Deadly Sweet (1967)

Overrated

Just perfect...

A Masterpiece!

Simple and well acted, it has tension enough to knot the stomach.

Tinto Brass is one of the more critically applauded Italian directors, what with the films Salon Kitty and the one called Caligula that had Malcolm McDowell as Caligula bumming some unwilling guy. That's how I felt watching this uneasy mash-up of Giallo and sixties groovy crapfest. This was truly a struggle from start to finish.French Guy gets involved with Jane, a groovy chick whom he finds in a room with a dead nightclub owner. French Guy thinks she didn't do nothing, and the two embark on a journey to find out who really killed the nightclub owner. Sadly for them and us a relentless barrage of sixties references assault them and the viewer until you don't care what happens, as long as the film ends some time soon.Jane has a brother who has gone missing and there's a load of bad guys following the two around everywhere trying to kill French Guy and kidnap Jane, including a dwarf who gives French guy a kicking. Jane gets herself kidnapped and French Guy hooks up with her brother to rescue her. Other stuff happens but you'll have killed yourself long before then.The problem with this film is that it's crap. Brass has the bones of a giallo film but for some reason feels the need to constantly refer to the 'swinging' sixties, with constant references to pop art, the Beatles, freak-outs, all that stuff. It's like a film being made these days with constant references to fidget spinners, fake news, and people voluntarily micro-chipping themselves so that they can programme their heating from their hands (what's wrong with those morons?) A lot of the time I was suffering from a very large Jess Franco vibe from this film, and by that I mean there was a lot of messing around on nothing that seriously disrupted the flow of the film and making me not care at all about anything that happened at all.

Well, Eva Aulin is certainly delicious and Jean-Louis Trintignant is sympatico as is usually the case, but the film in its entirety suffers from a poor script and from the director's misguided whimsy.Trintignant visits his partner's office, up the stairs from a dance hall, and discovers Aulin standing over the body, holding a gun, saying she didn't do it. Trintignant takes a second look at seventeen-year-old, blond, robustly figured, ex-Swedish-beauty-contest-winner Eva Aulin and quickly decides, "Right, she couldn't have done it." He runs off with her to search out the REAL killers, and we are treated to a tour of swinging London's most-visited sights. Here's Picadilly Circus. See all the skin shops? And, look -- here's a poster of The Beatles! There's also a kind of zoo. There are small shots of one of Trintignant's eyes. It gets confusing. I think they copulate on top of Nelson's Column but I'm not sure. I AM sure they copulate in Trintignant's apartment in a scene that is all apricot and rose and consists of unidentified hands caressing unidentified body parts. I guess Brass forgot to include the softly billowing crimson drapes and the lighted candles. When somebody hits someone else over the head, there are Pop inserts of the sounds, as in the old Batman TV series -- POW! and ZLONK! I've only seen three or four of Tinto Brass's movie but I'm already able to discern a kind of stylistic arc through the murk. In this film, the earliest of his that I've seen, he appears to be doing everything possible to draw attention to himself as the director. (The screen splits into three separate scenes at one point.) And the relentless use of pop imagery is symptomatic. Hey, look! Mamma mia, I'm inna movies!In a somewhat later film, I think called "L'Uolo," about a handful of people in a surrealistic hotel, the narrative is thrown out completely and we get one bizarre image after another -- no longer just pop, but a kaleidoscopic non sequitur that carries no weight at all after the first few shocking minutes.Finally, Brass found his metier, in the no-man's land between soft-core and hard-core porn. The stories in this later genre aren't original. Usually a bourgeois wife is bored with her marriage and finds a lover who introduces her to, well, a different kind of love. It wasn't original with "Emanuelle" either, or "Lady Chatterly's Lover," for that matter. I'd guess that the theme was first introduced to a public audience somewhere back in time, past Aristophanes, into the Masques, into the mists of antiquity.Of the three phases of Tinto Brass's career, I prefer the last one, the one with the preposterous, prodigious, prosthetic penises. At least there, the director seems to have found a comfortable and satisfying niche.The Italian title, "Col Cuore in Gola," means "With Heart in Throat," but the English title is as much a puzzle as the movie itself. "I Am What I Am." Is it from Yahweh or Popeye? I've been told this is a "cult movie." I wonder what a cult movie is.

This pop psychedelic giallo is an early film by the Italian "master of eroticism" (he's definitely "master" of something), Tinto Brass. Unfortunately, it's VERY derivative of Michaelangelo Antonioni's "Blow-up" from the previous year, and while some find that movie borderline pretentious, this movie is well over the borderline. It also compares pretty unfavorably to the OTHER pop psychedelic giallo released in 1967, "Death Laid an Egg", which also features French actor Jean Trintigant and Swedish nymphet Ewe Aulin. But just because it isn't as good as two excellent movies like "Blow-up" and "Death Laid an Egg" doesn't necessarily make it bad. It's well filmed, and it has good acting and good music. I actually liked it better than "Salon Kitty", "Caligula" or any of Brass' other later, more erotic, but much more tedious ventures.The story is pretty insubstantial. A man spots a a young girl at a disco and is immediately drawn to her. Later he finds the disco owner dead and the young woman standing over his body. Since the disco owner was apparently blackmailing her recently deceased father, the girl suspects that the killer might be a member of her own oddball family--her androgynous twin brother, her grasping mother, or her sinister gangster stepfather. As the couple are chased all over Swinging late 60's London by all kinds of colorful characters, including a hulking black man and a dwarf, they try to piece together the bizarro plot (while the viewers try even less successfully to do the same thing). Brass also throws in a lot of black and white footage--perhaps in an homage to American film noir--however, this style really clashes with the colorful psychedelic pop art and the principal story, which far from being downbeat and noirish, is often as light and airy as a soufflé.Trintigant was one of the most famous French actors of the period. He was kind of in the same mold as Jean-Paul Belomondo, Jean Sorel, and Alain Delon. But he didn't seem to rely as much on his good looks as some of his fellow French leading men, and he was often in more interesting, offbeat films like Robbe-Grillet's "TransEuropean Express", "The Angry Sheep", and, of course, "Death Laid an Egg". Ewe Aulin, who was only seventeen at the time, did this film as part of a 1967 trifecta which also included "Death Laid an Egg" and the big-budget celebrity-train-wreck sex comedy "Candy". Only one of these was really a good movie, but SHE is definitely very memorable in all three of them. If nothing else, this is certainly a prime example of a European co-production of the era--an Italian film shot in London with a French leading man and a Swedish leading lady.This is by no means a great film, but it is worth seeing.

Just saw this tonight uncut on the big screen here in Hollywood. Visually very nice. But not really a giallo, I don't know why people keep calling it that. There is a murder which basically occurs off-screen and has almost nothing to do with the "story." Virtually no violence, some eyebrow-raising sex, obviously inspired by Antonioni, et al. Little story, lots of avant garde/graphic style, references to Pop-Art/Lichtenstein, comics, "Blow-Up" and other movies/the Viet Nam War/other issues of the day. Nice visuals/editing/soundtrack (which was remarkably clear in the print I just saw, supposedly soon to be out on DVD). At times notably innovative and fresh. A bit of a surprise ending. Wandering narrative, quick cuts, lots of color and gritty flair. Swinging London backdrop. In b/w and color.