Enzo Castellari, glorious basterd

On the eve of his seventieth birthday, LA Weekly called Enzo Castellari an ‘Italian drive-in god’, thus betraying how little they know of a country where a ‘drive-in’ means a sparsely populated piazza and I Vitelloni projected onto the vest of the fattest man in the village. The next day, the Italian Cultural Institute in Los Angeles threw him a huge birthday party. It was a measure of the affection he enjoys in his homeland.

Until recently barely known outside Italy, Castellari has been the latest in a long line of laudable, if increasingly random, attempts by Quentin Tarantino to prompt a re-examination of popular cinema outside of the US. His remake of Castellari’s 1978 WWII western, The Inglorious Bastards, had the fan-boys salivating but it would be a tragedy if the director remains known only as Tarantino’s latest prank monkey.

The Killers (1946) gets a subtle makeover

 Castellari’s film career has spanned thirty years and more than twenty features, all of them kinetic, violent, sentimental and possessed of a bizarre, at times juvenile, sense of the absurd. He grew up in the Rome of the 1940s, surrounded by the cinematic legacy of fascism, which provided a movie-making infrastructure but allowed little in the way of experimentation. When Italian cinema regained it vitality in the 1950s, Castellari, like Sergio Leone, was too busy drinking in the American westerns and gangster flicks flooding the country to pay much attention to the blossoming neo-realist movement then shooting on the city’s streets. His cinema would be escapist, shamelessly populist and often spectacularly derivative  - but it would somehow remain wilfully, unmistakeably European.

Make no mistake, Castellari’s efforts are often gimcrack knock-offs of Hollywood blockbusters (hmm, what could 1973’s The Marseilles Connection have been referencing?) and have all the nuanced panache of a breakfast Sambuca. But having grown up in post-war Italy, Castellari knew how to make a little go a long way, a talent that put him in on the ground floor of some of the most striking new work. While only the most dedicated Castellaristo would place him in the same league as Leone or Peckinpah, his work on the Django and Trinity series helped create a wholly new cinematic language.

Ever the maverick, though, Castellari was unable to resist indulging his faith in the power of slapstick and shoddy spectacular to rescue otherwise hopelessly misfiring actioners. His gleeful willingness to get down with the ridiculous reached its apogee in the jaw-dropping 1976 western Cipolla Colt, starring an equally enthusiastic Franco Nero as the titular onion farmer threatened by Big Railroad’s landgrab. Colt fights back in his unique fashion, using the power of rank onion-breath and speeded-up action sequences to strike a blow for the little guy, all the while spurred on by Roman accented obscenities from his talking horse. Not content with having Nero confound his heroic image, Castellari also cast the sublimely bland Martin Balsam as a fascistic railroad boss with a clockwork hand. Fans loved the camped-up Nazi overtones but in fact Castellari’s subversion ran deeper: Balsam’s character actually referenced a popular liquer commercial of the time which itself featured a mechanically enhanced bon viveur rocking the drunken Gestapo vibe.

Horsing around: Franco Nero in Cipolla Colt, probably not at all making a mental note to fire his agent

Castellari’s Western career enjoyed a brief resuscitation in the early 1990s, when you could make a movie in the former Soviet Union for a fistful of cloned Switch cards and some sausages wrapped in newspaper. Unable to pass up a bargain, the director took his whole travelling circus, including regular leading man Franco Nero, out East where he helped give birth to the Borscht Western with Jonathan Of The Bears (1993), his own take on Dances With Wolves. Shot for a piffling £5 million, the movie extras snaffled a cool £2.50 a day, with gin-fizz sweeteners for the huge cast of midgets in attendance. Hundreds of Russian cavalrymen were borrowed from the local barracks to be transformed into the injun-tusslin’ US 7^th Cavalry by allowing each man a reasonably priced cowboy hat.

That was the high water mark of Castellari’s adventures in the Leone-meets-Looney Tunes world born of the late ‘60s Trinity films. But the work he carried off with most aplomb was his series of coarse cop movies of the ‘70s, most notably the ambitious pair of The Marseilles Connection and The Heroin Busters (1977). These capers are certainly nasty and possessed of the required air of sleaze but they’re not exactly gialli. They kick-started a style of European crime thriller that owed more to The Getaway and Bullitt than to the detective procedurals of the ‘60s. More, they seemed to spring from the turbulent streets of the time; during the planning of Marseilles, the Red Brigades gunning down of a Milan police commissioner was even worked into the plot.

This. Is. SPAAAAAAAR!

As with his overcooked spaghetti westerns, Castellari here created something new in the world of the Euro-pudding; gangster flicks that reflected the insanity in the air, replete with the stylish, theatrical violence being run out for real on the streets - not least by Rome’s very own bad boys of the Banda dalle Magliana, who, fittingly, would later get a movie of their own (Romanzo Criminale , 2005) that owed not a little to Castellari’s legacy.

LOST IN TRANSLATION

How some of those colourful Castellari titles got the monochrome treatment

Gli Occhi Freddi Della Paura (Cold Eyes Of Fear, 1977) was released as Desperate Moments

Sette Winchester Per Un Massacro (Seven Winchesters For A Massacre, 1968) hit the screens, sadly, as Renegade Riders

I Tre Che Sconvoisero Il West – Vado, Vedo, e Sparo (The Three That Upset The West – I Came, I Saw, I Shot! 1968) hit the brevity buffer as One Dollar Too Many

And a genuine improvement…

Quel Maledetto Treno Blindato (That Damned Armoured Train, 1978) was famously re-titled The Inglorious Bastards