he finds bludgeoned to death— with Jane standing aghast at the scene of the crime. She ex- plains that Prescott had un- derworld connections, and that her father was actually murdered by gangsters in a blackmail scheme involving her step-mother. Introducing himself to Jane (“Me Tarzan”), Bernard becomes her knight errant, tackling thugs (including future Darth Vader Dave Prowse and MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH’s Skip Martin, both un- credited) in defense of her honor, rescuing her from ab- ductors, and generally running with her all over the ever-chang- ing face of Swinging London. In an intelligent and remark- ably well-sustained audio com- mentary, Brass describes DEADLY SWEET as an oppor- tunity to take advantage of mini- mal story to explore different cinema “language experiments” and as a bittersweet reminder of the expressive, jubilant “big language of freedom” no longer
available to popular cinema. Storyboarded and technically advised by VALENTINA comics artist Guido Crepax, the film not only marks a creative turning point in the giallo, but like its two successors is a major ex- ample of Continental Op (my own term, courtesy Dashiell Hammett, for the Pop/Op Art films made in Europe during the mid- to late-Sixties), an explo- sion of Pop Art ephemera from Fillmore posters to a humor- ously placed copy of Stan Lee’s MONSTERS TO LAUGH WITH, BATMAN pows and zowie cards, inspired transition effects (an Esso advert’s “RRRRRRR” cutting to a speeding car) and more inventive screen-splitting, comicstrip-influenced framing devices than you could shake Brian De Palma at. Brass, who also edited the film, even plays with tactile possibilities, heavily scratching the emulsion and leaving edit splices visible in flash-cuts meant to evoke shock or pain. Most impressive of all
the film’s innovations, in some ways, is its daring narrative as- similation of The 14-Hour Technicolor Dream, a now-leg- endary, psychedelics-fuelled Free Speech benefit sponsored by the underground paper IN- TERNATIONAL TIMES, held at London’s Alexandra Palace on April 29, 1967. (It was at this happening, more fully docu- mented in Peter Whitehead’s TONITE LET’S ALL MAKE LOVE IN LONDON, that John Lennon reportedly first crossed paths with Yoko Ono.) Here it’s used as a sprawling, hundreds-of-ex- tras, historical backdrop for a key dialogue encounter be- tween Trintignant and Vira Silenti, who plays Aulin’s step- mother Martha, and this inter- lude qualifies DEADLY SWEET, in addition to everything else it is, as a forerunner of Haskell Wexler’s MEDIUM COOL (1969), another once-X-rated film, which literally involved its char- acters in the 1968 Democratic convention.
Jean Louis Trintignant is catapulted into a bizarre comicstrip adventure, all for the love of pretty Ewa Aulin, in DEADLY SWEET, a delightful Pop Art confection by Tinto Brass.
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