DVR Diary: THE SICILIAN CLAN (Le Clan des Siciliens, 1969)

Thanks to the Fox Movie Channel, which is still worth watching in the morning but turns to crap in prime time, I've just seen a French crime movie I've wanted to see for a long time. While dubbed in English, the Fox Movie edition is widescreen and apparently uncut. The dubbing is inevitably a disappointment; it sounds like Alain Delon may have done his own dubbing, but Lino Ventura definitely didn't, while Jean Gabin, at the time the grand old man of French movies, ends up sounding a little like the High Chaparral star Leif Erickson talking out of the side of his mouth. As you see, what we have here is an all-star picture, and with ex-con turned author Jose Giovanni co-writing the script just about all the ingredients are in place for a classic. But in the absence of a master like Jean-Pierre Melville behind the camera, Henri Verneuil directs a merely efficient caper picture without the mood or intensity worthy of his stars.

Despite the title, the film is not about the Mafia. The Sicilian clan in question is the Manalese family, led by patriarch Vittorio (Gabin), who helps jewel thief Roger Sartet (Delon) escape from prison -- Sartet is given a miniature circular saw to cut his way out of a paddy wagon during a transfer -- in return for the plans for the security system for an upcoming jewelry exhibition in Rome, which Sartet acquired from the designer, now a fellow convict. Sartet wants in on the prospective robbery but Vittorio doesn't trust him because Sartet is a killer -- and an outsider. After Sartet has to shoot his way out of a tryst with a prostitute, Vittorio keeps him under close wraps until he has a chance to case the Rome site himself, in the company of old criminal pal from America. They discover that the security system is more extensive than Sartet had indicated, and pretty much unbeatable. Here the film shifts direction. Instead of a Rififi-style caper, Sicilian Clan goes ultra-modern when Vittorio's American buddy gets the idea of the Manaleses hijacking a plane carrying the jewels from Europe to the U.S. The American can secure an impromptu landing strip for the captive plane by appropriating a stretch of highway outside New York City.  The caper becomes a matter of getting the clan (and Sartet) on board the plane without the police (led by Ventura playing like the French Walter Matthau) noticing the highly-wanted Sartet, then pulling off the hijacking without the U.S. Air Force blowing the plane out of the sky. All goes well until Vittorio learns about Sartet's beach affair with one of his daughters-in-law and decides that the randy Corsican should die. The old man's brutal assertion of patriarchal authority proves the undoing of the entire gang.

Sicilian Clan has some moments of intelligent suspense, particularly after Sartet boards the plane in the guise of a British security agent, when his cohorts have to deal with the sudden appearance of the real man's wife at the airport. After discovering that her husband is not on the plane, Vittorio tries to throw her off the trail by explaining (using an airport phone, he pretends to be a government offiical) that the man is still at his hotel. Now she wants to call him at the hotel, and it becomes a race against time to get the plane off the ground before she realizes she's been tricked. Verneuil is at least efficient, but to what purpose? It seems like some too-careful balance was struck between Gabin and Delon, with Ventura's flic the odd man out, so that Delon disappears from a large section of the film while Gabin visits Rome. Neither star dominates the film long enough for audiences to identify with one or really understand what they stand for. When Vittorio resolves to destroy Sartet, is this a vindication of old-school values or the self-destructive outburst of an obsolete old man? Is Sartet the wild beast Vittorio thinks he is? We don't see enough evidence to damn him so, nor does the film really make a case that Vittorio is dangerously old-fashioned or simply irrational. The plot ends up looking contrived to set up an intergenerational showdown, reducing the film to an overcooked potboiler. It can probably be enjoyed on its own undemanding terms, but the best French crime films have spoiled me. I expect more of an immersively existential experience along the lines of Melville's Le Samourai, or Claude Sautet's Classe Tous Risques -- but sometimes a caper is just a caper. Dial down your expectations and Sicilian Clan may still satisfy.

