Friday, April 24, 2009

CHASE THIS!

I have to go to an obscure Italian-produced film from 1976 for my favorite chase scene - Alberto De Martino's insanely fascist "Una Magnum Special per Tony Siatta" (aka "Blazing Magnum"), which was Italy's answer to "Dirty Harry.” The chase in question takes place midway in the film and careens for an amazing nine minutes. It’s a spectacle of vehicular mayhem that starts on car-clogged city streets, with chaser and chasee fishtailing around corners, flying over embankments and burning rubber the wrong way down one way streets.

De Martino must have loved one shot so much - where two cars get full air after bursting over a hill - that he shows it four times but from different angles! This multi-angled shot is accentuated by an explosion of music composed by Armando Trovajoli that only makes the proceeds all the more surreal and exciting.

The cars in the chase take an impossible amount of punishment but bystanders beware...cars parked along the streets are not safe from being slaughtered (one is heaved off of a jack while some luckless soul changes a tire) and pedestrians are seen running for their lives as out-of-control vehicles throttle down on them – it makes you wonder how much of this insanity was improvised. Note, too, how well edited this sequence is - there are multiple shot formations in use here: close-ups of the drivers (one being Stuart Whitman) in their cars, long shots of careening vehicles, POV shots with cameras placed on bumpers, medium shots of spinning tires – no CGI here, just sheer old-school filmmaking bravado.

The cars end up hauling down a 45-degree embankment and end up on some out-of-place country road, into a small town where they encounter a moving freight train. But - no worries - both cars leap over the train in a jaw dropping stunt that makes the final chase in Tarantino's "Death Proof" look like it was shot by a grade school kid. If you can find it (it’s not on DVD and barely made it on VHS as far as I know) – “Blazing Magnum” is a must see by car chase aficionados everywhere.

I LIKE THEATERS

In the suburbs of Chicago (I grew up in Geneva), 1977 seemed to be a transition year for movie theaters in that there were a few "cineplexes” popping up here and there, especially in juxtaposition to malls – the Fox Valley Mall theaters, Woodfield Mall, the Yorktown Cinemas were expanding. But the stand-alone, in town, theater was still king in ‘77, if not becoming home to “edgier” or – better – “sleazier” cinematic fare. I used to haunt the Tivoli in downtown Aurora, which was just down the street from the venerable Paramount.

In the summer of ’77, the Tivoli was turning into a good old fashioned grindhouse, but with a bent for horror. The theater’s décor was fitting for the genre – plush, deep, blood-red curtains, burgundy seats and gothic artwork on the ceiling. My most memorable film that played at the Tivoli? Dario Argento’s “Suspiria,” an Italian-produced bloodbath that was amongst the surge of late-‘70s horror films that were moving in subject matter from the supernatural to the slasher. “Suspiria” – happily –was both. Even though I’ve seen the film numerous times since then, the theater’s bizarre décor accentuated the “Suspiria” experience, branding it into my subconscious, keeping bits of the original viewing in my memory some 30 years later.