WINTER OF DISCONTENT: Live Like a Cop, Die Like a Man

On any list of maverick cops, Inspectors Harry Callaghan and Jack Regan are bound to feature highly. Fred and Tony – the, ahem, heroes of Ruggero Deodato’s ‘Live Like a Cop, Die Like a Man’ – are the kind of guys who make Callaghan and Regan look like Jessica Fletcher and Jane Marple respectively … or they would be if they weren’t played by Marc Porel and Ray Lovelock.

On paper, Fred and Tony are little more than licensed vigilantes, whose “means justify the end” work ethic reveals them as no better – perhaps even worse – than the crooks they pursue. On screen, however, Porel man-pouts with such moody determination that I rather suspect Robert Pattison used the film as a training video in order to perfect his characterisation for ‘Twilight’, while Lovelock struts and poses as if he were in some weird commercial for men’s fashions where a pistol is 1976’s must-have accessory and the best way to show off the cut of a sweater is to have the wearer beat up a suspect.

Still, for the purposes of this review let’s suspend disbelief (actually, let’s just expel the fucking thing – it’s quicker) and allow that Fred and Tony are hard, edgy characters with no moral code and not an ounce of human pity between them. As the film opens, they’ve just been transferred to a special squad under the command of Adolfo Celi. I can’t remember his character being given a name and IMDb bills Celi as “the Captain”. Anyway, Fred and Tony have been transferred to a special squad – it’s literally called the Special Squad – with the remit of stopping crimes before they’ve even been committed.

You see, the Special Squad have been given unlimited resources in the form of a very expensive computer that can predict crime (I kid you not: that’s the full extent of the exposition and Celi manages to deliver it without laughing). Now, exactly how nicking someone for a bank robbery before they’ve robbed it works in judicial terms, I’m not qualified to say. But surely it’s just intent at that point and the wannabe robbers would be back out on the streets within a few months.

Maybe that’s why Fred and Tony simply shoot everyone at the scene and leave the local beat cops to clean up with some vague promise of making sure their report clarifies everything. Not that there was even a single scene of them doing paperwork. There are plenty of scenes, however, of Fred and Tony behaving like due process never existed, and despite Porel and Lovelock’s inability to convince as hard-ass bad boys, it’s this tireless parade of unethical behaviour that ensures the film cracks along nicely, requiring no padding to reach its 100 minute running time. But desist with the technical details, I hear you cry; bugger the running time and don’t even think about boring us with aspect ratios and film stocks. Tell us about the unethical behaviour.

Well, it’s like this: Fred and Tony join the Special Squad and promptly go after gang boss Pasquini (Renato Salvatori), unaware that his inside man Daniele Dublino (again, I don’t recall the character having a name, and IMDb just goes with “corrupt cop”) is about to reveal their identities; and since that’s really all there is by way of narrative, Deodato and his three screenwriters (including ‘Milano Calibro 9’ helmer Fernando di Leo) basically ensure that Fred and Tony randomly get involved in any and all occurrences of mayhem on their way to the boatyard shoot-out that ends the film, be it pursuing a couple of snatch-and-grab artists in a six-minute motorcycle chase, crashing into a hostage situation, or gunning down the would-be perpetrators of an armoured truck heist for merely pulling on their balaclavas and looking at the truck.

And even when our boys are actually concentrating on the Pasquini plot, their modus operandi eschews such staples of policework as detection, forensics and evidence gathering in favour of arson, gunplay, duffing up the mobster’s associates and taking turns shagging his nympho sister Lina (Sofia Dionisio). If the surname’s familiar, that’s because she’s the younger sister of Silvia Dionisio, star of Deodato’s earlier ‘Waves of Lust’ and the director’s wife at the time. Sofia Dionisio has a nude scene in ‘Live Like a Cop, Die Like a Man’ that can only be described as sleazy. True, shooting a sleazy sex scene featuring your sister-in-law isn’t quite in the same league of ickiness as some of the stuff Dario Argento has cast his daughter in, but still …

