HOME CINEMA
November 2019 | Sight&Sound | 87
a diverse company from Hollywood
character stalwart Thelma Ritter to civil
rights-savvy duo Ruby Dee and Brock Peters,
a baby-faced Beau Bridges and, as the edgy
juvenile threat, a full-on Tony Musante and
Martin Sheen (his first film role). The results
are at once a writerly conceit and a vividly
real experience, with a rawness it might be
tough to replicate today. Definitely one of the
under-the-radar discoveries of recent years.
Disc: A vivid transfer gets two top-notch
commentaries, with the octogenarian Peerce
- his recall as sharp as his film – detailing the
how-to behind a tough yet rewarding shoot,
while critic Alexandra Heller-Nicholas gets
stuck into the gnarly thematic issues from
today’s perspective. Highest recommendation.
PASOLINI’S TRILOGY OF LIFE
THE DECAMERON/THE CANTERBURY
TALES/ARABIAN NIGHTS
Pier Paolo Pasolini; Italy/France/Germany 1971-74; BFI;
Region B Blu-ray; 111/111/130 minutes; Certificate 18; 1.85:1.
Extras: Notes for an African Oresteia (1970); documentary:
Pasolini and the Italian Genre Film; interview with Robin
Askwith; deleted scenes from Arabian Nights; trailers; booklet.
Reviewed by Philip Kemp
With The Decameron, adapted from a batch
of stories in Boccaccio’s classic 14th-century
collection, Pasolini took a leap into richly
coloured uncomplicated bawdiness that
disconcerted audiences – and many critics –
more accustomed to his dark, doomy arthouse
fables like Teorema (Theorem, 1968) or Porcile
(Pigsty, 1969). It also gave him his first major
box-office hit and won a Special Jury Prize at
Berlin. The opening anecdote sets the broad,
scrofulous tone: a rich young Roman (Pasolini
regular Ninetto Davoli) visiting Naples is
conned by a lovely young woman who claims
to be his half-sister; she steals his money and
booby-traps him into a huge tank of liquid shit.
Pasolini – who features in the cast as a
fresco painter, “a pupil of Giotto” – misses no
opportunity to poke fun at class, religion and
conventional morality. There’s a delight in
sensuality, with numerous scenes of nudity and
sex, both hetero and homo. Two men agree that
whoever of them dies first will come back to tell
his friend the truth about judgement and the
afterlife. The first-deceased keeps his promise
with the news that, whatever the Church says,
sex isn’t in the least sinful. The other rushes
off to leap into bed with his girlfriend, joyfully
shouting “Non e peccato!” (“It’s not a sin!”).
As he often liked to do, Pasolini casts
most of his supporting roles from non-
professionals, drawn from the streets; perhaps
in the interests of realism, he seems to have
had a preference for men with terrible teeth.
Not surprisingly, the acting is broad in the
extreme and the post-synching is atrocious
(so much so that the BFI has felt constrained
to add a note to the booklet disclaiming
responsibility for the mismatch between lips
and voices). It isn’t only the amateurs who
over-act, either. In The Canterbury Tales Hugh
Griffith (never at the best of times noted for
his underplaying) all but blasts his way out of
the screen as the elderly cuckolded husband.
Of the three items in the trilogy, Canterbury
Tales was the least favourably received; the
booklet includes a scathing review from Nigel
Andrews in Monthly Film Bulletin (“depressing...
bludgeoning... ill-composed...”). As in its
predecessor, there’s no framing story; Pasolini
himself plays Chaucer, scribbling and chortling
in his study, but the film has relatively little
to do with the original. True, we do get the
notorious fart-in-the-face episode from the
Miller’s Tale; but a final section set in hell,
with devils shitting out misbehaving friars,
is cruder than anything Chaucer conceived.
Davoli shows up again, this time performing
a rather cutesy pastiche of Chaplin, while
Chaplin’s own daughter, Josephine, plays
Griffith’s straying wife. Still, it’s all carried off
with gusto, and the costumes are a delight.
By comparison, Arabian Nights feels almost
restrained. Filmed in beguiling landscapes in
Ethiopia, Yemen, Iran and Nepal, it displays
no lack of sensuality but very little mockery
of religion, and there are fewer gay-sex scenes
- although the naive young hero Nur-ed-din
(Franco Merli), whose search for his beloved
Zumurrud (Ines Pellegrini) forms a running
thread, is warned at one point that a certain
sheikh “prefers bananas to figs”. Pasolini
includes moments of brutality, not least a
castration (Davoli again, this time as the
victim). But overall there’s a sense of mystical
delicacy to the film that offsets the comic or
violent raunchiness of specific images. It was
awarded a Special Jury Prize at Cannes.
