ORGASMO aka PARANOIA (Italy/France - 1969) Directed by Umberto Lenzi. Written by Ugo Moretti, Umberto Lenzi and Marie Claire Solleville. Cast: Carroll Baker, Lou Castel, Colette Descombes, Tino Carraro, Lilla Brignone, Franco Pesce, Tina Lattanzi, Jacques Stany, Gaetano Imbro, Sara Simoni, Calisto Calisti. (X, 91 mins/European version, 97 mins) Born in 1931, Carroll Baker had a couple of film and television credits to her name (most notably a supporting turn in the gargantuan epic GIANT) when she became an overnight sensation in the title role as Karl Malden's thumbsucking child bride in 1956's controversial BABY DOLL, directed by Elia Kazan and written by Tennessee Williams. It earned her a Best Actress Oscar nomination (Ingrid Bergman won for ANASTASIA) and made her one of the most sought-after young talents in Hollywood. But she almost instantly earned a reputation as a troublemaker when, under contract to Warner Bros., she refused to star in TOO MUCH, TOO SOON and voiced her disapproval about the quality of the projects she was being offered. The studio "suspended" her as punishment, which kept her offscreen for nearly two years after BABY DOLL, during which time she bought out her contract--an antiquated system that had been on its way out for years--thus allowing her to choose her own roles. Baker ended up in several big-budget blockbusters like 1958's THE BIG COUNTRY, 1962's HOW THE WEST WAS WON, 1964's CHEYENNE AUTUMN, and 1965's THE GREATEST STORY EVER TOLD, and enjoyed the freedom of experimenting with small indies like the 1961 cult film SOMETHING WILD. But she then found a niche filling the void left by the death of Marilyn Monroe in 1962. Shepherded by producer Joseph E. Levine, Baker became a major sex symbol in films like 1964's THE CARPETBAGGERS, 1965's SYLVIA, and in HARLOW, one of two identically-titled Jean Harlow biopics that opened in the summer of 1965 (Carol Lynley starred in the other one). Baker signed a contract with Levine following THE CARPETBAGGERS and after HARLOW's lukewarm response from critics and moviegoers, she decided she wanted out. Their rocky professional relationship and subsequent legal battle became tabloid fodder as Baker found herself persona non grata in Hollywood, with the powerful Levine essentially blackballing her out of the industry.
With no job offers on the table and having just gone through a divorce, Baker took her two children (including future actress Blanche Baker, best known as Molly Ringwald's center-of-attention older sister in SIXTEEN CANDLES) and moved to Italy to test the waters of the European film industry. She starred in Marco Ferrari's 1967 comedy HER HAREM and followed it with Romolo Guerrieri's 1968 thriller THE SWEET BODY OF DEBORAH, the latter leading to a string of erotic Italian thrillers that kept Baker very busy for several years. She ended up living and working exclusively in Europe until the late '70s, most notably in four collaborations with journeyman Italian genre specialist Umberto Lenzi (1931-2017), later to make his mark with a series of poliziotteschi classics like 1974's ALMOST HUMAN and 1976's ROME ARMED TO THE TEETH, and 1981's infamous cannibal gut-muncher CANNIBAL FEROX, aka MAKE THEM DIE SLOWLY. The four Lenzi/Baker gialli, filled with shagadelic sex, suspense, and a plethora of Eurolounge jams, have just been restored and compiled in a comprehensive Blu-ray box set from Severin Films, because physical media is dead.
The wonderfully-titled ORGASMO, released with an X rating in the US by Commonwealth United as PARANOIA, was the first of Baker's four gialli with Lenzi. It's luridly trashy and, at least in its oddly more explicit American cut, almost qualifies as softcore porn, with Baker one of the first big-name American actresses to unabashedly embrace the changing times and go all-in on gratuitous nude scenes. In ORGASMO, she stars as Kathryn West, a trophy wife-turned-wealthy widow taking up residence in an expansive Italian villa as her late husband's attorney Brian (Tino Carraro) begins liquidating his holdings--which include their estate in America, two oil companies, two TV stations, and a chain of department stores--which will net her at least a $200 million payday. At the villa, it's just Kathryn, sneering housekeeper Teresa (Lilla Brignone), and deaf, doddering handyman Martino (Franco Pesce), but that changes when stranger Peter's (Lou Castel) car breaks down outside the entrance gate. It doesn't take much for sex-starved Kathryn to turn into broke-ass Peter's nympho sugar mama with a thing for degradation games, and when he moves in, his sister Eva (Colette Descombes) suddenly turns up to crash there as well. This begins a whirlwind of booze, pills, and sex, with seductive Eva unleashing Kathryn's unexplored lesbian side and a willingness to partake in threesomes with a brother and sister. But when she catches Peter and Eva in bed without her, things quickly go south and the party's over. Peter and Eva start manipulating her, forcing her to fire Teresa and Martino, psychologically torture her with head games and blaring loud music into her room, and are soon controlling every aspect of her life--usually by keeping her drugged--in a plot to take control of her fortune, with some backup photos of their various sexcapades just in case blackmail become necessary.
