BEFORE SCROLLING TO THE WEB PAGE BELOW ABOUT TINTO BRASS, PLEASE TAKE A LOOK AT THESE NEWS ITEMS, WHICH ARE FAR MORE IMPORTANT THAN ANYTHING I’VE EVER HAD TO SAY:

AMY GOODMAN:     A little-noticed story surfaced a couple of weeks ago in the Army Times newspaper about the 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team. “Beginning Oct. 1 for 12 months,” reported Army Times staff writer Gina Cavallaro, “the 1st BCT will be under the day-to-day control of U.S. Army North, the Army service component of Northern Command, as an on-call federal response force for natural or manmade emergencies and disasters, including terrorist attacks.” Disturbingly, she writes that “they may be called upon to help with civil unrest and crowd control” as well. The force will be called the chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear or high-yield explosive Consequence Management Response Force. Its acronym, CCMRF, is pronounced “sea-smurf.” These “sea-smurfs,” Cavallaro reports, have “spent 35 of the last 60 months in Iraq patrolling in full battle rattle,” in a combat zone, and now will spend their 20-month “dwell time” — time troops are required to spend to “reset and regenerate after a deployment” — armed and ready to hit the U.S. streets....

FOR THE FULL STORY, CLICK HERE.

It gets worse:

NAOMI WOLF:     On October 1, 2008, President Bush deployed a brigade — which means three to four thousand warriors — somewhere in America. We do not know where they are deployed though citizens have informally reported to me having seen military vehicles and troops in Georgia and Alabama. We do know that their official mandate according to the first report is “crowd control” as well as action in the event of a mass civilian catastrophe. Initial reports described their technology “module package” as involving Tasers and rubber bullets.... The First Brigade is Bush’s force: they are not answerable to Congress or to the Governors of states: they are answerable to the Commander in Chief. In an Alternet posting, I interviewed Air Force Colonel (retired) David Antoon who noted that the troops must obey the president, even if he asks them to arrest Congress or fire on civilians or attack media outlets. If they do not obey orders, he notes, they face five years in prison.... Antoon himself calls the deployment “ominous.” Troops on our streets makes us something less than a democracy: one definition of a police state is when a leader sends his own military units into civilian streets. Meanwhile the civilian policing of citizens is becoming more brutal. Hundreds of preemptive arrests took place in St Paul, dozens of journalists were arrested.... In St. Paul, funds were sent in advance to pay off the lawsuits against police forces that were guaranteed to arise from the planned abuse of citizens. This sort of thing is happening across the country. The tactic has established a closed circle that has turned citizens’ law enforcement agencies into contractors of a state that is directing acts of increasing severity against US citizens. Now a military brigade is being deployed....

FOR THE FULL STORY, CLICK HERE.

Click here to see an interview with Naomi Wolf conducted in early October 2008.

For the past five years or so I hve been hearing rumors that Halliburton has been building (and has now finished building) 800 prisons throughout the USA, not yet functioning, but just waiting for the right crisis. I have not found reliable evidence for the specific quantity, readiness, functionality, locations, or details, but you might be interested in taking a look at page 5 of this Halliburton press release dated 26 January 2006: KBR has been awarded a contract announced by the Department of Homeland Security’s United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) component. The Indefinite Delivery/Indefinite Quantity contingency contract is to support ICE facilities and has a maximum total value of $385 million over a five-year term. The contract provides for establishing temporary detention and processing capabilities in the event of an emergency influx of immigrants into the United States, or to support the rapid development of new programs.... Now, really, what are the chances of “an emergency influx of immigrants into the United States”? And what are the “new programs” that could come under “rapid development”?

FOR THE FULL PRESS RELEASE, CLICK HERE.

NOW, BACK TO THE MAIN PART OF THE WEB PAGE:

Did you happen to record Monty Python’s Flying Circus when it was shown on PBS back in the 1970s?
Do you still have the tapes?
Is there a TIME-LIFE logo at the end?
If so, please write to me. Thank you!