THE BRAIN (Le cerveau, 1969)

In the 1960s there were two superpowers of slapstick: the U.S. and France. The Americans boasted Jerry Lewis, Blake Edwards, and the collective phenomenon of It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World. The French had Jacquest Tati, Pierre Etaix and, among possible others unknown to me, Gerard Oury. In 1966, Oury's World War 2 comedy La Grande Vadrouille became the most popular film in French history. Three years later came The Brain, an all-star caper comedy on a colossal scale. The international production (Dino de Laurentis and Paramount Pictures were involved) teamed Vadrouille's Andre Bourvil with superstar Jean-Paul Belmondo, David Niven in Pink Panther mode as a master thief, and Eli Wallach (huge in Europe after The Good, the Bad and the Ugly) as a Sicilian gangster. From the first notes of its would-be pop-hit theme song (sung in English), The Brain aspires to epic pop-art and quite nearly gets there.

Its early cartoonishness doesn't inspire confidence, however. We're introduced to Niven as he, with a crowd of Londoners, watches a TV in a store window announcing a clue to the identity of the mysterious master criminal, "The Brain." His brain is so big and heavy, we're told, that in moments of anxiety he can't hold it upright. Niven's distressed head promptly flops to one side -- but so do those of several other people. While he makes a quick escape to the continent, we discover Arthur (Belmondo) in prison setting up a guard to slip on a bar of soap. Naturally, the guard sails across the room and crashes into a wall. Arthur is sentenced to solitary, which is where he wanted to go. Sent there repeatedly, he's been working on a tunnel. Tonight, his accomplice Anatol (Bourvil) will dig under the prison to meet him halfway and make good his escape. In a cutaway shot, we see the two tunnelers approach each other as they dig with their absurd tools -- Belmondo's is a conveyor belt of metal coffee cups -- except that Belmondo's about three feet above Bourvil, who goes straight to someone else's cell while Belmondo emerges outside. Once they coordinate themselves, Arthur sacks out in a bedroom that's actually the back of Anatol truck. His bed careens back and forth as Anatol brakes or accelerates, climbs or descends. Finally, the bed bursts out the back door, leaving Arthur on the street to start a new day.

The Brain, aka Colonel Matthews, is in Europe to plan a major heist. In a reflection of current events, France's withdrawal from NATO (General de Gaulle wanted France to be a real superpower in its own right) compels the organization to relocate from Paris to Brussels, taking millions in funds along by train. Backed by the Mafia, Matthews draws up an elaborate plan to isolate the car carrying the money, disable the guards, and leave with the loot. Merely planning it is elaborate and expensive; Matthews has apparently sprung for a fully animated short subject illustrating what he intends to do. Meanwhile, Don Scannapieco (Wallach) plans to double-cross Matthews, resenting the Englishman's attraction to his sister (Silvia Monti). Arthur has managed to spy on some of the planning, escaping Matthews's pet tiger in the process, and convinces Anatol that they can horn in on the heist.

Some of the slapstick up to this point might seem stupid or merely silly, but the caper part of the picture actually plays out quite ingeniously. Matthews doesn't know about the two Frenchmen, and they don't know the full extent of his plan. They think they're taking the loot under the Brain's nose, but they end up actually facilitating his scheme, without his knowing it. The payoff is his moment of confusion when he triumphantly enters the captured car ("Now you'll see why they call me the Brain!") only to find it thoroughly looted. Arthur and Anatol feel the same when the sacks of money they thought they'd tossed to a safe place vanish. They've actually put them right into the hands of Matthews's assistants, who shock Matthews himself by informing him that they've got all the money he thought was gone. There are more twists to come, but all bets are off while the Frenchmen's ingenious stupidity makes them wild cards in the three-way game involving Matthews, Scannapieco and the police.

Oury is perhaps too obviously trying to top the scale of Mad Mad ... World in his big finale, which finds Belmondo trapped in a scale-model Statue of Liberty being hauled on board a ship bound for the U.S. as an American style marching band marks the occasion and a huge crowd sees the ship off. You can see symbolism in the Statue as both a womb of money (the bottom drops out with Arthur and the loot inside) and a force for destruction (the torch arm smashes its way into a store when the truck carrying the statue gets embroiled in a car chase), but the absurdity of the imagery transcends any potential political analysis. The Brain doesn't really have anything to say about NATO or international affairs. Oury and his game cast are simply out for laughs. To my ears, Niven performs his own French dialogue; I'm less sure about Wallach, but if it isn't him it's a plausible impersonation. Belmondo is in pure clown mode here, giving the sort of performance George Clooney gives in Coen Bros. movies. To my surprise, not even in the longer French version is there any hint that matinee-idol Belmondo might rival Niven, more than 20 years his senior, for the affections of the sultry Monti. It's all about the money for Arthur, as it is at the end for the mob scrambling for the bills falling from Lady Liberty's bottom. Once The Brain showed that it had a brain I found that I could tolerate its cruder comedy quite well. It may strike others as simply dumb, but it offers enough dumb fun and colorful spectacle for me to recommend it to international comedy fans and slapstick enthusiasts.

