On the Big Screen: THE LOST CITY OF Z (2017)

You never know what director will get the spirit of old-time adventure. James Gray's Lost City of Zed (to use the film's pronunciation) reminded me of Bob Rafelson's Mountains of the Moon in its presentation of a classical exploration story by an unexpected source. But Gray has been moving in this direction at least chronologically, The Immigrant taking place in a roughly contemporary period. He's adapted David Grann's best-seller about Percy Fawcett (Charlie "your next King Arthur" Hunnam), the Englishman who searched South America for evidence of an ancient Amazon civilization. Originally a mere cartographer, Fawcett gets hints from the testimony of natives and scattered pottery that there was more civilization in the jungle than most of his contemporaries were willing to believe. In this account, Fawcett clearly sees his hoped-for discovery as the way to make his name after lagging behind his peers and never winning a medal in the military. In old-school heroic mode, he's willing to leave his family behind for years at a time to pursue knowledge and glory. While his wife (Sienna Miller) is Penelope-loyal, angry only that she never gets to go on any of his expeditions, his eldest son (Tom "your next Spider-Man" Holland) resents the old man's abandonment of them until the Battle of the Somme teaches him to appreciate pater's heroism. Zed is probably too episodic for its own good, breaking down into a sequence of feuds, first (and briefly) with the stodgy unbelievers in the Royal Geographic Society, then with tagalong James Murray (Angus Macfadyen), a former colleague of Ernest Shackleton who isn't up to the rigors of the Amazon and proves treacherous when sent home, and then with his boy, who reconciles in time to go with our hero on his final expedition. The Fawcetts' fate remains unknown and in Zed Gray leaves things ambiguous. We last see father and son drugged up and borne to some tribal ritual that could be anything from human sacrifice to adoption into the tribe, and in an epilogue Mrs. F. receives an artifact hinting strongly that Percy reached his goal after all -- as modern research suggests was possible insofar as there does appear to have been a somewhat advanced civilization in the vicinity once upon a time.

Visually Zed is nicely done, with Gray well aided by cinematographer Darius Khondji. The filmmakers acquit themselves equally well in jungle darkness, the musty interiors of Edwardian England and the Somme. Christopher Spelman's score leans a little too heavily on Ravel's Daphnis and Chloe for its own good, and throws in some Rite of Spring for extra measure. Charlie Hunnam doesn't exactly age well -- I should say convincingly -- in the lead role but does convey the force of Fawcett's personality, and he's supported by a solid ensemble, including an almost unrecognizable Robert Pattinson as Fawcett's sidekick for most of the picture, a hissably pathetic Angus Macfadyen as Murray and our old friend Franco Nero in a one-scene "Special Appearance" that shows that the great man can still make an impression. Ultimately I doubt whether Zed does much to distinguish itself among other exploration epics, though I feel more generous toward it than those critics who hold it to an impossible standard set by Werner Herzog's films -- but then again, to judge by the fate of that Gertrude Bell biopic, Herzog himself gets held to that same unfair standard. Gray's film is neither especially strong as a character study nor particularly visionary in its exploration of Fawcett's world -- Embrace of the Serpent leaves it in the dust -- but it's a solid piece of cinematic craftsmanship on a subject of enough inherent interest to make the Grann book popular and the Gray film worth a look.

ENTER THE NINJA (1981)

 

Every time the conversation turns to ninja movies I have to remind people of the moment in You Only Live Twice when Tiger Tanaka introduces James Bond to his modern ninjas. On a firing range we see these ninjas firing machine guns, throwing hand grenades, and so on. Pretty cool. The film is from 1967, and cinematic ninja have grown only less modern since then. What the hell? Well, what happened, obviously, was the rise of martial-arts cinema as a global genre. These appealed to a romantic if not atavistic sentiment of their time, inspiring fantasies of ancient wisdom and personal discipline overcoming oppressive technological modernity. Archetypally speaking, there's not much difference between a ninja -- a good ninja, I mean -- and an Ewok. So by the end of the Seventies we had Eric von Lustbader's novels, Frank Miller's comics, The Octagon, and finally Enter the Ninja, a film that bestrides two eras. It looks forward to the Eighties as the work of two of that decade's defining genre producers, Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus, and an early showcase for the movie ninja of the decade, Sho Kosugi. But it looks to the past in its casting of Franco Nero as its hero. The implausibility of casting has never stopped Nero. If he can be a western gunslinger and a singing knight of Camelot, he can damn well be a ninja.

