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THE WORKS OF TINTO BRASSHeart in His Mouth(Col cuore in gola, a/k/a Deadly Sweet, 1967)
In 1967, Panda Cinematografica, a
This is a tiny film, a quick cheapie, without a discernible budget,
shot rapidly on natural locations with a mostly
Natural locations?
Absolutely!
Please take a look at what is now one of my favorite pages on the Internet:
“Col cuore in gola (With Heart in Mouth),”
ReelStreets: More Than 125 Years of Worldwide Film and Movie Locations.
Brilliant!
Heart in His Mouth occupies an unusual stage in the development in Tinto’s career.
It was a job, based on a mediocre book, and was not from the heart.
Yet, in a sense, this was Tinto’s first taste of cinematic freedom.
Whosoever Works Is Lost, despite being deeply personal
and despite having some marvelous moments, was rather trite and was done in a rush.
Ça ira, despite being startlingly good, was a tendentious educational film.
His next few movies, as impressive as they were, were not his stories, and he did not have final say so.
Heart in His Mouth was the first time Tinto was able simply to have tons of fun,
to apply his wildest ideas — though only to an inferior story.
Heart in His Mouth could have been a commercial breakout if only it had been marketed properly.
It was the mod/hip crowd that needed to see it.
The movie needed to be released in English, in England, and it needed to be promoted in the
it tabloids.
That would have pushed it over the edge into profitability.
Had that happened, it would have become a favorite at the Scala,
it would still be regarded as emblematic of its time,
it would have done modestly well in the US on the art circuit,
and it would still be remembered and revived.
Alas, the movie was not shown in England.
Rank Films, a British distributor, had the British distribution rights,
and offered it to England, but apparently the cinema chains saw no promise in it and placed no bids.
A year and a half later, Paramount Pictures acquired the British rights and offered it again, to no avail.
Instead, the film was buried and, despite a few
I do not know how much the movie cost,
nor do I know how much the movie earned,
though I would imagine that, in Europe and Latin America, it flopped.
At best, it barely earned its money back and nothing more, I suppose.
I wish I knew for certain.
The script was based on an obscure giallo (pulp-fiction) novel,
Il sepolcro di carta
(The Paper Tomb), by Sergio Donati, which is really not very good, no matter how you look at it.
It’s just a silly little crime story.
It’s clever; there’s no denying that, but it’s not particularly engaging or memorable.
Do I hold that against Donati?
Far from it!
He was a writer earning a living.
He did what he needed to do, just as we all do our boring nine-to-five jobs to earn our living, right?
Yes, he had genuine talent, but this book reflected only his craftsmanship, not his talent.
Rank Film released this movie in both Italy and France, and that is why I suspect that Rank Film had purchased some initial shares. I begin to get the idea that Paramount Pictures had also purchased some initial shares, but I am not certain about that. According to IMDb, world rights in 1967 were held by Compass Film S.r.l., and, if that is true, then I suppose that Compass also had some initial shares. The German distributor was Gloria Film, in collaboration with what may have been a subsidiary, Farbfilm, but there is no indication that Gloria was an investor. The
To convert a crime thriller into a dazzling work of cinema, Tinto started hiring collaborators.
He got famous jazz composer Armando Trovajoli (sometimes spelled Trovaioli) to do the score,
a score very much of its time, but not quite what one would expect in a crime drama.
More importantly, Tinto hired
Guido Crepax.
Comic buffs will recognize the name instantly.
(As a
A recent reviewer also pointed out a comic-book-based Italian movie called
Kriminal,
which had been released at the end of 1966.
There was also Fantomas from 1964,
which I think was based on pulp novels rather than comics but which is nonetheless regarded by some as a cinema fumetto,
but I can’t judge because I haven’t seen it.
Heaven knows what all else there was.
We could trace the form back to Charley Bowers or perhaps even earlier.
I’ll leave this for the experts to hash out.
Whatever people agree or disagree on, though,
Heart in His Mouth is not a typical cinema fumetto,
as it is not simply based on an already published comic book,
but is a
Trintignant found himself most perplexed when he was sent the script,
which bore no resemblance to what he and Tinto had verbally agreed upon.
Trintignant asked the director what on earth had happened, and then agreed to do the movie anyway.
In some publication that I can’t find but that must be around here somewhere,
Trintignant made mention of his delight at discovering that Tinto
was different from all other directors he had worked for or knew of in that
he never used a megaphone.
 Tinto Brass souvenirs a moment with his lead
A few years ago I picked up the DVD of a later cinema fumetto,
Baba Yaga,
released by Blue Underground,
since I discovered via the Web that it includes a fascinating 12-minute documentary entitled Freud a fumetti,
as well as an “Easter egg”:
Choose the “Extras” menu,
and you will see a table of contents on the left and a photo of a mouth-watering
Franke & Heidecke Rolleiflex
 Comic-book framing in a movie.
If you want to study this more,
here are some of Crepax’s unused illustrations for this movie.
(This was originally at
http://www.orf.at/orfon/kultur/991116-2440/2443txt_story.html
but the link is dead as a doornail — however dead that is.
Fortunately, I saved a copy.
If you own the copyright to that old page, or if you know who does,
please write to me. Thanks!)
Tinto reached a minor crisis when it came to the cinematographer.
Bruno Barcarol, who had done such a wonderful job photographing
In capo al mondo,
La mia signora, and
Il disco volante, died.
(Tinto would pay him a tribute almost four decades later in
Senso ’45.)
So now Tinto set about searching for a replacement.
As he told Nick Brown in the supplement to the
Cult Epics DVD release of
Così fan tutte,
his interview consisted of a single question:
How would you photograph a smoker well enough to show the burning ember on the tip of the cigarette?
The candidates came up with various complicated methods of accomplishing the task,
including planting a resistor in a prop cigarette.
Ippoliti answered simply: “Have someone smoke a cigarette and I’ll shoot it.”
He demonstrated — and he got the job.
He would be Tinto’s faithful cinematographer until he died in 1991.
(As we can see in various behind-the-scenes documentaries,
Tinto exercises a great deal of control over the cinematography of his films,
going so far as frequently to operate the cameras himself.
That’s why the visual style of his films is so similar,
no matter who the cinematographer is.)
When it came time to cast the femme fatale, though, Tinto was simply open to suggestions.
The suggestion that someone (who?) gave to him was to hire 17-year-old
“Miss Teen Sweden 1965,” Ewa Aulin (sometimes known as Eve Aulin).
He did, feeling indifferent about the choice, but luck was with them both.
Aulin was as far removed from the
DATES AND LANGUAGES Filming began on 27 March 1967 and finished probably the first week of May. As you can see from the above ad, though it was an Italian/French coproduction, it was shot in London, which led to a typically European phenomenon of a multilingual cast. https://youtu.be/bRkDgC6urdo The people in the train and at the station were all from Central Casting. The race track was Wimbledon. https://youtu.be/QWevVj84W6c https://youtu.be/cVgGYlLuZrM  https://youtu.be/du89G3TtFVk A tribute by someone who loves this movie as much as I do.
ANALYSIS. So much for the background, but what about the movie itself, you ask? Well, I first saw it in 1991 or thereabouts, and I was deeply impressed by the filmic techniques, which I found dazzling. As for the story, though, I didn’t see the point of it at all. It seemed trite, trivial, insignificant, shallow, merely a lame excuse to play around with pop art and mod music and psychedelia and scene design and colors and editing. I thought that, overall, it was one of Tinto’s weakest movies. Beginning in April 2009, though, I was compelled to watch this movie a thousand times under the microscope, and now I think it’s one of his finest and most brilliant works. It’s every bit as rich and complex as La dolce vita and Performance. Yet it’s not so much like those two movies. This is a bit more like the Bogart version of The Big Sleep. Have you seen The Big Sleep? Could you follow the story? As a matter of fact, not only could you not follow it, neither could the staff writers who were brought in to polish the dialogue, and neither could the author of the original story, Raymond Chandler, when he finally saw the end result. Nonetheless, there is a story, and no amount of studio interference and no amount of rewrites erased that story. The interference and rewrites just defaced it and made it nearly impossible to follow, but it’s all there, and it can be followed. To follow it, though, you need to watch it at least a dozen times, or you have to take notes, or both. Heart in His Mouth is even more difficult to follow, because the evidence whizzes by us. The characters never say much about the evidence, at least not much that’s of any value, because they’re as confused as we are. Again, though, the story is all there, and it can be followed, but not in a single casual viewing. Why is it so difficult to follow? You asked the right question. Originally the movie contained the entire plot, explaining who the gangsters were and what they were doing and how and why, and the movie explained how Jane and Bernard unwittingly got trapped into all this drama. I’m certain — absolutely certain — that the scenes explaining this were filmed, but the only evidence I can base that conclusion on is the evidence contained in the current editions of the movie, which are all but incomprehensible. Now that I’ve watched this movie so many times, over the course of so many years, it finally occurs to me. For the sake of argument, let us run on the assumption that it was Tinto himself who chopped the movie to pieces prior to its world première. If that is the case, then he had two reasons. First, in its original version, it would have been too challenging; audiences would have been exhausted. So he cut out all the background story, all the explanations, which distracted attention away from what he found most interesting, which was the personal story of Jane and Bernard and their emotional transformations. That leads to the second reason: Tinto has no interest in crime capers, and so the plot per se was not as interesting to Tinto as the exploration of how the violent situation altered the two protagonists and affected their personal lives. Further, I’m almost certain that the unconvincing flashback of Prescott’s murder was a
A casual viewing makes the movie look like so much silly fluff,
something along the lines of a cheap
In a book entitled Italian Production 1967 (a paperback trade annual published by Unitalia Film in January 1968)
is a summary surely written by Tinto Brass and translated into English.
