What with Jack Palance in career purgatory busy co-starring with Fernando Lama & Aldo Ray in KILL A DRAGON/’67, Henry Silva was the default go-to guy for this lower-half of a double-bill actioner. Playing the look-alike brother of a recently executed man (if he is the brother), he’s just the fellow to take over a prearranged political assassination. Could he actually be the same guy who got juiced in the electric chair? That’s what the wife thinks after sleeping with ‘the brother.‘ Can’t be unfaithful when its your own spouse, right? But all that comes much later, after various nonsensical Spy vs Spy moves designed to fill the time before a political assassination assignment calls on Silva to make a perfect shot thru the window of an airplane as it’s taking off down the runway.; a shot Lee Harvey Oswald couldn’t have made. Emilio Miraglia (just upped from the second-unit and calling himself Hal Brady!) doesn’t worry about connecting the narrative leg bone to the narrative thigh bone, but bounces along with a script that never does connect the dots. (Listen up for a great line of dialogue when Silva tells his spy boss to ‘Stop acting, you’re lousy at it.’) And it’s a kick to see such poverty row art design on the interior sets. Old Hollywood hid smallish budgets with drapes & shadows, now we get pastel painted flats. Did they film in one of those bland suburban development model homes?
WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: Lots of Italian ‘giallo’ in the ‘60s & ‘70s to show how stylish you could be without much of a budget. Mario Bava probably best known Stateside. An acquired taste, but in spite of its delayed release RABID DOGS/CANI ARRABBIATI/’74 makes a good entry point. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2021/11/rabid-dogs-cani-arrabbiati-1974.html
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