DRUMS fell off the cliff

Rewatched this punk documentary from 1981 by Penolope Sheeris, as I got a really clean copy off of laserdisc. It has not been released on DVD as I am sure they can’t get the rights renewed. If you watch it, look for the guy in the orange shirt in the freeze frame spitting scene in the beginning. That’s Bill Bartell from White Flag, you’ll notice him thoughout the rest of the film, often looking for the camera so he can mug!

I thought I had seen most of Anthony Perkins’ post-Psycho films, but I don’t think I have seen this before, or at least I forgot watching it. This gruesome film co-stars Tuesday Weld, and I cannot talk much about it without spoiling the plot, so I won’t

Well, I had become a little tired of watching some of the more forgettable of the Italian westerns, so I wanted to follow up with one of the higher examples. I wanted to watch one that I have never seen before, so I cued up an excellent Italian-language print of Sergio Sollima’s Faccia a Faccia.

Sollima directed two of my favorite spaghetti westerns The Big Gundown and it’s sequel Run, Man, Run, both starring the great Cuban actor Tomas Milian. This Sollima film was made in 1967, in between those two other films, and also stars Milian.

It is a remarkable film. A schoolteacher (played by Italian western great Gian Maria Volontè) heads to Texas for health reasons, and gets caught up with an outlaw. The film contrasts the schoolteacher slowly evolving into a ruthless criminal while the outlaw sowly develops a conscience. A third major character is played by Wiliam Berger, an Austrian-born American actor in his first of many Italian roles. Berger plays a Pinkerton detective going undercover to capture Milian’s gang. (I just read that Berger was once a roommate with Keith Richards?!?! I wonder what year that was?)

This epic film made up for watching a couple of merely ok westerns.

Watched a handful of movies recently, as I have been home, sick.

I watched another early spaghetti western, this one directed by Mario Caiano in 1965. It stars Anthony Steffen as Shenandoah, a US marshall faking to be a villian to catch the murderer of his wife. It was a good western, but not up to the level of a Leone film, of course.

I watched this wild, stylistic, mod, yakuza film from 1966 by director Seijun Suzuki. This movie had a whole lotta crazy going on. The studio thought this director had gone too far, so cut his budget, which forced him to leave out various connecting action shots, giving it a surreal quality, matched by the incredible visual style.

I watched this 1963 Italian western by director Ricardo Blasco. This film is one of the handful spaghetti westerns that came out before A Fistful of Dollars. But it has the same cinematagrapher as that film, Ennio Morricone doing the soundtrack, and looks like it was filmed in the same part of Spain as the later westerns. And despite a really beat print, this film looked and sounded great. The plot didn’t have the type of themes of the ater films, but that was to be expected.

So now that I have recently watched Yojimbo, I watched the remake. And it is a scene for scene remake. But what was interesting is to see where it differs, what scenes were created new by Sergio Leone in 1964. The great scene where Clint Eastwood keeps getting shot and keeps coming at the villian due to the metal plate under his pancho is a Leone invention.

I want step up my intake of spaghetti westerns, so I started with Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo from 1961. Ha! It is heavily influenced by US westerns and the music by Masaru Sato is not period music, but big band orchestra with (obviously) Japanese accents. Great film, but I need to understand more what “distension” means in film technique.

I was beat from driving around all morning, so I sat and relaxed to a pleasant WWII film. Communist director Edward Dmytryk meets fascist actor John Wayne in 1945. That’s sort of a joke but sums it up. Also has a great role for Anthony Quinn.

In this film the native Philipines have been overrun by the Japanese, but love the U.S. to the point where they would rather be hanged then take down an American flag. Their heros are Philipines who fought the U.S. 30 years previous, but now they love American hot dogs, especially the mustard and relish. The Japanese offer the Philipines independence and they show their thanks by staging a major attack.

Fascinating film, as they had to alter events to keep up with what was actually happening during the war. It looks like it features real P.O.W.s released during the freeing of a prisoner camp, a major restaged historic event which they use to bracket the beginning and end of the film.

Rewatched (a stellar new clean copy of) Guilio Petroni’s 1967 masterful western Death Rides a Horse. Good, Bad & The Ugly was the big influence on this film, as the two heros take turns chasing each other over the beautiful Spanish landscape standing in for the old west. I know that there are many references in Tarantino’s Kill Bill to this film, plus Tarantino copped some of the Ennio Morricone score, but I haven’t watched that much of Kill Bill. The film starts in a heavy rain, and ends in a sandstorm.

Stars Lee Van Cleef and John Philip Law, who was also in Roger Vadim’s Barberella, Mario Bava’s Danger Diabolik and The Russian’s Are Coming, The Russian’s Are Coming. John Philip Law does best on screen when he is silent.