15
Italian Popular Film Genres1

Austin Fisher

Gianfranco Parolini’s final Italian western, Diamante Lobo (God’s Gun, 1976), ends with a bravura stylistic contrivance, an apt parting shot for this doyen of the spaghetti western burlesque. A close‐up of a smiling Lee Van Cleef pulls out to frame the actor within the proscenium arch of a mobile puppet show, improbably parked by the desert roadside. As the horseman is about to ride away from the camera to return to the landscape, like so many western heroes before him, the fictive apparatus is thrust into the foreground. This visual conceit typifies the panache, not to mention the humor, with which Italian filmmakers of the 1960s and 1970s appropriated elements of American popular culture—in this case, the mythic western locale, the symbolic tropes of the Hollywood western genre, even Van Cleef himself—and reframed them, to create an overtly performed transcultural spectacle. It is hardly subtle, but this is the point.

Diamante Lobo emerged at the tail end of what is widely viewed as a golden age of genre production in Italy. From the phenomenal success of Pietro Francisci’s classical epic Le fatiche di Ercole (Hercules, 1958) until the decline in film revenues and the television boom of the late 1970s, a succession of rapidly produced overlapping cycles known locally as filoni flourished, turning the Italian film industry into one of the world’s most prolific. This timeframe and production model form the subject matter of this chapter, but I also seek to interrogate assumptions that lie behind the very notion of a golden age. Such labels are commonly predicated upon criteria of finely crafted artistry or “genius,” yet, as we shall see, the filoni display an offbeat, alternative approach to filmmaking, fascinating precisely for their divergence from conventional models of bourgeois cultural criticism. The sequence cited above, for example, calls blatant attention to the narrative apparatus with little regard for conventional structures of invisible filmic diegesis. Though light on plot or characterization, Parolini’s film is heavy on playful engagement with transatlantic popular culture. In ways such as this, filoni reveal themselves to be deserving of discussion on their own terms, and not as an inferior form of cultural production when compared to more canonical—which in the case of Italian cinema studies so often means neorealist or auteur—texts.

The task of charting popular Italian cinema is a daunting one. The difficulty arises not from the truly vast array of films that can reasonably be placed in this category but from the very words “popular” and “Italian.” In a cinematic context, neither lends itself to reliable definition, while both ruffle academic feathers. First, it is by no means obvious how “Italian” filone cinema actually is. Most of these films were the result of international coproduction, most frequently with Spain, Germany, or France. Far from representing a straightforwardly national cinema, therefore, their production processes were attuned to the tastes and trends of numerous export, as well as domestic, film markets. Additionally, and most importantly for my purposes, many filoni emerged in response to, and emulation of, the popularity of American film genres. Any attempt to understand the cultural significance of these cycles must take account of these transnational factors.

Furthermore, in European film studies, the word “popular” has become fraught territory. This perennially disputed term invites a variety of definitions, which can seem contradictory. In an important intervention, Richard Dyer and Ginette Vincendeau (1992, 2) offer two possible meanings of the term: commercially successful, or expressing the values and thoughts of “the people.” The former, more akin to Raymond Williams’s notions of mass culture, denotes that which is aimed at the largest audience, commonly inviting comparisons with American cultural imports. The latter inherits Gramscian notions of an authentic proletarian popular culture: one that resists ostensibly hegemonic mass cultural paradigms. In other words, this nebulous word can be used to mean both “mainstream” and “rejecting the mainstream.” This is, however, less a contradiction than a tension, from which a useful definition for the popular can emerge.

Alan O’Leary and Catherine O’Rawe (2011, 115) have recently argued that the notion that Italian cinema purposefully reflects national character is rendered problematic when one addresses certain forms of popular Italian film—so often overlooked and even denigrated. They argue that such cinemas do indeed register “versions of ‘Italian‐ness,’” but not necessarily those of a kind sought by more traditional scholars. O’Rawe’s (2008, 178–79) most pertinent lament is that the discipline of Italian film studies fails to subject its theoretical premises to adequate scrutiny. Vigorous debates that have occupied broader filmic discourse for decades, she insists, have still to be conducted in a field dominated by the outmoded assumptions of auteur theory, with Italian genre cinema in particular being starved of the nuanced scholarly attention afforded its transatlantic cousin. Certainly, when we look at trends within the wider discipline of film studies, we can see interpretative models that, by focusing on patterns of reception and consumption, offer a more appropriate fit for the filoni. Since at least the mid‐1990s, the milieu known variously as “cult,” “trash,” or “exploitation” cinema has been situated within alternative trajectories: for example, one influentially dubbed “paracinema” by Jeffrey Sconce (1995, 372). Such theoretical repositioning foregrounds marginal patterns of consumption that emerge around films whose divergence from standards of artistic quality, good taste, or narrative coherence transgresses normative filmmaking practices. This new mode of theorizing insists upon the unstable, inadvertent, and negotiated nature of cinematic meaning, more than any search for textual unity or the deft touch of a maestro.

