Scream for Help!: Deceased Artiste Michael Winner

Before the Oscars get around to their three-seconds-per-dead-legend necrology, I'd like to move through some of the notable filmmakers who departed in recent weeks and months (technology permitting, see below). I love the work of most folks I salute unabashedly, and for the reasons they intended. With Michael Winner, I can openly confess that his films were, for the most part, pretty dreadful – audience-pleasing on occasion, but lacking in any kind of artistry, vision, or even coherence. HOWEVER, he did make one piece of celluloid insanity that needs its place in the sun.

First, the usual historical overview: Winner died at 77 after a bumpy career as a director. He was the son of a successful businessman and graduated from Cambridge. He made a number of hip, swinging movies in the Sixties with hip, swinging titles – among them Play It Cool (1962), The Girl Getters (1964), You Must Be Joking! (1965), and I'll Never Forget What's 'Is Name (1967). Perhaps the height of Winner weirdness was The Cool Mikado (1963), a bizarre G&S update with Frankie Howerd and Stubby Kaye.

The one Winner film I legitimately like is the strange and moody The Nightcomers (1971), the prequel to Turn of the Screw that featured an inventive performance by Brando during the pre-Godfather period when he was otherwise sleepwalking through his films.

Winner's biggest successes were, hands down, the quintet of films he made with Charlie Bronson: The Mechanic (1972), The Stone Killer (1973), Death Wish (1974) and its first two sequels. Unlike Eastwood, Bronson mostly appeared in films that were pure shitkickers, and Winner was one of his best directors (along with fellow Brit J. Lee Thompson) for that kind of thing.

A possible epitaph for Winner's ability to make insanely weird and often entertaining (but, again, not for the intended reasons) crap was the startling Won Ton Ton, The Dog Who Saved Hollywood (1976). Winner was no Mel Brooks (witness the reteaming of Young Frankenstein costars Madeline Kahn and Teri Garr) – the film is crammed to capacity with cameos by old Hollywood stars, but it is a stunner in terms of its goofiness and inability to capture what made Twenties comedies funny, or at the very least charming.


 
The one Winner movie I want to draw to your attention, though, is the startlingly tongue-in-cheek (?) thriller Scream for Help (1984). Upon first viewing, the film just seems wonderfully moronic – an overwrought version of the classic daughter-thinks-her-stepdad-is-a-killer plot (best executed in the Eighties in The Stepfather).

I devoted an entire episode of the Funhouse TV show to the film back in 1995 and haven't aired anything from it in the years since, but it is QUITE a special bad movie. Set in New Rochelle, NY, but shot in London (!), the film was directed with a sledgehammer by Winner and is best known in trivia circles for having a melodramatic (read: often ridiculously melodramatic – on purpose, who knows?) score by John Paul Jones of that wildly overpraised shrieking Zep band.

The script was written by Tom Holland, after he had written Class of 1984 and Psycho II (but before Fright Night), so it would seem that the film was conceived of as a tongue-in-cheek exercise. However, Winner being the kind of director he was, it's often very hard to tell, since Winner's overkill approach didn't alter from comic to tragic subject matter.

One of my favorite reviews of the film came from Philip Strick in the late, lamented Monthly Film Bulletin, who assumed the film was a parody but a “clumsy and vulgar” parody: “It's apparent that the only novelty Winner has to offer is a variation on the American splatter genre, in which film technique itself rather than the cast is dismembered, as we watch in horrified disbelief.... He puts his camera any old where, in a spirit either of gleeful misconception or uninspired taste.”

I can hardly top that, except to say that two posters have put the entire film up on YT (copyright be damned – YT is wildly arbitrary in regard to its copyright enforcement). However, I recommend you check out the two small slices of the film I put up on YT myself. First, part of the concluding segment of the film, in which both rich mom and her intrepid, would-be Nancy Drew daughter are tormented by the evil stepdad and his cronies:



And one of my all-time fave insane scenes. Watch this and understand why both critics and viewers weren't sure whether Scream for Help was meant as a straightforward thriller or a spoof one. In either case, this is pretty damned amusing:



Note: on the tech front, I should point out that the slightly “unhooked” sound and image in the clips above is the result of using a Diamond Video Capture device for Mac OS. Quicktime is one of the most difficulty-plagued computer-clip applications, and that is definitely true when you're attempting to create clips using the cursed QT, a capture device, and a (surprisingly in good shape) old video cassette.

