Italy – Page 3 – The Magnificent 60s

Hornets Nest (1970) ****

Given exceedingly short shrift in its day. Viewed as in exceptionally poor taste. Marketed in some respects as Lord of the Flies Meets The Dirty Dozen. Audiences accepting of kids putting on a show or, the modern equivalent, making a movie, not so keen on youngsters going to war. In any case there’s an inbuilt repugnance as you get the distinct impression some of these kids would have been ideal recruits for Hitler Youth or the Mussolini version. And Italy, one-time ally of Hitler, becoming suddenly heroic seemed to jibe. Not to mention Rock Hudson’s marquee value fading fast after a gigantic turkey called Darling Lili (1969). Despite some distinctly unsavory aspects, bordering on exploitation, this seems enormously underrated, not just as an actioner, but for a raw depiction of war, far more realistic than many in the genre that toplined on violence.

Sure, it’s an odd concept, Italian kids, in the absence of adults, turned into a fighting force by dint of letting loose their innate venality and savagery. But they’ve not been washed up, adult-free, on a desert island. This small bunch have been orphaned and bloodily. Germans on the hunt for local partisans execute an entire village and then, finding a quisling, proceed to massacre the local resistance and for good measure destroy a team of American parachutists dropped into the area to facilitate the Allied advance.

The kids come across the one survivor, Turner (Rock Hudson), hide him from the enemy and dupe German doctor Bianca (Sylva Koscina), sympathetic to the plight of the innocent, into caring for the wounded soldier. Rather than hang around and accept the ministrations of such a beauty and see out the war with a view to possible romance, Turner is intent on single-handedly completing his mission of blowing up a dam.

Given the kids have amassed a secret armory and are trigger-happy, desperate to avenge their parents, and getting down to the gung-ho aspects of war, Turner, with appalling disregard for their safety, decides to commandeer them for his own unit. Bianca objects and watches with horror and for most of the rest of the picture confines herself to the pair too young to be considered combatants and who reek of desolation or to find ways of killing Turner or betraying him to the Germans.

Meanwhile, the kids have their own ruthless leader, Aldo (Mark Colleano), one part John Wayne, one part the creepy Maggott (Telly Savalas in case you’ve forgotten) from The Dirty Dozen, who objects to taking orders. Training consists of little more than a bit of marching in file and learning how to quickly reload a machine gun. Turner’s clever plan is to use their perceived innocence to distract the Germans guarding the dam. The distraught Bianca, stepping out of line once too often, is raped for her trouble.

*Oddly enough, Koscina does take a machine gun to the Germans, which you would have thought would be catnip to the marketeers, but that image is excluded from the poster.*

Setting aside all audience misgivings about the premise and the sexual undertones, the mission is very well done, plenty tension, a workable plan, and the eventual dam-burst impressive on the budget.

But the misgivings are not glossed over. There’s a dicey moment when it looks as if the kids, crawling all over the nurse, tearing off her clothes, are about to embark on mass juvenile rape. And the bloodlust will only be slaked when, by dint of secreting the detonators essential to the plan, they force Turner to lead them on a raid on the Germans, tossing hand grenades into houses and opening fire from the back of a truck on the unsuspecting enemy.

Aldo, in particular, gets a taste for killing and in a later battle doesn’t hold back when one of his comrades inadvertently gets in his way.

Sold as a junior edition of a mission picture, the trailer would have probably been enough to put off large sections of the audience, uncomfortable with kids being employed in such mercenary fashion. Kids grow up in war but not that fast seemed to be the general reaction. Okay if they’re portrayed as victims, less acceptable as gun-happy butchers.

So, the best elements of the movie is in not avoiding such misgivings. It was soon clear from the American experience – though this is not specifically alluded to – that hordes of kids in Vietnam were going down this route. The point at which kids cross over into bloody adulthood and lose the essence of childhood is dealt with too. That scene on the face of it and in isolation appears maudlin but in the context of the picture works very well. But the violence or its aftermath are not the most striking images. Again and again, the camera returns to the dirty, clothes-tattered, Bianca clutching the two infants, the detritus of conflict.

Setting aside his moustachioed muscle, Rock Hudson (Seconds, 1966) gives a well-judged performance and Sylva Koscina (A Lovely Way To Die, 1968), shorn of glamor, holds the emotional center. Mark Colleano (The Boys of Paul St, 1968) gives a vicious impression of a young hood on the rise. Directed by sometime cult director Phil Karlson (A Time for Killing, 1967) from a script by S.S. Schweitzer (Change of Habit, 1969) and producer Stanley Colbert. Great score from Ennio Morricone.

It’s worth pointing out that the idea of kids taking up arms received positive critical approval when it was applied to such an arthouse darling as If… (1969) but of course they were public schoolboys forced into action by bad teachers and in reaction to “the establishment” and not after seeing their families slaughtered. Double standards, methinks.

Worth reassessment.

