Columnists
Entries from May 2023
By Adrian Smith
Cesare Mori grew up in an orphanage in the 1870s but
rose to power and influence through the military, then the police, and finally
as a Prefect in Mussolini’s Fascist Party. He was dispatched to Palermo in
Sicily in the mid-1920s with the specific task of destroying the power and
influence of the Mafia, who held a vicious and all-controlling stranglehold on
the island. The Mafia were responsible for hundreds of brutal murders every
year, bribed officials, and were a prime reason why so many lived in poverty.
Mori was a man on a mission, and would stop at nothing to break this criminal
organisation. He was extraordinarily successful. His reasoning was that it was
not enough to simply arrest people: The citizens of Sicily had to see that the
authorities could help them and that they no longer needed the Mafia for
protection.
Following his promotion to the senate, where
ultimately he fell afoul of Mussolini
after expressing concern over Italy’s relationship with Hitler, he wrote his
memoirs about the role he played in breaking the Mafia, and it was this that
inspired the 1977 production of The Iron
Prefect, starring Giuliano Gemma in the title role. Gemma was well-known to
audiences thanks to his role in such Spaghetti Westerns as A Pistol for Ringo (1965, Duccio Tessari) and Day of Anger (Tonino Valerii, 1967) and he would even appear in
Dario Argento’s Tenebrae a few years
later in 1982. Despite being around twenty years younger than the actual Mori,
he creates a believable, authoritative character, and one can see why the
Sicilian police were willing to follow his sometimes-unorthodox methods. The
film features Claudia Cardinale in a supporting role as the struggling mother
of a young boy whose father was an influential leader of the Mafia, but having
had enough, she wants to try and secure a better life for the boy away from
Sicily. It was ably directed on location by Pasquale Squitieri, who was himself
no stranger to the Western, and had also made other films about organised crime
and the Mafia, including Camorra
(1972) and The Climber (1975).
It’s an easy comparison to make, but one can’t help
but think of the Sicilian section of The
Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972), and this film makes an excellent
companion piece to that: Sicily is hot, dry and crumbling, where peasants are
armed with shotguns and the authorities are powerless to do anything about the
criminal gangs who brazenly murder entire families to maintain control, until Cesare
Mori arrives of course. The Iron Prefect
has been restored in 2K from the original negative and is available here from
new boutique label Radiance Films with new and archival extras. As Squitieri
and Gemma are sadly no longer with us, an archival interview with them both
recorded in 2009 provides fascinating insight, and there is also a new
interview with Squitieri’s biographer Domenico Monetti. My favourite bonus
feature here is an appreciation of Giulliano Gemma by writer, director and
western fan Alex Cox who goes into detail and brings wit and style to the piece.
If Alex Cox, host of the important Moviedrome
series of film screenings on British television in the late nineties, could
shoot videos like this for all of Radiance’s releases, I for one would be very
happy. The limited edition of The Iron
Prefect comes with a booklet featuring new writing by Italian cinema expert
Guido Bonsaver and an original article on the real-life Cesare Mori and his
Mafia raid as depicted within the film.
This is another excellent release from Radiance, who
have rapidly become a popular and collectible label with an eclectic mix of
world classic and cult cinema. Cinema
Retro recently interviewed founder Francesco Simeoni about the label. You can read it here.
You can order The Iron Prefect direct from Radiance by clicking here.
By Mark Cerulli
Josh
Agle, better known as “Shag” has made a name for himself creating Mid-Century,
Tiki-inspired art that has become quite popular with collectors. He has
previously mined the cinematic landscapes of Star Wars, Planet of the Apes, Godzilla The Addams Family and Batman, creating stylized fine art prints,
many of which sold out. Now he’s finally
turned his talents to James Bond, releasing “Bambi & Thumper”, a Diamonds
Are Forever-inspired print at his Las Vegas store on May 27th.
The
work was, of course suggested by the 1971 Connery classic – “I first saw Diamonds
Are Forever as a kid and the scene where two beautiful bodyguards beat up
James Bond in a futuristic home is something that made a lasting impression on
me,” the artist explained in a recent email to his followers. The story gets even better, as Agle wrote “Many
years later I got to stay in that supervillain lair, the Elrod House in Palm
Springs and I blasted the soundtrack to Diamonds Are Forever… how could
it not inspire a painting?”
If
your licensed troubleshooting takes you to Palm Springs, Shag’s unique store is
worth a visit. The artist frequently
hosts print release parties where he chats with guests and is happy to sign his
work – which also includes Tiki Mugs, small prints, kitschy lamps and clocks, books,
beach towels, even socks! He also has a
store in The Palms Casino Resort in Vegas – a location both Bond and Shady Tree
would feel at home at.
“Bambi
& Thumper” will be for sale on the SHAG website (shagstore.com)
starting Sunday, May 28th, available framed and unframed. With a print run of only 200, hop in your Moon
Buggy to grab one!
