When Blondie and Tuco were captured wearing Confederate
uniforms by Union troops they are taken to Betterville Prison Camp. This is where
they meet up with Sergeant Angel Eyes who has taken charge of the camp as the
commanding officer is dying from gangrene in his leg.
The site of the camp is on a small hill not more than a mile from Sad Hill Cemetery which is Contreras, Burgos, Spain.
The Audace Audace Series
This comic book series was published weekly from 1949 to1950
entitled Hands Up!. It consisted of 373 issues. The series was
re-released in 1957-1958 in two series with Kociss the first series
being released on June 15, 1957, ending on April 19, 1958. A second series entitled
Little Ranger was released with #1 on June 15, 1958, to #68 on April 25
1971. It was published in Milan by SBE under the direction of Sergio Bonelli. Size
of issues varied from 44 to 80 to 96 black and white pages with color covers.
[These daily posts will cover little known actors or people that have appeared in more recent films and TV series. Various degrees of information that I was able to find will be given and anything that you can add would be appreciated.]
Mary Begona was an alias for María Begoña Bragas who was born in Bilbao, Vizcaya, Spain on April 4, 1925. She was a singer and dancer, theater, film and TV actress. She worked mainly in theatre as a vedette and later as a comedy actress in the cinema. He also made numerous appearances on television. Among them, Hostal Royal Manzanares.
In 1944, Mary took part in the show that consecrated a legendary couple: Lola Flores and Manolo Caracol. With them – and supposedly at the age of 15 she starred in “Zambra” and toured on stage in several Spanish cities. Later she managed to occupy a prominent position on posters as a dancer alongside Pepe Marchena. In 1946 the impresario Colsada set up a company of revues presenting himself with the show De la tierra a Venus. As female stars it featured Mary Begoña and Dorita del Alba.
Her filmography, which began in 1960, is not very extensive and does not include any major titles of Spanish cinema. At the end of the 1990s she enjoyed some popularity again for her appearance in the popular Lina Morgan comedy TV series ‘Hostal Royal Manzanares’.
At the beginning of the 21st century, she semi-retired. In 2000 she appeared in “The Prince's Bride” and a year later in “Approved in Chastity”, the last stage appearance also by Chicho Ibáñez Serrador. Shee then made a brief appearance in television series and quietly retired.
Begona appeared in only one Euro-western and that was a
small role as a prostitute in 1962’s “Torrejón City”.
BEGONA, Mary (aka Mari Begoña, María Begoña, Mary Begoña)
(María Begoña Bragas) [4/4/1925, Bilbao, Vizcaya, Spain –
4/12/2020, Madrid, Madrid, Spain] – dancer, theater, film, TV actress, singer.
Torrejón City – 1962 (prostitute)
Italian film and television director and assistant
director, screenwriter and author Aldo Lado died on November 25th in Rome, Italy. He was a week short of his 89th birthday. Born on December 5, 1934,
in Fiume, Italy he came up through the film industry as an assistant director,
notably to Bernardo Bertolucci on “The Conformist” (1970). After a series of
experiences as an assistant director, Aldo Lado made his directorial debut in
1971 with the horror thriller “The Short Night of the Glass Dolls”, followed,
the following year, by the thriller “Who Saw Her Die?” (1972). In 2015 he began
his career as a writer by participating with several short stories ("The
Giant and the Child", "Cold Case on Lake Maggiore") in some
anthologies. Lado was an assistant director on “Hallelujah for Django” in 1966,
“Pecos Cleans Up!” in 1967, “May God Forgive You... But I Won't” and was a
screenwriter on “Lynching” both in 1968.
Redazione Cinemonitor
November 20, 2023
"The cinema of Romolo Guerrieri. Journey into the Italian Genre Film" by Giuseppe Costigliola, in bookstores for "Edizioni Il Foglio", is the first part of a monumental critical biography on a cult author capable of opening up a vision of a particular way of doing, understanding and even seeing the cinema of which there is more and more nostalgia. We talked about it with the critic Giuseppe Costigliola.
What are the characteristics of Guerrieri's work that become paradigmatic for the moment in which his work is inscribed?
