{"id":3673,"date":"2015-11-28T21:02:24","date_gmt":"2015-11-28T21:02:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/?p=3673"},"modified":"2015-11-19T21:06:58","modified_gmt":"2015-11-19T21:06:58","slug":"elio-petri-the-tenth-victim","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/reviews\/elio-petri-the-tenth-victim\/","title":{"rendered":"Elio Petri: The Tenth Victim"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"The<\/a>
The Tenth Victim<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Aka La dixi\u00e8me victime (Fr), Das 10.Opfer (WG), La decima vittima (It)
\nItaly \/ France
\n1965
\nA Carlo Ponti productio for Compagnia Cinematografica Champion (Rome), Films Concordia (Paris)
\nDirector: Elio Petri
\nStory: Based on the novel \u2018The Tenth Victim\u2019 by Robert Sheckley
\nScreenplay: Tonino Guerra, Giorgio Salvioni, Ennio Flaiano, Elio Petri
\nCinematography: Gianni De Venanzo {Technicolor \u2013 Widescreen}
\nMusic: Piero Piccioni, the song \u2018Spiral Waltz\u2019 by Bardotti, Piccioni and sung by Mina
\nEditor: Ruggero Mastroianni
\nArt director: Piero Poletto
\nCameraman: Pasqualino De Santis
\nRelease dates & running times: Italy (01\/12\/65), France (10\/02\/67, 90 mins), West Germany (05\/08\/66, 92 mins)
\nFilmed: Exteriors shot in New York, Rome
\nItalian takings: 620.000.000 lire
\nCast: Marcello Mastroianni (Marcello Polletti<\/i>), Ursula Andress (Caroline Meredith<\/i>), Elsa Martinelli (Olga, Marcello\u2019s girlfriend<\/i>), Salvo Randone (\u2018the professor\u2019<\/i>), Massimo Serato (Rossi, Marcello\u2019s lawyer<\/i>), Milo Quesada (Rudi<\/i>), Luce Bonifassy (Lidia, Marcello\u2019s wife<\/i>), George Wang (the Chinese \u2018hunter\u2019<\/i>), Evi Rigano (a victim<\/i>), Walter Williams (Martin<\/i>), Richard Armstrong (Cole<\/i>), Anita Sanders (the masseuse<\/i>), Mickey Knox (Chet<\/i>), Antonio Ciani
\nUncredited: Jacques Herlin (the game compere<\/i>), Wolfgang Hillinger (Baron Von Aschenberg<\/i>)<\/p>\n

In 1965, however, Petri released the film that remains his best known work today.\u00a0 Based on a novel by Robert Sheckley, The <\/b>Tenth Victim<\/b> represented a marked sea change in his oeuvre.\u00a0 Gone was the low key, wry approach of his former films: this is a brash, colorful production that exudes extravagance from it\u2019s every pore.\u00a0 From the sets to the effects, from the cast to the marketing, this was a big film with big intentions.\u00a0 This was partly due to the involvement of Carlo Ponti, a producer who had achieved considerable success with large-scale international productions (he also made Operation Crossbow<\/b> and Dr Zhivago<\/b> the same year), although quite how he became involved with the more leftfield Petri would be interesting to know.<\/p>\n

It is the 21st Century, and violence has been legalized in the form of \u2018the hunt\u2019, a game in which people track down and kill each other.\u00a0 All participants play ten games – five as a \u2018hunter\u2019, five as the \u2018hunted\u2019 – and each game is composed of two players (one \u2018hunter\u2019, one \u2018hunted\u2019), chosen electronically by computer.\u00a0 Only one player can survive.\u00a0 The winner receives a cash prize, and if they win ten games they receive great honor and prestige, as well as a cool million dollars.\u00a0 The idea of all this is that it acts as an outlet for humankind\u2019s innate aggression, thereby making war and criminal violence unnecessary.<\/p>\n

Two of the greatest players are Marcello Polletti (Marcello Mastroianni) and Caroline Meredith (Ursula Andress), so it\u2019s almost inevitable when the former is chosen to be hunted by the latter.\u00a0 Things are made more difficult for Marcello because, whilst Caroline is allowed to research her proposed victim\u2019s life, he isn\u2019t permitted to know even the identity of his pursuer.\u00a0 Furthermore, whilst she is able to finance a number of assistants to act as back up, he is entirely broke after a messy divorce from his – frankly horrible – wife.<\/p>\n

Caroline\u2019s approach is unusual: she pretends to be a documentary filmmaker carrying out research into \u2018the sexual behavior of the Italian male\u2019.\u00a0 Marcello, desperate for cash, agrees to take part in a televised interview, unaware that it\u2019s planned as the location for his demise.\u00a0 Caroline has been paid for the killing to be captured live on television, with a full song and dance routine \u2013 including jiving teacups \u2013 to take place in the background.\u00a0 His suspicions are aroused, however, when he witnesses her signaling to an associate, so he decides to counterattack by arranging to assassinate her on film, and even intending to incorporate some handy product-placement of his own whilst doing so.\u00a0 These nefarious schemes are complicated even further by the fact that the two of them are slowly falling in love.<\/p>\n

