'Dogville' (2003)

Starring: Nicole Kidman, Paul Bettany
Music: Antonio Vivaldi, David Bowie
Director: Lars Von Trier
Screenplay: Lars Von Trier
Director of Photography: Anthony Dod Mantle

"And they asked me which heads should fall, and the harbour fell quiet as I answered 'All'."

(Berlot Brecht, trans. Marc Blitzstein, 'Pirate Jenny')

Internet summaries of the film's plot are plentiful, but I'll add my own re-cap to start things off in any case. On the run from gangsters, Grace (Nicole Kidman) is taken in by the citizens of tiny, dead-end town Dogville, in return for doing (paid) manual tasks. After a honeymoon period (capped by her guest-of-honour status at a Fourth of July meal), the town’s kindness turns to distrust and abuse, as they shackle her, repeatedly rape her, and force her to work as a slave. Eventually, they call her gangster father to come and take her off their hands; he does, but, with his daughter’s permission, also massacres the whole town in the process, thus contributing yet another of Von Trier's head-scratching 'happy endings'. So that, in broad outline, is what happens during the film's three hours: talking points and moments of controversy aplenty, as you can imagine. Let's begin our exmination of the film proper, then, with what has been perhaps the most controversial of the many controversial issues dogging Von Trier throughout his career: namely, his attitude to women, his supposed misogyny. Well, the way Grace bears her sufferings does uncomfortably play into the stereotypes of woman as suffering saint (not only because she refuses to give up her virginity, but because she persists in doing so (rebuffing Thomas Edison Jr.’s advances) even as it is repeatedly taken from her by all the other male inhabitants of the town; at once virgin and whore, have your cake and eat it). And her turn to avenging angel at the end is no better: it seems that the only option she has is to be a victim and to rely on 'daddy' to over-react to the bully when the time comes. (Yes, she shoots Edison Jr. herself, but only because daddy's gangster thugs give her the ‘manpower’ to do that). Consider briefly: what if the victim figure in the film were not a white woman at all, but a man of colour? Or even a white man? Would the things that happen to a female character be allowed to happen to a man? Or can they happen as they do only because Von Trier is following in a long tradition of exploiting and even glamourising female suffering, albeit with a twist of apparent knowing irony? It's unlikely, for example, that a male character would be repeatedly raped with a look of winsome resignation on their face (and then there's the whole S&M aspect of Kidman's collar (joined as it is with her fur-lined coat)). In addition, the sexual violence takes place in a way that doesn't really feel violent at all - like much of what happens in the film, it seems somehow to be veiled with a certain knowingness, a caustic and dispassionate knowningness. It's almost as if we, the viewers, are supposed to be in on some sort of joke, of which rape is a part. Von Trier, then, does not really intend to convey a wider point about the status/treatment of women in American society, or any society – not that he's above trying to make (quite heavy-handed) political points, just that he's got a blind-spot in his view of women which doesn't enable him to give even the remotest justification for their exploitation.

OK, so what about the Christian angle? Well, it would be a mistake to view ‘Dogville’ as too overt or direct a Christian allegory – not only because Von Trier hasn't emphasized that interpretation in his interviews, but because the Christian elements in his films seem to me more window-dressing than thought-through theological tussle. This is hardly a surprise given statements such as: “I don't know if I'm all that Catholic really. I'm probably not. Denmark is a very Protestant country. Perhaps I only turned Catholic to piss off a few of my countrymen.” Like everything else that his perplexed interviewers scribble down, this is designed to shock, without necessarily having a specific programme behind it – if he contradicts himself, so much the better; who said that he should be the conscience of society? (“I also don't want you to think I'm a moralist. I want you to think that I'm cruel, hard and manly” is another eminently quotable line from the same occasion, in which he also proclaimed: “I am an American woman. Or 65 percent of me is.”) Still, even with all that deliberate contradiction and provocation taken into account, the statement about Catholicism does capture something about the way his films unfold – hinting at, even blaring in your face, a certain type of symbolism, or allegorical reading, or horrific/absurd shock-image (remember the talking fox in ‘Antichrist’? or those more famous moments of sexual violence in the same film?), but never connecting these fragments into an cohesive overall picture. (In that sense, one thinks of Jodorowsky’s mystical-psychedelic kaleidoscope of symbols in ‘El Topo’ and ‘The Holy Mountain’.) He's good – very good, in fact – at general effects (in ‘Dogville’, the combination of John Hurt’s snide faux-story-book narration, the bare Brechtian backdrops, subtle jump-cuts within scenes adding a kind of fluid discontinuity to their flow, ranging camera-movements around the studio set giving an efficient sense of the community as pervasive, invasive, looking in, looking on, spying, complicit), less so on sorting through the specific points he wants to hammer home (the credit sequence at the end, in which David Bowie’s ‘Young Americans' accompanies photos of poor US citizens, both white and black, is caught between being wilfully ambiguous and wilfully didactic – it ends up awkwardly placed between the two). Nonetheless, that Christian element is undoubtedly there: Grace (yes, a loaded name) as female Christ figure, come to earth to be taken into our community, her good nature abused, persecuted; yet maintaining an attitude of acceptance despite all the suffering. (The shedding of tears, like Christ's shedding of tears on the cross, happens not because of his own pain but because of how far others have stooped – well, ok, both because of others’ sin and because it’s actually quite painful to be crucified.) But here comes the twist away from the traditional resolution of the Christian story; 'Dogville' doesn't end with the redemptive, sacrificial death of the lone victim, but switches to the rather different moral territory of the revenge climax. Grace does not utter the words, 'forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do', given that, in this case, 'Father' is mob boss James Caan. No, after a chat in his car, she comes to believe that they know very well what they do, the moral hypocrites; they are unredeemable, and therefore it’s only right to have them all killed as payback. So that is what happens. Grace's attempt to bear suffering with, yes, grace, and to always give people the benefit of the doubt, to think the best of them, comes a-cropper, and the only alternative is just to exterminate the scum, the dogs. In that sense, we're really meant to go along with Caan's speech in the car about not trying to understand rapists or murderers, just blowing their fucking heads off. Social explanations – pah! – who needs those?; just kill them all. Here is where Von Trier's social sense falls short, because, although he wants to present a vision of nasty small-town America and its intolerance, he himself has an intolerance for poor Americans that doesn't just condemn their racism or ignorance or whatever else he wants to attribute to them, but refuses to listen to any justification for it, refuses to think, for example, about the way that poor whites were set against poor blacks as a distraction against their own exploitation by governing classes (as documented in Howard Zinn's 'People's History of The United States'). Dogville is such an isolated community – at the edge of the wilderness, the limits of what is acceptable – that it could be considered a rogue, extreme or distorted version of small-town America, with all of its flaws and none of its virtues; trouble is, it's this very isolation that prevents it from being very effective as the wider allegory that Von Trier wants it to be. For all their dialogue, then, the townsfolk end up not all that far from the nightmare-cartoon-rapist hillbillies of 'Deliverance'.

