Spaghetti and Sandals.

Blasetti with Gino Cervi.

Director Alessandro Blasetti appears to have been the
major figure in Italian nineteen thirties film making. His status has come under attack on two fronts. He was an admirer of the fascists and his work has been hard to locate, though diligent foraging in ethnic video outlets did shake loose original language copies of his impressive 1931 Resurrectio, 1933 La tavola dei poveri and 1935 Vecchia guardia to challenge my limited Italian. 

 So interest picked up when a sharp but re-framed version of  Blasetti’s 1938 Ettore Fieramosca appeared on You Tube.  It was derived from the 1833 Massimo D'Azeglio work, which had already been twice filmed. In the Mussolini period, it was considered to have patriotic relevance for showing Italians aligning with Spain to overthrow a Sixteenth Century invasion by France. Unfortunately the film is one of Blasetti’s weaker efforts.

Ettore Fieramosca opens with ravaged peasants streaming into the film's solid looking castle, where the draw bridge is rolled up to provide their safety. Arriving outside, Condottiero Ettore Fieramosca, represented by Blasetti’s regular leading man Gino Cervi still young enough to play a tousle headed juvenile, takes a dim view of this, particularly when a castle archer lets loose an arrow, which takes down one of his horses. He demands hospitality.

Inside the Keep, Cervi is faced by another Blasetti regular, long serving Elisa Cegani as owner Giovanna di Morreale, surounded by schemeing courtiers whose menials fill their wine goblets over their shoulders at diner. As in La tavola dei poveri,  there’s some nice use of twilight filming. Skinny dipping with the castle kids, Gino is shown the secret river entrance to the castle crypt and, through the decorative ventilators, he sees Cegani at prayers.

Opposing armies maneuver on the hills and a battle is mounted, complete with charging cavalry and hand to hand combat - the film’s big set piece. Cervi joins the castle’s ineffectual defense and is smuggled wounded into the crypt by sympathisers. Gegani nurses him back to health. Not content with the outcome, Gino/Ettore mounts the historic Disfida di Barletta, where thirteen Italian knights confront thirteen French knights, their heraldic banners planted at the side of the battle field to be lowered as their owners are overcome in the struggle. Finally, the survivors dismount and face off with drawn swords. Ettore carries Giovanna’s colours and she waits on the battlements to see if he will survive to return them to her.

Ettore Fieramosca - Elisa Cegani

The film doesn’t lack ambition, with big elaborately decorated settings and crowds of dress extras. It draws on two very Italian imageries - Opera with its dancers, decor and costumes and Catholicism, complete with the service with the long candles and taking the knee at the altar. Looking at Cegani in her white cowl, she could be a nun - if she wasn’t plastered with make up. Camp follower Clara Calamai (later in Ossessione and Deep Red) makes a much livelier impression.

A stunt man from Metro’s fifties Ivanhoe, told me that jousting was one of the most difficult forms of action to stage. For this reason, it had been rare in films up till then (think Elvey’s second Wandering Jew) and  there was no experience to draw on. Looking at the Blasetti film - or Alexander Nevsky - it’s impossible to miss the superiority of contemporary Hollywood work - the De Mille The Crusades or the Curtiz - Errol Flynn films. Blasetti’s swashbuckling 1939 Un'aventura di Salvator Rosa, with Cervi again, is a decided advance, though it has some of the same ponderousness, like Henry King’s post war Italian-filmed Prince of Foxes. Salvatore Rosa is one of the director's best films however. It strikingly anticipates the superior Tyrone Power Mark of Zorro of the following year. 

You Tube and TUBI also offer another Italian costume adventure, an old favorite Vittorio Cottafavi's 1961 Ercole alla conquista di Atlantide / Hercules Conquers Atlantis/ Hercules and the Captive Women.  Seeing this again was high on my bucket list. It is still the film, that the few of us who paid these any attention, decided was the pick of the mid Century Pepla, the Italian sword and sandal cycle. It’s easily the best of the half dozen or so (depending on your criteria) that director Vittorio Cottafavi made, generally recognisable from the presence of Ettore Manni, midget Salvatore Furnari and yellow  smoke.

Ercole alla conquista di Atlantide - Reg Park.

 

 

Cottafavi was one of the signatories of the original Neo Realist manifesto along with De Sica, Rossellini and Zavattini, a leading interpreter of the work of Ugo Betti and someone who got a whole issue of “Presence du Cinéma” to himself, before moving to R.A.I. to make accomplished versions of literary classics. Despite a varied and frequently impressive output, Cottafavi's reputation did not travel. Bertrand Tavernier claimed that Communist critics bracketed him and Henri George Clouzot as film makers who did not show sufficient respect to WW2 Resistance movements. I once found myself defending his work to a local academic, who put up a clip of Hercules Conquers Atlantis as a joke - Fay Spain’s “Love me Hercules and together we will rule over men and Gods” scene too.

