SPASMO

d. Umberto Lenzi (1973)

Ah, Giallo, Italian for complicated. Sort of.

Giallo films are intricate, intriguing, surprising. They are fixated on murder and fear in the fast lane of the twentieth century, and feature attractive people with fabulous homes, cool clothes, fast cars and strange, unnatural urges. There is always at least one character who is a psychotic sex killer, and part of the game is working out which one (or two, or three) it is.

Spasmo is a text book example of its class, a triumph of style over substance. Almost everything is here for effect, so much so that the film resembles a less tedious Whitehall farce, filled with non-sequiturs: characters who drive miles to say a couple of ominous lines and then drive off again; women and men who are introduced just to be murdered; dead people who are neither dead nor people (one of the characters has an obsession with lifelike female mannequins, and likes to hang them from trees); shadows, mistaken identity, unlikely coincidences.

There’s a great kinetic energy to the film, as if it relies on perpetual motion or knows it’s a fairly flimsy house of cards that would collapse with the merest breath. Everything is heightened, racked up, piled on. In an amazing lighthouse on a cliff edge filled with caged birds of prey the camera cuts rapidly between headshots of the characters and the birds, each staring down the camera in turn as Ennio Morricone’s superb score stabs and swoops. The effect is slightly ridiculous, but wonderful, operatically dramatic. Perhaps the owl knows what’s going on, as no-one else really has a clue – or a care, it’s not that sort of movie.    

English actress Suzy Kendall – born Freda Belpin – lends extra quality to proceedings: she's beautiful and moves like a model, but is also excellent at screaming and pulling ‘urgh’ and ‘arrgghh’ faces. She is ably supported by an equally photogenic cast: this is Giallo, so everyone is good looking, except for the ugly ones, who have more than a touch of the grotesque about them.

MANSON

d. Laurence Merrick / Robert Hendrickson (1973)

I actually first watched this a few weeks before Charles Manson died, so maybe I inadvertently dialled up the cosmos and reminded it that Manson was still around and needn’t be.  I don't feel bad, by the way, Manson was a nuisance, and never did anything good for anybody, least of all himself.

This well-made documentary, which benefits from archive footage made by The Manson Family themselves, was released two years after the longest trial in American history, a fraught, complex thing in which a man was convicted of heinous crimes which he encouraged but took no physical part in. Manson was the ultimate bad influence, a lifelong criminal and misfit who collected hippies and runaway kids and brainwashed them into becoming a nihilistic death cult using sex, drugs and endless rambling monologues / lectures about race wars, societal breakdown and how Hollywood needed to pay for ignoring his musical genius.*

If you were wondering how Manson, a short, scruffy bloke with anger issues (a bit like Hitler) managed to keep at least thirty people under his thrall, ultimately getting them to kill for him, just watch  the interview footage with some of the fringe Family members, the ones that didn’t murder anyone and drifted away from the core soon after. One of the guys tells a rambling and obviously untrue story about how he talked to squirrels and rabbits in the desert while his audience, a gang of barefoot, snaggle toothed long hairs, none older than 25, sit agape, occasionally guffawing with raucous laughter. They are either cretins who genuinely find this bullshit interesting and funny, or they’re too scared to show that they’re not hip enough to be in on the joke. Chemicals play a part, of course, but there’s also an active disavowal of intelligence, a suspension of disbelief and critical faculties in order to be part of something, to be included, to belong. For someone like Manson, 'a Venus Flytrap amongst the flower children', they were easy pickings.

We also see the girls Manson left behind, those fizzing with resentment at not being in jail but still worshipping at their guru’s feet. They pontificate and philosophise, posturing with weapons and acting tough. One of them, Squeaky Fromme, gives us a lecture about how you should know every part of your weapon intimately as she struggles to pull her knife out of its scabbard. In 1975, Fromme tried to shoot President Ford, but her gun didn’t go off.  

Cannily, the film makers withhold Manson's voice from us until the very end. When he speaks, you hear exactly where his acolytes have got their opinions, their attitudes, their words, even their intonations, cadences and pronunciations. Yes, he is charismatic, not least because he is deeply unusual and utterly self-possessed, but I don’t feel like I want to carve the word ‘pig’ on anyone’s stomach for him. Perhaps I need more drugs. Send more drugs. 