To read the summary you would think that the movie is a meditation on the effects that external events have upon private emotions:
Might that be the summary that Tinto originally showed Trintignant?
Peculiarly enough, after you read Tinto’s summary, you can watch the movie again and see that he was right.
Those ideas are all there, and they are the foundation of the story,
but you would never have noticed otherwise, would you have?
Now it’s time to study the clues.
Here is the scene of the first of the many crimes:
As soon as Martha and her new beau Leris enter,
Because we think that screenwriters are obliged to spell everything out for us,
we never bother to make any sense of these clues either.
We simply sit back and wait for a character to explain to us whodunnit.
Yet if we don’t bother to make sense of these clues,
we’ll completely misunderstand the narrative.
Eventually someone will tell us whodunnit, but the solution will be entirely wrong.
This movie is not a whodunnit.
This movie is something else altogether.
This movie shows us a story in which it does not matter at all whodunnit.
What matters is how people respond to dramatic events, and why they respond the way they do.
(If we can pay attention to the clues in this movie,
we can pay attention to the clues everywhere else in life.
Politicians and journalists long ago learned that we all wait for someone to tell us whodunnit,
and that we never bother to figure these things out for ourselves,
no matter how much evidence is right in front of our noses.
That, for instance, is why politicians invariably get away with accusing others of their own faults,
and that is why a large minority of prison inmates in the US are entirely innocent.
We let it happen, because we refuse to think, but I digress....)
Is Bernard frightened?
Does he go for help?
No, he acts like a detective from a 1940’s Warner Bros. movie.
Jane is terrified.
She just walked in for an appointment, and discovers the freshly killed corpse of the person who called her in.
Before she can do anything, she hides to avoid being noticed by a stranger who also enters the room.
She has no idea who or what Bernard is.
Bernard takes a diary (date book), some money, and a gun from the open safe,
and when they hear approaching footsteps, he escapes with Jane.
Why does Jane follow him?
Well, what is her choice?
If she stays, she’ll have to confront the people who belong to those approaching footsteps,
and that prospect is far from comforting.
At least Bernard seems protective rather than threatening,
and he knows how to escape from the office through a back entrance.
What is Bernard, though?
Is he a detective?
Is he a criminal?
We don’t yet know.
Soon we are taken to his flat, and we begin to learn the embarrassing truth.
He is a
Jane really doesn’t know what to make of it all. She is so confused and disoriented by what she has just been through that she breaks down and tells what she knows. Is she telling the truth? Right now, we can’t tell. Her story makes sense, but she does not tell it comfortably. Why? Her story reveals something: Jane’s brother Jeremy, or her stepmother Martha, or both, seem to have some sort of involvement with organized crime. Martha had only just a week earlier lost her husband. Already she has a new boyfriend, Mr Leris, who tries to pass himself off as an art dealer, though he probably earns his living by other means. After putting all these pieces together, are we supposed to suspect that maybe Jane herself has some criminal connections? Jane speaks of compromising photos. Are they photos of Martha or of Jeremy? In the French and English versions, Jane mentions incriminating photos of both Martha and Jeremy. In the Italian version, Jane mentions incriminating photos of Martha, and Bernard gets confused and thinks they are incriminating photos of Jeremy. (In the Italian, German, and Castilian versions of this movie, Jeremy is called Jerome.)
Bernard, trying to imitate Bogart’s version of Philip Marlowe,
pays a visit to the late Prescott’s luxury London dwelling to see what he can discover about incriminating photos.
Curiously, the doors are all open.
What’s more, Bernard is hardly the first uninvited guest:
Not only were all the doors unlocked, the books were toppled and the cheap reading table was overturned, the safe was opened and raided (again, by someone who knew the combination), and files and notebooks were strewn about onto the floor. Who did this? Why? What were they looking for? There can be no doubt that the people who raided Prescott’s apartment were the same as those who had raided Prescott’s nightclub office and murdered him. Prescott’s hired hands, led by a certain
In addition to all of the above clues, we also learn that Prescott and Bernard were of like minds,
for Prescott was a childish connoisseur of Stan Lee comics and Nazi memorabilia and toy soldiers and whatnot.
When
Is this playfulness? Yes.
Is Tinto in love with comic books? Yes.
Is this pointless and gratuitous? No.
These bubbles tell us precisely how Bernard interprets the situation.
When the episode is over,
does he report on what has happened? No.
Does he feel at all nervous or shaken? No.
He feels that, as in the comic books, it’s time to make love.
He returns home while Jane is in the shower.
Alone in the living room, he caresses her boa which is hanging on a clothes hook.
When she emerges from the shower, does he tell her about the criminal-underworld thugs he encountered?
Does he tell her what he did?
No.
Throughout the course of this story, Jane will never know anything about what happened at Prescott’s apartment,
nor will she suspect that there should be anything worth knowing.
Bernard doesn’t bother her with this vital information.
Instead, he seduces her with a line of poetry:
“ ‘Water on a woman’s body is like dew on the petals of a rose’ — Lao Tse.”
Jane has never heard of Lao Tse.
Bernard follows that with a line from another poem:
“Tell me about yourself, LSD.”
Jane asks if that’s also Lao Tse.
No, he says, it’s by Nadine.
Who on earth is Nadine?
Have you ever heard of a poet who is referred to simply as Nadine?
Well, I just recently learned that Trintignant’s wife is named Nadine.
(That was in the English and Italian versions.
In the French version, there is no Nadine.
Instead Bernard quotes a verse of his own:
“Your mouth is like a sparrow’s nest.”)
The moment when Jane walks into the hall from the shower, by the way, is the first direct evidence we have of tampering.
In Tinto’s original version, we see Jane fully nude.
There is no question that the Italian censor objected, and so Tinto (or someone else) rummaged through the trims
and found an alternative take in which Jane is seen discreetly only from the side.
When the movie arrived in the US, something really strange happened,
which we shall detail below.
Jane vanishes once Bernard is asleep.
She had been only reluctantly accepting of Bernard’s advances,
and it’s apparent that his presence is an embarrassment — as it is for us.
We really do feel embarrassed for him.
So is it really all that surprising that she vanishes on him?
Wouldn’t you the same?
But then she does something unexpected: She calls and asks to see him again.
Why?
Why does she prefer Bernard to the police?
Out on the streets, a whole new technique comes into play,
and, as before, it’s there for a reason.
We’ve learned that Bernard has no grasp of reality,
that he’s hopelessly
When you watched the movie, did you read that news article when you had the chance? You won’t get another chance to learn what it said. The police are “anxious” to interview Bernard. Since Bernard believes he is a hero in a comic book, he cannot accept the report at face value. His interpretation is more dramatic: “They’re after me.” In a sense, though, he’s right. Someone had described this man of “average height” and “brown hair” and “believed to be of French nationality” going to visit Prescott’s office the night before. Who had lodged that report with the police? Why, who else? Someone in
Pay attention to the people in the crowd.
Some of them notice the camera.
Let’s look more closely at the busker.
He was in the movie only by stroke of luck, as he happened to be performing on the day of shooting.
He was doing a sort of dance vaguely, ever so vaguely, inspired by
Charlie Chaplin:
Why was this shot at a happening? I had guessed that Tinto’s crew had learned there would be a happening, and so they took their cameras along and shot some important scenes there. Simple as that. No, it was not that simple. Alan Sekers knew the people at the International Times who were trying to set up the
Martha does not know Bernard; she never noticed him at the club.
When he confronts her silently, she seems to think he wants a rendezvous, and she seems happy to oblige.
This is rather odd behavior occurring just a week after her husband’s death, isn’t it?
It would appear that she and Leris had arranged Mr Burroughs’s death, yes?
Martha is then caught by surprise over and over and over in this short scene.
Finally she collects her thoughts as best she can in her state of shock,
and she gives us a piece of information we never had before:
the earring found at Leris’s murder scene belongs to Jane,
and she concludes that Jane must have killed him.
