Hi, everyone. Moriarty here with some Rumblings From The Lab...
You know what finally made me feel better this week? The healing power of Italian movies.
Many people love the kung-fu nights best at these fests, but for me, it’s always been about the Italian films. As much as I loved Sergio Leone growing up, my knowledge of spaghetti westerns and Italian crime films and even giallo was woefully thin before I came to QT3 and got bit by the bug. QT Quattro only reinforced it, and I’ve spent the last few years trying to catch up, watching anything and everything I could.
One of my favorite filmmakers who I never would have heard of without any of the prior QT Fests is Fernando Di Leo. Thanks to Quentin, I got turned on to this awesome, uncompromised director, and, in turn, that’s what hooked me on this festival. I have a fairly broad knowledge of film, and I’ve seen more movies that most people I meet. But there’s always more to see, something to learn, some new influence to be exposed to.
Quentin’s love of Italian films seems ravenous, so I had high hopes for Tuesday and Wednesday of this week. You can’t help but look for clues about the next films Quentin is rumored to be making in some of what he programs, and considering how long we’ve been hearing about INGLORIOUS BASTARDS, I’m sure many people were ready to micro-analyze both of the WWII epics he picked for Tuesday.
The adorable Kier-La Jannisse opened the night for us. She’s one of the Alamo’s programmers, although I actually met her way back in 2001 at the FanTasia Fest in Montreal. She’s a walking encyclopedia of the obscure, and she spent most of her introduction gushing about Luciano Rossi, one of her favorite character actors, and how excited she was to finally be seeing the evening’s first film, one of his movies she had never managed to track down. She talked about how he showed up in a lot of films as a sweaty hunchback, the kind of guy who gets roughed up by the hero for a scene or two and then disappears.
After she finished the sponsor acknowledgments, she passed the mic to Quentin and took off. Right away, you could see how pleased Quentin was with the evening he had in store for us. He talked about the moment when the spaghetti westerns were starting to die in Italy, when you had all these writers and directors and actors who had been pumping out literally hundreds of Westerns a year, all of them suddenly realizing that they needed to find a new genre, something else they could do. That’s when THE DIRTY DOZEN became an international phenomenon. That film made so much money that director Robert Aldrich was able to buy his own studio, and that sent the message loud and clear to the Italians. Although some of them went off to do giallo, and many of them got busy making crime films, there were quite a few of them who were happy to start churning out WWII epics, one right after another.
Gianfranco Parolini, or “Frank Kramer,” as he’s billed in the film, worked under ten or eleven different names over the course of his career, something that wasn’t uncommon for the Italian directors. QT talked about how much fun the guy’s movies are, how he fills them with the kinds of character and action flourishes that Robert Rodriguez seems to love. He has a particular fetish for acrobatics and circuses, and QT told us we’d notice that in this film. The film stars Gianni Garko, who we’ve seen in early QT Fest films like THE PSYCHIC and WIPE OUT, and Margaret Lee, who Quentin referred to as “the queen of the Italian spy films.” He said that the film really belongs to Klaus Kinski, though, who finally got to play a Nazi here “like he’s been waiting to do it his whole life.”
The trailer reel started with MARCH OR DIE, a trailer I’ve seen now at the Alamo several times, although I have yet to stumble across the film itself. Seems like Columbia would eventually have to release this one on DVD. It’s a big-budget French Foreign Legion war film starring Gene Hackman, Terence Hill, Max Von Sydow, Ian Holm, and Catherine Deneuve. I just want to see the thing at this point because it always comes across as THE MOST IMPORTANT TRAILER EVER MADE!! I remember dragging my parents to see FORCE 10 FROM NAVARONE as a kid because Harrison Ford was in it immediately post-STAR WARS, and the trailer we saw next was the one I remember hooking me back then. Finally, we saw a B&W trailer for another war film called THE STEEL BAYONET, and then it was straight into the movie.