The longer ORGASMO goes on, the darker and more nihilistic it gets on its way to a ruthlessly fatalistic finale that offers a one-two punch of ball-crushing twists. Lenzi's preferred Italian cut, ORGASMO, runs 97 minutes and tones down a good amount of the sex, while the more explicit PARANOIA is actually six minutes shorter, removing mostly minor details except in the case of almost the entirety of Jacques Stany's performance as a mystery man tailing Kathryn. He's only fleetingly seen in the PARANOIA cut and even that's probably unintentional. Both endings reach the same conclusion, and ORGASMO's explains a bit more, but I think I prefer the more impactful abruptness of the PARANOIA finale. Both versions are included in on the Blu-ray, and either way, this is a twisted bit of occasionally psychedelic 1969 nastiness that still plays surprisingly well in the era of obligatory insane twist endings. Of interest to French cinephiles is the involvement of 28-year-old future filmmaker Bertrand Tavernier (DEATH WATCH, COUP DE TORCHON, ROUND MIDNIGHT), credited here as assistant director.
ORGASMO, under its US title PARANOIA,
opening in Toledo, OH on 12/12/1969
SO SWEET...SO PERVERSE (Italy/France/West Germany - 1969) Directed by Umberto Lenzi. Written by Ernesto Gastaldi. Cast: Carroll Baker, Jean-Louis Trintignant, Erika Blanc, Horst Frank, Helga Line, Beryl Cunningham, Ermelnida De Felice, Gianni Di Benedetto, Dario Michaelis, Renato Pinciroli, Lucio Rama, Paola Scalzi, Luigi Sportelli. (Unrated, 93 mins) Lenzi and Baker immediately followed ORGASMO with the equally tantalizingly-titled SO SWEET...SO PERVERSE, but the resulting film--neither sweet nor perverse--paled in comparison despite the involvement of genre luminaries like producer Sergio Martino and screenwriter Ernesto Gastaldi. A Paris-set giallo variation on DIABOLIQUE, SO SWEET stars Jean-Louis Trintignant as Jean Reynaud, a wealthy French businessman and serial philanderer already running around on Danielle (Erika Blanc), his wife of three years who's apparently been withholding ("What do you expect when I can't get my slice of cake in my own home?" he asks after telling her "You're not jealous...you're just bitchy"). He's intrigued by Nicole (Baker), who's just moved into the penthouse above theirs with her abusive, control-freak boyfriend Klaus (Horst Frank). Jean hears Klaus beating Nicole regularly, and his hero complex kicks in when the two quickly fall in love after Jean promises to get her away from Klaus and run away with her. Danielle has been tolerant of Jean's comparatively discreet dalliances so far--most recently with Helene (Helga Line), the bored wife of a hunting club acquaintance (Gianni Di Benedetto)--but his carrying on with Nicole, in full view of their fellow tenants and others in their upper-class social circle, is too much for her to handle. Plus, an enraged Klaus is also following the cheating couple around, even to a weekend island getaway where he torments them by driving his speedboat along the shore and glaring at them.
Never released theatrically in the US, SO SWEET is pretty tedious for its first half before things finally rev up, but once you recognize it following the DIABOLIQUE template, you'll know almost exactly where it's going. The now-90-year-old Trintignant, then becoming an international superstar with films like 1966's A MAN AND A WOMAN, Costa-Gavras' 1969 Oscar-winner Z, and Bernardo Bertolucci's 1970 breakthrough THE CONFORMIST, has apparently said in that past that SO SWEET...SO PERVERSE is his worst film. I haven't seen enough Trintignant films to know for sure, and even then, I don't think I'd quite go that far, but it is a disappointingly lukewarm affair for Lenzi and Baker after the lewd excesses of the gonzo ORGASMO. Baker switches gears by not playing the victim here, and leaves most of the gratuitous nudity to Blanc (Baker does get one slo-mo topless run along a beach in a dream sequence, but some existing stills indicate more Baker and Line nudity that Lenzi opted to not use), but the execution of the familiar narrative just doesn't really have a spark despite the talent involved. It does have an undeniably catchy score by Riz Ortolani that includes the theme song "Why," belted out in an almost Tom Jones fashion by J. Vincent Edwards, who would later make a fortune co-writing Maxine Nightingale's 1975 radio hit "Right Back Where We Started From." Lenzi liked "Why" so much that he recycled it in his 1972 Baker-less giallo SEVEN BLOODSTAINED ORCHIDS.
A QUIET PLACE TO KILL aka PARANOIA (Italy/Spain/France - 1970; US release 1973) Directed by Umberto Lenzi. Written by Marcello Coscia, Bruno Di Geronimo, Rafael Romero Marchent, Marie Claire Solleville. Cast: Carroll Baker, Jean Sorel, Anna Proclemer, Luis Davila, Marina Coffa, Liz Halvorsen, Alberto Dalbes, Hugo Blanco, Jacques Stany, Rossana Rovere, Calisto Calisti, Manuel Diaz Velasco. (Unrated, 96 mins).
"I couldn't help myself. I had to make love with you one more time."