This enables the revenge aspect to seem more uncomplicated; yes, OK, the gangsters shoot kids and a baby, but we'd only seen the baby as a rocking cradle prop anyway, the only kid with dialogue was a nasty brat who's getting what he deserved, and Kidman spares Moses the dog at the end anyway (‘Gee, I do hate it when animals are killed, don't you? I can watch a hundred people blasted away quite happily, but I blub like a baby if one animal is harmed.’) I had a similar problem with the Coen's ‘True Grit', a film which was much more about efficient story telling and nice period-atmosphere touches than about grand narratives, allegorical dimensions, but still…Like the original novel and the John Wayne film, it rendered its villains ill-drawn, not exactly pantomime baddies, but not exactly characters anywhere near as fully-drawn as the three protagonists either. We end up accepting revenge as 'just the way it was back then', revelling in it, going along gleefully with the simple law of 'an eye for an eye'. That's partially to do with the whole western genre, which so often turns on that element – though of course the notion that the hero must lose this bitterness and forego their revenge is also a part of that tradition. (Even if they do manage to have their cake and eat it when the antagonist tries to kill them, so that they've no choice but to fire back. Yes, you did kill them, even though you’d foresworn revenge; but, don’t worry, your conscience may remain clear; you only killed them ’cos you had to, not because you were hunting them down for any selfish motives.) Often, a pretended moral grapple with the whole notion of revenge is simply window-dressing for the violent denouement we knew was coming – at least the spaghetti westerns were less hypocritical than that in their straightforward revenge narratives. Even 'Unforgiven', one of the most thoughtfully considered views of violence and revenge clichés within the genre, turns on its head at the last minute – all the talk and demonstration of the griminess of violence, its ingloriousness, the toll it takes on lives, is swept aside for a western gothic shoot-em-up, Eastwood then riding, almost literally, into the sunset (not when he leaves the town, heading into the portentous raging storm, but over the final credits, as he stands silhouetted by his wife's grave). I’ve always wondered: was this Eastwood playing on the audience's demand for revenge, only to reveal its disgusting reality? Or was it something more unresolved, simply a re-tread of Pale Rider’s atmospherics, a cloak of style disguising a sudden lack of substance? The difference in 'Dogville' is that we're not in a western, the bloody revenge shoot-out is not what we've been waiting for/ expecting/ dreading/ enjoying in equal measure (à la any number of Peckinpah movies, ‘Straw Dogs’ (a western in all but setting) in particular). So is Von Trier lulling us into a false sense of security? – not so much that we don’t expect the harmlessly eccentric townsfolk to turn nasty, and are suitably shocked when they do, but that we expect the process of the innocent saint's abuse to lead to her martyr's death (perhaps then leading the townsfolk a realisation of what they've done, or to another hypocritical moral justification revealing their essential meanness). Instead, not only are we given the revenge we weren't expecting, but we can enjoy it all the more for its unexpectedness (urging Kidman on as she ponders whether or not to spare the townsfolk). Is Von Trier doing a Haneke (Funny Games)? Well, not really, he hasn't thought it through that much – essentially, what I get from it all is: small-town hick, dirt-poor America is nasty and mean, full of people grasping for what little money and advantage that can be extorted from their desperate situation, and from people in that situation even worse off than themselves (e.g. immigrants, which Kidman’s character isn’t exactly (in fact, she comes from a far wealthier milieu than the small-town hicks and pretenders into whose midst she is cast), but for whom she could easily be taken as a metaphor). Not only this, but said abuse is ‘backed up’ by all sorts of sentimental/sanctimonious cod-philosophical/religious justification. Such moral hypocrisy means that the aforementioned small-town, dirt-poor America thoroughly deserves what’s coming to it. Chickens coming home to roost / the glamour of gangster violence (all 1930s cars, hats and tommy guns; if the small-town milieu is America is seen/filtered through the perspective of stage plays (Brecht, ‘Our Town’), this gangster element is America as seen through the movies) / this glamorous violence as an efficient solution? I wouldn’t have a problem with this if it was so obviously within the moral context of a movie – Tarantino’s ‘Inglourius Basterds’ isn’t pretending to be anything other than a ludicrous fantasy, the ultimate WW2 entertainment – but Von Trier seems to be consciously trying for a wider moral high-ground (particularly given the fact that he decided to make his ‘US trilogy’ at around the time the whole business of American intervention in Iraq was rearing its head), and thus forces himself into a corner, where provoking liberal do-gooders turns dangerously close to espousing view such as the following: “Rapists and murderers may be the victims according to you, but I call them dogs and if they're lapping up their own vomit the only way to stop them is with the lash.” So “Shoot them and burn down the town.” These are the words given to the mobster father, but Von Trier himself seems to endorse them: “I liked the idea that the father, this hard-nosed gangster who's not particularly likeable, brings a sort of truth to the story. He has a healthy understanding of people. His daughter wants to be good to everyone and only causes damage.” We know that VT delights in making provocative statements (“Until that point I thought I had a Jewish background. But I'm really more of a Nazi” (he’s referring to his genetic background, in case you’re wondering); still, how much slack can you cut? How many pinches of salt can you...etc. Maybe it’s the Zizek syndrome: because you’re expected to be a good leftist, you constantly try to provoke your own audience (who lap it up and love it – treat me wrong, Slavoj, treat me wrong), by making points about cowardly liberals and honest fascists, and, consequently, you end up valorising racist working-class violence against gypsies. Not that you really believe all that, but your own status as a provocateur has driven you to a position where you can’t back down, where everything that you say has to be controversial, even when that position of constant controversy becomes little more than a stylistic tic which often misses the mark (that well-worn strategy: ‘this well-known fact is often trumpeted; but does it not mean the opposite of what it is commonly thought to be saying?’ recurs throughout Zizek’s writing, but, especially in the recent work, one often ends up thinking, ‘well, no, it doesn’t. You’re just saying that for rhetorical effect.’)

But, following that off-topic wander, I’ll leave it to someone else to lay down a better final word on ‘Dogville’ than I could:

“The sequence in Dogville that inspires the strongest reaction is the closing credit sequence, which is accompanied by a montage of photographs of American poverty and misery — Depression victims immortalized by Dorothea Lange, dead bodies lying in the street, miserable inner-city images of hungry children and unsteady adults. (It’s jauntily scored to David Bowie’s “Young Americans.” [Interpolation: I’m not sure that ‘jauntiness’ of the song isn’t belied by its lyrics, actually, which one might read as linking into what’s just happened in the film, bringing out an analysis of female exploitation – on those grounds, though, I think Bowie’s analysis in three minutes is actually more thoroughgoing than Von Trier’s in three hours…] Looking at these faces right after you’ve spent three hours seeing America as it looks through von Trier’s eyes has the most extraordinary effect: whatever feelings of respect or sympathy or righteous anger these faces might have inspired before, now they look like the denizens of Dogville, and it would be natural to make the next leap and conclude that wherever they are in life, they’ve gotten what they deserve. (The conclusion of Dogville, like that of Unforgiven, is likely to make you feel that way even as your brain dutifully recognizes that you’re meant to see the horror in it.)”

I think that gets it spot-on.

There Will Be Blood (2007)

Starring: Daniel Day Lewis, Paul Dano
Music: Jonny Greenwood; Arvo Part; Johannes Brahms
Director: Paul Thomas Anderson
Screenplay: Paul Thomas Anderson
Director of Photography: Robert Elswit

‘There Will Be Blood’ is, essentially, a film which privileges style over substance; this is a fact which cannot be covered up by hurling platitudes in the direction of score, cinematography, and Daniel Day Lewis’ performance, as most critics seem to have done. Despite its length, and gestures in the direction of the ‘epic’, the film is basically a cartoon (although one could claim that the standard Hollywood definition of ‘epic’ often mean ‘cartoon’ anyway. The difference is that ‘The Ten Commandments’ was sufficiently campy, and ‘Ben-Hur’ sufficiently enthralling as spectacle and narrative, to belie their pretensions to grandeur, while ‘There Will Be Blood’ takes itself very seriously.) Director/ screenwriter Paul Thomas Anderson has been quite open about only adapting the first 150 pages of Upton Sinclair’s novel ‘Oil!’, and what has been left out is pretty much all the political content, narrative thrust, and character interaction. Thus, the oil baron is not a human being with motivations, allegiances, and schemes; he is more like a ‘force of nature’, a symbol, an opportunity for Day Lewis to do the unthinkable, and go beyond even his demented turn in Scorsese’s ‘Gangs of New York’. (If he can be said to have chewed the scenery in ‘Gangs’, here he increasingly seems to want to gobble it all up, like the Cookie Monster from Sesame Street.) There *is* some sort of thematic backbone to the film, but it’s of a simplistic kind that really needs fleshing out to retain any interest beyond a one-sentence summary – in other words, to properly make the transition into a fully-fledged feature film. Thus, we have a simple opposition between the drive towards capitalist accumulation – as manifested in Day-Lewis’ character, Daniel Plainview – and the superstitions of religion – as manifested by the fanatical young pastor Eli, who shouts and wails in exorcism-type rites, aware of the benefits, in finance and welfare, that oil drilling will bring to the community (principally, this means bringing in funds for his church), but also concerned by the lack of interest in (and perhaps active antipathy towards) religion exhibited by Plainview. Day-Lewis’ ‘son’ is the film’s other major figure, but, in reconfiguring the parent-child relationship from the Sinclair novel, Anderson causes it to lose much of its significance. Whereas Sinclair’s son was the novel’s protagonist, a Socialist whose desire for better worker conditions and opposition to his father’s corrupt business practices placed him in familial conflict, the character in the film is relegated to secondary and near-mute status. He’s actually the orphan child of another miner who worked with Plainview on an early expedition, before he’d struck it really big; when the miner died, Plainview took on the child, as he felt this would be good for his image. The son never really comes into direct conflict with him; he goes deaf in an oil-related accident (thus indicating Day-Lewis’ sacrifice of the domestic and the relational in favour of the crazed pursuit of oil and wealth), and seems to harbour some resentment (particularly after he’s sent away for a year or so), but accepts with good grace the final revelation that he’s actually an orphan, and goes off into the sunset as a good model Capitalist – married to his childhood sweetheart, and intending to start his own oil-drilling business. As Plainview only really needed him for image purposes anyway, their relationship lacks any real dramatic spark; for someone who’s so blatantly and bafflingly misanthropic, it’s hardly a surprise that the Oil Man is unable to sustain a human relationship of real love and mutual affection.

We might be able to excuse such an element of the plot in isolation – perhaps even to praise it as refreshingly unsentimental – but it remains unfortunately true that the things Plainview does in the film often don’t make sense as the real, motivated actions of a human being: thus, when he finds out that the truth about the imposter who’d been posing as his brother, and whom he had taken into his confidence to some extent, he murders him in the middle of the night. Earlier in the film, when Eli approaches him to ask “when we are going to get paid?”, Plainview doesn’t try to sweet-talk him, but gives him a savage beating and a ‘baptism’ in a pool of oil, while roaring “why can’t you cure my son?”. One would think that, rather than unnecessarily antagonising one of the community’s main voices, the oil man would need to keep him (and thus the community in general) in his good graces, as he’s relying on them to work the derricks. Even given the fact of his near-pathological hatred of his fellow human beings, it seems unlikely that Plainview would have risen to his position without some degree of cunning (which he has demonstrated earlier, in his smooth-talking acquisition of the farmers’ land for bargain prices). Instead, Anderson always seems to feel that a ‘big scene’ is called for – murder, beating, yelling; consequently, the narrative feels rather unsteady at times, and Plainview’s characterisation turns more and more cartoonish.

