BY LEE PFEIFFER
"One of the most brutal and unforgettable crime films ever made, "Cry of a Prostitute" is now presented in its degenerate glory uncut in HD for the very first time!"
So reads the blurb on the Blu-ray sleeve of Code Red's new release of the Italian crime thriller "Cry of a Prostitute", a 1974 "B" movie directed by Andrew Bianchi. Although I was ignorant of the film until the screener arrived, apparently it has built a reputation over the decades because, even by Italian crime movie standards of the era, it was considered to be outrageously violent, tasteless and shocking. Obviously, I couldn't resist indulging...The film certainly lives up (or down) to the Code Red blurb and is representative of Italian movie-goers' obsession with violent crime movies during this period. The movie follows in the tradition of throwing everything but the kitchen sink into the screenplay: spectacular shoot-outs, a stone-faced anti-hero who is just as vile as the villains, a Morricone-inspired score and plenty of nudity and sexual abuse. This "something for everyone" scenario also includes the Italian cinematic tradition of blatantly cribbing plot devices from older films. It can be said that if you ever desired to see Leone's "A Fistful of Dollars" incorporated with Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet", your ship has finally come in.
As with many Italian films, an American leading man was imported to give the movie some additional luster and boxoffice appeal in the USA. In this case, it's Henry Silva, who plays Tony Aniante, a grim, unsmiling assassin who is brought to Sicily by a mob boss who hires him to neutralize a rival Mafia don. It seems the other gang is involved in a particularly insipid practice of using the bodies of deceased children to secrete the movement of illegal drugs. It's pretty hard to find any humor in such a scenario but when you see the corpse of one of the children displayed on a roadway after an accident, it makes it painfully obvious that it is a dummy used in CPR training courses. Such are the glorious absurdities of "B" Italian crime movies. As in "A Fistful of Dollars", Silva ends up dividing his loyalties to between the crime families for his own personal gain. He also gets involved with Margie (Barbara Bouchet), the wife of one of the dons who saunters around the house half-naked and has a penchant for suggestively eating bananas at the dinner table. The only sympathetic characters in the film are a young couple from rival families who are in a forbidden love affair, hence the Shakespearean connection. The film is packed with trademarks of the Italian crime genre: over-the-top fight scenes and sound effects, bright red paint substituted for blood, confusing plot devices and a "hero" with a particular eccentricity: in this case, he whistles loudly and ominously before appearing out of nowhere to kill his rivals. In fact, the movie blatantly lifts several plot schemes from "For a Few Dollars More", including flashbacks of a murder and the notion that when a tune stops, someone dies. (In "For a Few Dollars More", the music came from a locket.) The most memorable aspects of the movie are the grotesque scenes of violence. There is a decapitation, a corpse cut up by a buzz saw, the squashing of bodies by a steamroller and the serial abuse of Margie, who is beaten to a pulp with a belt and then raped by Tony, who previously had raped her while shoving her face into the hanging open carcass of a pig. As in most films of this type, the abused and beaten woman is sexually stimulated by her mistreatment and doesn't hold a grudge. It's enough to make "Last Tango in Paris" seem like "Brief Encounter".
The title "Cry of a Prostitute" is a bit absurd because there are no prostitutes in the film, although we learn that Margie had been one some years before her marriage. The U.S. distributor simply wanted a commercial title and so, voila!
The Code Red release is derived from "the 2017 HD scan from the original negatives with major extensive color correction done here in America". In general, it looks sensational, although on a few occasions there are still some glaring artifacts remaining.The print used for the transfer is the English-language version which features the requisite hilarious dubbing found in such movies of the era. (Even American Henry Silva is dubbed.) While it is generally best to view foreign films in their native language with English sub-titles, in a case like this, we have to be grateful for what we have. The only extras are separately viewed main titles for the U.S. release, a U.S. TV spot and an abundance of trailers for similarly-themed films.
All told, kudos to Code Red for continuing the good fight to salvage and present movies that would otherwise be lost to time. This one is definitely an acquired taste so we don't recommend it for suggested viewing on a first date.
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