Franco (aka Kim) Arcalli remains one of the undersung main ingredients of sixties and seventies Eurocult and Arthouse cinema. That's because he was a modest man with a job description that doesn't jibe with standard auteurist received wisdom, a combination film editor, script writer and cameraman-codirector hired by a succession of visionaries to work his overall magic and provide his famous flashback, segue and otherwise stream of consciousness montage sequences. Bertolucci, Antonioni, Sergio Leone all worked closely with him. On this forum his best known collab.s are those with Giulio Questi like DJANGO KILL and DEATH LAID AN EGG. If you've seen those films, you know his most obvious, signature contributions: those fragmented, stroboscopic, kinetic machinegun bursts of imagery with frames turned upside down or run backwards, the visual equivalent of head music moments like the Beatles' famous Day in the Life cacaphony crescendo.

That wasn't his only talent, but it's what jumped off the screen and ambushed me just now while watching a sneakily subversive mainstream comedy of those days with a hidden agenda, whose intentions are already hinted at by its run-on title: RIUSCIRANNO I NOSTRI EROI A RITROVARE L'AMICO MISTERIOSAMENTE SCOMPARSO IN AFRICA (Will Our Heroes Manage To Find Their Friend Mysteriously Disappeared in Africa?)

I love this sort of stealth film which starts blandly and conventionally, and gets progressively more intriguing till it suddenly erupts into full blown radical strangeness (at least compared to what it started out as). What seems to be a standard issue 1968 Alberto Sordi vehicle that pokes gently at Great White Hunter cliches while taking advantage of an Angolan coproduction deal to safari picturesquely in Africa...steadily adopts the strategy of Conrad's Heart of Darkness (aka Apocalypse Now), getting hijacked with heroes along the tourist trail and roughing it into darker revelations about colonialists of all sorts fantasizing and meddling in "Darkest Africa"...on the way to finding the white man turned local god at the very edge of the world in the heart of madness.

Neat trick for a nice little movie with a jazzy Trovajoli samba and congo line beat with Cantori Moderni chorusing mellowly...and Arcalli is relied on heavily for spectacularly weird visual freakouts to signify a radicalizing consciousness, from near subliminal cuts here and there to arias exactly the same in kind as the Questi ones. I'd say there's about a half hour all told of his specialty if you like to collect this sort of thing.

Also truly cool is a small but significant part, hilariously played, by Erika Blanc/k who's cast as a Poe heroine of the bush country, a mad eyed somnambulist widow, playing sonatinas in a crumbling manor by the graveyard, and the half built Mission her eternal beloved left behind. Just one vivid odd touch in a film of hundreds of them.

Expert writers here are Age and Scarpelli, working variations on some of their GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY situations in tandem with always interesting director Ettore Scola. Quite a gem worth a revival.

There is a comment on Kim's contribution to Giullio Questi's westerns on the two DVD's from Blue Underground in the on camera interviews. I recently (and quite by accident) met the editor who cut those two featurettes for the DVDs, and he had previously worked with Arcalli on two Cavani films, so in this case you have an interview discussing Arcalli edited by one of his peers. Like Michelle Suave or Lamberto Bava working on pieces for Argento. Arcalli was an actual revolutionary on the side of the communists against the fascists in Italy, which may reflect the political nature of the material on which he worked for most of his career. I've never seen the Sordi film, but look forward to it. On a different but related note, I'd love to see more Zurlini films on DVD.

Thank you for the information, Piotr!

Just as a don't-get-your-hopes-up-TOO-high precaution, the Scola and Sordi film is hardly politically rigorous to the degree of, say, Liliana Cavani. It's, to some extent, "just" an escapist comedy 'as usual', flirting with new ideas but not fully carrying though with them. In fact, the ending self consciously, ruefully, illustrates the limitations of politics in popular comedy by splitting the protagonist into two (figuratively speaking; you'll have to see for yourself), into one character who makes a definitive break with the old ways, and another who is unable to go that far except in fantasy...but returns to the same old world unable to see it the same old way: it's now all a crazy Arcalli hallucination! That's the usefulness of Kim in this context : to inject radical rupture, induce a double consciousness in the middle class viewer...a light dose of LSD slipped into the usual fare.