For Hercules Conquers Atlantis, one of several English speaking versions, they start as they mean to go, running the titles over the tavern number that appears to have been the first scene of the Italian original. This itself is a virtuoso exercise, apparently filmed in a single run of the camera. (possible edit when it briefly moves behind a dark pillar) A brawl breaks out. Manni actually picks up and throws a stunt man out of shot and the clearly classical trained dancing girl continues a strenuous Peter Vander Sloot routine through all the confusion, while imposing former Mr. World Reg Park’s Hercules finishes his meal untroubled. In other versions, the scene exists in a different edit. These films fell into the hands of fringe distributors who saw it as their function to make them over to their own taste.

Hercules is now back home in Thebes, relaxing with wife Luciana Angiolillo and teenage son Luciano Marin. However the sky turns red and a booming voice prophecy rings out. The newly federated Council of Greek Kings is unimpressed. Alessandro Sperli is told by his queen mother not to meddle and the Spartan ruler, a youthful Gian Maria Volonte just making his name, does a spear throw to emphasise his point but more gung ho local Theban royal Manni is determined to sail out and investigate. All those tavern brawlers who have been in training for such a moment are nowhere to be found. Manni has to recruit a crew of mutinous cut throats and Galley Slaves and kidnap his friend Park, who dozes in the sun on deck unaware that his son and midget associate tag along. Don’t expect any of this to make too much sense - not in English at least. 

The production runs to a practical sea going galley, so we face a bit of an anti climax, when the storm at sea is done with a tacky model. The mist clears and Hercules Park finds himself on the beach of the island home of  Proteus, who we are told by maiden Laura Efrikan, being eaten by its rocks, can be “the air that you breathe, the land you walk on” but  is visualised as guys in lizard suits and lion skins, as well as a snake, a stuffed eagle on wires, a gasoline blaze and finally elderly Maurizio Coffarelli. Park of course subdues him, releasing Efrikan from the rock which bleeds - straight out of Dante that.       

Laura says this won’t go down well with the Queen of Atlantis, who devised her sacrifice to maintain the kingdom’s divine protection, so Reg undertakes to explain things - cut to that imposing Atlantis decor with the ten horse chariot being driven through the populous city square. Its giant decors and crowds of extras prevent this from looking like a cheap production, even with a fair amount of hand me down. 

Reg is confronted by Queen Antinea, Fay Spain an odd choice hired in for name recognition in the English speaking market no doubt. She does a surprisingly regal job. He’s about to start his defense when Laura says “Hello mother!”  

At this point, they inject the plot of Pierre Benoît’s “L’Atalantide” with amnesiac Manni wandering the royal palace, before they side line him in a sarcophagus. More giant sets and ballet. Opera is still with us but we have lost the Catholics. This one is explicitly pagan with the malevolent presence of Proteus in conflict with Zeus, who his son Hercules occasionally calls on "Oh, great Zoos..." 

Hercules Conquers Atlantis.

When Hercules looks like he’s not going to go for her power sharing proposal, queen Fay slips him a royal roofie but our hero is too smart for that and escapes to debate with High Priest Mario Petri. It’s not hard to see Petri as a mythological Robert J. Oppenheimer, disclosing the secret of the destructive mineral deposit (the blood of Uranus of course) without sufficient consideration of what it will do in the wrong hands. 

Meanwhile Hercules’ son and Antinea’s daughter have become an item, with talk about incinerating them, before Park and Furnari show up to throw the funeral barge crew overboard. At this point the film starts stretching things with succeeding climaxes - a revolt of the slaves, some not all that impressive large set destruction and squeezed Haroun Tazzieff volcano footage.

Reg Park, who would foster the career of Arnold Scwarzenegger, was the most imposing of the cycle's champion body builder heroes. He manages some quite demanding stunting, including climbing the cave wall and driving the chariot at least once, though we can’t see whether there’s someone out front guiding the horses. Park was not muscle bound like Steeve Reeves, who kept on dropping Mylene Demongeot, while carrying her for The Giant of Marathon.  He was a passable actor - or at least half of one. In the Italian version Ivo Garrani pulls a double shift playing the King of Megalia and voicing Park as well. His timbre isn’t bad but Garrani has the familiar delivery of those busy dubbing actors of the day. Someone who looks like Park really needs James Earl Jones on the track. 