This men-on-a-mission movie, FIVE FOR HELL, doesn’t fuck around at all. The opening credits show Lt. Hoffman (Garko) putting together his team of men for an unconventional trip behind enemy lines. The next sequence is the big fake-out where it looks like they’re already on their mission, but it all turns out to be a training drill. And then, with basically no further preamble, they’re on the mission. They are supposed to infiltrate a villa that the Germans are using as a field base so they can steal “Plan K,” which is supposed to be some sort of major German offensive. You know these guys are unconventional because of the way they use things like baseballs and trampolines in their plan. Yes... I said trampolines. The film intercuts between the Americans as they head deeper into enemy territory and the Germans, who have problems of their own. SS Col. Hans Mueller (Kinski) is busy tracking down and killing all of the local resistance leaders, never knowing that the luscious Helga Richter (Lee), one of the officers working under him, is actually one of the key players in the resistance. He’s too busy trying to get under her skirt to suspect her. At 95 minutes, this film doesn’t waste a lot of time. The majority of the action takes place at and around the villa once the Americans arrive, and the film never takes itself too seriously. Kinski chews some scenery with panache, Margaret Lee is appropriately pouty and slinky, and each of the Americans has their trademark quirk that they emphasize in a few scenes. You know that they won’t all make it out alive, so it’s just a matter of who bites it when and whether or not they get the plans out. Kramer’s got a real knack for the set-up and pay-off, and the big finish to the film got a well-deserved round of applause from everyone in the theater. It did strike me as funny how the plan they spend so much time and effort to steal turns out to be a badly drawn map of part of the United States, but I’m no military analyst, so maybe I missed the fine points. All I know is the Nazis underestimated the power of baseball, and that’s what cost them this particular battle. Fun stuff all around.
QT was all smiles when he took the stage for the second introduction of the evening. He loves Umberto Lenzi. This is a guy who hopped from genre to genre without ever breaking a sweat. He seemed to be equally at home in horror or crime or war films. His CANNIBAL FEROX is notorious, but lots of his films are finally available on DVD. I just picked up ALMOST HUMAN, and plan to watch it when I’m back in LA.
In this case, Lenzi made the film late the WWII cycle, ten full years after FIVE FOR HELL, and he took a decidedly different approach. The whole film is hung on a gimmick which QT was careful not to ruin for us. He says that when he first saw the film on video, he was shocked by it. He felt like this could have been a huge hit if it had only come out earlier and had a major distributor pushing it. He talked about how sweeping the movie was, and how hard it was for the Italian directors to get that kind of film right. “They were great with the intimate mission movies, where they stayed focused on their characters, but they would stumble when they tried to get too epic.” He warned us up front that his print would be missing a scene. Considering how few prints there must be in circulation for some of these films, this sort of thing has to be expected. QT explained what happened in the missing scene, and said we’d get it when we saw it. When QT got a chance to meet Lenzi last year, they talked primarily about the four films that Lenzi made with Caroll Baker. QT asked him why he made so many films with her. “Because I was madly in love with her, of course!” Lenzi replied. QT wrapped up the intro by telling us that he only paid $50 for this print because the guy selling it said that it had gone totally red, a hazard with some older films. He told us to judge for ourselves what kind of deal he’d gotten.
The first trailer this time was for VON RITCHTOFEN & BROWN, a Red Baron movie directed by Roger Corman, which looked to be all about the aerial footage. Next up was a gloriously cheesy trailer for DAMNATION ALLEY, the post-apocalyptic action movie starring Jan Michael Vincent, George Peppard, and the Land Cruiser. The trailer kept touting that the film was recorded in “SOUND 360,” which must have been one of the dozens of Dolby Surround competitors that popped up in the late ‘70s. Finally, we saw a LOVE AT FIRST BITE trailer, featuring George Hamilton at the height of his disco era popularity. Hard to believe that was the same year as the film we were about to watch.
It’s also hard to believe that FROM HELL TO VICTORY was directed by the same guy who made CANNIBAL FEROX. This is an unabashedly sentimental film, hugely ambitious, and well deserving of the label “epic” even though it runs a taut 100 minutes.