This is a film of stubbly, gritty men in a harsh, dry, dusty landscape, about the myths of rugged individualism and savage competition that mark the formation of the American west – about violence, revenge, and hatred. Sound familiar? Well of course, and, while the comeback of the western hasn’t been that much of a success, as attested by such recent failures as the ‘3:10 to Yuma’ remake, its basic concerns and something of its iconography have made their way into tales such as ‘No Country for Old Men’ and ‘The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada’ (both, incidentally, starring Tommy Lee Jones, who has the weathered face of cowboy if ever there was one). This is not a complete picture, however; whereas westerns themselves had always, to some degree, had roles for women (though by no means proportionate to the number of women who actually lived in the Old West), and whereas ‘The Three Burials’ actually has a couple of sensitively-observed female characters, with their own frustrations and desires to balance out those of the men, ‘There Will Be Blood’ delegates something like 90% of its roles to males. There are some old women in the church; Plainview’s son marries a girl with whom he’d played as a child; and that’s it. Significantly, Plainview had no relationship with a woman in order to produce a ‘son’, and takes no part in the activities in a brothel (women are heard laughing in the background, but the only shot we are allowed is of Day-Lewis slumped grimly against a wall). Perhaps this is intended as a criticism, of the male-centred, dog-eat-dog mentality behind Old West mythology, and its translation into modern-day American Capitalism (cowboy presidents et al). And yet, the near-total *absence* of women feels like an important historical error, as if the film-makers got so stuck on the ‘ruggedness’ and ‘bleakness’ of their depiction, so enamoured of the malignant masculinity that they filmed in sweaty close-up and silhouetted long shot, that they forgot to fill in the detail, forgot to give some sort of context, some sort of background, to the ciphers on screen. The tone is set by the opening sequence, a near-silent depiction of the loneliness and danger of the initial stages of searching for oil which, in its own way, is very well done; from then on, the preference is always for a shouted, repeated line, a punch to the face, a bullet in the forehead, or the explosion of an oil derrick, rather than for conversation, for dialogue, for explanation. At times, this feels very appropriate – for example, the halting inarticulacy of Day-Lewis and the supposed ‘brother’ who comes to visit him in a mid-film interlude are nicely judged – but at others, it feels like an unnecessary restriction. The film is always telling us that something important is happening, or about to happen (see below), and yet it never really shows us in what way this is important; the occasional allusions to historical context (such as the mention of using pipe-lines to counter the cost of railroad transport, or the depiction of desperately poor farmers easily goaded out of their land by smooth-talking oil men) don’t really tell us *why* these men act as they do. Religion is portrayed (dismissed) as a succession of crazed set-pieces and false showmanship preying on the naivety of simple country folk, while Day-Lewis seems to act not so much out of greed as sheer misanthropy (in a scene with his ‘brother,’ he explains how much he hates other people, and wants to get away from them). To portray capitalist drives/ the lust for oil as mere man-hating evil and greed is to ignore the ideological back-up and societal framework which allows such action to be seen as ‘normal’, and creating such cartoon villainy in lieu of any deeply considered socio-political inquiry allows the film-maker to appeal to the ‘visceral’, to a kind of poetry of barbarism, a portrayal of man as harnessing and containing within him brute natural forces. Such a portrayal is in no way meant to be an endorsement – Anderson can be judged as firmly in opposition to his protagonist – and yet it does pave the way for a simplistically naturalising approach that betrays a lack of coherent or far-reaching intellectual back-up. In other words, all the technical resources are there, but there’s a certain quality and coherence of *thought* that’s lacking, and, while this problem might be sidestepped in a more pulpy or less ambitious context, it’s a major draw-back when one seeks to tackle a subject of historical dimensions, in a manner that suggests epic pretensions. As Zach Campbell comments at the ‘Elusive Lucidity’ blog, “[Anderson] knows only partly what he wants to say, and knows perhaps way *too* well how he wants to say it. [He] sometimes strikes me as someone who never entirely grew out of this [teenage film-making] stage--the need to tell truths but the rush to sometimes not think them through--and via charisma as well as intelligence & talent, gets away with it.”

It’s not, though, as if Anderson was constrained by lack of experience, by the film’s running time, or by budgetary demands; ‘There Will Be Blood’ takes two-and-a-half hours to unfold, with plenty of *big scenes* suggested by Jonny Greenwood’s overly-dramatic music (all sub-Ligeti pizzicati and glissandi and thundering percussion, with some Arvo Part minimalism and ‘ironically’ deployed snatches of the Brahms violin concerto interspersed to provide variety). In fact, the music tries to suggest drama, tension and angst even when the actors are doing little more than walking through the scenery. “THIS IS IMPORTANT AND TERRIBLE, DAMMIT” scream Greenwood and Anderson, “THIS IS AN EPIC – THIS IS A *BIG MOVIE* - AND THERE *WILL* BE BLOOD” – and the critics seem to have fallen for this hook, line and sinker. But it’s all just a cartoon, ridiculous rather than sublime, all posture and bravado, from the Gothic lettering of the film credits, to the schlocky title (which sounds as if it might have come from a pulp novel or a B-movie), to Day Lewis channelling John Huston via pantomime villainy (admittedly fun to watch, though that’s not really the point of the performance), to the absurd final scene. It’s here that the film most explicitly strives to insert a message, with big flashing lights all round it. Now an alcoholic recluse, having made enough money to get away from people (as he put it in his aforementioned admission of misanthropy), Plainview is visited by Eli, the young preacher turned Christian radio-host who earlier humiliated the oil man into accepting a baptism into his church, in exchange for a tract of land needed to build a pipeline. Eli desperately needs financial aid as the Great Depression looms, and Plainview takes great pleasure in cajoling him into thinking that he can help – on the condition that Eli admits that he is “a false prophet”, and that “God is a superstition”. Once this is done, Plainview informs him that help will not be forth-coming: the oil-rich land which Eli thought would fetch him a fine price is now worthless, as all the oil was leeched off via the derricks constructed on the land around it. “Drainage! Drainage, Eli, you boy. Drained dry. I'm so sorry. Here, if you have a milkshake, and I have a milkshake, and I have a straw…And my straw reaches across the room, and starts to drink your milkshake... I drink your milkshake!” These lines, seemingly designed for cult status and endless re-quotation, are apparently inspired by the actual use of a milkshake metaphor to describe leeching, in a real-life court case, and they are admittedly rather neat – though Day-Lewis’ spittle-dropping delivery has to be seen to be believed. It’s what follows that really takes the biscuit: not satisfied with Eli’s total humiliation, Plainview now chases him down the bowling alley he has constructed in his mansion and beats him to death. His servant pokes his head around the door to see what the fuss is about; Plainview reassures him that “I’m finished now.” Cue a final ironic burst of Brahms, and the film ends with a punchline, self-consciously flashy and audacious. In some way we’re meant to feel elated by the burst of violence we’ve finally witnessed: the film promised us blood, and we got it. Of course, we’re also meant to feel shocked at the depravities to which greed and misanthropy can go, and to reflect that this is some sort of allegory for the evils of capitalism and big business: murder in a temple of misanthropic millionaire excess, like Howard Hughes without the charisma. This really is the equivalent of having a message bashed over one’s head; except that, as outlined above, the lack of detail behind that message results in a certain emptiness that OTT, big-statement final scenes can’t redeem. Perhaps I’m being overly harsh here – but I do feel compelled to make my point, if only in reaction to the almost unanimous praise showered down on this film, the casting aside of qualification and balanced examination in favour of hagiography and platitudes. Maybe it’s just that I’ve grown frustrated with the ‘new, meaningful Hollywood’ – movies praised to the hilt for being more than just dumb entertainment, consciously showing off their bigness, their seriousness, their philosophical bent (my cock/fight scene/portrayal of existential angst is bigger than yours) while all too frequently only making *gestures* in that direction, running out of steam, and making up for it with smokescreens of sound, fury, or snappy sound-bites. In fact, one the films I’ve most enjoyed and appreciated recently is a little Uruguayan picture called ‘El Bano de Papa’: a sweet, yet realistically-, and sometimes pessimistically-observed story of the money-making schemes to which people in severe poverty are driven. There are no flashy visual devices, no great philosophical diatribes; instead, we get a nice balance between a genuine sense of personal struggle and an element of gently comic whimsy, through the presentation of a simple narrative and a set of characters who feel like complete human beings, rather than ciphers. The socio-political commentary which results, despite unfolding almost in passing, as an element secondary to the narrative, ends up seeming more coherent and convincing than that mustered by any pseudo-intellectual Oscar-nominee of the past few years. And it doesn’t need to try and imprint quotable lines in our collective consciousness by having Daniel Day Lewis shout them at us several times in a row…

Ulzan's Raid (1972): A Re-Revisionist Western

Starring: Burt Lancaster, Bruce Davison, Jorge Luke
Music: Frank DeVol
Director: Robert Aldrich
Screenplay: Alan Sharp
Director of Photgraphy: Joseph Biroc