Fay Spain's Antinea & masked albino zombies.

There are traces of other hands in this one. The jokey anachronisms turn up again in screenwriter Ducio Tessari's Son's of Thunder and Mario Bava’s participation in the effects is now noted. These vary from dodgy models to the startling mirror shot in the scarlet passageway, where we get some of the film’s best material, with the black mask armored albino zombies, who are genuinely menacing. Cottafavi's on screen introduction to his TV "Antigone" Includes comment on the Armet masks which differentiate the Chorus from the crowd. Whether Bava and Cottafavi collaborated in person is an intriguing speculation.

Age has diminished this one. Details don’t register on the small screen - perspective adding to foreshortening on the classic sword used as a missile or the red jet of poisoned wine from Park’s inverted face in the blue lit room. The colour is better in the Italian copy but we are still a long way from the glories of the 70mm. version. 

Any notion that this one rates the the kind of restoration effort that is being poured into Rosellini (or Burning an Illusion) would be treated with ridicule. However Hercules Conquers Atlantis deserves its place in popular culture. Even with a few rough edges, it is an immensely entertaining piece and, when you are settling in for a fun ride, it keeps on pulling you up with stylish pieces of staging or surprise references. Few films repay repeated viewing so well.

You can always check these out in Derek Elley's "The Epic Film: Myth and History" (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984) which I have referenced.

Spielberg, Witney & English.

The new Indiana Jones movie has opened to a mixed reception. Its evolution is well known.

Back in 1977 George Lucas had had a phenomenal success with Star Wars (later re-birthed Star Wars Episode 7 - A New Hope ).  If a retread of  Flash Gordon could coin it, Lukas, Stephen Spielberg and their mates figured that they could clean up with the old Chapter Play format. They brought in a copy of Don Winslow of the Navy, a serial which Ford Beebe and Ray Taylor turned out for Universal in 1942 but they got bored and gave up watching a few episodes in. This was probably their first experience of the form since puberty and the real thing didn’t match their childhood memories. However its cliff hanger, with the hero menaced by a giant churning propeller, turned up in the resulting Indiana Jones movie, Raiders of the Lost Ark.

That was good for a five movie, near half-Century blockbuster series, which cemented lead Harrison Ford into superstardom. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, the current release, cost three hundred million dollars. What had been an exercise in nostalgia has itself now been around long enough to generate its own nostalgia phenomenon, with Palace serving it up with a cup of tea on pensioner days.

My own exposure to serials had come with Saturday Matinee shows of the pre-television days, when neighborhood theaters competed in the number they could jam in to attract the highly selective kiddie public. I was ripped off. Columbia had a monopoly here, so in my most impressionable years I was deluged with the output of the Sam Katzman Unit. I won’t say it was the trough in the development of the serial form. The Weiss Brothers, for a while employers of John Wayne, could give them heavy competition there but Katzman’s serials were totally formulaic. In the same tacky locations, the same obscure support actors menaced a succession of scaled down comic strip heroes. Directors Thomas Carr and Fred F. Sears did their best. Veteran Spencer Benet never even tried. Later I would get a buzz out of The Man With Bogart’s Face’s camera panning from the Hollywood Sign to the mouth of the Bronson Canyon cave Katzman kept on using to introduce their own plaster studio cave interior. In every serial, they managed to re-cycle the hut they blew up on the back lot early fifties, even including the Athurian one, where it falls victim to a round bomb with a fuse hanging out of it.

Naturally Protea, Pearl White, Dr. Mabuse and Fantômas were unknown to the Saturday Matinee trade but Columbia’s cuckoos in the nest also managed to keep the work of the great Republic teams out of all but the most down market area movie houses. Exceptionally I did manage to crack it for an Episode of Zorro’s Fighting Legion at Redfern Lawson. Little surprise that I was at pains to inject these into later film society events, pursued them into London’s Cartoon Cinemas, for a sustained innings at Langlois’ Paris Cinémathèque, where beautiful first generation copies played in original language four hour sessions and a swansong on Channel 24 before Mal Turnbull pulled their plug in lock step with Trumpy and US public broadcasting.

