My thanks to all who’ve attended MIDCENTURY MADNESS during 2022. And thanks to the Roxie Theater for giving it a platform this year—we will be discussing the best way to continue this unique programming, and you will be the first to know about our future plans.
And please ready yourselves for THE FRENCH HAD A NAME FOR IT ‘22. Advance info, including the ability to buy/receive passes for our four-day (November 6-7-12-13), fifteen-film event, will be forthcoming this week through our standard mailing list. Physical passes are in the Roxie’s possession, so your chance to lock in seats is upon you—we hope to see all of the “faithful” (and a few more!) in November.
BUT—there are four more ultra-rare films for you to see this weekend (September 24-25). The schedule changes have worked in our favor, and once again we’ve stumbled into thematic cohesiveness with what I’m confident will be a memorable parting shot for MID/MAD…
…because we have various shadings of “mad men” who’ll both exasperate and astonish you with their bad behavior. Anger, petulance, ennui, fabrication, and outright madness commingle this weekend, proving that the anti-hero really begins to proliferate at the mid-point of twentieth century cinema. (We’d always had villains—they’ve been with us since the dawn of time—but anti-heroes are our specific cultural innovation.)
So let’s consider Alfredo Martelli (Marcello Mastroianni), the anti-hero of L’ASSASSINO—a charming, petulant cad who “sells antiques” and has an uncanny, architectural sense of the “social façade.” But, as we will soon discover, he’s in debt to his wealthy mistress (Micheline Presle) and it just so happens that she is found dead at her villa just after he’d last been there.
This leads him into a wrenching experience with the polizia, who are immune to his charm and quickly bring out a series of damaging incidents, which are related to us in a jagged-but-jocular series of flashbacks. Mastroianni is masterful in his mood shifts as his experience in custody becomes more and more nightmarish. Alfredo’s reputation as a “ladykiller” becomes more darkly ironic as more of his manipulative behavior surfaces during what one hopes will be his “dark night of the soul,” but…
Director Elio Petri, whose first film this is, balances temporal, tonal, and stylistic elements in L’ASSASSINO with astonishing ease. If anything, he is more assured with his second film, HIS DAYS ARE NUMBERED aka I GIORNI CONTATI—where Cesare, a hard-bitten, fifty-something plumber (played by Salvo Randone, the clever police commissioner in L’ASSASSINO) suddenly confronts his mortality when a man his age turns up dead on a downtown Rome bus he also happens to be riding.
This leads to a bittersweet roundelay of oscillating hysteria where Cesare revisits his past, discovering that it has little if anything to offer him. He discovers a prison-house of life that he’s been ignoring when he “frees” himself from his life of work. Later, having by this time used up his meager savings, he turns to an unsavory acquaintance involved in confidence schemes. Is he ready to join the criminal class?
The editing in these films (by Marcello Mastroianni’s younger brother Ruggero) is as sharply-edged as what assaults us in early Godard—but it is more disciplined, somehow always keyed to capturing dynamic expressions of male dissolution. Randone’s craggy, middle-aged features show how a “character lead” can provide more rhythmically revealed emotional information to the viewer, and it is this aspect of his performance, in conjunction with the editing strategies, that sets the film apart. It also sets up the film’s tantalizing ending, which is left open to interpretation.
(Here’s a coda with an oddly macabre fact: Cesare is 53 years old when he becomes obsessed with the prospect of death; Elio Petri died in 1982 at the age of…that’s right: 53.)
THE travails of out two Italian actors pale, however, in comparison with what comes to pass for Mexican actor Arturo de Cordova in the two films that conclude our 32-film foray into midcentury madness. A crisis of character or a mid-life kerfuffle are mere trifles for de Cordova, as those familiar with several of his Mexican noirs that have screened in the USA in recent years (TWlLIGHT, during his heartthrob phase in the 40s; and IN THE PALM OF YOUR HAND, from the early 50s, where he is a more conventional charlatan).
As he moved into middle age, de Cordova became obsessed with characters “on the brink”—if not of outright madness, then something at least several standard deviations from the straight-and-narrow. In RED FISH, his would-be author has created a real-life fabrication that is more ironically macabre than anything in Edgar Allan Poe. (Without giving things away completely, let’s just say that, in L’ASSASSINO, at least Alfredo Martelli was accused of killing someone whose corpse could be located!)
The strain on de Cordova’s character in RED FISH is loaded with twist after twist, with the story unfolding during his sequestration in a hotel during a rainstorm that is measurably more monsoon-like than what Gérard Philipe endures in SUCH A PRETTY LITTLE BEACH. We see his relationship to his fiancée (the fierce, brittle Emma Pennella, warming up for her role as Phaedra two years later) go through seemingly infinite gyrations as his fabrications slowly, inexorably coil a noose around his neck. The denouement, fittingly, plays out in the foul weather, still raging as if it was a supernatural force punishing the author for his overly zealous inventiveness.
And speaking of male dissolution, madness, and over-the-top set design (and how all of these attributes combine themselves into a spectacular collision), there is THE MAN WITHOUT A FACE, from Mexico’s ostensible “king of horror films” Juan Bustillo Oro (though Oro’s range in genres is much greater than commonly advertised, including a strong penchant for film noir: later in the 50s he would direct a film, THE TRACE OF YOUR LIPS, that was based on a Cornell Woolrich short story).
It is possible that no one has ever been as possessed by their dreams as the increasingly deranged detective Juan Carlos Lozano. Implored by his long-dead mother (shades of PSYCHO a decade later) Lozano is unable to track down the mutilator of women that, during the day, he also hunts fruitlessly. A psychologist associated with the police (stolid, brooding Miguel Angel Ferriz, best known for his taciturn characters in charro films) attempts to unlock the secrets within Lozano’s dreams, with frightening results. A deep reservoir of male dysfunction cracks at the base of its dam, and sordid, unspeakable truths spill into view.
Along the way, Oro renders Lozano’s dreams in a kind of Dali-meets-Giacometti anguished angularity that is both menacing and slightly comical. (American director Joseph H. Lewis, whose film with a similar plot (SO DARK THE NIGHT) was known to Oro, might well have seen the set design for THE MAN WITHOUT A FACE and “borrowed” some of its elements for his strange-to-the-point-of-parody “Bayou noir” CRY OF THE HUNTED, where the lead character, played by Barry Sullivan, has a dream that seems like a lampoon of Oro’s psychotic set-pieces.)
The key to making something like this work, of course, is that the lead actor must have the ability to act with his eyes sufficiently that we truly believe he is either possessed or is having a psychotic break. And by this point in his career, de Cordova was the world master of such characterizations; he would quickly be tapped by Luis Buñuel to play the insanely jealous husband in his celebrated 1953 film EL.
SO—madness manifests itself manifestly after our late-course correction for MIDCENTURY MADNESS, permitting us to take our leave after 32 films with head held high and—of course—with a wild, de Cordovian look in our eyes. It’s been a wonderful ride through mostly uncharted territory, and we hope that those of you who’ve joined us on the journey have found it galvanizing—and that it’s lived up to its proposition that there is still an efflorescence of mid-century cinematic gems in need of resurrection from the slough of obscurity. We must all own up to this truth lest we, too, are haunted by the man without a face.