Giuseppe Costigliola: I've always felt a strong originality in Guerrieri's approach to genre films. In the mid-Sixties, when he made his directorial debut, he wanted to establish himself as a content director, to create a path clearly distant from the one undertaken by his brother Marino, his first teacher, who for various reasons had confined himself to musicals and comedies: it is no coincidence that he signed his films with a pseudonym, a real identity choice. Romulus had submitted a dramatic subject to Ennio De Concini, one of the greatest screenwriters of the time, who said he was enthusiastic and proposed that he talk about it to Anna Magnani; as I tell in the book, the project did not come to fruition, but he was offered to shoot a western, a genre at the time in extraordinary take-off after the resounding success of "A Fistful of Dollars" by Sergio Leone. In two years, Guerrieri directed three in a row, in each one putting something personal, keeping in mind the masterful example of Leone – who, by the way, was his friend, they had both been assistant directors to Mario Bonnard – but also detaching himself from it. The most perceptive critics today recognize the originality of Guerrieri's approach to the Italian western, especially with regard to the psychological excavation of the characters, the "smoothing" of the figure of the fearless and cynical hero dedicated only to making money or killing typical of Italian westerns, the introduction of a "romantic" vein, this one really peculiar, or even the way in which he represents the female figure, never marginal or instrumental: for example, in "Johnny Yuma" the character of Samantha Felton played by Rosalba Neri is an authentic deus ex machina of the action. The personal imprint that Guerrieri gave to the genre film is even more perceptible in other areas: with "The Sweet Body of Deborah" he codified a certain way of shooting mystery-thrillers, in which legions of his colleagues who had become more famous fished hands down, and the same happened for what I consider one of the few cases of pure Italian noir, "A Detective", in which – in my analysis – he managed to blend elements of polar French with the classic American noirs of the Forties and Fifties, while at the same time keeping in mind the lesson of Pietro Germi. This originality is also evident in terms of content: detective Belli, played by Franco Nero, is one of the first cases of a "rotten" policeman brought to the screen in that type of film, and has marked an imprint followed by many, while in the film the fears and anxieties of post-sixty-eight Italy are perceptible. The discourse can be extended more generally to the crime films shot by Guerrieri in the Seventies, not centered on pure action, but on the psychological excavation of the characters – as much as, of course, it allowed a genre film to be made – and on the social and political issues of the time. I consider it an essential contribution, not always recognized by critics in the sector.
Among the big names of Italian genre cinema, that of Romolo Guerrieri is not so much waiting for a re-evaluation, because the critical favor is beyond question, but rather a rediscovery, on home video or, even better, within the numerous reviews organized in large or small festivals. When it comes to his cinema, the titles available are always limited to "A Detective", "Deborah's Sweet Body", "A Man, a City", and above all "The Divorce"... How do you explain the difficulty of finding many of your titles?
G.C.: As far as festivals and retrospectives are concerned, it's very true, Guerrieri is waiting for a rediscovery, his films should be proposed above all to an audience of young people, who have not had the opportunity to know his work, and in fact my critical biography was born precisely from this need.
With regard to home video, a distinction must be made between the Italian and foreign markets. In the former, as for many directors even more famous than Guerrieri, in fact there are few titles, especially those produced by Mario Cecchi Gori, some of which, however, are out of the market. The Italian home video market is very restricted, it is reduced to very few realities, investments are modest, so few titles come out and in a somewhat random way, in poorly edited and poor quality editions, often without special content. Here we are anchored to DVD, while in many foreign countries editions are produced in Blue Ray and even in 4K. Guerrieri's films that have an appeal abroad have almost all been released: westerns, noirs and detective stories, mystery-thrillers, and they are also useful from a critical point of view because they present interesting special contents, such as that of "Johnny Yuma", in German, by Colosseum. There is also "The Last Warrior", a science fiction film of not excellent quality, which however became a small cult in Germany. The rest of his production, comedies or historical films such as "Salvo D'Acquisto", have a very "national" reality, the same Italian comedy beyond the Alps is not widespread, except for the most famous examples, or in markets such as French or Spanish. As we know, comedy, in all its forms, is more difficult to export.
Brother of Marino Girolami, uncle of Enzo G. Castellari and Enio Girolami, Romolo Guerrieri is part of one of the most famous celluloid families in the history of Italian cinema. How did the family fabric also shape and direct Romulus' career (he is closer to his two nephews than to his brother Marino)?
G.C.: It was fundamental. Romolo Girolami began to breathe cinema as a boy, and went on a set for the first time at the age of twenty, in 1952, as a volunteer assistant director of the film "Noi due soli" by Marino Girolami, among other things an interesting case of comedy with a science fiction side. Marino, a director underestimated by critics, in reality very skilled and profound connoisseur of every cinematographic reality, from the screenplay, to the editing, to the photography, etc., is his recognized teacher, from whom Guerrieri learned the basic directorial technique, then refined with other masters, Bonnard, Campogalliani, Brusati and above all Giuseppe De Santis, of whom he was wanted and appreciated collaborator in the direction in "Italiani brava gente". Romolo has always recognized the importance of Marino in his training, but Marino has also provided him with another type of example: what he did not want to become as a director, since he aspired to create a personal path that would detach himself from the one traced by his brother.