This paradigmatic shift has in fact been persuasively applied to the filoni, first by Christopher Wagstaff (1992), and more recently by Mikel J. Koven (2006) and Robbie Edmonstone (2008), among others. In his insistence on the filone’s status as an “alternative” cultural milieu, Koven rejects the word “popular” altogether, identifying in its usage a ghettoizing of films whose aesthetic diverges from bourgeois concepts of artistry. Instead, he favors “vernacular” to describe patterns of production, distribution, and consumption attuned to the culturally specific tastes of 1960s and 1970s terza visione Italian audiences (those of third‐run provincial cinemas). There is no doubt that these films constitute a different kind of cinema, but Koven perhaps takes this argument too far. As the filoni become increasingly scrutinized in the academy, it is common practice for scholars to defend these films from the stigma of derivativeness from Hollywood, either by insisting on a hidden sophistication that likens them to the revered works of Italy’s canonical postwar auteurs,² or by emphasizing (as does Koven) that their stylistic tics, their eccentric narrative structures, and their disregard for verisimilitude constitute a purposefully contrary aesthetic, attuned to tastes entirely divergent from the global (and therefore, in postwar western Europe, “Americanized”) mainstream.

Rarely, however, is it argued that the derivativeness from Hollywood paradigms to be found in many filoni might be in and of itself both an apt expression of a popular sensibility and, given the cultural and political conditions of the era, a consummately Italian process, registering and filtering the lived experience of the nation’s audiences. Koven’s definition of vernacular cinema is informative and rewarding. Yet, however we decide to label this cinematic milieu, if it does indeed constitute a folk expression of the culturally specific outlooks of the people, recourse to American culture must also be considered such an expression in the context of postwar Italy’s rapid conversion to Americanized models of modernity. Diamante Lobo is an example of this vernacular aesthetic. Its overt and humorous use of instantly recognizable American cinematic reference points indicates this element so often overlooked in the discussion of popular Italian cinema.

Returning to the question of how Italian the filoni can really be said to be, I would posit that it is in part their very divergence from conceptions of national cinema that makes them popular. Following O’Leary and O’Rawe, I argue that the transnational dynamics of the filoni can be seen to produce documents of a certain kind of Italian‐ness: one in the throes of cultural and political upheaval. The fact that filone cinema presents a seeming morass of cultural contradictions should not be disavowed but contextualized. In the Italy of the 1960s and 1970s, perhaps the popular cinematic product arises from, and of necessity responds to, the tension between emulation of Americana on the one hand, and resistance to the cognitive and ideological mechanisms of the canonical mainstream on the other.

While charting the history of this milieu, this chapter will also discuss to what extent the supposed flaws and confusions of these films can be seen inadvertently to register the transitional and insecure nature of Italian identity in this era. I seek to cover a wide terrain, but, for purposes of brevity, the classical epic (“peplum”), the Italian or “spaghetti” western, the giallo thriller, and the poliziottesco police drama will serve as my chief frames of reference. I am wary of falling into the trap of homogenizing filone cinema. Not all filoni fit comfortably into the same transatlantic paradigm, but the tension with American‐led modernity is at least a useful heuristic starting point to analyze this form of cinematic production. In any case, we should recalibrate the debate around the filoni more broadly, beyond defensiveness or opprobrium. The question should not be whether these films are beholden to American culture, but why, how, and to what degree?

The Peplum³

From the moment a tree’s roots are torn from the earth in the opening sequence of Le fatiche di Ercole, the rippling physique of Steve Reeves dominates the frame, with low‐angle shots and medium close‐ups dwelling upon the superhuman constitution of Italian cinema’s latest mythical creation: an all‐American demigod. By 1958, as Italians negotiated a disorienting transition to American‐dominated modernity, it seems apt that the awestruck gaze is guided toward a transatlantic superhero.

Like so many linear cultural conceptions, the above reading is convenient but inadequate. Certainly, as a symbol for the vibrant lure of the American behemoth, this invincible one‐time Mr. Universe arriving to save the day functions as an object of potential veneration and wonder for Europeans in the postwar era. The lineage of Reeves’s portrayal, however, is in fact one of a fundamentally Italian cinematic archetype that harkens back to strongman figures such as Maciste and to the birth of the nation’s film industry.⁴ It is for this reason that Reeves provides an apt symbol, since the cultural relationship with the United States was no one‐way process of imposition or emulation. Francisci’s film, along with the peplum trend that emerged in its wake, captures an ongoing tension with American cultural and economic models: one that would give birth to, and nurture, the conditions in which filone cinema would flourish.

In the years immediately preceding the Great War, Italian filmmakers had blazed a creative trail with action‐packed classical adventures that led the world film market. Such sword‐and‐sandal epics as Giovanni Pastrone’s La caduta di Troia (The Fall of Troy, 1911) and Cabiria (1914), Mario Caserini’s Gli ultimi giorni di Pompei (The Last Days of Pompeii, 1913), and Enrico Guazzoni’s Quo Vadis? (1913) exerted a profound influence, not least of all on the early days of Hollywood. Cabiria introduced lateral tracking shots to cinematic grammar and displayed unprecedented special effects, inspiring D.W. Griffith to produce feature‐length films. This influence is most tangible in such pioneering American works as Judith of Bethulia (1914) and Intolerance (1916). It was only in the 1920s that the American industry overtook the Italian and monopolized the sword‐and‐sandal format. Fred Niblo’s Ben‐Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1925) in particular—filmed in Rome but finished in the United States, starving the Italian industry of funds—became a cause célèbre of America’s increasing cinematic hegemony in this era.