* There is a persistent rumour that Manson auditioned for The Monkees. He was actually in prison at the time. I don’t think he’d have got the job, anyway, they already had Davy Jones.

HITLER: THE LAST TEN DAYS

d. Ennio De Concini (1973)

Most of the films I write about here are modest in their expectation: they want to find an audience and make some money. They feature writers, directors and actors who are either at the beginning or the end of their careers, or stranded on a plateau of mediocrity on which they will stay. That's not to say that these films aren't sincere or don't contain artistry, even brilliance, as they often do, but that's a bonus: there is no expectation or pretension towards it.

Hitler: The Last Ten Days is an exploitation film. True, it's not one of the cycle of wretched Nazi sex films later classified as 'video nasties' (they were always nasty, regardless of format), but it's pure trash from start to finish, regardless of the fact that it has expectations, pretensions, even: a decent director, a good cast, a world famous star and the endorsement of historian Sir Hugh Trevor-Roper (it's now forgotten that, for several months after Hitler's death, no-one on the Allied side knew for sure what had happened to him. It was Trevor-Roper who put the pieces together). What we're presented with is a stilted, stifling drama, interspersed with alternately insensitive or ham-fisted use of archive footage. There are extraordinary moments: Eva Braun singing a song in blackface; the summary execution of a drunken Julian Glover; Hitler eating slice after slice of cake, but these are extraordinary because they are drawn from life, and were suffused with the unbearable tension and unreality of the Nazi Götterdämmerung. What we mainly have is British character actors (and a few Italians) talking, talking, talking, but no-one daring to speak, or smoke, or escape, or surrender, or kill Hitler, just fucking kill him, or even to reflect on what a colossal toll their madness has taken on the world (at the end, Eva Braun becomes disillusioned, and even admonishes her new husband, but there is no basis to believe this actually happened).    

The biggest problem with the film is Hitler himself, played here by Alec Guinness. Guinness was a fine and cerebral actor but the absolute antithesis of Das Fuhrer, an extremely unsubtle person. This Hitler looks like Stan Laurel with a stick on moustache and only really convinces when he becomes jovial, talking about nude opera, architecture and the greatest hits of his bloody rampage across Europe and Africa. When he loses his temper (which is often), the performance becomes hollow and unconvincing, with Guinness lacking the inner energy and even the strength of voice to convey his lunatic rantings. His gestures here are drawn from Hitler's speeches, and so are melodramatic and play to the back of the house. At one point, he is so angry he stamps his foot, a ludicrous gesture which, although almost certainly accurate, seems so silly that the director should have asked him gently but firmly not to do it.     

 

Hitler seems to be one of those roles, along with Napoleon, Jesus, Sherlock Holmes and Batman, that every halfway decent actor should have a go at. Sometimes it works and, well, sometimes you feel like shooting yourself in the head while simultaneously chomping down on a cyanide capsule, that's just the way the Pfefferkuchen crumbles.

THE LAST AMERICAN HERO

d. Lamont Johnson (1973) 

Jeff Bridges will appear in pretty much anything these days, but there was a time when he had a very specific appeal, a lot of it based around his youthful, open faced appearance and total insouciance. That lack of concern was always difficult to read: was he smart or stupid; self-assured or disconnected; natural or wooden: was he even really there at all?

Here, he plays Elroy ‘Junior’ Jackson, a 'wild assed mountain boy' who is a prodigiously gifted driver and local enigma. Starting out by running moonshine (sticking it to the man is a vital element in these hicksploitation films), he needs to become  a breadwinner when his Pa is imprisoned for bootlegging liquor, so takes his fast wheels to market, starting off in demolition derbies before progressing to stock car racing and, ultimately, the most pointless of all American sports, NASCAR. Junior is just about the best there’s ever been at driving quickly around in circles for hours on end, and the film ends with him holding aloft his first championship trophy.

Loosely based on 50s and 60s NASCAR legend, Junior Johnson, the script was derived from an Esquire magazine piece by Tom Wolfe. The original prose was kinetic and hyperbolic, full of colour and energy, a gleaming sports car with a tank full of pop art and rocket fuel. Sadly, the film is a rather clunky hybrid, powered by red diesel.  At best, it’s rowdy and rambunctious, but is mainly light and inconsequential, largely down to Bridges under-written character and non-committal performance: Junior never really seems bothered, so why should we be?