"Whore." That dialogue exchange gives you a pretty good idea of what A QUIET PLACE TO KILL is all about. The third Lenzi/Baker teaming is a big improvement over SO SWEET...SO PERVERSE and has more in common with the trashy histrionics of ORGASMO. A QUIET PLACE TO KILL has always been a point of confusion for some giallo fans, since its original European title was PARANOIA, which was also the American title of ORGASMO. Thus, this PARANOIA is now most commonly known by its export title, A QUIET PLACE TO KILL. Here, Baker plays Helen, an American expat and professional racing driver whose career comes to an abrupt end after a fiery crash during a test drive. Barely making it out alive, she's ordered to relax and recuperate, and is summoned by her conceited ex-husband Maurice (Jean Sorel, Baker's co-star in THE SWEET BODY OF DEBORAH) to his vacation home on Mallorca. They haven't spoken since their divorce three years ago--and it's mentioned in possibly joking fashion that she tried to kill him--but when she arrives, she's shocked to find he's now married to the older Constance (Anna Proclemer). Helen has barely had time to settle in when Constance offers her $100,000 to help her kill Maurice, giving her the weekend to think it over while she goes off to visit her college-age daughter Susan (Marina Coffa). Instead, Helen decides to spend the weekend indulging in carnal sexcapades with Maurice, and upon Constance's return, the three go out on Maurice's boat but Helen is unable to go through with Constance's plan. A scuffle ensues, Constance is stabbed to death, and as they're tying an anchor around her legs before tossing her corpse in the sea, they're spotted by Maurice's buddy Harry (frequent Jess Franco actor Alberto Dalbes) and his wife Solange (Liz Halvorsen) who are approaching on their yacht. Maurice capsizes the boat on purpose, letting Constance's corpse fall overboard, then telling everyone she got hit in the head by the boon and went under. Maurice's period of mourning is short-lived, as he's back in the sack with Helen that night, but then things get really awkward when Susan turns up and, seeing her stepfather and his ex-wife barely even attempting to hide their sexual shenanigans, makes it clear that she's on to them and isn't buying what happened to her mother.
Lenzi and the team of writers have quite a few tricks up their sleeve and A QUIET PLACE TO KILL is a very lively and thoroughly misanthropic thriller where alliances constantly shift, everyone has something to hide, and everyone is desperately scrambling and failing to keep those secrets hidden. It's not as over-the-top and X-worthy as ORGASMO, but something unexpectedly wild or downright sleazy happens every few minutes--Maurice and Constance on opposite sides of Helen at dinner, and both unknowingly playing footsie with her, Maurice complaining in a crowded restaurant that Helen was too frigid in bed when they were married, Susan's jaw-dropping reveal of how her mother ended up hooking up with Maurice--and you can't help but marvel at the utterly awful characters making up this ensemble of sociopaths. It's pretty clear early on that Helen is a self-absorbed bitch when her loyal assistant (Jacques Stany) picks her up at the hospital and stops for beverages at a carryout, only to have Helen slide over in the driver's seat and take off, leaving him stranded. This one is a lot of fun, plus it's got a brief appearance by Wess and the Airedales "Just Tell Me" during a nightclub scene, and it's the same song used to drive Baker's character crazy in ORGASMO. A QUIET PLACE TO KILL never made it to American theaters, but did turn up in an Avco-Embassy TV syndication package in 1973.
KNIFE OF ICE (Italy/Spain - 1972) Directed by Umberto Lenzi. Written by Umberto Lenzi and Antonio Troiso. Cast: Carroll Baker, Alan Scott, Evelyn Stewart (Ida Galli), Eduardo Fajardo, Silvia Monelli, George Rigaud, Franco Fantasia, Rosa M. Rodriguez, Dada Gallotti, Lorenzo Robledo, Mario Pardo, Olga Gherardi, Consalvo Dell'Arti, Jose Marco, Luca Sportelli. (Unrated, 92 mins) Lenzi and Baker's fourth and final collaboration was the 1972 giallo KNIFE OF ICE, which opens with gory footage of a bullfight and a bullshit Poe quote and then spends much of its duration setting up a third act bait-and-switch leading to its twist ending. Of course, it might not be that much of a surprise considering that the deck is stacked with so many obvious red herrings, but it's still a solid second-tier entry in the cycle. It's also the only one of these that keeps Baker clothed the entire time, casting her against type as Martha, a shy, demure woman who's been mute since her parents died in a tragic train accident when she was a teenager. She was raised by her Uncle Ralph (George Rigaud) and still lives with him at his estate near the Pyrenees. She's visited by her cousin Jenny (Ida Galli, using her "Evelyn Stewart" pseudonym), a famous singer who's stabbed to death in the garage the morning after she arrives. There's any number of possible suspects, including sinister chauffeur Marcos (Eduardo Fajardo), who's always lurking somewhere; housekeeper Mrs. Britton (Silvia Monelli); Dr. Laurent (Alan Scott), who shows up the next day with drops of blood on his pants; and local priest Father Martin (Jose Marco), who's raising his orphaned pre-teen niece Christina (Rosa M. Rodriguez). Bizarre Satanic symbols start appearing around town, including a goat's head painted on a tree that catches the attention of Mrs. Britton just before she's murdered while out running errands. This immediately makes a loud-and-proud area Satanist with creepy eyes (Mario Pardo) the main suspect, especially with the discovery of another body outside of town that may be tied into the current string of murders.
Lenzi gets a good amount of suspense going once helpless Martha is alone in the house, and as goofy as the out-of-nowhere twist ending is, it's effective. Baker is very good in Audrey Hepburn/WAIT UNTIL DARK mode, and KNIFE OF ICE gets a nice Italian horror vibe going with an electronic score by Marcello Giombini--with some help from the inimitable wordless vocals of Edda dell'Orso--that prefigures some of Goblin's work for Dario Argento. The appearance of a walking, quacking Donald Duck is an unnerving image at a pivotal moment, and in having the priest among the suspects, KNIFE OF ICE flirts with the recurring "distrust of the clergy" motif important to so many gialli, including Lucio Fulci's DON'T TORTURE A DUCKLING, Aldo Lado's WHO SAW HER DIE? and Antonio Bido's THE BLOODSTAINED SHADOW.
