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Père Samuel Fuller repaying the compliments of the Nouvelle Vague kids. "Enjoy the carnival." Freeze-frames and slow-motion and jump-cuts right off the bat, the title is a slain partner but also literally a dead pigeon, thus a burlesque farrago of The Maltese Falcon. The American dick in West Germany (Glenn Corbett), with the look of "an unemployed rapist." Infiltration and extortion are the reigning human interactions in the age of Nixon and Mao, the MacGuffin is a compromising microfilm held by a blackmail ring run by a dandified Mabuse (Anton Diffring). The gumshoe follows the enigmatic fräulein (Christa Lang) to a movie theater where he thoroughly savors a dubbed John Wayne, their caustic romance quickly takes off, "I'm warped and she's a bitch." Mr. Arkadin approach, a profusion of gags and cameos and monikers like Charlie Umlaut and Doctor Bogdanovich. Stéphane Audran ominously wearing pants, Anthony Chinn's George Sanders accent, Alexander D'Arcy dyed and grinning on a barge down the Rhine. "Where am I know?" "In the major league, buster!" The shootout in the maternity ward is dilated in Woo's Hard Boiled, the hopped-up henchman in clown makeup (Eric P. Caspar) gets confetti in his mouth during a raging close-up. Beethoven's Fifth Symphony segues into an earful of experimental rock, a familiar gruff voice from America, "Der Treue Husar" at the parade. Fuller on a tear in Fassbinder's turf, with notes from Pickup on South Street and The Crimson Kimono amid the flurry. The elegance of fencing is not for the showdown, the brute force needed brings swords and axes down from the walls in a burst of cinematic action painting. "All very irregular," all very splendidly bewildering. À bout de souffle for the finale, where the heroine introduced behind a frosted pane shatters along with the screen. With Sieghardt Rupp, William Ray, Verena Reichel, and Hans-Christoph Blumenberg.
--- Fernando F. Croce |