DVR Diary: THEY CAME TO ROB LAS VEGAS (Las Vegas 500 milliones, 1968)

"J ack Palance is very upset over the plight of American actors," Hal Humphrey reported in 1967. Earlier that year, Palance had played his role in Antonio Isasi's caper film on location -- in Spain. "Now obviously there's no need except a financial one to make a movie about Las Vegas in Spain," he complained to Humphrey. He thought American studios were taking work away from American actors, stars like himself excepted, in pursuit of profit. Palance wished that the Screen Actors Guild would show more backbone, as if they could stop the trend. "Why should American actors sit and watch their living go down the drain while American producers either import foreign actors or go overseas and hire them?" he protested. Palance plays a good guy in the picture and seems to have been one in real life, at least at that moment.

At least he had the company of fellow Americans Lee J. Cobb and Gary Lockwood for this project, and at least Isasi sent a second-unit crew to Vegas for some money-shot scenes of the film's superdeluxe armored car rolling down the Sunset Strip. Around the same time, Elizabeth Taylor, who apparently had less scruples on the subject than Palance, insisted on having the Strip recreated on a Paris soundstage for one of her pictures. But despite Palance's griping, I can't help but be impressed by the pictorial results Isasi got in the Spanish desert. The contrast with Vegas is perhaps more stark than could have been illustrated by Nevada itself, and it pays off in one ingenious transition from that shot I mentioned of the armored car cruising by the casinos to a small troop of men trudging from the upper right corner of the widescreen frame into a wasteland of dunes. There's a hint of Lawrence of Arabia in those desert scenes, but They Came to Rob Las Vegas is basically the bastard child of The War Wagon and Takumi Furakawa's Nikkatsu noir Cruel Gun Story. It's a mobile caper film with a revenge/redemption element. Tony Ferris (Lockwood) rebuffs his gangster brother Gino (French actor Jean Servais) who, having just broken out of prison, wants to take one Steve Skorsky's (Cobb) armored cars, which the casinos use to transport their money and the Mob uses, or so suspects Treasury agent Douglas (Palance), to transport contraband. Tony says no to his brother because Skorsky has an overwhelming technological advantage with his armed and armored vehicles, his hi-def surveillance system (everyone has widescreen monitors), and his computerized security network. Gino tries anyway, and despite wielding bazookas the Skorsky vehicle wipes them out. Somehow Isasi and composer Georges Garvantez wring pathos from a failed armored-car robbery, and Gino's corpse face-down and alone in the street is a poignant sight, especially if you watch from Tony's point of view. Now he owes it to his dead brother to prove that a Skorsky car can be broken into and humble Skorsky himself in the bargain.

With a job as a blackjack dealer Tony starts an affair with Ann Bennett (German Elke Sommer, but who cares about the nationality when you look at her?), a high roller who happens to work for Skorsky and may be more than an employee to him. Through her Tony expects to get information on schedules and personnel so he can plan his desert assault precisely with his ragtag team of misfits. This means keeping a lot of balls in the air: convincing Ann that he loves her and isn't just using her; dissuading his gang from simply blowing up the armored car, should they catch it, so he can prove that the impenetrable machine can be cracked. Little does he know that Douglas will throw an extra ball at him by nabbing Skorsky's drivers on the very route Tony intends to intercept and replacing them with his own agents, who expect to find proof of illegal transactions. That doesn't stop the first stage of Tony's plan -- I won't spoil it -- but the car, with Skorsky's men still in the main compartment, remains a tough nut to crack as tensions build within the gang....