In 1954, Robert Aldrich directed and Burt Lancaster starred in ‘Apache’, a re-consideration of the negative role accorded Native Americans in the western film. Just under twenty years later, they re-united for another examination of the same subject, but the revisionism this time was as much a response to the kind of film made possible by the likes of ‘Apache’, as it was to the old myths of whooping villains (a la ‘Stagecoach’). Attention is paid to creating an almost deadpan examination of the minutiae of life in the west, with a literate script depicting the complex moral dilemmas that were faced in a time of rough-and-ready law-and-order and rampant racism. Not only the settings but the characters are more believable than was the norm for the western at the time (and, given such recent efforts as the re-make of ‘3:10 to Yuma’, is the norm today as well). Thus, we have such closely thought-through detail as the army scout shooting himself and the settler he’s escorting back to the fort, to save them from being tortured by the Apaches, and the tactical manoeuvres centring on how long horses can last during a lengthy pursuit. In addition, the scout played by Lancaster isn’t (as he probably would be today) the ‘cynical’, ‘world-weary’ character who must redeem himself by some heroic action; rather, he’s a competent professional, a man who lives with an Apache wife but who doesn’t buy the ‘Little Big Man’ myths of the peace-loving noble savage– a hippie era antidote to the racism of ‘classic’ westerns that actually presented a view just as distorted as theirs. ‘Ulzana’ is far from a one-man film, though, and it’s the relations between Lancaster and other characters that make it such an interesting picture. Most notably, there’s the idealistic young officer (Bruce Davison) who leads the expedition to chase Ulzana, the Apache who’s fled his reservation in frustration and is leading a war party to rape and murder local homesteaders. The son of a clergyman, the young man believes that it’s “an absence of Christian feeling” that’s led to the situation of mutual enmity between white men and Native Americans; however, when he sees the aftermath of Ulzana’s raids (for instance, a mutilated settler has a dog’s tail placed in his mouth; as Lancaster wryly observes, Apaches have a strange sense of humour), he quickly swings to the opposite view, and wonders how Lancaster can have dealt with the Apache for so long without hating them. The fact that men could be so cruel offends his notion that man is essentially good (“made in God’s image”) – particularly so when members of his own cavalry troupe start to mutilate the corpse of Ulzana’s teenage son. Lancaster, though, sees through the bullshit, implicitly pointing out that such a ‘humane’ viewpoint over-simplifies the questions of culture clash caused by the white man’s invasion of Native American territory. It would be easy to characterise the tribes as mistreated innocents suffering at the hands of bloodthirsty colonialists (the hippie view), or, as the young officer does, to believe that a little talking and good-faith would sort things out, and that both sets of men could exist together in peace, motivated by similar feelings of love and brotherhood, following ‘good moral principles’ in harmony. What that ignores, though, is the brutality present in the tribal culture (at least, in that of the Apaches, who were feared by other tribes as well as by the white men); commenting on the rape of white settlers, several characters note that “they don’t treat their own women much better.” A culture that is based around rites of manhood (as documented in ‘A Man Called Horse’) and the feats of male warriors is not all that dissimilar to that of bloodthirsty white men masquerading behind Christianity, ‘the American way’, or simple lust for land. Yet just as one is not going to be able to ‘understand’ the Apache by caricaturing them as evil, heathen savages, one is also not going to be able to understand them by trying to view them as surrogate white liberals: there is a difference, an otherness which should neither be romanticised nor ignored. Appropriately enough, all of Ulzana’s dialogue is presented, unsubtitled, in his native tongue: no cushy Kevin Costner characterisations here. Overall, then, one might characterise the film’s nuanced approach as re-revisionism: a corrective both to the old Hollywood myths which everyone by now knew to be untrue, and to the new hippie myths which were perhaps more ‘worthy’ but were also riskily naïve.

NB. Ward Churchill's 'Fantasies of the Master Race' might help to point up some of the errors in the above post. At least, it might teach me to do some more research, rather than just taking on trust what I've seen in a film (which is, after all, fictional).

Valdez Is Coming (1971)

Starring: Burt Lancaster, Susan Clark, Jon Cypher
Music: Charles Gross
Director: Edwin Sherin
Screenplay: Roland Kibbee, David Rayfiel
(based on the novel by Elmore Leonard)
Director of Photgraphy: Gábor Pogány

Like Martin Ritt’s ‘Hombre’, made a few years earlier, this was adapted from an Elmore Leonard novel, and, like ‘Hombre’, it presents as its hero someone from an oppressed minority who is forced into a confrontation against heavy odds, due to the violent actions of some unscrupulous characters who hold him in racial contempt. Happening across a shooting party, Mexican lawman Bob Valdez (Burt Lancaster) is forced into a confrontation with an innocent army veteran, a black man accused by the rancher who’s leading the party of a murder he didn’t commit. Stricken with guilt at having killed the man, Valdez tries to get the rancher to give him $100 to compensate the dead man’s Native American widow; however, he’s met with contempt and physical violence, and the main part of the film sees him taking his revenge. (Although one should note that it’s not straightforward revenge, as Valdez is acting as much to prove a point – to make the rancher accept his guilt and show some concern towards the oppressed – as he is to avenge a personal slight or injury.)

Less downbeat and more unbelievable in its development than ‘Hombre’, this is nonetheless a film I wanted to like, and one which certainly has something to lift it above your average western. It’s not a ‘message’ picture, as was the vogue at the time (‘Little Big Man’, ‘Solider Blue’ et al); rather, its revisionism is gentle and easy to miss, often just a seemingly throw-away line (asked when he hunted Apache, the titular hero replies “before I know better”). The fact that Valdez is a Mexican also runs counter to the usual western clichés of those ‘over the border’ being either caricatured bandidos (Calvera from ‘The Magnificent Seven’ and General Mapache from ‘The Wild Bunch’) or poor, oppressed farmers, essentially innocent but often incapable of defending themselves without the help of white mercenaries (again, we can turn to ‘The Magnificent Seven’ and ‘The Wild Bunch’ for examples). Indeed, an exchange between Valdez and his old friend Diego, where Valdez impersonates the rancher who will prove the villain of the piece, nicely captures the mix of scorn and idealisation which characterises the white man’s view of the Mexican: “well, you’re a good greaser, Diego. As long as you’re a good greaser, I treat you fair and square – yes sirree, Diego, you people sure know how to live: singing, dancing, screwing – you don’t worry about nothing.” It’s one of the best moments of the film, in part because it’s so understated, yet underlain with a certain dramatic tension: having begun wryly, ironically, Lancaster delivers the final line with what is almost a sigh; a shift to a new, quiet seriousness and determination which is signalled by the faint rattle of Morricone-esque percussion on the soundtrack, and which sees him ride out on his horse for his near-fatal second encounter with the rancher.

Given all this, it’s unfortunate that the Mexican is played by a white man in make-up, although I’d accept that, back in the 70s, there were less bankable Latin stars of the kind who crop up in Hollywood films today (one can imagine Benicio del Toro playing this role, for example). Not that Burt Lancaster’s make-up is particularly bad; and, after all, the fact that he played the hero of Robert Aldrich’s ‘Apache’ in similar ‘brown-face’ didn’t prevent him from giving a very fine performance in a very fine film. His blue eyes do look a little out of place here though, and the henchman character, ‘El Segundo’, looks like a pantomime villain, with hair that sprouts in huge, wild tufts on either side of his head, and dollops of face-paint which make him look like Laurence Olivier’s Othello. Indeed, several of the protagonists also look distinctly like 70s TV characters: I’m thinking primarily of the woman Valdez kidnaps, and her man, the villain of the piece.



Particularly in the second half of the film, ‘Valdez is Coming’ threatens to become a rather tedious revenge/chase movie, though the plot is slightly more complex than this. Nonetheless, there is something rather pulpy about the way that Lancaster turns from put-upon minor lawman to brilliantly competent guerrilla fighter, shooting a man from a 1,000 yards, easily picking off the numerous armed riders sent after him, and sneaking into the heart of the enemy camp without anyone noticing. It’s particularly noticeable partly because of the understated, resigned quality that characterises his performance in the initial stages of the film: moving slowly and speaking carefully, almost deferentially, Valdez is a character not exactly resigned to his lot (which is being treated with open or concealed contempt by his white neighbours) but understandably cautious about being too outspoken. From the moment he pulls his old army gear from under the bed and starts to growl, “Valdez is coming,” he is suddenly athletic, hyper-alert, and a crack shot who never misses the target. The one-man-against-impossible-odds storyline seems here actually more unbelievable than in ‘Chato’s Land’, where Charles Bronson’s character has the advantage of knowing the terrain – as the film’s title indicates, it is the desert which accounts for the fate of the posse he stalks as much as it is the actions of Chato himself. Valdez, though, eludes capture with such ease that the fact he is forced into a final showdown comes as rather a surprise – though, given the mechanics and conventions of plot, it has to happen.

It’s the old Elmore Leonard trick (seen also in ‘Mr Majestyk’) of having the passive, good-natured hero take his revenge after suffering some memorable indignity (in ‘Majestyk’, this involved the machine-gunning of a crop of melons; here, the incident has Lancaster forced to struggle through harsh terrain with a wooden cross strapped to his back). But whereas that sort of thing might be expected in a simple action film like ‘Mr Majestyk’, imposing such a cliché on what could have been a reasonably realistic look at life in the Old West means that ‘Valdez is Coming’ fails to live up to its initial promise. The end result is a rather uneasy compromise between action-movie set-pieces and something more thoughtful and interesting. Still, it’s worth an hour and a half of your time – even if that’s for what it could have been more than for what it is.

Day of Anger (1967)

Starring: Lee Van Cleef, Guiliamo Gemma
Music: Riz Ortolani
Director: Tonino Valerii
Screenplay: Ernesto Gastaldi/ Renzo Genta/ Tonino Valerii
Director of Photography: Enzo Serafin

Quick rundown of the plot: Guiliamo Gemma plays Scott, parentless kid who takes out the town’s shit and is generally brow-beaten. Into said town rides Lee Van Cleef’s gunfighter Talby, who invites the kid into the saloon for a drink. The town bully doesn’t want to sit next to someone who stinks of shit, provokes a fight, is predictably finished off in the film’s first gunplay. At the hastily-convened trial, Van Cleef’s acquitted because he drew in self-defence, leaving him free to get the plot proper underway. Turns out he was fleeced out of $50,000 dollars by the leading citizens of the town, and he proceeds to take his revenge, in the meantime taking Gemma under his wing (becoming a gunfighter allows him to become one of the leading men in town rather than the bottom of the pack). Turns out Van Cleef’s not so much interested in revenge, though, as in turning the situation to his advantage and taking over the town. Gemma comes to realise that his new mentor’s just as corrupt as his former oppressors, and the inevitable showdown occurs in front of Talby’s brand new saloon.

At first glance, this seems as if it’s ticking the standard spaghetti western boxes, and a few extra ones as well – it’s entertaining and well-shot, which already makes it stand out from much of the crowd, a pleasant hour-and-a-half for genre fans with little touches to make it stand out even more: Lee Van Cleef in mean form, all growling voice and squinting eyes, a jazzy Riz Ortolani score, making a change from all those Morricone-derivatives, details like a saloon decorated with giant wooden guns on the front (see picture below), and a focus on the machinations of what it actually means to be a gunfighter (however gimmicky – Van Cleef’s series of one sentence ‘lessons’ to his young protégée Gemma).