Well, hopes of a return of the old buzz survive the first reels of the new Indian Jones and the Dial of Destiny. C.G. de-aged Harrison Ford arrives in German Uniform, trying to retrieve another mythic relic, the Lance of Longinus, which Adolf Hitler imagines will reverse his WW2 losses. However, rather anticlimactically, this proves to be a fake modern replica and attention switches to the Antikythera of Archimedes and the Fuhrer’s own archaeologist, Mads Mikkelsen no less, heading up a squad of Nazi goons, roughing up Indy’s side kick academic Toby Jones in (and outside) a variety of motor bikes, armored cars, trains in tunnels or bombed bridges. (Remember Lost Ark's “trucks - what trucks?”). There’s the usual gobbledygook about supernatural powers but Mads has worked it out. He plans a date with history.

An edit and socks are drying on the sixties tenement balcony clothes line while an authentically aged Ford's Dr. Indy bangs on his hippie neighbors’ door with a baseball bat, in a New York of Nescafe, Moon Walks on fuzzy TV, Angela Davis lookalikes, overhead projectors and quarter inch tape decks. Ford’s on the point of retiring and his history department presents him with a glass box clock, which he passes on to the first homeless man he meets on a traffic crossing. However his gloomy retirement is disrupted by a pushy, British accented young woman, who is the only one who had any idea of what his boring lecture on Mediterranean pottery was all about.

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny - Waller-Bridge & Ford.

 

 

Yes, it’s Phoebe Waller-Bridge the much publicised leading lady of Fleabag, who proves able to assert herself in the familiar Lukasfilm comic strip world, where despite all her determined athletics Cate Blanchette had been lost. Phoebe is Indy’s goddaughter grown and she gets to share in the pursuits, shoot-outs and grouchy one liners. Ford demands “Why are you chasing this thing that made your father crazy?” describing the relic changing hands between greedy owner-dealers and she comes back “That’s Capitalism.”

With a touch of the Werner Von Brauns, Mikkelsen meanwhile has got the inside track with the U.S. President, having enabled the Moon Shot and, after doing Space, he’s moved on to Time. Mads understands the significance of Archimedes’ dial, which has survived Toby’s instruction to Indy to have the thing destroyed.

Well, cut to the chase - literally - with the disposal of various henchmen and the dash through the Macy’s day parade on a traffic cop’s horse, like the one that Dennis Weaver’s Sam McCloud copied from Clint Eastwood in Coogan’s Bluff. This kicks off the succession of colourful locations, linked by the little plane’s dotted line on the map again.

Harrison Ford & George Lucas.

Here, rather than build excitement, the relentless scene changing and stunt action makes attention wander, in a two hour thirty four minute movie. Are the accelerated re-caps in the chapter breaks a necessary part of the experience? 

 

We get Ford/Indy touring the Arab world and the Mediterranean with another diversity hire boy sidekick in light-fingered Ethan Isidore, and Greek (!) Antonio Banderas’ deep sea diving introducing eels to evoke our hero's fear of snakes. Add a tunnel full of scorpions. The Tuk Tuk Material isn’t as imposing now that we’ve seen Gerard Jugnot do Pourris gâtés and what happens to that ride along Nazi aviator? 

 

Phoebe’s change of heart is like the attempt to give our hero a back story with the Shia LaBoeuf character from Ep. Four evoked as a Nam vet, not to mention the new happy ending. More promising is seeing our hero mesmerised by the Siege of Syracuse, after a lifetime of study, though it’s that same destructive Indy, melting off the millennia-old inscription to get to the gold disk. None of this resonates the way it needs to. 

The cast are great and technical work is faultless but we’ve been there, seen that.

By accident, Dial of Destiny surfaced when I was half way through the so nice You Tube copy of Republic’s l940 vintage, twelve episode King of the Royal Mounted, handled by William Witney and John English in their prime. Identical hopes shape the exploits of both Dr. Indy and Sergeant King. Seeing the productions together was extraordinarily revealing. I came away with some disturbing conclusions about popular entertainment. 

Allen Rocky Lane.

Before America's entry into WW2, Allen Rocky Lane couldn’t be seen to be opposing Germans so he was up against “the World’s Largest Secret Espionage Organisation” which sends an implausibly under-manned Submarine into Mackenzie Sound to drop off Master Spy Robert Strange. The bad hats have discovered that Compound X, previously used to cure Polio can be deployed in magnetic mines to wipe out the allied U-Boat blockade. ( "...and I thought you wanted to help with infantile paralysis")

The R.C.M.P. appear to be at a distinct disadvantage as Strange, scar-faced Harry Cording and busy Bryant Washburn (memorable opposite Joseph Schildcraut & Bessie Love in the De Mille Young April) have a seemingly unlimited force of expendable pug uglies (career serial henchman Jack Ingram isn’t even listed on the paper work) while the Mounties are restrained by the fact that wardrobe can only manage half a dozen uniforms, with their pointy hats and pistols on lanyards. This is particularly problematic when they have to parade the entire contingent for Herbert Rawlinson’s funeral.