She believes this, truly and completely, especially after hearing Bernard’s news.
Martha’s story contradicts the evidence we have.
(Remember: Jane had no idea at all who the kidnappers were, and she will never find out.
After a lot of misleading clues, though, we eventually learned who they worked for.
Put two and two and two together, and it just doesn’t add up to Martha’s story.)
Besides, we were following Bernard and Jane the whole time, and they chanced upon Leris’s freshly killed corpse.
It is impossible that she could have killed him.
You see, though, Martha has her reasons for believing the story.
Not long before, it did have some basis in fact:
Leris had had a night of fun with Jane, which explains where the photos came from,
and which explains how he discovered that there was a desperate
When Bernard accuses her of murder, why does Jane offer no defense? Why did she bring along a gun? Where did it come from? How accustomed is she to handling the weapon? This is never explained explicitly, but if you put a lot of thought into unravelling what you have just seen, you can understand that Jane by now has had too much excitement. Her life had been unusual, true. Her brother had gotten involved in criminal activities, and her stepmother, she believes, killed her dad with help from her new boyfriend, who is clearly a mobster. Yet the worst dramas only really started with the appearance of Bernard, one night earlier. As soon as Bernard entered her life, she became a suspect in a murder case, she was seduced, she was interrogated by the police, she was kidnapped and threatened with an automatic weapon, she was chased by underworld mobsters, and now enough is enough. Jane’s life has been in danger from the moment she met Bernard, and she has every reason to think that her life will continue to be in danger so long as Bernard is around. If she can get rid of him, she thinks, no one will suspect her; instead, all suspicion will fall on the mobsters. What she doesn’t realize is that the mobsters who had been chasing after Bernard are all either dead or imprisoned. She sees Bernard, and she hesitates. She has never before handled a gun, but when Bernard concludes that she was the murderer all along, she grows stone cold and shoots him. All evidence for several murders will now point to her.
Now that I’ve pointed out all these clues to you,
clues that you probably never noticed even if you’ve seen the movie 20 times,
I should confess to you that it was not Tinto’s intention that you pay attention to any of that.
When all was said and done, Tinto again realized what he knew when he went in to this project:
He doesn’t like crime thrillers.
So he chopped the plot out, relentlessly, and left the clues in only because there was no way to get rid of them all.
He wanted you to sit back and relax and go along with the erroneous conclusions that Bernard draws.
He wanted you to think of this movie as a delightful brainless
Like it or hate it,
you’ll almost certainly be compelled to admit that it’s a one-of-a-kind experience.
I’ve now seen the Italian version at the cinema twice.
At the first showing the audience were okay with the movie, but thought it no great shakes.
At the second showing, nearly everybody went wild with enthusiasm.
One gal was so overwhelmed that she couldn’t understand how the movie had escaped her notice.
“How did I miss it? Why did I never hear about it before?”
Then two guys happily emerged from the auditorium, one of whom said to me,
“I never heard of Tinto Brass before but now I’m a confirmed fan!”
I felt so good that night.
THE COMMENTARY TRACK.
Some months ago, prior to release, I heard Tinto’s commentary track for the Cult Epics DVD.
That was before I realized how complicated the movie was.
I found some of his comments entertaining, though he hardly said anything I didn’t already know.
It was clear to me that he simply does not enjoy doing commentary tracks.
He meandered and spoke of other movies and people and events that few of his listeners would know about,
and without a basic knowledge of these things, many of his comments will seem incoherent.
He made no mention at all of the story construction or of the subtle clues,
and in the end he said that Bernard had at last solved the crime.
Of course, that’s total nonsense, but that’s what we’re supposed to conclude too.
Since this was a commentary track, in which he was not only free to reminisce about all manner of background details,
but was actually encouraged to do so,
why did he make no mention of the narrative’s extraordinary complexity?
The answer, alas, is simple.
He doesn’t remember.
He has seldom seen the film since he finished it,
he has almost never thought about it again,
and he misremembers nearly everything except the amusing little anecdotes of what happened behind the scenes.
This becomes especially clear when he repeatedly misdescribes a major point of the plot
as being the search for “a girl’s body” rather than the search for some photos.
He even admits that he can’t remember many details of the story.
He doesn’t even remember that most of the film had been shot in English,
and he says that the movie followed Sergio Donati’s novel closely, though there’s almost no similarity whatsoever.
We should also bear in mind that he did not write this movie by himself.
His collaborators, Francesco Longo and Pierre
Tinto had begun his filmmaking career with the greatest of promise,
but his plans were waylaid when his first two films were squelched.
Nonetheless, he had attracted the attention of some prominent producers,
and so he was assigned to direct prefabricated scripts.
He was well on his way to entering a new and different career,
that of a reliable journeyman director of
EUROPEAN RELEASES
Heart in His Mouth, in its Italian version, received its world première on Friday, 8 September 1967, at the Venice Film Festival.
How the movie was received, I don’t know. I have found only two contemporary reviews. The American one was hardly flattering:
There was also a
What the critics dislike is what I find appealing.
Despite what she implies, Alice Pleasance-Liddell (a pseudonym, of course)
obviously never saw Whosoever Works Is Lost or Ça ira, The River of Revolt.
I doubt she saw My Wife or The Flying Saucer, either, since her criticisms in no way apply to those.
Tinto was not known for revolutionary writings. Not at all.
He never penned any.
He was not a Marxist, either.
Where do critics get these ideas?
The point that the critics missed was that Col cuore in gola, like Tinto’s previous three films, was an assignment.
The scripts had already been written and the producers were searching about for an inexpensive director who needed work.
Critics seem to have this crazy notion that directors are artists who do whatever they please and who have no producers or investors to answer to.
Tinto was working for a producer, working to spec, and he had to make the investors happy.
That was his job.
Why can’t critics understand that?
He had an extremely small budget and an extremely short schedule.
He could afford only a cast of unknowns, though he did manage to get Trintignant,
who, I am willing to wager, offered a discount and agreed to work at standard union wage.
Within those narrow parameters, Tinto did splendid work.
He converted a routine crime caper into a truly bizarre entertainment —
by no means the most emotionally satisfying movie ever made, but peculiarly memorable all the same.
Apparently the movie was also released in Belgium:
 “Le cœur aux levres” was scrubbed out and changed to “En 5ème vitesse,” and, at some time, “Dead Stop” was either added or subtracted.
And that pretty much seemed to be the end of that.
Because I’m not in Europe, I can’t go through the newspapers of 1967 and 1968,
but even if I were to, I doubt I’d find much of interest.
Since the movie was a French coproduction, it was released in a French dub under a different title,
En cinquième vitesse (In Fifth Speed).
It was fascinating.
Years ago I purchased a really lousy VHS from Video Search of Miami, which was a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy...
of a censored telecast.
(Video Search of Miami no longer sells that particular edition of the movie.)
First of all, the opening credits were completely redone, and were completely better than the Italian originals.
It is probably the only time a producer’s or distributor’s alteration of Tinto’s original was an improvement.
More interestingly, in the French dub, when the Brits were talking among themselves, they usually spoke English (no subtitles),
but when the Brits found they had to converse with Bernard (Trintignant),
they spoke with English-accented French, the sort of French they were probably required to learn in school.
My VHS copy is so poor that I sometimes cannot lip-read the actors,
but it would not surprise me at all if they were actually speaking French some of the time.
Here is the opening five and a half minutes:
For whatever it may be worth, the tiny nightclub was Samantha’s, in the basement underneath 3 New Burlington Street, W1. Also, when I first saw this rotten bootleg, I was enthralled by the opening scene in the morgue. It was shot and edited EXACTLY the way I think, EXACTLY the way I visualize stories. Tinto is the only filmmaker who sometimes shoots and edits EXACTLY the way I think. That was enough. I was a fan. More than a fan.
Again, I’m certain — absolutely certain — that Tinto had nothing whatsoever to do with this French dub,
which in many ways is better than the Italian dub.
Why am I certain he had nothing to do with it?
Because there is one horrible, horrible mistake.
Whoever wrote the script for the French dub
either couldn’t make out or couldn’t understand “What — me worry?”
and changed it.
What a mess!
There was also a German dub, Ich Bin Wie Ich Bin (I Am What I Am).
Curiously, the poster included a subtitle:
Ich Bin Wie Ich Bin: Das Mädchen aus der Carnaby-Street.
I have the above poster in my collection, and the staff of the cinema that once possessed it
indexed it simply as Carnaby Street, which makes me think that was probably its original German title
and that Ich Bin Wie Ich Bin was the title of a subsequent release.
Incidentally, though the line “I am what I am” (“Sono come sono”) is in the Italian dub,
on camera Jane never said that.
What she actually said was that she thought of herself as very much like Linus in the Charlie Brown comic strips,
perpetually carrying a security blanket.