Stiletto (1969) ***

The bursting of the B-movie bubble dealt a death blow to the careers of the two stars here. In the past, rising talent who failed to make the marquee grade could find almost a lifetime of contentment in low-budget westerns, neo-noir thrillers and down’n’dirty exploitationers with the hope of an occasional supporting role in a bigger picture to ease their path. By the end of the decade, just about the only option were Roger Corman biker flicks or spaghetti westerns. Especially if they had gone down the tough guy route, B-pictures might have provided an exemplary move for both Alex Cord and Patrick O’Neal. As it was, this was their last shot at the big time. And it was lean pickings.

Retirement can be a tough call any time for a high-flying businessman. But when you’re at the top of your profession in the Mafia, loosening such ties can prove problematic. Count Cesare (Alex Cord) is a part-time assassin, spending the rest of his time as a fun-loving playboy with a string of women, fast cars and racehorses. Only problem is, he wants to retire from the Family – and not in normal fashion, weighted down by a block of cement. Unfortunately, his dilemma doesn’t solicit sympathy from boss Matteo (Joseph Wiseman).

Adding to his problems is tough cop Baker (Patrick O’Neal) on his tail who fastens onto illegal immigrant Illeana (Britt Ekland), Cesare’s girlfriend when he’s not pursuing Ann (Barbara McNair). A strictly by-the-numbers thriller it’s enlivened by two underrated tough screen hombres. Alex Cord (The Brotherhood, 1968) isn’t given enough of a character here to tug at audience heartstrings although elsewhere he had proved better-than-expected value. If anything, he’s an existential kind of hero.

Cord made a brief splash as an action hero in the monosyllabic Clint Eastwood/Charles Bronson mold after debuting in the John Wayne role of the Ringo Kid in the remake of Stagecoach (1966) and didn’t have more than half a dozen stabs at making his name on the big screen before disappearing into the television hinterlands. So he’s something of an acquired taste, maybe the small output enough to qualify him for cult status. Here, he’s a decent fit for the violence but saddled with a role that makes little sense.

Patrick O’Neal (El Condor, 1970) followed a similar career trajectory, swapping television with the occasional movie and even managing a screen persona as a snarky type of villain/supporting character. A few more tough-guy roles and he might well have built a stronger footing in the business.

This is another thankless role for Britt Ekland (Machine Gun McCain, 1969), there to add glamor, but, surprisingly, she manages to bring pathos to the part. Barbara McNair (If He Hollers Let Him Go, 1968), always worth watching and who had made an auspicious debut the year before, hardly gets any screen time.

Director Bernard L. Kowalski (Krakatoa, East of Java, 1968) proves better at the action than the characterization, though, luckily nobody needs to be anything other than tough. Three scenes, in particular, are well handled – the opening murder in a casino, a shoot-out a penthouse and the climax on a deserted island which has more than a hint of a spaghetti western. Joseph Wiseman (Dr No, 1962) rustles up another interesting performance and collectors of trivia might note Roy Scheider (Jaws, 1975) putting in an appearance.

This old-style tough-guy thriller would have been better off had the Cord vs. O’Neal set-up taken center stage, with the assassin on murderous overkill hunted down by the zealous cop. As it is, it’s a missed opportunity for Cord to develop an Eastwood/Bronson persona and enter the action star hall of fame.

Based on a thin Harold Robbins bestseller, the screenplay by W.R. Burnett (The Great Escape, 1963) and A.J. Russell (A Lovely Way to Die, 1968) doesn’t take any prisoners.

Doesn’t quite deliver what it says on the tin, but interesting to see Cord and O’Neal battle it out.

Ripley (2024) ***

I’m not sure I can take eight episodes of this especially in this trendy audience-alienating black-and-white version. Going all monochrome is like a bit like a novelist never deigning to describe the weather or what clothes their characters are wearing and I don’t go for the argument that the B/W is to prevent audiences being distracted by glorious Italian scenery when that’s the exact reason Dickie Greenleaf (Johnny Flynn), spoiled son of shipping mogul, went there.

I don’t know what time of year the tale was set because even the Italian seaside, warm enough presumably for Greenleaf and girlfriend Marge (Dakota Fanning) to go for a swim (Ripley remaining on the beach because his parents drowned, maybe), just looks gloomy. Anyone who can render Italy gloomy needs their head examined.

This isn’t Schindler’s List (1993) – which director Steve Zaillian wrote – that used B/W to sensible artistic effect or even Belfast (2021) where it was employed to depict the grimness of life.

I’m not even convinced by Ripley (Andrew Scott). Sure, the grifter was much more charming and personable, if occasionally awkward, as portrayed by Matt Damon (The Talented Mr Ripley, 1999) or John Malkovich (Ripley’s Game, 2002). This Ripley is just glum. Sure, his little cons don’t always work, but he can’t be as doom-struck as this.

Anyway, the story (eventually) starts when Greenleaf’s father pays Ripley, whom he believes to be a university chum of his son, to bring the errant boy, wasting his time on painting, writing and general idling, back from Italy, presumably to take on the role of inheriting the family business instead of living off his trust fund.

Like Sydney Sweeney’s character in Immaculate (2024) it hasn’t occurred to him that not everyone in Italy can speak English and so is thwarted trying to find directions to his prey’s pad. There’s a seemingly endless scene of Ripley climbing endless flights of stairs (how unfit can he be, Denzel Washington in The Equalizer 3 at least had a decent excuse) and this Ripley seems incapable of worming his way in (at least in Episode One) to his prey’s affections.