In the opening scene, six friends sit in a café in Paris. Brett Rosson (George Peppard) is American, Maurice Bernard (George Hamilton) and Fabienne (Anny Duperey) are French. Jurgen Dietrich (Horst Bucholz) is German. Dick Sanders (Jean-Pierre Cassel) and Ray McDonald (Sam Wanamaker) round out the group. There are rumors of war on the wind, but these six friends are determined to enjoy their last days together. They know that the outside world is about to intrude, so they make a vow to reunite in that same café every August 24th from that point on. They take a group photo before they go on their way, and from that moment, everything changes for all of them. Jurgen is pressed into service first, and quickly advances up the ranks in the German army. Fabienne and Maurice both become active in the French Resistance. Brett goes home to America, but quickly re-enlists and gets sent back to Europe. Dick becomes a fighting ace. And Ray finds his own way into the war, only to end up reuniting with a daughter he never knew he had. Paths cross from time to time, but for the most part, Lenzi has to juggle all six of these storylines, and he does it quite well. The years whip by, and he does a nice job of showing how the war is progressing from every character’s point of view. Brett’s estranged son ends up in the war, but he hooks up with Maurice, not his father. The missing scene in the print deals with the moment where Fabienne and Jurgen reconnect, when he saves her after a group of French Resistance fighters are arrested. The budget for the film was obviously stretched thin, and if you’re an obsessive WWII fanatic, you’ll notice all sorts of maddening details that are wrong, whether it’s the type of planes people are flying or the types of tanks being used, but the battle scenes aren’t really the point of the film. They simply flesh out the human story between these people, and that’s what Lenzi gets right. By the time the war ends and the final August 24th rolls around, you’ll find yourself genuinely invested in who is going to show up to that café for one last reunion. Quentin’s print may have been a little bit red, but overall, it looked great, and for $50, he got a hell of a deal. Eagle-eyed MATRIX fans might have spotted a very, very, very young Lambert Wilson in the Paris scenes, where we learn quite emphatically that the Merovingian could not fly off the Eiffel Tower. Overall, this was one of the most satisfying films of the entire festival so far, and a truly overlooked gem.
As the night wound down, I was surprised by how good I felt. All of the symptoms of the cold seemed to be fading, but I still went home and got a good night’s sleep just to be sure. It also helps that Aaron and Kaela, who I’m staying with, were treating me to some home cooking each night. Kaela’s delicious lasagna made the perfect warm-up for Wednesday night, which turned out to be the first completely sold-out night since the Friday that started the fest. The Alamo staff spent a few frantic minutes packing people into every available seat as things were gearing up. We were treated to an all-new Alamo ad reel, which was a nice change of pace. Then the lights went back up and one last seat count was made. There were four seats in the house still available, and that situation was quickly rectified. A few sponsor announcements, a few Austin Film Society announcements, and then we were ready to begin.
QT took the stage confident and charged up. He knows that Italian Crime Night always kills, and he talked about how much he’s enjoyed turning people on to these filmmakers. He said Richard Linklater asked him if he had a Di Leo film to show this year, so it’s nice to know I’m not the only one who fell in love with the guy’s work. QT said that Di Leo wouldn’t be part of this year’s fest, but some other old favorites would be well represented. The very first QT Fest featured two Yul Brynner films, and QT explained that “Yul is the fucking man. It’s Yul’s world, and we all just live in it.” Tonight’s first film was actually the last starring role in Brynner’s career, directed by Anthony Dawson, who QT described as “a great Italian hack.” This is one of those Italian films where the hitman is portrayed as a hero, one of their favorite traditions. “This isn’t just any hitman, though. Yul is the hit-motherfucking-man,” traveling from New York to Rome so he can wipe out some mafia bosses. Martin Balsam also has a major role, which led Quentin back into another PSYCHO rant, talking about how much he loves Balsam in that film, even if he doesn’t love the movie. He points out that Balsam did about 20 films in Italy at one point.
QT then got to share a little of his love for Barbara Bouchet, who he called the queen of the Italian gangster films. He seemed surprised when he realized he’s never shown a Bouchet film at QT Fest before. “We have been fucking remiss, man.” He told us to watch for her entrance, which made great use of her trademark long blonde hair.
He wrapped the intro by tossing the mic over his shoulder, bouncing it off the stage, a move that’s become very familiar to anyone who’s been at the whole fest so far, and the trailers began with FUZZ, the Burt Reynolds film based on Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct books. Yul Brynner was the bad guy in the film, playing “The Deaf Man.” The second trailer was for a film I’ve never heard of called AMUCK!, but I think I need to see the film. It was our first glimpse of Barbara Bouchet for the evening, and she spends most of the trailer gloriously naked. There’s a slow-motion lesbian scene in the trailer that Quentin later told me is “the greatest lesbian scene in all of cinema.” STREET PEOPLE was the next trailer, a buddy comedy starring Roger Moore and Stacy Keach, and then the last trailer was for a Salkind production about the heroin trade called KILL!
