Word: mondo
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...shoelaces, his shirt open to the waist, his arms dangling to the floor, where his knuckles drag. A Gauloise rests in his gibbon lips, and its smoke meanders from his attractively broken, Z-shaped nose. Out of the Left Bank by the New Wave, he is Jean-Paul Bel-mondo-the natural son of the Existentialist conception, standing for everything and nothing at 738 m.p.h...
...Mondo Cane has one big flaw: the script, written by Jacopetti. The real impact of this film is visual; its point is adequately made by the sequences themselves and the way they are cut. Any narration beyond a minimal identification of what is on the screen is superfluous, and Jacopetti's is not only superfluous but also annoyingly stupid, full of bad puns, idiotic prejudices, clumsy writing, and leaden sarcasm...
...spite of the script, Mondo Cane is a gripping and sometimes extremely moving film. The most powerful scene was filmed on an island near Bikini, showing how animals and birds have been violently affected by the radiation from H-bomb tests. Fish have come out of the water to live in trees, and birds have tunneled underground, never to fly again. Other birds have been trying for years to hatch eggs killed by the bomb, and sea turtles whose sense of direction has been destroyed by radiation crawl inland and die after laying their eggs. After a panorama shot...
...Mondo Cane is good because the films it is made up of are good. They come from all over the world and have subject matter of enormous variety: Nepalese Gurkhas slicing the heads off bulls, a "house of death" in Singapore, a pet cemetary in Pasedena, a French painter who uses paint-covered nude girls as brushes, a Malayan tribe which gets revenge on man-eating sharks by stuffing poisonous sea-urchins down their throats, and so on. The movie veers wildly between the funny and the horrifying. It should not be missed...
Beniamino Placido, writer for II Mondo, emphasized the growth of Italy's communist party as both a cause and a result of the failure of the country's "so-called democratic parties" to put through effective plans for social change. Placido depicted the Italian communist party as a catch-all for protest votes from citizens with a wide variety of discontents. The Christian Democrats, Italy's largest party, is ineffective because "like a huge mass of jelly" it is always in danger of breaking when it moves in response to public pressure. The right-wing of the party evidences...