In the US, where movie returns can almost never be compared those of anywhere else in the world,
Heart in His Mouth, or Deadly Sweet as it was retitled,
played, I think, only at three
THE MINIATURE UK RELEASE
Heart in His Mouth was filmed entirely in London,
and the original intention was to have the movie in English; hence most of the actors spoke English on camera.
To my surprise, the movie was shot with a guide track, which was unusuable except as a reference.
The dialogue, music, and sound effects were all recorded later.
After the Italian dub was completed,
I just heard from Johan Melle, whom I had never heard of but who turns out to run one of the finest sites on the Internet,
Dubbed in Rome.
He was able to determine that
Christopher Cruise
dubbed David (Roberto Bisacco).
He further determined that
Geoffrey Copleston
dubbed the dwarf (Skip Martin) as well as the policeman who radios in to HQ.
He is nearly certain that Copleston also dubbed Leris.
That leads him to suspect that it was Geoffrey Copleston who wrote and directed the English dub.
Finally, he’s pretty sure that Vivianne Purdom (née Stenson) dubbed Martha Burroughs (Vira Silenti).
Does anybody know anything about Vivianne (often misspelled Vivienne) Purdom?
Is she still with us?
I think Christopher Cruise is still amongst us.
I don’t know how to reach him, though.
Would somebody like to contact him for me?
As for who dubbed Jane (Ewa Aulin), it was
Louise Lambert.
¿Great investigative work, que no?
The recording sessions happened no earlier than November 1967 and no later than early December 1968.
But the release was abandoned for some reason, and the movie was never publicly screened anywhere in the UK.
If you know anything at all about how the English edition came to be or why it was never released,
please contact me and let me know. Many thanks!
Since it was never released, imagine my surprise when I saw this listing on eBay:
 (Photo courtesy of Lee’s Cameras of London)
I was flabbergasted.
This was a three-reel
Note that the dialogue pretty much matches lip movements, sometimes,
and that it is far superior to the dialogue in the Italian and French editions.
Notice also that it is simply implausible that this English dub was created for this 53-minute Super 8 home-movie edition.
It was created for a planned cinema release.
When no distributor or exhibitor expressed interest in booking it,
the movie was chopped down for home-movie collectors.
I wonder if this English version was ever shown on television.
I wonder if a complete print still exists.
I wonder if the masters still exist.
I hope all the English materials still exist somewhere, for with them we could restore the movie properly.
Without them, we can’t.
IF YOU HAVE ANY IDEA AT ALL ABOUT THE WHEREABOUTS OF A COMPLETE ENGLISH PRINT OR THE MASTER DIALOGUE TRACK,
PLEASE WRITE TO ME AT ONCE!!! THANKS SO MUCH!
THE MADDENINGLY MYSTERIOUS US RELEASE
According to the
American Film Institute Catalog: Feature Films 1961–1970,
Deadly Sweet was released in the US in Technicolor.
That much is correct.
This Catalog further states that Films Distributing Corporation was somehow associated with Avco Embassy.
That is entirely wrong. (That mistaken reference sent me on a 30-year-long wild-goose chase.)
The Catalog also wrongly states that the US première was Sunday, 7 September 1969 in Portland, Oregon,
even though Sunday is usually not the day of movie premières:
That drove me crazy for 30 years, but then a librarian at the Multnomah County Public Library checked around and assured me that no movie under the title Deadly Sweet had ever played in Portland. I was completely satisfied with that Portlander librarian’s research, and I had no objection to it whatsoever, except that it was wrong.
The film did indeed play in Portland, but it did not open on 7 September 1969
and it was not released by Avco Embassy.
Anyone familiar with the European editions of the movie, which contain barely anything objectionable,
would be surprised by the X rating used in the US.
Can we get to the bottom of all this?
Yes, we can!
Not too long after Heart in His Mouth,
Ewa Aulin scored a bit of a sensation in a movie called Candy,
which was shot beginning in December 1967 and which opened in the US in December 1968.
At its première in Manhattan the lines went around the block.
So it was time to hop onto the bandwagon.
Paramount Pictures Corporation wish to capitalize on a rival’s success
by issuing a different movie with this
NOTE: Technicolor is not identified anywhere on the film in any way,
but the obvious IB process, with the soundtrack in b&w,
along with the leaders and tails all containing registration-check appearances of the letters
“Y” for yellow, “C” for cyan, and “M” for magenta
leave no doubt as to the print being made by Technicolor.
No, these letters do not refer to the YCM Laboratory, which would not be founded until 1983.
Furthermore, in three of the six reels, there was a printing error,
and two of the three colors were not laid over all the way to the very right edge of the frame.
Definitive proof.
IB Tech is brutally expensive,
and a specialist in these things assures me that in order to amortize costs
it would have been necessary to run off at least 100 prints.
(From this we CANNOT draw the conclusion that at least 100 prints were actually made, though.
Perhaps the costs were not amortized.)
That Paramount would go to the length of printing in IB Tech demonstrates their confidence in this movie.
They had more confidence yet.
They hired voice actors to record a new English dialogue track,
even though an English track had already been recorded in Italy.
A producer friend who is highly knowledgeable about 1960’s US releases of foreign films
assures me that it was extremely common for US distributors to hire new voice actors to replace voices even in English-language movies.
Often the English tracks recorded in Europe were inferior and the US distributors wanted something better.
Even when the English track was perfect, it was simply company policy to do it over again,
with voices and accents and delivery that the studios thought Americans would feel more at ease with,
even if the result sounded hopelessly artificial and unconvincing.
The company policy may well have been related to a contract with union actors, which guaranteed such work.
That’s just a guess, and I really don’t know.
It is true that the earlier English track sounded phony.
The problem was that the American track that replaced it sounded every bit as phony.
Technically it was better, and it lip-synched better, and it had somewhat better spatial characteristics,
but the voices were all wrong.
The Paramount crew were thinking in terms of film noir,
and overdid it.
They didn’t have any conception of Tinto’s irony or naturalism or absurdism,
of his goal of playing against type and against expectation.
A lot of the dialogue was delivered with phony British accents,
which would be convincing to most Americans’ ears but not to a British ear.
I wonder who these voice actors were.
I wonder who created their script.
I wonder who directed them.
I wonder who was on the sound and editing crews.
If you know, for heaven’s sake please let me know!!!!!
Thanks!
I would ask Paramount directly, but they made the horrible mistake of tossing all their records into the rubbish bin decades ago.
Some of the dialogue that Paramount dubbed in had been rejected and had already been revised for the older English dialogue track.
Some of the dialogue they dubbed in was not heard in the European editions.
Further, some of the
By the way, if you’re interested in seeing the Paramount version,
you might have a chance.
Paramount now has a 2K master ready to license to any distributor that is willing to take a chance on it.
It’s been about a year now, and I don’t think anybody has made an offer.
Another interesting project would be to locate all the master materials and record the English track anew,
with new actors, and do it right this time, and maybe even hire Tinto to direct it.
Such a project would cost a fortune and would never earn back its costs, but I think it would be worth doing anyway, don’t you?
Is anyone interested?
Paramount’s revoicing sessions must have occupied about two weeks.
And then after the revoicing sessions, the tracks were mixed and the elements were sent to Technicolor,
where by 20 February 1969 they had a reference print of Reel 5 ready for inspection.
So if we work backwards, work must have begun no later than late January,
and if we work backwards from that,
Paramount’s must have completed its licensing contract with Panda and Corona must in late December or early January.
What Paramount Did
The archive print I saw on a KEM flatbed on 23 April 2009 was physically altered,
and I am quite sure it was a reject, with a pictorial quality too poor to issue to a cinema.
In the original, there is a prologue in a morgue followed by Bernard emerging from the London underground.
Then there’s a
I mentioned additional dialogue.
Here’s the first example, when Bernard first bumps into
In the original there is no dialogue.
The two simply stop and stare at each other.
Paramount added dialogue, which went something like:
“What about this one?”
“He’s okay.”
“All right, I’ll let him go.”
There was also a deletion.
In the scene in the car, Bernard asks Jane:
“
Italian version French version British version
Anyone watching the European version of this movie would guess that in the US it would have been rated M or at worst R.
Zo, why was the Paramount release rated X?
The answer is revealed in the archival 35mm print of the Paramount version.
It is not the same as what we have come to know from the Italian and French and German and Spanish releases.
Two momentary bits are different.
Here’s one such instance.
In most versions of the movie,
this momentary nude image is discreetly shot:
In the Paramount version something strange happens.
Just as Jane begins to enter the frame, there is a jump in the action,
for there is a splice in the internegative to a different take of the same shot.
Not only does the action jump, so does the image, for the camera is in a slightly different position.
The color values shift, as this is not taken from the original camera negative or from the European internegative, but from a duplicate.
In this alternative take, the image is not so discreet: 37 frames of visible nudity, below the waist.
Altogether, the replacement footage runs 2 seconds and 3 frames (51 frames).