By the post–World War II era, however, though Hollywood’s economic pre‐eminence was long established, the Italo–American relationship was still one of exchange, both financially and culturally. In the 1950s, while Hollywood producers were facing domestic crises of falling attendance figures and declining output, the Italian industry was booming, offering a vital market for Hollywood productions. Moreover, protectionist measures introduced by the Italian government in 1949 locked earnings from foreign films into local production, forcing Hollywood studios to seek economic compromise. Large numbers of American actors and directors therefore decamped to Roman studios to embark on coproductions, utilizing the cheaper, technically skilled native crews and a readymade industry infrastructure in a phenomenon dubbed “Hollywood on the Tiber.” Significant box‐office successes ensued, such as Mervyn LeRoy’s Quo Vadis (1951), Robert Wise’s Helen of Troy (1956), and William Wyler’s Ben‐Hur (1959), on whose sets young Italian filmmakers learned their trade alongside these Hollywood giants.

The peplum, as simultaneously a resurrection of early Italian cinema and a response to an evolving economic landscape, emerged from and encapsulated a kind of tension with Hollywood cinema. The huge success of Le fatiche di Ercole and its sequel Ercole e la regina di Lidia (Hercules Unchained, 1959), not only in Italy but abroad,⁵ heralded the onset of a new production model: one born of an increasingly globalized outlook and a keen eye for the rapid exploitation of multiple markets. The craze for coproduced pepla that ensued, though driven by export‐oriented expediency, also offers a snapshot of Italian audiences’ preferences at the time, since it was precisely the enduring appeal of American cinema in the domestic market that compelled Italian producers to replicate successful formulae by mass‐producing cut‐rate genre films. The peplum’s irreverent, humorous response to the earnest grandeur of “Hollywood on the Tiber” signaled the future direction of the Italian industry. In short, the filone was born.

Around 200 pepla were produced in Italy in the 7 years after Francisci’s initial success.⁶ Similarly drawing from the rich tapestry of early Italian genre cinema, these films are characterized by the travails of muscle‐bound heroes most commonly named Ercole/Hercules, Ursus (a figure from Quo Vadis?), Sansone/Samson, or Maciste (a slave from Pastrone’s Cabiria). Following Francisci’s lead, these mythological heroes were commonly played by Anglo‐American strongmen and, like Francisci’s, these films play fast and loose with an amalgam of reference points—most frequently Greek, Roman, or Old Testament. As scholarly discourse around the peplum gathers pace, this filone is increasingly seen as a document of the socioeconomic or ideological coordinates of its era: by, for example, valorizing the white male body in an era of emasculating industrialized modernity; or by registering a flight from both contemporary social reality and the realism of Italy’s postwar art cinema (see especially Dyer [1997] and Burke [2011]). This last aspect is surely the most apposite, for the peplum is nothing if not divergent from normative conceptions of cinematic art, as any survey of this consummately playful filone will testify.

Riccardo Freda, for one, saw little reason to play the mythological subject matter straight in his pepla. Maciste alla corte del Gran Khan (Samson and the Seven Miracles of the World, 1961) drops its hero into thirteenth‐century China, while Maciste all’inferno (The Witch’s Curse, 1962) opens in medieval Scotland. Nor was Freda alone in this respect: Vittorio Cottafavi’s Ercole alla conquista di Atlantide (Hercules Conquers Atlantis/Hercules and the Captive Women, 1961) has Hercules battling an army of clones, Tanio Boccia’s Maciste alla corte dello zar (Atlas Against the Czar, 1964) pits its classical muscle against the nineteenth‐century Russian court, and in Giacomo Gentilomo’s Maciste e la regina di Samar (Hercules Against the Moon Men, 1964), the hero finds himself repelling an alien invasion. Therefore, though a generalized locale of classical antiquity normally provided the peplum with its iconographic anchor, fidelity to mytho‐historical traditions was not always its sine qua non. Indeed, as the generic hybridity of these admittedly extreme examples suggests, filone filmmaking was characterized by constant evolution, in a fervent search for the next lucrative cycle. An exemplar is Mario Bava’s Ercole al centro della terra (Hercules in the Haunted World, 1961), whose tiny budget is marshaled with considerable stylistic panache into a spectacle of horror‐inflected lighting effects, complete with an undead army rising from the grave.

Historical or generic verisimilitude, then, was far down the list of priorities for peplum makers. These films are replete with wooden acting, laughable dialogue, shoddy special effects, hilariously unthreatening monsters, and a distinct lack of psychological depth—but to denigrate the peplum for this would be to miss the point. Much of the pleasure of watching a peplum lies precisely in its humorous absurdity and its outright eschewal of narrative complexity. This was a form of filmmaking, akin in some ways to what Tom Gunning has termed the “cinema of attractions” (Gunning 1990), whose purpose was spectacle, and whose patterns of distribution and consumption invited uneven narration. As the English language titles listed earlier suggest, the hero of this filone was an interchangeable transcultural archetype. The specific mythological traditions of Hercules, Samson, or Goliath were therefore irrelevancies next to the lucrative opportunity for repetition with innovation.

The peplum trend lasted into the mid‐1960s, and its various generic offshoots continually testing the waters for fresh profits—most notably with the cycle of swashbuckling pirate films such as Umberto Lenzi’s Sandokan, la tigre di Mompracem (Sandokan the Great, 1963) and I pirati della Malesia (Sandokan: Pirate of Malaysia, 1964), and Luigi Capuano’s Sansone contro il corsaro nero (Hercules and the Black Pirates, 1964). In the long run, however, the next filone phenomenon would simultaneously eclipse all the others and take Italian cinema’s negotiation with Americana to a different level.

