Death Carries a Cane (1973)

What do film characters do when they’re not onscreen?  I’m not talking about the sort of people that populate sensitive dramas.  We can guess what they do, because it’s probably the same as us.  I’m thinking of bad guys, mostly: gangsters, monsters, slashers, ad infinitum.  When they’re not busy fitting the generic needs of a pick-me-up for the film they’re in, what are they doing?  Are they bogged down in the minutiae of moment-to-moment life like we are?  What did the Xenomorph in Alien do with his time when he wasn’t jamming his inner jaw through the skulls of the Nostromo’s crew?  Sleep?  Read a good book?  Suffer bouts of existential dread?  It’s the same with human baddies.  We typically enter on a scene where they’re already set up in a quasi-tableau: Hanging around the boss’ office, standing menacingly behind the boss, and so on.  Very rarely do we see them balancing their checkbook, washing their underwear, etcetera.  

These characters are not intended to have lives outside of those specifically portrayed on the screen.  Even when they talk about what they’ve been doing elsewhere, it doesn’t feel like anything touching reality.  It’s the character speaking as the character.  It doesn’t matter how colorful, or well-rounded, or logically motivated they are, these guys exist solely to function as antagonists.  We’re not supposed to think about what they’re doing when we don’t see them.  We’re meant to be involved with how the protagonists are engaged.  But I can’t help it.  I find myself thinking often of what banal tasks Jason Voorhees is getting up to offscreen.  He can’t stare at his mother’s mummified head all the time, after all.  This doesn’t mean that I want to see films based on this concept, per se (I think Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon pretty much covered this base sufficiently).  All that would mean is my wandering mind would instead focus on the good guys in the same capacity.  It’s like going to the bathroom.  How many movies have we seen where characters wake up somewhere and immediately spring out of bed and get moving without obeying nature’s call first?  Yes, there are reasons for not showing us this.  It’s just one of those things that occurs to me, the same, I’m sure, as the fact that most handguns don’t hold an infinite number of bullets occurs to gun enthusiasts.  Maurizio Pradeaux’s Death Carries a Cane (aka Passi Di Danza Su Una Lama Di Rasoio aka Maniac at Large aka The Tormentor aka Trauma aka Devil Blade) partially satisfies this obsession of mine by not only giving its heroine a nervous bladder (“I’ve gotta go pee pee!”) but also using this to instigate the action of the finale (yes, really, kind of).

While waiting for her fiancée Alberto (Robert Hoffmann) to show up and see off her relatives, Kitty (Nieves Navarro aka Susan Scott) glimpses a woman being murdered through an observation telescope.  Next thing she knows, witnesses are dropping like flies, and everyone takes a poke at playing red herring.

It’s no stretch to imagine that Death Carries a Cane is heavily concerned with The Gaze.  Not just the Male Gaze, though that’s a large part of it, but also the simple act of looking and how this affects the characters.  The opening titles are shot through an observation telescope as two horny guys completely miss the point of the instrument and wind up looking at just about everything except women (until the credits end, that is).  Kitty gets involved with the plot by accident, but she was still eager to look through the telescope, so The Gaze’s influence is felt on her, as well.  Similar to Hitchcock’s Rear Window, Kitty follows her desire to see what’s going on around her, observing without being observed, playing voyeur and suffering the consequences.  The Gaze has a price.  

Kitty and Alberto make and photograph blank-faced dummies that they stab and tear apart as part of their art.  The dummies replace real bodies, obviously, and the act of photographing them in “death” speaks to the loss of self and autonomy which comes from being the subject of The Gaze.  Also playing into this idea, Alberto takes naked pics of Kitty while she sleeps.  There is a focus on eyes with a great many closeups to drive the point home.  These are usually done in tandem with POV shots.  For example, when the killer visits the lowly chestnut vendor’s house, we watch through a cruddy window as the man eats his evening spaghetti (with a spoon!).  The camera tracks in on the vendor’s eyes as he looks out at us in Direct Address (this is external to the POV shots as its not handheld, if memory serves, though it goes to The Gaze on both sides, as viewer and viewed).  Of course, this wouldn’t be a giallo without a lot of female nudity, and the filmmakers serve it up often, playing to the prurient interest of the audience’s Gaze (as is often the case, the sex scenes don’t quite fit outside of being sex scenes for a movie; for example, Kitty has sex with Alberto immediately after he catches her trying to leave because he makes her nervous).