 Palance might have been peeved because his good-guy role doesn't exactly play to his strengths, though it does allow for some suspicion of Douglas's ultimate motives to complicate matters further. This is really Lockwood's picture, the nearest thing he had to a star role in his best year in movies, and Isasi does his best to give him a star presence. Behind his shades Lockwood has something of the cool calculating demeanor of spaghetti western heroes, and in Sommer he has more woman to handle than his western counterparts normally did. They make a handsome couple, and Lockwood even gets to hold his own with the mighty Cobb in a climactic desert showdown as Tony tauntingly urges a hidden colleague to help Skorsky find his truck. Pictorially and musically the film is uneven in tone. Impressive location work in Vegas and the Spanish desert alternates with patently fake looking interior sets. Garvantez alternates between the poignant simplicity of Gino's requiem and spooky-sounding vocalise more suited to a giallo -- playing some on a stereo, Lockwood comments implausibly on how the music really gets you. Either way, the music definitely seems to fit the time, even if it's Euro genre rather than American pop time. Overall, there's enough going on visually and the story works well enough as a thiller (with something of a heart) to make this worth a look despite its underutilization of an apparently unhappy Palance. He probably wouldn't have been better off had the whole thing been filmed in Nevada, but he might have felt better about it all.

MACHINE GUN MCCAIN (Gli Intoccabili, 1969)

No relation to the future Senator then stewing in a POW camp, Hank McCain (John Cassavetes) finds himself suddenly pardoned after twelve years of a life sentence and greeted outside San Quentin by a son he barely knows. The apple didn't fall far from the tree, though; the son is a criminal who tells Dad that he was sprung with a well-timed bribe so he could take part in a plan to rob the Royal casino in Las Vegas. McCain is wary. The plan looks good, but his boy's associates are "Hollywood fags" and he can smell a set-up a mile away. Still, he may as well take the money they're giving up front and live a little. Casing Vegas, he falls fast for Irene Tucker (Britt Ekland) and marries her practically on the spot. But as he continues to ponder his options, the plot is already collapsing around him. His boy was put up to it by Charlie Adamo (Peter Falk), who runs six western states for the Syndicate but wants a piece of Vegas. Rebuffed by the Royal, Charlie puts the robbery plan into motion, only to abort it when he learns that the New York dons own shares in the casino. Eager not to offend, no matter how he resents his subordinate standing, Charlie wants all trace of the conspiracy wiped out, and that means wiping out McCain and his son.

Cassavetes and Ekland cruise Vegas, and their luck looks good at first.

Trusting his instincts, Hank McCain escapes a death trap but loses his son in the process. Then, as if on general principles, and with only Irene to help him, he carries out the Royal robbery plan. It involves a lot of explosions: several throughout town to divert the fire department, then several inside the Royal to justify his arrival disguised as a fire marshall. Against the odds, he cleans the place out single-handed. Adamo and his right-hand man know that this is McCain's handiwork, and when they discuss him within earshot of Adamo's unfaithful wife (Florinda Balkan), she rats them out to Don Francesco (Gabriele Ferzetti), who deals with them as if they were still in on the plan. Now all the Syndicate's resources are focused on tracking down McCain, who hopes desperately to flee the country. With the escape routes closing fast, he and Irene have to turn to his former lover and partner in crime (Gena Rowlands) for their last chance at freedom....

I don't know if the explosions were part of the original casino caper plan, but Peter Falk takes the fall for them anyway.

Gli intoccabili ("The untouchables") is the second of two movies John Cassavetes made in Italy after The Dirty Dozen made him bankable there. While making Italian films was usually a mark of American career decline, for Cassavetes it was a fundraising venture for his independent directorial projects. One imagines that he was instrumental in getting Falk and Rowlands (Mrs. Cassavetes) cast in Giuliano Montaldo's film, and that all their salaries went into funding Husbands, which came out the following year, shortly after Machine Gun McCain itself reached the U.S. Montaldo tells us on the Blue Underground DVD that Cassavetes was clearly champing at the bit, second-guessing the director for the first week of shooting and growing jealous when Montaldo directed Rowlands. Nevertheless, the Cassavetes gang seem fully committed to the project, with the man himself striking the right hard-boiled tone and Falk playing especially intense as the volatile Adamo. Rowlands has only a "guest star" role but her scenes prove to be the key to the picture.

