Negative

I recently re-watched L'Ultimo treno della notte (Night Train Murders, Aldo Lado - 1975), as it was recently reissued by Neo Publishing with a very interesting interview and audio commentary from Aldo Lado himself.

It is fairly obvious the film is structured in three parts:
Munich,
the train journey,
and Verona
(Munich and Verona being, interestingly enough, twin cities).

But the train journey itself is divided in two distinct sections: day (1st train) and night (2nd train). And the night part is built in almost perfect symmetry to the day part:

Aboard the first train, there's light and natural colors,
the two girls are travelling on the platform and free to move around,
they are surrounded by a lot of people as the train is pretty full,
the disturbation caused by the two thugs is perceived more as some fun than a real threat (the girls joke with the two guys, even though they're not always at ease),
the woman with the veil is led by the thugs (when she's 'raped' in the toilet and lets go).

Aboard the 2nd train, darkness and cold blue and red monochrome colors prevail,
the two girls are isolated in a compartment which turns out to become their jail,
there seems to be nobody else on the train but the two girls, the woman with the veil and the two thugs (apart from the peeping tom showing up later),
the two guys' behaviour is now a real threat to the girl's lives,
and they are led by the woman with the veil, who obviously controls the situation.

The latter part of the train journey is the exact negative of the former, as if Aldo Lado wanted to reinforce that impression the viewer gets of a parallel dimension, of a world behind the mirror where there is no limit to cruelty and violence.

Knowing Aldo Lado's tendency to use cinema as a way to express a political point of view on the social situation of Europe in the 70s, needless to say he was trying to tell us something here.


L'ultimo treno della notte is one of the most striking and interesting genre films of the 70s. Find it here (FR) or there (US).
Read more about it from this blog here.

On a train

There are different points of view about L'ultimo treno della notte (Night train murders, Aldo Lado - 1975). Some see it as just another "rape-and-revenge" flick, others say it's a copycat of Wes Craven's "Last house on the left" (1972).
In fact, it's a film which leverages a well-known scenaristic frame to convey a political statement about 1970s' Europe.

30 years after, and seen from other cultures, this political dimension could well be not so obvious. However it is this particular element which makes it such a unique film - and the terrible translation of the title into 'Night train murders' totally undermines the initial symbolical meaning of 'The last train of the night'.

It is a social journey between Germany and Italy, surrounded by the shadows of fascism - the German war veterans singing 3rd Reich songs in their cabin -, terrorism of the Red Brigades - the first train stops because of a bomb alert -, cynically questioning the dark side of the Church - the senile bishop glancing at a young priest, and later this obvious physical connexion made by Lado between the bishop seen in the first train and a very unappealing prostitute in the second one -, and above all denouncing the overwhelming power of the upper class, the "Bourgeoisie".

A metaphor where the woman with no name (Macha Méril) epitomises Bourgeoisie, with her veil as a sign of respectability as much as duplicity - and somehow of death.
She is the puppetmaster, cynically manipulating two hooligans - the embodiement of the lower class - to achieve her selfish and vicious goals (raping two young girls on the train). She will later get rid of the two guys by abandoning them to the revenge of the desperate father.
They will end up crawling on the ground like agonising animals.

A fatalistic tale about the ineluctable loss of innocence and its irreversibility.
Once the damage is done, there is no escape: one of the girls dies, the other one has no other choice but to commit suicide.
The implacable build up to a fatal end is very cleverly encapsulated in the idea of the train: a journey you can't deviate from, in a claustrophobic environment.
This is why the real score of this film is the noise of the train, which becomes overwhelming throughout the movie, and sometimes even covers scenes disconnected from the train itself.

In this context, it is interesting to point out that Morricone's score is very minimalist, yet very powerful. A few harmonica notes, highly reminiscent of "Once upon a time in the West", which reinforce the anguish, especially since they're played by one of the two villains.
Strangely enough, music from Morricone scores made for other films can also be heard, as if he was quoting himself: the opening pop track of "Four flies on grey velvet" when the two thugs reach the train station at the beginning of the film, and a reinterpretation of "L'Assoluto Naturale" theme at the end, heard through a radio in the parents' house.

At the end of this trip, there's no justice to be found, no hope to take away ; just the bitter taste of a crude representation of society's cruel games, somehow still relevant today.


L'Ultimo Treno della Notte was one of the two films shown at La Cinémathèque in Paris, during an evening dedicated to Aldo Lado on February the 3rd.

An evening with Aldo Lado

A short man with a grey beard smoking a cigarette, out in the cold at the bottom of Frank Gehry's beautiful architecture for the former American Center turned La Cinémathèque Française : that was Aldo Lado last night in Paris, just before the special evening he was the guest of started.

After an introduction which sounded like a warning about what was about to be shown, the evening started with "L'ultimo treno della notte" (Night trains murders - 1975), a film which remains, 30 years after it was shot, still relevant in many aspects and certainly a distressing experience.

The lights came back on a deep silence of the audience, under the disturbing feeling left by this excellent film I'll come back to very soon.
Before the evening closed with the very original giallo "La corta notte delle bambole di vetro" (Short night of the glass dolls - 1971), a discussion was held with Aldo Lado and a surprise guest : Macha Méril, a French actress who is one of the key characters of "L'ultimo treno" and also played in Argento's "Profondo Rosso".

Aldo Lado talked (in excellent French) about his memories of making popular cinema in the Italian 70s. Back then, Italy was producing nearly three hundred films a year; it was the peak of exploitation cinema, or "cinema B" as it was referred to. Producers were so busy chasing money to pay the crew at the end of the week, they left directors with great freedom.

Undoubedtly, Aldo Lado's talent was to take advantage of genre cinema to make a political point in his films. If "L'ultimo treno della notte" was building on the "violence against violence" filone, it is also a very impactful critic of the European society in the 70s. This is also true for "La corta notte", which original idea was to demonstrate how "Power" crushes contestation. Indeed, both films are very consistent in denonciating the overwhelming power of the establishment.

This freedom of speech was daringly supported by unmatched violence and shocking scenes at the time, and many films had lots of trouble with Censorship, which was very strong in Italy.
"We can't release the film, they said we have to burn it", cried "L'Ultimo treno's" producer to Aldo Lado when the film was brutally rejected by the Italian board of Censorship.
But that wouldn't stop Lado: he went to the board and proposed to cut a few scenes which he had selected himself, and which absence in the final edit would not undermine the film. But they were strong enough to let censors think the worst had been avoided.
And obviously, when asked to cut a scene, Lado was saying yes and then only cut half of it...

Amongst the many obstacles, critics in Italy were also very powerful, if not always very honest: basically, there were the "Maestros" (Bellochio, Fellini, Antonioni...) and the others. When a director had reached this "Maestro" status, critics would never question his films, even if they were bad.
Genre cinema was highly disregarded, even if sometimes foreign critics managed to get their Italian counterparts to change their mind: Lado and Méril were mentioning the amusing example of a film which had been completely despised by critics in Italy, but when reading very positive French and American reviews the next day, the same Italian critics changed their points of view, all of a sudden considering the film a masterpiece...

Snapshots and memories from the weird years of Italian genre cinema, that was a very nice evening with Aldo Lado and his films, and a rare occasion to see them on a big cinema screen - definitely worth the experience.