The Decameron, and to a lesser degree its two
successors, spawned – as the documentary
included on this set relates – a mass of
increasingly crass, opportunistic ‘sequels’,
directed by other hands: Decameron No 2, No 3,
No 4, Black Decameron, Decameroticas, Prohibited
Tales with No Clothes On, and so forth. As Paolo
Bianchini, director of Decameron No 4, observes,
Pasolini “didn’t open up a window – he opened
up a motorway”. It may partly have been this
spate of third-rate imitations that led Pasolini,
shortly after having completed Arabian Nights,
to disown the entire trilogy, dismissing it as an
exercise in commercialised sexuality and knee-
jerk liberalism. As if to underline this rejection
and repudiate the trilogy’s celebration of sensual
indulgence, he promptly followed with its
diametric opposite: the chillingly sadistic, near-
unwatchable Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975).
Soon afterwards, his mutilated body was found
on waste ground near Ostia, apparently murdered
by a young male prostitute he had picked up.
Discs: High-definition transfers bring out the
exuberant colours of Danilo Donati’s costumes
and Dante Ferretti’s art direction. Extras include
tantalising hints of what Pasolini’s projected
African Oresteia might have looked like, and a
diverting interview with actor Robin Askwith
(Confessions of a Window Cleaner), who recalls the
director’s first words on meeting him as “You
look like someone who uses his cock a lot.”
THEY MADE ME A FUGITIVE
Alberto Cavalcanti; UK 1947; Powerhouse Indicator;
region-free Blu-ray; Certificate PG; 102 minutes; 1.37:1.
Extras: 1970 NFT interview with Cavalcanti (audio);
appreciation of the film by Neil Sinyard; featurette about
restoration of film; RAF training films with Trevor Howard
- Squaring the Circle (1941 – first 12 minutes without
audio), The Aircraft Rocket (1944); image gallery.
Reviewed by Robert Hanks
This fantastic, underrated thriller has been touted
as a British noir and recruited to a rather nebulous
‘spiv cycle’ of post-war crime dramas; but though
it borrows genre elements it is wholly sui generis,
far too eccentric to fill any slot. Bored ex-war hero
Clem Morgan is lured into working with gangster
Narcy (“Short for Narcissus”), who runs a black-
market operation out of an undertaker’s – nylons,
fags and illicit mutton smuggled in coffins,
under the watchful eye of Aggie, Edwardian
matriarch in public, elderly Fag-Ash Lil as soon
as the door’s closed (“If there’s one thing my
boyfriend likes, it’s mutton”: “Dressed as lamb,”
comes the riposte). When Clem takes exception
to Narcy’s sideline in white powder – “sherbet”
- Narcy frames him for a cop killing. Breaking
out of Dartmoor, Clem heads toward London,
and Narcy’s ex-moll, Sally, a plucky chorus girl...
Noel Langley’s script whips the corny plot
along, sketching in a rich cast of not quite
familiar types and packing the scenes with witty,
hardboiled dialogue sitting somewhere between
Dashiell Hammett and Noël Coward: as Sally
plucks lead shot from Clem’s back, he counts
the pellets out with “She loves me, she loves
me not.” Alberto Cavalcanti directs inventively,
with cinematographer Otto Heller (Peeping Tom,
1960; The Ipcress File, 1965) adding a nightmare
sheen: fog hemming in the prison scenes, a fight
at the undertaker’s among the plaster angels
and around a giant rooftop ‘RIP’, the funhouse
distortion of Narcy’s face as he beats Sally up (for
40s British cinema, the degree of violence towards
women is a little startling). As Clem and Sally,
Trevor Howard and Sally Gray are solid, but the
support is blisteringly good, particularly Mary
Merrall as Aggie, Rene Ray as Sally’s motherly,
marginally more streetwise friend, and Griffith
Jones as the charming, murderous Narcy.
Cavalcanti’s Went the Day Well (1944) showed the
savage side of Britain’s wartime spirit; this swig
at the sour dregs left over is every bit as good.
Disc: An excellent restoration (difficulties
explained by the BFI’s Kieron Webb in the
extras), with clean sound and picture. Neil
Sinyard offers a good critical overview, and it’s
fascinating to watch a very youthful Howard
in the pair of training films unearthed from
the Imperial War Museum archive.
New releases
Spivs like us: They Made Me a Fugitive
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