Grabbed by the Balsam

“I used that in THE EXORCIST. There’s a shot of, uh, well, frankly it’s a shot of a character being grabbed by the scrotum.”

William Friedkin, speaking in PSYCHO extra feature In the Master’s Shadow: Hitchcock’s Legacy, comparing Martin Balsam’s death scene in PSYCHO to a shot in his own shocker. His use of the word “frankly” I find, frankly, hilarious.

But he’s wrong.

This is a passable doc — what’s frustrating is they have people of the calibre of Scorsese, Carpenter, Friedkin, but they have to make room for Eli Roth and the composer of BASIC INSTINCT 2. There’s an assortment of editors and sound designers, and they mainly earn their presence by saying interesting or amusing things.

There’s also a colorized shot from Alfred Hitchcock Presents where they give Hitch a hideously crimson, ready-to-burst head, which looks set momentarily to take flight from his collar and go off to star in an Albert Lamorisse short. Or like somebody’s grabbed him by frankly the scrotum. My photo off the TV screen does not capture the full horror.

Friedkin tells us that he “found out” how Hitchcock filmed Balsam’s topple down the Bates house stairs, and duplicated it by attaching the camera to his scrotum agony man. Which isn’t what Hitch did at all, so I wonder what the “finding out” consisted of.

Hitchcock achieved his shot with rear projection, which most viewers can tell, I think. It looks as if Balsam is attached to the camera because he doesn’t move in relation to it. He’s sitting on a gimbal so he can sway from side to side but nobody seems to have thought of sitting that on a dolly so his distance from the camera can vary. The unreality of the effect is dreamlike, and Friedkin seems to have latched onto this bug and treated it as a feature.

The moving background was shot with what Hitch called “the monorail,” a kind of STAIRLIFT OF TERROR attached to the banister which let the operator slide smoothly down from landing to hallway.

The shot in THE EXORCIST always struck me as a bit of a blunder. It’s the kind of tricksy effect Friedkin normally eschewed in the name of realism. Screenwriter William Peter Blatty stuffed his first draft with fancy effects, and Friedkin tore them all out. A particularly extreme or striking shot should accompany important dramatic moments, I feel. Well, THE EXORCIST is full of traumatic stuff, but it seems to me that a mere ball-crushing, inflicted upon an insignificant character whose testicles play no further role in the story, doesn’t rate this kind of splashy treatment.

The shot goes by really fast, though, so I don’t think it does much harm. I mean, I would say that, they’re not my balls.

Supposing Hitchcock HAD attached a camera to Balsam, though. He’d still have had to devise a way to get his actor to stumble backward downstairs without breaking his neck (or the camera), so he’d still have needed a monorail. But a bigger one. And the resulting movement of the actor would be just as unreal, although I guess he’s have been more IN THE SCENE, instead of the sort of Cocteauesque feeling we get. Which would have been even more of a mismatch for THE EXORCIST, so in a way Friedkin misinterpreting or being misinformed about the PSYCHO shot worked to his benefit.

In the same piece, Scorsese talks about being influenced by the shower scene for the bit in RAGING BULL where Sugar Ray delivers an apocalyptic pounding to Jake LaMotta’s face-bones. And nifty intercutting of the two sequences creates a real sense of connectedness, with many shots appearing like exact analogs of one another. PSYCHO, of course, has no counterpart to the brief shots where DP Michael Chapman attached his camera to Sugar Ray’s arm, so that his boxing glove sits in the foreground, a leathery planetoid, a spherical scrotum agony man locked in position, while Robert DeNiro’s spurting face seems to lunge forward for a violent collision. This kind of FREAK SHOT is, again, a little much, but Scorsese and Thelma Schoonmaker cut the shots so tight you can’t quite register how odd it is, and it pretty much scuds by as just part of a generalized onslaught. Scorsese had a similar angle in LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST, the camera mounted on the arm of the cross as Christ hauls it along, but he didn’t use it. Too wacky. The only comparable angle is the view from the top of the cross as it’s raised into position — which he nicked (honourably) from Nick Ray’s KING OF KINGS.

Of course, LaMotta on the ropes is another Christ-figure, in the classic aeroplane pose.

(In framegrabbing that shot, I realize it’s a very different angle, though with the same crosscam effect, and there’s another shot moments earlier where the camera is attached to a hammer nailing Willem Dafoe or a disposable body double to the crossbeam. Also, arguably, too wacky, but again it’s quick and also we can at least agree that the moment is an important one, worthy of special effort.)