Yes, there are a couple of interesting scenes, Ripley changing seats on the subway because he sees a man staring at him on a different train. But most of the directorial art is devoted to snippets of images that have no relevance to the story or even the mood. There’s quite a barmy opening scene, too, of Ripley bumping a corpse down a flight of stairs in a tenement, not, to minimize noise, wrapping it up in a carpet or hoisting it on his shoulders. But that is clearly a denouement and it could be an awfully dull time away.

All build-up and not much else so far.

Immaculate (2024) ***

As you know we live in a Big Brother pampered society and even going to the movies comes with a health warning. But, I have to tell you, Dear British Censor, “strong bloody violence” doesn’t cut it. Now, I’m as happy to be scared out of my wits as the next guy, jump-out-of-your-seat shocks are part of the fun of horror pictures. But having to close your eyes to plain sadistic action – tongues cut off, feet branded, bellies of pregant women cut open, babies stoned to death – sorry that’s a bit more than “strong.” Maybe torture porn should have a category of its own.

Which is a shame because this is a clever twist on the old trope of the demonic child as proferred by Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and The Omen (1976) – possibly no coincidence either that’s beaten the Omen remake to the punch. Instead of satanic satanists it’s satanic priests and nuns mainlining on some kind of more scientific genetic Da Vinci Code.

And thanks to the runaway success of last year’s Anybody But You, there’s another element at play here, the breakout star’s follow-up picture to gauge if breakout picture was fluke or welcoming a new star into the firmament. Julia Roberts followed up massive hit Pretty Women (1990) with tepid thriller Sleeping with the Enemy (1991) and the soppy Dying Young (1991) but nobody cared how indifferent the follow-ups were and both turned into big hits and wow a star is born. Sandra Bullock arrives out of nowhere in Speed (1994) and follows up with ropey romance While You Were Sleeping (1995) and tepid thriller The Net (1995) and bingo a star is born.

So this is breakout star Sydney Sweeney’s follow-up – excluding Madame Web of course – and I’m not sure if it will sweep up that many of her newfound followers in its wake. Not because it doesn’t deliver the horror goods because outside of the torture porn it’s pretty creepy and with effective twists and if you want to see a bloodied Sydney creep out of a hole in the ground and give birth and then, as if confounding her newfound bubbly screen personality, beat the baby to death then this one is for you.

Anyway, let’s backtrack. Cecilia (Sydney Sweeney), a young American who had a near-death experience, hives off to an Italian convent filled mostly with the devout, the lost and the broken. It’s not Nun of Monza, and it’s not terribly strict either and even though she couldn’t be bothered learning Italian (don’t these nuns speak English?) there’s always someone on hand to help translate. She makes one friend and one enemy, but, hey, like any boarding school that’d be par for the course.

So, here she is settling in, becoming a bride of Christ, taking vows of chastity, obedience and poverty when suddenly charming Fr Tedeschi (Alvaro Monte) comes over all nasty, questioning whether she is a vigin or not. Just when that is established to everyone’s content comes the zinger – she’s pregnant by what is known in Catholic Church parlance as immaculate conception. Quite how this occurred is never explained, except the convent has an artefact claimed to be one of the nails that stuck Jesus to the cross and therefore containing remants of blood (we’re going Jurassic Park here) and thus his genetic code.

You won’t be surprised to learn that she’s not the first victim of this kind of conception. Things start to get fairly nasty after this – someone tries to drown here and then we’re in for the tongue-cutting, branding etc – and Cecilia goes from docile to vengeful. She comes up with a clever trick to escape and when that doesn’t work has to find another way out of her dilemma and if that involves strangling someone with rosary beads that seems nicely ironic in the circumstances.

It was certainly a day of mean mothers in my Quadruple Bill on Monday, this being the last of my quartet. It was certainly well done and the concept no more barmy than any of the demonic baby tropes, if a bit more up-to-date medically, and there was enough of the claustrophic creepiness that comes with the convent territory and the throwback barbarity of the Church (Spanish Inquisition, anyone?). Apart from the torture porn, a good entry into the genre but, despite Sweeney’s performance, this would not have put her in the break-out league. So I think this will just be put behind her as she charts a new rom-com course. Incidentally, like Anna Hathaway and Jessica Chastain in Mother’s Instinct, she was the producer.

Worth seeing for Sweeney, though, and the clever plot ploy.

Girl with a Pistol (1968) ****

Off-beat Oscar-nominated comedy-drama that is both a marvelous piece of whimsy and a slice of social realism set in the kind of Britain the tourist boards forget, all drizzle and grime. It zips from Edinburgh to Sheffield to Bath to London to Brighton to Jersey as if the characters had been dumped from an If It’s Tuesday It Must Be Belgium sketch. If your idea of Italy was Fellini’s glorious decadence or Hollywood romance amid historic ruins and fabulous beaches, then the upbringing of Assunta (Monica Vitti) is the repressive opposite.

