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.  

Alexandria ... Why? (Youssef Chahine, 1979)

Mohsen Mohieddin in Alexandria ... Why?

Cast: Mohsen Mohieddin, Farid Shawqi, Ezzat El Allaili, Gerry Sundquist, Naglaa Fathi, Yehia Chahine, Ahmed Mehrez, Youssef Wahbi, Leila Fawzy, Seif Abdel Rahman, Ahmed Zaki, Mahmoud Al Meledji. Screenplay: Yussef Chahine, Mohsen Zayed. Cinematography: Mohsen Nasr. Production design: Abdel Fattah Madbouly. Film editing: Rashida Abdel Salam. Music: Fouad El-Zahry. 
 

Red-Headed Woman (Jack Conway, 1932)

Chester Morris and Jean Harlow in Red-Headed Woman

Cast: Jean Harlow, Chester Morris, Lewis Stone, Leila Hyams, Una Merkel, Henry Stephenson, May Robson, Charles Boyer, Harvey Clark. Screenplay: Anita Loos, based on a novel by Katharine Brush. Cinematography: Harold Rosson. Art direction: Cedric Gibbons. Film editing: Blanche Sewell. 

Momma's Man (Azazel Jacobs, 2008)

Matt Boren, Flo Jacobs, and Ken Jacobs in Momma's Man

Cast: Matt Boren, Flo Jacobs, Ken Jacobs, Dana Varon, Piero Arcilesi, Richard Edson, Eleanor Hutchins. Screenplay: Azazel Jacobs. Cinematography: Tobias Datum. Film editing: Darrin Navarro. Music: Mandy Hoffman. 

A canceled flight leaves Mikey (Matt Boren), on a business trip to New York, spending a night with his parents in the apartment where he grew up. The stay extends into weeks as Mikey is drawn back into his childhood by the memorabilia crammed into the apartment. His mother (Flo Jacobs) is solicitous, constantly offering him food, while his taciturn father (Ken Jacobs) remains preoccupied with his own interests. Mikey sinks into his old collection of notebooks and comic books, and develops a kind of agoraphobia, becoming frozen at the top of the stairs that lead to the world below. Meanwhile, his wife, Laura (Dana Varon), is back in Los Angeles with their infant daughter, wondering why Mikey doesn't return her calls. Azazel Jacobs's movie is not only a story of a midlife crisis, but also a loving but slightly critical portrait of his own parents, who play Mikey's mother and father, filmed in their actual cluttered apartment where the director grew up. It's not like any other movie you've seen, being not a documentary and not quite fiction, but somehow real and touching and wistfully funny.   

 

Big Deal on Madonna Street (Mario Monicelli, 1958)

Carlo Piscane, Tiberio Murgia, unidentified baby, Marcello Mastroianni, and Renato Salvatori in Big Deal on Madonna Street

Cast: Vittorio Gassman, Renato Salvatori, Memmo Carotenuto, Rossana Rory, Carla Gravina, Marcello Mastroianni, Claudia Cardinale, Carlo Piscane, Tiberio Murgia, Totò. Screenplay: Agenore Incrocci, Furio Scarpelli, Suso Cecchi D'Amico, Mario Monicelli. Cinematography: Gianni Di Venanzo. Production design: Piero Gherardi. Film editing: Adriana Novelli. Music: Piero Umiliani. 

According to director Mario Monicelli, Big Deal on Madonna Street was intended not just as a parody of heist thrillers like Jules Dassin's Rififi (1955) but also of neorealism as a genre. We may get a glimpse of that when Tiberio (Marcello Mastroianni) hears that the target of the heist is a pawn shop: "My sheets are there," he says, perhaps reminding the audience of the scene in Bicycle Thieves (Vittorio De Sica, 1948) when the couple pawn their sheets so the husband can buy a bicycle. Whatever the target, Big Deal stands on its own as an Italian comedy classic, revealing the comic gifts of actors like Mastroianni and Vittorio Gassman, and providing a small but important role in the budding career of Claudia Cardinale. It's a tale of screw-ups, as everything possible goes wrong in the attempts of a crew of ne'er-do-wells to pull off a burglary that involves extensive planning, surveillance, and other feats that are just beyond their abilities. The comedy ranges from small ironies to broad slapstick, all set to a lively jazz score by Piero Umiliani. 

