Wake Up And Kill | Blu-ray Release

The robbery spree of ‘the machine gun soloist,’ as the real life smash-and-grab jewelry thief Luciano Lutring was dubbed by the exploitative inflammatory Italian press of the day, sprawled across Europe like a globetrotting Bonnie and Clyde, complete with wife, mistress, child, disguises and enough flippant flamboyancy to waste his stolen riches on whatever pleasure awaited around the corner. Just three months after Lutring’s final capture and subsequent 20 year prison sentence, director Carlo Lizzani went into production on a fly-by-night chronicle of Lutring’s criminal career. The result was Wake Up And Kill, a la nouvelle vague inspired, loose canon crime thriller that thrives on style, but lacks the connective tissues to keep the wily tale together.

With a cinematic background in documentary and neo-realist melodrama, having spent much of the ’50s directing non-fiction and co-wrote the Oscar nominated Giuseppe De Santis picture Bitter Rice, Lizzani was obscenely quick to capitalize on Lutring’s story. With propulsive gusto he set about adapting it to the real life streets and dimly lit clubs of Milan, Paris and Amsterdam (you can spot Pigalle’s famed Moulin Rouge and the Heineken factory during a pair of whip pans mid-car chase), lending the spectacle of multiple getaways a very real sense of danger and the stylish wash of neon streaked cars speeding through the night, not to mention the aura of room engulfing red and blues lensed throughout various Euro mod-bars by the talented cinematographer Armando Nannuzzi and fueled by a characteristically sumptuous score by Ennio Morricone.

But for all the new wave inflected stylistic dynamism that keeps the tension high during action, Lizzani and his co-writer Ugo Pirro’s screenplay leaps from scene to scene with the hacksaw boldness of Godard’s jump cuts, but without regard for narrative cohesion. Lutring, played with blue-steel iciness by Robert Hoffmann, flees from crime to crime with window smashing ax in hand, stumbles upon Angela (the lovely Lisa Gastoni), a gorgeous cabaret singer, and commences to physically and mentally abuses her into becoming his wife, dives headlong into the life of crime in the face of increasing press coverage, going so far as to take up arms to maintain his public image, all the while various outlying criminals and crime fighters get mixed in just to get their own cut of the action. It’s all a bit of a blur – messy, colorful, alluring, and a bit confused.

Though Lizzani intended to make a life of crime bio-pic, what he managed to encapsulate is a brief period of Italian crime culture with oddly impressionistic realism that focuses our attention on the physical work involved in burglaries and the mental, social and romantic expenses of such a life style. Lutring is constantly on the run, perpetually broke, always on edge, and the reliably unaccountable for his actions. Despite appealing to the popular press at the time as a jewel nabbing playboy (he was), he was living out of shabby hotel rooms, away from the people he cared about, deeply paranoid. Wake Up And Kill may be a narrative mess, its a crime wave worth a watch, if only for editor Franco Fraticelli’s snappy getaways.

Disc Review:

Arrow Video continues to bring Italian genre filmmaking back to the fore with another solid restoration in Carlo Lizzani’s Wake Up And Kill. While the film doesn’t rank among the label’s pictures, their top-notch treatment of the material is no different. Having received a beautiful new 2k transfer and a solid clean-up all around, the image quality is often stunning (especially those Parisian night scenes). Colors pop (note those club scenes and Gastoni’s bright red vinyl jacket), textural detail is crisp and the grain is thick and natural. Dubbed in post, the audio is occasionally out of sync, but it all sounds clean with adequate depth, especially that Morricone score. This dual format release (Blu-ray/DVD) comes packaged in Arrow’s standard clear case with reversible sleeve artwork.

Theatrical Trailer
As if ripped from YouTube, this highly pixelated, ultra poor visual quality trailer may have been better left off this release, though it does give you a sense of the schlocky marketing that helped push this picture into theaters at the time.

Booklet
With various press shots, promo materials, and an imperative essay on the film by Roberto Curti, the author of various books on Italian cinema, including Italian Crime FIlmography 1968-1980 and Italian Gothic Horror Films 1959-1969. Curti sheds contextual light on both the real life Lutring story and Lizzani’s adaptation of the tale to the big screen with a wealth of facts and anecdotes that help bring the film back to life.

Final Thoughts:

As the cultural malaise begins to seep through every pore of Lizzani’s hapless anti-hero and the true to life grit of the mid-’60s streets, a startling sense of discomfort settles in and takes over. From the start, Lutring is in over his head and he can not be helped, not even by those that love him most. Hardest to watch is his atrocious treatment of wife whom takes more abuse from him than affection and gives nothing back but love in return. Lutring was finally arrested for his spree of petty thefts, but based on the evidence on display here he should have been tried for ongoing domestic abuse.

Film:     ★★/☆☆☆☆☆
Disc: ★★★/☆☆☆☆☆