All women in her small town wear black. Men are not allowed to dance with women and must make do with each other. A man like Vincenzo (Carlo Giuffre) desiring sex must kidnap a woman, in this case Assunta, to which she will consent as long as he marries her. When instead he runs off to Scotland, she is dishonored and must kill him, armed with the titular pistol.

Pursuit first takes her to Edinburgh and a job as a maid, has a hilarious encounter with a Scottish drunk, and various other cross-cultural misinterpretations – in a bar she cools herself down with an ice-cube then puts it back in the bucket. Then it’s off to Sheffield where she falls in with car mechanic Anthony Booth (television’s Till Death Do Us Part) because he is wearing Italian shoes.

She can’t imagine he can watch sport for two hours. “You’re a man, I’m a woman, nobody in the house and you look at the television.” Although tormented by images of being attacked back home by a screaming mob of black-robed women, she begins to shed her inhibitions, wearing trendier clothes, although an umbrella is essential in rain-drenched Britain and given the Italian preference for shooting exteriors.

In between sightings of Vincenzo there are episodes with a suicidal gay man (Corin Redgrave) and a doctor (Stanley Baker). She becomes a nurse, then a part-time model, sings Italian songs in an Italian restaurant, drives a white mini, wears a red curly wig and more extravagant fashions. It turns out she can’t shoot straight. Gradually, the mad chorus of home gives way to feminist self-assertion as she becomes less dependent on men and a world run by chauvinists. It’s a startling mixture of laugh-out-loud humor and social observation. And while the narrative that at times verges on the bizarre, Assunta’s actions all appear logical given her frame of mind.

Vitti was Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni’s muse (and companion) through L’Avventura (1960), La Notte (1961) and L’Eclisse (1962) to Red Desert (1964). She had a brief fling with the more commercial, though still somewhat arty, movie world in Joseph Losey’s Modesty Blaise (1966) and the nothing-artistic-about-it comedy On the Way to the Crusades (aka The Chastity Belt, 1968) with Tony Curtis. Director Mario Monicello had two Oscar nominations for writing but was best-known for Big Deal on Madonna Street (1958) and Casanova ’70 (1965). Girl with a Pistol was nominated in the Best Foreign Language film category at the Oscars.

Violent City /Family (1970) ****

Of all the lazy, incompetent streamers this has to take the biscuit. Not content with branding as new films made over half a century ago, now we have films being screened which clearly nobody has bothered to watch even once. Otherwise, how to explain a picture where the language lapses into Italian at critical moments without the benefit of sub-titles.

Which is a big shame because, confusing through the movie is, it takes an unique approach to the femme fatale angle and serves up a noted screen tough guy as one whose heart is genuinely broken – suck that up, pale imitators going by the name of Stallone, Schwarzenner, Willis et al.

Post-Bullitt (1968) but pre-The French Connection (1971) we open with a dazzling car chase where the pursued race up stairs rather than down as is the current trope and batter their way through closely-packed streets in the Virgin Islands. That’s before wannabe retired assassin Jeff (Charles Bronson) is gunned down, although he’s still capable of diving under a burning car to escape immediate detection.

Jeff is on the lam with lover Vanessa (Jill Ireland). Dumped in jail with time to repent (no, strike that), mull over his circumstances, in the meantime dodging a tarantula (a real one!) crawling over his body, and coming to the conclusion that the moll has set him up and has returned to her previous lover, ace racing driver Coogan (no idea who plays him, imdb doesn’t know either). Despite having abandoned his profession, Jeff, not getting the hang of the broken-hearted moping malarkey, decides he’ll come out of retirement for the usual one last job, this time laying waste to Coogan.

But someone spots him and he’s blackmailed by Mafia chief Weber (Telly Savalas) into continuing his murderous ways. But here’s a sting in the tail – a wonderful twist to end all twists: Weber is Vanessa’s husband. She’s not a femme fatale at all just a sexual butterfly who dances from one lover to the next with Weber’s tacit approval.

But, in fact, in another twist, she is, after all, the femme fatale to end all femme fatales, setting up Jeff to bump off Weber so that she and attorney lover (what, another one) Steve (Umberto Orsini), Jeff’s best buddy, can take over her husband’s organization now that it has gone legit. And in the final twist to end all twists this ends with Jeff’s broken heart turning him suicidal (beat that Schwarzenneger, Stallone, Willis et al).

This is a very down’n’dirty Italian thriller, dashing from deadbeat locale to Southern Belle balls, from rusting riverboats to swampland, from factories to fashion shoots, the confusion factor infused further by the sudden incursions into Italian, often in mid-scene, as if this was some kind of artistic coup, determined to leave the viewer baffled.

Despite going the whole nine yards in the broken-heareted department, Jeff isn’t quite the full-blown romantic, an attempted rape of Vanessa in New Orleans only interrupted by (wait for it) three thugs beating another character to death. Naturally, Jeff isn’t the kind of good bad guy who intervenes, and these characters, even more naturally, have nothing to do with the plot (except as Jeff points out it’s a violent city after all). But what the hell, it’s that kind of film.

I’ve cutting Amazon Prime a big break here with my rating, because despite the language problems, it’s a cut above your normal thriller, and Charles Bronson (Red Sun, 1971) before being typecast by Death Wish (1974) gives a very good account of himself, certainly a lot more to do than just grimace, and, heck, you even feel sorry for him twisted inside out by emotion. Telly Savalas (A Town Called Hell, 1971) is a bit more polished and emotionally aware than his usual villain.

