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More famous for producing the Edwige Fenech-starring gialli and sex comedies of his brother Sergio, Luciano Martino (future Mr. Fenech himself) also tried his hand at directing several times, one of which was this blatant MONDO CANE riff from 1971. Wisely reduced from its mouthful of an Italian title to just NAKED CITIES by distributor MYA for the US market, it's hardly a great rediscovery, but was nice to catch up with nonetheless.
Trying to chronicle the film's litany of segments would be almost impossible, as CITIES takes MONDO's globetrotting approach and pushes it to the extreme, hopping from location to location so frequently and arbitrarily that it quickly becomes overwhelming. A few episodes will certainly stand out to modern viewers for all the wrong reasons: brief segments on gay weddings and a drag bar drip with condescension behind the studied ironic remove of the narration (another facet of CANE this film apes), while an interview with a mixed-race couple in New York shows how depressingly far we still had to go even in the supposedly liberated '70s. In between are strewn endless visits to strip clubs, nude dance studios, erotic artists, and basically any other location where the camera's leering lens might be able to find a girl taking her clothes off. Meanwhile, various tracks pilfered from Bruno Nicolai's scores for EUGENIE... THE STORY OF HER JOURNEY INTO PERVERSION and NIGHTMARES COME AT NIGHT will leave Eurocult fans yearning for the (I can't believe I'm saying this) relative coherence of a Jess Franco film.
While I may sound as snide and dismissive as I've accused the movie of being, I can't say NAKED CITIES is all bad. It certainly has some nice travelogue footage, and at least moves quickly enough that it never gets dull - it just suffers from being too scattershot. As far as mondos go, the best, like any high school term paper, present a clear central thesis and support it with examples. In CITIES' case, the thesis is muddled (it basically seems to be "people still get horny, even though they now live in cities"), and its examples are too varied and poorly developed to buttress the central argument. The transfer doesn't do the movie any favors, either. Supposedly derived from the only known print in existence, MYA's DVD certainly looks it, with source material riddled with scratches and wear. On top of that, the transfer itself is murky and poorly defined (you can still potentially do a razor-sharp transfer of a piss-poor element), and the subtitles, which over-literally translate every single word of the voluminous narration, are poorly written and difficult to follow. That said, as another piece of the Italian exploitation puzzle, I'm happy we have NAKED CITIES rather than not. It's no great shakes, but it's a rare peek at an Italian cinema impresario stepping out of his usual wheelhouse and trying something different. For that alone, it merits the attention of the curious.
Trying to chronicle the film's litany of segments would be almost impossible, as CITIES takes MONDO's globetrotting approach and pushes it to the extreme, hopping from location to location so frequently and arbitrarily that it quickly becomes overwhelming. A few episodes will certainly stand out to modern viewers for all the wrong reasons: brief segments on gay weddings and a drag bar drip with condescension behind the studied ironic remove of the narration (another facet of CANE this film apes), while an interview with a mixed-race couple in New York shows how depressingly far we still had to go even in the supposedly liberated '70s. In between are strewn endless visits to strip clubs, nude dance studios, erotic artists, and basically any other location where the camera's leering lens might be able to find a girl taking her clothes off. Meanwhile, various tracks pilfered from Bruno Nicolai's scores for EUGENIE... THE STORY OF HER JOURNEY INTO PERVERSION and NIGHTMARES COME AT NIGHT will leave Eurocult fans yearning for the (I can't believe I'm saying this) relative coherence of a Jess Franco film.
While I may sound as snide and dismissive as I've accused the movie of being, I can't say NAKED CITIES is all bad. It certainly has some nice travelogue footage, and at least moves quickly enough that it never gets dull - it just suffers from being too scattershot. As far as mondos go, the best, like any high school term paper, present a clear central thesis and support it with examples. In CITIES' case, the thesis is muddled (it basically seems to be "people still get horny, even though they now live in cities"), and its examples are too varied and poorly developed to buttress the central argument. The transfer doesn't do the movie any favors, either. Supposedly derived from the only known print in existence, MYA's DVD certainly looks it, with source material riddled with scratches and wear. On top of that, the transfer itself is murky and poorly defined (you can still potentially do a razor-sharp transfer of a piss-poor element), and the subtitles, which over-literally translate every single word of the voluminous narration, are poorly written and difficult to follow. That said, as another piece of the Italian exploitation puzzle, I'm happy we have NAKED CITIES rather than not. It's no great shakes, but it's a rare peek at an Italian cinema impresario stepping out of his usual wheelhouse and trying something different. For that alone, it merits the attention of the curious.
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