DEATH RAGE is a gritty little thriller that showcases an older Brynner, already showing some signs of wear and tear even though this was nine years before his death. He plays a hitman who saw his brother gunned down, leading both to a recurring trauma that has affected his vision and his retirement from the hitman racket. He’s given one last chance to settle scores, though, when someone approaches him and tells him where to find the guy who ordered his brother’s hit. That gets Brynner on a plane to Italy right away. Balsam plays the cop who tries to keep the peace smack dab in the middle of Mafia country, and as soon as Brynner arrives, he knows there’s going to be trouble. Brynner doesn’t even try to sneak up on the guys he’s in town to kill, and he attracts a lot of attention. One of the people who approaches him is a young guy named Angelo (Massimo Ranieri), who looks a lot like a young Harvey Keitel. He’s a small-time hood who occasionally fixes horse races, but he wants to move up, and he figures Brynner gives him an opportunity. He offers his services doing anything, and little by little, Brynner starts to trust him. One thing that helps is when Angelo introduces him to his friend Anny (Bouchet), who Brynner immediately falls for. The attraction’s mutual, and their love story plays out as a sad counterpoint to Brynner’s methodical destruction of every one of his targets. The print we watched was a bit of a Frankenstein monster. It was slightly red for the first two reels, then popped into glorious IB Technicolor abruptly, only to pop back into red for the final reel. Again... that sort of thing only underlines to me how many hands these films have been through, and I sort of enjoy the history implied by it.
The climax of the film is great, and as with so many of the films that play at this fest, I get the sense that Quentin will forgive a film any number of minor sins as long as they stick the landing. It’s fitting that Brynner’s final film ends with his onscreen death, especially one as well-executed as this, and I love how Angelo steps up to take his place as Brynner’s replacement. Dawson’s not a great director, but he was smart enough to get out of his own way and just let Brynner’s charisma drive this one, and Bouchet is indeed one of the great screen beauties, impossible to take your eyes off of.
After a quick announcement by Tim League, Quentin was back onstage, overjoyed. “Is Yul Brynner the man or what? Is Barbara Bouchet hot or what?” He seemed to eat up the enthusiastic applause from the audience. He said he first saw the next film as a kid, and he recognized Alain Delon from RED SUN. My first exposure to Delon personally was as Tom Ripley in PURPLE NOON, the French version of THE TALENTED MR. RIPLEY, and since then, I’ve always been impressed by the icy-cool countenance of one of the great Gallic icons. Quentin talked again about that period where the Italian filmmakers were scrambling to establish new identities after the Spaghetti Western genre dried up. Duccio Tessari was a huge Western filmmaker, the guy who made Giuliano Gemma a star in the RINGO films. He switched over to crime films, and he discovered he had a real knack for this genre as well. QT seems to feel this is one of his very best, and it says something that Delon hand-picked the director to make this film. After all, Delon was a huge star in his own right thanks to his collaborations with Jean-Pierre Melville in French policers like LE SAMOURI. This is sort of a cross-pollinization between the two sub-genres, and the result is pretty special. It’s another hitman looking for revenge film, but Quentin pointed out how there’s a giallo influence in the film as well, specifically in the way the various killings are staged. Every Italian film from this time period had to have an American has-been, and in this case, Richard Conte’s the co-star, great at playing crime bosses, and he was a huge hit at an earlier fest in WIPE OUT. Quentin made a special point of thanking Harry Guerro, who provided this print, and who has been so good about providing other prints to the fest over the entire run of it. He actually beat Quentin in an auction to buy this print, so it was only fair he brought it to show us.
The trailers this time included WHO SAW HER DIE?, which looked fucking incredible, as well as a double-feature trailer for both THE VILACHI PAPERS with Charles Bronson and SHAMUS with Burt Reynolds. The last trailer was the Terence Hill comedy SUPERFUZZ, and then we were off and running.
Sometimes, something as simple as the right star in the right role can push a film over the top for me, and that’s what happened with NO WAY OUT. From the moment Delon first appears, perfectly punctuating a scene with a shrug that says it all, I was totally smitten. This is a great thriller, a wicked nasty little piece of business staged with great flair. The 100 minute running time flies by too fast, but it never feels rushed. Delon opens the film with a contract killing, then goes home to his family. He looks at his son and realizes he can’t raise him around this world, so he goes to his boss, played by Conte, and tells him he wants out. That doesn’t go over too well with Conte’s partners, and they try to kill Delon. Of course, they get it wrong and they wipe out his family, and Delon turns into a one-man army, determined to kill everyone who had anything to do with their deaths. The film’s got some really snarky, funny dialogue, like the scene where one of the other mob goons is beating up his girlfriend and makes a crude comment to her. “When are you going to get your mind out of the gutter?” she asks.