House Warning

One reason Damiano Damiani might be more obscure than he deserves, despite his easy-to-remember name, is that his two biggest films were artistic disasters. The Leone-produced A GENIUS, TWO PARTNERS, AND A DUPE (aka NOBODY’S THE GREATEST) is usually consigned to the less-said-the-better bin, though I plan on giving it another try. We took a look at the De Laurentiis-produced AMITYVILLE II: THE POSSESSION, in the spirit of excavation — could anything be retrieved from the rubble of this sequel/knock-off?

It was a bold, trashy idea: make a sequel to the very successful (but dull) THE AMITYVILLE HORROR while also ripping off THE EXORCIST. Despite the US locations and studio filming at Churubusco in Mexico where the DeLaurentiis-Lynch DUNE was shot, this can be categorized alongside all those Italian imitations of the Blatty-Friedkin blockbuster, except that surprisingly it omits nearly all the gross (and highly commercial) elements.

The script is credited to Tommy Lee Wallace, something of a specialist in sequels to other peoples’ films; Dardano Sacchetti, frequent Lucio Fulci collaborator and schlockmeister, seems also to have contributed. The movie’s a prequel, purporting to show what happened to the family who died in the house before James Brolin et al moved in — which we kind of already know. And the story has the son called Sonny aiming a rifle at Dad’s head within minutes, so there’s not a great distance to cover.

Still, there’s good news: the actors are decent. Burt Young is the paterfamilias and Damiani, in it for the money, at least tries to interest himself in the possibility of this being a portrait of a dysfunctional family. Jack Magner as Sonny is very good indeed, required to go through a hell of a lot of transformations, both emotional and physical. Everyone, even the kids, seems well up to their tasks, though the family does initially seem both a parody of American family life, a step removed from The Simpsons, and at the same time more Italian than American — bursting into song, squabbling at high volume, becoming hysterical — which set of stereotypes are we going for?

But the abusive father stuff is authentically disturbing, which is good because non of the cod-supernatural stuff is a bit scary. There are some good practical effects but everything aiming at suspense is slathered over with Lalo Schifrin’s hackneyed score. He repeats the spooky lullaby approach first trotted out in Mario Bava’s KILL, BABY, KILL! — I guess it has an authentic Italian lineage but it’s pretty old by now and feels tired as hell. Schifrin was fired from THE EXORCIST, Friedkin at one point hurling part of his score out of the cutting room and across the WB parking lot, and this doubtless is his revenge. Damiani should have slung it from one of those quarter-circle window eyes.

The other angle Damiani finds to excite some interest is the mental illness one: if it weren’t for all the pyrotechnics, much of the story, even the bladder effects, could work as a rather tasteless exploration of schizophrenia. Sonny hears demon voices urging him to kill from his Walkman, the best use of the film’s 1982 setting (but if it’s a prequel to the ’79 film, the device wouldn’t have been available, surely?)

The intriguing parts, like Sonny’s Sony, are underexploited — the initial possession, with the camera plunging down on the partly-undressed young man like a spectral rapist, isn’t developed into anything more disturbing than consensual sibling incest (which is a BIT disturbing). And then all the main characters die, except Sonny, who becomes largely unavailable to us except as a bloviating demon voice, articulated through a set of disfiguring Albert Steptoe teeth.

Fortunately or otherwise, the film has established a priest, James Olson — Father Adamsky, a Damien Karras clone with the interesting parts deleted. He even has a blandly cheerful chum — “What’s this guy doing in the film?” I asked. “Father Karras had a priest pal, so he has to have one too,” diagnosed Fiona. Even if he has no story function whatsoever.

Rebooting the story, after the massacre, into another kind of thing altogether should be the film’s most original trope, but it merely completes the metamorphosis into EXORCIST MCMLXXXII: IT’S A BOY. In the rush to banality, nobody even wonders if Sonny might be insane. At one point, Moses Gunn is required to facilitate a jailbreak so an exorcism can occur, and it turns into a replay of Norval’s escape from THE MIRACLE OF MORGAN’S CREEK. “Oh I couldn’t do THAT, Mr. Kockenlocker,” one longs to hear Olson say. (The Sturges film also portrays a violent dad, a defiant child, an oppressive home — “The house ain’t paid for yet!” — and a miraculous ending.)

And, through it all, Damiani stays engaged — the blocking of actors and camera is consistently excellent in what I suppose we must call the dramatic scenes. The job was not just a paycheck, it was also I guess a potential calling card, but one soiled by the tackiness of the project: nobody much noticed Magner’s nuanced and compelling performance, or Damiani’s skill with the camera (making it rise over his young leads head and turn upside down at one point — and having this make some kind of sense).

