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La Dolce Caccia. In the year of Alphaville, a chase through sallow Wall Street leading to a striptease with bullets out of a brassiere. Elsewhere, a Billy Wilder joke about explosives and the Kraut who can't help clicking his heels. Violence somewhere in the future has been funneled into human-hunt decathlons, "societal safety valves" with stalker and prey taking turns—a computer in Geneva chooses the pairings, hence the strapping Yankee blonde (Ursula Andress) and the strapped Italian playboy (Marcello Mastroianni). One's ideal consummation is a fusillade inside the Colosseum while the other prefers a swimming pool filled with crocodiles, in the middle is where relationships are worked out. "The important thing is how one dies. Like a rabbit, or a samurai?" A comic-strip on l'amore volubile, Elio Petri gives it a brisk reading. The Tomorrow of Pop Art, where a home comes equipped with glass walls, plaster statues, herds of sheep, a giant blinking eye and a secret compartment to keep the elderly folks from being euthanized by the State. Big money means advertising slogans over fresh corpses, the hero makes a little extra on the side by delivering beachfront sermons to weeping audiences (and getting razzed by "those nasty neo-realists"). The new gladiators, the Temple of Venus, Mao's China, Diana the Huntress... "Why control the births when we can increase the deaths?" The punchline is that marriage is still the most dangerous game. Losey's Modesty Blaise the following year keenly pushes the degraded mod aesthetic, Bartel's Death Race 2000 one decade later brings it back to the drive-in. With Elsa Martinelli, Salvo Randone, Milo Quesada, Massimo Serato, and Luce Bonifassy.
--- Fernando F. Croce |