The footage it replaced was 1 second and 20 frames (44 frames).
There was a very strange deletion as well.
The beginning of the scene in the park was cut out,
and so we don’t see the collie, we don’t see Assistant Director Alan Sekers,
and we don’t hear or see the Christian fanatic preaching to nobody:
“And it shall come to pass that dog would eat dog.
Citizens of London, light bonfires in the streets.
Let us bring back the death penalty and whipping.
Let us condemn alcohol, smoking and gambling and sex.
Let us destroy chocolates with liqueur, chase out homosexuals and socialists and suicides, and down with modern women.
Down with the miniskirt.”
The total deletion is 23 seconds and 1 frame:
 He was scripted, and he was hired through Central Casting.
The following sequence was also augmented.
Here’s another change, which I can only quote inaccurately from memory. To get into a secured building, Bernard rings a random buzzer.
In the Paramount version the dialogue was something like this:
Interestingly, in this scene it is quite clear that Jean-Louis Trintignant was speaking English. He probably learned his lines by rote, as he had no ability to converse in English in real life.  They are looking for the Buick. They find the Buick. 
In the original: no dialogue.
In the Paramount version, Bernard says something like “That’s the car.”
Yes, there’s even more. In the original, Bernard and Jeremy hear the sounds of some gangsters playing dice in their room. 
But in Paramount’s augmented version, we hear the gangsters having a conversation off-screen,
and it goes something like this:
“What’ll Leris think when he finds out we’ve got the bird?”
“Who cares what he thinks?
It’s ten thousand quid.
We can get out of this country.”
I wonder if that was the original dialogue, or if it resembled the dialogue of a longer version of this scene.
If it was, I understand why Tinto struck it — if he struck it.
In a later scene there’s another glimpse, lasting only one second, of forbidden imagery:
In the European editions, the above scene is perfectly discreet.
In the Paramount version that I watched in 35mm,
there is another splice in the negative,
and a duplicate of 4 seconds and 9½ frames of deleted footage is cut back in (followed by 1½ frames of black slug).
We can see the colors shift and the quality degrades slightly in that restored footage.
The final frame and a half of the reinserted footage have a blank soundtrack, but with lab references written on it.
In 1969, even one glimpse of forbidden imagery was more than enough to qualify a movie as an X and to get it relegated to the exploitation circuit,
where desperate DG’s in raincoats would dash into a decaying cinema hoping not to be recognized,
scouting out the fire exits to prepare for a quick getaway in the event of a police raid.
Deadly Sweet had two such glimpses, totalling about two seconds.
An X, of course, is boxoffice doom — but not in 1969.
In 1969 all this stuff was a novelty, and people poured into cinemas to watch dirty movies.
So at the time an X may have seemed like a good idea.
In retrospect, we can see that it wasn’t.
The X was one of the three ingredients that killed the movie.
(For what it’s worth, you can click here to read my take on the ratings system.)
When viewing the Paramount version frame by frame, while watching the sprocket holes and soundtrack and splices,
we can determine that these two brief moments had been deleted from the European version of the movie.
Tinto’s preferred take of he hallway scene was junked and replaced with a milder take of the same moment.
The photo-studio scene was slightly shortened, and the original camera negative of the deleted footage was discarded.
Somehow, Paramount knew that there were hotter versions of those two moments and sought them out.
How?
Rather than restore the entire original hallway take, Paramount made a composite.
The shot begins as with the usual European version,
until Jane enters, when there is a splice to the hotter take.
Why not use the full original take?
Was it already discarded?
Was this tail end all that was left?
As for the photo-studio scene, in the standard European version, no viewer would guess that anything had been deleted.
Yet someone at Paramount knew and thus set about hunting for the missing moment.
To all appearances, the camera neg for that missing moment had been destroyed, and so it was copied probably from the answer print.
How on earth did Paramount know about this alternative footage?
How on earth did Paramount acquire this alternative footage?
My current conjecture is that Paramount had invested in this production,
by which it earned right of first refusal to distribution rights in certain territories, including the US.
As an investor, one of its representatives would have seen Tinto’s original cut
and then noticed that there were little snips in the release version.
That person then immediately did a dumpster dive in the hopes of finding the originals to reinsert into the US print to make it more sellable.
That’s my guess.
I could be completely wrong.
Zo, this makes me think.
I can only assume that it was Tinto who made the changes to the European version when he was told that if he didn’t,
the censors would take over.
When Paramount restored those two moments, I am quite sure that Tinto did not know, and I am quite sure that he still does not know.
Paramount knew how to redub muted dialogue in a sequence that could not possibly be
Paramount also decided to help the audience by adding some lines to this scene:
In the original, Bernard simply turns the knob and opens the door.
In the Paramount version, while we see him from the back he says “That’s odd. The door’s open.”
In the original: no dialogue at all.
In the Paramount version, when Bernard faces away from the camera, he says:
“You’re trembling, mon chère. What’s wrong? You all right?”
That dialogue is supposed to help us? How does it help us?
It adds deadweight to the narrative and leads us to an incorrect conclusion.
I am willing to wager that this line was never in the script and was never included even in a preliminary version.
It was a Paramount original.
In the original: no dialogue.
In the Paramount version, while Bernard’s face is
The British dialogue was straightforward:
JANE: “Who was that?”
BERNARD: “His name was
The Paramount version was something like:
JANE: “Who was that?”
BERNARD: “He’s one of Prescott’s men.”
I find it a bit baffling that though
In the Paramount version, as in the European versions, the background of this shot is almost entirely blown out.
That was intentional.
In both the British and Paramount versions, the dialogue in this scene was augmented:
Finally, the last changes.
At the end, Bernard is on the floor by the railing.
We see Jane’s feet as she walks up to him.
The Paramount version cuts off here, and goes straight to the end credits.
The Italian version, on the other hand, continues.
Jane, seen from the back, looks over the ledge at the scenery.
She turns around and walks towards and past the camera.
The camera tilts down to Bernard on the floor by the railing.
The credits scroll up over the image.
The total time from Jane looking over the scenery to the fade to black and silence at the end of the credits
is 1 minute 59 seconds and 1 frame.
The Paramount credits began with THE END fading in, in large yellow letters against a black background.
The two words then retreat into the distance somewhat, as the credits, completely reset and filled with errors,
appear under it and scroll up.
The credits are left-justified and the line breaks are mostly where one would expect rather than in
For the record, the total running time of the Paramount version is 100 minutes 38 seconds 4 frames.
That includes polyglot Bernard asking Jane her name in several languages.
It also includes the opening
With that knowledge in hand, we can do some simple arithmetic to determine the length of the version released in Italy.
The bit with the religious fanatic in Richmond Park is 23 seconds and 1 frame.
The bit with Jane emerging from the shower was 44 frames as opposed to the 51 frames in the Paramount print,
a net deficit of 7 frames.
The deleted bit in the photo studio is, in the Paramount print, revealed to be 4 seconds and 9½frames + 1½ frames of a slug.
Since it is missing from the European versions, that is a net deficit of 4 seconds 11 frames.
The ending is 1 minute 8 seconds and 14 frames longer than the Paramount edition.
Zo, 100:38,04fr minus 000:11,07fr, plus 000:23,01fr, minus 000:00,07fr, minus 000:04,11fr, plus 001:08,14fr comes to a grand total of
101 minutes 53 seconds 11 frames, plus the intermission (“FINE PRIMO TEMPO” and “SECONDO TEMPO”).
So that’s the running time of the Italian version.
Simple?
No.
As we shall discover below, the American Film Institute claimed
that the US running time of 101 minutes contrasted with the Italian running time of 107 minutes.
As we shall discover even further below, Peter Cowie gave the Italian running time as 107 minutes,
but he gave the rounded length as 3,030 meters,
which is 110 minutes 23 seconds.
Indeed, the current international distributor, StudioCanal,
lists the running time as 1 hr 50 min,
as you can see
here
and
here.
Making matters even more confusing,
the Associazione Nazionale Industrie Cinematografiche Audiovisive & Digitale
(ANICA)
gives the length as 2,180 meters, which is 79½ minutes.
Is 2,180 in fact a typo for 2,780?
(2,780m would be about 101 minutes and 20 seconds.)
Should we dismiss these alternative running times as the work of careless typists?
Maybe.
Remember, Paramount restored two brief sequences that had been deleted from the European prints.
That gives me the idea that the European version is not Tinto’s preferred version.
I begin to think that Tinto’s preferred version really was slightly longer,
and that its plot was a little more comprehensible.
Is there any internal evidence of cutting?
Kinda sorta maybe.
Here are the lengths of each 2,000' reel of the Paramount version:
Reel 1, 19 min 50 sec 02 frames
Reel 2, 17 min 54 sec 16 frames Reel 3, 18 min 32 sec 19 frames Reel 4, 19 min 48 sec 06 frames Reel 5, 12 min 59 sec 14 frames Reel 6, 11 min 45 sec 05 frames
It is common for the final reel to be short, since it is, after all, just the tail end of the story.