I'm told that there are versions of Menahem Golan's film in which Nero, as he reportedly prefers, speaks his own English dialogue, but Netflix isn't streaming that version. If anything, the superimposition of an alien voice only exacerbates what I see as Nero's visible discomfort with the project. Nevertheless, he plays Cole, whom we learn was once a mercenary fighting wars in Africa -- virtually a modern ninja already -- who for reasons never made clear quit the business in order to learn, in Japan, how to be a traditional ninja. The film opens with his final exam. Cole's white-clad bulk crashes through the woods, slaughtering all in his path, until he confronts and decapitates an old master. The master, head attached, promptly reappears for the graduation ceremony. All the mayhem and gore we'd seen were fake, the master's erstwhile head merely papier-mache. Cole has to recite the nine principles of ninjistu in order to graduate and nails them. But bigoted Hasegawa (Kusugi) protests that no foreigner can be a true ninja. Fortunately, his opinion counts for crap with the sensei and Cole is sent out into the world to follow the ninja way of helping the helpless and oppressed. But how will his bleeding-heart-liberal ninjitsu stand up to the rage of raw capitalism?

Cole heads to the Philippines, where his old mercenary pal Frank Landers -- Alex Courtney plays him like a hastily drawn and drunken-voiced cartoon of James Caan -- runs a plantation with his English wife Mary Ann (Susan George). Nero may as well be back in the Old West. Here, as there, an evil financier (Christopher George, no relation to Susan) covets the good people's land. The sinister Mr. Venarius, who keeps synchronized swimmers in his deluxe pool as a "living mobile," has sent a goon squad to the outskirts of Manila to drive the Landers' workers off the farm and the Landers off their land. The goon squad is led by Siegfried Schultz (Zachi Noy), a Teutonic leperchaun with a hook hand who is duly humiliated when Cole defends his friends. Our hero rips Schultzie's hook clean off, which helps convince Venarius that he needs a better class of goon. After Cole and another new buddy, the transplanted old codger "Dollars" (Will Hare) ruin Venarius's attempt to negotiate a sale at gunpoint, our villain learns that the Landers' protector is a ninja. "I want a ninja!" he demands -- I paraphrase -- "I want a ninja now!"

 

The forces of evil converge ...

Venarius's faithful flunky Mr. Carter (Constantine Gregory) dutifully flies to Tokyo and does what anyone would do to find a ninja: he goes to a talent agency. Miraculously, Carter ends up at Cole's old school, where he explains to the sensei, without naming names, that a bad man is terrorizing Mr. Venarius's business concerns. This looks like a job for Hasegawa, whose idea of defending the oppressed includes slitting Frank Landers' throat, kidnapping Mary Ann, burning down the farmhouses and cackling evilly. I'm not sure sensei would approve, and I know Cole doesn't. He happened to be out on a lark with Dollars, raiding Venarius's corporate headquarters and leaving his guards in compromising positions, as all this went down, receiving only Hasegawa's selfie film of a recent kill as a warning of what's to come.

 

Above, Mr. Carter's, "I think I've been hurt, sir," is my favorite line of the film.

 

Below: Senator McCain, this is human cockfighting.

To save Mary Ann, Cole must face another gang of useless guards and eliminate Venarius himself before confronting Hasegawa in a cockfighting arena. You might think that since Nero's ninja costume makes it very easy for a stuntman to replace him in all but the close-ups that this formal finale would be a truly climactic battle, but you'd be wrong. Kosugi and his stunt-opponent may be talented, but the fight choreography and direction lumber along as if Nero himself were fighting in his big white jammies. It doesn't help that our good ninja suddenly starts fighting dirty, blowing chalk into poor Hasegawa's face to get an early advantage. But I guess a ninja's gotta do what a ninja's gotta do, especially when the woman he now loves -- Frank having disqualified himself before death by drinking himself into impotence, and Mary Ann having seduced Cole in his guest room -- is in danger. After one of the clumsiest finishes to a swordfight I've seen, good triumphs, while Hasegawa gets the consolation prize of a genuine decapitation. But it was Sho Kosugi who'd live to fight another day, and another, and plenty more after that for Golan-Globus and others. while Nero never made another martial arts movie. That leaves Enter the Ninja looking like a rough draft of ninja films to come, but as the wellspring from which they flowed it still has a lot to answer for.

CONFESSIONS OF A POLICE CAPTAIN (Confessione di un commissario di polizia al procuratore della repubblica, 1971)

In his imperfect English, Franco Nero describes this film from the late director Damiano Damiani as the "most sold" movie in the history of Italian cinema. What he means is that Confessions of a Police Captain played in more countries around the world than any previous Italian film. This fact must gall him, since he reports that the producers never paid him for his work. That may explain why he didn't do his own dubbing for the English-language edition. The effect is mixed, since Nero is one of the few Italian actors whose own voice was readily recognized by American audiences. But doing without Nero's voice preempts any confusion over why his character alone has an accent while his co-star Martin Balsam, doing his own dubbing, clearly doesn't. Nero encouraged Damiani to cast Balsam after both star and producer had rejected Anthony Quinn and Ben Gazzara -- the latter had already committed to the film -- because both actors insisted on changes in the story and its location. Nero had seen Balsam in Catch-22 and other films and thought he looked Sicilian. It was a good break for Balsam, who could depend on work in Europe for years afterward, and he's a surprisingly authoritative figure in the title role. The picture itself is a potent urban tragedy, a portrayal of a government so rotten with corruption that two essentially honest (or at least good) men are unable to trust one another in the fight against crime.

