{"id":3714,"date":"2017-07-06T18:07:35","date_gmt":"2017-07-06T18:07:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/?p=3714"},"modified":"2017-07-27T19:58:36","modified_gmt":"2017-07-27T19:58:36","slug":"ciak-si-moroni","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/reviews\/ciak-si-moroni\/","title":{"rendered":"Ciak… si Moroni"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Conqueror<\/a>
Conqueror of the Orient<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The world of popular Italian cinema is crowded with the names of estimable filmmakers.\u00a0 Genuine auteurs, like Sergio Leone or Dario Argento, whose work is genuinely distinctive; or capable craftsmen such as Mario Bava, Duccio Tessari or Sergio Sollima, who dabbled in various genres, usually with some degree of distinction.\u00a0 Even b-movie specialists like Umberto Lenzi, Sergio Martino or Mario Caiano regularly made films which belied their low budgets and managed to look both stylish and accomplished.<\/p>\n

However, while it’s quite appropriate that these kinds of figures are the ones that crop up during discussion of cinema all’italiana, the truth is that Italian film also provided a decent living – at least for a short while – for numerous directors who were, how shall we put it, less talented.\u00a0 Journeymen who could spin together a serviceable if not particularly good movie for almost nothing.\u00a0 They worked with meagre resources, using scripts which had usually been constructed to ape more prestigious releases as closely as possible and they shot their films in extra quick time.\u00a0 Their films have several distinguishing traits: a reliance on stock footage; self cannibalisation; using stuntmen as lead actors; endless time spent in which the characters walk, ride or drive around; and usually featuring a high percentage of dialogue which describes events that have already happened (or have happened off screen, because the budget didn’t stretch as far as filming it).\u00a0 In this wonderful domain the filmmakers were often more flamboyant than talented; individuals such as Demofilo Fidani (better known as a famous medium), Mario Gariazzo (a part-time Ufologist), Paolo Solvay (who foisted the pube-eating mutant from BEAST IN HEAT onto the public) and Aristide Massaccesi (who later, of course, became the prime exponent of Italian hardcore films).\u00a0 Give these guys a buck, and they’d make a film with it.\u00a0 Heck, they’d make two.\u00a0 Bad films, undoubtedly, but films nonetheless.<\/p>\n

Although not as prolific as the aforementioned directors, Mario Moroni belongs very much in their circle.\u00a0 He only made two films during his long career in Italian cinema, but blth of them are cheap, nasty and rubbish.\u00a0 And as nobody else is deranged enough to waste their time looking at his work, it seems like an appropriate job for The WildEye.<\/p>\n

Moroni’s name first cropped up in movie credits in 1952, when he acted as a scriptwriter on the 1952 film Dramma sul tevere<\/b>.\u00a0 A suitably ripe melodrama, this was the story of two brothers, one virtuous (Aldo Fiorelli) and the other a delinquent (Renato Baldini).\u00a0 It was directed by Tanio Boccia, a quickie specialist whose name became something of a joke in Cinecitta (rushed, no budget films came to be known as Boccia jobs).\u00a0 In fact, Boccia wasn’t bad at what he did. \u00a0He never made classics, but his films were efficient enough for them to do well in the provincial cinemas and in export (especially to developing countries in the Middle East and South America).\u00a0 And the people who financed his work weren’t exactly interested in their artistic merit; they were interested in hard cash.<\/p>\n

Boccia and Moroni formed a strong partnership, and Moroni was involved in nearly all of Boccia’s films from the late 50s onwards.\u00a0 Ana perdonami<\/b>, made in 1953, was another melodrama, this time about a former prisoner of war (Aldo Fiorelli again) returning to Italy with a fortune but consumed with grief for his dead wife.\u00a0 Arriva la banda<\/b> was a musicarelli (a romantic story with pop songs) about a girl (Maria Fiore) in love with a drummer (crooner Matteo Spinola), much to her father’s disapproval.<\/p>\n

