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A Quiet Place in the Country
[Blu-ray]
Blu-ray B - United Kingdom - Radiance Films Review written by and copyright: Eric Cotenas (31st August 2024). |
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The Film
 His creative batteries drained, modern artist Leonardo Ferri (Django's Franco Nero) wants to get away from the city. Although his art dealer/lover Flavia (Blow-Up's Vanessa Redgrave) finds him a spacious villa, Leonardo finds himself drawn to an older, crumbling one deeper in the countryside. Despite her warnings that the villa is not a good investment, Flavia arranges for Leonardo to buy it and pops in and out with various supplies and modern conveniences and to make sure he is working. Leonardo soon discovers he’s not alone, however, as doors slam on their own and someone or something totally demolishes his workroom. Leonardo learns from some of the villagers that a promiscuous countess named Wanda Valier (Johnny Hamlet's Gabriella Grimaldi) was killed there twenty years before when an English fighter plane riddled the villa with bullets. When Flavia drops by to spend the night, the house seems to react violently to her presence. She nearly falls through the floor, a portion of the roof collapses on her, and then a shelf of bricks almost crushes her. Flavia jokes that the house does not like her but Leonardo wants to find out more about Wanda. He visits her ailing-yet-predatory mother (Diary of a Chambermaid's Madeleine Damien) and pays her off for some photographs of Wanda who becomes his new inspiration (not for painting, as he has lost the desire to create). Flavia fears that another woman has taken him away from her. Leonardo gathers several of Wanda’s suitors - including the villa’s groundskeeper Attilio (Is Paris Burning?'s Georges Geret) - for a séance at the villa, after which it seems as though Leonardo himself poses the greater danger to Flavia (although it is uncertain whether he has become possessed or if he is trying to please Wanda's ghost). A Quiet Place in the Country is another one of Elio Petri's arty, sexy exploitation pictures in the vein of The Tenth Victim, Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicious yet it is also an effectively-chilling bucolic ghost story. Based on the Oliver Onions novella "The Beckoning Fair One" the Victorian setting so ripe for a ghost story is transformed into a pop-art sixties Italy. The Gothic villa setting is invaded by Leonardo’s modern paintings, pornographic magazines, as well as modern conveniences – supplied by Flavia so Leonardo will not waste time doing anything but painting – like a dishwasher (which Leonardo uses to wash his brushes); yet the supernatural attacks on Flavia are unexpected, and the seance sequence is genuinely chilling. Nero and Redgrave had met on the set of Camelot the year before and she divorced Tony Richardson in 1968 (Richardson was already seeing Jeanne Moreau at the time). Although their relationship would be rather stormy later on – Redgrave had a fifteen year relationship with Timothy Dalton from 1971 to 1986, but married Nero in 2006 – it is hard not to read something into their onscreen relationship here, with Leonardo making reference to Flavia's wealthy husband and Flavia clinging desperately to Leonardo and proclaiming that she only wants his happiness; on the other hand, Redgrave and Nero may simply have embraced the characters’ sadomasochistic relationship as an acting challenge with a side of exhibitionism. As the seemingly possessed Leonardo, Nero adopts an unsetting gaze that anticipates both the protagonists of The Shining and The Amityville Horror. Since this is an Petri film, it is in no way a straightforward ghost story. Leonardo's creative mind is subject to hallucinations from the start, but they are not just cinematic game-playing on the part of Petri as Leonardo’s fears of failure are depicted through dreams and hallucinations of Flavia’s materialistic excess, Flavia as his nursemaid, and his murderer ("We almost had it all," she says as she stabs him). He accuses her of only being with him for his profitability as an artist, but it seems that she is carrying him with her husband's money, or at least managing his money since she has to ask him to leave him some cash before she goes out to work. Several times, Leonardo hallucinates killing Flavia violently and also replaces the various men in the flashbacks of Wanda's conquests. In its merging of the past and present, sometimes in the same shot, the film would make a good companion piece with Stephen Weeks' more understated 1973 film Ghost Story. The film is one of the few psychological horror films that is successful at making the audience question how much of the haunting is a projection of the unstable hero. When Flavia says at the end "I almost envy him," one wonders if it is not the villa but Leonardo's final destination that is the titular "quiet place in the country" since there he is finally free to focus on his art without commercial obligations or sexual distraction. The countess is not the only female to turn Leonardo's eye. There is also young housekeeper Egle (Rita Calderoni, later of Renato Polselli's Delirium and The Reincarnation of Isabel) who shares her garret room bed with her little brother (and with Nero in a humorous scene in which all three are spooked by ghostly doings in the night). Technical credits are top-notch with cinematography by Luigi Kuveiller (Deep Red) - Mario Bava's cameraman Ubaldo Terzano was also Kuveiller's regular operator - editing by Visconti’s editor of choice Ruggero Mastroianni (Conversation Piece), set design by Sergio Canevari (The Battle of Algiers), and a wonderfully giallo-esque score by Ennio Morricone in collaboration with the improvisational group Nuova Consonanza pre-dating The Bird with the Crystal Plumage. Leonardo’s paintings are the work of Neo-Dada artist Jim Dine. 