While we’re speaking of the Dionisios, remember Silvia’s J&B scene in ‘Waves of Lust’? Well, Deodato breaks out the blended whisky for narratively redundant bit of iconography featuring Pasquini’s moll:

And while we’re discussing the film’s reductive treatment of its female cast, Silvia Dionisio plays Adolfo Celi’s secretary, to whom Fred and Tony behave in a manner that would make even Sid James in a ‘Carry On’ film break character and tell them off for being chauvinist pigs. Granted, the script gives Dionisio a few zingers to fire back at them, but she’s one of only three female characters who aren’t there to be a vamp or a victim (the other two are elderly housemaids incorporated for comedy value). And yes, casual misogyny isn’t exactly a hidden agenda in the film industry as a whole and 70s Italian exploitation pictures in particular, but even your most disreputable of gialli and sexploitation opuses give their actresses a bit more to do.

So what does ‘Live Like a Cop, Die Like a Man’ have to recommend it? Why splurge over 1000 words on it? Because, basically, it’s entertaining as all hell. That six-minute motorcycle chase? It kicks off literally moments after the opening credits, hurling the viewer full-tilt into Fred and Tony’s renegade way of doing things, and the pace doesn’t let up from there. There’s an action set-piece every ten minutes or so, the execution of which are generally pretty damn good – the bike chase is a stand-out; ditto a bit of cat ‘n’ mouse in a quarry, and a mob hit on one of Fred and Tony’s colleagues. Deodato’s craftsmanship is effective: he has a knack of establishing the dynamic of any given scene very economically, often using specific visual details to define location or character interrelationships. The editing is focused and rigorous, driving things forward all the time.

Also – and it would be remiss of me not to admit this – Porel and Lovelock make for an unforced double-act, creating a kind of bland chemistry that suggests they’ve worked together for so long that they don’t even bother playing off each other any more. It’s just a shame that they come across as moderately less dangerous than Bert and Ernie during a particularly well-behaved episode of ‘Sesame Street’.

WINTER OF DISCONTENT: The Sister of Ursula

Hello, kiddies, and welcome to Uncle Neil’s film club. Now, can anyone answer this question: what’s the sleaziest giallo ever made?

What’s that? ‘The French Sex Murders’? Good choice, but I think we can find something sleazier.

‘Strip Nude for Your Killer’? Very good choice. Extra points for referencing a film that stars Edwige Fenech and Femi Benussi. But we can still hoist ourselves a few more rungs up the ladder of sleaze.

‘Amuck’, you say? With its slow-mo Rosalba Neri/Barbara Bouchet scene? Oh, well played. Well played indeed. But is it quite as sleazy as …

… drum roll, please …

… ‘The Sister of Ursula’? Let’s find out. But before we do, let’s consider the circumstances under which the film came to be made. It’s a far more interesting story than the tawdry narrative we’ll be deconstructing in a couple of paragraphs’ time.

First-time director Enzo Milioni had ambitions to make an art-house film starring Dirk Bogarde; his producer encouraged him to make something commercial, with the intention of securing financing for the Bogarde film on the back of it. Said project never came to fruition, and what we’re left with – the first of only five features Milioni would ever direct – is ‘The Sister of Ursula’, a piece of work whose own director admits is hack-work and which most of the cast look uncomfortable, if not outright embarrassed, to be a part of.

Let’s meet the cast and see what part they play in the whole sordid mess. We have the eponymous siblings Ursula (Barbara Magnolfi) and Dagmar Beyne (Stefania D’Amario), who as the film opens check into a coastal hotel run by the oleaginous Roberto Delleri (Vanni Materassi). Roberto’s wife Vanessa (Anna Zinnemann) actually owns the establishment and would rather Roberto were out of the way so she could take up permanent residence with her lover Jenny (Antiniska Nemour), while Roberto would rather Vanessa were out of the way so he could play hide the salami with improbably named nightclub singer Stella Shining (Yvonne Harlow). Meanwhile, man-pout specialist Filippo Andrei (Marc Porel) moons over Stella while pursuing his own ambiguous agenda.