Balsam is Captain (more correctly, Commisario) Bonavia, first seen paying a visit to a lockup for the criminally insane, where he orders the release of an atypically fastidious prisoner. Only days later, the ex-prisoner shoots up an office building, dying soon afterward of wounds inflicted by the guards. Bonavia seems to have expected this to happen, but he's surprised to learn that one person in particular wasn't killed and wasn't even there. He has to assume that the apparent target, one D'Amrbosio, was tipped off to the impending attack. Meanwhile, newly arrived assistant prosecutor Traini (Nero) finds the situation fishy as he learns more about the circumstances of the con's release. He can guess that Bonavia is up to something, but the reason remains a mystery. Meanwhile, Bonavia regards anyone else on the case as an impediment or a threat.

Bonavia and Traini circle one anoter warily and with increasing hostility as Traini sets up a meeting with the otherwise-elusive D'Ambrosio to learn why the ex-con or someone higher up would want to kill him. Finally Bonavia has to put his cards on the table, explaining to Traini his grudge against D'Ambrosio. It has to do with his failure to convict D'Ambrosio for the murder of a union agitator ten years ago, mainly because an eyewitness to the killing, a shepherd boy, had "accidentally" fallen off a cliff. D'Ambrosio controls the workforce on corrupt construction projects and is tight with local businessmen and politicians. That makes him virtually untouchable for Bonavia; hence his recourse to assassination, relying on a man whose family had a grudge against D'Ambrosio and whose sister (Marilu Tolo) has information on D'Amrbosio's more lethal activities. When Bonavia takes her into his personal custody, it only makes him look worse in Traini's eyes, since the prosecutor still suspects more venal motives on the Commisario's part. The gears of justice only seem to tighten the noose around Bonavia's neck, thanks in part to Traini's naivete, until the police captain feels compelled to take even more drastic steps to secure justice ...

Confessions may be the most pessimistic -- or cynical, depending on how you see it -- of Damiani's crime films, though it leaves open an actually strong possibility that Traini may finally do the right thing. It leaves you questioning what he could accomplish, however, given the systematic, self-reinforcing and demoralizing corruption in Sicily. The movie is clear kin to Italy's tough-cop movies from the same decade but is clearly more ambivalent about the apparent necessity of cops bending or breaking rules than the average Maurizio Merli or Tomas Milian vehicle. Balsam does a lot to sustain the ambivalence, avoiding the self-righteous hysteria we might expect from his role. When he blows his stack, it's in frustration with the system, while his vendetta against D'Ambrosio is a more cold-blooded affair, explained in matter-of-fact fashion. There's a growing resignation in his character, again best expressed by the actor's restraint when he realizes that Traini has unwittingly doomed another character. You remain convinced throughout of his authentic moral indignation, but it's Balsam's underplaying, his refusal to let you think his character is crazy, that keeps the Commisario a sympathetic and ultimately tragic figure. I can only judge Nero fairly by his physical presence in the English edition but Damiani again exploits a certain earnest shallowness he can make the actor project, as he did in a similar role in Day of the Owl. It's to Nero's credit that he liked working with Damiani even when the roles weren't flattering. I'd like to see The Case is Closed, the prison movie they made together between this and How to Kill a Judge, but I don't know if it's available in any English language form. I do have How to Kill a Judge at hand, so look forward to a review of that title in the near future.

Sergio Corbucci's COMPANEROS (Vamos a matar..., 1970)

Companeros is a thematic remake of Sergio Corbucci's Il Mercenario, with Franco Nero in a similar role as an archetypal foreign expert -- Polish before, he's a Swede now -- and Jack Palance as an even more eccentric antagonist: a Scottish (I think) pot smoker and bird fancier with an artificial hand. Added to the mix in place of Mercenario's Tony Musante is Tomas Milian, as much a spaghetti-western stalwart as Nero, as the archetypal primitive bandit. Corbucci gives him a Che Guevara look, complete with beret, but Milian's Vasco is no ideologue, but the usual self-interested, ignorant brute who almost by accident becomes an officer in the insurgent army of the retroactively regrettably named General Mongo (Jose Modalo). Mongo wears a fiery red tunic but is no leftist. His is one of at least two rival forces battling the Porfirio Diaz government in Mexico circa 1910. His main rival, for this movie's purposes, is the intellectual Professor Xantos (Fernando Rey), who has built a mass movement despite his personal nonviolence. Xantos was naive enough to seek support in the U.S., where he remains an involuntary guest as the story opens. The Americans are willing to support him against Diaz and Mongo, but only if he agrees to grant oil concessions to U.S. firms. While the Americans work on him, Mongo has taken a town from his followers. Xantos's treasury is inside a safe, but only he knows the combination. If Mongo is to pay the Swede for his boxcar full of weapons and explosives (disguised as a quarantined car), he needs the Swede and Vasco to cross the border and break his rival out of captivity. Once he has the information he needs, Mongo plans to put Xantos on trial and execute him.

