Tuesday's Overlooked Film: Fear Over the City

A grinning serial killer is hunting the women of Paris, inspector Le Terrier is hot on his trail. This is the basic and simple premise behind Henri Verneuil's Fear Over the City (Peur sur la ville) that came out in 1975. I just saw it last night on a 35 mm print, though it was somewhat faded and full of scratches.

There's much of Italian giallos in this film, and indeed it was partially financed by Italian producers. The Italian feel was heightened by English dubbing, which, while it wasn't badly made in itself, also added to the feel of unintentional humour. The film is at times an uneasy mix between serious thrill-seeking suspense film and a comical, almost self-parodist slapstick. Jean-Paul Belmondo in the lead as Le Terrier made his own stunts and one never really knows whether the scenes are thought to be funny or not, even though Belmondo was clearly at risk here.

In the end, it's only a middling film, with some nice touches here and there, but also with some ludicrous stuff here and there and everywhere. Some of the latter parts are very funny, some aren't. There are some beautiful women to be killed later on, which always makes me squirm a bit. The character of the serial killer is quite intriguing, though, his grin is scary. (I was told that the actor doing the killer's part was Italian, which also may have something to do with the giallo atmosphere.)

The best thing about the film is Ennio Morricone's eerie music. Check out the trailer below. Might've been better in the original French.

More Overlooked Films here at Todd Mason's blog. [Though seems like no post is up yet.]

Tuesday's Overlooked Film: Attack of the Robots (1966)

Jess Franco was a Spanish director who has probably made more feature-length films than any other director. His filmography has about 200 films. Many of them are erotic horror, some of them are more mundane action and sex flicks. His reputation has never been too high and I've gathered many of his films indeed are of poor quality, but some of them have redeeming qualities about them, such as hallucinatory sequences and imaginative camera work.

I just managed to see two of his films, which I believe were the first for me. I saw both on 35 mm on big screen. The first one of the two was much better than the latter one, and I'm pretty sure it has something to do with the screenwriter. Cartes sur table AKA Attack of the Robots (1966) was written by Jean-Claude Carrière, one of the best-known and most revered French screenwriters of the last 40 years. He's written lots of stuff for directors like Buñuel, Godard, Peter Brook, Philip Kaufman... and Jess Franco.

Cartes sur table is an enjoyable spy romp with many parodical touches. The film is full of silliness and it's almost always in the right tone, so it's not overdone or unintentional. There are some light touches of sadomasochism and fetishism, which both show in Carrière's and Franco's later films. Cartes sur table is also a reminiscent of Godard's Alphaville which was done a year earlier, so it's possible Carrière and Franco wanted to parody the better-known film. Both star Eddie Constantine as a hardboiled hero (though he seems silly and clumsy in Franco's film), both have Paul Misraki's music, and both have a huge central computer that speaks incoherently in the end.

Cartes sur table is one of those cheap spy flicks the French made in abundance in the sixties (remember the Lemmy Cautions and Nick Carters Constantine starred in?), but it's also a lightweight New Wave film in its self-reflectiveness which is never too loud. Comes recommended by me - if you can catch it, as it seems like there's no decent DVD publication.

And then I saw Franco's later Count Dracula with a stellar cast of Christopher Lee, Herbert Lom and Klaus Kinski, but this was only boring. Nothing else. Sorry. Nothing to see here.

Franco died earlier this year, having directed his last film in 2012. Its main character is called Al Pereira, just like Constantine in Cartes sur table.

More Overlooked Films here at Todd Mason's blog (after a hiatus).

Tuesday's Overlooked Movie: Alphaville (1965)

Woody Haut once wrote that both poetry and pulp fiction start from scratch. One film that is right in the middle between poetry and pulp fiction is Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville. In the film the hero kills the evil central computer by reading it Paul Éluard's poetry.

The film stars Eddie Constantine as Lemmy Caution, the hero of cheap French crime flicks, originating from Peter Cheyney's once-popular novels. Alphaville is a mix of parody, pastiche, deconstruction and homage to the cheap genre, timed to the rhythm of the Lemmy Caution's gun, Paul Misraki's pounding but jazzy music, hysterical car drives through the suburbs of Paris. The film is at times pure poetry in motion: the image changes into negative all of sudden, people stagger strangely in the corridors of the central computer building, the lights flicker, the screen is filled with neon-light words.

Seems like Todd Mason isn't doing his usual Tuesday round-up, but I'll post this anyway and add a link to his blog here.

Tuesday's Overlooked Movie: Une grosse tête

Une grosse tête from 1961 is a funny little French film written by Francois Truffaut and directed by his pal, Claude de Givray. The film stars Eddie Constantine. It's a forgotten gem, though not a great film in any meaning of the phrase, but entertaining, witty and inventive all the way.

The film is a parody of many Hollywood genres alongside with French genre films, especially those with Constantine in the lead: the Lemmy Caution, Nick Carter and OSS 117 films. There are some funny scenes in which Constantine fights some other guys and they are acted out like the outrageous scenes in those films. The film begins like a weird western film in which a stranger - Eddie Constantine in his glider! - comes to rescue an old man from some baddies who want to buy the old man's house and build a skyscraper instead. But then suddenly something completely different ensues! I'm pretty sure this is one of the very few feature films to have karting races at the center of things. The film changes tones in an instant and it also features some Nouvelle Vague type of loose editing and shooting. The ending made in a grand style of The Giant or some such epic is priceless.

