GIALLO SOURCE CODE [SOLANGE, ENIGMA ROSSO, and Kim Newman]

In my last review, I touched on the “Schoolgirls in Peril” sub-genre that’s become so well known to fans of the Giallo. Though some identify only the three key titles as comprising the sub-genre—the loosely linked trilogy of WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO SOLANGE? (1972), WHAT HAVE THEY DONE TO YOUR DAUGHTERS? (1974), and ENIGMA ROSSO (aka, RINGS OF FEAR [1978])—there are a number of other films that qualify, including the Poliziotteschi/Giallo hybrid WITHOUT TRACE (aka, CALLING ALL POLICE CARS [1975]), which picks up the schoolgirl prostitution ring of DAUGHTERS and does an equally disturbing variation on the theme.

The other angle that’s interesting, in the context of this site, is the Krimi connection—i.e., how the ingrained Krimi-ism of the ingénue-in-distress plot is made more extreme in the guise of sexualized schoolgirls and the consequences they face because of their promiscuity. And how the Giallo SOLANGE was recut, retitled, and resold as a Krimi in Germany.

On the audio commentary for Arrow Video’s recent Blu-ray release of SOLANGE, Kim Newman touches on these points:

“I think the real reason this is set in London is not to do with the Italian side of it, but to do with the German side of it. In Germany this isn’t a Giallo called WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO SOLANGE?, it’s a Krimi, called THE SECRET OF THE GREEN STICK PIN … one of the last entries in a very long series of 1960s grotesque crime movies based on the works of the British author, Edgar Wallace. This is notionally based on a book of his called THE CLUE OF THE NEW PIN … those movies [the Krimis] were all set in London and mostly starred the star of this movie, Joachim Fuchsberger, playing the man from Scotland Yard …”

Though Neman sees a distinction between the Krimi and Giallo in the *degree* to which they’ll push their sexuality and violence, he sees SOLANGE as a kind of quintessential example of that dual genre citizenship held by so many Krimi/Giallo Hybrids from this era:

“… although sort of seamier and rougher than those movies [Krimis], [SOLANGE is] very much in their tradition. There are imperiled schoolgirls, there’s a crime in the past that has to be solved, there’s a series of baffling crimes, and Scotland Yard—in the person of Joachim Fuchsberger—and an innocent personage who is suspected of the crime—in the person of Fabio Testi—have to investigate, independently, to come to a solution. That’s the template for the Krimi.”

His conversation with Alan Jones also covers the tendency, especially in British films of the day, for schoolgirl thrillers “where the likes of Suzy Kendall or Jenny Agutter are wearing short skirts and being stalked”. Newman then goes on to relate a fascinating “true” story that is the supposed source for all of these films:

“It all dates back to a tabloid story, from the early 1960s, which may or may not be true—it’s probably newspaper nonsense. Which was that, in a particular school, girls who were sexually active would form a kind of secret society that they would signify by wearing … the little badges that came with Robertson’s Jam, which were Golliwogs, stylized representations of black minstrels. This was a huge thing throughout the 60s and 70s and is now kind of culturally suppressed and forgotten.

“Even when Robert Hartford-Davis, one of Britain’s few exploitation filmmakers, made a film in the early 60s about this phenomena—it was called THE YELLOW TEDDY BEARS—it replaced the Golliwog badges with Teddy Bear badges. In this movie [SOLANGE], it’s the green pins that the girls in the secret society wear … that signify their involvement in sordid, sexual activity.”

And, in the “Schoolgirls Trilogy”-proper, we see this theme taken up again. In ENIGMA ROSSO—the final entry, meant for Massimo Dallamano but directed by Alberto Negrin after Dallamano was killed in a car crash—we get not a Golliwog or Teddy Bear or Pin, but a cartoon cat. Fabio Testi—returning to the series as the official detective this time, effectively combining his and Fuchsberger’s role from SOLANGE—first finds the mysterious cat image in the diary of a murdered girl.

After that, driving on the highway with his partner, he realizes the cat symbol is a logo used to advertise a particularly popular brand of jeans. 

And that a posh store that specializes in this brand of jeans is actually a front for the teenage prostitution ring. Combine this plot point—along with Testi's reprisal of role(s), and the fact that the film’s amateur detective is essentially a child—and you get a strange conflation of the first two entries in the trilogy making this third. 

Leonard Jacobs

December, 2015

ps. For those interested in tracking down a copy of the film, the old German Eyecatcher release is in widescreen. It’s a roached print—and only the English track is included—but even in this less-than-stellar form, it’s still a fair sight better than the cropped versions I’ve seen sold elsewhere

[REVIEW-CAST #11] MASSACRE GUN (1967)

[NOTE: Since a few days ago I posted about how related the particular mood of this film was to the worlds of the Giallo and Krimi, I thought I’d also post a brief write-up. This is the eleventh in a series of reviews that will focus on genres related to the Krimi and Giallo; for more info, read this post. As with all posts on this site, SPOILERS SHOULD BE EXPECTED.]

