WINTER OF DISCONTENT: Hitch-Hike

To hear Franco Nero, Corinne Clery and David Hess reminiscing on the special features “making of” documentary about how well they got on during filming and how proud they are of the work they produced, you’d think ‘Hitch-Hike’ was a high-point of world cinema, something worthy of comparison to Fellini or Antonioni. Actually, it’s a mean-spirited little exploitationer that was directed by Pasquale Festa Campanile. 

Campanile was incredibly prolific in three disciplines: as novelist, screenwriter and director. He was apparently something of an aesthete. You wouldn’t think it to watch ‘Hitch-Hike’. Its original Italian language title is ‘Autostop Rosso Sangue’ which means exactly what you think. ‘Blood Red Autostop’ – not exactly subtle, is it?

In a film utterly devoid of likeable or sympathetic characters our ostensible protagonists are Walter and Eve Mancini (Nero and Clery), an Italian couple holidaying in America. Walter is a burned out and borderline alcoholic reporter stuck in a stagnant decade-long marriage to his boss’s daughter. Apparently affluent enough (they’re tootling round the States in a big car with an even bigger caravan behind it and doing the odd bit of hunting with a pair of expensive-looking rifles), their lifestyle seems little compensation for the fact that they can’t stand each other. Walter is boorish and verbose. He treats his wife like a piece of meat – in an early scene, he mauls her in the back of 4x4 next to the corpse of a deer he’s just bagged – and that’s when he’s not fantasizing about doing her in.

The opening credits play out over Walter tracking Eve through the cross-hairs of his rifle, only hesitating from pulling the trigger when a deer presents itself as an easier target. Eve is waspish and petulant, not averse to attracting attention from other quarters in order to score points against her husband.

After spending quarter of an hour with these two, it’s almost a relief when – against Walter’s express instructions – Eve pulls over to offer a hitch-hiker a lift. Oh, wait a minute, the hitch-hiker’s played by David Hess. Yeah, this one’s going to end badly.

Hess began his career in the music industry, first as a singer (recording ‘All Shook Up’ a year before Elvis took it to the top of the charts and scoring a middling hit with a cover version of ‘Living Doll’), then as a song-writer (random pick from the CV: Pat Boone’s ‘Speedy Gonzales’), before establishing himself as an actor as the loathsome Krug in ‘Last House on the Left’ (he also wrote the score), a persona he continued to draw upon in ‘Hitch-Hike’ and ‘The House on the Edge of the Park’. Yes, folks, we live in a world where Wes Craven and Ruggero Deodato’s go-to guy when they needed a deranged rapist once recorded a Cliff Richard cover. Personally, I’m counting that one single fact as more mind-warpingly fucked up than anything I have ever featured as part of the Winter of Discontent.

Hess’s character is called Adam, hence various references in the script – adapted from the sensitively titled novel ‘The Violence and the Fury’ by Peter Kane – to Adam and Eve. Which would imply that Walter is the serpent. Events in the last third suggest there might be something to this reading. Indeed, it’s in the last third that Campanile starts to do something really interesting with the material, having rather abruptly curtailed the Adam-terrorizes-Walter-and-Eve/will-Adam-rape-Eve-before-Walter-fights-back dynamic of the first hour. And let’s face it, said first hour trades on sexual threat and a leering objectification of its leading lady to such an extent that it would have become utterly tedious if Campanile had played his string out any longer.

‘Hitch-Hike’ delivers its best moments in the early scenes when Adam is happily playing Walter and Eve off against each other (at one point Adam, picking up on Walter’s disaffection with his job, offers him the story of a lifetime tagging along in his swathe of crime and brutality as official biographer, kind of a Beauchamp to his English Bob), and towards the end when a confluence of wounded masculinity and bad influence bring things full circle.

Challenges to Walter’s full-blooded Italian masculine imperative are rife: his marriage has devolved into a lust-hate relationship; his father-in-law is his employer, to whom his vocational ambitions are in hock; early on he breaks his fingers, necessitating a surrender of the driving duties to Eve; he gets drunk easily, suggesting an inability to hold his booze; Adam goads him into a stunningly politically incorrect debate on how gays are making the world their own (I can’t help but wonder whether the drunken dwarf’s monologue on blacks vs whites in ‘In Bruges’ owes a debt to ‘Hitch-Hike’); and ends up on the receiving end of a sadistically executed practical joke by a bunch of free-loading students.

