In short: When Eight Bells Toll (1971)

British attempts at creating a new franchise in the spirit of James Bond have historically never fared too well. A nice example for this tradition is this attempt at bringing in French director Etienne Périer and turn to the ever popular Alistair MacLean for scripting duties to make a young Anthony Hopkins playing a permanently disgruntled treasury agent into “The New James Bond”.

Apparently, nobody involved in the production bothered to understand why the Bond movies were the smashes they were, so that series’ sense for POP and the popping eye candy is replaced by the more realistic and workaday charms of your typical Alistair MacLean hero and his world. Hopkins’s Calvert is still supremely competent, mind you, but like all MacLean heroes, he’s rather too down to Earth and focussed on solving the problems at hand to ever feel charismatic or cool like even the Roger Moore version of Bond does.

There is quite a bit of geographical hopping around here too, but where the Bond films show what tourists like to see – and typically set an outrageous action set piece there – When Eight Bells Toll prefers various, dramatically grey, coast lines, and lots of ships and boats (and helicopters, to be fair). There’s nothing wrong with that at all of course, but if you’re trying to beat the contemporary Bond movies at their own game, you might at least look as if you’re trying.

There are at least some direct if tepid attempts at copying the sexy/sleazy bits of the Bonds, but the film – after all written by the rather notoriously couth MacLean - feels faintly embarrassed by that instead of convinced, which obviously also turns it unconvincing.

All of this doesn’t mean there’s no fun to be had here. If you go into the film not asking for the Bond it doesn’t know how to deliver but for a more on-brand action/adventure Alistair MacLean style affair, there’s a lot to like here, particularly if you enjoy your action and adventure taking place on coastlines and boats (there is, thankfully, not too much interest in diving here), and featuring ultra-competent, slightly boring protagonists.

Past Misdeeds: A Whisper In The Dark (1976)

Original title: Un sussurro nel buio

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.

A rich Italian family lives the life of the rich and idle in their palatial mansion in the country. Things aren't quite as perfect as they seem, though. It's not just that family father Alex (John Phillip Law) is something of a jerk who cheats on his wife Camilla (Nathalie Delon) with a friend of hers who is staying as a house guest, or that the regularly visiting grandmother is a nasty old bint hiding her unpleasant interior behind impeccable manners, or that the family's two daughters make eardrum-shattering screeching noises whenever they open their mouths, or that Camilla's nerves are so on edge that she's bound to become the sort of hysteric that only exists in the mind of Freudians and filmmakers one day. No, all that is minor trouble when compared to the family's true problem.

Their little son Martino (Alessandro Poggi), you see, has an invisible friend called Luca on whom he seems to be more fixated than can be seen as healthy, but, quite unlike most invisible friends, Luca has a way of making his presence known physically. Luca moves objects around often enough to have Camilla and the nanny Francoise (Olga Bisera) believe the invisible child is more than just a figment of Martino's imagination. What's even more disturbing for Camilla is the fact that the name her son has given to his invisible playmate is the same she and Alex had given the stillborn boy they had before Martino, something the kid shouldn't know about at all.

Luca's presence becomes ever more direct, and though he seems to have the family's best interests in mind, he's not exactly unthreatening. Alex and Camilla decide their son needs professional help, but - not surprising to anyone watching - the usual neurological examinations find nothing at all. Alex manages to get hold of a rather dubious professor (Joseph Cotten) interested in the Weird, who is willing to move in with the family to take a closer look at Martino (and Luca). Although Alex doesn't realize it (obviously, being a jerk he ignores all of his wife's doubts), the Professor's interest in Martino isn't so much that of a doctor wanting to cure a patient, but rather that of a man having found an especially interesting lab rat. Of course, this isn't the sort of thing Luca will tolerate, and he defends his brother/creator/father in a rather lethal way. Alas, once a supernatural entity has begun with the murders, it tends not to stop with them again that easily.

Marcello Aliprandi's A Whisper In The Dark is Italian horror cinema of the 70s at its most typical: stylishly directed, beautifully photographed and drenched in a dream-like mood that is heightened by a fantastic Pino Donaggio soundtrack. It's a film occupying itself with creating an atmosphere for the audience's minds to inhabit, and not so much one interested in telling a clearly defined story. The film's pace is slow, very slow, from beginning to end, and what might sound like a clear increase in dramatic tension when looking at the plot on paper never feels as such when one is actually watching the film, because Aliprandi doesn't do dramatic tension as it us usually understood. Instead of working by the dramaturgical rules of the thriller, the film stops and starts, interspersing moments of tension and drama with scenes that prefer to circle around the things that are happening, or just hint at the things that might be happening or the motives that might be lying behind the characters' actions. For example, the film clearly insinuates that Cotten's Professor isn't wholly trustworthy through a certain shiftiness in the actor's behaviour (and the fact that he likes nothing more than let the family's maid bring him iced vodka to his bathtub, something he calls "imperative" for his mind to work), but it never outright shows or tells how bad his plans truly are, so that it never becomes clear how much of an act of self defence by Luca and/or Martino (again, if Luca is a telekinetic product of Martino's subconscious or his dead brother or something else is kept ambiguous) his murder truly is.

