A few Spaghetti westerns for May.

Long Days of Hate, aka This Man Can’t Die (1968), directed by Gianfranco Baldanello. This one stars Guy Madison as the cigar-smoking hero. As Spaghetti westerns go, this one is pretty poor. The acting is awkward, the costumes laughable, and the story familiar. The sound track is good, courtesy of Amedeo Tommasi, and the action scenes are passable. As for that familiar story, Martin Benson (Madison) is an undercover agent for the cavalry, out to thwart baddies who are delivering guns and booze to the Native people. The bad guys discover his betrayal and kill his parents. His siblings, two sisters and two brothers, escape the bad guys and repair to a furnished cave somewhere. They bring with them one of the bad guys who has been badly wounded. This bad guy proves not to be a bad guy, but another undercover agent. The head bad guy is courting Martin’s eldest sister Susan (Lucienne Bridou), but when he is revealed as the head bad guy, Susan is revulsed. Then we have brother Daniel Benson (Steve Merrick, a Will Hutchins lookalike), and sister Jenny (Anna Liotti) who is raped by one of the bad guys and loses her voice for a while. One scene in which the saloon girls battle with the baddies has quite a bit of nudity. The bad guys are really bad, even killing two elderly innocent people for no reason. Finally, we have a Raymond Hatton lookalike who has a short ladder on his saddle to help him climb down from his horse (and up again when need be). All is all, this is not a Spaghetti western you need to see.

 

Find a Place to Die (1968), directed by A. Ascot (Giuliano Carnimeo). This Spaghetti western is a remake of the Gary Cooper film, Garden of Evil (1954), and it has the feel of a 1950s western. It even has the requisite bathing scene in which the female lead finds a mountain stream in which to bath sans habille. Jeffrey Hunter has the Gary Cooper role here; he is Joe Collins, an American living below the border and running guns to the Mexican outlaw Chato (Mario Dardinelli). A young wife, Lisa Martin (Pascale Petit), whose husband is trapped in the Sierras comes seeking help to rescue her husband. Of course, Joe, and three other ne’er-do-wells, accept the lady’s offer. Mostly, they are interested in the lady and her gold. These five pick up a sixth member on their way to the Sierras. This is the preacher and lecher, Reverend Riley (Adolfo Lastretti). Arriving at the mine, they find Mrs. Martin’s husband deceased. He has been tortured. Torture appears more than once in this film. Anyway, the gold is gone, and so this little band of fortune seekers returns from whence they came only to find Chato and his gang have taken over the small village. A siege takes place. The bad guys die, and things end as we expect them to end. This is an efficiently made Spaghetti western, but aside from its interest in torture, it has little to distinguish it. The plot is overly familiar.

 

Adios, Sabata (1970), directed by Gianfranco Parolini (Frank Kramer). Mark this one down as a guilty pleasure. It has wicked costumes, especially for the Sabata character (Yul Brynner), an elaborate firearm with a magazine that holds a number of bullets and one cigar, a Morricone-style soundtrack courtesy of Bruno Nicolai, a cast of eccentrics including one fellow who performs more than one the flamenco dance of death, and many tumbling and squawking bodies. As Spaghetti westerns go, put this one in the parodic category. Like Guy Madison in Long Days of Hate, Yul Brenner often lights a cigar but never smokes one. His black fringed, open chested, low-slung gun-belted, and over the shoulder blanket, along with bell bottoms make for a strange and uncomfortable-looking costume. His taciturn performance might remind us of his robotic character in Westworld. The plot involves a gold shipment and a number of gangs looking to get their hands on it. The backdrop is revolutionary Mexico under Maximillian, but the political theme is not at the forefront of this film in the way it is in a number of other spaghetti westerns. Parolini’s tongue is in his cheek, and this film takes nothing seriously. There are two other Sabata films, both with Lee van Cleef as Sabata, and in this film Brynner was initially to play a fellow named Indio Black. The character’s name was changed to Sabata to help sell the film.