For his natty attire the Swede (Franco Nero, above) earns the nickname "Penguin" from Vasco (Tomas Milian, below) who's never been warned about drinking while shooting.

This is a more broadly comical and less pictorially ambitious film than Il Mercenario, but Corbucci and cinematographer Alexander Ulloa still put together an attractive picture. Like most of the foreign expert/primitive bandit buddy films from Italy, Companeros is still a consciousness-raising exercise, but it shows characters changing in different ways. In the most predictable scenario, Vasco evolves from one of Mongo's goons to a supporter of Xantos, taking the side of his sometime girlfriend (Iris Berben) whom he transforms from long-haired beauty to pixie revolutionary by hacking off most of her hair after finding her in bed with the Swede. The native usually gets the girl in these pictures, while the foreign expert either dies (sometimes deservingly) or gains revolutionary consciousness himself. Sometimes his new loyalty is just a matter of friendship, and that seems partly the case with Nero here, despite the impending duel with Vasco that serves as a framing device for the Italian edition of the film. Xantos himself evolves during the picture, finally abandoning his implausible insistence (given the situation) on non-violence when he's in a no-alternative position to rescue the good guys from Palance. Given the time and the likely audiences, non-violence was never going to get far in spaghetti westerns.

Xantos (Fernando Rey, above) hopes to convince you of the justice of his cause, while Mongo (Jose Modalo, below) would just as soon shoot you as look at you.

As the new element in the Corbucci scheme, Milian makes the best impression. Even playing an ignorant brute as he often does -- Vasco starts a gunfight when he mistakes the flash of a camera for an attack -- the Cuban actor always manages to convey that his character's mind is working on some level. Nero isn't exactly challenged by his role but at least he seems to enjoy it, while Palance is in his own special place as an almost superfluous and certainly gratuitous villain.

Let's leave Jack Palance (above) alone with his bird and his bliss while acknowledging Iris Berben (below) and her ambivalent band of rebels.

For a Corbucci film, Companeros has little obvious influence on Django Unchained, Quentin Tarantino's Corbucci homage, apart from a humorous tone that was also present, in a more moderate degree, in the more influential Mercenario. If anything, Companeros is Corbucci's homage to himself -- Vasco gets to drag a coffin around Django-style briefly -- or to Mercenario specifically. Its derivative nature keeps it from the top rank of Corbucci's westerns, but on its own terms it's an entertaining adventure that could be enjoyed easily enough by people who've never heard of the director or his earlier work.

THE MERCENARY (1968)

Back in the innocent Sixties, Americans apparently didn't know what a mercenary was. Or so film distributors may have thought. As a result, a film known in Great Britain as The Mercenaries was called Dark of the Sun here, though the latter, to be fair, was also the name of the movie's source novel. Likewise, when the time came to translate Sergio Corbucci's Il Mercenario for American audiences, the original U.S. distributor opted for the title A Professional Gun. Another possible explanation is that, if Americans knew what mercenary meant, they might assume that a film of that name would deal with violence in contemporary Africa, as Dark of the Sun did, rather than horseback action during the Mexican Revolution. The word Gun probably did more than anything else to identify Corbucci's film as a western, if not a spaghetti western, for those first U.S. audiences. But could any tweaking of the title prepare those people for the dazzling experience they were about to see? The year is 1968, and Il Mercenario is already in many ways self-consciously derivative of past Italian westerns. At moments the picture borders on parody, but Corbucci and five co-writers achieve a kind of transcendent parody that winks at the subgenre's conventions while remaining a sincere, authentic cinematic experience.

Il Mercenario is what some call a "Zapata Western," one of the many Italian westerns set primarily in Mexico rather than the U.S. Set during the Revolution of the 1910s, it anticipates the end-of-the-West atmosphere of similarly set The Wild Bunch, but does without the elegiac tone. The Italian filmmakers are too interested in revolution to worry about the end of things. Mercenario resembles Wild Bunch less than it does its major Italian precursors: Damiano Damiani's A Bullet for the General, which established the motif of the ambivalent team-up of Mexican bandit/rebel and Gringo specialist, and Sergio Leone's The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, which set the three-character pattern repeated here. In addition, Mercenario references Leone's For A Few Dollars More in its climactic staging by the "good" hero of a fair-fight showdown between the "bad" and "ugly" characters. For A Few Dollars More itself doesn't yet have the good-bad-ugly formula down -- it's really two goods vs. a bad-ugly -- so Mercenario's climax seems more generically perfect. But in discussing the climax I'm getting ahead of myself.