Earlier reels are generally between about 15 and 20 minutes.
One may guess that Reels 5 and 6 were both short in order to achieve a balance.
Rather than have a
How many trade screenings there were, I do not know.
But we do know about this one, held on Thursday, 20 March 1969, in Kansas City, Missouri:
What was that about? I wish I knew.
The story was included in the
“Kansas City” page of
Boxoffice magazine 94 no 22, Monday, 17 March 1969, p. 37.
Apparently there was some sort of trade convention going on at the time,
and Commonwealth Amusement Corporation
was the name of a regional cinema chain, but where precisely its screenings were held is a bit of a mystery.
Help?
(This was the same Commonwealth that bought out Frontier Amusement in Albuquerque.)
Do you live in or near Kansas City?
Could you do some research for me?
Many thanks!!!
Deadly Sweet was National Screen Service (NSS) job # 690023.
There was a press book, a one-sheet poster, a set of eight lobby cards, and a preview — or “trailer”
as many people would still call it.
(WE ARE LOOKING FOR THE DEADLY SWEET PREVIEW AND LOBBY CARDS.
IF YOU KNOW WHERE THEY CAN BE FOUND, PLEASE CONTACT ME. THANKS!!!)
Let’s take a look at the advertisement that Paramount’s Films Distributing Corporation created for Deadly Sweet :
As you can see, the advertising campaign capitalized on Trintignant’s A Man and a Woman, a few years old by then but scheduled for an English-dub
Here is another detail from that press book:
 So apparently the MPAA really meant business.
Why “X”?
I begin to suspect that the only reason the Paramount agent shoveled through the dumpster
was specifically so that Paramount could ensure this movie would earn an X tag.
This was 1969.
X was new, X was popular.
And what would audiences get for their money?
The movie has one sex scene, two love scenes, one striptease, and two vanishingly brief glimpses of frontal nudity in long shot.
Is this what the raincoat crowd would want to see?
Let’s take a look at the sex scene, less than one minute long.
It does not look at all like the publicity stills included in the ad and on the poster:
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
There is also a love scene that is by no means a sex scene, and which lasts about half a minute:
Then towards the end are some brief flashes of Bernard’s final fantasies:
 
 
 
 
That’s hardly salacious, is it?
That’s not what people who go to a “dirty” movie want to see, now is it?
(And Candy was nearly as discreet as the stills above,
which may have been the reason for its downturn in business.)
Once Paramount modified the movie to its liking,
it was time to ready the release.
The pressbook spelled out the contractual billing, and noted that this had limited application:
“FOR THE FOLLOWING TERRITORIES ONLY: United States, it’s [sic] territories and possessions,
Puerto Rico, Panama Canal Zone, Canada, Australia, United Kingdom, New Zealand, South Africa, South West Africa,
Rhodesia, Zambe [sic], Malawi”.
Did Paramount release this edition of Deadly Sweet in any of those other territories?
I wish I knew.
Let’s scour Boxoffice a little more.
In the
28 July 1969 issue (pp. 85–86),
we find this:
That calls for considerable interpretation.
The capsule review may have been written by an exhibitor
(i.e., a cinema owner or manager who had a subscription to Boxoffice magazine),
but if so, which exhibitor?
What was his/her name?
Which cinema, or which cinema chain?
On the other hand, a librarian in the know assures me that Boxoffice reviews were frequently submitted by stringers,
and, indeed, this review seems to have the hallmarks of a stringer.
Note that this supplies us with the Paramount release number.
Do you happen to work at Paramount?
Could you check on release # 6908 for me?
And while you’re at it, why not also check Technicolor
In a vertical file at the Margaret Herrick Library at the AMPAS Fairbanks Center for Motion Picture Study
is a form entitled
“Data for Bulletin of Screen Achievement Records,”
signed on Saturday, 24 April 1969, by Jan Hamilton, a Paramount official.
That was the day after the release, as we discover.
This is a form that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences requests that all US studios
fill out for all movies “IMMEDIATELY AFTER THE SCREEN CREDITS ARE DETERMINED.”
The completion date of the production was given as “Not known”
and the “1st ASST. DIRECTOR” was given as “GERARD GUERIN.”
This was quickly followed on 28 April 1969 in Boxoffice (p. 18),
which gave the MPAA ratings assigned to films released over the past week
(though the MPAA surely assigned the rating in March):
When we look through the publicity materials, and when we watch the Paramount version,
we are struck by the complete absence of any indication that this is a Paramount release.
Instead, the distributor is given as Films Distributing Corporation.
Why? This was a subsidiary of Paramount.
Why would Paramount release this movie under a different company name?
Let’s examine the evidence, and try to learn about Films Distributing Corporation.
According to
La Vanguardia Española,
28 February 1963, p. 28, the vice president of Paramount’s Films Distributing Corporation was
Martin Davis.
There was a passing mention of Films Distributing Corporation in
“Supreme Court Upholds Viking Suit Dismissal,”
Boxoffice, 22 June 1964, p. 5
,
and again in
“Second Viking Trust Suit Dismissed by Court” Boxoffice,
13 September 1965, p. 4,
but yet it was not listed in the trade annuals.
A few years later it was a litigant in Paramount Films Distributing Corporation v. State,
285 N.E.2d 695, 698 (N.Y. 1972) (which was referenced in
Eileen Syms et al. v. Olin Corporation).
So it had been around for a while and would remain for a while, and it had a number of credits,
but the only other one I know of is the attempted US release of L’étranger (1969),
which they retitled Sin with a Stranger.
Maybe that should give us a little bit of insight into the company?
My guess (only a guess) is that Films Distributing Corporation was Paramount’s sexploitation arm,
or at least that the corporate bosses were trying at that time to turn it into a sexploitation arm.
Since Candy was wrongly perceived as sexploitation,
Deadly Sweet was released as a
Of course, the problem with marketing Deadly Sweet
as a companion piece to Candy is that it’s nothing at all like Candy.
If DG’s attended out of a desire to see displays of flesh,
Deadly Sweet would only have succeeded in disappointing.
(Worse, after a strong opening, Candy quickly cooled.
It continued to do above-average business in the larger cities,
but below-average business elsewhere.)
Now, courtesy of the Internet, a tool we did not have some years back, we can make discoveries.
We can discover that Deadly Sweet opened as part of double and triple bills beginning on Friday, 23 April 1969.
Here is what may have been the first booking, in Phoenix, at the
Indian
Because you’re wondering: The Violent Four (By the way, the
We further discover that it opened in Kansas City, Missouri, at the
Riverside
  Because you’re wondering: Benjamin (and here and here), Week End (and here and here and here and here)
Now, as you can discern, even if you haven’t seen the movie,
this is not
The 28 July 1969 capsule review was indexed in subsequent issues of Boxoffice.
Specifically, I found it indexed in these issues (all formerly online, now pulled):
4 August 1969,
11 August 1969,
18 August 1969,
25 August 1969,
1 September 1969.
Here’s a random sample, 4 August 1969,
Oooo. I just discovered another booking, at the Fox Paramount in Seattle, which, by 1969, was no longer in any way affiliated with Paramount Pictures:
At long last, thanks to World Cat,
I learned that a library not too terribly far away has microfilms of Portland’s newspaper, The Oregonian.
I reserved some rolls for 16 April 2009 and the librarians retrieved them from off-site storage.
Of the six rolls, I needed only three.
One of the three had only been viewed maybe once.
The other two had never been viewed before, and I was certainly the first person to open the boxes.
I checked the 7th of September though I was not sanguine about the prospects of getting a hit.
Then I had a hunch that, since the 7th was a Sunday, the date may have been a typographical error.
Might it be a good idea to look at a nearby Wednesday or a Friday,
the normal days for movie openings in the 1960’s through the
What are we to make of this? The venue was the 3,036-seat Paramount Theatre, originally opened in 1928 as the Portland Publix Theatre, designed by Rapp & Rapp, and now known as the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall.
Though it was built as part of the Publix (Paramount/Famous Players) chain, by 1969 the Paramount Theatre was no longer associated in any way with Paramount Pictures. Further, this theatre/cinema did not specialize in “adult” fare. For instance, the previous double feature was the orignal
The advertisements above solve a minor mystery.
Sweden: Heaven and Hell was distributed by Avco Embassy, as we can see from the
Oh. And here’s another booking, this time at the
Fox Warfield in San Francisco, Wednesday through Monday, 11 – 23 March 1970:
Then at long last we find some more evidence, and it’s not from Boxoffice.
The evidence comes from Oakland, California —
from the palatial Paramount Theatre, to be exact.
As with the venue in Portland, this Paramount Theatre was NOT associated in any way with Paramount Pictures at the time.