 

A Genius, Two Partners and a Dupe (1975) Damiano Damiani. As comedic Spaghetti westerns go, this one has its charms. It clearly draws on films such as My Name is Nobody, For a Few Dollars More, Once Upon a Time in the West, Stagecoach, The Searchers, the Trinity films, and more. The musical score by Ennio Morricone follows suit and references earlier films. The cast too has its charms with Terence Hill, Robert Charlebois, Patrick McGoohan, and the perky Miou-Miou. Even Klaus Kinski turns up for a short while near the beginning of the film. The plot has something to do with the theft of $300,000, an Indian-hating colonel (McGoohan), the return of land to the Native people, the building of a railroad, and other stuff that bewilders me. The characters have names such as Joe Thanks (Hill), Steam Engine Bill (Charlebois), Jacky Roll (Piero Vida), and Village Idiot (Gerard Boucaron). The action, at times, plays like a Looney Tunes cartoon. The script is laced with silly remarks (well funny remarks). The landscape continuously shows us Monument Valley, although the film was shot in Spain. If there is anything serious going on here, it is in the focus on the Native people and their unjust displacement from the land. Damiani’s portrayal of Native people hovers between serious and ridiculous. This film can take its place alongside a few other comedic Spaghetti westerns worth watching, Corbucci’s The White, the Yellow, and the Black (aka Samurai), Tonino Valerii’s My Name is Nobody (a film with Leone’s imprint), and Enzo Barboni’s My Name is Trinity. A final note: the voices in this film (some dubbed, but not all) are strange to say the least. Squeaky and high-pitched barely communicates this strangeness.

Get Mean (1975), directed by Ferdinando Baldi. While watching this film, I kept thinking of Sergio Corbucci’s Samurai (aka The White, the Yellow, and the Black (1975). Both films are late Spaghetti westerns trying hard to be different, both try for humour, and both deliver strangeness in abundance. One succeeds, one does not. Get Mean does not. The opening sequence tells us all we need to know. The film begins with a horse racing through a barren landscape, dragging someone behind in the dust. This someone proves to be the Stranger (Tony Anthony). Why he is tied behind the horse remains unknown. But when the horse stops at an out of the way run down place, the people inside appear to be waiting for the Stranger’s arrival. They offer him $10,000 to accompany a Princess to Spain. He demands $50,000. So begins a film in which our hero not only gets dragged by a horse, but he also finds himself hanged upside down, chased by a rampaging bull, pummeled by invisible ghosts, roasted on a spit with a lemon in his mouth, all the time contending with what appear to be Vikings, Moors, a Shakespeare-quoting hunch-back who fancies himself Richard 111, and a gay fellow who is forced to eat a huge amount of mashed potatoes in order to make him disgorge a message the Stranger has forced him to swallow. Then we have the turret thing with the cannons that revolve 360 degrees. Then we have the bit where the Stranger disappears in a puff of smoke only to reappear as a black person. All of this has racist and misogynistic overtones. All of this struggles vainly to be coherent. All of this struggles vainly to be amusing. My advice: choose Corbucci’s Samurai instead.

 Just some films from the 1930s, including a couple by Dorothy Arzner.

Devil and The Deep (1932), directed by Marion Gering. This film boasts Cary Grant, Gary Cooper, Charles Laughton, and the inimitable Tallulah Bankhead. It also boasts a submarine that sinks to the bottom of the ocean (Oh wait, to the bottom of the deep blue sea); inside are a number of sailors, along with an axe-wielding Laughton and Ms. Bankhead and Cooper. Oh, and above water, the action takes place in some faraway exotic place where men dance and swing and night brings alluring goings-on. The plot hardly matters in this over-heated melodrama, but I can tell you this: Laughton as submarine commander Charles Sturm brings a lot of Sturm und Drang to his role of the jealous and psychotic husband, while Gary Cooper stands around wondering how he got here. As for Cary Grant, he appears for about 10 minutes and yet he receives third billing in the opening credits. Ms. Bankhead performs the abused wife well enough. As for the bit in the sunken submarine, this is noteworthy and engaging for being preposterous. The cinematography by Charles Lang is fine, but the sets and toy boat invite us to chuckle and we do. As a pre-code production, the film does offer us the following bit: a woman in a nightclub says to Diana (Bankhead), “You probably heard me say that I’d very much like to spank you!” In reply, Diana raises an eyebrow and says, “I should imagine that few things would give you greater pleasure.”

 

Hot Saturday (1932), directed by William A. Seiter. This pre-code outing from Paramount has Cary Grant as a rich playboy, Romer Sheffield, who has a summer home on the lake in a small community. He has his eye on local bank clerk, Ruth Brock (Nancy Carroll). So too does another bank employee, Connie Billop (Edward Woods). Then we have local boy returning home, Bill Fadden (Randolph Scott). Bill too has eyes for Ruth. When a local gal sees Ruth returning home in the middle of the night, driven by Romer’s chauffeur, the rumour mill begins working and soon Ruth is the bad girl of town and fired from her job. The film has one daring scene in a cave when Bill, who has found Ruth passed out in a ravine and soaking wet, carries Ruth to his cave (he is staying there for work as a geologist – or something like that) and undresses her while she sleeps. Another scene has Ruth wrestle the underwear off her sister Annie (Rose Coghlan). The film deals with risqué subjects. The actors are fine, Nancy Carroll reminding me of Claudette Colbert. Grady Sutton (someone I know as Og Oggilby from The Bank Dick - 1940) also turns up. The location shooting by cinematographer Arthur Todd is impressive. As pre-code films go, this one is pretty nifty.