With the arrival of the 1960s, Italian popular cinema was largely driven by the thirst for peplum films; mythological and historical epics featuring heavily muscled protagonists in the style of Steve Reeves (who had starred in the film which kicked the genre off, Pietro Francisci’s Le fatiche di Ercole<\/b> (57)).\u00a0 Never one to buck a trend, Boccia threw himself upon the craze with vigour, making seven such films between 1960 and 1966.\u00a0 Conqueror of the Orient <\/b>(60), The Triumph of Maciste<\/b> (61), Samson Against the Pirates <\/b>(63), Terror of the Steppes<\/b> (64), Atlas Against the Czar<\/b> (64), Desert Raiders <\/b>(64) and Hercules of the Desert<\/b> (65) were modest, unambitous entries in the cycle, indistinguishable from the mass of similar films being produced at the time.\u00a0 Almost all of them featured Adriano Cellini, one of the few Italian peplum stars but who was still obliged to hide his local origins by using the Americanised pseudonym Kirk Morris.\u00a0 During the course of these films, Moroni also extended his role, acting not only as a scriptwriter but also as an assistant or second unit director for Boccia, gaining valuable experience of working on a film set in the process.<\/p>\n

After Agente X 1-7 operaci<\/b>\u00f3n Oc<\/b>\u00e9ano<\/b>, an early and long forgotten eurospy film starring Lang Jeffries, the partnership between Moroni and Boccia seemed to dissolve.\u00a0 Boccia was still making films, but Moroni didn’t have any involvement with them (or at least he wasn’t credited with having any involvement with them).\u00a0 What he was up to during the second half of the 1960s is unknown, possibly he was working in advertising or in the nascent television industry.\u00a0 Whatever the case, he reappeared out of nowhere in 1971 with his first film proper, the Spaghetti Western Mallory Must Not Die<\/b>.<\/p>\n

MALLORY MUST NOT DIE<\/strong><\/p>\n

Robert Woods (Larry Mallory), Gabriella Giorgelli (Cora Ambler), Teodoro Corr\u00e0 (Bart Ambler), Renato Baldini (Col. Todd Hasper), Renato Malavasi (Doctor), Artemio Antonini (Block Stone), Mario Dardanelli, Attilio Marra, Fulvio Mingozzi, Renato Mazzieri, Carla Mancini (Maria), Alessandro Perrella
\nUncredited (according to IMDB): Antonio Basile (Jack)<\/p>\n

\"Mallory<\/a>
Mallory Must Not Die<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Spaghetti Westerns had been hugely popular in the late 1960s, during which period they had been virtually guaranteed to make a healthy profit, but by the early seventies the audiences had become bored with the repetitive plots and increasingly shoddy production values, turning instead to poliziotteschi and gialli; films with a contemporary setting which seemed more attuned to the troubled times.\u00a0 Those that were still being made had increasingly reduced budgets, and the filmmakers who really represented this period of the genre weren’t so much tthe Sergios Leone and Corbucci as the aforementioned Demofilo Fidani and Paolo Solvay, cheapjack specialists who managed to make films, but little more.<\/p>\n

By 1971, as well as it being the heyday of the no-budget production, the genre also experienced a transition, moving from a generally serious (if occasionally light-hearted) format into more comical territory.\u00a0 If people weren’t so interested in the serious stuff any more – so the thinking seems to have gone – then let’s throw in some fart gags and slapstick, that’ll keep them happy! This shift had been triggered by the hugely successful Bud Spencer and Terence Hill film They Call Me Nobody<\/b>, which was released in December 1970, and within a few months virtually every director working in the genre was upping the humor and partnering little and large protagonists for comic effect. In almost all cases it didn’t work. Atypically, and despite being released nearly a year after They Call Me Nobody<\/b>, Mallory Must Not Die <\/b>plays it admirably straight; even if it does display all the other trademark faults of the genre at the time.<\/p>\n

Southern Colonel Todd (Renato Baldini) has made a vow: to buy back the ranch that was tricked out of his hands by the malign Bart Ambler (Teodoro Corr\u00e0) while he was away fighting.\u00a0 Ambler had married his sister, persuaded her to sign over all rights to the family ranch, sold it and then killed her, leaving The Colonel homeless and itching for revenge.\u00a0 Unfortunately he\u2019s also been badly wounded in the war and is physically incapable of wreaking vengeance, so he hooks up with a half-breed partner, Larry Mallory (Robert Woods), to help him realise his plans.\u00a0 The two of them head South with a large sum of money, intending to buy back the ranch while Ambler\u2019s out of the territory.<\/p>\n