By Todd Garbarini
In
honor of Al Pacino’s 83rd birthday this past April, Cinema Retro
looks at the new double-disc Kino Lorber 4K Ultra High Definition and standard Blu-ray
release of Sidney Lumet’s 1973 police drama Serpico, a film that is based
upon the real-life exploits of retired New York Police Detective Frank Serpico.
Serpico is an early entry in Mr. Pacino’s film roles and also one of his
most riveting. He got his start in feature films by playing a potential suitor
to Patty Duke at a party in Fred Coe’s Me, Natalie (1969) and then
played the lead opposite Kitty Winn in Jerry Schatzberg’s The Panic in
Needle Park (1971), a cautionary tale of heroin addicts in New York City.
Following his transformation from a discharged military soldier into
cold-blooded family head Michael Corleone in Francis Ford Coppola’s The
Godfather (1972), he reteamed with Mr. Schatzberg for the heartbreaking Scarecrow
(1973) -opposite Gene Hackman- as Lionel Delbuchi, a man who attempts to right
past wrongs with his ex-wife. In Serpico, Mr. Pacino’s fifth film, he
teams with veteran director Sidney Lumet to portray the real-life police
detective who not only uncovers corruption in the ranks but takes the
department to task for accountability and change.
Serpico begins at the end and is told in
flashback leading right up to the start of the film when our hero is shot in
the face by a small caliber pistol. Mr. Pacino gives a powerful and deeply
nuanced performance of a man who knows right from wrong but feels trapped
withing the workings of the police department and needs to proceed cautiously.
As Serpico is rushed to the hospital and is met by Police Chief Sidney Green
(John Randolph), the full weight of all he has been through shows on his face,
his circumstance taking him back, in flashback, to his graduation from the
police academy. In his early days, Serpico is an idealistic and happy young man
who eschews donning the police department’s standard-issue plainclothes accoutrements
in favor of dressing like a civilian to improve the relationship between police
and the community. A burglary attempt nearly proves fatal when responding
officers open fire on him in his unrecognizable getup. He meets and courts Leslie
(Cornelia Sharpe), a ballerina, and her acquaintances back away when they learn
of his profession. Their romance suffers, as does his superior’s (James Tolkan)
perception of him.
Serpico
comes face to face with police corruption and initially treads lightly as officers
he works with take money from criminals to look the other way. From their
behavior, it is just another day at the office. When he attempts to report this
to his superiors, he is laughed off. Future busts with other officers results
in him being offered his “take” which he refuses to the shock and dismay of his
peers, especially Tom Keough (Jack Kehoe) who wants the gravy train to continue
and does his best to ingratiate himself and warns Serpico to comply and not to
go against the others. He begins to wonder who is worse: the rapists and
robbers or his fellow officers?
Serpico
entrusts the aid of an associate, Blair (Tony Roberts), who knows the right
people. They go straight to the mayor’s office, but the initial meeting leads
to more disappointment as the case is tabled, making life miserable for both
Serpico and his new girlfriend who loves him and desperately wants children
with him, but she eventually terminates their relationship. He then takes on a
mobster, an unrecognizable Richard Foronjy who would appear opposite Mr. Pacino
in Brian DePalma’s Carlito’s Way twenty years later in another
elliptical narrative wherein the lead is shot and the story is told through
flashback. The arrest and confrontation is Mr. Pacino at his most explosive in
the film, his fury directed at both the mobster but more at his fellow officers
who joke around with this man who was previously jailed for killing another
police officer. Things take a dangerous turn when he goes outside of the
department to report the corruption and brings his findings to the New York
Times. Serpico finds himself transferred to a terrible neighborhood busting
drug addicts, leading him to the near fatal shot to the face, after which he
testifies before the Knapp Commission regarding the corruption.
Serpico opened in New York City on Wednesday,
December 5, 1973, almost three years shy of the actual murder attempt in
Williamsburg. It was Mr. Pacino’s first time working with producer Martin
Bregman and he would collaborate over the next twenty years on Sidney Lumet’s Dog
Dag Afternoon (1975), Brian DePalma’s Scarface (1983), Harold
Becker’s Sea of Love (1989), and Brian DePalma’s aforementioned Carlito’s
Way (1993). Serpico’s mother is played by actress Mildred Clinton. I have
only seen her in one other film, Alfred Sole’s Alice, Sweet Alice (1976)
wherein she played Mrs. Tredoni. She is deeply affecting in her small but
significant role. The remaining cast is a smorgasbord of players you will
recognize from the terrific roster of New York character actors that includes
Tracey Walter, Tom Signorelli, Kenneth McMillian, Tony LoBianco, Judd Hirsch, Sam
Coppola, Sully Boyar, F. Murray Abraham, M. Emmet Walsh, and Sal Corollo. Cornelia
Sharpe, who was producer Bregman’s girlfriend at the time (later his wife), is
given less screen time than she deserves. She went on to play the role of Nancy
Stillman in Peter Collinson’s 1974 film Open Season, a bizarre film that
has never seen the light of day on home video in the United States (but is
finally available to download on Vudu) reportedly because producer Bregman
wanted it keep out of circulation, but that’s another story.