THE WORKS OF TINTO BRASS

Appeasing Producers—Continued

Heart in His Mouth

(Col cuore in gola, 1967)

A working title was Enigma Also known as: En cinquième vitesse (In Fifth Speed) Dead Stop Dead Stop: le coeur aux levres Deadly Sweet Escalation Heart Beat I Am What I Am Ich Bin Wie Ich Bin: Das Mädchen aus der Carnaby-Street With Bated Breath

An ad for the version that, as far as I can tell, was never released. And Tinto Brass is wrongly credited as the sole scenarist. Now, the AFI Catalogue says that this was “released” (actually, it was test-screened) by Avco Embassy. But, as you can see, there is no indication anywhere in this advertisement of Avco Embassy. Instead, the distributor is given as the romantically named Films Distributing Corporation. If you know anything at all about Films Distributing Corporation, please write to me.

This movie has barely a glimpse of nudity and no out-of-the-ordinary violence (well, except maybe for the eyelash scene). So if you know why on earth it was awarded an X rating, please let me know. Thanks! But then, do you remember the late 1960s and early 1970s? That’s when the re-release of the 1922 silent movie Witchcraft through the Ages was given an X rating. And so was the Tennessee Williams/Gore Vidal movie The Last of the Mobile Hot-Shots (presumably because it momentarily showed a baby breastfeeding). The Malcolm McDowell vehicles if.... and A Clockwork Orange were also awarded X ratings. Many people thought they deserved it. But then they were slightly re-edited, so slightly that the changes were almost unnoticeable, and they were then awarded R ratings. What was the difference? Other X-rated movies of the time? Well, how about Donald Cammell’s Performance, and remember Pasolini’s version of The Decameron? Luchino Visconti’s over-the-top The Damned (La caduta degli dei) also got an X, I guess because of the Ingrid Thulin/Helmut Berger scene, which, disturbing though it was, was discreetly shot. (By the way, the little girl hanging herself was deleted even from the X version.) Ken Russell’s version of The Devils also got an X, and people pretended to be outraged by it. But for the life of me I don’t see what the big deal was, and the R-rated version was essentially identical to the censored version that had previously gotten the X. It’s all nutty. And then in the early 1980s the re-release of Napoléon vu par Abel Gance, despite its copious severed heads and limbs, and despite the banquet scene filled with topless women, got a G rating. I guess the censors didn’t even bother to look at it because it was old and silent and must therefore be fit only for kids. So what’s the story with the anonymous moms and dads who sit on the Ratings Board? Are they bribed? Are they drunk? Are they asleep? I really don’t know. Once upon a time I read an interview with Fellini, who was asked about censorship. He said that, in principle, he was in favor of it, but the criteria should not be the usual ones, but rather stupidity: Stupidity should be censored out of entertainment. You know, that would make much more sense.

THE ITALIAN-DUBBED DVD IS FORTHCOMING FROM CULT EPICS.

UPDATED FOR THE UMPTEENTH TIME ON SUNDAY, 19 NOVEMBER 2006: After Yankee Brass moved to London, where he made a film a year for four years. Panda Cinematografica, a poverty-row studio, hoped to gain some stature by hiring renowned filmmakers, and thus proposed that Brass make a trashy crime thriller almost guaranteed to turn a profit. The script was based on an obscure giallo (pulp-fiction) novel, Sepolcro di carta (The Paper Tomb), by Sergio Donati. The co-producer, another Donati—Ermanno—may have been related, and that may partly explain the background here. Though the story was not Brass’s style at all, he enthusiastically accepted the assignment, because he realized that he could transform it into something truly original.

I just picked up the DVD of Baba Yaga, recently released by Blue Underground, since I discovered via the Web that it includes a fascinating 12-minute documentary entitled Freud a fumetti, as well as an “Easter egg”: Choose the “Extras” menu, and you will see a table of contents on the left and a photo of a mouth-watering Franke & Heidecke twin-lens reflex camera on the right. Move the cursor down to “Theatrical Trailers,” and then move the cursor to the right to light up the camera lens. Press “Enter,” and you’ll see a brief interview with Tinto Brass. A huge fan of animated films and comic books, Brass had been an admirer of the revolutionary comic-book artist Guido Crepax, befriended him, and hired him to draw the storyboards for Heart in His Mouth, which would then result in becoming almost the only example of a genre called Cinema Fumetto (Comic-Book Cinema). Pause and go frame-by-frame in the Freud a fumetti documentary to examine samples of the storyboards, and you’ll see that Brass followed those drawings almost exactly.

