ITALIAN B-MOVIE KINGS
Fernando Di Leo’s La Mala Ordina (The Italian Connection)
The retrospective of the 61st Venice International Film Festival, September 1-11, will focus on the pioneers of Italian genre films.
Italian Kings of the Bs (1960-1980) will include 30 to 35 films by directors such as the late “maestro of mayhem” Fernando Di Leo, who made notable contributions to the spaghetti western and slasher films but is best known for his “Milieu Trilogy” of noir thrillers (Milano Calibro 9, La Mala Ordina, and Il Boss), which depict Italy’s cities as seedy hotbeds of crime and corruption; gothic horror director Mario Bava, who created and defined the giallo, a form of the thriller which concentrates on violent death as opposed to prosaic police procedural; Vittorio Cottafavi, director of historical fantasy films such as The Legions of Cleopatra, Goliath and the Dragon and Hercules and the Captive Women; the Italian “godfather of gore,” Lucio Fulci; musical comedy director Antonio Margheriti; crime film helmer Sergio Sollima, best known for the pre-Godfather mob story The Violent City; and exploitation specialist Sergio Martino, who created many notable crime films, sex comedies and giallos, along with many other directors.
Among those expected to attend the festival to introduce films in the retrospective are Quentin Tarantino and Joe Dante.
According to Variety: “This year’s 20- to 25-pic Venice retro is part of a broader four-year rediscovery and restoration project called ‘A Secret History of Italian Cinema,’ for which the fest’s parent org, the Venice Bienniale, has teamed up with the Prada Foundation…
“From the 1930s onward, Italian cinema developed and grew… thanks to lowbrow movies, in which filmmakers dared to create the country’s first genre films, capturing the market without relinquishing their innovative charge,’ said fest director Marco Muller.”