Re: resistance heroes and partisans, I've been having a long chat just now with my stepmom about the subject. Her late, older brother Andrea is pictured entering Milan on the partisan side, leading the crew (of men and women) a banner of liberation in hand in a famous newspaper photo of the time (hanging on the wall of where I'm at). He was "with" the Communists, though my step mom wonders today how close that political identification really was at the time, and is further confused by the fact that her sister Eva helped those 'communists' while a nurse working with the 'Catholic' partisans up in Piemonte somewhere...they apparently were a special ski squad...but stepmom was just a little girl at the time, and the recollections are a bit confused, received through family legend. She mainly remembers hiding with her mom in a caretaker's shack in a vineyard for the better part of the war's final year, and has nightmares to this day of stormtroopers crashing through.

These memories were stirred by the Carlo Lizzani double feature we watched together last night, two films about the same period and events seen from radically different perspectives: ACHTUNG, BANDITI! about a partisan infiltration of an occupied town made just a couple years after the events portrayed, and PROCESSO A VERONA about Mussolini's sell out to the Nazis and scapegoating of his son in law made as memories threatened to fade away in the early sixties. These films just grow with each rewatching, hugely intelligent, absorbing, and entertaining. Not sure if they're cult or art, but they're further instances of a Communist partisan, Lizzani, making the most of his war experience as a truth-transforming one in his cinematic output.

I look forward to seeing PROCESSO A VERONA.
There are a number of great anti-fascist films that for some reason all star Richard Burton, that take place in or around Italy (or were funded with Italian Lira). One is George P. Cosmaos' RAPPRESAGLIA (MASSACRE IN ROME), a very somber recollection of the Nazi occupation of Italy's capital, with more than a handfull of bloody violence. Then there's the Yugoslavian war drama SUTJESKA, directed by Stipe Delic about the divisions in the pre Serbian republic. The greatest of these is THE ASSASSINATION OF TROTSKY, written by Masolino D'Amico and directed by Joseph Losey and covers the history of the communist conspiracy against one of its own ideological masters.
I can sympathize with your step mother, as I was born in Poland and was in High School during the era of Walesa and Solidarity. My family left long before the elections of 1989, but I returned to live here several years ago. There are so many reminders of the unpleasant past, but the culture and architecture here have withstood centuries of tribal while producing masterpieces of history, art and music.

Another interesting Italo-resistance one I'm starting to watch with many of the usual suspects involved as cast and crew (but not Richard Burton: FWIW, VERONA doesn't have him either: Silvana Mangano is the vengeful daughter scorned of Benito; a subtly shaded Frank Wolff shows what he could do with an Oscar-Contender role) is Gianni Puccini's SETTE FRATELLI CERVI (The Seven Cervi Brothers) . Like the Lizzanis, this 1967 film upends the text book assumption that it was Bertolucci who created the "modern" Anti Fascist film with SPIDER STRAGEM and CONFORMIST.

Puccini like Lizzani and Francesco Rosi and Elio Petri and Giuseppe De Santis and Vittorio Zurlini and De Concini (of Hercules films and much else) and war-obsessed Duilio Coletti (the most forgotten of them all) was one of the hardcore communist-tending American movie-addicted freaks (Puccini edited a cinema fanzine for many years) who gathered round mentors like Visconti and created the essential Italian workaday postwar cinema in all its varieties, a broader neorealism than the text books allow, one which encompassed all the genres we talk about here as well as set the terms for the highest art when the opportunity allowed.

The Cervi Brothers film is Puccini's big attempt, made back to back with equally worthy (albeit 'trashy' Spaghetti Western), FURY OF JOHNNY KID.

We get the works here, a true story, seven brothers (their leader portrayed by Gian Maria Volonte) settling a farm, unionizing the illiterate country folk, AND laying down their lives in big war scenes against fascists and nazis as told through convoluted artsy intercut subjective flashbacks within flashbacks from as many perspectives as there are kinfolk.

In a way, it's almost a self-parody, the ultimate art-resistance movie taken to an extreme, but the commitment and intelligence and moviemaking ability devoted to entertaining as well as instructing on display blows away any mockery and objections on my part. I'm thrilled to see serious pop art like this. It's like Roger Corman's best moments, or early Scorsese or what Oliver Stone aspires to be.

And re: Zurlini, I totally agree, a baffling absence on the rental shelves, if not absolutely as great as Fellini or Pasolini or whoever, pretty damn close.