Culture Shock 12.19.13: 'Big Gundown' is a Western gem rescued from obscurity

Fewer and fewer vintage films are finding their way to DVD, much less to the high-definition glory of Blu-ray. Too many still languish, in need of restoration and preservation, in the vaults of indifferent studios.

So, give indie distributor Grindhouse Releasing all due credit not only for rescuing "The Big Gundown" from obscurity, but for giving it a release worthy of "Citizen Kane," or "Vertigo," if Hitchcock is more your flavor.

Film critic and historian Leonard Maltin says "The Big Gundown" is the best spaghetti Western not directed by Sergio Leone, and if that isn't true, it's not far off the mark.

Leone set the standard for the genre with his Clint Eastwood-starring "Man with No Name" trilogy and his operatic "Once Upon a Time in the West," which turned everyman Henry Fonda into one of the screen's great villains. His success spurred many imitators, most famously Sergio Corbucci's "Django." But director Sergio Sollima's "The Big Gundown" (1966) is the cream of the crop.

Lee Van Cleef, who upstaged Eastwood in Leone's "For a Few Dollars More," stars as John Corbett, a bounty hunter looking to turn his reputation for cleaning up Texas into a political career. But Senate campaigns don't come cheap, even in the 1800s. So, when a rich businessman (Walter Barnes) offers his backing in exchange for help getting a railroad through his property, Corbett accepts. After all, the railroad is good for all of Texas, Corbett figures.

They've barely sealed the deal when news comes of a 12-year-old girl's rape and murder, and the lone suspect is a knife-throwing Mexican outlaw called Cuchillo (Tomas Milian). What better campaign publicity could you ask than bringing in a notorious child rapist and murderer to face justice? It's all so convenient. Too convenient, as it turns out.

Finding Cuchillo is surprisingly easy, but keeping him is another matter. Corbett may have cleaned up Texas, but he has never faced anyone quite as wily as Cuchillo, who tricks his way to freedom time and again, and charms beautiful women with raw machismo.

Milian plays Cuchillo with charisma to spare. He may be a rogue, but we don't believe for a minute he's really guilty. For once Van Cleef is the one getting upstaged, and that's by design.

Van Cleef delivers a measured performance that pays off when we get to the "big gundown" the title promises. The inevitable showdown pits Corbett against the businessman's personal hired gun, a monocled Prussian baron (Gérard Herter) who left a pile of dead duelists back in Europe.

Cuchillo starts out disillusioned with both the Mexican government and the revolutionaries looking to overthrow it. By the end, Corbett is left wondering if politics north of the border is any better.

Like other Italian-made Westerns, "The Big Gundown" is filmed on location in Spain, and Sollima and cinematographer Carlo Carlini make the most of the desolate yet gorgeous Mediterranean locale. This is an Old West that's deadly yet seductive, especially as reproduced on Blu-ray by Grindhouse Releasing.

It has been a banner year for Grindhouse, coming off last year's tragic death of company co-founder Sage Stallone (son of Sylvester Stallone) at age 36. First there was Grindhouse's Blu-ray/DVD combo of the little-seen Peter Cushing horror flick "Corruption," marking the 100th anniversary of Cushing's birth.

Now there's "The Big Gundown" ($39.95 suggested retail), a four-disc release that belongs on every cinephile's shelf. The set includes two Blu-ray discs (the English-language version and a longer Italian cut with English subtitles), the English-language version on DVD and a CD of revered film composer Ennio Morricone's energetic score.

It's a lavish presentation of the sort more films deserve.

Culture Shock 10.11.12: Bloody Bava bows on Blu-ray

Only in the past decade has Italy's "maestro of the macabre" begun to get the recognition he is due.

Throughout the 1960s and into the mid-'70s, Mario Bava's atmospheric films — mostly in the horror genre — played in drive-ins and other disreputable venues. Sometimes they were part of double or ever triple features of terror, dismissed by their distributors as disposable schlock.

That's the fate of a working director, which Bava was, grinding out movies on minuscule budgets. He was as much a craftsman as an artist. Bava often was his own cinematographer, and he always handled the bulk of his films' special effects. But he brought artistry to his craft, and that dedication has won him admirers as diverse as Tim Burton, Quentin Tarantino and Martin Scorsese.
As Bava's movies began to appear on DVD in their original, uncut versions in the 2000s — two decades after his death in 1980 at age 65 — he began to attract a new audience and renewed appreciation. Most of his best films have been released in two DVD box sets, The Mario Bava Collection Vols. 1 and 2. Now Kino Lorber, which released a brilliantly restored version of Fritz Lang's silent masterpiece "Metropolis," is turning its attention to Bava, bringing three of his newly remastered films to Blu-ray for the first time.

Kino's releases include Bava's breakthrough film "Black Sunday" (1960) starring Barbara Steele; his most troubled, yet most personal film, "Lisa and the Devil" (1973) with Telly Savalas, Elke Sommer and Italian screen legend Alida Valli; and his 1970 thriller "Hatchet for the Honeymoon." Kino has released "Black Sunday" and "Lisa and the Devil" under its Kino Classics label, while opting to release "Hatchet" under its Redemption horror label. That's understandable because while all are worthwhile, only the first two are true classics.

"Black Sunday" is Bava's best known and most influential work, the one you're most likely to see on late-night television, especially at this time of year. It's also the film that made a horror icon out of Steele, whose large, hypnotic eyes convey malice as easily as they elicit sympathy, which led to her more than once playing good and evil twins, including here.