Come Back, Africa (Lionel Rogosin, 1959)

Zachariah Mgabe in Come Back, Africa

Cast: Zachariah Mgabe, Vinah Bendile, Miriam Makebe, Lewis Nkosi, Bloke Modisani, Can Themba, Myrtle Berman, George Malabye, Morris Hugh, Hazel Futa. Screenplay: Bloke Modisani, Lewis Nkosi, Lionel Rogosin. Cinematography: Ernest Artaria, Emil Knebel. Film editing: Carl Lerner, Hugh A. Robertson. Music: Chatur Lal. 

Filmed surreptitiously and edited with skill, Lionel Rogosin's Come Back, Africa is everything a docufiction film should be, with the chief weakness being the fiction part. It's a revelatory exploration of apartheid in South Africa, concentrated on Johannesburg, that gets its focus by following the misadventures of Zachariah Mgabe, which is also the name of the actor who plays him. Zachariah comes to Johannesburg in search of work, leaving his wife and children in what is now the KwaZulu-Natal province. He finds work in the gold mines, but when the agreed-upon term of employment is over, he wants something that pays more. He negotiates the "pass laws," a notorious system of internal passports devised by the white South African government to enforce segregation, and finds work as the "house boy" for a white couple. But the mistress of the household, played by anti-apartheid activist Myrtle Berman, constantly scolds, berates, and finally fires him, so Zachariah moves from job to job, encountering suspicion and contempt from the white employers. Things become more desperate when his wife, Vinah (Vinah Bendile), and their children join him in Johannesburg. The film vividly explores the street life of the city, and climaxes in a scene set in a shebeen where Black intellectuals discuss their situation and Miriam Makeba, already a celebrity in the country, sings two songs -- a  superb performance that helped launch her international career. But the narrative thread of the film isn't sustained as well as the documentary scenes and after an act of brutality that isn't set up properly, the film ends on a harsh but inconclusive note.   

One From the Heart: Reprise (Francis Ford Coppola, 1981, 2024)

Teri Garr in One From the Heart

Cast: Frederic Forrest, Teri Garr, Raul Julia, Nastassja Kinski, Lainie Kazan, Harry Dean Stanton, Allen Garfield. Screenplay: Armyan Bernstein, Francis Ford Coppola. Cinematography: Ronald Victor García, Vittorio Storaro. Production design: Dean Tavoularis. Film editing: Rudi Fehr, Anne Goursaud, Randy Roberts. Music: Tom Waits. 

Was it the success of Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge! (2001) and Damien Chazelle's La La Land (2016) that inspired Francis Ford Coppola to try revamping One From the Heart, the 1981 musical that destroyed his hopes of creating a film studio? One From the Heart had often been called "ahead of its time," for its attempt to revive the movie musical with stylized sets and performers that weren't known for singing and dancing. The knock against One From the Heart was chiefly that the elaborate production overwhelmed the rather thin story: a couple who quarrel, split up, have flings with others, but return to each other at the end of the film. Unfortunately, that defect remains in the re-edited version, with previously unseen footage, that Coppola called One From the Heart: Reprise. And both Frederic Forrest and Teri Garr feel miscast: Forrest was a fine character actor, not a leading man, and Garr was a wonderful comic actress in movies like Young Frankenstein (Mel Brooks, 1974) and Tootsie (Sydney Pollack, 1982), but they have no chemistry together as the sparring lovers. Tom Waits's songs, beautifully sung by Waits and Crystal Gayle, work nicely as a kind of Greek chorus commenting on the action, but some who admire the original version of Coppola's film object that in the Reprise they've been smothered by dialogue. Mostly it's a treat for the eye and sometimes for the ear, but it never reaches the heart.    

The Spell (Lee Phillips, 1977)

Susan Myers in The Spell

Cast: Lee Grant, Susan Myers, Lelia Goldoni, Helen Hunt, Jack Colvin, James Olson, James Greene, Wright King, Barbara Bostock, Doney Oatman, Richard Carlyle, Kathleen Hughes, Robert Gibbons, Arthur Peterson. Screenplay: Brian Taggart. Cinematography: Matthew F. Leonetti. Art direction: Robert MacKichan. Film editing: David Newhouse. Music: Gerald Fried. 