The Gringo is Kowalski (Franco Nero, star of Corbucci's genre breakthrough Django), an erstwhile Polish revolutionary who's hired by a family of Mexican mine owners to transport their silver to the U.S. Before setting out for the mine, he has a shootout with a gambler and by killing him earns the enmity of Curly (Jack Palance), our Bad character. If the story has a weakness, it's that Corbucci never really builds Curly up as a super gunfighter or even a particularly tough guy. Curly usually has other people do his dirty work for him. Corbucci illustrates this by having his camera follow Palance while his goons beat or kill people offscreen, only returning to the scene of violence when Curly inspects their handiwork. Palance makes up for this with a performance that grows stranger, without really going over the top, as the film goes on.

Arriving at the mine, Kowalski finds that the proprietors have been captured and hanged by Paco Roman (Tony Musante), a small-time bandit first scene rebelling against his wretched existence as a mine worker and barely escaping execution by trampling. Paco is the Ugly character: uneducated and crude, resentful toward inequality but constantly tempted by self-interest. But self-interest defines Kowalski. When the army descends on the mine, he offers to aid the bandits with the machine gun he brought along to defend the silver -- but only if Paco pays him from the plunder. The army routed, Kowalski goes his way -- only to run into Curly's gang. Paco rescues him, having realized that Kowalski's weapons and wits will make his a more formidable rebel force. Inexplicably, they spare Curly after killing his men, though they probably expect him to die after they strip him down to his shirt (leaving no bottoms) to make his way back to civilization. Curly shows his true character under adversity, however, defiantly tossing the shirt at his enemies' feet and marching off stark naked after promising that he'll meet both men again.

With Kowalski's aid, Paco becomes a terror, sacking towns and acquiring a girlfriend, Columba (Giovanna Ralli) who may be the most cynical of all the characters, having no illusions about either of her liberators. The two protagonists are constantly renegotiating their alliance. Kowalski is always ready to walk away, but every time Paco realizes anew that he can't do without the "Polack," the mercenary demands more pay and gets it. Whatever idealism he had in Europe seems long gone, while Paco's experiences of power as he judges between rich and poor make him more ambitious and less tolerant of Kowalski's greed. Finally, he decides that the Pole can't leave Mexico without surrendering all his plunder to "the revolution" and throws him in prison to prove his point. Now, however, Curly reappears, apparently as an adviser to the regular Army. What advice can he offer? The same kind Carl Denham offers... airplanes! Actually, it's one biplane, but it does devastating damage to Paco's base of operations, and it's a shocking intervention of modernity into our familiar spaghetti-western fantasyland. As usual, it's up to Kowalksi to save the day, and the Pole may be the ultimate spaghetti western hero. How many others ever shot down an airplane?

Kowalski's victory is just one round in a fight Paco can't win, and both men have to flee. Months later, Paco is a clown in a circus fighting a pantomime bull when Kowalksi finds him. Curly finds him at the same time, but as always, Curly is soon short of sidekicks and it's time for the climax. It's one of the greatest showdowns in spaghetti westerns. Kowalski has the upper hand and makes Paco and Curly fight a duel with rifles, each with one bullet. They walk to opposite ends of the bull ring and wait for the Pole to ring a bell three times before turning and firing. The bell punctuates an unusually upbeat theme from Ennio Morricone; it's the same music you hear when Uma Thurman punches her way out of the grave in Kill Bill Vol. 2. It seems to be the music playing in Curly's head. As the moment of truth approaches, while Paco is stuck out there in clown makeup, Palance puts on an beatific expression, and you get the eerie feeling that he may not care whether he wins or loses. He's put his fate in the hands of a higher power. Superficially it looks like a mockery of Leone's showdowns; one of the combatants literally is a clown. But the overall effect, between the music and Palance's ecstatic anticipation, is like something sacred. Earlier, Paco's gang had desecrated a Catholic street festival by disguising themselves as saints on a float so they can assassinate a podium full of watching army officers, with Columba as a bearded, machine-gun firing angel or saint. The duel is their true sacrament, or their auto-da-fe -- or if it's not theirs, it's ours.

Unfortunately, the film has nearly 15 minutes left to go and no hope of topping that showdown. The final twists and reversals all seem anticlimactic, but the whole story has really been little more than a pretext for cinematic sensation. Django and the bleak, wintry Great Silence are regarded as the two towers of Corbucci's work in the western genre, but on the pictorial level, at least, The Mercenary may be his masterpiece. I've mentioned the fluid camera movements over long takes as the director actually avoids violence to follow Palance around, but practically every frame of the picture is a brilliant composition. Cinematographer Alejandro Ulloa has a lot to do with that. Mercenario has a richer palate than many spaghettis; you're more aware of the sky in all its colors than you are in many genre films that foreground blasted earth, stark mountains or mud.