[GENRE]: Neo & Noir  [>exploitation]
[VERSION WATCHED]: Arrow Video Blu-ray 

Before my cinematic world got swallowed by all things Italian, German, and Eurocult, my first serious gateway into movies—into movies being a real *thing* in my life—was the work of a half dozen or so Japanese directors:

Seijun Suzuki (esp. YOUTH OF THE BEAST and BRANDED TO KILL); Shôhei Imamura (VENGEANCE IS MINE and THE PORNOGRAPHERS); Yasuzo Masumura (MANJI, and the Yukio Mishima-strutting AFRAID TO DIE); Koreyoshi Kurahara (THIRST FOR LOVE and THE WARPED ONES); Hiroshi Teshigahara (FACE OF ANOTHER and PITFALL); and, though it’s true his filmography is congenitally uneven, Takashi Miike (putting Lynch’s LOST HIGHWAY into a Japanese blender and getting GOZU; also the performance he gets from the lead in his remake of GRAVEYARD OF HONOR).

It’s been a while since I’ve seen a Japanese movie that reminded me how I felt watching the work of those formally innovative, ero-guro-tinged (sometimes not just tinged, but *drenched*) directors. Watching Yasuharu Hasebe’s MASSACRE GUN gave me just that reminder. Partially, I’m sure, because he worked under Seijun Suzuki for part of his career, but more because his film manages to do what so many noir-influenced Japanese films of the 60s did: to marry flawlessly composed black-and-white, with noir nihilism, with a particular sense of that country’s tradition (notions of “honor” and “brotherhood” that get pushed to the point of self-destructiveness) with a nightmarish, ero-guro violence that one-ups and perfects everything else.

Though maybe not as off-the-charts bizarre (nor transgressive) as something like BRANDED TO KILL, MG still satisfies on the same levels.

The movie opens with a mostly wordless five-minute prologue where we watch Jô Shishido (literally the chipmunk-cheeked face of this genre for so many years) get pressed into self-destructive service: his yakuza boss orders him to murder the woman he loves (who certainly loves him). It’s wrenching in the sense that S.’s face shows us the inner turmoil he’s struggling to keep swallowed. Wrenching because when he goes to pick her up, she is blissfully happy in his arms, in the mistaken belief that they will be escaping by plane from this price on her head. Wrenching because the murder when it happens twists everything around in the scene so quickly—her joyous face contorted by the terror of the gun; the sudden burst of action that changes the contemplative, jazzy pace so far (S. leaps from a car containing her body as he drives it into a lake).

This scene cuts to the club Shishido runs, introducing us to Ken Sanders, whose deep-throated singing of a wordless dirge not only comments on Shishido’s headspace in the previous scene, but cues us for the tone of the rest of the movie. What follows is a series of gangland power plays that increase in intensity and offensiveness. And that show how hopeless any opposition to the yakuza's grip on society is (note how the focus on Sanders hands delicately playing the piano is repeated with the focus on the FISTFUL OF DOLLARS-like mutilating of a boxer’s hands by a rival gang).

The film becomes a parade of striking images:

• Shishido’s friend-in-the-uprising being delivered to his club in a casket (complete with hidden ticking time bomb tethered to his corpse);
• the erotic (and surprisingly modern-feeling) floor show at S.’s club, where a barely dressed man and woman do interpretive dance that could just as easily belong in an art film on another continent;
• the way S.’s surgically enhanced cheeks suck on a cigarette when he gives orders like a boss;
• a tense conversation between man and wife, shot upside down and in the reflection of a bar counter;
• a sudden skewer through the finger;
• an extreme long shot showing two people silhouetted by enormous sky, walking as they talk through their unfixable relationship;
• a rusted-out cargo ship used as the site of a gangland trap whose litany of guns give it strobe-lighting;
• even the boat scene that references the “youth in revolt” movies.

All of this would be enough to make the movie an indelible example of 60s Japanese surreal-o-noir. But then you get the reality-stretching end, the “massacre” in MASSACRE GUN. It’s a shootout on an abandoned stretch of highway system that feels ported in from some future, post-apocalyptic movie. Wrecked cars look like ships crash-landed into the pavement. Shishido scales (and then escapes, before it implodes) some kind of alien scaffolding that looks built out of a nightmare (which it is for his enemies, as it’s the vantage point he first uses to kill them long-distance with his sniper rifle). It feels like the least rational section of the movie, as the increasingly vented violence of the film finally erupts the rest of the way.

Shishido proceeds in “battle-damaged” mode, stalking his final opponent (his one true “brother,” who’s been forced by his gang affiliations to break ties and hunt S. down), circling around each other’s gun, drawing beads on each other on this impossibly abandoned highway—it’s really something. And recalls, more than once, that long sequence in BRANDED TO KILL when Shishido drags himself beneath a car (tied to a rope no less) in order to use the car as cover from the snipers trying to kill him.

It adds up to a hyper-violent, weird climax to what’s been, up till then, a noir mood piece. Def. looking forward to seeing more of Yasuharu Hasebe's work.

Leonard Jacobs

July, 2015