Just like Dial of Destiny, this one catches us off guard by killing off good guys. Similarly they back-story their characters, with Lane the son of station commander Rawlinson, having to prove himself a worthy successor and sub-hero Robert Kellard and heroine Lita Conway, brother and sister who grew up in the forest environs of their dad‘s Caribou Pitchblende Mining Company, knowing the hidden locations of trails and auxiliary shafts. This interest in pitchblende anticipates the WW2 F.B.I. putting agents onto Alfred Hitchcock when he referenced it for Spellbound. 

Like Waller-Bridge and sixty years before Me Too, Conway has to be shown an active participant, dropping flares from her stolen plane and swinging onto the rope that prevents trapper Bud Buster’s spiked bear trap from descending on Rocky.

King of the Royal Mounted - Washburn, Lane & Strange

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Regulars will already have seen those transfers between galloping horses or speeding speed boats exploding on the rocks, the plane crash, the timber finish van going off the highway, reproduced as miniatures by the Lydeckers, who MGM had to borrow from Republic to generate Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo. Their submarine, shown up by surface tension in the studio tank is not up to standard.

Our hero must of course also face the back-projected forest fire, a great big timber mill saw which takes a real long time to get nearer and nearer to Rocky, a train crash (the Mounties are remarkably ineffectual in protecting national infrastructure), a vat of bubbling chemicals in a substantial studio treatment plant and, particularly striking, a genuine dam spillway which Sergeant King gets sucked through.

The keen eyed will spot our hero metamorphosing into Dave Sharpe for these exploits, though Lane does turn up in the reverse angles or struggle back to the surface after the high dives. The stunt work, always deft at Republic, is particularly vigorous here but we can’t help noticing they impose a tree branch between the camera and the double who does that nice vault into the saddle.

Lane could manage a couple of expressions - dauntless and brow furrowed, which gets him through. His Sergeant King shows up again in Witney’s imaginatively titled 1942 King of the Mounted. He went on to front a series of Rocky Lane B westerns. Sidekick (“Take over Tom”) Robert Kellard also stayed with the force, heading up Perils of the Royal Mounted in 1942.

By contrast, Dial of Destiny involved a slate of A-Listers and the skills of flocks of the best technicians drawing on an extra sixty years of technical advances. You can see three hundred million dollars on the screen. The same aspirations are at play. The makers also swell their theme as the familiar silhouette of their adventurer hero races from one peril to the next. I was almost embarrassed to feel that knee jerk excitement, when Sergeant Rocky galloped through the piney woods, as Californian Redwoods doubled for the Canadian wilds, to the strains of Cy Feuer’s small studio musician orchestration with a bit of “The Maple Leaf Forever” thrown in. However I got bored with Indiana Jones’ relentless parade of genuine location action set piece spectaculars, propped up by John Williams now familiar march. Dial of Destiny echoed the let down represented by the 1932 Pál Fejös 1947 Jean Sascha and 1964 André Hunebelle Fantomases or the 1963 Georges Franju Judex. Let's not start on the later Perils of Paulines.

Now this is, to my surprise, not the way the nostalgia mechanism should work. I belong to the Lukas-Speilberg generation. I followed Harrison Ford's exploits over five decades, while Witney and English were never part of my childhood picture going. Their cut price efforts should have been out classed. However, while the adventures of Indiana Jones now merge in my memory, after a life time I have distinct recall on Reed Hadley’s Zorro, Tom Tyler’s Captain Marvel and Henry Brandon being Fu Manchu. 

Maybe I value these because it was so much more effort to find them but I can’t help feeling that the difference is that Republic’s hard-scrabble units had an understanding and a sympathy with the form that the super spectacle guys would never achieve, because deep down they felt they were on a holiday between their serious efforts. That’s an educated guess but I do find myself coming back to it in the time I spend on these. Of course, I’ll never know the real truth, always assuming there’s a real truth to know. 

Barrie Pattison 2023.
 

SPANISH FILM FESTIVAL 2023

Modelo 77 - Miguel Herrán

Another Spanish Film Event is a reminder not only of the strengths of Hispanic film culture but also the fact that so little of it reaches us. Checking the credits of  conspicuously talented people with work on show, throws up lengthy filmographies - lists of films that are totally unfamiliar and are regrettably likely to stay that way. These events, like their Italian counterparts, are frequently the highlight of the viewing year and this one did offer a couple of exceptional films.