The Spell was planned as a theatrical feature, but when Brian De Palma's Carrie (1976) became a big hit, the producers decided that another film about a telekinetic teenager would be dismissed as a copycat, so it was reworked into a TV movie. In the process, as its writer and director responded to tighter censorship, time constraints, and the need to accommodate commercial breaks, it lost a lot of suspense as well as some essential characterization and backgrounding. The Matchetts, Marion (Lee Grant) and Glenn (James Olson), are an affluent couple with two daughters, 15-year-old Rita (Susan Myers) and 13-year-old Kristina (Helen Hunt). Rita is overweight, and her father criticizes her at the dinner table for eating too much. She's a misfit at school, taunted by the mean girls, and when she's asked to do a rope-climbing exercise, she's unable to do it. The girl she was paired with in the exercise succeeds and starts showing off, but when Rita glares menacingly at her, the girl falls from the rope and breaks her neck. It's not an accident: Others who cross Rita, including her father and her sister, find themselves in danger, too. Marion  is closer to Rita and more defensive of her than the others in the family, but when a friend of hers dies in a freakishly inexplicable manner, she too becomes concerned. The story builds to a surprise twist, but the ending fizzles into anticlimax. The cast, especially Grant and Hunt, does the best they can with a clumsily mishandled narrative. 

Rabid (David Cronenberg, 1977)

Cast: Marilyn Chambers, Frank Moore, Joe Silva, Howard Ryshpan, Patricia Gage, Susan Roman, J. Roger Periard, Lynne Deragon, Terry Schonblum, Victor Désy, Julie Anna, Gary McKeehan. Screenplay: David Cronenberg, Cinematography: René Verzier. Art direction: Claude Marchand. Film editing: Jean LaFleur. 

David Cronenberg admitted he had trouble writing the screenplay for Rabid, and it shows. The movie begins promisingly in a somewhat isolated plastic surgery clinic in Quebec, where the surgeon, Dr. Keloid (Howard Ryshpan), is persuaded to try a new technique whose side effects are still unknown. When a young woman named Rose Miller (Marilyn Chambers) is seriously injured in a motorcycle accident near the clinic, he decides to use the technique to save her life. Rose lingers in a coma after the operation until she wakes up screaming one night with a serious hunger for human blood. The surgery has somehow left a sphincter-shaped organ in her armpit, from which a kind of stinger emerges that allows her to feed on other people. The victims wake up with no memory being attacked but with a similar hunger, and they swiftly go mad, infect others, and die. Rose escapes from the clinic and makes her way to Montreal, spreading the plague behind her. Rose doesn't suffer the madness and death that her victims do, so nobody suspects that she's the carrier of what is initially diagnosed as a new strain of rabies. Rose's story should provide a steady through line for the film, but Cronenberg gets sidetracked too often into scenes that take the plot nowhere and dissipate the suspense a thriller needs. Cronenberg had Sissy Spacek in mind for the role of Rose, but the producers disagreed, thinking that Chambers's notoriety as a porn actress wanting to go straight would attract audiences. Chambers gives a competent performance, but the role needs an actor who can generate both sympathy and menace -- the sort of thing Spacek demonstrated in Carrie (Brian De Palma, 1976).

Pulse (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2001)

Cast: Haruhiko Kato, Kumiko Aso, Koyuki, Kurume Arisaka, Masatoshi Matsuo, Shinji Takeda, Jun Fubuki, Shun Sugata, Sho Aikawa, Koji Yakusho, Kenji Misuhashi. Screenplay: Kiyoshi Kurosawa. Cinematography: Jun'ichiro Hayashi. Production design: Tomoyuki Maruo. Film editing: Jun'ichi Kikuchi. Music: Takefumi Haketa. 

Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Pulse is a quietly unnerving movie about the apocalypse, which comes not with a bang but with a slow (very slow) fading away. It seems to be brought about by technology, particularly the internet, which causes people to become lonely and isolated. The film is also a ghost story, which posits that the afterlife is a place of intense loneliness and isolation. As the film progresses, cities thin out and some of the characters simply fade into blurry splotches on the wall. One crumbles into flakes and is blown away by the wind. Unfortunately, we expect more from movies than melancholy disintegration, so the impact of Pulse disintegrates too, as it takes its long slow time to create a mood at the expense of telling a story.