You might be tempted to call Jill Ireland (Rider on the Rain, 1970) the stand-out. She still can’t act for toffee, but she is well suited to playing this kind of jinxed minx, whose beauty snags dupes well below her league. And (spoiler alert) she does let it all hang out, indulging in copious nudity.

Directed with some flair by Sergio Sollima (The Big Gundown, 1967) and extra marks for coaxing unusual performances from the three principals. Six screenwriters (can’t you tell) put this together including Lina Wertmuller (The Belle Starr Story, 1968). Great score by Ennio Morricone.

Given I couldn’t understand half of what was going on thanks to streamer disinterest in sub-titles, I was still very impressed. Worth a watch.

NOTE: Amazon Prime has this under the title Family but once the credits roll it switches to original title Violent City.

Youtube has the trailer.

A Fine Pair (1968) ***

Essentially an Italian take on the slick glossy American thriller in the vein of Charade (1963), Arabesque (1966) and of course Blindfold (1966) which previously brought together Rock Hudson and Claudia Cardinale. Produced by Cardinale’s husband Franco Cristaldi, directed and co-written by Francesco Maselli (Time of Indifference, 1966), it is a cute variation on the heist picture. Fans accustomed to seeing the more sultry side of the Italian actress (as in The Professionals, 1966) might be surprised to see how effective she is in more playful mood apart from one scene where she strips down to bra and pants. The other major difference is that in her American-made films, Cardinale is usually the female lead, that is, not the one driving the story, but here she provides the narrative thrust virtually right up until the end.

The twist here (as in Pirates of the Caribbean nearly four decades later) is that the bad guy (in this case bad girl) wants to return treasure rather than steal it. Esmeralda (Claudia Cardinale) arrives in New York to seek the help of Capt. Mike Harmon (Rock Hudson), an old family friend, a stuffy married American cop who even has a timer to tell him when to take his next cigarette. She has come into jewels stolen by an internationally famous thief and wishes to return them to a villa in the Alps before the owners discover the theft. The bait for Harmon is to try and apprehend the guilty party.

The audience will have guessed the twist, that she is not breaking in to return jewels, but once Harmon, through his police connections, has been shown the alarm systems, to deposit fakes and steal the real thing. So Harmon has to work out an ingenious method of beating three alarm systems, one of which is heat-sensitive, the whole place “one big safe.”

Most of the fun comes from the banter between the principals and the is-she-telling-truth element essential to these pictures. “I lied – and that’s the truth,” spouts Esmeralda at one point. I disagree with a common complaint of a lack of chemistry between Hudson and Cardinale. What the film lacks is not enough going wrong such as occurred in Man’s Favorite Sport (1962), which makes the audience warm to the otherwise rigid Hudson, or as seen in Gambit (1966) where Michael Caine played a similar stand-offish character. Cardinale is terrific in a Shirley MacLaine-type role, as the playful foil to the uptight cop, and who, like MacLaine in Gambit, knows far more than she is letting on.

What does let the film down is that it is at cross-cultural cross-purposes. As mentioned, this is an Italian film with Italian production values. The color is murky, way too many important scenes take place outside, but, more importantly, the actual heist lacks sufficient detail, and post-heist, although there a few more twists, the film takes too long to reach a conclusion. But for the first two-thirds it is a perfectly acceptable addition to the heist canon, the script has some very funny lines, Cardinale is light, charming and sexy.

The American title of this film was Steal from Your Neighbor, which is weak. A Fine Pair while colloquial enough in America has, however, an unfortunate meaning of the double-entendre kind in Britain.

Lack of films being released – these days due to the pandemic – is not new. A Fine Pair was made during a time of low production. But there was a sickening irony in the story of this film’s production. It was financed by the short-lived Cinema Center owned by the American television network CBS. When television was in its infancy, American studios had been barred by the Government from becoming involved in the new media. CBS got into movie production after studios had suffered from another governmental policy reversal.

In 1948 the Paramount Decree prohibited studios from owning cinemas, a move which led to the end of the studio system and decimated production. The most sacrosanct rule of American film regulations was that studios could not own movie houses. Everyone assumed that applied the other way until in the early 1960s cinema chain National General challenged the ruling.

By this point, production was so low that exhibitors were crying out for new product so the government relented, much to the fury of the studios. That opened the door for television networks like CBS and later ABC (Charly, 1968) to enter movie production. And now, of course, studios have re-entered the exhibition market as have, once again, television companies.

Entertaining enough and the pair have enough charisma to see it through.

The Appointment (1969) ****

You can see why MGM dumped this. Just as easily as you can see its attraction for star Omar Sharif, his boldest-ever role, completely against type, burying the romantic hero in one fell swoop. It wasn’t just the arthouse pretensions – the absurdly long, by Hollywood standards, long shots held for an insanely long time and the greatest aerial shot, almost to the moon and back, ever devised – that made the studio cut and run faced with the impossibility of selling Omar Sharif as a creepy, repressed guy who drives his wife to suicide.

