The Equalizer 3 (2023)

They should have let me in. Sicily. At a remote winery Robert McCall (Denzel Washington) kills gangster Lorenzo Vitale (Bruno Bilotta) and his henchmen to obtain a key to the winery’s vault and recoup money stolen in a cyber-heist. While leaving the winery, Robert is shot in the back by Vitale’s young grandson (Adriano Sabrie). Robert attempts suicide due to his injury but finds his gun out of bullets and then takes the ferry back to the mainland. While driving on the Amalfi Coast, Robert pulls over and slips into unconsciousness from shock. He is found and rescued by local carabiniere Gio Bonucci (Eugenio Mastrandrea) who brings Robert to a small coastal Italian town called Altamonte where he is treated by a doctor, Enzo Arisio (Remo Girone). As he recovers and regains his mobility Robert becomes acquainted with the locals and becomes fond of the town and its people. He makes an anonymous phone call to CIA officer Emma Collins (Dakota Fanning) to tip her off about the winery’s role in the drug trade, disguised as normal business transactions in Sicily. Collins and other CIA operatives arrive at the winery and find millions in cash along with bags of synthetic amphetamines used by ISIS terrorists hidden in a storeroom, confirming Robert’s suspicions. Meanwhile, members of the Camorra harass and kill villagers in an attempt to coerce them out of their housing and take over Altamonte for property development. Robert overhears Marco Quaranta (Andrea Dodero) a high-ranking Camorra member, pressuring local shop owner Angelo (Daniele Perrone) for protection payments. To make an example of him, the Camorra firebombs Angelo’s fish store as the entire town watches. Gio reviews video of the firebombing and calls the Italian central police for an inquiry. Along with his wife Chiara (Sonia Ben Ammar) and daughter Gabriella (Dea Lanzaro), Gio is attacked by the Camorra and beaten for interfering in their operations. Thereafter, Marco demands that Gio set up a boat for him. Overhearing the conversation, Robert asks Marco to move his operations to a different location. When Marco refuses, Robert kills him and his henchmen. The Naples head of police Chief Barella (Adolfo Margiotta) is threatened and tortured by Marco’s brother Vincent (Andrea Scarduzio) the head of the Camorra and is ordered to find the person responsible for Marco’s death … Those people don’t know where to go. Our favourite vigilante returns to equalize everything in sight, starting with the mysterious catalyst whose payoff takes the entire film to establish. Transported to Sicily and the Italian mainland, the violence returns with verve in Robert Wenk’s screenplay, the scribe of the others in the series, in the finale adapted from the TV show that starred Edward Woodward and was created by Michael Sloan and Richard Lindheim. What do you see when you look at me? McCall is ageing now and even he must be tired of all the killing. Lord knows I’m allergic to bad things. Availing of R&R in a pretty village with a pleasant woman restaurateur Aminah (Gaia Scodellaro) which introduces the hint if not the actuality of romance and a civilised doctor to oversee his recuperation he’s glad of it. Do I look like a guy who kills people? That’s an existential question that’s really kinda silly at this point in the trilogy: this film commences with a horrifying sequence of murders – yes, we know it’s McCall doing in some of the Camorra but it’s extremely shocking. Giving the CIA a tip-off is just the start of an elaborate denouement which unearths a terror cell and reveals the extent of the Mafia’s viciousness. The phone relationship with Emma is a preview of coming attractions: You don’t look like you sound/You do! That’s the opening gambit when they finally come face to face 48 minutes in. In these films Denzel is paired with younger women in a non-romantic way – they get the opportunity to do stuff and he returns to pleasantly predictable vengeful type. It’s his question to her that makes her think of the situation from a different angle: Why smuggle drugs into the most secure port in the entire region? That sets her off doing what he knows she will – directing the CIA action where it needs to go and hopefully keeping her out of the line of fire. While the women in this series are given an opportunity for some action it’s curtailed as here, where a well-timed call saves her but effectively puts her out of action – allowing him to rescue her and save the day because he’s the hero and that’s his job. That’s appropriate considering their previous pairing two decades ago in Man On Fire. Washington is an incredibly charismatic movie star and it’s a relief to have the first 45 minutes dedicated to rebuilding his constitution which allows him to cultivate relationships while the gangsters have their way with the locals, setting up an awesome revenge. His medical treatment and slow recovery gives the audience a chance to recover too before the inevitable kicks in. His visceral method leads him to explain his MO to a victim: It’s called pain compliance. It’s like he’s a doctor too! Shot in a palette verging on monochrome with chiaroscuro features by the brilliant Robert Richardson, the scheme complements the black and white morality, with the amorphous evil villainy of the Mafia rather less attractive than the mesmerising Marton Csokas in the first outing. It’s a stylish way for the series to take a bow – a kind of revenge Western with some spaghetti thrown in for good measure and a coda that explains why McCall fetched up there in the first place, a one-man reenacting of The Magnificent Seven against the mafia on their own turf. Directed as ever by Antoine Fuqua. I’m where I’m supposed to be

