Lipstick on your Killer

IL ROSSETTO (THE LIPSTICK, 1960) is Damiano Damiani’s first film as director. While Elio Petri’s debut, L’ASSASSINO, seems like a near-remake of Joseph Losey’s BLIND DATE, DD seems to have chosen as his model another British picture, J. Lee Thompson’s TIGER BAY. But he’s changed things more.

His lead is teenager Laura Vivaldi, who has a precocious crush on handsome Pierre Brice. He’s much older and only shows an interest in her when it turns out she can put him at the scene of a recent murder. Now he starts doting on her, while working out what he has to do to keep her quiet…

Vivaldi is great — maybe not the thespian genius Hayley Mills was as a kid, but very affecting and credible. Her mom is played by Bella Darvi, so we know there’s going to be trouble there. Brice’s REAL girlfriend is Georgia Moll, miscast by Mankiewicz as a Vietnamese character in THE QUIET AMERICAN (why didn’t somebody point JLM to Dany Carrel?). And the police inspector who starts honing in on Brice, using young Vivaldi as a wedge to crack him, is Pietro Germi, who did quite a bit of acting alongside his celebrated directing career.

Germi is one of the film’s most interesting creations — structurally, he’s Columbo-like (enter late, slowly take over), but less sympathetic. Damiani is not, I think, enamoured of the cops. Germi has a picture of his own daughter on his desk. He’s very kindly toward Vivaldi and he believes her story. It turns out she’s just the age his own daughter would have been.

When a more cynical cop undermines Germi’s faith in his star witness — and the thing that does it is the fact that she’s known to have experimented with lipstick — the hussy! — he turns against her. Things get very dark indeed, and social critique almost takes over from detective drama. It’s a perfect balance, actually.

Two possible criticisms — the movie could make a great advertisment for suicide attempting as a means to resolve adolescent troubles, which could seem irresponsible — and the resolution of the mother-daughter plot is not too satisfying since Darvi plays the mom’s bad qualities much more convincingly than the good ones — she’s been wrapped up in her own soap opera affairs as a married man’s mistress, and doesn’t seem to earn her happy ending. But really these issues don’t seem as troublesome as they ought to be.

Damiani’s direction is assured and simple, sustaining his beautifully crafted melodrama.

I also took a look at GODDESS OF LOVE (1958), in the wonder of Ferraniacolor and Totalscope — an unusual peplum-thing scripted by Damiani. He did a bunch of these for veteran director Victor Tourjansky, but this one departs from the usual playbook. There are no bulging biceps, and despite some marching armies in the second act, the film is mostly intimate, and genuinely interested in its love story, structured around the sculpting of the Aphrodite of Knidos.

You learn absolutely nothing important or accurate about this significant work of art except that it was chiselled by a bloke called Praxiteles (Massimo Girotti), but Damiani’s feminist side is apparent — Belinda Lee, a voluptuous lass from Devon, is tyrannized from all sides because of her beauty — it’s like THE RED SHOES, only clunky on every level. Praxiteles wants her as model (but secretly is smitten), a wounded Macedonian he shelters (Lithuanian sideboard Jacques Sernas, Il Divo in LA DOLCE VITA) is in simply manly love with her, and the entire Greek army lusts after her for the way she knocks the shape out of a tunic.

Damiani is guilty of some bad radio writing — “Let’s run away from here through this door!” but his story is actually compelling. Tourjansky, once a wild stylist in France in the 20s, has settled into his “mature” period — asleep at the wheel. You don’t need to watch it. But it’s interesting to see DD already mastering story and making something a little more interesting than it needs to be.

“There are a lot of inconveniences to yachting that ordinary people don’t know anything about.”

Rudy Vallee’s observation about a life on the ocean wave in THE PALM BEACH STORY might very well be echoed by Sam Neill and Nicole Kidman in DEAD CALM, which I finally caught up with. Director Phillip Noyce is someone I haven’t really bothered myself about — I found his lauded QUIET AMERICAN dull, more faithful than Mankiewicz’s re-Americanized version but simply tedious to watch, and I never persevered with SALT, despite its refreshingly coherent action scenes. And I promise to never watch SLIVER or PATRIOT GAMES.