Luxuriant moustache trimmed to look like a ramrod British colonel, often bespectacled, unmarried middle-aged lawyer Federico (Omar Sharif) takes a fancy to the withdrawn Carla (Anouk Aimee), fiancée of legal buddy Renzo (Fausto Tozzi). She works as a model in a high-class fashion house.

So Federico is shocked to discover that Renzo has dumped her after discovering evidence, somewhat circumstantial it has to be said, that she moonlights as an equally high-class sex worker who takes occasional assignments from antiques dealer Emma (Lotte Lenya). Now that Carla is unencumbered in the marital stakes, Federico undertakes to discover whether the accusation is indeed correct. If not, then he reckons, she might well fall for him, if only on the rebound, after all he is very successful and, despite the geeky haircut and moustache, a handsome dude.

It’s left to your imagination whether Federico actually has sex with the young woman – who “could pass for 17” and arrives clutching schoolbooks – for whom he pays 100,000 lire (around $1,000) but my guess is he does, getting her to pretend he’s her Latin schoolmaster. So that’s the Omar Sharif romantic persona killed off right there and from then on it’s hard to muster any sympathy for the character, every bit as obsessive, say, as James Stewart in Vertigo (1958).

This has a Hitchcockian aura, an atmosphere of stealth and secrecy and chill. He ends up marrying her, turns into a control freak, refuses to let her go out to work, complains about her make-up, asks where she’s been. He gets it into his head that she’s back to her old tricks and rekindles the investigation. She becomes more withdrawn and eventually commits suicide. The ideal ending, the arthouse ending, would have left Federico forever puzzled, not knowing whether he had married a hooker or not, whether, for all his caution, he had been duped. But that’s not the way with what you would otherwise describe as a psychological thriller – calling it a big-budget arthouse picture from a major studio by a relatively unacclaimed (outside of The Pawnbroker, 1964) mainstream director would not be an option – so we get a twist at the end.

This isn’t your usual Italy either, it’s not set in a sun-drenched land with impeccable beaches and ladies wandering around with cleavage abounding. This is the Italy of traffic jams and rain and wind and huge brown waves battering the shore and buttoned-up women.

And audiences have rarely been presented with such a depressing insecure female character. You get the impression she wears fabulous clothes to hide, not glorify, her body. She might come across as playing with Federico, pretending to be asleep when he comes to bed during a romantic weekend on a remote island, the woman way out of his league who wants to keep him at a distance while she makes up her mind. But that interpretation would only be from Federico’s perspective. Otherwise, an attendant viewer would note that she doesn’t seem at all comfortable with life, and that abandoned by one lover without finding out why she can’t risk losing her heart to another.

Had this been made by Visconti or Antonioni (Blow-Up, 1966, went down a similar suspicious route) it might have been acceptable as a distribution vehicle for MGM (after all, they did pump millions into Zabriskie Point, 1970). The odd thing was, the arthouse mob didn’t like it either, showing disdain in the most publicly humiliating manner possible, audiences at Cannes booing it off the screen.

But once you accept the odd premise and equally fall in with the seedy character depicted by Omar Sharif, you begin to feel its power. The daring camerawork is exceptional, some of the scenes in extreme long shot contain as their essence elements of intimacy, and the world’s greatest aerial shot pulls away from the picture’s most romantic scene, as if giving indication of what is not well, rather than enveloping the characters with the usual background of nature at its most rapturous. And it’s pretty much silent, a John Barry theme dips in and out, but scarcely swells when it does, on a rare occasion, appear, so this plays out without much in the way of musical nods to the audience.

Outside of Lawrence of Arabia (1962), this is easily Omar Sharif’s greatest performance. His gamble in parlaying his box office marquee and universal romantic appeal (he appeared in Mayerling, the ultimate romantic tale, the same year) to take on this unappealing role showed a commitment to expanding his screen persona that went unrewarded. Anouk Aimee, anointed one of the screen’s biggest female romantic leads after the unexpected success of A Man and a Woman (1966), is also playing against type.

Sidney Lumet went through a distinctly lean period between The Pawnbroker and his 1970s output – The Anderson Tapes (1971), Serpico (1973), Dog Day Afternoon (1975) – and while The Pawnbroker presented an equally disaffected character he was crying out for your sympathy. You could almost view The Appointment as an exercise in style and the director trying to see, in terms of narrative and character, what he could get away with, and to become the director stars would trust when they wanted to shake up their screen persona – witness Sean Connery as a criminal and Al Pacino as a gay bank-robber.

Critics have avoided this like the plague – three reviews on imdb, only one on Rotten Tomatoes – so if that’s not a sign of being under-rated I don’t know what is.

It’s different for sure but that doesn’t make it any less worth seeing. And it would certainly fit in with the expectations of a contemporary audience.

Behind the Scenes: Dear Mr Scorsese…or Mr Nolan

Should you be in the mood for atonement after a lifetime of deifying gangsters, Mr Scorses, you might wish to consider a biopic of the greatest cop, outside of Elliott Ness and Serpico, in American history. I’m sure Leonardo DiCaprio, who was at one time attached to a filmization of the bestseller The Black Hand (2017) by Stephen Talty, has brought the subject matter to your attention. Although Pay or Die (1960) covered similar territory, its budget and restrictions of length denied it the opportunity to properly explore the historical depth and social comment, for which in Killers of the Flower Moon (2023) you now seem more at home.