The film finds its place alongside Richard Fleischer’s 3D follow-up: skilled works by inventive artists that never rise to the status of interesting stories because the material is so flat and derivative. A perfect double feature if you’re feeling too inspired and optimistic and need to be let down a bit.

Church and State

OK, I’m on a Damiano Damiani kick now, so impressed was I by BULLET FOR THE GENERAL. And having liked IL STREGHE in the past. Encountering him via his unsuccessful collaboration with Leone was a false start, and misleading — he’s not a sub-Leone figure like Tonino Valerii, he’s his own artist, which is why they couldn’t work together. I’ll postpone his mafiosi and politziotteschi films a bit as I hoover up some outliers.

THE TEMPTER aka THE DEVIL IS A WOMAN aka IL SORRISO DEL GRANDE TENTATORE (1974) seemed like it was going to be a consolation prize for Glenda Jackson walking away from THE DEVILS after finding out the scene where Sister Jeanne’s severed head is worshipped after her death had been cut from the script, or an EXORCIST knock-off (the first?). It was a sensational, nutzoid Ennio Morricone score which does give it a groovy exploitation feel, but as often with this filmmaker, there’s something else going on.

What it really resembles most is ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST. But Jackson’s Sister Geraldine is, though quietly malevolent, also a more complex and sympathetic character than dead-eyed psycho Nurse Ratched, and Damiani’s film eschews misogyny. Sister G is running a hideway for problematic persons — a Polish priest who collaborated with the Nazis, a Prince in love with his own sister, a Bolivian woman who arranged her torturer husband’s assassination, a Cuban priest too sympathetic to communism. Forbidden by the church from conducting confessions, she exerts her power through vicious group therapy sessions…

Claudio Cassinelli is an interloper, a young writer hired to help the Pole (Arnoldo Foà) with his exculpatory memoir. Sister Geraldine comes to regard him as the tempter… we may have similar suspicions of her. In fact, the only quasi-supernatural element is a shadow glimpsed in the chapel at a fraught moment.

Designed by Umberto Turco, the film looks amazing (but badly needs a restoration/transfer) mostly confined to this weird marble living tomb — a good self-isolation movie if you need one. Damiani had been a designer himself, and one way the film does resemble THE DEVILS is in its look — specifically it reminds me of the papal library, ironically one of the few location scenes in that film — Derek Jarman repurposed what was actually a prison.

THE TEMPTER stars Gudrun Brangwen; Jesus; Lizzie Kavanaugh; Emilio Largo; Johnny Spanish; Inspector A; Federico Arturo Von Homburg; and Goya.

THE INQUIRY aka L’INCHIESTA (1987) has a plot that sounds like a good airport novel: in the early years of persecuted Christianity, a Roman consul is tasked with locating the missing body of Christ. Soon put a stop to this resurrection nonsense. And the story is by two greats, Ennio Flaiano (EIGHT AND A HALF) and Suso Cecchi D’Amico (THE LEOPARD).

Keith Carradine is Tito Valerio Tauro and Harvey Keitel is Pilate. A year later he would be Judas for Scorsese. Always the bridesmaid, never the bride… Phyllis Logan is Mrs. Pilate and Sal Borgese turns up to add an echo of spaghetti western days.

It’s a riveting detective drama with a classical history setting. “Ay, Jesus, whaddaya doin’ makin’ crosses for da Romans?” is how a friend caricatured Keitel’s performance in LAST TEMPTATION. It never bothered me, the American accents. Carradine seems to sense that his Californian drawl could be a problem, and tries to smuggle in some Anglo vowels, which is mostly distracting. He still pronounces “stupidly” as “stoopidly.”

A good rule might have been to cast Americans as Romans and Italians as everyone else, but things get a bit mixed up. It doesn’t really do to get religious about these things: cast good actors in roles that suit them and all will be well.

As the investigation goes on, things get intriguing — could Christ have faked his own death? — the Laughing Jesus Heresy (my favourite!) is hinted at, and a miraculous catalepsy-inducing drug is tested — then things get crazy and mystical. Damiani, a Marxist apparently, is perhaps mainly interested in how old power structures can be destabilised by new ideas — Tiberius is right to be worried! — but the Bible stories still exert a hold. Travelling into the wilderness at risk of his life — deep undercover — Keithus Carradinus is at first mistaken for the Messiah — shades of LIFE OF BRIAN — and then momentarily becomes convinced he IS him. Offers to cure a leper or two. “What am I saying? get away from me!”

THE INQUIRY stars Will Rogers; Judas; Lady Jane Felsham; Lucky Luciano; Anna Magnani; Messala; and Henchman.