\"Marcello<\/a>
Marcello Mastroianni looking cool in The Tenth Victim<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

This is the type of science fiction film that you rarely get nowadays: hardly a fast mover, it\u2019s jam-packed so full of ideas that half of them are only partially realized.\u00a0 It slots neatly in beside the likes of Dr. Strangelove <\/b>(64) and The <\/b>President\u2019s Analyst<\/b> (67) as products of the sixties that represent the ambitious pinnacle of the genre.\u00a0 Despite the synopsis making it sound like an action film, that is only partially the intention of Petri and his accomplices.\u00a0 They have other concerns on their mind: politics, death, consumerism and filmmaking itself.\u00a0 The barbs are fired widely, often missing their target, but you can hardly fault the filmmakers for effort.<\/p>\n

At a most basic level, The <\/b>Tenth Victim<\/b> is a critique of the Bond phenomenon that was kicking into a high gear at the time.\u00a0 It has the same outlandish gadgets (a bra that shoots bullets, skin colored body armor), but these are taken to a parodic level: one assassination scheme involves an ejector chair propelling a potential victim into a pool of alligators.\u00a0 It also has a \u2018training center\u2019 presided over by an eccentric, \u2018Q\u2019 style scientist and a similarly exotic ambience of high-fashion lifestyles and international jet-setting.\u00a0 The main difference is that \u2013 as with many Petri films \u2013 the central character has very little control over his life; he is manipulated at every turn, most particularly by women (his wife, his girlfriend, Caroline).\u00a0 Not something you\u2019d expect from 007.<\/p>\n

Beyond that, however, there are several subtexts at play.\u00a0 The notion of people trying to cope in a world gone mad is one that Petri returns to again and again.\u00a0 Marcello, like The <\/b>Teacher of Vigevano<\/b>\u2019s Antonio Mombelli, is someone who\u2019s trying to navigate a path through the insanity of mass commercialism.\u00a0 The big difference is that he\u2019s good at it.\u00a0 In this future, society appears to be on the verge of psychosis: a player who has just murdered somebody is congratulated by a policeman before being admonished for parking his car on the wrong side of the road; loudspeakers proclaim that participating in the hunt (and quite possibly dying) is a really good idea.\u00a0 It\u2019s almost redundant to point out the way in which the contemporary world of reality television has come to replicate the worst excesses of vulgarity on show here.<\/p>\n

Despite wearing its cleverness on its sleeves, The <\/b>Tenth Victim<\/b> also remains a jolly entertaining film.\u00a0 It\u2019s more accessible than some of Petri\u2019s later work and, despite being extremely stylized in approach, has a strong central narrative that holds the attention.\u00a0 There\u2019s humor throughout (\u2018a killing a day keeps the doctor away\u2019), which helps to soften the rather bitter concept at its heart.\u00a0 Those paying attention will also pick up a number of intertextual gags, such as having roads named after Fellini and Nino Rota. \u00a0My favorite, however, is Marco\u2019s admonition to \u2018\u2026pay no attention to the neo-realistic, unkind and vulnerable people\u2019.<\/p>\n

Some people have complained about the two leads (\u2018lack of chemistry\u2019 and \u2018bored\u2019 are epithets that have been applied), but the director encouraged actors to turn in idiosyncratic performances \u2013 flipping from the hysterical to the somnambulant – throughout his career, and these fit in perfectly.\u00a0 This role helped to cement Ursula Andress\u2019 status as the ultimate in Amazonian femme fatales and as for Marcello Mastroianni, well, what can you say: at this time the man was as cool as they come.<\/p>\n

(5)\u00a0Petri claimed to have originally had the idea of adapting Sheckley\u2019s novel in 1962, but having had no success in selling the idea to a producer it was put onto a back burner.\u00a0 Mastroianni then read the novel in 1964, and approached Ponti for finances. The relationship between the director and producer was strained: quite apart from their personal differences, Petri was aghast to find that Ponti was paying other writers to come up with adaptations at the same time as he was working on the script with Tonino Guerra and Ennio Flaiano.\u00a0 The result was far too downbeat for Ponti\u2019s tastes, and he insisted on the inclusion of more humour and a happy ending, all of which infuriated the director even more.\u00a0 At least the stars were happy: Mastroianni and Andress began a short affair during filming.<\/p>\n

Mastroianni and Petri had a close relationship, and at least two proposed films which never came to fruition.\u00a0 The first was to be a comic western starring Mastroianni and his brother Ruggero as a pair of feared gunfighters.\u00a0 The second was a lampoon of the Vincent Price horror films tentatively called Necrofilia.\u00a0 The actor was notably more keen on these than the director, but it\u2019s interesting to think how they might have turned out.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Based on a novel by Robert Sheckley, The Tenth Victim represented a marked sea change in Elio Petri’s oeuvre. Gone was the low key, wry approach of his former films: this is a brash, colorful production that exudes extravagance from it\u2019s every pore. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4094,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1212,8],"tags":[68,595,1133,1046,150,1132,851,497],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3673"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3673"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3673\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4096,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3673\/revisions\/4096"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4094"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3673"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3673"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3673"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}