After the success of Oppenheimer (2023) audiences might be receptive to a true story about a cop who took on the Mafia a.k.a. the Syndicate a.k.a. the Cosa Nostra before it was known by any of those names and there is, to boot, a heart-rending romance that the Ernest Borgnine picture barely touched upon.

I’ve even dreamed up an opening.

A horse pulls a wagon laden with oranges and apples through a congested New York street circa 1883. As the driver pauses to make a delivery, a child, Claudia, watches from the window of her father’s shop – F. Fellini Jeweller. The horse collapses. The fruit scatters. Malnourished kids race to scoop up the merchandise. Claudia races out and strokes the horse’s mane.

We cut to a man in brown overalls striding towards the camera armed with a cleaver. The crowd parts. The child clings to her father in terror. The man raises the cleaver high over his head and slams it into the horse’s haunch. The child screams. The jeweller remonstrates with the man. The man removes his cleaver and says, “Not dead enough.”

As the credits roll, we see Claudia chasing away the flies that gather over the corpse, being pushed away by a man chiselling out the horse’s hoof, another sawing off its tail. Some days later as she is trying to pick off wriggling maggots, the man returns, this time driving a wagon. She hides behind her father.

His cleaver flashes in the sun as he hacks away at the horse. By now decomposition is so bad that the legs easily part from the body and the man is able to drag the horse bit-by-bit onto the back of his cart. Claudia watches as he leaves with the steaming carcass. We follow the wagon through the streets down to the river. A boat is waiting. The man heaves the meat onto the boat. The boat sets sail. Far out in the channels, the man begins chucking the meat overboard.

Back on dry land, the man cleans his cleaver and removes his brown overalls. Underneath he is wearing the uniform of a cop.

This is Joe Petrosino.

In those days cops also ran the Sanitary Dept in New York. Removing dead horses – they were too heavy to lift manually so you had to wait till the meat rotted sufficiently to fall from the bones – was a job for new recruits.

When Petrosino reaches the police precinct you’ll notice two things about him. He is short, well below the standard police requirement, and all the accents except his are Irish. In fact, he’s the only Italian cop on the force and only recruited because he can speak Italian and get information from all those immigrants who still can’t speak a word of English.

But he’s also very unusual especially to a contemporary audience because we’ve all been acclimatized to thinking that all Italians of this and successive generations accepted the Mafia rather than as Petrosino hating them and all they stood for. So this is effectively the tale of a silent majority who came from the same locale as the Mafia, understood their position in society in the home country, but loathed the fact that they had been allowed to infiltrate American society in part at least because they spoke a secret language (Italian) that few Americans understood or made an effort to understand with all the underlying racism that suggested.

But Petrosino’s not like a contemporary cop, forced to work within the tight constraints of the law and he’s not even like the cops of the 1930s-1960s who might have lawyers breathing down their necks and in the later decades accused by the media of breaching civil liberties. Petrosino was a good old-fashioned two-fisted cop, think James Cagney or Lee Marvin or Clint Eastwood but on the side of law and order. He thought nothing of beating up hoods, humiliating them in public as a way of showing that society was not going to stand by and let them terrorize the public.

Eventually, Petrosino was able to set up a specialist Italian-speaking squad to tackle The Black Hand/Mafia.

But he was also a superb detective. The Black Hand’s main line of business was kidnapping – little Claudia would come back into the story as a victim. Don’t pay the ransom and your business or your house would be blown up, the kidnappee killed. You may remember from old kidnapping movies that the kidnappers always cut out words from newspapers to write their demands.

Well, the only reason they ended up doing that was because of Petrosino. Prior to that, they just wrote out their demands in pen and ink. But he started to round up suspects by the hundreds and find an excuse to get samples of their handwriting. And then using the samples on file, whenever a new demand appeared he would scout the files to match the samples and go an arrest an astonished hood. So the gangsters wised up and started using newspapers.

He was also the guy who worked out that immigrants didn’t suddenly take up crime on arriving in America but they may well have criminal records back home and therefore could be extradited.

On top of that was the heart-rending love story. Petrosino had fallen for the daughter, Adelina, of a restaurant owner. Every night he dined in the restaurant. But she had been married before. She was a widow. Her husband had died young and she couldn’t contemplate marrying again to someone who was in such constant peril. So it took years of wooing, nightly meals, before she agreed to marry. The marriage lasted a year, ended by his death. He was assassinated while going into the lion’s den, the Mafia strongholds of Italy.

And all this is before you deal with the social issues of immigrant integration, of racism, of finding the new world as guilty of betrayal of trust as the old, of those complicit in murderous actions of the Mafia by turning a blind eye.

I’m suggesting Martin Scorsese because he’s covered this ground before but on second thoughts this might appeal more to the likes of Christopher Nolan who is comfortable with complexity and constantly seeks a wider perspective and who, whether through the Batman chronicles or Oppenheimer, is happy for his principal character to be in the main an upholder of justice.