However, the Girolami family were a close-knit family, in the fifties Marino, Romolo, Enzo (the future G. Castellari) and the actor Enio worked together with great fun in several films, in particular those shot in Tirrenia, then home to the Pisorno film factories, the oldest in Italy. In short, the family journey has deeply marked Guerrieri.
What is also striking, in this first volume of a work that promises to be monumental, is the precision of the historical reconstruction, the search for detail, the verification of the sources. Beyond the conversations with Guerrieri himself, how was it structured and what did it draw from your research path?
G.C.: It's a job that took me two years. From the beginning, I wanted to give centrality and pre-eminence to the recovery of memory, because I believe it is essential that the protagonists who made it tell the story of the cinema of such distant times: directors, actors, authors, technicians and workers. For generational reasons, they are disappearing, and it is important to collect their memories while there is still time. My research path is built on their testimonies, in an attempt to reconstruct the relationships and relationships, human as well as professional, that characterized the cinematographic universe of that time. However, I have also tried to cross-reference those stories with the available written sources, academic and otherwise, since memory is a fragile and complex thing, it often leads astray, even unconsciously, and the conversations held with scholars and film enthusiasts have proved fruitful. Essential was the (repeated) viewing of the films, which always present surprises, of which I proposed systematic critical analyses. In this regard, I have programmatically blurred the division between so-called auteur cinema and genre cinema, a critical distinction that in my opinion does not take us far, but rather tends to conceal senses and meanings rather than reveal them. Another compass was History, with a capital "s", that of all of us, within which cinema, as an industry as well as as an art, has been created and evolved. Together with the biographical and artistic events of Romulus, History is the common thread of this book. Sometimes I literally let myself get carried away, driven by a voracious curiosity, fueled by the exciting discoveries I was making during the research, curiosity that I hope readers will also have, especially young people, because, at the end of the day, this book is about how we were.
What are the fundamental films that need to be known in order to understand the idea of cinema and Guerrieri's profession?
G.C.: For westerns, "Johnny Yuma" and
"$10,000 for a Massacre", very different from each other, seen in
sequence also testify to a growth in directorial awareness and progressive
"appropriation" of the genre. Guerrieri's most fruitful phase begins
with "The Sweet Body of Deborah" and ends with "Dangerous Armed
Freedoms", a scarce decade, from 1967 to 1976. In between are some of his
best films, such as "A Detective", "A Man, a City" and "Salvo
D'Acquisto". In the second volume of the biography, which I hope will be
released soon, and which specifically deals with Guerrieri's filmography, I
tried to highlight one of the least cited and appreciated films, "The
Stand-in" (1971), a thriller based on a novel entirely built with the
flashback technique, an authentic tour de force. Together with "One Man,
One City", it is perhaps the film in which the director has had the most
free hand from a production point of view.
Catherine Howe is a singer-songwriter, actress, television presenter . She was born on May 17, 1950, in Halifax, West Yorkshire, England. She is an Ivor Novello Award winner who has earned critical acclaim in dozens of music magazines both in the U.K. and the U.S.A., including Folk Album of the Year from The Sunday Times.
Howe was the youngest of five children. Just before her 12th birthday she moved to London to attend the Corona Stage School. She began an acting career in the late 1960s and has since gained a following in folk music: Record Collector in 2007 called her "one of the great unrecognized voices". Observer Music in 2007 said "Catherine Howe was a Kate Bush before her time".
Howe trained as an actress at the Corona Drama School in London. She commenced an acting career in the late 1960s, performing in contemporary television dramas such as ‘Z-Cars’, ‘The Wednesday Play’, ‘Doctor Who’, ‘Undermind’ and ‘Dixon of Dock Green’. Howe went on to appear in Barney Platts-Mills' film, “Private Road”. In 1970 Howe met Andrew Cameron Miller, an executive at Reflection, a subsidiary of CBS Records, resulting in her recording her debut album “What A Beautiful Place” at Trident Studios in London, in February 1971.
In the early 1980s, Howe took a break from the music industry, before reappearing in the 2000s with new music.
Aside from her time in music and acting, Howe has also written books on secularist George Holyoake and a history of her hometown of Halifax.
HOWE, Catherine [6/17/1950,
Halifax, Calderdale, West Yorkshire, England, U.K. - ] – writer, theater, film, TV actress,
singer, songwriter.
The Genius –
1975 [sings: “Glory, Glory, Glory”]
YouTube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwJDy_lqnpw