Wending our way back to Ursula and Dagmar, they’re residing at Roberto’s hotel while they track down their estranged mother in order to make over to her a share of their late father’s estate. Beyne mère, it turns out, was a successful actress who left Beyne père for her career and the attention of numerous admirers. Quite why Ursula and Dagmar don’t establish contact with her via her agent is left unexplained.

Oh, and did I mention that Ursula has some kind of psychic gift that vacillates between precognition and telepathy depending on the requirements of the plot? Or that said gift is explained away by the hotel’s resident doctor (Giancarlo Zanetti) along the lines of “oh, something traumatic happened to her so it brought out the supernatural”?

For a film in which sod all happens apart from extended naked writhings, ‘The Sister of Ursula’ sure is heavy on backstory!

What’s that? You would like to hear more of these naked writhings of which I speak? Are you sure? Okay. Let us take as our text the old adage that if a movie features nudity with its first five minutes, it isn’t a skin flick. Because, heaven help us, even pornography has the decency to build up to the old in-out-in-out. Milioni manages three and a half minutes before Ursula and Dagmar get up to their hotel room and the latter casually disrobes. Hereafter, at intervals of roughly ten minutes, nubile subsidiary characters get nekkid and roll around on top of each other for a while, after which the female participant is brutally murdered.

Ladies and gentlemen, ‘The Sister of Ursula’.

The only surprise is that neither of the titular siblings get an honest-to-God sex scene. Dagmar almost instigates a relationship with Filippo, but then he goes chasing after Stella so Dagmar consoles herself by masturbating with a chunky necklace (which isn’t a sentence I’d ever imagined myself typing, but hey that’s gialli for you); elsewhere, she simply sashays naked around the hotel room. Barbara Magnolfi as Ursula must have had a one boob only clause in the contract because she occasionally comes awake from a nightmare only for one strap of her nightdress to slide off and one … well, you get the picture. Everyone else in the cast lets it all hang out (there’s even a glimpse of semi-tumescence from one of the gentlemen), even though none of them seem to be enjoying the proceedings in the slightest. Particularly the two teenage runaways who buy the farm after they get turned away from the hotel and seek shelter instead in a strange old folly decorated with weird sculptures: their make-out session is noted by him trying to get to the end of the scene as quickly as possible before his mum finds out what kind of film he’s making and her responding as if his technique were a guaranteed cure for insomnia. Shame really, as they’re rudely interrupted soon enough.

So. Yeah. Erm. What was I saying about Ursula having nightmares? Yes, that was it: Ursula has nightmares about her deceased father and intimates to Dagmar that she keeps seeing his ghost. None of this adds up to much narratively so in order to pad things out Filippo plods around the resort town acting suspiciously while Roberto and Vanessa have dramatic moments as if they were in a telenovela and Stella turns out to be something more than the world’s worst nightclub singer. Meanwhile a certain decorative wood carving is put to an improper use.

Ladies and gentlemen, ‘The Sister of Ursula’.

But let’s be honest, Milioni and his creative team are so obsessed with phallocentricity that even the hotel’s verandah is decked out with miniature cannons angled so rampantly that you’d think they were on the verge of spunking up over the coastline. (Didn’t imagine myself typing that sentence either.)

Is it the sleaziest giallo ever made? Quite possibly. Is it one of the worst? Indubitably? This is a film in which everyone involved gave up trying about thirty seconds before Milioni called “action” on the first day of shooting. This is a film where the killer’s eyes are always in a penumbra of shadow even when it’s broad fucking daylight. This is a film where they pull that old routine where the victim looks up startled, breathes a sigh of relief as she mutters “oh, it’s you”, then screams her lungs out as she realises that she is in danger after all … only for you to realise as the end credits roll that at no fucking previous fucking point in the fucking proceedings did she ever fucking meet the killer. This is a film in which Magnolfi – a striking presence in Argento’s ‘Suspiria’ – tries to play Ursula as moody and troubled but just ends up with film-long resting bitch face.