The book it was based on, first published in 1956. This particular edition was an April 1963 reprint in a quarterly mystery magazine.

The English translation (London & Glasgow: Wm Collins Sons & Co Ltd, 1958).

A relaxed set

The pointless comic-book-like story about the murder of an extortionist, the workings of a Hitlerian mobster named Jelly-Roll, and the disastrously foolish amateur detective work by a French actor is not exactly riveting, but Brass turned the assignment into one long in-joke. Stills from Hollywood cult movies and B-movies are on display everywhere, and an arcade in Piccadilly Circus still offers a drop-a-penny-in-the-slot Kinetoscope with a decaying original 1890s film loop while an inept busker tries to imitate Charlie Chaplin in the middle of the street outside. Brass also littered the images with Crepax’s drawings, and illustrated fistfights with Crepax’s “SLAM” “OUCH” and “BWING” cartoon bubbles. Armando Trovajoli wrote the deliciously over-the-top score to match the idiosyncratic imagery. The editing is often so frenetic that there was apparently no time or budget to cut the negative properly. So instead we see a dupe of the work print, filled with messy six-perf tape splices. Boldly undoing all film noir clichés in a single stroke, Brass takes a break from a criminal chase to have Jane Burroughs (Ewa Aulin) perform an impromptu striptease while her new boyfriend Bernard (Jean Louis Trignant) madly accompanies her on a trap set and then swings on a cable, yodeling like Tarzan. (There are also several other meaningless references to “Burroughs,” “Tarzan,” and “Jane.”) All in all this is a difficult film to judge. As a story, it’s garbage. As an exercise in filmmaking technique, it’s often brilliant—revolutionary, really. Nonetheless, is it really any wonder that Trintignant is so disappointed with the movies he’s been in that he refuses to work in the medium anymore? (Well, usually.)

Like it or hate it, you’ll almost certainly be compelled to admit that it’s a one-of-a-kind experience.

This is the cover art for the German UFA VHS release. Where did this come from, and why is the title in English? Was the film ever released in English under this title? If you know, please let me know. Thanks! (I would love to acknowledge the guy who sent this scan to me, but I can’t remember his name.)

Heart in His Mouth, in its Italian dub, received its world première on Friday, 8 September 1967, at the Venice Film Festival. According to Variety (6 September 1967), “Italy not only has five entries in the running for main award Golden Lion of San Marco, but has a sixth getting a world-preem showcase here out of competition on the final afternoon. Film is Tinto Brass’s ‘Col Cuore Nella Gola’ [sic] (Heart in My Mouth). Brass is a prominent Venetian, which only partially explains last-minute string-pulling to program the Panda production.”

I was flabbergasted when I ran across this on eBay: a three-reel (about 60-minute) condensation of the English version released by IE International of Italy in Super 8 sound—and letterboxed to boot! If you know the story of how this came to be, or if you know of any other Brass films that were released in 8mm, please let me know. Thanks! (And thanks to Lee’s Cameras of London for the photo.)

LA MORTE HA FATTO L’UOVO. Trintignant and Aulin starred in another film in 1967, and judging from the internal evidence, I was certain that La morte ha fatto l’uovo was filmed first, and that Heart in His Mouth paid it some quite deliberate tribute. But then I noticed the dates. Heart in His Mouth began shooting in March 1967, prior to La morte ha fatto l’uovo. Further, the censor bureau passed Brass’s film on 7 September 1967, whereas La morte ha fatto l’uovo didn’t receive its approval certificate until more than two months later, on 21 November 1967. Interestingly, Brass’s old-time friend Franco “Kim” Arcalli coauthored and edited La morte ha fatto l’uovo, and Les Films Corona coproduced both movies. It’s really interesting to compare these two gialli. Anyone out there agree?