The Spaghetti Western

Between the years 1963 and 1978, nearly 500 western movies were produced or coproduced by Italian studios (Fisher 2011, 224). This extraordinary proliferation occupied significant sections of the nation’s film industry, as the genre dubbed by André Bazin (2004, 140) “the American film par excellence.” became a staple of Italian cinematic output. The Italian western has since long become a globally recognizable reference point but, in essence, this filone is nothing if not a document of Italy’s intimate yet ambivalent encounter with the Hollywood myth machine.

It is a critical commonplace to locate the Italian western at the opposite pole of the canonical American “original”: the stylistic flourishes, nihilistic worldview, and—on occasion—political subversiveness of the former amounting to a fundamental reworking of Hollywood’s hallowed foundation myth. Referring to this filone’s most esteemed auteur, Peter Bondanella (2009, 351) claims: “Unlike [the makers of] many classic westerns, [Sergio] Leone does not see the role of the frontier and the advance of civilization as completely positive.” This comment may suffice as a critical starting point, but it invites a dualistic assumption that the Hollywood western presents a straightforward endorsement of the onset of modernity—one that the Italian version problematizes. This overlooks the fact that many of the classic cinematic examples of the American western are ambivalent toward the arrival of industrialized society.⁷ Moreover, the vast and heterogeneous collection of films that makes up the Italian western defies easy categorization. Its extraordinary longevity (in filone terms) meant that numerous subsets and hybrids emerged within its generic boundaries. In the sheer variety of films can be found a wide array of responses to American popular culture and its cinematic manifestations.

Many early contributions to the cycle, such as Sergio Corbucci’s Massacro al Grande Canyon (Massacre at Grand Canyon, 1964) and Siro Marcellini’s L’uomo della valle maledetta (Man of the Cursed Valley, 1964), sought quite deliberately to resemble American westerns, both by deploying well‐worn plot motifs surrounding the civilizing of the West, and by their makers masquerading behind Anglo‐sounding monikers. It was with the decision of Sergio Leone—himself at first adopting the name “Bob Robertson”—to leave the peplum behind and make Per un pugno di dollari (A Fistful of Dollars, 1964) that the Italian version took on a distinctive identity. Leone was by no means the first to inject nihilistic disillusionment into the western genre. The American genre had been scrutinizing its own mythos for years (notably in Anthony Mann’s Man of the West, 1958, and John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, 1962), while, in Italy, Riccardo Blasco’s Duello nel Texas (Gunfight at Red Sands, 1963) preceded Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars, and Mario Caiano’s Cavalca e uccidi (Ride and Kill, 1964) was released the same year. Financially, however, it was the success of Leone’s film that provided the spark to ignite the Italian western craze and inspire a host of variations on a theme.

Leone’s stylistic élan would redefine the Italian approach to the western genre, but this is not to say that Hollywood models were eschewed. For example, Duccio Tessari’s Una pistola per Ringo (A Pistol for Ringo, 1965) and Corbucci’s Johnny Oro (Ringo and His Golden Pistol, 1966), while investing in Leone’s brand of lucrative cynicism, also pay direct narrative homages to High Noon (Fred Zinnemann, 1952) and the film described by Will Wright (1975, 34) as “the classic of the classic westerns,” Shane (George Stevens, 1953). In alternative trends, meanwhile, the characteristic hybridity of the filone phenomenon shone through, memorably merging Wild West and horror tropes in Giulio Questi’s Se sei vivo, spara! (Django, Kill! …If You Live, Shoot!, 1967), Antonio Margheriti’s E Dio disse a Caino (And God Said to Cain, 1969) and Sergio Garrone’s Django il bastardo (Django the Bastard, 1969).

In the mid‐to‐late 1960s, this filone embraced the politics of contemporary Italian countercultures. Most intriguingly, Sergio Sollima’s Faccia a faccia (Face to Face, 1967) and Corbucci’s Il grande silenzio (The Great Silence, 1968) weave cautionary parables of totalitarianism into the familiar western schema. For others, revolutionary Mexico provided material for Third World sentiment, and as the various extraparliamentary and student protest movements jostled for ideological position in Italy, Damiano Damiani’s Quién sabe? (A Bullet for the General, 1966), Sollima’s La resa dei conti (The Big Gundown, 1967) and Corri, uomo, corri (Run, Man, Run, 1968), Giulio Petroni’s Tepepa (1969), and Corbucci’s Il mercenario (A Professional Gun, 1968) and Vamos a matar, compañeros (Companeros, 1970) seized the radical moment. Yet, the Italian western was not destined to follow its American cousin down the path of serious political engagement into the 1970s. As the Hollywood genre was responding to crises in the United States, brought about by the Vietnam War and triggering revisionism in films such as Little Big Man (Arthur Penn, 1970) and Soldier Blue (Ralph Nelson, 1970), the most lucrative filone brand of them all was launched with Enzo Barboni’s slapstick comedy westerns, Lo chiamavano Trinità (My Name is Trinity, 1970) and its sequel …. continuavano a chiamarlo Trinità (Trinity is Still My Name, 1971).⁸

As we can see, some Italian westerns exploited extant strands within the American model, while others departed from them; yet others took possession of received iconographies and melded them into contemporary political parables or hybrid filoni. All represent attempts to negotiate a path through an ever more globally oriented cultural outlook. In a period of rapid sociocultural change up and down the peninsula, the Italian westerns present us with an Italianness that is unstable, diffuse, and amorphous. Their displacements of the western genre offer snapshots of an Italy in transition, within which the reference points of American popular culture are instantly recognizable, and endlessly manipulatable. To set this filone against the Hollywood genre is therefore to simplify a multivalent and complex transcultural relationship. If there is indeed a single unifying feature to the Italian westerns, it is one that has always characterized western films: the capacity to register and negotiate the neuroses of their time and place.