\"Robert<\/a>
Robert Woods in Mallory Must Not Die<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

After settling down in a local Inn while the deal is done, they swiftly make the acquaintance of a variety of dubious characters: there\u2019s Cora (Gabriella Giorgelli), Ambler\u2019s sister; Carter, the trouble-averse barman; Block Stone (Artemio Antonini), a local thug; and Doc (Renato Malavisi), a respected local surgeon.\u00a0 The transaction goes well and once the contract of sale has been signed\u00a0 they set about returning the ranch to its former glory, patching it up and investing in good quality livestock.\u00a0 But when Ambler returns to town he\u2019s none too happy to discover that the ranch has been sold from under him; he also has an emotional attachment to the place and was intending to buy it back.\u00a0 He also knows that a railway is due to be built through the area, thus increasing the value of the land exponentially, and he\u2019s willing to do anything he can to force Mallory and the Colonel out.<\/p>\n

Mallory Must Not Die <\/b>is generally considered to be one of the very worst examples of the genre, which is a little unfair; it\u2019s bad, but not that bad, and it\u2019s certainly preferable to some of the utterly crappy comedy westerns that were being made at the time.\u00a0 Despite hinging on a familiar revenge scenario the script does have a few distinctive features.\u00a0 The hero is motivated for much of the film by a sense of revenge by proxy; it\u2019s not him who\u2019s been wronged, but his friend the Colonel (until, that is, the Colonel is bumped off).\u00a0 Some of the characterisation is a little more nuanced than could have been expected, with the undoubtedly villainous Ambler being driven by motivations which aren\u2019t that different to the heroes (he\u2019s also portrayed as being less than the standard all powerful bandit, and the townsfolk are more than capable of standing up to him despite his short temper and gun-slinging skills).\u00a0 There\u2019s also a rather ludicrous but certainly unexpected climax.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not without potential, in other words, but unfortunately the execution is lacking.\u00a0 The more interesting elements of the story are occluded by a confusing, badly constructed narrative which regularly drifts into random territory while leaving much of the background story unexplained (the historical ownership of the ranch makes no kind of sense whatsoever, rendering the cause of the feud between Ambler and Todd incoherent).\u00a0 The cinematography by Mario Vulpiani \u2013 who worked on a number of prestigious films including Valentino Orsini\u2019s L<\/b>\u2019amante dell<\/b>\u2019orsa maggiore<\/b>, Marco Ferreri\u2019s Blow Out<\/b> and Damiano Damiani\u2019s How to Kill a Judge <\/b>\u2013 is undistinguished; it\u2019s a consistently crude and ugly looking film which never manages to disguise the lack of resources with which it was made.\u00a0 And although the painfully apparent low budget can shoulder some of the blame, some of it must aslo be apportioned to Moroni, who seems to lack any basic understanding of how to pace a film and hasn\u2019t the faintest idea when it comes to staging action sequences.\u00a0 If directed by a competent genre filmmaker such as Sergio Garrone or Paolo Bianchini, who also both traded in similar no-frills storylines, it could have been a more worthwhile affair.<\/p>\n

\"Teodoro<\/a>
Teodoro Corra in Mallory Must Not Die<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

As for the cast, Teodoro Corr\u00e0, an underrated performer, does a good job as Ambler, while Robert Woods – who wasn’t above appearing in this kind of no budget nonsense at the time – sports a strange pigtail and looks a little gaunt.\u00a0 There\u2019s also an unusually large role for Artemio Antonini, a stuntman who was more commonly to be found in blink-and-you\u2019ll-miss-him parts; the fact that he has such a prominent part is probably as good a demonstration of the scant resources at hand as anything.<\/p>\n