Every suspect in Death Carries a Cane has an infirmity.  Alberto has a sprained ankle.  Musician Marco (Simón Andreu) is impotent.  Silvia (Anuska Borova), twin sister to Marco’s girlfriend Lidia (also Borova), uses a cane.  Naturally, this is so that we have different characters on which to cast suspicion.  It also points to the damaged psyche of the killer, as he/she is crippled inside and out.  

Pradeaux’s film hues closely to the rules of gialli, with plenty of stylish, bloody murders (using more handheld camera than I’m used to with these types of films, although the set pieces are nicely orchestrated, by and large), some titillation (without somehow feeling totally sleazy), and an end reveal that comes so far out of left field you really have to consider if it was improvised on the day of shooting.  The film doesn’t rise above the crowd, though it’s solid enough in its group.  The thing that hurts it the most, in my opinion, is its choppy editing.  Its cuts are jagged, not meshing and flowing, and there is always the possibility that this was intentional in the same way that its extensive use of handheld was.  Maybe the two were meant to go hand in hand in an effort to create an off-kilter atmosphere.  Unfortunately, the discordance is discursive.  Not enough to make Death Carries a Cane a failure (as a giallo or otherwise), but enough to make it a lesser film with sparkles of greatness in it.

MVT:  Pradeaux’s ambition is on display, and he is to be applauded for the attempt.

Make or Break:  The witnessing of the initial murder does a nice job of inciting the plot and opening a proverbial can of worms.

Score:  6.75/10              

Crystalbrain (1970)

Sir Cliffton Reynolds (or maybe Reynold Cliffton according to the subtitles I had, but either way he’s played by Eduardo Fajardo) is a London judge plagued with intense headaches of late.  Dr. Chalmers (Frank Wolff) tells Cliff that he has about six months left to live, but the good doctor also has a possible solution.  Chalmers suggests that what Cliff needs is a new brain, comparing his proposed procedure to the transplanting of primate hearts into humans.  Cue Ginetto Lamberti (Simón Andreu), a working man who currently lies dying in the street, but whose brain is in perfect (this is subjective) working order.  But will this transplant prove to be a transmigration of Ginetto’s soul, or just an excuse for Cliff to go insane?

Juan Logar’s Crystalbrain (aka L’uomo Dal Cervello Di Cristallo aka Trasplante De Un Cerebro) is an amalgamation of genres.  It owes as much to gialli as it does to science fiction, as it does to psychothrillers, as it does to horror.  What it harks back specifically to, however, is the classic The Hands of Orlac and its profligate progeny.  The earlier story concerns a pianist who has the hands of a murderer grafted onto his arms, and the “influence” the hands begin to exert on his psyche.  This conceit, that a foreign body part introduced onto/into a “normal” person having a deleterious effect, is an intriguing one.  It plays both as a straight horror paradigm and as an investigation of pure human nature.  Most people like to think that they are, at heart, good.  But what if you were given an excuse to unleash your id, to behave in a way antithetical to your public personality?  Characters in these types of stories believe so deeply that their transplants have power, they allow their personae to transform, and rarely for the better.  Their darkest aspects rise to the forefront.  Many times, they become obsessed with discovering why their transplant died or with taking revenge on those who killed them.  Who, then, is the true personality?  The one who existed before the operation or the one who was created afterward?  Was one just masking the other?  Cliff appears to be a decent person before his procedure.  He believes that “justice balances right and wrong.”  He loves his wife Susan (Nuria Torray) and his brother Peter (Angel del Pozo).  While he doesn’t turn evil after the transplant, Cliff certainly becomes more than a little unhinged.  One way to look at the ensuing events in his life is that his sense of morality intensifies and drives him to find closure in the name of Ginetto by appropriating the Italian fisherman’s psyche.

