O Olho Selvagem

I was a little in love as a teenager with Delia Boccardo, I saw her in "Strogoff", "The Adventurers," "Martin Eden" (TV Mini-Series), "La piovra 5 - Il cuore del problem" (TV Series), she was beautiful, I liked her in those and I liked the movies too. Philippe Leroy I know him from many movies that I also really liked, starting with "Le Trou" and continuing with "7 uomini d'oro", "Il grande colpo dei 7 uomini d'oro", "The Night Porter" , "La Femme Nikita", etc., today, at 88, still active, still filming, decent actor. Gabriele Tinti was also very prolific, but he died young, just 59 years old. I've seen him in many films, the most famous being "The Flight of the Phoenix," "Rider on the Rain", "The Mysterious Island". Paolo Cavara I know him because of his huge success, the most famous documentary of all time, "Mondo Cane". This movie has something too from "Mondo Cane" but it's different.

I can't explain why, but I can't prevent myself to think of another Italian film, adventure movie, made thirteen years later, and taking place in the deep Amazonia jungle, involving explorers.... But it was a horror film: CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST. Nothing to do with this one, I mean at first sight, but I repeat, I can't explain to myself the mechanism that makes me put a link between those two amazing and daring pictures from Italy. In both cases, two "twisted" minds could imagine such stories using the documentary, shock documentaries element. Maybe that's precisely what specialist call Mondo films.... The problem is that this one is definitely not a horror film, only disturbing. Philippe Leroy's character reminded me Kirk Douglas's one in THE BIG CARNIVAL.

Made by one of the makers of Mondo Cane this is a biting attack of not only his partners, but also on the genre itself.

The film begins as a film maker and his party end up stranded in the desert. All seems lost and everyone begins to show sign of dehydration. Ghoulishly the film maker begins to film everyone's last moments, or not because its discovered that the stranding was staged to get footage for the next mondo film. From that point on the film becomes a world trek as the film maker pursues a girl and attempts to get the next great sequence. It all ends in Viet Nam during the height of the war.

Its not hard to guess that the film is a nasty jab by director Paolo Cavara at his Mondo Cane co-directors, who had just run into trouble about a killing that appears in their Africa Addio, since much of the film is a quest to film some one die on camera.

Ultimately this film is a mixed bag. While I have no doubt that much of what is shown is the way things were done, it often comes across as the pot calling the kettle black with mondo-esque sequences appearing within the fictional frame work. While I honest believe that Cavara disavows his Mondo days, I think he would also love the success that his former friends briefly met as kings of the Mondo world.

Reservations aside this is a very good movie in its own right and should you come across it you should see it, especially if you've ever watched a Mondo movie and wondered how it was done.

I was 15 when I saw this film in July 1967 in the Kremlin Palace of Congresses during the 5th Moscow Film Festival. People there were absolutely shocked with fantastic skill of Paolo Cavara. All the people in the Palace stood up and applauded to the Director who was present together with some other people who participated in the film. Applause was endless but at least more than half an hour. It was evident for everybody who saw the film competition program that this film was #1. I was extremely surprised several days later when I knew that this film got NOTHING. Six months later I was present at a lecture in a small town 150 km from Moscow at a lecture of a film critic about this film festival. He told a fantastic story. When the film selection commission received this film for the competition program at a very last minute they unanimously decided that this film will win and the jury later also considered this film #1. But the Cuban delegation (USSR and Cuba had very complicated relations at that time with Cubans because of their friendship then with Mao in China) protested. They said that the events in Vietnam had been shown in a wrong way. And their protest was satisfied. Thus we lost a fantastic director because in case of his victory his destiny might be glorious. Now I cannot find this film anywhere. Your site is fantastic because you HAVE information on this rare almost forgotten film.

Paolo Cavara was one of the three directors who had a huge hit with "Mondo Cane," though after an immediate followup he split from the other two directors, who continued to make films together for another decade. They all did some interesting work later, and all no doubt share the blame for the whole "mondo" phenomenom, but Cavara was clearly attempting to atone with this fictive expose. Philippe Leroy plays a cynical documentarian (more or less) roaming the globe in search of shocking content, even if he has to stage it himself. He pushes people into degrading or false situations, and ambulance-chases after misery, executions, even a terrorist bombing he's been tipped to, but deliberately warns no one about. Gabriele Tinti plays his cameraman, while Delia Boccardo is the beautiful young woman he seduces away from her husband, seemingly mostly so he has someone he can use for "horrified" cutaway shots when he's filming some atrocity.

No satire but an all-too-serious indictment of "mondo" phoniness and pandering, the movie may well have seemed bitterly incisive in 1967. But now, after a quarter century or so of "reality TV," it seems pretty tired for a movie to spend 97 minutes telling us that filmed "reality" isn't necessarily real, and its makers are often crass exploiters. It's a point that the movie makes over and over with little variation, and no evolution in the characters. Leroy stays just the same prickly opportunist, and Boccardo stays just the same decorative "object" (as he takes pains to tell her) giving him wounded-puppy looks. We're supposed to believe she stays with him despite her moral repugnance because she's a masochist (or so he claims), or because he's good in the sack (so we infer). But frankly her character is such a cardboard, passive simp, we can only view her as an idiot.

The movie is very well-shot on various exotic locations and has a lush, colorful (if sometimes inappropriately lounge-y) score. But its critique is too simplistic and repetitive to have any impact, at least not anymore. Alberto Moravia gets a special credit for "screenplay collaboration," probably just to heighten the film's respectability-god knows there's precocious little of the psychological dimensionality here that you might expect from his input.

The "mondo" movies and all they represented offered rich opportunity for some penetrating social analyst--but it's pretty clear Paolo Cavara was not that person. He bites the hand that fed him here, but "Wild Eye" is not itself intelligent or insightful enough to really say anything that hadn't already been said in spades, even then...about "mondo" cinema, commodity culture, et al.