On the same day that the film opened in San Francisco, it also opened in nearby Oakland,
which proves that there were at least two prints.
Deadly Sweet had a one-week run beginning on Wednesday, 11 March 1970,
and we see the same problem all over again.
Are we to think that perhaps a mad executive was issuing irrational orders while suffering from delirium tremens,
or maybe that some earlier preview showings had gone over so badly that Paramount just wanted to kill the movie,
write it off as a loss, and be done with it?
I don’t think either of those possibilities is too plausible.
Before we try to figure out what really happened,
let’s look at some more evidence.
Here is the very first advertisement for Deadly Sweet in the Oakland Tribune of 11 March 1970, p. 48.
(I highlighted it, else you’d never be able to find it.):
Just leaps right out at you, doesn’t it?
Irresistible, yes?
You sure wouldn’t want to miss that one, would you?
To be fair, though, the Oakland Tribune did indeed run a larger ad in the Saturday and Monday papers:
 
It ran for a week, and that was it.
As with the Portland showing, there were no display ads, no press releases, no reviews, nothing.
Once again, it was the second on a double bill, this time with
The Minx,
originally produced, cowritten, and directed by freelance photographer
Raymond Jacobs
who was unable to find a distributor as it was so unreleasably dull.
Then a year or two later
an indie distributor called Cambist purchased all rights for a song
and promptly shot new scenes to turn it into a sex movie,
which then turned a profit as a sexploitation item.
(Cambist regularly purchased rights to obscure and foreign movies and added sex scenes to them.
I hear tell that it was not only Cambist that did this, but other distributors as well.
If you know of any other examples, please let me know. Many thanks!)
In its favor, The Minx at least received an unattractive and poorly designed display ad,
in which there was no mention at all of Deadly Sweet.
As you can see, not only were both The Minx and Deadly Sweet rated X,
the listing made mention of “Continuous Show!”,
which implied, without stating, that these were showing in a “grind house.”
“Grind house” was the term for a hole-in-the-wall tenth-run Grade Z cinema
in which the projectors’ gears never ceased grinding,
as there were no intermissions between the movies.
“Adult” cinemas were typically “grind houses.”
The 3,200-seat Paramount Theatre, designed by
the staggeringly talented architect Timothy Pflueger,
opened in 1931 as the most magnificent cinema/theatre in Oakland,
but by 1970 it was on its last legs and ready to close down.
Grind-house sexploitation was probably a last-gasp effort to keep solvent.
Fortunately the building was soon rescued
and thrives to this day as a performing-arts center.
So, it’s time to keep ploughing away through Boxoffice in search of more clues.
All we find are repeats of that same index listing (though sometimes with a typo reading “2–” rather than “1–”).
Many of these used to be available online, and I had hyperlinked them.
Those were the good old days. No more. Gone. Sorry:
8 September 1969,
15 September 1969,
22 September 1969,
29 September 1969,
6 October 1969,
13 October 1969,
20 October 1969,
27 October 1969,
3 November 1969,
10 November 1969,
17 November 1969,
24 November 1969,
1 December 1969,
8 December 1969,
15 December 1969,
22 December 1969,
29 December 1969,
5 January 1970,
12 January 1970,
19 January 1970,
26 January 1970,
2 February 1970,
9 February 1970,
16 February 1970,
23 February 1970,
2 March 1970,
9 March 1970.
Insomma, from all I have been able to gather from available newspaper listings,
Deadly Sweet was screened only on the following dates:
• MPAA CARA (private screening), Mar 1969.
• Venue undetermined, trade screening, Commonwealth Amusement Corp, Kansas City MO, Thu, 20 Mar 1969. • Indian Drive-In, Phoenix AZ, Wed, 23 Apr 1969, through Tue, 29 Apr 1969 (1st on a double bill). • Crest Drive-In, Kansas City MO, Fri, 2 May 1969, through Thu, 8 May 1969 (1st on a triple bill). • Riverside Drive-In, Kansas City MO, Fri, 2 May 1969, through Thu, 9 May 1969 (1st on a triple bill). • Fox Paramount, Seattle WA, Wed, 20 Aug 1969, through Tue, 9 Sep 1969 (2nd on a double bill). • Paramount, Portland OR, Wed, 17 Sep 1969, through Tue, 30 Sep 1969 (2nd on a double bill). • Liberty, Pasco WA, Thu, 18 Dec 1969, through Sat, 20 Dec 1969 (2nd on a double bill). • Fox Warfield, San Francisco CA, Wed, 11 Mar 1970, through Mon, 16 Mar 1970 (2nd on a double bill). • Paramount, Oakland CA, Wed, 11 Mar 1970, through Tue, 17 Mar 1970 (2nd on a double bill).
So what happened?
Here’s my educated guess:
The original Heart in His Mouth was aimed at audiences who enjoyed offbeat movies,
as well as audiences who enjoyed pop art and psychedelia.
The X rating, the absence of any promotion, and the double-featuring with exploitation movies
simply killed Deadly Sweet.
The audiences who would have enjoyed it never knew about it.
The audiences who attended in expectation of seeing more of Candy’s anatomy would have been bored witless.
I ran all this by a movie scholar, who hazarded a guess that Paramount had received no bids at all for the movie,
and then, to recoup a few of its lost dollars,
dumped it off with some local indie distribs
who then shipped it out usually as an unadvertised second feature to the exploitation market.
That could well be why a brand-new movie was treated as a worthless
Were a few prints forgotten about and left behind to collect dust in some warehouses somewhere?
Does Technicolor still have elements of this film on hand?
If you know the whereabouts of any 35mm US release prints of this movie,
please write to me. Thanks!
So we keep on looking through Boxoffice for more clues,
and there is only one:
16 March 1970,
23 March 1970,
30 March 1970,
6 April 1970, and
13 April 1970.
And that was the final listing.
Deadly Sweet was officially withdrawn from release probably during the first or second week of April 1970.
The single minus sign indicated that the only known review was the anonymous capsule review from the 28 July 1969 issue.
OTHER RELEASES?
There was also a Castilian edition for Spain.
WEDNESDAY NIGHT,
 The Castilian version was also issued in a Super 8 condensation in Argentina. Unfortunately, the original box was destroyed, and the cover was scissored out and taped to this new box. But we still get the idea.  And here’s a scan that Marcelo made of a frame.
You want more?
It was also released in México. Whether the Méxicans saw the Castilian version, I don’t know. Perhaps the Méxican version had that awful fake neutral Spanish dialect that native Spanish speakers hate so much. 
 
 Méxican lobby cards
According to a Brazilian website,
this movie was released Escalation there.
According to yet other websites, it is actually called
Eliminação
and it is currently available on a Portuguese-dubbed
DVD.
What’s more,
Brazilian audiences really like it!
IMDb further mentions that the movie was released in Greece as
Μὲ
τὴν
ψυχὴ
στὸ
στόμα,
which means exactly the same thing as Col cuore in gola or Heart in His Mouth,
but that is an error.
There was indeed a movie called
Μὲ
τὴν
ψυχὴ
στὸ
στόμα,
and it did feature Ewa Aulin,
but it had nothing to do with Col cuore in gola;
it was, in fact,
an entirely different movie, originally entitled
La contrafigura.
IMDb goes on to mention other releases:
• Hungary: Dobogó szívvel (Pounding Heart) • Japan: 危険な恋人 (Dangerous Lover) • Lithuania: Mirtinai miela (Deadly Cute) • Soviet Union: Запыхавшись (Out of Breath) • Sweden: Den djävulska (The Devilish One) and apparently it was released in • Hong Kong as well.
Compass Film S.r.l., which at the time controlled international distribution, licensed a VHS for
Japanese release in 1988:
Was the VHS the only release of this film in Japan?
Apparently it was subtitled in Japanese, and I suppose the dialogue was Italian, but I don’t know.
AFTERMATH
LA MORTE HA FATTO L’UOVO.
Heart in His Mouth turned out to be little more than an unintentional prologue
for Trintignant and Aulin’s next starring feature,
La morte ha fatto l’uovo (Death Laid an Egg),
which began filming just as Heart in His Mouth wrapped up.
Interestingly, Tinto’s old-time friend Franco “Kim” Arcalli coauthored and edited
La morte ha fatto l’uovo,
and Les Films Corona coproduced both movies.
La morte ha fatto l’uovo soon came to be considered a cult favorite.
Nucleus Films of England
recently issued the uncut edition on
Maybe this is a pointless aside:
I just looked again at a bit of Candy and at La morte ha fatto l’uovo,
and I see that they both make Ewa Aulin look a bit harsh, uninteresting.
It was only in Col cuore in gola that she looked utterly adorable.
Tinto captured her personality, her smile, her friendliness.
The other two filmmakers entirely missed all of that.
Heart in His Mouth was forgotten before it was even shown and was then completely ignored.
