From my favorite movies..

Fresh and Exciting

Very interesting film. Was caught on the premise when seeing the trailer but unsure as to what the outcome would be for the showing. As it turns out, it was a very good film.

Fanciful, disturbing, and wildly original, it announces the arrival of a fresh, bold voice in American cinema.

"Cry of a Prostitute" is a typically boring and colourless poliziotteschi flick, perhaps only notable for its (also fairly typical) attitude toward women, who get slapped around a lot. One even has her face shoved in a hog's guts as punishment for trying to seduce the manly hero.I didn't pay close enough attention to work out the plot. It is impossible to pay close attention to 99% of poliziotteschi flicks because they are so boring and badly structured. You want to pay attention but then you're faced with a stretch of film about as exciting as staring at a wall for half an hour.There are, of course, some violent moments: the movie opens with a ridiculous car crash-decapitation scene, with what looks like a mannequin's head falling out of a car window. There's also an autopsy scene where a dead body has stitches in the chest which are cut open, revealing canisters of heroin.Anyway, main man Henry Silva, one of my all-time favourite actors, is a mafia don from the US who comes to Italy to investigate the situation. Once he's there, the other don's slutty wife immediately starts coming on to him, so Silva sticks her face in hog guts, and in another scene, slaps her down and attacks her with a belt. That'll show her!The only other woman in the movie I remember gets similar treatment.I remember reading that, unlike The Godfather, Italian mafia movies show the criminals for what they are: scum. There's no honour among them because the Italians had first hand experience of this type of scumbag and knew they were exactly that: human garbage.This is not true of "Cry of a Prostitute". You are obviously positioned to think that Silva is the "hero" of the story, despite his appalling treatment of women. In the end he is clearly positioned as the better man among his criminal cohorts, which is weird. He's a woman abusing criminal scumbag, after all?

Andrea Bianchi the director of the gory zombie film Burial Ground and the sleazy giallo Strip Nude for Your Killer turns his subtle (ha ha) hand to the Italian crime film with Cry of the Prostitute. It's Yojimbo time! The feuding between two warring families in rural Italy has become so fierce that the heat is coming down on the big families in Rome. Henry Silva is a gun for hire sent in to stop the fighting. He does this by playing the two gangsters against each other, offering his services to first one and then the other. Bianchi provides more gore than expected for the genre but none of it is overly convincing: a fake severed head, a band-saw mishap, and a dead child that looks, well, like a mannequin (and the camera lingers over it!). The adorable Barbara Bouchet appears playing a washed up former prostitute who has turned to drink. She wears heavy make-up and looks less than flattering. Nonetheless, I was glad to have her. Silva was fine as well. There isn't much here to praise and technically the film is less assured than many others in the genre. Fans might like it more than I did though.

It would seem that this film is more of a godfather rip-off than anything else, but it's clear that the film takes its fair share of influence from the western genre. Many Italian films lift plots from other successful films, and in this case it's A Fistful of Dollars that provides the influence (though in fairness to this film, Leone's first masterpiece did take its plot from Yojimbo...). The film also takes influence from the crime films that were rising in popularity in 1974, and could be described as an urban western. The plot focuses on Tony Aniante, a loner who arrives in a Sicilian town with a pair of warring families. He decides to be friends with both of them, until the moment to strike presents itself and he can have both families implode on themselves. The prostitute of the title refers to Barbara Bouchet's character Margie; one of the mob's whores who takes a liking to Tony and ends up getting embroiled in his little war with the rival mafia families.The film features all the things that make the Italian crime films popular, including fist fights, gun fights and car chases and none are in short supply. Andrea Bianchi never got himself a reputation for making high quality films, and that really isn't surprising considering how much Cry of a Prostitute borrows from other, more esteemed, sources. However, he does at least manage to keep things entertaining and that is of course the most important thing about a film like this. Of course, the fact that the plot has been seen many times before means that it is not difficult to guess what is going to happen by the end, which kind of spoils it a bit. The lead actor is Henry Silva and he does a good job in the central role. My main reason for seeing this film is the fact that it stars the lovely Barbara Bouchet. Barbara has never come across as being shy, and she doesn't here either! Overall, I wont say that Cry of a Prostitute is a must see Italian film; it adds very little for the experienced Italian film viewer; but it's not bad and is worth a watch.

1st watched 4/5/2003 - 4 out of 10(Dir-Andrea Bianchi): Godfather-like Italian movie without good acting, directing or writing. The title will fool you(at least the U.S. released video title-Cry of a Prostitute) because this movie has very little to do about a prostitute except that she is a minor character that pretends to be the wife of one of the many `Don's' in this movie. This is just a way to get people in the U.S. to rent the video. The story is actually about a man who plays the game with many mafia-type gangs and ends up being the top honcho in the end. It's very obvious where this movie is going, but there was some interesting things like seeing the actual reason for the family feuds(centering around the mis-treatment of a handicapped boy in one family) that became mafia's and seeing the reality of their real business's that become crooked by entering drugs into the business. The emotionless Henry Silva does an ok job in his part but most of the acting was not memorable. Watching this makes me want to see the Godfather, to see how much better it is in it's storytelling and acting. Not a good reason to give this a thumbs up, though.