Bucking the trend is director Alberto Rodriguez, whose La isla mínima / Marshland was an international hit. (Article 19 the Hindi version and Fieiesland, a German one, also impress) These and Rodriguesz' 2012 Grupo7/ Unit 7 and El hombre de las mil caras / Smoke & Mirrors have had limited showing here. That's already enough to convince us that he is a substantial talent.

Rodriguez' new Modelo 77 / Prisoner Seventy Seven was on view. Well on the way to be the best ever prison movie, this one manages to narrow its context so that we are not considering the excesses of the Franco period but abuses that the democracy that followed was not ready to confront. Rodriguez has staked out his territory with this film and Marshland, rather as Curt Maetzig did with post WW2 Germany.

We follow current Spanish A-Lister Miguel Herrán, as he is inducted into prison for an embezzlement, that he claims he didn’t commit. He’s given his bucket of water after a strip search and a guard makes him an offer for his suit, telling him he’ll lose it anyway to the hard case inmates.  Herrán rapidly learns about outrages by the authorities and the prisoners. An over worked court-appointed lawyer tells him it’s likely to be four years before his case comes to trial. His lady friend isn’t up for a visit but her dewy eyed, red headed sister Catalina Sopelana comes to see him.

The film is a growth or an enlightenment, as we lean the things Herrán learns - don’t step on the newly disinfected floors to avoid ulcerated feet, don’t believe in prisoner’s rights or the press, don’t look to the authorities for any protection. The judge presented as a an arbitrator is a disguised cop from another jurisdiction. They demand the prison guards supervise their post demonstration return to the cells, rather than the riot squad who will lay into them with batons. 

  Alberto Rodriguez

As the film progresses, Herrán plausibly changes from an indignant victim, to a protestor, whose hopes center in the P.R.A. association getting the Amnesty given to the political prisoners extended to all the inmates, to someone hardened by the failure of self mutilation, roof top sit-ins and hunger strikes, to a stoic who has chosen to abandon all hope.

This is played in authentic jail setting - the entry rotunda, the community of the yard, solitary, the wings dominated by prisoner bosses (one makes a decent living to support his family out of contraband beer and luxuries) - all things we’ve seen in other prison movies, though rarely with such conviction. To the indistinctly shown Guards, brute injustice is a way of life. Inmates, who we see more of, get varying sympathy. Herrán is witness to a vicious murder.

The thing that elevates Prisoner 77 is  the depiction of the fellow prisoner character played by Javier Guiterrez, unrecognisable from his lead in Marshland. He first surfaces as an aggressively territorial cell mate we take to be a minor character, gradually shifting to the center of attention, becoming the individual Herrán depends on and finally the one person who may halt his disintegration.

One of the nicest touches is the scene of the guards burning Guiterrez treasured paper back library, not realising that his stock of hashish is hidden in the spine of one volume, giving the bystanders a high.

With Marshland and Prisoner 77 on his C.V., Alberto Rodríguez rates as one of the most important film makers now working.

There’s a community in the films that I find myself seeking out - the westerns of Anthony Mann, the shockers of Dario Argento & Paul Naschy and currently the comedies of outrage of Álex de la Iglesia. They make us feel pain, heat, grubbiness, sex, danger and exhilaration. It’s not a surprise to find that de la Iglesia was a product of comic strips and film societies, with an imposing history that includes Comunidad, Balada triste de trompeta / The Last Circus, 800 Bullets, Witching and Bitching and his less involving English language work. Most movie authorities pretend these don’t exist and we are quite a few behind here, even with diligent scanning of the Spanish Film events.

Four's a Crowd.

De la Iglesia’s new (well last year’s) El Cuarto Pasagero / Four's a Crowd is our man at his most show-offish. They ought to run it in film schools to show how a film about four people in a car can be full of movement and visual interest - and it can involve you with characters you would struggle to avoid in real life. Actually they ought to run it in film schools just to give the students a break from people telling them about Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles.

It’s another one about Ride Share cf.  Martín Cuervo’s Con quién viajas / Carpoolers. Fifty year old Alberto San Juan has a regular Friday night run from Bilbao to Madrid in his polished car, in order to get close to twenty year younger Blanca Suárez (the daughter from The Skin I Live in) and now he’s rehearsing the marriage proposal he’s prepared, before ripping it up and shoving the pieces in the glove compartment on his way to collect her with her familiar striped case. Before he can get started, the car fills up with extraordinarily annoying Ernesto Alterio and Suárez’ perfect match, bearded, handsome, guitar playing, Taekwondo expert Rubén Cortada, who is her age and fresh from charity work with the South American dispossessed.