”I like the gutter,” he replies. “That’s where I found you.” QT’s right about the deaths in the film... each of them in staged in a very theatrical manner, and there’s a death by train that got three distinct explosions of sound from the audience, a reaction that just built and built as the death played out. There’s another moment where Delon runs out of bullets during a killing and just pops his switchblade, leaping up a flight of steps to drive it home in someone’s back, that almost made me jump out of my chair. When the film builds to its awful, inevitable conclusion, there’s a feeling of dread that sets in, and Tessari milks it for all it’s worth. The last shot is a real kick in the balls, and it cemented this as my favorite film of the festival so far. It doesn’t look like this is available on any home video formats currently, but if any specialty labels like Blue Underground or Anchor Bay are reading this coverage looking for stuff worth picking up, then please... for god’s sake... make this one a priority.
There was a long break after the second film, but QT finally ended up back onstage. He said that he’s been a little disappointed at past festivals when he’s programmed films like HICKEY & BOGGS at midnight, only to have half the audience leave beforehand. This time, he programmed with that in mind, and no one left. That’s not to say he programmed a bad film for the final slot... he says he’s a big fan of THE SELL-OUT, an Oliver Reed/Richard Widmark film. It’s part spy film, part crime film. It’s not Italian, either. It was actually shot in Israel, and Quentin talked about how the use of location is one of the things that really jumped out at him. Peter Collinson, the director, is another of those journeymen guys like Brian Trenchard-Smith, who does action well and who did a lot of genre hopping. He’s probably best known for the original THE ITALIAN JOB, but he’s made a number of exploitation films including OPEN SEASON and THE PENTHOUSE, which he did as a play first. Quentin told us that there was one problem with the print which he wanted to warn us about... it was missing an entire reel.
The whole crowd let loose an “awwwwwwwww,” but Quentin assured us that the film still worked. “Besides,” he said, “it does something really cool to the film.” Reed plays a spy who goes to his former mentor, Widmark, for help in the film. Widmark is living with the woman that Reed used to be with, and there are obviously still sparks between them. In the missing reel, they may or may not fuck again, but not seeing it means that you’re as unsure of what happened for the rest of the movie as Widmark is. Quentin said he’s not sure he ever wants to see the movie with the missing reel intact at this point, since he’s so familiar with it playing this way. “We’ll talk after the movie and we’ll vote on whether or not they really did fuck.”
We just had two quick Oliver Reed trailers, for BURNT OFFERINGS and THE THREE MUSKETEERS, and then we were straight into the movie. Oliver Reed shows up in Israel with pretty much everyone in the KGB and the CIA looking to kill him. He was an American agent at one point, but he flipped and defected to Russia. Now he’s evidently worn out his welcome, and he’s on the run. He ends up reaching out to the one person he feels like he can trust, his old friend and teacher Sam (Widmark). Then again, maybe Sam’s the reason he’s in trouble at the moment, and maybe he shows up looking to settle some scores.
It’s that kind of cat-and-mouse for the full running time of the film, and it works well. Gayle Hunnicutt plays the woman between the two men, and she may be the most cold-blooded of the three of them. At least the affection between Reed and Widmark appears to have been genuine at some point. She’s got a great line late in the film when her cover is blown, and Reed’s revealed to Widmark that she was always spying on him and filing reports on his activities even after he left the spy game. Reed calls her a walking tape recorder, and she turns to Widmark, pleading with him to believe in her. “Did I make love to you like a tape recorder?!” The highlight of the film is a car chase through Israel and the surrounding desert, including a careful crawl through an active minefield. By the time the film comes to its close on the Jordanian border, it’s earned its sentimental closing. Sam Wanamaker made his second appearance of the festival as smarmy U.S. Agent Harry Sickles, and Vladek Sheybal gets my vote as slimiest villain of the fest so far as The Dutchman. At some point, the filmmakers appear to have changed their mind about the rating and they dubbed most of the cursing down so they could get a PG instead of an R, which leads to some weird moments where people call each other “son of a pig,” but it’s just a little quirk in what is otherwise a rock-solid thriller, and a great way to close out the night.
That just left two more nights of original programming in the fest, and I’ll be back with my coverage of Sexploitation night and the Grindhouse Triple Feature, hopefully before I leave town. Right now, I’m off to eat my weight in barbecue at the Salt Lick before tonight’s films begin. Until then...
Moriarty out.