Serpico is an example of the great New York
1970s filmmaking style that I miss so much, and the film is an authentic
product of its time. There is no way to fake 1970’s New York convincingly today.
There are too many details to capture, although HBO’s The Deuce did an
admirable job of it.
The
new Kino Lorber release of the film contains the following extras:
Disc
One: 4k Ultra High Definition (UHD)
The
first disc is a triple-layered pressing of the film in 4K UHD with the film
image scanned from the original camera negative and color-corrected.
Exclusive
to this release is an audio commentary by film historians Howard S. Berger,
Steve Mitchell and Nathaniel Thompson. This is an extremely informative and
entertaining piece, including a discussion of great New York filmmakers (think Woody
Allen, Spike Lee, and Sidney Lumet). John G. Avildsen, who would go on to
direct Rocky for United Artists and win the Best Director Oscar, was the
original director, and he did not see eye-to-eye with producer Martin Bregman
and Dino De Laurentiis, leading to his dismissal. The film was edited by the
late great Dede Allen, who would also work with Mr. Lumet on Dog Day
Afternoon (1975, one of her greatest accomplishments) and The Wiz
(1979). Filmed on a low budget, scheduling was challenging as Paramount also
needed Mr. Pacino to return for The Godfather Part II.
Disc
Two: Standard Blu-ray
In
addition to the new transfer and running audio commentary, there are the
following extras:
Sidney
Lumet: Cineaste New York
– this piece runs 30:24 and is ported over from the special edition Studio
Canal standard Blu-ray release from 2010. Mr. Lumet, in a 2005 interview, talks
about his time growing up in New York City during the Depression; the changing
nature of what the city has to offer; how safe the city was at the time of the
interview; how he uses very little violence in his films; shooting on location
in the city, and how his characters relate to their environment.
Looking
for Al Pacino –
this piece runs 30:38 and is also ported over from the special edition Studio
Canal Blu-ray. It includes onscreen interviews with directors Jerry Schatzberg,
Michael Radford, and Jack Garfein, who all speak very highly of Mr. Pacino and
his method of acting.
Serpico
Reel to Reel – this
piece runs 09:58 and is ported over from the Paramount DVD from 2002 and
includes onscreen interviews with Martin Bregman and Sidney Lumet and how the
film came together once they were all onboard.
Inside
Serpico – this piece runs
12:55 and is also ported over from the Paramount DVD and focuses on the
astonishing way that the film was made. It began shooting in July 1973, was
shot in reverse continuity, edited during principal photography, and premiered
five months later. Absolutely unreal for a film of this caliber.
Serpico:
Favorite Moments – this
piece runs 2:37 and is also ported over from the Paramount DVD. Mr. Bregman
talks about his favorite scene, which comes near the film’s end when Serpico
refuses his gold shield. Mr. Lumet’s favorite scene is at the Hell’s Gate
Bridge when Serpico unleashes on his superior about going to outside investigative
agencies.
Photo
Gallery with Commentary by Director Sidney Lumet (4:24) is also from the Paramount DVD.
It focuses on Mr. Lumet’s desire to have no music in the film, something that
Mr. De Laurentiis completely disagreed with. Mikis Theodorakis was then
contracted to write a theme for the film that appears sporadically throughout
the film but is never overpowering.
The
following trailers are also included: Serpico, Michael Winner’s Death
Wish (1974), John Schlesinger’s Marathon Man (1976), Michael
Cimino’s Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974), Richard T. Heffron’s Newman’s
Law (1974), Peter Hyams’s Busting (1974), Stuart Rosenberg’s The
Laughing Policeman (1973), Sidney Lumet’s 12 Angry Men (1957),
Sidney Lumet’s The Group (1966), and Sidney Lumet’s A Stranger Among
Us (1992).
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By Todd Garbarini
An
old saying is that drama is easy, but comedy is hard. When comedy works, it is
nothing short of a miracle. When it fails, it is a thundering disappointment. On
New Year’s Eve in 1976, I attended a party at my mother’s aunt’s house. While the adults were ringing in the New Year in the small
and cramped basement, I was on the first floor watching a television airing of
Stanley Kramer’s It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. It was the first time
I had ever heard of and seen this madcap, star-studded extravaganza that pits a
Who’s Who of top-notch comedians in a quest to locate a suitcase containing
$350,000.00, the equivalent of roughly $3.5 million dollars today. To say that
I loved it would have been an understatement. To make a film on that scale with
that number of people and actually make it hilarious is other worldly. I immediately
became a fan of most of the cast, particularly Jonathan Winters in his role as Pike,
the driver of the moving van who must get to Yuma, AZ and will stop at nothing
to get his hands on $350,000.00 located under a “big ‘W’”.