Also fairly standard is the cynical attitude whereby the ostensibly ‘genteel’ citizens of the law-abiding town of Clifton oppress the illegitimate hero (the son of one of one of the whorehouse girls) even as they thrive on the services that that whorehouse provides, and the gambling available in the saloon, and where the judge, banker, saloon boss and rancher are all corrupt (a la ‘The Great Silence’ or ‘High Plains Drifter’). That said, I think there may be something more to ‘Day of Anger’ in the way it treats such corruption (though it’s not nearly as bleak in the way it follows through on this as either of the aforementioned films).

Caught between them (the judge survives at the end, though most of the rest are dispatched) and Talby (Van Cleef’s equally cynical gunfighter), it’s hard to know what our hero’s meant to do. The film is clearly going to culminate in a showdown between him and his mentor, but that’s not necessarily going to solve much. Having been wounded, Talby begs for mercy – for Gemma to let him ride out of town – but Gemma, remembering the various ‘lessons’ the older man has taught him throughout the film, recalls a similar moment earlier in the film, where Talby was the one in control and another man lay grovelling in the dust. The cold-bloodedness of the killing is somewhat surprising, given Gemma’s baby-faced innocence and ‘hero’ status (for, despite this being a spaghetti western, its main character is more in the vein of a Hollywood-style likeable youngster than a seedy double-crosser), and it’s also something of a shock to see a Van Cleef character bite the dust in such undignified fashion (reinforced by the low-angle close-up of his face as it hits the ground, with Gemma towering over in the background, left screen).

There’s also an after-taste from Van Cleef’s final ‘lesson’: “when you start killing, you can’t stop it.” Years before Eastwood’s ‘Unforgiven’, that one line suggests not just that being a gunfighter is hardly glamorous, but that gunfighters might in fact be regarded as akin to mass murderers: for all the enshrining of western lore in the talk about Gemma’s gun belonging to Doc Holliday, for all the enjoyment in action set-pieces such as Van Cleef’s horseback rifle duel (a western update of the medieval joust), what this ultimately suggests is that such spheres of activity are merely those of serial killers. The film doesn’t exactly build on that, mind – it’s caught between being an action adventure, aided by the boisterous Ortolani score and by some well-shot and conceived set-pieces (which are, moreover, spread out through the film rather than packed in a dozen at a time, so the killings don’t lose their force) – and between this more questioning mode.

Still, in order to negotiate the afore-mentioned problems of finding a ‘conclusive’ ending, the film does attempt some resolution: Gemma’s gesture of disgust, whereby he throws his gun in fury through a window after finishing off Van Cleef (and anticipating the gesture of John Wayne’s youthful protégée in The Shootist, some ten years later). Nonetheless, what ‘Day of Anger’ ultimately suggests is that the town’s corruption can only be changed by the physical violence, the costly ‘gunlaw’ of the likes of Van Cleef, who are always waiting on the margins.

And that’s how the ‘legitimate’ forces of authority gained their power in the first place – not by committing the violence themselves, but by hiring (and double-crossing) villains like the suitably grimy ‘Wild Jack’ (played by Al Mulock, of ‘Once Upon in the West’ opening scene fame), who appears earlier in the film. What the film suggests, then, is that violence is endemic to peaceful law and order – despite the fact that the marshal at the beginning of the film and his replacement, Gemma’s initial mentor Murph, are opposed to the wearing of guns around town – as well as to the more rough and ready ‘frontier justice’ brought in by the destructive force of Van Cleef.

But it’s not just a simple contrast between the men who know how to control and exploit these more ‘primitive’ forms of coercion and the out-dated gunfighters who are thus exploited (as would be the case in ‘Once Upon a Time in the West’, with the railroad tycoon Morton providing an example of the former and Henry Fonda’s Frank an example of the latter); Talby is something of a wily businessman himself, burning down his rival’s saloon in order to establish his bigger, better whorehouse/gambling house/ drinking house as the town’s primary centre for entertainment. That this ostensibly swisher, more urban and sophisticated location, all plush red carpets and sweeping grand staircases, as opposed to the rough and ready wooden structure which it replaces, is built just as much on crime (is, in fact, probably more corrupt, given that it is less honest about its violent foundations – shootings happen out the back entrance, rather than in the saloon itself), is indicated by the aforementioned production design master-stroke: the giant guns that flank the entrance. Indeed, during the ‘new saloon’ sequence, I’m reminded of a prohibition-era film, a ‘roaring twenties’ crime pic. Given the music – a distinctly 20s-flavoured vocal feature with a backing band of banjo, violin and double bass – that’s hardly surprising.

Returning to the ending, after Gemma throws the gun away there’s a beautiful final touch (though, from the sudden deterioration in the quality of the print, it appears that most versions cut out the very small segment I’m about to describe): he goes off walking down the street, literally hand in hand with the half-blind old tramp who’s turned up at various points in the film as one of his few friends in the town. In a film which focuses even more than most genre pics on the standard spaghetti western trope of relations between young protégées and old mentors – Gemma is taught to shoot by the old ex-sheriff, now stable-hand, Murph, jokes with the old tramp, and is taken under Van Cleef’s wing – it’s perhaps a fitting ending, after two of those mentors have been killed. Yet it doesn’t feel so much like that: rather, what we see is two fools, two lost souls wandering absurdly down the street for no particular purpose, the tramp’s stick la parody of a prophetic staff, like those held by the old beggars in Breugel’s ‘The Blind Leading the Blind’.

And, indeed, the more one thinks about it, the more the film reveals the fundamental absurdity of the spaghetti western, replete as it is with generic formulae which we viewers find ourselves conditioned to believe as ‘natural’ or at least ‘expected’ through repeated exposure (‘naturally unnatural’, one might say). It doesn’t do this by outright parody, or even, perhaps, by intention (though, as I said before, its intentions are somewhat muddled). But think to a moment such as that when Talby rides from the western town of Clifton to a ‘For a Few Dollars More’-style whitewashed Mexican village (despite the name ‘Bowie’ connected with the Alamo – the anti-Mexican statement part excellence, at least in John Wayne’s patriotic hands – and run (for the moment) by a bunch of white gangsters). Rather than the character moving from one (real, geographical) place to another, it seems more like Lee Van Cleef taking a horse from one film set to another, highlighted as an ‘unreal’ movement, a movement between and within generic conventions rather than a ‘real (real-seeming), motivated’ action contained within the bounds of the illusion of the fictional world we’re being asked to suspend our belief towards. We might explain this historically – Clifton is on the edge of the Mexican border, Bowie is one of those border hide-outs beloved of westerns both Italian and American – but, even though Van Cleef is shown riding over the Almerian scrubland hills between his arrival in the two towns, it still remains, my impression of this disjunction.



Perhaps it’s reinforced by the way in which the music – for all its use of hard-edged Shadows-style electric guitar, Dollars-trilogy style – has more of a spy-film vibe than any of the western score Ennio Morricone or Luis Bacalov or Bruno Nicolai might have penned. There are no vocal choruses, there’s no Edda dell’Orso, no Spanish-tinged trumpet melodies; instead, swelling brass flourishes accentuate particularly dramatic moments in a manner so over-the-top it must be at least slightly tongue in cheek. Given all this, when, towards the end of the film, Gemma shoots a harmonica-playing deputy, it seems at once a pseudo-plausible ‘historical’ reference and another knowingly deployed generic gambit designed to catch one just slightly off-kilter: the harmonica deployed not so much as a western prop but as a ‘western’ prop, a genre-object fore-grounded as such.

That’s not to say that the film is as wilfully surrealist as Questi’s ‘Django Kill’ or Jodorowsky’s ‘El Topo’ (which, for all its art-house qualities and refusal to be boxed into any one genre, still frequently has the feel of a spaghetti western). Historical touches are present: the detail about the best way to fire a gun, the court-room scene (saloon shootings are shown to have consequences, rather than just being set-pieces which everyone forgets about after they’ve happened), the appearance of a fire engine during the saloon fire. After all, the more careful film-makers, like Leone, undertook meticulous research to make sure that their vision at least appeared accurate, in contrast to the distorted Hollywood stock-image of what the west was like, even if historical accuracy went out of the window if it could be replaced by a visually arresting shot or by some parallel or symbolism (think the trench warfare-style scenes in ‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’, or the assassination of James Garfield reconfigured as that of JFK in ‘The Price of Power’), and even if their vision of the west was as much as the commedia dell’arte background to a twisted morality play as a representation of ‘how things were’. (Perhaps that’s why the western lends itself to the sort of odd generic fore-grounding mentioned above: though tangentially more related to historical reality than a superhero movie or a space opera or even an Italian gladiator pic, perhaps even more so than those it’s actually composed of highly artificial elements from which the film can be pieced together, jigsaw-puzzle style. Thus, it can feel self-conscious even when not self-consciously self-conscious).

All that being said, there are a number of anachronisms which are presumably intentional: as previously mentioned, Van Cleef’s grand new saloon (see pictures below) seems more reminiscent of the 1920s than of the early 1900 setting which, presumably, is the film’s approximate temporal location. I’m not sure whether this is meant to underline a thematic point at all – America as a land built on crime, ostracizing its criminals, its gunfighters and its gangsters as individualists in the bad sense, rather than the ‘good sense’ wherein everybody has equal opportunities to pull themselves to the top of the ladder, as long as they do it with ostensible appearance of fairness, confining themselves to ‘lawful’ pursuits (by which I mean those which the rules allow, rather than those which have any moral weight behind them – bankers take note). While condemning Van Cleef’s gunman and attempting to phase out the guns which are associated with the old, rough and tumble west, the town authorities are still perfectly willing to do deals with him, and to hire ‘heavies’ like him when it suits their interests. They are no less criminals for sitting behind desks than he is for openly making killing his living. Given that this sounds like a plausible interpretation, I’m not sure that such a bleak historical analysis is within the scope of ‘Day of Anger’ – though it certainly emerges through Leone’s films, particularly ‘Once Upon a Time in America’, though with more optimistic qualifications – notably, the great railroad scene which ends ‘Once Upon a Time in the West’.