This transitional Italianness is nowhere more tangible than in Corbucci’s Django (1966), a film that, through its very erraticness, typifies this filone’s ambivalent approach to American culture. What little was left of the western’s pioneering zeal and ennobling violence is emphatically absent from this spectacle of gleeful brutality. It is in this kind of apolitical transgression and alternativeness, more than in any purposeful allegories or finely wrought critique, that Italian westerns might be said to most pertinently comment on their time and place. With Django, narrative, characterization, and verisimilitude are paid little heed in a film imprinted upon the popular imagination as a pop‐art slideshow of half‐remembered set‐pieces, each a bravura rendering of elaborate torture or death: the orgiastic carnage of the machine gun massacre, the pastor’s ear being sliced off and force‐fed to him by General Hugo, the center‐frame crushing of the hero’s hands, and the drawn‐out climactic showdown in a windswept graveyard. Wagstaff (1992, 253) emphasizes that the social context of filone cinema was one in which audience members would come and go, and talk during the show, except for those parts that grabbed their attention. Django’s free‐floating crescendos of violent action and stylized iconic posturing are intimately entwined with this cultural and industrial milieu—as is the rapid‐fire production of around 50 “Django” sequels that followed in this film’s wake.

Figure 15.1 Franco Nero in Django (Sergio Corbucci, 1966). Screen grab.

Corbucci’s haphazard, even incoherent, reworking of the western therefore simultaneously offers a social document for the lived experience of Italian audiences in this era and shows an Italian sensibility experimenting with the building blocks of Americana. In an era when American popular culture was ever more visible, these two processes were closely related, since the transnational burlesque of Diamante Lobo was far from an exception. The Italian western flourished in the midst of confusing sociopolitical upheavals resulting from the late 1950s to early 1960s economic miracle, an increasingly polarized international political landscape, and the rise of diverse and fractious protest movements across the Western world. Its eccentricities are therefore most interesting for what they inadvertently say about Italian cultural identities that were themselves far from concrete.

Italian Horror

That westerns so conspicuously embodied the shifting tides of Italian filmmaking in this era was by no means to say that other generic models went neglected; far from it. The hybridity of the filone invited a fluid approach to production, within which numerous directors effortlessly crossed porous generic boundaries. Many of the most cherished cycles among cult movie fans—as well as the most influential upon subsequent directors—fall under the generic rubric of the horror film.

It is a common scholarly strategy to define the horror genre by its consistent representation of “monsters” whose irrational violence punctures the security of everyday social relations. Andrew Tudor (1989) offers a range of criteria by which horror films can be divided according to the kind of monster being presented. The supernatural monster, for example, is distinct from the secular menace posed by mankind’s meddling with science, while the external threat to society can be opposed to the internal terror arising from within the human psyche. The various vampires, demons, witches, zombies, cannibals, and serial killers to be found in Italian horror during the 1960s and 1970s traverse these axes, and are broadly unified by this “monstrous” generic umbrella.

The first significant horror cycle to emerge in Italy was the gothic variant, replete with sorcery, crazed scientists, haunted castles, sexual deviance, and neurotic portrayals of menacing femininity. Though Riccardo Freda’s I vampiri (The Devil’s Commandment, 1956) was the first to appear, it was the international success of Mario Bava’s La maschera del demonio (Black Sunday, 1960) that kick‐started this filone. The iconographies and thematic preoccupations of these two films would reappear time and again, most notably through a fixation upon female resurrection and possession. Bava’s most celebrated contribution to the cycle was the introduction of cult “scream‐queen” Barbara Steele to horror audiences. Steele would help cement the Italian gothic horror in the popular imagination through numerous portrayals of a duplicitous feminine threat occupying a liminal space between life and death in films such as Freda’s L’orribile segreto del Dr. Hichcock (The Horrible Dr. Hichcock, 1962) and Lo spettro (The Ghost, 1963), Antonio Margheriti’s Danza macabra (Castle of Blood, 1964) and I lunghi capelli della morte (The Long Hair of Death, 1964), and Mario Caiano’s Amanti d’oltretomba (Nightmare Castle, 1965). Similar plots of infernal resurrection, not to mention themes of necrophilia, incest, or vampirism, are to be found in Giorgio Ferroni’s Il mulino delle donne di pietra (Mill of the Stone Women, 1960), and Bava’s I tre volti della paura (Black Sabbath, 1963) and Operazione paura (Kill Baby, Kill, 1966), among many others.

