GIALLO IDENTIKIT #006 [AMUCK! aka ALLA RICERCA DEL PIACERE (1972)]

Barbara Bouchet (top) and Rosalba Neri (bottom) are the two poles that the film's movement most famously revolves around. Their various love scenes have granted the film a certain infamy among exploitation fans (esp. those most interested in the Italian tradition of exploitation), but in the larger realm of Gialli the question remains: Is it any good?

[Note: This is the eighteenth post in a continuing series discussing and analyzing all the Krimis and Gialli I've seen. It is also the second in a series examining the sleaze end of the Giallo spectrum. As with every post on this site, SPOILERS SHOULD BE EXPECTED. THIS POST ALSO CONTAINS NSFW IMAGES (YOU'VE BEEN WARNED).]

My Giallo Rating: ★★★★☆ 
Subcategory (if any): 
     i. Sleaze-Art-Sleaze Giallo (aka, Exploitation Giallo)
     ii. Giallo/Gothic Hybrid 
     iii. Country Giallo 
In My Giallo Top 50 (Y/N): Yes (Letterboxd List)


Like any other Giallo that finds its stock-in-trade inexorably tangled up with the overt sexploitation elements gaining traction in the 70s—say, SO SWEET, SO DEAD (the first film I covered in this just-beginning examination of the "Sleaze-Art Giallo"), or LIZARD IN A WOMAN'S SKIN, or DEATH WALKS ON HIGH HEELS—Silvio Amadio’s AMUCK! is impossible (or at least very difficult) to assess without writing about it on those terms. Without addressing those issues repeatedly and up front.

Conversely, you could fill book chapters (plenty of people have) on a Giallo like THE BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE, talking only about the movement of Argento's camera. Or how he's restaged the film’s source material (Fredric Brown's THE SCREAMING MIMI). Or how the innovative and experimental cinematic techniques he employed came to define the Giallo genre (even in its knockoff form) for decades  ... you can cover all that without ever broaching the topic, e.g., of a drugged, slow-motion softcore scene between Barbara Bouchet and Rosalba Neri.

Then another one, in flashback, not 20 minutes later, showing Bouchet and Patrizia Viotti dallying under a waterfall.

Then a decadent sex party with homemade LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD stag films. Drug-taking and swinging. Plus an OF MICE AND MEN-type local farmer who is both the prize sideshow at the evening swinger’s parties and the “simple-minded brute” who may have committed all the murders.

The infamous Bouchet/Neri scene begins with Neri giving Bouchet the once-over.

Rewatching this now after recently watching dozens of Gothic/vampire flicks (the Hammer films chief among them), it struck me that Neri's posture and embrace of Bouchet here feels more than a little vampiric. Considering all the other Gothic overtones infused into the film—decaying and isolated villa; mysterious excursions at night on a reed-choked body of water (at which time the dead bodies of women tend to dissolve into watery oblivion); Granger as macabre horror author whose fictional horrors have taken to intruding into the daily, "real" lives of the characters; taboo relations unleashed inside the walls of an ancestral home; etc.—it seems an appropriate echo.

That is, though it only shows up a couple years after BIRD, the emphasis in AMUCK! ("An explosion of sexual frenzy!" as its tagline exclaims) is clearly on pushing the sex envelope much further. It is true that Kim Newman and Alan Jones, in their BIRD commentary, talk about overtly sexual (and overtly, sexually violent) sections of the movie when discussing some of its most-censored moments. When a woman is stabbed to death in her bedroom, Jones addresses the charge of misogyny leveled against Argento, and talks about some of the distasteful yet unavoidable aspects of these films (like the recurring motif in the genre of [as he calls it] "knife as phallus," a motif that was then carried on through to the Slasher genre [and, in the hands of a feminist screenwriter, for the movie SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE, took perhaps its most foregrounded form ... either that, or the use of the giant-safecracking-drill-as-weapon in De Palma's BODY DOUBLE] ... I suspect, if this series continues, we will shortly arrive at De Palma's work). Jones says that when he first saw the scene, censored as it was, he "didn't know what all the fuss was about." Only later, while watching reinstated prints, did he see the most transgressive elements. Elements like (as Newman puts it) that the editing in the scene sets up "a rather squirmy thing about paralleling mouth and vagina."

But: Even these discussions of transgressive sexual imagery are less about softcore sexploitation proliferating under the umbrella of a slackening censorship, and more about the depiction and editing of violence—about the formal and stylistic choices being made to either exaggerate or underplay its explicit, onscreen presence. AMUCK! is a different animal altogether (or, the same animal, but wearing a drastically different coat), with standalone sections that could be mistaken for what would later be used to fill out the running time of Cinemax "thrillers".

So the question then becomes, for Gialli in this category, *why* is the envelope being pushed? If it’s just titillation, then, you know, okay (and AMUCK! succeeds mightily in titillating all those who would be smitten by an onscreen bedroom scene between Bouchet and Neri) ... which, to sound not-so-stuffy for a minute, certainly includes at least a part of me. After all, Gialli persist in the cinematic consciousness precisely because of their two or three most sturdy lynchpins: elaborate staging of hyper-stylized violence; transgressive and/or arousing sensuality-slash-erotica; and (perhaps most importantly) the preferencing of dream logic above all else.

