TINTO BRASS 60'S PSYCHEDELIC CLASSICS

DEADLY SWEET
(COL CUORE IN GOLA)

Deadly Sweet confounds all expectations, including, most likely, the expectations of its makers.

Tinto Brass had begun his career as a peculiar sort of impressionistic documentarian and had also made a strikingly original piece of semi-realism. On the strength of his work, he was hired to direct two comedies and a western, which all proved successful. In 1967 Panda Films took note of this promising young filmmaker. Panda was a poverty-row studio in Italy that had made only a few “quickies” and now wished to enhance its reputation with classier works by several top-notch filmmakers. To this end, the studio entered into a coproduction agreement with French company Corona, and together they wished to replicate an old success story. They remembered that eight years earlier a novice filmmaker by the name of Jean-Luc Godard, with nearly no money, had made a gangster picture called Breathless, whose fresh twists on the old clichés resulted in a surprise hit. With this in mind, they licensed the rights to The Paper Tomb, a crime novel by Sergio Donati, convinced that Brass could use it as the basis for a quirky movie.

Brass was not a fan of crime thrillers, but he gleefully accepted the job, knowing that he could indeed do something special with it. He brought in writers Pierre Lévy-Corti and Franco Longo to help with the script, and, more importantly, he brought in famous cartoonist Guido Crepax to draw the story boards and to create the art work seen on screen.

Crepax was one of the earliest comic artists to utilize sophisticated, angular, and complex images, and he had proved that the crime thriller could be done as pop art. He borrowed from film grammar as well: his images were composed as a director and cinematographer might block them out. An image that would be a quick snippet on screen he would display as a small frame that the eye would quickly pass over. An image that in a film would be held on screen as a lengthy shot he would display as a large frame that dominated the other images on the page. Crepax was best known for his series of sumptuous hardcover comic books featuring a character he called Valentina, which were, for the time, almost scandalously sexual and violent. By hiring this cartoonist, Brass completed the circle by having his film conform to Crepax's new comic style. Can it be said that these two artists founded the new, short-lived genre that came to be known as cinema fumetto (comic-book cinema)? Perhaps, though there was definitely something in the air at the time. Mario Bava was preparing his film of a comic strip called Diabolik and Roger Vadim was soon to embark upon a film of a comic strip called Barbarella, while Serge Gainsbourg and Brigitte Bardot were working on a song called “Comic Strip,” which they turned into a two-minute pop-art film.

Brass followed Crepax's illustrations literally. He masked the screen image to resemble comic frames, broke frames into panels, added exclamatory bubbles (SLAM, OUCH, BWING), and mimicked Crepax's editing style so wildly that the budget and schedule could not allow for proper negative cutting. The result is that several short sequences are dupes of the work prints, filled with splicing tape.

Brass referenced Godard to good effect, which surely pleased his producers, but he also paid homage to Stan Lee comics, Mad magazine, Michelangelo Antonioni, and the Royal Shakespeare Company's current production of Marat/Sade, among other cultural phenomena.

To play the lead role Brass chose Jean-Louis Trintignant, a well-known French stage actor who had recently scored a movie hit with A Man and a Woman. For the female lead Brass accepted a suggestion that he choose Miss Teen Sweden 1965, the 17-year-old Ewa Aulin, who had appeared in only two films. Despite her lack of experience, she was a natural and played her unusual part with surprising credibility.

Brass and his collaborators streamlined Sergio Donati's basic story to near-nothingness. Wishing not to be under the thumb of his producers, Brass switched the locale from Italy to swinging London and moved to a flat on Cadogan Place to imbue himself with the atmosphere that he found so exhilarating. To help with the feeling of spontaneity, Brass and his crew hid the cameras and had the actors perform their scenes in actual crowds. Sometimes the cameras were not so hidden, and if we pay attention we can see passers-by stop in wonderment at the discovery of a film crew pointing their equipment right at them.

Trivia fanciers will likely do a double-take when they take a close look at Jelly-Roll's bodyguard, who receives no screen credit. He is David Prowse, later to figure more prominently as Julian the bodyguard in A Clockwork Orange and as Darth Vader in Star Wars.

