Lina Wertmuller – The Magnificent 60s

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.

Only spaghetti western directed by a woman. Brings a distinctly feminist feel to that most sexist of the subgenres. You tend to forget that the sexy female Europeans imported to Hollywood as co-stars or to add spice further down the credits were actually top-billed stars in their natïve countries and demonstrated a greater range than the American industry allowed.

Not only do we have Elsa Martinelli (Maroc 7, 1967) as the leather-clad cigar-smoking titular gunslinger, whose watchword is female independence, but it was helmed by arthouse icon Lina Wertmuller (Swept Away, 1974). There’s a thematic consistency lacking in most Italian-made westerns, for example predating Once Upon a Time in the West (1969) in its water imagery. But any potential for lyricism is undercut by the risk attached to being a lone woman. And there’s a Tracy-Hepburn tone to the endless bickering and battle for superiority in her niggling romance with outlaw Blackie (George Eastman).

And, unusually in that decade, a woman who throws caution to the wind and will even bet her body when the money runs out at the poker table, as twisty a meet-cute as a screenwriter could devise. But thereafter it’s a struggle for dominance between the pair. She won’t take orders from a man. He won’t accept female equality even when she shoots the wooden fence he’s sitting on from under him, making him fall to the ground, and for good measure putting a bullet in his heels.

The first act builds up Belle Starr, cool at the poker table, even cooler in the bedroom, and demonstrating the gunplay that attracted her notoriety. The second act take an odd route, a lengthy flashback that digs deep into feminism, the orphaned Belle Starr running away after being sold into marriage by her uncle to an ugly old rich powerful man, traded, effectively, for political favor.

She returns to save a servant condemned to death for the crime of attacking the uncle when he tried to rape her. Sexual humiliation is a theme. Another outlaw Harvey (Robert Woods), who she regards as a platonic friend, steals her clothes as she swims in a lake, and then, having saved her from a posse, forcibly tries to take his reward.

The third act, like the duel between The Man With No Name and The Man in Black, is a case of double- and triple-cross. She refuses to join Blackie’s gang when he plans a million-dollar jewel heist, but hijacks the concept, recruiting her own gang to beat him to the robbery, and teach him a lesson.

But it backfires. Blackie is waiting. She has inadvertently hired his men. In the subsequence shoot-out he is captured. She rides to his rescue. But with their opposing ideas of a woman’s place in the world part on good terms.

The flashback was more subtly observed in Once Upon a Time in the West, and while she shared with Charles Bronson gunslinging skills he was not at any time viewed as a commodity or a piece of property or a candidate for rape. The flashback here fleshes out for the audience the powerlessness of women. But also the kind of camaraderie that is generally also usually only conferred on male characters.

We are pretty conversant with the notion that the gun rules the West. But less conscious of what happens when you are gun-less. Depriving someone of their fundamental weaponry makes them instantly impotent, as humiliating as denying someone water in a desert.

There are some nice directorial touches, blood dripping from a ceiling onto a dinner table, a saloon door opening to cast sudden light onto a corpse, waterfalls suggest sanctuary whereas open water attracts predatory males, and the finale, as they part, of Blackie, desperate to demonstrate his superiority, shooting off her hat from some distance.

Elsa Martinelli is a revelation as a star working to her own beat rather than playing second fiddle to some Hollywood marquee name. This wasn’t Lina Wertmuller’s first film and she had already made an impact with the Rita the Mosquito series, featuring another rebellious woman. Don’t be fooled by the co-directing credit, she replaced debut director Piero Cristofani after a few days.

It’s somewhat ironic that in a contemporary Hollywood attempt to create a female outlaw leader in Cat Ballou (1965), Jane Fonda was upstaged by Lee Marvin, and that in Bonnie and Clyde (1967), despite taking precedence in the title, Faye Dunaway was not the dominant one in the relationship.

By no means a great western but worth a look to see what Elsa Martinelli can achieve when not slotted in to the Hollywood co-star cliche and to get a preview of what Lina Wertmuller could offer.

Decent print on YouTube.

Tag: Lina Wertmuller

Violent City /Family (1970) ****

The Belle Starr Story (1968) ***