The film also boasts two very beautiful female actors, Alexandra Stewart and (I believe, as not all the actors are credited in IMDb) Genevièvé Galéa (the mother of Emmanuelle Béart, no less!).

I'd recommend this to all friends of French New Wave and some others too, since it's so light and not to be taken seriously, but seems like it's very hard to find. I just saw the 35 mm print held in the Finnish Film Archive. The film seems to have been shown in American TV as A Fat Head and in England as A Swelled Head. In Finland it was called Kovat kurvit ("Hard Curves" or some such).

More Overlooked Films here.

Here's a French rock band featured in the film playing a song called "Rock des Karts":

Tuesday's Overlooked Film: Quand la ville s'éveille (1975)

I  bought this French crime film on an old VHS cassette from a thrift store for 10 or 20 cents. I knew nothing about it, but I thought it might be worth to take a look at. It turned out it was both yes and no: the film is quite stilted, but it's still a French crime film from the seventies! And with this I mean the fact that the French probably make - or at least used to make - the best crime movies after the Americans and Hollywood.

Writer-director Pierre Grasset (who also stars) worked on some of Jean-Pierre Melville's films and it shows. This too goes for the Melville-type fatalism and existentialism, as it's about old career criminals who are retired, but gather together to make the last job and then really retire. Of course it all goes terribly wrong, but they do it anyway, without flinching an eye.

What's wrong about the movie is the reason why the job goes so wrong. They could've avoided it so easily. After the crucial scene it's only implausible. Still, there are some cool moments in which old guys dressed up in long trench coats shoot each other at desolate fields and subway stations. This could've been my stuff.

What also bugs me is that they use almost only one piece on the soundtrack - I got pretty tired of the accordion song, even though it turned out be by Astor Piazzolla. Disconcerting was also the fact the movie, of course originally in French, was dubbed in English - luckily it was pretty well made.

 
One thing still: the film seems to have quite a many titles. The original French title is above, but there's some confusion as to what the English and Finnish titles are. Both IMDb and the Finnish VHS database claim this was called When the City Awakes, but as you can see from the photo (sorry about the quality!) in the opening titles it's called Hot Day Afternoon (which doesn't really fit). The Finnish title in the VHS cover (see the photo above) is Lehtileike, which means "A Newspaper Clip" (doesn't make much sense), but as you can see, in the titles it's Keikkojen keikka, which means "The Hardest Job" or maybe "The Last Job", if you know what I'm getting at. I don't know where they got the last title, since the film wasn't shown here in theaters. Maybe there's an earlier VHS publication of which no one is aware of.

More Overlooked Movies at Todd Mason's blog.

Tuesday's Overlooked Film: Série noire

Alain Corneau is one of the most unsung and underrated French directors. He started his career in the early seventies with gritty crime films, like Police Python 357 (1976). Série noire (1979) is based on Jim Thompson's Hell of a Woman and I think it's a seminal film: it's the first in the new wave Jim Thompson film versions. (I think Burt Kennedy's The Killer Inside Me was still old wave. Though I have never seen it.) After Série noire came Coup de torchon in 1981 and then, some years later, The Kill-Off, After Dark, My Sweet and The Grifters, all in 1990.

Corneau's film is a quite slow-moving, but in the end an almost diabolically hysteric story of the downward spiral we so much love about Thompson's work. Patrick Dewaere jumps around like Woody Woodpecker on speed and gets sudden spurts of violence. This is the best part in Corneau's film - he handles arbitrary violence very well, with great verve. Violence is never portrayed as funny, but still the chaotic killings are the funniest parts in the film (especially when Dewaere places the gun in the wrong dead man's hand). The ending is very cruel, as befits a Jim Thompson filmatization.

The French title of course refers to the legendary book series Série noire that had almost all the important American and British hardboiled and noir writers. In English-speaking markets, the film was called... um, actually can't find that tidbit. Maybe it's never been shown in the English-speaking countries. That's impossible!

More overlooked films here.

Alain Robbe-Grillet: Trans-Europ-Express

I just got back from the Finnish Film Archive's screening of Alain Robbe-Grillet's Trans-Europ-Express (1966), a parody of French spy flicks of the sixties that's both hilarious and theoretical at the same time.

I'm not a big fan of French New Wave films. I suppose I should be, since I'm a young film buff living in Europe, but I've felt for some years now that many of the inventions of the French films of the sixties have become obsolete and not very effective today, even though there might be a dose of Verfrämmedungseffekt, to quote Bertolt Brecht on this. (I hope I spelled that right!) Same goes for Trans-Europ-Express: the metanarrative is clumsily made, the main narrative drags on for quite a while, the direction should've been more dynamic considering the film's theoretical contents. Now the viewer is only distracted, not entertained at the same time. There were some great moments - especially in the erotic scenes, which were pretty much ahead of their time in their kinkiness - which makes me think Robbe-Grillet made those clumsy and awkward moments in purpose. But the question still remains: why?

But don't take my word for it. Here's Senses of Cinema on the film, praising it very highly.

Here's also a very weird scene in which Jean-Louis Trintignant, the pervert smuggler of the film, is being interrogated.



The film, in all its clumsiness, made me think I should take my copy of Robbe-Grillet's Labyrintissa/In the Labyrinthe and read it.