SILVANO IPPOLITI. Bruno Barcarol, who had done such a wonderful job photographing Chi lavora è perduto, La mia signora, and Il disco volante, died. (Brass would pay him a tribute almost four decades later in Senso ’45.) So now Brass set about searching for a replacement. As he told Nick Brown in the supplement to the Cult Epics DVD release of Così fan tutte, his interview consisted of a single question: How would you photograph a smoker well enough to show the burning ember on the tip of the cigarette? The candidates came up with various complicated methods of accomplishing the task, including planting a resistor in a prop cigarette. Ippoliti answered simply: “Have someone smoke a cigarette and I’ll shoot it.” He demonstrated — and he got the job. He would be Brass’s faithful cinematographer until he died in 1991. As we can see in various behind-the-scenes documentaries, Brass exercises a great deal of control over the cinematography of his films, going so far as frequently to operate the cameras himself. That’s why the visual style of his films is so similar, no matter who the cinematographer is.

QUESTION: Does anyone know whether the camera mask was 1.75:1 or 1.85:1?

INFO ON THE SOUNDTRACK ALBUM:
Italian Soundtracks by Label:

FOR AN ECSTATICALLY FAVORABLE OPINION OF THE FILM, TAKE A LOOK AT http://www.luxuriamusic.com/Feat_Page?featureID=5571. Well, not exactly. The site is long gone, but I just found the copy that I made more than six years ago. If you own the copyright, please write to me. Thanks!

READ A ROTTEN REVIEW:
Robert Firsching, All Movie Guide

A NICE EXAMPLE OF GUIDO CREPAX’S UNUSED ILLUSTRATIONS FOR THIS MOVIE:
http://www.orf.at/orfon/kultur/991116-2440/2443txt_story.html. Well, the link is dead as a doornail (however dead that is), but in going through my ancient discs, I discovered that I had saved a copy. If you own the copyright to that old page, or if you know who does, please write to me. Thanks!

HYPHEN OR NO HYPHEN? Some sources hyphenate “Jean Louis,” others don’t. I’m pretty sure that Jean Louis himself does not use the hyphen.

Tinto Brass takes a snapshot of Jean Louis Trintignant

THE DIFFERING VERSIONS AND THE MULTITUDINOUS TITLES. Nobody believes me, but this movie, except for a few brief scenes, was shot in English, and much of it was shot in direct sound. Vira Silenti and Luigi Bellini spoke Italian and were dubbed into English, but everyone else spoke English. But if you see it now, you’ll only see the Italian dub — or the German dub, or the French dub. The English original seems to have vanished. I’m determined to find it. Help? This odd little movie seems never to have been shown under its original title, Heart in His Mouth, which is how it was announced in Variety (Wednesday, 26 April 1967, p 52). The Italian dub used an Italian equivalent of the title, Col cuore in gola, which, if you want to be pedantically literal, translates back into English as With the Heart in Throat. The film was almost certainly released in England, but probably under the title Dead Stop. The Super 8 condensation was sold as Heart Beat, even though the opening credits did indeed read Dead Stop. And judging from one of the posters reproduced above, Dead Stop: le coeur aux levres must have been the title in Belgium, where dual-language titles seem to be fairly common. The German dub was entitled Ich Bin Wie Ich Bin: Das Mädchen aus der Carnaby-Street. Now, whenever a title is that long and includes a colon, I begin to suspect that it is a re-release of a film that originally went only under the portion of the title that now comes after the colon. And indeed, my copy of the poster was indexed by whatever cinema had it as, simply, Carnaby Street. The UFA West German home-video release of the movie confuses things further, by printing the English translation, I Am What I Am, more prominently than the actual German title, which makes me suspect that the film may have been released under that title somewhere. The German video, by the way, deletes one of my favorite bits in the movie: the establishing shot of the London underground (“underground” is the British word for what Americans call the subway system). The original cuts back and forth between the shot of the underground entrance and Jean Louis Trintignant’s face probably forty or more times over a period of about five seconds. I can’t even begin to fathom why anyone would delete that bit. (The December 2007 DVD entirely ruined this sequence by re-editing it.) An American showing, apparently a test screening (by Avco Embassy Pictures????? no, couldn’t be), ran for probably only one week beginning on 7 September 1969, in Portland, Oregon, under the title Deadly Sweet. For reasons that have probably never been explained, it received an X rating. (Today it might get a PG-13—if that.) According to a Brazilian web site, it was entitled Escalation there. Heart in His Mouth was also announced as With Bated Breath by Betty Martin in “Movie Call Sheet: Burke, Bixby Given Roles,” The Los Angeles Times, 14 March 1967, p D14. I don’t know if that was ever an official title; it may well have been merely a journalist’s attempt to translate Col cuore in gola back into English.

