Don’t Torture A Duckling (1972)

The copy of director Lucio Fulci’s Don’t Torture A Duckling (1972) on Tubi that I watched felt like it was an older DVD transfer uploaded as the image quality was desaturated and a little fuzzy, which added to how the Italian village of Accendura comes across in the movie. The rocky hills seem almost yellow and the town centre, which is made of white stone, feels further visually drained of life.

Aside from the presence of sex symbol Barbara Bouchet (from The Red Queen Kills Seven Times) – playing the daughter of an absent rich industrialist, moved back to her hometown to kick her drug addiction – this giallo thriller feels different to the others shot in Rome, or taking place within the fashion or publishing industry. There’s not a lot of glamour in this provincial existence and that’s further compounded by the string of child murders that upset the town’s quiet existence, and add an eerie atmosphere to the film’s thriller mechanisms. As young boys turn up strangled and bashed, the police and an outside investigator pursue leads and a few suspects, each one causing the town’s mob mentality to rise up. Even as a newspaper man (Tomas Milan) and Bouchet’s character eventually become the film’s main investigators, there doesn’t feel like a fixed protagonist and everyone feels included within its procedural narrative. One of the most striking characters is Florinda Balkan (from Fulci’s A Lizard In A Woman’s Skin), harried and unkempt, observed in the opening scenes digging frantically in the dirt upon a hill and finding the bones of a baby’s skeleton. We find out later that she is an outcast who believes in witchery and black magic, and there are hidden secrets among the townspeople, as well as a latent capacity for violence.

Don’t Torture A Duckling has that narcoleptic quality, which I do enjoy, of giallo thrillers; usually I find giallos a bit sleep-inducing due to the drawn-out, convoluted mysteries, and yet here there’s a clarity to what’s happening even as the identity of the killer is held back until the very end. For the majority of its length, I thought this was good, a solid thriller, and was wondering a bit why it’s held in high regard for Fulci fans. Apparently this is one of his first films to get stuck into gore and body horror, and there’s a clear and striking sequence halfway through where Fulci’s brutality is on display, a very upsetting moment that underscores his critique of small town mentality. And then I was like, oh I get it, this is a strong Fulci moment! The other clear highlight is the very ending, more because of its absurdity as it collapses tones between an image of gore-laden violence and sentimental music by Riz Ortolani, a strong conclusion that speaks to the specific quality Fucli has as a horror filmmaker that would be expanded upon in his later masterpieces like City Of The Living Dead.

Even if a body looks like a fake dummy, as long as it can be demolished to show skull and blood, that’s cinema, Fulci-style! Recommended.

Merry-Go-Round (1981)

“… generally considered a failure – but what a failure it is!” A quote from the Mubi “our take” description accompanying Jacques Rivette’s Merry-Go-Round (1981), and if you do any cursory reading around the film’s making you can understand why even the director himself considered it a “failure”. The third of four planned movies he was making in quick succession, Rivette suffered a mental breakdown during filming, and only completed it on the encouragement of his actors; one of the two leads, Maria Schneider (from Last Tango In Paris, The Passenger) also was undergoing health issues and could not complete filming. Why watch a failure then? There were two Rivette movies on Mubi that I hadn’t seen, and I tried watching the pirate revenge movie Noirot but couldn’t get into it (I will try again). I am keen to see more Rivette movie and understand his whole thing more: the sense of games, theatricality, surreality, improvisation and play. And wanting the more contemporary option – contemporary to its time (though it was actually completed in the late 1970s and only released in 1981).

