Reprisal

I just watched my first George Pan Cosmatos movie. I’ve seen fragments of ESCAPE TO ATHENA and THE CASSANDRA CROSSING, been curious about TOMBSTONE (I own a DVD), and sworn to eschew RAMBO, COBRA and the like. But MASSACRE IN ROME has an interesting historical basis and cast.

History — it’s about the massacre in the caves that took place late in the German occupation of Italy in WWII. A moment referenced in Leone’s DUCK, YOU SUCKER, which is mainly how I was aware of it.

Cast — Richard Burton plays senior Nazi Ltn. Col. Herbert Keppler Kappler, who will eventually be put in charge of the mass killing, a reprisal (not regarded as a war crime by the Nazis, under the terms of the Hague Convention — but the Nazis might not be the best people to ask. George Pan Cosmatos might not, either, but he seems to be taking this seriously). Burton is surrounded by mainly British actors — Leo McKern, Peter Vaughan, Anthony Steel, and (yay!) John Steiner, who makes an excellent Nazi, if thin.

Burton is excellent — he keeps flubbing his lines, but is always able to recover and make it seem natural. However, I do feel a more disciplined director would have asked for a retake each time.

I was struck by a shot similar to one in yesterday’s film, IL GOBBO:

Ennio Morricone provides a pounding score. Cosmatos’ direction is equally emphatic, though less surefooted. I was about to blame Marcello Gatti for some of the slightly wobbly camerawork, but his considerable other credits persuade me that his director may be to blame for forcing the pace. Morton Haack is credited as production designer, but he was otherwise almost exclusively a costume designer, eg on the PLANET OF THE APES series, so what gives?

Marcello Mastroianni plays a heroic priest — a role designed to point up the inertia and indifference of the Church generally and Pope Pius XII in particular. (Though I should be cautious: author Robert Katz, director Cosmatos, and producer Carlo Ponti were all successfully prosecuted for defaming the dead pope, though their prison sentences were overturned on appeal.) Mastroianni’s character combines several real-life priests — it did seem slightly implausible the way he kept turning up at key moments. Mastroianni’s weak English holds him back compared to the Brits, and one does wonder why he’s the only Italian with a thick Italian accent.

I haven’t read Katz’s RW Fassbinder biography. Is it good?

The film takes a surprising angle — the Nazis are really the main characters, and their heroic mission is to choose the three hundred and thirty-five victims of their massacre. It plays like a grotesque negative variation on SCHINDLER’S LIST. Of course the filmmakers deplore this murder, but they make us follow with something that comes close to sympathy.

Burton, the master of disgust, plays Kappler as tired and disillusioned — in fact, per Wikipedia, he was an enthusiastic butcher, so in order to keep the audience engaged the film has glamorised a monster. Still, the fact that we’ve been following him with interest for some time before he starts talking about shoring up the numbers of condemned prisoners with Jewish families, we’re brought up short.

Jean-Luc Godard once said that the only adequate film you could make about the Holocaust would be to show the practical problems of piling the right number of corpses on a cart, and that such a film would be unwatchable. Cosmatos has almost given himself the same task, but the job is essentially bureaucratic here. The killings are — I want to say a let-down, but that’s not right. Cosmatos has lots of shots, but if Kappler has never personally killed anyone, as we’re told, and this duty is a punishment handed to him by a vindictive (and, it pains me to say, rather over-the-top) Leo Mckern (Rumpole of the Luftwaffe), then it’s the build-up to his first execution that should have been emphasised. It passes as if it’s nothing.

But, in fact, perhaps the film has taken the wrong approach altogether. Do we really want to sympathise with Kappler? Maybe all humans deserve a measure of sympathy, but there are people ahead of him in the queue. The other thing I knew about the Ardeatine Massacre is that Alexander Mackendrick was part of a documentary crew covering the post-war trial of the fascist police chief Pietro Caruso (played in the film by Renzo Montagnani, above) responsible for selecting prisoners for execution. While the prison governor was testifying against him, a mob broke into the court and grabbed the man in the dock, dragging him into the street and ordering a tram driver to run him over. When the driver refused, they threw the witness off a bridge. When he started swimming to shore, they rowed out and beat him to death with oars.

All captured on film by Mackendrick and his team, but the footage was subsequently lost — perhaps by a patriotic Italian postman, Mackendrick suggested.

THAT would make a courtroom drama like no other. (Details from Philip Kemp’s Lethal Innocence: The Cinema of Alexander Mackendrick.)

One thing that’s commendable — in place of end credits, Cosmatos scrolls up a list of all the executed people. When Morricone’s music runs out halfway, it continues in silence.

MASSACRE IN ROME stars Thomas Becket; Marcello Rubini; Thomas Cromwell; Longinus; Flying Officer Treherne; Winston the Ogre; Don Giovanni; Fornac; Mr. Hammond – Second Minister of the Interior; Professor Dent; Sakamura; and Mary Magdalene.

The Sunday Intertitle: Blood Feud Brothers

Maurice Tourneur’s THE CUB — I was watching that, wasn’t I? Weeks ago, it seems like.