Montaldo (who remains active at age 81 and has a new film coming out this year) explains on the DVD that, like many other filmmakers, he was fascinated by the idea of organized crime operating like a big business, the more ruthless for being increasingly impersonal. Hank McCain is supposed to represent an older, virtually obsolete criminal type -- hence the machine gun, presumably. When he reunites with Rosemary, the Rowlands character, we learn from news clippings that they'd been notorious years earlier as the "Machine Gun Lovers" until they'd been caught and imprisoned, him for life, her for 18 years (she was presumably paroled). While the chronology suggests the time period of Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate, Montaldo probably wants us to think more along the lines of Bonnie and Clyde. Whatever his intention, Hank and Rosemary are clearly meant as criminals from another epoch, a more honorable and romantic era for Montaldo's purposes. While Hank didn't exactly rush back to her once freed, we see clearly enough that she still carries a torch for him, and that their feelings for each other remain mutual. Rosemary exemplifies this romanticized oldtime criminal chivalry when she kills herself rather than rat out Hank, and Hank finally lives up to the dubious ideal when given an ultimate choice between flight and fight for Irene's sake. Seen this way, Hank's story becomes faintly reminiscent of Roy Earle's from High Sierra: an old-guard criminal freed only to take part in a questionable robbery and run away with a much-younger girl. When you compare Machine Gun McCain to High Sierra you see how Montaldo makes his point about the deromanticization of crime. Roy Earle and Hank McCain have somewhat similar ends, but unlike with Earle there's no sense that McCain has "crashed out" and is now "free." There's no one left with empathy enough for McCain to even suggest the notion.

Montaldo made his name internationally with his previous film, Grand Slam. Like that one, Gli Intoccabili is a caper film, though the caper doesn't dominate the story this time as it does in Grand Slam. It's more perfunctory about its caper because it ends up being a one-man operation, but the caper format gives Machine Gun McCain a different feel from other Italian crime movies. It really feels more American, not only because of the Cassavetes infiltration and the extensive location shooting in Vegas and elsewhere but because the story is more plot and character-driven and less sensationalistic than the typical shoot-and-chase film. McCain may disappoint as an action film (and many more violent Italian crime films are brilliant works in their own right), but Montaldo and co-writer Mino Roli compensate with their attention to character, while the Cassavetes gang hold up the acting end admirably. Their presence makes McCain a film-historical curiosity as well as an entertaining relic of a Vegas milieu that has itself largely vanished since it impressed Montaldo with its cold, merciless modernity.

BlueUndergroundInc has released an outstanding DVD of the film, and has uploaded a trailer for it to YouTube.

In Brief: THE ANDERSON TAPES (1971)

Sidney Lumet and Sean Connery had last worked together on The Hill, a fiercely visualized portrait of a British military prison. Six years later, Connery plays "Duke" Anderson, an unreformed con who's just finished his full sentence in stir and thus doesn't have to deal with parole officers. He reunites with his girlfriend and gets the idea of robbing the entire building she lives in: six swanky flats in all, filled with valuables and collectibles. He gathers a gang: an effete antiques dealer, a driver, a young safecracker released at the same time he was, and, in return for a syndicate subsidy, a goon named Socks whom Anderson is ordered to kill during the job. The mob's reluctant to invest at first, warning Anderson that his scheme is hopeless in this modern age of perpetual surveillance. And, indeed, Anderson is being taped nearly everywhere he goes, though only because he crosses paths with people under surveillance: mobsters, Black Panthers, his own girlfriend, etc. But this is a "September 10th" world, and with each monitor concentrating on his original target, there's no sharing of information to warn anyone of Anderson's audacious scheme, and he seems to have the tenants at his mercy....

The Anderson Tapes is a caper film but also an anti-caper film. It demonstrates that luck (or fate) still has a lot to do with crime. Anderson skips blithely and luckily from surveillance to surveillance, but there are other factors that he fails to anticipate that complicate things toward the end of the film. It's an anti-caper film in the way it suggests that the caper formula doesn't work as well in a real-world setting like an apartment building as it does when master crooks are pitted against super security systems (as in Grand Slam and other films) that seem to exist only to challenge their skills. But it doesn't announce itself as a satire or refutation of the caper genre. Lumet presents the story in matter-of-fact fashion that might leave some viewers thinking that what they've watched is all pretty meaningless -- and they wouldn't necessarily be wrong, either.