Merry-Go-Round has the skeleton of a thriller buried within and it flirts with genre trappings – fights, shootings, double-crosses – but for the majority of its two-hour plus running time, it’s not too bothered about getting there, which I’m sure will test some viewer’s patience. Two strangers to each other – Leo (Schneider) and Ben (Joe Dallensandro) – meet in a French hotel. They have both received telegrams to meet Elizabeth (Daniele Gegauff) there; Leo is Elizabeth’s sister, and Ben is Elizabeth’s boyfriend. As Leo and Ben pursue Elizabeth’s whereabouts through directions and clues, they become embroiled in a plot involving the disappearance of Leo and Elizabeth’s father, presumed dead, and a lost of sum of money (four million francs). However, what you mainly observe is Leo and Ben travelling between country townhouses, most of them abandoned, searching and talking between rooms. This is a rough movie with the dialogue occasionally mumbled and inaudibly recorded. Intercut to the narrative are two parallel tracks. One track is a dream space where the characters are being chased: Ben through the woods, Elizabeth on a beach (though replaced with another actress, Hermine Karagheuz). The other track intercut with the main narrative is footage of two musicians Barre Phillips and John Surman performing the downbeat jazz score in a room. The sense of exhaustion to the film emanates from the repetitive dream sequences, the sense of constantly rushing, or falling in the sand.

Yet the film is still intriguing and compelling, particularly with the combined presence of Schneider and Dallensandro, both wearing double denim, like a pair of 1970s burn-outs on a scavenger hunt, Schneider’s withdrawn quality contrasting against the Dallensandro’s New York street tough aura. I knew of Dallensandro a bit – “Little Joe” from the Warhol scene – but this was the first film (aside from The Limey) I was watching him in from this period, pony-tail swagger amongst all the French cast. A noirish film running on fumes and improvisation, but that still finds moments of grace and artistry, particularly by the time of its one-two punch denouement. Recommended, to a degree.

Un Flic (1972)

Grey buildings standing imposingly on a French coastline. An incoming storm whips the ocean and rain washes over deserted streets. A car moves slowly with four men in trench-coats and hats. They stop on a street corner and through the mist is a bank with its lights on, just about to close for the day, and the street lights turn on in the distance. This is the eerie opening to Un Flic (1972; A Cop), the last film directed by Jean-Pierre Melville. I love his masterpiece, Le Samourai, and only recently caught up with Le Circle Rouge; Un Flic is his third collaboration with actor Alain Delon, though this time he switches from playing a cool, silent criminal to a weary, silent cop (named Coleman). Melville’s trademark cool and elegant approach to the crime genre becomes emptied out here. There are empty streets in key scenes and empty people for protagonists. As Delon does the rounds, visiting crime scenes in his car with his subordinate, we observe Richard Crenna as Simon, leader of the thieves who rob the bank and are planning a further elaborate heist. Quite a thing to see Rambo’s colonel in the Le Samourai trench-coat, dubbed into French, and his youthful yet craggy face blends right in with the jaded looking criminals. The third part of this triangle is Catherine Deneuve as Crenna’s girlfriend, a nightclub hostess, who is also having an affair with Delon’s character. Yet Melville doesn’t seem to care about any emotions exchanged; everything is another empty transaction. Hard to tell if the artificiality on display – such as the painted backdrops of certain scenes and the very obvious models during its sustained, wordless second act heist involving a helicopter dropping Crenna onto a train to steal precious cargo – is part of the intended aesthetic? Or is simply an older filmmaker not bothered that a real helicopter is intercut with a wide shot where it looks like a child’s toy? Films like Le Samourai and Le Circle Rouge have an artistic tension in their bored observation, watching process and having characters say less with words and more through precise actions. There is similar tension in Un Flic but also a resigned nihilism, emphasising the law side of the coin as a hollow proposition. There’s a drained, blue-grey early-morning ambience to Un Flic, and the result is that it feels much more alienated than the Dirty Harry inspired Euro-cop movies that would follow in its wake (some of which would star Delon). I also loved the striking editing of people exchanging looks, head-on close-up shots cutting back rapidly between each other, indicating more emotionally and visually than the few words said. Available to stream on Kanopy in Australia. Recommended.