Quadruple Bill: Ferrari (2023) ** / Anyone But You (2023) * / One Life (2024) * / Next Goal Wins (2023)

The stars aligned and with only a couple of minutes between features I was able to squeeze in a record-equalling four movies in a single day (excepting all-nighters of course) at the cinema and with one exception they were all well worth the ticket price.

Ferrari

Not really a motor racing picture in the mold of Ford v Ferrari / Le Mans ’66 (2019) or Rush (2013) but more of a domestic drama centering around a dramatic race. The acting is plum, Penelope Cruz (The 355, 2022) taking the honors ahead of Adam Driver (House of Gucci, 2021) though Shailene Woodley (The Last Letter from Your Lover, 2021) seems miscast. The climactic race doesn’t carry the punch of Le Mans, however, the focus more on the backseat players than the drivers. And it’s not quite prime Michael Mann (Heat, 1995)

Set about decade before Ford v Ferrari, it finds Enzo Ferrari (Adam Driver) coping with the death the year before of his only son, the potential collapse of his business, and trying to conceal long-standing mistress Lina Lardi (Shailene Woodley) from long-suffering wife Laura (Penelope Cruz).

The depth of the couple’s despair at the loss of their son can be measured in the fact that every morning they take flowers, separately, to his graveside. He has at hand an immediate substitute, having fathered a boy, now approaching ten years old, with his mistress, but rejects the chance to officially gave the boy his name.

The manufacturing side of the business was always viewed as merely a way of financing the racing, Ferrari having been a driver earlier in his life. But overspending or lack of income, such details are not specified, has pushed the business towards bankruptcy and he toys with inviting a merger with a bigger company such as Fiat or Henry Ford (which formed a central plank of Ford v Ferrari). But the easiest way out is to win Italy’s most prestigious race, the Mille Miglia, a four-day 992-mile event that ran clockwise across public roads from Brescia to Rome and back.

But I had to look that up. Unlike Le Mans, unless you are a racing aficionado, this doesn’t immediately click in the public consciousness. And there were a host of other details that seemed to skimp on information. Unlike Ford v Ferrari where you learned exactly how fast cars got faster and what it took to drive them or be driven in one (witness Henry Ford’s terrifying hurl), here you are only given some vague technical data which makes little sense. There is little background fill, Maserati pops up as Ferrari’s chief rival but its inclusion is almost incidental. In fairness, you do get more about the jiggery-pokery of running a business.

Running parallel to the racing venture is the family soap opera, will Laura find out about the mistress and child, will she jeopardize the business out of spite. Once the race starts, it’s hard to keep up. Here the distinct lack of detail hurts the most, although there is one shocking scene.

Engrossing enough but it’ll struggle to fill cinemas.

Anyone But You

A contemporary take on the rom-com with the disgruntled participants of a one-night stand forced to pair up at a wedding where they encounter an abundance of exes and various interfering family members. Glen Powell, star in the making in Top Gun: Maverick (2022), comes good as does Sydney Sweeney (The Voyeurs, 2021). Skipping the raw rudeness of its immediate predecessors, this pivots on charm, but with a few helpings of humiliation (he strips naked to avoid a predatory spider) and slapstick thrown in, plus some old-style determinedly un-woke action from one parent in particular. He is the more vulnerable, a poor swimmer, requiring a soothing song to fly. The plot is over-plotted and occasionally it seems some incidents have come straight from Room 101, but generally it works. Probably it helps, if I’m permitted of offer such a comment, that they are A-grade beefcake and cheesecake, respectively. Setting that aside, they appear to have mastered the lost art of the rom-com and certain drew appreciative laughter from the audience I was part of. the kind of film that in the olden days would have picked up a sizeable audience on DVD and turned into the kind of cult that guaranteed a return joust.

One Life

A film of two halves when it should have been divided into three-quarters and one-quarter or an even stiffer division. Concerning the efforts of the “British Schindler” Nicholas Winton (Johnny Flynn playing the younger version, Anthony Hopkins the older) to smuggle out of Prague over 600 Jewish children at the outbreak of World War Two. The earlier section is far more gripping and the later section that revolves apparently around an attempt to publicize the previous rescue in order to highlight the plight of later refugees falls mostly flat on its face as it seems more intent on glamorizing the actions of a man who wanted anything but public recognition. Too much time is spent pillorying a society that sanctified such inanities as the long-running That’s Life television program when I felt it would have been more sensible, and fair, to devote more attention to the work of Winton’s collaborators. While the climactic scene where Winton meets, as grown-ups, the children he saved is moving, it feels redundant compared to the actual children-saving.

Next Goal Wins

Eventually, it turns into a feel-good picture but for most of the time seems intent on making fun of Samoans carrying the tag of the world’s worst team. Nobody seems to ask why FIFA is so determined to bring football to countries where there is no interest in the game. Oddly, Michael Fassbender turns in his most accessible performance as the coach drafted in to improve the team, a big ask since he has clearly been a flop at his chosen profession. You could have pinned the movie more easily on the transgender player more accepted in Samoa than virtually any other country in the world who, by default, becomes the first transgender to play in the World Cup.