Umberto Lenzi with Carroll Baker and
Jean-Louis Trintignant on the set of
SO SWEET...SO PERVERSE
KNIFE OF ICE might've been the end of the line for the Lenzi/Baker collaborations, but she appeared in other European genre titles over the next several years, including long-forgotten gialli like Eugenio Martin's THE FOURTH VICTIM (1971), Osvaldo Civirani's THE DEVIL WITH SEVEN FACES (1971), Gianfranco Piccioli's THE FLOWER WITH THE DEADLY STING (1973), and Luigi Scattini's THE BODY (1974). While it was ignored at the time, BABA YAGA, a 1973 live-action version of the erotic comics of Guido Crepax, found a new audience in the early days of DVD and, with the exception of these Lenzi gialli, has probably become the most well-known title from Baker's Euro sojourn. Most of these films never had US theatrical distribution and only a few of them surfaced on video in the '80s. By the mid '70s, there was a marked decline in the quality of work Baker was being offered in Europe. She started appearing in softcore Italian sex comedies with titles like AT LAST, AT LAST (1975) and the "Hot for Teacher" prototypes THE PRIVATE LESSON (1975) and MY FATHER'S WIFE (1976), while the scuzzy Spanish thriller BLOODBATH--shot in 1975 but unreleased until 1979--paired her with her GIANT co-star Dennis Hopper, just entering his barely employable coke years as a junkie poet named "Chicken." She made a brief return to America for the deranged 1977 black comedy ANDY WARHOL'S BAD, but by 1978, with her name misspelled "Carrol Baker" in the credits, she was reduced to appearing in the grimy CYCLONE, where Mexican exploitation auteur Rene Cardona Jr. combined the cannibalism of his 1976 hit SURVIVE with the shark attacks of his 1977 JAWS ripoff TINTORERA and wrapped them an in Irwin Allen-inspired disaster scenario.
Carroll Baker doing a Q&A at an event in 2019
Baker returned to America by 1980, appeared with Bette Davis in the Disney movie THE WATCHER IN THE WOODS, and then entered the character actor phase of her career, with solid supporting turns throughout the decade in Bob Fosse's harrowing STAR 80 (1983), the Jack Nicholson/Meryl Streep drama IRONWEED (1987), and the Arnold Schwarzenegger comedy KINDERGARTEN COP (1990). She had guest spots on TV shows like MURDER, SHE WROTE and L.A. LAW, and had her most prominent late-career role as Michael Douglas' housekeeper in David Fincher's THE GAME (1997). Now 89, Baker seems to have retired from acting, her last role to date being a guest spot as Rob Lowe's mother on his short-lived 2003 NBC series THE LYON'S DEN. She still makes occasional public appearances and as recently as late 2019, was still giving interviews, some of which can be found on YouTube. Unfortunately, she doesn't take part in any of the extras on Severin's Lenzi/Baker collection, though in the past and in two memoirs, she has spoken very favorably of her experiences in the Italian film industry and didn't view the giallo period of her career with any sense of disdain or dismissal.
IF YOU MEET SARTANA...PRAY FOR YOUR DEATH (Italy/West Germany - 1968) Directed by Frank Kramer (Gianfranco Parolini). Written by Renato Izzo, Gianfranco Parolini and Werner Hauff. Cast: John Garko (Gianni Garko), William Berger, Sydney Chaplin, Klaus Kinski, Fernando Sancho, Gianni Rizzo, Andrew Scott (Andrea Scotti), Carlo Tamberlani, Franco Pesce, Heidi Fisher, Maria Pia Conte, Sal Borgese. (Unrated, 96 mins) In the wake of Sergio Leone's groundbreaking trilogy of spaghetti westerns with Clint Eastwood, the copycats came so fast and furious that it had to be impossible for audiences to keep up. Giuliano Gemma starred in a pair of RINGO films, Franco Nero had the title role in Sergio Corbucci's DJANGO (1966), Tony Anthony played "The Stranger" in three films beginning in 1968, and Gianni Garko staked his claim to spaghetti fame as Sartana in a series that also kicked off in 1968. These official films spawned countless imitation Django, Ringo, and Sartana films, often with the characters crossing paths, but the five "official" SARTANA films have just been restored and released in a deluxe, extras-packed Blu-ray set from Arrow, because physical media is dead.
Never given theatrical releases in America, the Sartana films had some of the more playfully humorous titles in the genre, and things kick off with IF YOU MEET SARTANA...PRAY FOR YOUR DEATH. It's an incredibly convoluted but always enjoyable series of double-crosses and shifting alliances, as Garko's Sartana, who's more of a debonair wiseass than most of his genre brethren (Arrow's accompanying booklet with an essay by Roberto Curti likens Sartana to a western 007, and it's an apt comparison), involves himself in a mishap-filled pursuit of a chest of gold that no less than four separate sets of bad guys are attempting to obtain. There's outlaw Lasky (William Berger), a duplicitous bastard who mows down his own gang with a Gatling gun in order to keep it all to himself, only to find that the chest is filled with rocks; bandit and self-appointed "general" Mendoza, aka "Tampico" (Fernando Sancho, the genre's erstwhile "Frito Bandito," again cast radically against type as "Fernando Sancho"); corrupt bankers Stewall (Sydney Chaplin, son of Charlie) and Hallman (Gianni Rizzo), who hired Mendoza to steal the gold in the first place while they stashed it away in the casket of the recently-deceased mayor as part of an insurance scam; and Morgan (Klaus Kinski), another outlaw who's unconnected to the gold until an impromptu and ill-fated partnership with Lasky pulls him in.
