La cotta (1967) - Ermanno Olmi

Great solid short film (49 minutes), from Italian master Ermanno Olmi. Surprisingly this was made for Italian TV back in '67. Not that you'd know that by watching it, but then Olmi already had 3 features under his belt by the time he did this.

The miniscule plot revolves around a 15 year old Barton Fink look-alike, who like Woody Allen uses his charms rather than his rugged good looks to woo the opposite sex. He seems to be quite a player too, until he meets and falls for a young French dame. From then on she's the one for him. With New Years Eve approaching he makes his move and makes her promise to see in the New Year with him. However when he turns up to pick her up, she's already gone to a party. So despite the worst fog ever (even the taxi driver can't see anything and ends up getting out of the cab to find some tram lines to follow), our young Romeo decides to swallow his pride and go after her. How will it end?

If you've seen Il posto then you'll know what to expect, Olmi creates those awkward teenage moments so well. He also comes up with enough sweet ideas to melt even the coldest heart, having the girl lean in and mist up our hero's glasses with her breath before their first kiss, being the first that comes to mind. I loved the trick for nicking the dads Gin too. It looks great too, all real locations and visibly influenced by the then liberating French New Wave. Could that be why he falls for a French girl rather than an Italian? Just a thought. I love the moments in the back of the cab when our boy drifts into his head and imagines what his first love is up to.

The acting is naturalistic, and I presume most of the cast were kind of new to the craft if you know what I mean. Olmi is also brave enough to skip chunks of the story in order to focus on the bits that are interesting. So there are no real expositional scenes, at first it feels like a bit of jolt as one scene crashes straight into another despite the fact that time has passed. After a few minutes though it just feels fresh and makes the film skip along at a wonderful pace. Highly recommended.

Deep Red (1975) - Dario Argento

David Hemmings plays Marcus Daly, an expat flared white suit/black shirt combo wearing music teacher, living it up in some unnamed Italian city. One night he witnesses a murder, and from then on is plunged head on into Argentoland. There's twists aplenty, the strangest set of characters since Dickens hung up his quill, the odd red herring, comedy that is embarrassingly unfunny and more than enough to make you think afterwards that none of it makes any sense. That's pretty much the long and short of Deep Red, it contains all those things we love about Argento at his best, bizarre intensely beautiful architecture, Daria Nicolodi, a Goblin soundtrack, gore and of course black leather gloves hacking away at victims. All of this is shot through with Dario's distinctive sense of style, beautiful steady dolly shots, frames within frames, gorgeous rich colour schemes and of course that almost dreamlike style in which his stories unfold. Even if by the time the film finishes and the killer is unmasked it makes about as much sense as an episode of Midsomer Murders.

After the success of his animal trilogy Dario decided the time was right to have a stab (I do like a good pun me) at a different genre. Choosing comedy he made Le cinque giornate, which promptly tanked at the cinema. That was the last time he would direct anything outside of the genre that had made his name. He returned to horror with what most consider to be his best two films, this and its follow up Suspiria. Although confusingly in Japan after Suspiria's success, Deep Red was released as Suspiria 2, even though both films have absolutely bugger all to do with each other. Those crazy Japanese eh?
 
Anyway what you really want to know is how good are the killings, right? Er, I was just joking, but without coming across as Henry Portrait the different ways Dario comes up with to off his creations are always a huge part of the enjoyment of his films. This film utilizes the idea of killing folk via means that the viewer can identify with. So apart from the obvious stabbings, after all everyone has cut themselves with a knife even if they haven't quite had a cleaver rammed in their back, causing them to fall forward through a window and impale themselves on the broken shards of glass. There are a few more elaborate means that Dario employs, so we get death by boiling water, death by repeatedly hitting your mouth against a hard object (in this case a mantelpiece and a table) and so on. We're even treated to the sight of a clockwork dummy running out from the shadows, very odd bit of the film that.