Still, the temporal and generic blurring contributes to an atmosphere occasionally reminiscent of the McCarthy-era delirium of the American western ‘Silver Lode’ (1954). Like that film, it creeps up on you ‘reasonably’ and insinuates itself in with you, before suddenly catching up with jolts like the transition between the two towns, or the harmonica moment, or the saloon design, inner (as above) and outer (the giant wooden guns affixed to the entrance).

As usual, there’s little interest in women, and the few female roles that do exist are presented in a way that’s borderline misogynistic – the largest is for the judge’s daughter, on whom Gemma has a crush but who he is forbidden to see, given his lowly origins. Later, however, when he’s become a big-shot, the judge hatches a plan in which his daughter is used as bait to lure the youngster in to an attempted assassination: willing bait, it seems, as she is well willing to go along with his duplicitous schemes (although, given the scarcity of screen time, it would be a stretch to say that even this motivation could be elucidated from the on-screen evidence with which we’re presented). With the opening of the new saloon, another actress makes a speaking (and singing) appearance, though only briefly, as a sex symbol and as a prop to further the plot.

It’s a regrettable blindspot in the genre as a whole, and one which few films attempted to redress (‘Hannie Caulder’, starring Raquel Welch, is the only example I can think of). In fact, it’s doubly regrettable, because the spaghetti western tended to have a fairly safe Italian Marxist background even when not being overtly political as in the Zapata westerns: an opposition to racial and class oppression (abused old tramps, or, as in ‘Keoma’, abused old black tramps played, with his usual nobility, by Woody Strode) and even, in ‘Day of Anger’, an opposition, however tentative, to macho individualism (as much as that’s a trait whose celebration is integral to most films in the genre). It’s by no means a bad thing that the Italian western rejected the Hollywood western’s relegation of women to love interests who could ‘humanise’ the gunfighter hero and settle (or re-settle) them down to a life of law-abidin’ domesticity, home-baked pies, and red-and-white check-patterned tablecloths. But the alternative presented – where women were, at best, ignored (Leone actually cut a love scene out of ‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’), featuring only briefly as whores or virgins most likely to be raped or murdered – was hardly much of an improvement. One might argue that presenting women as either irrelevant to the macho world of gunplay, or as oppressed figures, was historically accurate (aside from such unusual cases, ‘manly’ women like Belle Starr or Calamity Jane). But the Italian westerns end up celebrating this – at last, we’ve managed to get away from the sissy feminine touches of Hollywood to present some gritty masculine truth! – or, at least, accepting it as a generic pre-requisite, part of the way things are in the world of the 60s western.

I guess a paragraph of summary, some sort of concluding remark, is expected, but I think I’ve said most of what I had to say on this particular viewing. If you haven’t seen it already, go watch it – the whole things’ up on youtube, and it’s also available on a DVD from Spaghetti western experts Wild East.

Prime Cut (1972)

Starring: Lee Marvin, Gene Hackman, Sissy Spacek
Music: Lalo Schifrin
Director: Michael Ritchie
Screenplay: Robert Dillon
Director of Photography: Gene Polito

I popped this one in the VHS player not exactly sure what I was going to get. Probably helped that I was hazy as to the plot outline before I watched it – I was expecting some sort of vaguely Point Blank-style hired-killer thriller – because ‘Prime Cut’ certainly skewed some expectations. This is truly a bizarre movie, and I feel a bit bad spoiling its strangeness by spelling it out below. If you want my advice, watch the film before you read my thoughts. It’s best taken unprepared.

The basic facts, then. We have Lee Marvin as Nick Devlin, a hired gun for the Irish mob. We know they’re Irish because of their names: Shaughnessy, O’ Brien, Devlin. In fact, reading the credits is almost as much fun as watching the film itself – listed are such wonderful-named characters as ‘Weenie’, ‘Mary Ann’, ‘Clarabelle’, ‘Ox-Eye’, ‘Farmer Bob’ and ‘Big Jim’. Mary Ann, as it turns out, is actually the main villain, played as repellent (but oddly charming) by Gene Hackman. Hackman is slightly underused, but is on true grinning, slimy, malevolent form (like Popeye Doyle, but on the wrong side of the law, and nastier). The film’s plot is sketchy enough: Marvin’s Chicago bosses want back their money, which former employee Hackman is swindling off them. Off trots Marvin/Devlin, with a couple of other city gangsters, and the city-boys-in-the-country scenario dutifully unravels itself into a series of well-staged action climaxes (with a white slavery sub-plot thrown in for good measure). The first of the big set-pieces, enlivened by some judiciously used hand-held shots, as well as some panoramic sun-baked vistas, begins at a county fair and soon turns into a fast-paced foot-chase, quickly followed by a menacing stalking-by-combine-harvester (with some nice point-of-view shots of the fleeing victims from between the churning blades). Things continue to build, and, before we know it, the climax has been reached: we start off with a shootout in a field of sunflowers (bizarrely enough), involving much hiding behind high vegetation that’s somewhat reminiscent of scenes from westerns like the Burt Lancaster vehicle ‘Apache’ or Sollimas’ ‘The Big Gundown’; the action then proceeds, via a particular destructive truck, to a large barn (the same place in which we’ve witnessed Hackman and Marvin’s first confrontation, and been introduced to the white slavery racket), where we see plenty more gunfire, and more dodging behind things (hay-bales, this time). A truly odd coda follows (and more on that later). But what to make of it all?

Well, few of its characters are well-drawn– it’s a film of few words, concentrating primarily on the sheer oddity of its premises, and on the action of its set-pieces, for effect. There are many unusual and intriguing touches – the climactic battle takes place while a thunder-storm brews overhead, the ominous thunder rumblings sitting nicely alongside gunshots. Full advantage is taken of the unusual location, with set-pieces in corn and sunflower fields. And some of the other things that fill the film make those elements seem pretty tame!

The 70s being the 70s, there are some political undertones, though these are by no means as obvious or heavy-handed as in some other movies of the time: they seem to arise as a side effect of the film’s general weirdness more than being fore-grounded as major thematic strands. Some sort of American dream is being undercut, though it’s a dream already so bizarre that it’s hard to believe anyone would have bought into it in the first place – the sort of thing Norman Rockwell might have thought up if there had been some handy ’shrooms nearby. Basically, this undercut dream boils down to Hackman’s comments to Marvin about being a ‘true American’, during the portion of the fair scene before the chase begins: we see what this involves as he paternally congratulates young kids, raising them into an atmosphere of acquisitive capitalism (giving one kid first prize for the steer he’s bought along, he hands him a wad of cash and proceeds to take the animal away from him. “But he’s a pet!” “Fatten some more up for me,” Hackman shoots back. The kid cottons on. “Want a goat?”) And of course, as the film progresses, we see what else this American dream involves. Meat-eatin’, gun-totin’, salivatin’ – Hackman and his cohorts (the local law enforcement officers included, or so we might judge from a shot in the fairground chase scene) are pretty much the opposite of Marvin’s debonair gangster (“you eat guts” he says with contempt as he encounters Hackman’s character for the first time in the film. “Sure I do,” comes the reply. “I like ‘em!)

While such subversion was common to most genres at this period, it was something which always been particular prevalent in the western, that form where the founding myths of American cultural dominance where both created, celebrated, and ruthlessly questioned. As Bill Harding argues in his fine book, ‘The Films of Michael Winner’ (track down a copy – currently a mere £0.01 on amazon.co.uk!): “The Western used to be the staple provider of action; now the urban thriller has taken over, and Clint Eastwood, Gene Hackman and Charles Bronson personify the excitement lacking in contemporary life.” This might not be strictly true – there were still a fair number of westerns being made in the 70s, with such big stars as Bronson, Eastwood, Marlon Brando, Jack Nicholson, and the like –(and it wasn’t really until the failure of ‘Heaven’s Gate’ that the death-blow really came). So, at this point in time, westerns were still being made – and good ones at that, mixing their doses of post-Wild Bunch gore and brutality with slightly more complex moral treatments (or, in the case of Michael Winner’s ‘Chato’s Land’, exceedingly problematic ones), as well as much Vietnam-era parallels. In 1972 alone, the year of ‘Prime Cut’, we got ‘The Culpepper Cattle Company,’ a much underrated piece which is probably the best cattle-drive movie ever made, Robert Redford’s mountain-man flick ‘Jeremiah Jonson’, Robert Aldrich’s exploration of atrocities perpetrated both by settlers and native Americans, ‘Ulzana’s Raid’, and the afore-mentioned ‘Chato’s Land’. But, even if I seem to have mentioned Harding’s statement only to knock it down, it does reinforce the point I’m about to make: that ‘Prime Cut’ is, in some ways, a western in gangster dress. The inexorable build-up to a climax of righteous gunfire, the American-Dream-subversion, the idea of outsiders wreaking havoc in a corrupt and hostile community – yup, ‘Prime Cut’ is basically a western.