A Man About the House (1947)

It may be an advantage to have a man about the house. The unmarried British Isit sisters Agnes (Margaret Johnston) and Ellen (Dulcie Gray) unexpectedly inherit their uncle’s Italian villa and have to deal with his sinister major-domo Salvatore (Kieron Moore) who manages the villa and vineyard. Agnes is overwhelmed by him and they marry, so he ends up owning the estate that once belonged to his family, believing Agnes to be the sole inheritor. Ellen’s suspicions are aroused when Agnes’s health begins to deteriorate and she consults Agnes’s former fiancé, visiting English doctor Benjamin Dench (Guy Middleton) …  Spinsters aren’t safe with such a man. A fun Gothic melodrama with an early opportunity to see Gina Lollobrigida in English-language cinema the year she came third in the Miss Italia pageant. Moore had played Salvatore in the theatre production of Francis Brett Young’s 1942 novel (which is adapted here by J.B. Williams) and he relishes his badness here – his speechifying about the differences between dried up Italian women and young unmarried Englishwomen has to be heard to be believed. Watching the sisters’ emotional unfurling as the vines are harvested is well done, their suppressed instincts vividly described against the emotional Italians nicely gauged in montages and changes of hair and costume.  It’s supremely ironic that it’s the stiff upper lipped older sister played by (the frankly weird) Johnston who succumbs to the determinedly sexual lure of the sleazy butler with murder in mind. Directed by Leslie Arliss. It is our duty as Englishwomen to set an example and not succumb to their lax foreign ways

 

 

That Hamilton Woman (1941)

Aka Lady Hamilton/The Enchantress.  They told us of your victories but not of the price you paid!  When small-town courtesan Emma Hart (Vivien Leigh) finds herself married off by her indebted uncle to British Ambassador to Naples, elderly widower Sir William Hamilton (Alan Mowbray), her world is turned upside down. Just as Emma is finally settling into her new life as Lady Hamilton, she meets British naval hero Horatio Nelson (Laurence Olivier) who vociferously opposes Napoleon’s growing empire and the two fall madly in love. However, their forbidden romance is soon threatened by the ever-growing shadow of the Napoleonic Wars... What a century it’s been: Marlborough rode to war, and Washington crossed the Delaware. Louis XVI, and Marie Antoinette. The last of the Stuarts. Peter the Great. Voltaire. Clive of India. Bonaparte. The framing story of this famous propaganda work created by producer/directorAlexander Korda is that of Emma Hamilton ensconced in debtor’s prison in France, regaling her incredulous fellow prisoners with her incredible life story and her grand romance. That this involved once notorious real-life lovers, then married couple, Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier (reunited by Korda from Fire Over England), must have been catnip to audiences. Indeed the film’s tagline boasted,  The Year’s Most Exciting Team of Screen Lovers! Its role in attracting the US into a total war nobody wanted is debatable. In fact Korda was accused of espionage, a charge he only escaped because his hearing coincided with Pearl Harbour:  special relationship?! There are always men, who for the sake of their insane ambition, want to destroy what other people build. The screenplay by Walter Reisch and R.C. Sheriff (with two of Nelson’s speeches contributed by Winston Churchill) condenses a lot of historical material and Olivier is perhaps a bit too slow but this is compensated for with the range of emotions Leigh explores to charismatic effect. Shot in the US, it looks gorgeous courtesy of Rudolph Maté’s intricate cinematography and the sumptuous design by Vincent Korda and Lyle Wheeler, with beautiful costuming by René Hubert,  while the romantic score is composed by Miklós Rózsa. There is no ‘then’. There is no ‘after’

It Started in Naples (1960)

 