Those eyes, that voice: Deceased Artiste Mariangela Melato

Mariangela Melato qualifies as one of those incurably sexy European actresses who also worked very hard at her trade, and was just as happy to be performing Shakespeare or Pirandello onstage as she was appearing in TV movies or big-budgeted feature films. For a lot of us, she will remain a talented and imposingly seductive performer, best known for the three films she made with Lina Wertmuller in the early Seventies.

Melato, who died two weeks back at 71, got her big break onstage thanks to the playwright Dario Fo, who recruited her for his theater company and cast her in the wonderfully titled Seventh Commandment: Steal a Little Less. She later worked for Lucino Visconti onstage (The Nuns of Monza) and kept appearing in plays for the rest of her career. One of the most intriguing clips of her on YT finds her playing Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire onstage.

Her movie career began with a role in Thomas (1971), a horror film by Pupi Avati, but her first really significant part came with the starring role in Elio Petri’s The Working Class Goes to Heaven (1971). Her first film with Wertmuller was the brilliant The Seduction of Mimi (1972), in which she plays the mistress of Giancarlo Giannini. In Wertmuller's Love and Anarchy (1973), she played the prostitute-sister of a would-be assassin (Giancarlo again).

For me and a lot of other film buffs, the “discovery” of Melato came with Wertmuller's timeless Swept Away (1974). Yes, I was a teenager when I first saw it and, yes, she looked fantastic in a bikini (with incredible eyes), but what came across in that film besides the carnal attraction between Mariangela and Giancarlo was the fact that Wertmuller wove in some wonderful insights about the class structure into her sex comedy, and that Melato was able to play a haughty bitch (a desirable haughty bitch) wonderfully while wearing only a bikini – something Madonna couldn't carry off in the misguided 2002 Guy Ritchie remake costarring Giancarlo's son.

The international success of the Wertmuller films resulted in Melato appearing in a pair of U.S.-funded films, Flash Gordon (1980) and So Fine (1981). She looked phenomenal in both, but they did nothing to enhance her acting portfolio and she was indeed a serious performer, so she returned to Italy to work steadily onstage, in film, and on television until her death at 71.

Not many of her later films played over here, but we did see The Nada Gang (1974) by Chabrol, Petri's Todo Modo (1976), and her reunion with Wertmuller, Summer Night With Greek Profile, Almond Eyes, and Scent of Basil (1986). (I don't know if De Sica's We'll Call Him Andrew from 1972 ever played in the U.S.)

As for that last wordy title from Lina, we must remember that the real title of our fave LW film is actually Swept away by an unusual destiny in the blue sea of August. Wertmuller was the last filmmaker to indulge in that wonderful Sixties “Jacques Brel is Alive and Well...”/”Who is Harry Kellerman...?” sentence-as-title conceit.

But on to Mariangela on video. There are several dozen terrific clips of her dramatic acting on YouTube, with most of them in Italian with no subtitles. Speaking of unsubtitled clips (but it doesn't matter here): One of the many films starring MM that never had an official U.S. release was the Ugo Tognazzi film Le Petomane (1983) about the famous real-life performer Joseph Pujol, who entertained French audiences at the turn of the last century by farting onstage in creative ways (he was, wait for it... une fartiste).

The end of the film is on YouTube, and it looks just as wonderfully solemn-yet-insane as it sounds. If there was ever a project that I wish Funhouse favorite (and good friend of Ugo) Marco Ferreri had taken on, it is Le Petomane (the film was directed by Pasquale Festa Campanile).

Swept Away has always been available over here on VHS and DVD; thus the fan-generated videos saluting it. The whole film is available in an English dubbed version here (remember, the Italians pride themselves on their dubbing and watch a lot of foreign films that way – most cinephiles hate it and it's murder on comedy, but this would be okay for an Italian viewer). The film still works wonderfully nearly three decades on:

Some charitable fanboy (I'm willing to bet good money it's a guy) has decided to share some scenes from Flash Gordon, including the one in which Melato, as General Kala whips the sublime Ornella Muti.

Melato had a wonderful, smoky voice, which she used quite well in her acting and in her singing. However, I didn't know until I began to research this piece that she also danced on Italian TV variety shows. Here she is in 1986 doing a “Last Tango”-derived tango number:

Here Mariangela dances to Joe Tex's “I Gotcha” (!) on the show Canzonissima '72: