Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 10/24/24

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Thursday, October 24, 2024

Don't Torture a Duckling (Lucio Fulci, 1972)

Barbara Bouchet in Don't Torture a Duckling

Cast: Florinda Bolkan, Barbara Bouchet, Tomas Milian, Irene Papas, Marc Porel, Georges Wilson, Antonello Campodifiori, Ugo D'Alessio, Virgilio Gazzolo, Vito Passeri, Rosalia Maggio, Andrea Aureli, Linda Sini, Franco Balducci, Marcello Tamborra. Screenplay: Lucio Fulci, Roberto Gianviti, Gianfrancoi Clerici. Cinematography: Sergio Offizi. Production design: Pier Luigi Basile. Film editing: Ornella Micheli. Music: Riz Ortolani.

From its offbeat title to its gruesomely overdone climax, Don't Torture a Duckling is an unsettling movie. At heart it's a whodunit, with amateur sleuths outdoing the police in solving a mystery -- typical of the giallo. But writer-director Lucio Fulci can't resist perverse twists throughout the film. It takes place in a picturesque town in Apulia, the boot heel of Italy, where the mysterious murders of several young boys attract the attention of the police and the press. The place is isolated enough to be rife with superstition and suspicion of outsiders, providing a variety of suspects that include the village simpleton and a woman thought to be a witch. There's also an outsider, a rich young woman sent to live there by her father after a drug bust. And there are the prostitutes brought in from elsewhere to sate not only the lusts of the local men but also the curiosity of the boys of the town, who spy on what's going on in the isolated shack where the women ply their trade. Fulci serves up this mixture of sex and blood with skill, scattering false leads throughout, but also with some gratuitous scenes that display a serious lack of taste.