Not all of Tourneur’s experiments work. As leading man/cub reporter Johnny Hines gets the job of writing up the story of the blood feud in the hills, Tourneur intercuts the hero getting ready for his trip with an incipient shoot-out at his destination. As a version of Griffiths’ famed cross-cutting, it doesn’t quite work, because the two actions haven’t a strong enough connection. Hines is clearly not going to arrive in time to prevent one warring family ambushing the other. Without that logical tie, the single suspenseful situation — the ambush — would be better treated as a standalone sequence. Likewise, Hines hurrying to catch his train will be more exciting if it’s not paled into insignificance by continual juxtaposition with a murder.

This seems like the kind of rookie error nobody would make nowadays, and Alexander Mackendrick had an axiom to cover it: “One dramatic problem is likely to be more effective than two,” or words to that effect. But since the whole idea of crosscutting was pretty new, I think the experiment was worth trying. It had literary antecedents — Griffith remarked that Dickens had done it — but I don’t know if anyone in fiction had experimented with quickly alternating scenes dealing with unconnected suspenseful action. If they had, they no doubt abandoned it, as Tourneur would.

Still, he’s not messing about. By the time Hines has arrived at his destination and performed some comic business about engaging a “taxi” — which proves to be some kind of tiny mule or ass — another assassination is being prepared. One fears that both Hatfields and McCoys will have extirpated one another entirely by the time he finds a hotel to unpack in.

NO SHOOTIN ALOUD

The cinematic value of THE CUB thus far has been excellent — but I’m curious as to how it will perform when its hero comes face to face with the issue he’s been sent to investigate. That’s going to require WRITING.

If anyone out there has a tame AI they can ask to develop this plot, I’d be interested in seeing how the results stack up against the 1915 screenwriting chops of Tourneur and Thompson Buchanan.

Route of all evil

Following Danger Man back to the native land of Bond, we discover Richard Johnson, who would play Bulldog Drummond in a couple of passable spy romps, working in a much more sombre and hard-edged thriller, DANGER ROUTE. Forgettable, generic title, and nearly a forgettable film, but it has moments.

It has a proper filmmaker in the director’s chair, too, though one in decline. Seth Holt would die during the shooting of his next production, BLOOD FROM THE MUMMY’S TOMB — an amusingly persistent case of hiccups turned out to presage a massive coronary. He’s on intermittently good form here — the inconsistent MUMMY movie is more persistently engaging, but he brings his talent fully to bear on the movie’s bitter climax.

The film is pitched somewhere between the brutality of Bond and the morose Le Carre worldview. Not so seedy, but grey and downbeat. Our anti-hero is a government assassin, and the first scene depicts two spymasters planning his final mission in a cinema (on the screen is the director’s previous film, STATION SIX SAHARA, an amusing in-joke though not as pointedly meta as the moment in CAPRICE where Doris Day hides from enemy agents in a cinema showing… CAPRICE), and the make it clear that if agent “Jonas Wilde” survives the job, a female agent has been put in position to destroy him afterwards.

There’s a distinct lack of glamorous locations — the Channel Islands are the height of escapism in this film, and the production values, courtesy of Amicus, are on the thin side, with unconvincing dioramas ob view through every window. Harry THE THIRD MAN Waxman is cinematographer, and the shots are sometimes expressive in a subtle way, but it’s no thrill-ride. A single Deutsch tilt, on a cross-channel ferry. The plot moves forward with some bold elisions, which helps a bit.

“A mountain of evil,” was Bette Davis’ summation of Holt on THE NANNY (probably his best film), which seems to have baffled his friends on the crew. There’s an intriguing comment also from his widow, who said that when Holt worked as producer on THE LADYKILLERS, rather than calming one another down, which is what both needed, they would tend to hype each other into a frenzy. Possibly that was good for the film?

A better script would help this one: good actors make a limited impression with thick eared, hackneyed dialogue. It’s not overtly clumsy but nobody comes to life. Johnson seems at home being glum and angry, but hits that same note too hard and often; Carol Lynley is seductive and sweet; Barbara Bouchet effective when mysterious, but when the mask comes off, what’s underneath is unconvincing; Sylvia Sims, Diana Dors, are as professional as ever, same for Harry Andrews, Maurice Denham and Gordon Jackson.

MASSIVE SPOILER ALERT

The final betrayal comes with a slick reversal — Johnson, a creature of habit, has fixed himself a Bacardi. He’s told by his girlfriend, Carol Lynley, that the ice cubes were poisoned — he’ll start to notice the creeping paralysis now.

He replies that the ice cubes are in the goldfish tank — he’s anticipated the betrayal.

His assassin looks to the tank, where the fish are floating lifeless — a school of substitute Johnsons. And Holt shows the next action — Johnson slaying his lover with one mighty chop — only in the shadow on the glass.

DANGER ROUTE stars Dr. John Markway; Ann Lake; Moneypenny; the Queen Mother; Frau Poppendick; Lord Lucan; Filipenko; MacDonald ‘Intelligence’; Professor Henry Harrington; Mime; and Kreacher.