Madeleine, Study of a Nightmare (1974)

Title		Madeleine, anatomia di un incubo
Origin		Italy, 1974
Genre		Drama: Psychodrama
Director		Roberto Mauri
Starring		Camille Keaton, Riccardo Salvino, Paola Senatore
Music		Maurizio Vandelli
Blurb		-

My favourite horror babe Camille Keaton stars in this psychological drama from Italy. Not a lot is known about this title, but the fact that Camille is in it and it has something to do with witches was more than enough to pique my interest.

Entrusted with the lead role of Madeleine, Camille is going to have to change her trademark sleepwalking style and actually do some acting to sustain this one. It simply won't do to just stand there while everyone around her wonders whether she's fallen unconscious or not.

We find Madeleine alone in the countryside sitting by a quiet pond. Is she awake? It would appear so as she seems to be doing some sewing but the picture is so poor it's hard to tell. As it is soon revealed that Madeleine is pregnant it's a safe bet that she's sewing (or knitting) baby clothes.

A promising beginning? Certainly it's a tranquil one, but how is the story to develop? Will Madeleine fall in that murky pond full of weeds and get a drenching? That would be horrendous - think of the laundry bills! But that's hardly going to be enough to sustain an hour and a half of drama. Though there could be a sub-plot where Madeleine removes her damp dress and underwear to dry, only to have them stolen by a clothes thief. Madeleine gives chase - completely in the nude!

But such sleazy speculation has no place here, for with director Roberto Mauri we are in the hands of a sophisticate. No cheap exploitation for him, this is psychodrama. Featuring the wealthiest Italian jet-setters, wearing the latest fashions in clothes, drinking the finest wines, and smoking the most expensive brands of fags. But don't worry if slumped there in your boxers with a bottle of White Lightning and packet of Rizlas you're feeling out of place. This is cinema, and everyone is welcome.

It turns out Mauri didn't use my suggestion about Madeleine's soaking wet clothes after all. He thought of something better! What's that cackling she can hear in the reeds? Madeleine is in the bad-books of a menacing pack of witches! Soon she's running for her life through the dark and misty woods. This sequence is rather silly but atmospheric and quite well done overall. They're an odd bunch of witches, with dayglo perms and costumes that appear to have been sewn together out of binliners. Certain clues lead us to suspect that this is only a dream (slow-motion, "nightmare" in the title, there's no such thing as witches etc.). If we accept the strict Freudian interpretation that dream imagery, no matter how terrifying and unwelcome, always represents the actual repressed desires of the dreamer, then it must be that Madeleine wants to hit people with sticks and set them on fire. Can't wait!

Madeleine wakes up screaming. Shall we call the ambulance for the mental hospital right now? Better play it safe and give it five minutes because at this point to my frustration the screenwriter decided to forget everything that just happened and have the story be about something else entirely. Or at least that's how it seems. At first nothing in the dream relates to Madeleine's real life. She's not pregnant for a start, and has no children. She is lying on a sun-lounger by the swimming pool of a hyper-modern (and hyper-expensive I'll bet) villa. There is a man of about forty years of age lying beside her. He raises his head a few degrees and expresses mild interest in the fact that Madeleine has just screamed the place down.

Who is this man? I can tell you he is played by Silvano Tranquilli and his character's name is Franz Schuman. He likes to read weighty tracts obviously of a psychological nature (cf. Sexual Aberrations in the Criminal Female in Hitchcock's Marnie). His body language conveys authority and proprietorship. Displease him and he looks absolute daggers at you (as if he was about to draw a stiletto - I was quite intimidated). Franz likes to observe, but is taciturn and distant. So distant that at one point he even blinks instantaneously out of existence, leading us to ask questions such as "what the bloody hell was that all about then??"

But what of his relationship to Madeleine? Is he husband, lover, father or boss? I've got to admit here that I do not speak Italian and a lack of subtitles meant I did not quite understand what was going on. Though this is often a serious drawback, in the right circumstances a lack of comprehensibility can make a story and its characters all the more fascinating.

Meanwhile, it appears that Madeleine is free to do absolutely whatever she wants. She drives into town in her nifty British roadster, and picks up a hitch-hiking hippy along the way. His name is Tomas, he's from Switzerland, and he stares at Madeleine's legs. The pair arrive back at the villa without incident (I'm amazed Camille could get insurance to drive that thing).

Madeleine proves herself the purest of playgirls by inviting Tomas for a swim - all in the nude! Or could this just be a ruse to make sure the hippy took a bath before allowing him indoors? (The swimming pool by the way would surely be the star of the show if Camille wasn't in it. It's massive, and the water the deepest of blues. The villa is splendid too, part traditional-style African grass huts, part Seventies steel and glass modernism.) But what is Franz going to think of all this carrying-on? Hmm.

