Daily Movie Rec 6/20/2023
Caliber 9 (1972)
"The rich don't care if the country's economy goes to the dogs."
Directed by: Fernando Di Leo
Cinematography by: Franco Villa
Country: Italy
Plot:
It's out of the frying pan into the fire when a low-level gangster, who everyone thinks stole $300,000 from his boss, gets released from a prison stint and finds himself embroiled with both the mob and the cops. Based on the short story collection Milano calibro 9 by Giorgio Scerbanenco.
Reasons to watch:
Between their spaghetti westerns, poliziotteschi crime thrillers, and horror-soaked gialli (which would have a monumental influence on the slasher genre), no one* blurred the line between high and low art quite like Italian filmmakers between the '60s and early '80s. They took violent, pulpy exploitation stories awash in sex and murder and wrapped them in such highly stylized avant-garde aesthetics, with compositions beautiful enough to hang in museums, that even the crimson blood spraying from arteries and bullet wounds to spatter across sand or concrete or the walls of a home evokes the creative expression of modernist design and fine art. Writer/director Fernando Di Leo was one of the most prominent contributors of these gritty, visually stunning masterworks, and with this twisting, lavish, aggressively anti-capitalist neo-noir gangster flick, the poliziotteschi filmmaker kicked off his iconic Milieu Trilogy, which would have an irrevocable impact on contemporary filmmaking icons like Quentin Tarantino and Nicolas Winding Refn (and probably Edgar Wright as well, though he's never publically acknowledged it. And also probably the John Wick franchise, which I just finished covering. Basically, any genre film that bleeds style owes a debt to the Italians*).
The Criterion Channel
*Many Japanese filmmakers were also doing similar things in that period. But the Italians certainly had their own stamp and didn't incorporate as much absurdism or dark comedy as Japanese filmmakers did in their genre films, which still contained eye-popping design but could get a lot more cartoony and over-the-top - like graphic novels come to life.
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