It’s not long before Alterio is putting together the torn up pieces of San Juan’s proposal and filming him in the highway shop brawl, that Alterio started, to put on the cloud, and the Guardia Civil are making San Juan walk the white line. Even driving off,  leaving Alterio while he pisses in a field, doesn’t solve San Juan’s problems. He finds himself dulling his frustration with brandy, while he watches Cortada ending a naked swim, in the pool at the futuristic hotel, by rubbing down Suarez with grape seed and honey.

Just when they need to accelerate away, the group face the giant week end traffic jam. (Eat your heart out the late Jean Luc Goddard!) Not unlike Speed, the film falls away when it opens out and they leave the car to get into a shoot out, while a couple is watching Marienbad on their stalled car’s TV, and Cortada whose hands are classed as deadly weapons, has to use his fingers of death in a face off with Iglesia regular, hovering, genuinely menacing drug dealer Carlos Areces.  

It’s no small accomplishment that, without softening his dreadful characters, de la Iglasia catches our sympathy - even for Alterio, finally seen plotting a “Love Program” where homeless orphans will be recruited to smuggle bricks of hash. The cast is full of people the director has worked with before. Acares was the second clown in The Last Circus, Suarez was in El Bar and Alterio in Mi gran noche and de Iglesia’s Spanish version of Perfect Strangers. The pixieish Carolina Bang, now Mrs. de la Iglesia, figures on this one as producer. The technical work is exceptional. 

 

I wanted to see El Te$t because Four’s a Crowd’s Blanca Suárez and Alberto San Juan were back heading that one's cast and there they were but I had to stare to find them in their new make overs. Even busted back to the film’s grandfather character and with his head shaved, Antonio Resines however was instantly recognisable. I’d have bought a ticket just for another look at the star of  Acción mutante and El Embrujo de Shanghai - or any of his other 172 movies. Now there’s a great idea for a retrospective.

In an awful wig, that’s part of the plot, Miren Ibarguren is a wife who has bought the entire activist agenda, assuring her associates that she only uses sustain-ably sourced products and not lettering her child go to First Communion - to Resines, the kid’s grandad’s dismay.

The script pivots on a test proposed in pop therapist Suárez’ best selling self help book, where the subjects must chose between ten thousand pesetas now or a million in ten years time. Ridiculously successful old friend Carlos Santos was once a street musician playing with San Juan, now Ibarguren’s husband and struggling to keep his failing bar business running. The couple visits Santos’ mansion, served by voice activated robots, for a dinner, where they will be joined by his glamorous new squeeze, Suárez. 

The evening exposes all the tensions between them, not unlike what we see in the much versioned Perfect Strangers. I suspect they wanted something closer to An Indecent Proposal. Resines turns up with the couple’s pre-teen daughter, who he was baby sitting and had to bribe with the sugar treats Ibarguren has forbidden. His is the surest comic touch getting a laugh with everything he does. Things build to a great scene where all the dreadful strategies, that the Suárez’ book outlines, look like actually working. Meanwhile she is getting stuck into the booze and pills combination that killed her sister.

The outline of writer Jordi Vallejo’s stage success is always visible but director Dani de la Orden has imposed an attention holding film form. We end up with a slick movie with strong performances, that near to convinces us there’s substance behind the clever gags. The final coda is implausibly sunny but you can’t have everything.

 

I felt some sales resistance to Alfonso Albacete’s La novia de América / My Father's Mexican Wedding.  It homes in on the Mexico-Spain interface, not exactly my keenest interest, and it fields those now popular favorites - gay couples and transvestites - currently in some over supply. I’d never found them fall about funny in Almodovar's movies.

My Father's Mexican Wedding.

It took a while to warm to the film - till about the time a pair of kidnappers in luchadores masks make off with the sister in law ring-in bride trying to usurp the place of voluptuous computer-fiance Diana Bovio, in mature Ginés García Millán’s second wedding. The in-law’s escape from the jilted butcher’s meat store, wearing the purloined wedding dress, freaks out the populace, who take her for la Lorna.

Director Albacete’s background is in raunchy Spanish comedies, which don’t get to play here. Miren Ibarguren again heads up the cast, in this one as Millan’s grown daughter. She jets out for the wedding with her brother Pol Monen, who is in a bind because he knows their stern dad will give him a hard time over his gay lover, passed off as a personal assistant.  The Spanish lot are greeted at the airport by bride to be Bovio’s brother Christian Vazquez’ car, packed with uninhibited Mexican in-laws and taken to their ethno-colourful extended family home, for comical culture clash.