This film has the sweep of high adventure, and Morricone rises to the occasion with an epic score. Nero is more a presence than a personality, but that works just fine for this picture, while Musante somehow manages to underplay his Ugly role, making Paco thoughtful if not necessarily intelligent. And as I've suggested, in an underwritten part Palance is amazing. The Mercenary may not be among the greatest spaghetti westerns, but it's certainly one of the most enjoyable I've seen in a long time.

 *   *   *

Footnote on the word mercenary: After posting this review I watched The Treasure of Pancho Villa, a 1955 film directed by George Sherman, on my DVR. In one scene Shelley Winters, playing a bluestocking turned Villista, calls Rory Calhoun's character a mercenary. Calhoun calls "mercenary" a "two-dollar word" ($2 were worth more in 1916) and adds, unrepentantly "If that means a gun for hire, sure, that's me." Consider that a historical vocabulary lesson.

Mill Creek Invasion: TOP LINE (1988)

Few movie stars have had a more diverse career, to put it mildly, than Franco Nero. For the longest time I knew him only as the guy from the Camelot musical, where he started his epic on, off and currently very much on relationship with Vanessa Redgrave, and some today may know him only as the old guy who was Redgrave's romantic interest in Letters to Juliet. It came as a surprise to me as I became a student of cult and global pop cinema that Nero had such an extensive career in genre cinema, from his international breakthrough as Django to a forthcoming performance as Aleister Crowley -- insert your own exclamation points. There's a lot of strangeness in between, over more than 170 appearances on film so far. Nero seemed capable of doing schlock and prestige almost simultaneously; he seems to have turned nothing down. For instance, before reporting for Franco Zeffirelli's Young Toscanini, Nero was in Colombia shooting a number of films and fathering a child. One of those Colombia-shot shows was this action film directed by Nello Rossati, who had filmed the one-and-only official Django sequel with Nero one year earlier. Top Line (that appears to be its original title) is a kind of compendium of Eighties genre motifs. coming on at first like a Romancing the Stone or Raiders type adventure story before snowballing through blatantly derivative sci-fi conspiracy themes with an inexorably wacky momentum that makes the film entertainingly bad.

Nero plays Ted Angelo, a journalist sojourning in Colombia, where he's pressured by his publisher, who happens to be his ex-wife, into fulfilling his writing contract. The hard-drinking Ted has women trouble all over the place; when he tells his Colombian girlfriend he's feeling tired, she pulls a knife on him. He explains quickly that he didn't mean he was tired of her. Getting back to work, he investigates an amazing find by a local hunter: a trove of Central American trinkets and a ship's log. The log may rewrite history because it indicates that one of the early transatlantic expeditions of "500 years ago" made a hitherto unknown stop in Colombia. For more info about the treasures, Ted tries to interview Heinrich Holzmann (George Kennedy, dubbed by someone else), a prominent collector and Nazi war criminal. After Holzmann rebuffs him, things start falling apart. Ted's apartment is ransacked and one of his friends is killed. He barely escapes from stalkers, only to find himself chased barefoot through a cactus patch by a car driven by a cackling Holzmann. He escapes Holzmann by burying him under a ton of salt, but a Nazi George Kennedy is only a warm-up.

The problem is, Ted's made the discovery of the century. Guided by the hunter, he's found the old Spanish ship -- and a spaceship. As he frantically urges his publishers to pick up the story, shadowy forces close in on him and his new girlfriend (Deborah Barrymore, who is related not to Drew but to Roger Moore). After more hairbreadth escapes, including one where he rides in the bed of a produce truck driven by a drunk and defeats his pursuers by throwing eggs at their windshield, things get still worse in a small town when a bulky, vaguely teutonic looking fellow opens fire on a crowd with a machine gun. This new adversary seems superhuman, tossing people aside two at a time. He can take a fireworks rocket to the eye with only cosmetic damage that reveals him as a termina--oh, let's call him a robot or cyborg or something else. With no heavy machinery that might crush the artificial life out of this mechanical menace, Ted must save himself the natural way. That's right; our hero must trap the relentless automaton in a corral with a bull. And that's all she wrote. It isn't even close. Had Skynet miscalculated and sent the original Terminator back to the Old West, one begins to suspect, the poor thing wouldn't have stood a chance.

Following the recent ban on human bullfighting in Barcelona, Catalonian tourist authorities are testing a futuristic, bull-friendly alternative.