James Frawley’s The Big Bus is a comedy
that took its maiden voyage theatrically on Wednesday, June 23, 1976,
nationwide. As a send-up of disaster films that made their rounds at the box
office during the 1970s, it is a film similarly pitting an all-star cast in an inane
situation that should be laugh out loud hilarious but falls a bit short in this
department. The premise concerns a nuclear-powered bus designed to be driven
from New York to Denver in record time while an iron lung-encased oil magnate
(Jose Ferrer), in cahoots with a group of oil sheikhs, plot to sabotage the bus
to protect their financial interests. They manage to take both the driver and
co-driver out of commission with a bomb, necessitating their replacements with
Dan Torrance (Joseph Bologna), a vilified former bus driver who crashed a
previous bus and was accused of eating all the passengers to survive, and his
narcoleptic co-driver “Shoulders” (John Beck), so named as he cannot keep the
bus off the highway shoulder and in his own lane. Along for the ride are Kitty
Baxter (Stockard Channing) as Dan’s former flame; Ned Beatty as one of the
remote radio navigators; Ruth Gordon as a passenger who tells it like she sees
it; Sally Kellerman and Richard Mulligan as a couple about to be divorced who
cannot seem to keep their hands off each other (the bit is initially humorous
but wears out its welcome); Lynn Redgrave as a staid fashion designer; a crazed
Bob Dishy as a veterinarian; Richard B. Shull as a man whose time on planet
Earth is coming to a close, and so on. The bus is even outfitted with an onboard swimming pool, if you can believe that such a
thing would fit. For those of you unlucky enough to recall, in February
1979 NBC-TV launched an ill-fated television series as their answer to ABC-TV’s
The Love Boat. Titled Supertrain, the most expensive television
series ever produced up to that time, it was (surprise!) a nuclear-powered
transcontinental New York to Los Angeles souped up ride that housed a swimming
pool, a movie theater, a disco(!), and a cast of characters so bland one wonders
how this train ever left the station. The pilot episode, directed by Dan
Curtis, was an interminable two hours, with a catchy theme that I dug at the
age of ten and was composed by Robert Cobert. Both shows were conceived of by
Fred Silverman at different points in his career.
Bus made its television network premiere
on Saturday, May 24, 1980 at the unorthodox time of 09:30 pm. The film runs 88
minutes, and while being placed in a 90-minute time slot, a good amount of
footage must have been excised to accommodate commercials. Bus may have
played out much funnier at the time of its release as a fair number of jokes
are topical, though the 2001 theme accompanying the rollout of the
titular vehicle is still very much in the minds of filmgoers decades later. The
gags are amusing but are light-years away from what it could (and should) have
been. An admirable attempt at humor, Bus cannot hold a candle to the
absurdist wrongdoings of the stewardesses and passengers of 1980’s Airplane!
Apparently, the Zucker Brothers, the brains behind Airplane!, worked on Bus
as well. Bus can be viewed as the appetizer, with Airplane!
served up as the main course – and dessert, to boot.
Kino
Lorber has released the film on a beautifully transferred Blu-ray. I love this
company and they do not disappoint. There is a feature-length commentary by
film historians Howard S. Berger and Nathaniel Thompson which is more fun to
listen to than actually watching the film – at least for me. They discuss the
location shooting and give short bios of the cast members as they appear
onscreen, while also engaging in anecdotes about the big disaster films of the
period. It is always a pleasure to listen to them.
The
film’s trademark comedic key poster art was illustrated by the late great
cartoonist Jack Davis, who also drew the key art for the aforementioned Mad World. It appears on the Blu-ray cardboard sleeve and the Blu-ray cover
art in a slightly truncated and altered version to fit the dimensions and still
be discernible.
Oscar-winning
composer David Shire, who also scored The Taking of Pelham 123 (1973), The
Conversation (1974), and All the President’s Men (1976), may seem
like an unorthodox choice to score such material, but he makes the most of it
with a rambunctious score that made its way to compact disc (remember those?)
in 2011 via Film Score Monthly.
Rounding
out the Blu-ray are a selection of trailers from the showcased title, John
Schlesinger’s Honky Tonk Freeway (1981), Richard Fleischer’s Million
Dollar Mystery (1987), Gus Trikonis’s Take This Job and Shove It
(1981), Marty Feldman’s In God We Trust (1980), Michael Apted’s Continental
Divide (1981), Joel Schumacher’s D.C. Cab (1983), and Neal Israel’s Moving
Violations (1985).
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