And it shares some westerns’ idea of violence as being, more often than not, a good thing – or the best solution at the time. Marvin is shown as completely justified in the final action he takes – as with Peckinpah, we relish the climactic confrontation, because the villains are so unbelievably depraved. Think ‘Straw Dogs’ (another western in modern dress), where you’re willing on Dustin Hoffman to dispatch those Cornish yokel nasties in unpleasant ways, just as you’re willing on Marvin to blow away the Aryan/dungaree-wearing/white trash yokels of ‘Prime Cut’. At least it’s not as salacious in its violence as Peckinpah – in fact, the violence is relatively restrained, in terms of actual blood and guts, perhaps more so than it feels, given the film’s lurid (in a deadpan sort of way) atmosphere. (On a side note, one could trace a kind of ‘anti-pastoral’ strain in films from this time – Straw Dogs, Open Season (starring Peter Fonda) and of course Deliverance).

So, redemptive violence: that’s morally dubious reservation number one. Did I mention the exploitation element? The whole white slavery plot element, while not as salaciously handled as might have been, does result in a fair number of nude shots with their fair show of objectification. Sissy Spacek, in her movie debut, is pretty much there to be ogled (by viewer as well as white slavers) – let’s say she plays wide-eyed wonder and infantile trust, with boobs. As with much of the movie, though, this is pushed to the limit – the film tests its own audacity in what could either be a piece of anti-misogynistic self-criticism, a shrug of the shoulders in the face of good taste, or a mixture of the above. Key moments: a pair of scenes set, first of all, in a hotel restaurant, played for laughs as Marvin grins at the old couple disapprovingly eyeing Spacek’s see-through dress, and then back in the upstairs suite, where the naïve orphan reveals how she used to snuggle up to her best pal in a ‘touching’ (literally!) lesbian relationship. It’s so close to male-wish fantasy that it must be taking the piss – musn’t it? (“Say my name.” “Poppy.” “Say it again”. Lee Marvin looks like he wants to burst out laughing, although of course he keeps his cool – impeccably. I don’t think Roger Moore would have been able to).

Indeed, the film does seem to be attempting to make some kind of anti-objectification statement. The title, ‘Prime Cut’ establishes the money/meat link – women as meat, drugged up (just like we shoot up the cows). The aggressive acquisitiveness I mentioned earlier finds a metaphorical parallel in the Hackman crowds desire to consume – cows for meat, women for sexual pleasure. Hackman’s oaf brother is always chewing on something, even attempting to stab Marvin with a (phallic?) sausage as he goes through his death throes. And the drugged-up girls are displayed in enclosures which are later used for pigs. Appropriate enough, then, that Hackman ends up being half-eaten by a pig…

As you might have gathered, animals and meat are the main thematic link in the film, if that’s important. The movie opens with a documentary-style scene following the process of death in a cattle slaughterhouse (though, one might note, without quite the graphic touch one might expect, given the rest of the film – one might contrast it’s tone with the scene in Barbet Schroeder’s ‘Maitresse’ (a very different sort of film) from a few years later, where Gerard Deapardieu’s protagonist witnesses the bloody death of a horse). The ‘Prime Cut’ sequence is more about putting the viewer off, catching, like the film as a whole, a key somewhere between black humour (most overtly stressed later on, with the character of the old woman and her milk tasting at the fair) and face-wrinkling grotesquerie. The whole scene is dogged by this tone, with Lalo Schifrin’s easy-listening strings adding an ironic air as we see the meat being minced up into burgers and strung out into strings of sausages. It could almost be vegetarian propaganda, but little visual hints make it just that little bit weirder and more interesting – as when we catch a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it glimpse of a pair of naked buttocks in with the doomed cattle, or the shoe that comes out along hunks of meat on a conveyer-belt. So we know what’s in those sausages, as the oaf brother, Weenie, packages them up and sends them off. This idea is at once so absurd that it’s absolutely hilarious, and just about believable enough to be quite shocking. (I guess this blackly comic tone shouldn’t be unexpected, given that the director is Michael Ritchie, whose satirical film ‘The Candidate’, starring Robert Redford, mixed that straight-faced, observational, Altmanesque in-the-middle-of-the-action 70s realism with satirical touches.)

What else can be said about this movie? Well, I identified animals and meat as a crucial element; the most important line of dialogue comes at the end of the final shootout, and it’s between Marvin and Hackman. The latter’s been shot from his rooftop perch and has plummeted down into a pigsty, where the animal occupant has proceeded to chew up his legs. Managing to drag himself out, the dying villain begs a mercy killing, and the ensuing dialogue goes as follows:

Hackman: “Kill me, Nick. Finish me off, Nick. DO IT! You would for a beast.”
Marvin: “You’re a man.”
Hackman: “There’s no difference.”
Marvin: “You’re wrong. There is.”

It’s a neat punch-line, Marvin’s laconic delivery contributing, as elsewhere in the film, to the aura of tough guy cool which made his ‘Point Blank’ performance such a hit (the natty clothes help too. Check out those white loafers!) In fact, it’s almost the sort of morbid joke James Bond might have made after polishing off a villain. But at the same time, it is pretty much a straight didactic moment – as much as anything in the film can be said to be at all didactic. One review I’ve read even calls it a ‘humanistic’ moral – not the sort of thing you expect in the nihilistic climate of 70s film-making. Yes, our heroes may be gangsters, who are probably fairly unsavoury characters in themselves, but they stop short at white slavery, where women are treated as animals (sold in pig-pens, no less). You can shoot a man, but at least give him the dignity of a graceful stunt fall death. And be nice to those innocent-looking girl-children. Men are not animals, and that’s where all the problems arise. The villains see women as so much bestial flesh, and turn men into sausages: if they just had a little more respect for the human body, things would be a lot smoother.

It is, I guess, a ‘moral’ that befits the film’s sheer strangeness. And I hardly think it’s meant to be taken in entirely as po-faced a manner as my extrapolation above. After all, Prime Cut’s ‘messages’ tend to be a little more mixed than all that. On the one hand, the film trades off the ruthless, ‘Point Blank’ Marvin persona, but on the other, it softens that by his feelings towards Spacek and the orphans (mostly just paternal, it seems). At the end of the film, he is entirely the benevolent protector: accompanied by those of his men who’ve survived, he takes Spacek to the orphanage where the girls are groomed for the white slavery racket, and frees them. The last shot shows said liberated orphans running off into the fields, gambolling like lambs (and bringing to mind Spacek’s line, earlier in the film, about being let out into nature in the summer). Over it all runs a jolly Lalo Schifrin cue with prominent whistling (spaghetti western Morricone with the sting taken out, you might say). My first impulse is to see it as conformist drivel, but it’s pretty hard to feel that way if you think about it all.

To explain why, one final detour is needed. Film-wise, in the 70s, cynicism and nihilism tended to be the order of the day – more often than not, you had to let your main characters die in the final reel. Take ‘Easy Rider’ (OK, it was made in ’69, but you get the picture): Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper couldn’t just ride off into the sunset. Why? Well, I think there was still some sense that the anti-heroes needed to be ‘punished’. Yes, this was the New Hollywood, with renegade young film-makers given free rein to do whatever the hell they wanted (I’ve read ‘Easy Riders, Raging Bulls’), but I have a feeling that the subversion was still being kept in check – just a little. It was all very well for Eastwood to happily count out the loot at the end of ‘For a Few Dollars More’, and American audiences lapped that up as much as anyone else, but those who controlled the picture-making industry in the US of A seem to have figured that, while they could exploit this new market for anti-heroism, they had to add in a touch, however slight, of moral finger-wagging, which somehow ‘justified’ it all. ‘FAFDM’, after all, was made by those degenerate (and Catholic) Europeans…So ‘Easy Rider’ opens with a similar illicit deal (money for dope, rather than dead bodies) but ends with the bikers getting their ‘just deserts’. Of course, the film-makers themselves weren’t intending this sort of cautionary tale element – it was more part of the film’s myth-making project (would Shane have seemed so iconic if he hadn’t been dying when he rode off on that horse?), in which drug-dealing bikers were the new cowboy heroes, sharing in their western predecessors’ freewheeling spirit and disregard for the rules of oh-so-barbarous ‘civilisation.’ Fonda and Hopper’s death at the hands of rednecks (like Nicholson’s earlier in the movie), is their comment on the often destructive clash between 50s and 60s values, between generations, between different philosophies and ways of living, as well as on the failure of the American dream (new or old) – “we blew it.” But at the same time it could be use to dull the subversive impact of the film as a whole, bookending it with a cautionary note. Don’t try this at home, kids – you’ll only get blown off the road with a shotgun, even if the Byrds are singing you a dinky little ballad (“all he wanted was to be free – and that’s the way it turned out to be”.)



How does that relate to ‘Prime Cut’? Well, the movie’s ending is a parody of the idealised, Norman Rockwell dungarees and cattle-ranchin’, country-livin’ world that the film has turned on its head throughout, as well as being a piss-take of the whole idea of the happy ending – but, like the man/beast dialogue discussed above, it’s also meant to be taken at least half-seriously. And in that way it’s more unnerving than any of those nihilistic, ‘Easy Rider’-style endings where the (anti)hero bites the dust. Both subverting and conforming to the anti-clichés of the 70s American thriller, it’s illustrative of a time when you often just didn’t know what the hell you were supposed to think about what you were saying – and in many ways, that’s the beauty of it. I’m not meaning to suggest that it’s a completely morally relative film, but its moral uncertainty certainly is a key part of its overall beguiling strangeness. It’s true to say that they just don’t make ’em like this anymore – and it’s hard to believe that they ever did.

Cannibal Holocaust: A Review

'Cannibal Holocaust' - the very title screams excess and exploitation, and normally I'd steer a mile away from that sort of thing (I'd rather not have to watch a film that exists solely to show extreme cruelty), but the film's reputation, and the fact that I'd previously written essays about it (without ever watching it) made me think that I should probably get round to giving it a go. Ninety minutes later, I emerged from the experience, challenged, provoked, disgusted and somewhat perplexed. I'll try to pick through my thoughts below.