Finally, rescue seems at hand when Ted's ex arrives with a boat. But no; she's part of the conspiracy, too -- a 12,000 year old conspiracy to cover up aliens' mining of a special element essential for space travel. For most of that time, the ex explains, mankind wasn't a threat because we were just too stupid. But "your evolution was a threat, so we took measures." Those measures included disguising as humans and becoming the leaders of all levels of society, including the publishing business, as this so-called woman demonstrates by stripping, vomiting on herself, sweating very heavily and enduring a round of face-pumping until she shows her true, hideously alien form. As his new girl faints, Ted gapes in disbelief. What have you done with my ex-wife, he asks? "Here I am, honey," the alien answers, as the film takes a final, queasy turn. She's now equipped with a projectile tongue that wraps around Ted's neck and yanks him toward her yawning fanged mouth. "You still taste good to me," the beast coos, "I am partial to your flavor." That's just dirty....

This is an extreme makeover.

Top Line is nonstop zaniness held together by Franco Nero in hysterical action mode. It passes for science fiction without relying too much on special effects, which is a good thing given that the effects, for the robot-man especially, are "special" in the unflattering sense of the word. From the limited evidence of the typically ravaged Mill Creek copy, the Colombia locations keep things consistently picturesque while giving things that edge-of-civilization feel of so many Italian genre films from the Eighties. The film moves fast and gets crazier as it goes along, and for a bad movie that's a good thing. Depending on your mood, Top Line can make for an amusing 90 minutes; for everyone, I hope it was amusing to read about.

MAFIA (Il giorno della civetta, 1968)

Fans of WildEast's spaghetti western and Eurocrime DVDs may be disappointed by Damiano Damiani's adaptation of Leonardo Sciascia's literary mystery novel The Day of the Owl, just as American moviegoers may have been disappointed when it hit U.S. screens under the utterly generic title Mafia in 1970. For Americans, that name carries connotations of urban crime -- indeed, of American crime -- that have nothing to do with Sciascia's story of small-town Sicily. "Eurocrime" fans, meanwhile, are unlikely to be satisfied with a story that has very little action of violence beyond its opening killing. As well, fans of Claudia Cardinale -- the star of this WildEast double-feature disc -- may be disappointed with the relatively little she has to do in a film that gives her top billing, made at the peak period of her stardom, at the same time she got top billing over Fonda, Bronson and Robards in Sergio Leone's Once Upon A Time in the West. But having laid down all these caveats, I found Damiani's film modestly effective as an atmospheric mystery and a critique of systematic corruption in Italy.

The mystery is the shooting of an honest contractor in the road-construction business in a sun-baked Sicilian town. Most people's first instinct is to ignore the crime; a busload of passengers would have looked right past the corpse had a carabinieri officer not also been on board. A young detective from "the north," Bellodi (Franco Nero) is the new officer in charge in town, a position that we soon realize is a revolving door to futility. The local mafioso, Don Mariano (an unwell-looking Lee J. Cobb) has seen the authorities come and go while he remains in power. I mean that literally: Mariano's house in the center of town and carabinieri headquarters look out at each other across a little public square. Bellodi presumes Mariano to be behind the killing of a businessman who wouldn't play ball with the mafia, but he has no evidence yet. However, the killing took place in plain view of the Nicolosi house, and as it happens the man of the house has disappeared, leaving his wife Rosa (Cardinale) alone. Has he left because he was the killer, or was he removed because he saw something he shouldn't have?

It's good to be the Don; Lee J. Cobb presides over his Mafia fiefdom

Bellodi's methods are manipulative if not Macchiavellian. With further evidence unlikely to turn up, he has to resort to trickery and outright lying to get people to open up or betray themselves. He tells Rosa that her husband has been found dead -- a lie -- just to see how she'll react, who she'll instinctively blame. Later, he'll confront crooks with fake confessions, hoping that they'll tell the truth if they think their pals are tossing them under the bus. His strategy is to compel someone into thinking their only option is to finger the real killer of the contractor or reveal where Nicolosi can be found. But his adversaries are just as good at lying as he is, if not better. They want Bellodi to believe that Nicolosi killed the contractor because the victim was having an affair with Rosa. When Bellodi deduces a different story and has Mariano and his cohorts arrested, the remaining mafiosi form a united front with an indifferent criminal justice system (Mariano is on good terms with the local ruling party) to overwhelm Bellodi's case with their own perjuries. Before long there's a new sheriff in town, so to speak, but a victorious Mariano finds himself missing Bellodi, whom he could at least respect as a worthy foe. The new man, like so many others, strikes the Don as just another "quack-quack-quack" -- like his own minions who quack in amused chorus when the worst is over. Maybe the story should have been called Day of the Duck.

Franco Nero goes incognito (right) for his meetings with the informer Parrinieddu (Serge Reggiani, left)

Given the cast and the literary pedigree, Mafia is no B-movie or genre picture and doesn't strive for sensationalism. We have the one shooting, and one corpse found later, and an attempted rape of Cardinale's character that doesn't go very far. Damiani's film stands or falls on conventional dramatic terms. On the director's part, the real strength of the picture is its sense of place. The square with the police station and the Don's house at opposite ends and characters constantly going in and out of jail or paying court to Mariano, is an ideal and picturesque dramatic space. On the outskirts of town, Tonino Delli Colli's cinematography gives you a strong sense of the wide-open, sun-blasted and grungy environment of road construction, the mundane business of a small-town mafia.

