 |
||||
|
Cani arrabbiati [1974] CAUTION: THIS REVIEW DISCUSSES THE TWIST ENDING Unless the Ayatollahs ever let Orson Welles's The Other Side of Midnight out of the vault it has languished in since the fall of the Shah, this 1974 Mario Bava suspense thriller stands as the most astonishing quarter-century-late movie ever delivered. By now, Eyeball readers will have heard the story of how the film was stalled late in post-production by a bankruptcy and went into a limbo from which it has only just emerged. And any joy at its resurrection [on DVD yet] is tempered by the fact that it's still not really available in a format most fans can use, much less playing at a cinema near you. Rights tussles even prevented it from appearing at the NFT Bava retrospective where it should, by rights, have been the triumphant centrepiece. Even more remarkable than the circumstances of its arrival is the fact that the film is at once such a fresh and striking piece of work and so different from anything else in the Bava canon, forcing us to reassess all assumptions about the director. There might perhaps be a link with the cynical misanthropy of Antefatto in attitude, but the mood, pacing and intensity of the film are entirely different. Cani arrabbiati - aka Semaforo rosso / Stop Light - seems, especially in a sequence where a couple of grinning grunge psychopaths force an abducted woman to urinate in front of them, to have been influenced by Wes Craven's The Last House on the Left, and perhaps also that Al Lettieri-Sally Struthers sub-plot of Peckinpah's The Getaway. After a payroll heist, during which a couple of chemical company employees are killed by hoods in Clockwork Orange masks and the robbers' driver is shot and killed, three fleeing thugs, plus a woman snatched in an underground car park, force their way into a car driven by the buttoned-down, diminutive Riccardo [Riccardo Cucciolla]. Also in the car is an unconscious but ailing child, wrapped in a blanket despite the heat of the day, whom Riccardo says he must get to hospital. Doc [Maurice Poli], leader of the band, insists Riccardo drive them out of the city, while his less controlled confederates - black-gloved, borderline hysterical knifeman Blade [Aldo Caponi] and the hulking, concupiscent, cackling Thirtytwo [Luigi Montefiore] - are distracted by the opportunity to torment and harass the innocent but annoying Maria [Lea Lander]. Despite the specific, immediate precedents, this is an old, old story, familiar not only from 'home invasion' thrillers like The Desperate Hours but - given the on-the-road urgency, more appropriately - from a great many Westerns, especially Budd Boetticher efforts like Ride Lonesome or The Tall T. As in the Boetticher films, grudging respect grows between the controlled leader of the crooks and the cool-under-pressure hero even though both know they will in the end try to kill each other. Their professional kinship is underlined because they are both disgusted by the unnecessary obnoxiousness of the villain's sidekicks. 'When he sees a pair of tits, nothing else matters,' Doc says of Thirtytwo [so called because that's his dick-size in centimetres]. Riccardo is no Randolph Scott, however, and just keeps his head down, focusing on the kid, while Maria is driven out of her mind by the incessant and extreme pestering. In the end, it has to be Doc who rescues her, taking advantage of a tunnel to shoot Thirtytwo, who spends the rest of the film dying even as his former comrades agree to split his share of the loot and dump his body. Playing out almost in real time and confined to the interior of the car for at least half the film - in that heat, you just know how bad the huge, sweaty Thirtytwo must smell even before he's shot - this is very much an exercise in suspense, abetted by a nerve-jangling Stelvio Cipriani score. Oddly, the most composed and Bava-like shot - a silhouette under the credits of a sobbing woman whose identity doesn't become clear until the very last - is the one piece he didn't film. The rest is almost the antithesis of his usual smooth, dreamlike style: inside the car, unobtrusive zooms and pans break up what might have been visual monotony, and the action sequences are shot with a grittier, rougher feel than the maestro tried elsewhere. There is a Hitchcock-style chase through a cornfield, and several potentially or actually explosive encounters with characters who get in the way - an old friend of Riccardo's met in a roadside mini-market, the dozing proprietor of an out-of-the-way garage, an unbearably chatty woman who forces the group to give her a lift, a grape farmer. We are constantly aware of the danger these people pose to anyone who intervenes. Like Antefatto, this doesn't let us get close to any
of the characters: three disposable women hostages are casually killed,
Blade and Thirtytwo are so out of control we catch on immediately that
Doc should never have relied on them in the first place and Riccardo
is ultimately revealed to be just as crooked as his abductors. When
they get to the end of the road and Doc orders the murder of the hostages,
Riccardo reaches into the child's blanket and pulls out a pistol, then
shoots Doc and Blade, with Maria being taken out by a stray spray from
Blade's tommy gun. Though Riccardo has let everyone think the boy is
his son, he is actually the kidnapped son of the crying woman from under
the credits and the film ends with him making his ransom demands to
her over the telephone. In a traditional giallo, a twist like
this would come out of the blue and the ostensible hero would have been
as ingratiating as possible before revealing his true colours, but Cani
arrabbiati is so swift and merciless that it hasn't had time
for fakery. Like Doc, we've sensed all along the coldness in the mild-seeming
driver; the twist is not a betrayal of audience involvement [cf: Kevin
Costner in No Way Out] but a confirmation that everyone
is as rotten as we always thought they were. First Published In: Eyeball [issue unknown] Visit Kim's Official Website at www.johnnyalucard.com
|
||||