Now we know a little more about her I'm going to advance the theory that Madeleine is an international jewel thief, and Franz is a retired Mafioso who blackmailed her into a loveless marriage. As good a theory as any, and I'm going to keep with it until definitive evidence turns up against it.

Madeleine gets herself another boyfriend called Luis (Riccardo Salvino). He's a racing driver (a dangerous sport that). He's also a lot of fun. But if he insists on games of badminton so close to the pool he's going to end up playing with a very damp shuttlecock! So how about horse riding along the beach without any shirts on? I wasn't quite ready to watch that game, but it was spectacular! But hang on, Luis seems to be involved with Franz in some way, presumably his son. So according to my theory he is messing around with his own step-mother, who is younger than he is. The jewel thief / marriage hypothesis is beginning to look shaky already.

So basically not an awful lot is happening here, and to be honest it is a bit boring. I filled in the time just wondering what mode of transportation pampered playgirl Madeleine would utilise next, and whether or not she would do it topless (eg. Speedboat: Yes).

On to the only real event of the film, the formal party at the villa. This is very swish, very sophisticated. The absolute epitome of jet-set. (The only slight faux pas in the arrangements is the cheap joke of leaving around saucers of burning cooking fat in the hope that some hippy will brush its flares against them and set them on fire.) But the more exclusive the gathering the greater the opportunity for social disgrace. And, in a certain type of film, social disgrace is the sole reason for staging these parties in the first place. So which of the ladies is up for the drunken striptease? Or will she go one better and urinate standing up where everyone can see?

At the party Madeleine, the playgirl now in the social glare turning to something of a wallflower, meets a beautiful young woman (Paola Senatore). The way these two first encounter each other is classic, exchanging silent glances as the couples weave towards and away from each other on the dancefloor. For me this is the most haunting and memorable scene in the film. Things are beginning to fit together in a subtle and mysterious way. And so we leave the story to slowly make its way to a resolution that is satisfying and suitably surprising. Or at least I get the impression it would be if only you could understand what people are saying.

It's difficult to evaluate a work like Madeleine. It has pretentions to be more than a typical genre drama, and the scenes of gratuitous nudity stop comfortably short of soft porn. I enjoyed the atmosphere of mystery and the way that events unfolded so subtly. Obviously not a lot of money was available to spend on it (and most of it went on entertaining the director's friends at that party scene by the looks of it). The sun-drenched photography often looks lovely even on my degraded copy. The modernistic score by Maurizio Vandelli sounds like it could have been recycled from Ennio Morricone's wastepaper basket. It follows the traditional Italian style of repeating the same couple of themes ad nauseum, but serves its function of establishing and maintaining a consistent dreamlike mood. And as for Camille Keaton's acting in the leading role - well, she doesn't need to act, she just is.

Overall Madeleine is almost a piece of social archaeology, recovering the most uninhibited dreams and aspirations of people from a distant time and place. I was strangely fascinated and very glad I took this trip backwards in time.

Clips

Madeleine the Playgirl
A Camille Keaton collection.

Download clip (Rapidshare)
(2:31 min, 384 x 288, 17.2MB)

 

Paola at the Party
Good-time girls getting it on.

Download clip (Rapidshare)
(3:23 min, 384 x 288, 23.6MB)

 

Ratings

Quality: 5/10   Fun: 7/10

Review copy

Publisher		Unlicensed
Format		DVD Region 0, PAL 4:3 (1.85:1 letterbox, sidecropped from 2.35:1)
Certificate		-
Image		Very poor sub-VHS

Sex of the Witch (1973)

Title	Il sesso della strega
Origin	Italy, 1973
Genre	Giallo
Director	Elo Pannacciò
Starring	Susanna Levi, Camille Keaton, Franco Garofalo
Music	Daniele Patucchi
Blurb	-

Angelo Pannacciò is one of the more obscure Italian directors, but any Euro-cult fan who sees his film Cries and Shadows will soon want to see another one. And here is another one, Sex of the Witch, made the previous year. Though superficially sharing a theme with The Shad (a bizarre melting pot of teenage possession and supernatural lesbian rape) this title largely eschews horror for more traditional giallo territory.

We start off with a priest being chauffeured through the Italian countryside. Is he going to an exorcism? I hope so. The accompanying laconically jangling theme tune is engaging if rather incongruous. And when the director's credit appears he's the only one to have his name in that big chunky "cake-slice" Seventies typeface. Things are looking promising.

Well, it turns out it wasn't an exorcism after all. The priest arrives at the mansion of Sir Thomas Hilton to administer the last rites as the patriarch lies upon his deathbed. Surrounded by his extended family of nephews and nieces, his consciousness slowly fading, Sir Thomas muses upon his life, and the callow generation that will succeed him.

Impotently he rails against their shallow morals, their alienation from their past, and the hopelessness of their future (Pannacciò has an inexplicable penchant for lengthy sermonising in his screenplays). Typical sentiments of the older generation these may be, but in this case he demonstrably has a point. Even as these thoughts pass through his mind the manservant and the maid are attempting to copulate in the very mausoleum into which his body will soon be entombed!