While the scenario presents him as the ostensible hero – tested to the limits in order to prove himself – Walter is continually painted as little better than Adam. Verbosity, quick-temperedness and self-importance are traits they shared. And while the scenario presents Eve as the ostensible victim she does herself no favours, deliberately provoking Adam when commonsense ought to compel her to fade into the background. That the sexual rivalry and one-upmanship resolves in the most ambiguous rape scene this side of ‘Straw Dogs’ just adds to the general unpleasantness and moral retardation on offer.

It’d be reprehensible and worthy of immediate dismissal … but it’s just too well made.

GIALLO SUNDAY: The Fifth Cord (guest review by Aaron)

Thanks to my buddy Aaron of The Death Rattle and The Gentlemen’s Blog to Midnight Cinema for the following review.

FIFTH CORD is a Giallo noteworthy for being shot by Vittorio Storaro (APOCALYPSE NOW) and starring Franco Nero (click on his name to see the greatest IMDB profile picture ever). It opens with a tape recording of the film's killer (who sounds an awful lot like Vincent Price), which acts as a bit of foreshadowing, I suppose. Cue one of the worst opening theme songs to a Giallo ever as we're introduced in shorthand to most of the film's characters as they interact with each other in a nightclub. Fortunately, Ennio Morricone redeems himself for his horrible opening theme with a subsequent score that sounds similar to his work on other Gialli, notably Dario Argento's BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE. Strange, considering that the film itself bares a few similarities to Argento's directorial debut. Italian tough guy actor Franco Nero plays a journalist with the not-so-tough name of Andrea. From the start, you get the feeling that he's a full blown alcoholic because of the fact that every time you see him he's pretty much shit-faced; not quite on the level of his character in HITCH-HIKE, but sauced nonetheless. However, as the film progresses, the "drunk" angle is dropped completely, which indicates that it's merely a cheap way of establishing Andrea as a character with flaws. Speaking of Andrea, he's a stereotypical Giallo character, in that he represents the everyman who's thrust into a situation where he's surrounded by murder and suspicious people, leading him to take on the role of an amateur investigator. In most cases, the protagonist is a contrast to the inept detectives who are usually investigating said murders, but in this particular film's case, there are no detectives to be found. It all begins with a socialite being attacked in a tunnel by an unknown pipe-swinging assailant. He survives but is hospitalized for the beating he took. A series of murders follows; presumably the work of the aforementioned attacker, since the killings - though seemingly random at first - all involve people who know each other, including the man who was beaten in the tunnel at the beginning of the film. Subsequently, the film turns into one of those Gialli where it's extremely hard to keep track of what's going on because of the fast pace, the numerous characters who are introduced for brief periods of time, and a seemingly endless amount of information being thrown out there for the viewer to process. As far as the killer, it's impossible to discuss that person's trademarks or motives without spoiling anything, but I can say that the killer's get-up looks identical to the mysterious slasher in CASE OF THE BLOODY IRIS: yellow gloves, black coat, black mask. I can also say that the killer is not Vincent Price, unfortunately. It should be noted that Franco Nero's character - besides being a drunk - smacks women around, but yet he's likable because: A) he seems to be the only person in the film with any common sense, B) he's the only person in the film who doesn't seem to be up to any shady business, and C) he's motherfucking Franco Nero, son. One of the things I love about Gialli, personally, is that a lot of them take place in upper-class areas of Italy and usually involve a bunch of yuppie scumbags, and THE FIFTH CORD is no exception. The worlds of gorgeous women who look like fashion models (and the handsome Italian men who fuck them and treat them like dogs) are shaken to the core by a mysterious killer who infiltrates their upper-class society and leaves a trail of dead bodies. Also, like most Gialli, there's an emphasis on style over substance in THE FIFTH CORD. To be fair, I believe the filmmakers had good intentions but simply fell short in some areas (namely the storytelling), resulting in a standard-but-stylish Italian thriller that doesn't really stand out from the Gialli that preceded it. As someone who's seen enough Gialli to have a good understanding of them (although I'm certainly no expert by any means), I feel comfortable saying that THE FIFTH CORD is worth seeing if you're a fan of the genre, but unless you're a Franco Nero completist (which you should be) I wouldn't recommend going out of your way to do so.

PERSONAL FAVES: Django

Challenge ten people at random to write a synopsis of their favourite western, and I'm betting at least eight out of the ten would start "Deke/Zeke/Jake [delete as applicable] rides into town and ..."

