Damiani Get Your Gun

Damiano Damiani has a particular trope that he uses in nearly every film: a dialogue scene where one character paces and another stands or sits still. Filmed from two angles, a pan from the approximate POV of the stationary character, following the restless one; and a tracking shot from the approximate POV of the pacing one, observing the stationary one in a series of back-and-forth moves.

In my video essay on HOW TO KILL A JUDGE I seem to recall theorising that Damiani borrowed the effect from the climax of BICYCLE THIEVES, where the camera adopts two POVs, intercut — dad on a bicycle and son watching him rush past. It’s still the best use of this technique in cinema, I think — the perfect moment for a visual flourish, rigorously tied in to the drama and meaning of the scene. The camera passing the boy somehow gives the effect of his world being flipped around, if not upended then at least reversed.

LENIN: THE TRAIN is a two-part historical drama, very good, but hampered by dubbing and imperfect casting: Ben Kingsley is an ideal Lenin, apart from not being Russian; Jason Connery, however, has never yet been ideal in any role. His time may come. Leslie Caron and Dominique Sanda: great, but why is one dubbed and the other not?

The story covers Lenin’s historic journey back to Russia to stage his own revolution. It’s a little unfortunate that the real journey was not quite eventful enough to power a two-part drama, but the film is to be credited for not spicing things up too much with invented incidents.

Damiani again does his De Sica move — he’s so compulsive in repeating this, it’s as if he wants to make it his, rather than a borrowing, by sheer force of repetition. This one’s only brief. He also steals a trick from Fellini at the end.

A montage shows us those characters we’ve met who are NOT on the train. But it’s a montage motivated by the train’s movement: a frontal shot of tracks rushing past is followed by trucking shots plunging towards one character after another, interspersed with literal shots of tracks.

The inspiration, clearly, is I VITELLONI, and the appropriation is appropriate for a film about a train which also connects up multiple characters influencing history from their own discrete locations.

I noted that James Gray also nicked this sequence for THE LOST CITY OF Z. While Gray’s borrowing displays more surprising erudition than Damiani’s — it’s no surprise that Damiani is well aware of Fellini’s work, especially his early, quasi-neorealist films — I think DD’s swiping is more dramatically justified than Gray’s, it’s really perfect for the situation and Damiani changes things around a bit more than Gray.

For some reason this device seems to get used only for steam trains. I can imagine it working for aeroplanes and helicopters (with high-angle moving shots of the various characters), cars, boats, even submarines (we could “surface” through somebody’s floor, but you’d have to be careful this doesn’t get ridiculous). One could even combine it with Damiani’s favourite technique and intercut a character pacing up and down with fake POV shots dollying through the private spaces of those he’s thinking about…

Round up the usual hunchbacks

Damiano Damiani’s fascinating GIROLOMANI, THE MONSTER OF ROME (1972) begins in striking style with the police equipping a small platoon of identical little blonde girls with bouncing balls and delivering them into the city’s parks to act as bait for a serial killer.

I got a similar vibe from Carlo Lizzani’s earlier IL GOBBO/THE HUNCHBACK OF ROME (1960) — we see the occupying German forces rounding up every hunchback they can find. They’re looking for one man in particular, played by French actor Gerard Blain (HATARI!). He duly turns up, massacres the Germans and releases the spinally-afflicted innocents.

Lizzano’s film goes like a train — it has Jimmy Cagney energy — complete with newspaper montages! Blain, freed from the requirement to be cute or sympathetic, gives it both knees (as Billy Wilder advised Kirk Douglas to do on ACE IN THE HOLE). Lizzano is best known for his spaghetti western, REQUIESCANT, and the rough-tough-rapacious protagonist here could have stepped out of that unformed genre. In fact, an investigation of the gangster movie’s possible influence on the spaghetti western might yield interesting results.

Il Gobbo, loosely based on a real brigand, is a fighter for the Italian resistance, but after the liberation he continues fighting, killing an American MP and carrying on his campaign of violence as if nothing had changed. I’m reminded of the idea behind Sidney Gilliat’s THE RAKE’S PROGRESS (admired by Truffaut): certain men, extremely useful to their countries in time of war, are an absolute liability in peacetime.

This De Laurentiis production has enough incident to fill an OPPENHEIMER-sized epic, but crams it into 92 mins. It keeps offing its supporting players and needs to continually restart its narrative with fresh faces — for a while it looks like Pier Paolo Pasolini (above), in his first acting part (he’d return in REQUIESCANT), has shown up for one scene only to get swiftly unalived, but he eventually returns, somewhat mutilated, with a Rotwang-Strangelove hand, and it’s a substantial role. He’s called Monco, a good spaghetti western name. Bernard Blier, as a slouching military cop, is saved up for late in the story. The key co-star is Anna Maria Ferrero (Vidor’s WAR AND PEACE), in a somewhat tricky role — she’s the daughter of the fascist cop hunting Blain, she’s raped by him, becomes his lover, gets knocked up, turns on him, has an abortion, becomes a sex worker during the Allied occupation — a lot of big changes, and the script doesn’t always give her enough psychological material to allow us to follow the switchbacks without mental derailment or the sensation that her character is being plotted rather than scripted.

But she’s not purely a misogynistic contrivance, as she might be in another filmmaker’s film (Leone wouldn’t even have given her so much to do) — it’s possible, just barely, to invent motivations for her shifting attitudes.

It’s a very interesting film — Lizzani I take to be a leftist, but he’s even able to show some understanding for the fascist cop, a joyless torturer. You probably have to, to make a film like this fly, since if we’re meant to care for Blain’s antisocial psychopath, radical empathy must be the order of the day.

Blain plays the whole thing as if he’s bitten a shit sandwich: nausea is his keynote. The script avoids making the character’s deformity into an easy motivator, it’s just that whenever Blain is defeated, his posture seems to add humiliation, further fuel for his rage. The real-life character’s background of poverty and orphandom isn’t over-stressed, which you might have expected from a left-wing auteur — it does come in, but surprisingly late in the tale. And now we finally learn the reason for his constant snarl of distaste — the bad soup he had to eat in the orphanage.

IL GOBBO stars Charles ‘Chips’ Maurey; Maria Bolkonskaya; Maurice Martineau; Julius Caesar – Roman Emperor; Geoffrey Chaucer; D’Agostino; and Dave Waggoman.

Cosa Nostra

I recall hearing that “Cosa Nostra” was clearly an expression invented by somebody on the outside, because it’s bad Italian — translates literally as “Our our family.” I dunno if that’s true.

What IS true, if you’ll forgive the crashing segue, is that Radiance’s new box set of three Damiano Damiani thrillers is a desirable item. A shame they couldn’t have included the OTHER Franco Nero collaboration, INVESTIGATION OF A POLICE CAPTAIN, but the rights holder apparently could not be located, such is the tangled state of Italian film production, despite the thing having been released on DVD.

What you get here is three fine movies, each with an ingenious variation on the downbeat ending inescapable in the “Years of Lead” — the one that’ll haunt you longest is probably THE CASE IS CLOSED, FORGET IT. It gets under your skin. DAY OF THE OWL is maybe an even more solid film. And among the wealth of extras is my video essay, edited by first-time collaborator Laura Wiggett, on HOW TO KILL A JUDGE, which may be the least satisfying of the films but it’s full of interest and excitement.