The cast is a mixed bag. Cardinale maintains a sullen glare for most of the picture, though she wears it well, but her character's ultimate helplessness makes little lasting impression. Cobb operates well short of full-blast, but with that voluble character actor that can sometimes be a good thing. It's wise to underplay, too, when character actors like Serge Reggiani (as an informer), Nehemiah Persoff (as a sleazy contractor) and Gaetano Cimarosa (as a really voluble gangster) are acting up a thespian storm around you. The real weak link in the cast is Franco Nero, who strikes me as too young for his role and too lacking in authority or cunning. He spends most of the show in his carabinieri uniform looking smug. That may be how his character was written in the original novel, but in the movie it provokes a feeling of pointlessness. For its original Italian audience, the most disappointing thing about Il giorno della civetta may have been the co-starring of Nero and Cardinale with a complete lack of romance between the two superstars.

Mafia is not a great mafia movie, but it's an interesting pop-culture artifact of 1960s Italy. In a way, it may have been a necessary prelude to the tough-cop movies of 1970s Italy, since it can't help leaving audiences frustrated at the triumph of injustice and probably wishing that someone would just lash out at organized crime. Damiani's film portrays something closer to the glum reality against which cinema would react with a vengeance.

STREET LAW (Il cittadino si rebella, 1974)

Vigilante movies are a peculiarly American genre but it comes as no surprise to see Italians making them as well during the 1970s. It may surprise some to learn that Enzo G. Castellari didn't make Il cittadino si rebella ("The city rebelled") not in response to Michael Winner's Death Wish but just about simultaneously, and that the Italian film is in many ways a more realistic portrait of vigilantism. One major difference off the bat is that Franco Nero's protagonist Carlo Antonelli is not an avenger, except of his own wounded pride. He loses money, not a loved one, to criminals, having picked the wrong time to make a bank transaction. The robbers having made their entrance just as he was at the teller window, Carlo's money sits tauntingly at the counter. I don't know if Italians had deposit insurance at the time, but Carlo clearly isn't taking any chances. He reaches out to grab his money and gets into a scuffle with one of the robbers that results in his being beaten up and taken hostage. Fortunately for him the vicious but stupid criminals leave him alive and largely intact in the countryside despite having taken their masks off in front of him. They presumably hope that Carlo will be too scared ever to identify them.

Getting robbed and beaten is all Franco Nero can stands -- he can't stands no more!

Predictably, the Italian criminal justice system only enrages Carlo more. Just as the cop heroes of the polizio genre complain about bureaucratic restraints on their ability to wipe out criminals, Carlo complains that the system seems to care more for criminals than for their victims, who are treated with condescension at best. Defying his girlfriend's skepticism, and invoking his dead father's involvement in the resistance to Fascism, Carlo acquires a gun and attempts to track down the robbery gang on his own. He proves an incompetent investigator, strolling into a seedy pool hall like a character in some other, more gratifying movie and asking with pseudo-subtlety for "information." He manages to flee without getting the beating his idiocy probably deserved, but the scene makes clear that vigilantism won't be as easy as Carlo may have thought.

Somehow, Carlo finally figures a way into the underworld. He manages to take photographs of two small-timers robbing a jewelry store and uses the pictures to blackmail one of the culprits. Carlo's notion is to arrange an illegal firearms purchase through this hapless perpetrator, and then tip off the cops so they'll raid the scene of the sale. When the cops prove too slow and the crooks seem to have been tipped off, the furious Carlo attempts riskier transactions and only endangers himself. He finally meets the three robbers again, but only gets beat up again. He only survives this time because his own victim, the petty crook Tommy (Giancarlo Prete), decides to help him escape. Tommy's no killer and can't stand the thought of someone getting killed. The great irony of the picture is that only with a criminal's help does our vigilante have a chance in the underworld. Some viewers may find it more ironic that Carlo actually befriends Tommy and encourages him with promises of a partnership in a garage -- the social reform approach to crime -- while relentlessly pursuing his original tormentors.

Castellari can be depended on for effective action scenes, and Nero does some heroic stuntwork as his character takes a picture-long beating. By Castellari standards Street Law is almost a chamber piece that concentrates on suspense rather than escalation in its cat-and-mouse climax in a vast warehouse. The suspense is well-earned since Nero and Prete's vulnerability has been well established already; whether either will survive their final showdown with the three robbers is entirely open to question. Castellari and his writers, along with Nero and Prete, not to mention a distinctively moody rock-inflected score by the De Angelis brothers, put together a very different movie than what I originally expected -- and a much better one.

Here's an English-language trailer, uploaded to YouTube by YOcke: