| I I don’t go to the movies. I have seen enough. I have reached the age where you sit there anticipating the action three scenes in advance and the dialogue as well, sometimes word for word. I have friends who could write better scripts and for much less than $400,000 per. Teenagers love movies and the reason is: they are blissfully unaware the movie they are watching has already been made--dozens of times. The titles change, the actors change, the clothes change but the story, with a few minor flip flops scene-wise, remains the same. The writing improves never. Naturally good films are always being made but the question you must ask yourself is: how many miserable clunkers am I prepared to suffer through, and to fork over $9.50 a ticket, plus popcorn, in order to bump into one movie worth seeing. Thats the issue. So I resort to the re-watching of old films I have seen before—my personal classics. Ill start with Down and Dirty. The action occurs in a slum outside Rome. Maybe slum isn’t the word. Slum would be an upgrade. It’s a collection of hovels banged together from rusted sheets of siding and lumber scraps and drywall discards, etc, accessed via a dirt road choked with garbage. There are stray dogs and rats, etc. that’s the setting Inside one of the hovels is the Mazzatella family. It’s a large hovel to shelter a large family-- the old man and his wife and 8 children and another 10 or 15 grandchildren and a handful of relatives who have installed themselves permanently as guests. The old man says: “Relatives are like fish. Keep them for three days and they begin to stink”. All these people live together in one room—a large room but one room nevertheless. Here they sleep, eat, break wind, curse and pummel one another, beat their children and, need I say, to relentlessly fornicate and if the partner is a blood relative so much the better. There are some women who think their opinion of men can go no lower but they are wrong. They haven’t met Signor Mazzatella. The old man is a sociopath, or psychopath, or both, he also drinks, the first glass going down at 5 am. He gets up early because he must be ever vigilant to foil any attempts at thievery—the stealing of his money. This explains the shotgun he sleeps with to secure the wad tucked away on his person--insurance money from an accident. Thats the story: the old man, the money, the paranoia and the mayhem that occurs as a result. There are some minor incidents and two major ones: the stabbing of the wife and the pumping of a round from the shotgun into a nephew. Also the cornering of a daughter-in-law in the toilet where he threatens her with blackmail (witness to a blowjob performed on a cousin) and she is obliged to favor him with a quickie. Etc, etc. You get the picture. Did I mention it’s a comedy? The old man is a misery and the family serves to verify the proverb about the apple that falls from the tree but not too far. In the case of the Mazzatella family it didn’t roll one time. The sons fall into the small time criminal category--thieves, purse snatchers and male hustlers and one of the daughters has nailed down work posing for an Italian version of Hustler mag. The only decent one of the bunch is Angelina the nurse who labors in a convalescent home where she is implored from time to time by one of the residents to administer a hand job—a 90 year old who is too enfeebled to get out of bed but has a hard on around the clock. Signor Mazzatella is played by Nino Manfredi and if at this point in your life you still have doubts about what it is an actor is supposed to be doing up there Nino Manfredi can fill you in. I will describe one scene to establish the general tone and leave it for you to imagine the rest. Giacinto (the old man) is wandering the neighborhood, following a few days in jail due to the shotgun incident and bumps into a hooker, also wandering around in search of a score. She’s on the large side, 300 lbs plus with legs like tree stumps wearing a mini skirt and 9 lbs of hair, etc, but as they say, tastes vary, he is hammered on wine, becomes inflamed and they knock off a quickie behind a dumpster. Now he gets the bright idea of bringing the whore home to meet the family. The whore, not the sharpest knife in the drawer, says: why not? They return late with everyone asleep and into bed he crawls, next to the wife and invites the whore to crawl in beside. The whore says: “wont she object?”. But in she tumbles and now the wife stirs, cocks a groggy eye, and says: Come va? He introduces the whore, the wife opens both eyes and they go back and forth for a bit and she starts to grind him that earns for her a backhand to the head. Up she leaps screaming, on go the lights and the entire room erupts and joins in on the act, etc, etc. At some point peace is restored with the wife going off to sleep in a corner and things settle down and the communal snore resumes. But here is a son who dimly perceives this gigantic ass a few feet off afloat in the murk and he crawls in behind the whore and works himself into position. She stirs, there is a little back and forth with the son who reassures her that everything is cool and this will take but a minute etc. At some point the family decides they have had enough, father or no, they must take action and there is only one action to take which is to kill him. They do their best—-via some rat poison dumped into the pasta-—but he survives. He is a Hitler type—-unkillable The movie ends as it began, with a young girl trudging down the hill carrying pails and buckets to draw water. She is 14 or maybe 13, sweet and innocent. At least she was innocent at the beginning of the movie. Now at the end she is less so. We see her from behind, trudging down the hill and now she turns for a profile shot and she is huge with child. It’s a powerful image--not only because of the implications of incest but the family in which the incest occurs. This could be the most revolting one yet--super signor Mazzatella. Movies are funny in different ways. I like Woody Allen but 5 minutes after seeing a woody Allen film I forget it ever existed—like eating Chinese food. The people don’t stick. They don’t have that power. Down and Dirty is different. Here is a study of people not at their worst but close enough and this is the question that nags you while you watch the film: do such people really exist? The answer is yes and if this is so it poses another question: why am I laughing? Thats Down and Dirty. |
| Movie Review Down and Dirty (Brutti, Sporchi, e Cativi) Starring Nino Manfredi Directed by Ettore Scola 1981 |
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