There’s something so unfair about that.
Ewa Aulin, despite youth and inexperience, was a natural-born performer who excelled in offbeat rôles.
Incomprehensibly, she was marketed as a sex object as a result of Candy,
though not even in that was she particularly sexy.
(Lest we forget, Candy was an
Speaking of integrity, I just ran across this NEA (Newspaper Enterprise Association) wire story from Rome,
written by Tom A. Cullen, and printed in the Burlington, North Carolina, Times-News on Friday, 26 April 1968, p. 9A,
which ran it under a grossly unfair title: “For Girl Watchers: Candy Is a Swedish Treat.”
It was an article/interview with Ewa Aulin, who said some thoughtful things.
Worried about being typecast as Candy, she said,
“For my next film I would like to do something entirely different,
not another comedy, but a character rôle that has real guts.”
A press agent at this interview mentioned in passing that she was a star.
Aulin was adamant: “I don’t want to be a star.
I want to be an actress. If I thought I was going to be a star
I’d run away to some island and you wouldn’t hear from me for the next 10 years.”
The press agent tried to persuade her otherwise, encouraging her with the prospect of the power that stardom brings.
Aulin shot back a statement that was pure Tinto,
verbatim Tinto:
“I don’t want to have power over anyone.
To me power is immoral.
I believe that people should be free to live their own lives without someone telling them what to do.”
Well, she certainly got that much right.
She did not want celebrity; she wanted fulfillment.
I hope she found it. She would never have found it in Hollywood, that’s for sure.
FOR AN ECSTATICALLY FAVORABLE OPINION OF HEART IN HIS MOUTH, TAKE A LOOK AT
“The Jet Sounds of Nicola Conti”
from The Millionaire, which used to be at http://www.luxuriamusic.com/Feat_Page?featureID=5571.
The site is long gone, but I just found the copy that I made more than six years ago.
If you own the copyright, please write to me. Thanks!
Here’s the passage I liked:
VIDEO CAREER:
Heart in His Mouth was released on home video several times, but with no fanfare.
Here are two Italian-dubbed PAL VHS editions that I know about, and they’re getting to be rather hard to find:
The German-dubbed PAL VHS edition was released by UFA, and if you have one to sell, I want to buy it from you —
even though my favorite sequence (the flashy editing when Bernard first notices the Underground entrance) was deleted:
 (I would love to acknowledge the guy who sent this scan to me, but I can’t remember his name)
There’s also this Castilian version on DVD in Spain.
It’s a one-light analogue transfer
(if memory serves, almost all the video editions of this movie are one-light analogue transfers)
and it seems to be copied from a VHS.
So the darker scenes, of which there are plenty, are so unstable and have such uneven density that they become nearly invisible:
The nude woman on the cover is not in the movie.
If you’re interested in ordering this, first make sure that your DVD player can handle Region-2 PAL.
If you live anywhere in North America, you’re probably out of luck.
Anyway, there are some really strange cuts in this edition.
Nothing seems to be censored, but every once in a while the film just skips a few seconds.
That’s not because the master was damaged.
That just seems to be some sort of carelessness in the video mastering/editing.
Very odd.
The Cult Epics edition was released on the 28th of April 2009.
It is basically complete (though missing the two split-second flashes of nudity mentioned above,
and with b&w rather than tinting),
but in Italian with English subtitles:
 This is starting to get reviews: Doomed Moviethon DVD Times 10,000 Bullets Giallo Fever DVD Holocaust
Then there’s the Italian DVD from December 2007.
Oh heavens to Betsy.
Yes, it’s worth getting for the Tinto interview in the supplement,
but apart from that it’s a terrible disappointment.
The transfer was considerably better than previous editions, but it was still
ANICA — Associazione Nazionale Industrie Cinematografiche Audiovisive e Multimediali Un film di Tinto BrassHeart in His Mouth / Col cuore in gola / En cinquième vitesseDistributed by Rank Film in Italy and France
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| Prodotto da (Producteurs delegues) |
Ermanno Donati (03 Mar 1920 — 09 Jul 1979) e Luigi Carpentieri (14 Dec 1919 — 12 Mar 1987) |
| Per la co-produzione italo-francese (Une co-production) |
Panda Società per l’Industria Cinematografica S.p.a., Roma; Les Films Corona, Paris |
| Soggetto di (story by) |
Tinto Brass |
| Liberamente tratto dal romanzo (D’apres un roman) |
Il sepolcro di carta di Sergio Donati (Edito dalla Arnoldo Mondadori Editore S.p.a.) |
| Sceneggiatura di (Adaptation cinematographique de) |
Tinto Brass, Francesco Longo (1931 – 27 Mar 1995), Pierre Lévy-Corti (08 Oct 1910 – 22 Aug 1975) |
| Suggerimenti grafici di (storyboards) |
Guido Crepax (15 Jul 1933 – 30 Jul 2003) |
| Hanno collaborato alla regia (assistant directors) |
Carla Cipriani (03 Mar 1930 – 09 Aug 2006), Gérard Guérin |
| Alla produzione (assistant producer) |
Franco Cuccu |
| Alla parte decorativa (art directors) |
Carmelo Patroni [capo], Bice Brichetto e Orietta Melaranci [assistenti] |
| Location Manager | Tom Hawkins [uncredited] |
| Alla parte tecnica (technical assistance) |
Enrico Sasso [operatore/camera operator] Giuseppe Gatti [operatore/camera operator] Vittorio De Sisti (C.S.C.) [fonico/sound] (23 Nov 1940 – 21 Apr 2006) Fulvia Armanni [aiuto montatrice/assistant editor] Augusto Diamanti [assistant camera operator] Sergio Spila [capo elettricista/gaffer] |
| Montaggio di (editing by) |
Tinto Brass |
| Musiche di (Musique de) |
Armando Trovajoli (02 Sep 1917 — 28 Feb 2013) |
| La canzone “Love Girl” di | [Armando] Trovajoli, [Audrey] Nohra [Stainton] |
| è cantata da | Mel Ryder [sic, should be Mal Ryder, real name: Paul Couling] |
| Edizioni musicali | NazionalMusic, Milano |
| Direttore della fotografia (Directeur de la photographie) |
Silvano Ippoliti (A.I.C.) (23 Jan 1923 — 1994) |
| Direttore di produzione | Lucio Trentini |
| Foley | Italo Cameracanna [according to IMDb] |
| Boom Operator | Primiano Muratori [according to IMDb] |
| Organizzatore generali | Piero Donati |
| Eastmancolor della | Tecnostampa |
| Stabilimento di posa studi (studio) |
Dear, Roma |
| Stabilimento di sincronnizzazione (dubbing studio) |
Fono Roma, Roma |
| Qualsiasi riferie realmente con fatte e persone realmente esistenti è puramente casuale | |
| PERSONAGGI ED INTERPRETI | |
| |
| Mr Burroughs (the corpse in the morgue) | George Barnes |
| Bernard | Jean Louis Trintignant |
| Jane Burroughs | Ewa Aulin |
| David | Roberto Bisacco |
| Jeremy Burroughs [Jerome in the Italian version] |
Charles Kohler |
| Jelly-Roll | Luigi Bellini |
| Veronica Yassupova | Monique Scoazec |
| Bartender | Enzo Consoli (c.s.c.) (19 Jul 1939 – 15 Feb 2007) |
| Martha Burroughs | Vira Silenti (13 Apr 1930 – 01 Nov 2014; Ermanno Donati’s wife) |
| Jelly-Roll’s bodyguard | David Prowse [uncredited] (01 Jul 1935 – 28 Nov 2020) |
| Busker | Ronnie Ross [uncredited] |
| Dwarf | Skip Martin [uncredited] (28 Mar 1928 – 04 Nov 1984) |
| Jelly-Roll’s thug | Ivan Josef “Joe” Zaranoff [uncredited] |
 Bernard drives away from Prescott’s house: End of Reel One. |
Start of Reel Two:  Bernard is back at his apartment. |
 Bernard and Jane leave the park, and the dwarf follows them: End of Reel Two. |
Start of Reel Three:  Outside the park. Jane: “What are you doing?” Bernard: “I’m going to call a friend.” |
 The dwarf’s End of Reel Three. FINE PRIMO TEMPO. INTERMISSION. |
Start of Reel Four: SECONDO TEMPO:  Jeremy, Jane, and Bernard dash towards the train yard. |
 Bernard is chased out of the station by End of Reel Four. |
Start of Reel Five:  The chase continues at the race track. |
 “Leris is dead.” They drive off. End of Reel Five. |
Start of Reel Six:  They arrive at the happening. |
|
Below is an article by Bob Polunsky from The San Antonio Light, Sunday, 12 April 1970, p. 26,
and I hope I don’t get into trouble for reprinting it below.
(Dear copyright holder: please contact me.
I shall gladly pay to license the rights to this article.)
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