So to the reading of the will, and here we have an old-fashioned Christie-esque motive for murder. The Hilton patrimony is to be distributed amongst his descendants (apart from the pointedly disinherited daughter Evelyn, and in addition to the family lawyer Boskin, to everyone's disgust), each receiving an equal share of the remaining family fortune as they attain the age of thirty. Given time to reflect on the implications, anyone of the age of, ooh say twenty-nine years and ten months, may start to see their future as rather uncertain.

The youngsters of this family seem unpromising as prospective killers. Not one of this litter of neurasthenics and consumptives looks capable of bludgeoning anyone to death without having an asthma attack and having to go home. Nevertheless, a murder is soon committed, and a detective is called in to investigate.

What about the other suspects? Aunt Evelyn (Jessica Dublin) for example? It's always a bad sign to be called Evelyn in an Italian film, and given that furthermore she runs a herbal medicine shop in a film with "witch" in the title, it's as well to monitor her activities very closely.

Then there's the lawyer Boskin (Gianni Dei), according to the cousins a homosexual, despite plenty of evidence to the contrary. And the wonderfully shifty, golfball-eyed manservant Tony (Franco Garofalo) who seems to spend his entire working day trying to get inside the maid's saucy knickers, not without success. Finally, being ready-primed for silliness, we mustn't overlook the animal kingdom, the family having recently acquired a large and vicious-looking dog.

Largely unperturbed by the violent death of one of their number, the brothers, sisters and cousins go about their business (whatever that is, as none of this bunch appears to have a job), and lazily pursue romantic entanglements within and around the ancient decaying Hilton mansion in the sunny Worcestershire countryside (clearly the part of Worcestershire known as "Little Italy", due to its Mediterranean climate and the preponderance of Fiats and Alfas on the roads - at this time Italian cinema often still pretended, for obscure reasons, that its thrillers were set in England, even if as in this case it meant no more than changing the names and featuring the occasional right-hand drive vehicle).

The most notable member of the cast is Camille Keaton, playing Ann, the shy, withdrawn, and dare I say it slightly tapped, family beauty. As usual Camille sleepwalks through the role in the most adorable fashion. Occasionally she speaks a few words, and these are accepted as being appropriate to the situation.

All the while the atmosphere is low-key and dreamy. The camera often keeps its distance, allowing the characters to open up as if unprompted. Opportunities for relatively restrained scenes of nudity are never missed. The typically repetitive but infectious keyboard score is sometimes light, sometimes tense, and strangely effective as a coherent whole. And director Pannacciò proceeds with all the confidence one would expect of an 'Elo Antonioni.

Which would be all very well if he wasn't in fact a complete hack, happy to stoop so low as to splice in a nightclub scene from a completely different film in the expectation that we won't notice, or at least won't care. The cast can barely act, the dialogue is banal, and the ideas dim-witted. The production design is of amateur dramatics standard, with only the family mausoleum being an impressive original location.

But only a select contemporary audience chooses to follow cinema like this. Such pretention and incompetence is what we expect, even hope for, and it is good.

So how is this story to move along? The detective (Donald O'Brien) is of the standard-issue clueless giallo type, only there to summarise the plot and stir things up a little by arresting the wrong person.

Plot points are introduced absolutely at random. Strangers are continually turning up at the door and being admitted to the house without declaring their business or even stating their name. It is revealed that Sir Thomas made a breakthrough in genetic engineering so startlingly revolutionary that only the most far-seeing of science fiction writers would dare to contemplate it. The police inspector remarks that this was very clever of him.

And then Boskin broaches a delicate subject with Susan (Susanna Levi), the only member of the family with her head remotely together. Apparently, when she was a child, Aunt Evelyn injured her in an intimate area, leaving a scar. Casually dropped in, seemingly innocuous, this comes across as a real kink. It's even relevant to the storyline and not, as one reviewer who ought to know better suggested, just an excuse to watch Susan fondling her breasts in the mirror!

More than this I will not reveal, except to note that the resolution of the plot is even more ridiculous than I ever dreamt it could be, and that it is all wrapped up with a coda that is as delightful as it is outlandish. I enjoyed it a lot.

Clip for download

A montage to set the scene, including some nudity. Note that we see the killer's face surprisingly early. This isn't the spoiler it appears to be as the revelation leaves us none the wiser.

http://rapidshare.com/files/235057255/Camille-Keaton-in-Sex-of-the-Witch-1.avi
(5:16 minutes, 368x208, 21.6MB)

Ratings

Quality: 3/10   Fun: 8/10

Review copy

Publisher	Unlicensed
Format	DVD, PAL 4:3 (2.35:1 letterbox)
Certificate	VM 18 (Italy)
Image	Sub-sub VHS, ragged border, but watchable. Italian language with good fan subtitles.