The French version fooled me for years. I was long convinced it was the original—and indeed, it would make sense for it to be. The characters who would have learned broken French in school speak English-accented French with Jean Louis Trintignant’s character, and otherwise everyone speaks English — without subtitles. Retitled En cinquième vitesse (In Fifth Speed), this version also had opening credits that were entirely redone — and entirely better. In the original the credits simply scroll from right to left. The French opening is fantastic, with blinking credits scrolling about in unexpected ways.

THE DVDs: The Italian-language version of this movie was released on Italian DVD in December 2007, and the transfer was so-so, a bit cropped and misframed at times, a bit dark at times. The master was complete, but the distributor deleted the rapid cutting, probably because some executive didn’t like the look of the splicing tape that was printed into the internegative. So they cut out all that beautiful intricacy and replaced it with rapid cutting back and forth among freeze frames. It’s a small change, but as small as it is, it’s large enough to kill all the entertainment value of the movie. People who would have liked the movie in its uncut form, will decide that they don’t like it if they’re introduced to it through this video. Blah. Now, Cult Epics will release that exact same transfer in March 2009, but will leave the film intact. Unfortunately, though, it will again be the Italian dub rather than the English original. Drat! What happened to the original soundtrack? Did someone hide it in a well? We must find it. If you know where it is, please write to me. Thanks!

VHS, dubbed into Italian, long out of print	DVD, dubbed into Italian, released in December 2007
The London Underground
The guy in the middle is David Prowse
That many deer in Hyde Park?
Her only movie rôle: Monique Scoazec as Veronica Yassupova
Monique Scoazec, Jean Louis Trintignant, Charles Kohler
Who is this guy? Is he credited?
My old neighborhood
Was this guy credited?
I think this guy appeared again in Nerosubianco, but I’m not sure
THE FOLLOWING FEW FRAME CAPTURES ILLUSTRATE WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU DON’T HAVE SUFFICIENT BUDGET FOR NEGATIVE CUTTING
	I can’t compare these VHS frames with the Italian DVD, because the Italian DVD deletes them all. The action is all cut out. The techies took a few clean frames, froze them, and cut back and forth among them. Well, that gets rid of the messy tape edges, but it wrecks this sequence, as well as the other rapidly cut sequences throughout the movie. Drat!!!!! All the intricacy is gone, substituted with typical TV-show-type flashiness. This was my favorite bit in the whole movie, but now it’s completely ruined. So if you’ve got the VHS, consider yourself lucky. Hang onto it! In all the sequences with rapid cutting, the VHS is authentic. You know, I’ve griped so much about business folks and techies altering other people’s works that hardly anyone wants to talk to me anymore. And I’ve killed any chance of getting a career in showbiz.
	Two samples from the eyelash scene, entirely re-edited — and entirely ruined — for the Italian DVD
In this shot, the VHS has more of the image. As for the DVD, see what happens when projectionists don’t frame properly? But there I go, complaining again...
Most of the stuff at the happening must have been documentary shots of a real happening
This guy coming down the sliding board reminds me so much of Peter O’Toole
LET’S PLAY WITH THE BRIGHTNESS LEVELS A LITTLE BIT AND SEE WHAT HAPPENS:

Here’s another edition of the PAL VHS of the Italian dub. Long out of print. Good luck in trying to get a copy. PAL VHS, of course, will not play on US equipment.

BACKGROUND:

Un film di Tinto Brass

Heart in His Mouth / Col cuore in gola / En cinquième vitesse

Distributed by Rank
Running time: 104 minutes at 24fps, 100 minutes at 25fps

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