As with other filoni, the various strands of Italian horror yield insights into the anxieties and mores of the era. The phobic projections of female beguilement discussed earlier, for example, are akin to what Barbara Creed (1993) calls the “monstrous‐feminine” through which horror films bespeak neuroses surrounding the empowerment of women in the modern age. There is also, once more, a transcultural dimension to this contemporaneity, for the horror genre was an import with very little native tradition in Italy prior to the 1960s. As Steele’s British nationality suggests, the gothic variant was a distinctively international cycle (most tangible in its influences were German Expressionism, 1930s Hollywood, and British “Hammer horror”). In the late 1970s, Italian filmmakers responded to a new breed of American horror film, inspired in particular by George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978), with lurid depictions of zombies: Lucio Fulci’s Zombi 2 (Zombie, 1979) and Umberto Lenzi’s Incubo sulla città contaminata (Nightmare City, 1980); cannibals: Ruggero Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust (1980) and Lenzi’s Mangiati vivi! (Eaten Alive!, 1980); and sometimes both: Marino Girolami’s Zombie Holocaust (1980). Margheriti’s Apocalypse domani (Cannibal Apocalypse, 1980) exhibits the humor at the heart of this trend with a parodic displacement of contemporary American neuroses. Margheriti’s titular nod to Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979) makes the American film appear positively restrained next to the Italian version’s depiction of Vietnam veterans, having contracted a virus in the jungle, going on a cannibalistic rampage back home.

Yet, arguably, the most intriguing transcultural trend in the Italian horror cycle was not one of direct response to, or parody of, Hollywood or Hammer. The giallo thriller has since entered the pantheon of exploitation cinema for its striking generic markers (masked, black‐gloved psychopaths, sensuous female victims, elaborately grisly murders, witnesses‐turned‐amateur detectives) and for its influence on American slasher films of the 1970s and 1980s. It is, moreover, at once the most resolutely contemporary horror filone and the most self‐consciously international.

Mario Bava’s La ragazza che sapeva troppo (The Evil Eye, 1963) is often read as one of the giallo’s “founding texts” (Figure 15.2). Indeed, though this filone would not catch on until the early 1970s, this film’s foundational status comes through not only in its narrative but also in its self‐reflexive identification of the giallo’s Anglophone source material. When the resourceful central character—a young American woman on holiday in Rome—finds herself under threat, the omniscient narrator reveals her thought process as she seeks a way to repel the crazed killer:

She appealed to her old friends, her murder mysteries. She appealed to Wallace, Mickey Spillane, to Agatha Christie …. Killers never read mysteries, fortunately …. The novel that was her inspiration had just been published in Philadelphia. It couldn’t have been translated into Italian yet.

As a metatextual nod, the reference to English‐language crime writers highlights the film’s debt to the yellow‐covered Italian translations of mystery novels, launched in 1929 by Mondadori publishers, from which the “giallo” appellation arises. With this gambit, Bava plugs into a rich vein of transcultural borrowing in Italy, through which foreign narrative models offer a filter for the familiar locale. The diegesis, however, goes further, by presenting an American tourist with a cultural advantage over the Italian monster. That she alone has access to the most recent popular artifacts positions the United States as a trailblazer, and the latest trends at a perceptual remove from the Italian‐speaking world, which can only cling to America’s pop‐cultural coattails. This evokes a sense that Italy is playing catch‐up with the Anglophone world, redolent of Jean Baudrillard’s comment (1986, 76) that “America is the original version of modernity. [Europeans] are the dubbed or subtitled version.”

Figure 15.2 Letícia Román in La ragazza che sapeva troppo (The Evil Eye, Mario Bava, 1963). Screen grab.

Little wonder, then, that after the giallo filone scored its first major success with Dario Argento’s L’uccello dalle piume di cristallo (The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, 1970), the director was nicknamed “the Italian Hitchcock” (Hutchings 2003, 128). By positing a normative status for Hollywood filmmaking, this phrase underlines a widespread perception that the giallo was a fundamentally imitative phenomenon, its cosmopolitan mise‐en‐scène amounting to a dilution of national signifiers in the face of transatlantic narrative formats. Certainly, the vision of contemporary Italy filtered through the eyes of a foreigner—on display in both of the abovementioned gialli and repeated in Giuliano Carnimeo’s Perché quelle strane gocce di sangue sul corpo di Jennifer? (The Case of the Bloody Iris, 1972), Sergio Martino’s I corpi presentano tracce di violenza carnale (Torso, 1973), and Argento’s Profondo rosso (Deep Red, 1975), among others—is testament to an increasingly globalized outlook. Far from a capitulation to Americanized modernity, however, the giallo’s international aspect can be seen as an expression of a localized contemporaneity. In identifying this filone as vernacular cinema, Koven (2006, 45–59) argues that its combination of psychotic terror with multicultural casting and depictions of jet‐setting lifestyles reflects a distinct ambivalence toward modernity felt by Italian audiences at the time. This tension between cosmopolitanism and parochialism is at the heart of the giallo’s efforts to negotiate a path through rapid changes in the country’s cultural outlook.⁹

The Poliziottesco

The giallo was certainly not alone in asserting its contemporaneity through recourse to international formats. The poliziottesco was a related, and concurrent, filone of crime thrillers, this time following the travails of professional policemen and detectives in modern Italian locales. These films display a surprisingly complex engagement with the sociopolitical ferments of their era¹⁰ and offer insights into the reach of American popular culture in postwar Italy. The poliziottesco is both a space of transnational exchange and an expression of bewilderment: one that registers a hankering after narrative coherence in an era characterized by labyrinthine intrigue.

The most culturally obvious factor in the emergence of the poliziottesco was the arrival on the Italian market of Hollywood cop thrillers, such as Dirty Harry (Don Siegel, 1971) and The French Connection (William Friedkin, 1971). These products of Nixon‐era neuroses over social breakdown and urban violence, with their depictions of maverick crime‐fighters refusing to play by the rules, were instant hits in Italy as elsewhere. Consequently, though a handful of early examples had emerged prior to April 1972—notably, Stefano Vanzina’s La polizia ringrazia (Execution Squad, 1972)—it was with the Italian release of Dirty Harry in the same month, that the poliziottesco cycle caught on. Around 100 such films would be released during the 1970s, and Siegel’s film had a palpable impact on both the cycle’s recurrent plot devices and its ideological outlook.