 

Merrily We Go to Hell (1932), directed by Dorothy Arzner. When, at her wedding to Jerry (Frederic March), Joan (Sylvia Sidney) discovers the ring Jerry has placed on her finger is the end of a corkscrew, she should realize the mistake she has made. This is a film about alcoholism, patriarchy, money and inequality, and open marriage. This is strong stuff for 1932. Arzner brings a sure hand to her examination of posh living late in the prohibition era. The film’s credits play on a theatre marquee and the lights that dazzle on the edge of the marquee serve as the merry signal of Hell. Going to Hell merrily, the people we meet suffer from a system that demands success and success demands performing specific roles, roles that set out what each gender may or may not do. Both Jerry and Joan struggle of free themselves from societal constraints, and this struggle leaves them with little but each other. When they first meet, Jerry sings a wee ditty to Joan: “First she gave me gingerbread and then she gave me cake; and then she gave me crème de menthe for meeting her at the gate.” Joan gives Jerry gingerbread and cake, but he finds the crème de menthe himself and fails to meet her at the gate. For much of the film, Jerry is inebriated and he is usually late or does not appear at all. The portrait of marriage here is not bright and cheerful. Quite the opposite. Arzner, the only woman director in 1930s Hollywood, offers a devastating look at marriage. The acting is nuanced, sharp, and believable. This is as good as it gets in pre-code Hollywood.

 

Christopher Strong (1933), directed by Dorothy Arzner. Perhaps not the best of Arzner’s films, Christopher Strong nevertheless has some amazing moments. The most famous of these moments occurs when Katharine Hepburn as Lady Cynthia Darrington enters a room dressed as a moth. She moves toward Sir Christopher Strong (Colin Clive) like a moth to a flame. Sir Christopher is a politician and a happily married man with an adult daughter, Monica (Helen Chandler, also seen as Lucy in Browning’s Dracula). Cynthia and Christopher’s affair is what controls the narrative. Sir Christopher’s wife Elaine (Billie Burke – yes Glinda from Oz) remains steadfast if sorrowful at the wandering of her husband. Another amazing moment occurs when Cynthia and Christopher make love. The love scene takes place before our eyes, but in a remarkably delicate manner. The camera stays on Cynthia’s ringed finger while the lovers talk just off screen. For 1933, this was a daring scene. What most impresses, however, is Hepburn wearing her aviatrix clothes, her jodhpurs, her voluminous coat, her long buttoned gown, and so on. The story has to do with marriage, fidelity, infidelity, independence, and the vagaries of the human heart. Of course, Cynthia and Christopher’s love cannot end well. Echoes of Amelia Earhart. This was Hepburn’s second film and first as lead; she carries the film.

Hôtel du Nord (1938), directed by Marcel Carne. Opening with a dinner scene celebrating a first communion and ending with a street scene of dancing and music on Bastille Day, this film takes us into the lives of the people who live and work in the titular hotel. This hotel is situated by the

Canal St. Martin in Paris, although the whole film is shot on a set, a magnificent set. Between the opening and closing festivities, we have two young lovers who attempt suicide together, a woman of the streets who switches partners, her pimp who is chased by a couple of gangsters, the lock operator whose wife cheats on him, the two owners of the hotel, and an assortment of other members of the common people. These various people give us romance, tragedy, comedy, and the stuff of life lived well. Carne’s fluid camera and carefully nuanced lighting and thoughtful angles work to deliver the famous poetic realism. The film begins and ends with two lovers, yes the same two who attempted double suicide, seated on the same park bench giving the film a neatly circular construction. Among the cast are such luminaries as Arletty (playing Raymonde the street walker), Annabella (playing the young lover Renee), Jean-Pierre Aumont (the other young lover Pierre), and Louis Jouvet (playing the pimp Edmond). Jouvet’s performance is especially noteworthy as this callous low life manages to redeem himself finding love, an impossible love, but love nonetheless. This is a film not to be missed.

Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932), directed by Robert Florey. This is one of the first round of sound horror features by Universal Studios and the cinematographer is Karl Freund who served as lighting person on The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. The Caligari connection will let you know that Murders in the Rue Morgue looks good, as good as any of the more famous flicks from that studio such as Dracula and Frankenstein. In fact, the sets here just may be more impressive. The plot, loosely based on the Poe story, has demented Dr. Mirakle (Bela Lugosi) trying to find a woman whose blood is suitable for mating with Erik, the gorilla. Yes, you heard that right. Mirakle believes the mixing of human and ape blood will prove evolution. He also believes he communicates with Erik and that Erik desires a wife. The film has echoes of The Hunchback of Notre Dame and even King Kong. Most impressive to me is the good – or mad – doctor’s laboratory that looks as if it had been designed by Rube Goldberg. We also have a fellow named Leon Waycoff playing our young hero, Pierre Dupin. Waycoff later becomes the more recognizable Leon Ames. Charles Gemora (uncredited) plays Erik, and plays him convincingly. The film has style. For sure.

 

The Sphinx (1933), directed by Phil Rosen. This is a Monogram cheapie, but it manages to maintain interest. In short, we have a series of murders, a couple of which have witnesses who spoke with the murderer. Both witnesses identify the murderer as a wealthy philanthropist who happens to be a deaf mute. The mystery here is how this person who has medical doctors certify that he cannot speak because his vocal cords have been sliced can get away with the murders. He fools ace reporter Jerry Crane (Sheila Terry) who takes a shine to the accused but exonerated Mr. Breem (Lionel Atwill). Another reporter and Jerry’s boyfriend at the outset of things, Jack Burton (Theodore Newton), is convinced that the suave Mr. Breem is, in fact, the culprit. Along for the ride are familiar faces such as Paul Hurst, Hooper Atchley, Paul Fix, Ernie Adams, and a shaven and uncredited George ‘Gabby’ Hayes. This is one of Monogram’s better efforts. Efficient and quite well scripted.

 

The Crime of Dr. Crespi (1935), directed by John Auer. Based on the Edgar Allan Poe story, "The Premature Burial," The Crime of Dr. Crespi is a creepy study of obsession. Filmed with an eye for expressionistic lighting and angles, Dr. Crespi stars Erich von Stroheim as the titular doctor who has taken to drink as he obsesses over the loss of his loved Estelle Ross (Harriet Russell) to his rival, Dr. Stephen Ross (John Bohn). Fate allows him to exact a fiendish revenge on this rival, and Crespi arranges for Ross to be buried alive. Of course things do not work out as Crespi hopes. For one thing, another doctor, Dr. Thomas (Dwight Frye – yes Renfield in Dracula) discovers Crespi’s skullduggery. Thomas and another colleague dig up the buried Ross, and low and behold, Ross sits up, then walks about. Oh dear. Soon the walking dead confronts Crespi. You know what happens, don’t you. Perhaps not. The film ends on Crespi’s terms, although these terms are rather dire. All in all, this is a creepy, effective little film. Erich von Stroheim is a nasty piece of work, snapping and even yelling at the people he works with. The atmosphere here is impressive. Films like this demonstrate that the low budgets of Poverty Row need not be an impediment to quality flicks.

 

Condemned to Live (1935), directed by Frank R. Strayer. This low budget vampire flick aspires to the look and feel of Universal’s Dracula, but does not quite make it. What it has going for it is the presence of a sympathetic vampire. Professor Paul Kristan (Ralph Morgan) is a local hero for his good work among the poor of a village, wherever this village may be. Sadly, years ago his mother, while in deepest Africa for some reason, was bitten by a large bat while sojourning in a cave. The result is the strange affliction her son suffers when he is an adult. The stress of overwork produces terrible headaches, which in turn lead to a loss of consciousness during which Paul becomes a horrible vampire. We have something of a Jekyll and Hyde situation, although Paul does not know what happens when he blacks out. Of course, we have a young women, Marguerite Mane (Maxine Doyle), who is betrothed to the good professor. She will marry him out of admiration, despite being very much attracted to local boy David (Russell Gleason) who desires to marry her. And of course, as things transpire, the fiendish nature of the Professor nearly does poor Marguerite in. Through all this, the loyal servant, hunchback Zan (Mischa Auer), tried to protect his master, the good professor, even going so far as to falsely confess to murders of a few local people. The villagers assume Zan is the monster. Things work out as you might expect. The good professor is played by Ralph Morgan, brother of Frank Morgan (see The Wizard of Oz). The plot, then, has some novelty, but the sets and camera work are pedestrian, at best. The studio from which this film comes is Invincible Pictures. Invincible indeed.