But how do you talk about a Giallo like BIRD right alongside a Giallo like AMUCK? Can it stand shoulder to shoulder with other, more well-regarded Venice-set Gialli (like, say, Aldo Lado's WHO SAW HER DIE?)? If the smut angle really *is* all that's going on here, any enduring interest burns itself out almost before it starts. But if those elements are being used to do something transgressive and weird and psychosexual and super-crazy accomplished, then, well, we might just be cooking.

[SOURCING (is part of) THE PROBLEM]
One problem with trying to locate AMUCK!’s place in this continuum is the lack of a decent home video presentation in which to view it. I’ve watched it three times now, all three viewings being of the Eurovista* release, which appears to be a DVD version of a dupey VHS copy. It is clearly cropped, with the visual composition of dozens of scenes totally destroyed by the fact that the left and right sides of the frame are missing. (The only bootleg I’m aware of seems to use the same source; if there are better copies available online, I’m sadly not in touch with them.)

Because the a/v is so compromised, then, you start off at a disadvantage, unable to even begin to guess how much credit Amadio deserves for his aims as director. When a third or more of the picture is missing in the frame, there’s no way to guess if he was trying anything interesting (even competent) with the composition. With washed-out colors and damage marks galore, how can you suss out any sort of stylistic hallmarks? (For that matter, the at-times choppiness of the editing made me think more than once that the version I watched could very well be missing sections of the movie ...)

Despite this handicap, I'd like to cover a few scenes whose stylistic oomph carry through despite the almost unwatchable version I had access to. And to do that, I'll get a brief plot summary out of the way:

The film opens with Bouchet's character (Greta) arriving by boat in Venice. Her boat ride continues out of the city proper, and arrives at what appears to be a neglected villa that sits, forgotten and dilapidated, on the outskirts of a body of water. She is greeted at the villa by Neri's character (Eleanora), the wife of an arrogant and sordid writer (played by Farley Granger) whose success finances the couple's decadent party lifestyle. On the plot's surface, Bouchet has come to be Granger's secretary/typist. Her true motive, though, goes back to the dispperance of Granger's last secretary, Sally (played by Patrizia Viotti). Greta and Sally were first friends, then lovers, and her disappearance has haunted Greta ever since she received a desperate letter from Sally, hinting that her death might be imminent. As the story progresses, Greta essentially becomes Sally's double, being drawn down the same delirious, addictive, hedonistic path—finding herself increasingly subject to the perverse machinations of her hosts. Will she meet the same murky fate suffered by Sally? And just what, exactly, was that fate?

Bouchet, being drawn down the same, doomed path that swallowed the memory of her friend.

[SCENES INDISPUTABLY UP TO MORE THAN JUST SLEAZE]

1. The Bouchet/Neri scene (sparingly screencapped above) does seem to be up to something other than just the sleaze. Once the two arrive at the bed, Amadio switches over to slow motion. This technique, which at first seems like it might be there only to lengthen the onscreen nudity, eventually makes both a stylistic and narrative sense. It's implied that Neri’s character has drugged Bouchet’s in order to take advantage of her (the bit about the glass of water in the caps above).

The slo-mo, then, can be read at first as the subjective pov of Bouchet’s character (the drugs taking effect), and then later, the next morning, as evidence that the tryst should possibly be read as a dream. When Bouchet wakes up, e.g., she's magically wearing her clothes again, and the glass that Neri had forced on her the night before—which had been broken by Bouchet's flailing—resides again at her bedside, unbroken. (Though, in an undercutting of that "clue," there is still a stain from the spilled glass on the carpet.) The end effect is to at least partially shift the emphasis from the coupling itself, and instead suggest that there is a shifting, dream-logic-y reality that rules the goings-on inside the villa, and that Bouchet's character—as long as she remains inside its walls—will be subject to its hothouse rules and whims. 

2. The scenes in which the film invokes the conventions of the Euro-Gothic. Beyond the vampiric subtext that can be read, pretty easily, into the proceedings, and beyond the "decadent-villa-as-dark-heart-of-the-film" that makes the decaying physical locations in the film an additional character, there are a number of sections shot in a way that evokes the work of directors like Mario Bava and Riccardo Freda:    

The always suspicious Umberto Raho searches for Barbara Bouchet in the Gothic underneath of Granger and Neri's villa. Raho here plays the villa's butler. Eurocult fans probably most know him as Monica Ranieri's husband in Argento's BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE. He also plays Anthony Steffen's butler in CRIMES OF THE BLACK CAT, the shifty hotel owner in TROPIC OF CANCER (aka, DEATH IN HAITI), and cameos as Horst Frank's spurned lover in CAT O' NINE TAILS.