Brass had announced the film as Heart in His Mouth - and so with an English title, a primarily English cast, and an on-location shoot in England, it was reasonable that the bulk of the film was shot in English. Indeed, a few portions of the film were even shot in direct sound, though Trintignant spoke French and was dubbed. But since Vira Silenti (Martha Burroughs) and Luigi Bellini (the heavy) spoke Italian, it is also reasonable that the Italian version is sometimes considered the original, and it was only the Italian edition that was made available to Cult Epics, as full-length copies of the English version cannot now be located. (If you can locate a copy, please contact us.) One interesting difference between the two is that in the Italian version Luigi Bellini's character is never referred to by name; whereas in the English version he is called Jelly-Roll, an appellation that fit him perfectly. The Italian release retained the original title in translation, Col cuore in gola. When the movie was shown in Belgium the title was changed to Dead Stop. The French edition was En cinquième vitesse (In Fifth Speed), the German edition was Ich Bin Wie Ich Bin (I Am What I Am), and other releases elsewhere changed the title numerous other ways, but never has the film been released under its original English title of Heart in His Mouth.

For the record, filming began on March 27, 1967, and the movie received its world première, in its Italian dub, at the Venice Film Festival on September 8 of that year and was released in Italy two months afterwards, on November 16. The English version, retitled Deadly Sweet and inexplicably awarded an X rating by the MPAA, received its US première more than two years later, on Wednesday, March 11, 1970, at the Paramount Theatre in Oakland, California. It played for one week double billed with another X-rated movie, The Minx. There were no display ads and no reviews, only a small line in the movie listings. This was a test screening and the planned release was scrapped.

Deadly Sweet is a record of a time, and those of us who are feeling nostalgic will feel an especial fondness for this movie. The countless references to Hollywood movie stars of the 1940s, to B movies, to pop and mod culture, to the works of the French New Wave, and to various modern artists defy any strict logic, and it is unsurprising that some critics dismissed this movie with such phrases as “a fatuous twiddling about 'being with it.' ” Brass' longtime friend, the famous novelist Alberto Moravia, had a more perceptive comment when he said that he recognized the signifiers in the film, but could not understand what they were signifying! More positively, several of the younger generation of filmmakers, notably Joe Dante and Quentin Tarantino, have recently championed Deadly Sweet as an influential masterwork and scheduled a special retrospective session for it at the Venice Film Festival.

ATTRACTION
(Nerosubianco, a/k/a Black on White)

From its beginnings, film and music had been joined inextricably. Silent movies would be unthinkable without live musical accompaniment, and some of the earliest sound films from the 1890s consisted of singers. Musical revues such as King of Jazz (1930) had occasional abstract visuals accompany songs. In the 1950s and early 1960s Ernie Kovacs filled TV time with kaleidoscopes and absurd visuals set to pre-recorded music, while at the same time experimental filmmaker Bruce Conner added songs to accompany random stock footage. But it can well be argued that Nerosubianco established the rules for the music videos that came into being a decade or so later.

After four years of accepting assignments, Tinto Brass was ready to do something of his own. With his new flat on Cadogan Place as his London base, he convinced producer Dino De Laurentiis to give him free reign to improvise an impressionistic film, which he would call Nerosubianco, whose English rendering, Black on White, loses the pun. Brass felt hampered by cinematic conventions and was frustrated by their distancing effect upon audiences. Films had no passion, and audiences simply went to the movies as a casual pastime. Brass noted that audiences were no more inspired by a screening of a film than they would be by staring at a blank screen. He was desperate to arouse people out of their complacency and decided that the best way to do that would be by shock value.

By October 1967, when shooting began, censor codes had largely broken down, and nudity was increasingly permitted, along with sexual subject matter. Brass decided to take full advantage of this new situation. Not only would the film be sexual, it would concern a married woman being tempted by the idea of adultery, which was still illegal in many places. But that would not be enough, he felt. At the time, romances between people of different skin complexions were widely regarded with horror and in many places were against the law. That decided the issue: the married woman would be attracted to an African-American man. Such a formula was guaranteed to get a reaction. Curious about Sweden's new reputation as being sexually liberated, Brass decided to cast Swedish actress Anita Sanders as the lead. She had appeared in only a few films and was not well known, but Brass admired her for her ease with displaying her body. As the object of her daydreams, Brass cast Terry Carter, an American actor who had come to some fame as Private “Sugie” Sugerman on the 1950s TV series, The Phil Silvers Show: You'll Never Get Rich (later syndicated as Sergeant Bilko). In the mid-1960s he became the first Black newscaster on American television, and in 1967 while summering in Italy with his Italian wife, he happened to meet Tinto Brass, who then sent him an invitation to appear in a movie in London. Carter took a leave of absence from Boston's WBZ-TV to accept the gig. Conveniently, he could communicate with the crew because he spoke their language fluently. He found the experience of making this movie so energizing that he abandoned his newscasting career and returned to acting, most famously in the TV series McCloud and Battlestar Galactica.

