Django, Prepare a Coffin (1968)

Hard to believe I’ve been writing reviews for this long and have never tackled a Western (Spaghetti or otherwise).  Why, you ask?  Well, several reasons.  The Western is a very special genre to me (Once Upon a Time in the West is in my top five of all time), and I was reticent to dive in on one because I wanted to do whatever the selection would be justice (time and about another nine hundred words will tell the tale on that one).  Second, and more important, I wanted the film I wrote about to be worth the time.  I had been hovering around reviewing Little Rita of the West (coincidentally, also a Ferdinando Baldi film), but that film’s run time made it a bit more difficult to squeeze into my schedule (you’d think a guy so devoted to film would make the time, but there you have it).  Thankfully, Arrow Films have come through again with Django, Prepare a Coffin (aka Preparati la Bara! aka Viva Django aka Get the Coffin Ready aka Django Sees Red), so the choice was taken away from me.  Their transfer is gorgeous, as always, though the special features are thin (yet filling), including a trailer and an overview of the Django films by Kevin Grant (author of Any Gun Can Play).  Still, if you’re a fan of the genre, this film is good (notice I didn’t say great) but worth owning simply by virtue of the fact that it exists in such nice shape.

Django (Terence Hill) and his crew are ambushed while transporting a gold shipment.  Django is shot, and his wife is brutally killed.  Years later, Django is employed as a hangman, but secretly he is gathering the falsely accused people he actually doesn’t hang to help him get payback on Lucas (George Eastman) and his henchmen.  And what has Django’s old buddy Dave Barry (Note: not the writer, but still played by Horst Frank) have to do with this (I’ll bet you can’t guess)?

I am a huge fan of Sergio Corbucci’s Django, and I realize that a cottage industry of films named for (but rarely having anything to do with) it enjoyed much success in Italy and abroad.  Django, Prepare a Coffin is one of the handful of films that does actually relate to its progenitor, though it hews far enough away to be its own film.  Mainly, this is a tonal difference, specifically, the difference between Hill and the earlier movie’s Franco Nero.  Nero’s Django was a somber, haunted man.  He dragged his own coffin around with him, and inside it was death (both his and other’s).  He was as much the grim reaper as he was a man starving for (perhaps denying himself) peace.  Hill’s Django is more amiable.  He has a pal in Barry, and his big dream is to settle down and “wait for the last judgment.”  More notably, this Django is happily married, a state which seems foreign to the character as depicted by Corbucci and company.  Even after he sets himself on his path of vengeance, Hill gives the character a certain goofball charm, which, let’s face it, is Hill’s stock in trade.  He plays with the local telegraph operator’s (his other friend) pet bird, offering it booze and conversing with it.  He also has an openly virtuous spirit.  While he is using his “deadman” gang to take revenge for himself, it feels as though he would have helped these people avoid the hangman’s noose, regardless.  He’ll gun a man down, but he’s so not stoic it feels slightly out of character.  It left me thinking that this was actually a prequel or origin story for the man from the 1966 film.

Prepare a Coffin likewise shares its screenwriter (Franco Rossetti), director of photography (Enzo Barboni), and producer (Manolo Bolognini) with Corbucci’s movie.  This provides another throughline between the two films, but the character is clearly the same, just different.  He still wears his heavy, dark Inverness coat (but significantly, he doesn’t don it until after his wife is gone).  He still has his huge, belt-fed machine gun.  He still suffers some hand injuries (though not nearly as mutilated as before) prior to turning the tables on his enemies.  Mostly, he is still heavily associated with death.  He figuratively buries himself next to his wife.  He’s a hangman, a legal dealer of death.  He is shown often digging graves.  The finale of the film takes place in a cemetery (again).  He’s as ghoulish as a man as can be, but Hill makes him goshdarned likeable.  Unfortunately, the two tastes don’t quite taste great together.  It’s tough to pull off being death incarnate and a swell guy at the same time, and this movie proves it.  This Django rebels against his loner stereotype.  He wants a family, he wants a community, he strives too stridently to not be alone in the world.  He’s Django Lite.