There are also Gothic plot points sprinkled liberally throughout. As Granger/Neri increasingly put the screws to Bouchet by openly menacing her, there is a seance/psychic incident where we learn that Neri apparently suffers "spells" of possession that allow her to communicate with the dead and predict the future. Unsurprisingly, her predictions for Bouchet's future are anything but encouraging.

3. Early in the film, Bouchet confides in a local detective and tells him the real reason for her employment at Granger's villa. The beginning of their conversation proceeds in pretty standard shot selection, back and forth as they talk, detail shots of the photo of Bouchet and the missing woman, etc. They stand in a clearly defined space (on one of the foot bridges of Venice). The whole scene seems likes it's going to unfold in a conventional manner.

But then, suddenly, the camera cuts to a series of abstracted, impressionistic shots of Venice. The point of view becomes unclear—are these the sights Bouchet is taking in while talking to the detective (and, if so, why are they all upside-down)? The camera with a mind of its own? Their editing into the stream of talky, expository shots is disorienting, and one of the first indications that Amadio is up to something, stylewise.

4. And then there's maybe the most impressive set-piece of the film. Bouchet is alone in the villa at night. Granger has left the latest dictation for his novel, which Bouchet proceeds to transcribe. As she listens to the tape, though, it becomes clear that Granger is actually narrating the way that he disposed of her missing friend's body. During the narration, the movie switches to moody flashback, that shows Granger—in full-on Ferryman of Death mode—steering his boat through back channels in the watery sprawl around his home. The body of the missing woman is stowed in the bottom of the boat.

The prow of the boat (as camera) plows through the reeds, on its way to Granger's secret dumping site.

Each time I've watched the movie, it's struck me that though this isn't Bouchet in the boat, she looks enough like Bouchet to make you think this, at least in passing. It proves to be another way that the style in this sequence becomes intertwined with its theme, as the stylistic end point of the sequence visually joins Bouchet listening to the tape to the corpse of the woman disappearing in the water (see caps below).

While Bouchet imagines the scene that we are watching (that Granger is narrating), Amadio stages it so that she is displaced into the scene *as the dead woman*. Layering this sequence so that it effectively becomes an author narrating a scene from his novel, that is in reality his confession of a real-world murder—that is also the foreshadowing of a murder yet to take place. Granger's confession to Bouchet's character is an act of transposing Bouchet and Viotti's places in the plot, superimposing one woman's past fate on top of the other's future.

We watch while Granger tosses Viotti’s body (now with an anchor tied around her ankles) into the sea. The camera watches the churning aftermath, the blue-white reflections playing across the water as the anchor sinks. This cuts to Bouchet back in Granger's house, listening to him narrate the story on tape. And this is where Amadio shoots the scene in a way that literalizes the connection between the two women: We watch the same blue-white light flow across her face like she's staring into water and not at the spinning reel-to-reel (the motion of the reel-to-reel seemingly accomplishing this play of light). Visually, she is the woman who's just been dumped in the water. And the story of her friend's death is made to stand-in for her own death, which is (according to Granger's foreshadowing) still to come.

These are the scenes that convince me the film is worth more than its weight in sleaze. The persuasiveness of these images, as Maitland McDonagh argues about the famous "stuck in glass" art gallery scene from BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE, "transcend [their] function within the narrative." This can be said of all good Giallo set-pieces, all embedded chunks of oneiric, weirdo, hyper-realized style that deform (transform) the topography of the film. In short: One of the core criteria defining what is and isn't a Giallo (and what is and isn't a Giallo *worth taking seriously*).

Not to mention: The rotation of Bouchet's position in the frame recalls both the churning whirl of the water and the spinning of the reel-to-reel.

 Leonard Jacobs

December, 2014

[SHOW NOTES]

VERSION WATCHED: The dreadful, dreadful Eurovista DVD (see further notes below) | LANGUAGE: English soundtrack | DIRECTOR: Silvio Amadio | WRITER(S): Silvio Amadio | MUSIC: Teo Usuelli | CINEMATOGRAPHER: Aldo Giordani  | CAST: Farley Granger (Richard Stuart); Barbara Bouchet (Greta Franklin); Rosalba Neri (Eleanora Stuart); Umberto Raho (Giovanni the butler); Patrizia Viotti (Sally Reece); Petar Martinovitch (Rocco); Dino Mele (Sandro); Nino Segurini (Il commissario Antonelli)

*The Eurovista DVD has two very brief interviews with Bouchet and Neri, apparently conducted at their homes (in 2001 they were neighbors?!). Both interviews run less than 5 minutes and thus don’t cover a whole lot. The most interesting anecdote comes when Bouchet claims that director Silvio Amadio retired from directing and “went into a convent” because his obsessive love for the actress Gloria Guida went unrequited. Have no idea if that’s true, but it makes for a good story.

The only other interesting tidbit I have about the disc is that the used copy I picked up some years back was actually listed as autographed by Bouchet and Neri. I have no idea if the signatures on the case are authentic, but it makes for a nifty addendum.