Brass decided that Nerosubianco would be an updated remake of his 1963 film, To the Ends of the Earth, but this time from a feminine perspective. He kept only a few basic structural ideas from that earlier work: the lead character would be a nonconformist who would wander the streets and fill the soundtrack with a voice-over of stream-of-consciousness narration. That's where the similarities ended. The older film had a strong narrative and was emotionally compelling. The new film would be devoid of plot and would be abstract, seemingly constructed of dreams within dreams within dreams.

To give cohesion to the fragmentary and often bizarre imagery, Brass decided he needed musicians. A well-respected group called Procol Harum had just fired three of its members, guitarist Ray Royer, percussionist Bobby Harrison, and manager Jonathan Weston. Classically trained, the three men felt less and less comfortable in the rock world, for they had little patience with pop-music culture's publicity gimmicks and commercialism. The need for income, though, outweighed idealism, and to escape unemployment they considered forming a group of their own, which they would name Freedom, in honor of the Charles Mingus piece, and they quickly hired singer Steve Shirley and keyboardist Mike Lease to join them. Before Freedom had composed even a single measure of music, Tinto Brass hired them, blindly, to compose the score for his new film. He explained the themes and ideas he needed, and simply turned the musicians loose in a flat in Mayfair, where, using only a monaural 1/4" tape recorder, they recorded 14 psychedelic-rock songs over the course of two months. It is surprising that well-trained musicians performed in such an unrefined manner as Freedom, and yet these 14 songs have a strange sort of appeal that overcomes their technical clumsiness.

Further to round out the unusual cast, Brass unexpectedly brought along the famous psychologist Umberto Di Grazia, founder of the Istituto di Ricerca della Coscienza, to conduct some research on camera, but the research was pure fantasy, edited into dreamlike abstraction, and leading to more stream-of-consciousness. Further to disorient viewers is a fleeting glimpse of fashion reporter Janet Street Porter as the hairdressers' assistant.

Impressed by the enormous contribution he had made to Deadly Sweet, Brass again hired cartoonist Guido Crepax to draw some storyboards and also to do some original art work that would be exhibited in the film. This art work fit in perfectly with the imagery found around the London of the day, which was then in thrall to the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Frank Zappa, and all manner of pop art, which frequently fills the screen, as does some imagery from pop art's precursor, Hieronymous Bosch. Many other images derive from newsreels, older films, Etienne-Jules Marey's experiments, footage made by scientific laboratories, and, most strikingly, Salvador Dalí's concept of eyeball slicing from Luis Buñuel's Un chien andalou. There is another odd bit of imagery as well, which goes by so quickly it is almost impossible to see: Anita Sanders opens Chairman Mao's little red book, only to discover that it is an English translation of Jean-Luc Godard's script of La Chinoise!

Tinto Brass and Franco Longo worked together to create an elaborate script, filled from beginning to end with highly detailed descriptions of impressionistic imagery: “The opening images are very lyrical and somewhat abstract - quick panoramic shots of sea, sky, trees, and meadows. Superimposed over these images are stroboscopic images of spermatazoa in their frantic race to the ovum.” They never filmed the script. Instead, Brass would call his crew together before daylight and they would wander about in their van looking for interesting locations. When they found a spot they thought they could put to good use, they set up cameras and audio recorders in the pre-dawn hours and would then improvise scenes, none of which demanded strong acting talent, but all of which demanded precise blocking and staging. Cast and crew all agreed that, should law enforcement question them, they would claim to be Italian documentarians, which, in a sense, was true. People in the streets were caught on camera and some were pressed into service, and various passers-by recorded improvised (spontaneous?) lines on tape. Much of the filming was miked, and the intention was to use this direct sound in the final film. (This was so effective that even in the Italian version much of the English dialogue was retained - without subtitles!) Since this movie used documentary techniques to present real people and real events, it was necessary to expose an enormous amount of film in order to capture a sufficient number of usable images. This led Brass to confess that his new purpose in life was to consume as much film as possible.