In this same way, there is the notion that transplants actually do have power over the transplantee.  In these cases, the fantastic element raises issues of identity and loss of same, perhaps even more than looking at it through a purely psychological lens.  The introduction of organs not our own suggests an invasion of our body (in fact, that’s exactly what it is), an attack on who we are.  The invader is usually malignant in nature and more powerful than the host body.  The transplant typically proceeds in wreaking havoc on the transplantee’s life and loved ones, and there is nothing the weaker of the two can do because, through the process of the transplant, they are, by definition, no longer wholly themselves.  Their identity is no longer their own because their bodies are no longer their own, strictly speaking.  In Crystalbrain, this idea is a bit easier to believe because the human brain is the whole of our conscious being.  Our hands may be adept at a certain skill, but that’s because our mind has trained them to be so.  Naturally, this trope also implies in some way that muscle memory goes further than being the unconscious ability to perform constantly repeated tasks.  Here, pieces of the donor contain the active personality (or aspects of the personality) of the donor.  The transplantee, being in a weakened state, is possessed through these parts.  It’s a bit like The Thing in that every piece of a donor contains the whole of him/herself.  

We, as an audience, may or may not buy any of this under normal circumstances.  A hand or a kidney is truly nothing more than a machine (or a part of a machine) without a power source.  Nonetheless, the big question that comes up in this film is how does Chalmers not consider that Cliff’s personality would be completely changed by his operation?  When questioned about this (“Do you think it’s morally responsible to destroy a soul to heal a body?”), he simply states that doctors have to stave off death whenever they can.  But he’s not saving Cliff’s life.  If anything, he’s saving Ginetto’s life by giving him Cliff’s body.  What the hell kind of medical professional do you have to be to not understand that?  The only way to explain it is that Chalmers believes that our psyche (or here, our “soul”) resides in our whole body, not just in our skulls (and he’s supposedly a man of science).  Frankly, he never should have been given a medical license, but what can you do?  

Logar and company deal with the disparate personalities of Cliff and Ginetto in a stylistically interesting way.  During Cliff’s surgery, he flashes back to the many people on whom he has passed judgment, and they each appear in double exposure alongside Cliff as he pronounces sentence.  They are voiceless; Cliff is in power, and his sense of justice is secure.  Later, when Cliff visits the cemetery where Ginetto’s body is buried, he envisions a series of people who are directly in his and Ginetto’s lives (Chalmers, Susan, Ginetto himself, et cetera), again in double exposure, and they all call out to him.  They are now tormenting Cliff.  He is no longer in control of his life or his being, but justice must still be served.  The duality of Cliff and Ginetto is tied together in this simple way, and I felt it was fairly successful.  

The editing of the film is also fragmented.  Time and space change in a heartbeat with little to no establishment of what’s going on or when these events take place.  Like the Crystalbrain of the title, not only is Cliff’s mind fragile, ready to be shattered, but the cinematic world these characters inhabit is equally splintered.  It’s an off-kilter approach, and it reflects what Cliff is going through.  He’s uncertain of who he is (right up until he’s certain, yet even then…).  His mind is unreliable, and the film’s construction is equally untrustworthy (although, as with so many foreign films of this ilk and time period, we can’t be completely certain how many editors’ hands this passed through), forcing us to fill in blanks and play catch up; essentially placing us in the protagonist’s shoes to some small degree or another.  Admittedly, the film is headscratching in its logic, and Cliff acts in a manner easy to disbelieve, even with all that’s happening to him.  It treats its supporting characters like props more than people, and I think this robs the film of the impact it may have had.  Even at eighty-five minutes, the story is not particularly well-paced, either.  And yet, it stands out among its peers, even if only as a curiosity rather than a revelation.

MVT:  The approach to the narrative is distinctive and interesting, and I would guess that the filmmakers at least tried to tell their story in a unique fashion.

Make or Break:  The scene in the cemetery, where Cliff (or Ginetto, depending on your perspective) hallucinates (or does he?).

Score:  6.5/10