The Sewer Rats (Robert Bianchi Montrero, 1974)
If ever a film deserved to disappear, this one did. It looks like it was designed to be a Spaghetti Western in the malignant mould of Django, Kill! or Cut Throats Nine, but there was no money for period costumes and props or no one involved could be bothered to locate them. Instead, it turned into an ersatz Straw Dogs, a charmless tale of revenge: banal, misanthropic, and loved by no-one, instantly forgotten.
This whole pointless exercise was the idea of Peplum beefcake, Richard Harrison – a Hollywood rejected, who enjoyed Italian obscurity after turning down Clint Eastwood’s role in A Fistful of Dollars, a catastrophic miscalculation he later described as his greatest single contribution to cinema. Hardly a flattering or career-enhancing project, Sewer Rats seems to revel in its lack or resources, casual violence and endemic grime. Harrison stars as ‘The Cripple’, an enigmatic wanderer with a lame leg. When his VW breaks down he is forced to take shelter in a nearby mining town populated by a small group of sadists, perverts, thieves, deserters and cynics. This is not auspicious – or accidental. The town is defunct, abandoned; there is a sinister atmosphere of sexual menace, moral and physical pollution, malevolence. Or, at least, there is meant to be, but the film is so loose and useless, there is simply indifference, squalor and drift. There is a series of scrapes and scraps and rapes that all lead to an inevitable and (admittedly) explosive dénouement. But the reason for it is perfunctory, to say the least.
The one redeeming feature in this mud pit is the lone woman, J&B-swigging tramp Rita, played with sour relish by the divine and disregarded Dagmar Lassander. Well, she certainly didn’t do a lot else in 1974. By the early 70s, she had lost her late ‘60s groove (Hatchet for a Honeymoon, Femina Ridens, Photographs of a Lady above Suspicion) as quickly as she’d found it. The roles got smaller (Emanuelle Nero 2) and stupider (Werewolf Woman) and sleazier (So Young, So Lovely, So Vicious). Her look and her persona had changed dramatically: from curvy, fresh, strawberry-blonde debutant to ruby-lipped, Henna-dyed, diamond-studded, jaded Milan moll. This happened in less than five years. She was having fun, apparently, but hedonism extracted a certain price: hardness of features, character loss to gloss and lire, innocent energy replaced by dead-eyed, routine resilience. Acting the tramp, sowing mayhem and discord among misfits and murderers, the lone white trash cock-tease in an isolated, dangerous dive, Sewer Rats was an insignificant excursion for her, a cheque she probably enjoyed earning, and another step into obscurity.
The film was released in Italian cinemas on June 5th. Days earlier, a bomb exploded in Brescia, killing eight people and inflicting significant casualties. It had been planted by neo-fascist provocateurs belonging to Ordine Nuovo, a mystical, underground, SS-styled militia. Two weeks later, the Red Brigades assassinated two members of Italy’s largest post-fascist party, Movimento Sociale Italiano. There was no normality or moderation in Italian politics in 1974 – it was in the midst of a second Civil War. Pocked with city states and divided by regional discord, subject to Soviet and US intrigue, stuck between Tito’s Yugoslavia and the fascist regimes of Spain, Portugal and Greece, the peninsula was tense, fragile, and paranoid. Italians were braced for a military coup and primed for revolutionary violence. Other factors unsettled them, too: the collision of sex and drugs and cosmopolitan pop culture with the malign, festering, parochial power of the Church. In response to social and political combustion – or just to keep up, to retain interest and profits – movie producers and projectors poured out cheap films drenched in profanity, obscenity, gore, vigilante justice, homicide and subversion. This was a good time to be creative.
Sewer Rats itself displays no art or pace or skill or any discernable cinematic qualities, but still retains accidental, odd power bestowed by time and place. It reflects something of the society it was designed to serve: mass behavioural and psychological deformities; violent chauvinism and casual misogyny; paranoia and parochialism; conspiratorial occlusion and endemic corruption. There is lingering tension, always on the edge of either sex or slaughter – when it comes (either way, or both ways) it is a release, a relief. This abject piece of trash is a part of the implosion of tradition and disorder, fuelled by intrigue and transgression and violent carnality; it is a worthless product that bears specifically Italian scars.
There’s a very strong, virulent civil violence in Italy. It’s abnormal, monstrous, grotesque. Italians wallows in the fact that they are bravi ragazzi, good people, measured and antique…But there’s an endemic violence between neighbours which lurks like a kind of fever beneath the skin.
Adriano Sofri