Miren finds the viewers of the Video seminar, she’s trying to run from another continent, craning to one side to get a view of this action behind her and her own attention is caught when she finds Vazquez soaping up in the shower. The priest has to compete with the leads for the microphone when the ceremony doesn’t go to plan. Some of the routines are uncomfortable - signing the pre-nup or the gay lover as a master chef, overcoming the elimination of the suitor-butcher but the cousin’s final drag act spectacular carries the day.

Vivid colours, personable cast and loads of folklorico detail.

 

Joaquín Mazón’s La Vida Padre / Two Many Chefs was made to order for a festival opening night crowd. The Paddington audience I saw it with gave it a standing ovation.  It’s a formula crowd-pleaser by assured craftsmen, mixing food porn with appealing characters and some more trendy gay gags, all wrapped round a soft core of sentimentality.

  Too Many Chefs - Elejalde & Mazón.

Chef Enric Auquer is already stressed by the prospect of a royal visit to the Bilbao family restaurant he now runs, after his father abandoned them three decades back, when the bum Auquer nearly runs over turns out to be veteran Karra Elejalde (Only the Rain), the missing father. The old man has blocked out the intervening years and is convinced that Auquer is trying to have his way with him, when he drives him off to the restaurant where Elejalde immediately takes over again. The staff have to be assured that the smelly hobo is in fact an ace chef whose skills may placate the visiting Michelin star food critic.

Subplots involve appealing doctor Megan Montaner, who we are likely to see again, Auquer’s dope dealing brother and the search for the secret sea urchin recipe which Elejalde is determined to keep from Catalonian agents, leading to his  camper filled with souvenirs of his meetings with master chefs in his world travels. Seeing this engulfed in flames motivates the sunny ending ... and there’s another robot vacuum gag.

Tomorrow We Fix the World

In established director Ariel Winograd's Hoy Se Arregla el Mundo, things are not good for TV producer Leonardo Sbaraglia (Una pistola en cada mano / A Gun in Each Hand). His long running TV show "Today We Fix the World" is getting shaky. It looks like we are in for another media satire but this element loses importance when he argues with his separated wife and she tells him that young Benjamín Otero, the boy they raised for nine years, is not his biological son. She immediately gets wiped off in a traffic accident - an indication of the film’s curious attempt at unexpected switches of tone. 

This leaves the kid without both a mother and a father. Otero reproaches Sbaraglia with never being a real dad. The rest of the picture is Sbaraglia trying to find the boy’s birth  father, assisted along the way by therapist Charo López - unremarkable episodes where they examine possible candidates, including an amusement park clown and a family man giving a birthday party for his daughter. Most of these could advantageously be removed, reducing the film’s long hour and fifty three minutes. Hopes do occasionally rise only to subside almost immediately. Both the the stars of the splendid Tiempo de valientes turn up. Luis Luque as the TV show’s bogus medico, whose drinking is revealed to be caused by fear he’ll be exposed, comes off best, with people urging Sbaraglia to consult him. Potential parent Diego Peretti is just wasted.  

Winograd handles a reasonable budget with some slickness but the film is not funny and not involving.

 

Daniela Fejerman and Elvira Lindo’s Alguien que cuide de mÝ / Someone Who Takes Care of Me attempts to shoe horn AIDS, good living, culture and women’s issues into a Hispanic Multiplex feature.

Aura Garrido

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It kicks off with glamorous Aura Garrido in the spotlight, accepting her Goya award. She’s the youngest of  three generations of  a family of actresses, who find themself sorting out crisises enough for a couple of Joan Crawford movies.

Garrido has gotten the lead in a stage production of Ibsen’s “The Seagull” directed by her stepfather-become lover. Her mother Emma Sußrez (the most familiar face after her Julio Medem films) puts herself forward for a bit of life imitating art, in the play’s actress mother part. While this is happening, she is in financial stress over the flat she wants to buy, needing the proceeds from the sale of Granma Magui Mira’s home in the now up-market river district, which holds the old woman’s memories. Added to which Sußrez has a secret!

Her leading man shows an interest in Garrido, who proves to have a great build, while Sußrez’ gay companion Pedro Mari Sßnchez steals performance honors from the women who are working hard for them.

Throw in some black and white flashbacks to Garrido’s youth as young Anastasia Russo, and Sßnchez long-past TV productions, along with the contrast of “serious” theatre and Sußrez’s tele novela role - and the best Latin production values. I got bored with it all.

Barrie Pattison 2023.