I won't bother summarising the plot - you can find plenty of other synopses on the internet - although I suppose it's worthwhile noting that it actually does have a plot, and quite a lot of dialogue. In fact, it sets itself up as something of a social critique (though it's unclear how far director Ruggero Deodoto actually bought into this), rather than a brainless gore-fest.

I think you have to see the film very much a product of its time (though with the rise into the mainstream of increasingly gory horror/exploitation movies like 'Hostel' and 'Saw', there has been something of a return to that typically 1970s combination of explicit violence and some sort of twisted moral thinking that hovers between the perverse and "hm, maybe they've got a point there"). So: the 70s, as every one knows, were a time of film-making excess (or boundary pushing, whatever you want to call it), and 'Cannibal Holocaust' is probably the most notorious horror/exploitation film from that period (it was made in 1979 and released in 1980).

The emotional/ psychological vein it taps into, though, was common to films with much bigger budgets, and bigger stars: gritty, unflinching looks at the cruelties men are capable of, like the films of Michael Winner, boasted actors like Burt Lancaster, Jack Palance and Charles Bronson, and were fairly popular at the box-office. We might think of example such as the opening rape scene in 'Death Wish', or, more relevant to 'Holocaust', the western 'Chato's Land,' in which Charles Bronson's near-silent, Vietcong-like Indian warrior, Chato, slowly picks off a posse, mostly consisting of caricatured rednecks.

There are no heroes in 'Chato' - Bronson's actions are pretty barbaric (there's an unforgettable image where the penultimate posse member is shot, and falls face down into a campfire, and another when the final member is driven back into the desert to die by Chato), though the white man's are even worse. This raises an issue of moral compromise which Winner seems to have ducked out of somewhat - at times he seems to be actually advocating the sort of revenge that Chato takes, seeing it as justified because the posse have raped and murdered his family, and are racist bastards. Similarly, in 'Death Wish', Bronson's vigilante actions are celebrated (when the law fails - and, by extension, in Chato, the 'laws' of 'civilised' behaviour - you have to take matters into your own hands, and act with the sort of violence and cruelty equal to that dished out to you). Perhaps this is unfair to Winner - maybe he is taking no moral stand, showing both parties as equally vile, and presenting a completely nihilistic vision. But it's deeply unclear, and, while such uncertainty accounts for the film's unprecedented power, their deeply unpleasant, 'impure' feel, it seems somehow reprehensible (if no less reprehensible than Hollywood's increasingly overt glorification of violence, if it's to save cute little kiddies and is done by your favourite action heroes).



So to 'Cannibal Holocaust'. Like ‘Chato’s Land’, its plot involves the intrusion of evil white men into the territory of natives who prove to be just as brutal in retaliating to the atrocities committed by said white men, and like ‘Chato’s Land’, it presents somewhat confused moral messages. Even more than ‘Chato’, it could be described as a deeply misanthropic film, and, if anything, its targets appear even more confused. As another review I've read has noted, it sets up its crew of film-makers pretty much as straw men (while it may be true that news-crews exaggerate, manipulate, distort, etc, I find it unlikely that they'd go as far as to massacre pretty much a whole village)and thus muddies the message. Furthermore, while the anthropologist, Prof. Monroe, becomes the jaded voice of reason later in the film, earlier, he's not exactly a pillar of virtue, shooting several members of one tribe in cold blood so as to gain the trust of another tribe. The idea that 'Holocaust' is attacking the 'Mondo' films (some of which actually did stage shocking events) is rendered unlikely by the fact that, with its attempt at verité-realism, it comes across as a Mondo film itself –at least, in the final, 'documentary' section. (Incidentally, this 'film-within-a-film'/ 'real documentary footage' effect is nicely done, at a time when such tricks weren't common, as they are now (Blair Witch and all its spin-offs), and as indicated by the fact that people at the time thought this was a real snuff film.)

In making this film, it seems, Deodato deliberately plays up and questions his own role as exploitation film-maker (though by doing so he unwittingly undermines himself as well). When, in the penultimate scene, the TV executive orders the footage to be burned, one wonders if this was not the very same attitude held by those who tried to censor Deodato's work. For a film that exists seemingly to confront (and arguably, to exploit) the depths of human depravity, cruelty and violence, the Professor's stance (wanting to suppress the footage) seems protectionist, censorial. Surely it would make more sense to expose the film-makers for who they were (as is Deodato and the script's intention)? After all, their earlier documentary 'The Road to Hell' has been shown to have been faked, to some extent, yet people will believe it be real - would it not make more sense to expose the film-makers (and by extension, the culture of exploitative reporting that they embody)?

Furthermore, Deodato's attitude to the native tribes is confused. We're supposed to sympathise, or at least, to understand, the actions they take towards the film-crew, to see them as justified; while they react with initial suspicion towards Monroe, it never looks like they're actually going to eat him, but the massacre in a hut pushes them over the edge. Yet what to make of the native 'savagery'? In one (infamous) scene, the crew come across a naked woman, impaled on a pole. Alan smirks, seems to be enjoying the spectacle, but is then told 'you're on camera' and immediately changes to a face of concern, pronouncing that this is the result of some barabric sexual ritual, from a people who hold virginity as almost sacred (earlier on, in the film's first truly shocking scene, we've seen a native murder an adulterous woman by sexually mutilating her). Obviously, this is supposed to be yet another example of the thrill-seeking filmmakers' callousness and exploitativeness, but at the same time, it's unclear what moral attitude is being taken vis-a-vis the natives' 'uncivilised' practices. True, the girl may have been killed in this way because she has been raped by the film-makers in the preceding scene (although it's unclear whether it's the same girl), and the tribe's attitude to sexual 'impurity' demands such a grisly response, but that doesn't make the actual act of execution any easier to stomach.

And of course, there are the scenes of animal cruelty. We see a muskrat have it's throat slit, and hear its screams of agony. Is this supposed to be just a fact of life - look, meat-eaters, this is the suffering animals go through to get you your meat - or just another cheap trick? Monroe shows a little distaste, but doesn't seem too concerned. The disembowelling of the turtle is shocking (you see its legs move even as its insides are being cut out), an effect enhanced by the score, but would it be appear any more palatable (excuse the pun) if it was done with care, rather than lip-smacking relish? It seems ironic that Deodato condemns his characters for filming the turtle-killing (as indicated by the ominous and queasy strings that blare up on the soundtrack), yet is at the same time filming this staged event himself, for the purposes of his own film.

At one point, a TV executive tells Monroe "Today people want sensationalism; the more you rape their senses the happier they are" (of course, she hasn't seen the actual footage at this stage of the movie). I don't think anyone could come away from 'Holocaust' feeling happy, although they might well feel that their sense have been ‘raped.’ By pushing things just that little bit further, the film does succeed to some extent in exposing and challenging our attitudes towards extreme violence. It is strange how we find something like 'Holocaust' shocking and deserving of censorship ("ban this sick filth", as the Daily Mail might put it), but have become immune to the horrors and deprivations we see daily on our news screens. Our morality is very perverted if can react with absolute horror and outrage to fictional gore but, when confronted with real-life events such as those in Darfur, can switch on the auto-pilot response of "oh, isn't it awful, but we can't do anything, that's just the way life is"? Of course, Deodato IS exploiting his violence, just as his fictional film-makers are, and I suppose one could argue that the film's value lies as much in the issues that he DIDN'T intend to raise as the ones that he did. In that sense, it goes beyond (or below) being art - its value lies, not in its quality (though I didn't find the acting too bad, there are moments where one feels that things are about to tip over into porno, or worse) - but in the issues it raises, however it raises them. If there was ever a film that deserved the title 'thought-provoking', Cannibal Holocaust is that film.

THE SOUNDTRACK:

You can download the soundtrack here: http://arquivosnet.wordpress.com/2008/09/20/soundtrack-cannibal-holocaust-1980/. Riz Ortolani's music is pretty effective, on the whole, though I’m not really sure that it works too well away from the film. Even in the film, it sounds a little dodgy – for example, the groan-worthy easy listening cue which plays over the title credits, and which steers things towards 70s porno when Monroe bathes naked in the river (the film's one concession to an idea of an unspoilt idyll, free from the trappings and repressions of modern life - "to be like them, naked and unfettered as Adam" as he puts it in the voiceover) – although it admittedly has some impact when played ironically over the village massacre, or at the climactic dismemberment of the film-crew. Meanwhile, the 'horror' theme, with its wrenching, mournful strings, is suitably disturbing, even without Deodato’s graphic images to accompany it (though the synth percussion effects are a little dated).

AND SOME LINKS:

J.G. Ballard on Mondo films: http://www.ballardian.com/jg-ballard-on-mondo-films
Wikipedia on Mondo films: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondo_film
A review of ‘Chato’s Land’: http://www.dvdtimes.co.uk/content.php?contentid=12010
A review of ‘Cannibal Holocaust’: http://www.braineater.com/cannibalholocaust.html
Another review: http://www.1000misspenthours.com/reviews/reviewsa-d/cannibalholocaust.htm
And another: http://www.slantmagazine.com/film/film_review.asp?ID=1848
And another! http://www.lloydkaufman.com/roids/2005/11/11/cannibal-holocaust-review/
Review of the recent DVD release: http://www.eccentric-cinema.com/cult_movies/cannibal_holocaust.htm

Finally, 'The Video Nasties: Freedom and Censorship in the Media’, a 1984 book edited by Martin Barker, has a chapter on ‘Holocaust’, and discussions of other controversial exploitation/horror films from the 70s and 80s. If you want to acquaint yourself with the sort of issues surrounding these films (and it is a fascinating area of debate) without actually having to watch them, it’s a good place to start, though it might be a little hard to get hold of.