This is a film whose last ten minutes aren’t so much a narrative train-wreck as an out-and-out holocaust against the very concept of rail travel. A film whose producers tried to claim that the actress who played Stella Shining – Stella (as in Latin for star) fucking Shining, for fuck’s sake – was the granddaughter of Jean Harlow. Actually, given the denouement the script tries to sell the audience, that particular chunk of BS is credible plus VAT by comparison!

Murder to the Tune of Seven Black Notes

Posted as part of Operation 101010
Category: gialli / In category: 10 of 10 / Overall: 95 of 100

Made two years after ‘Deep Red’, Lucio Fulci’s ‘Murder to the Tune of Seven Black Notes’ – the last of a decade’s worth of great gialli including ‘A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin’ and ‘Don’t Torture a Duckling’ – has definite parallels with Dario Argento’s classic. Both centre on a protagonist who initially misinterprets a crucial detail glimpsed at the scene of a violent crime. Both follow the blundering amateur sleuthing of the protagonist only for them to realise, far too late in the game, the extent of their involvement in…

But that would be telling.

If you haven’t seen either of these films (and I hadn’t seen ‘Murder to the Tune of Seven Black Notes’ until yesterday; kudos to the gentleman who made it available to me), make a point of doing so. They’re stone cold classics.

Before we go any further, a note on the title. In its original Italian, it’s ‘Sette Note in Nero’ (literally, ‘Seven Notes in Black’. It’s also been released as ‘Seven Black Notes’ and – most popularly – ‘The Psychic’. It was under this American release title that I watched the film and ordinarily that would be the title I’d have reviewed it under. But I’ll be damned if ‘Murder to the Tune of Seven Black Notes’, ticking two of the three traditional giallo boxes (animal, colour and number), isn’t one of the most awesome fucking titles in a genre renowned for awesome fucking titles. Also, ‘Murder to the Tune of Seven Black Notes’ (and there’s no way in hell I’m opting for some ‘MttToSBN’ acronym for the rest of this review; I’m enjoying typing it way too much) yields up a darker meaning as the end credits roll and you’re left to ponder a supremely ambiguous closing shot.

But again, that would be telling.

The movie starts in England as a distraught woman drives to a clifftop, parks her car and walks to the edge. A credit tells us it’s 11.45am. The scene cuts to Florence, Italy, and a young girl who’s one of a party of schoolchildren on a trip suddenly stops dead, a look of horror on her face. A credit tells us it’s 11.45am. A series of shocking cuts (well, maybe not that shocking, since the body that smashes into the cliffs in loving close-up is plainly a mannequin) juxtapose the young woman’s suicide with the girl screaming “Mother!” (IMDb list these incredibly specific references to the time as a “goof”, citing the fact that “continental Europe is one hour ahead of the British Isles time zone in which the time in Florence should read 12.45”.)

I wonder if whoever wrote that even bothered to watch the film to the end. That was the first thing that nagged at me, because I was sure Fulci had done it for a reason. And even then I was completely taken aback when he pulled the rug from under me round about the halfway mark and everything that I had taken in one context – and which had fit together perfectly – suddenly took on a whole different meaning.

The opening scene is Fulci’s answer to Marc Daly’s slow, confused walk along the corridor to Helga Ullman’s apartment in ‘Deep Red’. It’s there if you know what you’re looking for, and it’s so brazenly stated on a second viewing, that the sheer chutzpah of it is magnificent. Note to IMDb: it’s not a goof. It’s quite deliberate. It’s layered with meaning.