Let The Corpses Tan (2017)

A leather glove tightened. Sweat dripping down a lined face. The snap of a firearm being loaded. The glow emanating from a gold bar. Let The Corpses Tan (2017; Laissez bronzer les cadavres) luxuriates in these details, fetishing them in close up and heightened sound design. As filmmakers, Helene Cattet and Bruno Forzani have a love of genre cinema, but they way they express it is truly original, in my opinion, but very divisive. Aesthetics become primary, narrative and dialogue secondary as a focus. It’s about the image, the sound and the cut (both figurative and literal). Let The Corpses Tan is my favourite of their three films (so far) and it has a clearer story, based on the pulp novel by Jean-Patrick Manchette and Jean-Pierre Bastid. Rather than the giallo pastiche of the couple’s previous films, Amer and The Strange Color Of Your Body’s Tears, Let The Corpses Tan is beholden to spaghetti westerns and Euro-crime thrillers.

Set on an island in Corsica, the story basically deals with a standoff between a group of thieves hiding out in an artist’s house and a pair of motorcycle cops accidentally on their trail. The loot is a fat stack of gold bars and caught in the crossfire are the resident artists and visitors as well as a scheming lawyer, the connection between the two groups. There is erotic tension felt between some of them, and the film’s style is heavily invested in the erotics of everyone’s faces. Think of the climax to The Good, The Bad And The Ugly but stretched out to ninety minutes as time is slowed down with time-code intercuts and incorporating everyone’s perspective, jumping back and forth by a few minutes. A standoff, but it’s also an eternity. Surrealistic interludes depict a shadowy nude woman towering over strangers, either being subjugated or dominating those in her path. Some kind of hovering dreamscape where fate and power are depicted.

I’ve always wanted to revisit this one. I remember seeing this in the cinema thanks to Revelation Film Festival, loving it for the most part, but nodding off a bit in the third act due to the stop-start approach to pacing and the nocturnal passage before the sunrise climax. After having now seen Cattet-Forzani’s other films and being more used to their fractured commitment to style, I was more ready for it. This is my favourite of their work so far and it really simmers in the visceral details: sweat, skin, gold, leather, blood, piss. There is something difficult about their experimental, abstract approach. But I also think their films are quite unique and singular in how they remix their influences for visual and sonic impact. Features a cast of actors largely unknown to me, but obviously cast for their faces and their looks – the main stand out is the person I recognise most, Romanian-American actor Elina Löwensohn as the most mysterious, bewitching of the artists. The excellent soundtrack is compiled from other film scores including the work of Ennio Morricone, Stelvio Cipriani and Nico Fidenco. Available to stream on SBS On Demand in Australia. Recommended.

Street Law (1974)

Franco Nero and his moustache get into trouble in Street Law (1974) when he is taken hostage in a bank robbery. The opening credits have already spelled out that the city is rampant with robberies and murders, backed by the beautiful soundtrack work of Guido and Maurizio De Angelis (the prog-rock stoner jam of ‘Goodbye Friend’ is a raucous opening track). Beaten and humiliated, but left alive, Nero’s character is angered by police inactivity and decides to make his own investigation – even though he’s a chemical engineer without any training, weapons or skills. I appreciated that this Death Wish type story didn’t lean into the usual trope of someone brutalising and murdering his wife or family; his wife is played by Barbara Bach who is wasted in a nothing role but is also nicely left alone. Here, it’s more about damaged masculinity and the movie’s contention that Citizens need to Rise Up, which is all pretty ham-bone stuff. Nero is compellingly over-the-top – haunted eyes and flailing limbs – as he barges his way with his slightly grey hair and blue turtleneck into a criminal underworld and gets in over his head. Once Nero makes an acquaintance, a petty crook played by Giancarlo Prete (from Escape From The Bronx and The New Barbarians; he always gives me a Paul Rieser vibe) becomes his guide and partner into squaring off against the three bank robbers, the movies kicks into gear. There are some amazing slow-motion man versus car chases (the shot of Nero running away from a car is a thing of beauty) and a climactic warehouse shoot-out where Nero slings a formidable shotgun. Directed by Enzo G Castellari and a HD quality copy was available to stream on YouTube; I still have yet to see the other big Poliziotteschi/Eurocrime movie from Castellari and Nero, High Crime, which they made before this one. Recommended.