This is one of the last appearances, I believe, of the "old" Sean Connery, the one from the Bond movies. He still has hair on top of his head, albeit much less than Bond does in Diamonds Are Forever, and he hasn't grown his moustache for good yet. Unfortunately, Anderson is a realistically dull character. He has a nice cynical tirade as he leaves jail, but Connery doesn't really infuse him with the charisma a caper leader needs to keep our interest going.

Meanwhile, the movie boasts that it's "Introducing Christopher Walken," while IMDB indicates that the young man had already made at least one film as an adult, in addition to TV work and some child performances in the 1950s. Walken is the young safecracker, "the Kid," and you'd be excused for thinking that his star persona has arrived fully formed when he enthuses over living free in America by saying, "I wanna eat it!" But there are few similar moments later; Walken doesn't have that much to do, though he has a dramatic final getaway try toward the end. Also noteworthy in the film are Martin Balsam in an uncharacteristically flaming turn, a slurring Ralph Meeker as a police captain who has to deal with the robbers, a pre-Saturday Night Live Garrett Morris as the cop who has to implement Meeker's plans, and Alan King in an early attempt at a gangster part, something he'd do much better in Night and the City and Casino.

The Anderson Tapes has been released on DVD as part of an odd collection of "Martini Movies." I assume it was chosen largely on the strength of Quincy Jones's electro-lounge score, but who knows why films like Nickelodeon are part of the series? The "martini" aspect of the package consists of two "special features" that look for all the world like commercials, combining promos for the series as a whole with mixed drink recipes. This is really one of the lamest gimmicks I've seen in some time. Isn't it about a decade behind the times, or did all that tiki folderol get trendy again? Considering that this comes from Sony, which has given us such incredible DVD concepts as the Budd Boetticher-Randolph Scott box set and the Hammer "Icons" collections, this concept leaves me scratching my head.

GRAND SLAM (Ad ogni costo, 1967)

Edward G. Robinson is Professor James Anders, a schoolteacher retiring after 30 years of humble service in Rio de Janiero. The children serenade him at the airport in tribute to his work. This can't be right. His plane takes him to New York City, where after strolling through Times Square (The Bible is playing at Loew's State) and Rockefeller Center, he calls at a mansion that doubles as a swanky strip club. He has a business proposal for the proprietor, who's played by Adolfo Celi of Thunderball fame. Twice a year, Robinson explains, there's a major diamond delivery at the building across the street from his old school. In his spare time, he's figured out how four men could rob the place. This year is the best opportunity because the diamonds will be kept there longer than usual due to the coincidence of Carnival. All Celi has to do is recommend four men for the job.

Ad Ogni Costo is a caper film; it portrays the detailed planning and hopeful execution of a crime. It's virtues are usually superficial, but in Giuliano Montaldo's international caper those virtues are plentiful. The main visual selling point is the location work in Rio with documentary Carnival footage. Blue Underground's DVD (which I got in a 2-for-1 package with Sergio Sollima's Revolver) is a snazzy widescreen edition that emphasizes the picturesque qualities, including the scantily-clad revelers. Another virtue is Klaus Kinski as former military parachutist Erich Weiss (holy Houdini!), the toughest and surliest of Robinson's recruits. He mostly glares at people early on, but comes to life past the halfway mark as his enmity for pretty-boy Jean-Paul (Robert Hoffman) comes to the surface. Hoffman gets more screen time since it's his job to seduce Janet Leigh, the keeper of the key to the diamond vault. This is the major subplot of the film and has a cool twisty payoff. Yet another virtue is the score by Ennio Morricone. I wasn't impressed initially, since it starts as a very dated imitation of Herb Alpert, but the maestro comes into his own over time. If I were giving star ratings, I'd have to give the film an extra fraction of one because the burglars have to defeat the super-sensitive "Grand Slam 70" alarm system.

I can't go into as much detail here as I have for other films since caper films depend on details for their suspense value. I may give things away by saying it has a relatively downbeat "nobody wins" ending, but I don't think the Euro-cinema fan will mind finding out more for themselves. The trailer will give you some large hints, but not too many. I found it at DailyMotion, a worthy rival to YouTube for the movie trailer fan.

Ad ogni costo
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