The familiar spaghetti tropes are all over the place and would establish the SARTANA formula seen in the four sequels: a shipment of gold buried in casket (THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY), Sartana finding an unlikely ally in Dusty (Franco Pesce), the town's elderly, cantankerous undertaker (A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS), and Sartana's calling card of a chiming pocket watch (FOR A FEW DOLLARS MORE), just to name a few. Sartana also relies on some gadgety weapons that director/co-writer Gianfranco Parolini (aka "Frank Kramer") would use in his soon-to-come SABATA trilogy with Lee Van Cleef (in the first and third films) and Yul Brynner (in the second). The more political "Zapata" spaghetti westerns were starting to gain traction in Italy, and by 1968, the first SARTANA came too far into the craze to really do anything new. Still, Garko is a pretty badass hero and the film benefits from its many colorful--and frequently stupid--villains, though Kinski fans may be disappointed in his relatively restrained performance and limited screen time, as he's offed about 40 minutes in.
I AM SARTANA, YOUR ANGEL OF DEATH (Italy - 1969) Directed by Anthony Ascott (Giuliano Carnimeo). Written by Tito Carpi and Enzo Dell'Aquila. Cast: John Garko (Gianni Garko), Frank Wolff, Klaus Kinski, Ettore Manni, Gordon Mitchell, Sal Borgese, Renato Baldini, Jose M. Torres, Rick Boyd (Federico Boido), John Bartha, Franco Pesce, Franco Ukmar, Samson Burke. (Unrated, 103 mins) Gianfranco Parolini went on to make SABATA in 1969, prompting the hiring of Giuliano Carnimeo, who would direct the remainder of the SARTANA series under variants of his most frequent Americanized pseudonym "Anthony Ascott" (he'd go by "Jules Harrison" for his 1983 post-nuke EXTERMINATORS OF THE YEAR 3000). I AM SARTANA, YOUR ANGEL OF DEATH is sort-of a hybrid western/detective story, with a Sartana impostor orchestrating an elaborate, Joker-esque bank robbery involving a fake corpse and several henchmen wearing uniforms identical to those of bank security.The word is out that Sartana (Gianni Garko) is a wanted man and he's soon pursued by law enforcement as well as various bounty hunters, including a wily poker shark named Hot Dead (Klaus Kinski, having a little more to do than in the previous film but still underutilized). Sartana teams up with grubby sidekick Buddy Ben (Frank Wolff) to clear his name, find the fake Sartana, and figure out why his estranged friend and wanted outlaw Bill Cochran (Federico Boido) was posing as the corpse, and the trail leads quick-draw gunman and milk-drinking casino proprietor Baxter Red (Ettore Manni). Given his name, it should come as no surprise that Baxter Red is a red herring, but there's quite a few over the course of the film, with so many characters--including Sal Borgese as an on-the-take sheriff, Renato Baldini as a corrupt judge, and Gordon Mitchell as another bounty hunter--seeming to have it in for Sartana. Things pick up in time for its SCOOBY-DOO-meets-CLUE ending, but I AM SARTANA, YOUR ANGEL OF DEATH is a sluggishly-paced sequel that's not nearly as enjoyable as IF YOU MEET SARTANA...PRAY FOR YOUR DEATH. Garko is still fun in the lead, Wolff has some amusing moments as Almost Tuco, and Carnimeo carries on the motif of Sartana being seemingly impervious to bullets, but the story just dawdles and takes forever to get to where it's going, and some of the music cues (a recurring harpsichord riff on "Santa Claus is Coming to Town," a doofus being introduced to the tune of "Pop Goes the Weasel") only contribute to the uneven tone of the film.
SARTANA'S HERE...TRADE YOUR PISTOL FOR A COFFIN (Italy - 1970) Directed by Antony Ascot (Giuliano Carnimeo). Written by Tito Carpi. Cast: George Hilton, Charles Southwood, Erika Blanc, Piero Lulli, Linda Sini, Nello Pazzafini, Carlo Gaddi, Aldo Barberito, Marco Zuanelli, Lou Kamante (Luciano Rossi), Rick Boyd (Federico Boido), Gigi Bonos, John Bartha, Antonio Casale, Furio Meniconi (Unrated, 92 mins) The next three SARTANA sequels came in rapid succession, so rapid in fact that there's some dispute over their proper order. Based on its release date in its native Italy, the third in the series (and the third in the Arrow set) is SARTANA'S HERE...TRADE YOUR PISTOL FOR A COFFIN. These final three films hit Italian theaters over a four-month period from September to December 1970. Giuliano Carnimeo directed all three back-to-back, though Gianni Garko would sit out SARTANA'S HERE. His one-and-done replacement and the George Lazenby of the official SARTANA series was George Hilton, who would soon become a regular presence in the gialli of Sergio Martino, often teaming with the stunning Edwige Fenech. Hilton is a fine Sartana, though to use another Bond comparison, his Sartana could be deemed the Roger Moore-ish interpretation compared to Garko's Sean Connery. Hilton almost seems to be winking and smirking at times, especially when he's introduced throwing a canteen in the air and shooting it so it rains down and douses a lit fuse that's about to blow up some dynamite. The story is yet another baffling series of scheming double-crosses and backstabbing involving gold, this time from the mine of Appaloosa town boss Spencer (Piero Lulli), who's paying a group of Mexican bandits led by Mantas (Nello Pazzafini in the Fernando Sancho role) to rob his own shipments so he can horde the gold for himself. It's never quite clear what Spencer's ultimate plan is, but it doesn't really matter. SARTANA'S HERE...TRADE YOUR PISTOL FOR A COFFIN is fast-moving and Hilton fits in nicely with the slightly lighter but still generally serious tone, with an added quirk in that Sartana seems to have an obsession with boiled eggs. He ends up disguising himself as a Mexican peasant (a tactic used by Giuliano Gemma's Ringo in THE RETURN OF RINGO) to blend in Appaloosa and figure out how to play the sides against one another. Things are complicated even more with the arrival of dapper, white-suited, poetry-reading gunslinger Sabbath (Charles Southwood, best known as Winchester Jack in Mario Bava's spaghetti western ROY COLT AND WINCHESTER JACK), with whom Sartana may or may not form a Leone-esque unholy alliance. A big improvement over the lackluster I AM SARTANA, YOUR ANGEL OF DEATH, but Hilton moved on and Garko returned for the next film, which was in Italian theaters just two months later.
HAVE A GOOD FUNERAL, MY FRIEND...SARTANA WILL PAY (Italy - 1970) Directed by Anthony Ascott (Giuliano Carnimeo). Written by Giovanni Simonelli and Roberto Gianviti. Cast: Gianni Garko, Antonio Vilar, Daniela Giordano, Ivano Staccioli, Franco Ressel, George Wang, Helga Line, Luis Induni, Franco Pesce, Rick Boyd (Federico Boido), Jean Pierre Clarain, Roberto Dell'Acqua, Rocco Lerro, Aldo Berti, Attilio Dottesio. (Unrated, 93 mins) After a brief sabbatical during which he starred as a gunslinger named "Santana" in a spaghetti western that was magically transformed into SARTANA KILLS THEM ALL thanks to dubbing, Gianni Garko returns to the SARTANA series with HAVE A GOOD FUNERAL, MY FRIEND...SARTANA WILL PAY, and it looks like he had some time embrace his inner EASY RIDER by letting his hair grow and sprouting a porn stache and sideburns. Storywise, this is more of the same, with Sartana getting involved in some shady real estate and property disputes, starting when Joe Benson (Attilio Dottesio) is killed by hired guns (who are in turn killed by Sartana, who pays for their funerals, hence the title), with the assumption that his land will be taken over by town banker Hoffmann (Antonio Vilar), whose mustache-twirling villainy should be obvious the moment he introduces himself as a banker. Hoffman is in cahoots with the sheriff (Luis Induni) and saloon girl Mary (Helga Line) to make a killing on Benson's land with the rumors that there's a secret stash of gold (of course), but they didn't realize he left everything to his niece Abigail (Daniela Giordano). Sartana teams up with Abigail--for revenge and romantic purposes--and engineers the requisite series of double crosses, which also involve Chinese gambling house owner and problematic 2018 trending Vulture piece waiting to happen Lee Tse Tung (George Wang), who's introduced being pulled through town in a rickshaw by bowler-hatted manservant, frequently bangs a gong, and never misses an opportunity to drop a "Confucius say..." bon mot. Once Hoffmann realizes Sartana is on to his scheme, he starts a rumor that cheating gambling house dealer Piggot (Franco Ressel) was killed by Sartana, which leads to the dead man's four vengeful outlaw brothers coming to town.
As usual, there's generous helpings of the kind of goofy humor and occasional sight gags that portend the Terence Hill/Bud Spencer westerns that would be shortly coming down the pike, and three films into his SARTANA stretch, director Giuliano Carnimeo finds his groove, and in collaboration with cinematographer Stelvio Massi, really step up his game when it comes to Leone-esque frame compositions and a few split diopter shots of the sort that would become synonymous with Brian De Palma a few years down the road. It's also got a rousing score by frequent Ennio Morricone collaborator Bruno Nicolai, and this, following the direction that George Hilton took the character, probably represents Garko's loosest portrayal of Sartana yet, especially when he pulls an ace out of his pocket and flings it across the room to extinguish a candle during his seduction of Abigail, a move that's pure 007 in spirit. But the story is still confusing as hell, which seems to be the norm for the SARTANA westerns, so you more or less have to just roll with it and assume everyone you see onscreen has ulterior motives that will become more preposterous as the film proceeds.