The film still deals with Western genre themes.  It primarily concerns itself with the struggle to civilize the frontier.  What’s interesting here is its attitude regarding it.  Dave Barry and men like him have an air of respectability to them (he is an elected representative at the film’s opening).  He has money, he has status, and these give him power.  He is civilizing the West and killing it.  These aren’t cross purposes, they are the same purpose.  The socioeconomic status of men like Barry and Lucas is directly proportional to the level of their turpitude.  Moreover, it’s the greedy like Barry and Lucas who carelessly destroy the lives of the working men and women who actually endeavor to civilize the frontier in less exploitive fashion (of course, we can argue that such a feat is impossible), to live their simple lives.  Moneyed land barons and the like are nothing new in Westerns, but Barry’s political background gives his villainy a more far-reaching touch.  Guys like Garcia (Jose Torres) just want to be with their families.  Nevertheless, once gold enters the picture it’s a short trip to becoming exactly like the opposition and rationalizing it.  Naturally, only Django is incorruptible, giving his hanging fees to the men he emancipates.  He, then, is the true civilizing agent, selfless and self-determined.  He wants to give what was taken from him to others.  The problem is, most other people haven’t (or won’t) come around to his way of thinking.  And that’s life.

MVT:  Baldi is a solid director.  Though much of the film has a certain flat, stagy look (which harkens back to more traditional, classic American Westerns), it moves along nicely and has enough interesting turns to be worthy of its genre.

Make or Break:  Django trying to get a bird to drink.  It just doesn’t feel right.

Score:  6.25/10

A Hyena in the Safe (1968)

Comic book, cartoon, and now film character Harley Quinn had a pair of hyenas as pets (though they didn’t make an appearance in the Suicide Squad movie; more’s the pity).  They’re names were Bud and Lou (get it?), and they obeyed her as dutifully as any lap dog might.  I thought they were a great choice for her character, not least because I always had a thing for hyenas.  I don’t know what it is, but, outside of having Bionic Bigfoot as a bestie, a hyena would be my second choice (at least when I was a lad).  Odd, really, since there’s so much else about the animals that puts me off.  They stink.  Sure, they have a jaw that can deliver five hundred pounds of pressure per square inch, but they’re also scavengers; hardly the most auspicious of traits.  They always look like they have mange (hey, maybe they do).  Then there’s that laugh, that shrill cry that would get on my nerves no end if I had to listen to it daily.  Come to think of it, what the hell did I ever think made these beasts so attractive?  Unironically, there is no hyena, literal or figurative, in Cesare Canevari’s A Hyena in the Safe (aka Una Iena in Cassaforte).  Considering all the other ultra-hip flourishes in the film, I’m more than a little surprised by this decision.

Six criminals from all over (Germany, Spain, France, Italy, England, and Tangier) converge on a mansion.  The group has reunited to open the safe full of diamonds that they stole from a bank in Amsterdam, and each of these louts has one of the six keys needed to open the safe.  Tensions rise, and things get just a little weird when one of them can’t find his key.

Canevari showcases a wicked hand for stylistic touches from start to finish.  As Klaus’ (Stan O’Gadwin) car pulls up to the estate, his headlights start off in the distance and stop immediately in front of the camera.  He fires up a butt in complete darkness, the only light the cherry on the cigarette.  Carina (Karina Kar) comes on the scene, and as she walks through the pitch-black night, she is suddenly illuminated by Klaus’ headlights.  Later, her legs take center frame in the foreground, moving to reveal Anna (Maria Luisa Geisberger), the ringleader.  Mirrors and such are used deftly throughout the film.  Junkie Albert (Sandro Pizzochero) goes into withdrawal, and the camera angles and cutting reflect his torment, twisting and turning like his insides.  Everyone is dressed up like they’re going to a carnival (though they never attend it, there is one going on out in the streets, but I believe these people would have dressed the same no matter what).  The word “Fine” sits in a corner of the screen for the last few minutes of the film, out of focus, a large, yellow blob drawing your attention until it’s actually time for the credits to roll.  The thing about all of this is that this movie is far longer on style than it is on sense.  Sometimes this is okay, even fitting, but here I just found myself being confused much of the time.

This disarray, I’m beginning to think, is intentional, not incompetence.  First off, the film was made in the Psychedelic Sixties, when chaotic editing and non sequiturs were a common practice in line with the youth counterculture of the day (heavily influenced by the burgeoning drug culture of which Albert has become a victim).  As such, this movie fits in nicely with any given episode of Laugh-In or The Banana Splits or just about any other filmic or televised media that tried to be in touch with the youngsters.  I think you get the idea.