Events then move forward eighteen years and that selfsame little girl – all grown up and very elegant with it – is revealed as American designer Virginia Ducci (Jennifer O’Neill), recently married to suave Italian businessman Francesco Ducci (Gianni Garko). Bidding hubby farewell as he jets off to the States to close a deal, Virginia installs herself at an old farmhouse that’s been in his family for years, intending to renovate the property. En route, she has a vision: a room decorated in hellish red; an ornate mirror, broken; a reproduction of a Vermeer with something written on it; a hollowed out section of a wall; an ornament tipped over to reveal something hidden beneath; a man’s face emerging from the shadows; a discarded magazine with an attractive model on the cover; a cigarette with distinctive yellow paper smouldering in an ashtray; someone with a limp slowly approaching; bricks and mortar, a cavity being walled off, a corpse hidden. A strange, almost childlike tune floats through her mind during the vision.

Virginia reaches the farmhouse, starts pulling dust covers off furnishings and recognises the mirror from her vision. She hammers away at a section of wall (psychic visions; childlike musical cues; protagonist alone in creepy house; walled up area containing corpse – all ‘Deep Red’ touchstones). Next thing, the authorities are involved and Francesco, returning from America, is taken into custody pending a satisfactory explanation as to the presence of a skeleton in a home that’s been in his family for generations. Then the lab boys confirm said skeleton as the final remains of a model with whom Francisco once had a relationship. All of a sudden things are looking bad for our boy. Virginia reluctantly joins forces with Francesco’s hoity-toity sister Ida (Evelyn Stewart) and tries to prove his innocence.

For the next forty minutes or so, Virginia sifts red herrings (hmmm, a certain someone smokes a certain brand of cigarettes), identifies clues, and – with the help of her therapist Dr Fattori (Marc Porel) and his Nancy Drew-like secretary Bruna (Jenny Tamburi) – establishes a watertight mass of evidence that prove Francesco couldn’t possibly be the killer. Just one problem: the only thing that correlates all of the evidence is a vision. Which, as Francesco’s lawyer helpfully points out, is pretty frickin’ useless in a court of law.

Then Dr Fattori picks up on a crucial but overlooked detail and the entire picture changes …

I’ve rammed home the ‘Deep Red’ connotations to such a degree that I may have misrepresented ‘Murder to the Tune of Seven Black Notes’ as being derivative. Like IMDb’s misunderstood “goof” at the start, Fulci is actually using the audience’s assumptions very very cleverly. He evokes ‘Deep Red’ so well – right down to some Goblin-like motifs on the soundtrack – that it’s easy to take Virginia as a replacement/stand-in for Helga and assume that when she …

But that, once more, would be telling.

‘Murder to the Tune of Seven Black Notes’ is brilliantly conceived and executed, beautifully shot (it’s a damn shame that most people remember Fulci primarily for the gore and not how inspired a visual stylist he was) and ends on such a viciously unresolved and debate-in-it-the-pub-for-hours-afterwards note (and I use the word “note” very specifically) that it makes the last shot of ‘Inception’ look like an act of closure.

There are two moments that don’t quite add up (one along the lines of “but if X and Y are still at Location 1 it must mean that only a couple of minutes have passed so how come Z is already at Location 2 and spouting reams of expositional dialogue to certain secondary characters?”; the other involving the from-nowhere availability of building materials and an unfeasibly fast clean-up operation), and he overuses the technique of zooming into Virginia’s eyes every time she uncovers a clue that prompts a flashback to her vision of the crime to the point at which it’s become a cliché after just half an hour, but why carp? For one thing, Jennifer O’Neill has the kind of opalescent eyes that close-up was invented for; and for another, Fulci manipulates imagery, timelines and audience perception with such legerdemain that ‘Murder to the Tune of Seven Black Notes’ proves a headfuck so satisfying that you’ll be sparking up a post-coital cigarette and hoping you can do it again soon.