But this one finally tempted me, viewed as a George Miller movie (he produced) rather than a Noyce one. It feels tightly storyboarded and has been pared down until the backstory squeaks, a mere vestige of some now-lost subplot. The really intense suspense is in the first half, I found, but like such films as Hawks’ THE BIG SLEEP, it builds up such goodwill that you don’t notice if the last half isn’t as strong. I enjoyed MAD MAX: FURY ROAD as much as the rest of you, and it’s prompted me to revisit the Miller back catalogue.

Never get on a boat with Billy Zane, by the way. Just some friendly advice. Think about it.

Nicole K, still sporting her original birth face at this point, is both photogenic and convincing, while staunch Sam Neill is dominant enough to suggest a deeply-buried thematic level the film never quite gets around to pinning down. His advice to his spouse that she must forget their dead child and move on to their new life is uncannily echoed by Zane later in the film as he urges her to stop thinking about her drowning husband and devote her attentions to him.

But it’s the nasty thrills and elbow-gnawing suspense that mark the film out as attention-worthy. Miller has always been not only unafraid to kill men, women, children and dogs, he has practically insisted upon it — you can see his entire career as a preparation for LORENZO’S OIL, just so we’ll take that movie’s fatal childhood disease seriously. Trust him, he’s a doctor.

Bad panty continuity. Nicole stips off to seduce Zane, then climbs straight on deck wearing only a jacket — and is suddenly sporting tighty-whities. Did Noyce seriously say, “No one will be looking at her ass, they won’t notice”? Fiona reckons Nicole just didn’t want to spend the rest of the movie bare-ass (Zane clearly DID). I guess her character just generated panties by sheer willpower. I can’t help feel the movie offered a few later opportunities for the character to don grundies. You can’t rush into these things.

Now all we need is the Orson Welles version. I don’t mind if it’s not finished, or not very good — TOO MUCH JOHNSON convinces me it’ll be interesting anyway, and the less work it undergoes at the hands of others, the better.

Casanova in Greeneland

I’ve been looking at Mankiewicz, Joseph L, as the New York Film Fest is doing a retrospective and I was asked to write something for The Forgotten, which you can read about on Thursday. As part of my viewing, I was startled to discover that Fellini stole the opening of CASANOVA from Mankiewicz’s THE QUIET AMERICAN.

TQA is a Graham Greene adaptation set in Viet Nam, photographed by Robert Krasker (THE THIRD MAN) in inky b&w, whereas CASANOVA is a carnivalesque biography of the Italian libertine, poet, diarist and spy, so the two would seem pretty far apart. But both begin with celebrations, and what Mankiewicz and his team make of Chinese New Year in Saigon seems to have strongly influenced Fellini’s take on the Venice Carnival. Obviously, both events have certain elements in common — Mankiewicz centres his scene on a canal (he loved Venice, and filmed there), and there are masks and fireworks and bells and singing and chanting. It’s not surprising that the Fellini scene would contain all those features.

And it is POSSIBLE that the way veteran editor William Hornbeck fragments Mankiewicz’s scene, with near-subliminal flash-cuts of firecrackers exploding against the night sky, suggested itself to Fellini and his editor, Ruggiero Mastroianni independently. And the jumbled, jangled soundtrack, so very reminiscent, certainly owes something to what these celebrations naturally sound like, though Fellini’s is more elaborately layered and stylised.

But when a Chinese dragon’s head fell from a bridge and floated down the canal, I felt a distinct deja vu. The image of Venus rising from the waters like Martin Sheen in APOCALYPSE NOW has a precedent in Fellini’s work — the top half of a vast statue’s head is carried through the streets in a moment in SATYRICON, so it was a partial image in the maestro’s mind already. But I think the combination of similarities is fairly overwhelming — nothing is proven, you understand, but direct influence seems to me more likely than not.

And I’m still surprised — Mankiewicz influencing Fellini?