 Second off, the plot is a cat’s cradle of internecine manipulations, with everyone trying to fuck over everyone else, and duplicity is the byword of the day.  Juan (Ben Salvador) puts the moves on Albert’s gal Jeanine (Cristina Gaioni), who may or may not have lifted the key off Albert.  Anna tries to align herself with Juan against Steve (Dmitri Nabokov), then it turns out she is really in cahoots with Steve.  And it goes on from there.  The point is, the way the film is constructed, we can rarely trust what we are seeing because of the information skipped between scenes.  We are left in the same state of doubt and suspicion because we are adrift in the story the same as the film’s characters.  This is only reinforced by the constant extreme closeups of everyone’s eyes.  They accuse, they stare disaffectedly, they lust, they suspect, often all at the same time.  And we can trust none of them.  This leads to the CCTV that watches all of the characters and through which we will observe a standoff between two of them late in the runtime.  

Third off, I think the film may ultimately be a portrayal of one of the character’s descent into Hell and madness.  The film is loaded from stem to stern with oddly sinister touches, and one of the film’s final beats has this particular character go insane in a phantasmagoric onslaught of images.  It’s the culmination of the queasy mélange of incidents that begins with the avarice of all the characters and moves swiftly downhill from there.

There is also an uneasy playfulness in the film, most singularly captured by the Burt Bacharach-ian score that persistently pummels the audience’s ears (like, say, a hyena’s cries?).  Think of the main title theme to the 1967 Casino Royale, and you have an idea (even though I quite like that song, hearing it every couple of minutes becomes tedious).  It distracts and even detracts from the film’s innately tense premise.  Furthermore, there is the character of Callaghan (Otto Tinard), an odd, older man in a bowler hat who just sort of meanders through the movie.  At one moment in the film, a character states in direct address, “We’ve arrived at the last scene, and only you and I remain to act it out.”  There is also a variety of deathtraps and gadgetry that would be perfectly at home in a James Bond or a James Bond knockoff film of the day, including, but not limited to, an electrified garage door, a crypt that opens to reveal a lair of sorts, a room that floods with water, etcetera.  If anything, it’s these elements that take the film down from the heights it could have achieved more than its anarchic editing does.  A Hyena in the Safe is one of those films worth seeing more as an oddity than as any sort of required viewing.

MVT:  The film has style to spare, and it spares nothing in its style.

Make or Break:  I think that the second or third time you hear the film’s score, you’ll know whether or not you can endure it for the film’s remainder.

Score:  6.5/10        

Episode #324: Death Steps of Vengeance

Welcome back for another episode of the GGtMC!!!

This week Sammy and Will return to Italy for a little gialli...and a little spaghetti. We cover Death Steps in the Dark (1977) starring Leonard Mann and Vengeance (1968) starring Richard Harrison!!!

Direct download: ggtmc_324.mp3 

Emails to midnitecinema@gmail.com

Adios!!!

Goke, Body Snatcher From Hell (1968)

One of the more intriguing programs that appeared on Nickelodeon back in the Eighties (aside from the obvious You Can’t Do That On Television) was a little gem dubbed The Third Eye.  It was a series of mini-series which I believe were produced in either New Zealand or Australia (I could be wrong, so an apology if that’s not the case).  Each story centered on a psychically gifted child or children and the dangers they come across/adventures upon which they embark, but all with a dark bent.  Out of the five stories aired, the two I remember anything about are The Haunting Of Cassie Palmer, about a girl who befriends a ghost (who, if memory serves, was dressed a lot like a Puritan) and Under The Mountain, about a couple of kids who go up against slimy monsters reminiscent of the Axons from the childhood-scarring Doctor Who story The Claws Of Axos (i.e. composed of so many intermingling tentacles it could almost be a gestalt creature made out of giant, pink slugs; the sweet spot for a monster kid who was forever searching for the next scare).  The Third Eye is one of those shows about which very little is mentioned these days (at least within earshot of me), and I don’t think that any of the episodes ever hit DVD in North America (again, if they did they remain well out of my line of vision).  I know Under The Mountain was remade a few years back, but I haven’t seen it, and my guess would be it’s far slicker than the low-fi series I first encountered in my youth (not that this is a judgment, mind you).  I bring this up as a tangent (par for the course for me) to an aspect of Hajime Sato’ s Goke, Body Snatcher From Hell (aka Kyuketsuki Gokemidoro) I will get to in just a couple of short paragraphs.  Care to take a guess as to what it is?    