As an audience, we can speculate about the clearly supernatural, we can put our interpretative faculties into understanding it, yet we can never really know it.

Aliprandi uses a similar technique when it comes to the thematic underpinnings of his film. It's quite obvious that a part of the film's subtext is circling the way the child they have once lost has influenced the marriage and life of Camilla and Alex, and that Luca might be more of an externalisation of Camilla's inability to let go of her lost child (which in turn might be responsible for Alex being like he is), an interpretation that is certainly strengthened by the film's ending, but this isn't the sort of film ever willing to get concrete about, well, anything. Instead, A Whisper in the Dark hints and insinuates, and let's the audience do the thinking for themselves.


That's probably the point where friends of clear, linear narratives and directness in their horror movies will throw their remotes disgustedly at their TVs, but A Whisper in the Dark, like many of the most interesting European horror movies of the 70s, was not made with ideas like clarity and directness as virtues in mind at all, and therefore wasn't made for anybody expecting these things. It's all about the mood, the things that might be, and the things that happen inside of a viewer just willing to take a look, to feel and to speculate.

In short: Le Moine (1972)

aka The Monk

Ambrosio (Franco Nero) is the superstar preacher of his local abbey, full of fiery hatred against the things of the Flesh (even marriage is too icky a concept for him), and a fitting self-righteous attitude.

Things go well for Ambrosio until he learns that a young novice who clearly had him thinking unvirginal thoughts already is in fact Mathilde (Nathalie Delon), a woman; a woman, at that, who has smuggled herself into the order just to be with him. Realizing this and getting seduced into fornication are as obvious as my talent for similes. Once Ambrosio has started on the sinning, he's on a downwards path of sins from lies through more fornication through the lusting after teenage girls through murder. Mathilde is enabling Ambrosio's fall wherever she can, for she has been sent by the devil himself to tempt the monk, and really seems to have fun doing her job.

Things may or may not become difficult for the increasingly insane Ambrosio once the inquisition comes to town.

Adonis Kyrou's adaptation of Matthew Gregory Lewis's classic Gothic novel The Monk is a rather dispiriting case of a film taking a much too timid approach to its material to be successful; and that despite a script co-written by Luis Bunuel among whose failures timidity isn't usually counted.

The problem is that The Monk is a novel whose feverish and sensationalist tone cries out for an equally feverish and sensationalist movie. Kyrou, however, seems to think it an appropriate way to treat paedophilia, cannibalism, debauchery, black magic and murder with the sort of distance that doesn't love anything more than to stop short before showing or saying anything directly that might offend someone, where it would be rather more useful to try and offend everyone. Even the usual criticism of organized religion and particularly Catholicism in this sort of thing is reluctant and just not very convincing, as if the film were directed by someone too soft to ever step outside the boundaries of good taste. Which is of course the death knell for a film that should by all rights do nothing but step outside of these boundaries, and then throw faeces at them.

Visually, Kyrou isn't too interesting a director either. There's a certain blandness in his direction that doesn't even milk a (most probably Bunuel-derived) set-up like Nicol Williamson's paedophilic mock-Christian child procession for anything of what it's worth.

In other words, what The Monk needs are the slimy and fearless hands of an exploitation director. Consequently a lot of nunsploitation movies not based on The Monk are much closer to the spirit of the  original work than this nominal adaptation. They are also not nice, and not tepid, and surely not as polite as Kyrou's film is, never provoking the question this version of The Monk raises: what's the point?

Technorati-Markierungen: french movies,italian movies,german movies,in short,gothic,horror,adonis kyrou,franco nero,nathalie delon,nicol williamson

On WTF: A Whisper In The Dark (1976)

Original title: Un sussurro nel buio

One of the things I love best about the Italian horror movies of the 70s is their insistence on hiding ambiguity, incongruity and a total disinterest towards classical narrative techniques behind highly polished surfaces.

Marcello Aliprandi's A Whisper In The Dark (made with a pretty fantastic cast including Nathalie Delon, John Phillip Law and Joseph Cotten) might be the poster boy for this technique. My write-up on WTF-Film tells all!

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,john phillip law,nathalie delon,joseph cotten,reviews,horror,marcello aliprandi,other places