The “rushes” where regularly shipped to Rome for review by De Laurentiis. Shocked by the film's contents and nudity, the producer flew to London for a confrontation, demanding that Brass cease shooting censorable material: “Can you tell me where we're going to show this film? In Sweden maybe? And then? Are we making it to show just to your friends?” But a few minutes later he calmed down. The film cost so little that it was hardly worth arguing about. Brass continued as before. The “rushes” must have looked entirely like waste footage. The meaning was imposed only by the editing, which was the most frantic of Brass' career. As with Deadly Sweet, the editing was so extreme that negative cutting for the more complicated sequences was simply out of the question, and we again see dupes of the work print filled every frame or two with messy splicing tape. The editing, though, was brilliant, creating multiple meanings with subliminal intercutting that races by so quickly it is difficult to digest. In this DVD age, we are fortunate to have pause and frame-by-frame capabilities so that we can finally see what flashes before our eyes for a mere 8th or 12th or 24th of a second.

The world première took place in May 1968 at the Cannes Festival. Some executives from Paramount Pictures were in the audience and they were so taken with Nerosubianco that they hired Brass to direct a film of Anthony Burgess' novel A Clockwork Orange, a project that had been in limbo for a year and was then to have starred Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones. Brass read the book and was thrilled at the opportunity, but said that he would first make The Howl in Europe. That comment cost him his job, as the Paramount producers were not prepared to wait. Their impatience, as we now know, cost them the opportunity to make the film, which was soon bought out by Warner Brothers.

Nerosubianco was scheduled for a late 1968 release, but by that time Dino De Laurentiis had fled Italy to evade the tax authorities, who confiscated all his holdings and licensed Nerosubianco (now minus its producer credit) to Ceiad Columbia, who briefly gave it a half¬hearted release in 1969. It earned back its cost, but not much more, and was soon withdrawn.

In the US, though, there was a producer/distributor who was completely enamored of the film. He was Radley Metzger, who had seen it at a trade screening and instantly licensed the US rights to the English version (in which Anita Sanders and Nino Segurini were dubbed, while the remainder of the dialogue and narration was original). Metzger was an independent filmmaker who had recently come to fame with a series of erotic films. Through his company, Audubon, he released Black on White, as he then called it, in New York City in October 1969 with a self-imposed X rating, but it didn't do well. He widened the release shortly afterwards, but the film fared no better than it had in New York. After a few strange retitlings (the most amusing one being The Artful Penetration of Barbara), Metzger retired the film, genuinely sad that it had not found its audience. (Cult Epics utilized Metzger's personal 16mm print for this transfer.)

But there was an audience, or at least a potential audience. Atlantic Records had somehow gotten hold of a copy of Freedom's 14 songs and in 1969 issued them on an Italian LP that had a short run and soon became a collector's item. Upon discovering this music, fans came to consider it some of the finest psychedelic rock ever composed. Curiously, the members of Freedom were unaware of this album's existence until thirty years later! Inspired by the cult following, they were easily convinced to reissue the album on CD several times in recent years.

Nerosubianco was simply ahead of its time, yet a few people understood it instantly. Among them was production manager Nick Saxton, himself an artist and videographer. Recognizing it as the prototype of a new kind of entertainment, he took Brass' movie to heart and used it as a template for creating music videos (such as 1979's “Don't Stop 'til You Get Enough” with Michael Jackson). His pioneering efforts inspired the creation of MTV and other similar venues.

In the years since its original release, Nerosubianco has occasionally popped up on Italian television and has been revived only a few times at specialty cinemas and archives. Its shock value is entirely gone, as the world has caught up with it. Modern audiences, accustomed to the music-video phenomenon, are now considerably more receptive to and cognizant of the breathtaking artistry. Long before its fate could have been known, a journalist for L'Europeo (November 9, 1967) interviewed Tinto Brass and his wife Tinta (!) and asked how the film would be received. Tinta made an entirely incorrect prediction: “With this film, Tinto will be hated by women.” Tinto was genuinely surprised by her comment, and asked, “What? Why?” Tinta responded simply: “Because no woman, no woman at all, will forgive you for lifting the lid.”

