.

The film's subtext isn't much friendlier than those of other Spaghetti Westerns, though. Lupo's film isn't as hopeless as some other films of the sub genre, but calling California's ending a happy one would be quite a stretch, unless every ending that leaves people still standing is to be called a happy one.

I was pleasantly surprised by the acting here. Gemma has never been one of my genre favourites (which mostly says that he isn't a Franco Nero or Lee Van Cleef) does an excellent job of keeping his character sympathetic despite his flaws and past and still makes you believe in both, while Harmstorf actually manages something you don't get to see too often, namely making it plausible why people would want to follow the main bad guy. He's quite a charismatic man in his own, selling-women-into-prostitution way.

You could now add the usual paragraph criticizing the treatment of Bose's female main character as an object used to keep the plot running, but I'm afraid this just comes with the Spaghetti Western territory. At least, Lupo is showing restraint when it comes to showing the indignities heaped upon her on screen. Although I am not sure that this really is the better way to go about it. Not showing the worst often just seems a bit cowardly to me, as if a film wouldn't trust its audience enough not to enjoy a rape sequence.

The film's screenplay isn't without its flaws anyway. While I approve of its preference for randomness in place of classic plot logic when building the film (and here it really feels like a writerly decision to keep closer to reality than the orderliness of tight plotting and not like incompetence), there are moments when the film just drags its heels a little too much for my tastes.

Of course, nobody in her right mind watches Italian films for the quality of plotting. Thankfully, the rest of the script isn't half bad.

California is one of the better late period Spaghettis I have seen, well worth watching for anyone interested in seeing a film of the genre that shows restraint without being defanged.

The Master Touch (1972)

Original title: Un Uomo Da Rispettare

aka A Man To Respect

High-tech (by standards of the early 70s) thief Steve Wallace (Kirk Douglas) has barely been released from a Hamburg prison when Miller (Wolfgang Preiss), an old associate - but surely no friend - of his, tries his hardest to convince him to just another heist. Miller entices Steve with the sheer impossibility of breaking into a vault so high-tech, it's controlled by one of those "computer" thingies.

Miller's technique, and a bit of a looksee, do indeed convince Steve that the vault is just the job for him, but he doesn't want anything to do with Miller, who, after all, would want half the take and tends to have faces smashed in by his enforcer (Romano Puppo) where Steve prefers a non-violent approach to his job. Still, Steve will need a partner for the plan he has developed. Consequently, the aging thief finds himself one in form of trapeze artist Marco (Giuliano Gemma). Marco doesn't know anything about safecracking, but is willing to learn.

Problems do of course arise. Steve's wife Anna (Florinda Bolkan) wants her husband to end his life as a criminal; it's not so much out of moral abhorrence (Steve is, after all, a non-violent criminal robbing banks and other institutions of that type) but because his jail time has been very hard on her, and she can't imagine going through another year or two without him. That's particularly bad because Steve's plan to rob the vault and keep Miller off his back absolutely includes further jail time. And as if that weren't enough, heists do have the tendency to go wrong.

In the fourth decade of his career, at a point where most other actors of his generation were either starting to rest on their laurels or take an early semi-retirement on TV, Kirk Douglas went weird, taking on roles in peculiar comedies, Italian end times movies, and Michele Lupo's The Master Touch.

The Master Touch isn't a particularly weird film in itself but it is also a far cry from the movies the actor could have starred in at this point in his career that'd see him just point his face in the direction of the camera and go through the motions. At its core, this is a very typical heist movie, containing everything you'd expect from such a film yet giving everything just enough of a little twist to make it a very good heist movie, even for a viewer more than used to what the genre has to offer; see, for example, the film's rejection of the femme fatale concept.

However, Lupo's movie also contains elements rather less typical of its genre, like an absolutely insane car chase between Gemma and Puppo through the streets of Hamburg that looks and feels incredibly dangerous, seeing as it ends with both cars involved nearly totally destroyed. Hamburg itself looks at its least appealing here, as it mainly seems to consist of the dirtiest part of its harbour, grey and brown streets, and grey industrial buildings sitting under the typically grey skies of Northern Germany. If the rules of the heist movie (quite in opposition to the caper movie) wouldn't nearly guarantee it already, Hamburg's rather noirish appearance does suggest things won't end well for anyone involved.

In contrast to Hamburg's ugly side, much of the film's interior action tends towards the modernist and semi-futuristic, with a vault and safe-cracking tools that involve all the polished silver, blinking lights, and emptiness the Future of 1972 had to offer. It's a curiously nostalgic feeling watching computers large as a room, a few video cameras and what amounts to a microphone-based alarm system treated as awe-inspiring technological advances only a genius thief could conquer, but the film treats this aspect with such reverence and care, it does never become ridiculous from my jaded perspective on technology. It helps that Steve's plan actually makes sense with the technology given. The use of music to distract the computer system also has a finely poetic touch, and just feels right even if it may be slightly absurd in practice. Of course, once you witness Douglas wearing a rather wonderful suit (I say this with the full conviction of a man who neither wears suits nor likes suits as a concept) oozing tension and charisma while going through the absurd and not so absurd elements of his heist, there's no room for doubting you're witnessing something very serious and exciting.

Clarity is a particularly important part of every good heist sequence, because the audience usually needs to have a clear picture of what's going on in several places at once. The Master Touch's heist sequence shows Lupo as a director very much in control of the pacing of his heist sequence. Lupo clearly knew the importance of every edit here, resulting in a sequence with a highly impressive flow that alone would be enough to recommend the film.

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On WTF: California (1977)

After the short break, my weekly rambling on movies on WTF-Film.com continues apace with another Spaghetti Western. California is rather good, if you like not too friendly-minded, loosely plotted films that mostly take place in autumn.

 

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