On the disc's audio commentary, Bava expert Tim Lucas of Video Watchdog magazine draws our attention to an exterior shot that highlights Bava's attention to detail. The shot lasts a just a few seconds, but it is almost absurdly complex, involving a partial model, matte paintings, forced perspective and in-camera lighting tricks, all engineered by Bava himself.

But for me, Bava's masterpiece is "Lisa and the Devil," which I rate as one of the best films ever produced. Yet this is a film that couldn't even find a distributor when it was made. Bava's producer, Alfredo Leone, commissioned new scenes and released "Lisa" a year later as "The House of Exorcism," successfully cashing in on "The Exorcist" mania, but sacrificing Bava's most heartfelt work in the process. (Kino's Blu-ray includes both versions, so you can judge for yourself.)

By turns creepy and whimsical, "Lisa and the Devil" is part murder mystery and part ghost story, with a dreamlike plot involving characters who may be dead or may be department store dummies or may be figment's of Lisa's imagination. The story, like the village in which Lisa (Sommer) gets lost, is like an M.C. Escher painting, folding in on itself.

And at the center of the proceedings is Savalas, clearly having a ball as the butler Leandro, bemoaning his menial fate while bearing a not-at-all-coincidental resemblance to a fresco of the devil in the village square.

This is how Bava's greatest films were meant to be seen, in high-definition glory and looking better than when they were first shown. Sit back, and let the maestro conduct.

Just a (Manhattan) gigolo

In June 2001, actress-turned-newscaster Andrea Thompson (Babylon 5, NYPD Blue) became an anchor for what was then called CNN Headline News — now HLN, which sounds more like a homemaking and lifestyle channel than a news channel. This caused a minor scandal because 1) Thompson was a newsreading newbie, and veteran TV newscasters like to pretend reading a teleprompter requires journalism experience, and 2) Thompson had appeared nude in some movies back in the 1980s and '90s.

Despite its reputation for being "liberal," the mainstream news media in America is actually full of insufferable prudes.

While Thompson had done full frontal as recently as 1997's A Gun, A Car, A Blonde, in which she played "The Blonde," the movie that generated most of the heat was her first, an Italian-made bit of softcore Eurotrash called Manhattan Gigolo (1986).

At the time, Manhattan Gigolo had been released only on VHS, and the tape, a relic of the mom-and-pop-video-store era, was out of print. A few years ago, this all-but-forgotten flick — which would be completely forgotten if not for Thompson's involvement — finally made it to DVD, and, thanks to Netflix, I now know what all the fuss was about.

First things first: Manhattan Gigolo is a bad movie. If not for the sex and nudity — and I'll get to that — it would be perfect material for Mystery Science Theater 3000. The bare-bones DVD from Televista doesn't help: The picture is murky and dark, the presentation is a cropped pan-and-scan, and if it looks like the movie was copied off the old VHS release, that's because it probably was.

Can you believe they charge nearly $25 for this bootleg-quality crap? They're clearly counting on lots of guys being desperate to see Andrea Thompson naked — as if the Internet doesn't make that easy enough.

Manhattan Gigolo is like a bad Italian horror movie of the same era, except it's sorely lacking in gloved killers, zombies, zombies fighting sharks, or a director capable of overachieving with sub-par material. It also lacks the flair of other Italian softcore sex films. Director Amasi Damiani is no Joe D'Amato, and this is no Black Emanuelle flick.

I guess this movie might be competently edited and shot and it's just impossible to tell from the washed-out, VHS-duped presentation. But I doubt it because it has a scene where from one camera angle it's broad daylight while from the other it's pitch black. Continuity is not a strong point here.

The plot involves two friends, Johnny (Gianni Dei, known to Eurohorror fans for occupying the title role of Patrick Still Lives, the Italian knock-off "sequel" to the classic Australian exploitation flick Patrick) and Rudy (Aris Iliopulos, known to nobody for nothing) who have come to New York from Italy to seek fame and fortune as actors. This leads them to cross paths with actress/model Leslie (Thompson), who immediately takes a liking to the two. So at about 17 minutes in, we get the steamy three-way that caused such a commotion when Thompson joined Headline News. What follows is 6 minutes of enjoyable Skinemax-level erotica. It's the highlight of the film but certainly no cause for moral indignation, no matter how flexible the young Ms. Thompson is.

Unknown to Johnny and Rudy, however, their tryst with Leslie was staged for a voyeur, with Leslie pocketing the money. (Why does the most popular model in New York need an illicit side job, anyway? Shut up, that's why!) And Leslie is all for doing it again, this time giving Johnny and Rudy a cut. Johnny has moral reservations, but not enough to bail, even as his career really starts to take off. (If you think this seems ironically like Thompson's real-life experience, stop over-analyzing now.)

Naturally, it all goes bad, with professional jealousies and obsessive voyeurs who want to do more than watch all playing out predictably. There's also a bit more skin: a staged "rape" scene for one of the voyeuristic clients, another three-way interspersed in the middle of a montage, etc. But it's all pretty tedious stuff.

Did I mention all of this is told in a flashback from the back of an ambulance where Johnny, injured and possibly dying, and Leslie reminisce about how they met and fell in love? No? Well it is.

The sex scenes are the least embarrassing thing about Manhattan Gigolo. They come off well compared to everything else. Even with all the terrible acting surrounding her, Thompson seems especially bad. She is emotionless to the point of seeming constantly dazed, and, adding insult to injury, her voice is dubbed by someone else.

But to cut her some slack, this was her first film and she was probably the only native English speaker on the set. No wonder "confused" is a charitable description of her screen presence.

Thompson was much better on Babylon 5 — and reading the news on TV, for that matter.