THE HOWL
(L'Urlo)

The Howl remains Tinto Brass' most audacious work. The filmmaker was overwhelmed by the counter-culture and the large-scale student anti-war movement, and recognized that in this social milieu the traditional ways of making movies were decreasingly relevant. Frustrated by the strictures imposed by traditional scenarios, he wrote a short script of only 20 pages or so. He presented this to his producer, Dino De Laurentiis, who was deeply sceptical. Brass explained that he could not in good conscience use a standard script. Society was now running, and a script would lock the film down, making it “stand still,” as it were. The filmmaker needed to be free to invent as he wished, when he wished, where he wished. He won the argument, discarded his script, and improvised the movie entirely on natural locations. To help with the story and dialogue, Brass brought along his friends Franco Longo and the eccentric Giancarlo Fusco, famed as a journalist, actor, boxer, and prolific writer. The three of them, together with the famous comic Luigi “Gigi” Proietti, concocted the dizzyingly nutty dialogue.

The Howl was clearly inspired by, and was a reaction against, Jean-Luc Godard's recent film Weekend, a ferociously angry two-hour rant against consumerism. Brass also took inspiration from the anti-authoritarian psychologist Wilhelm Reich and from Edvard Munch's famous painting of “The Scream.” And just before shooting began he also discovered Allen Ginsberg's famous poem “Howl,” which, in Italian translation, became the title of the film.

With only the single idea that the lead character, Anita, would run away from everything oppressive in modern society, the film took on a life of its own, and no one knew from one day to the next where the story would go. To play the role of Anita, Brass chose Tina Aumont, daughter of movie star Maria Montez. Recently separated from actor Christian Marquand, Aumont was too restless to work on a conventional movie, demanding edginess and novelty, which The Howl provided in abundance. Though it was intended that Aumont would be the center of the film's attention, the boundless creativity of her co-star Proietti soon took prominence, and thus the narrative, such as it is, grew a little lopsided, with the star performer playing second fiddle to a clown named Coso, which is the Italian word for Thingamabob or Whatshisname.

When cast and crew grew bored, they would hop onto a plane and find a new location to give them ideas. Among the places they landed were Rome, Sermoneta, Veneto, Lombardy, Emilia, Naples, Berlin, Paris, a Yugoslavian nudist island, and the disused panopticon-style prison on the island of Santo Stefano. Filming began in late September 1968 and the movie received its belated world première at the Berlin Festival on June 27, 1970.

The story, which forbids comprehension, is one of the strangest ever dreamed up. With its fevered antagonism toward political structures everywhere and of every type, one would expect the film to be angry, but it never is. It is sometimes sad, yes, especially in the deeply disturbing newsreel clips of war atrocities, but it is never angry. On the contrary, it is frequently hilarious.

As with Deadly Sweet and Nerosubianco, there are more references than you will ever be able to catalogue - Spike Hawkins' ten-word “Tree Army Poem,” Hieronymous Bosch, “Le chant des partisans,” Giorgio De Chirico, the Keystone Kops, fairy tales, cut-up compositions, the faddish new religions of the late 1960s, Malcolm X, Roberto Rossellini's Paisan. There are also clips from Brass' own films: Ça ira, Deadly Sweet, and a sequence from Nerosubianco which in turn included sequences from Ça ira. There is also an explicit reference to Paramount Pictures, who had recently tempted Brass with an offer to direct A Clockwork Orange.

The Howl held forth considerable commercial promise, for it was in perfect lock-sync with the student revolts of 1968, which were occurring as the movie was filming. But the censors stopped the release. Rushing to Brass' defense were Michelangelo Antonioni and Jane Fonda, among others, but their efforts had little effect, especially as producer De Laurentiis was again in sufficient trouble that he could not even accept on-screen credit. Finally, in 1974, the censors granted a slightly shortened version a release permit, but by that time the US war on Vietnam was essentially ended and the student movement had been marginalized. The Howl missed its chance for fame.

With a story that rejects logic, with dialogue that is purest nonsense, with commentary promising to be clear but then continually thwarting itself with bizarre black-out sketches, it might be tempting to write the film off as pointless absurdism. Absurdist it is, but pointless it is not. Underlying the deliberate madness is a message. The Howl holds forth the idea that all authority is deadly and that all convention is stifling. The Howl is a celebration of genuine individual freedom, an almost-unattainable ideal. Cult Epics is proud to release the uncut version of The Howl, never before screened publicly, supervised by Tinto Brass himself.