Italian Style

I realised this morning that I'd missed out a film in my catalogue of all the schlock I watched over the weekend.  I also managed to fit in a viewing of The Last Shark, an early eighties Italian Jaws knock-off.  I say 'knock off', it was actually so close to the original in many aspects that Universal Studios successfully sued the US distributors for a share of the profits - of which there quite lot, it proved very popular when released in the US under the title Great White.  It lifts its whole scenario from Jaws - the small coastal resort, setting, the local mayor obstructing attempts to protect the populace from the shark as he is up for re-election and there's a big event ( a windsurfing gala) coming up.  There's even a grizzled shark hunter on hand, although the characters of the police chief and oceanographer are replaced by a local horror author called Peter Benton - that's Benton, not Benchley - who knows a lot about sharks as he has researched them for one of novels.  They even throw in a sub-plot from Jaws 2, of the local youth getting stranded at sea and menaced by the shark.  It's actually pretty well made, (the fake shark is at least as good as the one in Jaws), and surprisingly entertaining, despite the fact that it is entirely derivative, with no original ideas or plot twists.  It is almost like a Jaws highlights package, cramming versions of all the most memorable sequences from the original into a swiftly moving eighty four minutes or so.

Despite all of the makers' attempts to make The Last Shark look like a US production - location shooting for the exteriors, US lead actors in the form of James Fransiscus, Vic Morrow and Joshua Sinclair, for instance - there's just no mistaking it for an Italian production.  There is just something about Italian film-making which makes it distinctive.  Even when the films have above average dubbing for their English-language versions, (the synching and voice artists used on Last Shark are far superior to most other Italian exploitation films of the era), and Italian supporting actors carefully cast to 'look' like 'typical' US locals, you can just tell its Italian.  There's something about the way in which the films are  shot - the compositions, the use of colour, the way in which narrative is completely subordinated to visuals.  This latter point is significant: the plots of Italian films don't necessarily proceed in the 'logical' way we are used to in most English-language films, there are frequently leaps in logic, assumptions that things will be 'obvious' to the audience without explanation,  What matters more is the look.  Perhaps the fact that Italian films are traditionally shot with their sound entirely post-synched (Italian studios didn't have sound stages - actors spoke their lines in their own languages, with the actual dialogue track being recorded later and dubbed onto the film), has contributed to the way in which dialogue in their exploitation films is frequently so pared down, with directors relying upon the visuals to convey not just plot, but also emotions and reactions.

In English-speaking cinema, the advent of sound meant that films became, quite literally, 'talkies', dominated by dialogue.  In the UK, the seemingly all pervasive influence of the theatre ensured that, for a long time, action tended to play second fiddle to talk in British films, with stagey studio sets with actors entering and exiting stage left and right, dominated scenarios.  (The same was true of British television for many years).  Italian expoitation films, by contrast, never lose sight of the fact that cinema is a visual medium, where one should 'show' rather than 'tell'.  Even in plot driven genres like the giallo this is true - just look at films like Argento's Profondo Rosso or Tenebrae, where the viewer is allowed to piece together large parts of the intricate plots from purely visual clues, rather than exposition heavy dialogue.  Not that I'm making any claims for The Last Shark being cinematic art - it's a cheap exploitation film.  But a distinctively Italian cheap exploitation film.