In Sergio Martino’s Milano trema: la polizia vuole giustizia (Violent Professionals, 1973), a rogue cop uses his own violent methods of law enforcement in defiance of an impotent legal system, which is failing in its duty to uphold the rule of law. Time and again, the poliziottesco pits the lone hero against a society overrun with street gangs, protection rackets, Mafiosi, and terrorists. In Milano trema, only the hero’s uncompromising methods are proved to work until, disgusted with the system he has defended, he discards his police‐issue revolver, in a clear nod to the final sequence of Dirty Harry (itself lifted from High Noon). In other words, Milano trema, along with a host of other poliziotteschi, replicates the narrative and ideological tropes of Siegel’s Hollywood blockbuster. Viewed from this perspective, the filone appears to operate in a parasitic relationship with Hollywood mythology.

More politically and historically grounded readings of these films, however, highlight the poliziottesco’s entwinement with the era of Italian history dubbed the anni di piombo, or “years of lead”: a period of urban violence unparalleled in postwar Europe (O’Leary 2011). The years 1969–1980 saw over 12000 incidents of politically motivated violence occur in Italy, and terrorist groups of both left‐ and right‐wing extremists numbered around 600 (Antonello and O’Leary 2009, 1). Throughout the decade, as popular perception and public opinion became colored by this upheaval, law and order became an increasingly fraught issue in the Italian media. Two related perceptions have particular relevance to the poliziottesco and its ideological outlook: the sense of a broken society spiraling out of control and the widespread distrust of officialdom and instruments of state.

Clearly, films depicting out‐of‐control street gangs, opportunistic protection rackets, and psychotic political extremists were informed by an overtly contemporary and local imperative. Such uncompromising heroes as those portrayed by the actor Maurizio Merli, whose brutal persona appeared in 12 poliziotteschi between 1975 and 1979, offered vicarious fantasies of law and order, with a tough, no‐nonsense cop defying his superiors and crushing petty criminals and terrorists alike. Yet, the poliziottesco’s engagement with the anni di piombo goes deeper than a simple application of a tough‐cop schema. More than simply condemning a weak officialdom, poliziotteschi explore the murky workings of power in the Italian state, repeatedly depicting an actively malevolent, corrupt “system,” which is complicit with the heinous crimes against which our lone hero struggles. In film after film, murky cabals of ruthless capitalists, evil power‐mongers, and morally bankrupt public servants hide behind a veneer of respectability, invisibly pulling the strings of sadistic street gangs to provoke chaos in society. Fernando di Leo’s Il boss (Murder Inferno, 1973) depicts politicians and police in league with the Mafia; in Sergio Sollima’s Revolver (Blood in the Streets, 1973), the hero is caught in an impenetrably faceless web of intrigue; while in both Enzo G. Castellari’s Il grande racket (The Big Racket, 1976) and Martino’s Milano trema, the murderers and rapists whom the hero has chased throughout are revealed to be under orders from judges, lawyers, politicians, and police chiefs.

There is, moreover, an inadvertent cultural significance to poliziotteschi that points to a more nuanced transatlantic relationship than is immediately apparent when viewing these films. Simultaneously parasitic facsimiles of American box‐office giants, fantasies of law and order, and conspiracy theory‐fuelled paranoia, poliziotteschi also appropriate Hollywood tropes and adapt them to an Italian sociopolitical milieu. While Milano trema, for example, directly registers the controversies of the era, both by caricaturing the aims of contemporary radicals to alter public opinion through violent action, and by articulating widespread perceptions of state complicity in a “strategy of tension” aimed at exerting authoritarian control over Italian society, the modes of representation employed by filmmakers such as Martino reflect more than the immediate situation. Their investment in spectacle—with the poliziottesco’s ubiquitous high‐octane car chase, directly emulating famous pay‐off sequences from American cop thrillers such as Bullitt (1968) and The French Connection—and in narrative closure, with a denouement or twist laying bare state complicity in unambiguous terms, reflect a broader signifying practice of deploying elements of American cinema to dramatize neuroses surrounding extremism, terror, and societal power structures.

Fredric Jameson (1988, 356) has described conspiracy theory as “the poor person’s cognitive mapping in the postmodern age …. a degraded figure of the logic of late capitalism, a desperate attempt to represent the latter’s system.” Conspiracy theory, Jameson holds, aspires and pretends to know, to explain, but the narrative closure it seeks is a mere parody of authentic analysis of the individual’s complex relationship with political and economic systems. Viewed from this perspective, the poliziottesco’s recourse to Hollywood iconography and genre convention can be read as an articulation of a collective need in Italian society: that of attaching a narrative to an era of extreme cultural and political disorientation. At one point in Lucio Fulci’s Luca il contrabbandiere (Contraband, 1980), a policeman at the scene of a murder comments that “Italy is starting to look like America in the 1930s.” Given the poliziottesco’s close relationship with Hollywood conventions, this highlights an important cultural convergence in these films. Both the diegetic comment itself and the wider perception it implies are based on an “America” of the popular imagination—in this case one of Prohibition, speakeasies, and mob hits—lifted directly from Hollywood and transposed into the anni di piombo.