LIGHT THE FUSE...SARTANA IS COMING (Italy/Spain - 1970) Directed by Anthony Ascot (Giuliano Carnimeo). Written by Eduardo M. Brochero, Tito Carpi and Ernesto Gastaldi. Cast: Gianni Garko, Susan Scott (Nieves Navarro), Massimo Serato, Piero Lulli, Jose Jaspe, Bruno Corazzari, Clay Slegger, Frank Brana, Franco Pesce, Sal Borgese, Giuseppe Castellano, Lino Coletta, Raffaele Di Mario, Fernando Bilbao, Beatrice Pellegrino, Gennarino Pappagali, Luis Induni, Renato Baldini, Mara Krupp, Dan van Husen. (Unrated, 100 mins) By the end of 1970, the SARTANA sequels were coming so fast and furious that it probably would've grown difficult to tell them apart if LIGHT THE FUSE...SARTANA IS COMING didn't mark the end of the official series. Though they continued working together in other westerns, it's a shame that star Gianni Garko and director Giuliano Carnimeo stopped here, as LIGHT THE FUSE is the best of the pentalogy. In a shocking turn of events, the story deals with endless double crosses and the pursuit of a stash of gold, this time with Garko's Sartana getting himself thrown into a prison overseen by corrupt marshal Manassas Jim (Massimo Serato) in order to orchestrate a jailbreak with inmate Grand Full (Piero Lulli), who Manassas Jim believes killed his younger brother and made off with the gold. Also killed that skirmish--recounted RASHOMON-style by numerous characters throughout--was a friend of Sartana's. Shifting alliances abound, as Sartana cuts deals at various points with Grand Full, Manassas Jim, Gen. Monk (Jose Jaspe in the Fernando Sancho "Frito Bandito" role), and femme fatale Belle (Nieves Navarro), while trusting only elderly Plon Plon (Franco Pesce), who of course is killed, making Sartana's pursuit of the gold personal. Not quite as difficult to follow in its labyrinthine plot construction as its predecessors, LIGHT THE FUSE earns its status as the best SARTANA late in the game when Sartana single-handedly mows down Monk's army by MacGyvering a church pipe organ into a giant Gatling gun and multi-purpose firearm and "playing" it in a showdown in the middle of the dusty town in a display of grandiosity that would make Rick Wakeman jealous. It's one of the most insane and inspired moments in the entire spaghetti canon, and helps close out the SARTANA series on a high note.
RED RINGS OF FEAR aka ENIGMA ROSSO aka RINGS OF FEAR aka TRAUMA aka VIRGIN KILLER (Italy/West Germany/Spain - 1978) Directed by Alberto Negrin. Written by Marcello Coccia, Massimo Dallamano, Franco Ferrini, Stefano Ubezio, Alberto Negrin and Peter Berling. Cast: Fabio Testi, Christine Kaufmann, Ivan Desny, Jack Taylor, Fausta Avelli, Bruno Alessandro, Tony Isbert, Helga Line, Brigitte Wagner, Caroline Ohrner, Silvia Aguilar, Taida Urruzola, Maria Asquerino, Cecilia Roth. (Unrated, 84 mins)
The final installment of a loosely-connected "Schoolgirls in Peril" trilogy that began with 1972's WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO SOLANGE? and 1974's WHAT HAVE THEY DONE TO YOUR DAUGHTERS?, the giallo RED RINGS OF FEAR was a troubled production even before filming began. Massimo Dallamano, a career journeyman (A BLACK VEIL FOR LISA, DORIAN GRAY, THE NIGHT CHILD) who established himself as a top cinematographer in the 1960s with Sergio Leone's A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS and FOR A FEW DOLLARS MORE, directed SOLANGE and DAUGHTERS and was set to helm the third installment, but was killed in a car accident in Rome in November 1976, not long after the release of his final film, the polizia COLT 38 SPECIAL SQUAD. He was still in the process of completing the RED RINGS script, which was then cycled through an additional five credited writers--including future Dario Argento collaborator Franco Ferrini--over the next year and a half before shooting finally began. In Dallamano's stead, directing duties were assigned to Alberto Negrin, who's spent his entire career in Italian television as a go-to guy for prestigious RAI Radiotelevisione Italiana TV-movies and miniseries that would occasionally make it onto American networks, such as the 1985 miniseries MUSSOLINI AND I with Susan Sarandon, Anthony Hopkins, and Bob Hoskins as Il Duce, and 1990's VOYAGE OF TERROR: THE ACHILLE LAURO AFFAIR with Burt Lancaster and Eva Marie Saint. RED RINGS OF FEAR remains Negrin's only theatrical feature to date in a career going back to 1971, and he took the opportunity to cut loose and run with it. Typical of the sleazy direction gialli would take in the latter half of the 1970s beginning with the likes of the subtly-titled STRIP NUDE FOR YOUR KILLER, RED RINGS OF FEAR doesn't go as far as the 1979 giallo/porno crossovers GIALLO A VENEZIA and PLAY MOTEL, but it doesn't avoid embracing the trashier side of things, with a twisty and perverse story involving murders, corruption, cover-ups, abortion, and Catholic schoolgirls forced to take part in a prostitution ring being run by one of their own teachers.
Fabio Testi starred in WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO SOLANGE? as a lecherous teacher at a posh girls school who, as per giallo rules, becomes an amateur sleuth in an attempt to get to the bottom of a mystery in which he's briefly the main suspect. Here, dubbed by the velvet tones of Ted Rusoff, he plays the actual detective in charge of the case, Insp. Gianni Di Salvo, assigned to investigate the death of a teenage girl whose genitally-mutilated corpse was found wrapped in plastic and dumped in a river near a dam. The girl was a student a nearby Catholic girls school and, from a tip by the victim's little sister Emily (Fausta Avelli), learns that she was part of a clique known as "The Inseparables." He immediately suspects the other girls are hiding something, and since it's a giallo, he's right. The investigation leads to numerous red herrings, mostly involving the teaching staff who all act like they're hiding something, including an uptight headmistress and another who pointlessly sleeps with one black glove on his bedside table. The dead girl's diary also has recurring drawings of a designer jeans logo, which eventually leads to the involvement of uncooperative clothing store owner Parravicini (Jack Taylor with a perm). Anger management case Di Salvo begins losing his patience, especially after an attempt on his life as well as an escalating body count when a teacher (Tony Isbert) is killed in a mysterious hit-and-run accident and the remaining Inseparables become targets themselves.