Of course the weird thing about Argento is that while his visuals are gory they aren't particularly scary. You'll be watching it through your fingers, but only in the same way you would with Jackass. Dario isn't all that good at making the viewer jump either (the exception in this film being that bastard aforementioned dummy), so drink hot drinks safe in the knowledge they won't end up in your lap. The other thing Dario likes to do is crank up the prog rock Goblin soundtrack anytime there is any hint of something naughty happening. This is one of the better Goblin soundtracks too, even if one of the main themes does crib liberally from Tubular Bells. So to sum up this is a great film to watch if you are new to the world of Argento, and if you're not then you've already seen this, multiple times. One quick word of warning it's worth seeing the longer version of this film, although portions of it don't have an English soundtrack so it reverts to Italian in these spots. Well worth the effort.

Four Flies on Grey Velvet (1971) - Dario Argento

Ask any film mentalist who the greatest Italian Directors are, and chances are you'll end up with a list chock full of the usual names;- Fellini, Pasolini, De Sica, Rossellini, et cetera, et cetera (as the king of Siam was wont to say). All very yawn yawn, but true. The one name that often gets overlooked is that of Dario Argento. Now Argento might look like one of the living dead, and have a haircut that looks like an offended wig, but he is one of cinemas greatest living visualists, and anyone that doesn't agree is wrong basically.

All right so I'm being a bit facetious, but I do mean what I say. His films aren't always the best in the story or acting department, (in fact his recent batch are supposedly so bad, that I've decided to just stay away from them altogether), but they always deliver on the visual side. And lets face it cinema is first and foremost a visual medium. In a way he's the Italian Hitchcock if you will. I'd even say if you don't love the film, you will still enjoy gorging yourself on the beauty he throws onto the screen.

You don't believe me do you? Well take the opening scene of the film I'm supposed to be writing about. A band rehearsal in a huge room. Dario fills the frame with all sorts of bizarre camera set ups. Everything from ultra high crane shots, to having the camera on the neck of a bass. Then there is a shot that is from within a guitar, which threw me for a while until a hand came down and started strumming along to the music. He also uses the camera in a very subjective way, often creeping around the strange houses that his films take place in, using the camera as the point of view of the murderer. Ah did I mention that he only really makes horror films?

This is the only one of his films that I hadn't seen up until his recent loss of talent. It's the third part of his so called animal trilogy (The Bird with the Crystal Plumage & The Cat o' Nine Tails being the other two). Like both of those two films it's not Argento at his best, being neither gory or strange enough as the string of classics he would produce after Four Flies on Grey Velvet.

Anyway, the film, write about the sodding film I hear you chorus across the valleys. Well it was good, if not a mite predictable. Anyone used to a typical giallo film will know what to expect. For those that don't know their giallo, it's a string of murders, normally quite elaborate in their execution, the viewer is as much in the dark as the main character, it's very much a whodunit in much the same way as that TV series Midsomer Murders. Normally the first person that died turns out to be the killer, or it's some character that we only saw once briefly zipping up his trousers. Mad stuff like that, it doesn't make any sense or bear close scrutiny after the film has finished, but as I said you don't watch Argento films for the story, and definitely not for the acting. You see the Italians up until the 80's didn't record any sound on a set, everything is post synced. Well I say synced but it all looks like a Bruce Lee film, the mouth is moving and words are being heard, but something looks weird. But that's the way it is, even in Fellini films. It's charming in a way, and plus it means that you can cast around the whole world and have actors speaking all different languages on set without any problems. Just dub it in afterwards.

Anyway, the film, the film. The whole thing plays out rather rapidly, the drummer in the band has murdered someone (or has he), someone saw him, and now they're blackmailing him except they don't want money. There is some uncomfortably unfunny comedy, a strange gay detective and some of the most wooden acting of any of Dario's films (and that's really saying something). On the plus side it does have a dream like quality too it, which crops up in some of his greater films. The whole execution dream being particularly noteworthy. The murders are a little dull, and there are the usual silly moments where you find yourself shouting at the soon to be victim, to not go up into the attic, when she hears the murderer moving through the dark house. But there you go. Great to look at, with a typically odd 70's Morricone score. I can see myself watching this every time I go through an Argento phase (every 5 years or so). Now if he could just make something decent for his next film.