Far from straightforward reactionary polemics, therefore, poliziotteschi are repositories of cultural memory and sites of popular trauma. Their ideological and cultural eccentricities are an organic product of the turmoil and confusions of their era. By their very nature, as transcultural undertakings—and often playfully so—these films, and the spaghetti western before them, register a certain kind of Italianness: not only one within which Americana has become an ever‐present factor, but also one that has taken possession of this iconography in a varied and at times complex dialogue.

Conclusion

For a 20‐year period in Italy’s postwar development, industrial and economic conditions were favorable to the mass production of filoni. Though their engagement with transatlantic formats was multifarious, ranging from reaction or competition to collaboration or borrowing, all existed in a state of tension with American popular culture, whether through production, distribution, or consumption. I am acutely aware that, by focusing on the most prolific filoni, my survey has left out many less well‐known, but equally interesting, cycles of the period. Among others, the “Mondo” travelogue (launched by Paolo Cavara’s and Gualtiero Jacopetti’s Mondo cane, 1962) and the “secret agent” filone that arose in response to the James Bond phenomenon (e.g., Sergio Grieco’s Agente 077 missione Bloody Mary [Mission Bloody Mary, 1965]) offer insights into Italy’s transition to cosmopolitan modernity. Moreover, the amorphous, hybrid nature of all filoni to some extent renders the boundary lines drawn by my subheadings moot. As a whole, however, these films offer us intriguing snapshots of the era’s cultural and political idiosyncrasies.

The filoni provide a case in point of how an era can speak through popular cinema, not by authorial intent, carefully constructed “messages,” or purposeful oppositions, but through films’ uncertainties and cultural confusions: inadvertent yet revealing inscriptions of their time and place. Mathijs and Mendik (2004, 4) have argued, in reference to the peculiar dynamics of “trash” cinema, that such films, “do not allow for a clear‐cut distinction between text and context; they are messy dispersible texts, existing beyond and below the usual confinements of film culture.” The filoni are just such a divergent breed of cinema, which comments on its era precisely by being enmeshed within the bewilderment of the epoch. As Koven and others have stated, filoni should be considered in the context of the cultural choices of their intended audiences, but it should also be remembered that these were audiences for whom American popular culture was becoming ever more recognizable. The films’ status as popular artifacts rests, partially at least, upon their documenting of this experience.

References

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Notes

1 Editor’s note: This chapter might be read in conjunction with Bayman’s and Gundle’s, both of which address another Italian film genre, the commedia all’italiana, though the transnational dimension of Fisher’s “popular film genres” sets them somewhat apart from the commedia all’italiana. See also Uva’s chapter, which addresses the poliziesco/poliziottesco in the context of terrorism. The term “poliziottesco” was/is a pejorative term for what were considered low‐brow capitalizations on a more “dignified” tradition of the “poliziesco” or police/crime story. This chapter embraces the term as part of a rejection of high‐brow/low‐brow distinctions. Uva’s chapter chooses instead to use the term “poliziesco,” though for similar reasons: to avoid any seeming devaluation of the filone.

2 This tendency is particularly noticeable in the most highly respected sources. Gian Piero Brunetta’s appraisal of filone cinema (2009, 162) becomes a quest to uncover “gems and nuggets of genius” from among the “mishmash of derivative and poorly made films.” Peter Bondanella’s (2009, 311) most recent edition of his history of Italian cinema is vastly expanded where popular formats are concerned, but he similarly subordinates filoni to auteurist notions throughout. This is typified by the implicit value judgment informing his elevation of Mario Bava to a status alongside Fellini, Antonioni, and Visconti.

3 The word “peplum” refers to a short tunic often worn by extras in the classical/mythological “sword‐and‐sandal” movies discussed in this section.

4 See the chapters by Bertellini and Reich in this volume.

5 Each film grossed almost 900 million lire in Italy at a time when tickets cost as little as 600–1000 lire. Each was then distributed in the United States by Joseph E. Levine, with Le fatiche di Ercole returning a US$5 million profit from a US$120,000 investment (Bondanella 2009, 167).

6 This is an extraordinary number, but even it is in a sense misleading, since it limits itself more or less to the pseudomythological, historical, and biblical versions of the filone. The number gets much greater if we allow a host of other adventure movies inspired by but more tenuously linked to the original, Hercules, pepla. The Wikipedia entry (2015b) for “Peplum_film_genre” gets to well over 300 by including categories such as swashbuckler/pirate and barbarian/Viking movies.

7 Among many other examples, and though they arise from disparate political outlooks, are The Vanishing American (George B. Seitz, 1925), The Virginian (Victor Fleming, 1929), Jesse James (Henry Hill, 1939), Broken Arrow (Delmer Daves, 1950), and Shane (George Stevens, 1953), which all follow in the footsteps of James Fenimore Cooper, Frederick Jackson Turner, Owen Wister, and Zane Grey by suggesting that something noble has been lost to the American nation with the arrival of modernity.

8 …continuavano a chiamarlo Trinità topped the Italian box‐office rankings for the 1971–1972 season (Wikipedia 2015a).

9 I have explored the giallo's complex negotiation with its contemporary condition in detail elsewhere, considering the extent to which its horrific depictions of both the modern city and Italy's parochial underbelly can be seen to be documents of their political moment (Fisher 2016).

10 See Fisher (2014) for further discussion of the poliziottesco and its relation to contemporary sociopolitical events, particularly terrorism, in Italy.