Unlike SOLANGE and DAUGHTERS, RED RINGS OF FEAR was never released theatrically in the US, instead going straight to video in 1985 as TRAUMA (one of its many retitlings, another being the grindhouse-ready VIRGIN KILLER), in one of those Wizard Video big boxes that also erroneously included five-time Oscar-nominee Arthur Kennedy in the credits on the packaging (he was in his share of Eurotrash movies in the mid-to-late '70s, but this wasn't one of them). It's just out now on Blu-ray from Scorpion in a restored transfer, properly framed at 2.35:1, and looking better than it ever has after decades of barely watchable VHS prints that were ported over to numerous public domain DVD sets. From the time of Dallamano's tragic death, the film was plagued with problems, from script changes to, as Nathaniel Thompson points out on the Blu-ray's commentary track, co-star Jack Taylor even claiming the film was never completely finished. At the very least, things seem to be missing and possibly never shot, which may explain the unusually brief running time of just 84 minutes. Second-billed Christine Kaufmann, an Austrian actress and former Hollywood ingenue who was married to Tony Curtis for five years after co-starring with him in 1962's TARAS BULBA, is barely in the movie as Di Salvo's kleptomaniac friend-with-benefits. It's not really clear if they already know each other when he catches her stealing cat food at the supermarket early on (some of the dialogue even hints at the possibility that she's a prostitute) and nothing results from a later revelation after they have a fight and she's next seen sleeping with Di Salvo's boss, Chief Insp. Roccaglio (Ivan Desny, dubbed by Ed Mannix). She's never seen again after that--it's unknown whether she had scenes cut or never filmed and her appearances are sporadic and pointless enough that it's not out of the question to wonder if she simply quit the movie. For a prominently-billed actress of established repute in both Europe and Hollywood (she won the Golden Globe for Best Newcomer Female for 1961's TOWN WITHOUT PITY and went on to appear in several Rainer Werner Fassbinder films before and after RED RINGS OF FEAR), it's a strangely minor and insignificant role. Spanish cult actress Helga Line (HORROR EXPRESS) also has a brief bit part as the first victim's mother and future Pedro Almodovar regular Cecilia Roth (ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER) has a small early role as a Parravicini employee sleeping with her boss. In keeping with the choppy, seemingly rushed nature of the film's assembly, Riz Ortolani's main theme sounds like it belongs more to a 1970s cop show than a giallo murder mystery (Thompson points out that it was recycled in full from Ortolani's score for Dallmano's 1973 crime film SUPERBITCH).
But RED RINGS OF FEAR holds your attention: you've got Testi's rageaholic detective barging into a school meeting and bellowing "Somebody with a cock THIS BIG raped and killed her!"; you've got a bizarre sequence where, following the designer jeans lead, Di Salvo's partner (Bruno Alessandro) goes jeans shopping and struts around in skin-tight denim; you've got Di Salvo sarcastically calling the same partner "Starsky," something obviously ad-libbed by Rusoff in the dubbing studio; you've got one victim being stabbed in the neck with a flaming hot curling iron; bullying Di Salvo interrogating and threatening a scared-shitless Parravicini on a speeding rollercoaster; there's an ominous, unsettling vibe in the dimly-lit hallways of the school, filled with intimidatingly-placed religious iconography and a statue of a scowling, finger-pointing nun at the top of the main staircase, seemingly silently and pre-emptively judging everyone who walks in the building; an Argento-like sequence where an absurd amount of marbles are poured down a staircase being ascended by one of The Inseparables; a memorable performance by young Avelli, the other little red-haired girl in 1970s Italian horror movies who was called upon when the far creepier Nicoletta Elmi was busy (Avelli is probably best known to mainstream audiences as "Sweets," the little girl O.J. Simpson is killed trying to rescue in the 1977 plague-on-a-train disaster movie THE CASSANDRA CROSSING); and, in what has to be the film's most notorious bit, a cross-cutting juxtaposition of Inseparables member Virginia (Silvia Aguilar) going to a clinic for an abortion, intercut with flashback footage of the Inseparables at the orgy where the first victim was killed, bleeding out after her vagina was penetrated and torn apart by an oversized dildo. It has to rank as one of the tackiest sequences in any giallo up to that point, made even more retroactively surreal since one of the actresses playing The Inseparables is a dead ringer for Jennifer Lawrence. It had to be hard to fathom the giallo getting any more tasteless, but fear not, the 1979 double shot of GIALLO A VENEZIA and PLAY MOTEL saw ENIGMA ROSSO's abortion/orgy jawdropper, said "Hold our beers," and introduced hardcore porn into the genre, pretty much taking things as far as they could go and effectively ending the giallo at least until it was given a post-slasher film resurrection with a return to relatively traditional, classier fare in the 1980s. RED RINGS OF FEAR is a mess, but it's got its share of unusual, inventive, and audacious moments that make it hard to outright dismiss, especially with a quality Blu-ray presentation that helps it make a credible case for itself.
The back of the Wizard Video big box from 1985,
with Arthur Kennedy mistakenly credited.