Unsurprisingly, Mallory Must Not Die<\/b> hardly set the box office alight, although it presumably turned some kind of profit thanks to sales on the export market.\u00a0 Although Moroni wouldn’t make another Spaghetti Western, he did return to the genre – and to his former collaborator Tanio Boccia – as a writer on Sapevano solo uccidere<\/b>, a little seen release from 1971.\u00a0 This was another serious-minded tale of revenge which feels slightly out of its time, with Kirk Morris as a young man out for vengeance against bloodthirsty bandito Alan Steel (aka Sergio Ciani).\u00a0 He also wrote a film that, unusually, wasn’t directed by Boccia, Mario Bava’s entertaining if lightweight Four Times That Night<\/b>, a Rashamon style comedy told from several different characters viewpoints.\u00a0 In 1974, some three years after Mallory Must Not Die<\/b> trickled out into Italian cinemas, he returned with a second film, Ciak… si muore<\/b>.<\/p>\n

CIAK\u2026 SI MUORE<\/strong><\/p>\n

Cast: Giorgio Ardisson (Inspector Menzel), Annabella Incontrera, Ivano Staccioli (Richard Hanson, Linda\u2019s partner), Antonio Pierfederici (Benner, a director), Belinda Bron (Fanny), Carlo Enrici (Ross, the writer), Renzo Ozzano (Sergeant Bert Malden)<\/p>\n

\"ciak<\/a>While Mallory Must Not Die<\/b> was a low-budget and late attempt to make a Spaghetti Western, Ciak… si muore<\/b> was an equally low-budget and late attempt to make a film from another popular genre already way past its best: the giallo. Giallos – Italian thrillers named after the yellow jacketed, dime-store novels of writers like Edgar Wallace which had inspired them – had been sporadically released throughout the 1960s before entering a purple patch during the early 1970s.\u00a0 Following key releases such as The Sweet Body of Deborah<\/b> and The Bird with the Crystal Plumage<\/b>, numerous films leapt onto the trend, reusing key motifs that characterised the format to the point of tedium: a killer wearing black gloves; numerous starlets getting bumped off one by one; a weary cop with a distinctive character trait; the final revelation of the ‘unexpected’ killer, generally driven by near incomprehensible – and often pseudo psychological – motives.\u00a0 The genre had already outlived its welcome by 1973, at which point the number of productions dropped to a trickle, generally made by either semi-reputable film-makers with a particular connection to the format (primarily Dario Argento) or cheap-jack producers who hadn’t yet cottoned on to the fact that everyone else was more interested in sex or crime films.<\/p>\n

Perhaps taking its cues from Fellini\u2019s 81\/2 <\/b>– okay, perhaps not – the plot centres on a group of characters making a new, low-budget opus.\u00a0 Benner (Antonio Pierfederici), a renowned director, is the main mover behind this \u2018masterpiece\u2019; which is based on a much-mutilated screenplay by his regular writer Ross (Carlo Enrici), who\u2019s increasingly appalled to see his great work being reduced to a cheapjack sexy comedy.\u00a0 And things don\u2019t get any better when a hysterical diva is killed on the set, murdered while filming a sequence which takes place in a car wash.\u00a0 Inspector Menzel (Giorgio Ardisson) is called in to investigate and, oblivious to the proto-post-modern self-referentiality at play and ignoring the fact that the entire crew seem amazingly un-phased by what\u2019s happened, he begins drawing up a list of likely suspects.\u00a0 At the head of it is Hanson (Ivano Staccioli), a thuggish electrician and former associate of the dead girl, but he has a cast-iron alibi thanks to a local whore (who works in the back room of a grotty caf\u00e9).<\/p>\n

Before long another actress is bumped off, strangled in her dressing room just before she can pass on a vital bit of information to the Inspector;\u00a0 then another, bashed around the head while taking a shower and then finished off while comatose in hospital.\u00a0 In the meantime Benner is cooking up an insane climax to the film including a veritable fight to the death between good and evil, Ross is looking ever more dispirited and the Inspector seems far more interested in having a fling with actress Lucia (Annabella Incontrera) that doing any kind of detective work.\u00a0 But amongst all this, who could the real killer be?<\/p>\n