An Air Japan flight streaks through a blood red sky.  The various passengers, including a politician, his sycophant and the sycophant’s wife, a grieving widow, a psychologist, a teenaged punk, a man dressed almost exclusively in white (right down to the gloves), and a space biologist (yes, really), all pontificate the meaning of this ominous portent, as well as the fact that the whole world is basically going to hell in a hand basket (most likely shaped like an Air Japan jet in this case).  Birds smack violently into the plane’s windows, and after a glowing UFO buzzes past, one of the engines explodes, sending the aircraft down in parts unknown.  But surviving the elements and being rescued are the least of these folks’ obstacles, as they are all about to find out the hard way.

Goke is, to put it mildly, one of the most unusual anti-war films you may ever come across.  But it’s not the message that makes it stand out so much as the messenger.  There have been anti-war films almost as long as there has been cinema, and Sato uses some interesting visual techniques to hammer the point home.  For example, widow Mrs. Neal (Cathy Horan) carries a crucifix and a photo of her deceased husband in her luggage.  This photo, however, is not of Mr. Neal in his civilian life or even of him and his wife showing the bonds of their marriage.  No, the pic is of him in uniform over in Vietnam holding a puppy.   In other words, she remembers him as a dead soldier more than as a loving life partner (the puppy is an indicator of his good nature and the senselessness of his death).  After co-pilot Sugisaka (Teruo Yoshida) is shot in the arm, his blood drips down onto this same photo, staining it with a reminder that violence begets violence.  There are multiple montages in the film utilizing some horrific images from real war footage, all tinted red (of course symbolizing blood again), for the purpose of shocking us (assumedly back to our collective senses).  But aside from these things, and the bald-faced philosophizing most of the characters trudge through (and which we expect from such fare), it is the most basic aspects of the plot which are oddest.  The Gokemidoro (the alien race piloting the UFO) came to Earth to conquer it and exterminate humanity.  Naturally, what better time to do so then when we humans are so busy killing ourselves, we are at our most vulnerable to this sort of attack?  And that’s just it.  It’s not just that we should end all wars because humans are killing humans (well, it is as a byproduct, I think), but because if we don’t, we may be killed by invading extraterrestrials (or whichever force for Evil you’d like) who can take advantage of our disunity.  

This brings me back to a discussion of the third eye (the concept, not the television series this time).  If you’ve seen stills from this film, I would hazard a guess that most likely they were of Hideo Ko as Hirofumi, the man in white.  After the plane crashes and he escapes with a hostage (stewardess Asakura, played by Tomomi Sato), he comes upon the incandescent UFO and is mesmerized.  Once inside the saucer, his forehead splits open, allowing the Gokemidoro to enter and take over his body.  From a perspective of spiritualism, the third eye symbolizes enlightenment.  It is supposed to be a way of seeing beyond normal human comprehension, of seeing the truth.  Normally, this is represented in the arts as a form of inner peace.  Yet again, the filmmakers here take an expectation and turn it on its ear.  Hirofumi was already a man of violence.  It is intimated that he shot an ambassador a day or so before the events of this story unfold.  He carries acid (and a rifle) in his suitcase.  Nevertheless, once he is bequeathed with a third eye, he does not become a man of peace.  Instead, he becomes a genuine monster, a space vampire.  Hirofumi and the aliens don’t bring harmony but devastation.  Conversely, it can be argued that this is the ultimate truth, not only of human beings, but of all lifeforms; destruction is the order of the universe.  It cannot be escaped on this planet nor on any other. In the long run, it makes for one of the most pessimistic pacifist films I have ever seen, because it doesn’t matter whether or not the people of Earth abolish war.  Apparently, there are entire universes of races out there just chomping at the bit to decimate us.  Doing it ourselves simply speeds the plow.

MVT:  I love the main idea of this film.  If nothing else can be said about it, it is unique and loaded with imagination.  The film’s structure does bog the pacing down a bit by going the formulaic route, but the ending puts a final and fitting bit of punctuation to the proceedings.

Make or Break:  The first sequence inside the Gokemidoro ship is the Make.  Aside from the repulsive special effects, the interior of the craft contains aspects of both order and chaos (rectangular frames formed with jagged edges, kaleidoscopic lighting schemes, et cetera) I find appealing for its creation of a sort of visual tension.

Score:  7/10