In Sergio Corbucci's 'Django', the eponymous anti-hero walks into town and ...


Whoa. Let's back up a moment. Django (Franco Nero) doesn't even get into town before his misadventures start. Dragging a coffin behind him, Django arrives at a rope-bridge on the outskirts of town where he witnesses a group of Mexicans flogging a woman, Maria (Loredana Nusciak). Before he can intervene, the Mexicans are gunned down by a bunch of Yankees. Rather than rescuing Maria, however, it's their intent to tie her to a cross and burn her. This time Django does intervene.

So: body count already in double figures, a heroine who's earned the disapprobation of rival factions, and an enigmatic outsider about to play those selfsame antagonists off against each other. And we're only five minutes into the movie. Our boy hasn't even opened that coffin yet ...

Once in town, Django encounters the sadistic and xenophobic Major Jackson (Eduardo Fajardo), a man who gets his kicks forcing Mexican peasants to run for their life then shooting them in the back. He commands a private army (their uniform: KKK-style face masks, only red instead of white) as well as holding a post at a nearby US cavalry fort. A bar-room altercation sees Jackson's henchmen dead. Django casually enquires how many men he's got left. Forty-eight, Jackson replies. Django casually invites him to come back with all of them. Jackson obliges.

This is where our boy opens the coffin.

So: body count now pushing three figures courtesy of an off-the-wall shoot-out that most films would have saved for the denouement, and we've still got the little matter of Mexican revolutionary General Hugo Rodriguez (Jose Bodalo), his relationship with Django, their collaboration on a daring robbery at the very same US fort Major Jackson's affiliated with, and acts of betrayal and counter-betrayal that set up a truly excruciating finale where Django, his hands broken in a retributive beating, has to go up against his erstwhile antagonist while he can't even hold a gun, let alone pull the trigger.

Made in 1966, 'Django' was a cheaply and quickly produced spaghetti western, badly dubbed and aimed squarely at the American market. It became a phenomenon, spawning at least thirty sequels (only one of which, the slightly disappointing 'Django Strikes Again', was an official, linear follow-up with Nero reprising the title role). Countless other spaghetti westerns were quickly retitled to include the name Django, even though the character makes no appearance. Takeshi Miike's recent 'Sukiyaki Western Django' sets itself up as a bizarro prequel.

It also established Corbucci as the most popular and influential director of spaghetti westerns after Sergio Leone. Both were admirers of Kurosawa and saw 'Yojimbo' at impressionable stages in their careers. It's no coincidence that their breakthrough films - 'Django' for Corbucci, 'A Fistful of Dollars' for Leone - display similarities to Kurosawa's samurai classic.

'Django', though, ups the ante on even Leone's amoral reworking of 'Yojimbo'. Django is one of the genre's most inscrutable protagonists: he announces himself as Django, but refers to what's in the coffin as Django. He even refers to wanting to bury Django. Of course it's a fucking big gun in the coffin, not a person, so is Django admitting that he's lived by the gun for so long that he's lost his humanity to it, that the gun itself is Django and he's simply the mode of transport that hauls from one town to the next, one killing to the next? He has a grudge against Major Jackson over the killing of a former girlfriend, but the backstory is never revealed. Django saves Maria, but seems to abandon her to Rodriguez later on. The only other woman he takes an interest in, he uses to stage a diversion so he can steal off with a consignment of gold.

But he's angel compared to Jackson and Rodriguez. These two set the standard for corruption. Everyone's dirty. Even the town itself is a feculent mud-hole.

Corbucci ups the ante on the violence, too. There are fist fights, whippings, emasculation, death by pick-axe, a pre-'Reservoir Dogs' bit of ear-slicing and whole swathes of extras mown down when Django cuts loose with the Gatling gun.

And yet it's more than just a cheapie exploitationer. Enzo Barboni's cinematography is exceptional, Corbucci's direction is assured (in addition to the prerequisite shoot-outs and bar-room brawls, he pulls off an extended scene of Hitchcockian tension as Django attempts to abscond with the gold), and the film is rich in ambiguous imagery. Particularly religious imagery. Crosses are everywhere, from the marquetry on the top of Django's coffin, to the burning crosses Jackson's men carry, to the headstones in the cemetery where Django's final confrontation with Jackson occurs.

There's even a striking scene of Django, broken and remorseful, kneeling before a cross.

Umm. No. Wait. He's using it to aim his gun.