To be blunt, Ciak<\/b>\u2026 si muore <\/b>is not a very good film.\u00a0 It\u2019s all very predictable and uninspired, not to mention hindered by some poor cinematography from lower-than-low budget specialist Giovanni Raffaldi and a terrible, and terribly inappropriate, soundtrack from Aldo Buonocore (who seems to have been inspired by silent movies rather than the music of his own era).\u00a0 As with Mallory Must Not Die<\/b>, the lack of filmmaking finesse isn\u2019t helped at all by the extremely low budget, which leads to much of the film being shot in run down offices or studio sets and featuring talking heads discussing the finer points of the plot.\u00a0 The pacing is erratic, to say the least, with the running time padded out by an unlikely love affair between the Inspector and Lucia (which is subsequently forgotten about), and Moroni seems to have little ability at shooting action sequences, all of which end up being stodgy and confused.<\/p>\n

But\u2026\u00a0 if accepted as a runt among the giallo litter, it\u2019s not without its own moments of charm; most of which, it must be said, seem to be accidental.\u00a0 The plot, despite the disappearing red-herrings and other summary diversions, does kind of keep on track and has a certain simple effectiveness.\u00a0 Perhaps this was thanks to the involvement of Roberto Mauri, another low-budget specialist and occasionally effective director in his own right (and who could quite frankly have done a much better job with the raw materials at hand).\u00a0 Then there are some jaw-dropping sequences which come out of leftfield: a protracted dance scene in which Belinda Bron gyrates around in just a bikini during a horrid looking \u2018party\u2019; the climax, in which several people dressed in Diabolik costumes \u2013 one of whom is the killer \u2013 chase numerous bikini wearing starlets around an extremely crimson theatre (no, it doesn’t make any sense whatsoever, but it\u2019s worth the price of admission in itself).<\/p>\n

\"Murder<\/a>
Murder Most Foul from Ciak si muore<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Further kudos come from Moroni\u2019s surprisingly effective documentation of the art of low-budget filmmaking (although, worryingly, it\u2019s implied that the film-within-a-film here is a reputable production).\u00a0 With its dingy studios, precious directors, downtrodden writers always on hand to revise a script, bitchy starlets and assorted dubious hangers on, it rings fairly true as a representation of what it was actually like to make these kinds of films.\u00a0 There\u2019s an amusing scene set in a quarry, where the entire crew consists of about twenty people, a decrepit caravan and a film camera; which must have been just about what it was like filming Mallory Must Not Die<\/b>.\u00a0 There\u2019s also a reference to Antonioni\u2019s Blow Up <\/b>(by way of Argento), with a vital clue captured on film but not understood, although this ends up falling off the radar of the scriptwriters, who make no further mention of it after the half hour mark.<\/p>\n

As for the actors, Antonio Pierfederici is good fun as the flamboyant Benner, while Ardisson makes a suitably bemused foil (\u2018You want me to believe you don\u2019t know what you\u2019re doing?\u2019, he exclaims, when presented with Benner\u2019s explanation of the art of improvisation).\u00a0 Familiar villain Ivano Staccioli ends up having a surprisingly heroic role and giallo regular Annabella Incontrera has a glorified cameo.\u00a0 It\u2019s bad, for sure, but that doesn’t mean it\u2019s unenjoyable in its own cack-handed fashion.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, it would also prove to be Moroni’s last film\u00a0 as a director.\u00a0 He did receive one further film credit, as a writer on a virtually unseen Tanio Broccia war movie from 1981 called La guerra sul fronte Est<\/b>.\u00a0 It’s a shame this is apparently unavailable as it sounds rather interesting: a couple of Italian soldiers on their way to period of leave are attacked by Greek troops and forced to take refuge in an old mine with a motley group of other survivors.\u00a0 Renato De Carmine and Roberto Maldera starred.\u00a0 This also proved to be Tanio Boccia’s last film: he died in 1982, just after it’s release.<\/p>\n

During the late 1970s and early 80s, Moroni also worked occasionally in television.\u00a0 Information about Italian TV is sketchy, but he is known to have directed two mini series.\u00a0 Il povero soldato<\/b>, from 1978<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mario Moroni made two films during his long career in Italian cinema, both of them are authentic poverty row efforts of little critical or aesthetic value. But as nobody else is deranged enough to waste their time examining his work, it seems like an appropriate job for The WildEye…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4733,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[324,8],"tags":[1154,857,1155,1153,638,1087],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3714"}],"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=3714"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3714\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4734,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3714\/revisions\/4734"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4733"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3714"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3714"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3714"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}