Video
A Quiet Place in the Country largely disappeared from circulation after its theatrical release (United Artists released the film in the U.K. in 1970 while subsidiary company Lopert Pictures Corporation released it stateside in 1971). While a subtitled version made the gray market rounds in the nineties, an English-language version first tunred up on MGM VHS as part of their Amazon.com exclusive series (which also featured the first uncut American release of The Burning as well as some more bewildering picks like the 21st Century Film Corp. pick-up Dance Macabre and Curse 2: The Bite). The film then turned up on DVD in a new 16:9 transfer from CDE in Italy in 2005, but it was not English-friendly. More recently, the film was remastered and premiered on an English-friendly Spanish DVD edition in 2010 through MGM; however, MGM went the DVD-R route with this important title for its U.S. release the following year. The film also became available in Germany as part of a Petri DVD boxed set with English audio and subtitles, but the transfer ran roughly a minute less than the previous masters with a couple short sequences removed at the instruction of Petri. In 2017, Shout! Factory released the film on Blu-ray as part of their Scream Factory line followed by a limited German Blu-ray in 2019 from X-Rated in three cover variations and then a standard case edition in 2019 – the German Blu-ray editions being uncut, restoring the footage Petri requested removed from the German DVD boxed set transfer – and Radiance Films' 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.85:1 widescreen Blu-ray utilizes the same MGM master. The opening credits are in English and look a tad softer and specklier while the body of the presentation is cleaner and slightly more colorful than the SD edition and detail is improved, calling attention to some fleeting views of odd sights that may be part of Petri's weirdness or Leonardo's hallucinatory worldview. 
Audio
Audio options include English and Italian LPCM 2.0 mono tracks. While the English DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mono track on the Scream Factory edition had persistent hiss and buzzing, this seems to have been cleaned up a bit for the U.K. edition if not eliminated entirely. While the U.S. release had English dubtitles, Radiance offers optional English SDH subtitles for the English track – Nero and Redgrave dub themselves – and English subtitles for the Italian track. 
Extras
Extras start off with a select-scene audio commentary by critic and filmmaker Kat Ellinger (39:42) looking at Petri's recurring themes of masculinity, principally, man in existential crisis in post-war Italy which carries through his filmography regardless of the film genre. She notes that while Petri's use of different genres makes it hard not only to nail down a specific visual signature but also to restrict the classification of some of the films to one genre (A Quiet Place in the Country being as much a Gothic ghost story as a giallo which not only includes a past murder mystery but a protagonist who does not realize he may become a murderer himself). Petri's films invert the notion of a dichotomy between the practical, logical male and the emotional female, compounded with Petri's own issues with women making the pragmatic Flavia seem mercenary while Leonardo embodies the characteristics of the Gothic hysterical female as well as the inetto; that is, the "inept man" who wants prestige and position but flees from responsibility, as well as the notion of the "displaced man" not just as an artist but as a male in an industrialized world. Also new to this release is an interview by author Stephen Thrower (49:24) who reveals that Petri wanted to do the film as his second feature following L'assassino in 1962 with Marcello Mastroianni in the lead but that he was not able to resurrect the project until after the success of We Still Kill the Old Way. Thrower provides some background on Petri's education which did not include formal film school training but a patronage under Giuseppe de Santis (Bitter Rice), and how both his father's own belief as an artisan that creation should have a utilitarian purpose as well as Petri's own alienation from his communist associates who decried the decadence of artists and writers Petri admired wove their way through the film's themes of art and commercialism while still remaining quite faithful to the Oliver Onions story.  Ported from the Scream Factory disc is an interview with actor Franco Nero (32:07) who recalls that it was Petri and his wife who convinced him to take the lead role in Django to get himself known. He covers the first time he met Redgrave and their ensuing relationship, their opportunity to work together here, and describes his character as a child who needs his mother, a role fulfilled by his agent/lover played by Redgrave who actually did get hurt in some of their more intense scenes. He speaks reverently of Petri's abilities as a filmmaker and the way he shot the film, describing him as the Italian Stanley Kubrick, and also reveals that United Artists sent young painter Jim Dine to teach him how to paint, and he and Petri told off the upstart painter when he asked them if they wanted to buy one of this paintings for $10,000 only to then discover his artwork selling for much more only a year later in Paris and after that in New York. He also recalls his work on The Mercenary in which Gillo Pontecorvo was slated as director only for him to do Burn! instead and be replaced by Sergio Corbucci, and that initial lead James Coburn was replaced by Tony Musante who would also take a role in Giuseppe Patroni Griffi's Love Circle that had been rejected by both Nero and Gian Maria Volante. He cites the enjoyment of young audiences at recent screenings of A Quiet Place in the Country as proof that Petri and the film were ahead of their time. The disc also includes an interview with make-up artist Pier Antonio Mecacci (13:54) from 2021; however, the check-disc provided mistakenly used the subtitles from the Nero interview, a mistake which was caught before retail (we will update this portion of the review if we receive a replacement). The disc closes with the U.S. theatrical trailer (2:08). 
Packaging
The disc comes with a reversible sleeve featuring artwork based on original posters while the first pressing of 3,000 copies includes a booklet featuring new writing on the film by Simon Abrams, and is presented in full-height Scanavo packaging with removable OBI strip leaving packaging free of certificates and markings.
Overall
Lurking beneath the placid title and the pairing of new lovers Franco Nero and Vanessa Redgrave, A Quiet Place in the Country is a delirious mix of Gothic ghost story and pop art giallo.
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