It’s thinking in Italian I need to learn.  The younger black sheep brother of American lawyer Michael Hamilton (Clark Gable) has died with his wife in a car crash in Italy so it falls to him to take care of business which includes their eight-year old son Nando (Marietto Angeletti). He decides he will bring the boy back with him to Philadelphia. But when Nando’s gorgeous aunt, Lucia Curcio (Sophia Loren) protests a lengthy and heated custody battle ensues. The boy is a bit of an endearing wiseass and Lucia is a lady of infinitely risque abilities starting with her dancing job at a club. So when he takes charge of the kid who doesn’t want to leave the pigsty he’s living in there are complications not least Michael’s own growing feelings for Lucia … There are a lot of inconsistencies in this film – not the least is the mismatch between the ageing Gable and the very young Loren – and his expanding girth didn’t help:  apparently he developed such a craving for Italian food on location his weight ballooned. Watch him get bigger as the film progresses! However his evolving friendship with Nando, the romance between himself and Lucia which at first seems fake but then it’s not, and the astonishing scenery shot by Robert Surtees make up for a lot. And there’s the chance to see Loren’s mentor the great Vittorio De Sica in the role of her lawyer, not to mention her version of Americano. That and the religious procession reminds me of the scene-setting in The Talented Mister Ripley decades later. The story by Michael Pertwee & Jack Davies was developed as a screenplay by Jack Rose, the legendary Suso Cecchi D’Amico and director Melville Shavelson who does Loren a disservice in the musical sequences. Heck, it’s so pretty! Tu vuo fa americano!

Cynara (1932)

Fascinating pre-Code melodrama with Ronald Colman as the staid London barrister whose rock solid marriage to the disarming Kay Francis when she takes off for Venice with her flighty younger sister is challenged when Mephistopholean colleague Henry Stephenson manoeuvres him into a romance with attractive shopgirl Phyllis Barry. Cunningly adapted by Frances Marion and Lynn Starling from the novel by Robert Gore-Brown, this is structured as a flashback and there are some startling slices of dialogue to cut through the class froth. This is an opportunity to experience the fragrant charms of cult fave Francis while Colman is typically good. Directed by King Vidor.

Eat Pray Love (2010)

Maybe you’re a woman in search of a word. The zeitgeist sometimes throws up books that speak to a lot of people. This volume by Elizabeth Gilbert was one of them. It’s a given that 50% of the population (that is, the male half) will not get this. And a fair proportion of women who do not walk out on their toxic relationships will not get it either. (A friend in a dreadful marriage told me to ‘F… off and mind your own business’ when I gave her a copy of the book. Nice!) On a TV arts show I watched the women eviscerate this film:  it wasn’t ‘feminist’ or ’empowering’ and why would a good looking successful career woman with an idiot husband living off her need to leave him – like what’s she so UNHAPPY about?! … Etc.  And of those who do get this, some will remain sceptical about the benefits of handing over everything you own to a man just to be shot of him (he’s Billy Crudup but he’s a directionless tosser here, so that’s alright.) But when the next guy is James Franco, it’s slightly more understandable. But he’s not right either! Because life’s not all about sex with handsome empathetic actors into meditation! So Liz Gilbert got herself a book contract and took off with the proceeds of her travel journalism (and presumably some frequent flier miles) and decided to get back to basics – to permit herself to eat real food and not just lettuce leaves, to learn Italian and get some balance in her life. Sometimes to lose balance for love is part of living a balanced life. Julia Roberts is a skinny creature who will never gain the kind of weight we hear about here, Italy looks great and the men are delectable. Richard Jenkins is a kind of guru while Javier Bardem offers Liz the prospect of a marriage of equals in Bali. Okay – I understand that waiting for the right guy isn’t all of the answer but for some people … it’s some of it. Ryan Murphy is working from a screenplay he adapted with Jennifer Salt and you know, it’s pretty terrific.It was shot in sequence so that Roberts’ performance really achieves the gravity and grace she feels she needs to acquire to get through life easier. Sometimes you need to look at what a film is actually doing and saying as opposed to what it’s not attempting in the first place. Or something. What’s not to love? Eat? Pray?! Whatever! PS Speaking of the zeitgeist there’s a new book on the history of Chinese philosophy that totally discredits the mindless idea of mindfulness that seemingly intelligent people indulge right now – so get with the programme, eat pasta, learn Italian, dance! Cos the answer to life is not all inside – it’s outside! Enjoy yourself! Yeah! In the end, I’ve come to believe in something I call “The Physics of the Quest.”